He wants to argue. But he also doesn’t want to wake to acute pain. He feels like a child, staring up into his mother’s face, but—no, that’s unfair. His mother was beautiful. His mother loved him. Aileen performs a mother’s duties, a spouse’s duties, but for pay. Three ex-wives and no children. Is that natural? Has he unwittingly subverted a system in which he would have received affectionate care for free? Everything is contracted out now and the world is poorer for it.
“I’ll take two pills,” he says, “and call you in the morning.”
A small joke, but all jokes are too small to receive any acknowledgment from stolid Aileen.
*
BY MORNING, it seems ridiculous that the power was ever out; the storm was truly a case of sound and fury, all wind, almost no snow, at least not on the ground. Gerry enjoys watching the local weathermen and -women try to make it seem more than it was, storytellers aware that they have overpromised and underdelivered. They move their hands over what he knows to be blank screens; Gerry has done his share of local television talk shows, especially in Baltimore. Favorite son and all that. He knows—knew, he hasn’t done local television for years, hasn’t had to—the drabness of the studios, the indignity of sitting in some corner on a Saturday morning, hoping the regular adopt-a-stray segment didn’t run over, stealing the five minutes he had to try to explain his latest novel to a cheerful woman who wasn’t even chagrined not to have read it ahead of time.
This was all before the expansion of the idea of content, but that’s what he was in those situations, content. A static, wallpaper kind of content, determined to be inoffensive at all costs. Local television shows traded in the known. The stories changed, but the format never did. Crime story, traffic story, and now something to make you feel better about human nature. Weather. Sports scores. Local news was like a familiar hymn playing in the background, intended to soothe and pacify.
But national news now—wowza. It’s become an insane, coked-up party girl （or boy） who simply will not leave your apartment, yakking and yakking and yakking, moving from one topic to another without transition. Last year, the New York Times received a lot of criticism for an article about a man who had chosen to live without news. The ultimate in white privilege! Talk about a bubble!
Gerry, whose news “diet” used to consist primarily of the Times, on paper, and the New York Review of Books, thinks people were simply envious of the man. They did not realize it was in their power to turn down the volume, literally and figuratively.
Which is not to say that Gerry has no interaction with social media at all. There is a Twitter account, verified, run by Victoria, which sends out one or two items a week, almost always links to favorite but obscure poems, short stories, sometimes articles about the neglected writers of other countries. His avatar （ugh, stupid word, corrupted word, but at least it hasn’t been as wronged as icon） is a circular snapshot of his own shelves, taken at such close range that it appears to be a beautiful abstract painting, all those lovely worn spines, muted jewels. （The paper covers are stored because they’re dust catchers.）
It is also Victoria’s job to maintain a Google alert on Gerry—and to keep him wholly ignorant of it. Piracy issues are to be directed to Thiru, anything that smacks of libel goes straight to his lawyer, etc., etc. Oh, there was a time when Gerry Googled himself, checked his Amazon ratings, but that was in the early days of the Internet, which happened to be around the time his third book was published. He was young—well, youngish—and there was enormous novelty in obtaining any sort of data about one’s books.
Then one morning, as he typed his latest title into Amazon’s search box, he found himself quivering, there was no other word for it, and he recognized the feeling, even though it was not his: he was like a gambler in the moment before the roulette wheel came to rest. Gerry had never gambled in his life, not in any meaningful way, but his friend Luke had a chronic gambling problem and had described the emotions vividly.
So when Gerry felt that rush, he recognized it for what it was, and knew to avoid it at all costs. Long before other people began using programs to block their Internet access, he had set up his work life so he would not be disturbed. He doesn’t know the password to the apartment’s wireless service, so he didn’t use it on his laptop until his accident. He can get email on his phone, theoretically, but he almost never does, not real ones. Again, Victoria culls it every day and handles the account through his website, a website so basic that it was kind of a punch line, or had been for a day or two last month. “You’re trending,” Victoria had said. “That is, #GeraldAndersensWebsite is trending. Some big literary blogger went viral when she made fun of it.”