to be in Facebook pictures.
Like I said, more or less ignored.
The Internet has a funny way of sucking you in. I looked up at the time, and two hours had somehow passed while I’d wasted them looking at photos. It made me feel a little sad, looking at their happy lives together with friends and family and loved ones.
I clicked over to the last one, looking away fro a second as the cat starting bugging me again, another little turd by the desk leg.
“Godda…”
There. I stared at the computer screen, and in the last photo, dated four years ago. Her hair was different, longer, and I could tell it was older and pre-good cell phone cameras, probably an old digital camera image or a scanned physical photo. It was her, Jane.
I looked at the caption for a tag or link or whatever to lead me to her profile. There was nothing though, not even a descriptive caption for the picture, unlike most of the other ones I’d been scrolling through, some of which had whole paragraphs describing everything in mind-numbing num-nut detail.
Right then, my phone chirped. It was a text message from Kathy, telling me that she’d asked Elle, who apparently “lost” Jane’s number and that Jane was bad news anyway, and refused to elaborate more. The phone chirped again, with Kathy telling me that maybe I shouldn’t drink so much and then go home with random girls who I knew nothing about, because apparently Elle was a very good judge of character.
Interesting.
-
03
Actually, as interesting as the situation might seem, it really wasn’t in the long run. Maybe Kathy and Elle didn’t want me talking to this girl because of something she said I’d done or said that night. Maybe Elle really was a good judge of character and that this girl was bad news, someone for an innocent soul like me to stay away from.
While normally you’d feel a little hurt as a man thinking that a night of gin-fueled passion would be blown off that easily, I had to remind myself that not only was it gin-fueled, but even as my memories of that party and night slowly floated through the filter back into my head, I still couldn’t remember much about her or it. Clearly the universe had decided I just wasn’t meant to remember, understand, or enjoy the mental images
I went back to my desk, staring at the Jane girl’s picture on the computer screen. She was smiling broadly, the kind of look a summer day would bring out. I vaguely remembered her different, the eyes a little less bright, a little less openness in that face, in the smile. Time changes people.
She didn’t have the nose ring in this picture and her hair was longer. The background was of a city, I could see, and she was sitting outside at a restaurant or coffee shop. Whoever took the photo was right across from her.
Where was this taken? You couldn’t see anything in the background that could be recognized, besides the general layout of street to the side and some kind of buildings in the background. The tableware was vaguely visible, the usual white generic restaurant stuff. It could have happened anywhere, taken any time. The digital Facebook timestamp said it was three years ago, but it had to be a little older than that.
There was a note in the time stamp, light grey letters saying the photo had been edited a year and a half ago.
Alright, maybe that was interesting? Maybe someone had deleted something associated with the picture. In general, social media photos tend to be inundated with comments and connections, hotbeds of links to other places and people. Thinking on it, it seemed odd now that there was nothing, no automatic facial recognition or whatever pseudo-Orwellian thing that would go on with a photo like this in an Internet hole designed to connect and identify as many people as possible. No link or tag, nothing.
I looked at the pawn slip again, shoved it into the pocket of the shirt before I folded up the shirt and put it in a cardboard box under the desk. Just one of of those things, I guess.
The phone rang again. I swiped to answer. “Hello?”
“Hey, is this Lee…Ka, Kaporis?”
“Speaking.” Usually when a voice couldn’t say the name, it meant they were new clients, so I’d taught myself to keep the eye rolling and sighing to a minimum on the phone.
“I’ve uh, got a manuscript I was hoping to get looked at?” The tone was weird, and it threw me off, rubbed me the wrong way. It was the sound of someone trying to come off as more formal than they should, with a higher voice tone, a masquerade of education and responsibility.
“What agency are you at?” I went through the motions anyway, even though I had a feeling I knew where the call was going just on the voice alone.
“Huh?”
“Agency, you’re someone’s agent, right?”
“Oh uhm, yeah, yes, I’m with a new agency, just started up.” There, the crack in the mask again, and I allowed myself a sigh.
I had a little website on the Internet, advertising my proofreading, editing, and researching services, but for the most part my clients either came through the proofreader services and from word-of-mouth from publishers and book agents and website or magazine editors. Once in a while though, new and aspiring writers would find my contact information and try to reach out, thinking I could help fast-track them in some way towards literary stardom.
“Look man, just give up on this line, alright? I’m not buying it.”
“Sorry? Look, do you want my business or what?”
“Two hundred bucks a day, minimum three days’ worth of work for a novel, which I’m assuming this is,” I said in a flat tone. The numbers are what usually scare off the rank amateurs.
“No problem,” he said immediately. “So, when do we meet for…for me to drop off the, uh, the book?”
“Just email it to me, we’ll correspond on there, and I’ll call you back.”
“No, it’s uh, I mean, it’s a physical copy? I can’t mail it to you. Can you meet me in person? Today?”
At this point, there were enough alarm bells going off in my head to make me feel like a human smoke detector store right next to a burning building. Something was up with this. “You know what, sir? I’m sorry, I’m looking at my calendar, and I’m booked up.”
“What?”
“I can’t help you, but if you want I know a few good proofing agencies that you can…”
“This is bullshit! Are you kiddin’ me!” Now, the mask was totally gone, the tone deeper, the raging asshole right on the surface. I hung up as he was getting into whatever rant and rave he was starting up, put the phone down, and walked into the kitchen, kicking the coffeemaker into gear after dumping in a few scoops of some new stuff a friend had given me, tea and cocoa mixed into the coffee grounds. Whatever it was, I thought as the coffee brewed and I paced around, it smelled fucking amazing almost instantly. The cat had gotten up onto the little breakfast nook table I’d inherited and used as a catchall kitchen/front hall table, and was staring at me. No turds this time.
“Well, wasn’t that fucking weird?” I asked her, realizing how insane it sounded to speak out loud to her. She leapt down onto the floor and pounced like a kitten at my leg, trying to climb up my pants like a bear up a tree.
Most “aspiring writers” who managed to find me with that “look at my manuscript” shtick tended to be spineless nerds, so I was a little curious about this one. I jotted down the phone number and then put in a call to an old buddy, Pete Brooks.
Brooks was a writer, mostly cop and true-crime airport fare. Out of all the guys I went to college with trying to be writers, he was the least odious and the most successful.
“Lee?” Holy shit man, how are ya?” I probably hadn’t seen him in seven or eight years, but Brooks was one of those types who never let that bother them. I probably looked the same I did in college in his mind. More importantly, Brooks had actual connections. The last time we talked, I sort of remembered him bragging about cop and private eye acquaintances he used for research. I figured I could turn a “catching up” call into a “favor” one, so we took twenty minutes to see what the other was doing with li
fe.
“Look, Pete, I’m wondering since I got you on the phone, do you know anyone who could help me out? Like, with running phone numbers?”
He laughed, a deep honest laugh that I appreciated. He never laughed much when we were in school to ether, but when he did it was always a good sound. “Trying to stalk some girl?”
That hit a little too close to home, though I did try to laugh at it. “Well, more like some weirdo posing as a client giving me shit. You remember what a client is? Those of us with regular jobs have them.”
I hung up after Brooks got his laughs in and said he’d run the number by a cop friend. Sometimes, I helped to still talk to old friends from college who got successful.
After a few hours’ work, I fell down on the couch face-first. One of my current clients was an academia vanity press so the work was infinitely wordy. The other client was an ad agency and their word requirements, while on the other end of the spectrum, were just as insane. I lay there enjoying the fact that I didn’t have to stare at a computer screen or a printout for a minute. Even then though, I couldn’t let go of the call.
Yeah, it might have been weird that
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