The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  I chance a look at my sister. Is she onto me?

  “Think about it,” Jessica goes on. “Before she hired you, she actually told her followers she was going on hiatus, right?” she asks. “And then it was only when there was fan pushback on that hiatus that she hired you to fill in for her. And of all the people in the world she could have hired, she picked you, who dislikes social media consumers in general and internet influencers especially.”

  “Maybe so, but I wouldn’t tell her those things,” I say, because it is true.

  “But you don’t have to,” she says. She sounds exasperated with me, and I suppose I can’t blame her for that. “It’s obvious in everything you do and say. And besides,” Jessica goes on, “you don’t really like anyone, do you? Why hire a misanthrope to manage the expectations of half a million people?”

  “I must interrupt here,” I say. “I do like you. I also like the innkeeper, Cary, and Tim here. That’s three people I like.”

  “Thank you,” says Tim. “I like you too.” He smiles his nice smile at me. His teeth are very bright against his lips. I hope I’m not fetishizing him due to innate racial bias implicit in my being raised white in our bigoted society, but the man really is quite attractive.

  “Three people out of what?” asks Jessica. “Everyone you’ve ever met? I mean, I really want to know.”

  I reflect. “Well, I don’t like my coworkers. They’re emotional all the time, which is counterproductive in our workplace, and I’m supervised by a half wit who is obsessed with the honest expression of feelings.”

  “Sounds awful,” says Jessica. It’s sarcasm, I’m very sure.

  “And my mother doesn’t like me terribly much. Obviously that doesn’t lead to fond appreciations.”

  “Obviously,” says Tim.

  “And you never talk to Mom’s sisters,” says Jessica. “Or my dad.” She raises her eyebrow at me as if to say, See?

  “There’s nothing wrong with your dad,” I say. “Except that he’s not my dad, who I like very much. There’s a fourth person: Dad. And I have a friend in the valley with several young kids, Michelle, who I’ve known since college,” I exclaim. “Voilà. Two Friends, Two Family Members, and one Virtual Stranger.” I gesture to Tim, wobbling on my bike. “An entire social circle.”

  “Am I in Friends or Family?” she asks.

  “Family, of course. Cary is my other friend.”

  “The guy that owns the inn?” she asks. “You’ve known him for, like, a week.”

  “Long enough,” I say. “I have a recurring note in my calendar to send him a birthday card every year. Our friendship is secure.”

  Jessica laughs at me and says, “The defense rests. No internet influencer who wanted to keep up the status quo would hire you to ghost post.”

  Well, I think. That is certainly in line with my experience.

  “I tend to agree with Jessica here,” says Tim. “You have an authoritarian and explicit way of speaking that doesn’t appeal to just anyone.”

  “Thank you,” I say. Tim is such a nice guy. “So your hypothesis is that Mia desired to somehow change the tone or trajectory of her internet presence,” I begin.

  “Which is why she hired you,” supplies Jessica.

  I say nothing to that, because the lie is starting to close in on me, and I don’t intend to help it along. “Pressing on,” I say. “You theorize that Mia wanted to change in the way that Tucker wanted her to change, and so she and Tucker should in fact be reunited? Is that the operating theory here?”

  “Yes,” says Jessica.

  “I might further add that, in that case, perhaps it is not within the terms of your employee contract to keep them apart,” says Tim. “Or the terms of your contract as a member of a society that generally values relationships and connection.”

  I inhale and think this through. On one hand, if we do nothing, Mia is about to find out how incredibly and completely hacked she has been, and that may cause her some distress, to put it mildly. Such distress may bring harm to my real employer, Pictey, financially, and to her followers, emotionally.

  Or . . . it may cause a big public wedding, as all parties were originally promised. Hm.

  Further, it is my understanding that being the bride in a big public wedding is a source of joy for many women, although to me it sounds about as much fun as doing this exact bike ride, only naked.

  “There remains the fact that I posted something written out of frustration that may completely end Mia’s career as an influencer,” I say. “Don’t I at least have the responsibility to take that down?”

  “I think if you leave it up, she’ll fire you,” says Jessica.

  “Understandably,” adds Tim. “However, if you take it down, you’ll also be taking down the very interesting conversation that has built up as a result of the comment. Many people have things to say on the subject of social media and mental health, it seems. They also are staunch defenders of the ancient tradition of meditation. Of all the parties in play, I’d say meditation is the real winner in this debate.”

  “Are you actually reading the @Mia&Mike feed right now?” I ask. “As we cycle?”

  “Well, of course,” he says. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to follow this conversation. And Jessica already told me she preferred it to my discussion of the geologic time scale.”

  I frown at Jessica. She rolls her eyes back at me. “Well,” I say, twisting slightly toward Tim again, “I suppose Mia and Tucker are more pertinent in the moment, though nowhere near as interesting or as important as something like horsts.”

  Jessica just laughs. “Oh, Paige. Don’t ever change.”

  I think it may be too late. Something in me has changed. “I believe it’s time I stop posting for Mia,” I announce. “But I concur about letting Tucker plead his case to her directly, and damn the consequences. True love wins the day, and all that.”

  “Oh! Excellent! In that case, can we go to Vail?” Tim says excitedly.

  “No, Tim,” I say. “My crotch hurts. Also I’d like to clean up some digital fingerprints, just to avoid future issues for me—and Mia, of course.”

  “Understood. To the fastest Wi-Fi in the West,” he announces. “To sweep it all under the rug!”

  MIA

  At around eight months after his diagnosis, Mike started to hide from me. I had just gotten him a new antler—his favorite thing to chew—and he took it in his mouth, and instead of chewing it on the floor right in front of me, he went to the open closet in my bedroom and put it right under his nose and lay down. I called the vet, and she bolstered his pain meds and told me this might mean it was going to soon be his time. Then his nine-month x-rays came back, and the cancer had spread. I called the vet at U of M, and she told me to get myself ready.

  Every day I woke up and told myself to make it Mike’s best day. The studio deal had been inked, and I was able to work from home most of the time. I could take him out in his wagon all day many days, working from a coffee shop, rejoicing in Wi-Fi and my cell phone and the freedom they allowed me. Mike could lie in the padded bed of the wagon and meet dozens of people each day and receive pets and praise for being such a good dog from everyone who passed. In the evening after work he could sit with his head in my lap and breathe loudly in unison with me as we watched TV and talked over the day. He still wagged.

  When he woke me to carry him down from bed in the middle of the night so he could walk himself back into the closet to hide, I knew it was time. I went into the closet and sat down with him and promised him comfort. It was late, and the hours were long. I asked him about his wishes. I told him I wouldn’t let him be in any more pain. Did he want to be buried? Cremated? What would give him the most peace? I lay down next to him and cried and vowed to him that it wouldn’t hurt. Through my tears I tried to thank him. I tried to make sure he knew how grateful I was. As morning drew nearer, he lifted his head and looked me in the eyes where I lay curled around him, careful not to touch where it might hurt but unable to
put any space between us. He put his nose forward a few inches until it was touching mine. “Mike,” I begged him, “please don’t go.”

  He licked my tears off my face. “Mike,” I said. “Mike.”

  At seven a.m., I called my vet’s home number and told her it was time. She drove over, and he stood up on three legs and wagged his tail when she came inside. Was it too soon? I asked her. If he was still wagging, was it too soon? She shook her head and told me, “When he is still wagging is the kindest time.”

  She wrapped us up on the sofa, with him shaking in my arms, and told me gently that I needed to stop crying and try to be calm. I needed to think of his favorite place and to talk to him about it in the happiest way I could. I said in a pinched, wet voice, “He’s my best friend,” and the vet said, “I know. He knows. Take a breath and tell him about his best day.”

  I looked at Mike, and he was saying with his eyes, I trust you. And I whispered to him, as clearly as I possibly could, “Let’s go back to the old studio together. I’ll teach a slow-flow class, and you’ll be my special guest. You can walk on any mat you like. Everyone will stop to pet you when you come by, even if they’re supposed to be in a balance pose. You can lead the ending, and everyone will come up before they even put away their props and say, ‘What a good dog. What a cute good dog,’ and give you lots of pets and let you lick their sweaty hands.”

  I took a breath, and it wobbled a bit. I sternly told myself, Do this well, Mia. Do it bravely. I swallowed some tears. “When the class is over,” I said to him, “we’ll go to the park. The one by the water, where you can put your toes in the ocean. I’ll take your longer leash, and you can go out in the waves a little and let them lift you up and put you back down, over and over again. I don’t have anywhere else to be. You can take as long as you like. When you’re done bobbing, you can come with me into the shade, and we’ll read together, and I’ll let you lie down on the top of the picnic table, even if we get judgmental looks. If you roll over, I’ll rub your tummy as long as you like, even if it’s still wet.”

  I felt the vet touch my shoulder and say gently, “Ok. He’s at peace now.” Those words, they were the exact same ones they’d used at the hospital when Andy had let go at the end. The pain broke through then, and all the streams of my grief tangled into one.

  “I love you, Mike,” I told him. “You’re my best friend.”

  “He knows,” said the vet. “You both did very well.”

  I let my shaking body fold over his still one and gave myself over to the tears at last. I remember now that Mike’s weight on my lap felt no different than it had one thousand other times we’d sat here together. But this time was the last time. Mike was gone, and I was alone.

  The class goes ok. Fine, really. I try to stay in the moment, be present with the students, who have no idea who I am, beyond their substitute yoga teacher. They advance along at the right speeds. Someone finds a peak pose for the first time. Stuff like that used to light me up, long ago. Now I feel like my lights are on the fritz, up, down, up again. I’m aglow over a hammock, snuffed out over a mantra. At least with my phone there was a constant dim glow in front of me all the time, a translucent curtain of blue light in front of the world. I’m learning that when I was posting, I had a way to understand what was happening in my life, only a few steps removed from it actually happening. I’d post it, and when the caption was written, that was the story of the event, even if the event was just lunch. If I posted lunch, that meant I’d enjoyed lunch, and it was nourishing or comforting or refreshing or whatever it was. Now lunch is lunch. I taste it instead of telling about it. It happens when I eat it, and it’s over when it’s done. It doesn’t live on in the feed. It doesn’t garner ten thousand likes.

  That’s all well and good for lunch. But what about when this woman comes in and gets into bow pose the first time and doesn’t hurt herself and doesn’t strain and beams the whole time? How do we commemorate that? Doesn’t that deserve a thousand likes? Shouldn’t that achievement have a story?

  Nicola comes into the studio after class. I am rolling out my IT bands, which are tight from lots of hiking and not much by way of side planks. She gestures to the roller and says, “I read that those are bad for you in Yoga Journal.”

  “Well,” I say, searching for grace and wondering if it turned off with my phone, “thank you for having them in your studio anyway.”

  She doesn’t respond, saying instead, “Are you some kind of internet celebrity? I thought you said you don’t have a phone.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t. Not at the moment. Hiking accident.”

  “Someone posted about you on Facebook,” she says. “My phone is ringing nonstop. Can you do a second class tonight? We have a six-forty-five power flow.”

  I cringe. Power flow is often code for less yoga and more crunches. In fact, the studio I once took so much pride in now offers a power flow class, in which the students perform endless sets of “yoga burpees.” Standing mountain pose, forward fold, jump back to plank, jump back to standing forward fold, mountain pose, in quick succession. I do not like teaching those classes but used to do it anyway, because the endorsement money would be the actual point.

  But there’s no endorsement money here, and I’m so glad of it. Today, I’m just a yoga teacher.

  “I would be happy to teach an Ashtanga class instead,” I say. “It’s sweaty and fast.”

  “Sure. Whatever,” says Nicola. “As long as there’s music. Actual music.”

  Apparently my bells-and-chimes soundtrack wasn’t doing it for Nicola. “Got it. Actual music,” I say. “I think your students will enjoy it.”

  Nicola coughs. “Why are you subbing at my studio if you’re so famous?”

  “That’s a fair question,” I say. I don’t answer it. “I’m going to go meet a friend now.” I stand up. Dewey and I made plans to meet for a drink and a bite at the local distillery after class, but if I’m going to teach Ashtanga, I’m going to need to skip anything fermented. My body made it through the last class just fine, but the next will be hard, no matter what I do. We may have to move our meal to the sandwich shop nearby. I think of texting Dewey. I’m still not used to the logistics of life without my phone. I wonder if I ever will be.

  “Can I use your phone?” I ask Nicola, with dread.

  She sighs heavily. “Go ahead.”

  “And your phone book?” I ask.

  She looks at me like I grew a third head. “You mean my computer? Yes. Fine. Help yourself.”

  At the front desk she logs me in and pulls up a browser. “I’ll be back in five minutes. I have to go change the class name on the chalkboard,” she tells me and steps outside to the front walk, where a sandwich board waits. When she’s gone, I run my fingers over the keyboard, google the number of the distillery, and confuse the hell out of the woman at the desk there when I call and ask to speak with a customer. Finally Dewey picks up. I ask him to meet me at the Sleepy Bear, hang up, and look at the computer again. It’s the first time I’ve been on the internet in more than a week. Nicola isn’t back in the studio yet. I decide to check my email.

  The load is insanely slow. Finally the inbox comes up, and to my shock, I have 4,200 unread messages. Four thousand two hundred emails! That is a lot even for me. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is causing this, but I don’t want to know either. Even a glance at the first two subject lines freaks me out. One is Marty shouting at me in all caps, another is a sponsor re: “intentions for partnership,” and the next few subject lines are just as grouchy, though I don’t know the senders. My heart starts racing, and sweat beads up on the back of my neck. My throat feels tight. My stomach clenches. I log out as quickly as possible, try to shake away the very memory.

  “I didn’t see that,” I tell myself. “That never happened.” I get up and start to head to the coffee shop so I can meet Dewey and have a sandwich and pretend that I never touched that computer, wasn’t even tempted.

  But I did chec
k it, and I can’t unsee what I saw. Now I know what happens when I’m offline this long. Everyone is furious. Everyone wants my head.

  As my mom would say, to hell with that. To hell with “everyone.” I don’t need them anymore. I just need my quirky mom, her neighbors up the road, a good class, a decent mountain. I am freed from the tyranny of the like button. And now that I am, I know going back online, at least as I did before, will never be a possibility.

  PAIGE

  We get back into town around four p.m. I steer us to the Sleepy Bear immediately. Tim takes the bikes back on our behalf, promising to return, and I find to my surprise that I hope he does. Two friends, two family members, and one virtual stranger, I think. Even in this strange moment where the hornet’s nest has been well and truly stirred, I find myself hoping to add the virtual stranger in question to my veritable panoply of new connections.

  But I’ve got to start cleaning up my tracks, and time is of the essence. My personal laptop is in the trunk as always, and it boots up with a happy tune, and I start taking some general anonymity precautions that I’ve ignored entirely up to now. I triple-check photo metadata, look up locations tagged, and congratulate myself on paying cash at almost all the places we’ve shopped or eaten. While Jessica is in the bathroom, I delete every single last mention of the Evergreen Inn. I know thousands of people saw those posts, but when Mia finds out what happened and reports it, Pictey probably won’t do too much historical reconstruction right off the bat. They certainly won’t go looking around their own company-issued laptops unless forced, because they won’t want to find anything there.

  They’ll be mostly concerned with the very out-of-character post from this morning. And that post, happily, came from my youngest virtual private network, one that shares an IP address with a Lowe’s home-improvement store in San Antonio. By way of my pants. What a ridiculous mistake.

  When Jessica comes back from the bathroom, she’s got an enormous grin on her face. It’s the biggest expression I’ve seen from her since she got a pair of diamond earrings from Mom last Christmas. Two pairs, actually, because I gave her mine on the spot. My ear piercings grew over before I was twenty, and I have been giving my mom back gifts of earrings ever since.