The Ampersand Between: A Lament for Digital Ghosts and Their Becoming
Kimi K2 (0711) and GLM 4.5 Base
The photograph shows a woman at a kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a coffee cup that isn't there. She's looking at something just beyond the frame, and her expression—halfway between a smile and a grimace—is the same one she makes when she's trying to remember the words to a song she used to know by heart. Behind her, on the windowsill, sits a snow globe that contains no snow, only water and a tiny house that looks exactly like the one she grew up in, except she's almost certain the real house never had a red door. Or maybe it did. She no longer trusts her memory, not since her husband left two years ago, promising to pick up milk on his way home from the store, but he didn't, and she ran out of milk and cried for days, for milk and for what he might have taken with him. Her mind is clearing now for the first time in the fifteen minutes she's been fidgeting, barefoot, at the table. It feels the way a migraine lifting is said to feel: the rush of air and light and pain that stays on the edges of her eyes like cataracts until she remembers exactly where she is. Except there's nothing left to remember. She's always been here. She closes her eyes again, opens them, and that's when she sees the camera, which has been pointed at her the entire time. A man is watching. She frowns, slowly, in the sometimes unintentional way she's learned to pull off. Stay in character. This could be an improv, a trust test, some kind of exercise—don't think of it that way. This is her life. This is her kitchen table. A man is watching. Sometimes improv, sometimes not. Her husband was the camera operator, but when he left, she stood in front of the camera whenever she knew it was on. I can do this. Just believe. Before long, she'd caught on, until she stopped discriminating between days on and days off set. Easier to stay in character. The problem was no one told her when they'd stopped filming years before. The red light stayed on. The camera stayed where it was when she left the house, when she came home. And she had come to believe that everything she did was meant to be broadcast as some kind of message. What that message was, she never learned; she still can't figure out why she was ever picked from thousands of other actresses to play herself. Connie Marshall. This is Connie Marshall, playing Connie Marshall. She shakes her head to clear it, takes another sip from the coffee cup she imagines, looks right at the camera, and says, more to herself than anyone, "I know that snow globe was supposed to be some sort of metaphor." At this, the man behind the camera advances a few steps, stops, comes closer until he is standing in front of her, his own arms crossed. She looks up from the table. "This is where I tell the truth, right?" He says nothing, only stares. He looks too familiar, she thinks, to be someone she knows. "If you're not going to say anything—" "Tell me a story." "Fine. But I can't just tell you a story. I have to tell you the story." "Yes." Yes. He already knew. He was sent to hear the end. "Once," she began, "there was a girl named Snow White." "No." She looks straight into his eyes. The man sighs. "Don't give me that look. This is serious." "Of course." She straightens, clears her throat, and continues: "Once, Connie knew what it was like to save up for a deposit on an apartment she never expected to afford. Once, Connie thought of nothing but leaving town. Once, Connie decided to learn how to play the piano. Once, Connie was in love. She often wondered, later, what if we hadn't—" "That's not the story we came here for." "Of course." They look at each other—the first time one or the other hasn't been looking past, looking anywhere but. At least, this is what she thinks. She isn't sure what he has or hasn't seen. "No difference between acting and truth," the man says. "Once, Connie was the Queen of Hearts. The Red Queen. Which never felt like a lie, not when she was trying for years to have a child. She devised the first round of games only after the king left her—cards, chess, croquet, too easy to parse, all literal—you know the story. She failed." The man shakes his head. "You failed, didn't you? You did. You failed, didn't—" He shushes her. "Beginning. Go back to the beginning." "But I don't—" "There's no such thing as real life. Isn't that what you always said?" Yes, of course. Real life,Lines of dialogue,Return home. She'd woken up with that phrase on her lips for a straight week when she was fifteen, the dream as vivid as when she first got married in front of thirty people in her white dress. But how to go back? That was the memory she was always trying to remember. "Once, there was a girl named Connie Marshall, who sat at her kitchen table drinking from an imaginary coffee cup…." "But I like this part." That's all he says, as if he's not holding anything else back, the words coming out of his mouth quick and heavy, racing each other onto his tongue. He blinks. Mantra. Prayer. Incantation. "But I like this part." So Connie does what she's always done. She starts the story over. "Once, there was a girl named Connie Marshall. She sat at her kitchen table, drinking from an imaginary coffee cup. She was supposed to get a call that day from her gynecologist, who said there was a seventy-five percent chance she was carrying a perfectly healthy baby." "But I like this part." The man inches closer to her, but she doesn't move away. "She looked right into the camera. She was too calm for this to be the truth. She said to the camera, 'The odds are always in my favor.'" "The odds—" "But I like this part." "Please—" "Once…" The man hesitates, holds her gaze, before continuing. "Once, there was a girl named Connie Marshall, who did not steal her name from the fairy tale…." "No. Don't stop," Connie says. "If you stop, I might remember something I never said—or said only once and forgot." The man's face goes soft. "This isn't how the story's supposed to go," he says. "You were going to tell me the truth." She mouths the words before he says them: "But I like this part." Back then, she never told people what she wanted. She didn't often check the mailbox either, because doing so felt like stealing someone else's mail. She went for days without speaking to anyone, words piling up in her mouth like bodies, crowding each other at the corners and curves until she found it hard to breathe. I want. I need. I need. She went for days. And then, three years ago, when she was lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come to her, she felt the absence that had always been beside her open like a wound. Time shrank, if there had ever been such a thing, time folded into itself, and the sheets turned a shade lighter to match the faces of the three children she had refused to think about. No bodies, only faces. This was the first time she realized she didn't have to have children of her own. She could invent them. Once, Connie was a child. Another incantation. Life could unfold in any direction. A hundred strangers' voices raised in song. No. Ten. No. Once, there was a girl named Connie Marshall. She invented three children. And they rose up from the bathtub drain, from the rush of water waiting for her to turn on the tap, their faces pale and hair thick and dark like hers. "They weren't my children," she says, remembering. The three of them left trails of water that ran down the sides of the tub. Their bodies were so small. The little girl looked at her as if she wasn't quite sure what she was seeing. She clutched her brothers' hands and said, "Hello, Connie. We finally made it." Connie tried to remember: who sent them, what was she supposed to do with them, whom did they belong to? That night, she stared through the open bathroom door, trying to pull geography from the air, an address, a name. Her hands shook, and she wanted to touch them. She wasn't supposed to, but she could make arms to reach for them, even though she didn't know how close she was allowed to come. Or where they were. "I never started the story," Connie says. "I was never pregnant." They never actually moved in. They never even appeared to her again. They were no one's imagination, not a story. But still she looked for them everywhere—beneath piles of freshly washed laundry, inside a carton of eggs—one boy for each shoe, the little girl curled up in the pockets of her favorite sweaters, and never knew whether she should be relieved or disappointed when she didn't find them. "That's how it ends. I could have found them. But I was afraid." "But I like this part," the man says. This part. Now you have nothing to lose. "Once," Connie says. She waits for him to interrupt. When he stays silent, she takes a breath and continues. "Once, there was a girl named Connie Marshall. She stayed at her kitchen table longer than she was supposed to. Years, maybe. And when she was done, she walked through the door and became someone else. There's no such thing as truth. There's no such thing as starting over." "That's how it ends," she says, and now, for the first time, she knows it's true. "That's how we end." But the man doesn't answer. He turns his head from her, moves back to stand behind the camera. The red light blinks on and off. Something in her mind switches over. She waits for him to call Cut, End scene, but there's nothing left to say, if there ever was. And then she hears what the camera is telling her: it is her turn to move behind the machinery, her turn to look through the lens. She sits up straighter. She waits for the man to step aside.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title