“How would you like to be in the encyclopedia, Joann?” I asked with a smile as she and I were eating lunch one afternoon. She was slouched over her phone, one elbow on the table. She didn’t look up to reply. “No, thank you.” “I should say,” I went on, “that it would be very convenient for customers. What if they want to know more about you? I get clients all the time who come in and ask, ‘Who is that [i]Joann[/i], that marvelous woman?’” “You’re such a goof,” she said with a little jagged-tooth smirk. “That’s what Wikipedia is, an encyclopedia,” I explained, as though she didn’t already understand. “If someone wanted to know about your stature in town I could simply spin the monitor around and save myself the trouble of a lengthy discourse. It would save me a lot of time.” She laughed to herself, but didn’t say anything. It was rare that Joann and I had time to sit down together. She was a stout woman with a young face and large, dark brown eyes. There was no use talking to her the way I did. She was married, three kids. She had a tattoo of one of their names—the oldest one—on her wrist. The others I wasn’t sure about, and I didn’t ask—somehow it felt like it would have been wrong. We worked in an electronics store together. I was recently divorced, and bored, I guess, and wanted to get her on my new favorite topic. “Your kids would like it, too,” I said. “They could even make edits to the page for you—keep it fresh and updated. They could really be doing more for you, in my opinion.” She chafed, and her smile broadened out. “Everyone should have a Wikipedia page,” I said. Finally, she looked at me like a kid having found someone at hide-and-seek. “Your ‘friend’ needs to know when to stop. Coming in here, bugging you to do his projects. Who has time for all that?” “Oh, come on, Joann,” I said facetiously. “That man loves himself too much,” she replied, going back to tapping on her phone. “It’s for posterity,” I said, shifting tone a little. “He’s old. He knows he’s near the end of his life. If you get on Wikipedia, then, from his point of view, you are remembered for as long as Wikipedia is a thing. Which, I have no reason to doubt, might be a very long time. It’s silly, I know,” I said, preempting an objection, “but if it brings him some comfort then I say why not. Well, why not, Joann?” She shook her head. “Don’t be jealous,” I said, smiling again. “I ain’t jealous.” “Hey, listen,” I said, pointing. “I can make this work for you. I can already see the body of the article. ‘Joann Guidry received national attention at a Family Dollar in 1997 when, while waiting in a checkout line with a flustered cashier, she made an innovative reference to the movie [i]The Sandlot[/i], exclaiming, ‘You’re killing me, Smalls!’, a move which would be subsequently adopted by other women across the United States over the coming decade, including Laura Bush.” She closed her eyes and gave me another smirk. “You’re such a goof.” [hr] The client that I’m thinking of, his name is Mr. Watts. He came to the tech bar a few months ago and wanted to know if I would go as far as to make a correction for him on Thomas Jefferson’s Wikipedia page. I laughed. I’d done some work for him before. He had a son who died at my age, just a few years ago, and I think he saw something in me. But, what the heck? When you’re living by yourself, it feels good to solve problems for people, and I figured I could always learn something along the way, or get into some new territory. The first task was to earn credibility with the moderators of Wikipedia. I fixed an entry on the development of [i]basso continuo[/i] in Renaissance madrigal music. Then I made an edit involving some recent considerations regarding the designation of a certain transitional period in geological time, which (as a matter of fact) had to do with the appearance of [i]Hyalinea balthica[/i]. I was especially happy with that one. I showed Mr. Watts when he came in one day to see how close we were to Jefferson. He’s a wispy man, a white shade, a runner who exuded good health in his younger years. He liked to greet me with a solicitous smile that a juggler or a street performer might have. “Young man,” he would call me. He didn’t have to refer to the project by name; it was our secret project. “This is [i]real[/i],” I said, tracing a line in the article I revised with my finger. “I wish I had brought in the book to prove it to you. You like archaeology, right? Well now, you’re an archaeologist. And an ornithologist. And a biographer of Henry Fielding. It’s really interesting stuff. And they’re real references, they may as well be, right?” “Good, good,” he said. He was nodding and seemed to be looking past me, as though there was something he didn’t understand. “All good stuff. So, you think we’ll be getting there soon? I’m really excited about this.” “Oh sure,” I answered him. “It takes time, but we both know that. I want to make it as believable as possible. I tried to find some info on your aunt. Just some genealogy websites. I found her name, but nothing about what she did or who she knew. Maybe there’s a library we can go to? I mean, we can’t just put anything up on Wikipedia.” He wobbled a bit as I spoke. “It’s all right there,” he said. “I gave it to you. It’s up to you, I need your help, man.” Mr. Watts had left me with a dossier of yellow wide-ruled papers, filled with hand-written memos in all capital letters. I had never seen that in handwriting. The sheets were torn from their notebooks and had the quality of something discovered rather than notated, jewels of Hira, declaring his ancestor a mentor to Thomas Jefferson. He leaned in, and said, “I don’t care if they take it down. Just as long as it gets there, and I can see it. I’ll take a picture. No problem. And if other people want to look, then, well, I can’t stop them!” I was sure it wouldn’t work, but I replied to him, “We certainly can’t. And we’ve gone too far not to give it the old college. I’ll see what I can do. And if all that comes from this is that I have learned something about the migration patterns of the painted redstart, then the effort will not be in vain, as far as I’m concerned.” [hr] I forget when, but some time ago I learned that Mr. Watts has very bad cancer of the liver and prostate. His wife told us when she came in one day to make a few purchases on his behalf. I do know that this was before I decided to go see him in his house, and before the business with Jefferson, which actually turned out to be a success. That’s why I went to see him. He wanted to take it to the next level, and put himself in the encyclopedia, for all the places he’d traveled and the jobs he worked, for the people he’d seen and the tortoise he used to have in his backyard. I was in paradise. On the outside, the house looked like a home you might see situated anywhere in the American suburbs. I moved to the Bay Area just after my split with Debbie to get some pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a fascination of mine, some of these old places with evidence that people had done something. I had seen Mr. Watts’s postcards and his pictures of France, where his relatives supposedly once lived. Now I got to go in his damn house, which was filled like a lepidopterist’s museum with photos and maps and animal skeletons and saucy fifties women. He had columns from all the times he had appeared in the papers, fighting a fire or working at the university when something was going down. The purpose of my visit was to find a picture which would be suitable to put on Wikipedia for longevity. We went upstairs, where the exhibit extended into all the guest rooms. His wife was up there, too, in one of the small rooms watching a television on a dresser. She didn’t want to disturb whatever it was we were up to. “You’ve been to the Mesoamerican pyramids,” I said, inspecting a picture he had in a small office he had led me into. There was a world map on the wall facing the door, maybe six square feet, with pins stuck to various locations in Europe, the Americas, and the southeast Pacific. I squinted at the photo; I was trying to fathom Mr. Watts as a young man I might know, and I’d never known anybody who had looked down at the world from the steps of a temple-pyramid. He joined me. “Mhm. I’ve been to all seven continents—including Antarctica,” he said, indicating a tiny red pin on King George Island, “all fifty states, and over thirty countries. You can see it right here.” He paused. I stood there gawking a moment, trying to think of a question to ask, and he seemed to want to give me the chance. “If you see anything,” he went on, going back to rummaging through pictures, “anything at all that you think might work for the article, don’t hesitate to say so.” It was on me again. I didn’t know what to say. I thought of how long the plane flight would be to get from where we were to the horn of South America. I thought about the big black ocean of the south pole, how looking over it would be like looking into outer space. I thought of sunrises and sunsets, cream-colored, over lands forgotten to a continental shift. But I couldn’t come up with a single question. It was all right there, ready for me, but what could I do? “Take a look,” he said, coming over with a gloss print. It was a picture from maybe twenty years ago; there was a festival going on. Mr. Watts was in a white suit with a hat and bowtie, coming out of a crowd, looking ready to devour the camera. “Eh, whad’ya think?” “That’s the best one,” I said. “It’ll do.” He put it in a plastic envelope and let me have it. “So then. We’re done?” He flashed me his jester’s smile. I saw him all at once in a hundred dark images on the walls. I couldn’t see the faces, mostly, but I recognized the shape of the legs, the stance. It was the same in almost all of them. [hr] “I wish you had come along with me,” I told Joann. “It’s a great way to get to know your customers.” She shook her head, and her little ponytail bobbed with it. “I ain’t going in that man’s house.” “You have to take risks in life, Joann. We get people in here all the time who might be Allen Ginsberg or somebody. They hide themselves, you know.” “Mhm.” I said, “He has rodent skulls on in the wall in this living room. How cool is that?” She glared at me with her sandy eyes. “You expect me to go to a house with skulls on the wall?” “They’re not menacing.” “They’re [i]bones[/i],” she said, slamming her palm down on the tech bar counter and trying hard not to smile. “For all you know he probably found those things in his backyard before you came over.” “He was a perfect gentleman the whole time,” I replied, preening myself. “Maybe if you kept rat bones in your sala you’d be a little bit nicer, too.” She burst into a laugh put her hand on my bicep. “Shut up, will you?” [hr] For some reason—maybe just because things have had time to settle—I’ve been thinking of Mr. Watts again, lately. I called him to give him an update on his Wikipedia project; I hadn’t seen him in a good while. He picked up the phone with, “Mhm.” When he recognized me he saluted me and said, “I’m not going to come in today. I just got back from my tenth surgery. I’ve got a catheter in my dick, man. It’s big, and it hurts.” I said okay. I considered going to his house again to show him what I’d been working on, but decided against it, with him stuck to a catheter and all. The page went live for about a month before the moderators decided to take it down for being a vanity article. I tried to make it as credible as I could. To that end, I discovered that there is a name for people who collect stamps—a “philatelist”. I was as proud as he was happy that the article went up. I could officially say that I had gotten a man into the Internet encyclopedia. But I’ve been thinking about him and the ice caps, and about that catheter in his dick. I see him in a still moment, without throwing anything onto him. It’s hard to be serious about these things sometimes.