Back After This

Prologue

2:00 a.m.

The trick was not to be noisy. Slowly, as slowly as I could manage, I turned my head until I could see his face in the blade of streetlight that came in between the bedroom curtains. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack and open (which was both how he slept and how he kissed), and he was not quite snoring. I moved inch by inch, sitting up, removing my weight from the bed bit by bit and waiting to make sure he didn’t stir. Then I tiptoed out into the living room and opened my laptop.

We had finished an edit before we went to bed. It was an episode about a woman whose car was stolen, and when she went shopping on Craigslist for a replacement, someone tried to sell it back to her. I had done all the interviews—with her, at her cramped apartment in Columbia Heights; with her sister, at the bar where she worked; with a cop, at a diner; with the seller, at the sketchy lot where he swore to me that he’d had no idea it was stolen when he bought it.

I had written the intro: There’s something about having something stolen from you that is just…infuriating. That’s my stuff, you think to yourself. How can you take my stuff, that’s my stuff, I paid for that stuff. It bugs you. It nags at you. It makes it hard to concentrate on anything else. Even if what you lost isn’t worth that much, how can anybody believe that they can take what’s yours? Today, I’m going to introduce you to Casey, a woman who felt exactly that helpless, and then, somehow, it got worse. I had written it, but he had tracked it.

We didn’t use my voice on the podcast. At the station where we both had day jobs, I’d done only a handful of things on air, and I’d started to avoid it so I wouldn’t have to get a bunch of emails about what was wrong with the way I talked. I’d once spent about fifteen minutes retracking a single line in a studio because the veteran editor in the booth insisted my voice was frying on the last syllable. I read it again and again; he didn’t get any happier. I told him, “I think that’s just my voice,” and he sighed, “I guess it is.”

So Justin was the host. He was the voice. I did most of the research and interviews. We split the producing, although he was usually satisfied before I was. I’d say I thought the episode needed one more pass, and he’d say it was fine, and I’d say okay, and then I’d do one more pass on my own.

This is why I had crawled out of bed. We wanted to publish tomorrow morning, and we’d run late with the edit. It was my last chance. I put my headphones on and brought up the episode on the laptop. I was pretty sure that the problem was in the middle, around the transition into the interview at the sales lot. I played the same minute back four times.

It started with Casey saying, I needed a car. I couldn’t be without a car. And I was in a rush, and that’s probably why I went there in the first place. And then Justin’s voice: When Casey says “there,” she means Smithson & Son, the lot three blocks from her apartment. What it lacked in customer satisfaction, it made up for in convenience. And then Doug, the car salesman: I pride myself on making things easy for the customer. You need something, we’re right there.

I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t figure out what I didn’t like about it. After four listens, though, I heard it. We didn’t need Justin’s second sentence: What it lacked in customer satisfaction, it made up for in convenience. I snipped it out and cleaned up the edges of the cut. When I played it back, the rhythm was much better to my ear. I saved it and closed the laptop.

In the bedroom, he hadn’t moved an inch. I lowered myself onto the bed ounce by ounce, and just as I slid in beside him, he took a big inhale, stirred a bit, but didn’t wake up. For a while Ilay there facing him, looking at the bar of light on his cheek. I knew he was the only person who could ever understand why I would get up in the middle of the night to cut 4.63 seconds from a twenty-two-minute podcast episode that we were making out of our apartment. Not that I was going to tell him unless he brought it up.

That was before I lost the guy, lost the apartment, lost the show—I even lost the bed. But I was right about that cut.