Ghost Work

The fluorescent over my desk had a flicker on the left tube. You could only see it if you weren’t looking at it. I had asked maintenance about it twice. They came once, replaced nothing, and put a sticker on the ballast that said TEST PASSED. I read that sticker every afternoon for two years.

The afternoon the link came in, the coffee in the mug from home had been warm at 1:47, when the calendar pinged a meeting that got rescheduled. By 3:08 it was room temperature and slightly skinned. I drank it anyway because the alternative was getting up. The keyboard had a Backspace key with a worn corner. The second monitor was angled wrong and I had stopped fixing it. A coworker walked past my desk and laughed at something on his phone and kept walking. The ducts in the ceiling rattled and stopped. A breath of cold air rolled down across the back of my forearm. The hairs on my wrist stood up and lay back down. A calendar notification slid into the corner of my screen reminding me of a 4:00 I had already declined. The day was going to be a day.

The Slack notification arrived on the right monitor. A channel I was not muted in. Someone wrote, “this is BLOWING UP.” Three flame emojis, one applause. A link.

I clicked.

The page loaded inside an industry blog I had read for years. The headline at the top was a sentence I had written. The deck under the headline was a sentence I had written. The first paragraph was a sentence I had written. The byline at the top was not my name.

I read the byline three times. The byline did not change.

I sat back in the chair. The flicker on the left tube had locked onto the cursor blinking in the empty document. They were doing it together. The ducts rattled. The cold air rolled across my forearm. The hairs on my wrist did the same thing they had done all afternoon. My jaw set.

I twisted into confusion. I demanded a meeting with my chief editor. He said, “This is just how it works, Cody. Do you want a copy of your contract?” My contract. My work. My hours. My mind. My contract. Writing was different now.

When I came back to my desk the byline had taken up a position somewhere behind my sternum and would not move. I could feel the position at 4:17, when the meeting that had been rescheduled got rescheduled again. I could feel it at 9:14 PM in the kitchen, when my younger son said something funny about a cartoon and I laughed and the position behind my sternum pressed back, somewhere underneath the laugh. A byline does not need language to keep sitting on a page. The page sits on a server somewhere. The server has not gone down. The byline is still pressing now.

That month I shipped twenty-six articles. Twenty-five was the contract. Twenty-six was the kind of number you turn in when you’re trying to be necessary. None of them had my name on them. None of them ever did.

There was a Tuesday at eleven at night, ten years before this, when I sat in a small office in a strip mall and uploaded the first article I had ever written for pay. The content management system did not have a category for what I had written, so I made one. I named the category myself. I clicked save and watched a green checkmark appear and disappear. I sat in the chair for another twenty minutes before getting up. There was nobody to tell. The company that hired me is gone now. Both the company and the category I named went down in the same year. I cannot show you what I wrote because the URL it lived at returns a 404 page that suggests articles I did not write. I keep meaning to take a screenshot of that page. I keep not getting around to it.

There was an afternoon a year into the lockdown when I sat in the bedroom I had made into a home office and refreshed an industry awards page and watched my work win. The work was a training I had built for teachers, teaching them how to ask a teenager if she was thinking about killing herself. I had built it. The screen the awards page loaded on was the only window I had into anyone else’s work for fifteen months. Every meeting that year had been a tile on a screen. Every revision had been a comment somebody else was reading on a different screen in a different state. The firm’s logo appeared above a screenshot of the module. The press release the firm sent named three executives. None of the names were mine. I closed the tab. I put my forehead against the cool of the desk for a long time. There was nobody walking past.

There was a 6:14 AM, four years after that, when I sat at the edge of a kitchen island and watched a dashboard tick from 58 to 60. I had been working that score for fourteen months. The number had started at 35. The coffee beside the laptop was the way my wife had made it the night before, too sweet for me. The dashboard refreshed every fifteen seconds. The number rose once more, to 61, while I was looking, and something in the soft spot above my collarbone tightened and would not let go. The number was climbing past me. I had stopped being the reason. I closed the laptop and walked into the bedroom and lay down next to my wife, who was asleep, and put my hand on her hip and did not wake her. I did not yet know that an email had been drafted at 5:30 AM Eastern, scheduled to send at 9:00 AM Eastern, that would tell my team I no longer had a team. The number kept climbing that morning. Two weeks later I packed a box of office things into the trunk of my car and drove home and did not take it out for nine months.

The cost showed up later. It showed up in the kind of resume that reads thin even when the years on it are thick. It showed up the first time a hiring manager asked me to send a portfolio link and I sat for forty minutes deciding what counted as mine. It showed up the morning my oldest typed my name into Google and got a real-estate listing for someone else and a gym in another state. It showed up when I tried to describe what I do for a living to my mother and could not finish the sentence.

I am better at communicating for other people than I am for myself. I have had a lot of practice.

Safe is invisible. I have been safe for a very long time. The same skills that made me good at hiding inside other people’s brands made me hard to find when I went looking for myself.

The car gets the awards. I got the check. And the story.

So this. A blog page on my own domain that ran empty for a long time. The placeholder I wrote for it said, “Fifteen years writing nice things for other people’s businesses. Not here.” That line has been sitting at the top of my blog like a courtroom oath. It deserves a body of evidence underneath it.

This piece is the first of those.

I am not making a promise about tomorrow. The arc of search results is long. The arc of recognition is longer. There is a small thing I can do, which is put my name back on what I make and let it accumulate where someone can find it. The companies got the portfolios. The companies kept the leads. The companies took the awards. The companies are gone. Some have new owners. Some never made it through the year. The story is still the only thing I ever owned. I’m spending it now.