A couple of years ago I had to stop talking to my friend Lauren, because she is a narcissist and a bitch. We’d been friends for a long time, about ten years. I guess that’s a long time. It was long enough for her to become a successful writer. Like many who find themselves so lucky, she changed. Everyone changes, of course, it’s a dooming sign of maladjustment to remain unchanged from age 24, but I believe it’s important to change in a positive direction. Her openness used to be compelling, and she is very entertaining. But I have come to realize that these initially attractive qualities can indicate deep, perhaps even bottomless, reserves of the shallow. Her reliance on irony as a defense mechanism can trick the weak-minded into thinking she is funny, thus her success. If the topic of her comes up, which it doesn’t often, our mutual friends unsettle themselves, and, after presenting what they seem to believe are requisite offerings of anodyne gossip, ask with flittering eyes if I am “doing okay.” Of course most of them would not be so shortsighted as to abandon an ostensibly close friendship with a successful writer. I just don’t care about things like that.
What was the final straw? The final straw was made of paper: supposedly sustainable, in reality much too contemporary, profoundly irritating in the meantime. It was my birthday. My birthday is on September 11, and it depresses me. Not because of what happened on September 11, historically — of course it was very bad — but because time does not always pass in the way I’d prefer. I suppose September 11 is evidence that time does not always pass in the way one would prefer, historically. In any case it was a particularly troubled moment for me for reasons beyond the scope of this story, and beyond the scope of the activities of Al Qaeda. As a result I did not want to do anything on my birthday. I just wanted to sit quietly until it was over. Lauren knew well what was happening with me and insisted, in a group chat, that we go to a bar to celebrate anyway. This is her supposed generosity of spirit: conventional wisdom disguised as communitarianism. Depressed people are supposed to be made to go to the bar with their friends even if they don’t want to. I acquiesced.
Lauren was late. This was not the problem. We live in Berlin. Everyone is late. I was even a little late. But the way she was late — she drew attention to her lateness. An hour and a half after we had agreed to meet, she came striding down the street, flushed with incident, breathing somehow ostentatiously. She sat heavily on the bench across from me and almost tipped it over, interrupting a conversation I was having with Diana about Oasis, whose reunion tour had recently been announced and for which I had, unfortunately, not secured tickets through the lottery.
“Ah!” Lauren cried. “Sorry!” She said her train from Munich had been delayed. I was confused: I hadn’t known she was in Munich. Munich was not somewhere we went. And she had not been sending text messages like a person who was occupied with travel.
Diana brightened. “The metafictional Munich murderer!” she exclaimed. “How was it?”
Our entire party, eight people or so, was totally diverted. It seemed they had already heard tell of the metafictional Munich murderer.
“I lived,” Lauren said. She pulled her phone from her pocket with a daggered smile. “But he’s still texting me, despite insisting he would never do so again.”
I acknowledge my part in enabling what follows.
“Wait,” I said. “Who is this? You were in Munich?”
“I was in Munich.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively. “Let’s go inside and get a beer and I’ll tell you the backstory,” she said to me, “and then we can all enjoy the climax together.”
Again I acquiesced. We sat down at the bar.
“Happy birthday,” she said.
I thanked her.
She ordered two amaros — I do like it — and two beers.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Ah,” I said. She rubbed my arm. “Do you actually want to hear about this right now?” she asked, falsely. “It’s a good story, but …”
I guess I must have nodded in the affirmative.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s wait for the beers.”
Eventually the beers arrived.
“So I was on Feeld,” she began, “the dating app. Do you know what Feeld is?”
I had a hazy sense that I might once have heard of it. “It means, like, you play the field,” she said, “but it’s spelled ‘f-e-e-l,’ because it’s also a sex app, for emotionally enlightened people, or people who think they’re emotionally enlightened. You use it if you want to do something weird or you’re in an open relationship or whatever. I hate it, everyone hates it; whatever, what else do we have? So I was on it looking around and I found this guy who was like, ‘academic/writer, Australian, 6'3,"’ whatever. You can kind of tell by the way people write their profiles whether they’ll be able to have a conversation or not, from the grammar. And he had no picture. And I also don’t have a picture, so—”
“Wait. What do you mean you don’t have a picture?” I asked. “How does that even work?”
“I don’t have a picture of myself on my profile. I use a painting.”
I wondered who would ever — what, click on? “Like,” she said — who would ever pick someone who uses a painting as their profile picture. “I’d assume they were hiding something,” I said.
“Yeah, that they’re ugly,” she said. “But I’m not ugly.”
She was not, but that wouldn’t be readily apparent, I pointed out.
“No,” she said, “but actually you get tired of seeing what are basically the same profiles over and over and over. It’s hell. Life is hell. And the painting is not a normal painting. It’s funny, it’s appropriate to the context. If you have any actual interest in culture at all and you’re on this app you’d at least pause when you saw it. You’ll learn soon enough, my friend. Anyway,” she continued, “it’s also a good filter — the painting is a good filter — because the confident and interesting ones are willing to take a chance and talk to you a bit, and anyway it’s not even really a chance, because men are desperate and will try to match with anyone, even without a picture you get tons of matches because they are all fucking horndogs to whom nothing really means anything. AND it turns out a lot of people are just on there because they just want to text and probably won’t actually meet you in person anyway.”
“Really?” I asked. “I thought it was for sex.”
“People are afraid of sex now,” she said. “Haven’t you read the articles?”
I had read the articles. I’d thought it was just young people.
“It’s everyone,” she said. “Everyone is afraid of sex. So anyway,” she continued, “I matched with this guy. It says he’s hundreds of miles away, but he has his location settings on Berlin.”
At the time, I was a bit green in this area. “Why would someone do that?” I asked.
“Because Berlin is where the hot sluts who do fucked-up sex shit live,” she said, “and if you’re going to have some fucking pathetic texting relationship based on fantasies with a woman, that’s the kind of woman you want to do it with. And also because he was trying to cheat on his wife, which requires much more cunning to pull off when you’re living in a fucking village than he seems to have. He lives in Switzerland, the cows have eyes. But let me get to it. He writes me something, I don’t know, I write back, blah-blah. Whenever I match with someone who’s a native English speaker and seems like they’ve ever read a book in their life I try to make sure they don’t know who I am, because it’s not like I’m famous or anything but I don’t really want to be flirting with some guy who is going to screenshot my messages and put them on the internet and be like, ‘Look! The mean book critic is on the sex app for annoying people. Of course she’s a dom!’ As this story will demonstrate I am right to have that boundary, even if I don’t really heed it when it comes time. So anyway, I ask the guy what he writes. He’s like, ‘That’s not so important, you wouldn’t know it.’
“I say, ‘I might know it, I’m also a writer.’
“He’s like, ‘I’m not German.’
“I’m like, ‘Neither am I, I’m American.’
“He’s like, ‘Well, I’m Australian, I did a Ph.D. in London, I live in Switzerland, I don’t write for anywhere you’d know.’
“I’m like, ‘You’d be surprised,’” she said. “And then he says, ‘Oh, I think I do know who you are.’”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I really hide it. I don’t know my intentions with anonymity really. You could figure who I am once you start talking to me because I can’t lie, it seems. Whatever. So then he goes: ‘Yes, I know who you are, and I have to confess: I did not care for your novel.’”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Very exciting. I say, ‘That’s fine. What are your objections?’” She paused.
“He gives some objections: not emotional enough, debased themes, blah-blah, same old. I say these objections are boring and sexist.
“He says, ‘Maybe,’” she continued. “I say, ‘Okay, but now the situation is imbalanced. You know all sorts of stuff about me, but I don’t know anything about you. Who are you? Do I know you?’ And he says he needs to make sure I don’t know his wife before he tells me. So I’m like, ‘Okay, who is your wife?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I can’t say.’ Because the situation is delicate, and he requires discretion.”
“So he’s cheating on his wife.”
“Or trying to. I’m like, ‘Bro, I don’t give a fucking shit about your fucking shitty marriage. Tell me who you are and I can tell you if I know your wife who you hate.’ But I say it in a more charming way, of course.”
“That’s pretty charming.”
“Thank you. He thinks so too. Because instead of telling me who he is, he starts flirting with me using stuff from my novel.”
“Oh. The novel he said he didn’t like.”
“ExACTly! And not just major plot points but like, using the ideas from it. And of course it’s flattering. Especially because he has, like, clearly read the novel. And of course he knows and I know and he knows that I know that, also, this is, like, what the novel is about. So it’s very exciting. BUT! I am not so obsessed with myself that I will be permanently distracted by this.”
“No?”
“Haha. No. I’m like, ‘Okay, yes, good job, you really read the novel. Now who are you?’ This goes on for a while. Like more than 24 hours. And eventually—”
I asked the bartender for some tap water.
“Eventually I start getting really irritated,” she said. “I’m like, this guy just wants a sort-of well-known female writer to pay attention to him, he probably also enjoys being able to frustrate a sort-of well-known female writer, it’s just a fucking trap, I have to disengage from this. But he really keeps texting me. And you know, I love texting, I don’t disengage from texting very easily.”
“No, you don’t.”
“But he’s really avoiding my questions and it’s pissing me off! I’m asking, like, ‘Have you published a book?’ ‘Where did you do your Ph.D.?’ ‘Do you know my Australian friend Ellena Savage?’ ‘Is your wife Swiss?’ ‘Is your wife French?’ ‘Is your wife a theater director?’ That’s the only person in Switzerland I know. I’m also Googling every possible search-term combination I can think of, because I should have been able to figure out who he was that way, but of course Google doesn’t fucking work anymore. But it doesn’t really seem like I could possibly know the wife, based on what he says.”
“This guy sucks,” I said.
“Yeah, but now I’m hooked, I have to know, like, in what way does he suck?” she continued. “Because while I’m interrogating him he’s still making knowledgeable comments about my book. Eventually it goes on a bit too long, and it starts to seem like he won’t answer because of something else. So I’m really annoyed, and I’m looking at my phone being really annoyed, and then suddenly I realize: Oh. Oh my God. So I write him: …”
Here she paused to create dramatic tension. I waited patiently.
“‘Did you REVIEW my novel?’”
