In early 2022, there was a comedian on TikTok, or at least I thought they were a comedian, who said, and I’m paraphrasing here: My biggest fear living in the city today is not crime or something scary happening—it’s actually some person with a camera and a mic running up to me, asking me to do something for a dollar or questioning my musical taste. In the summer, around the time Nope came out, I was standing at the Queens Village LIRR station waiting for the Manhattan train, and across the street I saw three Brown kids jumping over a closed iron grate outside a bodega. In the fall, when the call for submissions came about, a story involving the first anxiety coupled with the second image of the bodega kids all came together, and I wrote and rewrote this in about two days.
When a nice man with a smart phone camera approaches them.
It is also the phone he uses to record his real real reviews of the tacos from the authentic food trucks in Brooklyn and the scenes of the noble and earnest people at the bodegas in Queens. Places where honest people hang out and where he doesn’t make friends with anyone.
But his search for truth is not enough. His TikTok fanbase grows, all four hundred thousand followers across the globe, hungry, no, starving, for the real real of the American city today.
And so it led him here, camera in hand, to Queens Village station, in front of three Brown boys at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
He shines the phone’s light on the boys without their consent and as he records, a hundred followers tune in and the man smiles at the camera with all thirty-two of his perfect teeth that “this is the authentic, real experience of Brown boy joy.”
The boys stop their game to stare. They stare because they’re prepared for men like him, the mothers warned them about this as soon as they were old enough to speak.
In between their old traditions giving alms to the old gods—those old insatiable monsters who must be fed lest they return to the mortal world—the mothers told the boys stories about these men and their comfortable lives.
They were men born outside the busy metropolis, born from nowhere and everywhere, nice quiet towns throughout the country with the nice supermarkets and the nice schools and the nice and open clean air with nice, manicured lawns. Men who had no truth in their lives, only facades and facsimiles. So they made a life of searching for truth in the outside world. Their logic: why be safe with the platter in front of you when there’s a whole world out there for the taking?
Beware these men, the mothers said, they come for our lives. And they will not stop until they have your soul.
The mothers have a tiring job, but it’s a living. Keeping the old ways in the strange foreign land is its own form of rebellion. So they let the boys play, for they know what to do when strange men lurk around.
The man with the camera does not know this.
He has abandoned his culture to try on another, like one tries on a new coat or a fresh set of pants.
He is wanton in his quest for the real real Nono4D, something his people in the nice quiet town did not share with him. Now that he is in the city, he believes he can finally search for the one precious thing in his life that would bring him meaning: authenticity. He wants to devour the word, feel it dance around his tongue, savoring the experience so he can feel something: rage, pity, empathy. Anything . . . His followers demand it.
The man approaches one of them, the one he perceives as the friendliest of the eight-year-olds—the shortest, stoutest, and big-headed of the three.
He extends one palm out in a “high five” gesture, a “high five” which signals to the young urbanite that he is an Ally.
Friendliness is his snare. A web to wrap the boys around his camera for the hundred or so viewers and growing fast. Viewers like children, quirky children more so, and quirky Brown boys who speak humbly and politely are viral traps, something for people to share with friends and coworkers and old relatives and say look how cute and joyful they are from a safe and happy distance. They’re not all bad. I wish more of them were like this.
Did you know that a few decades ago they took a Filipino indigenous tribe who immigrated to the United States, put them in loincloths and shipped them to Coney Island to perform mock rituals for the amusement of others? Now you know. If you go back far enough, you’ll uncover secrets that the powerful don’t like to talk about—a treasure chest of screaming mouths full of horrors, all the time.
What’s to stop them from doing that again, the mothers asked the boys. Have you seen how popular reality television is? What’s to stop them from making another human exhibition with high-definition cameras?
Instead of a high five, the friendliest of the three boys raises his hand to break the man’s palm in three different places, never touching him once.
In exchange for the alms, the old monsters taught the mothers in ways that one could defend themselves with one’s mind, one’s body. Practice long enough, and one can possess such strength that the mind can bend anything to its will, that real real. The man’s hand shatters in three different places, fingers twisted and limp, swaying like stalks of wheat on a windy day.
The pain is enough for the man to urinate all over his designer pants ($300 USD) and drop his smart phone ($1,400 USD). One of the other boys catches it midair, letting it dangle as long as his mind will let him. The lens faces the man, watching his hip bones break in two as his online following increases to five hundred thousand with six hundred of them watching him live—a quarter of whom keep asking: Is this real? A handful begging to see even more.
The attention is enough to make the man smile, so many followers and endorsements happening all at once, and he would smile and laugh but he can’t for he is screeching in unbelievable pain.
When his tongue falls out of his mouth, moaning replaces the screams. The tongue hits the concrete like a wet piece of raw, thin steak. The last of the boys, who chose not to use his energies, walks up to the phone and stares at the live stream, blocking the viewers from their amusement. A few people comment how they feel dizzy all of a sudden. Hundreds log off. One person writes how they’ve defecated all over their computer chair, and soon the chatroom is nearly empty.
Even in torment the man tries to yell NO, NO, NO. Not because of the pain, never the pain. It is the camera, the views, the people he desires. They came to stare at his fragmented body tearing by the bone. They are his congregants, come to listen to his mass of pain. It is real and it is painful. A tear falls from the man’s eye socket, eyeballs having since fallen out moments ago, and even as his ankles melt into the floor, forming a gooey red puddle, and his bowels and his blood pour out of him, he wants to stop the boy blocking the camera.
Why would you hide the real real for others to see?
And as the man and the puddle of blood become one, he remembers his childhood in the nice town: the stable two-parent household, the friendly dog, the nice house, the nice homecoming, and the nice partner at seventeen, the nice first kiss. That was a real life too, wasn’t it? Predictable but real. A real life that he could’ve written about, documented, cherished. Why didn’t he think of that?
Before he can think of any more nice things, his skin peels from his skull and soon that turns to mush too. The boy holding the phone lets it drop, camera first, showing only a black screen for the handful that stayed but cannot comment, for they have become puddles of human waste. When their families find them, they do not see them, they see red puddles and detritus of what once belonged to a person—a gold chain, a pair of glasses, loose change. The camera phone, at low battery, dies too.
The boys turn their backs to the blob and go back to their game, jumping over the can one at a time, seeing who can jump the farthest. In an hour it will be sunset, and the shortest boy will win. They will rush home for dinnertime, an old meal conjured by the mothers. A recipe from the monsters.
