A woman exchanges emails with two men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first man, a former lover with whom she stayed in touch for a few years, is a scholar living in Long Island. He used to be an excellent pen pal, but recently, his academic career took a leap and his interest in anything other than that took a hit. The second man, whom she met a few weeks ago on Museum Island, is a writer. Despite confessing that he doesn’t read books, he curiously holds strong opinions about them, which can be read every other week in the pages of a popular newspaper. The first man mentions a visit to Berlin, initially enthusiastic but later rudely stating, \u201cYes, maybe I’ll see you,\u201d but, he stresses, with utmost academic self-importance, \u201conly after presenting my new findings on Freud before the academic world of scholars.\u201d With the second man, it begins promising, but things quickly sour as he starts cancelling dates and being increasingly occupied reviewing books, he doesn\u2019t read while sending her emails that become very self-focused. Constant mentions of his ex-girlfriends dominate the conversation, as he casually describes running into them around town, like an unplanned pregnancy that keeps happening. He refers to his ex-loves like they\u2019re characters in a history book, never bothering with names. They’re just ‚they.‘ And in a bizarre plot twist, he even calls one of his exes ‚it,‘ turning the diversity saga into a strange grammar lesson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The woman realizes that these two men share more than verbose discussions about their public and private island lives; they both engage in nonstop banter with a great sense of selfishness. So, after a few such emails she grows uneasy and angered, reaching a level of frustration that is typically experienced when one feels completely unseen\u2014like being zipped in a plastic bag at the airport. Most of all, she grows tired, dead tired, a transgenerational tiredness that she attributes solely to the wear and tear of having to still deal with the uninterrupted undercurrent of the emotional self-centredness of men who still want the holacracy of having their cake and eating it too while she starves, because between the two of them she can\u2019t keep being intellectual while being thin, or pretty, not without sounding petty, isn\u2019t this what we\u2019ve been told, anyway, even if we are also told we should have it all? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unable to connect with these men, the woman finds herself slowly disappearing during the interactions, like a ghost. So, one day, seeing that she\u2019s talking to herself, and they are talking to themselves, out of boredom she simply pastes a paragraph from the first man\u2019s mail to reply to the second man. She figures that the first man\u2019s writing would snuggly fit in her goodbye email to the other one since it sounds so academic and abstract and in line with the massive self-involvement and lack of self-awareness of the second guy. Expecting never to hear back, she is surprised when the second man writes back quickly, blossoming with interest. Seeing that this worked she continues, this time answering the first man with excerpts from the second man. The emails start to arrive more and more often, and they pop with excitement, thriving, flourishing like corn after a rainy spring. The first man\u2019s stoic, philosophic language contrasts with the second man’s graphic novel about ghosting his exes, love triangles, and unsolved romantic issues., but it all becomes like a symbiosis, where two animals take advantage of each other, and both have something to gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00adThe woman realizes she has inadvertently created an unparalleled form of artificial intelligence, a curious confection of parsimony and progressiveness, a new ChatGPT that only seems to demonstrate that the less involved she is, the more involved these men are with her, meaning with each other, in a seemingly selfless, yet massively narcissistic way of relating. They\u2019re not even pretending to listen, because they hear exactly what they want to hear. It’s like sending a salad into a pizza competition and winning. What works even better is that even though those men both know they are talking to a person with needs and with her own life, they enjoy the uninvolved nature of the copy paste they receive. By not interfering with her own needs, the woman notices that the men flourish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They say that if you want to be admired, you should die or go on a trip. That\u2019s what people call a French exit, a fancy name for pulling a ghosting. Everyone wonders what happened to you when you ghost. People call a \u2018ghoster\u2019 the one who pulls the disappearing act, but in fact, we\u2019re the ones having to deal with the feeling of becoming invisible, ghostly, and when that happens, we certainly don\u2019t feel very admired. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, when the second man goes on to detail the ghostly connections he shares with his exes, the woman thinks of her own past. Her ex once said, \u201cWe should never speak again, and even if you contact me, I will never answer.\u201d Two months later she woke up to a \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d from him. The \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d was written exactly like that, there was no punctuation, no exclamation mark, no period, no intensity. Basically, dead talk. A dead \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d that sounds dead and tone deaf, like a beige sandwich with dead bread from a dusty shelf in a gas station in Indiana sent in an envelope licked by the dead fianc\u00e9e of George Costanza who died after licking the expired glue off too many envelopes for wedding invitations to a wedding that was never planned more than a funeral in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dead almost always come back, the woman remarks. They like to make sure we don\u2019t forget them. Amid this existential email ping-pong, the first man decides to further his inner philosophy. \u201cTo be dead to someone is better\u2014not worse\u2014than to be forgotten. What do you think?\u201d he muses. The second man, not one to be outdone, jumps in with a promise never to forget her, even if they become somewhat dead to each other. The woman contemplates this pledge of eternal, yet ominous, remembrance. What satisfaction does it bring to know someone won’t forget you, even if they clear out their digital clutter, meaning they uninstall a dating app, close an email inbox, or even block you? It’s like being told you’re a timeless masterpiece but only exhibited in a prison. I hope I die leaving behind an unfinished work of art like Mozart did with Lacrimosa<\/em>, she types. But, ah, there’s a pause. She knows can’t unleash contempt like a fire-breathing dragon. You can\u2019t fight fire with fire. Submission is surefire. Ready to fire? Here\u2019s another mid-century modern masterpiece: \u201cI don’t know what to say,\u201d she finally types, leaving them both in a state of existential confusion, as if they\u2019ve stumbled upon the lost Beckett play and discovered it was in fact written by Shakespeare\u2019s sister. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019re so mysterious,\u201d the second man says. \u201cI can\u2019t quite figure you out.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAh, mystery\u2026The meretricious lure of counterfactuals,\u201d the first man replies, a phrase she runs through the Merriam-Webster dictionary to make sure it\u2019s just academic and not Middle English, and thus comprehensible to the second man, who can\u2019t know Middle English because he doesn\u2019t read. And if it were Middle English, what, another part of her revolts. Joan Didion said she spoke Middle English when asked at her job interview at Vogue in 1970 what languages she fluently spoke. Which part of us has us think we\u2019re too daring if we are sincere? Which part of us has decided to use seduction to survive and which part has evolved to use seduction to defeat? All the women who used men names to write their books wrote history. How many men used women’s names to write history? How many women used to measure their orgasms against the count of Lady Chatterley\u2019s, like Erica Jong described in her book Fear of Flying<\/em>, only to learn that Lady Chatterley was in fact man called D. H. Lawrence? The second man is enraptured by the meretricious lure of counterfactuals. To appease the first man, he says \u201cI\u2019ll buy a book.\u201d\u201cBuy D. H. Lawrence,\u201d the first man persists. The second man obeys, even though he initially mistakes it for an acronym for DHL or Delivery Hero. And just like that, Narcis is subjugated. Because, apparently, deep down, we all crave a little subjugation. What would Freud say about that? <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019re very nineteenth century,\u201d the second man says, getting analytical about planning their next date, which must happen in a hotel because his apartment is likely inhabited by the ghost of some ex-girlfriend. He places her not in the Michelberger Hotel, where she would like to stay, but at the Oderberger. \u201cThat\u2019s a better fit for someone cute and <\/em>nineteenth century, like you.\u201d Because apparently, existential banter pairs better with a change of scenery that somebody else pays for. It\u2019s like being cast in a period drama, but instead of corsets and ballrooms, it’s Berlin’s hipster hotels. She doesn\u2019t get a room of her own because this man has decided she has all the perks of a wallflower, which was already established when he repeatedly called her \u2018cute,\u2019 because \u2018cute\u2019 is not something we can pull with grown-ass women, rather with small animals, children and outfits that pertain to sexualized infantilism or shows like Emily in Paris<\/em>. So, she gets her fitting instructions from the second man who thinks he’s the Frank Lloyd Wright of relational architecture. He’s got the blueprint for exactly where she fits, how she fits, and what fits her, because nothing says modern love like being situated in the landscape of architecture, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Enter the first guy, the nineteenth-century fox who probably thinks he\u2019s penning love letters to some forlorn waif-like 14-year-old maid picking heather in the moors at Downton Abbey in between reciting Thoreau and daydreaming about steam engines. He’s all scholarly, alright, and bright, writing in a way that’d make Lincoln tip his hat. So, the woman, not one to be confined by architectural blueprints, or cornfields, or gas stations in Indiana, decides to be wherever these men have placed her. She can be a sponge, or she could be a stone. She chooses to be a balloon, rise at Wuthering Heights above the situation and let them have their cake and eat it too. She lets the stoic man diffuse all the melodrama of nonsensical affairs of his counterpart, the modern D. H. Lawrence, and she lets the self-involved fuckboy listen to the stoic, who preaches the teachings of Moby Dick, a book in which no woman has ever set foot, because, it really only takes a man, or a couple of men, to stroke another man\u2019s ego with the only other most seductive thing that is not football or hunting: politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the first man confidently claims that Trump was the only American president to never start a war, the second man caves in. He stops the banter about his romantic past, and, as if finally discovering the woman for the creature unlike any other that she is, he writes an aroused email straight from the depths of Berghain expressing his secret, burning desire to persuade her to join him in the AfD. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the hallmark of mating in captivity. The symbiosis eventually turns parasitic. The animals enmesh with each other, begin to lose their distinctive traits and merge into a single, starved, and slightly confused entity, hungry to eat itself. And this is where nature intervenes, to self-destruct, to delete the anomaly, to ensure this could be just a cautionary tale and not once more the stuff of history books just before elections. The woman makes her French exit by the time the two men long to meet her, by which I mean they long to meet each other and perhaps continue the mental gymnastics on the sofa because they possibly read in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath<\/em> that every woman adores a fascist. So, she assassinates her own character, booting her software like the bot in the movie Her, solving the issue of disappearing in her own terms, which solves the issue of being admired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After all, every hero becomes a ghost.
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