SHE STAYED ON IN THE rented house by herself. She woke and slept. There was nothing else she needed to do. Nothing was in front of her. She paddled through a place she thought of as Catatonia, a wilderness tourist resort without tourists, only birds with enormous wings, like pelicans. There she flat-lined into a dreamless landscape indistinguishable from the horizon or from the interior of her shut eyes. The highway, she thought, the vast Canadian road that had kept her young and in constant motion, that endless river of macadam. She attempted to sleep at all times, to remain there in a state of absolute sleep.
When she couldn’t convince her body to sleep, she lay on the sofa and watched television. She stared at the agitated ghost-dance of burning pixels taking place in front of her. On the little screen she witnessed something she’d seen before, more than once, the disappearance of a lover. Arthur Gratton. There had been a day when she enjoyed the taste of that name on her tongue. “Arthur Gratton.” His name was voiced repeatedly, his picture shown, not a flattering likeness. It surprised Linda to learn there existed an unflattering picture of the man. By the end of the week he did not exist. Arthur Gratton had been caught out and exposed. Quotes attributed to various people turned out to be completely fabricated. People who’d led to the ruin of other people turned out to be not people at all. Crucial statements had been lifted from websites desperately constructed by Arthur himself, staying up desperately all night to piece them together. “Frequent acts of journalistic fraud,” is how it was put. “Extremely frequent.” In all, 137 verified acts of journalistic fraud. They were read out like a death count and for three nights the numbers climbed. An award-winning, two-part feature on a methamphetamine addict who sold herself for drugs and food for her equally-addicted daughter is what caused Arthur to evaporate. Jenny is a seven-year-old third generation methamphetamine addict, a precocious little girl with sandy hair. The sentence had been held up as the gold standard of investigative journalism and had earned Arthur a Michener-Deacon Fellowship.
Only there was no addiction, no mother, not even any sandy hair. Fabricated from start to finish like a dream everyone thought they should have had. Arthur was let go. Resigned, they said, citing personal reasons. A puffy-faced and contrite senior editor put himself in front of the camera; “If we can’t trust the accuracy of our stories, we are finished as a society.” “Whose stories?” she thought angrily. “Whose stories, mister? Whose society? Who we, white man?” She watched from the sofa. A pixelated face made sympathetic remarks about the effect of a competitive work environment on men under stress. A decaying apple had been uncovered. That’s all. The barrel was sound. On consecutive nights she watched this story and when it was over Arthur Gratton had been put to bed, plucked from the barrel and tossed away. Dead of exposure. Gone.
Linda thought that very soon she would get up from the sofa and phone him, not because she wanted to speak to him. She didn’t want to do that, she didn’t understand why people wanted to speak anymore, but to listen to his phone ringing without answer, each sound growing fainter until it went nowhere.
She was not asleep when her own phone sounded and she let it ring repeatedly to prove its faithfulness to her. It was Paul, she knew it. He was calling her from heaven, from the Milky Way, he wanted to know if the coffee was on. He was there, among the souls of everyone who had died, and he missed her. I miss you, he said. I miss you unbearably. Linda lifted the device and heard the desperate strained silence of a man who couldn’t speak anymore, or cry, or sing. She knew, from the silence itself, she knew.
“Arthur?”
Nothing came back to her. The loneliness burned with a hiss. “Arthur, it’s all right.” She wanted to tell him that what he’d done was all right. You made a story out of a living man, you led men to take their own lives, you took our stories and fed them into your machines. They paid you to do that. There are no more stories, we’ve sold them all. Turned them into a spectacle for the telling. You made a way of life out of it. We can’t get them out of the machine anymore. She understood that if she spoke she would sound exactly like her husband. Our songs have been taken from us. They’ve turned our stories into silicon. “Sing for me,” she whispered. “Can you sing? Can you sing the song that your mother taught you? Who mothered you and what is the name of your mother’s mother’s mother? What are her dreams?”
The silence burned on the line, it came out of the sky and filled the room. She heard the sound of a man shuffling in a lonely apartment. She waited for the word “darling” to break out and to bridge it. Darling followed by an obscenity. Darling. Darling. Let me count the ways in which I must have thee immediately.
“Paul,” She tried crazily, “Paul?” She didn’t know what she was saying. She wanted to speak to him, only to him, about mornings when the sun broke in on them, and they lay there wrapped together on the bed, this bed.
But no one was there. The line had broken and was dead. She put back the telephone and pressed her face into the pillow.