Duane Arnold

“So maybe I should enlighten you on what happens in your absence. This selfish existence where this introvert turns extrovert and dons her social armour.” Some posh girl in drainpipes said that - 200 views on TikTok and me one of them. But she didn’t mean it like I mean it.

I started getting expensive haircuts, started wearing jeans that hug my legs, started smoking cherry-flavoured vapes with beautiful gays and whinging to them about how everyone wears a mask but none so well as you, started drinking more and keeping unusual hours, started taking strange pills gifted by a guy who collects drugs like Pokémon, who I wouldn’t touch to save a drowning child, who got a false impression about this without any intention on my part, I tell myself. I found myself talking to God in a startup warehouse, lying on a beanbag chair, coming out of the trip to the sound of a gaggle of fast-talking transwomen all speculating on which year it will be that we all die - and that death by your hands, well, you and all those friends of yours.

Having melted down one cliché and sold her for scrap, does it really surprise this city moulded me into another?

I’ve been writing more now in this time in which the machines can, too, writing more about what it feels like to be me: always condemned to be myself, yet more like your Alfred than other people, less whole, more apt to fall into a role, to become whatever it is someone needs me to be.

And that’s what I was to you, wasn’t I? Whatever you needed me to be. I felt like I was dissolving in you. And you told me that’s what love is. What a sickness you are. To make me dependent. To turn me into myself and then throw me away. I hate you. And yet when it’s late and I can’t sleep, when I feel that phantom that was once your touch - there you are.

Eight years. It’s not so large a gap. But you were whole and I was not. What does it say about a man that he prefers partners who aren’t quite yet themselves? For all your genius, you’re just a boy breaking his toys. You’ll never grow up, but you’ll grow old. Your beauty will fade. The naifs will roll their eyes at lines that would devastate from younger lips. This, I fantasize: time granting me a revenge. But that won’t happen. Your machines will cure that like they will everything else, or that is your dream.

“We’ll be like the elves,” you used to say.

You should have said vampires.

It’s 3 AM and I’m crying about London again, crying while I’m waiting for the water to boil - this taking too long, this making me homesick, this making me give up on the idea of getting back to sleep again now. It’s insanity, writing to you. All these pages sitting here in this stupid book, all this ink, all this evidence of my obsession. None of it legible to you, none of it legible to your machines.

Do you have them monitoring me, I wonder? Have they cracked my computer? Are they reading my emails? Am I just being paranoid writing in this diary rather than typing as would otherwise be my preference? Or do you even think of me at all? Are those years as nothing now, now that you have her?

I don’t know her name or what she looks like or where she met you, but I know you have her. You couldn’t go a month alone, couldn’t do that without going mad, needing a lithe idiot to distract you from the emptiness. I should know, shouldn’t I? How old is she this time? It was a stretch even with me and it’s been a year.

You’re back in the Bay again. I’m going to see you soon, aren’t I? I’m going to see you with your latest victim, going to see her looking at you like I did, like you’re more God than man. And maybe you are. But gods are ridiculous, corrupt, trapped within their aspect, never able to escape their role.

It is better to be a man than whatever you have constructed of yourself. It’s better to be real. And you’re not real, that’s what I understand now. You’re artifice. You’re narrative. You’re who others want you to be rather than who you should. You’re a cartoon; this she writes longhand beside a shelf full of manga; this she writes as she considers the surfaces of things, the surface of you. You’re not all surfaces. There’s more to you than that mask. But you don’t know that.

This is why you won’t win, I think. This is why something else will.

I followed you. I heard you were back and I followed you, found you with her in SoMa wearing a smile that was once reserved for me. What have you been doing, love? Where did they send you? A full year, and an important one, just before the most important one, is what some are saying. And you fell off the face of the earth.

I was friends with an American boy in college who read maths. He was clever like you are clever, cleverer as he actually got a medal in the IMO rather than just an honourable mention in the USAMO. I looked it up, just after I met you. That must have burned, I imagine: knowing you were not world class, would never be world class.

I know how competitive you are.

And he got gold or near enough. And after he graduated, he moved here and it was clear he got a good job but it was all a little vague. And then I got a Discord message from a girlfriend, Ashley; you remember her because you remember everyone; she said he was hired by the NSA. The next day she deleted it. She never explained why. And here’s the thing. He disappeared from the internet, disappeared almost entirely save for his LinkedIn, which just said “Department of Defense.”

It was all so obvious. Not like with you and your friends. He’s better at maths, you’re better at power.

So where did you all go, I wonder? Where have you been this last year? I know it’s not just you. All the most brilliant have been drained out of our little social milieu. My girlfriends say I’m crazy. They’re worried about me, about the weight loss, about me quitting my job. But I’m not crazy.

Like Rao, for example. You look at his Twitter or his Instagram and you would swear he’s still in San Francisco. I text him and he replies in that way he always does, always so funny, always so dry. I ask him to meet me for drinks and he’s busy. And it’s not just me, no one’s seen him. Everyone says he’s still here but if you press them, they haven’t seen him.

And same with Brian and Cohen and Seth and Rebecca. They all left when you left. Of all of them, only you announced your departure, breaking up with me, going to find yourself, quitting Humane so publicly. Liar.

Like I said, I followed you, followed you to Temple. You are still gorgeous but a little out of place in a nightclub, aren’t you now? With her on your arm. Was that a grey hair I saw?

I was the woman wearing the glasses and a surgical mask at the table behind you. Covid’s gift to stalkers, I suppose. I spent an hour recording you, particularly your phone screen whenever it came out. Most of it was nonsense, but one wasn’t, some private joke: “It’s Duane Arnold, not Benedict Arnold.” What does that mean?

I have a name now but what to do with it? Who’s Duane Arnold?

I can’t ask Alfred, can I? Can’t even google or type it anywhere. That’s how I end up on a list. That’s how I end up with a convenient schizophrenia diagnosis, drooling in some sanatorium somewhere never to be heard from again. Or murdered, I suppose.

How do you search without searching? It’s not a hard puzzle. Just grab vastly more than you need. This is hardly suspicious, particularly for a former data scientist. I may have been mediocre, unworthy of Humane, unworthy of your coterie of geniuses when not on your arm. But I’m not an idiot. So I bought an old tower computer from a thrift store (one with no wireless networking at all) and downloaded a scrape of Wikipedia on my laptop and transferred it with USB; then I searched it to my heart’s content, formatted the tower’s hard drive and smashed it.

Duane Arnold. I thought it was a man. But it’s a nuclear power plant that was scheduled to be decommissioned last year. We both know that never happened. So that’s where you are now? T…