by Dan Newman
“Have you ever…” I begin, then falter and scratch at my head. “Have you ever done something that you knew wasn’t right, but you did it anyway? And then you justified it for yourself, and did other things, said things—maybe little things—to kind of shore it all up? And before long you’d created something that was impossible to back out of.”
“Roly, do you see the pattern in there—in what you’re describing?”
I nod and stare at the floor.
“We all tell lies. All of us. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. But all rationale aside, the conviction we place in the lie is what’s actually dangerous.”
I look up at her, unsure.
“You ever heard of a little Russian named Dostoyevsky?”
“The War and Peace guy?”
“Jesus. What are they teaching in school these days? No. Different Russian. I’m talking about Fyodor Dostoyevsky—he wrote Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov…” She expels a blue cloud above her, then waves a bony hand through it to no effect at all. “Anyway, he once wrote: ‘Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.’”
And so I sit with that and stare into the distance for a very, very long time.
27
“Naw, there’s nothing here. Musta been sent up already.” The guy on the security desk is a regular, but not one I know by name. I don’t trust his answer; perhaps it’s the fact that he never even lifts his eyes from the copy of Sports Illustrated he’s reading.
As I turn away, I say thanks and immediately wish I hadn’t. Back on my floor, I check with the receptionist, the mail guy, and all my cubicle neighbors but no one has seen any box for me.
I forget about the stupid box and spend another half hour staring at the keyboard for effect, while trying to decipher the mystery of who is looking into Chloe Dysart and me. My enemy list turns up only one candidate—Barret—and I quickly review every sighting I’ve had of him in the last six months. My mind instantly interprets everything I have seen in Barret as suspicious. Yes, he would love to see me collapse in on myself and be revealed as nothing more than a one-shot wonder—let alone an honest-to-goodness murder-setter-upper. With that thought, I see I am close to coming unglued. I take a deep breath and talk myself back from the ledge. Barret knows nothing. He can’t. It’s just paranoia.
In front of me is Lebo’s mother’s story. I reread it again and try to cut away some of the overly expressive references—ones I have injected, rather than the very real moments I have tried to describe honestly, where Lebo’s mother had her emotions stripped bare and left, bright and bleeding, in the cool mountain air. The story I wrote about Lebo, the one published on my return from Lesotho, originally contained a good deal about his mother. But, as so often happens to the first draft in this business, it was cut and cut and cut. Ultimately, her part in the story has been reduced to a single rather insignificant line. Not terribly unlike her life. Still there is more here, more I can bring from the story if I can do the job of telling it through her eyes.
I sit with fingers poised, but aside from minor edits, nothing more is coming. I switch tasks and open a document that I am preparing to justify another trip—this time to Zimbabwe, where a delusional Robert Mugabe is leading his country into a new and heretofore uncharted state of want and misery.
There are a number of valid reasons to go, and chief among them is the fact that the rest of the pack, that lens-toting group of fellow self-described Fourth Estate professionals, are all shipping out as well. If approved, I will set out in two days. A hop to London, a four-hour layover, and then on to Johannesburg. From there, it’s a short run up to Harare, where I’ll join the rest of the traveling journo road show and perform my duties as professional witness.
By four o’clock the details are set and there’s little else but to pass it through to Sheila; she has the authority to make the trip happen, and given the general exodus, and the success of the story from the first trip she green-lighted, I think I have a pretty good shot. She says good luck, nods sharply, and slaps me on the shoulder. That’s it. The only trouble I’m really having is now that I’ve left Sheila’s office: as I wait for the elevator I find myself wholly unprepared for the awkwardness of Donna standing two feet to my right.
I spend the entire ride wondering exactly where my eyes should fall. She’s behind me and to my right, and I know her stare is boring a hole into the back of my head. I feel the heat of her cutting glances, and by the time the doors open I am convinced everyone in the elevator car knows what’s going on, and has been infected by her loathing.
But she walks off in the other direction with no acknowledgment of me whatsoever. The others dissolve into various rooms and corridors, and I am left alone save a vague sense of melancholic embarrassment.
• • •
Three days later I’m on the ground in Zimbabwe, shoulder to shoulder with Steve D’Angelo, the Star-Telegraph’s number one man with a camera.
We follow the herd for the most part, catch a few dictatorial sound bites from Mugabe at a rally, interview a white farmer whose land seems likely to be liberated and returned to the people of Zimbabwe (at gunpoint), and speak to a handful of locals about their feelings toward their government.
In total, we are on the ground for four days, and on day three I meet a four-man TV crew from the BBC shooting B-roll for a piece on Mugabe’s policy of farmland repatriation. They ask us if we would comment on camera about our perspective, the journalist’s perspective, and I immediately turn to Steve, as he’s the senior guy. He’s in his fifties, has seen and shot everything, and doesn’t feel the need for niceties. By the time my eyes have flicked to him, he has already dropped his head and begun walking away. “Fuck that shit,” he says, in the same tone most people would say, “No, thank you.”
I, on the other hand, am a rookie. I know the odds are pretty slim that whatever they shoot of me will ever end up in the piece, but the thought of showing up on camera has a certain amount of damn-cool to it, so I immediately agree.
They ask about how we’ve been treated. Have we felt any sense of threat? Are the authorities cooperative and are we generally feeling any unease as foreign press poking our noses around in Mugabe’s affairs? At the end, the producer tells me I have a “real comfortable” way on camera and asks if I have any formal training for this side of the trade. We look at the replay and I’m quietly thrilled with the small comments from the Englishman. “Not bad,” he says, almost imperceptibly. “Not bad.”
On the plane home I spend time thinking about the BBC interview, and while the segment will probably never make it to air, I admit to myself that I really enjoyed sitting on the lens side of the camera. There is a certain immediacy to it, a short burst of focused time into which you can cram so much more than just the words. It’s exciting, perhaps a little egotistical, too. I hear Leo Bowman, dusty and aged in a stuffy office filled with books and yellowing newspapers. I’m a newspaper man, and for me that’s the purest form of the art—the written word. But I will admit to one advantage the TV people have—and that’s access. You want to hit the masses fast, that’s your medium. But be warned: it’s fast food. Deep thinkers want to sit down with something they can sink their teeth into. They want a steak. TV can’t offer that. Nope, it’s quick bites and on to the sports.
• • •
The stories from the Zimbabwe trip are not earth shattering, but they keep things moving forward for me. I file them remotely, prior to getting on the plane in Johannesburg, and by the time we reach London there is word—and tickets—to get Steve and me to Israel, where tensions are once again rising. I know little about the situation there, and Steve spends the flight educating me so I don’t end up looking like an ass when I meet the Middle East bureau chief. After Israel, it’s back home—briefly—before heading out again. My tour of dut
y spins me through a dozen countries in the next three months, all the while with Steve D’Angelo and all the while fully aware of the fact that this exhausting series of rather simple assignments is little more than Sheila running an aptitude test. The stories we’re sent to cover are mainstream, almost pedestrian, the kind you fully expect to see in the world roundup section—quick snippets about besieged dictators, disillusioned youths trashing Main Street, and citizens without nations lobbing bricks and stones at heavily armed soldiers.
But in truth, the grueling schedule works for me. I have no one waiting at home, no dog to starve or goldfish to float, and the constant state of movement means I spend little time reviewing myself—a factor that has quietly become the cornerstone of my little surge in career building. I go happily from story to story, country to country, taking with me everything I need in a single green backpack small enough to get me on and off planes with no checked baggage.
But, as the winter settles in and Sheila’s travel-test schedule lightens, I find myself back in the city, back at my desk, and, after pushing the workday as long as I can, back in my apartment.
Which wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for the letter I find slipped under my door.
28
The number in the envelope is ridiculous.
It’s preposterous. But then I suppose that’s the point. What really bothers me is how the note found its way under my door. I haven’t been in my apartment for the last six days thanks to Sheila’s Whirlwind Tours Inc., but the building is supposedly secure—there’s no doorman, but there is a door for which only tenants are supposed to have a key.
The letter is handwritten and the writing is so bad it would be laughable if it weren’t so damn menacing. It’s signed by Trots—a single capital T—but the body of the letter and the signature are clearly from a different hand. I suspect one of his evil henchmen wrote it, probably Bosco, with Trots doing the dictating. It says:
You had all the chance you gonna get. On Saturday the 19th, be at the station at 9:00 (at night) and have 40 BIG. Cash. We aint playin. Be there, or I gonna spend some muny and have some peeps come for you.
T.
It’s that last line—have some peeps come for you—that creeps me out. It’s been three months since the last time he found me, and I guess I’ve managed to convince myself, largely through omission, that he has no idea where I live now and that any threat I might face is always going to be a downtown, in-and-out-of-work kind of deal. Add that to the fact that my life seems set to have a large on-the-road component, and it’s been looking, well, sort of self-managing.
But this note, this note that’s in my building—shit, in my apartment (slipped under the door, sure, but it still fucking counts), is causing something inside me to unravel ever so slightly. I have a burning and sudden desire to withdraw, to shut the windows, pull the blinds, and put out the lights. I need a corner, a dark, defensible corner, where I can stare forward and see the shit coming straight at me when it inevitably does.
Soon everything about my life is awash with uncertainty. There is nothing about which I am confident, nothing upon which I can rely, and no one I can turn to to make it all better. Dr. Coyle’s voice sweeps though my head for an instant: Be aware that these events may yet come home to roost. And the horror of it wrings me completely.
In my bedroom there is a closet, a disorganized clutter of clothes and shoes and boots and sweatshirts, but it’s dark, away from the windows, and I can fit tightly into its corner. I reach up and pull fistfuls of clothes from their hangers and pile them around me, shoring up a barrier that will offer nothing but still insists on being built. I draw my knees up tightly and hide among the clothes and shoes, and finally reach out a tentative foot to swing the closet door closed. Finally, I am overcome with the exhaustion of worry, of fear, and I succumb to a sleep as thick and black as fresh tar.
On the afternoon of the second day I sense the first trace of a turning tide. I finally eat—a slice of well-buttered bread with honey—and look at the calendar pinned on the wall of my kitchenette. Today is Sunday the sixth, and Trot’s deadline is the nineteenth…thirteen days. I know there’s no way I can come up with forty grand, and even if I could, there’s no way I would hand it over to Trots. And as I think it, I feel the worm turn in my stomach.
By Monday I’m like some medium channeling pure frenetic energy from a clawing mass of long-dead scribes, each desperate for one last chance at the pen. It’s an exciting, almost sexual experience, and I know I’m smiling wildly as I write, flipping pages, rushing words and leaving them half finished as the next come tumbling through. I stop only long enough to call the office and leave a message that I’m sick, and then it’s back to the plans, the ideas, and the giddy euphoria that comes with this unbridled sense of clarity and creativity.
The surge runs its course by early afternoon and I walk away from the desk spent, eat more bread with butter and honey, and then sleep. In the morning it’s back to work. My energy is low, my mood somber, and I can tell from the looks I get that I’m broadcasting my disposition with no signal loss. It works for me, as no one bothers me, and it seems to support the story that I was sick the day before.
I stare at the monitor, at the story I’ve been working on, but in my mind I’m going over the scribbled pages back at my apartment.
“Donna’s got a gig with Foreign Correspondent.” The voice is behind me, to my right, or seven hundred miles away and speaking through a tube. For a moment I can’t tell which. “And she starts next week.”
I blink and then realize that it’s D’Angelo. He’s nursing a coffee and looks like a screwed-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and flattened out by a grimy mechanic. “Really? On-air?” I ask, warming to the idea that this may be a conversation I’m interested in having.
“I dunno, probably eventually. I’d bet it’s production for now, but on-air’s what she’s after.”
I nod slowly and dig deep for an intelligent response that will mask the vague sense of jealousy that I feel about her move to a credible television show with a truly national audience. “Wow,” is the gem I come up with. In my head the Donna-and-Roly highlight reel starts clattering away, but thankfully D’Angelo shuts it down quickly. “You good for tomorrow?” he asks, rubbing his eyes and settling onto the corner of my desk. With him this close, I can smell the day-old booze. While D’Angelo is no alcoholic, he has a reputation for doing nothing in half measures.
“What’s tomorrow?” I ask.
“You should read your email. We’re headed back to see Robby M.”
“Land grabs?”
“Yup. Two white farmers and their families pulled out of their homes and butchered. Then justified by the man himself.”
I shake my head in wonder. Mugabe is reacting to a one-hundred-year-old situation that saw 1 percent of the population (the whites), ending up with 70 percent of the choice farmland. His solution: throw out the whites, kill them where necessary, and hand the land over to his cronies. Two years ago this would have horrified me. Now it’s just something we need to get to and cover.
“What time do we fly out?”
• • •
Harare is comfortable, climate-wise, and is a lot less like what people imagine it might be. It has a busy commercial center, shiny high-rise buildings, and all the trappings of your average North American city—until you look to the streets. It’s there that you get the reminder that you’re indeed in Africa and that the gleaming skyline way above is far removed from life down at ground level. Harare is a concrete-and-glass warning for the rest of the world, a living example of what happens when you have it all and screw it up. Here extreme wealth and acute poverty live side by side, with nothing in between. As a result, the gleaming towers are besieged by a slow but inexorable deterioration, where dirt, refuse—human and otherwise—and every manner of detritus gradually finds a foothold and digs in.
As we thread our way through town toward the south, heading for the vast far
ms that once made the country—then Rhodesia—one of the richest in Africa, we see the wealth fall away, and, apart from the odd black Mercedes speeding by, almost everything and everyone is afflicted by poverty. The people, the relics of old cars, the skeletal animals hanging motionlessly in huge, dusty brown tracts of land—all of it reeks of decay. An hour later we turn in to a dirt road that leads directly to a farmhouse about a kilometer away across another enormous stretch of land. It is the Cullinan farm, where a white farmer and his family were butchered in the name of land redistribution. There seem to be many people at the building, poor locals judging by their tattered clothing. They linger around the structure as if bereft of purpose: outside, inside, all loitering. It looks like a huge house party that has ended; no one wants to go home, but the music has stopped and there’s nothing to keep things going.
As we approach, the driver slows and speaks in hushed tones to the man beside him, a guide we have hired, and the two exchange what I interpret as concerned glances. Up ahead, the group has noticed our vehicle and some begin to stand and look our way. The driver speaks to the guide again, only this time he is more animated. They are speaking Shona, which is lost on D’Angelo and me.
“What’s going on?” D’Angelo asks, with the first real hint of concern in his voice. “Why are you slowing?”
The driver stops the vehicle altogether and half turns toward us, one well-muscled arm hitched over the seat back. “Is not so good here, bhasa.”
D’Angelo is suddenly my own private Geiger counter and I am picking up his clicks with rapidly increasing intensity. “What does that mean?” he asks sharply. “What does not so good here mean?”
“Dis people. Dis guys here,” the driver says, gesturing at the group of thirty-odd black people at the farmhouse, “Dey are…” he struggles for the word, then, “…vengano.”
