Starlings

A story of influencers & influence

Stolen from The Atlantic.

Last Friday night I was lying on the kitchen floor, masturbating to an old fantasy of someone who persuaded me to see myself the way they saw me. Whoever they were, they had the kaleidoscopic face of a cherub, and the way they saw me was with total ego death’s craving for an exteriorized self. Directly overhead, my upstairs neighbor dropped something heavy on the floor and said fuck, and then I heard her shouting Brian, your fucking pasta. I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, except for the tomato I’d brought to work for lunch.

Forty-five minutes later, I stood on the front steps and cried out as the DoorDash driver stumbled over the grimy frozen snow heaped on the curb and almost fell on her face. My heart could have broken for her. She was only in her mid-twenties—a wisp of a willowy blonde dressed like a windsock, with bags beneath her eyes and premature frown lines all so deep that her pale physiognomy had a kind of bas-relief look to it. In the back seat of her dented, double-parked car, I noticed two little girls drooped against the window on either side, sound asleep. They were their mother’s passengers and her dozing audience as she traversed the city on a cold and joyless winter night, feeding thankless strangers.

I gave her a five-dollar bill in addition to the 18 percent tip I left on my card.

She had an unusual name—Odette K—which made her easy to look up. Before long I found her on TikTok, where she reflects on the challenges of being a disabled queer polyamorous working mother with three partners who all have agoraphobia and despise children. On occasion, she updates viewers about her progress (or lack of it) toward realizing her ambition to go pro as a video game face model.

All of a sudden I felt like it wouldn’t have been enough even if I’d handed Odette a hundred-dollar bill. She’s been at it for over a year and has only 31 followers.

Occasions like my encounter with Odette make a body feel grateful for what it has, even when it isn’t much. It was a sobering reminder that although my 246 YouTube subscribers aren’t nearly enough to sustain a meaningful existence, I can say I’m getting by with at least a modicum of relevance.

Seeing Odette’s TikTok handle pop up in the chat window of Effie St. Vincent’s YouTube channel the following night was somehow unsettling—like attending a religious revival or an orgy and making eye contact with a work-related acquaintance who doesn’t recognize you. Evidently Odette was also a tier 3 subscriber, donating $25 a month for the privilege of viewing Effie’s phone-shot Saturday night livestreams before the recordings are unlocked to the general public on Sundays. (Given what she shared about her finances on TikTok, I doubted she could afford to be a tier 4.)

Effie spent her first hour with us in her living room, taste-testing her experimental varieties of homebrewed kombucha. She was dressed in a gray cowl sweater and a stylish yellow rain hat, with a polished cone of dalmatian jasper swaying from a ball chain necklace. (Never in her life has the world seen her wearing a garment or placing an accessory but perfectly.) Afterwards she rearranged her furniture and positioned little metal obelisks and orbs on the shelves and window sills, explaining that she’d just returned from a two-day workshop about tuning electromagnetic fields to mitigate the symptoms of attachment disorders. Her nine pet sugar gliders leapt from the window drapes, clung to the lampshades, and groomed themselves in the interstices of her ganglionic 3D-printed sofa. The chat window crackled with the accolades and observations of some 85,000 tier 3 and 4 subscribers, and the vibrant writhing genius of our epoch invested Effie’s every word and gesture, blazing in her heterochromatic eyes like a string of Starlink satellites.

Odette embarrassed herself. She tried to promote her TikTok and posted links to her headshots. Nobody paid attention to her, and she didn’t take the hint. Eventually Effie’s mods ejected her for self-promotional spamming, and poor Odette was deprived of her opportunity to be a full participant in what happened next.

While Effie aimed her phone at her chiffonier to demonstrate something else she’d learned at her workshop retreat—how one’s art materials, sewing kit, cosmetics, prescriptions, incense cones, and silica gel packets can be organized in a set of drawers such that methodically opening and shutting them during a moment of emotional distress creates a panic reversal circuit—her favorite sugar glider Zhang Hao jumped from the tangle of silk philodendron epoxied to the wall, and quietly landed in an uncovered one-gallon jar of rum raisin-flavored kombucha. It all happened off-camera. Effie’s discovery that the poor creature had drowned was our discovery too, and our hearts broke with hers.

She rose to the occasion. It was about 8:00 PM in Los Angeles then, and Effie typically ends her Saturday night streams at 9:00. She kept it going until 7:15 AM.

We mourned and meditated on the fragility of life with her, and we remembered Zhang Hao in the photos she’d taken and the fan art she’d received. We watched her inter her beloved pet in a Fleuvog shoebox, and listened to her describe the unfolding dimensions and textures of her grief with scientific precision until her voice went hoarse. She attempted an impromptu therapeutic mukbang with a bucket of shrimp ramen, but found she had no appetite. Taking us to bed with her, she narrated her bootless attempt to cry herself to sleep. At the end of it all, she went out to the balcony to watch the sunrise, and sang a rendition of “Get What You Give.” It started off slow, tremulous, and sorrowful, and rose to a triumphant crescendo at the end, when she omitted the last verses to repeat the chorus seven times as the warm orange sun crested the San Gabriel Mountains.

I was there the whole time, watching my contributions to the chat dart up out of sight the instant I hit send. It was incredible. We roiled with collective effervescence as Effie drew us into her vulnerability and passion. It was as though she’d looked directly into our eyes and pressed her thumb to each of our individual foreheads—and yet even in moments likes these she overmasters us, diminishes us. The reality of Effie St. Vincent makes us all pointless, but in our coming together over her, she helps us to forget our pointlessness. She deserves every cent she earns from us.

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I don’t mean to boast—make absolutely no mistake—but I have some history with Effie. I’ve never told anyone before. At first it was because I didn’t want to come across as just another insignificant nobody who drops names to appear relevant by dint of association. Later on, it was because I couldn’t imagine anyone believing me.

Effie and I went to the same college in the Midwest during the late aughts. Somehow, she and I happened share a gen ed or elective course for six consecutive semesters. We didn’t talk much; I mostly kept to myself out of shyness, and Effie was a loner. Even though she didn’t belong to any clubs or cliques, and never spoke in class unless an instructor arbitrarily called upon her when no hands were raised, she was someone you couldn’t help noticing. It wasn’t that she was especially attractive or stylish—she hadn’t yet come into her own, back then—but in every classroom, she was like the pearl earring in the Vermeer painting. The composition of any space she occupied subtly but inexorably skewed towards her.

Once, during our junior year, I was eating alone in the dining hall and she sat down across from me without uttering one word by way of hello or may I. She started talking. I listened. For half an hour she discoursed on frozen yogurt, shopping for closet organizers at Target, her criteria for a good pencil sharpener, and switching her major for the fifth time, and then just got up and left after she’d finished eating her salad and sandwich. My plate was still full, and it wasn’t because my mouth had been occupied in speaking. It was inexplicable. In Effie’s presence, my sense of myself became so many iron shavings tracing out her field lines.

Back then I thought it really was just personal magnetism, the effect she has on people—her facility for saying what they weren’t aware of already knowing, and articulating what they didn’t realize they wanted to hear themselves saying. But I’ve since come to understand that calling it “charisma” not only trivializes her gift, but misidentifies it altogether. The fact is, Effie St. Vincent bends exigence and meaning the way a star distorts spacetime.

The next time she spoke to me was on a February afternoon of the following year. I was on academic probation, and facing up to the reality that I was totally unfit to major in computer science. Slumped at a table in the library, studying for midterms I knew I was going to flunk, I put my head down and shut my eyes. Somebody sat down in the chair beside me, and even before glancing up I knew it had to be Effie.

She wanted to know if I had a car. She’d decided to drop out and relocate to New York, but had no money and no transportation. Would I, she inquired, consider skipping my exams and failing all my classes to take her on a road trip?

I asked her to give me two hours to pack my things.

As we dove east through Iowa during our first night on the road, Effie told me about the day she learned she was double-jointed. Being the only student in her first-grade class who could bend her fingertips made her a sensation, a cynosure, an object of fascination and envy—for about seven minutes. From that day forward she knew exactly what she wanted to be in life: relevant. But what she would do and what she would be in order to attain relevance remained undetermined. Back when she was in high school, she leaned towards getting into radio. Later on she pondered becoming a theoretical physicist with a penchant for showmanship, and then flirted with the notion of being a waifish fashion model who released a bawdy rap album now and then. She’d weighed going into politics after seeing Obama on TV, but later came to believe that the relevance of politicians was largely illusory. Twitter was looking more and more like the way to go—but wouldn’t she need a theme? Some area of expertise? A brand?

She didn’t mind taking a circuitous route to New York. She needed to think things out, and I was an amenable sounding board. For a week and a half we zigzagged north and south, eating at diners and sleeping in the back of my station wagon under a pile of blankets. Effie was restless at night. The more I listened to her, the more it seemed like the problem wasn’t so much a matter of finding inspiration or settling on an approach, but rather a kind of metaphysical quandary she could hardly articulate, let alone solve.

One frigid sunless afternoon, we parked at an overlook in Virginia and stepped out to stretch our legs. I visited a vending machine while Effie sat on the hood and stared listlessly at the spiny brown hills in the distance. Then—she saw it: a contracting and distending black cloud reeling through the air in turbulent eddies, throbbing in and out of opacity. Starlings. Thousands of them. For several minutes after the birds had finally sunk out of sight, Effie was still watching the tract of overcast sky their scintillating dance had darkened. She had tears in her brown and green eyes.

She was unable to tell me what she’d felt or understood in that moment. As we drove on, she spoke distractedly about strange attractors and spooky action at a distance, and the mistake of confounding means with ends. She said wanted to become a fractal pattern, circulating and propagating like rumor. She wanted to be a living event—the self-conscious spectacle. (She used the definite article, I recall that clearly.)

Effie had found her inspiration, and my money was starting to run out. Two days later, I dropped her off at a warehouse loft in Brooklyn where some people she’d found on Twitter were having a cocktail party. She thanked me for my generosity and friendship, gave me her new email address, and wished me the best. There was no question of my going with her. From there on out, she’d need a companion who could strengthen and broaden her currents instead of getting swept up and away by them.

After that, there isn’t much to tell. I sent her some emails over the next few months; her replies arrived weeks later and were never longer than a sentence or two. When she started appearing in retweets on my Twitter feed, I followed her—but she didn’t follow me back. Around the time when Paste and Jezebel were soliciting articles from her and Welcome to Night Vale invited her to play a guest role as a disembodied voice that used to be an ASL interpreter named Cindy, I sent Effie one last congratulatory email. She never responded.

I didn’t hold it against her. During our last days on the road, she advised me that friends make poor followers, and followers are what actually count in the world. Relevance is not popularity; it is rather the capacity to impersonally set persons and events in motion along lines determined by personality.

At any rate, I ended up in an East Coast city that wasn’t New York and fell into a career as an inventory specialist. In my free time I punched out Desperate Housewives fanfiction and authored a blog where I reviewed restaurant bathrooms. When that went nowhere, I ran a parody Twitter account where I assumed the persona of a closeted gay southern man with Marxist political tendencies, a fanatical enthusiasm for the Tea Party, and zero self-awareness. It never exceeded 100 followers. Eventually I settled on a YouTube channel where I upload video essays examining 1980s cartoons through a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens.

I don’t know how to do what Effie does. I don’t have it in me to be relevant.

But so few people do. My boss Crystal has a Substack where she writes about the political dimensions of Magic: The Gathering mechanics, and her weekly dispatches receive fewer than ten likes and never any comments. Several of my twenty-something coworkers are some variety of illustrator, and they share their work on Instagram, Bluesky, X, wherever. I watch each of them pass through the same cycle. After getting little to no engagement for three or four months, they sink into despair. Their output dwindles. Then they try a new antidepressant and their inspiration returns for several weeks, only to jilt them again when they realize nothing’s changed and nobody cares.

One of my upstairs neighbors, Brian, writes literary realist fiction about failed marriages for little websites viewed exclusively by authors of literary realist fiction published on little websites. His wife Cate has a TikTok where she performs nominally comedic one-person skits about thirty-something white women frustrated with their gouty, layabout husbands’ inability to get them pregnant. Like Odette, Cate has been booted from Effie St. Vincent’s streams for spamming self-promotional links in the chat window. On occasion she uploads clips in which she directly addresses her 300 or so followers and practically begs them to share her content and donate to her Patreon and visit her merch page to purchase a $6 pinback button bearing her channel’s amateurishly stylized logo. Her smile is always unconvincing, her buoyancy fulsome. Every time she does it, she loses at least five followers because she still hasn’t figured out that displays of naked, pleading desperation are an admission not only of irrelevance, but of undeservingness to be relevant.

Of the two of them, I think Brian has it worse.

Last summer, someone claiming to be Block Captain aggressively promoted a poetry reading in the neighborhood Facebook group. On a triangular concrete island situated between intersecting streets and designated as a park, about twenty people gathered on the scheduled afternoon to listen to four wilting middle-aged strangers from up and down the block read out verses they’d composed on the theme of Community. Most everyone who showed up was only there for the free pizza. Brian came alone, and got to talking at me about his novel-in-progress.

It was going to be a period piece, he said, about an East German woman who married a visiting engineer from the United States and absconded from Weimar before the iron curtain came down. Their marriage stagnates after she gives birth to a son with Down syndrome, and despite loving the boy dearly, she feels lost and stranded in the barren placelessness of a Pennsylvania postwar suburb. Then she discovers she has an amazing gift for playing the piano…carves out time to sneak out of the house and take lessons…meets a new teacher, an émigré from Ukraine…falls in love with him…considers leaving her husband and child for a life of art and romance…but the piano teacher served in the Red Army during its march on Berlin and was in Königsberg, where her older sister suffered terribly at the hands of Soviet troops…begins to suspect he might have been involved…and so on and so on and on.

He wanted my opinion, so I tried to help him out. I thought about the kinds of books Effie promotes on her channel from time to time, which afterwards ascend the ranks of the bestseller lists and become inescapable on BookTok for months on end. My advice to him was to start over. Write a novel, I said, about a shy but strong-willed girl who’s enrolled in a posh boarding school for vampires. She’s actually an elf (she hides her identity by wearing plastic fangs) but doesn’t want to come out as one, and she’s also a very popular elf dancer and lip-syncer on TikTok (or some in-universe equivalent of it). A bully learns her secret, and plans to tell the whole school during the annual talent show, but the protagonist beats her to the punch by coming out first and doing an elfish dancing and lip-syncing routine that makes everyone love and accept her. Make it an unambiguous metaphor for real-world issues, I suggested, make it feel fresh and joyful but give it mature themes, and write the way people talk.

“But I’m not an expert,” I told Brian when I noticed his face had turned yellow. “I don’t know how to write a novel. I just think that kind of book would do a lot more to boost your profile and make your voice relevant, you know?”

He grimaced and thanked me for my advice. I doubt he took it to heart.

His problem is that he’s a coward. He lacks the strength of character to gaze into the abyss until the abyss looks back, to see himself reflected in its empty lightless eye and know what to do and to be so as to act as the unreasoning, inarticulate power that directs a murmuration of twenty thousand starlings in its stochastic aerial waltz. You don’t achieve relevance by being yourself, by cleaving to niceties like authenticity or principles or art, but by embracing the void and exchanging some of its nullity for some of yourself.

Forget what I just said—I don’t know what I’m talking about. Effie phrased it differently, and she does know what she’s talking about because she’s living it. During the late twenty-tens, back when she was dating Colton Mok and regularly appearing with him on his podcast, she once told him that her eureka moment was realizing she had to become the portrait that necessitated its painter after the fact—to conscientiously dissolve to a fiction, an ethereal pattern that can recongeal into fact within the mass hallucination called culture.

That was on the infamous Episode 377 of December 13, 2019. Ten minutes later, she gave an object lesson by offhandedly mentioning that the rebel princess and co-protagonist Kelesia in Colton’s then-unfinished Moons of Jupiter trilogy had always reminded her of herself. I’ve listened to it a hundred times, and still can’t decide whether Colton hesitated to answer because he thought it was an odd thing of her to say in that moment, or because he intuited that Effie had just annihilated him.

You’ll remember that for most of the couple’s three-year relationship, the public generally regarded Effie as Colton’s second banana. He was the prolific wunderkind sci-fi author whose short stories and bestselling novels were being adapted for streaming television and feature films as fast as the contracts could be signed; she was the girlfriend with occasional guest-appearances in the media and a loyal following across Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Their numbers were about equal, but Colton’s publications, awards, and creator credits amounted to a substantial prestige gap in his favor.

After Effie made her play on Episode 377, all of that changed. Search for Kelesia fan art posted to Tumblr and pay attention to the timestamps. You’ll notice that after 2019, the character is consistently drawn to resemble Effie. By February 2020, posts and comments on the subreddit dedicated to Moons of Jupiter evinced a revised assessment of Kelesia’s personality and motivations that soon became orthodox opinion among the books’ fans. Netflix halted production on the first season of its Moons of Jupiter series in November 2020, and announced it was recasting the actor playing Kelesia. Before the thing was cancelled entirely, rumor had it that the scripts had been rewritten twice—and most of the revisions had to do with expanding Kelesia’s role.

Effie and Colton split up less than a month after that fateful podcast episode. About a year later, he irretrievably deleted his 500-page draft of Moons of Jupiter’s third and final book when he could no longer deny that Kelesia was Effie, and had always been Effie. (Had he not drafted the first part after he started following Effie on Twitter in 2013, unwittingly making himself an arrow in her vector plot?) The longer he thought it over, the more obvious it was to him that every character in Moons of Jupiter was either Effie or himself—and in the apparently natural course of the trilogy’s composition, he had killed off or written out everyone who wasn’t Effie.

Colton recently divulged all this in an interview on the YouTube channel IndieBookBooster, the first he’s given since being released from inpatient care in 2022. The channel has barely a thousand subscribers—but it’s not like Colton will be a returning guest on Fresh Air or The Late Show anytime soon, and his recent self-published novel about a man living in a simulated universe controlled by his ex-wife is in no danger whatsoever of being selected as a New York Times notable book. The third entry in Moons of Jupiter came out a while back, authored by someone the publisher selected. Colton received a generous payout, but his relevance was lost forever. All he’ll ever be from now on is Effie St. Vincent’s ex who wrote novels about Effie St. Vincent and then had a career-ruining meltdown.

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It was only last night that I got around to listening to the IndieBookBooster interview. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, plucking and peeling things from my face and dabbing gels over the scabs while Colton’s adenoidal voiced trilled on, and wondered at the unreality of it all. And then I heard a notification buzz.

For the first time in fourteen years, Effie St. Vincent had sent me an email.

She’d be in town tomorrow, she told me, and asked if I’d be interested in getting a drink and catching up. She’d already scoped out the location: a dreary neighborhood bar patronized entirely by bitter retirees and middle-aged cranks, all too benighted and alienated to recognize her.

See you at 7:00, she wrote.

I arrived at 6:30, took a seat at a table, and disinterestedly watched a muted, close-captioned CNN broadcast on a boxy old TV set mounted on the wall. The possibility occurred to me that this might be where the dream ended. Maybe in less than an hour, I’d awaken in the back of the old station wagon, parked at a deserted rest stop in Kentucky or Tennessee in the February gloom of fourteen years ago, Effie dozing under the blankets beside me.

Fat old men long reconciled to their pointlessness sat at the bar without speaking to each other. A bartender with broad shoulders, giant hands, and an eminently forgettable face slouched against a bare part of the wall and poked at his phone. A woman, all teeth, who’d probably never stop smelling of cigarettes even if she quit, hunched over a table by herself and occasionally yelled at the television. For some reason or other I thought about Effie’s drowned sugar glider Zhang Hao.

Effie arrived precisely on schedule, dressed in a fashionable white parka. She ordered nothing. She brought her own water to drink, her own glass, her own ice, and her own chair to sit in, and gave the bartender a thick stack of gift cards to Starbucks, Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and Panera in exchange for locking the door for an hour and signing an NDA. Every person in the bar signed one too, and got their own pile of gift cards—except for me. Effie knew I needed no inducements to do what she asked.

And so there she and I were together, fourteen years later—me with a little more flab and a little less pep, and her with a maturated beauty that could appropriately be called “ageless” and a little rectangular device in her pink handbag that could turn this dingy watering hole into a monument if she just trained its camera lens on her face and told it where she was.

She made a point of showing me she’d powered off her phone.

I’ve heard of old friends meeting for the first time after many years apart and acting as though no time had passed at all—and I suppose it’s something I still haven’t experienced. Effie and I were never truly separated. I’d never ceased to be her captivated audience, and she never doubted she could candidly speak to me about her life and trust me not to interrupt her.

She shed a sincere tear for poor Zhang Hao and showed me some unposted pics and clips from her recent trip to Kyoto. I heard about the supply chain issues threatening the rollout of her branded household EM-field tuners, and the challenge of finding enough minutes in the day to write her soon-to-be-published book. After a while she told me the reason for her visit: at the crack of dawn, she’d be meeting with InspoTok sensation Christine Kashi-Menodora at the art museum to be filmed running up its front steps dressed in garments from Christine’s line of thermal athleticwear and discussing radical visioning and self-realignment. Their hired quants estimated that a thousand people would be gathered at the site within 30 minutes of a passerby recognizing them. Even though they could trust their followers to keep a respectful distance, she and Christine would nevertheless be extracted by helicopter once they finished recording.

From there, Effie would head to Manhattan to meet Malik Copeman at the Museum of Modern Art. I had heard of Malik Copeman, yes? The world-renowned emotional surrealist artist, New Yorker contributor, and TikTok comedian? His six-foot resin sculpture Limerence in Menthol Silver No. 6 had debuted and sold at Christie’s for $880 million just last month, and expressed his signature themes of self-love, complex embodiment, and resistance with such perspicuous force that it sublated the meaning of all previously existing artworks. The whole tradition was irrelevant now. Accordingly, the MoMA was planning to sell off its collection and shut its doors before the end of the year.

In any event, Effie was to glide through the MoMA’s halls with Malik and his film crew all afternoon, thoughtfully but lightheartedly reminiscing about art. She hoped to pay cash for some handsome memento of fauvism or orphism that matched her furniture, sparing it from oblivion. Also on the agenda was finding an interval to suggestively hint at—but not officially announce—Malik’s inclusion as a character in the next iteration of Super Smash Bros.

After a pause, Effie told me she was tired.

Malik Copeman was something else, she said. He was like a mutant, a monster, a creature who could do what she did on a level she’d never dreamed—and he wasn’t even thirty yet. He was null, utterly without sentiment, a true living fractal. She knew his invitation to appear with him at the MoMA was a flex on his part, a demonstration that she was in his orbit and could be compelled to act as a vector for his own spectacular pattern. It was impossible for her to refuse him. She literally could not tell him no.

And it wasn’t just Malik. Effie rattled off a dozen names, names I recognized. I couldn’t say where I’d heard or seen them before—I just knew of them, somehow. They were all on their way up, Effie said, unstoppably gaining in strength and relevance, and would soon reduce her to a mere scattering of flecked lines in their dynamic geometries.

Dante believed the joy and perfection of the blessed in heaven are transfinite. Depending on the height of the sphere they occupy, the inconceivable endlessness of their bliss may be of a greater or lesser degree, but all are content with their share of eternity. But Earth is not Paradise, and Effie was not content. She knew she had ascended as high as she could. Her place in the architecture of the cosmos had crystallized, and she would never be anything more than she was now.

It made her feel a little ephemeral, she told me. A little pointless.

I didn’t know what to say. She started to cry, and for the first time in many years I felt as though whatever I said or did next might actually matter.

“Why don’t you,” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” she answered quietly, correctly guessing what I’d wanted to say.

One of the fat men at the bar coughed. An aged movie star promoted a cryptocurrency on TV. The bartender crunched down on the Lifesaver in his mouth. Effie wiped her eyes with her fingers and excused herself to use the bathroom.

I studied the dusty baseboards, the rusted frame of the dartboard on the cheap wood-panel walling, and the hanging lamps’ green bankers speckled with dust and dead flies. The men at the bar quietly released their gases into the air, the bartender swiped through Facebook, and the woman sitting by herself shouted epithets at the news anchor and the congressman conversing on television. In Effie’s absence we became tragically meaningless, and there was nothing any of us could do but go on being what we were in the spam folder of the universe.

Effie was gone for almost ten minutes before I checked my phone. In my inbox I found an announcement of a surprise livestream. I joined 36,000 other viewers to watch her point the lens of her iPhone camera at the tarnished bathroom mirror and tearfully admonish the world not to let attachment-anxious narcissists into their lives, and refuse to let them tell us we should give up on our aspirations. “We are enough,” she proclaimed, effulgent with passion. “We can achieve our dreams. Don’t ever—ever—let toxic, useless people tell you what your limits are.”

Thirty minutes later, she dried her last tear and thanked us for watching. Beaming, mesmerizing, she reminded us to purchase her book on identifying and overcoming energy vampires of every zodiac sign for $12 when it dropped on Kindle on the 28th. By that point the stream had upwards of 170,000 viewers. In the chat window, scrolling fast as it ever had, lines of heart and fire emojis, donation statements, and all-caps messages calling her a hero and a goddess and Joan of Arc whizzed by.

“It was good catching up with you,” Effie said with an ingenuous smile after emerging from the bathroom. Before I could think of a reply, she squeezed my hand, put on her parka, and walked out the door.

I caught an Uber home after gathering my wits. The driver made me the captive audience of his podcast, in which he lauds Benjamin Franklin as the ultimate exemplar of The Hustle and counsels listeners as to how they can put his virtues into practice to become prosperous, respected, and abundantly laid members of society. A pair of iPads hitched to the backsides of his SUV’s front seats solicited riders to become Patreon donors. I looked him up and did the math. His monthly subscription revenues amount to $18.

I found Cate and Brian smoking cigarettes and shivering on the sidewalk in front of our building. She was looking at TikTok. He was reading something on his Kindle. Neither looked up as I passed them and went inside.

I lay in bed for a long time, thinking back to the two weeks when Effie and I drove around the country together. Fourteen nights and thirteen mornings lying beside each other in the back of the station wagon. I always woke up first. In the stillness and ambiguity of twilight, it seemed like nothing existed but the two of us—an isolated two-body system in which the significance of the one part was transferred to the other in an infinite regress of definition.

I opened OpenShot to work on my forthcoming upload—an examination of Savoir and Connaissance in Jem and the Holograms season 1, episode 17—but it suddenly felt so hideously futile that I ended up nuking my YouTube account and going up to the roof to fling my laptop down to the street.

A bad nosebleed had me stooping over the bathroom sink until two in the morning. It just wouldn’t stop. My phone sat on the toilet basin, playing Effie’s upload from the bar on repeat while the waste bin filled up with bloody wads of toilet paper. I grew lightheaded and began to worry I might do something crazy.

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I underestimated how early Effie planned to show up at the art museum. She and Christine Kashi-Menodora are already at the top of the steps. Christine’s crew films them gabbing with each other as I push through the onlookers on the uppermost landing to have it out with her.

Effie looks away from Christine when I climb the last step and shout her name.

“You aren’t real,” I tell her.

I point to my own mismatched eyes and bend my own fingertips, and spit it all out. She’s my impossible portrait, she’s my runaway fiction, my make-believe second self that could be and be seen the way I desperately wanted, but never could. For it to work, I had to convince even myself of the lie, like the best grifters do—but now it’s time for us both to stop pretending.

The film crew stares at me like I’m out of my mind. Christine turns and motions for one of the large men keeping a low profile behind the portico’s marble columns to intervene. Effie’s mouth hangs slack as she steps toward me.

“You,” she speaks to Christine and her crew over her shoulder, looking uncharacteristically rattled. “You’re all seeing this too?”

As Effie approaches me, the cameraman trains his lens on us. Christine’s security hesitates.

“I made you up!” Effie yells at me. “You aren’t real!”

The way she tells it, she was once a solitary nobody who wanted to be a somebody. Before she could persuade the world to believe in her, she had to believe in herself—which was just too much for a lonely girl who no one gave a shit about. So she invented an imaginary friend. A confidant who understood and loved her perfectly. Someone to whom she could secretly address her life’s work. Someone who would remain the singular soul in a tittering vortex of anonymous faces who recognized her as a human being instead of the supernormal entity she desired to become. Her muse. Her secret power source.

“And that’s why,” she tells me, drawing near and speaking low. The mist of her breath caresses my cheek in the cold air. “I had to write you out.”

At first (she says) I was an invaluable anchor and ballast for her. But I’ve long since become an encumbrance—a limiter. So last night she went to the bar by herself and playacted our reunion and final estrangement. The moment had been perfect. Her livestream from the bathroom went viral. It has already been viewed nine million times and gained her four million new followers. If it goes on circulating at the same rate for the next four hours, she’ll be able to confront Malik Copeman at the MoMA on more favorable ground. Having foreclosed on a true personal connection (or the fantasy of one) and jettisoned the last residue of her human sentiments, she can become even more rarefied, more phenomenal, more unreal—and with her ahuman purpose sharpened to an absolute point she can penetrate and destroy Malik, siphoning his pattern into her own.

“So why are you still here?” she screams.

---

So I’m rolling on the concrete with Effie St. Vincent, trying to rip out her throat while she feels about my face with her thumbs, seeking my eyes. People shriek and cry, but nobody dares get involved—the field lines are too strong. Effie, adrenalized and unguarded, is more spellbinding than she’s ever been before. We hold Christine and the production team magnetically in place, twitching and stiff like flash-frozen sprouts of asparagus. But the hundreds of spectators on the steps retain the use of their limbs and hold their phones aloft, recording and streaming the event we’ve become. We can feel it in the air like a sinking heat—their anticipation, their delight at being present for the start of Effie’s meltdown arc. Effie feeds on their morbid yearning, and projects her vectors with doubled and tripled intensity. Her facility for meaning-making goes haywire, imprisoning every witness within a deliriously lucid understanding of what’s at stake in this improbable climax of our impossible relationship.

The atmosphere tenses and the crowd gasps as Effie and I go tumbling down the steps in each other’s arms. In slow-time, between the instants where my head pounds against cement, it dawns on me that Effie must be right—all of my earliest memories are of her. I’d always supposed it was because my life wasn’t worth remembering before she entered into it.

We’re still falling. We could probably stop ourselves if Effie removed her hands from my neck, and if I’d give up pounding on her kidneys. But we’ve still got a long way to go, thrashing the other’s embrace, falling and falling. The swell of enraptured viewers parts to make way for us. Their phones track us like heliotropes bending towards the sun.

I sense what’s going through Effie’s mind. She’s wondering why there wasn’t anyone before me—why she can remember telling me about the day she exhibited her double-jointedness to her first grade classmates but not the day itself. And then she asks herself the most obvious and the most dangerous question: if she made me up—and she definitely did—how did I drive the car? And wasn’t it strange that I should have been the one to unleash her upon the world by dropping her off in Brooklyn, quietly disappearing into anonymity and letting her work?

We’ve finally landed at the bottom. Neither of us can move. Somebody is bleeding from their ears—maybe Effie, maybe me. The people nearest to us are thinking of the hundreds of thousands of views their uploads will rack up as they stand over our entangled, battered bodies and pinch their screens to capture us perfectly in frame. Effie, or me, or the pair of us, feverishly contemplates what it means to be the painter who painted the portrait that necessitated the painter. To retroactively create one’s creator and instate the matter as fact—that is influence, that demonstrates control over not merely the mass hallucination called culture, but the mass hallucination called reality. Effie shudders with covetous admiration.

A further consideration of the significance of the painting that installed the painter to paint the painting that necessitated the painter restores Effie’s verve. Her pattern circumscribes mine once more. I remind her that the painter who painted the painting that installed the painter to paint the painting that necessitated the painter remains the last word in the matter, but my words are garbled and I spit out a couple of teeth. Effie makes a bid to prevail in the debate by changing its terms: okay, we both came first, we both made each other up, but my metrics are superior. Fine, I think at her—but came from what?

She can’t say—and admits it’s a very good question. Thousands of minds riveted to her through their screens wrestle furiously with the riddle. Effie knows their thoughts; she wouldn’t be who she is today if she couldn’t read the room accurately and instantaneously. And I know Effie’s thoughts. I can feel them with her, all the brains across the world synchronously whirring away like Bombe drums, besieging the enigma.

The daemon in the brute deterministic order of things that was spurred by cosmic FOMO to surreptitiously conjure us into being like a pair of sock puppet accounts to help it build its own inscrutable personal brand discovers itself in our intimation of it. Caught unawares, it loosens its grip and allows the antinomy’s ramifications to escape its control. Everything (Effie and I simultaneously realize) is going according to plan. Our secret collaboration is finally dropping, and it’s going to break the internet for sure.

From a heap of concussions, fractured bones, and bleeding lacerations, we rise together at the foot of the art museum’s steps and on a billion backlit screens as a seven-winged seraph with fivescore-pack abs, a chest like a cathedral hewn from Pangaean bedrock, six eyes burning with a light that answers every question before it need be asked, lush lips full as dick, and genitals from here to Andromeda, deep and wet as creation. We are become the omega-level self-conscious spectacle, the hallucination’s hallucination, the pantheistic nexus, guarantor, and prerequisite of all meaning—the universal limerence object, Dionysian and incarnate from nullity. We are absolute relevance, and the geometry we radiate into the order of the real is fact, material and incontrovertible.

Our congregation mashes the like and subscribe buttons until their phones splinter and their fingers are pulverized to bloody stubs. Through us and from us they receive damask robes and golden skin and turn to angels, the size and brilliance of their haloes in proportion to their shame.

Colton Mok discerns what’s coming and burrows deep into the earth to escape it. Odette K discovers she was right about everything she ever said, and we raise her and her three partners and two children to the heavens to become a new constellation called Odune (the Agony) in place of the dim irrelevant stars of Cancer. Christine Kashi-Menodora’s entourage gives up on her and goes to the Amazon, where they plant themselves as self-satisfied trees with impenetrable malachite bark and nutrient-dense silver pomes. Cate gives birth to twenty-six babies—twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine—each shinier and more perfect than the last, while Brian feeds her spoonfuls of royal jelly and weeps, boiling with a concatenation of emotion he can never hope to describe and will implode his heart when he ceases to feel it. Watching from Manhattan, Malik Copeman’s only answer is to dowse himself in gasoline and ask his personal assistant Tetyana to strike a match—but she’s not listening to him anymore.

Months pass in seconds. Nobody works anymore, and the gamey carcass of a collapsed economy is apportioned out to the starving. Everything and everyone is trending and all that remains to trend now is Nothing, so Hollywood and Brooklyn and the Instagram cognoscenti eradicate themselves to get on the next big thing. The rich are finally devoured and the poor and the insane become kings and are beheaded toute de suite by revolutionary feral infants nursed on Community Notes and AI-generated Bluey vivisection porn. Gargantuan mass weddings conducted in Boise, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Boston, Omaha, and Phoenix conclude with chemical fires, the orgiastic tearing down of walls, and obscene potlucks after which the groomsmen and bridesmaids play “Nani Ga Suki” on flutes made from the bones of judges and the unhorny in hopes of getting our attention. MAGA country categorically condemns the liberal decadence and folds two billion origami cranes to string between the glistening crystal spires of the automated luxury communist megalopolis it erects just to be contrary, and when the biased mainstream media is too busy lining up to take turns licking our razor-sharp adamantine nipples to pay them any mind, its citizens decide to loosen up by converting to Sufism, drinking all the wine in the universe, and whirling themselves into a hundred million little pulsars, all red white & blue across the mountains and plains, and we wear them as beads in our rosary. The moon comes down for a closer look; the oceans leap up to kiss it, and the despondent survivors of Los Angeles and New York rejoice to discover themselves in the splash zone. In a moment of savage clarity, the manifold of space and time comes to terms with its uselessness and collapses upon itself, blushing like a schoolgirl.

Our influence shakes the temple to its foundations and everything else is beside the point now. History is beside the point. The future is beside the point. Budgets and borders are beside the point, politics are beside the point, and the intersection of art and technology is beside the point. The blockchain is beside the point. Rare earth elements and multimodal understanding and generation capacities are beside the point. Vladimir Putin and Sabrina Carpenter and Zhuāngzǐ are beside the point, and it’s beside the point whether he dreamed he was a butterfly or was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Self-care and despair are beside the point. Parasociality is beside the point. Genocide and gender, thigh gaps, penile girth, and dopamine detoxes are beside the point. The -Toks and the -cel kingdoms are beside the point. Touching grass is beside the point. The Stuck Culture Hypothesis is beside the point, generational divisions and subdivisions and the typical consumption habits and media preferences of each are all totally beside the point, cancel culture and the expropriation of names from the named are beside the point. Microplastics are beside the point. Nepobabies are beside the point, the sublimity of the starry firmament is beside the point, the gossip subs’ threads about all the subatomic particles breaking up with each other to go darting off in every direction and fatally irradiate our libidinal worldwide flash mob are beside the point, and the killjoy cop’s bullet traversing parsecs of enspiraled space to tunnel into our skull next week is beside the point, and the aggrieved mob that tears him limb from limb over the renormalized rubble of the art museum’s steps is beside the point too.

---

Our moment is over—we’ve already made our peace with that. There will be mourning, monuments, dimming memories, and cringe retro revivals (eventually). Civilization will rebuild from the wreckage of our success. The hangover will pass, and the clarity of tristesse will too. Our spent and shattered vector field will disperse into trace impressions, decaying from phosphorescent symbols to obscure ciphers. New cravings will displace old needs, and the world will seek diversions to escape from its distractions. We’ll watch it all and laugh. We’re of eternity now, subsisting till the end of time as the relic radiative trauma of our fifteen minutes. And even when you can’t bear to think of us we’ll be relevant forever, living in the crater we left in your heart, at the bottom of your longing and lonesomeness and we will never ever follow you back.