Zooming up the 405 in the rear right seat of a cherry-red Tesla, Will Montperg1 checked his phone for approximately the seventeenth time in two minutes to find a message from Hardyhar, the Twitter anon with whom he had bonded via DM the previous year over a shared interest in the writings of Nick Land.
running ten min late
He glanced up from his iPhone 8—a relic inherited from his mother-in-law, its blush gold hue disguised by a black Otterbox case—and leaned over to look at the screen of the Uber driver’s more up-to-date cell, which was affixed to the dash by a suction mount. On the right, the towers of Century City gleamed in the late-morning sunlight. The imposing steel-and-glass cluster, which housed international law firms and massive hedge funds with low-key names like Mountain Partners or Bottlebrush Group, LLC, made Will acutely aware of his own smallness and powerlessness by comparison. Wending his way northward on the five-lane freeway, he saw himself as an ant-sized agent scurrying through the canyons of an endless, impersonal maze.
He looked down at his phone again and (he belonged to the sorry tribe of one-fingered texters) laboriously tapped out a reply:
no prob. behind myself. ETA 11:04
A less earnest man than Will would have been content to “like” Hardyhar’s text, without feeling the need to let the man off the hook—a need all the more pointless given that Hardyhar himself undoubtedly felt zero guilt about his lateness, which he had communicated to Will not out of courtesy but on the (as it happened, erroneous) assumption that Will was himself equally guilt-free and might, should he fail on arriving to find Hardyhar at the coffee shop in Westwood where they had agreed to meet, simply leave to go do something else.
Will twisted to make room for the phone to slide into his hip pocket. Then he plucked his Leuchtturm1917 from the seat cushion, snapped off the elastic band, and resumed jotting a bullet-pointed recap of the meeting he had just had in the Gundo with the co-founder of LumbrYard, a 3D printing company that used zinnia cell cultures to create bio-prints of customizable, lab-grown wood.
The Tesla switched lanes, accelerated smoothly to avoid a truck, and swooped off the freeway and down a long, curved ramp onto Westwood Boulevard. Will extracted and checked his phone—nothing. Hardyhar had not even bothered to like his reply. He turned once more to his Leuchtturm, flipping back through its dot grid pages to the notes he had taken in preparation for the upcoming meeting.
For about two months now Will had been in on the secret of Hardyhar’s true identity, their conversation having migrated from Twitter to Signal, where the prolific shitposter interacted with a select inner circle of trusted mutuals. Entranced though he still was by Hardyhar’s cryptically hilarious tweets, which only a fellow devotee of the Lemurian shaman could have fully deciphered, Will nevertheless occasionally experienced a twinge of treasonous doubt. Hardyhar’s QT slam dunks often swerved into vicious ad hominem, and lately what Will had once been able to tell himself was merely edgy trolling crossed the line into horror with increasing frequency (why, for example, did Hardyhar insist on retweeting an account with the skin-crawling descriptor “David Irving fanboi” in its bio?).
Yet the transgressive aura of the high-follower-count anon was highly seductive to the cautious, wholesome Will, whose own anon account (which had still boasted all of 347 followers when he last checked that morning) was so timidly tame that he might as well have tweeted under his real identity.
It had been both a relief and something of a disappointment to discover that the persona Hardyhar cultivated on Twitter/X was just that—a persona. The mask lowered, he had proved in their DM chats to be an articulate, level-headed interlocutor whose views about most things would have sounded unobjectionable to even the flintiest HR manager at the publicly-traded tech company where he worked as a senior executive.
This was to be their first in-person meet-up, and though becoming more closely acquainted was its ostensible raison d’être, lurking beneath their friendly coffee appointment were unspoken transactional motives, as well as the mystical belief that something obscure might be unlocked in each of them by the encounter.
Two years before, Will, then at the height of his Landian fascinations, had signed up for an online seminar with the legendary British philosopher, who taught the course from somewhere in China, at a time of day in the US that meant it was the middle of the night for him. Weirdly inept when it came to actually using technology, Land had created a website that looked as if it had been designed in the late 90s. The layout was primitive, the organization of materials chaotic. Videos of past online seminars kept popping up on the homepage, and Will, with the voracious curiosity of an acolyte, watched them all, and then, for posterity’s sake (who knew how much longer the archaic site would even remain online) downloaded the lot.
When Hardyhar had learned of these bootleg seminar videos, he expressed a strong interest in viewing them himself. Innocent (all-too-innocent) Will would have turned them over without asking for anything in return, but Hardyhar, revealing his own mercenary mindset in what he assumed about Will’s, framed his ask as a quid pro quo. Casually, he hinted that he could get Will into an invite-only online book club hosted by “JK,” his use of initials betraying a superstitious reluctance to spell out The Name in full, though Will knew immediately whom he meant: JK stood for Jordan Klegg, the young, handsome, stubble-faced VC with the crooked grin who presided over a tightly-knit clique of tech insiders Will had long aspired to join. Every month, JK convened via video conference a ragtag group of hedge fund types and right-wing academics to discuss a masterpiece of literature or philosophy (currently, Hardyhar revealed, so as to authenticate his own membership in the club, they were working their way through The Man Without Qualities).
“I’ve met JK,” Will had typed back, adding with an overdose of modesty: “Not that he would remember me—we were just introduced really briefly at a New Year’s party.”
The Tesla drew to a halt outside the entrance to a multi-level concrete parking structure. It was 11:03—a minute earlier than expected. Hefting his Tom Bihn laptop bag—the only piece of luggage he had brought with him for the overnight trip—Will bid the driver goodbye, glanced at the screen that said “Add a tip for Marlon,” and, promising himself to do so later, pocketed his cell phone. The red machine whirred away, leaving Will alone on the street, which was awash in pleasant sunlight, but oddly quiet. A few cars were parked along the sidewalk, but there were plenty of spaces to be had. High overhead, a palm tree rustled and hissed in a wind unfelt at street level. Will tapped the left breast pocket of his windbreaker, feeling for the encrypted mini USB key on which he had loaded the Nick Land lectures for Hardyhar.
Had he been asked why the prospect of joining Jordan Klegg’s book club was so alluring to him, Will would not have attempted to hide the truth behind a pretense of disinterested intellectual passion. Instead, he would have attempted to hide it behind a mask of cynical self-interest. “Deal flow mirrors social linkages,” he might have said with a Machiavellian gleam, and a rich chuckle, to imply that his motives for wanting to plow through hundreds of pages of Robert Musil were purely money-related. And there would have been an undeniable plausibility to this stated rationale. Will and his wife, Maggie, were renting their 1,058-sqft house in a formerly working-class neighborhood of West San Jose. With two kids, and a third on the way in a few months, buying and settling down in something bigger, ideally with a backyard (the current place had only an attractive but kid-unfriendly brick rear patio/garden area) was high on Maggie’s list of desiderata. Will’s salary at The Workshop, the bespoke wooden computer-case start-up he had joined the year before, was far from hefty, even if for the time being it almost paid the bills (they had been forced to dip into savings to cover last summer’s vacation). So any in with Jordan Klegg was worth pursuing, simply on the principle that rubbing shoulders with capital was never a bad idea.
The truth, however, was that Will’s desire to be welcomed into Klegg’s circle was less cynically calculating than even he believed. It was not that he wanted to be close to money and power—there were tech investors with much more of both than Klegg. No, it was something else. It seemed to Will, as it seemed to many others, that Jordan Klegg was in some ineffable way at the very center of things, such that if you belonged to his milieu you too would find yourself transported to that otherwise inaccessible center, the stable axis where restlessness became repose. And so there was a not-inconsiderable part of Will’s soul that yearned simply to say, if only to himself, “I am in a book club with Jordan Klegg.” That was the extent, at once immense and negligible, of his desire.
As he crossed the street, Will patted his breast pocket again, this time with his left hand, feeling with his finger tips. The USB key was no bigger than half a Scrabble tile, so it could easily have slipped into an un-palpated cranny of his pocket. With his right hand he took out his phone, checked it with the automaticity of an addict, and again pocketed it. He reached inside his windbreaker, unzipped, and groped with wriggling fingers, exploring every interior fold.
By this time he stood in front of the coffee shop, which was housed in one wing of a low, vine-covered brick building. It French doors were thrown invitingly open, revealing a wooden counter with a glass pastry display and a slate sandwich board on which an employee had scrawled featured items with pink chalk.
A slight sinking sensation tickled his entrails, yet Will barely felt it. His attention was now divided between the search for the mini drive and anxiety about the whereabouts of Hardyhar, whose imminent arrival represented the deadline for its retrieval. Zipping up the pocket, he looked over his shoulder. There was outdoor seating at brushed-steel tables in a sun-drenched patio court. Could that flaxen-haired man in jeans and Doc Martens swiping at an iPad be Hardyhar? It seemed unlikely. Stepping through the French doors, he shrugged off the shoulder straps of the black laptop bag, where, in his haste to leave the hotel room that morning, he must have stowed the USB drive, instead of carrying out his intention to transfer the minuscule plastic object to his jacket pocket.
“What can I get for you?”
“I’ll have a medium latte, please,” said Will. He slid a credit card out of his wallet and inserted it into the chip reader. He then squatted to unzip the bag, into which he plunged an arm, rummaging for the quart-sized Ziploc where he kept his passport and other valuables.
“You can take your card,” a wry female voice floated down to him.
He rose out of his crouch a few inches, so that his eyes cleared the level of the counter, smiled his thanks at the barista, and slipped out his card, which he shoved in his hip pocket.
Now his fingertips made contact with the Ziploc. He pulled it out with a panicked yank, causing a balled-up pair of clean beige dress socks and a pair (not clean) of gray boxer briefs to spill onto the coffee shop floor. In that moment, all his life’s accumulated hopes seemed to be concentrated in the encrypted drive, tiny though it was. The interlocking plastic channels parted. Surely it was in here? He felt around, desperately. It was not.
He stuffed the Ziploc and the boxer briefs back into the backpack. And then, inside his gut, an elevator cable snapped, sending everything plummeting downward with a sickening rush: the Leuchtturm. He remembered now. Having second thoughts about the voluminous windbreaker pocket, he had slipped the mini drive into the notebook’s accordion pocket, knowing that of all his personal possessions his Leuchtturm1917 was the one from which he was least likely ever to be separated.
In this he had been wrong, for the notebook was even now journeying through the streets of West Los Angeles on the back seat cushion of Marlon’s cherry-red Tesla.
At that moment someone punched him on the shoulder. He jumped to his feet and spun around to see a man in a stylishly-cut, mid-blue Havana suit, a pinstripe shirt, and a yellow wool necktie, his handsome, dark-bearded face smiling broadly at him.
“Hey dude!” said Hardyhar, as if they were old friends (which, in a way, they were). “What’s up?”
A strong right hand clasped his. Will, dazed and disarmed, gave a feeble return squeeze. Hardyhar’s grin morphed into a quizzical frown. He bent over, and then straightened. In his hand was the balled-up pair of beige socks.
“These yours?”
The characters (and companies) in this post are fictitious; any resemblance to actual people (or companies) is purely coincidental.
This is great! I look forward to reading more.