by S. J. Maher
I don’t really remember getting here, but apparently I was dragging a plastic bag full of pathetic convenience store supplies—a gallon jug of water, a dozen granola bars, and two apples—because I found that next to me when I woke up.
I seem to have also dug through my sister’s old camping stuff, because my face was buried in her musty old sleeping bag. And I think I must have taken some Ambiens, because the pill bottle was next to my hand.
It was terrible to come to my senses, to remember why I was here. I wished I could go back to sleep. But I couldn’t, because I had to pee.
There’s no bathroom. I found an old orange plastic bowl in a box of my sister’s discarded kitchen stuff and decided that would have to be my toilet. I tore the top off a box to use as a lid to cover it when I was done. Ugh.
Then I did an inventory of my sister’s stuff.
Aside from her old tent and some bags of unfashionable clothes, I found boxes of old documents and books, both kinds of skis, some lame appliances: a juicer, a waffle iron, an old white microwave, and a broken step machine.
I hunted around for an outlet, then plugged in the microwave and set the clock, so I could keep track of time. I guessed that I had slept for twelve hours, and that it was about 10:00 p.m. Monday when the Ambien kicked in, so I had set the microwave for 10:00 a.m. I could be way off, but it was better than nothing. It’s now 8:21 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Candace Standard Time.
I will eventually have to get out of here, if only to get more supplies, and I can check the time then.
For now, I need to stay hidden. I figure if they lose track of me for a few days, it will be easier for me to slip quietly out of town, and onto whatever comes next.
At least that’s what I think in my better moments. In my weaker moments—and I have a lot of them—I wonder if I should let them catch me. I could talk to a lawyer. Maybe there’s a way out of my situation that I can’t see. Likely not, but maybe. Whatever it is would probably be bad, though. And right now I am free, kind of, so no.
I’ve also been thinking about a third option. If I don’t want to let them catch me, and I don’t want to go on the run, I could, you know, not do either.
I feel that like an undertow in my mind, pulling me down. Would it be so bad if I stopped existing? It could be better for a lot of people, including me. I am in a terrible position and it’s hard to imagine all the things that will have to happen before I can relax and just live my life. So it might be better, really, for Candace to, um, exit.
The only problem? I’ve got just three Ambiens left, which wouldn’t do the trick.
I want to write down the Dorothy Parker poem I like, but I only remember the last stanza.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
I promise myself I’ll look it up and write the whole thing in the front of this notebook the next time I can google.
6
Rebecca interrupted my social festival of congratulations to ask me to go for lunch with her and Craig.
In the elevator, she asked me how Beatrice took the news.
“Zero fucks,” I said. “Exact quote.”
“Interesting. I thought she wanted the job.”
“I don’t know if she’s cut out for social. She’s so into her art.”
We walked over to the five-way intersection at Fourteenth and Hudson, to Dos Caminos, a Mexican place with a terrace. It was full of social media and fashion swells eating tacos and drinking margaritas in the sun. Stylish clothes. Tinkling fake laughter. It was the world of successful Chelsea people, and I was joining it. I felt nervous and happy. Rebecca led me to a table where Craig was sitting with one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen.
Craig was dressed in skinny jeans, a stylish tie, and a blazer, with Ray-Bans on his forehead, managing to look immaculately groomed in a way that only gay men and some straight Frenchmen manage. His companion was tall and slim, with tousled chestnut hair, and so good-looking that I wanted to stop and stare at him. He was wearing khakis and a blue button-down shirt.
“So, Candace, congrats!” said Craig. “Welcome aboard!”
“Thanks! I’m excited, guys.”
They had beers in front of them. Craig already seemed a bit buzzed.
“You earned it. Nobody in Content Marketing drove more clicks. And that’s the spirit we need at the New Media Lab. It’s a start-up, and we have to think that way. We eat what we kill. No kill? No eat. It’s all about conversions.”
The waitress arrived, but Craig kept talking.
“We have clients lined up for you both, so you can get going, like, this afternoon. Start data fracking, kicking ass, taking names.”
He did a drumroll on the table with his fingers, then noticed the waitress.
“We ordered,” he said. “You guys know what you want?”
Rebecca asked for chiles rellenos and a glass of Chardonnay.
I ordered a Perrier and the chopped salad, without the goat cheese.
Handsome Stranger, who had been sitting quietly, stuck out his hand.
“I’m Wayne, by the way. I think we’re going to be working together.”
I got a good look at his eyes for the first time. They were grayish blue, with long, almost girlish lashes. He had a beautiful nose, long and straight, and perfect lips. I didn’t want to look away but I couldn’t hold eye contact with him. Luckily, Craig was still blathering on.
“I want you two to think of yourselves as community managers, influencers, curating content, putting SoSol into the bleeding edge of social marketing. This is a major pivot. You need to think big. Look at where we are.”
He gave us a second to think about that.
“This is Silicon Alley. The opportunities for synergies are all around us. We can be the red-hot wire connecting Madison Avenue to the HTR. But I need big-time buy-in from you two. I’ve picked you because I think you both are already awesomely virality-aware. Now you need to turn that up to eleven. You need to be social, think social. I want you newsjacking, connecting with fanbassadors, gamifying the brand experience for clients.”
“So, in practical terms, do you think that means Twitter, Facebook, Instagram?” asked Wayne.
“Good question, Wayne! We need to be omnichannel, channel-agnostic. The channels are increasingly irrelevant. We need to be Web three-point-oh. Fish where the fish are. I want you to live in the analytics, be where you can be the most impactful.”
“You’re getting me pumped up,” said Wayne. He didn’t look pumped up. “Can you tell us about the clients?”
“I think you’re going to like this,” said Craig. “For you, I’ve got Cheese of the Month Club, an innovative upstate start-up that sends artisanal cheeses through the mail.”
Wayne and I wore identical fake smiles.
“And Candace is going to be driving clicks to Bowhunting.com. We were really lucky to get them. Big market presence.”
I’m vegan, which Craig should have known, if he’d bothered to find out anything about me, by, like, looking at any of my social media accounts before he decided to hire me for a social media marketing job.
I was trying to think of how I could tell him that I couldn’t possibly ever direct a single click to Bowhunting.com when Wayne spoke up.
“Would it be okay if we switched?”
Craig looked irritated.
“I guess so. Why?”
“I think Candace might be a vegan.”
He looked at me and I nodded. Did he figure that out from my lunch order? Likely. Who but a vegan would order the salad with no cheese?
“I would have a hard time having anything to do with a hunting website,” I said. “I mean, cheese is kind of problematic, actually, because of the way they take calfs . . .”
Craig looked surprised, irritated, then bored.
“Never mind. The cheese site is great.”
He nodded, ready to move on.
Then my new phone rang, which shocked me, since it was the first time and it was the steel drum ring, which I hate, and I reached for it suddenly and knocked Wayne’s full draft over, dumping all of it into his lap.
Fuck!
“Oh my goodness! I am so sorry.”
I jumped up. The crotch of his pants was totally soaked. He pushed his chair back and stood up, laughing. Without thinking, I reached over with a napkin to pat the front of his pants dry.
He grabbed my wrist to stop me, smiled, apologized, took the napkin from me. I sat back down and buried my face in my hands.
7
It’s hard to make a decent noose out of torn-up T-shirt strips.
I’m feeling pretty low. Forlorn. I can’t stop thinking about all the terrible things that have happened, and I can’t think of anything good that might ever happen to me. Hopeless. That’s the word. I don’t know where hope fits into the category of human needs, but I know that I have none, and it makes me . . .
Well.
Also, I am out of Ambien. Last night, after all my writing and organizing, I decided to have a little Ambien vacation and enjoy a spacey few minutes of numbness before blanking out. It is great, amazing, until I wake up and realize that there will be no more Ambien. I take that hard.
One minute I’m lying facedown in my sleeping bag, pondering my grim position and the grimmer Ambien-free future. The next minute I’m suddenly purposeful—Miss Busy rummaging through the boxes of old clothes, cheerfully looking for something I can use to make a noose.
I don’t remember, or don’t want to remember, how I got from one state to the next.
But I do realize I have decided that the world would be better off without Candace. Everything will be easy! Everybody wins! There comes a point where anguish is unendurable. I reach it. Sue me.
I find a shitty old canary-yellow T-shirt that’s easier to tear than the other shitty old T-shirts. It says DANBURY HALF MARATHON on it. I sit cross-legged on the sleeping bag and have a demented craft session, tearing it into strips until there is no T-shirt left and then braiding them into a bunch of really shitty little ropes. I knot them together and I have a four-foot rope that, surprisingly, feels kind of strong.
I think I can tie one end to the steel cage around the light fixture, stand up on the microwave, and then kick it away.
Then it occurs to me that I don’t know how to make a noose.
The point of hanging, I believe, is to break your neck. It’s the knot that does it, and your body’s sudden weight.
Otherwise, you’re just strangling yourself, which I don’t think works, because if you change your mind, you can just undo the rope.
Wouldn’t you change your mind when your brain starts to get starved of oxygen?
So, how to make a noose? I would google it, but I can’t, so I have to improvise. I loop the rope around, fuss with it, but after a few minutes I realize that I’ll never figure it out.
Okay.
Maybe a loop will do it. I tie the knot, test it on my forearm. It seems strong.
Then I haul the microwave over, climb on top, stand on my tippy-toes, and tie one end to the steel cage. The other end, the end with the loop, I put around my neck.
I realize then that I need to move the microwave. I need it not to be right under me because I could step back onto it. I should have it a couple feet away, so that when I step off it, I will be hanging directly below the light, with nothing under my feet but air. That ought to do it.
I can’t help but find it strange that I do all this in a state of cheerful busyness. I’m not thinking about anything beyond accomplishing each little task.
Miss Busy, who has always been there for me when I need her, is back running the show. She’s the one who gets up on the microwave, puts the noose around my neck, and takes a step forward. It’s kind of scary, though, because she isn’t checking in with me. She knows how to fix the situation, always has, and I guess I am okay with that, at least until I feel the rope bite and suddenly she is no longer in charge. I am, and I don’t want to choke to death.
For a moment, probably about a second, actually, I kick and grab at the rope around my neck. I wedge my finger under it, but it’s too tight and getting tighter. Oh God. No. I can’t breathe. I feel my face turning red. My neck is constricted. My eyes feel bulgy. I gasp for air. My tongue sticks out. This is bad. THIS IS BAD.
Then there’s a jerk, and one of my knots lets go, the rope parts, and I fall to the floor.
After I catch my breath, I remove the noose, throw it in the corner, and, eventually, pick up my notebook to write.
I miss Ambien.
8
After the beer spill, Wayne was really gracious and polite, and he suddenly went from very attractive coworker to guy I have a crush on.
No, I kept telling the crush. Stop that.
We left Craig and Rebecca at the restaurant to conspire and walked back to the office together. I wished the walk was longer.
I thanked Wayne for switching projects with me.
“No problem,” he said. “Do you like the way I cleverly manipulated the situation to get Bowhunting.com all to myself?”
“You can have it.”
“Big client. Outfoxed you there, Walker. Also, I don’t have to try to sell cheese by mail.”
He winked at me. I tried not to look at his long lashes.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “The world is waiting, patiently next to its mailbox, for a new way to get Gruyère delivered.”
The truth is, I was feeling worse and worse about the job. During lunch, Craig let us know that Alvin Beaconsfield, the venture capitalist backing us, had approved the budget for two staff for the summer only. That’s why he kept going on about eating what we kill. There was no budget for data or support, no plan, just contracts with two companies that would pay SoSol a percentage of any sales. And, he let us know, that there would likely only be one position available in the fall. He didn’t spell it out, but it was clear enough. He’d set everything up as a competition. The first prize was a job. The second prize was no job.
I’d never really wanted to do this kind of work. At school, I’d hoped to publish a series of books about ethical veganism. I imagined myself finding the writers, designing and editing the books, and distributing them to widespread acclaim, seeing them nestled on bookshelves across America, next to Eating Animals and Thug Kitchen. Gwyneth Paltrow would love them. But in my first year at New York University, which I mostly spent smoking weed with JFXBF, the financial crisis hit.
I eventually realized that my prospects of landing a decent-paying publishing job were roughly zero. I became deathly afraid of ending up like one of the terminally underemployed Occupy Wall Street losers I saw in Zuccotti Park, substituting pointless activism for a career.
I wasn’t particularly good at college, but I discovered I had a touch for social media. I was quick and clever, had a personality I didn’t mind projecting, and I knew how to drive clicks. It was one area of the economy that was growing, so I threw myself into it in my last year at school, volunteering to promote campus events and organizations, learning the greasy little tricks that allow you to herd people like sheep, building my following, developing a sassy online persona.
I did all that because I wanted to be employed, so I had done my best to nod enthusiastically during Craig’s pep talk, and, at the end, when he’d mentioned a party that night that Alvin was throwing in a Brooklyn club, I perked up.
“He wants to meet you two,” he said.
“It should be fun,” I lied. “I can’t wait.”
9
Digging through Jess’s camping gear, I find her old canteen, which I haven’t seen since I was ten and Jess was twelve.
When we were little, we used to go on family camping trips. Mom and Dad would load up the Subaru station wagon and we’d drive for hours, with Jess and me whining and picking at each other in the backseat; then we’d all sleep in a big square tent in some park for a week. Mom would
cook on a propane stove, Dad would sit in a camp chair and drink cans of Bud, and Jess and I would run around in the woods and play games she made up. She would be the brave princess and I’d be her sidekick, or I would be the kidnapped princess and she’d be my rescuer, fighting dragons or orcs or witches until she found me, and I had to thank her for saving me from being eaten or boiled alive or whatever.
Jess would always have her old-fashioned canteen, with its fuzzy wool cover and leather carrying strap, and would dole out water to me in her bossy way.
The last time I remember seeing it was on our last camping trip, just before Jess’s social life got to the point that she didn’t want to go away in the summer anymore.
We drove up to Nova Scotia, the longest drive yet. By then, we’d stopped playing make-believe and would just explore, but Jess still bossed me around and she still carried the canteen.
On that trip, we were staying at a campground by the sea. On our second day there, Jess and I wandered away from the tent and took a trail through the woods that ended at a sandstone cliff overlooking a little island topped with pine trees. Jess decided we should explore it.
We scrambled down the cliff, got our flip-flops and feet up to our ankles coated in sticky red mud, and managed to climb up to the top of the island, where we sat in the sun on the springy ground, looking out at the vast mudflats and the brown water. There were seagulls wheeling around in the sky, cawing, and we sat there trying to figure out what they were doing. Eventually I realized that they were picking up clams, flying into the air, and dropping them on rocks below so the shells would break and they could eat the meat inside. Jess didn’t believe me at first, but finally had to agree that was what was happening. Some of the gulls would hang around and try to steal the clams when they landed rather than finding their own, so there was a lot of frantic wing flapping and screaming.