Jeremy P. Bushnell

factchecking

after JorieGraham

(1stdraft begun: Jan 21, 1999)

(1stdraft completed: Mar 1, 1999)

Itis not yet quite the middle of the night, still a few hours to go for that, butit is late, and the people who live around here, the other ones, the ones thatyou 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, thosepeople who are not like you, remember, the way it seemed like that?); by nowmost of them are themselves in bed, probably. Passing subdivisions built on hillsides, your eyes cross the stratifiedrows of houses, and you see some drapes that switch on and off ghost blue fromthe TVs behind them but mostly the windows you see are dark. When you imagine the people behind thosewindows (you do sometimes) you imagine—what?—a woman in a pink nightgown withflowers. 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 iscomfortable. Husband climbing in nextto her, toenails newly clipped, all the rough points filed down to safecurves. Spare lightbulbs in everycloset, in there, nested in packages poetic with the accumulation of soft words(lumens).

Inthere, in whatever you are imagining inthere to be tonight, woman-in-nightgown or some variant, whatever, theimportant thing is its difference from outhere, out in the not-yet-quite-late night that you are out in. You belong to this, at least tonight youbelong 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 whohave left one bar and are heading to another. Carfuls of guys shitface boozed on a weeknight, dangerous with hormonesand frustration. Every driver a drunkdriver. When there are no cars comingyou 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 windowsto be with other teenagers who have climbed out their windows, who prowl, whoare out to damage property, to pretend that they are vampires, to fuck in thepark. You are looking for hitchhikers,hoboes, wanderers, killers.

Forfictions. It’s a thing you want todo. Yes, it makes you feel unsafe,certainly—a woman driving, alone—but you know, secretly, that you only feelunsafe because you want to. Theinhabitants of the night are dangerous, you tell yourself, and you, out in it, one of them, must also bedangerous. And that’s a thing you want,sometimes, secretly; you wouldn’t tell your friends this because they’d laughand tease you, or (worse) they’d put on the patient-and-understanding face, butsometimes when the boys cajole you into going to see those stupid movies thatyou 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 everymovie you want to be the other one, the evil one, the psycho queen, thecastrating bitch, the lean terrorist fatalewho doesn’t speak and who runs a katana throughthe hapless security guard in the film’s first act. Strong, sexually confident, and sadly dead by the closingcredits: electrocution, helicopter crash, something violent but indirect. You ignore the death. You sit in the darkness of the theatre andthink of the fictional futures still possible for you and this makes you quiverwith 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.

Backin the car, then, the darkness, dangerous night. Only it’s not really. Your car constantly throws powerful beams of light out onto the road infront of you; what you are really doing is perpetually moving into a bubble of day. It’s not really night and you’re not reallyout in it either: you’re going to work. Danger?: streetlights punch glowing holes into it with a reassuringperiodicity. Even the traffic lightshelp: they reduce the chaos of hundreds or thousands of human beings equippedwith 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 thestars—really seeing the stars, hesaid to me, you think you can see them until you really see them and then you realize how many stars you normallyjust don’t ever see—he stressed itlike that, as though he was saying something that he thought I didn’t reallyunderstand.) Your hand keeps punchingbuttons on the radio, jumping you from preferred station to preferred stationas you try to avoid commercials (it’s only a twenty-minute drive to work, but it’sexhausting 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 softforce of your memory; you listen to these fragments (safe, corporate-owned,familiar to tens of thousands) during the same moments that you are lookinginto houses and thinking about normalpeople, you push the button to avoid the sports bar commercial at the samemoment that you are mentally shaping the matter of night into somethingdangerous, an unknowable zone, lunatic with the flux of melodramaticforces... 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.

Youpull into the office park and carefully aim the car into the notch between apair of parallel lines, pointing into the space that you consider yours. It’s a good spot, a safe distance (fifteen feet?) from the frontdoor—this spot is so close to the mirrored front of your building that you canglimpse your own face reflected there, a smudge, just above the dazzlingapocalypse of the reflected headlights. You call the spot yoursbecause you always get it, same one. This office park may be busy during the day, but now, at night—not thatit’s night here, really, either. Thetall spokes of lampposts loom everywhere, alien sentinels, keeping the officepark in a perpetual artificial dusk. You step out of the car and the sickly yellow glow wraps you as you movethrough 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 wholecartographic system of them, everyone forgets, pretends. Where do you think you are going?

What she does: work for the paper. Copyediting. Factchecking. It is workshe doesn’t love, scrutinizing over an empire of lost commas at three am,cross-referencing addresses against the phone book to confirm that they existin the way they’re meant to. In the waythe writer says. The co-workers (heartheir voices? coming up the hall now?) chat, and babble with the insanity oflate night, and quote passages from the ChicagoManual by heart, and take turns making pots of potent coffee, and they’reokay, but she is not friends with them. What’s wrong with her? Is therea 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 outwith platonic when half of them have expressed interest at one time oranother? What is going to happen to hernext? Now she pushes through the coldand heavy door and enters the jittery lit space of the Copyeditors’ Bullpen.

Waves,smiles; they call her by her name. Theyshout questions about her period to her over the tops of their monitors (she’scoming into some discussion late); she answers these with quips that get laughsbut 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 shesuspects that they do.) She pulls ahead 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 staredfor too long at the cluttered landscape of this desk, and the blue square ofglowing Heaven that hangs above it. Sheuses a geologic metaphor because she feels she could measure the time spent atthis desk in geologic time. It’s notquite a joke. She doesn’t know yet thatin four months the time at the desk will transform, from life into memory..

Shewill move to a new desk, and a new desk after that, and in a short time—only afew years, really, though that seems amazing—she will work in a room that isher 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 hermouth. She will work in a room and shewill be able to call every chair in that room hers. Someone will be paidto make coffee and bring it into that room and someone else will be paid toclean the room up after dark. This allhappens later. Later she will be in abuilding and she will stand up from her desk in the middle of the day; therewill be no one supervising her; no one to tell her that she can’t put down thepapers 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 ather. She will move to the window andlook through it and see the world out there, bright and colorful, everything inplace, fully revealed. The window willbe full of light.

Butnow there are no windows. There arecinderblock walls painted white and there is six months’ worth of accumulatedmess and above that a blue square of computer screen hovers. Look into it, enter the slug and waitnow. Wait for the yellow words toemerge from that ether, reporters’ words, words made out of dots, pixels:light. Pictures of the world made outof text, pictures she will check for accuracy and grammar, that she will makemore real by verifying the spelling of the names and correcting the miscappedwords. Only tonight the words don’tcome up. Instead she gets a file notfound. She looks at the spec again,doublechecks the spelling of the slug, types it in a second time: randolph.

—Who’sgot a copy of the budget? she asks.

Damianholds it high.

—What’srandolph?

—Randolph,randolph, Damian says, flipping in.

Randolph,the budget reveals, is a story about something, you won’t remember later, awoman, Julia or Jane or Somebody Randolph, with some achievement to her name,you don’t remember. You will rememberthat 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 aphilathropic bent—?

Buttime, back then, is still moving—

—Wellit’s not coming up on Pubman, she is saying. Who wrote it? Do we have a diskcopy?

—Idon’t know about the disk copy, says Damian. And—(he refers to the budget)—Larson’sthe writer.

—FuckingLarson.

Shejoggles 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 firsttime someone’s called Larson up this late and made him come out with a copy ofhis story on disk.

—Findout about that disk copy, she says.

—Anyoneseen Larson’s disk?

Tudorman,on his way to his station, stops behind her and pokes her in the back of herneck with a plastic ruler.

—Ihear you’ve fondled Larson’s disk on occasion, he says, his voice jovial withnaughty euphemism.

—Harhar, she says. Fuck off.

Tudormanshrugs and continues on.

—Don’tmake me have to call him, she shouts. Ihate calling up the writers.

—I’mlooking, says Damian.

Shecomes up out of the files and types randolphagain just to see. Nothing, of course,the same error message as before, superimposed over the same zoned field ofnothing. She sits there, fingershovering over the keyboard; she waits for a word from Damian that does notcome. She looks into the blankness andbites her cuticle absently and thinks of this young achiever, J____ Randolph, awoman 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 dosomething that gets the paper interested; she imagines what she would do nextif 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 hermind to quit? Or should she go into thefiles, get the number, get on with the work of the night? You’re working this, and for a long time youonly have her sitting there, hands over the keyboard, thinking. I don’t remember what you thought you weredoing anymore.

Andthen: her hands move. She clears theerror 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 everydetail. The computer’s white hum. Banter of the co-workers. Every bit of electricity that moves in herbrain and takes the shape of words. Iam not quite making it all up as I go along, but I am remembering these thingsout of the darkness, one at a time. Seethem again: hum, chatter, thoughts.

Seethis: she moves her hands. She types ina woman’s name that she will not remember in a few years. She types a lead sentence, she thinks aboutthe information from the budget, whatever it was—I almost have it—this woman,Randolph, has designed something, a tool, a bicycle, something for disabledpeople—whatever it was, she molds that information into a lead, and types it in—andthe next thing that happens is she enters into a giddy moment: a part of herbrain has forgotten how newspapers are supposed to work, and this part imaginesthat 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 theback of her brain: the decision to create a woman up out of nothing, to sculpta woman, an ideal woman, out of darkness before the papers hit the doorsteps inthe morning.

Butnow I am having her stand here and look out the window at the afternoon lightglaring 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 awoman she does not know is in her mouth, and she almost thinks she can get awaywith it. But Damian is calling her fromhis 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.

Ihave the things I want for myself. I amsuccessful and happy. I am at thewindow and the world beyond is complete and in place and nothing is missing.

Youwill find the story. It won’t be hard,really: you will just end up calling Larson, and he will fax a copy of itin. You will type it into the computerthe 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 worldpictured correctly there.

Iknow who I am and I can see who I am going to be.

Youwill drive home, bleary as the sun rises. Another day: carrying you forwardinto the future you end up with. Through the windshield you will watch colors come out of thedarkness. New light and the songs onthe radio will outline you; they will trace your body, your face, your skin andclothes. They will coat your contours amillion times each second, repeatedly making you real.