Short Story: God Mode
“Why did it so often feel like she was asking his permission to do things? Or rather, why was she always asking his permission to do things that she was going to do regardless of what he said?”
The first time could have perhaps been a coincidence. But when it happened again, Nate couldn’t explain it away, at least not completely.
Granted, he was only there the second time. He heard about the first from Silvie, and maybe it was because she told him about it right before it happened again that he got the impression that something was off. They were walking to one of her favorite bars, The Headless Horseman (the bartender had a crush on her — free drinks) and she was trying to amuse Nate, because he had blown off his parents to hang out with her and was feeling guilty.
If she wasn’t trying to alleviate his guilt, Nate would later think, she might’ve not mentioned it at all.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you: I saw Max the other day! Can you believe that?”
Nate could not believe it, because wasn’t Max back in Germany? Silvie had thought so as well, but in a routine visit to the 14th Street Trader Joe’s, she had run into him tasting smoothies with the concentration of a social media fitness influencer.
“Apparently his band is touring the U.S. again. He’s staying at an AirBnb on Perry!”
Nate controlled his urge to ask every question that assaulted his brain (How long is he staying? Did you make plans to see each other again? Did he apologize for the breakup?), anticipating that Silvie might get defensive. He settled for a vaguer “How is he doing?”
“He seems great! Very low key, although the band is probably doing great if they’re touring here again. He seemed really surprised to see me.”
“I mean, you live two blocks away from that Trader Joe’s.”
Nate hoped that response wasn’t too much. Silvie seemed unfazed, though, admitting that she too thought Max must have considered the possibility that they would run into each other at a place she so often went to. But he didn’t seem to be faking it, and he was something of a space cadet, so…
“It was good to see him,” she concluded, as they stood outside the bar finishing their cigarettes.
“Oh?”
“Made me realize I’m finally over him. It has been a great year, and like, I knew that, but now I’m really sure. I didn’t feel anything other than like, I’m happy that he’s happy, you know?”
Nate nodded, as if a stenographer was keeping track of the conversation and his non verbal agreement couldn’t be used against him later, when it all inevitably blew up.
They tossed the cigarette butts and went inside the bar, loud and full, playing what Nate called “angry girl music” and Silvie called a regular playlist for anyone born in the mid-80s.
As they made their way to the bartender, Nate thought he saw a face. Couldn’t be. It was on his mind because of what Silvie had just told him, that’s all. Craning his neck, Nate tried to get confirmation.
It wasn’t a trick his eyes were playing on him: Max was there.
* * *
They sat together in the booth — Nate, Silvie, Max, and his two bandmates, whose hard-to-pronounce names Nate had never bothered to learn. The bandmates talked to one another, Silvie talked to Max, and Nate just drank. He got the same feeling he’d often get in social events, of being an extra in someone else’s movie.
According to Max, this was a coincidence, just like the Trader Joe’s encounter a few days ago had allegedly been. He said the band had chosen to get a drink here after finishing a gig a few blocks down, because they remembered last New Year’s Eve party at the bar. Nate also remembered it, although he was sure their memories differed significantly: his mostly focused on holding Silvie’s hair as she puked on the street, and riding in the Uber with her, even though he was only slightly less wasted (he did his own puking at home). Max and his bandmates hadn’t even noticed they were gone, dancing obliviously till the New Year sun rose. “Taking care of you when you’re drunk should be your boyfriend’s job,” Nate had remarked to Silvie the following morning, as they ate medicinal McDonald's. She had ignored the comment.
“Nate?” Silvie was looking at him, as was Max.
“Sorry! What?” Nate took another sip of his drink, some custom mix the bartender had engineered and he hadn’t questioned because it was free.
Apparently Silvie had been telling Max about his promotion. Nate just nodded and said the pay bump was great, the extra hours were not. Max didn’t have any follow up questions.
Silvie insisted. “Nate also has his own team now. Three people!”
She sounded like a mom telling her friends that her son could now count to ten. As much as therapy was kicking in to tell him not to, Nate couldn’t help interpreting Silvie’s fawning as a request for him and Max to connect. Why did it so often feel like she was asking his permission to do things? Or rather, why was she always asking his permission to do things that she was going to do regardless of what he said?
Max did have a response this time: “What do they think of their new boss?”
It was meant to be chummy, Nate thought, but the accent got in the way and made it sound snippy — Max in a nutshell. Like those 3D cards that alternate between two images: tilt it to the left and he’s a harmless New Age hippie, tilt it to the right and he’s a passive-aggressive asshole.
“I think they like me? They don’t really know me, it just happened last week.”
“I’m so proud of my baby” Silvie kissed his cheek. Nate kept his eyes on Max. Max had never objected to their romantic banter, or the posts in which they pretended to be a couple, the kind that had made a lot of people actually think Nate and Silvie were dating. “You come first, and they need to understand that,” Silvie would often say when talking about potential boyfriends.
While she was dating Max, however, Nate more than once felt like he wasn’t coming first at all. Which made her current displays of affection all the more irritating.
Max had no visible reactions to the comment or the kiss, just a “you two are so cute together” smile. And for the first time that night, Nate thought maybe he was taking the whole thing too seriously. Perhaps it was a simple as: Max’s band was touring the US again, and he happened to run into Silvie a couple of times. She was over the breakup, and they were on their way to becoming good friends.
But tilt it to the right…
* * *
It was almost 2AM. Nate felt like he couldn’t take another minute of dancing to music he hated. He yelled to Silvie over the blaring speakers: “let’s go out for a smoke!” She nodded.
It was cold outside. Nate wanted to hug Silvie close to him, but he felt his body reject the notion. She was speaking so loud. She was too drunk, and not just on alcohol.
“Hey, so, when do you think we go?”
“I’m not ready yet!” Silvie swayed to the trace of music that came from inside.
“Right but, when do you think you’ll be?”
“I don’t know!”
“I’m kinda ready to turn in.”
“Nooooo stay!!!” she grabbed his arm. Nate spoke Silvie, however, and he knew that what she meant was: I’m gonna stay regardless. It made him angry. It made him worried.
“So that’s like… two times in a row you’ve run into one another, huh?”
“Just goes to show, the universe is wise,” Silvie lifted up her arms in prayer. “All I wanted a year ago was to run into him, and now that I no longer have feelings for him, it’s happened twice.”
Was she talking to him, or to the stenographer?
“I think I’m gonna go. Are you sure you don’t wanna come?” he asked, suppressing the other things he wanted to say (You’re too drunk. You can’t be sure how you actually feel. Remember why you broke up.)
She stayed, and he walked alone to the subway.
As he navigated the jumbled crosswalk to get to Union Square, Nate wondered if he was a bad friend for leaving Silvie behind. Should he have stayed? Danced a few more songs, gotten more drunk, played the charade so as to leave Silvie no other option than to go home alone because Nate was watching and she had, after all, insisted she had no feelings for Max?
I really need to get laid, he thought, the statue of Marquis de Lafayette looking at him because there was no one else to look at that late hour.
* * *
Back when Silvie and Max started dating, Nate had actually been very much #TeamMax. The whole thing started as one of Silvie’s many hostel hookups while alone on vacation, but Max, who had driven several hundred miles to keep up with Silvie’s multi-city German tour after that first night, turned out to be more than a Manic Pixie Dream Boy with a (in Silvie’s words) height-proportionate dick. He seemed to be infatuated with her, and she violated her “don’t fall in love abroad” rule by offering him a stay in New York should he choose to come — which he did, two months later. By the end of that visit, they were calling each other boyfriend/girlfriend, and Nate was thrilled.
Not that, of course, he wasn’t somewhat jealous of the space Max took up on Silvie’s life. Nate hated dating; or rather, he suffered from low enough self-esteem that he only dated below his league, and once the validation of feeling adored died down, he felt compelled to run. The healthy thing would be work out the issue in therapy so he could find someone he’d be genuinely interested in, but his friendship with Silvie provided so many of the trappings of a relationship that they both had fallen into an informal arrangement of fucking other people but coming home to each other (metaphorically speaking, since they were self-aware enough to know they would’ve murdered one another if they lived together).
Eventually, however, an issue had arisen: Nate really loved his job, and Silvie did not care for hers. As he rose through the ranks at a social media startup which eventually became a full-fledged company with a billion-dollar IPO, she bounced from gig to gig, at first believing that the next one would reveal her true passion, and then concluding that she just did not like working at all. A dread had begun to set in, with Silvie describing her life in terms of what she didn’t have (professional prospects, a boyfriend, money) rather than what she did. The financial gap between them kept growing, causing Nate angst over whether to engage in the activities he could now afford and wanted to try out, or hang out with Silvie; he often invited her to expensive things and offered to pay, but she was too proud to let him (at least every time).
He began worrying that every new achievement (putting a downpayment on an apartment, travelling business class) would trigger more insecurity and dissatisfaction in Silvie, which in turn stifled him from celebrating things he considered he had legitimately earned. And more importantly, he began wondering if their cozy arrangement, even if unofficial and unspoken, was part of what kept her (in her words) “stuck.” The introduction of Max into the equation proved that it wasn’t the case, and he had nothing to feel guilty about.
It might’ve been the reason that he was so enthusiastic about the relationship; he had arguably been more excited about it than Silvie herself, who hated romantic lingo and felt almost shame at the idea of being in love. But Max checked a lot of her boxes: not American, left-leaning politics, good relationship with his parents but not too attached, adventurous in sex, chill enough not to care about her thousand pet peeves (that wasn’t one of her boxes, but Nate thought it was crucial).
What did Nate think of Max, as a person and not just Silvie’s boyfriend? He often avoided answering that. It didn’t matter, really, what Nate thought — he wasn’t the one dating him. Or at least that’s how he framed it to others. Deep down, what had begun as a healthy mixture of skepticism and optimism about Max had soon given way to the realization that, to put it gently, there weren't too many pages in that book. The dude loved self-help and seemed to genuinely believe in the effects of aromatherapy. If it had been a cover to attract women, Nate might’ve respected it; but as a true personal philosophy, Max’s whole personality was an affront to Nate’s beliefs. So would he have preferred not to have Max as part of his social circle? Sure. But if it meant Silvie was happy and did not see herself as a failure of a person, Nate could put up with it. Max didn’t even live in the U.S.
That specific circumstance, however, eventually gave way to a more worrying possibility when Silvie started talking about maybe moving to Germany (since Max was the one with stronger ties — i.e. an actual career). But still, Nate tried to be supportive, and practiced with Silvie the best way to bring it up. He loved her too much to keep her in the U.S. to himself, he said, loving how good it sounded, not sure he actually believed it.
They must have not practiced enough, however, because that conversation provided the first big fight in Silvie and Max’s relationship. It wasn’t just that Max didn’t feel ready for that step — the mere suggestion of it had shocked him. Silvie felt humiliated for even thinking of it; Nate found himself arguing that Max was the one being unreasonable. How long could they possibly travel back and forth? Nate didn’t understand how he had become the most ardent supporter of the alternative that would put an ocean between him and Silvie, but there he was, pushing her to ask again, if not for an immediate commitment, at least a timeline. Max did not budge: thinking too much about the future, he said, prevented him from “being present” and disrupted his “flow of energy.”
Things had only gone downhill from there, a time period that Nate didn’t like to think about, and it had all eventually collapsed a few months later. In an email sent from the taxi taking him from Silvie’s house to the airport, Max broke it off for good.
Now, it seemed, his flow of energy had brought him back to the U.S., to an AirBnb a few blocks away from Silvie’s house.
* * *
Nate woke up early, even though it was a Saturday, and checked his phone instantly to see if there were any messages. There weren’t. Or rather yes, one, from his mother, checking in on how he was doing from the fake illness he invented to skip the monthly family dinner. He tried to silence the guilt, typing up a response saying he wasn’t 100% but getting there, then deleting it. He should wait until noon-ish —- that’s when his sick self would have the strength to text.
But nothing from Sivie. It was early, he reasoned. His own body was complaining over dehydration and too much dancing, so Silvie’s couldn’t be doing much better, considering he went to bed before her. He drafted a “Good morning! How was last night?” but didn’t send. He couldn’t let the anxiety show. But he couldn't do much to stop himself from feeling it. Going back to sleep wasn’t an option, so he decided to engage in his usual Saturday morning idleness with the full knowledge that he wouldn’t enjoy almost any of it, one eye constantly checking his phone for even the slightest of movements, the faintest of lights, that communicated Silvie was alive, well, and not back with her ex.
Would it be so bad (he asked himself as he failed to pay attention to an article in the New Yorker about artificial genetic manipulation in toads) if she got back together with Max? Well, for starters, they wouldn’t be “back,” they would have sex, and that meant she’d on his hook again with no guarantees of a future. If Silvie was gonna waste her time with a man who wouldn’t marry her, she already had Nate, who would never break her heart. But assuming it was more than sex — could Max be trusted? What signs had he shown that he had changed, that he was ready for commitment, that his enjoyment of Mother Earth or whatever did not stand in the way of Sivie’s happiness?
And more importantly: why had he showed up in two places that he knew Silvie regularly attended and passed it off as a coincidence?
This he really could not wrap his mind around. It seemed true his band was back in the U.S. (he thought as he mindlessly massaged shampoo onto his scalp) because otherwise his bandmates had agreed to join him on a personal vacation to a place they’d visited several times, and that seemed like a stretch — New York was nice, but not that nice. So what was it that Nate suspected? What was the conspiracy here?
A temptation assailed him while he slipped back into his sweatpants. A familiar temptation, one that he felt ashamed of. Not because it came to him, but because he had not been good about fighting it in the past, and he had promised—
Silvie was calling him on video. What did this mean? A call felt big, “I slept with him” big, but then would she really call him? On video? She’d try to hide it, no?
He picked up.
“Baaaabe I’m dying” she said with a raspy voice, her hair tangled in what seemed like a somewhat staged tableau. Bowie, her dog, lay next to her, nuzzling her ear.
It was instantly obvious, her play: the drunken mistake. She took a while to bring it up, because Nate refused to ask. She spent countless minutes on the music, the bartender, the drinks, the other people there, delaying the inevitable, which when she got to it, she prefaced with “you’re not gonna believe this.” If Nate wasn’t so upset, he would’ve considered it hilarious — he was very much going to believe this.
It was the attempt at manipulating him that made him angry, not the fact that she had slept with Max. It insulted him that she thought Nate could fall for her act, or perhaps that she knew he wouldn’t and still put it on, not able to control herself. If she had to lie about it, why do it? And if she did it anyway, why lie? Nate was not her father, he fucked up too every once in a while.
She ended the story (which was very unoriginal in its details, down to the fact that Max had only just left, after going out for coffee and having it in bed) with: “honestly it was the closure we both needed. Now it feels like the whole thing is finally over, no hang ups, no regrets.”
“Max needed closure?” Nate asked, the least bad of the things he thought to say.
She was not upset by it, or at least didn’t show it. Yes, Max did need closure. During coffee in bed, he had apologized to her for the way he had treated her and for being a coward (his words) and breaking up with her over email instead of doing it face to face. The band’s new U.S. tour had come as a perfect opportunity to do it right, and they had parted feeling like this was the ending they deserved.
Except, of course, that she had decided to attend his gig later next week.
“Did you have to lock Bowie up?” Nate asked, as punishment. Silvie loved her dog more than anything or anyone, Nate and Max included. But Max was allergic, so unless he had his meds on hand (which he wouldn’t on a drunken night), Silvie would have had to lock Bowie in the kitchen.
“It was just a couple of hours, and I let him out to play while Max was getting coffee. He didn’t mind, did you Bowie? Did you baby? No my baby no you didn’t.”
* * *
It didn’t surprise Nate, but still deeply annoyed him, when Silvie and Max’s closure turned into a new chance for love (which, he later found out, was the title of a book Max had read after the breakup).
They had the terrible idea of taking Nate out to dinner and announcing, as a couple, that they were again — well, a couple. It felt unbearably patronizing; Mommy and Daddy telling him that they loved him very much, and this had nothing to do with him, sometimes things just worked out that way.
“It’s been two weeks since you two hooked up?”
It wasn’t really a question, but it required an answer. Max took the lead: “But it’s been now almost three years since we first met. The break up was as much a part of our relationship as the coming back together again. We’ve both done a lot of growing.”
Silvie’s strained expression suggested that she also thought the language was a bit bullshit, but she agreed with the overall sentiment. She left for the bathroom right after, a wordless plea for both to just get along. Well, for Nate to get along with Max.
“I’m really happy, mate,” Max said as he drank his beer. Did Germans use British slang as if it was normal? Was that a terrible attempt to connect “man to man?” “I was so glad to get the opportunity to apologize, did not imagine that it would turn into a full comeback…”
Comeback? Was this just another band he was part of?
“I get that you two are happy right now, you don’t need to convince me. I just remember how broken up she was over you, and it wasn’t that long ago.”
Did that make him angry? Hurt? Reflexive? Max’s face was hard to read.
“You’re right. You are. I guess it took almost losing her for me to understand how much I cared about her.”
“What do you mean, losing her? You broke up with her.”
Max seemed confused, then relaxed his expression and laughed in a I’m-only-human kind of way. “I mean, the other guy, from work. She told me.”
What other guy from work? What the hell was he talking about?
Nate did not get a chance to find out, as Silvie returned from the bathroom with a big smile screwed onto her face. “What are my boys talking about?”
Max kissed her on the cheek. “How much we both love you.”
* * *
As soon as Nate got home, he logged into the social network (the same one he worked for) and pulled Silvie’s profile. There was nothing to feel guilty about, he told himself; he was just doing what any average user could do.
He was absolutely sure there was no “other guy from work.” Which meant Max had seen something on Silvie’s profile that had led him to believe she was getting involved with someone else. Which in turn meant his whole “chance encounters” angle was a lie and Nate could finally prove it.
He scrolled through Silvie’s pictures and eventually found three likely suspects. It wasn’t a guy from work, it was one of her sister’s friends, Ryan, a gay man who liked to pose provocatively with her. They had spent a lot of time together last summer, when Silvie had found herself Nate-less, since Nate had gone to California for management training. Max must have thought Ryan was someone from work because they were celebrating at a marathon’s finish line in one of the pictures, and that was indeed a work event for Silvie; Ryan had just signed up to support the cause.
In another picture, Ryan was kissing Silvie on the lips as she showed a plastic toy ring on her finger, caption “#HeProposed #SheSaidYes.” Nate understood the joke, even though he found Silvie’s humor around Ryan grating, but maybe Germans did not have a tradition of mocking heteronormativity? Maybe Max genuinely thought Silvie was falling for Ryan, and decided he wanted her back? But framed it as a series of coincidences so he could… what? Catch her unaware? Disarm her pride?
When he took it out of the realm of suspicion and tried to look at it objectively, Nate realized his theory still had a lot of holes. There wasn’t a clear motive for Max to lie. There wasn’t even that much proof: all he had was a throwaway comment while Silvie was in the bathroom (though he refused to believe it didn’t mean anything) and a couple of pictures that might be related. For all he knew, Max hadn’t seen the pictures. He certainly hadn’t liked or commented on them.
And then the temptation came back.
* * *
Nate didn’t talk about it much (in fact the company actively discouraged them from doing so), but as part of the Consumer Experience team, he and his co-workers were able to use to the so-called God Mode, which allowed them access to basically every piece of information they could ever want on anyone or anything inside the social media platform they worked for. It ranged from the innocuous (times that the user was online) to the unspeakably creepy (pinging the devices of any given user to reveal their location). There was nothing someone could do on the platform that they didn’t have access to.
The company, of course, understood the potential for abuse, so the watchers were themselves watched by a Compliance team. Anyone caught focusing too much on a single user’s activity, or using God Mode too frequently, would get flagged, and depending on the circumstances, reprimanded or even fired. They had been warned that there should be no expectation of privacy in their activities (something that also applied to the users — but in that case they had managed to bury the disclaimer so deep into Terms of Service that it had escaped unexamined).
However, the company culture worked in their favor: there were legitimate reasons, related to creativity or understanding behavior, to focus on a single user, including those you were known to have a connection to. “My friend mentioned to me the other day that she wanted to read more news from ‘both sides’ so I’m monitoring her activity to see if she does — I think it would be interesting to examine how much her idea of herself aligns with her actual behavior.” So long as you bothered to actually put together a report of your friend’s news consumption, you were free to spy away on her every move.
Nate had never done that. He knew that was a seal that couldn’t be unbroken. Even at times when he suspected he had been lied to, he had resisted. It wasn’t about people finding out, it was about him knowing that about himself: that he had violated someone’s privacy in a terrible way. “Fruit of the poisonous tree,” he’d heard once in a show about lawyers. A rotten piece of evidence he’d never be able to use in any way without outing himself and the company he worked for, and which would darken his soul irreparably.
That is, until a year ago, when Max said he wasn’t ready to live with Silvie and she still refused to dump him. Nate had agonized over whether to do something for weeks, but in those weeks, Max told Silvie he not only wasn’t ready to take the next step, he didn’t know when he was going to be — and she still continued to date him, submitting to his terms and settling for way less than she deserved. During Max’s last trip to the U.S. before the breakup, in which she still hosted him instead of making him get a hotel, Nate learned Max had made a comment about Silvie’s weight (“I had a dream that you were thinner” — passive-aggressive asshole). It had brought her to tears, and Nate decided that was it.
He created a cover (“I’m looking into how musicians separate their use of professional and personal accounts” — he was even careful enough to monitor other bands of the same size) and got to work, not knowing quite what he would find, and deciding to only feel guilty if he found something he could use. At first, it seemed pointless. Max’s profile was all inspirational quotes, long videos at the piano, and Lego sets he thought were cool. But on his band’s account, he found several messages from fans, some of them female, some of them answered in quite racy language. Was it Max, or the bandmates? He painstakingly checked devices: all three of them used the band’s account, but only Max’s device matched the times that the messages had been sent. All chats eventually ended with him urging the women towards an email address.
Nate felt both vindicated and panicked. He had proof that Max was at the very least engaging in flirtation, and possibly fucking around, with some female fans. As far as Nate knew, Max and Silvie were monogamous — this was bad. But how to use it? What did he have that an average user could also have? He lucked out: the band’s profile had liked, probably by mistake, some of those fans’ pictures.
He framed it as casually as he could to Silvie, feeling horrible every step of the way, but not stopping himself from doing it. “So I was checking out Max’s band the other day, looking for that song you mentioned, and I swiped to the activity tab by mistake and saw they had liked some girls’ pictures…” Silvie said it was probably the bandmates. Besides, Max was a guy, guys like pictures of women, she had no illusions.
“Still,” Nate pushed, “might be worth asking him about it?” No, she said — she would sound crazy. But Nate knew Silvie: once the question entered her mind, it would not leave unanswered. She eventually checked Max’s phone while he showered. Saw the chats. Confronted him. He denied it all, said it was his bandmates, that he was horrified she had invaded his privacy like that. She apologized.
The next morning, on his way to the airport, he sent her the email breaking up with her. It didn’t say it was because of the fight, but it didn’t need to. Silvie didn’t speak to Nate for weeks, saying she needed “space.” She never explicitly blamed him, but she also didn’t need to.
Since then, Nate had always been very careful around the subject of Max, afraid of tripping up the alarm system that he felt would trigger Silvie’s buried anger at him. It ate him up, not being able to prove to her he had been right. He swore to never use God Mode again.
Until now?
It wouldn’t be that bad this time around, he argued. He only wanted to see who had seen those pictures where it looked like Silvie and Ryan were dating (information only God Mode could provide). In fact, it could put him at ease once and for all if it turned out Max hadn’t seen them — case closed!
He typed in his credentials in a hurry, almost looking away, so he’d have no time to think about it. And what he thought would be relief felt instead like disappointment: Max, either personal or band profile, was not on the list of accounts that saw any of the three pictures. In fact, upon further digging, he discovered that Max no longer had an account, had deleted it before the pictures were even posted, and that only two devices had been accessing the band profile — devices that matched his bandmates’.
Max was completely off social media, apparently.
Case closed?
* * *
He decided he would be happy for Silvie, even when she used her vacation days to follow Max around the country on the new tour.
He asked her, before she left, if she was sure: what if she and Max fought, and she got left behind in some random town? More importantly: was she sure Max had changed? “I know it might not work out,” she said, the most honest she had been since the whole thing started up again. “But I’m gonna do it anyway, okay? And I don’t want you making me feel bad about it.” Nate complied. Because he had used God Mode and he had been wrong. He needed to get back on #TeamMax, not for Max, but for Silvie. It’s what a good friend would do.
He followed the tour on social media; she posted almost every day. It looked like love, the kiss against the backdrop of a beach, the hug from behind on some nameless bridge, her candid picture of Max’s naked body as he ran into the sea. Nate felt jealous, a pure jealousy that almost satisfied him in its simplicity. It wasn’t masked by any other righteous feeling he could hide behind. It reminded him of being in high school, seeing his crush with someone else: in theory, the jealousy came from seeing them with another, but in practice, it came (and perhaps envy was the better word) from the fact that they were feeling good in a way he’d like to feel good. Nate didn’t desire Silvie sexually, even if he loved spending time with her. But she looked so happy, and there was nothing Nate could do to get that happiness; he couldn’t buy it along with the other things he could now afford, he couldn’t make it happen in a few hours by ordering it online. He could try to find it by creating a dating profile and waiting for months, maybe years, until it found him, if it ever did. Just thinking about that was worse than accepting it wouldn’t happen, so instead he played with Bowie, who had been left behind for Nate to take care of — another victim of the whole affair.
Nate pictured himself on the tour. Eating s’mores together in the desert, huddled under a blanket; having sex under the stars. His apartment, of which he’d been so proud when he moved in, now looked so lonely and boring and sad. The rational (was it rational?) part of his brain screamed that it was all manufactured, social-media-ready, and that even if Sivie was as happy as she looked, it was a rush of endorphins caused by sexual attraction that would soon fade. But he couldn’t bring himself to agree. The only time he came close was when she posted a selfie with a new t-shirt that read “The Worst Mistakes Make The Best Stories,” which reminded him of how stubborn she could be, even when she knew she was wrong.
But wasn’t that how falling in love went? Tilt it to the left, and it’s the best feeling in the world. Tilt it to the right, and it’s a terrible mistake.
* * *
Then, Bowie disappeared.
Upon their return to New York, Max’s bandmates left, but Max asked Silvie if he could extend his trip a couple of weeks and stay at her place. She said yes, and then he asked her: when he went back to Germany, would she go with him?
Silvie broke the news to Nate on a one-on-one dinner this time, perhaps because she wasn’t just giving him Max-related news; she was also telling him she was leaving. Nate had objections, but he didn’t voice them. He saw in her face how much she needed him to say it was a good idea — and what evidence did he have that it wasn’t? All of it was circumstantial (another term he learned from the lawyer show) and would only upset her. So instead they toasted and started talking about how often they would travel to each other’s country, masking their sadness with scenarios that neither could guarantee would come true.
The plan, like Nate’s conspiracy theories, was full of holes, because Silvie had no savings and Max’s earnings from the band only made a small fraction of his budget — he was mostly sustained by a grandmother that loved his music. Would she also love paying for an unemployed American whose main occupation was having sex with Max? There was no talk of visas (although Nate could tell that Sivlie had the vague impression she would be proposed to at some point), or what to do with Silvie’s apartment in New York. But still Nate remained silent, trusting her to figure it out, which was the mature version of a different feeling: that he wanted to remain as far as possible from the whole scheme.
But then Max voiced what he had assumed was an unspoken understanding: Bowie couldn’t come. It was unreasonable, even cruel, to imagine that they would share a life in which Bowie would be locked up in some room of the house every day, especially because Max liked all the rooms in his apartment and didn’t particularly care to have one of them permanently occupied by a dog who, with enough time, could make his larynx completely close up. And he was not on board with the idea of taking meds every day (“Western” medicine was “poisonous”), let alone risking an attack should he forget them. Nate had been taking care of Bowie during the tour, Max reasoned — couldn’t he just adopt him?
Silvie didn’t repeat that particular request to Nate other than to point out how ridiculous it was. She loved Bowie more than anyone, and it had hurt a lot to be apart from him during the tour (had it really? Nate wondered). She and Max had a big fight about it. Neither was willing to compromise, and it seemed like the whole thing would collapse. Nate felt guilty at how excited that made him.
And then one day, while Silvie was walking him around the neighborhood, Bowie’s leash snapped and he ran after a motorcycle. Silvie, who had been on her phone and didn’t immediately notice, couldn’t catch up to him — Bowie was big, and could run very fast. She turned a corner, and both the motorcycle and Bowie were gone. He didn’t come home. Sivlie was devastated.
A few days later, someone responded to a post from Silvie in a neighborhood group. A dog had been found buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn of their building. Could it be Bowie? His body was mangled and his collar was missing, but Silvie and Nate recognized him immediately — and, later, the microchip confirmed it. The doorman had not seen anyone dig the grave; it must have been late at night. The vet said the wounds were consistent with a car accident. The driver must have felt guilty and buried Bowie so as to avoid the consequences.
Silvie was inconsolable. Max cried, ostensibly from how much it hurt him to see her suffering.
Nate, on the other hand, was alert. How much of a coincidence could this really be? The only obstacle that separated them, gone? He asked the vet, in private, if the wounds could’ve been inflicted by a person instead of a car. The vet could not say conclusively, and asked him why he wanted to know.
As always, it was just a suspicion, hard to put into words in a coherent way. There was no way to prove Max was involved.
Was there?
* * *
He logged into God Mode, and opened up the pictures with Ryan and Silvie. He was sure that Max had seen them. He was done fighting his anxiety. Maybe Max hadn’t used his profile, or the band’s, but that didn’t mean he hadn't seen the pictures.
Nate scrolled, patiently, through the hundreds of accounts that had been exposed to the posts, most probably idly scrolling by, not even paying attention — the fact that Silvie’s profile was public made it worse. He decided to use the analytics, first querying all the profiles that had seen all three pictures (Nate imagined Max needed more than one to form his theory that Silvie was falling for someone), then excluding everyone Silvie followed (it stood to reason that if Max had used a different profile to stalk her on social media, it would be one Silvie was not familiar with). That still left a fair amount of people.
He filtered for profiles located in Germany — there were only three, two women and one man, all with enough activity that they seemed legit. Maybe Max was using a VPN to mask his location? Why? Would he ever suspect that someone was looking? Perhaps. He did know, after all, that Nate worked for the company.
Or maybe he’d never seen the pictures and there was a rational explanation for everything?
No.
Nate had another idea: he filtered by profiles with 10 or less followers, reasoning that if Max had created a fake profile, it wouldn’t be known to too many people. That did the trick: there were only four profiles, two without a profile picture, one with a Pikachu… and one with a Lego.
He pulled up all the information available, which was very little. The profile had mostly looked at Silvie’s posts, starting a few months ago. Feeling equal parts thrill and dread, he checked the email address associated with the profile.
He recognized it immediately.
* * *
Nate’s stomach churned as he explained it all to Silvie, leaving nothing out, showing her printed copies. The email address Max gave to female fans who reached out to the band’s profile was the same one he had used to create the account to stalk her. He must have realized it was Nate who told Silvie about the chats with those girls and, knowing he was watching, Max had tried to be careful — he just didn’t know how powerful the God Mode was.
“This is proof,” he finished.
She took a lot of time to respond, her expression blank. “Proof of what?”
The question caught Nate unprepared. He was suddenly drawing a blank. “Proof, that, uh… that he cheated on you the first time, or at least flirted with other women, and on top of that made you feel crazy when you confronted him.”
“Well, you made me feel crazy, because you knew all of this and didn’t tell me.”
What? Wait, what? Nate tried to refocus — she was shooting the messenger!
“I told you as much as I could! What I did was super against the rules, I was trying to protect you—”
“If it’s against the rules, why are you telling me now?”
“Because he’s LYING! Don’t you see? He’s pretending fate or whatever brought him back here and he just happened to run into you a couple of times, when it’s clear that he’s been planning this, trying to fool you and me—”
“Nate. I saw him play those gigs. Is his manager in on it too? His bandmates? Did they all put on a fake American tour so he could seduce me, is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, maybe he— he told them that—” Nate didn’t know where to go. Why wasn’t she listening? She made it all sound inconsequential when it was not inconsequential.
“What about Bowie?”
“What about Bowie?”
“You have a big fight about him, one that could potentially end the relationship, and then he just disappears?”
“Nate, I was walking him! Max wasn’t even with me!”
“Maybe he... maybe…”
It was pointless. She didn’t wanna listen, and now he was the one who sounded crazy, not Max. Max was the crazy one. Nate had the proof in his hands.
He tried again: “He’s been pretending not to be on social media, but he’s been watching you.”
She threw the papers back in his face. “No, YOU’ve been watching me.”
* * *
He smoked as he walked back to his apartment, the cold air sneaking in through his sleeves every time he took a puff. Blood pulsed loudly in his head, as if his heart had relocated to his cranium.
She had refused to listen, explaining Max’s behavior away at every turn. According to her, even if Max had seen her posts, even if he had thought she was falling for Ryan, so what? It’s not a crime to regret mistreating someone and try to win them back. Maybe it was lame for him to pretend to run into her, but hey, it had worked.
Silvie and Max were happy. Nate was jealous. End of story.
Worse than jealous, she made Nate sound dangerous. She said he should be reported for spying on people, that if he ever so much as looked at her account again she would call his boss, the press, the police.
The police! Nate looked up: there was the precinct, two blocks away from his house. He looked back at the envelope in his hand, containing the evidence that Silvie had been impervious to. Maybe they would listen? Probably not, but at least… at least there’d be a record somewhere, raising the alarm about the guy. If something ever happened to Silvie (what would happen to Silvie? Whatever happened to Bowie, perhaps), Max’s name would be in the system, he would become a suspect. He wouldn’t get away with it.
Nate stepped down onto the crosswalk, angling towards the precinct.
“Wait.” A voice cut through the silence of the empty street, followed by a rhythmic clacking.
Nate looked up. Who had said that?
“Wait,” the voice repeated.
It was the pedestrian signal, talking to him because there was no one else to talk to at that late hour.
* * *
By the time he went to bed, Nate feared Sivlie was right. Their friendship was probably over, and it wasn’t clear why. Nate’s theory had always had holes in it, and maybe he had blown past them because… he wanted to be right? He wanted Max to be a threat? He had never really gotten on board with Silvie having her own life, completely separate from his? The questions exhausted him.
He pulled out his phone, logging into God Mode, not even bothering to feel guilty, not even caring if he got caught by the compliance team for using it on a personal device.
He pinged Silvie’s phone. She was home. Good. Part of him had expected her to be at the airport, as if the fight could upset her so much that she’d move to Germany a few days early just to get away from Nate. But she was still in New York, and that meant she was safe (or at least safer than in Germany). And that felt good.
For a second.
Then he started thinking about what she would say to Max. How she would finally accept it had been a mistake to make Nate a priority. That she had fostered his “unhealthy attachment,” that she had allowed this “abusive friend” to become possessive of her, controlling, invasive. Would she tell Max the whole truth? Nate’s insides twisted at the thought.
Max would probably defend him with platitudes like “Nate cares about you very much, even if his methods were wrong.” He’d pretend to be the gentleman, the zen one, the good partner who’s so heartbroken over his beloved’s friendship falling apart. All the while smiling inside, because he had won. Whatever his plan had been, Max had clearly won.
Nate found himself wishing he could use God Mode to listen to their conversations. He pinged the location of the account with the Lego picture. At the very least it would reveal if Max was with Silvie at that moment.
But something must be wrong.
The map showed the device as being at Nate’s address, not Silvie’s. What would Max be doing—
Nate heard a rattling noise, and looked out his window to see a shadow on the fire escape.
Curious to know more about this story and why I wrote it? Read my thoughts here!
Illustration by Deepti Sunder, revision by Lilly Camp.
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