What Happened to FB?
By Juan Martinez
I’m not the right person to tell FB’s story, but I waited a year and no one else has volunteered to do so, which is odd. You might think the Tribune would have done something—a little note, a bemused Chicago-pride sort of piece. But there’s been nothing, not in the Sun-Times and not even on WGN, and all attempts to reach my former coworkers have resulted in pretty much no-replies, or auto responders, or in messages that wish me well in my new gig in the western suburbs.
We live in Oak Park, and the commute to work is short, and the public schools are excellent, but it’s not like we left the city behind. You can reach us. You can even take the el. It’s a short hop on the Green Line.
My former coworkers, however, have pretty much ghosted me and my four children and my wife, though they have children and wives and ex-wives of their own. They no longer show up at the family barbecues. We all lived close together, huddled mostly around Wrigleyville and Lakeview, and we gathered in the summers and hardly saw each other in the brutal winters and we said we don’t understand why people live here, and we meant Chicago, and we all swore we would leave, and I did.
I did leave. Some of them left too. The rest stayed. They no longer respond to my Evites. They don’t seem to appreciate my hitting Like on their Facebook or Instagram updates. They never like any of the things I post. I suppose this is all normal. You stop being friends with the people you no longer work with. You no longer exist. I mean me. I no longer exist. But still.
Mysteries remain, the biggest of which—for me—is why they’re no longer willing to talk about FB even though that’s all we talked about, for a long while.
I suppose I understand. They want to pretend he didn’t exist either, or that his existence didn’t—briefly—overshadow our work at the branding agency where we worked hard to come up with names that stuck hard to the brains of potential consumers, and where we made too much money. and where we all felt vaguely dirty—all of us except FB, who genuinely seemed to enjoy his work.
He was a little older than us, maybe a decade older—maybe more—but his face was boyish, and though he had a bit of a beer belly, he seemed to take good care of himself. He was technically one of our supervisors, though the agency was trying to keep up with the tech start-ups and did its best to efface the hierarchies, so he just hung out in his khakis and sports coat and Cubs hat, and Averill asked me if I knew what was up with the hat.
I said, “Because he’s bald?” Averill laughed, told me to look at the back of the hat next time he came around.
At the time I was like, whatever. Don’t make me work at this, Averill; I seriously didn’t care. I’m Colombian, a graduate of Andes University, and I didn’t land in the US until the agency poached me from the Erickson branch in Bogotá, so I always felt a little behind. People assumed I didn’t know a lot about the US, and that rankled, because how else would I end up here, at a company that pinpointed what Americans wanted, if I didn’t know at least a little? But people also assumed I did know a lot about the US that I didn’t actually know or care about, baseball being top on that list. So it was all a little irritating. I didn’t want to study someone’s baseball hat.
And besides, I wasn’t wrong. Whatever else, FB totally wore his hat indoors because he was going bald.
FB had just told us to help ourselves to the IPAs in the lounge fridge. He had brought them in from California. It was noon, too early for a beer, but Averill wanted one, and I liked hanging out with her, so I followed her up the terrace where we could see the glory of the river and the awfulness of the Trump sign.
Averill said, “FB doesn’t like the thing about the pigs.” She opened her beer with my keychain opener, a gift from FB, a heavy leather-and-chrome dealio he’d given everyone for Christmas, each person’s name engraved. She’d lost hers. I liked mine. It was good for keys, and a group of us liked to have beers on the Metra after work, and we always drank the kind of beers you couldn’t screw off, so the gift came in handy.
I wasn’t surprised. I loved the pigs, and pretty much everyone I knew loved them, too, but I suspected that maybe FB didn’t—that maybe he was the kind of Republican who would hold his nose and vote for Trump, even if we’d talked about how jarring we found the sign (FB didn’t like it either; he loved the Chicago skyline, the most perfect skyline in the world, he claimed, until Trump insisted on peeing all over it). I’d read about the artist, how he wanted to float five helium-filled golden pigs to obscure the letters, and had even talked to my wife about maybe donating a thousand dollars to the GoFundMe. I could imagine FB coming up with something similar, maybe for one of our clients, but I could also easily imagine him not loving the idea, finding it uncool or obvious or not worth the effort. It’d only be worth the effort if he had been the one to come up with it. He was that kind of ad guy. Ideas were good as long as they came from him. He was getting to that age where you feel vulnerable, where you look behind you and everyone’s younger and hungrier, and I think he didn’t quite like us, or the world we were building, but I liked him well enough. I had been obsessed with the films of Whit Stillman, loved Metropolitan and Barcelona and had a thing for American preppie culture, and everything about FB exuded it: the khakis, the Bass Weejuns, his indiscriminate love of madras blazers and Patagonia fleece. Even the Cubs hat.
Averill said, “So you still haven’t seen it? You looked, yes?” I had, but it’s not the kind of thing you can do discreetly, so I told Averill the truth, which is that I noticed the autograph on the hat—someone had taken a silver Sharpie and made a scrawl. I could read the name but it meant nothing.
She said, “Seriously?” “He’s friends with a baseball player?” I said. “He knows the owner? He owns the Cubs?”
Averill chugged her beer in a way that didn’t raise any alarm bells at the time, but our office had a pretty liberal drinking culture, so it wasn’t like she was unusual. By the time I got home I was often a little drunk. My wife and I had had a few talks about that. I had promised her I’d cut down. I was worried about my own drinking, and I envied Averill’s cheerfulness. She had to do a shit-ton of aerobics, she told me, otherwise she got a belly, and what man would want her then? She had recently divorced, had no kids, had what I assumed was a lively and heady social life outside the office.
“Seriously?” she said again. “You don’t know John Hughes?” “Who?” “Hughes.” She was nearly done with the fancy IPA We had been on the terrace for fifteen minutes. The river glowed a bright emerald green. Three kayakers skirted an architecture boat tour. “You’re serious,” she said. “You never heard of John Hughes?” I shrugged. I didn’t. She said, “You’ve seen Sixteen Candles.” I hadn’t. She rattled off the other titles, the ones I’m sure you know and I didn’t: Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“That’s him,” she said. “FB is the real Ferris Bueller. I mean, it’s an open secret. They were friends in high school, him and John Hughes. The movie’s based on his actual life. Like, that’s FB’s Winnetka.”
I said okay. Averill said I should watch it, and I promised her I would, but I didn’t, not that evening.
One of our kids had an assignment. She wanted to sync the audio from a song she’d made up to the movements of mannequin fingers, and we spent the better part of the evening working out how you could do it with the Legos. We eventually got it, my wife and I, long after our kids had gone to sleep. I asked her if she’d seen the movie.
She had. Of course, she had. Apparently everyone had seen this movie, had loved this movie.
“It turns out that FB is Ferris?” “Really?” my wife said. She tested our kid’s project: the mechanical fingers snapped to life as the song came on. “No,” she said. “No way.” The fingers waved. “Save Ferris,” she said.
“What?” “It’s a thing in the movie.” I asked her if she wanted to split a beer. She said she didn’t, and that it was time for bed, that she never slept well if she had a beer right before bed and that I didn’t either. Just go to bed, she said. Skip the beer, just go to sleep. I couldn’t, I told her. I didn’t exactly know why.
We lived in Lakeview still, not far from the noise of the bars on Clark, in a two-flat that had been reconverted to a single-residency. The house was beautiful but dark. We had paid a fortune for central air and heating, which proved a mistake, because the cold trickled in no matter what we did. I was bundled in a blanket in the kitchen, my kid’s project on the table. It was finally late enough that the arguments of Wrigleyville would come in in full force. They never woke up the kids somehow. I decided to have the beer I had been planning on splitting, and to get on Facebook, and to check on my coworkers. Averill had posted a photo of a nice meal she had. Also a donut, a fancy one from a shop in Bucktown. At least two of my coworkers were apparently in this indoor soccer league to which I had not been invited, which was just as well, because I am the one Colombian who does not play soccer.
I had not been meaning to look for FB. It had never occurred to me that his own page would have anything of interest (he hardly ever posted), but he had: photos of the night sky in Winnetka, photos of dark leaves against the dark sky, each photo uploaded one right after the other. He was awake. He was posting photos of his night walk. There was a forest of new growth, barely visible, mostly a blur of black and violet. The photos arrived every few minutes, and I imagined FB taking a few steps, finding something of interest, taking a photo, posting it, and walking. He followed the curb of a suburban street, and I marveled at its width—everything was so narrow where we lived—and he finally remembered to turn on the flash feature on his cell, and he captured the crags and dells of his suburban forest, a narrow path leading down to a narrow brook, a startled deer. He took a photo of the running water, a close-up. It looked cold and silvery and clean. The next photo was of a bunny caught in mid-leap.
I clicked Like. There were no more photos for a half an hour, but I stayed on his page and waited. I had a sense there would be more, that I needed to wait. I realized that FB might find it strange for a coworker to like his bunny photo just as soon as he posted it, but I did not care, and then I realized that maybe it’d be less strange if I liked all of his night-walk photos, so I did that, while I waited: He had taken fifty-four photos so far. I had no doubt in my mind he would take more.
It did occur to me that it was not normal. That I was somehow intruding. It did also occur to me that what FB was doing was also not normal, that people didn’t leave their houses in early winter and go for walks, that they didn’t post what they could barely see. I thought, Maybe he’s blue. I also thought, What if he tries to kill himself? Do I know where he is? Could I ask for help? What do you tell 911 in cases like this? I could say, He’s by a brook close to his house; there’s a bunny.
I should reach out, I thought. I was pretty sure I had his cell phone. I could text him, or I could Facebook-message him.
That’s when he posted the photo of the house. It was all glass, all glass on every side, and from the flash I could tell that the lawn was wide and full of trees, woody. He had walked deep into someone’s property to take the photo, which I’ve learned is a giant no-no in the States. You don’t walk on people’s lawns.
But the yard looked unkempt, and the front door had those sad little combination lockboxes on the front, and I imagined there was a For Sale sign up front. You could see a little into the house, enough to know that it was empty, that whoever was selling it no longer lived here. I imagined us living there. We were well-off, we could almost swing it, I imagined. Almost. We were well-off but not well-off enough to live in Winnetka. That was senior colleague territory, and besides, we didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, our kids loved their school, and I loved the city, and if we moved we wouldn’t move here, couldn’t imagine living here, in this sad house that was all glass. It must be so cold right now.
I waited for FB to post again, but he did not, so I eventually made it to bed. My wife stirred. I could not sleep: I didn’t sleep the whole night, and I thought of the brook, the startled eyes of the bunny, the empty glass house.
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Juan Martinez is the author of Best Worst American, a story collection published by Small Beer Press and the inaugural winner of the Neukom Institute Award for Debut Speculative Fiction. He lives in Chicago and is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Huizache, Ecotone, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Mississippi Review and elsewhere. Visit and say hi at https://fulmerford.com