The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  She has been on Pictey since it was still in beta.

  She started her social-influencing career with yoga and yoga-lifestyle posts, often featuring her late dog, Mike, a three-legged bulldog mix often photographed in a red-and-white-dotted bow tie.

  She now distributes a lifestyle email once a week, does speaking events, and, most of all, endorses crap no one needs on her Pictey feed.

  She recently announced her marriage to a mildly talented photographer going by the username @TuckerlovesMia. (@PaigeMiller feels nauseous.)

  And she just posted a message saying she was taking some time away from her feed, for no reason whatsoever.

  I am checked into the Inn Evergreen, and it is indeed beautiful. I am shown to a room that is done up in what I will call “expensive chalet,” where I collapse on the bed before the owner of the place has even shown me how to work the gas fireplace. He takes the hint, but before leaving he mentions cookie time in an hour. I do not miss such an important detail as this. After the hour passes, I toss aside my phone, march from my pretty bedroom to the dining room, and hover uncomfortably near a little table by a tall shuttered window. There are a few other guests there, and I try to get excited about eating cookies while milling about with strangers.

  But it turns out cookie time is a seated occasion. The innkeeper shows me to a little table like I’m at a restaurant, asks me about coffee and milk, and then says cheerfully, “Chocolate, hazelnut, or both?”

  I say both, and then when he brings in a saucer piled with soft, warm cookies, I begin to understand the reason people love B and Bs so much.

  When I am polishing off the last of the hazelnut rounds, but before I start on the chocolate chip, I ask the innkeeper if he does many weddings, and he says, “Ah, you thinking about a wedding?”

  The question surprises me. Dating, love, and marriage are things other people do. Masochists, specifically. I make some awkward noises. Uhhh and ahhh and umm.

  “I only ask because we just had a cancellation,” he says, then makes a tsk sound with his mouth. “That poor woman. It was a mess—she had put down her deposit and all, but it threw me out of whack, and I had pangs of guilt keeping the money in her worst moment. I want my guests to be happy, you know. I’m thinking I might change my wedding policy.”

  All my light bulbs start going on. “But the bride, she was ok, right? You saw her?”

  “Oh yes. Totally fine. I mean, well, it was hard to tell. I think she was putting on a brave face. Obviously this wasn’t how she meant things to go. And it was only a small event, she said, just immediate family and the officiant, but she had booked all four rooms here so everyone could be together. So it was like, Sorry about your wedding, but thanks for the massive deposit.”

  I try to think of what a normal nonstalker would say to that. I think of what my roommate Michelle from college might say. With three kids, a balding husband, and a big cheerful house full of throw cushions that say Live, Laugh, Love, she is highly normal. Of course, no one in their right mind would jilt her.

  So I say, “You know, if that happened to me, I’d probably get all my girlfriends in here and just binge on Häagen-Dazs and the wedding champagne and feel sorry for myself for the entire weekend.” This is so far from the truth. If, in some alternate universe, I dated, and then if I met someone, and then if he actually wanted to marry me, and then if he jilted me at the altar, I would have a panic attack, spend a night in the hospital, get my meds adjusted, and remind myself never to date again.

  “You’d think, right?” says the innkeeper. “But not this woman. She went up there alone and locked the door and didn’t move for a day or two, not that I could tell. Except for breakfast. I brought up her breakfast—she’d made all these specialty diet requests, so I couldn’t use her food for anything else anyway. No dairy, no gluten, no grains, Lord a’mighty. Of course, maybe she’s onto something; she was the size of a toothpick,” he goes on, patting his not-insignificant tummy. “But still, life is for living. What was I saying?”

  I smile warmly. Or I try to. “The bride, you were saying she locked herself in her room.”

  “Right. And then one day she must have come out while I was gone, and then she came back with her mom, and by then she was all business. Like nothing happened. No tears, no nonsense. Packed herself up and away. Even took a selfie on her way out. I mean, good for her, but still, whoa.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Whoa.”

  “Well, all I can say is that I wish you a happier stay here at Inn Evergreen. Oh! And I smudged the rooms, so don’t worry about bad energy.”

  I make a note to myself to look up smudging when I get upstairs. “Thank you?” I say. And then, as I eat my final cookie, I whisper to myself, like the late-night-TV stalker I seem to be, “You were right, Paige. You were right.”

  So Mia did not get married. The post about Tucker not wanting to post about their wedding was utter bunk, and the truth is he jilted her. I am so excited by this information at first that I spend some considerable time forgetting that Mia is an actual person with actual feelings. But even so! I knew something was up, and It Was! I’m an internet-celebrity myth buster. I have no use for the information, and I still don’t know the woman from Adam’s off ox (biblical, of course, but also touching on the wise idea of placing an unfamiliar [off] ox farthest from you in a yoke, if you’re ever in a multiple-ox situation). Even so, I am vindicated! I have proof that internet celebrity is indeed, as we all knew, utter tripe, that no one’s life could possibly be as beautiful and happy and perfect as hers is supposed to look. Mia Bell’s entire wedding was a publicity stunt! I want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to go on Pictey and post the news and bring the whole thing crumbling down . . .

  Except I also don’t. I think of the thousands of Jessicas who love this woman, and I cannot decide which would make them feel better—knowing that her perfect life is impossible or believing that it could be attainable somehow.

  In the end, it’s not my decision to make. By the time night falls, Mia’s feed seems to be bringing itself down. All she said was that she wasn’t going to post for a while, and her comments blew up. Half the feed says some version of take your time; enjoy your new husband. The other half ranges from mild disappointment—awwww, we will miss you, Mia—to straight-up entitlement: Marriage ruins everything and I’m going to need someone new to follow.

  Most surprising are the trolls. I didn’t know @Mia&Mike had trolls, but that may be because she has earned a Pictey Gold Button, which is a special dashboard widget given to Pictey superstars who drive a tenth of a percent or more of daily traffic. Basically it gives them the ability to hide—not delete but hide from public view—any upsetting or offensive comments, even if they aren’t caught in a flag. Pictey quietly monitors the use of the Gold Button, and if someone goes too nuts with it, we reduce its efficacy, but otherwise the mind-set is, to hell with free speech: if an inappropriate comment doesn’t have to cross our desk in Safety and Standards, so much the better.

  I didn’t realize Mia had a Gold Button, because she lets all kinds of truly critical comments build up in her feed. People ask her about the environmental impact of every move she makes, complain fervently when she links to a brand page, and just generally hate everything she does with her hair. But when I read the first for-real troll comment, I realize that they’re in a different league. It says, About time you stop selling hope to the fat fucks out there with nothing going on in their lives. Maybe then they’ll get off their asses and lose some weight.

  I feel a chill. It’s the chill of the sheer meanness, the artless yet multidimensional cruelty that this one purportedly human commenter has been able to dump into the world in just a few lines. Cruelty that, while actually random, feels deeply personal. Am I not, in this stranger’s eyes, a fat fuck with nothing going on in my life?

  I flag the comment. It’s despicable and unnecessary. Then I read each of the posts under it, the indignant followers who don’t know, or do know but can
’t leave it anyway, that a troll’s only desire is for attention. The loyal followers rush to Mia’s side, saying her life is not public property, saying that there are professors and doctors and artists in the comments feed showing that her fans have lots going on in their lives, that her lifestyle promotes health and well-being, that her followers are a community of support and kindness, that fat shaming is no better than racism or homophobia, and on and on. Eloquently they rush to her defense, they spend thousands of words on carefully crafted responses, they try to drown the troll in logic.

  But trolls float like an unflushable poo. When you comment on a comment on Pictey, the original comment crawls to the top of the feed for “relevance.” By the time I’ve finished reading everything from the morning’s post and hit refresh, the troll’s post is the very first one under the original caption.

  It makes me furious. Sure, Mia is a liar and a hack. But also, look at all these nice people spinning their wheels, being insulted for no reason. With Mia gone, there’s no one to stand up for them. There’s no Gold Button.

  But of course, I realize, there is. I get out my work laptop, caution to the wind, log in to the Pictey Support general user account, pull up the flag I just made for the troll, and Gold Button the hell out of that asshole myself.

  MIA

  I start missing my phone around ten minutes after I get down the hill. That, naturally, is also when the skies open up and it starts pouring rain. I am not used to rainstorms. I don’t have a raincoat or quick-drying pants, but my mom does. I climb into her rain gear and put on a Rockies cap I find on the coatrack, even though she would sooner wear a sombrero than anything affiliated with pro sports, and some tech-wool socks. I don’t think I could make it down the wet rock-and-mud path safely in galoshes, so I leave hers there and gratefully lace back into her hiking shoes, which are utterly no nonsense and thankfully just a half size too big for me. When I glance at myself in the hall mirror, my blonde hair threaded through the cap’s back, my clothes and shoes just incrementally out of style but utterly weatherproof, I smile. I look like a real Coloradan.

  And wouldn’t that be nice? If I could live in Colorado and hike up mountains every day and run my “brand” from these views instead of from my third-floor two-bedroom with a view of another third-floor two-bedroom?

  But that’s stupid. I need to be close to the airport to do the speaking gigs, and I need to be close to all that Los Angeles offers to do everything else. Besides, I’d get tired of this little tangle of towns and ski resorts eventually. Unlike Dewey, I don’t think I could run up the same mountain every week without going insane.

  But today I get to summit it twice! Whee! I decide to try to run up it, since I’m drowning in this rain anyway. I get a third of the way up when the lightning starts, and I realize I am not safe. Further, I am not in good enough shape to get to the top running, so I’m going to have to walk, increasing the amount of time in which I might get caught in a mudslide or hit by lightning.

  But. I need my phone. What else can I do?

  I am embarrassed to admit that even after the thunder and lightning are undeniable, I still keep climbing for ten minutes before I come to my senses. I’m on a wooded slope, and I’m miles from shelter. I need to turn around. The phone is waterproof, and the case is one of those rugged monsters that you can set on fire or take down into the Mariana Trench. It will, in other words, survive. I will also survive if I go home until tomorrow and take cover. I tell myself these facts over and over again as I carefully jog my way back down the hill. When I get inside, I’m up to 30 percent relieved I wasn’t hit by lightning and only 70 percent panicked about being offline.

  My mom has a phone! I go looking for her—she’s in the basement moving cardboard boxes up off the floor. “This is a real gully washer,” she tells me in lieu of hello. “Whoa, you look like a drowned rat. Did you get caught out in it?” She tilts her head. “Is that Andy’s hat?”

  I purse my lips and then shrug. “I was hiking,” I say, then grab a box and lift it onto a wooden pallet in case the basement floods. “Hey, um, you know that phone I bought you?”

  “Sure I do. You want it back?” She looks totally unsurprised. We keep loading boxes.

  “Could I borrow it for a few days?”

  “Absolutely. I can get it tomorrow or Sunday.”

  “Sunday? It’s not in the house?”

  “Oh, hon. What would I do with it? I have the red one and the one on the wall. That’s two phones already, for one person.” The red one is a flip phone from the age of the dinosaurs. Remember when phones, not cases, came in rainbow colors?

  “Mom, you need a real phone, for emergencies.”

  “That’s what the red one is for.”

  “But you have to keep it with you all the time so it’s there when you need it.”

  “I keep it in the car so it’s always charged up! Honestly, what kind of emergency am I having outside of home or the car?”

  “What if a baby came?”

  “I keep my red phone with me when I’m on call,” she says. “I’m not on call right now.”

  “What if you were taking a walk or went on a bike ride?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Honey, people didn’t have cell phones for millennia. And they have been hiking the Rockies since God was in short pants. Life goes on.”

  I give up. “Whatever,” I say. “I just need to borrow the phone I got you. I dropped mine on my hike, and it’s too wet to go find it.”

  “Oh shoot. I gave that extra phone to Aunt JoLynn.”

  When I was born, Aunt JoLynn was neither my aunt nor JoLynn. She used to be my mom’s college friend Joe, but she transitioned years and years ago. Now she manages a senior-care facility in Golden and is always scrounging up used handheld devices and outfitting them with adaptive functions for her clientele. They love the changeable size of the text and icons, the backlighting, the high headphone volumes. “Mom,” I say. “That’s not some ten-year-old iPad. That was new! And expensive!”

  “It’s just on loan. You can go get it anytime. Though I will warn you, she actually is using it herself. She gave her old phone to a sweet old lady who likes to watch unboxing videos at an otherwise deafening volume. I gave her those fancy blueface headphones too.”

  “Oh, Mom.” This is my mother. This is why she thinks phones are stupid. She thinks they just stream constant unboxing videos into, what, blueface headphones? I sigh. She smiles. She well knows I won’t take away Aunt JoLynn’s phone. She needs it more than either me or my mom. And the thought of the senior woman with the unboxing habit makes me strangely happy. It makes me want to send the care center something that comes in an elaborate package that she can unbox herself—or better still, a subscription gift that comes every month. I reach for my phone to make a note of this idea, but it’s not in my pocket. It’s on the top of Mount Wyler. How does anyone remember anything without a phone?

  I sigh again. I’ll have to dust off my mom’s modem to get online later tonight, but that’s not good for much—if she needs to connect, she still plugs her modem into a phone jack. It’ll take ten minutes just to download my email. I shake my head. My mother is crazy.

  “Why is all this stuff on the floor?” I ask, because I am making no headway on the phone conversation anyway. Usually her basement is sort of orderly, boxes on shelves, labeled. Mia’s crap. Marla’s junk. Those boxes are all still shelved as usual, but these on the floor are new to me, closed tight with clear plastic packing tape. They’re mostly reused wine boxes. I look around and find no kind of labels on them.

  Mom gives a sad sigh. “These things, they were your brother’s.”

  “They were?” My voice gets quieter. Six years after the accident, we still speak in hushed tones whenever Andy comes up. We probably always will. “Where did they come from?”

  “His apartment. I forgot all about it after he died. His landlord packed this stuff up and took it home and called me to come get it, and I forgot that too. And she never pest
ered me about it, just kept them in her own basement. Sweet woman. But she passed a few months ago. Her kids looked me up.”

  “Oh man,” I say. I don’t want to see Andy’s stuff from the apartment. I couldn’t even go into his apartment, after. We got anything important back years ago from his friends. The rest is probably flannel shirts and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. “Oh, I remember her,” I say, thinking of the landlord. A doting woman with great-grandkids and a pocketful of lollipops. “Just old age? Nothing tragic?”

  “Old age,” says my mom. “Ninety-five this year.”

  “I should send a card.”

  “I’ll give you the address. She lived about a block from Andy.”

  “Do we have to open the boxes?” I ask. I don’t want to see Andy’s old clothes. His socks that always had holes in the second toe area because it was longer than his big toe. Mine is the same way. I thought it was hideous. He thought it was hilarious and was forever buying me flip-flops and daring me to wear them in public. “You can’t hide your shame!” he would say with an evil laugh. “Don’t even try!”

  “You don’t have to open anything,” my mom says with a frown. “I will, when I’m ready. There might be something good. Photos, maybe. I never thought we got back enough photos. But whatever it is, I need to get them off the floor. We got a ton of rain this spring, and the ground is already saturated. I’m sure it’s coming in by the evening.”

  “Does it flood down here every time it rains?” I ask. I don’t think that’s good for a house, but what do I know—I live on the third floor.

  “Nope, just special situations. Don’t worry; I’m not going to float away. At worst I get an inch.”

  I grab the last box. Is there a photo in here I haven’t seen before? In those first six months after he died, I looked at every photo of Andy so many times I started to create imaginary memories around things I had nothing to do with. Did I go with him to Mesa Verde? Or was that a Scout trip? I cannot be sure anymore. “Well, even so,” I say, glad to talk about anything besides that, “I’ll order some shelves for this stuff.” I reach for my phone to place the order. Again I’m out of luck. I’m going to have to start writing things down. On pieces of paper.