Replay

What do I do? I replay events. I sit alone in a windowless room and face a large screen. I watch videos of things I’ve been trained to call newsworthy. Things that might one day be called historic. Press conferences, marathons, politicians shaking hands on tarmacs, tree-lighting ceremonies, car chases, arraignments, funerals. I sift through hours of footage to locate a single usable frame. Whatever cliché you want to use about finding something rare in a sea of ordinary junk, it’s exactly like that.

I look for what my boss calls clean stills. We need clean stills, he says. Clean means sharp and not blurry. It means no distracting elements in the background. Nobody’s mouth hanging open, nobody’s eyes closed, and definitely no profane gestures. Once I almost sent over a still of an Olympic athlete wiping sweat off his forehead, but it looked like he was doing something much worse. Luckily I caught it in time, before it went to air or was used on any of our affiliate sites. So now I always double-check. Then I mark the still with a green circle called Done. After that it goes somewhere, I don’t know. That’s someone else’s job.

The room I sit in is called Navy Yard. The room across from mine is called Foggy Bottom and the one next to Foggy Bottom is called DuPont Circle. The rooms are named after neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. I don’t know why. I don’t work in Washington, D.C. I don’t know anybody from there. Nobody sits in DuPont Circle or Foggy Bottom. They’ve been vacant as long as I’ve been here. The rooms are at the dead end of a long, deserted hallway. The newsrooms and studios and executive offices are in other parts of the building, on different floors and in various wings. People only come to this hallway to make private phone calls or cry or gossip. They think nobody can hear them, that they’re completely alone. But I can hear them. I always leave my door cracked. I bought a lamp for my desk so they know I’m here, but I don’t know if it’s made any difference. They continue to say all sorts of things near me.

Last week a woman with loud shoes stood right outside the door, yelling at someone on the phone about going to pick up Tom’s ashes. She said the ashes would get thrown away if someone didn’t pick them up by Tuesday. And it can’t be me, she kept saying.

The week before that, one of the evening anchors was practicing her newscast. She had a man, I think a cameraman or a producer, with her. She asked him, Does it sound like my mouth is numb? She said, I went to the dentist this morning, and they said the numbness would wear off after an hour, but I still don’t feel right.

Sort of, he said.

She was practicing saying, The Department of Justice released a third—a third tranche of files . . . third tranche of files . . . included are—included are photos, emails, court records, news clippings, and videos.

She was struggling to enunciate third tranche of files which might have been hard even without the numbness. She didn’t sound numb to me, but nobody asked me, and I couldn’t see her. Maybe her mouth looked lopsided in a way I wouldn’t know from sound alone.

I once saw a man weeping in Foggy Bottom. I was leaving for the day. I’d just put on my coat. The door to Foggy Bottom was wide open, as it always is, but it was hard to see him at first. The room was so dark, and I was used to it being empty. I could barely make out the shape of someone sitting at the naked desk, but there he was, with his head in his hands, weeping. He took long, shaky breaths, and his nose made wet, clogged sounds when he tried to breathe in. I shut my office door behind me. His head jerked up. He stared at me with an expression I can’t describe. We held each other’s gaze for a second, maybe two, before I headed for the elevators. I never saw him again.

At night when I get home, I hang my shirt and fold my pants. I sort through bills and heat my dinner. I pour myself something to drink. I sit in my armchair recliner and watch whatever’s on TV. The other night it was a movie about a disgraced ex-government contractor. Men in suits discussed American political interference. They looked at digital screens with green fonts. They swiped cards to enter rooms protected by steel doors. My face, I am sure, was illuminated by these events. But my mind was stuck on a moment from the previous morning. I was entering the pharmacy on the ground floor of my office, and a woman inside the pharmacy was exiting. She had a nice face. We were waiting, I thought, for the other to do something. I pulled the door open and let myself in. I should have let her exit first, but it all happened so fast. She’d initially smiled at me, but her smile dropped when I stepped through the door. She did one of those quick exhales women do. She said simply, Okay then, and pushed past me. It was awful.

Why hadn’t I held the door open for her? Why hadn’t I let her go? What was my rush? I had none. I was left with a bad feeling for the rest of the day. I was left with the image of her face changing from one thing to another. Suddenly my mind was filled with other images. I couldn’t control them. I saw my fourth-grade teacher teaching a lesson on integrity. She said, It’s what you do when nobody is looking. I saw myself cleaning crumbs off the lunch table, sharpening the classroom’s supply of No. 2 pencils, teaching a classmate who’d never learned how to properly tie his shoe. I jumped through time. I saw myself nearly drowning in the Gulf of Mexico because I’d misjudged the current, taking a called third strike with runners on base in my last varsity game, losing the regional spelling bee on the word vigilant, mixing up the gas and brake my first time driving a car and plowing through the neighbor’s mailbox, inches from their garage door. I saw an email I’d written to an old professor in hopes of a recommendation. An email I’d sent before realizing it had an unfinished last sentence: I hope to.

I saw my father yell You don’t say at sports commentators making obvious predictions. I saw my sister practicing violin and heard it make terrible sounds. I saw a scene from a nature documentary playing in a dentist’s office: Our new cameras were able to capture moments that verged on the miraculous. I saw the time I fixed the office printer and people actually cheered my name. I saw lies I’ve told and my reasons for telling them. Arguments with friends over things like politics and money and discrepancies in success. I saw the way these arguments had a way of marking the end of something. I hadn’t spoken to many of these friends in years. Where were they?

No matter what I saw in what order, no matter where these images took me and for how long, I always landed in the same place. The day I met my wife. Or the day she told me it was over. Or our last day in the house we shared. She’d already packed up her things. All that remained was everything we’d decided was mine. She told me to mark with blue tape what could be donated or thrown away. She’d hired men to come take these things and deal with them. But I misheard her. I was so distraught and numb with shock and denial that I completely misheard her. I did the opposite of what she’d asked. I taped everything I wanted to keep, which was most of it. The couch, the nightstand, the rocking chair that’s been in my family for who knows how long, the large abstract painting I bought at that garage sale. The quilts, the footstool, the lamp she called dated, the coffee table, the rugs. Oh, the rugs. I stuck blue tape on all of it. And in the time it took me to get my oil changed, go to the bank, and pick up boxes at the hardware store, the men she’d hired had come and taken it all. I returned to empty rooms. I found her in the bathroom putting lotion on her hands. I heard my frantic, stifled voice choking out the question, What happened to everything? I saw the side of her face, staring at her reflection. I saw her mouth say, What do you mean? It’s gone.

I looked around my apartment. What was in it? Nothing. The armchair I sat in. A small, flimsy table for under the TV. My bed, a nightstand. There was no art on the walls, no rugs, nothing to separate the floor from my feet. No throw pillows, no blankets, no candles or plants or vases of flowers. Not even any books. I didn’t like being in there. Other things were wrong with it, too. The front door didn’t lock unless you threw your whole body into it. The sink water came out cloudy and brown. The oven screamed anytime I turned it on, the shower barely drained, the insulation was bad, and packages—not mine, but other people’s—were always getting stolen.

I got up from the chair and walked to the other corner of the room. I got into bed. I closed my eyes, or maybe I didn’t. I saw the day we met. It was summer. We were at an Irish pub in a neighborhood neither of us lived in. We were both there with friends. We stood in arbitrary groups. The first thing she said to me was, I need you to get me out of this conversation. She said it in a whisper and through her teeth. I looked at the poor guy next to her. He had a dumb expression on his face and a haircut that annoyed me and he was saying something about the problem with subtitles in foreign films. I asked him if he wanted to step outside for a cigarette. When he and I made for the exit, I glanced at her over my shoulder. She watched us with a smirk on her face.

Later that night, she laughed and said, You know you were supposed to take me outside. The man with the haircut was gone.

I know, I said.

I remember how she looked at me then. Her eyes seemed to tell some private joke. She said everything she wanted and nothing she didn’t, and she beat me to every punchline. I never saw her hesitate. The next word was always right there in front of her. She’d just reach out and grab it.

The next morning in Navy Yard, I had a message from my boss. Story out of Texas. A reporter secured an interview with a man on death row who’d received a last-minute stay of execution. We have video, my boss said. We need clean stills. He sent another message: two camera set- ups, tight and wide, need grabs from both. I watched the video play as a faster version of itself. The first set-up was a close-up on the man’s face behind the glass. He spoke into a phone. Something in his face intrigued me. He was old and fat and—not that it was up to me— looked incapable of doing something violent. I wouldn’t be able to explain why, it was just a feeling. I watched his mouth move and listened to him speak:

They gave me cloth slippers for my feet. That was a long day. They don’t put it in those exact words. They just get you in the van. There was fresh sheets on the bed. Someone’s wife made butterscotch brownies. I had a visit with my spiritual advisor. Every thirty minutes we prayed together. I had a choice between last meals. Salisbury steak or a rice mixture. I don’t remember what time it was when they said I got a stay. It was a long day, like I said. I talked to my attorney. Maybe it was around 10:07. I think that was the last time me and him prayed that night. After that he looked at his telephone, said I think you got a stay. The warden and Mr. Clark said you got a stay. They said, Let’s get you dressed. What I was thinking all day was lord, please intervene. Please show me something, lord. Please have mercy and grace. Yes sir, I believe that. It was a long day. I feel hope. You’re asking me how does it end? I don’t know. Or how I would like for it to end? Cause I don’t know how it’s gonna end. But I’m hoping and praying they do the right thing. I’ll repeat it again and again. That was a very long day. Yes, sir. A very long day.

I looked at his face. His eyes were open, his head was steady, and his mouth wasn’t hanging open. I right-clicked to download.

I scrubbed through the video until I saw the wide shot and the reporter’s head in the frame. The reporter was one of those people who talked wildly with his hands. He had a pencil between his fingers that he kept waving around, so it was hard to get a clean still of him. But finally I got one that was good enough. It was right after the man on death row said, It gets you angry inside, hearing that.

I marked them both with the green circle called Done.

At home that night I sat in my recliner. On TV I watched the evening news. The interview was airing as part of the six o’clock show. I wanted to see which of my stills they’d use to tease the story. I liked seeing my work on TV. I felt restless. My mind was full of other things. I saw the curtains of a hotel room I once stayed in. I saw the metal plaque on a park bench: For Alex. Loud and smart and immortal. I saw pink clouds and advertisements. I saw red brake lights and lines of cars. I saw the time my wife and I were returning from a trip, stuck in unmoving traffic for hours. I saw myself angry and impatient. I saw myself saying, Somebody better be dead. Then it turned out somebody was. We saw ambulances and a motorcyclist on a stretcher. She looked at me in a way I will never forget, like I’d killed the guy myself.

Onscreen the evening anchor said, Coming up. And next to her on a smaller screen I saw the wide shot, the one with the reporter’s head in the side of the frame. He looked blurrier than I remembered. The pencil in his hand was awkward and strange. It drew your gaze right to it. Behind the pencil was the face of the man on death row. His eyes were half-closed. Even when they cut to commercial, I saw the still in my head. It was full of distracting elements. His mouth made a shape like he was in the middle of a word. I don’t know what I’d been thinking. I don’t know how I missed that.