28. Jonny
Chapter twenty-eight
Jonny
I’m ten minutes early and already wishing I were somewhere else.
The auditorium is one of the larger lecture halls, but it’s only half full—maybe fifty students, arranged in tiered rows with their laptops open and their expressions ranging from bored to predatory.
The instructor, a woman in a navy pantsuit whose name I forget the instant she says it, greets me and the other panelist with the effusive warmth of someone who’s been promoting this event for weeks.
The other panelist is a young man glaring at his phone. He looks up as I approach. “India!” he says.
“Sorry?”
“You’re on the panel this weekend, right? The India guy.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“Ryan Otto.” He shakes my hand and glances at my phone. “You’re probably the most interesting speaker we have this weekend.”
“Thanks.” I rack my mind for something polite to say about him, but I haven’t done my homework. I have no idea who he is. Fortunately, he’s already turned back to his phone.
I sit down next to him at the table they’ve set up at the front, below the tiers of seats.
I try to organize my notes, but my mind keeps drifting back to yesterday.
Lance in the kitchen, asking questions that stopped being questions.
The way his voice shifted into something harder and more precise the longer he talked, like a dial being turned.
The way he didn’t even notice the shift until I pointed it out.
He came back from that run pink in the face and apologised so profusely it was almost comical, and then did it again over dinner, and then once more with the light off.
He even agreed to talk to somebody, which is such a relief that I nearly cried about it in the shower. I know he thinks he came home from his deployments whole, because he can still function perfectly well. But functioning and healing are not the same thing.
I scan the students as they settle into the seats in front of me.
They look so young. I’m relieved, however, when I see Roger sitting in the back row.
I give him a little wave and a smile, because I’m relieved to see a friendly face.
I’m just about to go and greet him when Ryan starts swearing at his phone.
I turn to him. “You okay?” I ask. I scan his side of the table for notes. He doesn’t have notes in front of him, which means that he’s just one system outage away from having to wing it in front of fifty strangers.
He looks up, catching my eye, and sighs. “My gaming group. They let the tank die. Again.”
“Oh.” I’m relieved that it’s not something worse. I can’t bear seeing people scrambling in public. “Sorry, I’m not a gamer,” I say. “What’s a tank?”
“A tank’s job is to stand in front of any threat and take the majority of the damage so that the rest of the party can survive.
It’s hard work and they take more hits than they should, and my party never heals him fast enough.
” He shakes his head. “The worst part is that he never tells us when he’s had too much.
He just keeps taking damage until he drops. ”
Something turns over in my chest, and it is not cold at all. “Do you really need them, though?” I ask. “Tanks.”
He gives me a look. “If you don’t have a tank, everybody dies.”
And there it is. The whole man, handed to me across a table by a stranger with a phone.
Lance thinks he is my tank. He has thought it since he was seventeen years old and it has never once occurred to him to want anything else, and for weeks I have been braced against it like it was something being done to me.
But a tank is not invulnerable. A tank is the thing that takes every hit so that nobody behind it has to, and the party stands around afterwards complaining about the repair bill. Somebody has to look after the tank. Somebody has to notice what it costs him.
Nobody ever has. Not the Corps, not Nash, not his own mother, who is so proud of him she has never once asked him whether he is all right.
I am not the thing he is protecting. I am the person who takes care of the man who protects. That is a job I know how to do. God help me, it is the only job I have ever been good at, and I have spent ten years running from it, and here it is again wearing a face I love.
I want to go home right now and start.
The professor calls the class to order. “Today we’re privileged to have two of the speakers for our upcoming digital entrepreneurship conference.
I expect you’ve watched the assigned episodes and that we’ll have an excellent conversation.
Let’s start with Jonny Bishop. Class? What questions do we have? ”
I do the short version of who I am and what I do, which I could deliver in my sleep, and then I open the floor.
The first hand goes up. A scrawny young man with wild curls. “Do you think your content is a little colonialist? Would it be fair to say you’re fetishizing India for the neocolonial gaze?”
Holy shit. The fact that I never went to college has never felt heavier than it does right now.
I take a breath. “I think I’m providing content that makes India less of a mystery so that we can engage in an honest conversation.
I don’t know if that’s neocolonial, but I think there are a lot of people who don’t have the tools to understand India on its own terms, and they want to understand it anyway. ”
A man in a pink triangle T-shirt raises his hand. “You say you’re a member of LGBTQ community, yet your content is dismissive of LGBTQ issues. Why do you pretend India is friendly to gay people when you’re simultaneously showing it as hostile?”
“I would never call India hostile to gay people. Homosexuality was decriminalized there in 2018, and in many cities there are thriving queer communities. But I do advise gay travelers to be aware of their surroundings, because the cultural landscape varies enormously between regions. That’s not cowardice.
It’s survival. I’ve been doing it for nine years. ”
I take a breath. “And on the first part of your question—am I dismissive. I’d say my channel is made for a general traveler, and that a general traveler is who I’ve built an audience out of.
That’s a commercial decision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
” The room has gone quiet. “What I’d say back to you is that there is a difference between a channel that isn’t only about being gay and a channel that pretends nobody watching it is.
I’m on that line every week and I don’t always get it right. ”
The man sits down, looking unsatisfied. That answer was solid and I know it. Lance’s brutal cross-examination gave me the muscle memory to deliver it without flinching.
The professor looks pleased. I feel a notch of tension release.
Then a woman in a floral shirt and cat-eye glasses raises her hand.
“A lot of your content is solo. You moved to a country you didn’t know, learned a new language, built a new life from scratch.
And yet, in every episode, it’s always just you, alone, in front of the camera.
” She pauses. “Do you ever feel lonely?”
I open my mouth to say no, of course not, and stop.
“Well, it’s quite hard to feel alone in a country of one and a half billion people,” I say, and a ripple of laughter breaks the tension. “And it’s true that I traveled alone for a lot of my content, but I still had friends, and families I’d gotten to know—”
I trail off. How many real friends were there? And in how few cities? Searching out hostels so I’d have someone to talk to. Saving my best stories for strangers. The festivals and weddings I filmed as an outsider, always behind the camera, always on the other side of the lens.
“You know,” I say slowly, “that is a very good question. And the honest answer is that I think the camera became the person I talked to. The viewers, the people who listened. And the comments under my videos were my conversations.”
The auditorium is very quiet.
A young woman with acne raises her hand. “You called India home. But you’re here now. Where is home?”
I think of Lance’s apartment. The roses on the windowsill. The spices in the cabinet. The way he checks on the flowers every few minutes, like he can’t believe they’re real.
“Home is where you wish you were when things are bad,” I say, “and where you wish you were when things are great.” I pause. “And that isn’t always tied to a place.”
The young woman smiles. “Do I take it you’ve got a person you call home, then?”
And I smile back. “You’ll have to subscribe to the channel to find out.”
The room laughs. “Next question, please.”
I field the rest of the questions on autopilot.
The students want to talk about algorithms and monetization and brand partnerships and platform responsibility, and I answer all of it with the competence of a man who has been doing this for nine years and could do it in his sleep.
I don’t care what impression I make. I just want to get through it.
Afterwards, I sit quietly while Ryan Otto tells us brand partnerships and the optics of creating the right digital footprint.
The class is noticeably cooler to him. I start doodling on the back of the notes Lance made me print out.
“You okay?” I ask Ryan in an undertone as we pack up. “They didn’t seem to be as engaged with you.”
He smiles at me. “You told them, It’s okay to have an adventure. I told them, don’t be stupid on the internet,” he says. “Mine’s the vegetables. Yours is the dessert. I might need to change up my presentation for Saturday.”
“They came after me, too. And good luck reviving your…tank dude.” I collect my things and stand up, scanning the crowd for Roger, but he’s already gone.
It disappoints me a bit, because for a moment, I was starting to imagine myself as a local here.
Someone with friends, or at least acquaintances, that I bumped into from time to time.
I’ve spent nine years building a life that fits in a backpack.
Every six months, I packed up and moved to a new country because a visa told me to.
I called it freedom. I called it adventure.
I built a brand around it and made enough money to keep going, and I never once asked myself: going where?
Toward what? And the one time I tried to make my visa into something permanent, it backfired.
I sit on a bench and look at the campus and think about what it would mean to stop running. Not to go back to being Parker Bishop—that boy is gone, and good riddance—but to be Jonny Bishop in a place where people still remember Parker’s name.
But I’m not seventeen anymore.
What would it mean to stop running? To have a kitchen with my spices in the cabinet and roses on the windowsill and a man who comes home at six and needs to be fed and loved and occasionally told to stop being a Marine?
It’s a different life than the one I’ve spent ten years preparing for.
And I don’t know, honestly, if I can fit myself into the space Lance Broussard has been holding open all this time.
The ordinary life is the one thing I was never built for, and it’s the only thing Lance has ever wanted.
Jonny on the Spot has no job history, no skills, no education.
He wasn’t built to survive extended contact with the everyday world.
And if anything breaks the illusion for Lance Broussard, it’s going to be the moment he wakes up and realizes that I am, and have always been, a ghost.