by Dan Newman
25
As with cattle, there is security in numbers. The only thing I’m not doing this morning is mooing. I blend with the herd, the commuter livestock around me, stick to the center, and scout for trouble. I get to work with no extraordinary encounters the next morning, save a few curious glances from those wondering about the two shiners that are so very clearly peeking out from behind my sunglasses. I long for a nice set of wide-swept Wayfarers.
At the security desk there is a replacement pudgy guy who knows nothing about the box, and cares even less.
“They musta sent it up,” he declares, never moving his eyes from the newspaper. In the elevator, I catch a few more glances and even a question from an intern named Mark. He is a budding journalist with a tight line of questioning: “Dude, what the fuck happened to you?”
I explain that I was knocked over the day before and hit the pavement face first. Never got my hands out in time. Not sure how it happened.
I’ll repeat the story another twenty or so times today, with the only important instance being the time I recount it all to my new boss, Sheila Copperhead. Sheila is nothing at all like Ed; she’s a woman of the modern world. She’s tuned in precisely to the corporate sociopolitical vibe, and her suits are no-nonsense with clean lines and a cut that says, Take me seriously or I’ll put a stiletto through your eye. She has impeccable academic and professional qualifications, and is universally recognized as a highly effective, on-the-money editor. Because of all these positive qualities, she is generally referred to as a “bitch.”
But the label just doesn’t fit. She’s a genuinely warm person—just one who doesn’t mince her words, which is a good thing given her career choice. Our conversation is almost exclusively about me: a kind of after-the-fact interview. She asks about my motivation to get into journalism, which I have to hastily manufacture as I suspect the reality—that writing was the only thing that I seemed to be any good at—didn’t seem to be the kind of answer she was looking for. I speak about Professor Bowman and about being inspired right from the first lecture, and she nods in approval. She mentions that she knows some of his work and that he has a solid reputation in journalistic circles.
She asks about my motivation to join the international desk, especially given the fact that selling papers means pandering to social trends and that, in turn, means less and less focus on what’s happening thousands of miles from here. I mention the immigration stories and the subsequent trip to Lesotho. I tell her that despite the shrinking column inches dedicated to the international scene, my own interests in journalism run at the scale of nations—the human condition as described by the meeting of cultural forces, global forces that are compelled to intersect more and more as the planet shrinks and the wealth gulf expands.
I am mildly surprised at my argument and about the clarity that I see in it—regardless of whether I’ve captured it verbally or not. I can tell by the way I’ve described it—by the sense of ownership that I feel myself wrapping it in—that these are ideas I actually give a rat’s ass about. I sit back for a moment and realize, while staring blankly at a spot just past Sheila, that I have just come pretty damn close to ringing my own bell. Those first-year lectures with Professor Bowman have stayed with me, and his heartfelt convictions of how important this business really is, have been backed up with my own early experiences in the trade. Journalism is becoming everything I have believed it would be, sullied only slightly by the path I took to be part of it.
And the universe, through Sheila, confirms it. “You know you’re not very popular with a number of people out there,” she says, stabbing a finger at the newsfloor outside her office. “A lot of them think you haven’t paid your dues.”
I’m still caught up in a little of the wonder of the self-bell-ring, so my answer comes out ultracasual, almost drugged, the kind of response you give when someone catches you staring and you don’t want to stop the moment.
“Well,” I say, “fuck ’em.”
And then I snap back and realize I am still in that after-the-fact interview phase with my brand-new boss, and that potty mouth probably isn’t the way to her heart. I think I gravitated to writing because you get to hone your responses, bake them fully and then deliver them with all the odds in your favor. Real life doesn’t provide you the luxury of time to create those perfect one-liners.
Despite my shortcomings in the quick wit department, I manage to do the only thing remotely sane given the situation: I say nothing. Instead, I look directly into her eyes and lock every muscle in my face. It’s not a carefully thought-out strategy, not some mechanism designed to come off as a hardened, I-don’t-give-a-shit news vet, but rather simply a total lack of data input. I am a deer trussed up, with eyelids peeled back and restrained with little metal fasteners. All I can do is stare.
It can go one of two ways here, neither of which I can control. Sheila looks at me with a face that I am having trouble reading. She seems to be at once horrified and amused. Somehow, a bitter lemon has been secretly slipped into her mouth and fully squeezed to boot. And somehow, I still hold her gaze.
Then it happens.
Sheila smiles and then chuckles. “I know what you mean,” she says. “I know what you mean.”
I have no idea what she means.
“See what else you can develop in the same vein as the immigration story. There seems to be an appetite there. Let’s talk in a week and see what you’ve come up with.”
As I leave her office, the conversation begins to gel and I do start to see what she means. She said I wasn’t popular with a lot of people out there, and she’s right. Live people, dead people, it doesn’t matter. I am an equal opportunity offender.
Fuck ’em, I say. Fuck ’em.
26
Lebo’s mother—the one whose tin lean-to I sat in while she cried and told me about her beautiful, dead son—left an impression that has stayed with me. The idea of making luck, the way her son had, at least in the beginning of his adventure, is fast becoming a beacon for me. She isn’t the first to mention the idea, but the concept has been sticky ever since.
Four days after the attack behind the building, I’m sitting at my desk and trying to commit an idea for a story to paper, but I keep being pulled away to the notion of manufactured opportunity. Nothing “just happens.” Look at Colin Dysart. Did he wake up one day and find a media empire at the foot of his bed? And at the other end of the scale, look at Rhona: late forties and running an independent copy shop and still holding out against the big chains. How? By design. She’s doing what needs to be done to survive. For her it might mean a tighter top and a little extracurricular credit, but it works.
In my mind’s eye, I equate it to a process of maturation—letting go of the idea that the cream rises, that justice prevails, and that hard work is the key to success. The true brass ring is accepting the ugliness that propels people, careers, and corporations forward.
I look up and Donna is standing there.
Her eyes are puffy and it’s clear she’s been crying. But she’s in control now. I see something stony in her, something resolute and impenetrable, and I know right away she has heard about my new job. “Is it true?” It’s more accusation than question.
My reply is pathetic and even I feel it—but I need time. “Is what true?”
“That you’re working for Sheila now. Officially.”
“Oh, right. Um. Yes, I just got…”
She doesn’t speak but simply looks at me the way people look at a schoolyard bully who has just won a fight with a dirty kick to the balls. She doesn’t ask the question I know she’s burning to ask, and even now I can’t help but admire her. That high road is one I’ve rarely chosen, and she takes it now as she simply turns away from me and leaves, taking everything we had away with her. In my head I can almost hear an audible crack, like a sheet of ice calving from a glacier, and I know this thing has just broken in a way that is unfixable. You’re going to piss the world off…
My phone
warbles and I snatch at it. “Keene.”
“Roly!” says a voice that is clearly smiling. “It’s Warren.”
“Warren Barton. How the hell are you?” I am pleased to hear from him; it feels like a sudden reprieve, a welcome distraction from the strange pain I’m experiencing over Donna and the way she just left. I don’t like the feeling; it’s all too real, too present, and too reminiscent of Dr. Coyle’s predictions…and you’re going to be alone. I suddenly have the urge to come clean on my coffee debt. “Where are you?”
“I’m at my dad’s offices just over the way.” Warren’s a pro at trying to play things down while almost always achieving the opposite. He doesn’t mean it; he just royally sucks at coming off as the common man. What he’s really saying is that he’s at his dad’s penthouse suite of offices in the Barton Building on First and that there’s a pretty damn fine chance that the building I’m sitting in—just over the way—is owned by Daddy, too.
“Listen, you want to grab a coffee? I’m sure I owe you a few.”
“Sure. When?”
• • •
Leaving work midmorning is simple; research, interviews, dumpster dives—all manner of distractions are available as excuses—and the walk to Starbucks is measured in minutes. I pause at the front door, darting glances toward likely hiding spots for Trots, but I know it’s unlikely he’s here. Trots will be playing the odds, looking for me at the obvious places and times—on the way in, on the way out, that kind of thing—and waiting for me to make unscheduled and unusual midmorning departures would be a significant waste of his time. It’s not long until I move off with a sense of relative safety and I begin to think about the possibility of actually settling up with him.
In terms of a real debt, I owe him something in the order of a few grand. But in Trots’s reckoning, including the daily, penalties, surcharges, and all manner of lender’s fees, I am into him for upward of ten. I don’t have it, and every day his number climbs. Paying him is a pipe dream. I rationalize it all away with the thought that he’s probably well past wanting the cash now, anyway. Killing me is the real objective, and his windfall is the effect it’ll have on any other loan defaulters in his little evil empire.
Warren is already inside when I show up, staked out at a table and being eyed by little groups of coffee drinkers, two and three strong, all trying to lever him out of the spot with their implied group rights. Warren is oblivious and I immediately warm to him for it. He has two coffees on the table, which I suspect is the only thing that stopped the loitering table-seekers from tearing him limb from limb. I sit down and realize there will be no debt settling today; I can only hope to maintain the coffee debt status quo at best.
“Roly,” he says, as if I’ve been a naughty boy, “you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder, buddy.”
“I know, I know. Sorry, man, it’s just hairy at the paper. You wouldn’t believe how competitive it is. I kept meaning to call you back.” I’m only half convincing, but then again, I’m only telling half the truth.
“Did you get the stuff—your box of shit from the apartment?”
For a moment my brain stalls. “What box?” And as I say it I find the answer—the box left at reception. “Oh…at the security desk.”
“Yeah.”
“No, no,” I say, raising my hands in mock despair. “I completely gapped on that. It’s still there. What the fuck’s in it? And how did you end up with it?” My tone has somehow become accusatory, I think, so I reach for levity and come up empty-handed. There is a stretched moment there and all that emerges is a ridiculous facial contortion that apparently implies I am having a seizure rather than trying to be funny.
Warren does the classy thing and pretends it never happened. “Your landlord is a freaking stalker. The guy called me a thousand times until I came and got the box of crap you left behind. I was your emergency contact on your lease, remember?”
I nod and vaguely do remember. My mind flits back to that lightless little hovel, the lumpy mattress, and the hotplate. I make a silent promise to hurl it into the lake if it’s in the box Warren left me.
“So are you practicing, or vetting, or whatever the right term is for fixing doggies?”
“And you’re supposed to be a writer?” he says, eyebrows pinned up high. “Never mind me—I’m following your shit in the paper. If you’re not writing the stories, you’re starring in them!”
I turn my palms upward and give him my best hapless fool.
We chat aimlessly, frivolously, but eventually the conversation picks up on an old and well-worn thread. “So is there anything happening with the investigation? Around Chloe’s shooting?” he asks, and then hurriedly adds, “And yours, of course.”
Of course. “Not that they’re telling me. The police haven’t been in touch in quite a while, so I’m guessing it’s shelved.”
Warren scratches his head and screws his face up in doubt. “I kinda doubt it. The Dysarts have a lot of pull with the city and a lot of cash to spread around. And Chloe’s dad is a one-cause man these days. He was over at my dad’s place and I hear he’s letting everything else slide. He’s focused on catching the fucker and nothing else. That family’s stretched thin, man. That’s what I hear.”
Something large and solid is fighting gravity, forcing its way up from my chest and into my throat. “Is he getting anywhere?”
“Fucked if I know,” he says. “But you gotta know he has the resources to take a damn good stab at it.” He sips his coffee and shakes his head. “I still can’t believe you were right there, man.”
“Yeah. Me either.”
“I’m still talking to people about it, you know. Or at least they’re talking to me. I get calls every now and then asking about you. It’s pretty freaky.”
“Like who? Who calls?”
“Well, the cops did, but not for, man, over a year now I guess. I’ve also had some calls from guys in your line of work—shit, had one just yesterday.”
“Really? Who?”
“Can’t remember his name. Said he was researching a story on Chloe Dysart’s death and wanted some background stuff on you—what kind of guy you were, where you went to school. Stuff like that.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“Don’t worry, pal, you came off smelling like a rose.” He sips his coffee again and then realizes I am waiting for a real answer. “Aw, I just said you were a good guy, a talented guy.”
“What else?”
“Shit, I don’t know…um, that you didn’t really know her well. And that you crashed and burned once hitting on her.” He smiles but it is short-lived.
“Fuck, Warren. Don’t tell these people stuff.”
“Hey, take it easy—it was just a joke, a throwaway line.”
“You don’t know what these people are like, Warren.”
“These people?” he asks, dripping with sarcasm. “These people are you, Roly. Journalists.”
I back down. “Yeah, yeah. Look, just do me a favor and don’t make any more comments.” Inside, I am a fully drawn bow; I don’t know whom Warren has spoken to, what it was for or anything, but the string is humming with latent energy and the arrow is eager to let fly. It apparently does not go unnoticed.
“Buddy, you need to bring it down a notch.” His tone is part sarcastic, part concern.
I shrug and try to guide the conversation away. “Yeah, I know. It’s all been pretty weird. So what’s up with you, anyways?”
Half an hour later I’m back in my cubicle at the Star-Telegraph, clicking away at the keyboard and wondering why anyone is still picking at the Chloe Dysart scab. Christ, it’s almost two years old. Why are they looking at it? Who is looking at it? I find no answers, but plenty of dread.
• • •
My knee bounces incessantly and I know it, but if I don’t bounce it I have to pace, and Dr. Coyle’s little office is too small for pacing. That and the fact that it would make me look like some kind of manic fool on the very edge of control.
The woman in the blue fog looks like a shadow, half there, half not. “So at some point are we going to get to why you’re here? I mean why you’re really here?” she asks, her hands folded calmly in her lap, a smoldering near-death cigarette pinched between her fingers.
My voice is tight, just like the rest of me. “Like I said—it’s been a long time—too long—and I thought I should just check in. You know, stay in touch. Just in case.”
“Just in case,” she says, parroting me.
I nod and my knee bounces.
“Okay, so let’s say right now is that just in case time. Tell me what’s going on for you. It doesn’t take any special insight to see you’re on edge, Roly. Something’s got you revved up, and your being here tells me you know it, too. Now, that in itself is a good thing—we talked about self-awareness, about reaching out. About being your own first line of defense.”
Well, you see, someone’s asking around about me in regards to how Chloe died, and it’s freaking me out. “I broke up with my girlfriend,” I say glibly. “Well, she broke up with me.”
“Hmm. Girlfriends.”
“I deserved it.”
Dr. Coyle leans over to a small side table, crushes out the cigarette, and fishes another from her pack. She pauses while she sets a flame to it, then: “Okay, Roly, the therapist in me would pick up on this and say, ‘Tell me about the relationship, about your feelings. Tell me about why you think you deserve what happened.’ But the real-life person in me, Cathy Coyle, she would say Leo Bowman covered as many visits as you wanted for a year, but that’s over now. And this hour’s on your tab. So why don’t we stop with the bullshit about girlfriends and breakups, and talk about what’s got you sitting there sweating like a whore on nickel night?”
I stare at her for a long time. She just sits and smokes. There’s a neutral expression on her face—open, but neutral—and she waits with an infinite patience for me to speak. The silence is almost unbearable, but Dr. Coyle is content to sit and smoke and wait.
