by S. J. Maher
For Camille
Walkercahier.pdf
Résumé
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
—Dorothy Parker
1
I dropped my phone into the Hudson River yesterday.
I was standing at the back of the ferry, traveling to Jersey City from the floating, glass-walled terminal at the foot of One World Trade Center. I stood there, in the wind and sun, like a carefree tourist, gaping at the Freedom Tower, and put my hand over the rail and opened it and let my iPhone X fall into the churning water below.
I didn’t look down to see it sink below the surface, in case they were watching me. I don’t think they were, though, because they didn’t need to watch me. Not while I had the phone. But I couldn’t be sure, and I can’t afford to take any chances.
That’s my new motto. Take no chances.
I keep thinking about that stupid phone, sitting on the bottom of the river, because I keep thinking, Hey! This is boring! I should check my phone. Oh, I can’t. It’s on the bottom of the river. That happens less often today than it did yesterday. I hope that soon it will go away completely.
I hate writing by hand.
I bought this notebook just before I got on the ferry, for $24.95, at a shop near the terminal, one of those places that used to sell books and now sells calendars and candlesticks. I wanted to see if anyone was following me before I got on the ferry, so I popped into the shop, looked around, saw a stack of Moleskines, and bought one on impulse, with cash.
It feels strange to be writing with a pen again, and not just because my hand hurts from where the subway train hit it.
My handwriting looks like it belongs to an earlier version of myself, a junior high school student doing a book report, or sharing her feelings about One Direction. My words don’t look like my thoughts, which are in Times New Roman or Helvetica, depending on my mood, not this weird girlish script.
I’m glad I have the notebook, though, because I need a record of important events that I can recall clearly now but that I know will fade or become distorted over time. This is my AutoRecover, my backup.
Also, I need something to do.
All I do is wait and think, try to figure out what happened to me, stare at the steel door and hope it doesn’t open, and absently reach for my phone every five minutes, then remember that it’s at the bottom of the river.
2
The phone was sitting in the middle of Rebecca’s blond wooden desk when I first saw it, in its glossy white cardboard box, like a present waiting to be opened.
Rebecca’s stylishly furnished office was at the front of the building, a brick room with windows overlooking Sixteenth Street—a contrast to the crowded, windowless space in the back where the click-drivers worked. On the window behind the desk there were a bunch of yellow sticky notes. Rebecca and her friend in the office across Sixteenth Street put emoticons on their windows every day, a playful interoffice social semaphore. Today it was a :-0.
She waited until I sat down, then looked at the box and smiled. I could tell she was relishing the tiny drama of the moment.
“So, Candace, I have some good news for you,” she said.
I tried to look like I was mildly pleased. Inside: mariachi music.
I’d been driving clicks for SoSol for eight months, sharing a table with a half-dozen other sullen young people. We competed to see who could come up with the worst clickbait ads, taking ironic pride in fat-shaming celebrities, making self-loathing wisecracks to hide our grim competitiveness.
Working for the New Media Lab would be different. SoSol (formerly Social Solutions) was launching a marketing branch, with real clients, not the kind that sell weight-loss pills and herbal erection boosters to idiots.
I’d had the feeling I was going to get the job. Beatrice, my best friend among the clickbait crew, had also applied. She was smart and sassy but ostentatiously disengaged from her work, well past the point of the dignity-maintaining detachment I sustained, saving her real energy for her art and Rudy, her partner.
But Beatrice wasn’t in here with Rebecca. I was.
Rebecca closed her laptop and leaned back in her chair.
“I just got the email from Craig,” she said. “And I’m pleased to tell you we want you to be part of the launch team.”
She smiled at me expectantly.
What to say?
“Awesome! Thank you for the opportunity. I’m really excited.”
Is that what she wanted? Did she need more enthusiasm? Should I suck up?
Rebecca is early twenties, African American, like, really African, Kenyan or something, and beautiful, with shiny ebony skin and stunning lips and cheekbones, always stylishly dressed, like a model moonlighting. She’s hard to read.
“I hope you’re ready to work hard because I pushed for you to be on the team,” she said, and looked at me.
What did that mean? Did it mean Craig, her boss, wanted someone else?
I thought he liked me. He’s in his forties, gay, stylish, energetic, kind of a remote figure to the clickbait crew, but in the interview we seemed to connect.
I found him more straightforward to deal with than Rebecca. He seemed to only want me to demonstrate that I accepted his leadership and thought he was awesome, which was easy enough to fake. Rebecca always seemed to want something I wasn’t giving her, or to be disappointed that I hadn’t said something or done something that I didn’t know I should say or do.
“Thank you, Rebecca. I’m pumped.”
She looked at me with a brittle smile, as if she wasn’t sure she’d made the right call.
“It wasn’t an easy decision. There were so many good candidates. I felt, though, that your work here was so good we should give you a shot. You showed real initiative and creativity with CelluVibe.”
I nodded modestly.
CelluVibe is a handheld electric massager that deluded fat girls across America use to vibrate their dimpled skin in the mistaken belief that it will somehow remove their fat cells. An ad I designed—with red circles around the cottage cheese on Britney Spears’s thighs—blew out all our metrics, making lots of money for SoSol, coarsening the culture, ripping off countless lovelorn chubbos, and making me the secretly self-hating star of the clickbait crew.
“I was really pleased at how that caught on.”
“Virality,” said Rebecca. “That’s what you bring. And that’s what we need.”
Ask about money. Ask about money.
“I’m really going to throw myself into this, Rebecca. This is where I want my career to go, so I’m supermotivated, partly because I’d like to eventually make a little more money.”
Rebecca’s smile got thinner.
“Would there be a raise, um, attached to the promotion?”
“Not initially. No. It’s a start-up, so we are going to prioritize cost-control until it produces revenue. But if it works the way we think it will, it would be kind of normal for your compensation to be addressed.”
Okay. So no raise right away, which wouldn’t help me pay down my credit card debt, or allow me to travel anyplace interesting before I was too old to enjoy myself.
I was going to ask her when we might revisit the question when Kevin appeared at the door. Kevin was the tech guy, and the only lumpy person at SoSol, a sad wannabe hipster. He had a sandy receding hairline, a stupid sandy mustache, baggy jeans, and a faded Rush T-shirt. There was a chain connecting his belt to his wallet.
“Kevin, there you are!” said Rebecca. “Can you help Candace set u
p her new phone?”
He walked to the desk, opened the box, booted up the phone, got me to sign in with my iCloud password, and hovered behind me until I noticed from the reflection in the phone that he was looking down my scoop-neck top. He was actually gaping.
I grasped my collar and cleared my throat, and Rebecca turned around, saw what was up, and gave him a dirty look. He started and turned away.
“Dude, I got this,” I said.
He blushed and walked backward to the door, babbling.
“No problem it should be okay now let me know if you have any problems it’s pretty easy.”
I gave Rebecca a quizzical look after he left.
“He was,” she said.
“I know, right?”
“Totally.”
“Creeper.”
We shared a moment of wordless disgusted sisterly commiseration.
“So we’ll get you a desk in the New Media Lab space once we get it set up next week,” she said. “For now, you can work from your spot in Content Marketing.”
“You haven’t told Beatrice or the other applicants yet?”
I was nervous about that.
“I’m working on an announcement,” she said, gesturing to her laptop.
“I have an idea for that,” I said.
3
I am doing yoga on my sleeping bag, in the downward dog position, when I hear a noise from the hallway.
It is the first noise I have heard from outside since I got to this little room, and I am sure they are coming for me. My heart starts pounding. I drop to the sleeping bag and turn around, being very quiet. I make my breathing shallow.
The sound is from the steel door at the end of the hallway: the squeak of the hinges, a slow pneumatic sigh from the thing at the top that makes the door close slowly, then the tread of someone walking toward me.
It’s a hallway, I tell myself. It’s just someone walking down a hallway. A lot of that happens in the Big Apple. But I am petrified that they have found me.
I have been stewing about the GPS tracking on my phone and fretting about my carelessness. By now they would have reviewed the record. I imagine it would be like one of those Uber maps, showing my route from the moment I left the subway station and walked around Chelsea, with a straight line out into the river that ends at the point where I dropped the phone.
I should have used tinfoil.
Unless they are stupid, they will eventually figure out that I was on the Paulus Hook ferry and start trying to guess where I went when I got off. And I know they aren’t stupid.
I think about that as I hold my breath and listen to the footsteps approach my door. It sounds like a man’s tread: heavy shoes, in a steady, purposeful rhythm.
Here he comes, I think. And you have nobody to blame but your own stupid self.
I am terrified that he, whoever he is, will open the door and find me, my sleeping bag, my granola bars, my jug of water, my bowl of pee, and my Moleskine notebook, and I’ll be trapped.
I can’t run. There’s only one door. Can I hide? Where? Could I tuck myself behind the cardboard boxes? I could! Nobody would see me from the door if I lie down behind them.
But that’s stupid. If someone opens the door, it’s because he thinks I might be here. He won’t just take a quick peek and leave. He’ll mean business, and be prepared to take me away in handcuffs, unless he plans to shoot me on sight. If I hide, I’ll delay the terrible moment by ten seconds, and also I’ll look pathetic. No. Better to let him see me calmly waiting. I can have my dignity.
Or can I try to run? If I stand behind the door, can I wait until he enters the room and then slip out behind him?
It’s worth trying.
I ease myself off the sleeping bag and drag it behind me. Otherwise he’ll see it when he opens the door. I try to be quiet but the sleeping bag rubbing against the concrete floor makes a tiny sound and I’m frightened that he has heard it.
The footsteps have stopped. I ease myself behind the door and press myself against the wall. I hold my breath and close my eyes, trying to prepare myself.
From the hallway, I hear the jingle of keys.
Then I hear a door open and slam shut. He’s in another storage unit. I allow myself to breathe again. It’s just some idiot fetching his golf clubs or something. I listen as he rummages around.
I tense when the door opens and slams again and the footsteps go by, and I stay still for five minutes after the big door at the end of the hallway closes. Could he be waiting inside for me to betray my presence by making a noise? No. But I stay still all the same, my back flat against the wall.
I start to think about how silly it is to still be standing there, and how scared I am, and start to worry about my thinking. I can’t let myself lose touch with reality. I will have to leave this place eventually, and I won’t be able to manage it if I’m a head case.
I decide to continue my yoga routine, finish what I started. I need to feel my muscles tighten and relax, stop my frantic brain from fretting.
Then I pick up the Moleskine and here I am.
Hi!
My fingers hurt. I don’t like writing by hand. I miss my phone. I miss my laptop. I miss the sun. I miss everything.
4
Rebecca agreed that it would be fun and appropriate to announce my appointment with a selfie.
I really wanted the right kind of image to announce my first Big Girl Job.
I had decided to give up on normcore, the better to blaze a path of social business success. I was wearing a charcoal skirt suit, a scoop-neck powder-blue Armani silk blouse, chunky black glasses, black pumps, and an L line necklace, because Brooklyn, bitches. I had pulled my tangly red hair into a bun, with a few locks hanging down, to soften the look.
Rebecca was wearing a figure-hugging gray pencil dress with a big gold necklace. She folded her arms across her chest. I stood next to her. We both looked up at the phone I held in my outstretched arm, smiling while I snapped bursts of shots.
We looked like a stock photo: Businesswomen in Hip Office.
Rebecca’s phone rang.
“We done?” she asked and picked up the phone before I could reply.
I went to the bathroom to sit down to flip through the pictures. I sent the best one to my sister, Jess, and asked if it would do for a job announcement selfie. She responded by texting me back with thumbs-up emoji.
Big sister had had a real Big Girl Job for two years, as a lawyer at McNally-Blenkhorn, uptown, which is great, except that she works such long hours she often doesn’t have time to pee, so she replies to my rambling, neurotic messages with emojis. Before I sent the announcement, though, I had to deal with Beatrice, who was sitting at her terminal, typing away, her arms bare except for her sailor’s tattoo, a topless girl in a bandanna with a huge bottle of rum.
She looked up with a smile.
“Sup, bae?” she said. “Did you get it?”
I made a complicated nodding frowny face at her. She was my only real friend there. I was afraid she would hate me.
But she got up and hugged me. “You got it. Yeah!” She pulled me into her warm body and held me tight, squeezing even. “We gonna celebrate. I’m happy for you,” she whispered. “Really.”
“I was afraid you would be sad you didn’t get it.”
“Zero fucks,” she said, and I believed her. That’s sort of her motto. What a relief. I needed her to be my friend.
She plunked herself down.
“Did I show you my newest picture?”
Beatrice had been taking screenshots from porn videos, printing them on fabric and then needlepointing them. She had lined up gallery space in Williamsburg and was rushing home every night to stitch.
She pulled her needlepoint frame out of her purse to show me a half-stitched image of a woman with feathered hair fellating a man. The colors had that faded VHS look.
After I cooed admiringly, I finally got to turn to my laptop to roll out the job announcement. I took the best selfie, c
ropped it and adjusted the color, then sent it out to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Pumped to start at SoSol’s New Media Lab! Thanks to Rebecca Manawa for the great welcome!
I wanted the world—boom—to see me looking good in my new job, and I didn’t want the world to know that I was petrified to be revealed as an imposter, so I had already created a strategy for this moment, a social storyboard.
I had imagined my college, coffee shop, and bookstore friends learning that that weird bookworm girl who wasn’t very good at making lattes or working a checkout scanner had a fancy new job.
I had also imagined JFXBF finding out that I’d landed a real job in social while he was still pulling pints in Williamsburg and JFXBFNGF made eyes at him from her ugly barstool.
I linked to a blog post I had ready comparing the social media revolution to the impact of the Gutenberg Bible, eight hundred words of semismart stuff I’d pillaged from a paper I wrote in my last semester at NYU, updated with hot links and illustrated with gifs from TV shows.
I sat back for a few minutes to see who liked and favorited my post and watched the click counter on my blog sluggishly turn over.
Then I put my sock puppets to work, using them to send congratulatory messages to myself.
Amazing!
They’re lucky to have you!
You go, girl!
The fake messages mixed with the real messages from real friends and soon my social feed was a churning celebration of my awesomeness, which was what I needed to happen.
From time to time I checked JFXBF’s Instagram and Facebook. I half thought he might cryptically subtweet me, as I kept cryptically subtweeting him, but he maintained radio silence. His last post was still an out-of-focus five-day-old picture of a pint of passionfruit stout, which sounded like the most piss-tasting thing you could think of.
Anyway, fuck him.
5
I am so over this storage room.
I’m not sure how much longer I can bear it. I don’t even know how long I’ve been here because I can’t see the sun. It’s a windowless cinder block box with a gray steel door in one end and a bare light bulb overhead. I don’t have my phone or computer or a watch, so I’ve lost track of time. I’m pretty sure today is Tuesday, since it was Monday when I arrived, and that was yesterday, but I am kind of fuzzy on the last few days.