Fakebook (25 page)

Instead we got a middle-aged Russian. He looked terrifying. His full black beard and unkempt hair made his piercing blue eyes seem to match his silver chain. He was built powerfully, an intimidating figure. Then he pulled out a badge.

“Please state your name for the court.”

“Officer Patrick Malkin,” he said in a thick accent.

“Please state your assignment.”

“I'm undercover, part of a long-term investigation of illegal gun trafficking in upper Manhattan.”

The usual line of questioning went on—the standard awkward legalese that gets all the formalities on the record. By the end of it, the “Russian gangster” had the same impatient attitude I'd recognized in Amadi's arresting officer.

“Are you familiar with Amadi Johnson?” the prosecutor asked, as he showed a picture of the defendant.

“Not by that name,” he responded. “I know him as Nine Track.”

“What is your relationship with Amadi Johnson, a.k.a. ‘Nine Track'?”

“He delivers guns to me.”

It hit the room hard. We sat there, absorbing this news. We'd thought, at worst, that Amadi made a bad decision that night. It never occurred to us that he might be a gun runner. Finding our worst suspicions not just confirmed, but exceeded, was devastating.

“Is this one such gun?”

The prosecutor pulled out a manila folder. In it were a photo and a forensics report on a handgun.

“Yes.”

The prosecutor then read the report aloud. The gun was purchased without serial numbers and with bullets. The undercover officer had paid Nine Track seven hundred dollars.

Before we had a chance to fully process these details, the prosecutor produced another gun report from another sale. Another loaded gun. Another missing serial number. Another large sum of money.

It didn't make sense. Amadi was an underprivileged kid who barely had seven dollars to get to the neighborhood dance. He was scared shitless of the twenty-one adults sitting in front of him. Nine Track was a gangster who delivered guns to the Russian mobster who terrified the room.

A third gun report was produced. Then a fourth. And a fifth. And a sixth. We reached eleven before Officer Malkin was excused.

I thought about Amadi's testimony through a new lens, recalling how he'd repeated lines verbatim, like a rehearsed script. And the story—that he found a gun, tucked it in his boot, and was off to the authorities like a perfect little citizen—was ludicrous. It always was.

I thought back on Amadi and how he was presented to us. All the details: the wardrobe, having exactly seven dollars and not, say, ten. It all reinforced our discomfort and manipulated us into wanting his story to be true.

A handful of jurors clung to the discredited story. I hated it. I hated everything about it. But I couldn't stay silent.

I stood up and spoke against Nine Track. Because as comforting as it would have been and as much as it felt like the right thing to give him another chance—I realized that believing his story would have been a selfish act. Absolved from consequence, Amadi would return to his school and his neighborhood not as the scared kid we saw, but as Nine Track the emboldened gangster. The one we'd failed to stop. He'd be a PR win for the gang who exploited him.

And we'd be doing Amadi no favors, either—encouraging him further down a dangerous path. A path that led back to this courthouse, but the next time he'd be a little older and a hell of a lot less sympathetic, and under god knows what charges. Most of all, we sure wouldn't be doing anyone any favors if that trigger got pulled.

No, the only people who had anything to gain were us, the jury. We would have gained the delusion of living in a world where a scared sixteen-year-old kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not in one where some fucking gang could seduce a desperate child to peddle their violence.

I want to live in a world where his story is true. But I don't. Instead I live in a world where I helped send Amadi Johnson, a scared kid who was dealt a shitty hand, one step closer to jail.

That night I grabbed my hockey stick and went to the handball court on Houston. In the summer, it's a madhouse, but you can count on it being deserted in the dead of winter. I was relieved to see that it was even plowed.

I wound up and took my first shot. It was as weak and inaccurate as ever, but the ball made a comforting “thud” against the wall just the same.

It was about as quiet a night as downtown can have, and the ambient sounds of city traffic were easily pierced by the various thuds and scraping sounds of mindless ball hockey. Combining with the deep breaths of cold winter air, it had an almost meditative effect on me.

I felt awful about what had happened in court. I couldn't get over how easily and deeply I had rationalized Amadi's story. I had forgotten how powerful a thing perception is. Truth can't be destroyed, but it can certainly be buried. And when it's buried, we have our hands on the shovel, don't we?

I wished Amadi's story to be true, and in doing so I was a willing participant in his lie—willing to connect the dots for him because I liked the picture that made. And for the first time, I truly understood how I was getting away with Fakebook.

The story I was telling tapped into the collective angst of my peers. Twenty-six is an overlooked age—not a kid anymore, but still not settled. The honeymoon phase of young adulthood is fading, and stretching out in front of us are the consequences of the course we set—a course that seemed like a good idea to the teenager who picked your major—for another sixty years.

When we were in our teens and early twenties, every ambition or goal was possible in the wide-open future—and our goals were wonderful ideals created by our imagination, not yet tarnished by becoming real.

For most of our lives, it didn't matter what our friends were doing with theirs. Whether they were going to a good school, playing in a band, or starting a landscaping business, no one had accomplished anything yet. It created the illusion that we were all the same. Everyone was at the beginning of their path toward a wide-open future.

But by our midtwenties, the future was beginning to narrow. We'd traveled different distances down divergent paths, and the gaps between us have turned into gulfs. And every time we log in to Facebook, the choices we didn't make, the lives we aren't living, are staring back at us through other people's profiles. Facebook can become a window to the world for each of us, just as the world begins to pass us by.

And we feel something. It's not jealousy, exactly. And it's not exactly nostalgia for our youth. It's a yearning—a sense of loss that comes with understanding that becoming who you are means saying good-bye to all the possibilities of who you could be.

And then there was Fakebook. Imagine that you're going through the motions of another Monday. After staring at a spreadsheet for the better part of the morning, you begin to lose motivation. In search of a thirty-second distraction, you click off Excel and log on to Facebook. Somewhere between the dozens of posts bragging about another great weekend, you stumble onto my page.

Here's a guy admitting publicly that, like you, he's in a rut. Like you, he doesn't have a plan. Like you, he doesn't know what he wants or how he's going to get it. But unlike you, he's not letting that stop him. So right when you are about to accept the inevitable narrowing of your potential—when you begin to acknowledge your only possible future because of the choices you've made—you see my story.

Dave, a guy you sort of know, walked away. He is walking away right now, while you're reading about it. He rejected the inevitability of the path he was on and has begun blazing a new one! In truth, it actually is only an escapist fantasy, but to your knowledge, it isn't fantasy at all. It could be you.

When I began Fakebook, I tried to remove people's emotional investment from the story. I thought it was messy and morally complicated. I didn't want people to care. Now, I realized that was never possible. My Facebook friends weren't simply unsuspecting victims of my hoax; they were its collaborators. Once they wanted to believe, Fakebook no longer needed to be convincing—it just needed to be rationalized. No one would believe Fakebook if they didn't believe in the
idea
of Fakebook just a little bit more.

The question was…was I starting to believe in Fakebook, too? Was pretending to quit my job and walk across the country just a pragmatic, quasi-believable premise to a practical joke? Was that all? Could I keep calling it a parody when, I realized now, so much of it felt completely sincere? Don't I also have a longing for a new adventure or the chance to start over?

I shot the orange street-hockey ball off the corner of the wall, and it deflected out of the court and into a grimy pile of plowed city snow. I scrambled up the pile with my feet cracking the dirty, iced-over surface and sinking in. As I plucked the ball out, I felt some of the city snow begin to melt into my socks. It was time to head home.

During the walk back, I sent out a post with a caption that felt as honest as anything I've ever written.

Heh, I thought. It's almost funny: I longed to live in a world where Amadi Johnson wasn't a criminal. But my Facebook friends longed for a world where Dave Cicirelli was.

Tic, tic, tic, tic, tic.

Juror 8 typed away on her cracked iPhone.

“Can I help you turn off the sound?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't think that's a feature on this model.”

Juror 10 and I exchanged a knowing look. At least I had tried.

The bailiff walked in. “No more cases for the day,” he said, hands gesturing up in the air. “Thank you for your service. See you in seven to ten years!”

And with that, jury duty ended. A half dozen of us went out for drinks afterward in a crappy little bar just up the street. It was an easy environment to bond in—for the past month, we had all shared an experience. It felt appropriate to have a proper send-off.

But soon enough the crowd dwindled down, as people got back to their families or didn't want to trek home through the snow. Before long, it was just me and Juror 10.

We talked for a while about the things we saw at court—the characters in the jury or the funny behavior of some of the more harmless criminal cases. We joked about having a favorite stenographer, or that one lawyer who didn't know how to tuck in his shirt. Then we talked about our jobs, and how we both felt like it was time to try something new. How she was working full time and going to school at night, pursuing a new career in fashion journalism and marketing.

I told her how much that impressed me—that she had the guts to start something new. How I was finding myself especially impressed by that of late—by making a change in direction. Then I teased the aspiring fashion journalist for wearing giant snow boots.

She laughed and stuck out her foot, as if to model them. When she rested her leg, it was touching mine.

It was a snowy night, and I offered to hail a cab or walk her to the subway. She opted for the train. It was a long walk, considering the weather. But we trekked the two dozen blocks through puddles and slush, and she jokingly pointed out how dry her feet were inside those boots.

I suggested we cut through Washington Square Park because it'd be nice to see in the snow.

I'd had a lot of time during the month in court, during the time at the bar, during the walk through the park, to convince myself that she was too pretty to be interested in me. I'd had plenty of time to convince myself that the past month established a platonic relationship or that it was too soon to try something new after the Dhara disappointment. There were hundreds of reasons to protect myself from rejection.

But I didn't think about any of that. A little over a week ago, I'd completely exhausted myself with Fakebook, with work, with relationships. I'd crashed through the wall, and I was still in that echo. I didn't have the patience for overthinking, for indecision, for cowardice. I wasn't weighed down by worry. I'd lost interest in trying to navigate the haze of all the things I couldn't know.