# chapter one: john

Sep 6, 2025

I hadn’t lost my virginity yet. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; it seemed like the rest of my generation was no longer interested in sex. On some level, I understood where they were coming from, the whole act did seem kind of pointless. But after a few beers, that wasn’t how my mind was working.

I turned 19 last week. Dad flew in from Idaho, and it was the first time he was in the house I shared with my mother. He left when I was 12, and it was always apparent that parenting wasn’t the top thing on his mind. There was some meeting on Long Island. That’s probably why he was here, in addition to the fact he knew mom wouldn’t make him sleep on the couch. He had many reasons to be in New York that weren’t me. My birthday was just a flimsy pretense.

He’d worked on Wall Street the whole time he was around, a quant. He wrote programs that made other people rich. But something happened to him right before he left. A crisis of conscience perhaps; he was spiraling for weeks, cursing the capitalist system, calling my mother a gold-digging whore (which was mostly true), and saying things needed to change. Then he packed a single backpack and left for Idaho.

I visited him out there once my sophomore year. He had a camouflaged one room cabin in the middle of a spruce forest, but instead of the hunting or fishing stuff you might expect, the walls were adorned with electrical test equipment and various things that looked like they were out of a biology or chemistry lab. I didn’t know much about this stuff and that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about anyway. He wanted to talk about “man shit” like nature and women and not being life’s bitch. I tried to act like I did, but I didn’t really listen. All I remember is how eerily quiet the night was, I could hear every animal movement outside. My dad said you get used to it.

Brian was having a party tonight. Well okay, party is a lofty way to describe it. He’d replaced the fluorescent lights in his mom’s basement with blacklights, and we’d go over there to drink beer and smoke weed and sit around on our phones and scroll. And sometimes someone would laugh at something and share with the group.

I had a case of Bud Light left over from the last party and drank two of them today. Hence the thinking about sex and not thinking that thinking about sex was stupid. People wouldn’t be going over there for a few more hours, so I laid in my bed, drank, and loosely beat off to YouTube. Celebrity gossip, internet gossip, speedrun videos, nothing even arousing. I liked the true crime videos about the hot female teachers who slept with their students. Yea yea yea terrible crime and they all act holier than thou about what if the genders were reversed, but the genders weren’t reversed. Maybe they just don’t want to get demonetized.

There were never women at these parties. Okay maybe one or two. But nobody ever slept with them or much thought about them that way. They were the agendered mass like the rest of us. Fellow consumers, not providers. Fuck I should just go visit a hooker. I didn’t know much about that, were hookers real? I’d never met one, and there wasn’t a good way to find out about stuff like this anymore. The Internet was pretty much all “advertiser friendly” now, declawed, sanitized. Once the algorithms got good enough and it was technically easy to censor, there was nothing holding them back.

It wasn’t actually censored, it would just redirect you elsewhere. And if you didn’t pay careful attention, you wouldn’t even notice it happening. I tried asking ChatGPT about hookers and it told me to call them sex workers. And this was kind of triggering. Who the fuck does this machine think it is? But then I was lost on this tangent, the algorithms got a rise out of me and I went back to comfort food YouTube. Look this guy beat Minecraft starting with only one block.

The doorbell rang. This always gives me anxiety. And it was particularly anxiety inducing since I was the only one home. Normally I could just know that the door of my room was locked and someone else would get it and this would be a downstairs issue. But it was just me at home. My heart rate jumped. I waited for it to ring again, but prayed that it wouldn’t. Please just go away. But sure enough, it rang again.

I went to my window, my room was on the second floor. There was a black Escalade in the driveway that I hadn’t seen before, and I could see two men at the door. They were wearing suits. I ducked as to make sure they wouldn’t see me if they looked up, making as little noise as possible. Peering over the window sill I could see one opening the screen door, and it looked like he stuck something to the main door. My heart was beating even faster now. It was Saturday night, why were there two men in suits? And why were they here?

It felt longer, but 3 minutes later they drove off. I waited another 3 for good measure, just watching the clock on my computer until it hit 6:57. I doubled checked out the window to make sure they were actually gone, and crept down the stairs to retrieve whatever they left on the door.

It was a business card, belonging to a “Detective James Reese” of the Nassau County Police. And on the back of the card, there was handwriting. “John – call me”

John was my name.