Six Shorts 2017: The finalists for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Victor Lodato
this forced irreverence aside, the company, it was quick to assert to the new writers in the all-glass conference room that day, had principles. They did not work with felons, or people found guilty of domestic abuse, or convicted sex offenders. Standing in front of a whiteboard, a tanned man in thin designer cotton spoke to Alice’s group with the wry twist of his mouth, his California upbringing apparent in every protracted syllable. “These people in general are, like, not dudes you want to be having dinner with. The good news, right, is you don’t have to. Our sales reps take care of that.” A titter unfolded in the room and the new hires leaned back in the ergonomic chairs. “You just deal with their files.” Ethan resembled some beautiful, off-limits older brother, tall and freckled, blessed with the demeanour of those who always seem just-roused from some luxurious sleep. In the afternoons, a dripping wetsuit could be seen hanging in his office. As he coached her on her first customer, Ethan brushed a light hand on her elbow. Together they giggled about the client’s sham company, which sold advertising space on magnets with the false promise of distribution in small towns. Cackling at its website’s “About Us” section, filled with dated stock photos of big-haired women before enormous computers – "Who could fall for this,” he had laughed – Ethan shot her a glance of unmetered approval. “You’re doing such a great job, by the way. It’s a little scary how fast you learn.” She was, she marvelled, mastering it quickly: all she had to do was write three hundred words, essays in miniature, that made her clients seem more impressive and decent than they were. By the surveys the customers filled out, Alice could immediately identify the people they saw themselves as being, and then she wrote that person into existence, her voice transforming accordingly. A person who listed scuba diving as a hobby was always an adventurer as well as a professional, and the individual who wrote “books, especially mysteries and crime”, an avid intellectual. She padded the pieces with SEO tags and handed them over to the web team, who situated links in places unknown to her, ultimately pushing the clients’ embarrassing or disturbing Google search results to page five or six. Gone were the variously threatening and pitiful voicemails they had left for their exes, gone the lawsuits involving unpaid child support.
There is no direct interfacing with the clients, Alice would say later, a thoughtful index finger on her cheek, when people asked about her job. This was the phrase she would use.
*
In the beginning, when the nature of the work was still novel, Alice had Googled each case assigned to her, read the Drunk in Public arrest report, the vicious Gawker article about the embezzlement or the affair with an intern. A few direct-deposit paycheques later, she ceased to do this, as it only added time to each job and diverted her thoughts as she tried to write the glib summaries of careers and personal achievements. Dedicated equally to his family as to his career, she would write, the dry introductory clauses coming to her automatically, so-and-so enjoys yachting with his two sons and traveling with his wife. After six months on the job, she could handle three cases each day, which roughly amounted to $1,600 per week and $75,000 a year, an amount that would have seemed improbable to her beforehand. One of the most admired minds in the world of litigation, she would write, Alan Nixon remains a dental health professional committed to both furthering his education and supporting his community. The balances on her student loans were vanishing, the recurrent nightmares of creditors gone from her sleep. It was the first time in her adult life that her talents had felt translatable, commodified, that she hadn’t smelled of the entrées carried three at a time on her forearm.
The Yeshiva teacher’s file had not given her much to begin with. She got those, sometimes, people who – despite having paid thousands of dollars for the service – could not be bothered to fill out the forms about their career, their hobbies, their philanthropic endowments. They provided only a birthday, a name. Dov Weberman supplied only the Yeshiva and its address. The anonymous supervisor she chatted with – the company had transferred Ethan, done away with traditional models of management, at least with regard to the freelance writers – advised Alice to write about the client’s place of work. This meant producing a great deal of filler and jamming his name into every other sentence, no matter the lingual acrobatics required. Dedicated to its students and the greater community alike, the Viznitz Yeshiva for Boys organises numerous events, the majority overseen by Dov Weberman, which enrich and educate. The Viznitz Yeshiva for Boys and Dov Weberman are known in the surrounding neighbourhood as bastions of Hasidic culture and faith.
After she read about the suicide in the paper, she could not help arranging the facts of it in the hyperbolic, humourless tone of the pieces she wrote for the company. A paedophile for more than 25 years, she thought, Dov Weberman takes intrepid measures to prevent any members of his community from exposing him. It was her mind’s way of inflicting punishment, keeping her from any moment of relief.
On a date with a man who asked the waitress too many questions about the wine, was it effervescent, was it biodynamic, she continued to compose. Particularly passionate about shy children, Dov Weberman first poses as a mentor to gain the trust of their families. “A sancerre sounds perfect,” she said. The rest of the evening felt like following another car, changing lanes and matching turn signals, but grasping nothing of the route itself. Her date was making a case against technology that afforded the user too many conveniences. He was talking about the shift in American philanthropic giving patterns, or about the term post-racial, or about his family’s summer home.
Although she could not remember much of what was said over dinner, or perhaps because of the guilt she felt about this, Alice agreed to a taxi back to his apartment and the sexual contract that entailed. It was the only respite she’d found from her obsession with the story, on her knees with her forearms flexed and hips raised as he moved behind her. These were the only minutes in which her thoughts slackened, and as she came, bucking him backwards, unrelated memories presented themselves in blithe procession: a Mexican bakery’s lights going on in the very early morning, a cat strolling through a damp Louisiana cemetery, a cutting board and washed spinach near an open window. He may as well have been faceless, but still she ran a hand across his collarbone, after, and spent six naked, unconscious hours in his company.
On the train home she felt ashamed in front of the commuters, who stood there with admirable posture, just-groomed and well-prepared for the work ahead of them. She hid behind her honey sunglasses, acutely aware of her own smell, the wine she hadn’t brushed from her teeth and the sex she hadn’t showered off. Dov Weberman employs numerous methods when manipulating a minor, including chaperoned trips to traditional bathhouses and one-on-one tutoring sessions. In the last six months, the company had let go of the majority of the writers and rehired new, outsourced talent under the guise of a different, nebulous group called AirCommunications. Her survival was the result of an exacting exam on company grammar and style, meant to weed out all but the unassailable among the writers. She had always enjoyed the space of a test, the clarity of the task, the time alone with her flexed and ready mind, and she had been among the few who passed.
Back in her apartment, she boiled water and ground coffee and set the stewing titanium French press near her laptop. By her standards, she was late to log in to the SharedWorkspace, but there was nobody appointed to notice; time existed only vis-à-vis the proof it had been filled. AirCommunications required she enable a productivity-monitoring app once she began writing, but until then her actions were not tracked. Unable to click on the queue of tasks that had filtered in overnight, paralysed by the sentences her guilt continued to write, she opened a window to compose an email to Ethan. Though he had long since worked as the writers’ supervisor, he favoured her and occasionally sent her special assignments. She still had his address with his real name attached, a piece of information he asked her never to share. Everyone else in AirCommunications’ SharedWorkspace knew him as Anakin, a Research and Development expert who occasionally surfaced to lead digital seminars.
From: [email protected]
Date: March 7, 2015 at 11:22am EST
Subject: client screening
Hi Ethan –
Long time, pal. How is everything in your new position? I miss you in “The Writer’s