A Single Source of Truth

by Michael J. Vowles

Kit

“Those are the proof points, and that’s all well. But we’re missing the most important thing here—and that’s trust. The hero for this messaging framework ought to be that our data is a single source of truth. That’s what we lead with.”

By now, the rest of them have left, one by one, for the town hall space. Kit can see them from his desk—must be over two hundred—coupling and uncoupling in a pressed, moveable mass. He swallows, eyes flicking back to the two faces on the screen.

“That makes sense,” he says. “But can we get that phrase past legal and compliance?”

“That’s what we need you folks in marketing to help us with,” Stephen smiles, leaning back. “Craft a brand narrative that positions our data as the single source of truth, without using those exact words.”

“Have you reached out to Anoushka, or anyone in Sales yet?” Miriam asks.

“No, not yet. I was waiting for us to align first—”

“You should have connected with them already. These conversations need to be happening in parallel, otherwise everything gets delayed,” Miriam says. Kit can see her sighing. “We’re at time—thanks for your help on this one, Stephen. Kit will take another stab at it and send you an updated draft by the end of the week.”

Kit saves his Copilot notes, removes his headphones, and looses a shuddering breath. At the opposite end of the row of desks, framed against the dark sky and the city lights, Miriam is collecting her things. It’s just the two of them left. He tucks his laptop into his bag and thinks about whether to wait. He waits. Miriam buttons her coat, staring down at the evening traffic. She continues staring for a while, rubbing hand cream into her palms absently.

When she finally turns away from her desk and starts toward him, he feels his stomach twist. Something juvenile and sickly precious inside him that he hates. He meets her unsmiling eyes for a second and has to look away. Conscious of the sharp clack of her footsteps.

“That went well,” he offers as they head toward the party.

“You don’t need to wait for someone in authority to tell you what to do,” Miriam says. “You’re expected to take the initiative and reach out to internal stakeholders yourself.”

“Of course.”

“I gave you the responsibility of managing this project because I thought you were ready for it. But it just feels like it only ever moves forward when I chase you up on it.”

“I’m sorry. I, um…” Kit says, trailing off. But Miriam keeps striding ahead, eyes on the shifting multitude that packs the town hall and spills into the kitchen, out toward the front desk. A press of body heat and shoulders, a sense of synthetic light. Before he can think of what to say, he loses her to it.

Kit pauses for a moment. He can’t spare the time, but there’s alcohol here. Good chance of it later, but later isn’t now. He shuffles over to the long counter that separates the kitchen from the town hall and grabs a flute of champagne.

“Hey, how was your big meeting?” someone asks, tugging at his elbow. Magnus and Ivana.

“Miriam keep you long enough?”

“Yeah, it was fine,” Kit says. “Only mildly sharted this time.”

“Ha.”

“You should be proud; you just had a meeting with two managing directors. That’s great exposure.”

“Not if I expose myself as an absolute donkey, it isn’t.”

By now, Kit has drained the champagne flute and grabs another one.

“Easy there.”

“I’m sure you did great.”

“Miriam wasn’t, uh, Miriam, was she?”

“I’m not saying shit,” Kit says. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “What’s this? A little canapé action? Cheeky.”

Magnus holds up his hand to one of the passing servers from the catering company.

“Alright, what do we have here then—”

Kit stops.

The woman holding the tray smiles up at him.

“Sun-dried tomato and basil pinwheels. And these ones here are smoked salmon and cream cheese cucumber bites.”

Kit stares at her and she just smiles up at him.

“But you don’t like salmon, do you?”

Kit feels himself flush.

“Jocelyn.”

He lets out a laugh that could be mistaken for a cough. Her smile deepens—not to the full width of her face, but as a subtle upward movement at the corners of her mouth. She’s got her blonde hair in a chin-length bob now, with the top clipped back. Everything else the same. Blue eyes, the gold ring in her left nostril. She’s wearing a black button-down shirt tucked into a black apron, the words “Aurelia Bites” stitched in gold on her left breast.

Everything else disappears. The din of clinked champagne flutes and canine laughter. Magnus and Ivana and innumerable ruddy faces. All thought and memory of the meeting with Miriam and Stephen. All sense of time. All light and color compressed out of focus, leaving her stark and whole in front of him. Wholly Jocelyn.

“I wasn’t expecting…you’re with the catering company?”

A stupid question. Jocelyn doesn’t answer stupid questions.

“How’ve you been, Kit?” she asks.

“Yeah, alright.”

“Seems like you’re doing well for yourself.”

“Oh, don’t be fooled. I’m a small fish in a very large pond. An ocean, really.”

“I’m sure you’re doing great.”

She probably has to get back to work, he thinks. Any moment and she’ll have to resume doing the rounds. But she just stands there smiling at him, and people drift over to pick the canapés off the tray. No one even seems aware of their conversation. The whole office is in flux, with the two of them fixed and implacable at the center.

Remembers licking a film of sweat up her sternum as she drew a breath. Taste of salt. A sense of the humid night outside. The way everything seemed a part of them. And conversely, how deeply they felt a part of everything else.

Bali, before the pandemic.

“So you’re back in London?” he says.

“I’m back.”

Kit doesn’t ask how long. Disorienting enough just to know she’s back. He opens his mouth and closes it again. What can he say? Nothing he can think of seems to make any sense. Jocelyn standing here in the office doesn’t make any sense.

“It’s good to see you,” she says.

Perhaps she can tell he’s struggling, he thinks. Giving him a polite out. How can he not know what to say to her, of all people? The thought of them self-conscious around each other, of conversation requiring active thought, an insult.

“I’m actually…” he glances at the doors. “I’ve got to…”

“Yeah.”

“It was nice…”

‍ ‍Nice to see you, he means, but the rest of it doesn't come. He doesn’t want to leave, but it’s too painful not knowing how to talk to her. Each second that passes in silence more horrifying than the last. There’s sympathy in her smile. He tears himself away as though pulling his flesh from barbed wire, leaving pieces of him behind. The sharp sting of newly hollow places.

In the elevator he thinks about that smile. How angry he used to get when she’d call herself “cold.”

Kit doesn’t check his phone until he gets outside. He’s late. There are messages but he doesn’t reply to them. Just pockets his phone and heads to the tube station. Victoria Line, north. He closes his eyes and thinks about those last few weeks in Bali. The way everything seemed to come undone.

What was his name? Tattooed rough lad from Southampton.

‍ ‍Hey Kit, this is Jamie—we met at my surfing class this morning. Jamie, this is my friend Kit.

Friend?

When he gets off at Oxford Circus, he types a new message to his brother: You wouldn’t believe who I saw. Almost as soon as he finishes typing, he deletes it. His brother will ask how he’s feeling and Kit won’t be able to lie to him. He’ll tell Kit how much better he’s doing now. And then, maybe, they’ll end up talking about when Kit wasn’t doing so well.

That year after Bali, living in his childhood bedroom at 28 years old. How much weight he lost. Staring at their avatars on Snapchat Maps, in the same place day after day. Every day scrolling and refreshing. Until he saw them together in his dreams at night. And dreaming about them together night after night until he didn’t know what was real anymore. Until, finally, his parents paid for therapy.

Kit shudders at the image of himself, just two years ago; a grown man lying in the fetal position in that tiny bed. And all over what?

When he reaches the gallery, Abigail is already inside. Kit stops for a moment and looks at her; she hasn’t noticed him. Nothing makes sense. How he went from wasting away in that bedroom to selling market data in the city. The world before the pandemic to the world now. Jocelyn to Abigail.

“There you are!” she says when he stands beside her. “You had that meeting, right? With the scary American lady?”

Kit grunts in acknowledgement. He doesn’t want to talk about it. Abigail not the kind to push things. Unable to see right into him like Jocelyn could.

She takes his arm and they head to the exhibition in the next room. Abigail has their e-tickets on her phone. They mark the first few portraits in silence, and then he feels bad. It’s dark and so he whispers, pointing at the man in the next frame.

“What do you reckon his name was?”

“I don’t know; does it say?”

“No, I mean, guess.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Looks like a Philip to me. A Philip from a long line of Philips.”

Abigail chuckles politely and doesn’t say anything. Kit remembers visiting galleries like this with Jocelyn before Bali, and how they’d invent stories about the subjects of the portraits. Taking haphazard, zig-zagging routes across the gallery floor, Jocelyn adding imagined dynamics between the dead faces.

“This lady here,” Kit says. “Where do you think she’s from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just guess. Is she French? Is she a commoner that’s married into luxury?”

“I don’t know, okay?”

Kit goes silent. Abigail tugs on his arm and they drift over to the next portrait. He feels her glance up at him, that nervous little assessment she does sometimes.

“You’re being silly,” she whispers, then gives a contrived chuckle.

He’s about to say that he’s just tired, but then he stops. A young woman with blue eyes stares back at him out of the frame, her blonde hair tied back. A slight, sinewy strength in her. The kind of person that doesn’t fear what hasn’t happened yet, or what might happen someday. Eyes that go right into him.

Jocelyn

Jocelyn sees him before he notices her. It’s definitely him. But why does he look so different? Sure—there’s a more pronounced widow’s peak and he’s lost the stache, but there’s something else. It’s like he’s learned how to blend in, she thinks. How to be like everybody else.

  She feels herself smiling and then her feet changing direction. She approaches from the side and Kit’s eyes go to the tray of canapés before her face.

“Alright, what do we have here then—”

It’s all Jocelyn can do to stop herself from bursting into laughter when he realizes. Kit always was slow on the uptake like that. For a moment, it’s just like how it used to be, she thinks, with her surprising or shocking him in some way, him always playing catchup.

‍ ‍Fuck it, let’s go to Australia.

The memory of his face, trying to work it all out.

‍ ‍But what about—

‍ ‍No one can get a career-level job at the moment. You’re sick of delivering parcels and I’m sick of waitressing. So let’s say fuck it.

‍ ‍But how? I mean, how do we—

‍ ‍We’ll figure it out as we go.

And then four months in Australia became six, and Australia became Bali.

“Oh, don’t be fooled. I’m a small fish in a very large pond. An ocean, really.”

Jocelyn feels a surge of happiness for him. Whatever he says, he looks to be doing better for himself than the rest of their old friends. None of them with careers related to their degrees. They work in pubs and warehouses and call centers. They live with their parents into their thirties and pursue online side hustles. And some still are running around Southeast Asia, putting off adulthood as long as they can.

Kit mumbles something about having to go and takes off. The last smoked salmon and cream cheese cucumber bite is pinched from the tray and Jocelyn stands there for a moment. She thinks about the last time she saw him, when they were in Bali. They hadn’t really said anything then either. Just a wordless decoupling. Something that felt inextricably tied to where and when they were at that time, as though everything they were back home didn’t make sense in this new place. The way it suddenly just fizzled out in the unrelenting heat.

‍ ‍I’m not ready to go back yet, Kit.

  Jocelyn replaces the empty tray where her colleagues have set up a cocktail bar on the other side of the room. It’s a large, open space, with a high ceiling and several rows of auditorium-style seating along one side. She doubles back without a new tray and heads toward the doors. The toilets are outside the office, shared with the company on the same floor.

Jocelyn takes longer than she needs to in the stall, wondering whether Kit really had to leave or not.

‍ ‍What’s wrong?

‍ ‍Nothing’s wrong, I just don’t want to leave Bali yet.

She used to think that Kit was incapable of seeing her fundamental coldness. That the more he insisted on his image of her, the more she tried to show him the truth. The only truth. Maybe he can see it now, she thinks.

When she gets out, there’s a woman leaning against the wall at the other end of the long row of large, unisex stalls.

“This one’s free,” she calls out. The woman shows no sign of hearing her, and Jocelyn notices her shoulder sliding downward. At that moment, Jocelyn breaks into a run. She catches the woman before she falls, taking her weight.

“Hey, hey, you’re okay. Everything’s okay,” Jocelyn says. The woman blinks up at her, breathing rapidly. She looks, Jocelyn thinks, to be in her late forties or early fifties. “You’re okay. It’s passing. I need you to take deep breaths—in through your nose and out through your mouth.”

After a few seconds, the woman seems able to stand on her own.

“Here,” Jocelyn guides her into a nearby stall. She puts the toilet seat down and gets the woman to sit. She runs a stack of paper towels under a cold tap and dabs the woman’s face. The woman manages a weary smile.

“I’m alright…”

“I think you’re having a panic attack,” Jocelyn says.

She lets the woman get her breathing under control and offers her a dry towel.

“A panic attack, huh?” the woman says, patting her face.

“I get them sometimes. Hot flashes, dizziness, hyperventilating. They can be really sudden, but you just have to focus on your breathing and know that it will pass.”

“A panic attack,” the woman says. “Makes sense, I guess.”

When they exit the toilets, the woman pauses in front of the glass doors to the office.

“I’m not ready to go back in yet. I just need some air…” The woman turns to look at her. “Do you smoke? You look like you do.”

They take the elevator up to the building’s sky garden and step out into the November cold. The place is deserted. Jocelyn looks out toward Belgravia on one side and Westminster on the other. She realizes, from up here, what a crazy coincidence it was to run into Kit the way she did. For the briefest moment they intersected, and now it’s unlikely they will again. He’s already out there, down there somewhere, doing whatever it is he had to rush off for.

Unless, she thinks, he didn’t have to rush off. Unless just seeing her was too painful.

Jocelyn hands the woman a cigarette. The woman laughs.

“That’s not what I meant…”

“Oh.”

They share a look.

“Are you sure?” Jocelyn asks her. The woman cocks her head and Jocelyn replaces the cigarette. They stand in silence while she rolls the joint. She finishes it, examines her work for a second, and hands it over. The woman places it in her mouth and Jocelyn retrieves her lighter.

“I’m Jocelyn by the way.”

“Miriam,” the woman says. She takes a long drag on the joint and passes it back. “Thanks for the breathing lessons.”

“I hope you’re feeling better.”

“You know, at first, I wasn’t sure if it was something else,” Miriam says, wincing. “Before I left New York, I got some news. And I haven’t told anyone yet, but it’s bad. I’ve…I’ve got—”

She watches Jocelyn’s face go slack.

“Never mind.”

They pass the joint back and forth for a while. Jocelyn waits, her chest tight, but Miriam doesn’t seem able to come back to it. Whatever it is seems stuck in her throat.

“You don’t really know what’s going to happen,” Miriam says then. “Don’t waste time looking for meaning in things. Don’t be a caged animal. Do you understand? There’s no single source of truth that’s going to explain everything.”

That night, Jocelyn rents an e-bike and cycles back to Hammersmith. On the way she imagines running into Kit again. As long as she isn’t home, it seems stupidly possible. If he hadn’t tried to plan everything out and lock her down, she thinks. If only he didn’t have so much difficulty living in the present. But then, he wouldn’t be Kit.

If he were here right now, she’d have so much to say. But the street is empty and the sky without stars. And only silence on the ride home.