Talk to Me

by John Kenney

  Ted nodded, a prosecutor who’d just gotten a witness to confess.

  “Why is that surprising, Ted?”

  “What else do you do, besides play squash? Do you talk about squash? Watch squash videos on YouTube? Is there a squash.com?”

  He wasn’t sure why he was asking these questions. He felt out of control. He kept nodding.

  Claire looked at him as if at a deranged man. She sighed deeply.

  “We do the things people do, Ted. We go for a coffee. We go for a walk.”

  “That sounds nice.” More nodding. Too much nodding. He felt it building. “What else? What other fun things? Movies? Do you go to the movies? Or plays? Or hotels? Do you screw at hotels?” He had not expected to say this but the line pleased him.

  Claire stared at Ted for a time. “Don’t engage,” the therapist had said. “Count to ten, chuckle to yourself at the words you want to say. Say them to yourself: prick, fuck-nut.” The therapist laughed. Claire did, too. The therapist had left her husband as well.

  Claire tried counting to ten but had only made it to four when the line came out.

  “We’ve done pretty much all of it,” Claire said.

  It was her tone that stopped Ted. Flat. Honest. Not intentionally cruel, but still. He thought he’d hit a winner over the net and she’d rocketed it right back over, straight down the line.

  Ted turned and walked across the kitchen, to the window by the back door. Bismarck thought it was time for a walk and scampered to Ted’s side. Ted looked down, patted her. She seemed disappointed and walked back to her spot. Ted had disappointed all of the women in the family.

  He looked out the window at the rain. Patches of frozen snow, hardened and dirt-covered, dotted the yards, the rain washing it away. Ted felt very tired suddenly, the fight seeming to go out of him.

  “Does Franny know?” he asked, still looking out the window.

  Claire had told Franny about a month ago, at a lunch they’d had in the city, Franny asking what had taken her so long, which precipitated an argument that ruined the meal.

  “Yes.”

  This wounded him, too. In another life, another universe, one where Ted was a good father and caring husband, this never happened. Or, if it does, his daughter calls him. In that world Ted and Franny are thick as thieves, best friends. Lunch once a week. Calls just to check in, for advice, to share a joke. Franny would have called. “Dad, we have to stop this affair. We have to keep the family together.” And Ted, magnanimous, would have planned a family getaway. The Sag Harbor house, maybe, before the season. Paris. The French Alps. A skiing holiday. Time together. Where have I gone wrong, Claire? Let’s never break up our little family or we will be lost.

  Ted hadn’t realized that he had been staring at a spot on the floor, a knot in the wood of the wide-planked oak floors. He was also scratching his head with both hands. He had been doing this for some time now. He looked at his wife and saw it on her face; she was over him. And this stunned him. Here he’d thought—and he wasn’t sure why—but he’d thought that the talk that evening would be just another fight, one of thousands, followed by their respective retreats, where Ted would heat up an artisanal burrito from Whole Foods, drink three glasses of Sancerre, and watch half of a Jason Bourne movie while Claire would order sushi, call her sister, and draw a bath. He thought she would admit to the affair but say it was over and that she really wanted Ted back. Hell, why choose happiness when you can choose thirty more years of fighting and being ignored?

  Ted wondered how he might report a story like this.

  TED: Our correspondent, Phil Barnes, is live on the scene in the Grayson kitchen. Phil, any sense of why this Ted Grayson fellow was so delusional?

  PHIL: It’s an enigma, Ted. Though he was a huge disappointment to both his wife and his daughter, withdrawing into his own world and caring little for others. Neighbors say he kept to himself. Colleagues had little to say about him except that he was a friendless, egotistical prick. His daughter, Franny, a journalist in her own right, said only that her father had, and here I quote, ruined her life. His wife, Claire, an extremely good-looking woman, has said that Grayson changed over the years. She also said he was a shockingly bad lover.

  TED: A pathetic man. Thank you, Phil. Phil Barnes, reporting live.

  Ted was thirsty. His throat hurt and he needed a glass of water.

  “What else?” he managed.

  “Do you really want to know, Ted? Or are you just being an asshole?”

  The way we talk to each other, in a marriage, a ruined marriage. A way we would never talk to another human being.

  “I want to know.”

  “We talk,” Claire said, voice a bit quieter, less defiant.

  Ted was looking at the sink and Claire saw him nodding slowly.

  “What about?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  She didn’t mean it to come out this way but it was reflexive, years of practice. She regretted the tone instantly, squeezing her eyes shut and clenching her jaw.

  Breathe, Claire.

  Ted went to the sink, turned on the tap, and put his mouth up to the end of the spigot. Then he stood and wiped his mouth on a dish towel. A ball of anger built in Claire’s stomach. A $500,000 kitchen renovation, open shelves, Simon Pearce glasses an arm’s reach away, and he has to drink like a pig at a trough?

  “Everything,” Claire said. “We talk about everything.”

  “Really?” Ted said, once again finding his thirteen-year-old-boy voice. “You talk about LeBron James and race relations in America and the concern over the renminbi?”

  And again, Claire wasn’t having it. Her voice remained calm.

  “We do, actually. He loves sports, cares deeply about social justice, and has clients in China.”

  Water dripped down Ted’s chin. He felt it would be unmanly to wipe it, though he wasn’t sure why he felt this. Once, a long time ago, Claire would have reached over and dabbed it, rolling her eyes at what a boy he was, finding it charming. Now the water on his chin repulsed her.

  “Is this really a surprise, Ted?” Claire asked.

  It was, but Ted said nothing.

  “We don’t talk. We don’t do anything. You don’t love me. And we stopped being husband and wife a long time ago.”

  His body tightened. He knew she was talking about sex. He’d assumed it wasn’t important to her anymore. The notion of her as a sexual being, with someone else, thrilled by someone else, made him weak.

  He was filled with embarrassment and rage. He was also surprised to find that he wanted to say Claire, please, I love you and I miss you but I’m lost inside and I don’t know how I got here and I desperately need your help. But that’s not what came out.

  “Well,” Ted began, unsure of where to go after that. “I hope you two are happy talking.”

  Claire stared at him. This petulance. How long had she put up with him? He drove her to these feelings, these awful, toxic feelings.

  “We’re happy doing a lot of things,” she said.

  Ted felt that he had long ago reached a point where he couldn’t be surprised. He had seen so much of life, so much pain and ugliness. But this shocked Ted to the point where he opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.

  How best to respond?

  She’d be expecting a blowup. Show class, Ted. Show some grace. Let her go. Surely after all this time together he wished her happiness. It didn’t take.

  He was staring at the pristine Carrara marble counter, the tulips in the glass vase, Claire’s phone next to them.

  Ted nodded slowly and, with a nimble quickness that recalled his days as a high school quarterback, scooped up Claire’s cell phone and sidearmed it through the kitchen window, a sharp, urgent cracking sound from the Marvin window ($3,500 per window and there were twenty-seven in the house) breaking
but not shattering, the phone exploding in two, like a space shuttle separating after liftoff, the disparate pieces coming to rest in a pile of dirty, mud-caked snow by the back door.

  Claire looked from Ted to the window and then back to Ted, yet seemed not at all surprised. She stared at him for a time and then held up her phone.

  “That was your phone, Ted.”

  All the news that’s not even remotely fit to print.

  High above Ninth Avenue, just north of Fourteenth Street, across from Google’s New York offices, in the former mixing and baking rooms of the National Biscuit Company, sit the impossibly hip offices of scheisse.com. Once, decades ago, in this same space, underpaid men and women with heavy accents, from Russia and Ireland and Italy and Poland, takers of long subway rides from the outer boroughs, lugged sacks of flour and baked saltines and Uneeda Biscuits twenty-four hours a day, food to show for their labors. Now, within the exposed brick walls hundreds of nearly identical-looking people in their twenties and thirties, from fine universities, posted their own kind of sustenance to the masses, an endless feed of insipid online drivel, a kind of visual and verbal vomit, under the guise of journalism.

  On the walls, high-resolution photos of Orson Welles’s character in Citizen Kane. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Peter Finch as Howard Beale, looking insane, from Network. Why it was just fictional characters no one ever questioned.

  And above it all, the scheisse mantra: NO RULES. JUST CLICKS.

  The stories on scheisse were the result of research that in some cases took almost thirty minutes, based, often, on reading something on another website and repackaging it. Story length usually topped out around two hundred words and almost all stories were accompanied by a link to a video, thereby allowing a fifteen-second commercial to run before it. Bylines claimed that twenty-six-year-olds with two months of writing experience were “senior political correspondents,” though most would be hard-pressed to tell you the meaning of the word “gerrymander.”

  The site had originally been called Gertrude&Alice, a small New York blog on culture, art, music, and the rich and famous in the 212 area code. It had been started by two women from Princeton, Upper East Side kids with connections. It was buzzy and hip, one of the early websites that generated notice. It also made money. Which attracted buyers, one of whom was the only son of a German industrialist, a thirty-four-year-old billionaire named Henke Tessmer.

  Henke bought the site, charming the women who started it, making them rich, and promising to keep the “mission” the same. He fired both of them within a week of taking over, several of the writers quitting in protest when Henke put up a giant poster of Virginia Woolf’s head rather expertly photoshopped onto Kim Kardashian’s body in the office. Thus was born scheisse.

  Henke’s mission in life was to shock. Nothing more. To shock in his appearance, his words, his actions. He spoke openly about his sexuality, flirting with women and men equally. “Gender is a construct of the West,” he liked to say. He would barge into the women’s room at scheisse to wash his hands. In the early days harassment suits were filed, settled, the employees long gone.

  He claimed he had gone to Oxford and done graduate work at the London School of Economics, though he also claimed to have quit because he was bored. He inhabited a world of half-truths and gauzy reality. When the spirit moved him, he said he’d also done graduate work at MIT, Stanford, and the Sorbonne, all of which he’d apparently quit. There was little the world could teach him.

  In almost every serious endeavor in life there are standard operating procedures. Not merely technical but moral, ethical. Law, medicine, journalism, plumbing. A code of conduct. A manual, codified over years of careful thought and experience. Henke did not hold to this worldview. He believed the world had changed in ways so radical that most people still hadn’t grasped them. That facts were dead. That today you could write and say anything you wanted. He believed the internet generation would write the rules as they went along. Had he been in Philadelphia in 1776, he would have said, “Fuck the Constitution. Let’s just see what happens.”

  This, he believed, was the essential difference between a place like scheisse and mainstream media. The old guard didn’t get it and they never would. Fake news? There was no such thing. There was only what you could get people to click on. End of story. Perfect example: a story recently about an intern at Procter & Gamble who, while working on the P&G product Dawn dishwashing liquid, posted a tweet that read, We’re going to war with Greece. Who’s with us? The poor kid’s autocorrect marring his thin resume for years to come. The typo was retweeted 1.5 million times in twenty-eight hours. Within three days, protests against the nation of Greece had broken out in a dozen cities around the world. Scheisse ran stories about P&G being a company that unfairly bullied a poor nation, knowing full well it was a typo. They stayed on the story for a week. The hits were spectacular.

  Now. Let’s talk about journalistic responsibility. The scheisse worldview assumed that everyone was an adult and as such had a responsibility to find the whole story. Scheisse had no interest in telling you the whole story and if you for some reason (say, the history of responsible journalism for much of the twentieth century) were under the impression that the words on the site were carefully chosen and vetted, reported, and sourced twice (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, etc.), then you were a fool. Because what you didn’t understand was the mission. The mission wasn’t to inform. The mission was to sell to advertisers. Click, friend, at your own peril. Clickeat emptor (Henke’s words).

  He’d caused a stir at a TED Talk last year (titled God is dead. And so is The New York Times) by saying nothing was out of bounds. He demanded that the TED audience suggest stories or images too far gone.

  Sex? Please.

  Private moments in one’s home that had nothing to do with news? Grow up. Everything is news.

  The Pope on the toilet? I would pay a million dollars for that photo.

  In his talk, Henke said, in part:

  “There is a quote that guides me. It was said by digital media thinker Danah Boyd. She said, ‘In the tech sector, we imagined that decentralized networks would bring people together for a healthier democracy. We hung on to this belief even as we saw that this wasn’t playing out. We built the structures for hate to flow along the same pathways as knowledge, but we kept hoping that this wasn’t really happening. We aided and abetted the media’s suicide.’ Now, I agree with every word except one. The last one. I would change the word ‘suicide’ to ‘rebirth.’ Mark this date. Remember this talk. Because you are alive at the birth of new media. Like any birth, it is messy. It screams and cries. It is afraid and cold. It knows nothing. Yet. But it will learn. It is the birth of an entirely new way of communicating. And I am not talking here about the digital age. That is a vehicle no different than the printing press and it bores me. I am talking of a far more profound shift in how we talk to each other, of what is allowable, of what is real and true. Because it is no longer the same. Empiricism is for dead men with beards in bas-relief on university library walls. I can prove or disprove anything. Because there are no more rules. No more guides. To some, it is profoundly disturbing. To me, to the people who work for me, it is liberating.”

  There was stunned silence, a few boos, and a smattering of confused applause. Wired magazine recently put Henke on its cover and called him the future of news.

  * * *

  • • •

  Burrowed in a far corner, a view of the Hudson River on one side, a wooden bookshelf she’d found at a flea market blocking her view of her colleagues on the other side, sat Frances Ford, née Frances Ford Grayson. Franny was a seasoned veteran at age twenty-seven. She was the head of features (stories that could run almost a thousand words as long as they had photos and accompanying video). She had decided a few years ago to refer to herself in print as Frances. Her mother and a few old friends were a
llowed to call her Franny. She’d dropped her surname, initially because she wanted to make her own career and later out of sheer rage.

  At present, Franny was trying to breathe. Her palms were sweaty. Her stomach nurtured a small bubble of tension. She wasn’t sleeping well or enough. Her diet lacked fruits and vegetables. She’d stopped going to SoulCycle and hadn’t played squash in months. Mostly she watched Netflix, ordered in sushi, and drank too much white wine.

  She was on deadline on a potentially large story. Or so said Henke. He’d texted Franny and several members of her team last night, late. Apparently, Salma Hayek had experienced a minor wardrobe malfunction at the opening of a new restaurant in Los Angeles, thereby exposing a portion of her nipple. The kids in editorial were blowing up the video—just four seconds—and creating a GIF. There was clearly a quarter inch of nip—so said an unscientific mini focus group of four scheisse employees. Franny knew the nip would play big and that they could milk it (ha!) for more than one story. Why not an additional story, and by “story” Franny meant a video compilation of “Best Nip Slips” in history?

  Franny was one of the original seven employees of scheisse. She had felt, at the beginning, anyway, that scheisse made a difference. She initially proposed longer pieces but they kept asking for shorter.

  Still, she felt that she and her colleagues were at the center of entertainment and fashion blogging, of infotainment, the physical and literal center of everything important and fun that was happening in the world.

  Did Franny really believe this? No. But it’s what she told herself. She also told herself that she’d get a real job once her life began. She would be changed by love, perhaps marriage, by happiness, large, elusive, cloud-like thoughts that seemed reachable for others. There would be dinner parties and children’s birthdays and the riches of life as seen in magazines, TV shows, and Subaru commercials. These images seemed to slip further away with each passing year, each empty hookup, each disappointing date, each late-night drink with like-minded friends whose cynical worldviews only confirmed that life sucked. This was not the plan.