The Ledger

Chapter 6: Down the Feed

Chapter 6: Down the Feed

15

I watched it standing up in Tommy's kitchen with the sound off, because my phone had been going since 6:12 in the morning and I hadn't looked at why. Nineteen seconds.

Whoever shot it was standing. You can tell from the angle. The carpet fills most of the frame, and that carpet is the good kind, the kind nobody rolls out in a private club unless somebody's paying. There's glass in it. There's me in the middle of it, from behind, on my knees. At the very top of the frame there's a chin.

Somebody laughs on the audio. More than one somebody.

At the bottom a counter kept rolling the whole time I watched. It was at forty-one thousand when I put the phone face down on the table, and I put it face down because I'd started counting instead of watching, and counting is what you do when you can't watch.

The account that had it first has 2.1 million followers. The caption was nine words long. Hale money. Watch what it does to a person. The pinned reply underneath had the price of the bottle in it. Thirty thousand dollars. The number was right, because it came out of my account. The last time I'd looked at that account there was thirty thousand five hundred dollars in it. Now there's five hundred, and a video of me on a floor, and by eight o'clock that morning four hundred thousand people had watched it.

One of the morning shows ran it behind the anchors and called it "viral footage out of Chicago." I'd never been on television before.

By nine there were two "everything we know so far" posts. One of them had a source in it. The source was described as a friend of the couple.

The friend said she paid for everything. The rent, the dinners, the trips, the furniture. The friend said I'd known what she was worth the entire time and stayed anyway, and that she put me on my knees because I cheated on her and the whole room knew it, and that was the point of the whole thing.

There was never any apartment like the one in that post. Ours was on the fourth floor of a building with an elevator that worked about half the time, and there were two chairs at the kitchen table and both of them came off a sidewalk on Halsted, and I carried them up four flights myself in July. Nobody in that post had ever been inside it. I knew that better than anybody alive, and it made no difference, and it was never going to.

Then the comments.

"what kind of man does that"

"what kind of woman ASKS for that"

"nobody put a gun to his head, he's a grown man"

"there's a whole room laughing in the background and nobody's talking about that"

"where's the company in all of this"

"don't cry for him, he saw the ring three years ago"

"money doesn't do that. people do that."

"she should be the one answering questions"

"victim blaming much"

"check the family's books while you're at it"

"wait till you find out who her people are"

That last one got the most likes. It was the version that took.

By noon they had my name. By one they had the studio. Somebody put the studio's address in a reply, and then a picture of the front door taken from across the street, and then the studio's client list, and every one of those things was public and none of them had ever been public in the same sentence before.

The address they posted for me was the apartment I gave up in March. I put the keys through the slot the day I left and never went back. Whatever's in there now isn't mine.

Two people from the studio texted me that day. Both of them wanted to know whether I was going to put out a statement. Neither of them asked how I was.

I called her once. It rang through to voicemail and I hung up before the beep. Then I checked the phone twice more over the next hour like an i***t, once for a text and once for a call, and neither one was there.

I typed it out four times.

She didn't pay for everything. We split the rent out of a joint account. The bottle came out of that account. Three years, straight down the middle, and the gifts were mine.

I deleted all four. There wasn't a box on the internet where any of that was going to be read as written. It would go in as a fact and come out the other side meaning something else, and I could see that clearly enough by two in the afternoon.

So I deleted the accounts. All three. The one from college with my résumé on it, the work one, and the one for apartment listings, with four places saved in it that I wasn't going to get anyway. Every one of them asked me if I was sure.

Then I sat down on Tommy's kitchen floor and stayed there a while, and I noticed I was doing it, and I didn't do anything about it.

16

It was Ray at 10:40 on Monday morning, and the first thing he said was a question he'd never asked me before.

"Ethan. Where are you."

"North."

"Right." There was a pause with a lot of stuff in it. "So this isn't a work conversation."

"Okay."

"This is a conversation about the studio."

"Say it, Ray."

"Doug called me Friday. Doug's boss called Saturday. Somebody at the paper called this morning and asked for a statement, which nobody in this office has ever had to give, and I've been here eleven years." Something clinked on his end, a mug, a pen, whatever was on his desk. "The leave stands. It's in writing as of this morning, so it's out of my hands. Off the West Harbor job, off the client, off the building."

"Fired."

"Leave. Call it whatever you want in your own kitchen. If it's a reporter, it's my phone that rings."

"There's a thing I could tell you."

"Don't."

"I'm not asking you to do anything about it. I'm asking if you want to know."

"I don't." Something moved on his end, a chair or a door. "I've got twenty-two people in this office. Two of them have kids in private school and one of them has a mortgage that's older than you are, and none of them did anything. That's the whole thing. That's the entire thing, Ethan."

"There are two guys downstairs with a light and a phone. They've been out on the sidewalk since eight. They asked the kid at the front desk for you by name, and he gave them my name instead, so now they want me too. Do not come in. Don't come in for the box. I'll send the box."

While he was still talking, the phone buzzed against my ear and a gray bar slid down the top of the screen.

West Harbor — Design. You were removed from this chat.

I didn't say anything about it.

"Take care of yourself," he said, and hung up.

He called back twenty minutes later about the keycard. I walked it up to the mailbox on the corner in a padded envelope and sent it back the same afternoon.

The box came Wednesday. The set I'd printed, the mug, a charger, the stuff from my drawer. Everything I'd left in that building after three years fit in one box, and Ray paid the postage out of the studio account.

The next Monday he called again, and it was shorter.

"Ethan. It's Ray."

"Yeah."

"They're not bringing you back at the end of the three months. I wanted to say it before you heard it from a letter."

"Say it in one sentence."

"I can't do that."

"Then say it in three words."

His voice did something small. "Your employment's ended."

"Okay."

"There's an email coming with your final paycheck. There's a PDF in it. Read the PDF." A pause. "Your name's still on the cover sheet. I didn't take it off."

I stood in Tommy's kitchen with the phone against my head for a while after he hung up, and then I tried to open the PDF on Tommy's laptop twice and it wouldn't open either time, and I never did read it.

17

Tommy came in from work and didn't take his coat off. That's how you know.

"There's more."

"More what."

"Pictures. Different ones. Not from the video."

He handed me his phone with his thumb already on the screen and stood there with his arms crossed, still in the coat, and watched me look, which I hated more than the pictures.

They'd gone up five days after Ray's second call, on an account with fewer followers than the first one and worse comments under it.

Four of them. Not frames — stills. Whoever took them was standing at the end of the couch by the door, and whoever it was knew how to hold a phone, because not one of them is blurry. The first is me on the floor, from the front, and you can see one of my hands in it and you can see the broken glass and you can see how far down my head is. The second is the room, low, taken from where I was sitting, so all you get is shoes and the bottoms of the couch legs and one leg of a service cart. The third is me from the side with the bottle in front of me. The fourth is the couch end, farther back than the others, taken by somebody who stepped out of the way to get the whole room, and along the right side of it there's an arm.

Blurry. Half out of frame. Black leather at the cuff, five studs down the sleeve, and a phone at the end of it.

I looked at that one for a long time. Tommy gave it four seconds.

"Who is that."

"Somebody."

"Somebody who."

"There was a guy at the door that night. Leather jacket, studs down the sleeve. He's the one who put me through the doorway."

"He's in the picture?"

"A sleeve of his jacket is in the picture."

Tommy took the phone back and pinched the picture bigger with two fingers and held it up to his face and squinted at it like a man checking a receipt.

"That's him, then. He stood at the end of that couch with his phone up the whole time, and then he sold them. Fuck."

"Or somebody else was standing at that end of the couch."

"Ethan. Come on."

"I don't have a name, Tommy. Nobody in that room said a name to me all night. Nobody said anything to me that wasn't an instruction."

"So go to the cops."

"And say what? A man in a jacket." I put the phone on the table. "I know what I'd be telling them. That I got shoved through a doorway. That they told me to drink off the floor and I did it. That somebody stood there with a phone up while I did it. There's no part of that where somebody looks at me and sees a crime. They're going to look at me and see the video."

"You didn't do anything."

"I know."

"So what the hell are we doing."

"Nothing."

"Nothing." He looked at me for a while. Then he got a beer out of the fridge, didn't open it, put it back, and said he had work in the morning. He went to bed at nine. Nine is early for Tommy.

I sat at his table with the lights off and started at the beginning again, the way I had every night since the banquet, looking for the part where I did something wrong. The tray in my hands. The carpet. The paper coming off her desk and across my face, and the blood I wiped on the back of my hand. The ice the server brought me, still in the napkin. The file going out at 3:58 in the morning from this table.

Everybody in those comments knew what I did. Two million people had it worked out before lunch.

I still can't find it.

Author’s Note

Four times Ethan typed out what really happened — the split rent, the joint account, the bottle — and four times he deleted it. Then he deleted the accounts themselves: the résumé, the work one, the saved apartment listings. Of everything in this chapter, 'I deleted all four' is the line I kept coming back to. A man who has always trusted numbers, finding out that his version of the facts can't survive being read.

If you'd like to read ahead, the chapters past this one are already up on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang