It was a Tuesday afternoon in late April. The sun that bathed Yorktown College in gold felt warm on my back, although there was enough breeze to be comfortable in sweaters and jeans. I took some deep breaths, walking between lush green lawns. I always associated university with parties and all-nighters, but in the daytime, a college campus was a quiet, beautiful place.
As I took my time walking toward the math department, the Euler Building, a few students overtook me. Some of them jostled in little groups, chatting amiably with each other. The rest were on their own, swaying to the rhythm of the music only they could hear. I tried to recall what it felt like to be twenty, increasingly conscious that I was a bit too old to blend in. Not that anyone was paying me any attention.
The tag fixed to my shirt spelled Visiting Scholar, below that was a black-and-white college logo. Clara, currently working as a postdoc at the Courant Institute of NYU, got me this chance to attend a math seminar at Yorktown College.
It felt strange to walk on a college campus after ten years. Clara continued her studies after we graduated from university, but I had dropped out of grad school to work for the NYPD as a crime analyst. I chided myself for being nostalgic while doing undercover work and reminded myself of what had brought me to this place.
***
“Jay, do you know what a keyboard warrior is?” Clara asked me on the previous Sunday morning. That kicked everything off.
I had just finished a night shift and had dropped at her place for a late breakfast. Her beanbag was a heavenly thing, and I had to use every ounce of my strength not to pass out.
The image being conjured was of a knight fully armored, wielding a keyboard instead of a sword. Fortunately, I was awake enough to say, “Ugh. No.”
“Neither did I, but Angie was having trouble with one.”
Angie was Clara’s little sister. She moved to Chicago after graduating from Boston, trading snow for wind. They weren’t particularly close, but Clara made a point to check up on her regularly.
“I looked it up,” she went on. “A keyboard warrior is someone who bullies people online, saying things he doesn’t have the guts to in person. So, there is this coward bothering my sister. It has been going on for weeks.”
Clara was leaning on the door frame, one finger slowly twirling a strand of her golden hair. It was a rather feminine gesture. Too bad she only did that when she was in a bad mood.
“You know Ange often tweets about cute animals. The bastard left comments on every single one of them. I borrowed her account for a couple of days to check up on the guy. It’s bad stuff.”
She looked at me expectantly. After a pause, I sighed and followed her to her laptop, giving the beanbag a lingering glance.
The guy called himself MonarchyKing. I could say he was a racist, but that would be like calling Manhattan an inhabited island. Ninety percent of his posts, with glaring grammar errors, ranted about the inferiority of colored folks. Black people received most of his venom, but every other non-white color was targeted at least once. Occasionally mixed with all the racist stuff were posts against women’s rights, immigrants, homosexuals, and a whole bunch of other things. His Twitter account had precisely zero followers, but that didn’t seem to discourage him from broadcasting his opinions every day and crapping over other people’s posts.
“He gotta make up his mind. Can’t be both a king and a warrior.” I yawned. “Just tell Angie never mind him.”
“I did. She did. But he isn’t leaving her alone. I want you to find him.”
“Find him?” I was so tired I must have been hearing things.
“He’s on the east coast. So far, he only posted between seven in the morning and eleven in the evening, which suggests he’s in the same time zone as us.”
“That still leaves…” I stopped short. Clara fixed me with a stare, making me feel I was the one who should be blamed.
“Just look at his remarks on Angie’s posts. They say a serial killer begins with animals, and animal abuse probably is only verbal at first. You know, this guy could be a serial killer in the making.”
I shook my head slowly, too tired to argue. “Say that I fly as far as Key West and manage to find him. What do you want me to do?” I sighed. “I can’t beat him up. I work with the police. I can’t arrest him, either, even if I come up with a charge. I’m just a civilian analyst.”
“I’m sure you will find some way. Maybe book him with a shrink.”
***
I asked a friend in the force to trace where the warrior’s posts were uploaded. Turned out he was right in the city. Which was not surprising from a law of averages point of view – New York City being the most crowded place in this time zone. I also learned the guilty phone had been used regularly in the Mathematics building of Yorktown College because being in overdeveloped Manhattan meant there were so many cell towers in the city that triangulation could be narrowed down to a single building, especially when the building almost took up an entire block. Furthermore, some of the posts had time stamps on Friday afternoons, when the only people still in the building were faculties and graduate students. The seminar on Tuesday afternoon was a good opportunity to meet them all.
Clara had met the head of the math department at a conference a few years back. Courant Institute is still considered prestigious by these math nerds. She asked him to fix her a seat in this week’s research seminar, which the guy gladly did. But it was me who was going to attend.
I arrived at the Euler Building, a four-story structure dating back at least eighty years, to an era that didn’t believe in elevators, and walked up to the head’s office on the top floor. It was still his office hours and he was surrounded by several straggling undergrads. I heard a student whine, “But I got most of it correct, can’t you give me half the points?”
His secretary referred me to the deputy head. The nameplate on the deputy head’s door read Andy Silverman. Silverman was not a silver man, I thought to myself when he opened the door, not for another twenty years. He was in his mid-forties, with rich brown hair that felt incongruous for a professor. He welcomed me and we shook hands in his book-lined office. Then I had to feign interest as he talked about his research work. Ten minutes and two glances at his Rolex later, he guided me to the seminar room.
The plan was simple. The warrior had established he almost always replied to comments on his posts immediately. Based on this, Clara would give me a notice right before her writing on one of the warrior’s posts. Then I would just look for the one busying with a phone. Yes, we were Nick and Nora material.
“Why can’t you go?” I had asked Clara, “You will fit in with those mathletes better than I do.”
“Come on.” She had smiled mischievously at me. “You know why.”
Yes, I did know why. It was meant to be a sting operation.
***
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
In thirty seconds.
If Clara’s message had arrived five minutes later, I would have fallen asleep from listening to the arcane topic. I was half a mathematician myself, but that didn’t mean I needed to be enthusiastic about something called stochastic gradient flow.
It was a small department. There were only about twenty students and a dozen professors. Two people looked at their phones in the next minute. One was a guy with flaming red hair. He smiled (or was that a smirk?) at whatever was on his phone before putting it away again. The other was a black girl. She immediately put her phone under the table and sent off a quick reply.
Did you get a response?
I texted Clara back as fast as I could. I already had a fair idea of who the warrior was, based on my deduction skills that would make Sherlock Holmes proud. As I was writing the message, I saw next to me Silverman was also typing on his phone. His fingers moved laboriously across the small keyboard. Arthritic or old age? I wondered with slight amusement. I turned my head away when the fluorescent light glinted off his wedding band into my eyes.
No sooner had I pressed send than Clara’s new message arrived.
No.
So that confirmed it. It was the redhead.
Except, two minutes later, while Silverman was putting his phone back into his pocket, I received a new message from Clara.
Now I get one.
***
Our plan went only as far as identifying the warrior, and I had trouble believing it was Silverman. I kept glancing at him furtively. Once he caught my eyes and gave me a warm smile. I knew the whole point of being a keyboard warrior was to have an alternative ego, so to speak. But could people really behave so differently when they are anonymous?
By the time the seminar finally broke up, I concluded it wouldn’t be a bad idea to observe him a little longer.
I left the Euler Building and walked to the nearby library. It was full of students, but I found a window seat that offered a view of the entrance of the math building. Pretty soon Silverman came out, hands plunged in his pockets and a messenger bag across his body.
Surveillance was not my strong suit, but it was easy to follow someone in the New York subway in the rush hour. I had pulled up my hoodie, trying to be incognito, but I didn’t need to have bothered. I stood no more than twenty feet away from Silverman during the ride, but he never looked once in my direction. We changed at Times Square and got on the eastbound seven line toward Queens. Above us, Pakistanis, Indians, and Chinese were hauling I ♥NY souvenirs made in those Asian countries to Asian tourists, but the warrior appeared unfazed.
Coming out of the subway in Jackson Heights, I was astonished to see him helping a Hispanic old lady carry her trolley down the stairs. I felt conspicuous hovering near the subway entrance, waiting for him to come back up, while he took his sweet time speaking broken Spanish with the abuela.
Then I could tell we were approaching his home from his posture. A little spring began to appear in his steps. Noise and pedestrians faded away as we entered the residential neighborhood, so I had to fall back a little. But I still saw him stopping at a house on a street corner, where a pit bull was running in the yard, barking happily. He played fetch with the dog a couple of times, before scratching its ears and resuming his walking.
Something is seriously wrong, I told myself. I wanted to call Clara and run the Twitter comment trick again, but there was no time. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out a ring of keys. It was now or never. I made up my mind, quickened my steps, and called out to him, “Professor Silverman, can we talk for a minute?”
***
“How did it go?” Clara asked me when I came to see her that evening.
“Oh, wonderful. One hour in that room reminded me why I quit grad school. Do you know what a stochastic gradient flow is?”
“Sure. I can explain it to you if you want. But what about the other thing?”
“I found our warrior all right,” I said, sinking into her couch.
“And?”
“And he said he won’t bother Angie no more.”
Clara looked at me for a second. I could see my reflection in her blue eyes. “Somehow I doubt you bullied him into changing his heart. Why don’t you tell me what happened? There’s coffee in the pot.”
I recounted our dialogue to Clara. Well, calling it a monologue would be more accurate.
***
Silverman turned at his doorstep when he heard me calling. Confusion flitted across his face before recognition replaced it. “Jay? What a surprise. What can I do for you?”
“Professor, I need to talk to you. It’s about those posts on Twitter.”
He hesitated for a second, looking at me carefully. “You mean MonarchyKing?”
I nodded once.
He sighed and unlocked his front door. “Why don’t you come in?”
I followed him meekly.
“I did it for my brother,” he said as soon as I walked into his foyer.
Those words reminded me of Clara helping her sister deal with the keyboard warrior. I thought I saw daylight. “You mean, it’s your brother who holds those opinions?”
“Oh no, no. I guess I should start from the beginning. Come in. Sit down. Let me tell you a story.”
***
The short hallway opened into a spacious living room. The furniture was simple but elegantly placed. Silverman opened a window, and the afternoon breeze floated in with the sounds of basketball and skateboard.
“Thirty years ago, I learned I was adopted.” This opening gambit took me by surprise. He started talking as soon as we sat down, looking like he wanted to get the words out before he changed his mind. “It didn’t come as a big shock. I always felt there was something amiss. But nothing really changed, we are still a family.”
I had no trouble believing that. Among the pictures on the mantelpiece, there was one of a younger Silverman with an older couple. They all looked happy. But I couldn’t see how this had to do with anything.
“The true surprise,” he went on after glancing around his room, “came eight months ago.”
“I answered a knock on the door to a black man. I remember I was alone so it must be a Saturday. Because my wife went to the gym every Saturday morning and every day after work. Come to think of it, she would be home any minute now. Anyway, it was the weirdest thing, like something out of a dream. The man standing on my doorstep looked just like me, except he was black.”
I tried hard to keep the surprise from my face, but I couldn’t help sitting straighter.
“His clothes were hanging loose, and they smelt a little. I remember thinking he was some beggar. He told me he was my brother, my biological brother. I didn’t doubt him, not when he was the mirror image of me, but he produced some documents nonetheless. It was one of those DNA things. Some companies allow you to trace your family when you submit your DNA. He knew he had a brother somewhere, three years younger than him. When he had saved enough money, he paid for a test and managed to find me.”
“I can see you have guessed now, I’m African American. But some dormant white genes had suddenly decided to turn dominant when it was my turn.”
He paused as if waiting for me to say something. I nodded and that was enough for him to continue.
“The year I was born, my father had just been diagnosed with PTSD. He went to Vietnam, you see. When his wife gave birth to a white baby, their marriage was nearly finished. He suspected she had cheated on him while he was risking his life away in the jungle. But eventually, the crisis passed. Mostly because I started to look like my brother as time went by.”
“Nowadays white children born to black parents are reported all over the world. There are even twins with different skin colors. But I digress, when I was close to one year old, the country went through a minor recession. It was nothing compared to the one a few years ago, but it hit our family rather hard.”
“The financial hardship, and the fact that a white kid stuck out in Harlem at that time, persuaded them to give me away. I was sent to Connecticut and grew up there with a loving family, but for some reason, New York always drew me.” He gave me a wry smile.
“I felt sorry when he was telling me all this. Still do. He’s the only relative I have left, and I didn’t even know he existed. Here I am, the deputy head of the math department at an esteemed technological university. I lived a wonderful life, and I’m not yet fifty. The only regret is we don’t have a child yet. Whereas he, well, let’s just say his life was a million miles away from mine.”
“He never requested any help, not money, not a job. That made me feel all the more guilty. All he wanted was to talk to me, to catch up on the lost times.”
“So he visits me on Saturday mornings. We share stories. I tell him about the work I do, the places I visited, and the relationships I had over the years. His life stories were completely in a different vein. He was against apartheid and was bullied for it. He told me in high school, a few white kids… Hell, you don’t need me to tell you how it is.”
I shrugged non-committally.
“Well, it has been eight months. You might not believe it but you are the first person I said anything about this. By the way, you’re not really some scholar, are you?”
I saw no reason to lie. So I mentioned Angie’s Twitter blog and told him why I came here.
“Yeah, well, I leave rude comments on other people’s posts. They see I keep insulting them, sooner or later they will click on my profile. Human nature tricks them into objecting to whatever I write. Subconsciously, they already take a stand against everything I post before reading any of my racist stuff. I also keep removing my followers so I won’t affirm some asshole’s beliefs.”
It sounded like a reasoning he had rehearsed many times in his mind.
“Tell your inamorata I won’t bother her sister anymore.” He sighed. “I don’t know if my little mind game has actually achieved anything. Even if it is helpful, it takes way too long. For all the efforts, I’m trying to influence merely one or two people at a time, when the world is going fast down the drain.”
A silence descended in the room, while we reflected on the injustice and cruelty we heard every day from around the world. “What’s he like?” I asked, partly to fill the heavy silence, partly to distract him.
“He looks just like me,” he repeated, with a sad smile. “He…”
Silverman didn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment we heard the front door opening. A few seconds later, a woman around forty entered the living room.
She had shoulder-length blond hair, which framed an almond face with lively brown eyes. Slim waist. The grace of a dancer when she walked. I knew from the photos on the mantelpiece that I was looking at Mrs. Silverman.
“Hey Renee, had a good time at the gym?” Silverman got up from the sofa.
“Hi, Andy.” She turned to hook her jacket on the racks behind the door. Her voice was high in pitch but cool in tone.
“Where is my kiss?”
“In front of your student?”
I stood up while Silverman told her I was more of a friend than a student.
“I gotta go. Thanks for talking to me.” I offered my hand.
“It’s a pleasure. Please keep in touch.” I could tell he meant it from the way he shook my hands.
I smiled, and nodded at Mrs. Silverman, before telling him I could find my way out.
I don’t think I will see you again. I thought as I closed the door gently behind me.
***
“Now you see what he’s doing?” I was into my second cup of coffee. “He leaves abusive comments with everyone. Democrats, Republicans, activists for whatever cause, you name it.”
“He’s trying to make everyone mad at him? The opposite of love me, love my dog?”
“Exactly. People who check out his tweets have a prejudice against whatever he wrote even before they read them, not to mention all the stupid grammar mistakes. It must be tough for Silverman though. He has to transform into an entirely different person as soon as he gets online. Provoking others, saying the opposite of what he believes. He has been doing this for a long time. I’m surprised he hasn’t gone mad. And there’s no immediate result, is there? I suppose his plan works to some degree, but he can’t see it. Probably never will.”
“Hell of an intricate plan,” Clara murmured.
I shrugged.
“Do you approve of what he’s doing?” she asked softly after a few seconds.
“It’s not the way. He’s hurting other people in his crusade, despite his best intentions. Angie, for example. But who am I to judge?” I shrugged again. “At least he’s trying something.”
“Does that mean will you take him up on the offer?” Clara moved to the window. From her apartment in Brooklyn, we could see the ever-changing skyline of Manhattan.
“About meeting him again someday? I don’t think so.” I drained my cup. “He probably doesn’t want to. You can only open yourself up like that to a total stranger.”
That was what I believed. Silverman and I would never hear from each other again. It turned out I was wrong. Partly wrong. I heard from him again. As for Silverman, he couldn’t hear anything anymore. He died a week later, smashed in the face by a meat tenderizer in his home. A few feet away from where I had been sitting.
[Image Credit : Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash]
by 
Jo Ayker
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