Fake Me (1-3)

-Alan A.

See Foriegn Desk Editor ASAP

Mira

So said the post-it on his computer. He traced a curving line between the “i” and the “e” to demonstrate the appropriate spelling, because he couldn’t stop himself from inscribing the symbols of the print editors’ cant in red pen whenever he felt stressed. It was a skill that would soon join shorthand stenography and 10-Key in the room of useless office abilities. The post-it note itself was a strange survivor that would always have a place on the desks of even the most electronically-inclined employees. Mira would have e-mailed him unless the Foreign Desk editor needed him upstairs before he could boot up his computer.

No coffee stop. At that moment in the break room, the last French Roast pod danced a foil-unwrapping pirouette before the metal arm slammed it into the compressor. He heard the drip of the boiling water recede as he climbed the stairs. At the summit, the industrial gray international newsroom loomed, intimidated, and ultimately made him feel like an obtrusive spider, tolerated only when he lingered in out-of-the-way corners and devoured the few pests more miniscule than himself. Why was he here?

The hall between the cubicles was empty, and only the sporadic sounds of clicking keys or rustling paper from either side suggested activity, and life. Then a near-giant ducked his head under the doorjamb of a larger-than-average gunmetal cubicle with a crude roof. Alan sucked in his breath and continued on, disappointed when the Corp’s ombudsman turned his way. Lloyd George Ramero cheerfully encouraged the reporters to call him Lord George, even as he appeased the op-ed letter writers with those same reporters’ hides. Alan had twice been invited into the ombudsman’s cave to answer for a reader’s ire, and had been released the second time with the promise that his “nuance” defense would not save him again. Not surprisingly, Ramero continued in the direction from which Alan had come, and ignored the social nicety of passing to the right. Alan uncomfortably swerved at the last moment.

“Ah, excuse me.”

Ramero didn’t slow, but half turned his head to regard the flotsam in his wake.

“Huh? Oh, don’t sweat it.”

As unpleasant as it was to meet the foreign desk editor, there were worst destinations, and this encounter reminded Alan of that. He told himself that Ramero was six feet, six inches tall – six inches taller than himself. He told himself that Ramero was wider than he was in the shoulders, but not extraordinarily fit, a kind of near-giant one picks for a basketball team solely because of his abilities to play a natural center. He told himself that next time he would try to think of all of these things before he let the ombudsman intimidate him.

Mira’s cubical by the corner office defied every rule of corporate media conformity. Instead of the plastic frames of kids or kid scribbles, she had covered the walls of her cubical with headshots of every character, major and minor, from Death Note. Black and red strings tied different characters together in ways that were probably significant, Alan had never seen or read enough about it to fully know why. The large headshot of the protagonist was in the center, of course, most strings radiating out from his mug like spokes from a wheel. Mira had kissed the central figure on the cheek in a moment of exceptional fandom, and Alan found himself unable to keep his eyes from returning constantly to those naughty purple impressions.

He coughed, and wondered if she knew his last name. Mira turned away from her twin computer screens long enough to nod her head and say “In there.” He hesitated for a moment, and she gave him a second glance that seemed calculated to remind him that she was single-handedly supporting the IT needs of eighty-seven employees, and would always be deemed superior to him in every way by the Corp. The knowledge that he could best her in a spelling bee or grammar contest didn’t comfort him this time. He went in.

Louis Tulwar made him wait for twenty minutes while he made several phone calls, including one that sounded suspiciously like a lunch order. Finally satisfied that he would not be receiving a sandwich with mayo, the foreign desk editor hung up and crooked several fingers at Alan, who counted twelve steps between the door and the mahogany desk. Rumor had it that the office had been intended as a conference room.

“Alan. Fuckin’ Alan A!” He didn’t know Alan’s last name either. “I have a very important job for our last and certainly not least reporter.” Alan used to get excited when he heard that, but the editors had dashed his hopes too many times. Tulwar continued as if he were reading a telemarketer’s chirpy script, not actually meeting Alan’s eyes. “Pak-E-Stan-E leader was killed. You read about that? Of course you did. Anyhoo, it turns out that her party has a new leader, and the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

He went on to explain what Alan already knew; the candidate’s nineteen year-old son was her chosen successor, and her husband – a former convict – had been tapped to lead the party until the son was old enough to do so. Tulwar was predictable, and Alan could easily guess what he wanted, but that didn’t stop him from trying to escape it.

“I’d be happy to dig up information on the father,” Alan said. “He’s got a long and sordid past, so there’s plenty of material.”

Tulwar grinned and pointed his index finger at Alan, working the middle finger as if it were squeezing a trigger. “Cool as that would be, I’ll be working on that. That’s the sort of thing that requires a seasoned journalist who actually lived through that administration.” At that time, Alan suspected, Tulwar would have been a high school sophomore who had never read any news story longer than the directions for shaking a can of spray paint. “What I need YOU to do, is find out more about that boy. Set a young person to catch a young person, I always say. Here’s a tip, no charge: start with that facebook site that the young people go so crazy over. Find out what music he listens to, grab any photos you can find.” A new thought occurred to him. “And e-mail me those photos, along with pictures of any cute friends of his that link to his page. And hurry.”

Outside, Alan thought of all the interesting politics and intrigue that Tulwar’s assistant editors would be finding on the colorful and infamous widower. Corruption. Crime. Incarceration. Racketeering. Meanwhile, he would be plumbing a website for softcore pictures of Oxford coeds that Tulwar could drool over in the name of “research.” But before he turned to his inevitable fate as an underpaid twenty-something, eternally the youngest staffer, the portfolio-stagnating reporter for the most dismal news corporation on the east coast, he had a flash of inspiration that appeared as a web of lightning in his mind. He could still remember it when it faded, and it aligned perfectly with Mira’s 2D Death Note mobile.

She glanced at Alan and then dismissed him, but she would never intimidate him again. He sat next to her keyboard and grinned into her surprised kohl-lined eyes.

“Mira. How fast can you build a fake website?”

They met up for lunch inside the Omni, three blocks and far enough outside of the probability that one of their coworkers might wander in. Even in the rare event that someone did spot them in here, Alan knew it couldn’t be one of the higher ups, all of whom ordered in or visited far more expensive restaurants, with liquor licenses.

Only lower tiered workers like Mira or himself would hoof it to the Green Wok for vegetable chow mein, ($3.00 for a large bowl).

The front door hadn’t opened for a while, and the heat from the kitchen was taking over the small dining area. He eased off the long scarf and removed his knit hat, pondering the removal of his long coat. He settled for turning the collar down instead, and soothed his blond bangs and their prematurely gray compatriots back along his scalp. He was glad this wasn’t one of those days where he had to be clean-shaven and wear a tie; he suspected that a gritty appearance would set her at ease.

Mira entered and paused just inside the doorway, studying Alan and the tray vegetarian Chinese food she’d ordered him to procure as a prerequisite to the meeting. Her dark cloak billowed dangerously in the doorway, and she jerked the folds out of the way of the closing door just in time. Now completely in, she shrugged and joined him in the booth. At first glance, he might have seen her more obvious choices – black billowing clothes over her pale skin, black painted nails, eyes lined in blue, and categorized her as “goth,” but on closer inspection he had to revise that opinion. A turquoise bracelet. A braided belt, over what appeared to be loose black pants. Biker’s boots. A studded hair clip that trapped black hair with an entwined pair of blue threads. If she was the sum of her parts, then Mira was a counterculture gothic-hippie-punk.

“Wait.” She held up one finger to forestall his greeting, peeking cautiously at the vegetarian chow mein, and raking it over with her personal pair of black lacquer chopsticks. Satisfied, she opened her handbag, an old black leather thing that a country doctor would take on a house call, and removed three packets of jerky, which she snapped into small pieces and stirred into the vegetables.

“Okay,” she said after her first rapturous reaction to the taste of her own concoction. “Talk to me about this plan, and why I should be a part of it.”

Alan took a long swig from his water bottle, doing his best to reorganize the pieces of his argument that had scattered in his brain like sandpipers on a shoreline when the tide comes in. Inverted pyramid style wasn’t going to work on a woman like this.

“The plan flashed into my head, fully formed, all because I’d finally dropped the last pretense of belief in our company’s little meritocracy.”

“Yeah,” She said between mouthfuls, “Our company stinks. So what?”

Apathy was a slender thread to seize, but Alan had nothing better to grab at the moment.
“Exactly. No one can move up, or change anything, Tulwar and his ilk wield total power, and wave that power about like a teenager with a chainsaw. Just last month, one in ten got sacked, and everybody else got moved to the weakest health plan imaginable. You didn’t see a bonus this year, did you?”

Apathy was eating jerky chow mein and beginning to tune Alan out. “Nobody did.”

“The corner office residents got fourteen percent.” He wasn’t supposed to know this, but it was true. Before the coordinator had canceled the intern program, one of the journalism students had left an executive internal memo on the copier bed.

Mira swallowed and gave him a hard look. “Let’s say I believe you. Why don’t you just get another job?”

“I’m sure you and I will, sooner or later. But don’t you see, that’s the whole game, the wheel that keeps spinning. We move on to another organization with new managers and coworkers who are a little better or a little worse, and of course we don’t talk about where the last group went wrong, because the cardinal rule is that you don’t badmouth the last company to the next. And so the Tulwars of the world continue to escape justice because nobody exists to hold them accountable.”

Alan took another long swig. He wasn’t accustomed to making speeches, and he was surprised by how easily this one fell out. He didn’t feel like he was penetrating Mira’s cynicism yet, but he felt all of this was structurally important. Time for stage two.

“You heard about Brackenridge and Stark?”

She indicated that she had by nodding soberly through her chewing.

“They did good work, and the readers loved them. And we had it in our budget to pay them what little the syndication rights cost.”

“I thought they said at the meeting that the price had gone too high to continue. Wasn’t that what the accounting guy said?”

“Brackenridge and Stark haven’t seen an increase in pay since 1998. The reason they were fired was to make way for the elementary school art teacher Tulwar boned – his children’s elementary art teacher.”

Mira snorted. “I’ll grant you the cartoons they replaced them with are beyond weak, but how do you know all that?”

“Because Tulwar needed me to proof the gag orders and tell him if they were legit. Gag orders, I might add, that were sent out to the fired cartoonists, the legal counsel, and of course, me.”

Mira set down her chopsticks and smiled. “Which you’ve just broken.”

Alan finally picked up his own chopsticks and expertly rolled Singapore noodles into a tight whorl-shape and popped it into his mouth. “It hardly matters. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to in the office who didn’t already know.”

She looked stung for a moment, and then recovered. “Well, I don’t socialize much around the office, as you can tell.”

Six salesman in business casual attire entered at once and roughly snatched orange trays from the racks. They all talked at once, some ordering loudly from the help, some carrying on conversations at street volume. One of them said something that ended with the word “Gothika” and the others brayed and hooted. Mira’s face went flinty, then resigned. Alan leaned forward.

“Look, I don’t really care about office politics, or water cooler gossip, or careerism networking bullshit. We work hard enough to take some pride in our work, but people like you and me treat work as something we get through, something that keeps us fed and boarded until we have time to do what we love to do, whether it’s spinning discs, or traveling, or making webcomics.”

She didn’t miss his emphasis. “How did you – have you been spying on me?”

It was risky, but he needed to take a chance here and impress her.

“In that mobile in your cubical, you have one character that isn’t connected to any of the other threads, portrayed in a completely different drawing style. I called up a fan art aggregator, named some probable genres, and, after a few false starts, spotted a familiar face, caption: “Tambourine Echo.” Then I plugged “Tambourine Echo” into the engine and found the ‘Meganekko Mirage’ strip on the first try.”

It was exceptionally lucky that he had been able to get from the image to the text, and he had been pleasantly surprised that he had succeeded in about twenty minutes of perusing thumbnail sketches. Some sites on the deep web allowed one to scan a face and return all instances that matched the face’s composite points, but he was fairly certain that the facial recognition software available to the public only worked on a limited array of photos, not drawings.

Mira refused to react, so he pushed harder.
“I think the fan site portrayed Ms. Echo in a far saucier pose then you’ve probably ever arranged her, but I can’t really be sure, since I only had time to read the last two months. Have you really been updating that page three times a week for four years?”

Mira wiped her chopsticks with a rag and slipped them into her bag. “Never missed, not even when I had pneumonia.” She pressed the plastic lid of the container back on top of her noodles, having eaten only a third of the bowl.

“It’s definitely better than that crap the naughty art teacher lumps together in MS paint.”

“Powerpoint,” Mira had closed her eyes, lightly tracing the surface of the leftover container.

“Pardon?”

“She imports clip art into Powerpoint.”

Alan had been confident that he was winning her to his point of view, but now that she had closed her eyes he found he couldn’t predict her next mood or action. “That doesn’t sound like a good way to go about it,” he said uncertainly.

“It’s atrocious,” she grated. “It’s an insult.”

“What should she use?”

“That’s not important! The problem is that she hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to tell a story with pictures.”

The business casual crew ate with forks, but one kept gesturing at Mira with his unused chopsticks when he thought Alan wasn’t looking. He murmured something for the group and they all snickered. Alan caught his eye and slowly made a fist. The other chuckled nervously and looked down, face flaming. Alan had never done that before, and couldn’t believe that it had worked.

“If it’s any consolation, the readers agree with you. It’s been panned by everyone, so much so that they shut down the letters section the other day.”

This wasn’t much of a consolation, he knew. Even if the strip was given the axe, the damage was done. There could never be another Brackenridge and Stark-level replacement. Money removed was never returned. In keeping with Alan’s penchant for finding symbols in everyday life, he saw that Mira’s voluminous sleeve had slipped back to reveal a line of pentacles, inscribed in henna and winding up the back of her arm.

“So, you still haven’t told me what you want me to do.”

It was the Five of pentacles. Did the subject have trouble with money in a big way? No, the Tarot reader might suggest that the subject struggled with the problems and difficulties of opposing social conventions.

Alan held out his hand, palm up. “Help me reveal them to the world. The fools and liars and jerks. We’re going to blow the whistle without suffering the usual fate of a whistleblower, because they’ll never know we did it.”

Mira stared at his palm as if she could read their future in the lines. “They have gone too far.”

“We’re going to put them on the world stage with a royal hoax, and let it blow up in their faces. But only if we move fast.”

She slid her pale hand into his and shook it.

Alan returned to his cubicle in the basement and covered the window where the legs of passersby endlessly marched in both directions and kicked the dried leaves. He was not so much concerned about being discovered, as he was distracted by the setting sun’s glare on his monitor. Mira had feigned illness after lunch and gone home early to begin their scheme. His only tasks now were to “properly” research the story, and abort the plan if another news outlet unexpectedly broke the social networking angle first. This was possible, but unlikely. Every feed he monitored lead with conspiracy theories about generals, to the exclusion of all else. If the news cycle played out the way it predictably did, the weekend editions would run profiles of the young man.

Even so, he knew that many other reporters in organizations around the world had already been charged with his assignment, and even now were researching the real social networking page. This would make the contrast between their weekend stories and the Corp’s more glaring, and ensure a maximum audience by the time Monday arrived with corrections. Fortunately, he had a plan to make his colleagues’ research augment his own defense in the inevitable Monday morning recriminations.

He activated his phone’s headset as he typed the “true story,” pausing briefly to dial and then write down a few “fake story” ideas in red pen on a notepad.

Arctic Monkeys
The Namesake (India - too controversial?)
Everything is Illuminated (American Jewish author)

“How are you feeling?”

Mira fake-coughed into the phone. “A little better, actually. I found some medicine in my cabinet that had expired, but then I dug a little deeper and got some good stuff. If it works as promised I should be over this bellyache in two hours.”

Alan was pleasantly surprised. “Only two? That is good news.”

“Three at the most.”

He considered his own progress. “It’s going to sound old fashioned, but I know where to find some kick-ass chicken soup. Suppose I drop it off this afternoon after everything settles, say… seven o’clock?”

Mira hesitated. “Are you sure that wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

“None at all,” he said, wondering what the source of this sudden reluctance could be. “It’s essential… to your recovery, I mean.”

“Okay,” she said. “My boyfriend will let you in.”

So that was it, Alan thought.

Someone had been trying to beep through for the last thirty seconds of the coded phone call, which he had believed was unnecessarily cautious until Tulwar broke through. Until now, he hadn’t known they could do that.

“Alan! Sorry to cut you off, man, but your favorite editor needs you to give him an update on the prince’s webpages.”

“He isn’t a prince, actually—”

“You see, there’s someplace I need to be, so I’m leaving early tonight. I said to the chief: ‘don’t you worry, my boy Alan A. is on the case, and he won’t stop sniffing ‘till he find the bone!’ and she said she appreciated that, but that her hands were tied, and every editor has to collect progress reports from his people before we clock out, no matter what.”

Alan struggled to think of his best move. The big reveal needed elements of the fake story and the true story. Was it possible that the minor reveal in the progress report should be the same way? This was no small matter, because he would have to be perfect on Monday when what everyone knew, and when they knew it would go under the microscope. Tulwar heaved a stage-sigh and continued to talk at him.

“I tell you, Alan, it’s not like the old days. We used to trust everyone to get the job done, in the newsroom and in the bar after work.”

Alan hesitated as the uncomfortable feeling of agreeing with Tulwar settled on his shoulders. Progress reporting was corporate-enforced time wasting that pleased nobody except the ombudsman, whose job it secured.

“Sure, there’s much more money these days, but I think I’d give some of it up to have that trust back.”

And just like that, Alan regained his resolve. “Shall I e-mail you a summary?”

“Thanks, buddy, that would be great. I’m still going to go early, but I’ll have the crackberry along to keep the chief happy. Oh, um, and about the pictures of prince’s harem, maybe you should hold off on that. Don’t need the wife getting the wrong idea, know what I’m saying?”

Alan chuckled tolerantly along with him, only though clenched teeth. They disconnected and he took off the headset, breathing deep and taking in the entire page he’d been typing while they were talking. The true story. The cover.

Then there was the red script in the notepad beside him, with the names of bands, books, and films – and a quote:

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”

He logged onto the computer and browsed a few networking sites before resting on the one Mira had selected. He quickly found her fake page, still just a framework waiting for him to breathe an identity into it. Mira had helpfully added a few widgets, including a clock that 21:04 GMT.

“Good girl,” He murmured. That meant it was now four minutes after four p.m. where he was. In approximately three hours he would reach the point of no return. The only way to fight down the fear and guilt was to keep on typing, so he did.