The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  The studio was on the basement level. The B button was already pushed.

  The door sealed shut, The car sank. It felt like the world did too.

  “Sorry about the Jansky bit,” Glass said, “All’s fair, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Inside the steel box, Glass’s folksy accent had reverted to its Manhattan flatness. The cramped space made Baseman think of the apartments he had shared, back when he was scraping by, before a Black man could earn even half a white man’s salary, Glass knew nothing about spaces so fraught. How emotions ran hotter, how physical contact was unavoidable.

  “Don’t edit it,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Quincey tape. If you’re going to run it, run it straight.”

  “We’re alone, Baseman. Be blunt. Is this a personal favor?”

  “Do it because it’s right. Ever heard of that?”

  Glass exhaled. She sounded, to Baseman’s surprise, tired.

  “Let me explain something,” she said. “Even you should be able to understand. If I air, on my program, a video of a vicious gang attack, my twenty-five-to-fifty demo makes a three-thousand-point jump. Husbands tell their wives and kids to gather round the boob tube, and everyone at WWN gets Nielsen ratings gift baskets. I air that video unedited, and it includes, just for the sake of argument, a man ripping a woman’s throat out with his teeth—tossed in willy-nilly between commercials—do you know what happens to those metrics?”

  “We quit cutting to commercials an hour ago. At this rate, we’ll never go back.”

  “Of course we will. Anything can be normalized, It’s News 101.”

  “News, That’s what you’re calling it now?”

  “Who are you trying to impress? You and I show people what they need to know, not what they’re not ready to handle.”

  Baseman tried to focus on the descending floor numbers: 13, 12, 11, Were the numbers always red, or was it a new shade to his vision? He tried to slow his words to the pace of the numbers.

  “Emmett Till. Name ring a bell, Glass? You don’t close the coffin lid on Emmett Till. You don’t cut ten or twelve baton hits from the Rodney King tape just because it might make your Mendicans more comfortable.”

  “Rodney King, Emmett Till. The Aztecs, King Tut, How far back you plan on going? Look, you were producing on 9/11, You’re proud of it and you damn well should be. But did you tell your directors to show bodies going plop, plop all over the pavement? No one was ready to see that. God knows we have our differences, you and I, but at the end of the day? We’re both decent people, Baseman. Are we not decent people?”

  Baseman kicked. It just happened, Forty-five years in a heartless biz, a hundred racist so-called colleagues, two hundred regrettable calls he’d had to make—when another text buzzed his leg, it was like a biology-class electrode poking the leg of a dead frog, Baseman’s leg shot forward, the sole of his shoe crashing against the display, lighting each of the bottom eight floor buttons, Baseman panted, an out-of-shape old fart nowhere close to Glass’s twenty-five-to-fifty demo.

  Glass shivered and bared her teeth, angry she’d been scared for even a second.

  Eighth floor: the doors purred open, Nobody was waiting.

  “Super,” she said. “Now I’ll be late for makeup.”

  Are we not decent people? His divorce from Sherry was three years old, not nearly enough for him to safely reclaim decency. Back during his first reporter gig in Chicago, Sherry had delighted in every detail he brought home: the adventure of the newsroom, thunderous with typewriters, stinking of ink, hot with cigarette smoke; the thrill of tearing around town with his team of cameraman, soundman, and lighting technician; feeling like a hero battling a big, bad city, and while he was at it, forging friendships and breaking down walls of prejudice. He could still hear his team’s laughter over the crackling walkie-talkie. He could still smell fresh sixteen-millimeter film. He could still taste the Billy Goat’s burgers and fries.

  He switched to field producing in Kansas City. Film out, videotape in. Images uglier but quicker, and that mattered to TV’s hungry stomach. He’d gotten caught up in it. Who wouldn’t be? Viewers soon expected to see events while they were occurring, and if Baseman’s station was not first on the scene, another station would be. The job became about winning. Winning the scoop. Winning the ratings. Winning the loyalty of a city viewership.

  To keep winning, he brought the work home. More accurately, he did not bring himself home. Breaking news did not observe nights, weekends, or holidays. He added to his office a toothbrush, sleep mask, and cot. Perhaps these should have been flapping red flags, but Nathan Baseman was making a name for himself, being promoted, receiving invites to speak at Black business groups, These were gains not just for him but for society. Sherry had graduated from typist to secretary at a marketing firm; she was breaking through barriers too.

  The move to Atlanta tore them in half. Baseman was not sure why. The wet heat? The Jansky shot? They became junkyard dogs. Sherry threw things, heavy things, Books, a clock radio, a toaster oven. If he called the police, reported domestic abuse, rival stations would find it in police reports.

  Plus, he’d bitten her. One night while she’d pummeled him with her fists, his hands had corralled hers and he’d sunk his teeth right into her shoulder. In the moment, it was a release. It felt good. The salt of her skin, the slight aftertaste of blood—it tasted like sex, a little. But with that, she’d won. She had the scar on her shoulder, and if she wanted, she could show it.

  The bite in Ross Quincey’s footage, the big plug of flesh ripped from the screaming woman’s throat, floated through Baseman’s mind. Whatever was going on out there, it was turning good people bad, and that scared the ever-loving shit out of him. Because he knew he had bad in him. He knew he was the kind of person who bit.

  He glanced at Glass, pushing away images of doing to her shoulder what he’d done to Sherry’s.

  Seventh floor: the doors opened, shut.

  “The suspense,” Glass said, “is killing me.”

  Baseman faced his bête noire, his smudged reflection.

  “We were in that conference room for a million years,” he said, his voice steady. “No telling what news has broken. Let’s work together. Let’s try.”

  “I have a quite capable staff.”

  “But I know Chicago. That’s where I started. I’ve got people there. I can get the actual story to go with the scary footage. From real people.”

  Sixth floor. Open, shut.

  “The inference being my people would be fake.”

  “Come on, you know what people you’ll get, Camera hogs, ambulance chasers. People who get off pointing at bloodstains. My people, they know each building of that complex. They know the names of the gangs who want that courtyard.”

  “So you agree it’s gangs?”

  Fifth floor.

  “No, I don’t, But if it is, they’ll tell us. Specifics are what we need right now. We tell the story right, we prevent every wannabe militiaman in America from pointing a rifle out their window and waiting for the next Black person to stroll by. My people can tell us, ‘It’s these guys, not those guys.’ You feel me?”

  “I’m not running the tape uncut.”

  “I know. I’m done asking for that.”

  Fourth floor.

  Glass crossed her arms, a pink-painted fingernail tapping against the golden cross she wore around her neck. Baseman knew it was a prop. Pick any Sunday morning and you’d find Rochelle Glass at Cherokee Town and Country Club. He choked the urge to say it aloud. They were running out of floors and time.

  “I’m listening,” she said, “What’s your ask?”

  Third floor.

  “That you stay with the story, I’m telling you, I feel this one in my bones. This is the big one. So you ride this thing like a reporter, not an entertainer. The Face has forty-five minutes left. Give me that time to set the table for you. Residents, community organizers. Think how it felt when you were ju
st getting started, Glass. Before it started being about whose office was bigger. That’s how it used to feel for me too. We can have that back. We can have that back today.”

  Second floor.

  “That would mean dropping Ben Hines,” Glass observed.

  “His luckiest day since the Oscars,” Baseman said. “We need those news choppers back.”

  He did not know if the elevator’s first-floor pause was engineered to take longer; it would make sense, as the floor fielded the most comers and goers. The door gasped wide, revealing a ruby-red rug stretched across a marble lobby to an entryway of art deco brass. It was eerie without foot traffic, the magisterial but deserted ruins of a gilded, irresponsible age.

  Glass smiled. Red light gleamed from her capped teeth.

  “I’ll A-block the gangs. But we quit covering Hines over my dead body. Liberal do-gooder gives award speeches out of one side of his mouth, filthy come-ons out the other? That’s its own kind of violence against women. We’re airing it.”

  The elevator doors clanged and snorted when opening at the studio level, Shoe heels were clopping, doors banging, printers wheezing, keyboards crackling. It was always a storm down here, but today it was like one of those jacked-up conditions the weather department liked to invent: thundersnow, arctic blast, bomb cyclone. Baseman could smell coffee, sweat, and hair spray. Shit was on fire; they’d made it all the way down to hell.

  Glass stepped into a hall saturated with red LIVE TV lights. The moment other people looked at Glass, she transformed, growing taller and thinner; her hair radiated the devil’s light; she was a heroine swaggering into town to save the day. In a world of Bad vs. Badder, Glass was the one who told you which side to root for.

  She graced Baseman with a last look.

  “My audience skews a little older. They need their food a little softer, that’s all. You should know this, Baseman. You’re getting up in years too.”

  She winked and strode off to Hair and Makeup. Baseman’s stomach clenched. Soft made him think of both Sherry and the woman in the Quincey tape, their shoulders and throats gnashed like gelatin. Softness: it might yet be revealed as humanity’s most distinctive quality.

  From down the hall, Glass’s voice: “Answer your phone already.”

  His phone was convulsing with another text. The same leg he’d used to bash the elevator panel kicked out to stop the elevator doors from closing. In the hallway, he dug out his phone. All four texts were from his current intern, Zoë Shillace, who until this morning had texted him exactly once to calmly, professionally, and with proper grammar, inform him her subway was being evacuated and she would be late for work. In other words, she was not a young woman given to hyperbole.

  911 baseman 911

  don’t want to text need to talk in person this is zoe

  where are you very serious need to talk right now

  are you shitting me where are you this involves the fucking WHITE HOUSE

  Bigger Balls

  Fuck, here came Baseman. The executive producer was an old-school, coffee-swilling, antacid-gnashing, capital-J Journalist who side-eyed image-conscious upstarts like Chuck Corso as if their Armani suits were SS regalia. Wary of each other’s species, Baseman and Chuck kept apart on instinct, and never had the latter received a one-on-one at the desk from the former, the equivalent of a coach’s visit to the mound. Seeing Baseman approach, Chuck’s spirit tumbled, which at least told him he had spirit left.

  Chuck had just spent five numb minutes poorly summarizing the current situation. The aggressors were being described as unarmed and in a trancelike state. Homeland Security forces were being deployed in forty cities. National Guard outposts were being mobilized everywhere. Octavia Gloucester, on assignment in Tampa, reported nursing-home deaths reversing and the revived patients becoming “belligerent.” Citizens were being asked to stay tuned while the threat was contained.

  Lee had spoken up at last, thank Christ, saying that intake had a package from Joanie Abbott in Philly, and Chuck should throw to it, right now, and drink a gallon of water with a bottle of Xanax if he had it. Chuck stammered the fewest words required to pass the baton—“Joanie Abbott in Philly”—and Camera 2 ceased its laser torture, only to reveal in the ensuing dark Nathan Baseman’s stormy stomp. Chuck had to restrain his right hand with his left—he wanted his laptop, he wanted ChuckSux69.

  Trained on eyelines, he noticed how Baseman positioned his body to block the camera views of those in the control room. Next, he plucked the two-mic lavalier from Chuck’s tie, tossed it on the floor behind the chair, and planted both hands on the anchor desk opposite Chuck’s script, He kept his voice at a rasp too soft for the tossed mic to pick up.

  “You killed the boobs.”

  Life and death were up for grabs, and this surly old dude was talking about … what, exactly?

  “The spring break B-roll,” Baseman clarified. “You made Lee kill it.”

  Ten minutes ago, was it? And already Chuck had to think hard, like he was doing long division, to recall it. While Chuck spoke live on the phone with Octavia from Tampa, Lee had played generic Florida B-roll behind him. The footage hopped from Everglades imagery to spring break revelry, girls in garish swimsuits toasting with plastic wineglasses, bleary-eyed college students dancing in suds. Chuck found Octavia’s words and Lee’s visuals grotesquely compatible: the spring breakers’ mindless chase of sensory stimulants, their carnal craving for the physical body, their near-death inebriation that kept rising, kept dancing, kept screaming for more.

  Yet he’d made Lee cut it, He’d barked an order—to Lee Sutton!—on live TV, and sure enough, the shot of college girls waggling their bikinied breasts in an eruption of fizzy alcohol froze, leaving one girl’s drunken shriek looking like a rictus of despair.

  “I’m … sorry?” Chuck offered Baseman. “I just … It didn’t seem—”

  “Bigger balls than I expected from you,” Baseman snapped. “There have been times I ordered Lee, right to his rat face, to cut away from nubile flesh and he outright said he couldn’t understand me. Like he couldn’t understand my Black voice. Who was I going to take that complaint to? Unitas? That guy will take any excuse to put skin on-screen. You did all right, Face.”

  “I said complimentary instead of complicated.”

  “I know.”

  “Collaborated instead of corroborated.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Shut up. My point is, you gave me a little sliver of hope. And hope is something in short fucking supply right now.”

  Chuck vaguely recalled thinking that very word before his shaky vamping. ALL HOPE IS NOT LOST, he’d told himself. He was a TRUTH TELLER, he’d told himself. Baseman thought he had balls? He had the wrong guy. Chuck leaned over the desk and took the producer’s arm. His cool skin showed Chuck how heated he’d gone under the deathless lights.

  “Get me off the desk,” he begged.

  Baseman’s glare hatcheted Chuck to the spine.

  “Listen carefully, Face. Are you listening?”

  Chuck nodded, his head bobbing as if filled with helium. A touch-up man sidled up to him, carrying a foundation palette and powder brush.

  “Go away,” Baseman ordered.

  The man darted off. Baseman twisted Chuck’s forearm until he was holding Chuck’s wrist. It hurt. Chuck’s eyes widened, then watered, then cleared. Baseman’s face jumped into stinging focus. Rivulets of wrinkles and a sheen of sweat gave the older man’s wizened skin an oaken varnish. Baseman licked his lips, his breath the sort of sour only a rebelling stomach produced.

  “Now you listen good,” Baseman hissed. “Half an hour from now, you’re done, They’re giving Glass the desk at the top of the hour. This desk, you read me? The anchor desk. Once she’s colonized this land, you know as well as I she won’t give it up without a coup. She’s strapping on adult diapers as we speak so she can piss without leaving the chair.”

  “Good.” Chuck hated his own whine, but couldn’t help it. “I tried, but I don’t �
�� I don’t have the stuff—”

  Baseman squeezed Chuck’s wrist hard enough to make Chuck gasp.

  “The fuck you don’t. You had it all morning, Face. I saw it. Everyone saw it. And the truth of the matter is, we don’t really have a choice. You think things are bad now? The second Rochelle Glass goes on, we’re shooting bottle rockets from a hill of TNT. Everyone huddled in their homes soaking up her vile shit, then squeezing it out for their friends and families. If what they’re saying is real, and—”

  “It’s not real,” Chuck insisted, “It’s … Lee keeps saying They’re gangs, right?”

  “You too,” Baseman scoffed. “Using They and Them. They’re us, Face.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Baseman gave his head a brisk shake. “It’s not gangs. It can’t be. It’s worldwide.”

  This new info went down like unchewed food, “What?”

  “I just came from the control room. It’s in your next update. Sydney, Tehran, Kinshasa, Athens. Does that sound like gangs to you?”

  “Do they say … Do they tell us…”

  “They say they’ll have the situation under control in twenty-four hours.”

  Chuck knew he was grinning by the paths of his falling sweat.

  “Oh, that’s … that’s wonderful, that’s—”

  “It’s bullshit, Face. It’s Reagan laughing off AIDS. It’s Bush saying, ‘Mission accomplished.’ My guy at APD says CompStat is down. Our West Coast choppers are all on Ben Hines. We still have news teams on other stories. Face—there are no other stories.

  “What, you want to throw to sports? Fine, let’s talk fucking sports. There’s a soccer game in Madrid that’s supposed to be a bloodbath, a gladiator ring. We got to pull our shit together, Face, and we got to do it before Glass takes over.”