walking meditation and Double DP, we will give it to you.”
She starts to laugh.
“Why are you laughing at me?” I snap. “I am not joking!”
She waves a hand. “I know, I know, but what you just said ‘double’—” She shakes her head, still laughing. “Never mind.”
I lapse into silence. I want to go on, to tell her of my frustrations. But now I am embarrassed at my loss of composure. I have no face. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to control my emotions, but now I am an American, as childish and unruly as Janice. And Kulaap laughs at me.
I control my anger. “I think I want to go home,” I say. “I don’t wish to be on a date anymore.”
She smiles and reaches over to touch my shoulder. “Don’t be that way.”
A part of me is telling me that I am a fool. That I am reckless and foolish for walking away from this opportunity. But there is something else, something about this frenzied hunt for page views and click-throughs and ad revenue that suddenly feels unclean. As if my father is with us in the car, disapproving. Asking if he posted his complaints about his missing friends for the sake of clicks.
“I want to get out,” I hear myself say. “I do not wish to have your clicks.”
“But—”
I look up at her. “I want to get out. Now.”
“Here?” She makes a face of exasperation, then shrugs. “It’s your choice.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She tells her driver to pull over. We sit in stiff silence.
“I will send your suit back to you,” I say.
She gives me a sad smile. “It’s all right. It’s a gift.”
This makes me feel worse, even more humiliated for refusing her generosity, but still, I get out of the limo. Cameras are clicking at me from all around. This is my fifteen minutes of fame, this moment when all of Kulaap’s fans focus on me for a few seconds, their flashbulbs popping.
I begin to walk home as paparazzi shout questions.
Fifteen minutes later I am indeed alone. I consider calling a cab, but then decide I prefer the night. Prefer to walk by myself through this city that never walks anywhere. On a street corner, I buy a pupusa and gamble on the Mexican Lottery because I like the tickets’ laser images of their Day of the Dead. It seems an echo of the Buddha’s urging to remember that we all become corpses.
I buy three tickets, and one of them is a winner: one hundred dollars that I can redeem at any TelMex kiosk. I take this as a good sign. Even if my luck is obviously gone with my work, and even if the girl Kulaap was not the bodhisattva that I thought, still, I feel lucky. As though my father is walking with me down this cool Los Angeles street in the middle of the night, the two of us together again, me with a pupusa and a winning lottery ticket, him with an Ah Daeng cigarette and his quiet gambler’s smile. In a strange way, I feel that he is blessing me.
And so instead of going home, I go back to the newsroom.
My hits are up when I arrive. Even now, in the middle of the night, a tiny slice of Kulaap’s fan base is reading about checkerspot butterflies and American government incompetence. In my country, this story would not exist. A censor would kill it instantly. Here, it glows green; increasing and decreasing in size as people click. A lonely thing, flickering amongst the much larger content flares of Intel processor releases, guides to lowfat recipes, photos of lol-cats, and episodes of
In the center of the maelstrom, the green sun of the Double DP story glows — surges larger. DP is doing something. Maybe he’s surrendering, maybe he’s murdering his hostages, maybe his fans have thrown up a human wall to protect him. My story snuffs out as reader attention shifts.
I watch the maelstrom a little longer, then go to my desk and make a phone call. A rumpled hairy man answers, rubbing at a sleep-puffy face. I apologize for the late hour, and then pepper him with questions while I record the interview.
He is silly looking and wild-eyed. He has spent his life living as if he were Thoreau, thinking deeply on the forest monk and following the man’s careful paths through what woods remain, walking amongst birch and maple and bluets. He is a fool, but an earnest one.
“I can’t find a single one,” he tells me. “Thoreau could find thousands at this time of year; there were so many he didn’t even have to look for them.”
He says, “I’m so glad you called. I tried sending out press releases, but…” He shrugs. “I’m glad you’ll cover it. Otherwise, it’s just us hobbyists talking to each other.”
I smile and nod and take notes of his sincerity, this strange wild creature, the sort that everyone will dismiss. His image is bad for video; his words are not good for text. He has no quotes that encapsulate what he sees. It is all couched in the jargon of naturalists and biology. With time, I could find another, someone who looks attractive or who can speak well, but all I have is this one hairy man, disheveled and foolish, senile with passion over a flower that no longer exists.
I work through the night, polishing the story. When my colleagues pour through the door at 8 A.M. it is almost done. Before I can even tell Janice about it, she comes to me. She fingers my clothing and grins. “Nice suit.” She pulls up a chair and sits beside me. “We all saw you with Kulaap. Your hits went way up.” She nods at my screen. “Writing up what happened?”
“No. It was a private conversation.”
“But everyone wants to know why you got out of the car. I had someone from the
It’s a tempting thought. Easy hits. Many click-throughs. Ad-revenue bonuses. Still, I shake my head. “We did not talk about things that are important for others to hear.”
Janice stares at me as if I am crazy. “You’re not in the position to bargain, Ong. Something happened between the two of you. Something people want to know about. And you need the clicks. Just tell us what happened on your date.”
“I was not on a date. It was an interview.”
“Well then publish the fucking interview and get your average up!”
“No. That is for Kulaap to post, if she wishes. I have something else.”
I show Janice my screen. She leans forward. Her mouth tightens as she reads. For once, her anger is cold. Not the explosion of noise and rage that I expect. “Bluets.” She looks at me. “You need hits and you give them flowers and Walden Pond.”
“I would like to publish this story.”
“No! Hell, no! This is just another story like your butterfly story, and your road contracts story, and your congressional bud get story. You won’t get a damn click. It’s pointless. No one will even read it.”
“This is news.”
“Marty went out on a limb for you—” She presses her lips together, reining in her anger. “Fine. It’s up to you, Ong. If you want to destroy your life over Thoreau and flowers, it’s your funeral. We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. Bottom line, you need fifty thousand readers or I’m sending you back to the Third World.”
We look at each other. Two gamblers evaluating one another. Deciding who is betting, and who is bluffing.
I click the “publish” button.
The story launches itself onto the net, announcing itself to the feeds. A minute later a tiny new sun glows in the maelstrom.
Together, Janice and I watch the green spark as it flickers on the screen. Readers turn to the story. Start to ping it and share it amongst themselves, start to register hits on the page. The post grows slightly.
My father gambled on Thoreau. I am my father’s son.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in the
