Everything Is Fake

re: Scene photo, "The Lakeside Cabin" (posted 9:14 PM)

marrow_and_salt · 9:30 PM · 12 likes: Staged. The lamp is on the wrong side of the body for a right-handed person.

mothlight · 9:41 PM · 6 likes: Agree, but the window is nice. Somebody took their time with the window.

Exterminators · 10:02 PM · 214 likes: The lamp is a small mistake. The larger one is the quiet. People who do this kind of thing do not leave a room so still. They leave it tired. Whoever arranged this has never been in a room afterward, and has only ever been in one before.

cold_open_77 · 10:15 PM · 3 likes: Whoa. Okay.

On Wednesday evening the four of them met at a coffee shop two blocks from the laundromat, at a table by the window, because Marcus had decided that a forum like that deserved a proper meeting.

He had brought a notebook. It was the kind with a black cover and a red elastic band, and he opened it on the table between the cups with the air of a man unveiling a chart of the solar system, and on the first page he had drawn a grid. Down the left side were the names of posts. Across the top ran a single scale, from one to five, and over the scale he had written, in block letters, REAL OR FAKE.

"Okay," said Marcus. "Here's the system. Every scene gets a score. One is a man in a Halloween mask. Five is, I don't know, call-the-police. You rate it, I average it, and at the end of the month we see if anything ever gets above a three."

"Nothing will get above a three," said Priya, who was stirring her tea with the wrong end of the spoon. "It's a bunch of lonely people with a good camera."

"Then you won't mind being wrong."

"I never mind being wrong. I mind being early."

"What does that mean?" asked Noah.

"It means that if it turns out to be real, I want to have been the one who said so six months ago, and not the one who said so last." Priya finally put the spoon down and licked a drop of tea from her thumb. "Anyway, I'm in. Somebody has to keep Marcus honest."

"I'm completely honest," said Marcus. "I just round up."

Noah laughed, and pulled his chair closer to look at the notebook, and Asher, who had been waiting for his turn to talk since he sat down, put both hands flat on the table and began, in the voice he used for the last five minutes of a long day, when he wanted a room to know it had been in the presence of someone who knew things.

He started with the cabin photograph from the night before, the one with the lamp, and he said that the lamp was wrong. Then he said why it was wrong, and then he said why the other people who had said it was wrong were wrong about why. He mentioned that the standard of proof in a civil case was different from the standard in a criminal one, though nobody had asked, and he spent some time on what a court would make of a photograph with no metadata. He quoted a case. He said the name of the case twice, in case they wanted to look it up.

By the time he reached the end of it, nearly eleven minutes had gone by, the barista had twice wiped the same stretch of counter within earshot, and Priya's tea had gone cold in front of her, with a skin forming on it that nobody had bothered to remove.

She was looking at Noah, and Noah was looking at Marcus, and Marcus, with great care, had picked up his pen and written a number in the grid, and when Asher leaned across the table to see, he turned the notebook over and laid his palm on the cover.

"What did you give it?" said Asher.

"Two," said Marcus. "It's a solid two."

"I'd have said three. The window is a serious piece of staging."

"Right," said Marcus. "That's why you're the lawyer."

"Intern," Asher said modestly, and the other three exchanged another look that he did not see, because he was already scrolling for the next post on his phone.

"Do you want to hear the one about the stairwell?" he asked. "It has a better problem than the lamp."

"Maybe next week," said Noah, gently, in the tone one uses with a dog that has found a dead bird. "I have a thing at six."

"It's only four-fifteen."

"It's a long thing."

It did not occur to Asher then, or later, that he had not asked any of them a single question the whole afternoon, or that Marcus had paid for his coffee without being asked and without mentioning it. He walked home through the cold thinking that it had gone well. They had listened, after all, and nobody had interrupted him, and he took that to mean they were interested.

…

That night he went through the forum from the top.

He had told himself it would be an hour. He sat on the bed with the laptop on his knees and a bowl of cold cereal balanced on the blanket, and the laundromat's yellow light lay across the ceiling, and he read the threads in order, from the oldest to the newest, taking notes in a spreadsheet he had made for the purpose, with columns for the date, the nickname, the claim, and a final column headed Credibility in which he gave each person a mark out of ten.

Most of the marks were low. He was not a generous grader, and he did not see why he should be, since the people in the room were so obviously his inferiors in method, and it gave him a quiet pleasure to put a four beside a name and watch it sit there.

There were three kinds of people in the forum. There were the ones who posted pictures, whom the rest treated with a sort of cheerful skepticism, and there were the ones who argued about the pictures, which was most of them, and there were a handful, very few, whose comments sat apart from the others, calm and short, like the remarks of a senior partner at the end of a long meeting.

The one Asher read most carefully was called Exterminators.

The avatar was a mask. It was a plain white mask with narrow eyes and no mouth, and it sat in a little circle beside every comment, and the first time he saw it Asher felt a small cold pull between the shoulder blades and told himself it was the cereal. The comments themselves were nothing of the kind. They were beautifully written. They were polite and unhurried, with every clause in its place, and they never used a word that did not have to be there, and each one was followed by a long tail of replies from people who wanted to be agreed with.

The lamp is a small mistake, read the one under the cabin photograph. The larger one is the quiet.

Asher read it three times. The numbers beside it said two hundred and fourteen people had liked it, which was more than any other comment on the page, and he found that he was nodding, alone in his room, in the dark.

It was so right, and that was the thing that troubled him. Everyone else in the thread had seen the lamp, and only this person had seen what the lamp was a symptom of, which was exactly the kind of observation he made himself in meetings, to blank faces, and which he had never once heard another human being make aloud. It was the way a real professional thought, a man who had read a great many files and learned to distrust the ones that were too tidy, and Asher wanted, with an eagerness that embarrassed him a little, to be thought of in the same breath.

He clicked on the name, and the page told him that the account had been a member for six years. He clicked Follow.

Then, because it seemed rude to do that and say nothing, he began to write.

…

He wrote the first draft in twenty minutes and deleted it, because it ran to nine paragraphs. He wrote a second, shorter one, and deleted that, because it began with the words "With respect." In the end he posted something plain, almost casual, which took him another half hour to arrive at.

The point about the quiet is well taken. I'd add that the photographer has composed the frame like someone who expects to be looked at. A real scene is never composed. It's only recorded.

He posted it under his own nickname, which was A_Cole_Case, and sat back, and ate a spoonful of cereal gone soft.

Nothing happened for a minute. Then a second. He told himself it was ridiculous to be waiting. It was a comment on a message board, and a stranger in another city, perhaps another country, did not owe him a reply, and he got up and washed his bowl. When he returned there was a red dot on the corner of the screen.

Exterminators replied to your comment. It was ten minutes past midnight.

Good observation, it said. You read carefully. Few people here do.

Asher stood quite still with the damp bowl in his hand.

His face had gone hot all the way up to his ears. It was so absurd that he laughed, once, at himself, a short bark in the empty room, and set the bowl on the desk, and sat down. He read the reply a fourth time. You read carefully. In all his weeks at Whitlock & Crane no one had said as much to him, not in those words, not in any words, and here it was on a black screen from a person with no face, and he felt the old hunger in him ease a little, like a tight belt let out one notch.

He did not notice that the praise was two sentences long and said nothing at all about what he had written. It would not have mattered if he had. He took it the way a man takes a coin out of a pocket he had forgotten, and turns it over, and finds it is real money.

He opened the spreadsheet and added a column. At the top of it he typed, in capital letters, EXTERMINATORS, and under it, in smaller type, Likes me. Then, after some thought, he went back to the Credibility column and gave the account a ten, which was the first ten he had given anyone, and felt that a ten was perhaps not enough.

…

On Friday morning there was a small wet mark on the hallway carpet outside the copy room, where Dana had spilled her coffee, and he stepped around it with the care of a man crossing a minefield.

"You're in a good mood," said Dana, who had come up behind him with a stack of folders.

"Am I?"

"You're humming."

"I'm not humming." He listened to himself for a moment and found that it was true. "Something good happened. I can't say what."

"Something good happened and you can't say?" She shifted the folders onto her hip and looked at him with open curiosity, as one looks at a house cat that has brought something in. "Is it a girl?"

"It's a... professional connection."

"Okay!" said Dana, and she smiled in earnest, a little startled, because it was the most human thing he had said to her in six weeks. "Well, that's great. Good for you."

He went on to his desk with a feeling of generosity toward the whole fourth floor. He would remember her coffee, he thought. He would buy her another one, and keep the receipt.

At lunch he did not even look at the soup. The phone lay face-up beside his tray, and he had refreshed the page forty times since breakfast, and the ladle behind the counter rang against the steel in the same slow rhythm as always, once, twice, up to seven, and the wooden paddle rapped the rim with a flat tock that Asher did not hear.

At twelve-thirty a notification slid down from the top of the screen. It was a small gray line, set beside the little white mask.

Exterminators is now following you.

He looked at it for a very long time.