Big Echo

Critical SF

MN, MN

Hannah Lamb-Vines

Jordie brushes her teeth in the off-screen bathroom in the basement of her apartment building. She stretches back her lips and jerks the bristles across her big front teeth, spits a frothy mess into the drain, and steps back. In the mirror her reflection bares its teeth so she can see a bright red line run between pearly whites. Her reflection’s lips peak up at the corners. She goes back to brushing.

Her gums have been bleeding like this lately. She enjoys the contrast. She enjoys the gore. But a pattern of gore won’t bode well for her ratings on KIDZNET, and KIDZNET is the only platform where she ever gets any ratings. Technically, she shows up on the STARS2WATCH feed and the MN,MN LOCALZ feed, but she hasn’t got a hit from those platforms in months. If her ratings get any lower she’ll have to get a job. Last time she went to the music store she saw they were hiring. Of course, a music store job would be in pretty high demand for people like her. Steady income and a way to meet other musicians. Plus, a music shop might have an interesting workplace dynamic. So if you worked at a music shop maybe you could get hits on MUZNET or LAFNET. Maybe you could even get picked up by NBC. National.

And if that doesn’t work, the Gap next to the music store is always hiring. Not that a pattern of folding shirts would be exactly great for her ratings, but it’s sixteen bucks an hour. It could be a way to meet drinking buddies. None of the KIDZNET musicians drink. Wouldn’t be good for the ratings. Wouldn’t align with their brand. They’re real serious about it. Passionate.

Gotta be, in this industry, they always say. She always shrugs. They don’t like her to talk about anything other than the music when they’re at KIDZNET events, which is the only time she sees them.

That’s not what my fans are interested in, they always say. When they say this, their voices get longer and louder and somehow more hollow. The word ‘fans’ always stretches the longest. As if to encompass the multitudes of fans.

Jordie spits again, and this time the froth is a chalky pink. Like pepto bismol but bubblier. She stops thinking about ratings for long enough to feel the scrubby scratch of bristles against the roof of her mouth, her tongue. She spits and rinses out the brush.

In her own bathroom, with the REPLAY switch flicked back to off, she braids her hair, black lock under ivory lock over black lock, until the back of her head looks like some fucked up zebra’s ass. It’s her schtick. She hates it. But when she did it for Halloween she got three thousand new global ratings that stay consistent as long as she does the zebra thing. Three thousand ratings pretty much pays for her phone bill and her weekly spot on the KIDZNET stage. So she does the zebra thing.

In the mirror, her reflection beams.

“Heya, kids!” it says. “What’d you have for breakfast today?”

The reflection raises its eyebrows and nods its head.

“Wow! That sounds zeeeeee-licious!”

Jordie pictures a rolling eye emoji. Her reflection rubs its tummy and reaches out of the mirror’s frame. The hand comes back gripping a ukulele. She shakes a smelly t-shirt back into the laundry. In her head, she can hear the astonished laughter of a couple thousand local kids, the most ratings she ever gets at breakfast. A ukulele hidden in the laundry bin? What next?

“Alrighty kids,” the reflection strums on the ukulele. “Who’s ready for the Full Tummy song?”

The truth is, Jordie thinks, she doesn’t know if the kids really do laugh at her jokes. She doesn’t know if they pay attention at all. Just that their parents or their Play Guards turn it on and they all sit around with their bodies blanked out by the infrared lights sewn into their shirts and embedded in their pacifiers. Not that there’s cameras around them while they’re watching TV, not in a Privacy Protected Place like a child’s room or a preschool. Screen-time isn’t on brand for anyone in MN, MN.

“I’m just saying, Jordie,” her mother just says. It’s midnight. “It’s midnight. Why do I have to wait until midnight to talk to my daughter?”

“Some mothers have to wait a lot longer than midnight to talk to their daughters,” Jordie says. Her phone is on the teal table-top of her vanity, the speaker turned up. She rummages through drawers.

“What is that supposed to mean?” her mother asks, then, “What are you looking for?”

Jordie stops looking. Stands up. Scowls into the vanity mirror.

“Mother. Please. Turn off your television,” her reflection says, its mouth a thin line. Jordie turns away from the vanity and starts looking in her nightstand. “I can’t believe you pay for this. Couldn’t you just pay my phone bill instead?”

“Not if I don’t get to talk to you until midnight once a month. Are you looking for your pot? I think you left it in the spare room.”

“Christ, mom!” Jordie sweeps up her phone and walks out of the room. “Stop stalking me. Where in the spare room?”

Jordie won’t tell her mother that she feels guilty for only calling after midnight. It’s just that she doesn’t think these calls are great content. Who would tune in? So she calls her mom after midnight, the same time that she smokes weed and listens to copyrighted music. She comes alive after midnight, when no one’s really watching. Especially not watching her feed, in her apartment. She knows she should go out more, meet people, appear on other people’s feeds for the exposure. But she has to spend her days faking cheer for the kids. She doesn’t think she can do that if she spends her nights meeting new people.

Jordie, like many of the residents of MN, MN, barely recognizes that she is depressed.

“You know, hun,” her mom says after the silent minutes while Jordie packed and lit a bowl in the empty spare room, “I really miss hearing your music.”

“What, you don’t watch my feed during the day?” Jordie coughs.

“Oh, no, I watch,” her mother responds quickly, a sort of back pedal. “It’s just that I don’t know if what you’re doing is really... your music.”

Jordie snorts. “You mean I’m not on brand enough?” she says. There’s sarcasm in her voice, but also a spasm of shock. She can’t interpret her own feelings at this moment. Is she insulted or does she feel cheered on? The confusion is compounded by the alert on her phone announcing that someone else has tuned in. Ten people are currently watching. She hopes none of them have kids, but she doesn’t hope hard enough to stop smoking. Her mom doesn’t say anything. She wishes her mom would say something.

“I’m going to bed,” she lies over the phone. Her cheeks get red and she knows her mom sees it. She knows that her mom will see her not go to bed. She can’t afford to hit the REPLAY switch for more than ten minutes a day, so her feed will be live.

“Alright, gal,” her mom says. The sadness she tries to keep out of her voice is overwhelming. Jordie holds her breath to keep from crying until the call ends and she can run down to the off-screen bathroom, fuck the REPLAY switch, who cares about ten people watching? “I’ll see you in the morning.”

What makes her decide tonight, in the off-screen bathroom, of all nights, to say fuck it to the KIDZNET stage session she paid for? She’s supposed to be there at 8:30am to play live for a group of kids who won’t remember her thirty minutes after they see her. She tells herself the stage session is to grow her ratings, but really it just keeps her ratings where they are. So even though she should be waking up in four hours to get ready for her performance, she’s not going to bed. She’s watching her reflection put on makeup in her own bathroom. Not the kind of makeup her audience likes, happy, colorful, rave shit. Not the kind of makeup her grandmother likes, dewey nudes like she just woke up in a garden without a hangover. The kind of makeup she likes, dark and moody and mysterious. Her reflection pulls her hair out of the dorky braids and into a marbleized bun. She thinks about how it will look on camera. She thinks about what her mother sees.

Jordie has decided to go to a Karaoke bar.

She takes the RHONY line downtown--to the new downtown, and remembers when her apartment and the surrounding bars and restaurants and shopping centers were all that MN, MN was. Her reflection stares at her like a ghost from the dirty subway windows and she thinks about the last time she looked like this. She had been at Augmented with Audra and she had blacked out, but the night was recorded for posterity on her feed. She scrolls back a year and a half. Has it really been that long? Has it really been that short? She presses PLAY but keeps the audio off. Augmented is always a loud scene, good DJs and lots of yelling. She reads the subtitles instead.

AT SOME POINT YOU WANNA STOP PERFORMING AND JUST SORT OF LIVE YOUR LIFE, Audra shouts at the bar. They both have drinks in their hands, glasses at least. The cups are mostly ice. Jordie spins the ice with her straw and doesn’t look at Audra. This was back when she was paying a real editor, instead of using the free AI kit, and it was good. Even without the audio, she can feel the tension and the beat. But even with a good editor, the number of live ratings in the corner only hovers around 500.

I DUNNO, MAYBE THAT’S GROWING UP? Audra shrugs.

WHY NOT GET AN INFRARED PERMIT? Jordie looks up and into Audra’s eyes. Her own eyes are pleading. They’re the last two left in MN, MN. They were the first two of their friends to move out there, and now everyone else has either made it or moved on and Jordie’s about to be alone so she’s grasping at straws for ways Audra can stick around. But she knows why a permit will never work. Permits cost money and with the infrared obscuring your feed you can’t make money from ratings, so how would Audra pay for it anyway? She doesn’t have tech skills, can’t live edit or set up new feeds. Neither of them can.

YOU KNOW I CAN’T KEEP MY JOB AT THE DISPENSARY IF I GET INFRARED, Audra shakes her head.

ARE WE OLD NOW? Jordie can’t read her lips on the screen. She’s slurring, but her editor knew what she was saying and made sure the subtitles matched. I THOUGHT WE’D BE FAMOUS BEFORE WE’D BE OLD.

THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING! Audra drops her glass on the bar and ice spills out. THIS CITY SHOULD COME WITH AN EXPIRATION DATE. She puts her hand on Jordie’s shoulder in that moment-of-truth sort of way. SORRY BABE. WHY DON’T YOU COME WITH ME?

Jordie clicks her phone screen off and makes eye contact with her reflection. Why didn’t she go back to Brooklyn with Audra? Her ratings had been dwindling all year. She tries to think back to that night, think back to her thoughts, not just her words and actions, but her memory’s a black screen.

“So who’s your audience?” The guy sitting next to her at the bar is covered in tattoos from head to toe. She wonders if he’s hitting on her. On stage, a man in a cowboy hat sings along with an electronic rendition of Cotton-Eye-Joe. She leans into the tattoo guy’s ear and says, louder than necessary, “MY MOM,” before going back to her phone, where she scrolls through the list of copyright-free tracks she can sing along with. The tracks are either ridiculous, absurd, or written and recorded within MN, MN by musicians who didn’t care enough to register the copyright.

The bar has another list of songs, top 40s and classics to which they’ve purchased the license. But if she sang one of those songs, her own feed would be muted, and she’s realized that she actually wants her mom to see this.

An alert fills her screen. TEXT FROM MOM. It’s like her thoughts show up on her feed. For a second she panics. Was there an update she missed? Can the cameras read minds now? Surely not. That would be a privacy scandal beyond even what MN, MN’s lawyers could handle. She remembers the sarcastic joke she just made. Relieved, she opens the text. It’s a crying laughing emoji. Another text appears below it. Love you!!!

Jordie scans the room for her reflection but she can’t find one. She hopes that whatever it’s doing is genuinely making her mother laugh, not worry. She didn’t move out here to make her mother worry. She moved out here to show her family that she was everything they’d always said she was: star material.

She goes back to scrolling the tracks. Her heart jumps a little bit without her recognizing why, so she scrolls back up. The track is called GRILLED CHZ, by The Flirt Heads. That was her. Her and Audra. The Flirt Heads. The song was a riff on all the advertising requests they’d been sent. Food brands, fitness brands, all sorts of subscription brands.

But no record labels. No TV producers. Nobody wanted them for their talent. Well, fuck those guys, they’d said to each other. We aren’t sellouts, they declared. And they recorded this song in the shitty studio next to the off-screen bathrooms in their basement, which was their basement when Audra still lived there. Clearly, they hadn’t cared enough to file the copyright paperwork.

Another text fills her screen. Do it!! her mom says. And she listens to her mom, because really, she doesn’t want to let her mom down. She selects GRILLED CHZ by the Flirt Heads and waits for her turn on stage.

She wakes up at 8:45 the next morning. She missed her set at the KIDZNET stage. You can’t miss a set, they won’t take you back. She doesn’t care. She’s a little bit hungover, but there’s a good feeling hiding behind the hangover. She lies in bed and swipes to her ratings. The usual couple thousand viewers have tuned in. She’s surprised that they stay tuned. She’s literally doing nothing. Do the kids’ caretakers really pay that little attention to what they put on the screens?

She doesn’t deep dive her analytics, doesn’t notice that there are no children watching her feed--not babies, at least. Doesn’t see the high school students who want to be musicians, teenagers with dreams of performance. Doesn’t realize her audience is other depressed residents of her city, and of other cities. Doesn’t know that the tattooed man and the bartender from the karaoke bar, and other people she met last night but can’t recall through her headache, watch her when she tosses the phone aside. She does know, as always, one person who’s watching.

“This is it,” she says out loud, making the live announcement to her mom. “I’m leaving Minnesota, Minnesota.”

She walks to her own bathroom and starts to brush her teeth without hitting the REPLAY switch. Her gums are especially bloody today. Her reflection smiles wide, white teeth outlined with bright red. She pictures a shrugging emoji. She doesn’t notice the alert on her phone because she left it on her bed. Someone new tuned in.