by Kelly Harms
“Fine,” I say as I walk into Karrin’s office. “You win.”
Karrin is on the phone, the kind that plugs into the wall. Her use of the phone is so annoying. I feel for her fellow middle managers, who probably had to get an office phone just so she could call them with it. Her desktop computer, with its convenient keyboard, is just two inches away from her. She could be DMing them. She could be Zooming them. She could be in Slack. Why does she always insist on the intrusive, overpersonal telephone?
“Right, well, it looks like we’re ready to do this,” she says to the phone. I knock on the doorjamb and gesture to her to hang up the receiver.
“Ok,” she says, while giving me a little palm up, sideways wave, which I think means come in, sit down. I do these things. “Right, right. I hear you,” she says, though I am sitting here waiting and it is me she should be hearing. “I can absolutely see what you are saying,” she adds.
I roll my eyes and cross my arms, because she is supposed to be an expert on body language. She notices and gives me a little grimace I don’t care to translate. “I appreciate your time,” she says, and I hope it’s me she’s addressing. “We’ll circle back later so I can get right on the first steps,” she goes on. To the phone, I’m fairly sure. “Goodbye. Yep. Thanks.”
“You see,” I say when she finally sets the phone in its cradle. “If you don’t call them, then you don’t get stuck on the phone with them.” I have tried to explain this to her before.
“I just love a good conversation,” she says to me. “And for me, it’s easier to understand someone’s meaning and express my own meaning with my voice. It’s more personal, you know. If I could just get up and go to Howard’s office, I would, but that would require a plane ticket.”
“Why were you talking to Howard?” I ask. Howard is our COO. He is at the top of the flowchart for Safety and Standards, and he seems like a brilliant man. I am a little disappointed to learn he uses the telephone too.
“Same reason I’m talking to you,” says Karrin. “An escalation that was of note.”
“You mean a flag,” I tell her.
“Yes.”
“An escalation is what happens if you miss a flag. Did I miss a flag?”
“You did not.”
“I could have missed one. I handle a lot of flags. All day. Every day,” I say.
“And whenever I ask you how that makes you feel, you share your desire to leave my office,” she replies with a smile. “So I won’t ask you that today. Instead, I’ll ask if there was anything memorable about yesterday’s flags.”
I think back. “There was a penis that the facial recognition software thought was a person. Not exciting. There was a big multiaccount attack on a twelve-year-old that met my standards for cyberbullying. I wiped that and issued four decency warnings. There was some child pornography that got by the computer. I did all the FBI reports for that,” I say. I hate child pornography, which comes with so much extra paperwork. “There was a coded conversation about cross-state sales of bump stocks. At first I thought they were talking about cocaine, actually. It came clear in a few seconds. Drug dealers are actually smarter than gun dealers, it seems.”
“Sounds like a fairly normal day,” she says. “Anything else?”
I search my mind. “No. The regular flags. Nipples, threats, some fake news.”
Karrin pauses a moment. “I have something I need you to see,” she says, and she hands me a piece of paper.
“You can show me computer screens,” I tell her, annoyed. “You don’t have to print everything out.”
“Sometimes it helps me,” she says.
“Whatever,” I say and take the paper. It’s a flag dated yesterday. I don’t recognize it, but that’s not unusual. It’s from the thread of a popular influencer—@Mia&Mike, in fact—and as I look at it more closely, I see that it’s in a foggy area we call possible ideation. Possible ideation—the mention of a plan to commit suicide in a post—is my coding nightmare. Even with the best sentiment software we have, there is simply no way to automatically discern the difference between what shrinks describe as a “cry for help” and an empty threat.
I should know.
“It’s a possible ideation,” I say to Karrin. “Item seven, part b. ‘If a possible ideation occurs on a celebrity page, the posting user’s comment will be deleted and the user will automatically receive suicide-deterrence resources via their original sign-in email.’”
“Paige,” she says quietly. “Look again.”
I read it again. This time I notice the user ID. @thatJessica17. Unlike in our flagging software, on this printout there’s a small thumbnail photo of the user. I recognize it at once.
“Is this . . . does this account belong to Jessica Odanz?” I say, confused. My half sister is the happiest person I know. She’s currently finishing her last year at CU Boulder. She’s on the dean’s list, for goodness’ sake. This post—asking the influencer if she ever felt so bad she wished she were dead—it doesn’t even sound like her. It sounds more like me. The old me.
Karrin frowns. “I’m sorry to say it is. She attempted suicide last night. But she’s alive—” she tells me right away. I sag in relief. She’s alive, I tell myself. No need to start panicking. Above all, do not start panicking.
“How did I miss this?” I ask. My voice sounds tight and high.
“You must have logged out right in the middle of this flag. Consie got it next, and she’s overactive on possible ideations, thank goodness. She pinged your sister, got no answer, and called 911.”
My heart seems to freeze up. “Please tell me my sister wasn’t using a VPN,” I say. A virtual private network can be used to connect to proxy servers, making it impossible to find where someone’s logging on from. Meaning 911 wouldn’t be able to find my sister.
“Just a plain old IP from her dorm room.”
I experience a moment’s relief, but only a moment’s. I think of a breathing technique I read about years ago. Breathe in four, hold four, breathe out four, hold four. Karrin picks up a yellow pad upon which she’s scribbled some notes. As she reads them aloud, I get stuck on a hold and don’t remember to breathe out.
“First responders found Jessica unresponsive after serious blood loss. She was rushed to Billman Adventist Hospital and has been admitted. Again, Paige, I’m so sorry to share this upsetting news with you.”
I stare blankly at the desk between me and Karrin. The mess of papers, the yellow pad, that stupid telephone. The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lies open on the floor. I wonder, for a strange out-of-body moment, how it would categorize me. I suppose it describes me to a T: Rising heart rate. Tightened breathing. Sudden feelings of detachment.
“I hardly know her anymore,” I find myself saying, my voice growing more pinched with every word. “I only see her once a year. Over the holidays.”
“Even so, this must be a shock,” Karrin says. I try another relaxation technique, making note of the physical objects I see in the room. Lamp. Desk. Chair. Suicide note.
“What’s a shock,” I say stupidly, “is that Consie’s overactive imagination actually did some good for once.” Consie calls 911 in some municipality at least once a week. The dispatchers always tell her they prefer that she is too careful, rather than the opposite. But I’ve seen the statistics. Very few completed suicides begin with a post on social media.
Attempts, on the other hand . . .
“She didn’t really mean it,” I continue to bluster, my voice getting higher by the second. “It must have been a stunt for attention.” I don’t actually believe what I am saying, but I can’t seem to make myself stop. “I’ll start looking at ideations harder. I know I should have caught this. But you know how it is,” I tell her. “So many people use them to try to manipulate internet personalities. And then there are the careerists,” I add, referring to the people who threaten suicide every time they need attention. “And the shock artists.”
“It’s ha
rd to tell which is which,” she agrees. “To be clear, no one believes this is your fault. No one blames you. We’ve trained everyone in S and S to leave their work behind when the day is over. That means you did the right thing.”
“I read it, though,” I tell her. I am breathing in now more than I am breathing out. I need to take a benzo. Right away. I start rustling around in my boxy black handbag. “I read it, and I missed it.”
“It’s just a bad coincidence,” says Karrin. “I mean, what are the odds that you’d get that flag?”
“There are forty people in this office,” I say, fishing around in my purse more. “So around one in forty, give or take.” I find the bottle and pop it open with one hand, still concealed by the leather bag. But it’s empty. Right. I put in for a refill, but my doctor wanted me to come in first. Bureaucrat.
Karrin pauses. “We need more staff,” she says, apropos of nothing. “How are forty people supposed to handle four million users?”
I don’t have the calm necessary to answer this. If Karrin doesn’t know by now that the code handles 99 percent of all daily flags, she’ll never know. Instead, I fall back on distraction. Solve a technical problem, I tell myself. Write some mental code. I wonder if there’s a way to rank these flags based on the users generating them. Demographic risk levels, number of similar posts . . . maybe I could write something that would give ideation flags a danger score of one through ten. “For next time—” I begin.
“Regarding next time,” she says. The words come out very slowly, like the beginning of bad news.
“You’re not firing me over this,” I tell her, and what I could deny before is now obviously becoming full-blown panic. “That doesn’t make sense. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m not firing you at all,” Karrin says. “Paige, don’t be silly. You do great work! We love having you as part of the team. That’s why it’s so important to keep you in the best kind of emotional health possible. And a way to achieve good mental health is through support and connection. That means when you have a family emergency, we want to support you.”
For some reason, the words family emergency upset me more. It is because they’ve been used in this context before. “You did support me,” I try to tell her. “Or Consie did. She saved my sister’s life. Problem solved.” Problem not solved. Why didn’t I go in for more Xanax? Why didn’t I find another doctor?
“And we’re proud of that. But there’s more we can do for you. I was thinking of giving you some extra vacation,” she says. “So you can go see your family.”
The penny drops.
“No, no no no no. You can’t do this to me.”
“Give you extra time off of work?” she says curiously.
“I don’t want time off of work,” I tell her. On this I am adamant.
“Don’t you want to be with your family?” she asks.
“They’re not my family,” I say on a hard exhale. “I mean, they are, but we’re not close.” My breathing has a hiccup now. I feel like air isn’t getting into my lungs. I try to breathe in four counts, but I can’t, and I start to cough, and my coughing seems to echo in my body like I’m the inside of a cave.
Karrin replies, but I stop hearing. I squeeze my eyes shut and see the comment. The comment that made me think, Oh, just another suicide threat, and What is wrong with these people? and Why am I even seeing this? And then I see my sister’s username and her pretty little profile pic and her real-life face and hear her always-bouncing laugh, teasing me about my clothes every year since she was eleven in sparkling sneakers and I was home from grad school in all-weather sandals with socks.
My racing mind recalls how rarely I see Jessica, how I never call or visit her at school, even though I know what life can be like with our mom and know the genetic brain chemistry that we very likely share. And I am certain that Karrin is wrong. She said no one blames me for logging off midflag, for ignoring my own sister’s cry for help.
But someone blames me, after all. I blame me.
“Paige? Paige, are you ok? Are you experiencing distress?”
“I feel fine,” I say. But I don’t. My hands are sweaty. I put them to my face. I seem to be dying. That’s what’s happening. I’m back in my mom’s house, I’m shaking and crying, I’m hiding and coughing and choking down pills. I’m falling off the chair and onto the floor, and I’m thinking, The pain will be over soon, and then I’m in that awful place, between the bridge and the water, and I’m trying to gag myself, trying to make myself throw up, but it’s too late, and then I’m back in Karrin’s office, trying to stand up, to get out of here as quickly as possible. And as I stand up, I feel my legs crumple, and I think, so dissociated that it is like I’m watching myself from a great height, I think: This cannot be.
I am rock solid, I think. I am untouchable. The version of myself that could get shaken so easily is long gone. Snuffed out through a careful combination of practice and psychopharmacology. And still, no matter what I tell myself, it’s still happening. Here I go, down a path I’ve been before and I thought I’d never go down again, to a place where everything feels too much and is too loud and too scary and too dangerous.
I hear Karrin call my name again. But I can’t respond. The edges of my vision tighten in like a close-up . . . the Vaseline is smeared over the lens . . . the lights go dim, and then I feel the floor come up to me and meet me hard. The room becomes a blur of shapes. I’m not dead, but I’m not alive either. I’m breathing, and somewhere, someone is calling out for help. I try to make sense of the blur, of the noise, but my eyes close, and the room is black. And then, with the loud sound of ringing in my ears, I’m out.
MIA
Thanks for all your responses, my friends! I love hearing from you, and your comments on my newest shade of lipstick are sooooo sweet. And guess what? Our friends at EverydayGlam are so thrilled you like the MatteGlam Everyday Lip Barrier and Color in One from the last post that they’ve given me a #couponcode to share! Who wants 25% off all lip products until Saturday? Which, PS: IS MY WEDDING DAY (in case I haven’t mentioned it four hundred times). I ordered two more shades that will be perfect for the honeymoon. Any guesses to which colors? #HappyShopping xoxo Mia
My mom lives in a hippie fairyland.
Generally, we keep a safe distance from each other, my mother and I. She’s lovely, and it’s nothing personal; it’s just that everything she does is crazy and wrong. She doesn’t understand me, either, so the feeling is mutual. She doesn’t know exactly what it is I do and seems to operate under the impression that I’m mostly unemployed. If she would just look at her phone once or twice, she would get it. But she stubbornly refuses to look, and she was born in a time without internet, so she will never, ever get it.
That said, she’s very nice. My dad bailed early—he now lives in a Nova Scotia fishing village following his own strange drumbeat—and she never once complained about it. She was a loving, hardworking single mother, and she raised my brother and me to know the value of hard work and have self-esteem and so on and so forth. Growing up, she worked a third shift at the hospital so she could be there for us after school, on sick days, when I got my period during volleyball practice. And still, twenty years after she rushed clean underwear and a maxi pad to the high school gym and passed them to me hidden in a two-disc Best of Dolly Parton jewel case, whenever something terrible happens, just like anyone else, I want my mommy.
I call her. I call her landline, it should be said, because though she has the latest cell phone technology and a cell contract, both paid for by me, it’s a reasonable guess that said phone is in a drawer somewhere, with the tech watch and the Pro tablet and all the other attempts I’ve made to bring her into this century.
She’s not home, of course. The phone rings and rings. And of course, a ridiculous answering machine—an actual machine—picks up, and it’s one of her favorite radio stars whose voice starts playing, because she once, maybe fifteen years ago, won an NPR quiz show, and the prize was the
voice of Carl Kasell answering her phone. Yet another argument she makes against switching to mobile.
I do not leave a message, because I will not stoop to her level, even in this, my time of need. Instead I drive to the pretty little B and B where I’ve been staying in the Copperidge Ski area. This, the Inn Evergreen, was to be our wedding headquarters, and I have already told the friendly guy who runs it that I’ve been jilted and the 50 percent deposit is all he’s getting this weekend. He was pretty amicable, considering the financial blow. He said, “Shit happens,” with a sort of sad smile, and “How ya holding up?” Then he told me since we had prepaid one room for Tucker’s parents, one room for my mom, and a room apiece for our officiant and videographer, plus the room that was to be our honeymoon suite, I was welcome to stay put through the rest of the weekend. So I have a place to put my head down from now until Sunday night, when I’m going back to Los Angeles, which is where I live but also, regrettably, where Tucker lives, four blocks away from me.
When I get to my room, everything I need is there, and the room’s been made up. Last night’s bourbon, taro-chip, and coconut-ice-dessert weepfest has been cleared away, and there are fresh garden roses in a large vase on the nightstand. They are yellow, fuchsia, ballet slipper pink, and peach. A mountain sunset in a vase. It’s as pretty as it’s going to get, I suppose.
I guess I’d better do the dress photos.
I get out a long white garment bag from the pretty wardrobe on the far wall, think better of it, hang the bag back up, and clear out all the clothes hanging next to it that are anything but white, silvery, or gray. It’s still too plain, so I hang up the long satin pink bed sash, doubled over on a hanger to look like it might be a scarf. There. I put my wedding heels on the floor of the wardrobe, toes out. I slide everything to one half of the clothes rod and close the opposite door, because the wardrobe really is that pretty, and open the other half wide. It would be nice, I reflect, if there were a mirror on the inside door of the wardrobe, but since there isn’t, I take the square mirror that is hung above the vanity off the wall and lean it against the side of the wardrobe “casually.” I stand back and look, and it’s really close, to my surprise. Sometimes these shots can take me hours. Selfies are so much faster.