Reprinted with permission of Atlantic to Pacific magazine.
cato is Dead; Long Live cato
By Simon K. Pacy
You could be forgiven for thinking that the post was a joke. After all, cato’s online intimates, if you can call anyone on the Internet an intimate, assumed it was. And post might be the wrong word for it. The first note, really it was a note, came in the comments section of cato’s final video. Its message was simple: this is cato’s life partner—i regret to inform you that cato is dead.
The message was posted under cato’s own handle, so it did not follow the pattern of social media hoaxes in which fans would jokingly bomb a celebrity’s account with fake notes saying how sorry they were about that celebrity’s tragic death. No, this originated from cato’s actual account. But the tone of it also struck followers as too blunt and callous for an actual announcement. Later, they would say things like, who says, ‘so and so is dead’? Like, it’s usually ‘they passed away’ or something.
The first response was immediate and came from one of cato’s top YouTube followers and commenters: lol, dude. Not your best video but you don’t need to quit. You’ll bounce back. And of course, that brought out the naysayers. cato has been dead for a while, didn’t need an announcement and cato’s not dead but their mom is cuz I rode her so hard last night and haven’t looked at cato in years. Which of course brought out the defenders: then how did you know, you’re looking now and f— you, cato-mother-f—er, you take it up the —, and similar strands of today’s rhetorical finery. And this continued for days until someone pointed out, yo, cato, we all just playin here, you can post anytime again. You know we love you, bruh. Which drew its own speak for yourself, glad cato’s dead but on the whole stood mostly unchallenged.
Followers noted in short order that the same message, verbatim, appeared across platforms on all of cato’s accounts: this is cato’s life partner—i regret to inform you that cato is dead. That message, with no further explanation, appeared on Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, BeReal, and probably others that this writer isn’t aware of. All posts occurred within a couple of minutes of each other. Reaction across platforms closely mirrored the YouTube response, and indeed, most followers of cato are multiplatform—that is, they watch cato’s videos, watch cato play games on Twitch, and watch shorter videos on TikTok.
Week two of cato’s total silence across platforms brought various rumors: cato is going to drop a mind-bending project that breaks the metaverse or a friend said he saw cato in Bermuda—my friend knows cuz cato straight-up introduced himself and Your friend lying—cato is a chick; she partyin in Cozumel lol and yo, heard they found cato hanging in the suicide forest in Japan . . . literally hanging and cato ain’t even real—cato is like a conglomerate or a conspiracy or something, like North and South Dakota. Ain’t no one never seen North or South Dakota, so how you know they exist? They don’t. That’s all made up. and wtf, what is this wack-ass s—? the stuff cato does is real.
And therein lies part of the rub. Who exactly is cato? cato has never been seen on camera, scrupulously avoids gender pronouns when referring to themself, changes and modulates their voice(s) when narrating, never posts their location, greets no fans, responds to messages only through messaging, never speaks of a family or friends. At times, cato has been accused of being a bot, though bots are not known to play Fortnite with the same live dexterity cato demonstrates while streaming on Twitch. Indeed, much of cato’s Twitter writing is bot-like: short, clipped, sentences or words that appear to fit together and mostly don’t: Neon dreams entwined in silicon lace, we chase the ghost in the potato’s face. This generated replies like, lol, cato. Is it National Potato Day? and Whose side are you on? Idaho or Maine? and Can you explain silicon lace?
Then there was Alone in the bandwidth, we’re all data dust; existence fleeting, in Charmin we trust. Which got replies like, I feel like this is what happens when Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure has a baby with the South Park Japanese toilet episode.
cato gave followers this to consider as well: In the prayer’s melody, a one-armed embrace; the silent mantis ripples through time and space. That got retorts like, dude, you’re definitely just plugging nouns in a language algorithm and wtaf? how does a mantis ripple? And in this case, cato had a retort. Sort of.
What is definite is that cato has not interacted with any of their online fandom for more than two months, and influencer experts say that this no doubt is hitting someone’s bank account. cato’s following across platforms is believed to generate upwards of $100,000 per month for whoever is behind the account.
What is not definite about cato is who they are. Of course, there has been no sighting of them, and part of cato’s allure has been the mystery. cato’s talents are so diverse that many people assume they are actually several people. For example, cato has frequently appeared on Twitch to stream expert-level game play in anything ranging from Roblox to Minecraft to World of Warcraft to Fortnite to Legend of Zelda. It’s not unusual for gamers to be strong at different games—the breadth of expertise is a bit unusual and cato’s unwillingness to brand themselves or associate themselves with one or two particular games is unusual. In fact, requesting that cato return to a game tended to be associated with their not playing the game for longer periods of time. Unusual, too, was cato’s voice on Twitch streams—it varied from one broadcast to another, lending support to the theory that cato was several people, but others argued that cato was using a modulator and synthesizer.
cato was also an expert in fantasy sports . . . from soccer to football to baseball. They showed plenty of evidence of success—cato could be found on the major sportsbooks under the same moniker and would periodically post screenshots of their hauls after big weekends. You knew they weren’t on the losing side and not announcing it because periodically, they would announce a prize that could be collected if you could decode ciphers and find it, and at least three such prizes were verified and claimed.
And the ciphers . . . these were not grade school A = 1 creations. These were Zodiac-level and the three were solved by only two people combined—one person found two prizes and the other found one. Both were specialists in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
cato’s videos ran the gamut from slickly produced takes on history, a la Oversimplified, to point of view trips into obscure wooded areas of the world that gave one the feeling of watching The Blair Witch Project. Some videos were silent, some narrated, some animated, most actual. cato appeared to be a connoisseur of high-end food as well as a chef of high-end food. Have you ever watched a POV video of a chef making high-end food? Have you ever watched one in which no one talked? cato’s fans have. It’s like ASMR, one fan said in response to one of these food videos. The uninterrupted sizzle, the cracking of eggs. It’s incredibly simple. It’s pure genius. Plenty of people don’t get cato. That’s fine for cato’s fans.
Early in the debate about who cato was, Internet scribes pointed out that Cato is a Latin name meaning “all knowing.” Further, it is gender-neutral and has been used over the centuries for both men and women. Given the diversity of cato’s online presence, knowledge, and skills, plenty have said it is a deliberate brand identity designed to push certain products, though one cannot easily make out what products those would be, since cato’s tastes in fashion range from men’s to women’s to nonbinary with a cross between Timberland boots and Louis Vuitton bags as themes. Others pointed out that cato is an anagram of taco and that references to Colorado’s Casa Bonita restaurant (and the South Park episode of the same name) appear throughout cato’s body of work. Here’s an online presence that has to be earning way more than the product it is advertising, wrote one theorist on cato’s identity.
cato once posted a blurry photo of a pond rimmed by trees in autumn colors and captioned it, “Monet.” A follower asked, cato, who are your influences?
Dead Mau5, Kavinsky, Gorillaz, Joaquin Phoenix the rapper, Slim Shady, Buffett, Skeens, Kozyrev.
This generated a thousand responses ranging from bemused to bewildered. Buffett? Jimmy or Warren? Skeens? Kozyrev? Phoenix the rapper not him as an actor?
Skeens might be Linda Skeens, the Appalachia grandmother turned cookbook author. Kozyrev might be Russian expatriate and artist Dimitri Kozyrev whose multilayered scenes on The Forgotten War anticipated Russia’s disaster in Ukraine. The first four in the list are performers, no matter how good or bad, who are also personas of an original creator.
Which begs the question: who or what has actually died? When Joaquin Phoenix dropped his rap artist persona, it could be said that the persona died while Joaquin the man and actor continued. Perhaps the most famous version of this notion is the Star Wars revelation that Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, the latter persona which Obi-Wan Kenobi had pronounced “dead.” Surely, there is a person or persons behind “cato” with a different name and a non-virtual life. The question remains open of whether said actual person has died.
Of course, the question of actuality is also in play. What constitutes actuality and reality? For millions of people, cato is real, even if entirely constructed. And when cato paid out actual prizes on contests, those payouts were actual and came from a real bank account, as the winners attested. When followers left messages for cato, cato responded and did so in a method true to themself, and that self is possibly or probably different from that of the flesh-and-blood person(s) driving the persona. What’s more, the persona of cato is likely to live far longer than that of the actual person(s) behind the account. After all, the creator(s) is so scrupulously hidden that their actual death is likely to draw little more than the average obituary.
Indeed, in all of this, cato has perhaps pushed the boundaries of our understanding of existence. Shakespeare’s Jaque observed that “all the world’s a stage . . . and one man in his time plays many parts.” For Jaques, those parts constituted seven stages that roughly chart the human lifespan and end with “second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” cato was never born but suddenly flickered into existence; they were never gendered or even pinned down as being singular or multiple; in death, the light was snuffed out even while all the deeds shall live so long as there is an Internet, immortal and never changing. And if there comes a time that there is no Internet, then there is no cato nor ever was. cato is indeed a truth that can circumscribe a great whole of existence or be reduced to nonsense and oblivion. It is hard to guess whether a flesh-and-blood person died two months ago, but an existence appears to have, even though it cannot. And with millions, I shed a tear and cry, “Long live cato!”
***
Reprinted with permission of the magazine Texas, Today and Tomorrow.
The Boy with No Name
By Jaime Saavedra
It’s always the fishermen who make the discovery—a bloated or decomposed body gets caught on a log or stuck in a marsh or pushed to shore by waves, and fishermen who go to the obscure places of rivers, lakes, and oceans stumble upon it. God bless the fishermen.
This time, the body was on the beach miles down Big Shell. By the time fishermen made their way to it, only strips of flesh were left on the legs and around the ribs, while almost everything else had been stripped away by carrion birds or crabs on the beach. The three fishermen, all brothers in a local family making their annual fall fishing trip, had to trek back over loose sand in their four-wheel-drive Jeep to get within cell range to report the body.
Police eventually stated that the body was male, likely adolescent or young adult, thought to be Hispanic, about five foot nine. They believed the body had been in the ocean, then had been deposited on the beach and that the death had happened as many as two months before. No missing persons report matched the body; no one called to claim the body; the body was too decomposed to make a determination of cause of death—it had no obvious signs of trauma.
With no one to claim it, the body was quietly made part of a little known but controversial program in Texas in which the unclaimed dead are donated to medical schools or forensics programs. And therein, some enterprising students went well beyond their mandate and made a startling discovery.
The Missing Boy
In the ghost story told throughout Mexico, La Llorona is a mother named Maria who drowns her children, then is cursed at the gate of heaven to wander the earth trying to recover their bodies while both mourning them and seeking revenge on others. Her motivations vary depending on the version of the story. In a common telling, her high-class lover has refused to marry her, so she drowns their children in revenge.
The ironies and values in the story are in the eye of the beholder. With the name Maria, she reminds us of the ultimate unwed virgin mother who then must give up her Son on behalf of all people. In others’ views, she is modeled on Hernando Cortes’s enslaved woman and consort Marina who bore him at least one child.
In the case of the body, the forensic program refuses to comment on what it did and how (a state investigation is ongoing), but students positively identified the boy as Jesús Maria de Antonio Sandoval or, to his friends and family in Robstown, JM. DNA testing of blood relatives confirmed the findings, and the body was ultimately surrendered to JM’s aunt for burial even as criminal proceedings opened.
It turns out that JM had been in foster care, then had disappeared barely six months into his tenure with his maternal uncle, Juan Antonio. That was more than four years ago, and the then thirteen-year-old boy had not been seen since. Not that the state had really noticed, though, or investigated.
JM’s upbringing was complicated. By her own admission, his mother, Josefina Garza, was a mess—she had come to the United States illegally a decade before and had wrestled with demons her whole time. She was mother to three boys, all by different fathers, and she was deep into alcohol and substance abuse. JM, born in the United States and hence a legal citizen, struggled in school, and when school officials signaled Child Protective Services to investigate, Josefina made herself scarce because of her immigration status. JM was soon living with his uncle, Juan Antonio, Josefina’s brother and a green card holder.
“It was a wakeup call,” said Josefina. “They took all my babies and they would not have if I had been there for them.”
She got clean, met with social workers who assured her they were not in touch with immigration officials, and worked to get a job and get help from the community center with her legal status. She saw all of her children on supervised visits, though she says, “JM was the most shy, always nervous, never quite sure whether to hug me and uncertain what to talk about.”
Josefina believed she had turned a corner and that her parental rights were increasing, possibly on their way to being restored. She kept in regular touch with her brother who reported JM improving in school and otherwise stable. Then, one day, he was gone. The police and social services were contacted, a limited investigation took place, but for agencies, penetrating child disappearances can be frustrating, and immigration status clouds the issue. Often, children disappear across the border to live with other family members until stateside issues settle down. Sometimes, they serve as means to help other family members cross and make connections. Many times, kids simply run away, and family are reluctant to give investigators too many clues lest they give away other family members whose immigration status is in question.
“I don’t want to say it happens all the time,” said a CPS official who spoke on condition of anonymity, “but it is frequent enough as to not raise alarms either.”
Both Josefina and Juan were stunned and clueless about the disappearance. Fearing repercussions for her immigration case, Josefina nevertheless pressed officials for help, as did Juan and other members of their family and tight-knit community. Answers to some of those questions did not come until after JM’s death, and many remain open.
The Beach Condo
Javier Vasquez was sitting at dinner on a mild October evening as the local news played. The story of JM’s identification came on, and Vasquez slowly lowered his fork and stared in disbelief. “No way,” he muttered, and his wife asked, “What’s that?”
“That’s the A&M Corpus Christi grad we rented the place to three doors down.” Vasquez’s wife, Rachel, stopped loading the dishwasher and turned to the television.
“Good lord, it is,” she said.
Javier and Rachel own three beachfront condos in Flour Bluff—they rent out two of them and live in the third. They called police after seeing the news report, and the mystery of JM only deepened.
“He responded to one of our ads. He was a local kid, he said. Grew up in Alice,” said Javier. “Went to A&M Corpus Christi and was now working for an Internet company. Said it was like bitcoin but better. This was about a year and a half ago. We checked him out—credit history, job, all that. It wasn’t bad for a young guy. He paid the deposit through venmo, and that was it. I met him once to give him the key, and I think after that we saw him maybe twice. Rent always arrived on the first of the month through electronic deposit. No one ever said nothing about him.”
Did Javier or Rachel note anything odd about him? “Just his name,” said Rachel. “He’s this latino kid from Alice, looks like he has seen time in the fields there, and his name was Bill Parker Stone.”
“Yeah,” said Javier. “We even talked about it. His ID said right on it, ‘Bill.’ Not William.”
What investigators now know is that JM surfaced thirty months after his disappearance with a totally new identity, complete with ID, credit history, and bank accounts, all at the age of fifteen-and-a-half years old.
“Sure, he looked young,” said Javier. “But he didn’t seem young. He knew his way around. He had a tax return in the six figures.”
Josefina was dumbfounded at the news when police approached her. “At first, I refused to believe it,” she said. “Normally, a kid goes away like that and he is living on the streets, caught up in drugs or sex trafficking. JM winds up in a beach condo with a six-figure income? How? And where was he for two-and-a-half years?”
Where indeed? It is common for many runaways to fall in with drug and smuggling gangs—they make money at first as lookouts and mules that move drugs or immigrants crossing the border. If they survive and hold down the job well, they get offered higher-paying jobs. They may wind up being minor players in the cartels. But in JM’s case, none of the local affiliates knew anything about him—and sure, they are used to lying about their associations, but even police-friendly informants had no clues.
Boy in the Water
How and why did JM wind up dead in the ocean? Without concrete traces of his movements the last four years, it’s nearly impossible to say. People who believe he was connected to the cartels say that this is how it typically ends for young soldiers—a violent, anonymous death with almost all clues and traces wiped out.
But investigators are skeptical. “There’s no bullet in his head. His body was found in the ocean, not some place meant to signal anybody,” said an investigator speaking on condition of anonymity. “When the cartel kills you, it’s violent and the gun is untraceable. Your body is some place that other soldiers can know that you got out of line. Death is a message. Here? There is no violence to the body that we can see. And there’s no message.”
For now, investigators remain mum on what they know. “They don’t tell us nothing,” said Josefina. “But I also think they don’t know nothing either.”
Indeed, the anonymous investigator who spoke to Texas, Today and Tomorrow said that JM’s cellphone and laptop had been wiped clean and that his bank accounts were proving difficult to trace—some evidence seemed to indicate that JM was operating in cryptocurrencies, but the trails there were deliberately murky. Further, no professor at A&M Corpus Christi could confirm having taught him, and the records office had no record of him as a student, either under his legal name or the alias he had given to the Vasquezes.
For Javier, the simplest explanation is probably the truth. “I had to open the condo for police,” he said. “First time I had been in there since I rented it to him. Dude was living a spartan existence. No TV, just his laptop. A couple of camp chairs in the living room, a mattress and box spring just sitting on the floor. I think he had nobody. I think he walked out into the water and didn’t come back alive. That’s pretty much it.”
Nothing else unusual?
“Just one thing, though it doesn’t make any sense. He had this fountain sitting on his kitchen counter. Like the ones you plug into a wall and it puts you to sleep or whatever. And above it on the wall, he had this sign in pink with blue letters. Casa Bonita.”
His Smile Lit Up a Room and Other Things to Say at My Funeral 