Bee-Loud Glade Read Free

the inventions of others with jobs just like mine, the whole blogosphere a soapbox for a few busy schemers selling plastic palm trees and flavored milk drinks and guides to selling products online. Each of my imaginary bloggers had a backstory, a family or else an explainable absence of one; each had his or her own history of successes and failures. Second Nature's viral campaign spanned the gamut of human behavior from borderline psychotic to contemplative, fractured English to erudition, and all of those voices and vices were mine.
    And the more I said through my ciphers, the less I spoke in real life. My cube was in a far corner of the department, near some filing cabinets to which the keys had been lost, so apart from occasional walks to the bathroom and my twice-daily route between front door and desk, I was easy to miss. The faces changed around me without introduction, and in time no one knew who I was. There was no director of brand awareness for me to assist, and no one asked what I was doing. I'd been forgotten, become furniture in my far corner, and that's how I held onto the job for as long as I did even after I'd stopped writing about Second Nature and had let my online shills take on lives of their own. Their weblogs grew longer, spanned months and then years as they made projects for high school and graduated from college, grumbled or raved about various jobs, and enjoyed visits from growing grandchildren. They took trips to Hawaii and endured bouts with cancer, enjoyed good days at work and suffered through awful blind dates. Some gave birth and others died, their comment inboxes filling with sympathy notes they would never read, but I read them all. Commenters asked where flowers could be sent, and others suggested—success!—Second Nature's own hyperefficient arrangements.
    Years went by offline, too. Computers and carpets upgraded around me, but always at night so I never saw how or by whom. The restaurant across the street from our office changed from sub shop to low-carb to noodles to salads, then back to sub shop again, and I ate whatever it sold. I gave up my newspaper subscription and read only the headlines from my browser's home page, then I stopped reading news altogether because the headlines were the same ones they'd been all my life.
    Sometimes I postdated a batch of blog posts so they'd appear across upcoming days, then I let my computer sleep as I sat at my desk doing nothing. I spent days watching a trickle of water rise up and wash over the cairn of reconstituted brown stone in my desktop fountain (a decoration I'd claimed after its owner, the woman in the cubicle beside me years earlier, never returned from vacation). The same few cubic inches of liquid flowed by me again and again, until the soft sound of water and the whir of the fountain's electric pump carried my mind away from Second Nature and plastic plants to more or less nothing at all.
    So for this new submanager to notice my name in his files, to ask himself what, exactly, I was being paid for out of his budget... it was less of a shock to be fired than to hear someone speaking my name, and to hear my telephone ring when he called me into his office. The shock was being reminded that I had a job so long since I'd actually done it.
    First he took a stab at small talk, speculating about the year's Wimbledon prospects for a player who had been retired a decade at least. Years earlier, before I had been forgotten, before this particular submanager's time, a rumor had somehow started that I was a big tennis fan, which I wasn't and never had been. One of the best things about being forgotten at work was the cessation of tennis-themed holiday cards and questions about tournaments and players I'd never heard of but felt obliged to offer cryptic opinions on each time I was asked. I had even taken to reading up on the world of tennis so I wouldn't let down my side of those forced conversations, and pretending to have insider knowledge I