LIFE/STORY by Emily Mitchell

1.

The producers arrive in the middle of the night, just like all the rumors say they do. Around 2:30 in the morning, the front doorbell buzzes. Martin is still half asleep when he feels Lilah next to him sit up suddenly in bed. It’s almost like she was already wide awake and waiting for this sound.
“Oh my god,” she says, shaking Martin by the shoulder. “Oh my god!” She jumps up and runs over to the window. She raises the blind and peers into the darkened street outside. “Holy shit,” she says, then covers her mouth with both hands the way she always does after she curses. It’s a gesture Martin still finds cute after all their years together. “Marty,” Lilah says over her shoulder. “Come and look. They’re here!”
Martin clambers out of bed and goes to stand beside her. Below them, at the curb, idles a long black car with tinted windows. Its headlamps wash the street in milky light, illuminating patched and potholed asphalt, cracked, uneven sidewalk, the house that’s three doors down from theirs with boarded‑up windows and an overgrown front yard. Among these things, the car looks like a visitation from another world. There is really only one reason a vehicle like this would be outside their house. The producers of Life Stories have come looking for one of them.
The buzzer sounds again. Lilah grabs her dressing gown from where it’s hanging up behind the bedroom door and rushes out into the hall. Martin hears her go downstairs then pause, perhaps to check how she looks in the hallway mirror. He hears the door open and voices.
Ever since it was announced that New York would be on the list of cities from which Life Stories would choose next year’s contestants, Lilah has had a feeling that she might be selected. When Martin asked her why, she’d shrugged: “I don’t know, I just do.”
“Oh, come on, hon,” he’d said. “If they choose a hundred people in the whole country each year, what are the chances?”
“They’re tiny,” she had answered. “I know that. But wouldn’t it be great if it happened anyway?”
Martin hadn’t been so sure. Would it really be that great? He’d kept this to himself, however. Lilah loves that show. She watches every episode, discusses it online after it’s streamed, votes each season for the Story she thinks most deserves to win. She has a carefully thought-out plan for her own Story. She and her sister Sonya would start a program in one of the FEMA camps along the Gulf Coast to help the women there. Sonya, who’s a hairdresser and cosmetologist, would offer them free training doing hair and nails and make‑up, while Lilah, who is a librarian, would help them search for jobs, write applications, practice their interview skills. Women get stuck in those camps long-term more often than men because, as Lilah has explained to him, children make it harder to move somewhere new for work and harder to find housing if they do. The goal of the program would be to get all the participants resettled outside the camp within a year. Lilah is sure this has all the ingredients of a great Life Story: drama, poignancy, characters that you can root for. In the end, Martin decided: if she was having fun imagining being on the show, why spoil her enjoyment with his reservations, especially given how unlikely it was to happen in real life?
But now it appears, incredibly, she was correct. For here they are, stepping into the front hall as Martin comes downstairs: two producers, tall and slim in sleek, dark clothes. A black man carrying a hefty briefcase and a white woman with long, brown hair. They are both extremely handsome, though later when Martin tries to picture what they look like he’ll have trouble actually remembering their faces. Next to Lilah’s tiny bird-like frame and his own body, which he likes to think of as well-padded, they look almost like members of a different species.
“Hello,” the woman says. “I guess you know why we are here.” She’s smiling, showing white, even teeth.
“Of course,” says Lilah. “I’m a huge fan of the show.”
“That is wonderful,” the woman says. “It is always great to meet a member of the Life Stories community.” She has a foreign accent Martin can’t quite place. Scandinavian of some kind? Eastern European?
“We’re sorry to get you out of bed,” the man says. “We do this at night so we won’t attract so much attention. It makes things easier.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lilah says. “It’s just so thrilling that you’re here. You know, you’re not going to believe this but this year I had a feeling, somehow, that it might be me . . .”
“Well, actually,” the man says, “we’re looking for a Mr. Martín Rodrigo Gatz . . .” He pronounces it Martín, with the accent on the i, the way that Martin’s mother used to do.
“Oh. Wow,” Lilah says. “Really?”
Martin steps forward and says, “That’s me. I’m Martin Gatz.”
The woman smiles even wider. “It is nice to meet you, also. Is there some place we can sit down to go over a few things?”
“Sure,” Martin says. He is just trying to think which room is the least messy at the moment, when he notices two small figures on the landing of the stairs. The children must have been woken by all the noise. “What are you doing out of bed?” he asks, and when they don’t answer he says, “Why don’t you come down and say hello?”
“Oh, Marty . . .” Lilah says. She turns and peers up at the children. “Alright. Come down quickly and say hello and goodnight. Then back to bed, okay?” The children tiptoe downstairs and emerge into the light of the hallway, curly-headed Daniella and tiny Lucas with his enormous saucer eyes. They stare at the producers.
“These people are from Life Stories, the show that Mommy watches,” Martin tells them. Then to the producers: “This is Dani. This is Luke.”
The man kneels down in front of the children until he’s on their level.
“Hello there, little man,” he says to Lucas.
“What do you say?” Lilah prompts.
“Hello. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.” It occurs to Martin that neither of the producers have introduced themselves by name. “How old are you?” the man says.
“I’m five,” Lucas says.
“And I’m seven,” Dani says, not to be outdone. “I’m in the third grade.”
“Well, that is wonderful,” the man says. “Just fantastic. Do you have a favorite subject yet in school?”
“I like math and swimming,” Dani says. “My dad taught me to swim.”
“Wonderful,” the man says again.
“Okay, guys. You both have school tomorrow. Let’s go up to bed.” Lilah takes both children by the hand and leads them gently to the stairs. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she says to Martin as she does this. “Why don’t you show our guests inside?”

They sit around the kitchen table under the lemony light from the aged fixture. With the two producers sitting there, elegant and expensive-looking, Martin can see more clearly what Lilah is talking about when she says this room is shabby: the scuffed‑up cabinets, the blackened burners on the stove, the worn linoleum of the countertops and floor. He feels, briefly, mildly embarrassed.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Lilah asks when she returns. Her voice is business-like and friendly. No one except Martin could know how disappointed she must be that they are here for him instead of her. “It will just take me a minute to make a pot.”
“No, thank you,” the woman replies.
“Not for me either,” the man says, “but it’s kind of you to offer.”
As Lilah settles into the chair next to Martin, the man reaches down and picks up the briefcase he brought with him from the floor beside his feet. He lays it on the table. He clicks it open. From inside it, he removes a tablet and slides his fingers across the screen until he finds what he is looking for. Then he hands it to Martin sitting opposite. Lilah cranes so she can see it too.
“Your contract,” the man says. “Go ahead and read it over.”
Martin reads. The contract isn’t very long. It gives permission for Life Stories Inc. to record his actions 24 hours a day for the next 12 months using their patented micro-drone technology. During that time, he’ll be paid a monthly stipend, equal to his current salary, plus a budget for expenses connected to developing his Story; should he be found to have deliberately used a substantial portion of this budget for expenses unrelated to his project for the show, Life Stories Inc. reserves the right to take legal action to recoup their losses. The contract further says that Life Stories gives him the right to approve or reject the condensed and edited version of his Story that will be submitted to the judges. All other video will be destroyed when the editing process is complete. Besides his editing team, no one but Martin will view any of it.
If the judges select his Story for inclusion in their upcoming season he will receive a payment. The amount of that payment is specified in the contract. It is substantial, equivalent to several years of income.
If viewers choose his Story as the winner, the Top Story of the season, he will receive another payment. The amount of this second payment, also specified in the contract, is fabulous; more money than he would earn if he worked the rest of his life at his job as a gardener for the City Parks Department.
There are more clauses about rights to his image, merchandising, syndication, nondisclosure, sponsorships. And then, at the bottom, there is a dotted line for him to sign. He can feel all the eyes in the room watching him, waiting eagerly for him to squiggle his signature along it. But somehow, he hesitates.
“Listen,” he says. “I really think my wife would make a better subject for your show. She’s a big fan. I mean, not that I’m not a fan, I am, of course, but she really loves Life Stories. She has a great idea for her Story and she’s very photogenic. Couldn’t you give this to her instead?”
The woman shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “You are the one our algorithm chose. If you don’t want to do it, we can go. A small percentage of people do decline each year. But we can’t just transfer your place to someone else.”
Martin glances at Lilah and finds her staring back at him. She’s wearing a look that is part enthusiasm, part don’t-screw-this‑up-please. He can almost hear what she is thinking, what she’d say if they had time and privacy to talk about it. You don’t turn down an opportunity like this. You seize it with both hands. This is a big chance. If his Story is chosen for the show, never mind if it becomes Top Story, it will change their lives. They could finally move out of this narrow old row house that Lilah’s mother bought back when real estate in the outer boroughs was still worth something, and that now they can’t sell because it’s too close to the East River Flood Barrier and the risk of inundation gets worse every year. They could move to somewhere further from the water, out of this neighborhood that’s already half empty. Maybe they could go live on Manhattan behind the Sea Wall. Or maybe they could pull up stakes completely, relocate to one of the prosperous, growing, inland cities, somewhere like Cleveland or Detroit. Better air for Luke who suffers from asthma; better schools for both children; less crime; more opportunity. They could even get a new car to replace the rust bucket Martin drives right now, which is so old it still runs on gasoline. The first step toward all these things is to put his name on the document in front of him.
“Alright,” he says. With his forefinger he signs his name. Everyone around the table smiles. Lilah puts her hand gently on his shoulder and the male producer takes from his briefcase a dark carved box. Its outside is made of glossy polished wood, perhaps mahogany, and it looks like something a woman might keep jewelry in. The man sets it on the table.
“Oh, wow,” Lilah says. “Are they in there?”
The man smiles at her, his eyes bright. Martin wonders if he looks forward to this part.
“Are you ready?” he asks Martin.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Martin answers.
The producer opens the lid of the box. From inside it, they rise: a swarm of tiny, winged machines, glinting with the opalescent colors of an oil slick. They circle and ascend, spiraling and dispersing until they hover around Martin like a cloud. Martin looks up at them, amazed. For the next year they will be with him everywhere he goes; the cameras they each contain will document his every moment. They wink and shimmer in the light.
“Congratulations,” the woman producer says. “Welcome to the show.”

2.

After the producers leave, Martin and Lilah, who are both much too keyed up to sleep, sit talking at their kitchen table. Martin feels incredibly self-conscious now that everything he does or says is being recorded. Even though most of the video will be discarded unseen, just knowing image and sound are being captured makes him queasy. It’s as if all of his words and actions have developed a strange echo. He keeps glancing up to where the micro-drones are hovering soundlessly. Each time he looks he feels a tilting sensation in his stomach, like the nerves he used to get before a game when he played soccer back in high school.
Lilah, by contrast, seems unfazed.
“So,” she says, “since we’re awake anyway, why don’t we start going over ideas for your Story?”
“Sure,” Martin says. He can’t think of any reason to say no.
“Let me hear all of them, even the ones that you don’t think are so great. Don’t censor yourself. You’re just brainstorming right now.”
“Okay.” But the truth is that his mind has gone completely blank. Did he have any ideas for a Life Story? If he did, he can’t remember them right now.
“That’s alright,” Lilah tells him after he confesses this. “You have the whole year to come up with and play out your narrative. It might take a few days or even weeks for you to get used to all this.” She gestures upwards. “The important thing is to find something authentic, something that represents who you truly are. The Stories that get picked, you can tell the people are following their dream or passion, doing something they genuinely care about. They didn’t just cook up something for the show.”
Martin nods. “I see,” he says. “Authentic.”
“Like, remember that man two seasons ago who went by boat around the area where the Florida Keys used to be and photographed the sunken towns? He said that was something he’d always wanted to do because his grandmother lived there, he just never had the time or money before. Or the woman who went back to Russia to find her birth mother and discovered that she had been a famous ballet dancer? Or the man who took his sister to China to have experimental surgery to help her walk again and it worked and the audience got to see her take her first steps in more than 15 years? And then he ended up falling in love with one of the doctors at the clinic? They all chose something that was really meaningful to them. That’s what you should do.”
Martin does his best to think of something meaningful to him. In college he studied horticulture and he likes working with plants. He likes cooking, too, especially now that Dani is old enough to help him. He likes challenging himself to cook something that will impress Lilah even during shortages, like last summer when fresh fruit and vegetables got so scarce and expensive. But he doesn’t see either of those things being the basis for a good Life Story.
“I’ve always kind of wanted to take the kids to Ecuador to see where my grandparents came from,” he tries.
Lilah frowns. “No,” she says. “They haven’t featured a Story about someone rediscovering their ethnic roots since season twelve, six years ago. That’s not sufficient anymore. It would need a further twist, like your grandparents had to flee for their lives from a death squad and you go back and uncover the truth about what happened and finally bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“I don’t think they really had death squads in Ecuador back then. That was more of a Central American thing.”
“Well, but you get my point. There needs to be more to your Story than you taking your children on vacation.”
“Okay,” Martin says again. He thinks: what has he always longed to do or learn, something interesting and difficult that he’s just never had the chance to try? When Life Stories first became a big hit, when Martin was in high school, he and his friends talked endlessly about what their Story would be if they were ever chosen. Back then the show featured more straightforward stuff, people having adventures and doing fun, crazy things. Now the Stories have become more complicated, which is one reason he doesn’t really watch it anymore. At 16 Martin had said that he would learn to skydive. Or he would trek through the Andes on foot. Or he would train to be a deep-sea diver and go down to the bottom of the ocean where hardly anyone has ever been – all things that make him tired now just thinking about them.
That was a lot of years ago, before he fell in love with Lilah and got married, before his kids were born and he became absorbed by the business of daily life: work and money and school and groceries and laundry, looking after his children, loving his wife. It’s been a long time since he thought about what he’d do for his Life Story because being picked was so unlikely and because he’s been too busy with the life he has to spend his time imagining another.
Lilah reaches across the table and takes his hand. She looks at him, her face full of warmth and excitement. She is so pleased for him that he wants to be as pleased for himself.
“Sweetheart, look,” Lilah says, “it makes perfect sense that you’re a little nervous. I mean, this is a big, big deal, a huge opportunity. It’s going to feel intimidating at first. But you don’t need to rush. Just relax and take your time. Then when you’re least expecting it, an idea will come to you out of nowhere. I’m sure it will. You just have to stop worrying and trust yourself and then I know that you’ll come up with something great.”

3.

Martin tries to follow her advice. He goes about his ordinary life and waits for an idea to come to him from whatever dark corner of his mind it might be hiding in. He goes to work, aerating the sports fields out in Flushing Meadows, then supervising the spring planting of the flowerbeds in St. Michael’s Cemetery. He cooks dinner for his family. On Sundays, when the air quality is good enough, he plays soccer with some old friends from school. He takes Luke to his appointments at the allergy and asthma clinic over in Manhattan; he waits in line at the Queensboro Bridge checkpoint to have his ID card examined to enter and leave the island.
When he walks down the street now people turn and look at him because he is surrounded by a mass of tiny levitating crystals. Some people stare openly, others glance furtively then look away. A few try to mug for the cameras, but this is difficult since there are so many of them and they move around so much. Some people come up and congratulate him, shake his hand and wish him luck.
Martin doesn’t like the extra attention the drones bring, but this is offset for him by the fascination Dani and Luke have for them. They ask endless questions. What are the drones made of? How many are there? (They try to count but can’t because they keep moving around.) How do they fit a camera into something so small? Are they all recording all the time or do they take turns? Martin answers as many of these questions as he can, even though he doesn’t know much more than the kids do. He loves his children’s curiosity and delight. One day he overhears Daniella tell a friend at the school bus stop: “My dad’s been chosen to try out for Life Stories.”
“Wow,” the friend says, “that’s so cool,” and he feels a surge of happiness at his daughter’s pride.
Apart from the attention to the drones themselves, the other noticeable change in his life is that now everyone feels the need to tell him what they would do if they’d been chosen for the show.
“You know what I’d do?” his friend Steve says. Steve is on his crew at work, and they are on their way to mow the lawns at a park in Jackson Heights, sitting in the cab of a Parks Department truck.
“No,” Martin says. “What?”
“I’d build a house for my family from scratch. Do it all myself: design, construction, everything. Plus I’d make it totally sustainable, all recycled materials, that kind of thing.”
“Where would you build it?”
“I’d buy a piece of land upstate near where I used to go vacation as a kid. It’s still pretty nice up there. Quite a lot of trees survived the blight. There are even lakes around that area where you can still swim.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Martin says.
“Yeah,” says Steve. “I think so. Hey, what are you going to do?”
“Oh,” Martin says, “I’m still tossing around ideas, taking my time to choose the right one . . .”
“I see. Keeping your cards close to your chest. I understand. Well, I’m sure it will be great, whatever it is.”
Lilah’s brother Ron spends almost an hour during a family barbecue describing how he would spend the year investigating an unsolved murder that took place a few years back not far from where he lives.
“I read all about it in the papers when it happened and I think I know who did it,” he says. “If I could dedicate a year to it, I bet that I could catch the killer.”
He goes on to tell Martin all the details of the murder while they eat their hot dogs: how the body of a young woman was found dismembered in different places along the Gowanus Canal; how her wealthy sometime-boyfriend was never questioned properly by the police; how the boyfriend was well-known to have a violent temper. Apparently, he’d been accused by a previous girlfriend of attempted assault but the charges were dropped after his family paid the woman a substantial sum. It is this special, local knowledge that makes Ron certain he can crack the case.
“That sounds really interesting . . .” Martin says.
“It is,” Ron says. “It’s fascinating.” And he launches into a description of the strange incisions that were found upon the various recovered body parts, which bits were missing and which bits were curiously rearranged . . .
Martin puts his still full plate aside. He looks away from Ron, trying to distract himself from the grisly monologue. They’re in New East River Park, right next to the water, on top of the embankment. The city has put picnic shelters up and sown grass here to make the ridge of earth look more hospitable. This barrier is supposed to protect the neighborhood from flooding during storm season. Last year it barely succeeded. Two years ago, after Hurricane Josephine, the river overtopped it and the streets closest were under several feet of water. Martin and Lilah’s house escaped the flooding that time, but Lilah’s friend Eileen, who lives only a few blocks from the barrier, got flooded out and came to stay with them for several weeks. Martin does not get along with Eileen too well, so he remembers those weeks more clearly than he’d like to.
After that, he put up storm shutters on the windows of their house. He went out and bought a fiberglass canoe which could fit all four of them. When he brought it home, Lilah had been skeptical; “Do you even know how to paddle one of those things?” she asked, and it’s true that the canoe still leans unused against a wall in their basement. But it is only a matter of time until the water gets high enough to reach them, and he wants to be prepared.
From his current vantage point, he can look across the water and see Manhattan surrounded by the gleaming curve of its granite sea wall. None of the buildings over there will be flooded in the fall, the towers of the financial district, the well-heeled residences of Gramercy Park or Murray Hill. He knows that the city has to set priorities, but he can’t help feeling resentful about this blatant choice of who to save and who to leave behind.
Martin sees Ron’s wife Karen coming toward them. At last, he thinks, someone to help move the conversation away from the topic of dismemberment.
“Hi Karen,” he says, interrupting Ron. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, good,” Karen says. “You know. Nothing happening that’s as interesting as what’s going on with you. You must be so excited!” She tilts her chin to indicate the drones which are suspended in the air all around Martin.
“Of course,” Martin says. “I’m thrilled.”
Karen leans in towards him conspiratorially.
“You know what I would do,” she says, “if I was a contestant on Life Stories?”
“No,” Martin says. “What would you do?”
Is it going to be like this all year? Every person he meets unfolding in elaborate detail what their Stories would be if they had to create one? Even Luke’s preschool teacher buttonholes him to tell him somberly how she’s always wanted to spend a year working on a farm, learning how to cultivate the land.
The thing is, all of these ideas – even Ron’s – sound fine to Martin. But unfortunately, not only do none of them seem right for him, they don’t inspire him to come up with any brilliant ideas of his own. In fact, nothing does. He tries brainstorming in a notebook. He tries watching old episodes of Life Stories to see if anything in them sparks his imagination. He has a few ideas, outlines of ideas, but none of them seem good enough and he doesn’t know how to choose between them. It’s as if the very importance of the decision has paralyzed him, made his brain stubbornly inert.
For the first month of this, Lilah remains unfailingly patient and encouraging. When he tells her he is stuck, she just smiles and says, “Don’t worry. There’s still plenty of time.” By the time six weeks have passed, however, she can no longer completely hide her frustration with his lack of progress. She tries to help him by making suggestions of her own: maybe he should go with one of the ideas he had when he was younger – but with something added to make it more grownup. Like instead of skydiving himself, he could sponsor someone with a disability who had always wanted to learn and they could do the lessons together. Martin thinks it over but now when he contemplates what that would mean, i.e., actually jumping out of a plane thousands of feet above the earth, he feels only a sick lurch of fear in his stomach, accompanied by the terrible thought that if something happened to him Dani and Luke would have to grow up without a father. He’d never get to see them graduate from high school or get married or have children of their own. Whatever appetite he once had for that kind of risk has gone with age and he cannot will it to come back. The same goes for the deep-sea diving. He’d rather eat a pair of his own shoes.
Lilah tries a few more times. What about some kind of project in the neighborhood? Something for the local kids? What about going to search for some rare plant species somewhere? Or planting a garden or painting a mural or, Jesus Christ, something!
Finally, she stops bringing it up, which feels ridiculous since the drones are always there as a reminder. She goes back to her previous strategy of encouragement, but now there is sometimes an audible strain in her voice when she tells him everything will work out fine. Almost two months have gone by since the producers came when Martin notices that Lilah has begun avoiding him. It starts in small ways. She doesn’t meet his eyes as often. She no longer reaches out a comforting hand to touch his back or shoulder as they pass each other in the course of their daily routine. They don’t talk as much and when they do, it’s mostly practical. At night, they don’t make love as often as before. Or is he just imagining all this because he feels like it’s what he deserves?
Martin knows he’s disappointing her, that he’s letting her down by being indecisive. But then again, this was never something that he wanted. A lump of resentment starts to grow, just below his collarbone and slightly higher than his heart. It’s resentment against Lilah. But also against everybody else, his friends and family, all those people waiting around to see what he will do. And once it’s there, he can’t figure out how to dislodge it. Instead, he gets at Lilah in small ways: staying out for beers with his coworkers and forgetting, somehow, to call and let her know where he is; leaving the leaking faucet in the upstairs bathroom unfixed when he knows that it annoys her. It isn’t good to act like this. But he can’t seem to find a way to clear the air, not while he has the drones around reminding him constantly of what he hasn’t done.
Meanwhile, time is slipping by, and with it his chance to do something interesting enough to be watched by people all over the country. Why can’t he choose what to do, a path, a direction? He feels bewildered. Before he knows it, almost three months have passed. He feels a rising sense of panic that hums through him as if his body were filled up with bees.
Finally it occurs to him one night, when he is lying awake worrying, that he is doing this all wrong. Instead of staying home living his regular life, he needs to get out into the world, explore, and that will help him figure out what his Story ought to be. Maybe if he encounters unexpected things, new places and people, he will find inspiration at last. This feels like an answer, like it might be what he’s waiting for. Of course he hasn’t had his brainwave yet, surrounded by the same old places and things he’s always known. What he needs is to expand his horizons. He has money for travel and other expenses from Life Stories. He can go wherever he wants for however long he wants. Why on earth doesn’t he take advantage of that?
But now he must choose where he’ll go. If he tries to choose, he might end up with the same paralysis he’s experienced until now. So he will not decide. Instead, he’ll introduce an element of chance into the process. He’ll make a game of it. He’s more likely that way to encounter something genuinely new. He’ll make some rules and let them take him somewhere he would never think of going on his own.
When he lays out this plan to Lilah the next morning, she smiles at him, the first time she’s done that for a while.
“I think you might be onto something,” she says, and Martin goes through the day that follows not minding so much the swirl of tiny mirror-skinned devices circling constantly all around him.

4.

He gets the kids to help. He has them bring the globe down from their bedroom and set it on the coffee table in the living room. He tells Luke to spin the globe and Dani to close her eyes and point to somewhere on its surface. Wherever her finger lands that is where he’s going to go.
The first couple of tries, she points to the middle of the ocean – it turns out there’s a lot of ocean in the world. The next time she points to somewhere in Siberia. Russia hasn’t given visas to U.S. citizens for years so that won’t work. But on the fourth spin, she points to a little tag of land extending west out of Great Britain. It’s so small she has to peer closer to read its name.
“Wales,” she says. Okay, so he is going to Wales.
He immediately feels that this was not quite what he’d wanted. He’d been picturing somewhere more, well, different from America, like Nepal, Kenya or New Guinea. Somewhere where at least they speak a different language. But he’s made the rules and he doesn’t want to disappoint Dani or make her feel her choice wasn’t any good. He does some online research about Wales. It turns out that it does have its own language, composed of enormous unpronounceable words full of y’s and w’s, and a flag with a red dragon on it, which the children love. Other than this it is known for castles, sheep, rain and singing. It has been basically peaceful since the Middle Ages. Not exactly the ideal place to go searching for adventure. But isn’t that the point? Who knows what he will find there? He must be open to whatever possibilities arise.
He gets on the waiting list for a plane ticket. With the funds from Life Stories he could pay extra to jump the line and go whenever he wants, but he balks at the colossal price. Anyway, this time of year it doesn’t take long, only about a week, for him to get a seat. Once he has his departure date, he packs his bag. Lilah drives him to the airport and waves to him as he goes through security. He gives a letter explaining the presence of the drones to the TSA agent, and all the security staff gather around him to offer him congratulations. Some of them want to have their picture taken with him. One woman tells him how she has always wanted to learn ikebana and tea ceremony in Japan. Then he is ushered through to get his flight.
He arrives in London, where it’s raining. He takes a train to Cardiff, where it’s also raining. He checks into a hotel and watches the drops of water turn to rivulets on the far side of the window pane. He realizes this is no good: he has to get outside if he is going to encounter anything surprising. He wonders if he ought to call his family, because it would cheer him up to see their faces. It would remind him why he’s doing all of this. But he has nothing interesting to tell them yet. So he gets his coat on and makes himself go out.
The city is a mix of red brick and grey stone buildings and the streets are full of dark-clad people pushing through the slanting drizzle, their faces invisible behind tilted umbrellas. Martin goes to Cardiff Castle, where he learns that parts of it are 2,000 years old, built by the Romans. He wanders through the Norman keep and the opulent Victorian Gothic wing. He takes some pictures.
It takes him about six hours to realize that he’s made a mistake coming here. This city of Cardiff – and from what he’s seen of it, the British Isles in general – seems surrounded by a force-field that stops anything too exciting or dramatic getting in. This is not a place where he will be swept up by forces beyond his control or much of anything.
He feels depressed by this dawning understanding, but he decides not to give up quite so quickly. The next day, since it is not really raining only sort of misting, he takes the train to Penarth on the coast. From the grey-pebble beach there he can see two huge, curved walls of artificial boulders sticking up out of the water some distance out. Beyond these, the buckled skeleton of the old pier. A few people swim in the iron-colored waves but the beach is mostly empty. On a placard on the esplanade he reads that 20 years ago the houses closest to the sea were dismantled and removed. There were plans to rebuild them on higher ground, but the sign says they have been postponed indefinitely.
In one of the few shops in town that he finds open, Martin buys some gifts for Dani and for Luke. He buys some sticks of luridly pink candy, a stuffed dragon for Lucas and a t‑shirt with a dragon on the front for Dani. As he’s going to check out he sees a kite with a dragon emblazoned across it hanging behind the counter and he buys this for Dani, too, and then to keep things even, he buys a dragon-themed lunchbox for Luke.
This second day confirms it for him: he’s wasted more time on an endeavor that has come to nothing. He takes the train back to Cardiff and when he arrives he finds that he would really like a beer. He decides to go and have a pint in a pub. This at least will be an experience of the local culture.
He finds a little place near his hotel which his guidebook recommends. It looks quaint and appealing and serves food. It has whitewashed exterior walls and flowerboxes in the windows and an antique-looking sign hung above the door that says The Fox and Hen and that shows a picture of a fox about to rip apart a terrified chicken with its teeth. He steps inside, shakes off his umbrella. The low-ceilinged room is full of heavy oak tables and stools with seats covered in gold-colored artificial velvet. A long oak bar stands at the back of the room facing the door. There is thick, burnt-orange carpet underfoot. The faces of the customers all swing towards him. They take in his American clothing, his skin that isn’t deathly pale or sunburnt pink, and the circling drones above his head. A few of them mutter to each other about it: he knows that Life Stories has been shown in other countries so he guesses they understand what’s going on. But no one gets up to greet him or ask him questions; instead, they go back to their drinks and conversations. Martin is relieved. It’s actually kind of wonderful, for a change, to be totally and utterly ignored. Maybe there was something worth coming here for after all.
He sits down at a table in a corner, then remembers that he has to order from the bar. He gets a pint of some kind of locally brewed ale and orders something to eat called shepherd’s pie that the bartender recommends. He sits back down.
Okay. He needs to make another plan. He can buy another ticket and go somewhere else more promising. He can still include an element of chance: he will make a list of places he would like to go and then pick one out of a hat. He doesn’t need to give up on his idea yet, there’s still time, a little less than nine months. He drinks his beer which turns out to be pretty good. His food comes and he eats it. He starts feeling a little better.
Out of the corner of his eye, Martin sees someone cross the room towards him. A girl: slim, pale, dark-haired and, he sees as she gets closer, pretty. She’s got her hair pulled into a ponytail high on her head and she has a little overbite that makes her cute rather than beautiful. She’s wearing a pink knit sweater that suits her coloring, jeans, and a large number of tiny gold rings around the curve of her right ear.
“Hello,” she says. “Are you going to be on that television program then?” She speaks in the accented English that Martin has heard around him since he got here.
“With the way that things are going at the moment,” he says, “I’d say the odds are low.” She looks taken aback and he realizes how he must sound. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that, yes, I got chosen to try out for Life Stories, but I think I’m fucking it up. I mean, sorry, screwing it up.”
The girl pauses a moment, appraising him. Then her expression softens.
“I’m fucking sorry to hear that,” she says. “I hope things start to go a bit fucking better for you soon.” When she sees Martin break into a smile, she turns to go.
“Wait,” Martin says. It has been several days since he’s had a non-transactional conversation with another human being. He doesn’t want this one to stop quite yet. “Can I buy you a drink? To make up for my attitude.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll have a half of cider.” She sits down in the chair across from him and waits while he goes to the bar.
Her name is Bron, she tells him after he comes back with the glass of cloudy, aromatic drink. It’s short for Bronwen. She teaches at a primary school, which is the same as elementary school back home. She grew up here, in Cardiff and has lived here almost all her life, except for when she went to university in Hull, and the year after she finished her degree when she and a friend went backpacking around the world.
“We really got lucky with the timing of our trip,” she says. “We got to see Venice just before it was finally closed to visitors. We went to Egypt, too. A few years later and the civil war would have made it much too dangerous. Turkey was my favorite, though. Istanbul. I still remember what I saw there as if it was yesterday. But, you know, what I liked best really was coming home at the end of the trip, how familiar it was, how comfortable. I guess I’m boring that way.”
Martin nods. “I’ve lived in the same city since I was a kid and I don’t particularly want to leave. But if you like where you are or what you have, people think it’s weird. That’s my problem in a nutshell.”
“What do you mean?” Bron asks. She looks genuinely interested. Martin gets them one more round of drinks and tells her about his failure to come up with some dynamite idea to give his experiences the dramatic arc they need for Life Stories. He tells her about his last-ditch effort to make something exciting happen by traveling.
“And so you came to Cardiff?” Bron says skeptically.
“I didn’t know!” Martin protests. “But you’re right. It hasn’t helped at all.”
Bron leans back, takes a sip out of her glass, regards him thoughtfully.
“I think that’s just how I would be,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to think of anything. Or else I’d think of too many things at once and couldn’t choose.”
“Exactly,” Martin says. “Everyone else thinks I’m crazy.”
“Not me,” Bron says. She raises her glass in mock salute. “To indecisiveness.” They clink their glasses and finish what is left in them.
Over a third drink, they swap stories from their childhoods, his in Queens and hers just a couple of miles down the road. They are both avid soccer fans (“football,” Bron insists) and over a fourth drink they discuss how upsetting it is that the World Cup has been suspended, its prospects for reinstatement, which Bron thinks are not good. Martin keeps thinking he should mention his family so that there is no misunderstanding between them. But somehow he knows that this will dent if not destroy the pleasant and flirtatious nature of their conversation and he is enjoying this more than he’s enjoyed anything in months. Can’t he have one evening where he isn’t worrying about the lack of compelling storyline in his life?
At some point, he notices that it is dark outside. He checks his watch and sees that almost four hours have gone by. He is not feeling so clearheaded. He looks across the table at the woman sitting with him. She is lovely, he thinks, and she also seems to be the only person in the world who doesn’t think he’s a total failure because he can’t think of anything extraordinary to do.
“I’d really like to kiss you,” he tells her. Oh no, he thinks. He stands up and the room see-saws a little before settling down. “I’d better go,” he says. Bron looks at him. She’s smiling.
“You should at least walk me home instead of rushing off into the night. That would be the polite thing to do.”
“Alright,” he says. “Where do you live?”
“Not far,” she says. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

5.

The first thing Martin sees when he wakes up is a huge framed poster of Topkapi Palace. For a moment he has no idea where he is. Then it comes back to him: the pub, the girl, walking her home, kissing on the stairs that led up to her flat. Her asking between kisses, “Is this going to be on television?” and him saying “I’ll make them edit this part out, I promise.”
He turns to see Bron asleep on the pillow next to him. He feels his stomach flip over inside him. He’s never been unfaithful to his wife before. He’s never even been especially tempted until now.
“I’m married,” he tells Bron when, a little while later, she blinks and opens her eyes.
“Well, good morning to you, too,” she says. “I know you’re married.”
“How?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe from that massive ring you’re wearing.”
Martin looks down. His wedding ring is where it always is on his left hand. Well, at least no one can accuse him of duplicity.
“Oh, no. This is terrible. I should go right now.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bron says. “Calm down. I’ll make some tea and then we can say our goodbyes like civilized people. I really had fun last night. Please don’t ruin it by acting like a prat.”
She goes into the kitchen and boils a kettle and makes two cups of tea with milk. They sit and drink them at her kitchen table. When they are done she comes around and hugs him and kisses him soundly on the cheek. Then she leads him to the door.
“Good luck,” she says. “I hope you find your Story.”
“Thanks,” he says. She flaps her fingers in a little wave. Then she closes the door firmly in his face.
As soon as she is out of sight the gloom of what he’s done descends on Martin. He wanders back to his hotel through the first genuinely sunny day since he came to this country. Above the sky is perfect, ridiculously blue, and under it the city’s charms, such as they are, blossom. His drones make little points of shadow as they loop and dip around him. People look friendlier and the heavy Victorian architecture seems almost graceful.
Well, I wanted to experience something new, he thinks miserably. He goes up to his hotel room and sits on the bed, staring at the wall. He wonders if he can just forget about this, keep it secret for the rest of his life. It’s unlikely that Lilah will find out by accident; there’s no one who could tell her apart from him. He considers it: perhaps if he buries this – what should he call it? – this incident, the memory will fade away. After a while he’ll hardly remember it himself. His life will go on as before.
But how much worse will it be if he compounds his cheating by not being honest about it? He should go home and tell Lilah what he did. He should do it right away, before he goes on with his travels. Otherwise he will be too distracted and unhappy to concentrate on finding a good Story in the time that he has left. He will go home now and confess what he has done, ask her to forgive him. After that he can continue with a clear head and a slightly clearer conscience.
He has not applied yet for a return ticket since he did not know when he’d be going home. He decides to just pay the absurd price required for him to get a ticket when he wants one. Even so, the soonest he can fly home is three days from now. After that he calls Lilah. When she doesn’t answer he is not sure what to do. He doesn’t want to tell her what has happened in a voicemail. Nor does he want to leave a cryptic anxious message that might alarm her. So what should he say about why he’s coming home? He ends up saying something vague and rambling about missing her and Luke and Dani, about things not really working out in Wales. He tells her that he loves her very much. Then he hangs up.
He takes a train to London and stays for two nights in a hotel. To distract himself, he goes to see some of the tourist sites. He goes to the Tower of London. He takes a boat to the Floating Cities in the Thames estuary, which he’s wanted to see ever since he heard about them years ago. He goes to Buckingham Palace and then tries to walk through a nearby park only to be waved away by the police who tell him that the encampment there is no place for a tourist unless being robbed at knife-point seems like something he’d enjoy. Through all this he rehearses in his head what he’ll say when he gets home: I’ve just been so stressed out recently, it was a mistake, it didn’t mean anything. Or is that right? If it was meaningless doesn’t that imply he feels no regret for what he’s done? I was sad and lonely and missing you, or missing how our lives used to be before this stupid Life Stories thing began. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.
The next day he takes the train to Heathrow, then a seven-hour flight. He has felt too guilty to ask Lilah to collect him from the airport. So he takes the subway, which requires him to transfer three times. He arrives at his own front door just as it is getting dark. He’s tired to the point where little pieces of the world are flaking off and scuttling away. He looks up at the whirling, weaving drones above his head and feels a sudden fierce dislike. He tries swatting up at them, but they dodge away out of his reach, just as if they were the insects they resemble.
In front of his house, he stops. In the near-dark, all its imperfections are invisible and with the gold light shining in the windows it looks warm and welcoming. He feels that he has made the right decision to come back and talk to Lilah. If things aren’t right with her and with their family, it wouldn’t matter if he won Top Story or had all the money in the world.
He finds his keys in the front pocket of his pants, unlocks his front door and goes inside.
“Hello?” he calls. He hears footsteps upstairs and Lilah comes onto the landing and downstairs toward him. Her face, when he can see it, is worried and perplexed.
“Martin,” she says. “Are you alright? Your message . . . I didn’t know what was going on, you sounded so upset. I’ve been sitting here worrying that you’d been robbed or beaten up or I don’t know . . .”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says. He takes her in his arms. She’s so tiny, so much smaller than he is and he feels for a moment the ghost of the closeness they have always had until recently and it makes him grindingly sad. Lilah pulls away from him so she can look him in the face.
“What happened?” she says. “You still haven’t told me.”
He opens his mouth intending to confess, but the words stop in his throat. He cannot get them out. Her face is full of concern and tenderness and it has been such a long time since she has looked at him this way and suddenly he cannot bear to think about how her face will change when he tells her the truth.
“I . . .” he manages. “I just . . . I missed you. I didn’t want to be away from you.” And, there it is. He’s done the very thing that he wanted most to avoid.
Lilah pulls away from him.
“Martin, you were gone less than a week. What about your whole idea of going out to explore the world and find your Story?” She’s furrowing her brow, a look of great confusion on her face, as if she thinks she can’t have understood him properly. Martin can feel his face turning red. He tries to raise his eyes to meet her gaze. He can’t.
“Alright,” she says. She sounds suddenly tired. “There’s some lasagna in the oven if you’re hungry. I’m going to go up and finish getting the kids ready for bed.” Her voice is dry and practical. She turns away from him and goes upstairs without looking back.
That night, as they get into bed, they hardly speak. Martin lies there unable to sleep. He wants so much to tell Lilah what happened but somehow he can’t bring himself to. It’s her reaction to him coming home. Wasn’t she even a little bit glad to see him? It’s like she’s let her feelings about Life Stories eclipse all other emotions. Doesn’t she realize there is more to life than that fucking show?
The next morning, Lilah is busy getting the kids dressed for school and there isn’t any chance to talk to her, even if he could summon the will to do it. It’s as if a scab has formed over the truth, trapping it inside him. One night goes, then two nights, three, four. Lilah acts so calm it scares him. She avoids being alone with him. Or are they both avoiding one another?
He had intended to choose another destination for himself as soon as possible. But he can’t bring himself to leave until he gets his secret off his chest. He’s stuck. Besides, Brazil or Bali or Australia – none of them sound in the least intriguing or exciting to him now.
The one bright spot in these few days is giving his children the presents he brought back with him. They are delighted about all the dragons. Dani has never had a kite before and so he takes her to the park and shows her how to fly it. They spend an afternoon watching it turn and dive in the wind coming in off the river.
One morning when he’s been home for about a week, he comes downstairs to find Lilah sitting in the living room, waiting for him. He’s been sleeping later than he used to when he had to get up for his job. The kids are already at school and he had expected the house to be empty.
“I thought you’d be at work,” he says to her.
“Oh,” she says, in a sarcastically airy voice, “I thought I’d stick around and see what it is you actually do all day instead of . . .” She stops herself. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand what’s going on. You seemed to finally be getting somewhere, with this travel idea. But now you’re here again. You were only gone for a week and you gave up and came home.” Martin looks at her. “How can you be so . . . I don’t know . . . so unimaginative?”
She sighs. “You could go anywhere. Do you know what I would give for just that one part of what you have? I’ve never even been outside this country. And it’s not because I can’t think of anywhere to go . . . ” Martin stares at her. “I always wanted to go to France or Italy or Greece . . .”
“Why don’t we go?” Martin says. “I have access to unlimited funds for the rest of the year. We could all go, you, me, the kids . . .”
“Marty, the one thing that you can’t do is use that money for something that has no Story. And anyway, I need to keep working, since obviously you’re not going to be on the show . . .”
“I never wanted to do this,” Martin says. “You know that. I agreed because . . . I don’t even remember why I agreed anymore.”
“I knew that you were not the most ambitious, go-getter type when I married you,” Lilah says. “But, Martin, really, everyone has an idea for a Life Story! Everyone has something that they dream of doing if they had the money and the time. And now you have both and you can’t come up with anything. What’s wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Martin says. Suddenly, he’s angry. “What’s wrong is those things.” He stabs a finger upwards at the circling black points above him. “We were fine until they arrived.”
Lilah looks at him quietly for a minute. Then she sighs.
“No,” she says. “We weren’t. Not really.” Her voice has changed now and sounds sad instead of frustrated. “When was the last time we managed to pay down any of our credit cards, never mind actually saving any money? We’re getting by just barely, but we don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to stay here. Three more years? Ten more? It would be so easy for us to become one of those families you see on the news, driving around the country looking for work or living in a FEMAville.” She sighs. “I don’t care if you win Top Story. But you won’t even try!”
“Lilah,” Martin says. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to come home but then something happened . . .”
“What do you mean something happened?”
“When I was in Wales . . .” Lilah waits for him to go on but he still can’t get it out.
“Martin, what did you do?”
“There was . . . I was . . . you and I weren’t . . .”
“You slept with someone else,” Lilah says. It’s not a question but anyway he nods, his eyes cast down. He doesn’t want to look at her. For a minute there is a horrible, dense silence inside which he can hear his own heart grinding the blood through his veins.
Lilah stands up. “I think I better go . . .” she says. Her voice is unsteady, so quiet he can hardly hear her. She starts towards the door and he tries to intercept her, puts his hand on her arm. She shakes him off.
“Don’t touch me, please,” she says, “and don’t follow me either.” She turns to face him, her eyes bright with anger or tears, maybe both. “You can’t even screw up in an interesting way, can you?” she says.
Then she goes out the door.

Later that afternoon Lilah sends Martin a message saying she’s going to take the children to stay at her friend Eileen’s house for a while. She isn’t sure how long she’ll be there. She needs some time to clear her head. She’ll be coming by around 8 PM that evening to pick up clothes and other things they’ll need. She’d rather he’s not home while she is there but of course that’s up to him.
When she arrives that evening, driven by Eileen, he tries to talk to her. He’s sorry, he tells her. Please. If she would just let him explain. She ignores him and moves around the house putting clothes, toys, books, toiletries, Luke’s medications into suitcases. Eileen waits in the front hall and gives him unpleasant looks whenever he goes past. Eventually, he gives up and sits down on the couch in the living room. He listens to her tread upstairs, the sound of her opening and closing drawers and closets. He hears her dragging something heavy after her that thumps on every step as she descends. He goes into the hallway and sees her with a couple of big suitcases too full for her to lift. He tries to help her but she waves him off. Eileen comes and takes one of the suitcases and together they carry the bags to the front door.
“Goodbye, Martin,” Lilah says. “Please don’t call me for a couple of days.” For just a moment she looks at him like she might want him to talk her out of leaving. But before he can, she steps outside and pulls the door shut after her. He watches through the window as she goes down the front walk, gets into the car and drives away.
After she is gone he sits down again on the sofa in the living room. He picks up his phone to call her and then puts it down: ignoring her only request seems like a bad way to begin trying to get her to change her mind. Instead, he rereads her message from that afternoon and then stares at it for several minutes letting the characters dissolve into a blurred mesh of black and white. Then he stands up and throws his phone against the wall. He watches it crash into the plasterwork then fall with a thump onto the carpet. The only motion in his field of view is the looping of the tiny drones around his head. He swats at the nearest one but of course it veers away from him.
Fucking things, hovering there indifferently, recording every minute while his life goes to pieces around him, when everything that’s gone wrong is their fault.
Suddenly, he’s swinging wildly at the space above him, trying to knock them down. They bob and weave about, and he misses them by inches until, to his surprise, he feels one of them against the meat of his palm. It’s angular and cool to the touch and he’s surprised by how much it resists him as he pulls it down towards him. For a moment the drone rests in his cupped hand. It’s the first time he has seen one of them up-close and still. It looks like nothing he has ever seen before: a seahorse built out of black mirrors; a huge wasp with one enormous, vacant eye. A tremendous urge to throw it against the wall comes over him, to see it smash to pieces: dark shards, disemboweled circuitry. But when he goes to close his fingers on it, it flits away from him, lifting and tracing a parabola towards the ceiling, where it lands, out of his reach. He imagines how he must look to it: helpless, flightless, obsolete. Although, of course, it’s just a machine made to do a set of predetermined tasks. It can’t judge him in that way, can’t really think at all. Can it? He stands there, glaring up at it, glaring at all of them, unable quite to shake the feeling that he is being made fun of, though he cannot say by whom.

6.

After Lilah leaves, Martin is alone with nothing much to occupy his time. At first, he keeps the house impeccably neat, the kitchen clean, the refrigerator stocked with food. If Lilah drops by unexpectedly, he wants the place to look like a home she might want to come back to, and he doesn’t want to add being a slob to his list of crimes. He also does this to keep himself from sinking into misery. He sets a list of tasks for himself every day. He keeps regular meal times. He walks around the neighborhood in the afternoon to keep his energy and spirits up. He considers asking if he can come back to work so that he’ll have something to do each day apart from sitting around feeling sorry for himself. But the idea of having to explain the situation to his supervisor and his coworkers is too humiliating to bear.
Sometimes Martin feels full of contrition and regret. He’s sure that all this is his fault. If he’d just been less selfish or more steadfast, he’d be out in the world doing something fascinating for his Story with his family at home waiting eagerly for his return. Other times he thinks that’s wrong; that Lilah has her share of the responsibility as well. She lost patience with him too soon. She pushed him away. She pressured him into doing something that he never wanted to do and then blamed him when he failed at it. And now she’s just gone, abandoned him, that’s it, no discussion or anything.
He tries not to bother her too often. He doesn’t call her more than once a day. Or maybe sometimes twice. But he never calls her late at night or when he’s upset or has been drinking, except for one time when he dials her number after having some beers and one – or is it two? – large shots of whisky, and leaves her a long, rambling message saying, among other things, that she obviously cares about Life Stories much more than she cares about him. Then the day after that he has to call her several more times, hoping she will answer and he can apologize for everything he said the night before. But apart from that, he tries to be respectful of her space.
Lilah and Martin do agree that Luke and Dani should spend time with him each week. So on alternating days they come to him after school and he gives them supper and then Lilah comes by in Eileen’s car to get them later on. On the first of these occasions, while they’re eating dinner, Dani tells him soberly:
“Mom says we can’t come home until you figure out what your priorities are.”
“Sweetheart,” he says, “I swear I’m working on it.”
But actually, he’s not even sure what that would mean. His priority is reuniting with his family. He already has that figured out just fine. How he makes that happen is another question altogether. When he and Lilah meet to talk things over, which they do a few times early on, he can’t seem to get a straight answer out of her.
“I don’t know,” she says, casting her eyes around the room. “I just don’t have any confidence in you right now. Do something to show me I should trust you again.”
“Like what?” he asks.
She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says again. “I think you have to work that out yourself.”
Is Lilah still expecting him to come up with something for the fucking show? He hopes not, because right now it’s taking all his energy just to maintain basic sanity and order in his life.
Soon, though, he starts failing to do even that. He wakes up late since he doesn’t have anywhere particular to be. He doesn’t have anyone to share his meals with so he stops cooking and instead eats junk food and take-out at whatever hour he finally notices he’s hungry. He stops taking his afternoon walks because whenever he goes out, inevitably, someone will see the drones and come up to congratulate him, and this makes him feel angry, sick or both. Once he tells a white-haired older woman – who has only come over to tell him how if she was in his fortunate position she’d try to find out what happened to her father who walked out one day in 2009 and never came back – to go fuck herself. After that he feels so ashamed he doesn’t leave the house for several days and subsequently he goes out only when it’s absolutely necessary.
Martin spends a lot of time walking from room to room noting all the things that Lilah took with her when she left. Half her clothing, almost all the childrens’ clothes and many of their toys. She even took the gifts he brought back from Wales for them, he notices.
He watches more TV than he ever has before. He sits in the same chair and watches the images flit by. He also develops a habit, just occasionally, of talking to the drones as if they can hear him. He isn’t sure exactly when this starts. But he finds himself addressing them the way some people talk to their dog or cat. “Well,” he’ll say, “what shall we have for dinner?” as if the tiny, spinning apparatuses could actually share his meal and therefore might care what he served. Or: “What did I do with my keys? You guys have any idea?” At first each time he does this, he is mortified. But after a while he thinks: no one is around to hear him do it so who cares? Who else is he going to talk to?
Sometimes he tries to think systematically about his situation but he finds it so depressing that he never gets far. How much time has passed since he signed his contract with Life Stories? Six months now? Seven? Time seems to be doing weird elongations and contractions. It’s hot outside, the kind of reverberating heat that swelters the city in mid-summer. It’s July, he’s pretty sure, then at a certain point it’s August. If he could only come up with some astounding, fascinating, dramatic Story, it would solve all of his problems. He’d win his wife back, make his children proud of him again. But nothing comes to him. His brain might as well be a rock.
And so the days turn into weeks, then months. In the day he’s tired all the time but at night he can’t sleep. He lies awake staring at the dark and goes over and over in his head how he got to where he is. His family and friends have no idea what to say to him when they come by or call. He haunts the rooms of his old life with nothing but the whirling pinpricks of the drones for company. Instead of expanding like it was supposed to do, the world grows narrower and narrower.

And then it is September. The hot weather starts to ebb. The leaves begin to tumble through the air, drift into gutters.
One night he’s watching television when the weather comes on and he hears the glossy anchorwoman say that this coming weekend it looks like they’ll have the first big storm of the season. Hurricane Elsa. It’s predicted to make landfall around Charleston, South Carolina. But of course storm paths are always unpredictable, so he should stay tuned for more updates.
The next day, when he checks, the storm has gathered strength and changed direction. It now looks like it will come ashore further north than first predicted. People on the coast in New Jersey and Delaware are being told they should evacuate. In the city it won’t be so bad, but there could be power outages and high winds. There is no evacuation warning for this area yet, but people who live right next to the water might want to go and stay with relatives until it’s past.
Lilah and the children are still staying at Eileen’s house. Two years ago, the basement and ground floor there were under water for more than a week. He calls Lilah and when she answers he asks her if she’s heard about the storm. She has. He asks her what she’s planning to do that night. She says that they’re buying water, batteries for the radio, candles, food that can be eaten without being cooked.
“Do you want to come stay here tonight?” he asks.
There is a silence on the line while Lilah, he imagines, thinks this over.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she says finally.
“I’ll sleep on the couch if you want. You can all come here, Eileen as well.”
“I don’t want the kids to think something has changed between us when it hasn’t. Eileen is out of town this week with her boyfriend, anyway.”
“Okay,” Martin says, fighting down disappointment that is mixing with unease inside his stomach. The house where they are is so close to the river. Even if this one isn’t supposed to be so bad, it’s not a great place to be during a storm.
“Hey,” he says. “Have you thought about staying at Ron and Karen’s tonight? They have space for all of you. Just so you’re further away from the water . . .”
He hears Lilah sigh, which on the phone sounds like the rasp of sandpaper. “We’ll be fine, Martin,” she says.
“Okay. Just, please, be careful, alright?”
“Of course we’ll be careful. Look, I’ve got to go.”
He watches the news on and off for the remainder of the day. They are saying now that the storm is one of the biggest in the past few years. It is going to hit the coast around Atlantic City. The decision to relocate that area’s entire population inland, which was so controversial when it was taken ten years ago, is looking very wise right now, the commentators note. There are evacuation warnings for towns as far north as Tom’s River, but the city seems like it’s going to escape the worst. The mayor is still deciding whether to activate the Rockaway Barrier’s huge adjustable steel gates to protect the neighborhoods next to the ocean, Coney Island, Brighton Beach. Still, everyone should make sure they’re prepared in case the power is out for a while.
Martin goes to the store and buys batteries, water, candles, snacks. He comes home and fills the bathtub. He winches all the storm shutters closed: maybe they won’t turn out to be necessary, but it can’t hurt.
That evening, on TV, he watches the spectral tentacles of storm inch over the satellite map towards the green line of the coast. Outside he hears the wind begin to make its rising, hollow sound against buildings and among the branches of the trees. The rain comes soon after, waves of it, a rush like fierce applause. With the windows shuttered Martin can’t see what is going on outside. The house feels claustrophobic, closing him in like a ship. He wishes he was not alone tonight.
“No offense,” he tells the drones, “but you don’t count.”
He is just starting to get sleepy, to think about turning the TV off and heading up to bed, when a sound from outside in the street snaps him awake. It’s the crack of something large and heavy splintering, then a series of crashes as whatever it is drags along the ground. The wind is louder than before, a deep, frightening roar. The rain is a stampede. There are more noises of tearing and collision. The world outside sounds like it is coming apart. Over the racket he hears the announcer on TV say something about a last-minute turn in the storm’s path that was not accurately predicted. Even with all the resources of modern meteorology at our disposal it is still possible to be completely . . . and then the power goes. The television fizzles and then dies. The hum of the air conditioning and the refrigerator both abruptly cease. Darkness wells up from the corners of the room, dense and total except that, glancing up, Martin notices for the first time how each of the drones gives off a faint blue-purple glow. It’s visible only now, when there is no other source of brightness. But it must have been there all along.
Martin fumbles for his flashlight, but when he switches it on the cone of weak light it emits doesn’t comfort him at all. He switches it off again. He sits in the dark, watching the dance of ghostly phosphorescence above, and listening. From somewhere close by and below him, he hears the sound of water rushing in.

7.

Martin follows the beam of his flashlight down the basement stairs. From halfway down, he sees the concrete floor below is filling up with a substance that he knows is water but which looks like ink. He hesitates just momentarily, then descends the rest of the way and steps into it. It reaches already to his ankles. He shines the light around but he can’t tell where it is coming from. It seems to be seeping in from all directions at once.
He saves as many things as possible from the flood. Down here there are boxes of children’s toys, linens, winter clothes, bicycles, old photo albums he inherited from his parents and grandparents. He manages to carry most of these upstairs. He drags the canoe he bought two years ago up the steps and into the front hall. The water in the basement is up to his knees by this time. After another few trips up and down, he gives up the rest of the basement’s contents for lost and makes his way upstairs to his bedroom on the second floor, shucks off his pants which are soaked to the thigh. He feels wired, wide awake. He lies on top of the covers and listens to the relentless wind. At some point, without meaning to or being aware of it, he sleeps.
He opens his eyes some time later to darkness and an eerie quiet. The pieces of the previous night begin assembling in his head. Now the wind has dropped to a low, inconsistent moan. The rain seems to have stopped too. He finds the flashlight lying by the bed but when he presses its switch nothing happens. He struggles upright and fumbles around in the dark to find some clothes and pull them on. He feels his way to the door of the room. He steps into the hall.
The first thing that strikes him is the smell, briny water mixed with engine oil. He makes his way downstairs one step at a time. He reaches the bottom and feels that the floor is waterlogged, squelchy underfoot, but not submerged. He sidesteps to the front door waving his arms around him like antennae. When he reaches the door he pauses for a moment, then tugs it open. Daylight pours into the interior gloom, dazzling him.
When his eyes adjust, he sees the street outside has turned into a river. The water comes part way up the front steps of the house. It must be three feet deep at least in his yard and deeper in the roadbed, where the roofs and windows of the cars are all that’s visible. The flood is placid-looking, flat grey-green murk in which the white sky reflects smoothly until a gust of wind sends black scales fanning over its surface. Martin peers in both directions down the street. From where he is the water seems to go on endlessly, the houses turned to islands, the street signs protruding uselessly.
He goes back inside and into the kitchen, winches open the shutters there to let the light in. His phone is lying on the counter. He switched it off last night to save the battery but when he switches it back on now there’s no service. He takes it out to the front steps and sees a small wedge of signal appear in the top right-hand corner of the screen. He dials Lilah’s number but the call doesn’t go through. He tries again. Still nothing.
He gives up, returns to the kitchen, and turns on the radio. He swings the dial through realms of static until it fastens on the frayed thread of a woman’s voice. She is talking about the aftermath of the storm, the stories that are coming in from all around the city. She is trying and failing to recount them in a calm, neutral reporter’s voice.
No one had expected the storm to be this bad and so the city was terribly underprepared. The subway is flooded because the decision to seal the gates that are supposed to keep the water out was taken much too late. Fires have been reported in several neighborhoods because electricity was still flowing to their substations when the waters started rising. The hospitals did not evacuate their patients because they did not think it would be necessary. The number of people trapped by floodwaters in houses and apartment buildings can’t be even estimated yet.
The woman on the radio tells people whose homes are on dry ground to stay where they are so the streets can be kept clear for rescue workers. She tells people in flooded areas to stay inside and wait for emergency personnel to reach them. She says: even if the floodwater looks shallow where you are, stay out of it. The current can be stronger than it seems. The water may contain downed powerlines, floating debris, broken glass, toxic chemicals, or household waste.
Martin goes out front and tries Lilah again. He still does not get through. Disheartened, he sits down on the front steps. He sees a neighbor on the far side of the street come out of his house and wave his phone around just as Martin had done moments before. He knows the man by sight so he waves. The man waves back, then shrugs theatrically – what can you do? or perhaps how fucked are we? – before going back inside. Martin stares into the foul swirl of water. He’s worried about Lilah, Luke and Dani. Should he get in the canoe and try to go over to Eileen’s house? He’s still thinking about this when his phone rings.
Without the usual groan and rumble of traffic the street is so quiet that the shrill electric bleating startles him. He looks down at the screen and sees his wife’s name. He answers it as quickly as he can.
“Hello?” he says. “Lilah? Are you all okay?”
The reply comes in scratches of sound that he can barely piece together into words. He can tell, though, that Lilah is extremely upset. “ . . . okay . . . but Luke . . . lost . . . inhaler . . . water . . .” he hears.
“What?” he says. “Hon, I can hardly hear you. Say all that all again . . .”
She does but it isn’t any clearer. “. . . all this . . . in the . . . breathe . . .” she says. “ . . . don’t know . . . help . . .” There is silence cut by jots of static noise and then one more word “ . . . smoke . . .” and then the call cuts off.
Martin calls her back once, twice, three times but he cannot get the connection to work again. For a few minutes he paces, unsure what to do. The radio said, stay inside. Stay out of the way. But he can’t just wait here and see what happens, not after the fragments he just heard. Fuck it, he thinks. Fuck it. He’s going to go and find his wife and children if he can.
He goes inside and gets some bottles of water from the refrigerator and puts them in the canoe. He pushes the canoe over the threshold so it clatters down the steps and lands on the surface of the water with a smack. To his relief, it actually floats, not something he’s had a chance to verify before now. He pulls it around so that it is parallel to the steps, and climbs in.
He almost capsizes the boat just stepping into it, but he manages not to panic and to sit down and the rocking slows, then stops. He picks up the paddle and uses it to push off from the steps and immediately gets stuck against the chain-link fence at the edge of his own yard. It takes him several minutes to get the canoe turned around and open the gate so he can maneuver out into the street. Once he’s free, he starts to paddle in the direction of the river. And it is at this moment he realizes, incredibly, that he doesn’t actually know where he is going.
How is it possible that he does not know the way to Eileen’s house? He hasn’t been there since Lilah went to stay; it was part of giving her the space she said she wanted. He knows, roughly, the neighborhood, Long Island City. The specific address is in the contacts on his phone. But now, when he takes his phone out of his pocket and tries to get online, his screen presents him with an endless swirling circle.
He will just have to rely on memory to get him there. He can picture the house: white vinyl siding, louvered windows, next door to a delicatessen that sells products from Eastern Europe and that has a red-and-white awning in front. But which side of the expressway is it on, north or south? And how many streets away from the river is it exactly? He tries to recall this but he can’t.
He paddles away in what he thinks has to be more or less the right direction. He feels the strain of the exertion quickly in his arms and chest, and curses the months he’s spent inactive, sulking, in his house. His strength and endurance aren’t there when he needs them most. His hands start to blister. He keeps going towards the river, moving with the current. The submerged city around him is unfamiliar, its proportions altered by the flood. Light bounces off the water and quakes among the buildings. He passes downed trees, houses with their roofs pushed in, floating cars, and something billowy, swollen, rotating slowly on its axis, which only afterward he realizes must have been a human body.
Once he gets close to where he’s pretty sure Eileen lives, he tries to be organized, deliberate. The streets are a grid so he starts by going down one until he gets to where the buildings end at the river. Then he turns around and goes back up the next street. In this manner, he works his way from north to south. He calls out as he goes. The sun comes out and he can see the comma-shaped shadows that his drones make on the surface of the water. It occurs to him that they are recording this strange, shimmering scene of drowned streets and houses.
“I hope you’re getting all of this,” he tells them, “because this is the most interesting stuff you’ve seen all year.”
He paddles up and down the streets nearest to the river for almost an hour. His arms ache and he’s drunk all of the water he brought with him. He knows that as he gets more tired and thirsty he is thinking less and less clearly. He reaches where the bridge over the river intersects with the expressway, the overpass held up by enormous concrete legs, and it is at this point that he starts to smell something beyond the sludgy putrid odor of the flood. It is the smell of burning. It’s faint at first, then stronger as he slides beneath the highway. Emerging on the other side, he sees ahead of him a sheet of dirt-colored smoke rising into the sky, slanting out over the river. He can’t tell how far away its source is or which direction it is moving. It might be half a mile from him or more or less. He’s downwind from it, which means that the fire must be coming towards him, and, unless he is totally turned around, the house where Lilah and the children are is someplace between him and the flames.
He starts paddling again, moving on as quickly as his worn-out limbs will let him. Block by block the smell of smoke gets stronger. He can see now a miasma hanging in the air around him, yellowish, acrid. He is picturing in his mind what Luke looks like when he’s struggling for breath, his eyes wide with fear, his small chest working. The image gives Martin a frantic energy, makes him paddle harder, shout louder as he goes.
At some point, though, he has to stop and rest. It occurs to him that maybe he has not found them because they are not here. Perhaps they have been picked up by a team of rescuers already, emergency services or another person with a boat and they are already away from here and safe. He checks his phone but there are no calls or messages that have come through. Around him, the drones are tiny dark claws skidding through the wind.
“Where are they?” he asks the drones. “Why can’t you do something useful for once and find them?” Of course, they don’t give him an answer, but he looks up as if they might and this is when, beyond the cloud of them, he sees it. It is in the air above the houses, bobbing in the wind currents. A kite. Through the pall of smoke, he can just make out on it the figure of a scarlet dragon.

The house is two streets over. When Martin comes in sight of it he sees they’ve tied the kite string inside one of the upstairs windows. Later he will ask Lilah how she knew that he would come for them and she will say: “I didn’t. But I hoped somebody would.”
“Hello!” he shouts up at the house and sees Lilah and Dani’s faces appear at the open window. When they see him, they wave at him frantically, and Dani yells “Dad, Dad, over here!” as if having seen them he might just go on by without stopping. The water level has reached halfway up the front door of the house.
“Is Luke there? Is he okay?” Martin calls.
“He’s okay for right now,” Lilah answers. “He’s sitting down doing his steady breathing. Can that thing really hold all of us?”
“I don’t know,” Martin says. “Let’s find out.”
Getting Lilah, Luke and Dani from the house to the canoe actually proves kind of difficult. The ground floor is under water too deep to walk through. Dani and Lilah could swim between the staircase and the boat, but Luke is too little to know how even if he was not already having trouble breathing. For a few minutes it seems like they are stuck. Then it occurs to Martin they can tie a sheet to something sturdy in the upper room where they are and use it to climb out of the window and down to the boat that way. Lilah takes the sheets off the bed and knots them together and fixes one end around a radiator. She tugs on it to test that it will hold.
Luke goes first, clambering down to Martin waiting below.
“Alright,” Martin says when he has hold of him. “You’re alright now.”
Luke looks up at him with big, scared eyes. “I’m alright now,” he repeats, and Martin hugs him and silently hopes this is true. After Luke, Dani climbs down, and then Lilah. They sit down in whatever space they can find. Martin looks at them and feels a surge of strong emotion. He’s going to get them all to safety.
“Alright,” he says. “Let’s go.”
But when he starts paddling, he discovers that it’s much harder to move four people over the water than just one. The boat is sitting much lower beneath their collective weight. Also now they are going against a current that is flowing downhill toward the river. Martin is pulling as hard as he can but they are barely moving. He gets them to the end of the block but then he has to stop. He manages to brace the canoe against a stop sign so at least they don’t slide backwards. But he isn’t sure how much further he can really go. He was already tired when he reached them.
“Want me to try?” Lilah asks.
“No, no. I’m sorry. I just need a little rest,” he says.
“It’s okay,” Lilah says. But at the same time he sees her look down anxiously at Luke who is sitting on the floor of the boat between her knees. She leans forward and strokes his hair. Martin thinks about how far he had to come to get here. Is he really going to be able to get them all to dry ground? Maybe if he can push on a bit further to where the water isn’t quite so deep they can get out and walk the rest of the way.
This is when they hear the high whine of a motorboat coming towards them. A minute later they see a Red Cross dinghy, carrying two men in high-visibility vests with the word volunteer stenciled across their fronts. It zips around the corner at the end of the block. They wave and shout and the boat arcs around and pulls up next to them.
One of the men points at the space above Martin’s head. “Wow,” he says. “Are you on that program, what’s it called?”
“Life Stories,” says the other man.
“Yeah, that’s right. Life Stories.”
“Yes,” Martin says through gritted teeth.
“That’s awesome,” the first man says. “I always wanted to go on that show. I’d . . .”
“Listen,” Martin interrupts him. “As much as I’d love to hear all about your Story idea, our son lost his inhaler. Can you please, please help us get out of here?”
The man frowns. “Sure,” he says. “Of course. No need to be like that.”
The Red Cross boat tows them to dry land. Watching the houses and streets file by, Martin knows they would not have made it on their own. Finally, they get to where the road slopes up out of the water, and they untie the line and watch the Red Cross boat swing around and go back to search for other stranded people. Martin paddles them the last few meters to where they can step out of the boat and walk onto the crumbling grey asphalt.
Lilah takes the children and goes ahead. Strangers help Martin pull the canoe up onto dry ground. When he straightens up and looks around he sees a crowd has gathered at the edge of the flood. They are all gazing past him out across the water to where the wall of smoke coats the sky in dark streaks. It is eerie seeing them all transfixed like this, faces stunned and almost reverent, unable to look away. He makes his way past the watchers to where the Red Cross has set up their operation further up the street. There is an awning with trestle tables beneath it with urns of hot drinks and food set out, a supply van, an ambulance. He finds Lilah, Luke and Dani behind the supply van where a volunteer has given Luke an inhaler and he is taking long whistling breaths through it. When Lilah sees Martin, she turns and opens her arms and he goes to her and they hug each other hard, for a long time. Curiously, it is this embrace that makes him feel how exhausted he is. The weight of the emotions he’s been holding back all day descend on him. He feels as if he is disintegrating. He closes his eyes and holds onto his wife’s small body like it’s the only thing that will keep him from coming apart. Finally, he says, “I’ve got to sit down,” and she guides him over to the nearest curb where he collapses.
“Let me see if anyone has water,” she says, then to the children, “Stay here with Dad, okay?” The kids sit down next to Martin and he puts one arm around them and hugs them to his side. He looks at them dazed, stupid with relief. After a minute, Lilah comes back with bottles of water. She hands these out, then sits down on the curb on Martin’s other side.
For some minutes they sit together quietly, sipping the cold water, saying nothing. Then the kids ask if they can go and see what there is to eat over at the stand under the awning and Lilah tells them, yes, if they hold hands and only go where they can still see her. When they have gone, she says to Martin:
“Thank you for coming to find us.” She leans in and kisses him.
“Please,” Martin says, “come home.”
“Alright,” Lilah says. “Whatever is left of our home, I’ll come back to it,” and then she laughs, a nervous, high-pitched sound that makes Martin start to laugh, as well. They sit on the sidewalk giggling together like stoned teenagers. When their laughter runs down, Lilah kisses him again. She puts her head down on his shoulder and they sit gazing out over the flood.
“Look at that,” Lilah says. “Isn’t it spectacular?” She says it slowly, dreamily, as if she’s talking to herself. Martin realizes she is referring to the fire. He follows her gaze. It’s late afternoon now. In the sinking light the flood has turned gold and the smoke is red and so thick it looks solid. Lilah is right. There is something magnificent about it.
“Yes,” Martin says. “It will look great on the video.”
He had not meant to say this aloud. He is dismayed that such a thought would even come into his head. He waits for Lilah to pull away from him, to tell him she can’t believe what he just said. But she doesn’t. Then after a minute she says, still in that quiet, absent voice:
“You’ll have to get them to edit out the part where the motorboat helps us to escape. It will be much better if you rescue us yourself. Don’t you think?”
He doesn’t answer her, just nods. It floats into his consciousness that if Lilah had gone to stay with her brother last night, as he’d suggested, none of this would have happened the way it did. They would not be together now. There would have been no suspenseful rescue, no reconciliation. But instead of going where she knew she would be safe, she stayed in a place where she might not be . . . deliberately? He dismisses this thought. Lilah could not have foreseen how bad the storm would get. She wouldn’t knowingly put herself and the children at risk just on the outside chance that he would come and find them. Of course she wouldn’t. The idea is totally ridiculous.
Ridiculous or not, this thought returns to Martin over the next days as the flood waters recede and they can finally walk in and see the damage that has been done to their house. The basement and the first floor are ankle-deep in silt and mud. Their possessions are flung about, smashed, waterlogged. There are books that have swelled up and turned heavy as bricks. There’s garbage spread through all the rooms.
His ridiculous thought comes back to him again, from time to time, during the weeks it takes them to clean up, air out the house, remove the debris from the basement and the yard. They pull up carpets and throw away wrecked furniture. In the end, not much from the bottom half of the house can be salvaged. They have to get rid of bloated chairs and couches, dead televisions, all the kitchen furniture. They are luckier than some. The upstairs of their house escaped largely unscathed. The drones swoop around through the wrecked and sodden rooms, capturing it all.
A few times Martin is on the verge of asking Lilah about her decision to stay at Eileen’s on the night of the storm. But how exactly would he phrase the question? And if he’s wrong (he must be), won’t she be outraged that he’d felt the need to ask? They’re back together, and the last thing that he wants to do is jeopardize this. He decides it is better to say nothing.

8.

They are so busy making their house habitable again, the next two months go by in a flash, and then, Martin’s twelve months with the drones are over. Life Stories sends people to collect them, not the same ones who delivered them but just as polished and willowy. He is surprised to discover how much he misses the drones’ presence when they’re gone. He feels somehow less clear and definite without them. Like he might look down and see himself blurring at the edges, bleeding away into the light.
He works on his Story with the team of editors assigned to take all those thousands of hours of footage and turn them into a single hour-and-a-half-long episode. At first Martin doesn’t want them to include anything about his infidelity. But the lead editor, a wiry, earnest man who tells Martin he worked for The New York Times before it folded, convinces him it adds dimension to his character. You can’t be too perfect or good, apparently. You must be fallible so that viewers can identify with you but not so bad that they’ll reject you altogether. You have to go wrong so that ultimately you can redeem yourself.
“Otherwise, you don’t come through as masculine enough,” the editor tells him. “It’s fine for you to love your home and family. But we need something more than that, as well.”
Besides, it’s also an important plot point. What happens afterwards, specifically Lilah leaving him, doesn’t make much sense unless he cheats.
Martin and Lilah talk it over. If they follow the editor’s advice it means that everyone they know will learn that Martin was unfaithful. But Lilah points out that this will only be an issue if his Story is chosen for the show, and in balance it seems worth it.
It takes the editors a couple of months to make the episode they will submit to the judges. They come a couple of times to the house to interview Martin and Lilah, together and separately. They play them portions of the drones’ video and ask them to comment on it and explain what they were feeling, what motivated them. They ask questions about how Martin and Lilah met. They ask questions about Martin’s childhood.
Finally, he is invited to watch what the editors have made. He spends a day at the Life Stories studios in Manhattan so he can view the video securely and then give official permission for it to be streamed. What he sees amazes him. They have condensed a whole year of his life. The episode is divided neatly into eight chapters, each one serving to advance the story, complicate and resolve the plot. Watching, you would think that someone had planned everything out carefully. There’s no meandering, no slack. Even Martin’s confusion and delay seem like part of an eventual design.
Then there is the cinematography. In the beginning, the editors chose shots made in bright daylight with a tight focus, so that Martin’s house and neighborhood look cramped and all their flaws are clearly shown. Martin finds himself sharing Lilah’s frustration at the circumstances of their life and sympathizing with her hope for something better. As the film goes on and he becomes more isolated and alone, the shots get wider, showing Martin surrounded by unoccupied space, mostly in shadow. The light has a consistently blue cast and everything in the frame looks chilly.
The CGI impresses him as well, mainly because no one but him could ever know that it is there. The most obvious example of this is Bron, whose face and voice have been radically but seamlessly altered. You would never recognize the real Bron if you saw her and you would never know that the Bron on screen had been changed at all.
But the fire is the most extraordinary feat of all. In the final cut of Martin’s Story, it is huge, flames stabbing into a tower of rust-colored smoke. It looms over the viewer as if it might leap out and consume them, too. The editors have done something to the scale of the blaze so it looks bigger than it actually was. He asks, after the viewing, about whether this is fair, strictly speaking; the lead editor says sure, it’s fine. Similar adjustments are made to all the Stories.
When the lights come up in the screening room, he has to sit there for a minute to recover. Then he signs the waiver giving permission for the footage to be sent to the Life Stories judges and then, if it is chosen, to be streamed for viewers. After he’s done that, the editors invite him to erase all the unused video of himself. He presses delete and watches the files, one for each of the twelve drones, disappear one after another. He feels a sense of lightness and relief that they are gone, but also loss. A whole year of his life carefully, meticulously documented. He wonders if they might have let him keep the files. Not that he ever would have looked at them but it would have been nice just to have them, to know that they were there. It’s too late to ask about that now.
Before he leaves the studios, Martin shakes hands with everyone. He wishes them good luck. They wish him good luck in return. He feels all at once reluctant to leave and go home to his ordinary, unrecorded life. But he has no more reason to be there, and so he goes. He rides home on the subway. The early December afternoon is blue-lit and cold. A lonely kind of light, he thinks. A light for people who have lost something important to them.
A month later to the day, he learns that his Story is one of the ten selected to be on the new season of the show.

The news comes by phone call and the man on the other end sounds like he might be one of the producers who came to their house more than a year ago, but Martin isn’t sure. Whoever it is congratulates him.
“The judges said they had never seen anything quite like this before. They thought it was such a great, unique idea: the whole thing about not knowing what to do for your Story. They said it was really suspenseful waiting to see whether you were going to figure it out.”
Martin is so excited he can hardly listen to what the man is saying. He can just pay enough attention to gather that more details will follow by email and that the full amount of his prize money will be paid into his bank account by the end of this month.
“Thank you,” he says to the man. “I’m just so . . . thank you. Thank you.”
After he hangs up, he rushes upstairs two at a time to where Lilah is lying on their bed, reading a book. When she sees his wild grin she sits up.
“I can’t believe it,” she keeps saying over and over when he tells her.
She is looking up at him and smiling. Then her face crumples and she starts to cry. Martin pulls her towards him and holds her. But he’s bewildered by her tears. Wasn’t this what she wanted to happen?
“What’s wrong?” he asks her.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t . . . I guess I’m just so happy about this . . . ” She starts crying again harder. It takes her quite a while to stop and calm down so that they can go and tell Dani and Luke. They decide it should be Martin who breaks the news to the children. He notices that Lilah is looking out the window as he talks. But he can’t see the expression on her face because she’s turned away from him.
They watch the whole season of Life Stories together. Martin’s episode streams seventh, which Lilah says is a better-than-average slot. The seventh episode gets voted Top Story more often than some slots, like three or four, but not as often as the eighth episode.
The other Stories on the show are good. One is about a nun who lost her faith and decides to leave her order and make a life out in the world. She goes through many scrapes and rediscovers her faith in the kindness of other people and comes to a new definition of divinity. The second is about a couple, David and Michael, who want to adopt the baby they are fostering and have to wait a whole year while the birth parents try to straighten out their lives. If the birth parents can stop drinking, get jobs and stay in counseling, they will get their daughter back. If not, David and Michael, who clearly adore this little girl, get to adopt her.
“That’s the one that’s going to win,” Lilah says afterward.
There are more episodes after this, all compelling in their own way. Then, finally, it’s Martin’s turn. He and Lilah sit very close together as they watch the opening credits roll. When the first establishing shots of their street appear, she grabs his hand and doesn’t let it go.
It is so strange to watch the version of himself the drones recorded. It’s even stranger to see, on screen, Lilah in their living room, while sitting with Lilah in their living room. Martin finds that he is watching her as much as he’s watching the screen. She’s never seen the final version of the Story before. Her expression is difficult to read. She doesn’t look upset, exactly. It’s more like she isn’t feeling much at all. As if the people on the screen are strangers who have nothing to do with them.
His heart is in his mouth when they reach chapters four and five, the part where he meets Bronwen. The producers have faded out tastefully with them kissing on the stairs and then cut to Martin waking up bleary-eyed in a bed he doesn’t recognize. He’s waiting for Lilah to stand up and walk out, for her to look away or at least drop his hand. But she does none of these things.
Three more episodes after his and then the voting starts. The results are a closely guarded secret. The protagonists of all the Stories are invited to be in the studio audience for the final episode, the only one that is streamed live. Martin and Lilah buy new clothes for the occasion. Lilah gets a plum-colored dress with a halter neck that accentuates her pretty, slender shoulders and looks lovely against her skin. Martin buys a new suit which he has tailored to fit him. He’s lost weight over the past few months. Dani and Luke look at them when they come downstairs in these new outfits like they aren’t sure these stylish people are really their parents, which makes Martin and Lilah laugh.
At the studio, they sit with the other contestants in the front row of the audience. Next to them, the couple with the adopted daughter bicker fiercely in whispers. The episode is a two-hour special in which they recap highlights from all the Stories before announcing the winner. It is nearly 10 PM when the host of Life Stories takes the big paper envelope from her assistant, calls for a drum roll and then opens it.
“And the Life Story of the Year,” the host says, “belongs to David and Michael Lundgren for their story, ‘Adopting Baby Jane’!”
“Told you,” Lilah whispers to Martin as they applaud and the parents come up on stage to get their prize. The rankings of the other stories are announced. Martin’s story doesn’t do too badly. It comes in fifth, which Lilah later says is decently respectable.
At the party afterwards, they go over and shake hands with the other contestants and congratulate the winners, who seem to be getting along better now. They drink a few glasses of wine. They dance a little. They call a car service to take them home around midnight.
And then, it’s over. There is nothing more to do or worry about. Martin drives his new car to work and his co‑workers tell him how nice it is and how glad they are he’s back. He is glad to be back too, although he notices that people treat him differently than they used to. There is a kind of stiffness when they talk to him, a distance. He thinks this will go away with time, once they realize he’s the same person he’s always been. But then he overhears two of them talking about how stuck‑up he’s gotten since he was on television, how he thinks he’s too good for them now. His wife only stayed with him because of the money, one of them pronounces. This is Steve, who Martin thought was his friend.
Whatever, he thinks. They can go to hell. He and Lilah are talking seriously about moving inland away from New York altogether. Neither of them has ever lived anywhere else and the idea of relocating, away from family, makes them both nervous. Also, it turns out that in the places where the economy is stronger, housing is much more expensive. The Life Stories money isn’t quite enough after all to cover their move and get the kind of house they had envisioned when they were first imagining their new lives. They will have to be smart about it, look for a good deal, find jobs as quickly as they can after they move. They haven’t made a definite decision yet to leave.
But Martin thinks, despite these difficulties, they should still go. Not just because his coworkers are mean. Since the end of the show, he hasn’t felt so great in general. It’s hard to describe exactly how. When he walks down the street, no one turns to look at him anymore. No one tells him about their crazy, life-long dreams. He knows he hated all that when it was happening. But now, without it, he looks for his reflection in all the windows he passes, to be sure he’s still there. He looks up and there are no crystal sparks enveloping him. There’s no great urgency to anything he does. His days now are like they were before Life Stories. He works, he comes home, he cooks, he tends the yard. But something isn’t there. The things that used to make him happy, that he used to enjoy, when he does them now, they don’t seem real. When he looks into the future, he sees a procession of days like the ones preceding them that will slip past him and vanish, unrecorded, and when they are over it will be as if they never happened at all. Martin thinks if they go somewhere new, perhaps this feeling will subside. In the new place, he will feel better. He will find what he has lost. It must be out there somewhere.

---

Emily Mitchell is the author of the novel The Last Summer of the World (2008), and the story collection Viral Stories (2015), both from W.W. Norton & Company. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, Harper’s Magazine, New England Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly.