The first video was posted by a girl called @kaylalikesitloud and it was about a milkshake. Twenty-two seconds. She holds the cup up to the boardwalk lights and rotates it so the camera can admire the strata—cookie crumble, soft-serve, a wedge of funnel cake planted on top like a flag. Behind her left shoulder, out of focus, my brother Danny is leaning on the railing, looking at the ocean.
The video was filmed June 9. He died June 30. The algorithm showed it to me on July 21, between a man restoring a hand plane and a woman who wanted me to quit sugar.
I watched it forty times that first night. Not the milkshake. The eleven frames where his face almost turns toward the lens. He’s wearing the green shirt I put in a contractor bag in August with the rest of his shirts. He is doing nothing. That was the unbearable part. He is just standing there being alive, and at his back a girl is filming a milkshake, and neither of them knows anything.
I learned the grammar of the search. The boardwalk has a geotag; the geotag has a page; the page had, that summer, 3,400 videos. Ring toss. Sunburn. A hermit crab named Sergeant. A proposal, two fistfights, a hundred more milkshakes. I watched all of them. I watched them the way you’d pan a river, and six times the pan came up gold.
June 9, the milkshake. June 11, he’s a smear crossing a skateboard video by the arcade; June 14, he’s in line behind a woman reviewing a taco stand, reading the menu board with his weight rolled to the outsides of his feet, the way he stood in every line of his life, the way all his sneakers wore out at the edges first, and when she pans to the salsa bar he’s gone. June 17, he sits alone on a bench at the edge of a family’s beach day, forty feet of sand between him and the camera, and for the length of the video he doesn’t move.
June 22, he’s laughing. This is the one I can’t watch anymore. Someone’s dashcam-style walking video, the kind with no subject at all, just a man narrating his steps for reasons the internet no longer requires him to explain, and Danny passes him going the other way, phone to his ear, laughing at something the phone said. The audio is a sea shanty.
Every video, the audio is something. A shanty, a sped-up pop song, a voice explaining the milkshake. Six videos of my brother’s mouth moving and not one second of his voice. I downloaded them all and muted them and played them in a row, and it was like watching him through the window of a train.
The sixth is June 28. He’s at the far end of the frame of a girl filming the sunset, and he is also filming the sunset, holding his phone up to the same sky, and I have been through his account, his drafts, his camera roll, and there is no sunset. He never posted it. He never even kept it. Whatever he saw that made him raise the phone, he looked at it and deleted it two days before, and I want to ask him what was wrong with it. That’s the question, of all the questions. What was wrong with the sunset, Danny.
By September the algorithm understood me completely. It’s not a mystery how. I had watched twenty-two seconds of milkshake 400 times; I had lingered; the machine measures lingering. My feed became boardwalk, then Jersey shore, then strangers’ background figures everywhere, as if it had grasped not the words of my search but the shape of it—that I was looking for a man at the edges of things. It started offering me other people’s Dannys. Out-of-focus fathers. Men on benches.
Once, a woman’s video about her divorce, and behind her in the coffee shop a man with his head in his hands, and I watched it eleven times before I understood he was a stranger, and I watched it twice more after that.
Then October 4. Posted that morning by an account that reviews diners. A booth by the window, pancakes arriving, the reviewer saying okay so first impressions. In the corner booth behind him, half out of frame: the green shirt. And in the aisle, one sneaker, tipped onto its outside edge. The diner is in a town Danny never went to, and the video is dated ninety-six days after we buried him.
I sent the account a message. I kept it casual, the way you’d keep your voice casual asking a nurse a question you already know the answer to. Hey—random, but do you know the guy in the corner booth behind you? The reply came at 1:40 in the morning, which is when everyone is awake now.
what guy lol