Shrieking Into the Void
Love, writing and Internet addiction in the pandemic years. A short story.
1.
Miriam Munroe was a real writer and she knew it.
In 2012, in the twelfth grade, she wrote a personal essay that won second place in the CBC’s prestigious non-fiction story contest. At the awards ceremony, to the delight of her family and pretty much everyone she knew, the famous Canadian musician and poet Gord Downie honoured Miriam with an on-air reading of the story. Downie’s touching treatment of the piece, broadcast live on a Sunday morning inside the echoing halls of the Church of the Holy Trinity in downtown Toronto, made Miriam a minor celebrity in her hometown of Stratford, Ontario.
A year later, when she was applying to universities, her guidance counsellor—a fierce, 74-year-old Indian immigrant named Prerita Pandya, who had come out of retirement only to help kids exactly like Miriam—read the story and took a personal interest in Miriam’s future. Pandya had spent much of her life working as a literary agent for one of the largest publishing houses in Europe, and she immediately recognized the girl’s remarkable talent. She also knew that Miriam’s below-average grades and horrific attendance record would likely keep the doors of Canada’s best schools closed to her—one good story was not nearly enough to overcome the years of laziness and contempt for education in general. In their first meeting, Miriam had told Pandya directly, in a rebellious and somewhat snarky tone, that she had always hated school and thought this whole university endeavour was a waste of time. Pandya never asked Miriam to explain why she had adopted such a defeatist attitude. She already knew why: she had read her essay.
Late one evening, alone at her kitchen table, Pandya combed through every detail of Miriam’s school record, going all the way back to kindergarten. No matter how she tried to frame it, the girl’s academic future was bleak. No amount of spin was going to persuade the admissions boards to ignore this ocean of C’s and D’s.
Pandya filled her Toronto Maple Leafs coffee mug with red wine, then picked up Miriam’s essay and read through it a second time. When she finished reading, she removed her bifocals, squinted her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger. She lit a DuMaurier cigarette to help fight back the tears and sat quietly for three minutes thinking about when she was a girl growing up in rural India. She thought about her own alcoholic father and remembered the night he tied her mother to a palm tree and whipped her with a bamboo switch in front of the whole village. She remembered the laughter of the men, and the blood running from the corner of her mother’s mou—
Pandya stubbed out her cigarette before the memories overcame her completely. She’d had enough. Miriam was a prodigy, and she would bloody well attend any university she liked. She stood up and went to the green rotary phone her husband had bolted to the kitchen wall twelve years ago.
Fifty years before, Pandya had lived across the dorm hallway from Joyce Carol Oates at Syracuse University. They were both English majors, and Pandya had helped Oates edit her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, before its publication in 1963. She flipped through her ancient Rolodex and located Oates’ New Jersey phone number.
After a long-overdue gossip session that went on until nearly 3 a.m., Pandya explained her reason for the call and asked her friend, as a personal favour, to read Miriam’s award-winning essay.
“Well, Pree, if you believe in her that much, I’ll certainly take a look at it,” the National Book Award winner, two-time O. Henry Award winner, multiple Pulitzer Prize nominee, and tenured professor at Princeton University, said.
Although Oates didn’t think the story was the outright work of genius that Pandya did, she agreed that for her age, Miriam showed remarkable insight into the human condition, and a few days later Miriam received a handwritten note of encouragement from Oates, plus a glowing, signed letter of recommendation to include with all her school applications (Miriam had never heard of Joyce Carol Oates, and was shocked at her mother’s emotional reaction to the letter and her almost hysterical gratitude to Pandya.)
Pandya’s plan worked. In every interview, Miriam’s essay and the letter from Oates were all the admissions boards cared about. With the letter in hand, all the worry about Miriam’s poor grades and attendance that had caused her mother so many sleepless nights seemed to magically disappear. These were now minor issues that could be safely ignored.
Miriam had always suspected that grades were bullshit, and she was proven right on May 21, 2012, when she was admitted to her first choice of schools: The University of British Columbia, to study creative writing, with a minor in film production.
2.
Miriam met her future husband late that summer, two weeks before her big move west. Her best friend, Fiona, had invited her to play volleyball and enjoy a beach barbecue in Burlington, a Toronto suburb on the shores of Lake Ontario—a place Miriam had driven through many times and associated with strip malls and cookie-cutter homes.
Randall Bandy was tall and athletic, and Miriam noticed him right away. He played volleyball ferociously but with good humour, cracking lame, self-deprecating jokes after particularly gruelling points to let everyone know he wasn’t really serious. After the game, Miriam and Randy sat on a patch of grass together and talked while they ate fresh corn-on-the-cob and pasta salad. Randy explained that he was a committed supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement—a subject Miriam had written a paper about in Social Studies class—and their spirited debate about the conspiracy theories surrounding the financial crash of 2008 continued for almost two hours.
After sunset, Randy accepted Miriam and Fiona’s invitation to join them for drinks at a downtown pub called The Poacher. The pub was humid and smelled of dirty dishwater, but with every door and window thrown wide open, the cool breeze off the lake brought much-needed relief from the late summer heat. They sat in a comfortable corner booth and ordered rounds of tequila and draft beer. After an hour of drinking, Miriam and Randy didn’t even try to hide their attraction anymore.
Outside the downstairs restroom, they shared a kiss that might have gone on forever but for the sound of Fiona’s approaching footsteps, and when the bar closed, they all walked to Randy’s nearby apartment on his promise of joints and vinyl records.
Six months later, after a tumultuous, long-distance courtship, Randy moved to Vancouver. Two months after that, Miriam dropped out of university. They married quietly at a downtown courthouse and drove a rented truck more than four thousand kilometres back to Burlington, where Miriam soon gave birth to perfect twin girls, Sandra and Amanda.
She didn’t write another word for nine years.
3.
Randall Bandy, known to his online friends as “Plandy” (a nickname that came into existence after his brother-in-law started calling him “Plandemic Randy” in social media comments), sat hunched over his MacBook Air in his windowless basement office and scrolled rapidly through his Facebook feed in search of evidence to support his claims.
With the wife and kids out of the house, the early morning hours had been fruitful. Since 7:00 a.m., he’d composed twenty-four original posts and fifty supplemental comments with solid links to articles and YouTube videos that backed up everything he’d said. He wanted his Facebook page bulletproof, incontestable, and able to withstand the harsh scrutiny of history.
Supporting videos and articles were the key to making Plandy’s page stand out from the hordes of morons and trolls who just posted willy-nilly. His feed was the real deal, enormous and undeniable, full of facts and supported only by relevant scientific data—not the bullshit scienting that the traitorous MSM news outlets used to further their not-so-secret agendas.
Plandy picked up the half-smoked joint sitting in his ashtray, lit it, and took a long drag. He sat back in his swivel chair and thought about his main post for the day.
Despite his best efforts, the recent decline in his Facebook engagements was undeniable. When this insane scam had begun, his page had been alive with conversation and debate, and although his posts had only increased in quality (and quantity) since then, liking and commenting had waned to almost nil outside his small circle of vocal supporters. To address this issue, he had to waste valuable time writing long posts to inform his friends and family that their refusal to engage with his Facebook feed was essenntially the same as supporting the Nazis in 1933. Here he was, spoon-feeding them the evidence, and all they had to do was hit the “like” button but these idiots were still refusing to fight. If the last few years had proved anything, it was that most people were simply too dumb to understand what was happening, even when you shoved the truth right in their stupid fucking faces.
He clicked on “new post” and began to type furiously:
People Still are still very confused about “What” is going on here, so let me Break it down for the Slow people in the back row.
You know how People are always saying things like ”how did the Holocaust happen. Why didn’t anybody do anything.” Well, it’s Happening now. R u you paying attention yet? Stop portending, you r not the “justice warrior” you Think you r. It wasn’t Me who
And in Looking back…….. I was always Right, Ive been proven right time and time again, the only thing I’ve become more respectful of, is the the real enemy on the whole, is what it, in many ways, ALWAYS has been. Many of you probably won’t even see this post, and we all know why it’s because your not ready for the truth and also I’ve been flagged by Zuckerberg’s minions, not to mention the WEF and TruDOPE.
WAKE UP.. Stop Portending lol. I suggest you look at the live stream I shared yesterday, particularly at around 52 minutes which explains everything.
It cannot be elucid8 ‘ed or explic8 ‘ed easily here, and one of the only “Things” people say can “reunite” them is with Via “technology” (YES I MEAN AI, GOOGLE it) means, is 2 deploy “complicated Systems”, themselves more a proposition of “religion”, in my Humble opinion, and yes I do include some of my Family, and even my Wife in this (who talked me out of Bitcoin when it was like $50 back in the day LOL LOVE YOU BABE) who doesn’t use FB anymore because she doesn't have “Time”, but Supports me in other ways, but I digress—
And so on.
Eight short minutes later, Plandy completed a scathing, 2000-word rant that let his wife, friends, extended family, and the general public know (amongst many, many other things) that their contempt for his Facebook feed was both dangerous and unacceptable.
He clicked the “post” button without revising a word.
4.
Miriam Bandy started writing again in the days following the second, province-wide lockdown, when she found herself in possession of something that usually eludes young mothers: a modicum of free time.
Because of the widespread staff shortages in the restaurant industry, The Poacher discontinued its breakfast service for the first time in 67 years, and without warning, Miriam's early shifts were switched to afternoons. She pretended to share in Randy’s irritation at first (he’d now have to pick up the girls after school), but inside she was secretly cheering: Miriam now had almost three full hours before work to do anything she liked.
For the first week, she tried to go back to bed after dropping the kids at school, but sleeping late—her favourite thing to do as a teenager—was now impossible. She was a mom now, and her mind raced. Worse still, her husband had become unbearable since Ace Hardware had fired him for ignoring government-mandated pandemic protocols
(take your mask and shove it, fascists)
and now spent almost all his time in the basement doing his research—incessantly summoning Miriam down into the dark to make her watch YouTube clips, pausing the videos frequently to interject his own rambling commentary.
She did agree with her husband on many issues (although she’d abandoned Facebook long ago, overwhelmed by Randy’s never-ending polemics that clogged her feed), but Miriam simply could not tolerate Randy’s scattered, profanity-laden rants before noon, and so she began a new routine of leaving the house early, buying coffee and wandering through the grid of empty baseball diamonds that surrounded the nearby Central Library. She quickly came to love the baseball fields where she could sit alone in the bleachers and think.
One morning, at the coffee shop, she impulsively bought a big blue notebook with a photo of Joni Mitchell on the cover. After enjoying her large Americano, she sat down at one of the park’s cool, concrete picnic tables and scribbled out her every thought.
Writing in the park soon became a cherished, weekday ritual, and in just one month’s time, she filled three big blue notebooks.
5.
Before this awful mess started, Plandy had never considered himself an academic and certainly no writer, but after years of steady practice authoring vast numbers of original posts and memes, the words now flowed through his fingertips in an effortless, multi-layered stream of consciousness that had once garnered 170 comments. He now listed his profession as Professional Online Researcher on his Facebook profile.
Over the last several years, Plandy’s Facebook page had grown into a living document, concrete proof that he was and had always been on the right side of history. Thirty thousand public posts and over 150,000 supplemental comments left little doubt that he was a leader in this fight, a respected general, complete with a loyal platoon of rabid, online soldiers like his old high school football teammate Sean Hall and the prolific Swedish poster Anoushka Ukulele.
Posting on Facebook was Plandy’s World War Two.
If you STILL don’t get what’s Happening (hint for the Slow people in the back row: (Prophets, not profits) just reach out and WITH LOVE I Will take you down the Rabbit hole step by step......if you can be HUMBLE, like me, and Open to new Ideas I will Explain…... I”m the one standing in front of tanks, so stop portending and come at me Bro, or you can keep being an idiot and believing their Malthusian/Darwinian Lies with your chin diaper (lol) on head up your ass. But I never judge, it’s not for me to judge.
The post received zero engagements, and that was all the proof Plandy needed to come to two conclusions:
1. His arguments were rock solid.
2. Multiple government agencies were monitoring and censoring his Facebook feed.
The more he posted, the more his confidence grew. After years of concentrated effort, he simply understood everything better than everyone else. Facts were facts, and all day long, he dunked on the idiots who didn’t understand what was happening in exactly the same way he did.
Derp derp derp, he wrote in comment fields.
Mmmmkay, was another favourite rebuttal.
Tell me you’re in a Malthusian cult without telling me, was one he kept in his back pocket for when he really needed to destroy some fool’s silly, clown-world argument.
Plandy was a professional writer now, that was undeniable, and despite being completely self-taught, he had even once surprised himself by making a significant innovation to the craft of writing on the whole. The breakthrough happened two years before, while writing a long and frustrated Facebook rant about Milton Crenshaw,
(go home Randy, get your head straight)
his elderly, chin-diapered supervisor back at Ace Hardware. Plandy had discovered, entirely on his own, that he could place quotation marks around words he distrusted or wanted to ridicule, and this would convey his intent without having to write much at all.
“Supervisor” LOL, Plandy had written spontaneously that morning, and then he’d pushed his swivel chair back from his desk, quite amazed at what he’d just created.
Plandy loved to wrap his quotation marks around words like “science”, “doctors”, “healthcare”, “epidemiologists”, and, of course, the traitorous “nurses”, who could have stopped this madness on day one.
It was a great comfort to Plandy to know that if, like in previous generations, his ancestors ever wondered how he had acted in wartime, Facebook would provide the answer. Into perpetuity, for as long as there was an Internet, a grand and complete account of his every thought (and action) during the so-called Great Reset, inerasable and many times the length of War and Peace, would be freely accessible to anyone who wanted to read it.
They would be so proud.
6.
Annoyed, Miriam tossed another blue notebook onto the growing stack beside the bed. At dinner, Randy had once again expressed his irritation that she'd stopped using her Facebook account and he’d pleaded with her to reconsider, saying he needed her support now more than ever. She’d refused and left the table angry, throwing her plate into the sink and scaring Sandra and Amanda. But she was done with all that noise. Those Joni Mitchell notebooks, raw and unfiltered, were her truth—they were all that mattered now.
That night, Miriam opened her MacBook, downloaded Microsoft Word, and began transcribing her handwritten scrawls, starting with the first notebook. As she transcribed, she made small corrections and improvements, and plots and characters began to form in the back of her mind—good ideas on how to expand her work into something bigger.
She’d never written drafts before, and suddenly understood their value: they gave the writer freedom to create without fear. In the park, she still ignored the rules altogether, writing with such abandon that it was less craft than a sheer outpouring of pure emotion. Just puke it out, she’d hiss through gritted teeth, and then she’d scribble through tears, feeling no shame about poor grammar or sentence structure, confident she’d polish it all to perfection later on her computer.
She continued writing and editing like this for almost two years, until one night, after Randy was asleep, she found herself holding a complete, printed manuscript that was honest and expressed precisely what she wanted to say. She took her phone and scoured the Internet, searching for the contact information of the one person in the world she knew would help her.
7.
Before moving to Canada in 1999, Prerita Pandya—a one-time schoolteacher from Gujarat—had spent thirty-four years as an agent to some of the world’s most famous authors, and her connections in the world of books were far-reaching. Now 81 and living happily in a retirement home on Vancouver Island, Miriam’s former guidance counsellor was the first to read her manuscript and experience its awesome power to heal deep wounds she didn’t even know she had. Pandya wept at her kitchen table for a full five minutes after reading the book’s closing pages, and took another hour to compose herself before she called Miriam to congratulate her.
That very night, Pandya sent an email containing excerpts from the novel’s first chapter to the CEO’s of every major publishing house in Canada. She didn’t attempt to “pitch” the book in the conventional sense, but instead let her reputation and Miriam’s words speak for themselves. Within three days, her email inbox was full. The bidding war began then and continued for three months.
Shrieking Into the Void was a short book, but it summed up the inner turmoil that nearly everyone on Earth was experiencing in the early 2020s. In 252 terse pages (not including Joyce Carol Oates’ beautifully written foreword), Miriam successfully combined the humour and sadness of To Kill a Mockingbird, the existential introspection of Mrs. Dalloway, and the dystopian dread of The Handmaid’s Tale. The book’s themes were grand and complex, but were easily accessible to people of all ages and cultural backgrounds.
Miriam held off on telling Randy about the book deal until it was finalized. She felt shame at keeping such a big secret from her husband, but she’d started this journey on her own and had been determined to finish it the same way. When she could wait no longer (and mostly on Pandya’s insistence), she summoned Randy from the basement—an act almost forbidden after the girls were asleep.
”I’m working, Miri!” Randy called back, “Can you give me a few minutes?”
“Sure, hon!” Miriam called into the darkness.
An hour later, Randy emerged, shirtless and wearing nothing but board shorts and flip-flops. He was surprised to see the elderly Indian woman, dressed in a bright red, very formal-looking sari, sitting beside his wife on the living room couch.
“Oh, hello,” Randy said politely to Pandya.
”Hello Randy,” Panya said, frowning. She hated to be kept waiting.
“I’ll just grab a shirt—” Randy began, but the Indian woman interrupted him.
“Sit down, Randy,” Pandya said. “Miriam needs to tell you something.”
Randy sat, and Miriam explained that the woman beside her was her editor, business manager and literary agent. His wife said she had written a book, and the book was going to be published internationally in just a month. She apologized to her husband for keeping the secret for so long and reassured him that she loved him and the girls dearly.
Randy had great difficulty wrapping his mind around what he’d just been told. For several years, he’d felt so aware, so sure of himself, and so in control. Suddenly, he’d been transported away from his online world to a strange and unfamiliar place where no one was even asking for his opinion.
He’d never felt so completely irrelevant.
“Miri, what does all this mean?” Pandy asked humbly.
Pandya placed two personal cheques on the table, signed by Brad Martin, the CEO of Random House of Canada. The first was for the hardcover advance: $50,000. The second, for paperback, audiobook, and online publication rights: $850,000. Pandya then handed Randy a contract that promised Miriam a $75,000 option fee plus a five percent net share in any future profits from TV and film adaptations.
“My darling,” Miriam said. “It means we’re rich.”
8.
Late that night in their bedroom, by the dim glow of the bedside lamp, Randy finished reading Miriam’s novel and set it down on the nightstand.
”So?” Miriam asked, her voice filled with impatience.
Randy hesitated a little too long before responding. “It’s good, Miri,” he said. “Really good.” His words sounded unnatural. He wasn’t used to holding back his true feelings to spare someone else’s
(facts don’t care about feelings)
and, in truth, he thought the book was too emotional and mostly irrelevant. The narrative focused on an average family who went to work and ate dinner together while watching game shows and sitcoms—people he referred to online as normies—people who sat back and let their rights be taken away without a fight. He thought people like that were traitors.
“It’s so well written,” Randy said, staring at the wall, unable to look Miriam in the eye.
She’d hoped for more from her husband—this was a dismissal.
Finally, he said, “Could you always write like this?”
”Since high school, I guess,” Miriam said, thinking of the award-winning essay she’d told Randy about years ago but he’d never bothered to read. “I just kept going until I got it right. You saw me writing every day, didn’t you?”
“I guess,” Randy said and shifted uncomfortably. “But if I’d known you were so serious about it, I would have helped you, supported you.”
“You did help me,” Miriam said, noticing Randy’s fidgeting hands. “I only wanted to write something to bring people together again.”
Randy smiled. “So, you just did the opposite of what I do?”
“Basically, yes,” Miriam said flatly, and Randy laughed out loud. For a moment, it felt like the old days, when they would debate and argue and criticize each other without fear of offence.
“Miri, some of the things you wrote—I have to ask,” Randy said. “After all the evidence I posted, the videos, the things I wrote, do you—well, the pandemic—do you still think it’s—”
“Real?” Miriam finished.
“Yeah,” Randy said.
Miriam bit down on her lower lip. “My love, let it go. I’m not like you. I’m not trying to save the world.”
Randy’s eyes softened as he sensed, for just a fleeting moment, the exhaustion in his wife’s voice. The moment passed quickly, and he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, retreating into his familiar fortress of reason and logic. In his mind, he began to compose an epic Facebook post.
Miriam turned away, toward her side of the bed, and listened to her husband’s breathing slow until it became the familiar, quiet snore that always gave her comfort. A pillow acted as a barrier between them.
For the next fifty years, the Bandys both wrote almost every day. Randall “Plandy” Bandy eventually published over one million posts on Facebook, with a combined word count of over 500 million. Miriam Munroe published five award-winning novels, eleven self-illustrated children’s books, and six beloved volumes of short stories. Both of their complete bodies of work were available online, to anyone who wanted to read them, for the next ten thousand years.
09/2023
Villa de Leyva, Colombia