BACK IN HIS PARENTS’ BASEMENT IN BALTIMORE, Mark hit the space bar on his laptop keyboard. He transferred the video file he’d just recorded over to iMovie. He began editing. He left it mostly raw, left in a long silence a little more than halfway through. He slash-cut between each thing he’d said so that while it took him almost ten minutes to speak all those words on-screen, the video he created went for just over four. He had almost spliced it all together when he realized he’d forgotten the most important part. So while he’d need more material for the second missive, which he hoped to record in just a couple of days, and while he still needed to sign in to YouTube so he could post the video he’d made, he put the iSight back up, and he spoke for a couple minutes more, until he’d said all there was to say that first day.
Mark stood up from his desk aflame, crude oil fractured free from shale and lit by a spark, immiscible and joyous for the first cathartic time since the day he cowered home from New York City, in more debt than he could think about. He took a shower. While he showered he sang a baby boomer anthem to himself, a famous Buffalo Springfield song. He got out of the shower and dried off. He looked on the computer. It was like he’d been given a present, like the feeling of the first night of Hanukkah. The video was still there. He came back to his computer once more and spliced his speech about the Akedah into what was there before. He went to YouTube and uploaded it. He watched. Under the video it just said the number “one.”
One hit.
Him.
He was the first to watch it, to watch his own screed on-screen. He hit Command-Q and closed the browser on his computer.
Then he walked upstairs and said hello to Julia, who made him a pastrami on rye with deli mustard, the same sandwich she’d made him every lunch throughout high school.