Free The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman Page A

tonight, he’s no longer composing a hundred-word e-mail a hundred different ways; tonight, all he does is check his in-box. He checks it constantly. It’s robotic, mechanical. Bruce knows a lot of keyboard shortcuts—he can check and close his e-mail in less than two seconds, and he does so incessantly. He gets messages every hour, but not the one he wants. He downloads Billy Squier’s Don’t Say No , listens to half of “In the Dark,” and then he checks his in-box. He attacks Alaska from Kamchatka, and then he checks his in-box. He reads a blog post about China’s environmental policy, follows a Wikipedia link to a list of prominent Chinese entertainers, puts a documentary about Yao Ming into his Netflix queue, and then he checks his in-box.
    He shows no emotion while compulsively rereading the message he wrote the night before. I sit on the floor right next to him, unseen; we both reread his letter to Sarah. Neither of us sees anything worth rethinking. Around two thirty a.m., he gives up and goes to bed. When he checks his e-mail the next morning, there’s still no reply. He drinks his morning Dr. Pepper and leaves for work. I was in that house for five days, and Sarah never responded. It was probably the only thing he thought about, despite the fact that he was technically thinking about twenty-five other problems.
    Now, what do you think this means, Vic-Vick? Why do you think I told you this story?
    I told you this story because I’m curious about what element you view as meaningful. What part of Bruce’s life do you consider to be most important? In my view, Bruce was living three lives. He had his exterior life, which was composed of day-to-day work and shallow friendships: This was his job, the people he had beers with, all the normal daily filler. This exterior life was boring and unsatisfying—I suppose I can’t prove that he didn’t like his day job, but that’s the impression I got. Now, he also had a second life, on the Internet—a life that was simultaneously unreal and fulfilling. It was a life he controlled completely, and it was the means for his escape from the boredom of being a normal person with normal responsibilities. But he also had a third life—this hyperinterior life, within his own mind, where he incessantly imagined an intimate, online relationship with Sarah. A life where his first life and his second life were intertwined. Every time he wrote and rewrote that e-mail, he was activating that relationship inside his imagination and fighting the natural, irrational urge to become fixated on a person he didn’t really know. I mean, Bruce was a sane man: He knew his connection to Sarah was not real unless she responded to his e-mail, and he knew he’d be living like a crazy person if he just sat at a desk with his armscrossed, staring at his static in-box. So Bruce used the Internet to normalize his abnormal existence. As long as Bruce was engaged with his computer, it was not unusual to check and recheck his in-box, or to write and rewrite a single e-mail. That’s what people do when they’re sitting at a computer: They multitask and they daydream and they think about everything at once. One can easily fold obsessive self-absorption into the process of online communicating. In other words, the Internet was doing two things for Bruce—it allowed him to separate from the exterior life he hated, but also allowed him to stay engaged with an interior life he wanted. It was, ultimately, the single most important aspect of who he was: It removed his present-tense unhappiness while facilitating the possibility for future joy. It made the dark part of his mind smaller, but it made the optimistic part limitless. It added what he needed to affix and subtracted what he hoped to destroy. And maybe this was bad for Bruce’s humanity, but I think it was probably good. I think it took a mostly sad man and made him mostly happy. The degree of authenticity doesn’t matter.
    Right?
    Here’s