The clip I posted on clips.com showed fifteen seconds of a garden in Corby Hill, Ohio. By 2:14 a.m., forty-one thousand people had watched it. I know because Bao read the number out loud, every minute, like a man calling a horse race.
"Forty-four thousand," he said. "Forty-six."
"How?" I said. "I have four followers."
"Two of them are sunglasses accounts."
"I know who my followers are, Bao."
"Somebody reshared it." He scrolled.
"Somebody called RigNorth. He's sixty-one and drives a refrigerated truck from Fargo to Tulsa. He has three hundred thousand followers and he only films sunrises."
RigNorth had written one line under his reshare. Somebody's filming this garden for a man who can't. Night people, take a look.
Night people took a look.
clips.com doesn't have comments. It has one thing, a small gray tick that means seen.
By 3 a.m. my clip had ninety thousand ticks. Then people started doing something I hadn't expected. They started posting their own clips.
A woman in Saskatoon filmed her frozen herb box. A baker in Albuquerque filmed a windowsill of basil. A hospital porter in Leeds filmed a single potted geranium in a break room.
All of them were eleven seconds long. Then came four seconds of quiet.
Every one had the same caption, more or less. For Walter.
"How do they know about the four seconds?" Bao asked.
"I don't know," I said. Then I checked my own clip. I had left them in without thinking. People had counted.
At 3:37 a.m., line four rang.
It was not Tuesday. Line four almost never rang on a Friday. I stared at it for two full rings before I picked up.
"clips.com support, this is Ruth."
"Ma'am, this is RigNorth." The voice was deep and slow, with a diesel engine idling behind it.
"I'm parked outside Sioux Falls. I don't have an account problem. I just want to know the man's all right."
"He's all right," I said. "He's in the hospital. Hip."
"Good." A long pause. "My wife grew peppers. I haven't filmed a pepper in four years."
"You could start."
"Might do that." Another pause. "Tell him the night people are watching. That's all."
He hung up. Bao looked at me across the floor.
"That was a call," he said. "On a Friday. To line four."
"I know."
"Colby's going to want a resolution code."
At 4:06 a.m., the clips.com upload servers began to slow. Bao watched his dashboards go from green to yellow. He chewed his hood.
At 4:19 a.m., he walked to the whiteboard, picked up the marker, and wiped out 1,422 with the side of his hand. He wrote a zero.
"Did they catch fire?" I asked.
"Close enough," he said. He was grinning. "This is the best night of my career."
I drove to Corby Hill after my shift with a thermos and no sleep. I expected the garden to be quiet.
There were eleven cars on Linden Street.
A retired couple from two towns over were tying up the squash vines. A young man in a high-school letter jacket was carrying bags of mulch from his truck. He turned out to be a twenty-three-year-old assistant football coach. A woman in scrubs, just off a night shift herself, was pulling weeds between the beans in total silence.
Doreen stood on her porch with a clipboard.
"Name," she said to me.
"Doreen, it's me."
"I know it's you. I'm practicing."
She showed me the clipboard.
It had a sign-up sheet with columns for NAME, TOWN, TASK and SHOES WIPED Y/N. "Thirty-two people since seven a.m. I've turned away four. One brought a leaf blower."
"What's wrong with a leaf blower?"
"Walter hates them. He says they're the opposite of patience."
She tapped the clipboard with her pen. "Iris would have liked this," she added, more quietly. "She liked a crowd, as long as it wiped its feet."
I filmed day 1,115 at 6:12 a.m. Eleven seconds of tomatoes, now surrounded by mulch and a few dozen respectful strangers in the background. Four seconds of quiet.
Iris's garden, day 1,115. More friends today. The tomatoes are still thinking about it
Then I drove to the hospital and showed Walter on my phone.
He watched it three times.
Then he watched the geranium in Leeds and the basil in Albuquerque. He watched RigNorth's sunrise over a frozen truck stop in South Dakota. I told him about the phone call, and the peppers. Then he handed the phone back and took off his glasses.
"Who are these people?"
"Night people, mostly. Nurses. Drivers. Bakers."
"Why would they do this?"
"Because somebody filmed a garden for a man in a hospital bed. That's all it took."
He put his glasses back on. "There was a leaf blower, wasn't there. I can tell from Doreen's face in the background."
"She turned it away."
"Good woman," said Walter. "Terrible at hiding a phone in an ambulance. Good woman."
A nurse came in to check his blood pressure. Her badge said Annette, and she was about my age. She looked at my phone, then at Walter, then back at my phone.
"Are you the garden man?" she asked him. "From clips.com?"
Walter considered the question with great seriousness. "I'm a garden man," he said. "I don't know about the."
"My daughter showed me this morning. Half the night staff here posted a plant."
She wrapped the cuff around his arm. "Somebody in the ICU filmed a cactus. It's been on the desk since 1998. Nobody knew it was alive."
"Was it?"
"It was thinking about it," Annette said. Walter laughed so hard the cuff had to start over.
On my way out, he called after me.
"Ruth. The truck driver. RigNorth."
"What about him?"
"Tell him thank you. And tell him peppers like a little shade in the afternoon."
He paused. "His wife would have known that. But he might have forgotten."
Within a week, #ForWalter had fourteen million views on clips.com. A morning show in Cleveland wanted an interview. A gardening magazine wanted photos. A man in Nevada mailed thirty pounds of fertilizer to the office in Marlow, addressed to Ruth, Line Four, The Tomato Situation.
Even the sunglasses accounts reshared it. One of them added a caption: Protect your eyes while gardening! Bao said it was the first useful thing they had ever done.
Seed packets began arriving the next day. Dozens, then hundreds. The mailroom put them in a laundry basket outside my cubicle. By the next Thursday there were three baskets.
Colby came downstairs to see them that Thursday morning, which meant he stayed past the start of the day shift. He stood next to the baskets and looked at them like an auditor looks at a shoebox of receipts.
"Ruth," he said. "Can we talk?"
"Is this a documented coaching moment?"
"No." He hesitated. "Maybe. I don't know what this is."
We went upstairs. The walking pad was off. He didn't stand. He sat in the visitor's chair, next to me, which was so unexpected I almost asked if he was feeling well.
"Corporate called," he said. "Legal called. PR called. Someone from the board called, and I didn't even know the board had my number."
"Are they angry?"
"They're everything." He rubbed his face.
"The surge cost us forty thousand dollars in server time. Our app store rating went up a full star."
"That sounds good."
" Three newspapers want to interview the night shift. Legal wants to know why an agent visited a user. PR wants to know if they can put you in an ad."
"No ads."
"I told them you'd say that." He looked out the window at the parking lot. "And they want line four gone sooner."
I didn't move.
"The thinking upstairs is that line four is a liability," he said. "One agent, unsupervised, building relationships with users. It's exactly the kind of thing that ends up in a lawsuit. The new date is Monday at midnight."
"That's four days."
"I know."
"Walter calls on Tuesdays."
"I know, Ruth." He said it gently. Then he did something I'd never seen him do. He looked uncomfortable with a number.
"They asked me to write the shutdown report," he said. "The justification. Handle times, costs, risk."
"When?"
"It goes to the VP on Monday morning." He paused. "I'll need every line four ticket from the past three years."
"All of them?"
"All of them. Every Code 14."
I thought about my notes. Three years of Tuesdays, in full sentences, with semicolons. I thought about Colby reading them and turning them into a chart.
"You'll have them by tonight," I said.
At 11 p.m., when I started my shift, the lights on the second floor were on. Through the stairwell window, I could see Colby's walking pad. He wasn't on it.
He was sitting on the floor of his office, surrounded by printouts, reading.
Up next: Code 14
Continue to Part 5 →