Sharing is caring
by Rheea Mukherjee
HER NAME IS Peggy. She lives in an undisclosed city. No one comes close to doing the job as well as Peggy does. If you meet her, you won’t be able to recall the color of her eyes, but you’ll notice the intensity of them.
Peggy stares at you as you talk. Eating every word, computing multiple translations of any one sentence you throw at her. In theory, she’s that active listener the world tells the world to do more of. In truth, no one is comfortable with it.
Peggy has a shoebox for inspiration. But we’ll come to that part soon enough.
Peggy’s idiosyncrasies must be overlooked, because her job is tough. If you had it, it’d knot your gut. Everyday she pulls out the city’s most violent stories and starts to rate them in terms of potential. It’s not just the pedestrian crimes she looks for. She must curate the stories that sting the nerves and hearts of certain factions.
Each faction must feel differently about the same news and respond to it on the internet with hyperbolic emotion and targeted political agenda. She must, for a lack of a more cohesive phrase, orchestrate perceptual disharmony with bad news. It’s a craft. She should know, she’s tracked for her every performance. She’s so good at it, her bosses take big gulps of chalky antacid when they think about losing her to a better job.
Last week her goal was straight forward enough. Make women aged 18–32 paranoid and resolute. But accomplishing it wasn’t that simple. She had to simultaneously instigate men aged 30–54 to become defensive. She pulls out the horrific story of a rape that occurred in the most innocuous of places, Marcos Road. That road even had a friendly coffee shop where poets come and unrhyme each others verses. But at night the terrible thing happened. Peggy is not interested in the exact details, because honestly, the same kind of thing happens all over the place. It’s the same story told a hundred different ways. She must orchestrate. She is being watched and one slip can set fire to a group of people that her company relies on. Unlike the damn poets.
She curates the news on The Space, knowing people are waiting, breaths held, salty sweat pouring out of their fingers, just waiting to type. The morning is here and Peggy updates.
40% of women are now carrying pepper spray in their handbags, it’s not like we have to say it, but no woman is safe. RIP Maria.
She backspaced the sentence and twitched her drying lips. With one tilt of her head she retyped the same exact thing again. It was perfect. There wasn’t too much nuance which was the perfect ecosystem for her favorite trolls. Inevitably they will succumb to commenting
‘not all men are like this’ or ‘men too live in fear’.
Additionally, Peggy relies on data guy who would spout car accident statistics and compare it to rape. Then the feminists would come in and do their thing. She publishes it. The post was lit AF with disharmony.
It was a good thing because the month before she had gotten low scores from one of the bosses. See poverty is not a thing in this undisclosed city. Small enough population in a small enough country, in a small enough city. The generic middle class had enough in their reach to live well. And what was out of reach, well, that was aspirational enough to keep them moving like hamsters on a wheel.
You should know that Peggy has never tried to create disharmony with news that comes from outside the boundaries of the city. It was a waste of time for one, more accurately, it did not fit with the company agenda. But Peggy was a risk taker. At her interview the board of men who hired her were intrigued when she admitted she’d break rules sometimes. Because no one truly knew what ingredients made up content virality.
She hadn’t had to break rules in the 3 years she had worked there. But then last year she had read story about a child locked up in a family’s home, a paid servant yes, but a slave nonetheless. It was from a country where poverty was enough to merit at -scale home labour. Something that happy- middle -class undisclosed city could never think about. They were happy to wash their own dishes, clothes and homes, because they didn’t know better. No monstrous disparities of class, everyone had that same generic respectability.
Peggy already knew this worked in her favour. Any story of people having hired help was of interest to her city. And a story that abused that social culture with a child? Even better. It would of course create polarization in a few seconds. The first being the commenter who would definitely criticize hired help and class disparity across the board. This would undoubtedly lead the way for the moderate cultural relativists. They would spout the definition of relativism and ask the question
‘would it be better for a child to earn his living to eat or better to just ignore the reality and let that child be squashed by the system of poverty just so you can feel better about your social delusion?’
This type of commenter would also make sure to say that this particular story was terrible and should have never be published on The Space. After all, criticizing child labour without accounting for the economic and social realities of the world encourages people to float in their la-la privileged swimming pool.
But you see, none of these predictions happened. The content brought up only one response and that was unanimous city pride.
All I can say is how proud I am to live in a city where this could never happen.
No cultural relativism remarks. It stayed solely on the city and how the possibility of this happening here could never take flight. And wasn’t that a good thing? One corner of the world where this one bad thing could never happen. Even the trolls agreed.
The Company was not happy. They pulled Peggy in the room and gave her a warning. Stick to the city and the plethora of specific bad things that happened here.
Peggy was shaken but she went back to her usual top scores within seven days. There was suicide, murder, and even story on rabbits being blinded to test eye drops that could improve human vision.
Now about that shoebox. She has one for inspiration. It’s tucked into her sweater closet, nestled between woolen blues and striped whites. Every couple of months the anxiety ripens. She feels the need to take a peek inside the box, but she know how terrible she might feel. In truth she’s only looked inside of it twice in the 7 years she’s had it.
The first time she peeked into her shoebox wasn’t too traumatic. There was a chinese woman in the box, shrunken and tired. She was sewing a lacy bra with pink ribbons on the side. A heap of other bras lay on her side. Peggy intrinsically knew the woman had hours and hours of work left. At least 12 more. You can’t touch things in the shoe box, but Peggy makes do by hanging her finger over the woman, soothing her fatigue. She shut the box and didn’t think too much about it.
The other time she peeked in the box, she saw a tied up dog, It had been tied up for at least 16 hours, near it was a puddle of urine and a lump of fecal matter. It’s eyes looked hopefully at her. She shut the box immediately and threw up in the bathroom. Oddly, it didn’t further effect her, she had broken up with a man she loved deeply that week and all her feelings had to go to that.
She wanted to rid herself of the shoe box, but it was a family heirloom passed down to her by her grandmother. ‘You don’t have to look, but you must keep it’ was the family rule. Her mother had never looked and had simply passed it down to her when Peggy was 21. There was always something in the damn box, and Peggy was always waiting for something to gnaw at the numbness that built in her chest. She sought refuge in the possibility of opening it at any time.
Nowadays Peggy and The Company are only threatened by the Good News company. They are pulling up happy generic things people do and spouting them as changemakers. It’s the ‘every drop in the ocean adds up’ kind of narrative and nothing irritates her more. It is the exact kind of news that one can’t orchestrate, the one that feeds the soul and makes people who are regularly defined by their world view pause for a second and feel happy about something. The phrases are too candied, stripped of words like patriarchy, misogyny, abuse, and systems of oppression. With no trigger labels and terms, people start to go soft and find too much in common.
She starts to lose her footing. The trolls, objective rationalists, the vegans, and the feminists start to blur together. She sees some of her favorite factions start to comment and respond happily and generically to the Good News company. She even loses two reliable trolls to The Good News Company.
To soothe herself she peeks in the box for the third time. It will be the last time she promises herself. Inside the box is man who is all alone sitting in the corner with only a metal bed next to him. He is scraping the floor with his fingernails out of boredom. He hasn’t read anything in months. He hasn’t talked to anyone in a year. He tried to harness the power of the man to imagine a life outside his confinement, but it ended only in hallucinations that made him scream. Now he only finds peace in scratching the floor with his bleeding broken finger nails. She closes the box and weeps, at first for the man, but then for the dog, and then for the Chinese woman. Then for herself.
Thirty two days later It’s unanimous and no fault of her own. The men at the company say so candidly, they are going under and there is nothing they can do. It’s not your fault, peggy, people have no spine anymore.
They let her go, but she doesn’t have to worry. The Good News Company with their nauseating goodwill and hope for humanity offer a job, after all they could use a good community manager.
Peggy has no other skill to offer and takes the job. It’s quite strange for her to realise that after she started working there all the bad things started to dwindle. Without any discourse on how things ought to be, the factions dissolved into a melting pot of sorts, rational enough to work for the greater good. Now they could pull out many other articles from the world and add it to their list of things that could never happen here. All her old commenters come to the Good News and don’t argue much. A good thing, is a good thing.
And so Peggy keeps pulling out good things from the city and publishes them on the wall without much thought. The Good News company has commended her on her ability to find the best stories. Peggy, after all, does what the job calls for.
In the evenings she goes home and looks up the bad things in cities elsewhere. Her heart only starts to fasten then and a slow predictable thrill starts to rise in her chest. She pulls her shoe box out but never opens it, instead she reads articles of bad new to it. See it could be worse for you, whatever or whoever you are in the box right now, she whispers.
But the shoebox is not good enough, and she misses her old job.
She imagines the various ways to position bad new articles in the evenings after work. Then she types out responses on a blank word document. She imagines herself a zealous patriarch and then a lonely troll. She writes another comment from the perspective of an academic ( and backs it with research). Every evening the high diminishes by a fraction. Until she’s left with aching bones, sweating hands, and a raging headache that just won’t go away.
Until she’s left in bed, a flapping fish out of water, cold flesh that shakes with shivers. Even her teeth hurt. No one notices when Peggy doesn’t come in to work one day. You see, The Good News Company does not notice when bad things happen.
Rheea Mukherjee is a writer in Bangalore. Her forthcoming novel, The Body Myth, comes out February 2019 by Unnamed Press. She is the co-founder of Write Leela Write, a design and content laboratory. She spends most of her spare time eating and making vegan hipster things.