Replaying the image of the frail spindly talons I had seen gripping the hole into which it disappeared made the hairs on my arm stand at attention. “Because I saw the feet,” I said. Feet? Talons? Feet?
“Not really the season for birds,” he said. “More for bats. People call about birds when really it’s bats.”
Harold tried to open the locked door to the next room.
“Oh, that’s locked,” I said.
“You have the key?”
“It’s not my house.”
“Can you ask whose house it is for the key?”
The thought of having to explain to Evan that there was a bat trapped inside his house and I needed the key to a room that was obviously private for a reason seemed somehow more ridiculous than just trying to problem-solve this myself. You’re in the weeds again, Maren! I justified snooping for the key because if I found it somewhere, then it was meant for guests to find, right?
“I guess I was just thinking that if it could climb through that hole, then it could come back out here, too. Excuse me,” I said, and squeezed past him to once again put my ear to the door. There was only silence. “I swear I heard the wings just before you got here.”
“It’s probably scared now. I can wait,” Harold said, sitting with his back against the wall on the floor of the closet. “But if it is a bat, it’s not going to come out here again in the light. Last week I was at a house until two in the morning, waiting to catch one. I’ve known people, they sell their house because the sound of bats in the attic drives them insane. They can’t sleep.”
“How does one . . . catch a bat?”
“Nets. A bat can fit through an opening the size of a golf ball. If you don’t deal with the problem, or if you block off the exits, then what are the bats going to do? They can’t eat and they die inside your house and then you have a bigger problem.”
Then we both heard it, the fluh-fluh-fluh, fainter now than before, but the sound still made my stomach flip-flop in a mix of empathy and fear. Harold stood up to listen at the door. “Huh,” he said. “Does sound like bird wings.”
This was the most exciting thing that had happened to me away from a screen in as long as I could remember.
Harold set up a dark green trap, a little larger than a game-board box, and showed me how it worked: seed at the bottom would lure the hungry bird and the slightest pressure on the metal basket would trigger a mesh net to cover her. It wouldn’t hurt.
He demonstrated by dropping one of his work gloves on the trap and it immediately sprang closed with a loud snap.
“Call me when you have it,” he said, like we were collaborators.
Harold removed his booties and put them in the pocket of his overalls. I followed him outside so I could get a signal to Venmo him whatever was left in my account. It couldn’t have been later than five o’clock, but already the light in the sky was dimming to indigo.
After I saw his truck pull out of the driveway, I opened my first bottle of wine. After all, I deserved it. Drinking was the ritual that transformed working into something to celebrate and waiting for the bird was tonight’s work.
* * *
...
Devin and I were a team. She scouted the influencers and courted them, at expensive lunches with the tiniest portions, over cocktails at Le Bain, at female entrepreneur mixers. To become a Richual influencer, they had to commit to leave their other social platforms behind and encourage their followers to join ours. It was like moving your whole family to a foreign country, but once they built their following back up, we would act like an agency, connecting them with major brands on campaigns that would earn them $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 a post. No one was spending their marketing budget in traditional channels anymore. It all had to funnel through real people—successful, hot, popular, inspiring real people.
After they signed their contracts, Devin turned them over to me. I worked on the “real” part. Our average Jane user had to buy the sponsored content—the protein shakes and the wearable posture trainer and the three-step cleansing routine to stabilize the skin microbiome—without realizing she was being sold anything. She had to trust that these influencers were human, as messy on the inside as their followers, only with a more polished veneer.
In my email to new influencers, I wrote:
Our users join our community in order to learn the sacred practice of self-care. Many of them are here because they have struggled with depression or an eating disorder or experienced a trauma, etc. Beyond offering holistic solutions and wellness products, we also pride ourselves on the high caliber of influencers we recruit, to model resilience at the highest strata of the Richual family. You ARE what has happened to you and we want you to feel comfortable opening up to your new family about that. Please know that your answers to the attached questionnaire will remain confidential and will only be used with your permission to develop the most engaging content for your new Richual profile.
I developed the questionnaire after months of lurking and listening to what our users were already talking about. Have you ever: lost a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a husband, a boyfriend, a friend, other (please describe); known someone who overdosed; experienced sexual harassment in the workplace; been adopted; been biracial; been molested; been a cutter; been in an abusive relationship (check as many as apply: emotionally, physically, verbally, sexually); been raped; had a chronic illness; been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, other (please describe); struggled with addiction to alcohol, pain meds, heroin, meth, cocaine, marijuana, food, shopping, sex; had anorexia, bulimia, or an eating disorder not otherwise specified; had an abortion; had cancer; been bullied; been accused of narcissism; felt like someone was underestimating you; thought about taking your own life?
Incest was out. No one wanted to hear about incest. “Molest” sounded dated—I encouraged them to use “sexual abuse” instead because it was more inclusive. Bipolar disorder was tricky because there was so much stigma around it, so I preferred to let the women who looked the least bloated from lithium post about how we need to break the silence around the stigma. Likewise, it was most impactful to have someone who was a size 2 talk about how she had recovered from her eating disorder and even better if that eating disorder was anorexia because no one wanted to read posts about vomiting or laxatives (perfectionism was more compelling). We had to be careful that ED posts didn’t come across like how-tos.
Posting about abuse and assault was encouraged, but influencers were not allowed to name their abuser, not even a first name, not even a pseudonym. We didn’t have the infrastructure to handle a defamation lawsuit.
Dead grandparents were boring, but I allowed one post a year, especially if the user had a glamour shot of granny in her twenties she could post in remembrance. It was awesome if one of your parents died after you became a Richual member, because the first post announcing the death always got the most hearts. But for everything else, it was better to look back on something that had happened in the past, a crucible you’d emerged from stronger than ever.