Karma Police
A Short Story
In the end, after much deliberation, Nile chose a pair of slim ash-gray chinos and a light pink Oxford shirt. On his feet he wore comfortable, expensive canvas slip-on sneakers. Into his pale brown suede messenger bag he packed an underripe banana, an organic fig bar, a pot of full-fat Greek yogurt, a pouch of roasted almonds, a pouch of lupini beans, a vacuum-sealed strip of tamari-flavored beef jerky, four sticks of spearmint gum, a spoon, a smartphone, headphones, an orange folder, and a paperback copy of W.S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees.
Nile walked six blocks to the nearest subway station. Under other circumstances he would have cycled—the office was only nine miles northwest—but he needed to arrive appearing well-kempt. This would be his sixth interview in as many months. It was for a clinical internship at a private psychotherapy group practice in a neighborhood so wealthy the air there was redolent with Kentucky yellowwoods and cardamom buns.
On the train Nile sat across from a vandalized advertisement for Van Cleef & Arpels. CLASS WAR was scrawled across it in acid green. The other passengers in the car were two teenagers huddled together looking into their respective phones; a wizened man stretched out and sleeping beneath what appeared to be a thin airline-issued blanket; a middle-aged woman and her young child, each entranced by their own sources of digital entertainment; and a young man who, with his backpack and an unopened ornithology textbook in his lap, appeared to be a student.
Nile took out his phone, checked text messages and e-mail and news headlines, rolled through a bevy of social media apps. He slid his phone back into his bag, could not recall what he had just seen or read, and retrieved the phone, this time intent on focusing.
After a few minutes he again deposited the phone in the bag, trading it for a handful of almonds, a handful of beans, and the orange folder. Inside the folder was his resume. He had already submitted the document through the clinic’s online application system, but he’d printed it too for his own preparation. He quickly reviewed the sheet of paper. It still looked fine.
Nile still preferred this, a thing to be touched and held, a thing to be looked at all the way around. He remembered the satisfaction he’d felt, as a schoolboy, in handing in completed worksheets and exam booklets, and the pride he’d taken in his carefully honed penmanship. He had enjoyed studying, had taken his responsibility toward his own intellectual development seriously, even when his efforts garnered mostly Bs.
Thirteen years before meandering toward graduate studies in psychology, Nile had attended a weird little undergraduate institution called Somerset, where he’d earned a degree in Dance and Choreography. Somerset had produced, over its modest fifty years, a number of talented and industrious graduates who tried very hard to turn creative practice into livelihood. Somerset had recently gone bankrupt. When the closure was announced, Nile texted fellow alums, Oona and Alexander, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He could have texted anyone, but it was the two of them he’d immediately thought of.
They met at a bar in Gowanus. Alexander arrived wearing immaculate lilac scrubs. Oona was dressed like her high school self but somehow also dressed the way current high schoolers dressed: a long floral skirt, a white crop-top, black lace-up Doc Martens. She had cut her graying hair into a pixie cut and dyed it platinum blonde. Her brow bones and crow’s feet shimmered with soft silver highlighter. Nile wore jeans and a t-shirt with a screen-printed image of a cow on it, an outfit that suggested his humble status as a graduate student while also showcasing his steadfast dedication to fitness.
They drank Boulevardiers and ate herbed olives and freshly made pita with warm hummus. They invoked people they had danced with: Yves, a classically trained dynamo who still performed internationally; Gigi, the coltish daughter of aristocratic lawyers from coastal Maine; Beth, obsessed with ugliness, now an acupuncturist; Eionn, the sweetest, brawniest, most naive of the group, dead from an accidental overdose within months of graduation. They remembered professors and teaching artists, and thesis shows that confirmed that what they were doing there together was significant. They talked about how intellectually leaden everyone, themselves included, had since become. Gone were the days of earnest, heady philosophizing. Nobody wanted to talk about avant-garde depictions of the relationship between the body and consciousness in modernist literature. Nobody wanted to talk about ethnochoreology.
“I’m just glad I found a profession I actually like, that, like, aligns with my actual values,” Alexander had said. “Nothing about our education really prepared us for the real world. But,” he paused to take a drink, “for those four years the world we inhabited felt real, and it was heaven.” Nile and Oona had nodded emphatically. “Yes, thank you,” Nile had said, “that is so well-said.”
“I feel orphaned,” Oona had sighed. “I feel like there was, like, an umbilical link between me and that place and all the people I met there and all the thinking I did there, and it sustained me somehow, it helped me feel like no matter how average my life becomes or how feeble my career, I would still have that world. But it’s gone, that world is gone, and I’m just, like, homeless.”
In response, Nile and Alexander had each offered validation and sympathy; what Oona described was recognizable to them. Then they’d moved on to gossip, restaurant recommendations, film reviews, relationship updates. Mostly they drank. By the end of the night the three of them had spilled into a frenzy of affection for one another. Their friendships, while integral to their respective college experiences, took on a radically enhanced splendor, and when they parted ways each left with the drunken conviction that from now on every high and every low, every milestone, every grief and every joy, would be shared within the fold of their honorable triad.
And then, on the cab ride home, Oona posted a revised and abridged iteration of her mournful utterances—I am orphaned. I am homeless. RIP Somerset.—across several social media platforms and was promptly, savagely demolished.
Much of the heat emanated from other alums. There are actual orphans, someone responded. Sorry, but you don’t get to claim homelessness, posted another. An anonymous user curated and shared an album of photographs of children, presumably orphaned children, from around the world, and paired the album with a long, somber message addressed not only to Oona but to anyone who failed to develop a more highly evolved moral operating system.
Oona was ignorant. Oona was selfish. Oona was gross. Oona lacked compassion. Oona lacked empathy. Oona was delusional. Oona was ugly. Oona was a typical American. Oona was vapid. Oona was mentally ill. Oona was the worst kind of overeducated leftist woman. Oona was an embarrassment to her alma mater. And on and on.
The backlash further diminished the school’s already dwindling legacy. Look! the normies and conservatives said. This is why progressive liberal arts education is endangered: they eat each other alive.
For a time, things were quite bad for Oona. She was shunned. She was forced to create a new personal e-mail account, unable to cope with the incoming wrath. Over the years Oona had posted innumerable images of herself on various websites, it was easy to learn what she looked like, and so she suffered public humiliation offline, as well. She took to wearing sunglasses and baseball caps while running errands on her block in Crown Heights. She stopped riding the subway. She transitioned from working on-site for a downtown arts foundation to working from her studio apartment. Her parents flew in from Washington to console her; she was their only child.
When Nile had first seen the post he himself had rolled his eyes and marveled at Oona’s flair for melodrama. Then he’d caught on to the tsunami of vitriol crashing down on her, and it occurred to him that both he and Alexander were in a position to openly defend her, to provide context for her misstep, to testify to her basically good character. They had been there. They had understood what she meant. What she’d expressed, they’d felt it, too. He mentioned this to Alexander, via text.
Nile typed, We could help her.
Oh, Alexander typed back.
Cringe emoji.
Oh no.
No. That isn’t done.
Nile watched the mother and child leave the train. He watched the mother maneuver the stroller down the aisle and through the doors and onto the platform without taking her eyes off her screen. The sleeping man sat up then and stretched his arms overhead, and the blanket slipped, revealing a threadbare Alice In Chains t-shirt. He yawned and farted loudly, laid back down, covered his head, began to snore.
This was what Nile loved about the city: being surrounded by other people in moments of organic adaptation. As a student Nile had designed anthropological projects dedicated to observing quotidian human movement, and made dances inspired by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Rudy Perez, Paul Taylor. He liked to look at how bodies shaped and were shaped by the space and objects around them. If he had to make a dance today, he thought, he would explore the way bodies had become enmeshed with contemporary technology. But he could see how that might be boring, as a uniformity of posture had settled over the populace: bowed head, collapsed thyroid, rounded back, the protrusion of the seventh cervical spinous process, thickened palms, swollen thumb tendons.
At the next stop the ornithology student and the teens disembarked, and a dozen or so new passengers entered. A woman wearing kitten-print pajama pants, an oversized baby blue sweatshirt, and enormous red rubber pool sandals boarded the train and sat against Nile, so close he could smell her shampoo. She navigated to a social media video app and began to scroll rapidly with the volume up. Nile calmly, discreetly pulled his headphones from his bag and put them on. He selected OK Computer.
He ate the fig bar, the banana, and the beef jerky one after the other, taking care not to chew loudly or to open his mouth too widely with each bite. He could feel the woman eyeing him sideways with disgust as he ate, but he had to, his blood sugar was dropping. He considered eating the yogurt but thought better of it. In order to create more of a forcefield around himself—the woman’s right foot was now out of her sandal and resting against his own shoe, her elbow poked at his waist—he took out his book. Coming into the high room again after years / after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies / after losses and feet on stairs—1
He couldn’t concentrate. He held the open book against his chest. His vision blurred as he gazed at the image of a $14,000 18-karat rose gold Frivole ring. The tiny emeralds and rubies. CLASS WAR. He was thinking about Oona again, wondering how she was doing, whether she was still in the city at all. She had called him, texted him, sent e-mails illustrating the stress she was under and the lengths she had to go to in order to function. She’d lost friends, nobody invited her out anymore. All of her messages were harried. The voicemails—unbearable! He’d deleted them without listening all the way through.
But she’d stopped short of asking him for anything. It wasn’t really his business, anyway, he reminded himself. He hadn’t returned her calls or her e-mails, though he had answered one or two texts, he was sure of that, he’d said something neutral, maybe something mildly encouraging, and yet he couldn’t recall exactly what.
Nile surfed across a handful of sites, searching her name. He found no profiles or accounts belonging to her. He did find, of course, a smattering of posts and articles about her. How silly, he thought, what a silly mess. Nobody would have seen the post, he was sure, if hundreds—thousands?—of people hadn’t amplified it. It could have just as easily disappeared, been absorbed into infinity.
It was possible that the whole thing had had a profound effect on Oona. It was possible that she had fully recovered. More than recovered—was thriving. The tragedy—probably, hopefully—was that there was no tragedy: what she had said, what others had said back to her, the animus, the shame—none of it mattered, not at all, not even a bit. It had been months now. Some trace of Oona’s mistake would live on, yes, because that was the curse of the internet. But a new outrage was manufactured every other minute. A new calamity erupted every other day. Who would remember a small, clumsy thing like that?
Nile opened his Messages to look for his thread with Oona, but it was gone. Ah, right. He had deleted it, along with her Contact file. There had been that night, not too long ago, when he’d worried that his affiliation with her would threaten his prospects as a mental health professional. These situations tended to be sticky and indiscriminate.
The train pulled into his station. He removed his headphones and popped two sticks of gum into his mouth, hopped out onto the platform, moved through the turnstile and up the stairs. Streams of people rushed past him in all directions. The weather had been forecasted to be unseasonably hot, but Nile found the wind was dramatic enough to cut through the humidity.
The air moved around his body, his body moved through the air. Strength, rhythm, grace, dignity. Right, dignity, Nile thought, the most important thing. He walked taller now, with his shoulders back and his chest forward and his neck long, he breathed gently, and in doing so his form took on an internal lightness, and he was momentarily cleansed of certain feelings, the ones that arose now and then, when he had a little too much time to reflect. It hasn’t rained in a long time, Nile thought, looking at the sky, which was blue and only blue.
Reading Recommendation: My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Image: Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College
https://merwinconservancy.org/poems/late-spring-by-w-s-merwin/