“You’re a long sad book about love,” she said. Or I said, about myself. We were smoking inside Darwin’s—back when you still could smoke inside—and eating the free popcorn and drinking the cheap beer. After the Rainier bottle-cap puzzles ran out, we’d turned to a game called Which Book Are You. She was a bestseller I lost on the bus. She was a work in translation. She was the one I kept starting over.
She picked up my wrist and held it. She was always doing that—tugging at me, staking her claims. But she had none, at least technically. I was dating a man at the time—a truly Good Guy. And she had set us up.
“Let’s try and see the Titbook,” she said next. “I’ll ask the waitress.”
“No,” I said, “It’s taking advantage.”
“Don’t you want to see what another woman’s breasts look like?” she asked. This was a test or a flirtation or both.
“I have to work early,” I said. “I’ll call you for lunch.” And so there were no tits that night.
The truth is, I’d loved her since we were fifteen and met on the ski team. She was always warm, no matter what the temperature. She could sit beside me on the bus and heat me like a furnace.
My job at the paper was to check the facts and edit the copy. In practice, this meant correcting commas for eight hours a day. I didn’t mind cleaning up after others. I didn’t mind having no byline. It felt comforting to make a decision and immediately take action on it, even about something as small as a comma.
The fact-changing began as a one-time affair. I still remember the headline: “MOOSE OVER-RUNNING KINCAID PARK.” I’d gone back and forth on whether to add the word “are”: “Moose are over-running Kincaid Park.” I didn’t want to insert a clunky “to be” verb, but as it was, it sounded like only one moose was over-running the whole park.
And that’s when I got the idea. The article’s lead read, “A female moose protecting her calf charged a skier Monday at Kincaid Park on the Roller Coaster trail.” And just as easily as I would correct a comma, I changed “calf” to “calves.” Just like that, the moose had twins. In that moment, reality changed entirely, and I was the one who had changed it.
In fact, the closest I ever came to dying, I had thought of her. We were on a team-building trip whitewater rafting near Hope. Six of us in the boat plus the red-bearded guide in the back shouting out paddle commands. She was right behind me, and she was seventeen like me. Seventeen meant I had never once thought of death.
We hurtled over an eddy and crashed down bow-first. Water rushed into my corner of the raft, and the front lip caved into the river, and then I couldn’t breathe—sucked out of the raft and helmet smacked against rock, and my very next thought was, Did she see it happen? I was hoping to make her worry, to wring her hands and watch me drift downstream, struggling to turn onto my back like the guide had instructed: Let the current take you; don’t struggle.
I looked upstream for the raft and saw a yellow speck. Cold river trickled under my fingers, and I imagined the way water flowed over her skin in the shower, her fingers running through her soapy hair. She actually dyed her hair purple later, in college down in Seattle, and gained weight, then lost it again—plus much more—on an all-saltine cracker diet she adopted for various roles in various plays put on by the theatre troupe.
Through the window of the sandwich shop, we watched a line of tourists shuffle around the block clutching cartoon maps and water bottles.
“You know I skipped bingo for you,” she said. She worked at an assisted living facility called Anchorage Manor. Her job was to plan the activities—crafts, spelling bees, and movie nights where they served mocktails. Those living with assistance were never allowed alcohol.
“Listen,” I said. “Do you think the Titbook’s real?”
Specific rumors about the Titbook varied depending on whom you asked. According to some, only women were allowed access to it—and only if they agreed to a Polaroid of their own breasts first. Like a sisterhood of tits. Others had it that the exchange was “a shot for a shot.” And still others claimed that there was no Titbook at all, or that the bartenders only showed the book to those they thought would be too drunk to remember it.
“Why don’t you do a story on it and find out?” she said. “Isn’t that the whole point of the paper? To uncover the truth?”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “I’d never do that.”
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked, and her eyes locked on mine and made their point known.
For years we’d been doing this dance—testing each other, slowly building a case. About 60 percent of the time, I was sure she wanted me. But that wasn’t enough to tell her. There was too much at stake. It was too great a gamble.
A week or two after the moose, in an article about the Salmon Derby in Seward, I changed the weight of the prize salmon from 51.4 pounds to 51.9. I knew the winning fisherman wouldn’t call in to report an error half a pound in his favor. This was the art—getting away with it, of course, but more importantly, ensuring that the fact change did not disrupt anything essential to the story’s meaning. That, I decided, would be unethical, and I am a very ethical person.
So I never gave misinformation or invented quotes. It was the small details I altered, and in this way it felt like leaving my mark. Like an artist’s signature—like finding the artist’s hand in a painting’s tiny brushstrokes. I started to love seeing copies of the paper around town in a way I never had before. A thrill went through me every time, knowing at least one of my secrets always lay inside.
One year I flew down to surprise her when she was a Shark in the chorus of West Side Story, and I was shocked at how thin she was. All golden eyes hungry and hollowed out in her skull. She didn’t even have a speaking part. All I wanted was to hold her shaky bones in my hands and feed her directly from my mouth, and I wanted to put her fingers into my mouth, too, and that’s when I first realized that, like her, all I am is hunger and need.
Sometimes she’d call me from the Manor after she put the Assisted to bed. We’d do crosswords over the phone together or watch Bewitched and fight over which Dick we liked better. I’d cross out commas and listen to all the things she had to say.
“It’s depressing around here,” she might mutter.
“Isn’t it your job to keep them happy?” I’d ask.
“There’s only so much you can do,” she’d say, “to make them remember who they are.”
That afternoon, I made my biggest fact change yet. The story was about a brown bear who’d been shot in Girdwood after breaking into a house. He had smelled a pizza cooling on someone’s kitchen counter and had smashed in a window to get it. The homeowner had shot him three times with a shotgun.
My first thought was: What a stupid reason to die. For pizza, of all things. But then I felt embarrassed for the bear, and then I felt sorry for him. He was either so hungry he had to barge into someone’s home, or so brave he didn’t care. One was pitiable and one was admirable, and as I sat at my desk, oscillating between these two feelings, I realized that I couldn’t tell the difference, and that the difference didn’t matter.
I was The Great Gatsby, and she was The Sound and the Fury. I was 100 Years of Solitude, and she was Gone with the Wind.
I was surprised when she came back North after college. I thought she’d move to New York and star in off-off, then off, then Broadway productions. Singing and acting and dancing were all she’d ever cared about. Once I’d asked her how she could be so completely—so believably—someone else, and she shrugged and said, “That’s why it’s called acting.” And I knew then that she would ruin me all the way through.
The only thing that could be done to restore the bear’s dignity was to retell this one part of the story—how many shots it had taken to bring him down. In one quick moment I blacked out the “three” and changed it to “six.” Then I stood up quickly and carried the page down the hall to the copy chief for final proofing.
The whole walk back to my desk, my hands shook and I was hot with fear and relief. I reached for the phone as soon as I sat down.
“It’s me,” I said. “Do you have a movie night tonight?”
“Yeah, A League of Their Own,” she said. “But I can skip.”
“Okay. Let’s do Darwin’s at nine.”
“I’ve always loved what a wild woman you are,” she said.
By ten we were silly drunk and by eleven she had cried once, put her hand on my knee once, and interrupted me in the middle of a story to hug me because I was so funny and she loved me so much and she was so, so glad we’re friends.
As the night went on, tourists smelling like hotels and buses started crowding the small bar, knocking over beers with their elbows and pointing at locals indiscriminately.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, taking my hand, and we walked down Sixth to the Inlet.
The ravens had all changed into their summer whites and were cawing so loud I could barely hear her when she said, “Tell me a secret.”
“What kind?” I asked. “You know all of mine.”
“If I knew all your secrets,” she said, “I wouldn’t still hang around you.”
I thought of the bear dying with the taste of hot bread in his mouth. I thought of the way her chin tucked to her chest when she glided down a hill. I thought of myself, in the ladies room after her play, holding my head in my hands and breathing.
“Tell yours first,” I said, and the gulls cawed at the thumbprint moon, and we both felt lonely.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been really loved,” she said. “Except by you.”
“What?” I asked. A hole tore open in my stomach. “You know?” And she did.
“No,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Well, it’s true.”
She was sitting beside me in the cool air pumping out heat like a radiator. Across the bay, Susitna slept in the purple light, waiting in the water for her love to come back to life.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.” And that’s when she put her hand on top of mine, and my chest tightened and released all at once. In that moment I felt like she’d opened some kind of backdoor in my life I didn’t know was there. I was seventeen again—seventeen still—and I would never, ever die. She kissed my hand, and I couldn’t believe it. She looked in my eyes, and I couldn’t believe it. She leaned in, and my heart was drowning itself.
We talked for hours, long after the sun finished setting. Making plans, telling our stories. Laughing about how long it had taken. I felt like I was at the first act of my own wedding. She held my hand, and she traced my lifeline. She found herself in all my futures.
Once, on the trail, her boot had unclipped from her ski and, frozen, wouldn’t snap back in again. I stopped and walked through the pines the rest of the way with her, our poles and skis propped across our shoulders. We were still half a mile out when two huge, snow-covered dogs came sprinting down the path toward us. Their harnesses jingled, and their tongues lolled, giddy.
“Hey!” she said. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
The dogs stopped immediately, looked at one another for a moment, then turned around and ran back the way they’d come.
“Everything is urgent when you’re in love,” she’d said.
She took it all back the next morning, of course. I had run all the way home and barely slept. At six I got out of bed, put on my best shirt, and cooked a big breakfast of waffles and eggs. Made a smoothie and drank it too fast, imagining and imagining what could possibly happen next. I had never been happier.
I was washing the dishes when she called. My heart hummed like an engine.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me. Listen, we need to talk about what I said last night.”
“Okay?”
“I wasn’t feeling well, and I had taken a lot of cough syrup and Tylenol PM. I don’t remember what I told you, exactly, but whatever it was, I didn’t mean it.”
The way she said it—the complete honesty in her lie—felt like a new silver fish just pulled from a foreign river—glittering, cold, and alive. Like these were the first words ever spoken in time. They were so pure and beautiful in their devastation that I didn’t even try to fight it. “Are you sure?” was all I asked.
“Yes, it’s true.”
If the Titbook is real, then it is full now of breasts that might be dead, might be biowaste, might be full of milk. This is why I am afraid of it. The permanence of a photo is not what’s troubling, but the impermanence of flesh. All those women and their lives—their possible, delicate lives.
I stopped changing facts after the bear, but years later, I woke in the night thinking, Of course I’m not the only one. Perhaps the homeowner changed the facts. Perhaps the State Trooper who salvaged the skull and pelt did. Perhaps enough facts have been changed, or could be changed, to alter the bear’s fate entirely. Perhaps he is on this very day eating a king salmon on the bank of a cool fast stream.
After I hung up the phone, this is what I did. I sat completely still and listened to the stillness. I listened to her words in my head and to the clock’s second hand and to the trucks rattling down the highway and to a dog standing on top of his doghouse barking. The answer, it finally dawned on me, was to take action and go someplace else.
But there was nothing to do, nowhere to go to survive that stillborn love. So I finished the dishes and left in my good shirt and walked under the brilliant, manic sun to the office. I let myself in with my keycard and took the elevator up to the paper and crawled under the copy table to shake like the addict I was. If this was an earthquake then I would hold on, surrounded by whatever I called facts.