There was a really bad month where Tomaszo stayed up late after his wife went to bed every night. He would listen to podcasts and play a skateboarding video game. He often used a cell phone application called Twitter to view and recommend to others a diverse array of ironic, cynical, sarcastically violent, earnestly violent, and/or politically extreme media that leveraged characters and stylistic themes/imagery from Japanese animation, low-resolution still shots and promotional material from outdated computer games, and assorted iconography, turns of phrase, and/or images appropriated from disparate internet communities of which he was sometimes a member and sometimes an outsider. But he also used the cell phone application to communicate his earnest thoughts and feelings so that people on the internet could console him in his paranoid schizophrenia or talk him down during bad episodes of autism.

He tweeted about how he felt this strange detachment and someone sent him a Twitter dm saying he was probably having a dissociative episode and that even though it happens to people sometimes, he shouldn’t tweet about it, because of how employers and family and whoever else can see his tweets and might do something that would make his life worse, like send him to a psychiatric hospital or prevent him from getting a different job. He thanked the person, deleted the tweet, and read most of the “dissociative disorder” article on Wikipedia.

He unpaused the skateboarding game. He dissociated some more. He had a hard time playing the game but liked having a word for what was happening. He paused the game. He looked at Twitter. He saw a brand entity icon account, @milady, post a joke about video games. Tomaszo replied to the @Milady account with a funny joke death threat. The @milady account was verified on Twitter. Tomaszo looked up how to be verified on Twitter. The verification process required a photo identification and filling out bureaucratic-seeming forms; it didn’t seem to make any sense for a brand to be verified on Twitter. Tomaszo deleted his death threat because he knew it was low-value, violent speech that wasn’t protectable under the First Amendment. Tomaszo then tweeted at the @milady account to ask if it had photo identification. The @milady account quote-tweeted Tomaszo’s tweet alongside a photo of a man being stabbed in the neck. The picture seemed real and was exceptionally graphic. There was blood and the beginnings of a gaping wound. The @milady account called Tomaszo a dumb piece of shit in the quote-tweet. Tomaszo liked the threatening and violent tweet out of a vague hope that it would defuse things. He unpaused his skateboarding game and worriedly played for seventeen minutes.

He paused the game and checked Twitter and saw that the @milady account’s quote-tweet had been deleted. The @milady account had tweeted an apology about being hacked. The apology had several thousand likes. Tomaszo received a dm from the @milady account. The @milady account called him a little bitch. The @milady account sent another dm calling him a fucking narc. The @milady account sent another dm with a picture of the man being stabbed in the neck. It looked like the same man from the first photo being stabbed for a second time. Tomaszo saw both neck wounds full of shiny blood. He saw that the @milady account was typing another dm.

He closed the Twitter application and put down his phone. He looked at the TV. He picked up his phone and opened the Twitter application. He saw that the @milady account had sent another dm. He looked at the message preview and thought, “this seems really bad,” and laughed uncomfortably, waking his wife.