Am I Viral?
When I woke from my potentially life-threatening nap, my mother was at my side, brandishing my backpack and announcing, “Not lost! Not stolen! Not run over!”
“Wallet?” I grunted. “Phone?”
She itemized aloud: wallet, phone, charger, the plug part that goes into the outlet; keys, headphones, lip gloss, tampons, sunglasses, gum, a Snickers bar. Did I want to use the phone? Anyone I needed to call?
Was that a note of social optimism I’d heard—perhaps a reference to a previously unannounced boyfriend who’d be sick with worry somewhere?
“Just charge it,” I said.
My father, so clearly wanting to do anything, said that he’d spotted the outlet! With some ceremony, he affixed the phone to the cable, the cable to the adapter, the adapter into the outlet. He asked if he should jack the head of the bed up a bit—he’d be careful; he’d seen the way the nurse had done it. I said yes, okay, but slowly. Stop if I scream.
Had I really been out cold and phoneless only one day, I wondered, because as soon as the phone came to life, there was a slew of voicemail, email, and text messages.
Before I could open or answer anything, a call came in with a D.C. area code and no I.D. “Aren’t you going to answer it?” my mother asked.
“No.”
She took the phone from me. “Rachel Klein’s line. This is her mother speaking.”
What was that look I was getting? Intrigue? Excitement? Her whole face was signaling: Wait’ll I tell you. She was saying yes, yes, no, yes, no, I don’t know, and finally “No comment.” And finally, “You’re welcome . . . Beverly Klein, the usual spelling . . . her mother.”
“Who was that?”
“A reporter!”
“A reporter for what?”
“I didn’t catch it. A man. Very polite.”
“Did he say how he got my number?”
“I didn’t ask—”
I tried without success to prop myself up on one elbow. “A reporter calls out of the blue and you just answer the questions without asking why the hell he’s calling and how he got my number?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly! I’m sorry! My only child was hit by a car. You know what it’s like when the police call and the first thing you hear is, ‘There’s been an accident’? You lose your mind!”
“Worst call of our lives,” added my dad. “A nightmare! And when you try to reach the doctor’s, it’s only ‘press one’ for this and ‘two’ for that. I’ve never been so frustrated! And when you finally reach a real person, she can only say next to nothing because ‘anyone can claim to be a patient’s parent!’”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking of that end of things.” I took the phone back, put it down on the side table, changed my mind, and rested it on my chest. Would all these text messages, emails and voicemails explain why a reporter wanted to speak to me?
Boom! Someone had captured my accident on a phone and posted it on Facebook. One of my cousins wrote, I tried to call Aunt Bev & yr dad, but they weren’t at the store and their voicemails were full!!!! OMG R U OK? LMK!
My first instinct was open Facebook. But look under what or whom? I didn’t know which paparazzi wannabe had posted it, or how they knew it was me.
“What?” my mother was asking. “Did you find something?”
I told her that concentrating was hard and reading harder—not a lie: I had halos shimmering on the periphery everywhere I looked. Easier: hitting the number of the nameless reporter who’d just called.
A man answered with a distracted “Associated Press. Loftus.”
“This is Rachel Klein. Someone from this number just called me.”
“Oh wow. I didn’t know if you’d be able to talk.”
I asked if he knew about the accident from Facebook, and if that was true, how did he know it was me in the video?
“You don’t know?”
Would that be information gleaned from a police website that over-shared? “An accident report?” I asked.
“No. The press briefing.”
The press briefing? Had there been news so major, so life-changing—the president resigned or died or been assassinated?—so that the press was going down the list of every single employee for comment until someone answered his or her phone? “What happened?” I whispered.
“You don’t know? I assumed you did.”
“Give me a sec.” I checked text messages first: more OMGs and R U Oks????, plus “press briefing”, “press conference”, “press secretary”, “White House”.
I hit the speaker icon and said to my hovering parents, “Listen to this, in case I’m hallucinating.” He summarized, clearly from notes, that before some underling press secretary took questions on matters of state, politics, and presidential hot water, an even more junior staff member read from a slip of paper, offering Rachel Naomi Klein—spelled it—recently of the Office of Presidential Records and before that The Office of Correspondence, get-well wishes from The President and First Lady. Further: thankfully, Ms. Klein had sustained injuries of a non-life-threatening nature soon after leaving the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
My parents were smiling for the first time since I’d opened my eyes. Good Democrats both, yet my father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Was their daughter more important than either of them realized? More beloved by the office that canned her?
“Did anyone say, ‘who’s Rachel Klein?’” I asked the reporter.
“He didn’t have to. He stated what your last two jobs were.”
“Then what?”
“Well, you know the White House press corps . . .”
“No she doesn’t!” my mother yelled.
“Well someone asked what ‘recently’ meant. ‘Could he be more specific: did that mean resigned? Fired? Retired?’”
“Oh, crap,” I said.
“Which one was it?” the reporter pressed.
“What did the spokesperson say?”
“He’d find out and get back to us.”
“Why would it matter? I was a nobody. I mean, in the great scheme of things, I only worked there like a minute.”
“Well, let’s just say everything is suspect.”
“Me? I’m suspect?”
“Not you. Maybe what happened to you.”
I said, “I’m very tired. Did my mother tell you I had a concussion?”
“I knew that. Sorry. Can I call you back later?”
“Please don’t.”
“One more question: Do you know who was driving the car that hit you?”
“Do you?”
“I’m working on it. I mean, I have the license plate number—”
My father asked, loud enough for it to carry through the phone, “Do you think Rachel might’ve been hit on purpose?”
“No one said that. ‘How do you spell ‘Rachel’?”
I said, “Doesn’t the Associated Press have bigger things to cover? There are people dying in refugee camps on every continent, including ours!”
“Would I be wrong to assume that you were fired for cause?”
My father was shaking his head, frowning and gesticulating like a man worried about a daughter who might never get another job. Not a word!
But how would a “no comment” sound? I asked, “By ‘cause’ do you mean I did something that the White House didn’t like—a fire-able offense?”
“It’s a simple question: can you tell me why you were fired?”
I blame what followed on exhaustion, on my phone blowing up with email dings and ring tones, on the sharp pains in my ribs, on my dry mouth, my concussed brain. I told him, “Okay; I wrote a critical email, a joke really, and hit ‘send’ by accident.”
I told him it wasn’t that bad—merely a rant about my stupid job, and maybe, probably, some venting about Donald Trump’s learning curve. That’s all. Yes, it had gone to my whole department, an inadvertent “reply all”. And yes, I suppose it was the kind of thing you pound out late at night in a fit of pique, but by the light of day don’t send.