by Jason Letts
Boarding the plane took forever, but I endured and found myself on a jet staring out the window as the city of Austin shrunk beneath me. So many yellow lights clustered together as if the plane was spewing out stardust.
I felt relieved to be leaving Austin, which I don’t think I could’ve stayed in for another minute, but the thought of reaching New York filled me with dread as well. I was under no illusions that things would be much better for me there, but there would be familiar faces who could help me get through it when I finally took a glimpse into the world’s never-ending discourse online. Whether Keenan would be one of them was another story.
So I tried to enjoy my feeling of limbo as much as I could. The lights were quickly turned off and the people seated near me weren’t obtrusive or obnoxious. Most were just trying to get any rest they could. Miraculously not a crying baby could be heard anywhere. It gave me a few moments to wonder how it could’ve all turned out this way and if I should’ve even come to Austin in the first place.
I wasn’t going to back down from fighting for the things I believed in, but big festivals and ostentatious shows weren’t my thing. They were too impersonal. I got to talk on stage to a lot of people, but I’m not sure that even one of them heard me. If TedTalks called, I’d tell them to dress a seal in a mid-thigh dress and have everybody come see that.
I’m not sure if I got any sleep, but somehow daylight started to filter through the window and the plane began its descent. I got a good glimpse of New York down below, and despite how I’d felt earlier I grew increasingly optimistic about being back. That feeling only grew as I disembarked from the plane and stepped outside, which while colder than Austin by far was unmistakably a sign that spring was underway.
It was early in the morning and the entire day was ahead of me, one I could have to myself since no one at Mouse Roar was expecting me in until tomorrow since I’d paid for my flight out of pocket (OK, Mastercard’s pocket). But I had a feeling of dogged perseverance that I should just charge through everything ahead of me without wasting time sitting around, so I didn’t even stop at my apartment and went right in to work.
The trouble with my drive for vengeance was that there was no one to direct it to. In the rearview mirror, Andrew was now just some underling of the South by Southwest festival who didn’t matter. Darla and Girl Code probably would’ve loved it if I created some publicity for them by badmouthing her on the Internet, making total silence the least fun but most effective means of attack. And going after all of the Internet chatterboxes laughing at me wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
Short of doing anything illegal the best revenge was going to be just generally being awesome.
There were some surprised looks from the staff as I emerged from the elevator and strolled past the desks with a few quick greetings here and there. I arrived a little over an hour after the workday began. My eyes immediately drifted over to Keenan’s office, where the door was closed. After sitting down at my desk and frittering away five minutes looking over our websites and sales numbers during my absence, I abruptly got up and went over to it.
My knocks went unanswered.
“He said he has a dentist appointment this morning,” said Lena, who appeared next to me with raised eyebrows and a demure shrug.
“Hey,” I greeted her, putting my arm around her shoulders for a quick squeeze. “Must be nice to get to skip out on work to attend to your teeth.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to get in until later. What are you doing back so soon?” Lena asked tentatively, giving away that she already knew the answer.
“Do you want to sit down for a minute?” I gestured to my office. She nodded and we went to sit down with the glass office door closed. A mousey redhead, kind to a fault, Lena was someone who I thought never got the recognition she deserved. She had an unassuming, nonjudgmental nature that made her a great confidant.
“The truth is I just felt like I had to get out of there as fast as I could. I still haven’t turned my phone on or looked at my email. How bad is it?” I asked.
Lena seemed to wilt in front of me at the obligation of giving me bad news.
“To be fair, I think people are laughing at both of you. What you have to remember is that nobody who saw this on the webcast or the video segments is seeing you as a person. It’s like a sitcom with two people snapping back and forth at each other,” she said.
I nodded, grateful for her attempt to relieve the sting of being mocked across the Internet but at the same time concerned that I wasn’t getting the full story.
“And what about the people who do know me as a person? You saw it, right? What did you think?”
These questions were obviously paining Lena, and I promised myself I wouldn’t ask any more. After some hesitation, she gave me a sympathetic look and took a deep breath.
“You let her get to you. Even after she instigated the fight, it was your reaction that escalated the whole thing. It would’ve been uncomfortable to be accused of sleeping with someone you’re sitting next to in a professional setting and ignoring it, but instead of losing a little dignity you kept upping the ante and lost a lot.”
I shuddered as she said it because I knew she was giving me the unvarnished truth. It hurt to face my own fault in what had happened, but trying to deny it wasn’t going to help.
“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t handle it well. None of any of that should’ve happened. I don’t know what I was thinking. Let me ask you something else though. How have things been here? Managed without me just fine?”
Lena brightened at this softer line of questioning.
“We’re chugging along and the numbers keep ticking up. I know Mr. Roche is always looking for some way to trigger exponential growth, but slow and steady is going to win the race for him. We don’t need a Japanese partner or anybody really.”
I smiled in agreement, glad at least that nothing in the way of a disaster had been notable enough for her to mention as soon as I got back. But in all honesty it wasn’t the business that I was most concerned about.
“And how about Keenan?”
“He seems less tired now,” she said.
It felt awkward for me to ask her the question I really wanted an answer to, but there wasn’t going to be any other way for me to find out.
“You didn’t happen to see him with anyone, did you? Picking him up from work or whatever,” I said, and Lena’s face took on a rose tint as though I’d asked if she’d seen him naked.
“No,” she squeaked. “I’ve got to get back to my desk before the system explodes.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, giving her another smile as she went.
If Lena had seen Cassie or some other woman with Keenan, her response would’ve been ten times more uncomfortable and excruciating. As it was, even if Keenan hadn’t met with her at work didn’t mean he didn’t see her at all.
I’d been dragging out the agony of avoiding the connected world long enough, and now it was time to pull the band-aid off as quickly as possible. If I got through it all at once it might not seen so bad, and then I could move on.
I turned my phone on and opened my email simultaneously, and then proceeded to open up some tabs on my computer for sites like Wired that might veer into festival gossip. There were over a dozen texts and about twenty missed calls. The only one that stood out as being important was from my sister Lindsay, who with uncharacteristic brevity just told me to call her as soon I could. It was urgent. Although I appreciated her concern about my public folly, talking to her about it would only make me feel like more of a complete mess.
To my surprise there was nothing in my email other than usual work-related chatter that I could easily dispense with. I started to notice that I hadn’t run across anything from Keenan yet other than that one missed call right before I shut my phone off. On Facebook there were a ton of tags, many by strangers but also some by friends, on videos showing the exchange. It took a while to untag myself from them, but along t
he way I couldn’t help but see some of the comments. People seemed to really love the old man at the end, who was becoming an Internet sensation in his own right.
There were countless comments from men that amounted to how a threesome with Darla and I would be even better than being with twins because after sex they could kick back and watch us fight. My self-restraint began to wane and I found myself reading more comments, finding some that were truly disgusting and repulsive. It made me sick and I finally rounded out the entire tour by Googling myself, finding more websites where little articles had been written about me, many with click-bait style titles.
The most surprising was called “Schizophrenic Woman Faces Reflection and You Won’t Believe What She Does.” Someone had edited the video so that it looked like only Darla and I were there. Our clothes had been edited to be more similar. They’d taken my exit and used it at the beginning to make it seem like I was sitting in front of a mirror and having it out with myself. Some people had too much time on their hands.
It turned out that was only the beginning of the ridiculous. There were Youtube parodies, some with live actors replacing us and some set to music. I became so engrossed in the astonishing variety of what people had done with this exchange that I didn’t even realize Keenan had returned from his appointment until he was standing in front of my door, watching me through the glass.
Startled, I donned a sheepish grin and waved for him to come in. Somehow a week away had restored my previously numbed appreciation of how handsome he was. His unkempt brown hair, stubble that at the moment was closer to being whiskers that meant he was likely to shave the next day, and of course those green eyes that felt like looking into the nexus of life and death.
There was a blizzard of possibilities of what he would shoot at me first, whether it be for sleeping with his college roommate, making an unprofessional spectacle of myself at a major event, or more about the deal with Polling and Interlink House. Even bringing up the simple fact that I shouldn’t have been here this day would’ve made sense.
“How about we go to lunch?” His simple question and the carefree way he asked it were disarming.
“Spent too much time in the office today?”
“The only way I can stand going to the dentist is if I reward myself after with a chili dog.”
We left the office together, but from the direction Keenan took I could tell he didn’t have any of the nearby places in mind. Instead we hopped on the train and went uptown a ways, getting off near the park, where the last minuscule deposits of snow remained. Bare trees and bushes stretched up toward the sun, gathering energy to fill themselves with leaves.
Keenan wasn’t the type of guy to avoid talking about tough subjects, but I appreciated that he wanted to get well clear of anyone else in the office before broaching them. The walls of his office were just not thick enough to conceal even modest yelling or other less-modest outbursts. We stopped at a stand, where I got a tofurkey dog, and we walked into the park near the pond where ducks were paddling around.
There were a few couples meandering around, but seeing them only reminded me of the anguish Keenan and I had before I left, and I was under no illusion that it was a figment of my memory that couldn’t return in a jiffy.
“You’ve got a little chili sauce on your cheek,” I said to him as we turned a corner. His eyebrows raised in alarm.
“That’s got to get back between my teeth where it belongs,” he said. We kept walking without talking, and it started to make me feel anxious that I didn’t have a clue how bad he was going to react yet.
“What’s weird is I used to be hyper focused about my teeth and would go to the dentist every other month for a cleaning. But this was my first time going in two years,” he said.
“Are you still drinking NyQuil to get to sleep every night?”
He looked away from me.
“No, I switched to ether. I got the idea from Michael Cane in Cider House Rules,” he said. Normally references like that would’ve gotten a chuckle out of me, but I was too apprehensive for it. My feet couldn’t take another step without facing it.
“If you want to make a list of all of the things I have to apologize for, I can get it over all at once,” I said.
Keenan stopped to look at me. His chili dog was gone and he folded up the little wrapper and stuffed it in his pockets.
“Do you know what I saw when I saw you on stage? And I mean both times, not just during the discussion segment.”
“No, what?”
“I saw myself. It was like I was back in that auditorium when Connoisaurus made their announcement that they were going to destroy my business. It was an ambush then, and I felt like that’s what happened to you. Maybe it wasn’t really intentional on anybody’s part, but you were set up. The cards were stacked against you. Other people were not going to play along with what you had in mind. I know it all too well,” he said.
I kicked the gravel on the ground a little.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes,” I said. It was something I’d just always known that if I was hard on myself other people would be quicker to forgive. I needed the oldest trick in my book to pay off one more time.
“How was Seth?” His question and the look that came with it were barely able to conceal some hostility behind.
“You mean…?” I didn’t know what I could possibly tell Keenan that he could stand to hear. Seth was more athletic, more impatient, less sensitive, less subtle in his enthusiasm. They were both well-built, large men, but they carried themselves very differently. Keenan never felt like he needed to show it off or let it dominate his appearance, but Seth never shied away from trying to make an impression about his force.
“Did he seem in a good state? Was he still living off of cheeseburgers, chasing girls, and constantly talking about shooting things? Ohio State was a big school, but there were a few times where we got out on some excursions and he made some hardcore hunters look like wannabes. I guess it shows you how little I paid attention to your conference. I had no idea that he was going to be a part of it or even what he’s been doing since I last saw him at graduation. We were only freshmen roommates, and by the end of our senior year I could barely remember his name,” he said.
“He seemed fine,” I said. “He’s running a cryptocurrency business, as you must’ve learned from watching the conference replays, and is doing pretty well with it. But, look, if I’d had a clue you knew him at all I wouldn’t have said word one to him.”
I watched Keenan twist his neck in discomfort, but he swallowed whatever he was feeling and took a deep breath.
“I don’t have any claims about you or what you do now, outside of work at least. I can’t say I’m happy about it. It doesn’t make any difference to me,” he said, which aggravated me. It was impossible for it to both make him unhappy and not make any difference to him.
“Have you gone back to seeing Cassie? I thought you said she was shallow and after your money.”
Keenan tilted his head down and looked up at me.
“We’re not back together, but it’s a little more complicated than that. When we were together we both took an interest in this little art gallery over in Brooklyn. I ended up making an investment in it and she still spends some time working there. Lo and behold there was actually a theft and it’s sort of left the place in dire straits. So I’ve had to be involved in sorting that out with her.”
“Oh, that sounds pretty sucky,” I said with sophistication and grace. After my conversation with Cassie earlier in the year, I wouldn’t have put it past her to exploit any kind of situation to gain leverage over Keenan.
The obvious remaining question was where all this left us, but after Dr. Alex’s prescription I knew I couldn’t just abandon my say in defining our new situation. What I wanted was for him to desperately profess how much he wanted to be with me, but from the look on his face I knew that wasn’t going to happen. The cloud of how things were before was tangible between us
.
“I guess that makes us both on the market and available,” I said, satisfying myself that I’d made a statement even though there was definitely a question in there. Keenan washed over me with his eyes, and I could tell he was feeling me out over how much I meant it. He made the subtlest nod.
“Coworkers then. And friends. If you know any intelligent and attractive young women, you can point them in my direction,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll definitely do that,” I said, my words as hollow as a jack-o-lantern.
With our personal lives cast apart, we immediately went back to what we had in common, work. Once we’d resumed walking for a few minutes, he glanced over at me.
“So what’s the story with Gary Polling?”
I took a deep breath and nodded, but in my head I was weighing what I would tell my boss versus what I’d tell my boyfriend about what had happened. There were some parts of how this sausage was made that he didn’t need to be burdened with.
“I didn’t think it was going to work out, but somehow it did. He was a nice enough guy until we started talking business, and that’s when he became obstinate and really kind of offensive. It wasn’t easy, but I landed a deal with him for our clicks. But there was a big catch,” I said.
Keenan squinted at me.
“What’s the catch?”
“We’ll get millions of dollars worth of impressions at a very cheap rate, but I had to bribe him with a Mercedes for it. If he follows through with a contract for a year we have to buy him a car costing around sixty thousand,” I said, watching Keenan cringe. “Believe me when I say that there was no other way to get any kind of concession out of him.”
The grumbling was enough to startle some nearby ducks.
“If the numbers are right and he delivers, then if he wants a car rather than the cash we can do it,” he said at last.
“That’s what I thought,” I said, feeling a little relieved.
We returned to the office and I felt like I’d gotten off easy considering everything that had happened. The only thing that bothered me was an isolated feeling I got as I watched Keenan head back into his office and close the door, knowing closed doors from him were all I had to look forward to. That bothered me, and so did the realization that I’d be spending the night back in my loathsome, dingy apartment.
