What You Are Looking For Is What Is Looking

N

az is half an hour late to see Matthew when she steps out of the Uber on University Avenue and realizes she has forgotten what he looks like.

Two years ago, she would have given anything to see him again, sooner, closer. In the early days of lockdown, lying on the floor in her father’s kitchen beneath the sounds of a Zoom lecture about organic chemistry, she imagined a text would arrive saying “Forget these lockdowns, just come over! Bubble with me!” Matthew’s name, scrolling into view on Insta or Twitter, had been ringed with fire, like a wild reward. But as the pandemic wore on and Matthew had gotten increasingly caustic and snide in his online rants about the lockdowns, it became easier to accept that he had rejected her and that it was for the best. This week, when he texted her out of nowhere and invited her to the ROM, it felt like a message arriving from an abandoned planet.

Naz’s friend Sophie thinks she should just remember that Matthew sucks and ditch him. “You think too much,” Sophie said on a walk through Withrow Park yesterday. “He’s an ass. Tell him you’re coming, then like, don’t even show!” But Naz is not the type of person who doesn’t show. “You’d apologize if you were rude to somebody who was mugging you,” Sophie likes to say. Adjusting her N95 mask, Naz primes herself with conversation topics. She could ask Matthew how his online classes went, but that might start him complaining about lockdowns. At this point he might be seeing someone else, but she can’t start by asking that. She remembers his parents live in Oakville, she can ask how they’re doing. And he had a brother, she thinks? She reassures herself that you can always ask someone what TV they’ve been watching, and suddenly she misses the brief period when they talked and watched TV together.

It's almost 30 degrees in late May, but Naz is wearing long pants. Bloor Street is full of people finishing ice cream cones in a hurry. This is supposed to the start of “Hot Girl Summer,” but these terms never feel like they apply to Naz. She reaches for her phone to let Matthew know she’s arrived and finds eight messages from her father. He wants her to buy Brita filters if she is out. No, he wants her to buy a water filtration device, he has sent the address. Call for the credit card when she gets there. No, he just saw something bad about that company, go back to the filters. Tonight they’ll get pizza. What does she want on it? Can she pick up a pizza? Also he needs batteries, the kind that aren’t contaminated, she remembers which ones.

Naz exhales and tries to put her father out of her mind. She has plans to move in with Sophie for the fall—there will be an escape from this twitching incubator of paranoia. Naz can’t stop picturing roommate movie nights, roommate adventure walks. Could they get a dog? Sophie is disorganized and a poor cook, but Naz thinks she can teach her something. She imagines the two of them in the grocery store, in parallel checkout lines. Sophie playfully tossing crackers across the store into her cart, because Naz will eat most of them anyway. Another young adult life running nearby, while she chooses for herself what to buy and eat.

As she enters the museum, she feels a ruffle of lightness, remembering she actually needs nothing out of this afternoon.

Matthew reasons: Either Naz has seen the video already, or she hasn’t. That’s a logically exhaustive list of the possibilities.

He has moved to wait inside the ROM because outside, a guy in a Zelda t-shirt noticed him and stared. The shirt suggested a tech-savvy guy, someone very online, who logically would have seen the video. Matthew had wanted to hold his stare, claim territory, but after a moment he looked away, his head full of abortive explanations about his “real argument,” which it would be ridiculous to shout at a stranger on the street. If you’re explaining, you’re losing—that’s the internet. It would be better to throw a punch.

He feels transparent—everyone who looks at him seems to think they know a secret.

If Naz has seen the video and still agreed to meet him, that’s something. There is a kind of approval in that, a suggestion she might see it his way. He can complain about how unfair the edit is, how the guy hitched his mockery on to the beginning of Matthew’s video and left out the rest. He can throw his hands up at the idiocy of the world, laugh with her. The joyous high ring of her laugh.

The problems will arise if she hasn’t seen it yet. He will be unable to explain without showing her, and her response could be any grade of condescension or polite embarrassment. If almost four million people have joined in to laugh at him, she might laugh at him too. She might even go home. Essentially, he’s made an appointment to get laughed at by someone who already rejected him before it all started.

He stands on the staircase with his ticket clutched in sweaty hands. Every time someone meets his gaze, he’s one step away from a primal battle. He waited for two years for people to calm down and think logically, crunch the numbers about varying risks, open the restaurants. But now he’s here, and real life has been traded away for nothing. He feels transparent—everyone who looks at him seems to think they know a secret.

But now a woman with an N95 mask and a pink streak in her dark hair is coming up the stairs, holding his gaze with an unnatural steadiness. His stomach shrinks up—this is the real one, the keen and ready antagonist, warming up for the kill.

She waves and he realizes it’s Naz.

Matthew’s face has more acne scars than she remembered. He’s doughier, especially around the mouth, where he’s puffing his cheeks in a tentative half-smile. Nothing in his manner suggests the person he’s been online—the snarky whiner she had to mute periodically. But nothing suggests a guy she should have dated either. She laughs, thinking that if he texted her from across the room instead of speaking, she would at least have experienced the old thrill of seeing his name appear.

“Hi,” she says, wondering why he’s shrinking away. No hug then.

“Sorry. The hair—I didn’t recognize you,” he says, gesturing to the pink wave.

“It’s new,” she says. “How are you?”

He shrugs wearily, like a man being crushed by a rock who doesn’t want to complain about the obvious. “Dinosaurs first, or mummies?” he asks.

“Ooh! Mummies. I want to save Dinosaurs for last.”

They seem uncertain who will move first. Naz starts up the staircase and then looks back to see Matthew covering his mouth, like he’s conscious of not wearing a mask, though fewer than half of the people in the ROM are wearing them. If he complains about hers, she resolves to leave.

But he doesn’t. He asks how her father is doing. She doesn’t want to tell him yet about the paranoid reactiveness that has taken over her apartment—how her father warned her, before she left today, not to go near the hospitals because they ambush people in the street with vaccines. (Naz has two shots, but her father doesn’t know that.) She’s almost certain Matthew is more sensible than her father, she doesn’t want to test it out just when they’re getting started. So she tells him her father is “bonkers” and can’t remember not to talk to her during Zoom classes, which at least seems funny. Matthew just says, “It’s been hard,” and looks at a display of Greek pottery.

By the time they get to the Bronze age, Matthew has determined that she hasn’t seen the video. He’s given her too many openings. But he’s too nervous to launch into the explanation—even that will be humiliating. He focuses on reading about the spear heads. Seeing his reflection in a glass case, he tries to straighten his back. When facing a mirror directly Matthew can fix his posture and make a serious expression, but photographs from the side always reveal how ugly he is. He has the posture of a comma. Naz is the only person he’s ever slept with, though he doesn’t think she knows.

Wandering to a Roman shield, Matthew chews over one of his favourite ideas: that throughout history, everyone on both sides thought they were the good guy. It’s shocking how few people beyond himself seem to know this basic fact.

Matthew has spent much of the pandemic trying to convince himself that Naz was the unlucky one, that it was small and illogical of her to have rejected someone she clearly had a lot in common with—they could have seen each other regularly and joyously over the last two years instead of floundering in their separate lives. Yet he asked to see her after the video, betting on a memory of her compassion. He thinks most people are really very simple, and only want someone to look down on. Wandering to a Roman shield, Matthew chews over one of his favourite ideas: that throughout history, everyone on both sides thought they were the good guy. It’s shocking how few people beyond himself seem to know this basic fact. Certainly the asshole who made the video is walking around thinking himself a hero right now. Three nights ago, Matthew was up for most of the night, rehearsing a situation where he would find the guy. He refined the threats he would issue, the excitement of promising a murder-suicide, the shock he would see in that gleeful smug face when it arrived finally at fear. But his fantasy meant nothing at all, beyond a boiling sense of having nowhere to go. The next morning he texted Naz.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here on time,” Naz says. “You would think that Uber drivers would get around the traffic better.”

“You know how Google Maps knows where the traffic is? It’s the phones.”

“Sorry?”

“The phones in the cars. If they’re packed in close together, there’s traffic.” Matthew feels he is hitting his stride now. “We are the traffic we’re looking for, I guess.”

As they meander from Rome to Egypt, Matthew says something mock-profound about how we are the traffic we’re looking for. Naz smiles behind his back, unable to remember why she’s supposed to be angry at him. She’s lost in half-remembered text, volumes of unsent writing she addressed to him over the last two years, trying to find the fulcrum of her frustration. She was prepared for anything—except that he would reappear as some guy, a perfectly pleasant person. She was ready for anything but the fact of a human face. She remembers reading somewhere that it was impossible to hate someone while you were looking at them.

Naz has at least 80 unsent emails to Matthew saved in her drafts folder. Two years ago, the first messages were simple attempts to clarify what had happened between them. She told the story of how her high school boyfriend Carl had also just dropped her, and searched for the vocabulary to ask if she was an easy person to drop. But as she struggled to get the tone right, to cut out self-pity and neediness, Matthew started to transform. He spat vitriol about the lockdowns several times a day. His online self knew only three snarky phrases:

“Helping People.”

But at least they don’t have COVID …

Trust the ExPeRts!

It wasn’t that Matthew never had a point: he occasionally posted articles about the mental health costs of lockdowns, and she agreed with some of what he said. But as his tone kept hardening, she grew wary, fearing each time that he was about to slip into the same territory as her father, making wild claims about 5G towers. He never quite did. At one point, Matthew said people were “deluded” if they thought they could run from the virus by getting vaccinated, since vaccines contained some of the virus anyway. She had written: Congratulations on passing Grade 10 biology, genius. She deleted it, then wrote it again and deleted it again, and then muted him for a month. His narrow, know-it-all vitriol was so different from the guy she remembered—he was really his own best proof that lockdowns had costs.

Seeing him in meat space now, she realizes that she hasn’t really been writing to Meatspace Matthew at all. She has been addressing that thin, online thumbnail of a person—nothing she has written has touched his flesh and blood.

Meanwhile, her father was getting more and more disjointed, demanding things and then forgetting them, refusing to take her to visit her mother’s grave in Mississauga—something they had done every year. As the angles of her apartment got nauseating and tight, she began drafting a new series of messages addressed to “Meatspace Matthew.” She vented at him for being like her father, but then calmed herself the next day and tried to be fair to both. She would paraphrase her father’s weird ideas, trying to push her imagined correspondent to denounce the paranoia about vaccine trackers and admit to some basic bedrock reality. She didn’t want her only romance as an adult to have been somebody crazy and small. I want to have at least been neglected by someone sane in my life, she typed, laughing at herself. She talked about how hard it was to see a world full of frightened people. How her mother had been 78 pounds on the day she died; how natural it would seem to lose everyone she had left. Her writing got tangled and after many emails she signed off: It’s a good thing Meatspace Matt doesn’t exist any more because he would be ashamed of you. I lost my mom. You lost board game night. I hope I never see you again. But the next day, she started a message in a tone of apology, knowing she would send neither. The messages continued so long as she had room to try to pry a window open back to a moment when it had once been morning and she had left Matthew’s apartment and walked to the Jane bus, the day full of sunrise and eye contact.

Seeing him in meat space now, she realizes that she hasn’t really been writing to Meatspace Matthew at all. She has been addressing that thin, online thumbnail of a person—nothing she has written has touched his flesh and blood. Here he is: the mysterious dope who stormed away and sat on the other side of the classroom when she tried to talk about what was happening between them. The guy who sat behind her in his bed after sex while they watched Rick and Morty.

Matthew’s bedroom flashes up around her. Suddenly his rejection of her is white hot, confusing and impossible. Everything that has happened since feels irrelevant, compared to the nearby fact of his body. Suddenly aware of the edges of her mask, she wants to grab at his belt and see what happens. How could she still be here, wanting him? How could she not have known?

The mummy always gives Matthew a thrill he can’t explain—the withered body sitting in the base, the ornate blue and gold lid suspended above it. The shy glimpse of teeth through the wraps, like the creature might still be trying to breathe. This mummy was nobody special; the plaque says Young Male. He shivers. Perhaps the young male was prepared for a glorious afterlife, only to wake up desiccated in a museum and see school groups staring down.

He turns to see Naz starting down the stairs to the dinosaur floor, and scurries after her, glad to have a reason to move.

Matthew is about to chat up this idea to Naz—that they are somehow standing now in the mummy’s afterlife—when he looks across the glass case to a teenager staring at him. The kid points at Matthew and elbows his buddy. The two of them raise their hands to their mouths. Whatever it was he saw before that made him think people had recognized him, it was only a rehearsal for this. He turns to see Naz starting down the stairs to the dinosaur floor, and scurries after her, glad to have a reason to move. He’ll have to tell her now; there will be no other way to explain his flushed face.

“Hey wait up,” he says.

She holds his gaze over her mask. “I see you’re a little slow today,” she says.

“Oh, yeah I was just looking at the mummy.”

“At the mummy … ” she repeats.

“Isn’t that what we said we were going to look at?”

“I can’t remember,” she says, with the oddest playfulness. “You say a lot of things.”

They’ve stopped now on the landing. There’s no sign that the two guys are following them, but Matthew’s chest is heaving. Her tone has turned on a dime. Is this some kind of trap, that she waited so long to start mocking him? Logically, that must be what’s happening. You say a lot of things. So she’s seen his humiliation after all.

The day she rejected him was the same. She approached him in the hall before composition class, all shrugs and no eye contact, and told him that they could hang out more “if he wanted,” but this thing they had been doing “didn’t have to a be a big thing—maybe it isn’t.” It was a staggering shift from two nights before, where they had stayed up talking until three. He had nodded and then gone to the bathroom, where he sat in a stall, staring at the door. When he went back to class, he sat on the opposite side of the room from Naz, since that was clearly what she had told him to do.

Naz doesn’t know what’s taken hold of her. She feels tossed across a surface like a skipping stone. This is the way Sophie flirts—playful and toothsome, laughing at a guy’s least important faults. It feels powerful. At the same time, she looks down on Sophie, who confuses guys with slow and uneven responses, but only succeeds in keeping quicksand beneath her own feet by leaving everyone guessing.

“What do you mean?” Matthew asks as they walk out into the dinosaur floor.

“I mean, I’m chatty, but you’re wordy,” she says. “It made it hard to get to bed.” This feels explosively risky.

“Most people these days don’t have the patience for many words or complex arguments,” he says.

“Ah, yes,” she says. His tone is sharp, but it still feels like he might be playing along. Not sure where to go next, she adds, “Probably something we should have thought about before we agreed to live on the internet for two years.”

“But apparently people can be jerks even to your face,” he says, so harshly that her game falls apart. He looks baffled and annoyed. Behind him, the Triceratops lowers its head for combat.

Naz clearly can’t pull off Sophie’s tricks. She starts to formulate an apology about having forgotten how to talk to people.

“Are you working together to embarrass me?” he asks. “Like, did you know those two guys?”

“What guys? What’s going on?” He sounds exactly like her father, so suspicious that the walls themselves might be conspiring against him.

They hold eye contact. He’s on the verge of tears.

“You haven’t seen the video, have you?”

“No. What video?”

“Find me in a few minutes.”

He holds up his phone with a little wave, signalling that she should look at it, and walks away.

A text arrives, with a link to TikTok. It’s a video of Matthew, pointing at bubbles of text with the showy confidence everyone uses on videos. The bubbles read: 1) Per capita deaths is bullshit 2) We should care about real people: there is no such thing as 2.4 deaths 3) Check out what percentage of the people are dying of any particular cause. He concludes with a hearty nod.

And then we cut to the real entertainment: a middle-aged white man springs into view, poised over a synthesizer. He sings: I don’t know what per capita means. Naz realizes he’s right—Matthew failed to notice that what he asks for in his third bubble is pretty close to the meaning of per capita. The man develops his theme, arrives at a snappy chorus: Don’t tell me some countries have more people than others / That’s too many ideas for me. / Only a few people died of COVID / In my tiny town by the sea.

But it’s also terrifying to be reminded of this basic function of the internet, the hanging threat in whose shadow they all live.

Naz smiles despite herself. The song is catchy, and it’s a little satisfying to see someone who has been spitting basic snark for two years get put in his place. But then she sees the 3.7M hearts and covers her mouth. The video is six days old, but more people have liked it than live in the proper city of Toronto. She scrolls to the comments, which are full of people hoping Matthew dies of COVID, because of course they are.

Matthew texts: I don’t know how I come back from this.

Naz has no idea what to say. Part of her worries that Matthew really is dumber than she thought—does he know what per capita means? But it’s also terrifying to be reminded of this basic function of the internet, the hanging threat in whose shadow they all live. Why is it okay for this man, as old as their professors, to get his five minutes of fame by humiliating them?

I’m sorry this happened to you, she responds.

It’s barely worth going out. People recognize me. He adds: But I wanted to see you.

Naz notes that whoever he thought was ganging up on him seems to have vanished. But beneath it, she is reeling with the discovery that after two years, when Matthew needed to see someone, he still wrote to her.

She texts: I wanted to see you too.

Can we just go for a walk, he asks.

She is already striding past the Parasaurolophus, on her way to find him. She could do anything right now. She could run to him, grab his hand, declare that they need each other. After two years, life would crack open for the wild taking. She starts speeding up, imagines throwing her arms out. The loping silliness of her body. How good it would feel to kiss someone, now.

Why does some ugly part of her want to nest up with Matthew, feel the artificial tightness of playing house?

She turns a corner and sees him on a bench, sagging over his phone. He hasn’t looked up yet—has no idea she is halfway through running to him like a woman in a movie. Again he is his plain self, sitting alone curled under the weight of the internet. She is full of the temptation to dash to him, but she is also conscious of it, watching herself. It’s too exciting—too fantastical. Who is she, trying to throw herself to the wind like this?

He still hasn’t looked up.

She thinks about her fantasy roommate life, the image of Sophie tossing crackers from the next checkout line. Isn’t that more appealing than this man, spitting himself back at the internet? Why does some ugly part of her want to nest up with Matthew, feel the artificial tightness of playing house? Slowly, her excitement begins to disgust her. It’s as if she is always trying to escape into a convenient ecstasy of family, something close by and slightly more appealing than her father.

He still hasn’t looked up.

When Naz was a teenager, she had to fill out a survey for a fast-food job application. There were hundreds of personality questions: Naz had to rank adjectives, judging whether applied to her. Her mother, already very sick, was sitting at the kitchen table. Naz asked her, “Can’t people just lie?” Her mother said that if they asked you ten questions, yes—but over hundreds of questions, you would get bored and answer by instinct and your real personality would come out. “Take your father,” she said bitterly. “When we first met, he told me he was confident and calm. But life proved otherwise.”

Naz wonders if the pandemic has distorted Matthew, or if the guy she knew was always suspicious and snide, and just on his best behaviour with a new girl. Perhaps what she’s been seeing online is his comfortable and intuitive daily self.

Matthew still hasn’t looked up from his phone to see her, breathless in the distance. It’s the rom-com ending our generation deserves, she thinks. Perhaps in Meatspace, Matthew really is just meat—an empty body colonized by online life, half his mass having leaked away like gravity to another dimension.

A deep breath. Naz feels she has landed back on her own feet. She wants it all over, the afternoon a narrow bridge she can cross and be entirely done, with nothing left unsaid. She gets out her phone.

Wait a moment, she texts. I have to tell you first what my life has been like. I already wrote it to you. I just didn’t send the messages. Check now.

She opens her email. She opens her drafts folder. Send, send, send.

Matthew scans one message, then the next. Her messages are full of accusations—shocking, verbose descriptions of how small he is, how he has ruined himself.

How can someone go on for so long? he wonders, scandalized. Hasn’t she already said that I suck?

But he keeps reading, carried along by the rhythm. He is stunned that she thinks he is the one who rejected her. She is articulate and sad, talking about her parents. She is graceful, beautiful, talking about what he meant to her. How together they opened up the sense that you might be with someone and they might say what they mean and be laughing and themselves.

He cannot fathom that he has ever been seen this way, as the start of someone’s life.

Matthew has no words for what he is learning, what he will continue to learn, reading and re-reading Naz’s diary. Seven years later, Matthew will be out for dinner with his girlfriend, Sasha. He will recently have come home from Naz’s wedding to a man named Ethan, which he was surprised to have been invited to—they nominally remained friends but rarely spoke. He will go, dragging a sense of longing that he must keep to himself, never having been certain why she didn’t want to make a try of it with him when she had already built up so much to say. At the wedding, she will speak about how when she was younger, her grief drove her to hold on tight to almost anything—and Matthew will gaze into his beer and leave early.

But just as he is about to say that Sasha sounds like a little girl, he will find himself refracted through a hall of mirrors, remembering that he has sometimes admired the fullness of mind that comes from turning every feeling over, considering everything.

Matthew will be thinking about Naz while Sasha explains that she has been upset by a conversation with her sister. It won’t be obvious to Matthew how some casual dig about decorating style could be so hurtful. Matthew will cascade through a variety of dismissive reactions, noting how illogical it is to get so hung up on what someone else’s words might mean. But just as he is about to say that Sasha sounds like a little girl, he will find himself refracted through a hall of mirrors, remembering that he has sometimes admired the fullness of mind that comes from turning every feeling over, considering everything. That it could be a way of deciding someone was worth it. He will miss Naz for a moment before saying to Sasha, “I’m sorry that was hard for you. I guess there’s just a lot to know about a person.”

But for now, Naz’s messages are a bolt of light, a shocking sense that the same stooped frame he hates in the mirror is loved from another vantage. All day long he has feared he is transparent, like someone might know his secret. But after 20 minutes of reading he is so surrounded by Naz that he imagines he could look right through her, and on the other side there would simply be more of her to see.

It will all happen, he thinks. He will run to her. He will reach for her and their hands will pass right through, as light is transparent to light.