Fiction, Sophie McGilloway
Over the course of my long career, full of twists and turns, I one day wound up a data analyst in health insurance, like a water bug darting around on the surface of a river full of fish. Every day I rode my bike from my two-story house on a side street in the northern suburbs to the brightest tower at the center of the city. The handlebars vibrated as I passed over rough cobblestones and half-paved streets and sometimes I felt like I was about to lose control, though I never did. Along the way, people would throw trash out of their cars at me or roll down their windows and shout,
“Look how small that bitch is!”
I was very small. Some would say I am still very small, though I’ve been smaller. It’s still hard for me to lift heavy objects. My knees protrude in two fat bulges on the sides of my legs and hang a foot above the ground like they’re afraid of jumping. My hair is long and red, and I cherish it because it’s the only beautiful part of my body. Aside from that, my traits are miniature, like someone took a picture of them while zoomed out as far as the camera would allow. And yet I am a full-size human being.
At the tall skinny building where I worked, I sat in a cubicle on a corner of the 15th floor where there were no windows. The walls were painted yellow and hung with framed paintings and photographs of the exact view of the skyline I had as I biked to work. The cubicles were grey. I was right in view of the boss’ office, and his secretary sat in the cubicle just out front. Often she would come out of his office with a stack of paper and her phone clutched in her bent neck and take the paper to a shredder, shouting into the phone over the unbearable sound produced by the machine. Since I was right near the shredder too, this combination of noises, like a rubber ball bouncing around a turbine, made frequent interruptions to my concentrated labor. Yet as much as it got on my nerves, I felt a giddy sense of freedom when the noise got so loud I could barely focus on anything, like I was being released from my duties and could say and do whatever I wanted. There were also times when she would stand there after the shredding was done, either talking on the phone or in silence, and this made me very uncomfortable; but it wasn’t long before I would hear a honking sound coming from my boss’s office and back she’d go.
The smell of rotting meat would rise up through the building from the cafeteria on the second floor around lunchtime.
My job was to look for patterns and trends in data that had been gathered from enormous sets of patients and insurance claims into convenient databases. The process was slow. I always began by staring blankly at the numbers and names, which were written in an unknown language that was nonetheless adjacent to our own. After a few minutes, the cold familiarity of data was broken off and I began to penetrate into this language point by point. As patterns and singularities presented themselves to me, I would apply the tools I had learned on the job to articulate trends, to gather evidence that would support conclusions, and before long, firm sentences and insightful visualizations were unfolding over my heart like the dazzling plumage of a bird taking flight.
One time I discovered an upward trend in disenrollment. I noticed that as time went on, the insurance plans were losing more and more subscribers. I thought this was an alarming trend since our business depended on having as many subscribers as possible. (“Subscribers” was our word for people.) I lined up a branching spreadsheet with a statistical program like a taxidermist sewing an appendage onto the body of an animal. This allowed me to discover the root cause of all the disenrollment: subscribers were reaching the end of their effective living period; in other words, people were dying.
“More and more people are dying,” I told my boss as we sat in his office, blowing over open paper cups of black coffee.
He looked at me like a poor scavenger who turns over a piece of garbage to determine whether it contains any metal that can be stripped off and sold for money. “As time goes on and families give birth to bigger families, the population of the earth grows,” he said. “This results in a natural uptick in the population, which results in more deaths. What is the root cause?”
“Population growth,” I summarized.
“But what is the root cause of the population growth?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“Exactly.”
I had no idea where to start. Under my feet I felt a tectonic shift in the amalgam data landscape, like the answers to the empirical questions had all been scrambled around.
My boss looked at me seriously. “Let’s have this wrapped up by tomorrow.” His watch beeped twice. Then twice again. Then silence. Anticipation. Then his watch beeped a few more times like the answer to a knock-knock joke.
Later that day, as I was shoving columns of numbers into a meat grinder of a model, a man who worked on the same floor came up to me. This man, whose name was Larry, had shown me some attention before, but it was difficult for me to work out whether he was simply making conversation or whether he was flirting with me. He stretched his arm along the top edge of my cubicle and snapped his fingers.
“You know, you have funny knees,” he said. I remembered I was wearing a skirt. My knees drew back into little frowns between my shins and my thighs like two vanishing turtles’ heads.
“Yes,” I said, trying to hide my anger at being interrupted in this way.
“I think I just came across something big.” He had an air of self-satisfaction that was annoying to me.
At that moment the secretary was walking in our direction with a stack of paper. When she saw we were talking, she coughed and turned around, then stood there with her back turned a few feet away. Even though she was off to the side, I could feel her enormous frizzy haircut hanging in the air between me and Larry.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I started off riding through the open desert, no data at all, just blank sheets in every direction. That’s how I usually start out: a preparatory cleansing. Then, when I was reaching the outskirts of the call center data hub, I pulled up on the reins. There were streaks of terminated plans along the empty country all around me. So I got down on my knees and looked at them up close. They were leading towards the billing department. Just my style, I thought: no guides, no guardrails, just me and the involuted grit of the data. Do you like the Wild West?”
“I prefer neat pastures and farms,” I replied.
“Oh, so you’re an Englishwoman.” And Larry went on weaving his story through winding calculations and over peaks and troughs of bright buckling graphs.
His story caused me to drift off into a reverie, but it was a sad, lonely, pathetic reverie with just one image, that of a three-legged horse hobbling around on a farm.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in my chair alone. I looked around.
No movement.
I looked at my hands and tried to follow the course of what had just happened. Larry, the Wild West, then a horse, then blankness, then this. A gap in my continuous memory. What had happened in the time I was “gone”? I had been seriously disconnected from my body, like a dream. I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. It began to dawn on me that something terrible might have happened, that someone could have hurt me, that I could have hurt someone else! I got up and looked around. Everything seemed normal—the secretary had her head down at her desk, the door to the boss’s office was closed, and I could hear the keyboards in the cubicles around me chattering intermittently. “I didn’t see anything.” “Me either,” they seemed to be saying. Still, I could think of nothing but those terrible cases of amnesia in the movies, where the police uncovered a dead body in your closet and suddenly it came back to you that you had murdered someone.
I walked across the floor to the windows and looked out. There was only one cloud, turned over on its back in the darkening sky. I tapped a rhythm on the pane and did a breathing exercise, then headed back to my desk, struggling to stay calm.
I tried to concentrate once more on the data, but anxiety over what had happened was throwing me off. Every time I made as if to enter the data, the data would open up and then swallow, and, as soon as it closed its lips—like I was caught in a time loop—I would find myself sitting back at my desk staring at the screen, ready to start examining the data, my mind as blank as it was at the beginning. I was suddenly overcome by a wave of deep exhaustion. I turned my keyboard upside down and shook out the crumbs, then, letting out a heavy sigh, I began to browse the internet aimlessly. I looked at pictures of farms, dice, and ancient florins, my favorite kind of coin.
I had the idea to look up Larry on social media but was met with an unexpected challenge. There were two profiles with the same first and last name, Larry Wagner. One of them had a picture of a man drinking coffee in it, but it was blurry and didn’t look a whole lot like Larry. The other had no picture at all but listed his location as Feasterville, a town not far from the city we worked in. Unable to figure out which one was the Larry I knew, I sighed again and closed out the browser. It was late, and when I walked outside, I could feel the breath of night along my shoulders and my neck.
I rode my bike home along the river. The fading light of dusk rose and sank on the water, struggling like a school of fish in an oil spill. The new buildings built along the shore were made in a dramatic clash of styles. Some were quaint imitations of old buildings, cabins, and boathouses, others were boxy modern bunkers that reflected the yellow street lamps around them with nonplussed faces. The cumulative effect was that I was not biking along the river in a city but rather flipping through a catalogue of buildings like you might find in a real estate agent’s office.
When I got home I fed my cat, who was almost as big as me, and laid down in my bed whistling and staring at the ceiling. The events of the day were haunting me. Not only could I not recover a portion of my memory, I had been tasked with finding a root cause out in totally uncharted territory. It was with great difficulty that I imagined I was on a farm. The cows, which seemed like they wanted to be crows, made sounds like the music you hear in a dream but can’t remember the next day, and meanwhile, the sheep, which thought they were people, were silent like the shadowy grass that slept underneath their feet. I approached one of the cows and tried to milk it but when I groped at its udders, it was like I was pressing the valves on a saxophone and the music coming from their mouths changed gradually, although no fluid came forth. Cursing, bewailing my woe, I ran over to the sheep and tried to shear them with my fingers, but as soon as I had a tuft of wool in my hand it turned into a cluster of stars that burned my skin until I dropped it. As it fell it landed on the umbrella of the night sky, under which I fell asleep, breathing in the open air, my cat at my right side, and at my left all sorts of creeping things struggling under an opaque net that I had stretched out over top of them with the hope of being good and comprehending of it all.
I took a different route to the office that morning. Here the homes were small and quiet and did not want to be disturbed.
I arrived late and snuck to my desk like I was being hunted. Already anxious because of the black spot in my memory from the day before, I was not prepared to face any kind of reprimand. When I was halfway down the narrow path between the cubicles, I noticed a man standing next to my desk snapping his fingers. It was Larry. I wondered as I approached whether it was the blurry Larry drinking coffee in the picture or the imageless Larry who lived in Feasterville. I remembered that I had blacked out in the middle of our conversation the other day and I still had no idea what we talked about.
“Still on for lunch?” Larry asked.
I stared at him for a moment. I had no memory of arranging a lunch date of any kind. I did not know what kind of date it was. I did not know his tone of voice when he asked me out to lunch.
“Okay,” I said, “sure, yes.” I felt the muscles tightening in my armpits. Larry made a sort of clicking sound like a crab’s claw and wandered off to his side of the floor.
I sat at my desk and tried to focus on the work I had to do that day, but my thoughts came loose and I was left in a daze. I didn’t think I was sitting there for very long but then I smelled the rotting meat and I realized it was already lunchtime. My boss was honking, calling me into his office.
He looked at me gravely. “Major fire drill today. I was on the phone with one of the VPs this morning. All eyes are on that death trend. We need to find the root cause. Or if it’s just noise, we need to know that too.”
“But the population growth,” I stammered.
“We need this. I know I can count on you. Be the transparent eye at the center of the database. Merge till there is nothing else left.”
“Sure, yes,” I said. I was feeling smaller by the minute. The boss had a beautiful view of the city and the river from the windows behind him in his office and it was giving me vertigo. I imagined myself falling down into the river and being slurped up by an enormous golden-purple fish. Then I imagined myself skinning the fish and pulling out its bones with a pair of pliers.
“Try to have that by end of day,” he said, turning to his laptop.
I went back to my desk and there was Larry, in his trench coat, tapping his foot. I gathered my things and accompanied him to the glass elevators. We waited in silence. The hallway was carpeted and in front of the elevator, I noticed a long coffee stain that sprayed out from where the elevator door would open. When a gentle beep announced the arrival of the elevator, Larry said,
“After you.”
We went down into the echoing lobby and out into the courtyard.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Remember? The Round Ground,” said Larry. We must have already discussed this.
We made our way through the throng of buttoned-up lunchtime workers to the Round Ground, a cafe down the street from our office building. The place was empty and I was disturbed by the starkness of the tall skinny chairs and the tall skinny tables. I sat down at a booth seat near the front window and Larry shuffled sideways into the seat opposite me.
“The Boys are having a good season,” Larry started, raising his eyebrows. He clicked, somewhere behind his tongue.
“I don’t follow sports,” I said with some agitation.
The waiter came over to take our orders. I hadn’t looked at the menu, but Larry said,
“We’re ready. I’d like the cheese fries.” Then he looked at me.
I mumbled something quietly and the waiter pretended to write something on his notepad.
Larry looked embarrassed. He touched the waiter on the shoulder and said, “I thought you were saying you liked the fish tacos here” while making eye contact with the waiter.
I didn’t say anything. The waiter left and Larry whispered to himself, then we sat in silence for a minute.
Outside I saw a long trail of ants crawling over a dead bird.
Larry snapped his fingers, first the left hand, then the right hand, then the left hand, then the right hand. He looked just like a crab, the one that I was always afraid of when I went swimming. Suddenly I remembered there were two possible Larrys.
“Do you live in Feasterville?” I asked.
Larry laughed and snapped his fingers back and forth again. It must have been his signature move. Someone down the street was shouting, arguing. Don’t come back here anymore, they were saying.
I gave a nervous squeeze at my bulbous left knee until a little drop of ooze came out. I was wearing pants, though, and my knees were under the table, so Larry probably didn’t see.
Larry said, “Did you figure out that trend the boss was looking for yet?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to pull more data this afternoon.”
“I would try the data dump first,” he suggested.
“Always start with the data dump,” I agreed.
The waiter brought our food. We ate in silence, the food tasting like the idea we had imagined of the food before it came, disappointing as a water steak. When I looked back outside, the ants were carrying away the enormous bird carcass like a conveyor belt.
“Do you ever eat at the cafeteria?” Larry asked.
I gave him a worried look.
“Most of it isn’t good,” he admitted, puffing out his chest, “but I love the burgers.”
We went back to the office. The lunch was successful, in the sense that I had not had to fight off any unseemly advances from Larry. As I thought of Larry he seemed to be splitting in half into his blurry lookalike and a version of himself that had no profile picture.
We took the glass elevators up through a pickled-yellow tube.
When I was walking down the aisle between the cubicles, a woman stuck out her head toward me and moved her eyebrows up and down. I wasn’t sure what she was insinuating or if there was some joke I was supposed to be in on. It felt like something was missing.
When I got back to my desk, I remembered I only had til the end of the day to get to the bottom of the root cause of population growth and death. I pulled up the sprawling dataset full of datasets known as the data dump. The data dump was dirty, but in its grime it contained a picture of things that a more curated dataset could never show. It showed everything, including the mistakes, the mishaps, the disappearances; you could say it was a picture of the frame along with the picture. Here was a database full of every molecule contained in every drug, with their atomic weights and polarities, complete with an estimate of how confident we were that the drug actually existed. Here was a list of every single subscriber on any one of our insurance plans, with various demographic details, age code, race code, income stratum, body weight, marriage factor, and some private information we bought from credit card companies, like whether they were into motorcycles or not, whether they subscribed to gardening magazines, and even when the last time they got their hair cut was (well, not really, but it was possible to estimate this to 95% confidence with a little linear regression).
I combed through various cuts of the data and tried to find a trend with the brute force method (pure concentration). I sorted this way and that, lining the little rows of characters up by birth date, by gender presentation, by occupation.
I filtered out the elderly, I heard a familiar sound. I filtered out children. I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I filtered out the middle-aged, rows and columns snapping back and forth like muscles. I filtered until all that was left was the dead, the ageless, or rather, those with an age greater than their death date. Then, in the midst of the alphanumeric swarm, I started to notice a familiar shape. I zoomed in and readjusted, unable to believe my eyes. The characters at the center of the model were sketching out the shape of a chicken.
The chicken started to flap its wings and move its legs. The chicken was hungry for all the dead people in the world and it moved its beak around slowly like a power saw. Gradually it lifted its heavy body of represented bodies off the ground and did its best to fly around the room. Its wings couldn’t bear it for long, so it wound up in the big frizzy haircut of the boss’s secretary, who was talking on the phone to her best friend.
I heard, faintly at first, then gradually growing louder, the sound of applause rising from the edges of the river down below us.
The applause cut off sharply and I was staring at my trembling hands. The fluorescent light felt like it was pulsing brighter and brighter and I was half-choking. There was a new email in my inbox: “A Message from Susan Potter.” Who was Susan Potter?
I was running out of time. The population of the earth was changing. More and more people were dying, being born.
I thought I heard the sound of a traffic jam outside, but it was just my boss honking me into his office. I picked up my laptop and went in. Inside the office he was watching a video of two people talking in a language I did not recognize. Then I noticed that he had a tank of crabs in there like you might see at a seafood shop.
A brief gust of air from the cafeteria brought the smell of rotten meat.
“Sorry,” he said, turning off the video. “Core meltdown today. We have a whole subset of subscribers that CMS is calling ‘insane in the membrane.’” He paused, then clarified, in a different, low-pitched voice: “Insane in the brain.”
My hands were still shaking, and I managed only to cough and smile by way of response.
“So. Did you get to the bottom of that…thing that was going on?” He seemed to forget what he had told me to do.
“I’m going to need a few more hours,” I stammered.
Larry poked his head into the office and pointed when he saw the crabs in the tank. “J’accuse!” he shouted.
The boss walked up to Larry and laid a conciliatory arm across his shoulders. He started whispering in his ear. While they were speaking, I noticed a lone crab hiding out underneath the tank who had somehow gotten free.
The crab walked out from under the tank and I followed it as it passed out of our boss’s office, between the desks and cubicles and over the carpeted floor. We walked onto the elevators and down into the courtyard and out into the dusk. Further and further into the night, me and this crab, in a straight line. Torn-up mail and Taki bags all over the street. Systemless through the dark in a groove. The crab now curving to the right. This curving line was really very similar to the trend lines I created at work to analyze data. I felt there must have been some meaning behind this motion, some further analysis that I was not grasping, buried beneath the root cause. Before it could suck me in we wound up at the edge of the river, the water low. A family of little crabs dancing left and right on the shore. I realized that the crab was only looking for its family, that it wanted to be set free. I placed the crab among its kin. Then I myself began to shuffle to the left and to the right and to snap my little hands back and forth like claws. The water was almost up to my knees, which were quivering with excitement. And so we spent the evening shuffling around, blowing bubbles and snapping away at senile river bugs. When all was said and done, it was actually quite a bit like a farm, and I was pleased.
Sophie McGilloway is a writer and a musician from Philadelphia, PA. She performs music under the name Rrose Defoix and her music has been released by Strange Mono Records. This is her first published work of fiction.
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