the spider

spider, louise bourgeois

on the other hand there was a man who courted one woman by using eight different names. it happened like this. at first obviously there was only one of him to match the single one of her. but during their conversation he wanted to ask her a question that he felt was too risky to connect with his name. he wrestled over whether or not to do it, typing it out, deleting it, until he finally decided to switch to his art-retweeting account (not obviously connected with his main) & throw the question at her from there. she didn’t take it as badly as he feared, & suddenly he was in two conversations with her.

this had certain advantages. for instance if he didn’t want to double text, or otherwise seem needy, he could switch accounts and talk to her from the other side. also this insurance allowed him to be braver and bolder. obviously if he said something she didn’t like, even something she disliked enough to cut him off, he still had the other door. this was the level he was aware of. more nebulously, he could say things that made him vulnerable to her, while gating the vulnerabilities away from each other so they didn’t multiply each other.

this situation was already more than a little silly but you can imagine that somebody who would do this once would do it twice, and do it three times, and four times, and on multiple apps, and every iteration felt like a redo, with each he was able to create a persona more attuned to her than the one before. but he didn’t want to give up the old identities, with their history.

she was always slippery about actually meeting up with him. he felt sometimes that she was most likely to actually agree to meet with the one she had talked to the longest, long enough to build trust—and then sometimes that if these ones hadn’t won her yet they never would. but meeting was a bit of a leap when he never (for reasons that may be obvious) tried to video chat with her or talk to her on the phone or even send her pictures, and she, being a coquette, never directly asked for any step forward in their acquaintanceships.

a setup like this is obviously unstable. one day he revealed himself. meaning to send her a screenshot of some dumb tweet, he accidentally sent her a screenshot which made it incontrovertibly clear that he was behind all of (at least) the twitter accounts. his panic was intense.

although she was afraid, and she was angry, she was also flattered. piecing together the different fragments of persona she was able to see something far more compelling than any of the safe little men he had been before. she kept asking him questions, first self-defensively, then with genuine interest about him. she was moved to be the cause of his machinations.¹ she asked him “are you x, and are you y on z app.” they were closer than they had ever been. she even talked about potentially meeting him “for closure.”

but then the fatal moment came. she asked him if he was a certain man on instagram. but he didn’t have her insta; he didn’t even know her real name. he went & looked at this man’s profile. he was overcome with jealousy—jealousy of this man, whose conversations with her he could only imagine, and did obsessively, overflowed into jealousy of other unknown men she must speak to, because it couldn’t only be him and this one other dude (especially if she was willing to talk to him under eight different names!) and finally, monstrously into jealousy of himself. he imagined if this revelation hadn’t happened & his plans had worked, her meeting him under some persona & then continuing to message his other names—or losing interest.he felt that she had not liked any part of him enough to be loyal to that part, even against himself. it took him several minutes to block her on every account.

1. this is not a particularly healthy emotion, nor likely to lead you anywhere safe. but she felt it.