The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  “Will you go along?” I plead. “I’ll drive traffic to you.”

  Tucker coughs. “I don’t want traffic. I’m quitting Pictey.”

  “What? You’re a photographer! What are you going to do if not Pictey?”

  There’s a silence on the line, and then he says, in that awful why-do-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you way, “I’m going to do a show. In a gallery. A real gallery, an actual building, with walls and stuff. I’m going to be an artist.”

  I throw my hands up and almost fling my phone across the room by accident. “You are an artist, Tucker. Your photos are in front of half a million people every day!”

  “That’s not art,” he says.

  “Right, because it makes people happy, it’s beautiful to look at, and you can make a living doing it, so it can’t possibly be art,” I sneer.

  He ignores me. “I want half the endorsement income from the wedding,” he says. “It’s as much mine as yours.”

  “You realize that if you’d just kept your promise and married me, you would have gotten all that anyway, right? Not to mention the honeymoon endorsements that were scheduled for next month, which we can kiss goodbye.” Not to mention the honeymoon itself, a trip to Paris, chosen by him because it was “the most photogenic city.” I exhale deeply. Try to take in one long, slow inhale. It turns into a gulp. “Sure, fine, half the cake, flowers, and the chuppah. But don’t close your Pictey account until I have a chance to walk back the wedding. It’ll be fishy if you just disappear.”

  “I don’t want to be on there anymore, Mia,” he tells me. “It’s stifling my creative voice.”

  Was he always this tiresome? I ask myself. “It will only be a couple of weeks,” I tell him. “A month at the longest.”

  “No.”

  I think for a minute. I know this man. What will make him change his mind? “I’ll cut you in on half the dress as well.” This means I’ll break even from the wedding deposit on the inn and the other things I can’t recover but not have a penny in liquid cash left over. I’ll be back to start. But it’s worth it.

  “How much did you get for the dress?” he asks, and I know, no matter what he says about being an artist, that he is going to say yes for the money.

  I tell him. “Is that enough?” I add.

  “Yeah,” he says eagerly. “That’s enough.”

  “Well then,” I say. “Congratulations. You’re the real winner in this, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mia,” he says. “I didn’t even know this would hurt you. Isn’t this just a learning experience or a growth opportunity? Isn’t this the gift of failure?”

  These are my words, taken from my posts over the years. “The gift of failure” is one of my key mission messages in my upcoming e-class, something I developed after being lectured, by Tucker and others, that I needed something called a passive income stream.

  I want to gift him in the face right now with a nice big heavy box of failure, one with lots of pointy edges. And then push him into a rushing passive-income stream.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Thanks for the gift of failure. I really appreciate it.”

  “You weren’t so sarcastic when we first met,” he tells me. “You used to believe in everything you were selling.”

  I swallow hard, because this is true. But when we first met, I was mourning Mike, and I was clinging to earnestness and optimism to usher myself through. Now I’ve hit some kind of tipping point where my phone is buzzing thousands of times a day, people are criticizing me in think pieces just to get clicks, and my followers are bringing me problems I can’t possibly solve. I’ve needed armor to get through my days. I thought Tucker, who would spend days in a funk after one bad troll attack, could understand that.

  “I believed in you,” I say softly. “I thought you already were an artist.” His photos are beautiful. When I was in one of his best, it felt like immortality. “What did I know?”

  “You knew I was changing. You knew I wanted more. And still, you were forcing me to shrink my dreams down to your size,” he says, and maybe that’s true. Maybe I didn’t care that he was losing interest in the enterprise. After all, he seemed to enjoy spending the money that came out of it just fine.

  The thought gives me a shudder. Am I the coldhearted lifestyle zealot he thinks I am? And if so, why did he ever propose to me? Who, exactly, was using whom?

  I sink down on the back stair, seeing the fields of wildflowers that climb up the hills as nothing more than a blur of green and blue and brown and then seeing them sharpen and then finally seeing them as what they are, a beautiful picture. A beautiful sentence made of color and carbon, in the beautiful story that is supposed to be my life. “My dreams are big,” I say to him. “My dreams go beyond your wildest imagination.”

  And he replies, “If your dreams can be faked for an audience, then just exactly how grand can they be?”

  PAIGE

  The weekend has been hell, has been worse than most weekends, because I can’t pick up hours remotely or do staff trainings to fill the long drooping hours between lunch and dinner. I try to stay off Pictey but can’t; I try to leave off from searching for new information on my sister and fail; I try taking walks and reading, and I even uncrust my one bottle of nail polish and try painting my toenails. It is tedious and pointless, and I throw the polish away after four toes. This, I think, would be the optimal time to use recreational drugs, but I don’t, and I wouldn’t know how to start.

  My apartment, all five hundred square feet of it, starts to shrink in on me. The television, which I enjoy so much after dark, taunts me during the day, when I am too agitated to focus on just one screen at a time. I very much like going to the movies, but the movie I want to see is in its opening weekend, and those crowds are too much for me at the very best of times. I feel the unnatural, shame-ridden luxury of being bored, and I hate it. There must be a hundred things I need to do—when was my last oil change, I wonder?—but absolutely zero things I either must do or would like to do.

  Through a combination of boredom eating and internet abyss diving, I make it to Sunday night, but when I wake up Monday, there’s absolutely no question what I must now do—I must go get my job back. I do not want two more weeks, or even two more days, like the last two. What I will do is talk to Karrin about a new piece of code I’d like to try out to catch what I am now thinking of as the habitual threateners, users who cry suicide on a celebrity post once a week. Basically, if we can run a screen on those at the time of the flag, we’ll know we aren’t looking at that when we do our ideation review. I have some doubts about this idea’s real viability, just as I am suspicious of any programmer who says they can use AI alone to screen for clinical depression, but Karrin might love it. It might be the thing that gets me back to my desk early. It’s worth a try.

  But I underestimate not just Karrin’s discernment but also Pictey’s desire to back her up. My swipe card doesn’t work on the front door of our office. I have to piggy in with Sumeta, and she clearly knows I’m on leave because she raises her immaculate eyebrows when I slip into the building behind her. “Are you supposed to be here?” she asks, and I say, “Yes.” But I don’t get on the elevator with her, opting instead for the stairs and a way out of that particular conversation. When I come out of the stairwell, I am stuck again; there is another, more specific card-entry door at the entrance to our office suite. This was created so that only Pictey Safety and Standards personnel with nondisclosure agreements ten miles long come within a mile of the work we do here.

  My ID also is deactivated at these doors, but Karrin is apparently expecting me, because she’s standing by the door and opens it for me.

  “Good morning, Paige,” she says warmly. “Would you like to join me in my office?”

  I would not. I would like to go to my computer and do some flags. I think if I weeded out a few private parts and some skinhead propaganda this morning, I would be able to gain my equilibrium. But I can’t possibly say that to her
. “That would be great. I’ve got something on my mind.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she says.

  “Did you . . . did you know I was coming?” I can’t help but ask.

  She smiles weakly. “I put your badge on the no-fly list,” she says, referring to the code Pictey gives people who have been fired or have been judged unstable at a mental health screening. “Not because you’re a danger to anyone,” she adds quickly, “but because I wanted to know when you came by. Forewarned and all that.” Her smile is surprisingly casual. “My job, remember, is to support you. Sometimes we don’t make choices that align with our best interests. Sometimes we might even be harming ourselves, despite our best intentions.”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m not harming anyone. I’m just trying to figure out what went wrong, is all.”

  Karrin sighs. “Let’s talk in my office.” Her eyes slide side to side, as if she’s looking for someone who might have heard me suggest something went wrong in our perfect little department.

  I follow her back in there and feel strangely disoriented. Has it only been since Friday that I learned about Jessica? Since then I have tried and failed not to dig deeper into my sister’s online life. I have found baby pictures my mom uploaded years ago, seen a video of her first tap recital, made a series of informed guesses about her teen years, taken a virtual tour of the Airbnb she stayed in last year, and read all her online reviews. Including a rave for something called the Magic Hair Wand with the headline Bibbity-Bobbity-DO!

  I have not yet figured out how to call her and say hello.

  As soon as I sit down, Karrin starts in. “I just want to stress, not just from a legal perspective but also a psychological one, that Pictey didn’t do anything wrong in this situation, and neither did you. Your sister’s cry for help was not your responsibility. That she posted it on our platform is a sad bit of fate. And there are hundreds of different ways that post could have been interpreted. The flag you saw—I’ve looked at it from every angle—was inconclusive at best, and the way we work here allows for redundancy and safeguards, and yet, even if we somehow caught every moment of desperation on our little corner of the internet, even if we dispatched emergency services at every instance, it wouldn’t be enough for some people. We cannot stop someone from taking his or her own life. No one can, if the person is determined. And the larger fact must stay with you: Suicide is a cocktail of events, health conditions, and personal situations. It is not the result of any one incident. It’s one of society’s great sadnesses, but it’s certainly not fair to lay it at the feet of some coding on a mobile app.”

  I nod to all of this, because I have had this conversation with myself several times in the last three days.

  And yet I am still sure I could have made things different.

  “It’s not that I don’t accept all those things to be true,” I start. “I’m just interested in shifting the odds.”

  Karrin leans back. “That’s awesome of you,” she says. “Just super awesome. The trouble is you can’t do that right now.”

  “Why not? How would it hurt for me to sit at my desk and play around with some code?” I ask.

  “It could hurt you, Paige. You had a blackout from panic three days ago, and now you seem to be exhibiting survivor’s guilt. You need time to process all that before you leap right back into the fray.”

  “That’s not the real reason,” I say. “If you were just worried about survivor’s guilt, you wouldn’t even have told me about the suicide. There’s no possible way I would have found out. There must be a lawsuit.”

  She pauses. Starts to say something, then stops herself.

  “But my sister’s not dead,” I say. “Doesn’t that limit the damages?”

  Karrin says absolutely nothing but is watching me carefully.

  “It’s a class action,” I say.

  Karrin puts her hands on her desk, softly, slowly, like she’s sinking into a chord of a piano nocturne. “Paige,” she starts. “You’ve shared that you’re not close with your mother’s family. We don’t want to . . . add fuel to that fire.”

  I roll my eyes. “My mom won’t join a class like that. She won’t even tell a soul this happened. She’d never want it to come out in public.” When it was me, she never even used the words attempted suicide, even after the neighbors started blabbing. She called it “Paige’s little accident.” If she called it anything at all.

  Karrin shakes her head. “I cannot comment, Paige, even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to—because my mission here is straightforward: I’m here to support and protect our team. That means I want to help you process these events in a healthy way. And being here, in this office, thinking up these ideas you’re having, is unsupportive of your best health. You need to go home, lose yourself in books and movies, and, if you feel ready, spend time with your extended family. Regroup. Touch base with what your values are and make decisions about whether you want to come back here or if it’s time to move on to another department. You excel at coding, and there’s hardly any coding in this office anymore. Maybe you’ll be happier somewhere else.”

  My eyes stretch wide open. “I thought I wasn’t getting fired!”

  “Of course not. You’re getting opportunities, though. If you want them.”

  I narrow my eyes. “I don’t. I want to come back to Safety and Standards. Now.” I say this because I don’t know what else to do with myself. I’ve been doing this for years. I don’t know if I remember how to do anything else.

  “You have time to think it over.”

  I put my head on Karrin’s desk. I don’t care if she sees how annoyed I am or how disappointed. It’s only Karrin, after all.

  With my face down, dark all around, I think of one of the many studies Pictey has run to find out how to make sure people want to keep coming back to our platform again and again and again. One of the findings of this initiative was that we must, under all circumstances, preserve the equanimity of the influencers. People like @Mia&Mike are the reason millions of users open Pictey ten times a day, every time they sit down to pee or eat or wait in line at the DMV. Mia Bell must be kept happy at all times.

  A single normal user’s happiness, however, is inconsequential to the future of the platform. Like, for example, that of my sister.

  “I have to look at my phone,” I tell Karrin. I pull it out and open Pictey and look again at @Mia&Mike’s feed. To my surprise there are several new posts since yesterday. There are photos of her wedding flowers, the cake, the pretty canopy of wood wrapped in peonies from five new angles. In one, Mia, decked out in a lacy white wedding gown, is hugging a woman who is so similar to her that she must be her mother or older sister. I don’t read the captions, not right that second. Like the post on Saturday, there is something screwy about them all, and the pics are more like phone snapshots than the perfectly exposed art photos she normally shares.

  I close my eyes and search deep into my memory, trying to figure out what my subconscious is trying to tell me, but nothing clicks. When I open my eyes again, I momentarily see the lovely foothills in the background, the sun dancing on the wildflower-covered hills, and wish, not for the first time, that I were not Paige Miller, Pictey screener and abandoner of her half sister in her time of need, but instead Mia Bell, vapid but beautiful lifestyle guru and internet celebrity, gallivanting up and down the Rockies in the high June sun, surrounded by wildflowers and hothouse peonies and loving family.

  “Ok,” I say at last. “I’ll go away for a while, if I can have my job back after two weeks. Ok?”

  Karrin nods. “Two weeks. You come on back, and we’ll do some behavioral screening, and if everything checks out—and I’m sure it will by then—you can get back to your regular routine.”

  “Ok,” I say again and begin to gather myself up to leave.

  “Paige?” asks Karrin. “May I ask where you’re headed?”

  Back to my apartment, I think. Back to stalking my sister and living vicariously through a total stranger an
d maybe just getting the damn oil change whether I need it or not.

  God, even I have to admit that sounds awful.

  Instead I hold up my phone screen, showing her one of Mia’s pictures of the mountains and sun and flowers. “Here,” I say. “I’m going here.”

  She smiles. “That looks perfect. I’m sure your sister will be so glad you came.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But even if she’s not, I’ll still regroup, like you said to do. Read books and go on walks or whatever.”

  “Whatever you feel is best,” says Karrin, sliding over yet another NDA for me to sign. “Within our lawyer’s parameters.”

  MIA

  Hey #squad, I wish I had time to write more, but let me just say that yesterday was my dream come true and today is all about hanging with family, especially my mom who keeps me #grounded at all times. Who keeps you grounded? If you can’t answer that question, what can you do to build that relationship? Hint: That relationship may be with yourself. I am reposting a favorite guided #meditation I did earlier this year to walk you through some grounding visualizations in case that’s what your soul needs right this moment. Thank you for all the love and well-wishes, my friends. I can’t imagine this without you. xoxo Mia

  By Sunday lunch I’ve got all the sponsored posts ready. I post the flowers, the cake, the dress, the chuppah, the makeup, the shoes, and even some things that weren’t sponsored, like the inn, just because I like the guy who runs it. I get my mom to dress up and take some posed pictures with me. I use the tripod and get more, just me, the mountains, just Mom. Hippie though she is, she is uncommonly beautiful, like me but better, because I need mascara and highlighters and shading and airbrushing to be picture ready, and she needs only a shapeless silk dress and a barrette to hold her shoulder-length silvery hair away from her striking face. Her skin stays a pretty olive from April to November, and her lips are rosy brown without lipstick. Though she irritates me on so many, many levels, this is one thing I find endearing about her, this ease and success on film. It makes for a kind of balance between us, a way for us to relate.