Page 62 of Death of the Author
Amanda didn’t flinch. She didn’t apologize. All she did was smirk. And that was when Zelu realized she’d just given Amanda what she wanted. What a coldhearted asshole this woman was.
No one gave her a cue. She stood up and walked off the set.
When she got to her dressing room, she slammed the door and locked it. Not a second after, the knocking began.
Knock, knock.“Zelu!” her agent called. He sounded out of breath.
She buried her face in her hands. “Give me a few minutes!” she shouted through her fingers.
“Okay.” He paused. “Is your phone in there?”
She looked around. It was on the counter in front of the mirror. “Yeah.”
“Can you let me in?”
“No. Not yet. I need a few minutes.”
“Okay, fine,” he responded. “Just don’t look at your phone.”
She narrowed her eyes. Why was that what he was worried about at a time like this? She hadn’t really looked at it since yesterday, wanting to avoid the dumpster fire of early reactions to the movie. But she was not in the mood to be caught unawares again. She grabbed it, swiped it awake, and immediately saw that her social media was going nuclear. And not about the movie. She felt dizzy. She tried to recall the specific words she’d used in the interview. She couldn’t. Her head was in too much of a muddle. All she knew was that she’d been attacked out there, ambushed, on national TV. On one of the biggest news shows in the country, during prime time. She scrolled through the notifications, sitting down as she read.
Bitch!
Your book is AI-generated trash.
Dumbass Africans always sell out to white people the fastest.
Even the ones with no legs.
We were so behind you!
I’m throwing my book away!
Stop lying to us. You’re actually a robot, right?
#BoycottRustedRobots
#ZeluIsTrash
#AbleistDisabledWriter
#AbleistWriter
She was hemorrhaging followers by the thousands every minute. A notification from Yebo popped up.
You seem to be receiving a large amount of negative traffic on various social media platforms. Shall I filter?
She clicked Decline.
The posts kept coming. Faster and faster. Clips from the interview manipulated to make poo come out of her mouth as she spoke. Distorted to make her look monstrous, with glowing red robot eyes. Her body replaced with a monkey’s. Images of her cut out and pasted into the middle of a literal dumpster fire. These were the same people who had been loving her for months. Who had salivated at her every word, sharing, Liking, screenshotting. The hashtag views were quadrupling by the second, spreading like a disease, flooding like water. Nothing could stop it.
More Yebo notifications offering to hide the negative activity popped up, and she declined them all. She needed to see what was happening. She wanted to know.Let it happen in front of my face instead of behind my back, she thought.
She sat in that room for a long time. There was shouting from outside the closed door. A landline phone on the green room’s wall kept ringing. Msizi was trying to call her cell. Her siblings were texting her. She reached into her purse, fished out her AirPods, and stuffed them into her ears. She shut her eyes, turned on noise cancellation, and let everything fall away.
My skin is stronger than titanium. Smooth, contained, no pores. I have no mouth, ears, nostrils, vagina, urethra, anus. My eyes are African lights. My face is a screen made of thick glass. My display is Ankara themed. I have all I need within my body. I replace whatever I want to replace. It’s all still me. I don’t breathe, because I’m a robot. I fly into outer space. Out here it is quiet. I’m still. I’m calm. I’m peaceful.
Zelu’s phone buzzed in her hand, breaking the spell. That idiotic woman had blindsided her, and social media picked up and ran with the accusations. Snakes in the grass, all of them. So entitled, all of them. They did not know or care what it was like to live in her body, in her mind. She opened her eyes. Her knuckles were white, clutching the corners of her phone. She felt like Dave Bowman in2001: A Space Odysseyas he floated over to disconnect HAL. But instead of shutting off her phone, she went onto her social media platforms, bypassing the hurricane of posts, and clicked open the text boxes. In them, she typed:
