You've Been Flirting Again

I parked my car in a mostly empty downtown lot, initiating the main screen on the dashboard. A scrim of light covered the windshield and enlarged a web browser with my most visited sites and applications, including Parlor, the only dating app that properly interfaces with driverless cars. I scrolled to its home page - a menu of photos and videos of possible dates - and opened my inbox to see who had messaged me since I'd last logged on that morning: seven users, almost all of them bots. One wrote to me in a garbled English: $$$ now. Red light that is yours for keeping sir Another: make or act fast as soon as you READ this. I am convincing you my friend. Another: Yours now free Euros Swiss Francs British Pound Sterling yes And Now. All if you, sir, administer your account. I deleted the messages and scrolled through the rest before stopping at one from a profile named @_Monica23: Hi. How are you? I replied: Hi. She lived in Oak Park, the other side of town, and checked no car as a conditional stat. I messaged her again: What are you up to tonight?

I never liked to drive. With the sophistication of self-driving technology and its cheap implementation in the past few years, things changed. I prefer the ease of driverless protocol with its open sense of spatiality, lying down in the backseat to watch TV while outside everything continues to slip past, eliding destination and surface into a liquid state of travel, distance flattened to a frictionless, horizontal plane, the slide toward point B. Riding in cars is easy. Romance, social-networked for idle moments mid-commute, is easier. The proliferation of dating apps - with their universal binaries of choice - followed the popularity of reality dating shows in the 2000s, where prayerful hope of a partner was regimented in network-produced pageantry, imaging interpersonal complexity as a series of recycled gestures and "challenges." While reality TV is more or less dead, we can all play The Bachelor online. With Parlor, we can play it in our cars. Hey. Hey. Hi. How are you?

In The Bachelor, which broadcasts though almost no one watches it anymore, courtship follows the accelerated logic of the elimination game, rendering "true love" an antiquated if not totally imaginary idea, one referent in a system that has otherwise reduced all feelings to a series of staged make-outs in the hot tub and dinners on the deck overlooking the 9th hole. Like, although dating remains gently gorgeous and fragile in the presence of all those cameras, hovering over the women vying for the Bachelor's attention, it's easy to get lost in the mess. "Honey, you look lost," one woman says to another, who, in becoming her target, looses face, her otherwise calm expression breaking into a nervous grimace in recognition of the accumulating losses presented by each bad date with the Bachelor, a man whose good looks and generic dress leaves him nearly faceless. A masculine composite that never coheres beyond he's so hot, open shirt with a bit of chest hair, "razor-sharp jawline," and yet who remains by virtue of the game an elusive object of desire. She sits up, regaining her composure, and winks at her competitor across the dinner table. I'm not lost, she things, looking into the camera.

The interior of the Bachelor's house is always open, a spacious domestic array of luxury couches to fall on and talk, open windows, a pool, and a large kitchen. Spotlights managed by hired specialists isolate both happiness and discomfort whenever it's felt. Everyone is seen. Regardless of the show's disorienting arrangement, she doesn't feel lost, rather force-marched to the denouement of her brief, televised romance with a moderately wealthy man, vaguely sensing the path that will lead her to the finale, if he permits her. In the mean time she will never be alone with the Bachelor until he proposes to her and they depart together in the luxury driverless car that will await them at the entrance of the mansion, drone cameras poised overheard to capture the moment. She often dreams of the finale,of turning to wave to the mansion that housed them and her defeated competitors. They will offer the public a kiss in tribute to the losers when they leave. Sensing this, the car's windows will slowly roll up and self-tint.

Hi. How are you?

I'm going out. What are you doing tonight? @_Monica23 wrote to me. The dashboard beeped when the message was received, flashing Parlor's logo - a cursive P circled in a shimmering loop extending from its base - on the windshield.

Nothing, I responded. U?

Oh yah? No plans on a Thursday?? Lol.

:(

Want to meet up? Come to this party. It's called Shush. It's this girl Abhor's party. It's on the north side. Belmont Avenue area. At Shore Club if u look it up.

k.

I leaned my head against the driver's window and fiddled with the car's web interface as it located a parking spot outside the Shore Club. I swiped to Parlor and found @_Monica23. Her profile pic featured her sitting next to friends in the grass in a park, everyone's faces blurred except hers. A dot beside her name indicated that she was online. Hey, I wrote. I'm here. I waited a few minutes for her to respond. No response. Finally, the dot went red: she was offline.

The car found a parking lot a block away from the Shore Club and directed itself to a narrow spot at the far end, between a motorcycle and an Audi. It eased itself in between them, adjusting itself with surgical precision as it crept forward. When it stopped, the car shut itself off. I exited into the chill October air and the door locked behind me. I headed for the entrance of the lot, where a few people stood nearby, talking and smoking: "It's OK, yah," one said. "You should check it out. I mean, it's definitely fun."

A huge crowd had gathered at the entrance of the Shore Club, which was guarded by a bulky man who'd folded his arms in seemingly total indifference to the urgent flurry before him. He didn't speak except to occasionally shout that everyone needed to stay in line and not linger outside the bounds of the rope. People pushed to get to him and the doorwoman to insist that they were on the list, but he ignored them, resolutely focused on a wall of graffiti across the street. When anyone pushed the limit of the rope he'd break his concentration to yell that they could step back or leave, his frustration so rehearsed it seemed deprived of any real anger, just canned words that had been paired down to a basic, agitated command that would be universally understood: "Get the fuck back." I thought maybe he was ready for the night to be over. A tattoo of a drone swaddled in snakes and roses threaded up his right arm, beginning at his wrist and stopping just at his deltoid. The drone had been anthropomorphized with a screaming face, its eyes squeezed shut as though it were hurling forward at full speed toward its target. His left arm was unmarked. A small woman with a purple visor and gold sunglasses stood beside him, checking the list. She was turning almost everyone away, impatiently repeating herself, "No, no, please leave the line," to everyone who told her there was a mistake.

I put you on the list, @_Monica23 had written to me. If you can't get in, just call. I'll be inside.

I told the woman my name. She paused to check her tablet, scrolling through the names before she looked up. "Sure, go in," she said, waving me through.

Inside, the air heaved under the sweaty density of bodies jostling toward the coat check, the bar, the dance floor, and the edges of the room, where plastic cushioned seating shielded people against the larger crowd. I headed for the dance floor, back to a DJ booth where Abhor - whom I'd seen at other parties in Chicago - stood encased in a clutch of tranquilized club kids. Monica would be with her, I thought. In the shadows, Abhor seemed like half a machine, her figure cut by an angular red dress with a tremendous, poppy red hood slung back over her shoulders. Her right arm had been tattooed all black. Nothing about her look seemed improvisational, an accident of simply trying things out. Rather, she appeared to have militantly executed every detail, from the way the hood fell onto her back to the loose hairs that stuck out of the black bob that sat on her otherwise shaved head. She centered the room, the axis for a wavering orbit of dancers. She was talking to a boy with his shirt off, his chest covered with blue paint. I decided against going up to her.

I searched for Monica, but didn't recognize any faces except Abhor's. The Shore Club's few overhead lights crisscrossed the room, briefly catching people as they moved and conjoined together. Except for those few seconds, everyone remained in the dark. The music vibrated the floor and walls the closer I neared the back. No one I passed talked - or screamed - to one another except in the corners, where little groups hovered over bottle service, kissing and leaning in to gossip or flirt or share drugs. The lit tips of electronic cigarettes cut the smoke fog machines had pumped in to the room. It was 3:30am: everything had entered an endless flux that seemed to have exempted me from it, isolating me as though I were present and surrounded, but trapped alone behind glass, a camera scanning a crowd. I looked around, embarrassed that I didn't really know anyone here. I got in line for a drink at the bar near the back. It was installed under a large metal cross with the word Shush sculpted in neon red into it.

A girl split the line open and grabbed my arm, pulling me toward her. She wore a black tank top with jeans. "Hey," she said, her head tilting to the side, "I think you're looking for me. I'm Monica. Are you waiting for a drink?"

I nodded. "Oh, hi. Yes…"

She glanced at the line and shook her head, playfully annoyed that I'd even thought to come here, to the most crowded bar in the club. "Oh, no, don't." She shook her head and held up a drink. "Here - have mine. I just got it. Let's go in the back. We can sit behind my friend Abhor - there's a booth." She stopped. "You look so funny," she said.

"How so?" I put my hand in my hair and pushed it back. I'd slicked my hair back and wore all black sportswear, like almost everyone else. Did I look weird?

"You look so serious, like you're not having any fun."

I made a smile, but I knew it had come off as a grimace. She waved it away. "Don't worry, you look fine."

She led me to the back, sliding through the sweaty crowd while I struggled to keep up. When we got to Abhor's booth she cleared away a few people to make room for us. We sat for thirty minutes, talking mostly about the party in the absence of anything else to say, only touching once on her life when she mentioned she'd just moved into a new building with a pool on the roof, which felt like conversation enough anyways, until even our secluded part of the room swelled with people and we were pushed up against the wall, onto the top of the couch, where we were wedged in together with some of Monica's friends. She asked me what I did for a living and I told her I programmed websites but that I'd just left grad school without completing a degree. She asked if I enjoyed programming, and I told her I didn't, that I wanted to do something else, maybe even leave Chicago for New York. "Ah," she said, and turned away to say hello to a friend who'd tapped her shoulder.

I watched Abhor from across the room as she smiled and greeted everyone who passed her. She hugged them, kissing each cheek once, but remained otherwise stationary, fixed in place near the DJ. I'd never seen a promoter stand so still as her. "It's never usually this crowded," Monica said. "But it's Thursday, I guess. Maybe let's leave?"

"Already?"

Parlor - or any of my apps - doesn't enact a familiarity so quickly as it does a connection between user profiles, an immediate link between clicks of like and dislike, comment and silence, mainlined to a messaging system that condenses language to its minimum: What r u doin rn? U want to hang out? I'm actually never doing anything. It seldom changes. Parlor possesses of itself a sense of displacement that we think we must turn away form, back to real life, but don't. After thirty minutes I didn't know if I wanted to go. Outside probably wouldn't differ so much from the inside. "I'm not sure. Where would we go?"

"Let's just drive," Monica said to me. "Can you drive? Or did you cab?" She set down her drink on a ledge. "I can't."

"No, I can't either, but I have a driverless."

"Oh, amazing! I've never been in one, actually. I hear they are so insane."

"You haven't? How is that even possible? It's great," I said. "Sure, let's go."

She jumped up. "Bye," she said to Abhor. "Have a good night." Abhor gave her a hug and nodded at me. I gave her a small, awkward wave.

"I'm not lost," she says to herself, getting up from the table. She refuses to accept the situation of her desires as they play out at dinner, which has been set somewhat clumsily for them by a catering company that the show regularly hires. This is not really life, she thinks, though she also thinks she can't define "life," the totality of experiences that constitutes that feeling that things are living, going on, being, herself included, televised, untelevised, the whole telepathic sense of her image as it is distributed throughout the world, whatever "the world" itself might be. Every thought feels stupid. This feels stupid. She reaches over a plate of cauliflower for the wine, but stops, pausing a moment before retracting her hand. She feels like she's had enough. She decides she should decline the rose (the award the Bachelor bestows on those who are not eliminated, thereby permitting them to move on the the next level) that is hers should he decide to give it to her. She will say goodbye to the other contestants, then ascend the stairs as the camera bobbing above her floats away, its eye refocusing elsewhere on the room, allowing her to pass off screen.

"I'm just trying to keep it real," the Bachelor says after the show cuts to an interview with him in his bedroom. "I just want to forget everything, the cameras, the show. Keep it real, you know, with the girls. I just want to be sure I've selected the right woman. That's the only thing that matters to me."

There is no future determined by these coordinates, extrapolated from those bodies flung into it, but this felt most true within the car as it sped toward the dim horizon, wherever that may have been situated in time.

After leaving the Shore Club, we raced through town, or what seemed like town, what could have been Chicago or its suburban outskirts, I couldn't tell, but once we hit 100 mph I was sure we had left the city's limits, following the network of highways that intertwined until all become country, the flat geometry of fields and the machines that till them. The shapes of the buildings, houses, and the skyline disintegrated into indefinite shards of light and darkness that collaged into a glowing patchwork until eventually even that broke up and we slipped into a permanent fog broken only by the occasional streaks of other cars that passed us. "I'm not telling you to speed," Monica shouted, "I'm just telling you I think we could be going faster." We had been driving for twenty minutes, speeding up at her insistence. She explained she wanted to see what driverless could do under real pressure.

"Come on, faster," she repeated, looking out the window. I wasn't sure if she was talking to the car or to me. I wasn't sure if the difference between the three of us even mattered. I reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled back. I felt dizzy, a little sick as the car vibrated under the engine's stress. It shuddered as though it were beginning to break apart, shedding itself of its plastic shell as we sped forward. She turned up the music.

I directed the car to increase its speed. "Maximum limit reached," it replied. The dashboard buzzed as the speedometer strobe-lit to indicate that we were going as fast as legally permitted in the state of Illinois. "Any further acceleration would be a violation of Illinois state law, specifically that limit which was set forth by the Illinois state legislature on January 25…" I silenced the car.

"Faster," Monica shot back.

The fog melted into stark black. We couldn't see anything but a faint glow out the rear window that I thought must be Chicago. I didn't want to go back and wondered if it was even there. Forward, everything reversed into beginning: Monica seemed unreal, hallucinated into the car by the car, a reality abridged by fantasy accelerated to the transcendence of the difference between the two. I shouldn't have let the Shore Club. Feelings fade so quickly. We overlapped, sliding onto the leather seats of the car, slowly becoming gauzy, bodiless subjects bobbing against the ceiling like helium balloons. I tried not to throw up.

Monica turned to me and clapped her hands. "This is what I'm talking about." I asked her what she was talking about. "The faces at the party," she said, "circulating in the network, all of them linked together in off-site data storage centers somewhere outside of town, each profile centered in the delay between hi and hi back. Like, hello, this is yours. Just respond."

"I don't get it," I said.

She went to roll down the passenger window. I grabbed her hand. "Don't. You'll ruin it."

She bit her lower lip. In the car, she seemed to have separated herself from herself, and had begun to drift throughout the cabin of the car.

Say nothing of you, us, me, him, her." She counted off the pronouns on her fingers. "The days are long, evening longer. Without interval. Can we say that? It doesn't seem a total collapse, does it, even if I have been removed to a car and refuse to declare any place elsewhere it home. I'm not interested in goodbye. To post an update, to update oneself, to post - as in the crisis of, is to accept these conditions as ours: glycerol in the sand, contradictory iMessages, mesmerized by the approaching headlights. I will not miss any moment in the past or hope to reestablish it in some moment in the past or hope to reestablish it in some future, yours or mine. We know it won't come but it is sometimes necessary (sometimes a necessary feeling) to assert a moment maybe even a parenthesis of being between things, that will depart from earlier notions of time - and continuity."

We made eye contact. The imperative remained: "Drive," she said, "even if you don't understand me."

Light streaked the window again. I grew dizzier, split from Monica and the vehicle, lost in various dreams of common space; metropolitan haze at 5am, which might be described as "liquid" or "hydrous," two words that more or less say the same thing according to my car's dictionary. Driverless, sunless: urgency well after midnight never changes. We move, even if the precious, but persistent nostalgias of manual over automatic don't shield us against the machinic impulse to do nothing, and repeat nothing again and again. It only serves to make its hierarchy more obscure. I am in it. She is in it. I turned to Monica to tell her all this but she was looking out the window again, pressing her face to the glass.

I wanted to direct my car to her apartment, which I imagined was in one of the new skyscrapers downtown. The pool she mentioned would be on the roof, in view of the skyline and the few stars that shone through the city light. We would strip off our clothes and jump into the water, despite the cold, swimming about for hours. We wouldn't do anything, just float, paddling a little with our hands and feet, careful not to break the stillness of the water. The moon would be nearly full.

We made out in the back seat. She put her hand to my face and pinched my cheeks, pushing my face away from hers. "Will it crash?" she asked.

I turned to look out the window. "Of course not," I said. The entire frame of the car began to shake violently.

The car beeped as the dashboard flashed an alert: "Warning." "Warning," it repeated, bringing up the main interface to indicate that the car's battery had been nearly depleted. The windows of the car suddenly filled with the flashing alarm icon. The car's battery was less than 5% and falling: "Program will terminate in five seconds," it said, at which point a second countdown started. At 2%, the car initiated its shutdown. The images of the speeding highway melted into a glitchy collage before the car went dark and the windows returned to the normal view rather than the video feed, opening to the parking lot near the club. The simulation had ended. The air conditioner and speakers stopped.

I moved up to the front of the car and pressed the on button a few times. Nothing. I turned to Monica. "It's dead for sure."

"What?" she said. "What happened?" She stared at me, almost in anger.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't understand. Did the car die? Where are we?"

"We're... The program died. We're still at the Shore Club." I had already explained to her that a driverless can't go very fast, but it can simulate speed.

She sighed. We'd sobered up. "I see, I see. So it's almost like a ride." She ran her hand through her tousled hair. "I see," she said, again. "I bet watching TV like that is fun."

"Really fun," I said. "Especially the new shows, the ones they shoot with multiple cameras. It's almost like you're there."

"It felt really real."

"Yeah, That happens to a lot of people when try it for the first time. The simulation goes long enough that it just feels like real life, and you kind of slip into it."

She nodded, a bit unconvinced. The first time I'd tried it I felt the same way. I'd used the program to imagine driving through the desert at night at 135mph. When the car's feed ended to reveal my driveway in Chicago I felt like a dream had just begun, the real a dull simulation of my other life.

"Will you get home?" she asked.

"I can call a cab," I said, "and just...I don't know, have it charged in the morning. You?"

"Oh, I'm fine." She opened the passenger door to exist and got out, shakily at first, sticking her head back in to grin at me. "Ok, sure. Have a good night," she said. "Text me tomorrow?"

The Bachelor enters the pool alone. He sticks his index finger in the water to test the temperature. Though it's chillier than he'd hoped, he decided it's warm enough and leaps in to find that it isn't so cold after all, actually, but rather warm, as warm as any body, and so he stays down and holds his breath, taking the moment to break from the competition and the cameras. He can go for thirty seconds before he has to come up. He tries again, this time reaching thirty-three seconds. He surfaces again, takes in a mouthful of air, and dives down, swimming to the bottom of the deep end where he paddles to keep himself close to the pool's floor. He counts forty seconds, then pushes himself to forty-five before coming up once more. He throws his head back and looks around him, wiping the water from his eyes: the contestants have left the house and are gathered around to watch him, clapping and calling for him to join them for drinks on the veranda. "Come out of the pool," one of the women yells. A few laugh and coo at him. He lowers his head and sucks in a mouthful of water. "Come out!" another possible wife says. He says nothing and the women fall silent for a moment. They wait for him to answer them. Finally, he spits out a jet of water at her. Everyone begins to scream with laughter. He laps the pool, splashing the women as some of them leap in and others step back to get out of the way. A few of the possible wives fall back onto the wet grass, laughing as their glasses of wine spill out to the ground. The camera crew rushes out of the house to capture them.