by Jonathan Dee
“Probably not,” Ashok said. “There are dozens of hours of these tapes, from what I’m told. I don’t think we want to engage them on the level of authenticity. Anyway, the first course of action, in this type of situation, is to dirty up the messenger, if that’s possible. And here it seems most definitely possible. Everybody hates Murdoch. Everybody values privacy, and this whole dispute has its root in illegally bugged convos, which are basically stolen goods.”
“What’s on the tapes?” Shelley asked.
Ashok frowned. “See, even just asking that moves the conversation—”
“I know,” Arturo said. “Still, it’s information they should probably have.”
Ashok sighed. “Price-fixing,” he said impatiently. “Buried in these hundreds of pages are some arcane discussions about price-fixing. But that is information that stays within these walls, because it is not relevant to the problem at hand.”
The hell it isn’t, Helen thought, but she stayed quiet as the requisite tasks were assigned, none of them to her. This was her first real experience with a corporate job and its attendant hierarchies, and her chief aspiration for now was to avoid giving offense. Older or not, she wasn’t so proud as to assume that her instincts were better than other people’s. Ashok enlisted Shelley’s help in writing an anonymous blog that would attack the Journal and Murdoch for their greed in rushing to cash in on someone else’s crime and thus interfering with the workings of the justice system. The fictional blogger, claiming to have a mole inside the Journal, would release piecemeal everything the Crisis Management group knew about conflicts inside the paper, as well as some other allusive nuggets Ashok would simply make up, for instance the suggestion that the Journal might have paid for the tapes not after the fact but before. Two other members of the team were directed to set up a nonprofit entity called Americans for a Responsible Press, which would begin placing print ads exploiting the average citizen’s push-polled contempt for the immoral tactics of the media. They talked about staging an actual rally outside the Journal editorial offices; but that would mean hiring actors, with obvious attendant risks, and so Arturo wistfully declared that proposal tabled for now.
They carried these plans out over the course of ten days, never knowing how close the Journal was to publishing its story. Helen spent the better part of those days on a different case, arranging photo ops for a hedge fund manager who had started a charitable foundation to overhaul public schools, first in the city and then, after what he viewed as his inevitable success at home, across the country. The photo ops had to be the sort at which no reporter could ask this client a question, for his chronic problem was that he couldn’t keep himself from publicly insulting the teachers, administrators, families, and even children he had supposedly devoted his time and expertise to helping. “Charity” seemed to Helen an odd word to use in connection with what seemed more like a campaign of aggression, but she tried to see the best in people, and surely the goal was a worthy one. She went to every ten-thirty meeting and offered her update when asked, even though what she was doing didn’t seem to her strictly like crisis management work.
She ate in the cafeteria with Shelley and Ashok once or twice a week. The food was remarkably good, and their youth gave her cover. Shelley was maybe twenty-eight, but what made her really imposing was her level of physical fitness. Her arms alone, at which Helen had to remind herself to stop staring, must have amounted to a part-time job. Ashok, whenever the subject came up, looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a gym membership that he never had time to use. Though Shelley in particular loved to pump Helen for her backstory, neither she nor Ashok ever made much reference to their own lives outside the office. Once, when Shelley got up for another Vitaminwater, Helen—curious how well these two work friends even knew each other—asked Ashok with a conspiratorial smile what was up with that tattoo on the back of Shelley’s neck. Not to sound like an old lady, but weren’t they generally supposed to be somewhere less visible? Did everything these days have to be so out there? He did his best to smile back at her before answering.
“She lost a child,” he said. “Those are his initials.”
And as chastened as she was by that, Helen never forgot Ashok’s weak but carefully complicit smile, which was obviously meant to help her feel less guilty in retrospect for having accidentally made light of something tragic. She was right about him, she decided.
Her salary was now almost ninety thousand a year, plus insurance and access to a car service and other assorted little freebies such as coffee that her colleagues didn’t even take into consideration but that Helen, not long ago, was penciling into her budget every week. Suddenly there was money in her and Sara’s lives that was not only sufficient but dependable. Certainly they could now afford to live somewhere nicer than the cramped two-room rental they’d been in since January. Looking for a place to live in Manhattan, though, was absurdly complicated and labor-intensive. Helen wasn’t really working longer hours now than she had been at Harvey’s office, but she did have much less freedom to take off for an hour or two in the middle of the day in response to yet another excited phone call from some broker.
“There’s Brooklyn,” Sara said when they were discussing it at breakfast one Sunday.
“Sweetheart,” Helen said, cutting in half a warm everything bagel, “I am going to let you in on a little secret. I am too old to figure out where everything is in Brooklyn.”
In the end, she decided that another rental, even if it were bigger than this one, would only put them through the trauma of packing and moving again; they would wait until it seemed reasonable to start looking for a place to buy. That day might already have been upon them had the sale of their old house in Rensselaer Valley, upon which their original plans had naïvely depended, not fallen through. The buyers had started postponing the closing with demands that escalated in ridiculousness—a second well test, a certificate from a tree surgeon, replacement of the foam insulation in the garage—and when Bonifacio began skeptically looking into them, he discovered that the husband had recently lost his job, and their financing had been pulled. He wanted to tell them to take a hike, but Helen had suggested waiting to see if they could bounce back and get approved for another mortgage. They couldn’t, though, and eventually they withdrew entirely, and Helen had earned her lawyer’s scorn by returning this time-wasting couple’s deposit even though they weren’t entitled to it. They had a one-year-old son.
In the end, the Journal mined the bugged phone conversations not for one story but for almost a dozen—one every day for a brutal two weeks, as if to manufacture the fiction that the tapes themselves were still being feverishly transcribed, with the most damning moments reprinted as eye-catching sidebars. It was a war of attrition, which Ashok and his team were ill-equipped to win. His grassroots offensive, however loving the craftsmanship with which it was faked, was roundly ignored. Finally the day came when the CEO of the chip company tendered his resignation, along with most of the board of directors. Apart from a hopeful uptick on the day the resignations themselves were announced, the company’s stock fell steadily through the floor.
Helen took no pleasure in the air of panic and failure that seemed to suffuse the Fishtank during these weeks. She lay low and took meaningless notes. Then one Monday morning Arturo began the ten-thirty meeting by announcing that the chip manufacturer’s reconstituted board of directors had just fired them, and the recriminations began.
“Did anybody besides me even look at that blog?” one group member said disdainfully. “It read like a child wrote it. Even the comments sections were full of people calling bullshit on it.”
“It didn’t matter who wrote it,” said another voice, “or how well. It’s an old-school tactic. It’s a Neanderthal, first-year-business-school-textbook idea. Ivy Lee would have thought it was stale.”
Ashok, clearly panicked, hit the table with the heel of his hand. “How nice to hear from you,” he said, “finally, after all these weeks. I certa
inly didn’t hear a word from you back when we were looking for ideas. Of course it’s much easier to wait like a vulture and then say how you would have done things differently. And Ivy Lee was Ivy Lee for a reason, by the way—”
“Enough,” said Arturo. He stood up from his chair, buttoned his jacket, and turned upon them a stare so ostentatiously cold that a less handsome man could never have pulled it off. “Nobody is getting fired over this,” he said, “so there’s no need to start eating each other. Look. We can argue about strategy in here all we want, but what we do outside this room—what we do in the world—is predicated on belief. Everybody has to pull together, everybody has to believe in the idea at hand just as you would if you thought of it yourself. Everybody has to not just understand but completely internalize what we are fighting for. You can’t be an impartial advocate. You are either all in or you are part of what we’re fighting against. Do you understand what I mean when I use the word ‘belief’? Not a performance, but the real thing. Not ‘I will act as if my client is in the right.’ The public sees through that in a second. And I see through it. Doubt is a cancer, whether it’s doubt in our strategy or doubt in the people we represent. The distinction doesn’t matter. Cancer is cancer. When you walk out of this room in a minute, do it with a sense of your mission on the other side. And if you can’t do that, don’t come back at all.”
He closed his briefcase and left the room. They watched him through the glass walls all the way to the elevator bank. “Wow,” Shelley said. “Extra hot when he’s angry.”
Helen, despite herself, was stirred. There goes a leader of men, she thought. I could never do that job. The more she thought about Arturo’s words, the less sure she felt what he was actually talking about—it was really just sort of a variation on my way or the highway, with a little Messiah complex thrown in—but still, he was right, it wasn’t just about what you said to the world, it was about what was in your heart when you were saying it.
FREEDOM FROM HER FAMILY, freedom from a sense of place, freedom from peers who knew all about her, freedom from familiar objects: all of this had happened to her once before, Sara reflected, but not when she was old enough to remember any of it. “Rebirth” was too strong a word, maybe, but it was both truer and more mischievous to say that she felt like she was up for adoption again.
Here was one of the differences between her parents: she knew she could never figure out her father’s email password in a hundred years, but it had taken her all of five seconds to correctly guess her mother’s, which was “Sara.” Sara sent an email, from her mother’s account, dropping out of the basketball program entirely; she carefully deleted both the sent email and the coach’s understanding reply. She still rode the bus across town every Tuesday and Friday after school, though, usually just to wander in and out of stores or, when the weather got a little warmer, to lie on the grass embankment between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, a spot she found soothing and also far enough from most human traffic that detection wasn’t a worry. Once in a while she’d take a picture of the river and upload it straight to Facebook, less for the benefit of her few friends from school who might see it than just to create some record of where she was. Sometimes these friends would respond, sometimes they wouldn’t, and then one day a few of them came and surprised her en masse, two she knew and three others. They sprinted across the highway like idiots to reach the embankment, rather than go two blocks out of their way to take the underpass.
They sat and watched the boats, Sara’s cheeks growing hot in the midst of them, talking about nothing—mostly waiting for some jogger to go by, or for some middle-aged guy to emerge from below the deck of his weathered boat, so they could fall silent and then mock him after he’d disappeared again. One of them, a boy in a green army jacket and a sad Jewfro that the wind off the Hudson kept shaking like some kind of jello mold, had a pocket-size bottle of Jägermeister with him; but after one swig everybody pretended they were buzzed just so they wouldn’t have to taste it again. Sara’s sort-of-friend and chem lab partner, Tracy, seemed to want to cultivate the impression that she was with one of the other guys, a fellow eighth grader named Cutter (at least that’s what he had named himself), whose family, she’d heard, was more well off than anyone else’s in the school, which, because he was black, probably shouldn’t have seemed ironic but did. Cutter kept catching Sara staring at them, which was not cool; she made herself look instead at the tide racing upriver toward the George Washington Bridge.
She heard his voice on the hill behind her, diluted by the pulse of traffic sounds from the highway, and then she realized he was saying, “What’s her name?”
“Sara,” someone answered him.
“Hey, Sara,” Cutter said, “you live near here?”
She swallowed. “No,” she said, “I’m all the way across town. Not too far from school.”
“So you just like boats?”
She laughed, still without looking at him. “My mom thinks I’m playing in a basketball league,” she said. “But I just come here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. ’Cause I like boats?”
“What about your dad?” Cutter said. “Where’s he think you are?”
“Don’t know,” Sara said, but none of them heard her because they were all yelling at Cutter to try minding his own fucking business and stop asking people personal questions. “This is why no one will hang out with you except us,” the Jewfro guy said.
Next Wednesday in school, Sara was standing in the cafeteria line, which stretched out the door, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, boat girl,” Cutter said. “What’s your first class after lunch?”
“English,” Sara said.
He snorted. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.” He took her hand, which kept her from dwelling too much on anything else that was happening as they walked straight through the kitchen and out the fire door onto Seventy-seventh Street. He hailed a cab going west, and at first she thought he wanted, for some bizarre romantic reason, to go back to the embankment by the boat basin where they’d met, but no, the cab kept going south all the way to the Hudson ferry slips, where he bought them two tickets for the Circle Line. They sat on the deck—it was two-thirds empty, no one but out-of-season tourists and a couple of lame class trips—and circled the island of Manhattan, watching the sun split by the peaked tops of the buildings, the silent cars, the way the crosstown streets would open up to their full depth just at the moment you passed them and then flatten out again. Cutter pushed her hair out of her eyes with one finger. Sara felt a bit like she’d heard drugs were supposed to make you feel—dangerously receptive, like in the future it was going to be too hard to resist knowing that you had the power to feel this way again.
“Better, right?” Cutter said. She looked at him quizzically. “To be the one on the boat,” he explained, “getting looked at by the people on the shore.”
He had a thing for boats, it turned out, even though they were no great novelty for him since his family owned one, which they kept at their place out in Sag Harbor. It was a little disappointing to Sara to realize that that was the initial basis of his interest in her—that she reflected an interest of his own. On the last Friday of the nominal basketball season, he took her to ride the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry itself was about the least quaint thing imaginable, and the harbor was surprisingly crowded, and if you looked too closely at the water it was pretty full of garbage, but Sara loved it anyway, in large part because of the uncharacteristic smile it put on Cutter’s face. When you got to Staten Island there was really nothing to do—some storefronts, an empty baseball stadium, MTA buses that went God only knew where—but there was the ride back to look forward to, with Manhattan expanding in front of you, as you tried to pick out from the forest of mismatched structures along the water the one small maw toward which the ferry was pointed.
She’d never been anybody’s girlfriend before, and she wasn’t sure she was now; the most
official-seeming aspect of it was that Tracy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. She and Cutter never went to each other’s homes, though if the weather turned wintry again and they kept hanging out like this, she could see how that was going to emerge as an issue. For now they dated the way she imagined two homeless people might date. The first time he tried seriously to make out with her, they were on a bench on the East River promenade, and she was freezing. She pulled her head back and looked into his desire-clouded eyes.
“What is your real name?” she said, stalling. “I don’t see how I can kiss a guy when I don’t even know what name your mother gave you.”
He shrugged. “What name did your mother give you?” he said.
Which undermined her just enough to make her want to end the conversation; she unzipped his jacket so she could get her arms inside it for warmth, and kissed him until she could feel that her whole throat was bright red.
He talked a lot about adoption, actually, and about race, with passion but with no sense that these were subjects about which she might know something he didn’t. He claimed that a lot of people assumed he was adopted, since he was black and had money. Sara had never seen any instance of this assumption, though, and she decided that it was probably something that had happened to him one time but had become such a big deal in his mind that his recollection of it had swelled. It was true that no one knew why his family had him in public school when they had the resources to send him anywhere they wanted. Liberal guilt, Cutter said: it isn’t just for white folks. Though in the next breath he’d insist that he wouldn’t go to one of those elitist private banker-factories if you paid him to. Not many of his friends had actually seen where Cutter lived, but those who had, or said they had, all agreed solemnly that it was enormous.
