The Last Magazine: A Novel (19 page)

“Never mistake the facts for truth.”

—T
HOMAS
J
EFFERS
ON
, 1803

“Make love by email, make war by phone.”

—K. E
RIC
W
ALTERS
,
FR
OM
HIS
1997
BESTSELLER
21st Century Business: 101 Survival Tips

“They say war is hell. I disagree. War is war. Hell is reserved for the folks who start wars.”

—F
ROM
THE
UNPUBLISHED
JOURNAL
OF
A
REPORTER
WHO
WAS
KILLED
IN
1944
BY
A
SNIPE
R
IN
THE
S
OUTH
P
ACIF
IC

“I had inflicted terrible violence on my body, on myself. I had only two things to show for my suffering, and both were double D’s.”

—F
ROM
AN
ANONYMOUS
SUBJECT
IN
A
RESEAR
CH
STUDY
PUBLISHED
B
Y
THE
American Medical Journal
, “B
ECOMING
M
E
: P
LASTIC
S
URGERY
IN
P
URSUIT
OF
G
ENDER
-B
ASED
W
ISH
F
U
LFILLMENT
”

I
more or less forgive
The Magazine
for how they’ve treated Peoria. I’m not a suspect for the leak to Wretched.com, either.
The Magazine
is just relieved that Peoria’s later incident—when he fell on his pencil—didn’t make it onto the blogs.

Maybe Delray M. Milius thinks it might have been me, but he can’t prove it. I’m starting to have second thoughts about the leak as well—was it worth the risk of getting caught just to try to defend A.E. Peoria (and my guilt is probably why I stop feeling bad for Peoria). I don’t know him very well, really, and though I admire the reporting he’s done—and
Desperation Points West
actually is a decent book—I also know he’s pretty fucked-up.

Why so quick to risk everything to come to his defense? Especially now that I’m making some real progress in my career.

I’m working eighty hours a week, in the office six out of seven days. I’ve started to write a few stories a month for
The Magazine
’s website.

What I did realize about Wretched.com is that if I don’t start writing online on a regular basis, I won’t be very well positioned down the
line as a journalist. The online editors at
The Magazine
really like what I’m doing for them, and so when an associate Web editor position opens up, I apply, and they offer me the job. The associate editor gig will finally make me a full-time staff member—I’ve been working full-time, but my title is still temporary researcher—and give me a salary, a job title, and benefits.

Then Nishant Patel calls me into his office.

“You’re better off staying here at the international edition,” Nishant Patel says.

“I’d like to, I guess, but the Web is offering me a permanent position.”

Nishant Patel leans back in his chair, glancing at his monitor to see if any critical emails have popped up, and shakes his head.

“The Web is a black hole,” he says. “There’s not a future on the Internet.”

You might think that this is a funny thing to say now. Maybe you would have expected a guy like Nishant Patel to say that in 1999 or 2000, or even 2001.

“But the Web is offering me a permanent position,” I say, not wanting to get into the whole future-of-journalism debate. Maybe Nishant Patel doesn’t even really believe what he’s telling me; maybe he’s more interested in getting me to stay so he doesn’t have to find another research assistant.

“No, no, I think, for your career, you’re much better off staying with the international edition. You can still write for the Web, of course, but it’s much better for you to stay here. I spoke to Sandra this morning, and she agreed.”

That’s when I realize that I’m not really being given a choice. Sandra is the Web editor, and I had spoken to her yesterday, and she had been very excited about having me. Nishant pulled rank. I’m not going anywhere.

“We’ll find a permanent position for you here soon,” he says. Then he goes back to checking email, and I know I’ve been dismissed.

I’m pretty pissed off. On the one hand, I feel like Nishant Patel is really fucking with my career. I’d worked hard to get the job offer, and once I was in position to take it, Patel blocked it—more for self-interested reasons than anything about my future, I think. On the other hand, it’s kind of a backhanded compliment—they feel I’m so important that they don’t want to lose me. So I guess that’s a good sign.

Sanders Berman is waiting for me at my cubicle.

“Hastings,” he says.

“Oh, I was just talking to Nishant,” I say.

“How is the professor?”

“He’s good. I think he’s doing
The
Daily Show
tonight.”

“
The Daily Show
? Good for him. I probably won’t be able to catch it, as I’m going to be filling in for Chris Matthews.”

“Oh, that’s great. I’ll have to make sure to TiVo them both.”

“I’m due in DC in about five hours,” he says.

“Taking the Amtrak?”

“No, that’s what I’m here to ask you about.”

I’m wondering what research I’m going to have to do. Probably something for the news of the day because Sanders is filling in for Matthews.

“Could you go pick up a pillow for me?”

“Sorry?”

“A pillow. One from Duane Reade would be fine. Just drop it off with my assistant.”

I’m wondering why his assistant doesn’t go buy him a pillow, and as if he knows what I’m thinking, he says, “I asked Nancy to get it for me last time, and I don’t like her doing too many things like that. I don’t want to get a reputation as a prima donna.”

“Okay, right. Um, why do you need a pillow?”

“For the trip to DC. My car is picking me up in forty-five minutes.”

Right: Sanders Berman hates to fly, and he also hates trains. He doesn’t feel comfortable waiting in Penn Station, his assistant told me. Too many people who could recognize him. So when he goes to DC, he hires a car service.

Car services are the big topic of conversation around the office, especially for those editors who don’t get cars all the time. Jerry got all the numbers, and he likes to recite them. Nishant Patel’s car service bill: $7,323 a month. Sanders Berman’s: $9,356. Sometimes they take them five blocks. Five blocks! Do you know how many reporters we could hire for that bill, Jerry likes to say.

“Sure, I’ll grab you a pillow.”

“Thanks.”

I take the elevator down, and I’m getting kind of annoyed again. If I were an associate editor, I wouldn’t have to be doing this kind of gofering anymore. As long as my title remains researcher, I’m more or less the office bitch. I have to figure out a way to get on staff, and I guess buying pillows is a step in the right direction.

I pick up two pillows at Duane Reade—one is from this foam material, another is designed for people with bad backs. I want to cover my bases, do the job right.

Sanders’s door is open, and he’s on the phone. I leave the two pillows with Nancy.

“I’ll put this with his travel bag,” she says, tapping a pile of folded sweatpants and a blanket on the desk. “Sanders,” Nancy whispers, “likes to put these on in his car so it’s more comfortable.”

“Oh, right.”

I see Sanders hang up, and I think maybe I should ask him if he’d step in to talk to Nishant about letting me go to the Web.

“Sanders, I just have a quick question. I applied for the associate editor job at the Web, and Sandra seemed really keen on having me there, but I don’t know if Nishant wanted me to go for it. But I think it would be really good.”

“The Web,” Sanders says, like it’s something he’s never heard of.

“Yeah, the magazine’s website.”

“You mean Sandra the Web editor?”

“Yeah, that’s who I mean.”

“Oh, you don’t want to go to the Web. Nothing good is happening there,” he says.

I go back to my cubicle and I don’t do much for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t feel like working. What’s hard work gotten me?

I leave an hour earlier than usual and take the F train back down to my apartment on the Lower East Side. I go to the dry cleaners to pick up clothes I’d dropped off yesterday.

In line at the dry cleaners, I notice a girl standing ahead of me. She’s cute, and I recognize her face because her picture is always up at Wretched.com. She’s the editor, and I know she lives in the neighborhood as well.

“Hey,” I say to her.

She looks at me like I’m a danger.

“My name is Mike Hastings. I’m a writer for
The Magazine
,” I say.

“Oh, okay, I thought you might be some crazy asshole stalking me. I’ve been getting a lot of that kind of email lately.”

“No, I’m just a fan of Wretched.com.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“Yeah, right. Actually, you guys posted something I sent in—I probably shouldn’t bring this up—but yeah, I sent you guys an email about the
Magazine
riots and how they were, uh, blaming . . .”

“Oh yeah, sure, I remember that. Uh, thanks.”

I give the Chinese woman my dry cleaning ticket.

“We should hang out sometime,” I say.

“Yeah, that would be cool. Send me an email.”

“I will.”

She leaves the dry cleaners. And that’s how my relationship with Wretched.com begins.

The disgruntled employee—it’s hard not to sound like a loser, a whiny bitch, ungrateful. Noticing it just now—rereading where we’re at in the story.

What gave me the right, at twenty-four or twenty-five, to expect my goals and desires to be taken seriously at
The Magazine
? Why did I expect them to care or to give a shit? Let’s get my head out of my ass here: this is a magazine, part of a company that routinely hires and fires and thwarts much bigger plans than mine. Why would I expect anything other than frustration and dues-paying?

Don’t they say that nothing in life is easy, and if it’s easy, it’s not worth it?

Maybe they do say that.

I read this book on twenty-first-century business survival tips, written by a guy named K. Eric Walters.

Walters, see, he opens the book with an anecdote about Tom Cruise. Nothing beats the wisdom of celebrities, Walters gets that, and so he brings us to Tom Cruise talking on the Letterman show.

Tom says: “People look at me now and think that my life has been smooth sailing. That I got everything that I wanted, and that my
career just happened to take off. No. It didn’t. I had to fight to get my foot in the door, and every day, people tried to slam that door shut, right in my face. And finally I did get my foot in, and they tried even harder to kick my foot out of the door, to shut it tight. I didn’t let them. I kept my foot there. And one day, it opened. That’s my advice.”

So yeah, maybe I was having a bad day back then, and I wasn’t able to get the needed perspective.

What’s a few years of hard work unrewarded? Sounds like life to me, says K. Eric Walters.

Anyway.

And so on.

Can you believe I’ve made it to page 232? Passed the halfway mark by far. It’s still December where I’m at in 2005, and I’m still trying to get this over with before the new regime takes over in January. I think that’s when it’ll be the best time to bring the book to market—right when the new editor of
The Magazine
is taking over.

T
he darkness, the darkness, oh the darkness. His pillows off the bed, sheets crumpled on the floor, shades drawn, four stale glasses of water on the bedside table. The darkness in his bedroom had even taken on his scent. He could smell himself, he could smell his days without a shower and the trip to the laundromat that kept getting put off and delayed and delayed. He could hear the buzz of his laptop, the keyboards sticky from who knows what delivery food residue, the fan on the laptop clicking away. Cooling down, screen saver jumping in and out, breaking through the darkness in some sick technological light, a sick mechanical glow, an unhealthy light—but even an unhealthy light was better than the darkness.

A.E. Peoria had hated the lights at the office, the radiating lights, the plastic dimples parceling out the fluorescent rays, sucking the soul, draining life from the skin. But how he missed those lights now.

A leave of absence. Yes, he was given a leave of absence.

Hugging himself in his bed, he wished he could have embraced the leave of absence. And he had, for the first seventy-two hours of darkness. He thought, I deserve a rest, a break; it’s not really a leave of absence or a suspension; it’s a much-needed respite. It would not be
held against him, it would not hurt his career, he could just ride it out, like Milius said, until that entire story blew over, until the news had moved on to the next big story and all that was left from the
Magazine
riots was a vague memory, a memory that he would remember certainly but that most people would forget and move on from, so that in the future, in conversation, perhaps the riots would trigger some association with him, but not the kind of detailed association of fresh scandal—“Oh, didn’t you have something to do with . . .”—and there would be more stories for him to write, more stories attached to his name, and eventually the riots would get pushed back, another chapter, another life lesson, just one more step in his career.

And who needed the magazine, really, he’d told himself, on the third evening of his leave of absence, garbage overflowing, bathroom floor littered with cardboard toilet-paper rolls. I don’t. I had a life before the magazine—I had a life and a career before the magazine, and I will have a life and career after the magazine, so fuck them.

But the darkness was creepy. The lack of phone calls, the lack of supportive email, the fact that the six-orgasms girl had broken up with him—and he didn’t even love her, what did he care that she’d broken up with him—but now he had faced the darkness for three days and he didn’t want to move.

When he dreamed, he would dream of his past horrors; he would see pencils sticking up along desert berms, flames, tanks exploding; he would dream of TV appearances gone bad, the camera frozen on him, scratching away at the earpiece until blood started to shoot out, as if the earpiece were like a small worm, a bug in a science fiction novel that had traveled into his brain and made his voice sound silly and his brain stop working. That made him stutter, drilling away, and behind the camera he could see his friends and family looking at him, he could see Nishant and Sanders and the intern Mike and yes,
there, holding a pencil between his legs, he could see Chipotle, the Mexican—or was it a Puerto Rican he had saved?

He would dream of cell phones not working, of plane tickets that weren’t good, of unavailable seats and long lines at security checkpoints. He would dream of getting drunk, shitfaced, and waking up trying to figure out what thing he had done that he should be ashamed of, then realizing he had done nothing, smelling his darkness, and that he had not moved from his bed for two weeks.

His laptop had been on the entire time, picking up a wireless signal, but he could not check his email—he knew messages and emails and voicemails and texts had been building up over those two weeks but he did not want to look at them. He could not stand the sight of them, because they would just be bringing more bad news, more blog postings and stories about how he had failed, fucked up, screwed the pooch, about how the
Magazine
riots had been his fault, that he had killed, by accident, by dint of bad reporting, seventeen Iraqis (the death toll had risen).

This wasn’t true—he knew he had been the victim of a great crime, a great conspiracy, a great cover-up, and he wanted
The Magazine
to go to hell, he wanted
The
Magazine
to burn.

But then, like a slave, he thought, he wanted
The Magazine
to forgive him, he wanted
The Magazine
back. He rationalized that the magazine was doing what it did best, that it was just protecting itself. That by protecting itself it was protecting him, too. That he was still part of
The Magazine
’s family, and that he just wanted their forgiveness. He just wanted to become A.E. Peoria,
Magazine
Journalist, again.

And after week three, he had said, I will get out of bed. I will get out of the darkness. I will forgive and let live. Let the bygones go their merry way—what the fuck is a bygone? I will check my email and voicemails, and I will be very Zen about it.

The three weeks of cleaning his system. Of no pills or booze, of cold turkey that had added to his general feeling of despair, of mild drug and alcohol withdrawal, shakes and tears and self-recriminations.

On week three, he cracked the blinds and saw the snow falling, and said to himself: It’s not that bad, it’s not that bad, it’s not that bad. I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.

He finally left his apartment to go down to the STD clinic that smelled like wet cigars.

“All looks okay under here,” the doctor, a small man with a gray beard and yellow teeth, said. “Have you found any more spots?”

“No, I haven’t,” Peoria said.

The doctor tossed the bandage into a wastebasket.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Your blood tests came back negative on other STDs.”

“Great, that’s great.”

“Last time we talked,” the doctor said, looking at his chart, “I suggested you go to AA.”

“Oh, I haven’t, but I’ve stopped everything. I’ve stopped everything, and it hasn’t been easy, because I’m sort of in a tough spot vis-à-vis my employer right now. I’m sort of out of a job.”

“You still have insurance?”

“Yes, I have insurance, but I’m on, like, administrative leave, I didn’t even know journalists could get that. It’s like something they give cops after they shoot a black kid intentionally by accident, you know. But yeah, I’m on administrative leave.”

“And you haven’t done any traveling, no more trips back to . . . Thailand?”

“No, I haven’t really left my apartment.”

“Because sex addiction, you wouldn’t believe it, men, once a month, take these trips, rack up all kinds of debts, tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Disappear for a long weekend, a long weekend or
five days, halfway around the world, that’s what their sex addiction does to them. Like I said before, one sign of sexual addiction is if you have an STD—it’s the equivalent of drunks having a blackout—and so it’s prudent to look at those signs carefully.”

“No, I’m not a sex addict, I don’t think. I don’t know if I’m really an addict at all,” he said. “Not in the traditional sense.”

The doctor looked at him skeptically.

“You should check out the meetings.”

Peoria left the clinic, no more bandages, free at least temporarily from molluscum contagiosum, feeling, for the first time in weeks, prepared to confront his inbox, his voicemail, his backlog of unanswered communications.

He felt okay.

He went into his apartment, breathing deeply, forcing energy upon himself, forcing the darkness away—I can do this.

Then he got the last message.

He’d been fired again.

The Magazine
, the message from Delray M. Milius said, thought that maybe Peoria should take another six months, perhaps a year or more, of leave of absence before he returned—before he discussed returning. He would be able to keep his benefits but he would not be getting a regular paycheck anymore.

Back to the darkness he went. Back to the darkness, for another three-week stretch, the bills and dirty laundry piling up, redux. Resorting to reusing the coffee filter in his coffee machine after running out of paper filters, ordering groceries and deliveries, ordering everything and keeping the door shut. Vowing to never again check his email, never to look at what other news it would bring—the wound on his leg had healed, the puncture wound had healed, the molluscum contagiosum had run its course, but a new wound had opened up.

The darkness didn’t help him heal that wound. The darkness hid it from him, hid what he didn’t want to recognize. He went over the scenarios in his head again and again. This wound was deep, cut to his core. He tried to ignore the wound, tried to pretend it wasn’t there, but he knew he was burying his feelings, burying his emotions, burying the truth. I’m a journalist, he thought, and if I can’t look at truth within myself, how can I see the truth out there in the world?

And the truth was he was terrified about his leave of absence—terrified and angry and dreading all social interaction. For the first time in his life, he didn’t want to see, didn’t want to spill.

What would he tell people he did? What could magazine journalist A.E. Peoria now say when asked what his job was?

The truth: The fuckers had stolen his identity. By firing him, they had taken away what he held dear—he didn’t even know he’d held it dear, he didn’t know how much his identity had been wrapped up in
The Magazine
’s brand: that for the past few years he had thought of himself primarily as
Magazine
Journalist first, a person and human being second. He felt like he was one of those kids who went to Yale or Princeton or Harvard and for the rest of their lives clung on to that as their calling card, as the most important part of their identity, even years after graduation day, years after it was all over for them—years after the rest of the world had moved on, they saw themselves as the Ivy League (he didn’t get into Ivy League schools, true).

Was that now him? Would he now only be able to say, when introducing himself, that he used to write for
The Magazine
? A former
Magazine
journalist! Pathetic!

How did he allow his identity to become so entwined with some pieces of paper printed weekly? How did he fall for the prestige and structure—though he had chafed under the prestige and structure, he had fallen for it, more than he would have thought possible. He had fallen for it, and then they had taken it away, they had snatched
his identity from him during the worst time of his life: Six Orgasms had broken up with him, a public humiliation on television, reputation raped on the blogs, a dent in his otherwise skyrocketing career. Yes, he had been bumped off the fast track, the people mover at the airport. He was back on the other side of the plastic barrier. Even worse, he was on his knees, on his stomach, his face getting hit by an imaginary janitor’s mop, soaking the floors to make them nice and shiny for those who did have real careers and who did not stumble, who did not fall. For those on the fast track, the floors were clean, while he was licking the dirty end of the mop, drinking from the murky waters of the mop bucket, the janitor standing on the back of his neck, saying, You thought you almost made it, you thought you were almost there, but you weren’t! You fool, how could you have believed that you were going to be one of them? One of the brands, one of the bylines that people recognized? How could you ever have thought that was where you were headed?

How could you have thought you were going to be your own brand?

No, you were a failure, a fuckup, a fucktard, a dipshit, a loser, a skank, a donkey-ass weak bitch motherfucker. Yes, these words and even worse passed through his mind—a cunt snorter! Yes, he was a cunt snorter, an abysmal failure, a catastrophic embarrassment, that’s what he was. He could feel it on his teeth, even after brushing and flossing, he could smell the failure through the darkness, he could taste the failure on his pillows. The crust in his eyes: he would wipe it out, place it on his tongue, and he knew. The dried sperm in his pubic hair: he would reach down and touch and then taste the musk. He could taste the failure all over his body, a disgusting taste, with no career future to cleanse it away.

What else did he have besides a career? What did anyone in his peer group have besides a career? No close family, no God, what else
was there to fall back on? To make sense of the world, to give his life meaning besides his career, his once promising career, his career that he had taken for granted. He had taken it for granted: the flying first class, the phone calls returned, the pickup lines—I write for
The Magazine
. What do you do?

Yes, the career had been his life. The career at
The Magazine
had been his id, his ego, and his soul. He didn’t know it at the time. He didn’t care enough about it. He just took pills and got drunk and passed out under his desk because he thought that he had it locked up. But one mistake—fuck, and it wasn’t even a mistake! But maybe it was a mistake, the more he thought about it. Certainly running after Milius with a pencil was a mistake—maybe he did fuck up. Objectively, he had to admit, it appeared that he had fucked up. After all, he was in the darkness. He was living in the darkness while Healy went on to break more blow job stories and Delray M. Milius collected his six figures and Nishant and Sanders showed up again on television—yes, all of these things were as true as his unwashed sheets.

If only he could just allow himself to give up. To say, It’s okay, it doesn’t matter, life is too short. If only he could just knock off the ambition, if he could just take a deep breath and say, It’s all going to be all right. Then he would be okay, then he could let go of the career, then he could fall back on something. But that wasn’t in him. He knew it would be like telling a lion not to bite, an elephant not to deposit large amounts of excrement; no, there was no way the gears in his mind would stop turning over and over and over again. Why couldn’t he just lie in bed? Why couldn’t he just accept the darkness, postpone the heat death of the universe, still and silent? Or, perhaps, open the windows and open the doors and accept the light?