by Jamie Metzl
“Let me think about it,” she says, putting two fingers to her right temple in faux contemplation. “It’s coming.”
I smirk painfully, shake my head, and turn to walk away, sensing that Martina is just marking territory like an alpha dog. I’m not in the mood to get pissed on.
“Richie,” she says in a softer tone, “I’m teasing you.”
Despite her perpetual antagonism, I have to admit, grudgingly, that I like Martina Hernandez in spite of myself. She may not be well educated, but she is dogged and has worked her way up from answering phones in circulation to being a senior editor, no small feat even in a dying industry like this.
“What did you find out?”
“Not much. Dead body of young girl. Needle mark on her arm, so it could be Blue Magic, but she doesn’t look like any of the others I’ve seen.”
Martina’s ears perk up. “When can you confirm?”
“The autopsy should take a few days, but I’m trying to figure things out earlier than that.”
I can see Martina weighing the options of whether this is a Blue Magic case and therefore a worthwhile story, or not and probably in her mind just a waste of our time. “All right,” she says deliberately, tilting her head to the side, “just do a short piece for now. We’ll only need more if there’s a story.”
“Yes’m,” I say sarcastically, making an oblique reference to my subservient status that she ignores.
“The clock’s ticking, Jorge. We don’t need a dissertation. Some things are what they are.”
I ignore the dissertation comment, shake my head, then walk toward my cubicle, following the route I probably should have selected in the first place and wondering how I got here and what the hell I’m doing.
After Astrid’s death I’d drifted through life without a destination, doing odd jobs around Davis to keep me in my run-down apartment and away from Glendale, passing through a series of almost relationships with a series of women I now hardly remember, listening obsessively to Bach, smoking marijuana when I felt particularly shitty, and pretending with the few of my friends who’d stuck around that college had never really ended and the terrifying expanse of life was not looming before us.
Some drifters stay up all night drinking, others dissolve into video games. I became obsessed with voraciously reading everything I came across as if getting lost in a book, any book, was better than facing the abyss of my little sister’s murder or playing the scene over in my mind again and again, wondering whether I could have saved her. I read my way through mountains of crappy thrillers, heaps of biographies, stacks of manga, reading with a fervor to take me anywhere but where I was. But nowhere could I get as ecstatically lost as in the most obscure of philosophy books. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, Rawls, Spinoza—nothing was too dense. I dove in as if exploring an underwater cave, only half wanting to ever make it back to the surface.
As I started on my PhD at Davis, philosophy became even more of a new world for me to inhabit, a series of existential puzzles that kept my painful memories of Astrid, my sense of guilt, life itself at a safe distance. But without a bridge between that world and the world that any child could recognize as the real one, my work left me no way back once I began to heal. Over the five years getting my degree and three years as a postdoc writing obscure articles on the subjective nature of existence, my world of escape began to feel increasingly like a glass prison separating me from life in a more real world I felt an increasing yearning to revisit.
So I escaped to what I’d thought was a more concrete existence, but I’m not sure if coming to the Star was a landing or if I’m still falling without realizing it, the way our planet feels stable enough when you’re standing on it but is in fact hurtling through space at a fantastic speed.
But if I feel bad about it, I can’t help but offload the feeling as I approach Joseph Abraham’s desk.
Shit flows downhill and only scientists call it gravity.
3
“Abraham,” I bark in my best drill sergeant voice.
He straightens in his chair with a jolt.
“Yes, sir.”
I feel guilty. Clearly I’ve triggered some kind of atavistic response drilled into Indian schoolchildren by the distant legacies of harsh nuns wielding sticks.
I place my hand on his shoulder. “I need your help,” I say in a softer voice.
He exhales.
Joseph Abraham is on a work visa from India. He’d graduated from Mizzou with a Master’s degree in journalism and needed a job to keep from being sent home. We’d hired him for little more than minimum wage and he was grateful.
Short and pudgy yet sturdy like a bulldog, Joseph has thousand-year-old eyes that nestle deep in his round honey-brown face topped by a mop of curly jet-black hair, collectively somehow creating the impression he’s been molded from the earth or emerged organically as the reincarnation of an ancient tree. I’d teased him in the beginning about having two first names and taking everything so seriously, but the earnestness of his responses eventually sucked the fun out of the whole teasing enterprise. It also changed things that I’ve become ever more dependent on this quiet, resourceful, thoroughly decent young-old man. In spite of his twenty-seven years of age, there is nothing about Joseph—the way he sits, stands, walks, his clothes, his overall demeanor—that suggests youth. Joseph carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, which, in a perverse way, connects him firmly to the ground.
“What did you find?” I’d sent Joseph MaryLee’s name from my car and asked him to dig up everything he could on her.
“MaryLee Stock,” he says in his lyrically accented English, “age twenty-four, from Springfield, Missouri, attended Springfield High School, 640/680/690 SAT scores, right field for the Springfield Tigers women’s softball team, only child. MaryLee is . . . was, getting her Master’s in pharmacy at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, second year, section four. Adopted as an infant from Romania when she was three years old, no information on her biological parents. Adoptive father died when she was twelve. Her mother never remarried, works at the YMCA.”
I have no idea what they taught guys like Joseph at the Indian Institute of Technology, but I am always amazed at how much information he can gather so quickly from sources I can’t imagine are open to the public. Of course, I made him promise to always work through anonymizing web portals and to feel free to “work from home” when he needed “extra time with the wife and kids” he doesn’t have.
“Here is the Galileo GPS image of her mother’s house in Springfield. The address is at the bottom. This is her class schedule. Here are her grades for the last three semesters.”
“What kind of images do you have of her?” I ask.
“Surprisingly little,” Joseph says, tapping up the photos on his wall screen. “These are from the Springfield High yearbooks from 2014 to 2017. Here’s the photo in the UMKC system.”
I feel uneasily voyeuristic as I look into MaryLee’s wide blue eyes shining brightly above her kind half smile. How could she have known when taking this photo that such a tragic fate awaited her?
“I couldn’t find much video,” Joseph adds, “only this clip from the Springfield School of Dance tap recital when she was ten in 2009.” He rolls his finger along his u.D, and a video box appears on his cubicle wall.
“Somewhere beyond the sea . . .” The music starts playing as the three young girls tap across the podium in glittery blue halter tops and green skirts. It’s immediately clear that MaryLee is the one in the middle. Her long, black hair flows a moment behind each of her movements. At first, her smile is self-conscious as her attention points inward to count each step, but she warms up as the music plays, releasing herself to the joy of the music and movement. By the end of the short song her feet are tapping like whips, her arms flowing with abandon. She and the others reach their hands into the air as the music stops and the muffled applause is heard in the background. I watch her scan the audience with a wide, jubilant smile as the clip cuts.
&n
bsp; I shake my head from side to side. “Anything else?”
“That’s it, boss.”
“Great start,” I say.
Joseph looks up.
“Thank you,” I add.
His mouth twitches up at the edges for a quick moment then recedes.
I take the papers and settle into my cubicle to dictate my first story. Just the facts, ma’am. Young woman found dead, no comment from police, name withheld by police request, police investigating. The story doesn’t seem like much, definitely neither reflecting the loss nor “juicy” enough to make me feel confident about my future.
Not that anyone in this business has much right to feel confident no matter what we do.
Few of us were big fans of the News Protection Act of 2021, but the struggling newspapers across the country simply could not survive without financial support, and only the federal government was willing to provide it. Sure, we mocked the requirement pushed by the AARP and the unions that subsidized news organizations continue their paper editions and hated the idea of a national security exemption in exchange for the subsidies, but that was the final offer and no one wanted to face the alternative.
Even with all of us straying into new territory because of shrinking staffs from the budget cuts, I’d been pretty cautious when Martina asked me to start covering crime stories a few months ago. But I know all too well, as the rounds of layoffs continue, that a journalist with a job is a lucky one.
An image on the wall catches my eye as I head toward the newsroom exit.
The south wall is one enormous screen divided into four quadrants. The two bottom sections show native Great Plains prairie grasses blowing in the wind, but the image in the top left has become strangely familiar these past months. Senator Carlton King is addressing yet another rally of the faithful at a prayer vigil in yet another stop of his relentless bus tour around the country. The images are always the same—the weeping men and women, the hands in the air, the stoic, contained voice of Senator King as he lays out his indictment of America’s highway to hell and charts the path out of darkness.
“When God created the earth, did he want us to poison it with dangerous chemicals, to bake our planet in greenhouse gases?”
“No,” the assembled voices reply.
“Did he want us to murder the most precious of his creations when they were defenseless babies held in the protective embrace of their mothers’ wombs?”
“No,” the voices wail.
“Did he want us to create new life in laboratories, to challenge the sanctity of the world he so lovingly created?”
“No!” they shriek.
I stand absorbed in this strange conservative revival spreading across the country.
Who would have thought, I wonder, that a religious movement could have become so powerful in 2023 America? But then again, who could have thought the mighty United States could have defaulted on its debts in 2019, or that China, America’s biggest rival, could have led the International Monetary Fund and a group of creditor nations in demanding such major reforms in order to keep lending us money? Most shocking of all, who could have imagined that instead of fighting against these tough conditions, the centrist wings of the Democratic and Republican parties would have come together to field a national unity slate of candidates for the 2020 elections based on the twin themes of national competitiveness and national revival, or that the first bill passed by the new team, the National Competitiveness Act, could have done so much to start turning things around? It’s been almost three years, and I still can hardly believe it myself.
The national unity platform was good news for America, but not every American perceived it that way. The 2020 Republican primary split the Republican party right down the middle, with Senator Carlton King, the powerful Missouri senator and ultimate political operator desperately seeking the Republican presidential nomination, denouncing then Ohio governor and soon-to-be-president Bart Lewis for selling out Republican and American moral values by making common cause with the Democrats.
“Or did he want us to follow a path of righteousness?” King asks, his tirade escalating, “to love and respect the great bounty he has provided, to remake, to reincarnate America once again as the great beacon on the hill?”
The collective “Yes” sounds almost sexual.
If the nation and the parties were coming together on the big things, perhaps it was inevitable that new fault lines would emerge. King read the political wind of American conservatives, largely evangelical Christians, growing uneasy with rapid technological and social change and blasted Lewis in the 2020 Republican primaries for betraying America’s “Christian values” and raised the culture issues—abortion, stem cell, synthetic biology, biotech, genetics research—to a fever pitch, leading religious-tinged marches on biotechnology research centers and abortion clinics around the country. He condemned the National Bioethics Commission as a “servant of sin” and led a successful campaign to have it abolished by Congress.
King lost the 2020 nomination by a hair and entered into an uneasy truce with nominee and then president Lewis and, the ultimate stake in the heart, Lewis’s Democratic vice president Jack Alvarez, a declared agnostic. But now, less than four years later, King is charging hard at President Lewis in advance of the April 2024 Republican primary with his army of the righteous marching right behind him.
“Then I need you with me on this great crusade to bring this great country back to God’s path. Are you with me?” King yells.
“Yes,” the voices proclaim.
King drops his voice to a near whisper. “Are you with me?” he says powerfully, staring directly into the camera.
The assembled follow his tone, now completely under his control. “Yes.”
The scene sends shivers down my spine.
The camera scans the weeping crowd that looks far more like faithful at a religious revival than party advocates at a political rally.
“Then we march on together,” King says quietly, his body becoming more erect with each word. “God Bless America,” he bellows, then pauses for a dramatic moment before delivering, once again, his movement’s thundering punch line. “God—shall—overcome.”
The assembled stand silent until the familiar music starts playing and the singing begins.
I feel myself almost moved but fight the impulse. If I who loathe what King stands for am feeling this, I wonder how the average American Christian must be responding. The polls are starting to show the answer. Positively.
I may be marching on, but only out to my car to head home.
My little place on Thirty-Sixth and Charlotte in Hyde Park isn’t much, Adirondack style with an exposed deck I hardly use and a central atrium that always feels empty to me.
The neighborhood was once the proud domain of blue-collar whites, then it became part of the hood after desegregation, and it’s been slowly creeping back over the past years. It’s ironic that crappy neighborhoods like this can reintegrate as formerly wealthier people drop down the income scale. Leaving this neighborhood was once an aspiration; now just staying here is.
I pop the trunk and grab my two bags. Everyone else in the world is taking the garbage out. I must be the only guy taking the garbage in.
My u.D vibrates as I push open the door. I tap my wrist and feel the silence.
“Mom,” I say after a few moments, “are you okay?” I know the answer but always ask anyway.
“I’m okay, janum,” she says unconvincingly. The rapid-fire blows of my sister’s murder and my father’s death knocked the wind out of her. She’s a strong woman at her core, but it always takes her a few moments when we talk to gather her momentum.
My mind scrambles to fill the void. What can I say? That I’m investigating the senseless death of a young woman? I revert to our cultural default. “Are you eating, Mother?” Seventeen years ago, before everything, she must have been a good thirty pounds heavier.
“Yes, janum,” she says.
I know she’s
lying.
Her maternal instinct kicks in. “How are you, jeegarus?”
“I’m good, Mother,” I say, slightly concerned she’s still calling me her liver after all these years and not sure whether I am okay or not but happy to shift the conversation toward me.
When I speak with my mother, I feel even more acutely that somehow my life seems to dangle over a precipice dividing my painful past and unknown future. I remain wracked with guilt that I am living away and only bring myself to visit her in California once every couple of years, yet am painfully aware during my occasional visits that my mother’s mournful love has the potential to smother me.
“How is Shoonig?” I ask stupidly. Shoonig, the high-strung shih tzu I bought for my mother as an unsuspecting puppy six years ago, has become my yapping alter ego, pathetically standing in for my absent presence.
Her voice picks up as if mention of the dog has reconnected her to life. “He’s a good dog. It’s our fate to keep each other company.”
I feel a twinge of guilt at my mother’s subtle barb, painfully aware that I’ve outsourced the task of minding my mother to a fur ball with the IQ of a two-year-old.
“No one is an island, my janum.” My mother catches me off guard with her pivot.
“I know, Mother,” I say, sensing where she is heading.
“Life is difficult sometimes, and it’s okay to lean on people who love you” she continues. “Did you know that married people live longer than single people, that people with pets live longer than people who don’t have them?”
“I know, Mother.” I’m not sure she hears me.
“Even people with plants live longer than people without them.”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to for this line of argument to arrive at its conclusion.
“Have you heard anything from Toni?” she asks.
“Mother, you know we split up six months ago.” I try to keep a measured voice but sense she’s not convinced.
“She sounded to me like a dandeegin. Nobody is perfect. Even you, my janum, are not 100 percent completely perfect.”
