Volume 7: "Factchecking" by Jeremy P. Bushnell
after Jorie Graham
It is not yet quite the middle of the night, still a few hours to go for that, but it is late, and the people who live around here, the other ones, the ones that you sometimes allow yourself to think of as the normal people—well, by now they must have put their kids to bed (because they all have kids, those normal people; they're all couples, those people who are not like you, remember, the way it seemed like that?); by now most of them are themselves in bed, probably. Passing subdivisions built on hillsides, your eyes cross the stratified rows of houses, and you see some drapes that switch on and off ghost blue from the TVs behind them but mostly the windows you see are dark. When you imagine the people behind those windows (you do sometimes) you imagine—what?—a woman in a pink nightgown with flowers. A glass of filtered water, within reach of the bed, intended for smoothing her transition into morning, erasing the dryness deposited in her mouth by the night. The learned habits of a life that is comfortable. Husband climbing in next to her, toenails newly clipped, all the rough points filed down to safe curves. Spare lightbulbs in every closet, in there, nested in packages poetic with the accumulation of soft words (lumens).
In there, in whatever you are imagining in there to be tonight, woman-in-nightgown or some variant, whatever, the important thing is its difference from out here, out in the not-yet-quite-late night that you are out in. You belong to this, at least tonight you belong to this: you are out. Who else is out in this? Who are your companions in not-in-ness? The bars, you know, are still open.. You try imagining the other (occasional) cars on the road full of people heading out to drink, maybe full of people who have left one bar and are heading to another. Carfuls of guys shitface boozed on a weeknight, dangerous with hormones and frustration. Every driver a drunk driver. When there are no cars coming you scan the side of the road for people. Other citizens of your out-at-night community. You are looking for teenagers who have climbed out their windows to be with other teenagers who have climbed out their windows, who prowl, who are out to damage property, to pretend that they are vampires, to fuck in the park. You are looking for hitchhikers, hoboes, wanderers, killers.
For fictions. It's a thing you want to do. Yes, it makes you feel unsafe, certainly—a woman driving, alone—but you know, secretly, that you only feel unsafe because you want to. The inhabitants of the night are dangerous, you tell yourself, and you, out in it, one of them, must also be dangerous. And that's a thing you want, sometimes, secretly; you wouldn't tell your friends this because they'd laugh and tease you, or (worse) they'd put on the patient-and-understanding face, but sometimes when the boys cajole you into going to see those stupid movies that you hate, you find yourself wanting to be the women in them. Not the nice ones, not the hero's girl, never the hero's girl, God no—in every movie you want to be the other one, the evil one, the psycho queen, the castrating bitch, the lean terrorist fatale who doesn't speak and who runs a katana through the hapless security guard in the film's first act. Strong, sexually confident, and sadly dead by the closing credits: electrocution, helicopter crash, something violent but indirect. You ignore the death. You sit in the darkness of the theatre and think of the fictional futures still possible for you and this makes you quiver with some impulse that approximating delight. Now—look—the window is full of light. No, wait. Be careful. Don't come out of the dark yet: remember: you are after something with this.
Back in the car, then, the darkness, dangerous night. Only it's not really. Your car constantly throws powerful beams of light out onto the road in front of you; what you are really doing is perpetually moving into a bubble of day. It's not really night and you're not really out in it either: you're going to work. Danger?: streetlights punch glowing holes into it with a reassuring periodicity. Even the traffic lights help: they reduce the chaos of hundreds or thousands of human beings equipped with fast and powerful vehicles into a predictable sequence of on-off pulses; in their own small way, they, too, cast the darkness out. (I remember a guy at some party recently, just moved here from Colorado, and he told me about hiking and seeing the stars—really seeing the stars, he said to me, you think you can see them until you really see them and then you realize how many stars you normally just don't ever see—he stressed it like that, as though he was saying something that he thought I didn't really understand.) Your hand keeps punching buttons on the radio, jumping you from preferred station to preferred station as you try to avoid commercials (it's only a twenty-minute drive to work, but it's exhausting to spend half of that time as a target). You steer, and you take in halves of songs by Aretha Franklin, the Cardigans, U2, and every note in them is burnished to beautiful by the soft force of your memory; you listen to these fragments (safe, corporate-owned, familiar to tens of thousands) during the same moments that you are looking into houses and thinking about normal people, you push the button to avoid the sports bar commercial at the same moment that you are mentally shaping the matter of night into something dangerous, an unknowable zone, lunatic with the flux of melodramatic forces... You let an imagined reality, false one, supersede the total picture of what is in front of you. It's OK. This is a thing that everyone does.
You pull into the office park and carefully aim the car into the notch between a pair of parallel lines, pointing into the space that you consider yours. It's a good spot, a safe distance (fifteen feet?) from the front door—this spot is so close to the mirrored front of your building that you can glimpse your own face reflected there, a smudge, just above the dazzling apocalypse of the reflected headlights. You call the spot yours because you always get it, same one. This office park may be busy during the day, but now, at night—not that it's night here, really, either. The tall spokes of lampposts loom everywhere, alien sentinels, keeping the office park in a perpetual artificial dusk. You step out of the car and the sickly yellow glow wraps you as you move through it to the door. Illuminates you. Sheds a little light on the Subject. Your ID card is in your hand already. How did you get here? There must have been choices, a whole cartographic system of them, everyone forgets, pretends. Where do you think you are going?
What she does: work for the paper. Copyediting. Factchecking. It is work she doesn't love, scrutinizing over an empire of lost commas at three am, cross-referencing addresses against the phone book to confirm that they exist in the way they're meant to. In the way the writer says. The co-workers (hear their voices? coming up the hall now?) chat, and babble with the insanity of late night, and quote passages from the Chicago Manual by heart, and take turns making pots of potent coffee, and they're okay, but she is not friends with them. What's wrong with her? Is there a thing in her past that makes her keep her distance from these people? What are the ways she has been hurt? Where is the man in this picture? Why does she keep the boys she hangs out with platonic when half of them have expressed interest at one time or another? What is going to happen to her next? Now she pushes through the cold and heavy door and enters the jittery lit space of the Copyeditors' Bullpen.
Waves, smiles; they call her by her name. They shout questions about her period to her over the tops of their monitors (she's coming into some discussion late); she answers these with quips that get laughs but which don't contain any actual information. (This is common; she keeps her information closed to them.. She hopes they don't pick up on it but she suspects that they do.) She pulls a head spec out of the communal pile, stops by the coffeepot to fill her mug, makes her way to her station and sits down. The computer at her station desk rises out of a badland jumble of junk: a broken-mountain pileup of style manuals and dictionaries (three different) gives way to a surrounding foothills of loose matter: mugs, pencils, pens, scattered teabags, wadded napkins, receipts, take-out slips, loose stamps, shreds. She feels like she has stared for too long at the cluttered landscape of this desk, and the blue square of glowing Heaven that hangs above it. She uses a geologic metaphor because she feels she could measure the time spent at this desk in geologic time. It's not quite a joke. She doesn't know yet that in four months the time at the desk will transform, from life into memory..
She will move to a new desk, and a new desk after that, and in a short time—only a few years, really, though that seems amazing—she will work in a room that is her own; four walls and a ceiling will enclose a space that she will call my office. It will not take long, really, for the words to sound normal in her mouth. She will work in a room and she will be able to call every chair in that room hers. Someone will be paid to make coffee and bring it into that room and someone else will be paid to clean the room up after dark. This all happens later. Later she will be in a building and she will stand up from her desk in the middle of the day; there will be no one supervising her; no one to tell her that she can't put down the papers she's looking at; no one to tell her that she can't rise from her seat, stand in the middle of the clean room and do nothing while the phone purrs at her. She will move to the window and look through it and see the world out there, bright and colorful, everything in place, fully revealed. The window will be full of light.
But now there are no windows. There are cinderblock walls painted white and there is six months' worth of accumulated mess and above that a blue square of computer screen hovers. Look into it, enter the slug and wait now. Wait for the yellow words to emerge from that ether, reporters' words, words made out of dots, pixels: light. Pictures of the world made out of text, pictures she will check for accuracy and grammar, that she will make more real by verifying the spelling of the names and correcting the miscapped words. Only tonight the words don't come up. Instead she gets a file not found. She looks at the spec again, doublechecks the spelling of the slug, types it in a second time: randolph.
—Who's got a copy of the budget? she asks.
Damian holds it high.
—What's randolph?
—Randolph, randolph, Damian says, flipping in.
Randolph, the budget reveals, is a story about something, you won't remember later, a woman, Julia or Jane or Somebody Randolph, with some achievement to her name, you don't remember. You will remember that she was young—college age—even then that seemed young to you— young to have achieved something, anyway. What was it? Something philanthropic, an invention, an invention with a philathropic bent—?
But time, back then, is still moving—
—Well it's not coming up on Pubman, she is saying. Who wrote it? Do we have a disk copy?
—I don't know about the disk copy, says Damian. And—(he refers to the budget)—Larson's the writer.
—Fucking Larson.
She joggles her drawer open and fishes around in the files. Somewhere she's got a list of the writers' phone numbers. It wouldn't be the first time someone's called Larson up this late and made him come out with a copy of his story on disk.
—Find out about that disk copy, she says.
—Anyone seen Larson's disk?
Tudorman, on his way to his station, stops behind her and pokes her in the back of her neck with a plastic ruler.
—I hear you've fondled Larson's disk on occasion, he says, his voice jovial with naughty euphemism.
—Har har, she says. Fuck off.
Tudorman shrugs and continues on.
—Don't make me have to call him, she shouts. I hate calling up the writers.
—I'm looking, says Damian.
She comes up out of the files and types randolph again just to see. Nothing, of course, the same error message as before, superimposed over the same zoned field of nothing. She sits there, fingers hovering over the keyboard; she waits for a word from Damian that does not come. She looks into the blankness and bites her cuticle absently and thinks of this young achiever, J____ Randolph, a woman whom she knows next to nothing about. She thinks about the things she doesn't know. She imagines what it must be like to achieve something, to do something that gets the paper interested; she imagines what she would do next if she had just completed an achievement like that one. The future could take any form. And she sits there. What do you want her to do now? Is this the moment she should make up her mind to quit? Or should she go into the files, get the number, get on with the work of the night? You're working this, and for a long time you only have her sitting there, hands over the keyboard, thinking. I don't remember what you thought you were doing anymore.
And then: her hands move. She clears the error message, stares into the blank region where the story should be. Am I having her do this? I must be: I am in charge of every detail. The computer's white hum. Banter of the co-workers. Every bit of electricity that moves in her brain and takes the shape of words. I am not quite making it all up as I go along, but I am remembering these things out of the darkness, one at a time. See them again: hum, chatter, thoughts.
See this: she moves her hands. She types in a woman's name that she will not remember in a few years. She types a lead sentence, she thinks about the information from the budget, whatever it was—I almost have it—this woman, Randolph, has designed something, a tool, a bicycle, something for disabled people—whatever it was, she molds that information into a lead, and types it in—and the next thing that happens is she enters into a giddy moment: a part of her brain has forgotten how newspapers are supposed to work, and this part imagines that the missing details are not a problem. She gives herself permission to make all of those details up. A decision rises from a hollow space in the back of her brain: the decision to create a woman up out of nothing, to sculpt a woman, an ideal woman, out of darkness before the papers hit the doorsteps in the morning.
But now I am having her stand here and look out the window at the afternoon light glaring off of a hundred windshields. The sun has moved into the right position for this moment to come. No, back: she finishes typing her sentence, her fiction, and she speaks it under her breath, the sound of the name of a woman she does not know is in her mouth, and she almost thinks she can get away with it. But Damian is calling her from his desk—we need to get the story, I think, he is saying. You'd better call Larson, he is saying. We need to get that story.
I have the things I want for myself. I am successful and happy. I am at the window and the world beyond is complete and in place and nothing is missing.
You will find the story. It won't be hard, really: you will just end up calling Larson, and he will fax a copy of it in. You will type it into the computer the way it is supposed to be, making double-sure to get all the facts right, and everything will make it to the printer on time. In the morning people will open their papers and find the world pictured correctly there.
I know who I am and I can see who I am going to be.
You will drive home, bleary as the sun rises. Another day: carrying you forward into the future you end up with. Through the windshield you will watch colors come out of the darkness. New light and the songs on the radio will outline you; they will trace your body, your face, your skin and clothes. They will coat your contours a million times each second, repeatedly making you real.