Tag: longreads

‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s Newest Southern Reach Book

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But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.

The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.

On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”

(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)

Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.

She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”

Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”

This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.

Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.

He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.

“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”

Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?

Excerpted from Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.

I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty

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I liked the idea that my foremost duty as an OnlyFans chatter should be to comfort the afflicted rather than wheedle the sexually frustrated into buying pricey “nudes and lewds” content. But I balked when the founder suggested that I start as his intern, an arrangement I suspected would lead to weeks of unpaid labor. I didn’t want to end up like so many of my peers on r/OnlyFansChatter, who called out deadbeats in angry posts littered with all caps text.

Good news finally arrived in the form of a kind email from an agency representative I’ll call Janko. After I confirmed that I’d be willing to work for $5 per hour plus a 0.5 percent sales commission, Janko had me take a brief test. The trickiest of the three short-answer questions asked me to imagine that I was chatting with a 34-year-old construction site inspector who is a lonely virgin and cat owner. If this man was droning on and on about how much he hates his job, how would I nudge our chat in a happier direction?

I thought back to something Bel, the Argentinian chatter, had told me about her approach to such situations. A longtime writer of fan fiction about the Yakuza video games as well as a connoisseur of erotic audio stories, Bel had an excellent feel for how to get a chat back on track. “You can say, ‘Oh, I had this really hot dream,’” she said, “or, ‘Oh, I just saw this porn video.’ And you guide the conversation from there.”

I took the first of Bel’s recommended approaches, keeping in mind that my customer seemed to be a sensitive soul. I told the subscriber I had dreamed of him cooking for me in his apartment as I snuggled up on the sofa with his cat. “And I was watching you in the kitchen making me dinner, except now you were wearing something different—these gray sweatpants that really showed off your body,” I wrote. “I felt so happy in that moment.”

Janko pronounced himself a fan of my cringey work, a bit of validation that I relished too much. He followed that praise, however, with a rude surprise: He didn’t have a job to give me. His agency had vetted me so that I could be placed in the recruiting pool for an entirely different agency, a firm that manages some of OnlyFans’ biggest accounts. So I couldn’t get to work right away, but would instead be admitted to a Discord server with scores of other candidates from around the world. It was there that we would receive the training and testing required to become chatters for the sorts of superstar models who have a million-plus followers on Instagram and TikTok.

“We wish you luck and the only advice I have for you is feel free to be greedy and push for sales as much as you can,” wrote Janko. “We like the approach you have and have high hopes for you.”

ANIMATION: EMILY LOPEZ; GETTY IMAGES

There were supposedly three steps to securing a full-time job with the big agency. The first was to attend a series of tutorials led by one of the firm’s principals, a master chatter whom I’ll call Luka. I would then have to take yet another test—a longer, more in-depth version of the one I’d aced for Janko. If I scored high enough, I’d be assigned to shadow some accomplished chatters as they handled major accounts. Once I’d observed a few of these pros function in real time, I would finally be slotted into an eight-hour shift.

At the onset of my initial training session, held in a Discord voice channel, Luka distributed a link to a Google Doc that contained his collected wisdom on the subject of chatting. It included a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who was identified as an American president: “The potential is untapped, dealing with PEOPLE, you may never know what’s awaiting behind the next chat.”