This is a whimsical piece about the ways that social media shapes identity. It's from Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City.
Kith & Kin
I hit my head. Whacked it good. I was parked in a Hertz garage, and as I squeezed out of the compact rental—pow—my skull smacked concrete: bald to wall. Next thing I remember is a hospital bed with a doctor leaning over me.
“What happened?” I slurred.
“Concussion,” said the doctor. “How do you feel?”
“Ok, I guess.” I fingered the lump. “A bit touched.”
The doctor checked his clipboard.
“Who’s the president?” he asked.
“Barack Obama.”
The doctor frowned.
“What pet meme just went viral?”
“Dogs playing poker?”
He scribbled.
“What campus demonstration is trending?”
“The Big Chill?”
His eyebrows went up.
“What’s your Twitter handle?”
“Bluebird?”
“Ok,” he unclicked his pen. “We’re going to run further tests, but I think that your hypofalsus,” he tapped my left temple, “has been compromised.”
“Is it serious?”
“The hypofalsus governs a very specific part of brain activity,” he said. “It processes short-term secondhand experience—anything immediate that you learn about but don’t apprehend firsthand.
“Sounds bad.”
“Eh,” he shrugged. “There’s still a lot we don’t know.” His palm drifted upward. “Why the hypofalsus doesn’t affect nuanced argument, or noncommercial verse, or anything painted by hand, or published in a limited edition, or performed in a minor key.”
The doctor shook his head.
“There’s been a sharp spike in incidents,” he said. “It’s not uncommon to see ruptures or even infarction independent of any external trauma.”
“I feel OK, Doc.”
“The FDA is useless.” He wiped his specs. “But the NEJM targets one cause: social media. Blogs, tweets, I.M.s, texts, and YouTube vids cause inflammation. In your case, the last eighteen months of Internet activity has been wiped clean.”
“Will I recover?”
“We can’t say if the hypofalsus will ever be fully restored—or as we say, ‘re-storied.’ But you can drive, work, operate machinery. There should be no effect on your daily life, except that you may find yourself confused at rallies.”
He scratched out a prescription. “No more than twenty minutes a day on Facebook.”
Pulling the curtain, he shot back, “And stay off Fox.”
In the first weeks after the accident, a lot changed. The world no longer streamed through my devices. All my links were broken. I was unplugged.
When someone mentioned ISIS, I nodded and smiled. Benghazi e-mail scandal drew a blank. I didn’t know where Ferguson was, or why Baltimore burned, or what “I Can’t Breathe” meant. It was disconcerting. Could cucumbers scare cats? Ice buckets cure ALS? Was Donald Trump really president?
Then there was my own small quadrant of the noosphere—the lit racket. In po-biz, rumors swirled. A lawyer tweeted Gone with the Wind as conceptual art; a white guy masqueraded as Chinese to get into BAP; an L.A. editor did a walk of shame after a failed joke about cowboys and Indians.
Mostly, it’s the police. Everywhere cops were armed and dangerous. I could remember Rodney King and the ’68 Chicago Convention. I remembered Serpico and Alabama’s Bloody Sunday. It’s not as if my hypofalsus had been erased back to Officer Joe Bolton and The Stooges’ Fun House. But now, police violence had gone viral. Could it be that all over the country blue uniforms were hunting black civilians?
As my hypofalsus started to recover, my head was getting worse. My brain pulsed with pixelated batons, barricades, gas masks, Bluto-vests. It got so bad, I went back to the hospital for a follow-up.
“Doc,” I said, “I’m not sure I even want a hypofalsus. I might be better off reading no screen beyond my bedroom window. Is there a pill or something I can take to kill it for good—like thyroid medicine. Or you could cut. Lobotomize. Take it out.”
The doctor shook his head.
“We get that a lot these days. And frankly,” one hand cupped his mouth, “There are a few quacks out there. But the hypofalsus serves an essential function. It sustains the therapeutic illusion that beyond us, out there,” he thumbed the curtain, “is another body—composed of knowledge: a single corpus that we all aspire to attain. When Plato talked about ideal forms—he was using his hypofalsus. The Talmud, City of God, Communist Manifesto, e=mc2 . . .” the doctor spread his arms. “Einstein’s brain was hyper-hypofalsian.”
“I can’t sleep, Doc.” I grabbed his wrist. “The world is spinning before my eyes. I can’t tell big from small or near from far. My tinnitus is starting to sound like newscasts.”
“It’s mysterious, the hypofalsus, and nowadays often overstimulated,” he said. “Sometimes it gets so hyperactive that the body of knowledge starts to calcify. People hallucinate—think they actually see it. And of course that descends into orthodoxy. Then doctrine. Acronyms. Slogans. It’s epidemic.
“But before jumbotrons and quadrophonics, life was easier on the hypofalsus. The brain could distinguish between first- and secondhand knowledge. The page, the scroll, the spoken story were natural filters. Even black and white tubes. But now . . .” his voice trailed off.
“Your hypofalsus needs complete rest. In time, the membrane between the two vectors will strengthen.” The doctor’s pen squiggled. “Meanwhile, we’re going to try a diet of high artifice. Give the hypofalsus a chance to read between the lines. I’m recommending nothing contemporary. Homer, Dante—in the original if possible. Milton is good, and Pound, or Hart Crane, or Zukovsky if your system can tolerate him. Novels are iffy. Joyce, Woolf, Pynchon are nice. Plenty of the higher nonsense. But stay away from Hemingway and Oates.”
It’s been two months now, and I haven’t done well. More and more I dream about life without a hypofalsus. There would be no gun lobby. No right-to-lifers. No killer cops or provosts. Everybody composts. Poetry pays. And there are only two races: kith and kin.
In the unhypofalsified world, kith is a race composed wholly of people I know. I made a mental list. Fifty-six kith. Not all are present, or alive. Some I have not seen for years. Some live in whereabouts unknown. But I know them all.
Color, gender, and ethnicity don’t count. Each kith belongs. Each is distinct. Their words and actions form patterns I have experienced. No matter how briefly, or how long ago, each kith has shared a moment with me and we harken to that touch. Most important, kith can be remembered without prompting. Without a functioning hypofalsus, I can’t rely on Facebook friends, Twitter followers, gamers, civic club members. I do not scroll or click. I do not like.
My injury has rendered me 92 percent solipsistic, so it doesn’t matter that no one but me knows that they are kith. They have no common customs or allegiances or culture or even secret handshakes. They do not necessarily know each other’s names. They are a nation only in the sense that Leopold Bloom (who does not qualify because of his fictional status) defines nations: people living in same time and place, or not. Of course Bloom’s definition was limited by three thousand years of tradition. As a solipsist, I lack that inhibition.
I do not count the newly born, even infants born to kith. Without a nametag or mascot bib, I could not recognize them till they learn to speak. Not that speech is the determining factor. There are many kith with whom I have held little conversation. But newborns, no. Still, excluding the unweaned may be mere prejudice. I may be bigoted against babies—their failure to speak or excrete fastidiously or even move more than a few inches should not be held against them, and certainly if a kith lost those faculties—as a few, in fact, have—they would not be exiled. So why should newborns be excluded? I don’t know, but I can’t help myself. That’s the way bigotry is.
Kith is not blood. I have excluded cousins. Kith is not people I like. The kith sports a few pricks and shrews and two ninety-proof assholes. There are people I love who are not kith. Kith are species-specific. Though I know some animals as well as I know any human beings, my cat is not kith, even when my hypofalsus purrs.
I have made another mental list. People I forgot I knew. This list is completely integrated with kith. I regret the omission, but it’s important that I don’t crib from premade lists to construct some comprehensive census. List-writing is processed by the hypofalsus. Women slept with. Events of shame. Vegetables. Bar jokes. Best-ofs. If items don’t live in memory, they aren’t part of an unfalsified life.
My second counting yielded fifty-three new kith, and it also complicated matters. For instance, what about people who’ve had a big effect, but whom I can’t really claim to know—nuns and professors and cops and priests and doctors—including the doctor who diagnosed my hypofalsus. They are terribly important, and yet do I know them? I have identified thirty-seven people in addition to the 103 listed so far who fall into this category. I’m undecided about their status.
And what about famous people? Not celebrities, who are clearly excluded on the grounds that I experience them only by the agency of a healthy hypofalsus. So, in my condition, I do not experience them as people at all. But people I have studied: writers and historical figures whose work has affected me?
I’ve decided that the kith, in order to function, must exclude these worthies, though I feel like Dante excluding Homer and Virgil from Paradise.
Some kith are privileged. Others are oppressed—by color or gender or age discrimination, by impending mortality or past tragedy. A few belong to the most downtrodden: the dim and homely—populations so despised that slurs against them are socially acceptable.
Roughly, kith demographics are as follows: 72 percent Caucasian; 80 percent U. S. citizens; 43 percent female. Mean age forty-seven. Median income undetermined, but some estimates place at 672 percent of global mean. And me? 90th percentile of age; 82nd percentile of education; 29th of integrity; 71st athleticism; 42nd life expectancy; 91st of height; and 50th of likability.
I’m OK with those numbers.
But still, I’m left with everyone else. If googling didn’t frazzle my hypofalsus, I’d get a nose count. As it is, there is a whole planet of people I don’t know. These are the kin.
For a week or two, the kin seemed all the same. It wasn’t that they looked or acted alike. It wasn’t that they seemed familiar, or friendly, or even comprehensible. It just didn’t matter. Everyone was kin, which is true, genetically speaking. Any one of them could have stepped forward from anywhere and been welcome into kith.
But as my hypofalsus started to itch and tingle, things fell apart. There were kin I didn’t know yet but whom I might feasibly encounter; there were kin who spoke my language or a cognate; kin who played sports I played or ate appetizing foods. There were kin whose customs I knew from living in their countries.
Others I had no idea about: the Iroquois and the Tibetan, the Aboriginal and Portlandian. But somehow the ones I knew seemed farther away than the ones I could barely imagine. I knew how little I knew of the groups I knew. As my hypofalsus healed, calling them all kin seemed impossible. Religion, color, dress, language, cheekbones, political and economic systems, utensils, art, modes of transportation, climate—everything near and far—started to splinter. Everyone spun farther and farther away from everyone else, and away from me.
What about terrorists who wanted to kill me without knowing me? What about the aged who didn’t even know themselves? The malnourished, the mentally ill, the cufflink wearers and machete wielders? What about the a cappella singers? Were there kin in the vanishing rainforests? Beneath melting icecaps? Deans’ offices? What of legions dying in American prisons? Were they kin too?
The doctor says that my problem may not be my recovering hypofalsus. Other parts of the brain, he says, may be compensating, the way the blind become more sensitive to sound.
But walking the streets at night I’m lost and inconsolable. Who are my kin—the passersby? The faceless cabbies and truckdrivers? The joggers, bikers, polemicists, dog walkers, hipsters, lummoxes, and models gliding up and down the city avenue? I want to accost everyone.
“Tell me your story,” I want to beg. “By what cause were you conceived? How did your ancestors wend here? What’s behind your glasses? How did you appear before my eyes?”
I babble, gesture, and mutter to myself. I would grope strangers, stop traffic, wave and dance at stoplights to understand why kin seem every day a little more unkind. Only fear of the police restrains me. I’m afraid some cop with a fried hypofalsus might not realize I am white.
I know my problem is not new. The hypofalsus has driven better people mad. Look at Oedipus—he lived by the hypofalsus, peering straight at the body of knowledge. He named the body “Sphinx” and he solved it. Race hatred, abuse, oppression—he had them all figured out right up to the moment he didn’t. That’s what the hypofalsus does: makes you think you know right up to the instant that you don’t. Stabbing knitting needles into his eyes—it wasn’t that Oedipus didn’t want to see. He loved his children. He hugged them underneath the hanging body of his mother-wife. It wasn’t that he wanted to go blind. He would have died to lay eyes on his dead father. He still wanted to see whatever faced him. It wasn’t his eyes those needles were aimed for. I know. It was his pulsing, quivering hypofalsus.
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