\u201cAlready?\u201d Georgina chirped with her hands balled together. She tucked her thumbs into her fist, squeezing against the bone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was fast! I thought it was supposed to take twenty-four hours,\u201d Ben said to his wife. Knowing how quickly Georgina could startle, he asked her, \u201cReady for this?\u201d He reached for his phone which had first illuminated in a blush blue but had already receded into blackness, its glittering notification faded with melancholy.<\/p>\n
Ben swiped up on his phone and looked at the picture.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not\u2014” he said. Georgina released her thumbs but still kept them burrowed in her fist. Any excuse eluded him.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me see.\u201d She grabbed the phone from him. Her thumbs, out of her fists, rotated in minuscule circles on the phone\u2019s screen, zooming in and out while panning left to right. The image was in the same style as all the photographs all over the news and social media: photographed directly above the subject\u2019s head, a completely elevated selfie from the sky itself. The subject held her long arm above her, making her head look too small. Next to her face, which gazed with widened shock, was a screenshot of Ben.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s you,\u201d Georgina said.<\/p>\n
Ben craned his neck to look at the screenshot within the picture. \u201cI don\u2019t have a beard!\u201d<\/p>\n
Georgina furrowed her forehead as she read the post below the photo.<\/p>\n
Just got my FF post\u2026 i post this in 5 yrs after this creep YANKS MY HAND DOWN HIS PANTS AT A WORK RETREAT\u2026 thx FF. #bengarfield #mesoon.<\/em><\/p>\n They looked at each other; Georgina gripped the phone tighter in her hand. \u201cShe used your name,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She said it again: \u201cShe used your name.\u201d<\/p>\n Slowing down like a musician who doesn\u2019t know how a piece of music will end so just stops playing, she said, \u201cShe used your name.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben\u2019s focus was not on the picture of what appeared to be himself with a beard or the girl\u2019s face in the post, but her three-letter acknowledgment\u2014thx<\/em>\u2014unsure if it was typed with sincerity or sarcasm.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not\u2014it can\u2019t be true,\u201d Ben pleaded, dropping his phone. The screen dimmed again to black.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat did you do?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t do anything! It\u2019s the future\u2014\u201d he stopped, unsure how to explain the technology, the app, let alone the logic.<\/p>\n \u201cThis can\u2019t be real. This is a joke?\u201d She wanted to sound assured. \u201cI don\u2019t understand\u2014I\u2014.\u201d She rose and left the room. He heard the closet door open and then the front door open and close, the Indian bells they purchased online glittering against the door.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t understand?\u201d he shouted after her, knowing she would not hear him.<\/p>\n He rose and approached the window facing the street, filled with the night. She really had gone for a walk and not just gossiped on the phone with all her friends, her vape pen illuminated like a blue eye. If they were going to make any real traction as newlyweds, they would have to talk to each other (exactly what the therapist said!). He returned to his phone, to scrutinize the post again. If Ben zoomed in, he could make out a scar above the bearded man\u2019s right eye, similar to Ben\u2019s own scar. But it also could be a blur. He clicked #mesoon and saw the stream of posts everyone had seen for six months. When this had all started eighteen months ago, few people Ben knew\u2014including himself\u2014imagined that their FuturFoto would portend an international sexual harassment marathon.<\/p>\n He found a video (nine minutes long!) of a kid also caught in the #mesoon mess.<\/p>\n \u201cTo my future victims,\u201d he began from the front step of his home. His eighth-grade graduation banner was visible behind him in the doorway, \u201cMy mom helped me write this letter. I don\u2019t know what will lead me to hurt so many\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n There Ben stopped. He looked out the window again, looking for Georgina. The clouds hid the stars, but no rain had fallen yet. Their neighborhood was enveloped in blackness, like they had all been crammed into someone\u2019s pocket, muffled in addition to blinded. The immutable past\u2014filled with its documents of violence\u2014had announced the incorrigibility of the future, breathing into it some unholy sentience. This unfairness\u2014in his own home!\u2014led him to consider all of social media\u2019s men: backpedaling, qualifying their responses, or not responding at all.<\/p>\n \u201cThis can\u2019t be,\u201d he said, looking to where Georgina had gone. He would not assault some woman in five years; he didn\u2019t know her; he wouldn\u2019t meet her; he would avoid her; he would respect her; he would only grope her if she wanted it. He would not limit her or his potential of a beautiful life and he refused to have his potential for success challenged by a fallacious claim from the future which held no evidence and which\u2014yes! he now understood it\u2014did seem to upend freewill and predetermined a hostile future, implying his ostracism, but\u2014ah! here\u2019s what only he understood\u2014FuturFoto allowed him to choose a path: he knew precisely how to avoid this if Georgina could withhold her judgement until he had the chance to figure out\u2014<\/p>\n He opened the front door and stormed to the edge of his property, demanding to know when she would return. He considered sending her DNA into the app, seeing how she liked getting wrapped up in some scandal that she supposedly couldn\u2019t prevent. He refused to believe any of it because the fallacy of FuturFoto is it could all be prevented. Of course! This was a good thing (he wished he could laugh about it). If she would only come home, he could demonstrate his freewill to her. He ached to see the dumb glow of her vape pen\u2014the way the future illuminated itself in formally analog things. Ben never felt like a Luddite, but suddenly he missed hand rolled cigarettes, CDs, and cookbooks. Suddenly he craved a world he could touch, a world where he didn\u2019t spit into a USB port to learn about his future. He wanted the past\u2019s hands all over him, to pull on him and expel him into some ancient form of ecstasy.<\/p>\n What started as mere strings of water around him thickened into ropes of rain then balled into pellets: a barrage against him and his neighborhood. This hail had been predicted and he had ignored it, ignored it still as a shiver violated him.<\/p>\n Georgina\u2019s shadow was bouncing through the night toward him\u2014the blue glow of her vape pen at her hip\u2014her hood down as she ran past him. He could not hear the bells glisten as she opened the front door, but did hear her shout his name. She yelled it again, moving into the house. She was in the back of the house now, their bedroom, inaudibly calling for him.<\/p>\n He slogged through his yard like it was not cluttered with hail. He cycled through the normal responses he made to their fights. He eliminated those options until he had no ideas; in such vacancy he felt his future\u2014his real future\u2014take shape with this simple solution: if he could surprise her right now, then he could surprise her in the future.<\/p>\n He returned to his house and closed the door slowly to muffle the bells. The shattering hail smothered the squeak of his shoes as he descended the hallway, her shadow stretching out from their bedroom. He drew one breath in before he leapt out at her with a growl and she screamed and hurled her vape pen at him, the cartridge turning in the air so its heavy end collided with Ben\u2019s eye. His head jolted into the door frame which he did not hear crack as he collapsed headfirst into the ground. They had never replaced their hardwood floor with carpet. He was conscious, but he was dazed and his wife sounded faraway, as if he were still outside.<\/p>\n Within him a pain resounded like a sharp hum and he thought of a gong, if it ever stopped reverberating. Her voice was becoming clearer; he could discern her scolding tone as she yelled his name, as the pain seeped into his soul. But he would expunge this pain, yes, he would hurl it at somebody else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suddenly he craved a world he could touch, a world where he didn\u2019t spit into a USB port to learn about his future. He wanted the past\u2019s hands all over him, to pull on him and expel him into some ancient form of ecstasy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":20888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-andrew-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20889,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20378\/revisions\/20889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}