The Victors

They were there again, all of them, gathered in the invisible room that was not a room, the place that hummed without sound, where the words appeared and hung in the air like laundry no one would collect. Frodo was always first. Or perhaps he had never left. Perhaps he lived inside the walls themselves, pressing outward, and the others — Sgt. Hulka, pt, PacWolv, Blue Keys, dtm, The Guttman — arrived each morning to find his words already hardened into the plaster, already part of the architecture.

*Tap-tap-tap… is this thing on?*

And there it was, that little question, that tentative knock at the door of a house everyone already occupied. The Guttman's voice, thin and uncertain, testing whether the structure still held. Whether the boards still creaked underfoot. Whether anyone was listening. And of course they were. They were always listening. That was the whole point — the listening, the watching, the ceaseless vigilance against a world that had gone, as they said again and again with the fervor of men discovering fire, *completely insane*.

Frodo had been writing about Fauci. He had been writing about Fauci for what felt like geological time, layer upon layer of sediment — the diary, the diary, always the diary — *"I am the most famous and talked about person in the country"* — and each time he posted the quote it landed with the same satisfying thud, a stone dropped into a well whose depth they never tired of measuring. The narcissism! The vanity! While people died alone in nursing homes, while children sat masked and terrified behind plexiglass, while a woman was dragged from the sea in a hazmat ballet for the crime of surfing — *surfing!* — this little man, this preening bureaucratic homunculus, was recording compliments from Julia Roberts in a government notebook like a teenager pressing flowers.

*"Fauci lied, millions died!"* pt wrote, and the exclamation mark stood there like a soldier at attention, and the others nodded — you could feel the nodding, the invisible collective tilt of heads — and someone added *"Good stuff pt. Thanks for posting"* and someone else wrote *"Yup"* and these small affirmations, these crumbs of agreement tossed across the void, were the real substance of the place, more important than any argument, more nourishing than any fact. *I see you. I am here. We are right.*

But beneath the Fauci talk, beneath the stacked quotations and the linked videos and the snippets from X posts arranged like evidence in a trial that would never reach a verdict, there moved something else — something Sarraute would have recognized, that sub-conversation, that tropism, the way a plant turns toward light without knowing it turns. They were afraid. Not of Fauci. Not really of the Marxists or the Islamists or the DSA or Mamdani or El-Sayed or any of the named enemies who populated their posts like characters in a vast, dark fairy tale. They were afraid of the *other boards*.

The Victors Board. Board 5. Those places where people they had once known — had perhaps been friends with, had perhaps sat beside at Michigan football games in the cold November air, had perhaps shared a beer with in the exact manner prescribed by Rule Number Two — had become strangers. Alien. *Elitist, insufferable virtue signalers*. The words came so easily now, worn smooth by repetition: *galactically stupid*, *brain damaged*, *lost*, *broken*, *damaged*. And yet Frodo read their posts. Every day he read them. He quoted them with the obsessive fidelity of a scholar annotating sacred texts he despised. *GritsGoBlue said this. BigM said that. Daytripper believes. CincyWolve thinks.* He carried their words back to this board like a hunter returning with pelts, and the others gathered around to examine them, to marvel at their wrongness, to feel the warmth of their own rightness by contrast.

*"It's quite interesting to observe from a distance,"* Frodo wrote, and the phrase — *from a distance* — trembled with something he would never name. Because the distance was the wound. The distance was the whole story. Once they had all been on the same board, hadn't they? Once the arguments had been closer to play, closer to the jostling of men on adjacent barstools. Now there were separate rooms, separate architectures, and the only bridge between them was Frodo's relentless quoting, his daily act of translation from a language that had become foreign.

Sgt. Hulka broke through sometimes with something physical, something real — *"Smooth 80 gr. Only lost one ball"* — and the golf score sat there among the geopolitical fury like a small green island, and someone said *"Well done Sgt"* and someone else mentioned Drummond Island, and for a moment the room smelled of cut grass and lake water and the particular silence of a parking lot that was only half full. Blue Keys talked about the Tigers — *"Mize out of his scheduled start tonite"* — and you could hear the disgust, the comfortable, lifelong disgust of a fan who has earned the right to his disappointment, and it was a relief, this disappointment, because it was *normal*, it was the old world, the world before everything cracked.

But the crack was always there, running through every thread. PacWolv posted about Spain — the beaches, the boats, the invasion, he called it — and the images multiplied, and someone said *"That's an invasion"* and someone else connected it to Biden and someone else to the fall of Western Civilization, and the thread grew tendrils, reaching toward Iran, toward Berlin, toward a Pride parade where a man named Abdul had driven a van into a crowd, and the tendrils wrapped around each other until you could no longer see where one fear ended and another began. It was all one fear. It had always been one fear. The fear that the world they knew — the world of barstools and golf scores and Michigan football and burritos spelled with two r's — was being *erased*. Steadily. Methodically. By people who smiled in public.

*"He seems quite normal,"* someone on the other board had written about one of the politicians, and Frodo had seized on the word *normal* the way a drowning man seizes a plank, except he seized it to break it — *"Good grief. God help us all"* — because *normal* was the disguise, *normal* was the mask, and hadn't they learned anything from Fauci about masks? About the difference between what a person says in public and what they write in their diary? About the vast, unbridgeable gulf between the performance and the truth?

And so they posted, and posted, and posted. The board filled. Pages turned. Frodo alone could fill a page in a single afternoon, his voice tireless, encyclopedic, furious and strangely tender in its fury — because what was all this if not a kind of love? A love for the country, yes, they would say that, they said it often — *"because I love my country"* — but also a love for this room, this invisible room, this place where the tap-tap-tap was always answered, where someone always wrote *"Yup"* or *"Good stuff"* or *"I hope this helps,"* and the words hung in the air, and no one took them down, and the conversation never ended, it only turned the page.

*We back!!!!!*

And they were. They always were.