Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jen said.

Jen was at work, leaving a voicemail for Jim.

“In the dream, I’m in a simple Lutheran church, everything’s wood; hard, cold pews; hard, cold everything, but lots of leg room. You’re on the aisle and I’m sitting beside you. I know you’re you, but you don’t look like you; you look like Max von Sydow in Through a Glass Darkly. On my lap, sitting up like a regular person, is the embalmed and neatly dressed corpse of a middle-aged English woman named Dolly. Everyone else in the pews also has an embalmed corpse on their lap, except you. There’s a small, shuffling group of mourners that stops by each pew to pay their respects to the deceased. One of them is Dolly’s dad. Dolly’s dad leans over to see his daughter, kind of awkwardly bent over you. He’s wrecked, just totally destroyed by this whole ritual, but he’s trying his best to put on a good face, and the result is that he’s doing this kind of high-pitched, hooting-crying thing, and he keeps saying in his posh British accent, ‘Goodbye, Dolly, goodbye, we love you, Dolly, bye-bye, now, Dolly, that’s our girl, Dolly, goodbye.’ Over and over. Dolly’s mother stands by his side, silent, just watching Dolly with this fathomless expression. I keep apologizing to you for how difficult this is, and you are silent. As the mourners are dispersing, I notice that Dolly is picking at her face. I say ‘No, no, Dolly, don’t do that, sweetheart.’ I turn her toward me — now I’m cradling her — and she’s scratching and pulling really hard. Her skin is breaking and bleeding. I try to pull her hands away, but she’s too strong for me. Then I think, What does it matter if she picks her face? She’s dead. That was the end of the dream.”

Jen pushed the button to listen to her message, then pushed the button to erase the voicemail from Jim’s inbox, then hung up.

The online launch of the Leora Infinitas Foundation and its “web channel,” known as LIFe Lines, proceeded as scheduled. (“ Website seems stale to me, and blog seems so limiting,” Leora, or maybe Donna, wrote in Leora’s Welcome Letter to readers. “ Web channel feels like a network that is also a conduit — a sticky-sweet yet liberating web of endless possibilities.”) Also publishing on schedule was LIFe Lines’s flagship video suite, “Overcoming Adversity.” (Six segments, edited down from seven.) LIFt’s kickoff campaign, the interactive Total Transformation Challenge (TTC), likewise launched on time, and by the end of day one had attracted 1,137 entries — each of which contained seven vows toward improvement in the assigned areas of Mind, Body, Spirit, Space, Earth, Mission, and Heart. Altogether the launch was an unqualified success insofar as it was not a total disaster, a dichotomy captured on the morning of day one, when Sunny rushed over to Jen and asked her if they could unlaunch the site.

“That would be like un-born-ing a baby,” Daisy said.

“Um, inappropriate, Daisy,” Sunny said, looking at Jen.

“Un-birthing a baby, I guess,” Daisy said.

“Daisy is right,” Jen said. “But let’s fix what we can.”

Some of the rationales for an unlaunch were sound. For example, two of LIFt’s newly announced grants, one to support teaching computer skills to girls in Colombia and one to support a girls’ entrepreneurship program in Rio de Janeiro, hadn’t actually been signed off by their underwriter, which was in both cases the Bluff Foundation.

Some of the rationales for the unlaunch seemed somewhat less sound, such as Leora’s reported dissatisfaction with the background color of the logo.

“We’re seeing plum when we’re really going for amethyst, ” Sunny explained.

Part of the reason Leora may have been distracted from the finer details of her website launch was that she had spent much of September lining up off-the-record breakfast meetings in New York City and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with small groups of female journalists convened for maximum hybrid vigor, from veteran foreign bureau chiefs to young feminist bloggers, in the chambers of downtown cafés and brasseries more frequently reserved for upmarket baby-shower brunches. In some cases, the breakfasts — which, as far as the public was concerned, never actually happened — resulted in positive coverage of LIFt and TTC where otherwise there would have been none; in other cases, they turned what would have been snarky or withering coverage into positive coverage or, at the very least, peaceably ribbing coverage. Babette Exley, proprietor of the influentially cruel blog Nastygram Ladyparts and undisclosed invitee to one of Leora’s undisclosed breakfasts, headlined her post on the launch I CAN’T TOTALLY HATE LEORA INFINITAS’ WELL-MEANING NEW LADYVENTURE, AS MUCH AS I WANT TO.

In a bittersweet twist, a lone note of inadvertent critique of the LIFt launch and the TTC campaign came from Ruby Stevens-Meisel, whose effectively anonymous public status and undetermined off-the-grid location ensured that her name, or rather her pseudonym, would be left off the breakfast invitations. It was Ruby Stevens-Meisel who first publicly acknowledged the unfortunate double life of the TTC acronym.

“Is the rebranding of TTC — the mutation of the yearning admission ‘Trying to Conceive’ into the gauntlet-throwing ‘Total Transformation Challenge’—a form of poetic license or fruitful coincidence?” Stevens-Meisel asked. “Even in launching an Internet venture, it is not Leora Infinitas’s responsibility to learn every corner of Internet jargon and parlance. I doubt she knew about the dual meaning of TTC, which has become a rueful badge of belonging for the infertile community. But to acknowledge Leora’s blissful ignorance — not only of any darker recesses of the online experience in general, but also, specifically, of the private agony, shame, and frustration of infertility — is not necessarily to discount the strange serendipity at play here. What she is asking of women with the TTC campaign is what she has constantly asked of herself: to nourish and incubate a better version of oneself. She is asking her audience to conceive who they are and give birth to that woman, bring her squalling triumphantly into the world. She is merely the midwife, the humble attendant. Leora Infinitas is the doula of the self.”

TOTALLY TERRIBLY CONFUSED: LEEZA INFANZIA DOESN’T KNOW IT, BUT SHE JUST GOT EVERYBODY PREGNANT was Nastygram Ladyparts’ subsequent headline.

“You know, I have to be honest with you, I didn’t actually know about this coincidence,” a benevolent Leora said during one morning-show appearance, inclining toward the question as if it offered a fond embrace. “One of the really exciting things about this new adventure is learning about all this stuff and really getting in touch with the online community. I have so much to learn. I’ve always been here as a student as well as a teacher. It’s humbling. Luckily, it’s also a lot of fun.”

“It’s just such a huge oversight,” Sunny said at a staff meeting that same week.

“No, if we’d had proper oversight in place this wouldn’t have happened,” Donna corrected Sunny.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Sunny said.

Jen looked at her phone.

Pamela Radden

Thursday, Oct 8 11:24 AM

To: Jen

Subject: Re: Hi

Dear Jen

I got your note and I appreciate it. Look everyone fucks up once in a while including me. There will come a time when I’m not angry about this and we can be friends again It might not even take that long I’ll get in touch with you then. I hope you can understand