The Boy Kings

highway in search of food, which is scarce in the desert at midnight. Soon, Thrax and I were in the grocery store again, only this time it was the Palm Springs Walmart instead of the Menlo Safeway. In 2008, even Walmart had an organic section, but I didn’t care, because all we were doing was finding enough food to feed us after twelve hours of trekking across the Coachella lawn in search of music. I didn’t argue with the hot dogs, sloppy joe mix, and white bread that Thrax dropped into the cart. My legs were wobbling with jet lag, and I was just trying to stay up and awake until we could get home.
    In the checkout line, we leaned against the shopping cart, companionably close, hipbone grazing hipbone, too tired to talk. In my sun-worn and jet-lagged mind a vivid memory surfaced of us shopping family style at Safeway, two years before. Because Air France misplaced my luggage and I had yet to receive it, I was wearing Thrax’s signature T-shirt, the one with a grenade on it and the name of the first streaming video Web site he made in Georgia, and madras camp shorts. “You look like Thrax,” Emile had exclaimed with affectionate approval when I walked into the kitchen wearing Thrax’s clothes that morning. As we walked down the checkout lane, Thrax pulled the cart behind him and I followed along with one hand on the cart, tired. “This is how my mom used to pull me along in the supermarket,” he said, and in my boy’s outfit I did feel a bit like the child to his parent. It wasn’t the first time I felt like I was reverse aging into a pubescent boy, suffused by the postadolescent testosterone that saturates the office. “I’m just trying to make it family style,”Thrax said, apropos of nothing, as if reading my mind, as the checkout clerk ushered us forward in line.
    Oddly, Thrax often said something at the exact moment I thought it, as though our brains’ synapses operated on some transparent wavelength, speaking to each other even when we weren’t. Later on, when I was working directly for Mark and charged with the task of interpreting his thoughts for the world, Mark told me that his dream for Facebook was something like this, to make us all cells in a single organism, communicating automatically in spite of ourselves, perhaps without the need for intention or speech. Perhaps this connection with Thrax was some outcome of living in this new, technical Hotel California for so long, becoming attuned to each others’ rhythms unconsciously, like female friends or coworkers who end up having the same menstrual cycle. Or perhaps it is something more archaic and personal. I no longer knew.
    “Soul mates,” Thrax said as we walked out of Walmart, speaking to himself and to me at the same time. I was so tired, still on Italian time, that it felt like I was living the line from The Crying of Lot 49 that I picked for the “About Me” section of my profile, “Later, sometimes, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.” Was any of this real? What was I doing in a Walmart, in some boy from Georgia’s grenade T-shirt, exhausted by world takeover? How could I be soul mates with a coworker that I would most often communicate with on AIM, like some disembodied voice from the Internet who only rarely appears in human form?
    Soul mates seemed like such an odd word for Thrax to use that I continued to muse as we walked toward the car to meetthe others, who had stayed behind. Connections, it had begun to seem, not a particular connection, are the point at Facebook and, through Silicon Valley’s efforts, the thing that we are all connecting to was technology, not people. No one person, in the age of the social Internet, could provide the constant, easy attention that the technology can. As employees as well as users of Facebook, the work we did wasn’t about focusing on one other person, or even on a few. Our job was to create a machine that attracted the attention of as many people as possible and allowed us to give it back in kind, and the only way it was possible to pay attention to that many people and be paid attention to is through technology. In real life, we didn’t have that many inputs and outputs. We could only talk to so many people in a day. Technology, then, was our new soul mate, telling us it understands us, telling us that we are connected, that someone loves us, that we are not alone.
    But then, I realized, Thrax might, as a human, have needed to identify a “soul