Bee-Loud Glade Read Free Page B

I bumped the mouse while moving the fountain and the monitor came to life with a ping. I might have made final postings for each of my online personas, bringing their imaginary lives to some closure, but the idea of dozens of people who had never existed simply vanishing all over the web had an appeal I couldn't resist. And all of those voices falling silent at once, having said everything they had to say, remains—even all these years later—the most satisfying accomplishment of my tenure at Second Nature. So I set the fountain down on the desk and went online one more time to erase all my records of usernames and their passwords, removing bookmarks to those many sites created by me but belonging, most likely, most legally, to Second Nature. I didn't know then if anyone would replace me, and I don't know if anyone did, but I know they were never able to make my congregation of characters speak to sell plastic plants or to celebrate birthdays or just to vent about a bad day at work. All the lives I'd created and lived in those years went into stasis for as long as they stayed on their servers. For as long as their archives existed and their permalinks worked.
    When I had finished erasing my online tracks, I lifted the fountain in both hands and wove through the cubicle maze toward the exit, trailing a dark thread of water across gray industrial carpet. As I walked to my car, I smiled to think that the trail, too, would vanish within a few minutes, and I would go back to being forgotten.

3

    T he first weekend of my unemployment passed like any other: I watched reruns of shows I couldn't remember from when they were new, and I went grocery shopping in the middle of the night and washed clothes in the quiet hours of morning when the laundry room of my apartment complex was otherwise empty.
    Saturday night I went to the movies; I bought my ticket online then fed my credit card to a machine in the lobby to claim it. The movie was a sequel. I hadn't seen the original but that didn't matter—it was an action thriller, full of explosions and car chases just like the explosions and chases in other movies, only more so because this one was newest. Right away I knew what would happen and also what wouldn't, so I could settle into the film like I might settle into a long bus ride through a landscape that never changes and is familiar from the first moment on. I stayed awake through the whole movie, but when it was over I felt like I'd had a restful night's sleep because it had passed through me as easily as a dream, only smoother because there were fewer surprises.
    After being out late at one movie, then watching another one at home on TV that was more or less the same as the first, I slept through most of Sunday and it wasn't until evening that I remembered I had no job to show up for the next morning. Sunday nights I usually watched TV and thought about what all the people I'd invented and spoken for on the company's marketing blogs were doing over the weekend, and what they would share with the world the next day, but none of that mattered now. They weren't doing anything anymore, and they would have nothing to share and no means of sharing. I could have kept on writing their lives at home, with my own computer, but they'd always lived on the company's time, stolen time, and that made their lives worth living alongside my own.
    I ironed my shirts for the week ahead, per usual, as if I would need them, and I scrubbed the floors in the kitchen and bathroom of my bland, boxy apartment—a kitchen, a bedroom, a family room all to myself. I did all the chores I could think of, even sorting the pantry full of canned goods and packaged meals, until I was finally tired enough to fall asleep without thinking for too long in bed.
    I'd turned off my alarm clock, but Monday morning I awoke at the same time as always, at the time routine had trained my body to wake. I had my coffee and oatmeal then sat at the kitchen table for hours. I needed