“I think you should. In this case, at least.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Malcolm, but I’m not.”
“Lydia, I know it’s on the line, but—”
“On the line?” Her dark eyes had flashed like the warning lights at a railroad crossing. “Malcolm, this isn’t on the line. This is so far over the line you can’t even see the line from here. You’d have to board a plane to get back to the line!”
“Come on, Lydia,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect them to understand.” He cocked his head to indicate the white editors, the whole white world, beyond the walls of her office. “But you should get where I’m coming from.”
Now thunderclouds rolled into those eyes, and he knew he had gone too far. “Do not,” she said, “play blacker than thou with me, Malcolm Toussaint. You know better. There is no form of condescension, paternalism, sexism, or racism that I don’t know firsthand. I had to climb over all of that to get to sit in this chair. And the one good thing about it is, after all of that, I don’t have to prove who I am, to you, or anybody else.”
“Lydia, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just saying—”
“I know what you meant, Malcolm. You should go home, take a few days off. When’s the last time you had a vacation?”
“Maybe I could rewrite it? Soften it a little?”
“No. This piece will not run in my paper. Go home.”
He had left, but he had not gone home. Instead, he had gone to a bar he knew on the South Side, where he had spent the afternoon staring morosely into one beer after another. And there, he had hatched a plan. When he returned to the Post offices in the big building on Michigan Avenue, it was late. Very late. Copy editors were pulling on their heavy coats, the police reporter shutting down the scanners, the janitor pushing a big trashcan between the mostly empty desks. The newsroom was quiet. The “daily miracle” had been accomplished once again.
He had slipped past them into Bob’s empty office, closed the blinds against the leakage of light, and fired up Bob’s computer. Seven months ago, Bob had given him his password, with its administrative access to the Post’s systems, to fix some glitch in a column Bob didn’t have time to get to. And sure enough, Bob had not changed his password in all those months. Malcolm typed it in—Bob_dylan#1—and Bob’s desktop flashed into view.
Malcolm’s original plan had been to pluck the banned column from the deleted items basket and put it in its customary spot on the editorial page, back of the CitySide section. But sitting there at Bob’s desk, signed on under Bob’s name, he had a better idea. Or at least, a bolder one. It was the kind of idea you get when you’ve had a few and some voice in your mind says, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and you nod to yourself because that seems, under the circumstances, sage advice.
So he had called up the front page, which had already been transmitted to the pressroom. If the pressroom chief was ready to roll the presses and saw that Bob—Malcolm, actually—had the file open and called upstairs to find out what was going on, Malcolm knew he would be well and truly screwed, so he had to work fast, and he did. With a few deft keystrokes and clicks, Malcolm stripped a story off the bottom of the front page—some wire piece about voters who were still undecided on the eve of the election—and dropped his forbidden column in its place.
And then, even though time was critical, even though the pressroom would be looking for this page any second, he paused. There was a moment, a moment of absolute clarity, when he knew what he was about to do and what would happen and what it would cost him and that doing it was absolutely insane. A moment. And then he pressed send.
Now, five hours later, on not quite four hours of restless sleep, he sat in his car and regarded the end result. He had thought he might feel some rough sense of satisfaction, even vindication, at getting the column in the paper. He was disappointed to realize that all he felt was the same fatigue that had walked with him like a shadow for so long now, the sense that he had spent his entire life like a tire spinning in snow, kicking up a great fantail, making a lot of noise, and getting absolutely nowhere. He felt hollow, empty as the wind that moved the skeletal branches of the trees outside.
Malcolm tossed the paper onto the passenger seat and stomped the gas. The car leapt forward into the darkened street.
He had the city to himself for another hour or so. Nobody on the streets, few cars on the road. A police car going the other way, an old white van with rust patches on the hood following behind him, a battered old Toyota parked at a gas pump, a tired-looking woman in a waitress uniform slumped against it.
Was it really so long ago they had thought they would change the world, people—kids—like him? Young men and women with big Afros and Jewfros and long blonde locks and strident voices singing songs of peace and love and revolution, a whole generation of them, fresh and raw, untainted by the failures and compromises of their parents’ generation, utterly convinced that they were something this old world had never seen, a new people thinking new thoughts that had never been thought before.
Was it really 40 years since they had raised fists and chanted “Power to the people”?
And “Give peace a chance”?
And “Off the establishment”?
And “Revolution”?
Forty years. And look what had become of them. Look what had become of him, old and tired and driving a trophy car away from a trophy house and socking away money into a 401k. They had been so smug about their power to change the world.
Malcolm heaved a sigh. He thought of turning on the radio, filling the small space with jazz or Motown or even the ceaseless drone of the news. He left it off. The silence fit his mood. He got on the expressway. Chicago flew by.
Moments later, he pulled up to the entrance of the parking structure beneath the Post building. He swiped his ID card and when the gate lifted, he was mildly relieved. It had occurred to him they might already have disabled his access to the building.
The night man on the security desk gave him a curious look but only nodded as Malcolm swiped his ID card again and went through the turnstiles. Riding up on the elevator, he wondered idly what that look had been about. Maybe the guard had seen the paper already and knew that Malcolm was dead meat walking. Maybe the man just wondered what anybody was doing here at this unholy hour of the morning.
The newsroom was quiet as a cemetery and Malcolm felt not unlike a ghost as he wandered through. He was tempted to linger, to look around, to press the memory of this place into his mind like an image in a scrapbook (did anyone use scrapbooks anymore?). After all, the newsroom of the Chicago Post had been his home away from home for more than half his life and he knew he would never be here, never be allowed here, again. But there was, he knew, no time for that. So he retrieved two empty boxes from the mailroom, let himself into his office, and went briskly, methodically, to work.
He took the photos first. There was Marie’s high school picture, showing a stunning teenaged girl with blue eye shadow, a reddish Afro, and a soft smile. There was Jimmy Carter jabbing a finger at Malcolm at some contentious point in their interview. There was a family photo with the kids at his son Miles’s college graduation. There was Malcolm shaking hands with Bill Clinton at some awards ceremony. There was the signed photo of Michael Jordan towering over Malcolm, draping an arm upon his shoulder. With each photo, Malcolm had to remind himself not to stop and look, not to lose himself in the memories the images contained.
He looked at his awards, the statues and wall plaques trumpeting this triumph or that. Here was an NAACP Image Award for one of his books. Here were the citations for his Pulitzers. Here were prizes from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Press Club of Atlantic City, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, honorary doctorates from a half dozen universities.
Two boxes would not do it, he realized distractedly. He would have to go back to the mailroom and get more.
In a minute. First, he went through his pap
er files, then threw his Rolodex and his notebooks into a box. He did not worry about computer files. Though he had learned to use them, Malcolm did not especially trust computers. He understood the technology well enough intellectually, but still, the whole idea of storing information digitally, keeping it in some form that you could not touch and thus assure yourself it was there, struck him as a leap of faith, one he could not bring himself to make. You had to take the machine’s word that it had your stuff, that it would not inexplicably take a mood and banish your hard work to nonexistence. That was why he saved a hard copy of everything he did. When they heard this, people always called him “old-fashioned,” but he had been vindicated more than once by the agonized, inconsolable moaning of some colleague whose irreplaceable data had been lost to hard drive failures.
But it wasn’t just the reliability of computers he distrusted. It was the way they had changed everything.
You couldn’t talk to a person on the telephone anymore. You had to talk to a machine. You had to use a machine to pay a bill, buy a concert ticket, write a letter. And everything was wired up these days, interconnected. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to be the best journalist you could be, to do the work and put it out there and let it speak for itself. Suddenly, you were supposed to keep a Facebook page and answer emails and moderate discussions on your message board.
Malcolm had stopped saying these things aloud. He knew how they made him sound. He was conscious of the world moving faster, receding from him, as if he were a sprinter grown winded. The worst part was, he didn’t care.
A sigh. Despite reminding himself to hurry, despite knowing he did not have time to linger over photos, he lifted the picture of Marie out of the box, stared into the eyes he had loved for so many years, that lush smile, a teenaged girl facing the rising sun of an unknown future with the kind of confidence that comes only when you’re too young to know any better. It was, he had always told her, the best picture she had ever taken. What would she think of what he had done?
And all at once, this idea of slipping in to pack up his office did not seem such a smart thing after all. There was too much. It would take too long. He kept getting lost in reverie and it was making him sad. Besides, he realized suddenly, where would he put multiple boxes? He was driving a Corvette.
Let someone else pack up his office. Let them ship his stuff to his house. Hell, they owed him that much.
So in the end, he didn’t take the notebooks or the Rolodex. In the end, he only took the picture of the kids and the one of Marie. He turned off the light in his office without looking back and went out to the elevator. As he was reaching to touch the button, the door opened and there was Amy Landingham, sipping from a tall cup of some designer coffee.
She was a young reporter, a 20-something white girl—woman—with a ponytail, big glasses, and a reputation for doggedly chasing down facts other people could not get. Probably, she was coming in early to get the jump on some big project or other. Everyone said she would go places, assuming the newspaper industry survived long enough to take her there.
Malcolm barely knew her, but she had approached him once the week after she was hired and said something that warmed him inside like cocoa after an ice storm. “You’re the whole reason I’m here,” she had told Malcolm shyly, looking at him up over the rim of her glasses. It turned out he had spoken at her high school career day a few years before and had made such an impression with his passion for journalism that she had decided her future then and there. He hadn’t even remembered giving the speech.
Now she stopped short, as surprised to see him as he was to see her. No, he realized on second glance, it wasn’t just surprise. She had seen the paper. He could tell. And that look on her face, was it…hurt? Pity?
“Malcolm,” she said. Her voice was stiff like new denim and he decided the look was probably anger.
“Amy,” he said.
“Awfully early,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I came in to get some things.” He moved past her to grab the elevator door before it could close. “You have a good day.” He stepped inside, stabbed at the button.
Amy was looking at him. “Malcolm,” she said finally, “I have to ask. Why did you…?”
“I just got tired,” he said.
“Tired? Tired of what?”
He was pondering how to answer that when, to his great relief, the elevator door closed.
Malcolm rode down to the lobby with that look on her face before his eyes. It was, he suddenly realized, the one thing he had not considered. He had thought about how his bosses would react, he had thought about what would happen to his career, he had thought about the controversy that was sure to come. All those things, he had thought through, and accepted. But he hadn’t thought about people like Amy. Now, walking out past the security gate, pressing the button for the parking elevator and riding it down, she was all he could think about.
“You’re the whole reason I’m here,” she had said that time, gazing up at him in adoration, like meeting him was meeting Michael Jordan.
Don’t blame me, kid. That, he told himself now, was what he should have said. He should have punctured that puppy dog look. He’d have been doing her a favor.
But Malcolm’s anger would not hold. How many Amys had he met over the years? How many times had they told him they admired him for the stands he had taken on same-sex marriage, race, Islamophobia, guns, abortion, women’s rights, global warming? Hundreds? Thousands? “A prophetic voice,” someone had said. “You speak for me,” someone else had said. “You make me feel like I am not alone.” He had heard it many times. So many times, he realized with a sudden jolt, that at some point over the years he had stopped hearing it altogether.
But he heard it now, as the elevator doors opened and he strode across the empty parking garage. He heard it anew, heard it clearly, and for the first time since he had done what he’d done, he wondered what those people would say, what they would feel, what they would think of him now.
Lowering himself into the car, wincing automatically from the pain, he realized all at once that he had misread Amy’s face. That wasn’t hurt shining from her eyes. It wasn’t pity, or even anger.
It was betrayal. It was the look you give someone when they have let you down.
She had trusted him—no, she had believed in him, which was worse—and he had proven her wrong to do so.
Lord, what have I done?
The thought punched through him like a shaft of sunlight through rain-clouds. He tried not to think it, as he started the car with the familiar roar that always made him feel better about himself, but did not so much as touch him now.
What did I do?
The thought was relentless. Because suddenly, he knew: It wasn’t the acclaim that mattered. It wasn’t the prestige.
He accelerated into the 5:30 a.m. streets.
It wasn’t even the career. No, it was the trust. At a time when, increasingly, nobody believes in anything, people, some people at least, had believed in him. At a time when everyone in media is screaming and no one listens, they had listened to him. And with a few beers in his gut and a surfeit of anger in his heart, he had destroyed that.
Malcolm stopped at a light. He was barely conscious of the tears on his cheeks.
The light changed. He drove toward home in a stupor. The sun was coming up. There were still barely any cars on the street. An old Cadillac of an indeterminate color limping in the opposite direction. An imperious black SUV passing him on the right. A white van with rust spots on the hood following behind him.
He stopped at another light, wondering—and he couldn’t believe this was the first time he had asked himself—what he would do with himself now, having killed his own career. Teach? No. Who would want him? Write a stupid book like Jayson Blair to explain himself? No, he’d explain himself—as best he could, anyway—to whomever he gave his first, probably only, media interview. CNN, he was thinking. Or maybe the New York Times. Maybe both. Maybe do
two interviews, one for broadcast, one for print.
And then what? Disappear, he supposed. Go out to California where Miles and Andrea were and get to know his grandkids. Assuming, of course, his son and daughter still wanted to have anything to do with him.
Malcolm made a disgusted sound, recognizing the self-pity rising in him. He had to snap out of it.
He glanced automatically into the rearview mirror and all at once, his eyes went wide. He had time to register the white van coming up behind him, time to realize that it did not seem to be stopping, that it actually seemed to be gathering speed. “Oh, God,” he said. His brain told him to mash the gas pedal. His foot never made it.
The collision came in a shriek of metal. The airbag deployed with a sound like a gunshot. The Corvette lurched forward from the impact. His body flew. Something punched him hard in the temple. There was a flash of lightning. And then…
Darkness, silence, wetness.
Blood?
His heart thumped heavily.
Darkness. Breathing, pain.
Voices.
“Hurry up! Hurry up!”
“I’m hurryin’.”
“Get him out of there!”
“I got him. No worries.”
Darkness.
And then he was briefly aware of the door pulling open with a groan of twisted metal and a strange face leaning over him. Strange, because it was immobile, did not move. A white man with a white beard, his broad face frozen in a cheerful, awful smile.
Hands were on him. He was being pulled from his car. He protested. Thought he protested, at least, but he wasn’t sure.
Pain. Oh, God, pain. His leg was on fire. He moaned, heard himself moan. They did not lay him on the street, loosen his collar, call 911. They were…carrying him somewhere?
Darkness was edging back in and Malcolm welcomed it for the relief oblivion promised. In the instant before it claimed him, he realized that he recognized that strange face, indeed, that he had known it all his life. But he had to be wrong. It didn’t make any sense.
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