The spreadsheets are in disarray. There are endless columns, far past Z into the double letters, spilling over onto Jonathan’s second monitor. He’s been staring at the screens, trying to grasp the core logic, for, literally, hours. Robin, the client, gets prickly when he asks questions or when he sends a piece of functionality to test. Her only participation was this knot of spreadsheets she’d uploaded into his Dropbox after their first meeting. That’s all that’s required, she thinks. How is Jonathan supposed to know what features he needs to build out, what scripts to program? You’re the expert, she’d texted hours after he chatted a minor question about how a column heading related to the numbers beneath it. Really there’s one underlying question, yet unanswered: what does Robin need this database to achieve? It’s fundamental, the healthy root from which any decent result will grow. And there’s a deadline. In a week she’s heading to a three-month residency on Minorca, at which point there will be an information blackout. A working version is meant to launch before she leaves, to keep her small DUMBO gallery running while she’s off grid. So, he’s got to get her a functioning beta release; till then, no sleep for the wicked.
What Robin fails to grasp, though he’s been at pains to explain from the get- go, is: it can’t work this way. The best databases–at least the best Jonathan’s made, and he’s got a few great ones out there—emerge out of an organic conversation between developer and client. Good work proceeds in an iterative loop, you build and hone as you go. He’s been at this for two years, ever since graduating Rhode Island School of Design; he knows that much.
What makes Robin’s mire of cryptic data doubly impenetrable, though, is the formatting. Case in point: columns don’t wrap. In cells with overlong sentences, the text mows down borders, bleeding into the next column over, which displaces data, which disrupts clarity, which obfuscates meaning, if any is under there. Which makes Jonathan’s head hurt.
In the gap between monitors, the rectangle of light from the hallway dims and brightens, Sadie shuffling past on her way to the bathroom. In a moment, the toilet flushes. The sink squeaks on, then off. Between the monitors, the light dims, then brightens; Sadie shuffling back to bed. It is late. She has to be up early to catch her flight.
Jonathan changes Robin’s cell alignment to wrap the text and widens the columns. This corrals the text inside the borders and stacks the cells neatly, providing some visual, to Jonathan, at least, relief. Such a simple thing. Now it’s halfway legible. People underestimate the power of decent formatting, dismiss it like it’s window dressing, mere fluff. Nope. Formatting is the vehicle by which the data delivers its story. He could write a manifesto about it. Get on a soapbox. Write an ode.
He clicks over to his newsfeed. Jalalabad has fallen to the Taliban overnight. It’s the last major city before Kabul. The US is pulling its remaining troops from the country it’s sunk a trillion dollars and twenty years into. Talk about no core logic. What had they been trying to achieve? The takeover is happening in an instant. Even as he reads, ground is ceded, seized, the newsfeed a scroll of real-time, on-the-ground dispatches. Each time he punches the refresh button, further disintegration.
Back in the spreadsheets, an aggressive color-coding seems to be at work, with no key. Why are two rows lime green, two gray, then one a custom peach? If you’re going to go to the trouble of overriding a default color, you must have some intention for what it represents. But . . . what? Again, formatting. The unexplained colors add to a feeling of logic gone haywire, a purposeful scrambling of meaning. There’s no discernible pattern—if there was a pattern, he could draw out the story. Robin’s story is a forced march through a stranger’s ayahuasca journey. Gathering any internal coherence requires a spirit guide.
What he isn’t, is some kind of diviner. He’s an artist. This is a side gig. He does it for cash so he can make art. He realized after graduating RISD that here was a built-in clientele, former classmates and a social network of artists, designers, creatives. Some, like Robin, had small businesses; one superstar wanted a database to track his burgeoning career—exhibits, prizes, residencies, commissions. Another was producing a sprawling conceptual project that required a database to track the movements of participants worldwide along various timelines and spatial axes.
Business boomed. He’s not getting rich but it pays his half of the rent and he’s been able to move up from the lowest rung of New York State’s catastrophic healthcare ladder. At some point he realized he had a good thing going and jumped through the hoops to incorporate—Tables and Fields, he called it— invested in decent monitors, built a website, printed up business cards. For a while it was an engaging challenge. He discovered a knack for transforming clients’ abstract, inchoate desires into organized information and converting that into a functional program. He even delivers for the little warlords who preside over their spreadsheet like captured territory—though these are tough jobs, leaving him little room to play. Which is worse? he wonders. The control freaks or the purveyors of chaos? He highlights a painfully loud red row and dials back the color intensity so he can make out the fluorescent pink text buried alive in each cell. He usually pulls off something usable. Maybe he is a kind of diviner.
Then one day he woke up; he’d been out of school for more than a year and was spending every waking hour helping others move their dreams ahead while he stood still. Progress on his own art had slowed, then stopped. Don’t pour so much of yourself into work, says Sadie. Conserve your creative energy. If they hand him a dry, airless spreadsheet, hand them back a dry, airless database. He has high standards, he counters. It wouldn’t feel right not to give his all. But she’s right, and he tries to pull back, but mostly it doesn’t stick—he gets sucked back in. What Sadie doesn’t utter yet manages to telepathically convey, is that he’s using work as an avoidance mechanism. In moments he sees what she sees, admits that losing himself in his work helps him not dwell on how far he’s veered off course, how others are more enterprising, luckier, have access to more resources, are more charismatic, more keyed in to the trends, socially literate, politically savvy, less hung up, more connected. Face it—and he does, hourly, minutely— more talented than he.
Past midnight, Robin G-chats: I don’t get it, you charge me mad coin and drop all this work on me? S’not right, dude. A frowning, beet red emoji. The urban-hip language does nothing to elide the bald power dynamics at work, here. That she, Robin, is paying him, Jonathan, to do her bidding. It’s insulting, and, worse, it is true.
In his newsfeed, bedlam. Chaotic checkpoints, packed streets, gesticulating confrontations, blank stares etched from hours of anxious limbo. Are any women among the crush of bodies outside the airport gates? Jonathan scours the busy pictures like the kid’s game where you spy a word embedded in the flowered wallpaper, the floor grain, disguised in plain sight. Spot the Burqa. Do they slip out of frame when a camera points their way? Or do they stay home, locked indoors during an invasion, during an exodus? It is the women—the girls—after a generation of western occupiers—for whom the withdrawal marks a monumental tragedy. Loss of liberty. Denial of opportunity to pursue their dreams. Forbidden, even, to have dreams.
The sound of a heavy sack falling to the floor. “Okay, so.”
Between the monitors, Sadie in the doorway, backlit, recently-cut pandemic hair fetchingly grazing her shoulder blades, big duffel at her feet. They’d bought it—it felt so grownup to make a joint purchase—for a road trip to Montreal after graduation. She’s headed to her sister’s wedding in Savannah. Ever since the announcement it was clear Sadie didn’t want him to go. His critique of Kath and her old friends and relatives and the world she came from was—well, it was spot on, she had to agree. His imitations made her laugh. But they depressed her, too. If he went with, she’d feel obligated to keep him company on the sidelines, sharing his dark and snarky, if true and incisive, commentary on everything that was wrong with these people and their way of life. Without him, she’d be out there on the dance floor. “You should come,” she’d said, pointing to the plus one on the invite. “I don’t want to be a drag,” he replied, as she must have known he would. She was too polite to tell him outright—her loaded silence part and parcel of that pathologically indirect world she’s from.
“God, what time is it?” he says.
His gooseneck lamp is bent low, the room otherwise in shadow. But a square of gray fills the window shade beside him, a thin frame of light leaking in around the edges.
Sadie hefts the duffel, heads to the kitchen. The thought that he’s meant to get up and follow her, that he’s to wish her a bon voyage, perversely pins him in his seat. She’s rinsing out the coffee pot, dumping water into the well, grinding beans.
The kitchen glows. Early morning sunlight angling in from the east. The brightness makes him squint. Sadie’s at the stove.
“Mask up,” he says. He has gotten up. He has followed.
Sadie holds up an arm, egg dribbling from her spatula onto the stovetop. Dangling from her wrist like a complicated bangle, her favorite mask, hand sewn from a bag of quilting scraps she’d lugged home from her grandmother’s attic.
He pinches his eyes shut—the rims feel like ancient rubber bands, dry and cracked. lnflamed data from the spreadsheet does a jittery dance against his inner eyelids.
He’s been facing her, but it’s taken a moment to register: Sadie’s making an egg sandwich for the road. It’s their tradition, egg sandwiches on the morning of a trip, one of those tiny routines they’d started as a couple. That’s ours, he thinks. That she is doing this, now, without him, both touches and, unexpectedly, stings. She will take this with her when she goes.
A pressure that’s been building in his head doesn’t feel like a headache and doesn’t feel like impending tears. It feels like something is in there pushing outward, trying to expand his skull using brute force. He reaches over the sink to the window and closes the curtains—another creation Sadie made from quilting scraps. A fledgling lawyer, she makes things, minus the angst and tense obsession that turns Jonathan’s meager efforts at making art into waking nightmares. He lets out a sigh. Sadie looks up from her eggs.
“The light,” he says. “All-nighter.”
She twists the knob on the burner, killing the flame.
“Poor baby,” she says, and slides the eggs onto a waiting roll.
He’s got to stop working for artists. It isn’t healthy for him or for the ones— one—he loves. He needs to, he will, find a way to make a living that is divorced from the thing he’d wanted to do, to be. This adjacency is soul-crushing.
At his desk, back in the spreadsheet, he spends another good fifteen minutes— thirty dollars’ worth!—of his time, trying to make sense of Robin’s intermittent asterisks, which refer to a tab labelled “astrix,” where a column of cells —*, **,
***, ****—serves up three-inch-high blocks of unpunctuated explanatory text.
He clicks back to the main sheet, selects all, and clears the rows of color. A pale, uniform gray with black text fills both screens. The relief is like an eye wash. It’s so oddly cleansing, to have vanished the offending colors. He is, successful or not, recognized or not, productive or not, an artist. The way things look—color, pattern, line, shape, space itself—matter deeply. They tell stories. It’s his value system, his grounding, it is how the world makes itself known to him, if not always understood. This is automatic, baked in, not a choice.
G-chat sounds its dull two-tone alert. His eyes shift to the popup window.
Robin says sorry but there’s no way she can pay for this work since it’s not what she wanted. –N.
Neana. Or Neona. Whichever. Poor kid—an intern forced to do her boss’s dirty work.
Jonathan sits back, stunned. He lets his arms float in the air above the keyboard, as though to stretch. He does stretch, in fact, leaving his arms dangling above. Gazing up, in the darkness his hands look like someone else’s, detached from his body. Then, as though switched on, his fingers splay, like talons, like a pianist gathering strength to pounce into a frenetic passage. Then, he dives.
In a couple of keystrokes he has reverted Robin’s file to its original state— its murky data sea, its seventeen asterisks, its disastrous, obliterated cells and lurid colors—and exports the spreadsheet as an image file. This he imports into Photoshop where, slowly, deliberately, with a creeping glee, he introduces distortion, pixelating and degrading the image. The spreadsheet transforms, morphs until it has become a fractured version of its former self, frozen at the moment of its corrosion. Around the whole thing he draws a frame, which he fills with a surface layer suggestive of rust and oxidized copper, just transparent enough to afford glimpses into the destruction beneath. It is beautiful.
He exports this picture of digital decay and uploads it into Illustrator, where he creates a text block, selects an ornate font—he hesitates over this for a moment, not entirely satisfied with the choice, but elbows the doubt aside. It’s not perfect, but it is fine. He types: Dispatches from the Messy Mind of Robin Rezzhi. It’s the first art he’s made in years.
He works on the piece through the day, long past the muffled click of the apartment door closing, Sadie’s departure, working until the dark square of window shade signals nighttime, again.
Robin is famous. She has thousands of followers. She will view this as an unforgivable breach, exposing her to public scrutiny, judgment. Jonathan knows this, even as he uploads the image to his Instagram account, even as he links it to Twitter, to Facebook, to TikTok, altering the format to suit each platform, and pushes each post live, a flurry of concentrated activity during which time he is flooded with regret, powers past it with a rising courage, then panics, doubting, the next moment thrilled and flush with pride, with flashes, only, but oh so wonderful flashes, of joy, all in a cascading sequence of logic, by which time it is out there, too late to reclaim.
Founding director of the New School Archives and Special Collections, Wendy Scheir holds an MFA in film, a BA in English literature, and an MA in history from NYU. Her short film, No Hands, appeared in the Chicago Film Festival and Boston International Film Festival, and a screenplay, Riggs Locks, received readings at the Telluride Independent Film Festival and A Separate Star, and was two-time finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. A repeat participant in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Wendy has published nonfiction in various journals, and has a short story in the spring 2024 issue of Thieving Magpie. She lives in Yonkers, New York.