The rain held that morning, steady from the outer bands of a hurricane predicted to stay offshore. I was early; my official start time wasn’t for another ten minutes. When I got to the truck, a production trailer with audio decks and the broadcast feed, the sounds from inside stopped me at the door. I didn’t even touch the knob. I listened only briefly to the couch’s squeak, the definite breath. My work had trained me to diagnose noise quickly, to anticipate. And to back out quickly: I went across the street to the convention center’s overhang to check my phone while I waited till clock-in. A new notification from Venmo jolted me, a sad pang—Levon, my ex, had sent me $200. He was returning what he owed in installments.
At 7 a.m., I sprinted through the rain back to the truck. Inside, HT was at the decks and Amber was on the couch, typing on her laptop. Our hours were grueling that week at the political convention in Charleston—last night we’d closed up at 12:45—but the overtime was good and I needed the money. After the network’s merger last year, they’d moved all non-executive staff to freelance.
“What’s really good?” HT said to me by way of greeting. He was shorter than Amber and me—both of us tall for women—and he carried himself with chest-forward confidence. I couldn’t see any trace of affection between HT and Amber, though I’d stay off the couch during my shift. Their getting together was deeply inappropriate. And weird. If that was indeed what I’d heard. What else though? Amber was our producer, the boss, fifteen years older than HT; she was stylish and controlled, and he was a disheveled, pesky genius.
“I’m still waking up,” I said. Rest came in spurts—power-naps and a bleary-eyed manic edge, much like the president himself. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t noticed any flirtation these past few days. That bothered me. Noticing was my professional expertise and my role in our trio. Amber was 41, HT 26. At 33, I was a bridge to both of them.
“The hotel coffee is surprisingly delightful,” Amber told me as she arranged her hair in a clip. Even with the long hours she wore makeup and smooth bangs. HT, well, maybe there was something there—in his cheekbones, his tented t-shirt. I wondered if this was the first time they’d been close.
I asked them if it had been quiet.
“The president’s at a prayer breakfast,” Amber said. “Probably good for another hour.” She’d worked for the network for over a decade, trained by the guy who was in the truck during the Super Bowl with Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. He kept his job.
With HT at the left deck, I settled in on the right. He was more skilled than me, an associate audio engineer while I’d never climbed past assistant. In the old days, these convention events had been scripted, safe. Now the network still had to maintain the FCC’s decency standards despite the president’s profane speeches and ad lib remarks. Radical bluntness, he called it.
By the door, Amber was removing her sweatshirt as she prepared to leave the deep chill of AC. “I’ll be at the interview site for a few hours.” She held up an umbrella. “I’m taking this.”
“Cool,” HT said, squinting at his screen. “It’s mine.”
On the live feed, the president’s head was bowed, his hands folded. I squared up in front of the monitor, just in case.
I’d been a censor at the network for almost six years. The job wasn’t for everyone. I’d started on live wrestling with another new hire so focused on the brutality that at the end of the broadcast, he took off the cans and quit, eyes wet. Next they put me on a talk show, and I got good at anticipating, though I also learned restraint, so as not to bleed out the non-blasphemous. There was a particular gleam in the eye, a certain revving up pre-expletive. And some guests were more prone to it. Obvious, beginner stuff. As my technique progressed I could discern agitation in unexpected places. The awards shows, soused in emotion and suspense. Jesus fucking Christ from the elderly actress’s elegant mouth upon the decades-delayed honor. Protests in odd places, storm coverage that surprised. And politicians that could unhinge rapidly, especially now.
It wasn’t just the president, but his press secretary, a few in his cabinet, the vice president too. When they spoke his language, I had to cut some of it out. It’s not like I wanted to pedestal the vitriol. But I upheld the network’s mission to transmit information, packaged in an acceptable form. My best friend Mel did makeup for a news show, and we’d shared similar gripes. Putting concealer on a dictator. Touching up liars.
At the decks, HT swiveled to face me. “My buddy will buy the hot mic tape,” he said, pulling his headphones aside. “I talked to him last night.” His gaze was laser-like, already guiding my response.
Yesterday, while the president was prepping for a sit-down with the network’s star anchor, the mic caught him disparaging his followers to the hairstylist. “I could say anything and these dipshit dweebs would be right behind me all the way into a ditch. Into a cesspool! They’d enter a bed of septic lava crawling with nasty snakes. It’s like giving poison to a baby. They’re stupid, worthless shit-brains, and that’s fortunate for me, because it means I’m going to win.”
HT saved it. He saved the recording. Valuable, he’d said yesterday, but I hadn’t thought he really meant it.
Now HT was on his feet. “He’s offering 50 grand.”
“We’d get fired,” I said.
“Only if we get caught. And if we do, we can find new jobs.”
On the screen, a minister was talking with his hands. 50 grand was a lot of money, and even a small portion of it could buy me a new life. I could move to a new apartment and fully break up with Levon.
HT rubbed his unshaven cheek, watching me. “What are you going to do next? AI can censor now. You’re going to need to pivot. This would give you some time.”
That my fears were so obvious bugged me. I hadn’t told HT about my relationship troubles, but he did know my job was on thin ice. AI could censor, true. Really, one could lean back and run the machines—that’s what our human resources guy had been warning me. But I knew artful, natural redaction required a human touch. And the computer sometimes got it wrong, normed to Midwestern flat and missing how emotion and emphasis changed words’ sounds.
“I’ll go back to sports,” I said. I’d rather do that anyway. Less money but better moral parameters.
“Sports won’t need you either,” HT said. Probably right: I’d been hearing rumors that the FCC was going to loosen restrictions, matching the cultural shift. Little kids said the F-word now. Their parents found it funny.
HT was a prodigy. While I could catch a swear, he was a nimble surgeon, cutting out verbal tics, even predicting them with a bat’s freaky hearing, a deft finger on the space bar. I mean, sort of, you know. Like, that linguistic old trusty, was still rife in casual speech, but waning, HT said. Now people were hedging more.
My phone buzzed. A text from Levon. I sent you Venmo. I miss you. I love you. Can we have dinner together when you get back?
I blinked tears, turning so HT didn’t see. I missed Levon too. Though we were still sharing the apartment, I’d told him we weren’t a couple anymore, and we’d separated our lives, keeping space between us. Levon on the air mattress on one side, me in the bedroom on the other.
I read Levon’s text again. The thought of dinner was so tempting it hurt—Levon was a great cook and an amazing storyteller and we used to stay at the table for hours—but only if I could go back in time, back to the Levon I knew before I found out.
“We need to get the tape out before his big speech tomorrow,” HT said. “I want to disrupt that. Throw him off his game. We all hate him. We can’t let him win.”
I swiveled to face HT. “You’re on your way out anyway. You could easily find a better job.” HT could take his skills in verbal tic reduction to the corporate world or public radio or TED.
HT sat down again. “You could too,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. My skills were esoteric, more constrained than HT’s. And I liked the work, actually, or at least I had before the material shifted to this endless barrage of profanity. In smaller and less vituperative doses I’d enjoyed it: the energy of expectation, the possibility and responsibility. The intimacy with breath and gesture. I liked the sense of control.
“Have you talked to Amber about it?” I asked.
“Sort of.” HT’s face was a glass of water, blank and cool. I wondered again if they’d been intimate before today. How did each of them justify the infidelity? Amber was married, HT had a girlfriend. I seethed at that, my heart beating fast—Levon had lied to me for months.
“It would help if you could talk to Amber about it too,” HT said. He rearranged his hesitation, straightened in his seat. “I’m sure she’s down.”
I wasn’t so sure. I’d known Amber longer. Eight years older than me, she was also a few steps ahead of me professionally, sinewy and adept. When I started at the network I’d sought her mentorship, asked her to coffee at the top-floor cafeteria. She’d agreed, warmly, I’d thought—she’d signed her email that way, warmly—though when we sat down she set a phone timer for ten minutes. “I have a lot going on,” she told me, not unkindly.
Now HT said he wanted to leak first thing tomorrow morning. “Let this truth-bomb land and work its magic before his primetime speech.”
Tomorrow was really soon. I wasn’t ready for such a quick decision, one that might explode my life beyond its current shambles. My job, wearisome and maddening, was the most stable thing I had going. I may be a son of bitch, but I’m your son of a bitch, the president liked to say.
And leaking would mean definite risks—besides the damage to our careers there was the threat of other people, the president’s fanatics eager for fuel to excuse and protect him. Some of them were in the government, and visible on the screen now, wearing baseball hats with the bad part of his trademark phrase fuzzed out: Go Fuck Yourself. The network used AI visual censors.
“Are you thinking of a three-way split?” I asked HT. I lived paycheck to paycheck. I couldn’t afford first, last, and security in a new apartment. And the money would give me time to find a new job. Change was never cheap. Or maybe I could get back together with Levon and my needs wouldn’t be so great.
“15, 15, 20,” HT said. “I get the finder’s fee.”
I was still nervous about the consequences. “Isn’t it criminal?”
“Not if it’s careless,” HT said.
When I’d first met Levon he was an audio producer at the network, though he soon left to freelance as a studio engineer. When Levon set up a recording session he liked to put everything extraneous away, he’d told me—the amps and mics he wouldn’t need went in the closet or out of the room, so there wouldn’t be too many choices. He was a similar neatnik in our apartment—his place in South Brooklyn where he’d lived alone till I moved in. I liked that he kept my messy leanings in check. We were there together for five months, until I found out he hadn’t been paying the rent. He’d held onto my half. He didn’t actually have a paying job. He’d been working, but not for money, so he kept my share of the rent and bills instead of giving it to the landlord and ConEd.
That was July 1; now it was mid-August. Levon had lived on my money and also used it to rent studio time to record a fledgling but visionary band as well as a broke guitarist, so Levon could build on those presumed successes and invest in opening his own recording studio with two other guys, so he could do the kind of work he’d been pretending to get paid for, the work he’d been doing for free. Steps to something bigger, making the necessary connections. That’s what he said when he apologized—he cried and spoke in a halting think-aloud, as though I should comfort him for what he’d done wrong. I cried too.
The landlord cut us a deal—if we gave him the $10,000 we owed him, he wouldn’t evict or take us to housing court. Levon borrowed the money from his brother and a few friends, promising he’d pay it back. He told me he’d return what he’d taken from me too. I was furious at Levon, stunned and unmoored. His deception made everything unreliable, my world shaky without his foundation. Levon kept telling me he wanted to get back together. He was picking up projects from an audiobook publisher and working toward stable finances. I wasn’t sure what to do—I missed him and our shared life terribly. But whether I could ever believe him again was the open question.
HT tapped on my desk. “Talk to Amber about it, OK?”
I don’t want to, no way, it’s a bad idea. I thought these responses but didn’t say them out loud. If I voiced anything but agreement, HT would keep pushing. He was like a rat terrier, single-minded until his jaws closed. Maybe HT had hooked up with Amber to get her on board with his leakage plan, since she was a discerning control freak unlikely to bend without special efforts. But being a control freak was a job requirement for all of us. Maybe Amber was different in her downtime. Certainly I was—untidy in my domestic spaces, OK with dust in the corners. Levon used to get on me about my piles and bags.
HT pointed to my monitor. The prayer breakfast was breaking up.
I pulled up my headphones and got ready. With my index finger I redacted as the president spoke to a reporter. “We’re here this week to make clear that we know who these little fuckers are. So anyone who’s on their side, we’re going to fuck up their cunty little faces. That’s right. Tell them to go fuck themselves.”
At noon I went out for falafel, after a text from one of the president’s handlers tipping me to the start of a long pause. The aides wanted us fresh too. Outside it was still raining, something I hadn’t known in the truck.
The afternoon kept us busy with the president and transportation secretary on simultaneous briefings. Around three, HT said he was leaving for a break. Amber was typing on her phone and HT held my gaze while Amber’s was averted. Talk to her. I kept steady, promising nothing. On the monitor, men in flag colors floated around the ballroom. HT left with the sodden umbrella, his personal headphones necklaced, ready. I wondered what he played when he was off-duty, if he had the same problem I did. Hard to listen to anything just for fun.
My phone buzzed. Another text from Levon. I’m going to change. I’m not that lying person anymore.
Leaking would be dangerous. Maybe I should say no to HT—it wasn’t worth the risk. If I stayed with Levon I wouldn’t need the extra money. We could try to make it work.
Last summer we’d visited his parents in Spokane, our first big trip together. Levon brought tofu sandwiches and homemade cookies and gave me the window on the plane. We went through weather that made it hard to do anything but grip his arm. His take was different, his demeanor relaxed—he didn’t want air travel too tranquil. A smooth ride was actually more unsettling, he said. He’d rather be reminded that he was in a giant machine six miles off the ground, responding to the forces of the sky.
Turbulence was normal, I was thinking now as I rolled my neck in front of the screen. Levon and I could do things differently this time, not try to fake a calm trip. Instead we’d feel what was actually there. Accept the dynamic atmosphere. The plane had still landed despite the rough air. We made it to Spokane and went hiking with his parents, sweet old hippies who brought us to a waterfall in a park on the rehabbed site of an old railyard.
Another text appeared from Levon, as though he could sense my thoughts. I hope you’ll be willing to try again.
That last word rattled me. Again was what I wanted too. But that possibility was tainted by his deceit. Why did you think it was OK to lie, I typed into the response field, then deleted. How am I supposed to trust you? I x’ed back on that too.
“Everything OK?” Amber asked me.
We’d been dating for almost two years before I moved in, and we found a rhythm in the same space. I loved who we’d been there. Up early, I’d kept coffee hot in the thermos, and jumped to hug him when he emerged bleary and smiling from our room. We were the same height, the same size. Levon made a calm place for me to return to, with plants and music, dinner at the end of the day. Now our former home was just an apartment whose every inch we had to maximize, keeping distance and barely speaking, but not yet ready to be apart.
“Levon wants to do dinner when I get back,” I said. Amber knew that Levon and I were having problems but not the specifics. We’re taking a break, I’d told her. I hadn’t closed the door all the way.
“Do you want to do dinner?” Amber asked. Levon and I had not shared a meal at the table since his betrayal cracked open, though many nights he’d left me a plate of food in the kitchen.
“Maybe,” I said. What I wanted was our life back, a return to the time before I knew.
“Maybe it would be clarifying,” Amber said. At last year’s holiday party she’d met Levon—he got the bartender to make margaritas and we shared them with Amber’s husband through a loud and excited analysis of the NBA, though Amber didn’t partake. “He’s so cute,” she’d told me later.
“I’m not sure what I want.” If I said yes to HT’s plan, then I’d be free to leave the apartment, I was thinking. My lack of money would no longer force me to stay.
Amber’s face was creased with concern. I was right on the verge of telling her what Levon had done—I felt the lure of divulgence, the promise of someone to feel my pain. I wanted to hear Amber say it back to me: What an asshole! What kind of person steals his girlfriend’s money and lies about paying the rent?
But if I told her then I’d have to accept that version of Levon as the only version. Telling her would end the possibility of getting back together with him. I still wanted that chance to exist. I hadn’t told anyone the full story, not my parents or my brother, not Mel or my other friends.
On the screen, at the briefing, the press secretary was blithering about the lift of the crowds. I was thinking about Levon—anyone I told would say I should get far away from him. They’d call me crazy for staying. A big risk. A fool’s move.
“If you want things to be fucked up, vote for a fuckface!” the press secretary said on the screen. “Next question.”
Damn it. Flustered, I hit the space bar. Too late—I’d buzzed the wrong word.
“That was yours,” Amber said. Annoyed, she pushed back from her desk. “You have to pay attention.”
“Sorry,” I said, prickly. I’d missed it. I was missing a lot of things.
Amber grumped over the log while I monitored the end of the press conference. Now there was nothing to zap, of course. When the coverage shifted to a prerecorded fluff reel, I tried to get back to her good graces. “How was Nathan’s interview?” I asked. Amber’s husband had stayed home with the kids while she worked crazy hours. But now, with her move to freelance, they had to figure something out.
“It got changed to Monday,” she said, eyes jumpy, voice low. She was uneasy, probably suspecting I’d heard her and HT. What had I missed, I wondered, for how long?
Amber glanced at the monitor. The president was elbow-tapping through the crowd while Lynyrd Skynyrd roared. “Fucking sexist twat.” She rolled to the desk again. “His speech tomorrow is going to be pretty loaded. We’ll need to be vigilant with the crowd blurring.” The audience could really get going with the Go Fuck Yourselfs in unison, which was tricky for HT to manage against the cadences of the speech, also in need of redaction.
“HT mentioned that,” I said.
Amber flinched, fussed with her sweatshirt’s zipper. I wondered why she did it, what in her marriage she was willing to chance. Don’t do it, I wanted to tell her. Save yourself the pain. But what did I know about the inside of Amber’s life?
Her hands rested on her keyboard; she wasn’t typing, just staring ahead.
“What do you think will happen?” I asked. With the president, with language and culture, I meant.
“HT’s talking to an AI start-up,” Amber said. “About his verbal hedging stuff.”
“If the swears don’t matter anymore,” I said. “What then?”
“People will still make mistakes.” The false starts and gibberish stumblings. The faux-pas and too-hot takes.
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Do you want to keep doing it?”
“Not for these people,” she said. “Not if he wins.”
The president’s acolytes were nuts, charged by altercation and readily vindictive. That scared me.
“If the hot mic tape got out,” I said, “what would they do to us? If it leaked on purpose. I don’t mean a mistake like the one I just made with the press secretary.” I was losing my ability to notice, and that scared me too. Until the landlord had arrived to demand the back rent, I hadn’t noticed any ripples with Levon. But in the weeks since I’d found out I’d combed through everything in my mind—when Levon had told me he was out late watching a friend’s baby, when he’d said he had a Roth IRA. He’d played gamelan in college and once met Usher in the airport. What else had slipped past me unchecked?
“That was just a blip,” Amber said, more forgiving now.
“What would happen if the whole thing got out there?” I asked. “The president’s true feelings about his loyal followers. Uncensored. Uncut.”
“At least some of them would be angry,” Amber said. “Hurt enough to stay home on Election Day.”
“Some of them might like him even more. They love that he doesn’t censor himself.”
“It wasn’t like this when I started,” Amber said. “Whole different ball game.” She flicked her pen. “I don’t think I want this ball game.”
“Same.” I’d gotten good at the work without realizing it would turn into hyper-vigilance of a potty-mouthed tyrant. “I never thought I’d stay for so long.”
“That’s what happens,” Amber said. “But now we have the chance to do the right thing.”
I wanted that chance. I wanted to unseat this profane man’s twisted power. But I thought again of the money. Being broke had given me a reason to stay in the apartment with Levon, putting off any decision. Leaking would make it my own choice. But my judgement had proven terrible during the oblivious months before I found out what Levon had been doing. Could I even handle this choice the right way?
“We’ll talk to HT about it later,” Amber said, cheeks pinking as she returned to the log.
Nervous, a little dizzy, I faced my own screen. I still loved Levon even though I didn’t know if I could trust him again. And even worse, I wasn’t sure if I could trust myself.
The possibility of the leak thrummed in the truck all evening, trembling in my fingers as I redacted, as we scrambled through our tasks. Our chance to talk was delayed by the chaos of a string of usual-suspect vulgarians followed by an unexpectedly salty speech from the Speaker of the House, a born-again Christian who’d until now been reliably mild.
Close to midnight, just as the network’s coverage was wrapping up, I got a text from Dante, my contact in the president’s handler team. I read it out loud: The president had just taken an Ambien.
HT was hunched at his keyboard; Amber was stretching by the couch. “Sleepy time,” HT said. He looked at me, expectant, but I turned away, not ready to give him my choice.
“Closing time,” Amber said, addressing the ground as she pushed back to downward dog.
Though I’d been up since pre-dawn, I didn’t want the day to end. Once we went to bed, morning and leak-time would come.
“Let’s go check out the harbor and see if it’s flooded from the storm,” I said.
HT watched Amber move her body. “We could use some fresh air.”
The humidity was a pleasant shock once we left the refrigerated truck. Heading downhill toward the water, I could see boats in the marina riding high. Our walk felt festive, with the three of us off-duty, outside. Like a holiday, the family together again. Amber must have been feeling it too. She told us about a vacation on an island in Greece. She went with a friend, and they took the bus from the ferry landing to his grandmother’s house up a winding hill. One bus that did everything—it was the school bus and the municipal bus and also carried the mail and occasional medical matters too.
“There was a teacher riding with her teenage students,” Amber said. “This boy was playing a Greek rap song on his phone, and his friends were singing along. The teacher too, and I was charmed by the way the entire community came together to sing, intergenerational sharing of the music on this bus that did so many different things.” Amber’s friend translated the song, incredibly obscene. The teacher didn’t even care. “That’s Greek style,” Amber’s friend said.
Right, I was thinking. Life was sometimes obscene, and covering it up didn’t change that fact. During the last surreal weeks, sharing the apartment with the new version of Levon, a person I’d learned had lied to me, a person I still loved, I kept raging at him, circling over the same point: I was a fool for not noticing what had been under my nose the entire time. He must have thought I was a real dummy.
“No,” Levon told me. “I’m the idiot here, not you.” He didn’t know why he’d done it, he kept saying; he’d been desperate and out of his mind, not himself. Even so, he’d chosen to lie. And now I could see that by calling himself a fool, blaming it all on his supposed flaw, that was a form of censorship too.
We stopped in front of the harbor, the sidewalk glazed by the too-high tide. I took out my phone and texted my friend Mel. When I get back, can we talk? She’d be disgusted by Levon’s behavior. But I wasn’t his editor anymore.
“What were the lyrics of the Greek rap song?” I asked Amber.
“I fucked your mother, she is my whore.”
“Did that change your warm feelings?” HT asked Amber, his tone teasing, coy. His gaze held a little long.
“Not exactly,” Amber said, giving it back.
HT was right next to her, the hair on his arms frizzed from the humidity, brushing Amber’s bare arm. And she was enjoying his attention, her hip jutted as she fiddled with her earring and laughed. They were openly flirting now, or maybe I was just noticing it in a way I hadn’t before.
Yes, I could see it, along with something else that had been under my nose all along, hidden in plain sight. Money or no money, I could choose whether to leave for good or try again. I’d been afraid of allowing myself that control. But even with the truth about Levon out in the open, the decision would be mine to make.
I followed HT and Amber as they skirted the public square that fronted the harbor. Waves washed gently at the concrete shore. We passed a yammering group sweating in dress shirts, their ties loose. By the railing, a guy in a “Go Fuck Yourself” hat dipped his knees, whispering to an infant bound to his chest.
My exhaustion had lapped itself; I was renewed now by the sight of people I didn’t have to oversee. “I want to do it,” I told HT and Amber, my pulse hot in my temples. “We should do it.”
We stopped again to survey each other, there at the edge of the flood. Amber’s eyes sunk into tired purple shadows, but even so her expression was arch. HT nodded at her, earnest, seeking, then tipped his chin to me.
“OK,” he said.
“Yes,” Amber said.
HT repeated her affirmation. “I’ll send it out first thing.”
We watched people move through the square. A woman in spandex danced at the perimeter, throwing punches to an invisible foe.
“Keep us posted,” Amber said to HT.
“Of course,” HT said. “But I won’t have to tell you. You’ll see it. You’ll know.”
My sneakers were wet. I wasn’t sure where we were in the tide cycle, if staying here meant the water would rise even more, soaking my ankles and socks. I still feared these people in their profane hats, their inevitable wrath at the reveal. But that’s what we wanted, why we were doing it—millions of people would hear it, and things would move forward from there. I didn’t know yet what I’d choose to do with Levon. But at least I knew he’d been honest when he said I wasn’t a fool.
Now men in suits and headsets were charging forward, clearing a path through a knot of tourists doing selfies. The men’s urgency gave shape to what was happening—a trio of black town cars had pulled up to the concrete plinths at the far edge of the square. I looked at HT, at Amber as she pushed her hair from her eyes. We knew.
A shock to see it but not a surprise: the old man in sweatpants and a jumbo t-shirt was sloshing across the plaza. He looked smaller up close. “Those little cock-wads can go fuck themselves! We’ll tell those cunt-bags to bag it up!” He was yelling and I jolted with each swear, my reflex still strong. I’d miss being the one to clean it up.
Around me people raised their arms, like a religious revival, a rave, their phones up to hold him. Remarkable how they’d coalesced so quickly into a crowd. I took a video of everyone gathered to listen at the edge of the wider sea, and texted it to Mel, to my family’s group chat, and my best friends from high school. Get it out there, I thought. Get some fresh air. I sent it to Levon too, even though the news would reach him soon enough. All those words, loud through the lush night, plain for anyone to hear.
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