When Amanda read the press release, her first impulse was to post the pertinent facts on all her social media accounts. She believed she was contractually bound to do this but, because she didn’t have a particularly legal (or even rational) brain, she couldn’t be sure. She had the vague impression that somewhere in her misplaced agency and publishing agreements, there was a clause that required her to nurture social media accounts wherein she would do her bit to market her writing. Mostly, she did her bit to share photos of her cats with acquaintances she met at yoga, but gradually, miraculously, she grew her audience, 50 new followers one month, 25 the next, until she had 1,249 followers on Twitter and 2,135 followers on Instagram. She didn’t count Facebook because that included people who had known her since high school and whose mere existence made it harder for her to carry on as if she was exceptional much less competent.
As per the press release, she announced to the world—or at least to her narrow sliver of it—her absolute delight that she had been awarded the Harold G. Whitcomb Short Story Award for her story titled “My Covid Suffering” published in the middle of 2020, that year everyone wanted to forget but (at least in her view) had a duty to remember. In her posts, she thanked the usual supports, clacked away on her smart devices about how wonderful it was to have such exposure, and included a link to the online version of the journal which had first published her story. On Twitter, her post got a couple retweets and a handful of likes. On Instagram, it got a long run of likes and a few comments, all in the form of emojis strung together as cryptic pictographs which she didn’t understand but took to be messages of congratulation. Instead of posting on Facebook, she shared a link her agent had posted, then logged out and went to the kitchenette to make a pot of tea as she had done on almost every afternoon of the past year.
While she waited for the water to boil, Amanda stared at her tiny head reflected back to her in the curved metal surface of the kettle, and she considered that maybe her life was beginning to feel as warped as it appeared to her in the kettle. She poured the boiled water into her pot with the cat-eared lid, the pot whose photo had generated more likes than anything else she had ever posted on Twitter, the pot that had prompted an existential crisis when she realized that people were more interested in a stupid kitty teapot than in her most dour-faced literary efforts. Now, at last, with the Harold G. Whitcomb Short Story Award in hand, she might be able to effect a major shift in her personal branding. She had a fantasy of one day becoming an influencer: publishers would pay her big bucks to pose with books in exotic locales. All she needed to do was lose 20 pounds and change her hair. With the right app, she might not even need to lose the 20 pounds.
“My Covid Suffering” was a pathetic story—pathetic in the classical sense of being filled with suffering. It told the story of Amanda’s mother, Robyn, who had died of complications from Covid-19. Robyn had been immunocompromised, on anti-rejection drugs thanks to a kidney transplant when Amanda was in high school. Because they never talked about it, and because Robyn always appeared healthy, it never occurred to Amanda that her mother might be more vulnerable to infection than other people. When Covid-19 went from an exotic disease somewhere “over there” to a backyard story dominating the local news cycle, Amanda treated her mom the way she treated her healthy friends. Whenever she dropped in on her mom, she kept her distance and wore a mask, but she didn’t take extraordinary measures. Everything seemed fine. And Robyn, herself, acted unconcerned. Every day, she went outside for a walk. Once a week, she drove to the mall and shopped for groceries.
Things went on like this week after week. Until they didn’t. Robyn phoned, barely audible. She was having difficulty breathing. Amanda rushed over and, seeing her mom’s distress, phoned the public health hotline, but even as she was on that call, she saw how her mother’s breathing became laboured, so she hung up and called 911. The EMS workers arrived in N95 masks and blue latex gloves. They gave Robyn an oxygen mask and carted her out on a gurney but wouldn’t let Amanda ride in the ambulance with her. They said that, even in before times, family members only got in the way. The best thing she could do was Airdrop her contact info and wait at home for someone at the hospital to contact her. Amanda nodded as if she had truly assented to this impossible scenario, then rocked her heels on the curb as she watched the ambulance tear off into the night. As she waited for a call from the hospital, she washed her mother’s dishes then vacuumed the area rug in the living room. She stretched on the sofa and stared at the ceiling until she realized there was no compelling reason to hang out at her mom’s place when she could wait in her own apartment and enjoy the comforting indifference of her cats. When the Uber car pulled to the curb, she had to apologize to the driver: she’d been caught away from home without a mask and had ordered the car before she realized she had no mask. The driver said he couldn’t take her and peeled his tires as he tore down the street. He gave her a zero star passenger rating which severely damaged the perfect rating she had worked so hard to cultivate.
Amanda had not yet made it home when a nurse called from the hospital to advise that Robyn’s condition had taken a dramatic downturn after admission. Laboured breathing. Ropey green sputum. And, later, failure of her one good kidney. Based on their experience with other patients in a similar situation, Amanda should expect that her mom had only a few hours left. Amanda noted that the sky was lightening in the east, as if the sun was declaring its intention to contradict the nurse.
“But she was fine yesterday afternoon.”
“I know, dear. That’s just the way it goes for some patients.”
The voice sounded like it belonged to a grotesque doll that haunted a laundry machine.
“Your mother wants to talk to you. Would it be okay if I use my tablet to connect by video?”
Amanda had only two percent left on her battery but she didn’t want to disappoint. She hung up and waited for the nurse to call back by video.
“Mandy?” came the rasping whisper.
The nurse’s hands shook. It looked like Robyn’s hospital room was at the epicentre of an earthquake. Robyn had a plastic tube up her left nostril and tape to hold it in place. She wore what looked like a plastic shower cap and as she moved her head the angled folds of plastic reflected glints of fluorescent light into the tablet’s camera lens. The bed was enclosed within sheets of plastic that gave the scene a Gaussian effect. Amanda wondered if maybe the nurse had accidentally applied a painting filter to her video app.
“Mom, I only have two percent left.”
Afterwards, Amanda hoped the nurse hadn’t recorded the video exchange. As a writer, Amanda was supposed to have les mots justes hovering on the tip of her tongue, but when she was put to it, when time drew all her attention to one of life’s defining moments, the best she could do was, in effect, tell her mother to hurry up and die. As a writer, Amanda couldn’t help but view the world in symbolic terms which meant, inevitably, she regarded her smart phone’s waning battery life as a metaphor for her mother’s situation.
“Honey, I just—” She paused to catch her breath. “I just want you to—”
And that was that. The screen went black. Amanda raised her head and saw how beams of orange shot from below the horizon and stoked the eastern sky. It was the sort of sky she’d expect to see in inspirational memes circulated by her religious friends who were, thankfully, few in number. There was nothing worse than the comfort of platitudes. Ten minutes later, she was in her apartment with her phone plugged into a charger, and ten minutes after that, she had enough power to call the nurse who said she was very sorry but her mother, uh…(Amanda could picture the woman glancing at the chart to get the name right)…uh, Robyn, had passed.
This was only the first half of the story. The Whitcomb jury loved its tone and praised it with the sort of words you’d expect from a literary jury, words like interplay and zeitgeist, words which, when strung together, were impossible to decipher but equally impossible to contradict.
This was only the first half of the story. The Whitcomb jury loved its tone and praised it with the sort of words you’d expect from a literary jury, words like interplay and zeitgeist, words which, when strung together, were impossible to decipher but equally impossible to contradict. As much as the jury loved the first half of the story, it was the second half that really clinched it for them. They said its sensibility hovered somewhere between ironic distance and outright alienation, between postmodern ballyhoo and pure techno-parody. Amanda was puzzled by the word ballyhoo but the jury seemed to mean it in a complimentary way. Postmodern ballyhoo. They topped it off with the observation that the second half of her story was “emotionally authentic.”
Robyn’s death hadn’t seemed real. Touch-free, like a car wash. Plastic sheets rolled out by the bolt. Deathbed video, ready-made for viral release. After taking care of a few administrative tasks and leaving the rest to a lawyer, there was nothing for Amanda to do but resume her life. If this had happened in before times, she might have taken a vacation someplace tropical where she could drift mindlessly from the cabana bar to the swimming pool and back again, losing herself in an alcohol-induced amnesia, returning north with spirit scoured bare by a white hot sun and afternoon purges into her toilet bowl. But stuck as she was in lockdown, there were only so many on-demand streaming shows she could binge watch and only so much baby-talk with her cats before she feared her brain might implode. HR—which was really a woman named Gladys—had suggested she take two weeks to deal with shit. Gladys had such a way. But one week alone with her own company was all she could stand before she was begging to come back.
The second half of the story was about Amanda’s return to her day job which required her to scoot through an endless succession of video conference calls. Each day after waking, she made sure her hair looked halfway decent, put on a clean top, and spent the next eight hours sitting in her underwear at the kitchen table. Whenever conversations got out of hand, she picked up one of her cats, drew it onto her lap, and stroked it behind the ears in view of everybody at the video meeting. Inevitably somebody (not Amanda) interrupted the meeting to comment on what a beautiful cat she had and what good company it must be during lockdown. Only once did somebody challenge her, calling it a passive aggressive tactic (which it was) and a distraction from their agenda (which it also was).
At first, the early return to work seemed helpful. It gave structure to Amanda’s day and kept her from thinking too closely about what had happened to her mother. But by the end of the first week, with her shoulders sore from sitting in the same position all day, and with her eyes blurred from squinting at a mediocre screen, Amanda experienced an unsettling lapse. She had looked away to the cat curling around her ankle and, returning her gaze to her computer screen where a video conference was in progress, she thought she saw her mother in one of the squares. There were eight people at the meeting, two rows of three squares and one row of two squares on the bottom. She saw a glare in the top right square that looked like light reflected from a sheet of plastic. Behind the sheet of plastic was a blurred form that might be her mother. A vague figure flailed an arm at her and tried to mouth words through a Gaussian sheen.
Amanda excused herself from the meeting, unsure whether she stood before or after she swivelled away from the screen, worried she might have given her boss and her colleagues a glimpse of her ratty panties. She retreated to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, tottering on the brink of hyperventilation but tumbling at the last minute into the world of calm thoughts and controlled breathing. If she had been blessed with a rational brain, she might have told herself it wasn’t her mother she’d seen on the video chat; it was the product of stress and liquid liberties during her lunch break, all augmented by what she liked to call her “supplemental” benzodiazepines. Amanda thought it was horribly cruel—maybe less cruel than strange or disorienting—that the world should arbitrarily (and without consulting her) decide it was acceptable to use the same platform to say goodbye to a loved one and to settle on a marketing strategy for a company that sells drink mixes. It reminded her of the celestial bio-engineer who decided it was a good idea to use the same equipment for both urination and copulation. While we have no way to push back against this latter designer, surely we are free to argue with the former. Why should we settle for things that make us feel cold and useless?
Winning the Whitcomb made Amanda feel odd. On the one hand, she was glad to have the recognition. On the other hand, she devoted much of her time to the cultivation of invisibility and winning a prize is the opposite of invisibility. She didn’t know what to do with the attention. She didn’t know what to do with the disruption it injected into her life. She took comfort in the simple routine Covid-19 imposed on her simple life. At least that’s what she told herself. She woke each morning to the alarm on her smart phone, the sound of fake marimbas that made her think of dry bones dancing on the Day of the Dead. She dropped her cats to the floor before she made the bed, the only daily habit she followed with any consistency. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she took a shower; otherwise she combed out her hair and padded to the kitchenette in a clean shirt where she put a slice of toast into the toaster and made herself a cup of coffee. In before times, she had gotten her coffee on the way to her day job, but now, with her stay-at-home gig, she had taken to filling her apartment with the odour of homemade coffee. She went online and ordered a coffee grinder, a French press, and a big bag of fresh roasted beans, and experimented until she came up with what she believed was the perfect cup of coffee. Her toast was not so consistent because the toaster was temperamental, some days leaving it more bread than toast, other days leaving it more like the scrapings from a crematorium. Although Amanda wished her toast could be as good as her coffee, she couldn’t justify the expense of a new toaster, not as long as it meant she’d have to carry a balance on her credit card, a habit she was determined to draw into check, just like her habit of blimping out her BMI. Amanda tried to time her second cup of coffee to coincide with the start of her work day so she could appear on the morning’s opening video conference bright-eyed and perky with a steaming mug in one hand and a smart phone in the other. It was important to look like a competent multitasker even if, in fact, her attention sometimes wandered further off course than Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.
Amanda wondered if she should tell her co-workers about the Whitcomb prize. Would the fact that she had interests beyond work help promote the image she was trying to cultivate? Or would it persuade her employer that she wasn’t serious about the job? She spent vast stretches of time weighing the pros and cons of the situation but, in the end, the choice was wrenched from her hands. Geoff from accounting had read both the award announcement and the story and, soon enough, so had everyone else at work. Emily from HR phoned to say how moved she was by Amanda’s account.
”Really and truly,” she said. “For most of us, this Covid business is nothing more than an inconvenience. But for some…Life upside down. That’s what it is. Everything—”
“Can I just interrupt you there, Emily.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a story, not an account.”
“Such courage.”
“It’s a short story.”
“Do you need a week or two off?”
“For winning a prize?”
“No, silly. For bereavement. Sorry. I shouldn’t have called you silly. That’s so insensitive of me.”
her boss seemed to imply that his grandmother had died when his grandfather had run her over with a tractor
Later in the afternoon, Amanda told an off-colour joke about farting on Zoom and one of the men on the call screwed up his face like he was sucking on a lemon and asked how she could joke at a time like this. Her boss interjected on her behalf and said it wasn’t for him or anyone else to judge how others grieve. We all cope in our own way and in our own time. Personally, he thought it was wonderful that Amanda felt comfortable enough to join them so soon after the fact and if, in the days or weeks to follow, she found herself having difficulty, she shouldn’t hesitate to excuse herself. They’d understand. Grief can be a funny thing. Strange. Not funny. Not like ha ha. Sometimes you think you’re doing fine and then, suddenly (who knows why?) something sets you off, something you didn’t even know was a trigger. The boss went on to tell everybody about how he felt when his gran died. Amanda wasn’t sure if she understood the account (which she wished was a story and not an account); her boss seemed to imply that his grandmother had died when his grandfather had run her over with a tractor. Amanda was aching to ask clarifying questions, especially around the matter of the grandfather’s intentionality, but her boss wiped a tear from the corner of his eye and moved the conversation on to the marketing budget.
At the end of the day, when Amanda had logged off the last of her video meetings and shut her laptop, and while she was pulling ingredients from the fridge for a three-egg omelette, her phone rang. She could see from caller ID that it was her mom, Robyn.
“Mandy, dear, I’ve just been talking to your sister and she tells me you won some literary prize—”
“Yeah, it’s no big deal.”
“—and she emailed me a link to the story you wrote, the one that won the prize and—Mandy!—Really! What were you thinking?”
“Thinking about what?”
“You said I caught Covid.”
“It’s a story.”
“Now everybody thinks I’m dead.”
“You’re not, you know.”
“Of course I know.”
“Good. I was worried you couldn’t tell the difference.”
“You and your smart mouth.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“Really, how could you?”
Amanda didn’t have an answer to that question. Such an answer would require a reason and Amanda wasn’t the sort of person who spent a lot of time reasoning things out. Her writing was a response to the world as she encountered it and that response always tended to be more visceral than cerebral. If she had been a romantic, maybe she would have said that she responded with her heart. Even the viscera/heart distinction demanded more from her head than she was prepared to give. To her, the world was a puzzle and she responded to that puzzle by throwing the pieces together in ways that seemed to fit. She left it to other people to make sense of the result. If she could make perfect sense of everything she did, critics would be out of a job.
“You wrote me dead so critics could keep their jobs?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Then what?”
“Aren’t you happy I’m doing something I love?”
“Killing your mother?”
When Robyn was Amanda’s current age, Amanda was eight. And now, while Amanda was theoretically old enough to have an eight-year-old daughter of her own, she felt like she was only a year or two out of high school. Even though, in many ways, she was far more capable than Robyn had ever been, Amanda was reasonably certain that if she were to have a child today, she would fuck up that child as egregiously as Robyn had fucked her up. She scribbled a note to herself for her next Zoom therapy session: “Did I kill my mom as an act of vengeance? Discuss.”
The next morning, as Amanda was settling, coffee in hand, onto her chair at the kitchen table, Emily from HR sent an elaborate email:
It had come to their attention that Amanda’s mother, Robyn, had not, in fact, died of complications from Covid-19, that she was, in fact, alive and quite healthy. While Amanda was free to make whatever (mis)representations she liked, she was not free to exploit those (mis)representations in order to secure paid bereavement leave from her employer. They had consulted their legal representative who said such behaviour is tantamount to fraud and the appropriate response is immediate dismissal for cause. Based on that advice, and after careful consideration, they found that they had no choice but to dismiss her from employment forthwith. They would send someone to her residence that afternoon in order to retrieve her laptop which was company property.
Although she couldn’t be sure, Amanda suspected this was the first time she had ever received an email that included the word forthwith. Amanda phoned Emily and tried her best to reframe the previous day’s conversation, the one in which Amanda had said it was a story, not an account, the one in which it was Emily and not Amanda who had raised the possibility of paid leave. The phone call didn’t go as hoped. Emily was disinclined to listen and had obviously been coached to say, again and again, that this had gone way beyond an HR issue and was now a matter for their lawyers to discuss. When the call was done, a torrent of clever retorts streamed into Amanda’s brain, but by then it was too late. In the midst of the conversation, Amanda had been too flustered to say anything useful and, once again, she began to doubt whether she was fit to be a real writer. Where were les mots justes when she needed them? She prayed to the spirit of Oscar Wilde but he was busy sprinkling his clever-dust on people who could make proper use of it.
That afternoon, Josh, her ex-boss’s pimply-faced nephew, knocked on the door to retrieve the company laptop. Amanda secretly hoped the kid was allergic to cats and would die in the hallway of anaphylactic shock but outwardly she smiled and conducted herself with all due professionalism, or with as much professionalism as it’s possible to scrounge when you answer the door in sweat pants and have a big coffee stain on your “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt. Once she surrendered her laptop, her only access to the Wicked Wide Web was via her smart phone and the overage charges were burying her.
It was time for afternoon tea. Just because one part of Amanda’s life had turned sideways was no reason the rest of it had to turn sideways too. Keep up the ritual, she told herself. As she poured boiling water into the kitty teapot, she pretended she was an ancient Japanese philosopher finding peace in perfect ceremony. It was Zen, the anagrammatic opposite of the French word for nose which, at least in the alternate version of rationality that overtook Amanda’s brain, was somehow significant. She drew the tea deep into her lungs and, because she could smell the subtle scent of jasmine wafting on the steam, gave thanks that, of the various disasters strung together to make her life, contracting Covid-19 was not one of them. She based that supposition on an article she had read about how one of the symptoms of Covid-19 is that you lose your sense of smell. She could smell her tea. Ergo she did not have Covid-19. When the pandemic had run its course, Amanda planned to set herself up as a guru of Nez meditation. Her followers would meditate by doing things backwards, standing on their heads, chanting om out their asses.
As she was sipping the tea, her phone rang and she could tell by caller ID that it was her agent who wasn’t really her agent but a friend of a friend who was pushy on her behalf. A red tick appeared, indicating a voice message. Her agent wanted to know if she had seen the latest press release from the Whitcomb people. If not, she might want to brace herself before she read it. She could find it on the Whitcomb web site. It was hard navigating the web site on her smart phone because the print was super tiny and the people at the Whitcomb were Luddites who hadn’t implemented a responsive site that would adjust according to the device used to access it. Amanda kept a magnifying glass in the kitchen drawer that proved helpful.
The Whitcomb people had decided to rescind their award. They had granted it on the premise that her short story had been an authentic expression of suffering. It was a bedrock assumption—not unique to the Whitcomb and by no means idiosyncratic but, quite the contrary, widely held as a foundational cultural tenet—that woven into our literary experience is a gossamer thread that binds honest lived experience to its authentic expression. They had awarded the prize to Amanda not simply because she had submitted a good story but because she had held it out as a reflection of her lived experience. However, they subsequently learned that she had falsified her situation. While she did indeed have a mother named Robyn, her mother had not succumbed to complications arising from Covid-19, had never even contracted Covid-19, and at this very moment was sitting in the comfort of her suburban condominium. The literary community could not tolerate such fraudulent behaviour. The one positive in all this was that they had discovered the author’s duplicity early enough that she had not been able to make use the Whitcomb’s organizational resources to advance her own interests. And do rest assured: the Whitcomb would be able to recover from the reputational damage it had suffered. Amanda imagined a giant finger wagging in her face.
The Whitcomb press release was less disconcerting than the posts that followed it on social media. The record-setting response to the photo of her kitty teapot was insignificant by comparison. Hundreds of people piled on, calling her a lying bitch, a fake wannabe writer, a nobody with a nothing life who wanted to scam her way into a real existence. A journalist put it in more measured terms but wrote what amounted to the same thing: Amanda’s “banal gambit suggests a level of immaturity one would expect from a person with little experience and, perhaps more to the point, a life devoid of suffering.” Amanda had met the journalist a couple times, a woman not much older than herself who had published a collection of inspirational stories about young women who overcome insurmountable odds to become fully realized versions of themselves. Never was a collection so deliberately positioned for placement on Oprah’s Book Club list. Last year, at a book launch, Amanda had stumbled on the journalist in the middle of a pissing contest with a poet about which of them suffered most for the sake of their craft. Amanda chimed in that she had it worse than either of them because she had to listen to their bullshit. Two drinks was the threshold beyond which Amanda invariably lost her tact and, on that occasion, she was well past that threshold. Unfortunately, the journalist had not passed the threshold beyond which she would forget the remark and Amanda had borne her enmity ever since. Had Amanda known the price she would pay for her remark, she might have kept her mouth shut. No. In all likelihood, foreknowledge would have made no difference.
Amanda slumped into her sofa, a cat on either side, and checked her calendar to see how long before her next Zoom therapy session. She’d never tried Zoom therapy on a smart phone before. She’d have to make sure her phone was fully charged before she started the session. She opened her bottle of benzos and scattered the contents across her coffee table which wasn’t really a coffee table but a pane of glass laid across two upside down milk crates. There were only five pills but the label on the pill bottle said there was one more repeat left on the prescription. Thank god for generics or she’d never be able to afford them. She set a shot glass in front of each pill and filled each glass to the brim with cheap bourbon. One for each hour, which would take her nicely to bedtime, which would ensure a dreamless sleep, which would guarantee her complete erasure from reality for the next twelve to fourteen hours. These days, this was as close as she got to a fucking holiday. And cheaper too.
What Amanda liked about the benzo/bourbon combo was the numbing effect it had on her mind. She set the first pill on her tongue then tipped back her head and, with a tiny fury, slung the first shot to the back of her throat where it burned and drew tears to her eyes. The gesture had a quality of ritual to it. Like an ancient Japanese philosopher, Amanda gazed at the four remaining pills and at their attendant shots and posed a koan-like question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear its crash, does it suffer?