translated by Magdalena Mullek

This translation first appeared in Books from Slovakia 2017.

Reprinted with permission of LIC.

By now we had found our bearings at headquarters. We were working in a bizarre freak show.

Trolls. Cheap and effective labor. I didn’t trust anyone except Johana. There were the bankrupt rockers, vindictive revanchists, cyber hackers, Internet jihadists, veterans of the Hybrid war, crazy adventure-seekers, and other suspicious types. They thought trolling was an exciting trek into the unknown, an adrenaline rush for which they didn’t have to go whitewater rafting or rock climbing; they just had to sit at their computers.

I was hoping I hadn’t turned into one of them, but I was afraid that hate had already seeped into my heart. I clenched my fists so as not to jump up and start yelling what I really thought about headquarters. Johana kept reminding me that it wasn’t the right time yet.

For now there was nothing we could do about the awful shenanigans; we had to try to forget them, otherwise we’d go insane. I had the feeling that on top of our bond of friendship we now also shared a bond of fear and shame.

One extreme whackjob, whom Johana and I called the Philosopher, went so far as to refuse a salary. He trolled on principle and didn’t expect remuneration. He claimed to have a degree in philosophy, but we couldn’t find any evidence of it. He used titles before and after his name that didn’t exist in the academic world. He made himself out to be an eternal rebel. His days started with a beer, a borovička, and a joint, and his results were consistent with this combination. What he produced was a mixture of bunk, base comments, and conspiratorial pub talk. Once in a while he picked up a book — some esoteric trash or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — and consequently, people at headquarters treated him with an absurd reverence, as if he were an intellectual. The one-eyed man in the land of the blind was basking in an aura of a sage.

His bald head was as shiny as an apple. There was a shallow cut across his cheek. His eyes projected a healthy, active vulgarity. When he was in a bad mood, he couldn’t stand being contradicted and used any excuse to fly into a rage. He would sweat and his eyes would become bloodshot. Looking pissed off was his permanent state of being. He constantly took selfies. Then he posted them online with motivational phrases of his own invention. He used Word to typeset this mind-blowing rubbish.

Supposedly he had really studied Marxism back in the day. He got kicked out of the university in his second semester because he got drunk and beat up two of his female classmates, causing them serious injury. After the fall of the Leader’s regime he joined the radical wing of the Neo-Nazis. Two years ago he had established the National Homeland Defense. He trained confused young people for guerilla warfare against enemies of the state, which meant anyone who dared to criticize him. He went around gyms and bars, and in the poorest regions he recruited the frustrated unemployed, brainwashing them with conspiracy theories. With his gang he staged a demonstration on the main square, where they publicly burned books by “agents of the West.” In protest against sanctions he destroyed American and European food products with impudence. He believed that AIDS was developed by the CIA to kill off American blacks. He repeated ad nauseam that Jews were developing invisible weapons to destroy the Arab oil supplies through radiation. Behind every historical event he saw a secret objective of the Bilderberg Group.

The thing that irritated me most was that both Valys and the Philosopher constantly referenced Nikolai A. Berdyaev, whom I had studied in depth at the university. They claimed to be his followers, which was a complete outrage, but I thought it best to keep that to myself. Whenever they uttered some colossal garbage, more often than not it was a bad paraphrase of poor Berdyaev, who must have been spinning in his grave like a top.

The Philosopher had also published a book, his collected trolling. It elevated him even more in the eyes of his followers. This travesty was on display everywhere, so I finally flipped through it at a bookstore. What caught my eye were the motivational phrases: If you’re still looking for a troll who will change your life, look in the mirror! or The best time to start trolling was yesterday.

That was all I could take. Compared to him even Coelho sounded like Dostoevsky. Since drivel was in vogue, his book became a bestseller, which further cemented the Philosopher’s own sense of greatness and importance. I found him amusing, but at the same time I was afraid of him.