ephmrlst

by Rudi Dornemann

Alexander wasn’t sure when he became aware of the ephemeralist. At first, he’d only heard the name, thought it was maybe an email discussion group (the ephemera list). But he noticed more and more mentions and eventually found it.

The trick was leaving all the vowels out after the first “e” as if the word were already going away. Whoever Twittered and retweeted under the name covered all kinds of transitory happenings–locations and specials of the newest food trucks, gps coordinates of pop-up restaurants, schedules of subway flash mob dance troops, Saturday night invitation-only book auctions in the empty apartments, street corner moment-museums…

For a while, it was enough to read about them, but actually tracking one down seemed intimidatingly hip for Alexander. His job involved turning weekly statistics into multi-color charts for a multinational more or less in the financial services industry and he coveted the trendier existence in the marketing and advertising departments two floors up.

Then he stumbled across a food truck that had been mentioned the day before, and he was hooked. It was as if that Chinese steamed bun filled with spicy Ethiopian stew was something he’d always craved but never imagined existed. His still devoted his days to surrounding pie charts with haloes of callout lines, but evenings and weekends he explored cuisines, places, events, micro-societies that wouldn’t exist in a week, in a day, in an hour, that might have already ended.

On the subway, after watching midnight PechaKucha projected 50-feet tall on an abandoned building, he dozed for a moment, and woke to find his iPhone displaying ephemeralist’s Twitter page. He looked again–he wasn’t viewing, he was logged in with a new tweet just started. It read “The next.”

He looked around–the ephemeralist must be here, pranking him. The girl in the hoodie and earbuds not meeting anyone’s eyes? The middle-aged hospital scrub-wearer with spiky frosted hair? The ponytail guy reading Stieg Larsson?

He had a quest, and began scanning his fellow attendees for any repeat visitors. Easy enough–she always wore the same sweatshirt.

“You’re him!” he said, plunking down in the next seat on the train.

Beside him sat Mr. frosted hair, eyes closed, snoring lightly.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m infected, same as you.”

Out the corner of his eye, he saw the man in scrubs was texting in his sleep–something about a moment-museum…