Colby Fenn's office at clips.com was on the second floor of the old mattress showroom. It had a standing desk, a walking pad underneath it, and a framed poster that said DATA IS A LOVE LANGUAGE. I had never seen it before. I wished I still hadn't.
"Ruth," he said. "Sit, please. Coffee? I have oat milk."
"I'm fine."
Colby was thirty-four, tall and earnest, in a quarter-zip with the clips.com logo on the chest. He had the face of a man who had been told in a training once to make eye contact, and never stopped.
"So," he said, still standing. The walking pad hummed. "The police called."
"I know."
"You requested a welfare check on a user."
"On a friend. Who happens to use clips.com."
He walked in place for a while. It was very hard to take him seriously, and I could see him knowing that.
"Here's my concern," he said.
"If agents start knocking on users' doors, we have a privacy problem."
"Okay."
"A legal problem. A trust problem." He counted them on his fingers. "Three problems."
"He was lying in the bean rows, Colby."
The walking pad stopped.
He didn't fire me. I'll give him that. He gave me a written warning, and he said the words "documented coaching moment" twice. Then he asked me to sign a form, which I read in full while he waited.
"Do you read everything?" he asked.
"Only the things I sign."
"Nobody reads those."
"That's why they're so interesting."
I signed it. On my way out, he said something I didn't expect.
"Is he okay? The user?"
"I don't know yet," I said. "I'm going to find out."
The walking pad started up again behind me. I heard it all the way down the stairs.
Corby Hill is two hours south of Marlow, past three grain elevators and a billboard for a church that also sells tires. Linden Street was eleven houses long. Number fourteen was white, with green shutters. Its porch leaned slightly toward the road, as if it wanted to see who was coming.
The neighbor was already on her porch when I parked. She was holding a garden hose like a rifle.
"You're the computer friend," she said.
"I'm Ruth."
"Doreen Pask. I was postmistress here for forty-one years. I know everyone's business, so don't bother lying to me."
She looked me over. "You're older than I thought."
"I'm fifty-two."
"Good. The young ones never stay." She put down the hose. "Come see what you're inheriting."
Walter's garden was bigger than it looked on clips.com. Fifteen seconds of phone video makes everything tidy. In person it was a quarter acre of beans, squash and tomatoes. There was a bed of late flowers and a blue shed with a padlock that wasn't locked.
The tomato cages leaned in two straight rows. A plastic bucket sat upside down at the end of one row, with a thick paperback on top. General Code of Operating Rules, 1974.
"He reads to them," Doreen said.
"I know."
"Signal clearances, mostly. I've told him tomatoes prefer fiction. He won't listen."
Near the third cage, a patch of earth was flattened. A phone in a cracked rubber case was still lying face down in the dirt. Doreen saw me looking.
"I found him there at nine," she said. "He'd been out since six. He said he was fine."
"Was he?"
"He wasn't fine. Hip."
She folded her arms. "He asked me to bring his phone in the ambulance. I forgot it. I've been feeling bad for five days, which is about four days longer than I usually feel bad about anything."
I picked up the phone. It was dead. The rulebook watched me from its bucket.
Doreen took a key from her apron and handed it to me. It was on a ring with a wooden tag that said IRIS in faded paint.
"Back door," she said. "In case you need to charge that. Don't touch the thermostat. He has a system."
"What kind of system?"
"Nobody knows," said Doreen. "That's what makes it a system."
"Which hospital room?" I asked. "Do you know?"
"I'm not family. They tell me nothing."
She sniffed. "Forty-one years I delivered their mail. Now I can't get a room number."
Corby County Medical had a front desk, a gift shop and a volunteer named Hal who was at least ninety. He wore a vest covered in pins from every hospital fundraiser since the Carter years.
"Family?" Hal asked.
"Friend."
"Then I'll ask him if he wants a visit. Patient's choice. That's the rule."
He picked up the phone. "Name?"
"Tell him it's Ruth. From Tuesdays."
Hal relayed this exactly. I watched him listen. Then he put the receiver down and gave me a look of deep professional respect.
"He says, and I'm quoting, 'Has the button moved?'"
I laughed so hard Hal had to hand me a tissue from his vest.
Room 312 had a view of the parking lot and a whiteboard with a nurse's name on it.
Walter was sitting up in the bed. He was smaller than his voice. He had a white crew cut and wire glasses. He wore a flannel shirt over his hospital gown, as if he refused to fully commit to the situation.
"Ruth," he said.
"Walter."
"You came all this way." He looked at the phone in my hand, then at me. "You brought my phone. Doreen forgot it, didn't she."
"She feels terrible."
"She doesn't. She feels inconvenienced." He smiled. "How are the tomatoes?"
"Still thinking about it."
"Of course they are."
I sat down. For the first time in three years, I could see his face while we talked. It was a good face. It looked like it had spent a long time outdoors and didn't regret any of it.
"They say six weeks," he said. "Hip surgery went fine."
"And then?"
"Then rehab, over at Maple Terrace. Then home, if I behave." He looked at the window. "Six weeks of gray squares."
"Does that matter? The squares?"
He was quiet for a long time.
"Iris was a night nurse," he said finally. "Thirty-one years."
I waited.
"At the end, she couldn't go outside anymore. So every morning I took the camera out to the garden and showed her. Eleven seconds, because that's how long she could keep her eyes open without getting tired."
I didn't say anything. I didn't trust myself to.
"After she was gone, I kept doing it. One clip a day, eleven seconds."
He smiled at the parking lot. "The other four seconds are hers. In case she has anything to add."
"Walter."
"I know it's foolish."
"It isn't."
"Six weeks, Ruth. That'll be the first time she misses the garden in three years." He took off his glasses and cleaned them on the flannel. "I don't suppose you know anyone who can hold a phone still for eleven seconds."
I looked at his dead phone. I thought about the policy at clips.com, the one Colby had made me sign that morning. Agents may not log into, post on, or operate a user's account.
"I can't post on your account," I said. "That's a firing offense."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
"But nobody said I can't post on mine."
He looked at me. Then he put his glasses back on, very carefully, as if he wanted to see this clearly.
I filmed it at 6:12 the next morning. Doreen stood behind me with her arms folded, supervising. Eleven seconds of tomatoes. Then four seconds of the garden, quiet, just the wind in the bean leaves.
Doreen had opinions about the framing. She wanted more squash. I told her Walter never showed the squash in the first three seconds. She said that was because Walter was a coward about squash.
"Iris liked the squash," she said. "He knows it. He's just shy about it."
I posted it on my own clips.com account. I had four followers: my son, my sister and two of the sunglasses people.
Iris's garden, day 1,114. Filmed by a friend. The tomatoes are thinking about it
"That's it?" Doreen said. "That's the whole internet thing?"
"That's the whole internet thing."
"Seems small."
"It's supposed to be small."
I drove back to Marlow for my Thursday shift. Line four didn't ring. It wasn't Tuesday, but I looked anyway. At 2:14, Bao rolled his chair across the floor so fast he hit my desk.
"Ruth," he said. "What did you post?"
"Tomatoes."
He turned his laptop toward me. His face was pale. Behind him, the whiteboard still said 1,422.
"I don't think," he said, "that number's going to last the night."
Up next: Eleven Seconds
Continue to Part 4 →