The Last Magazine: A Novel (17 page)

G
ary and I take the elevator up to the homecoming party. A line has already formed, people standing and chatting along the windows, bulging out in the middle of a scrum centered around Henry the EIC, who accepts congratulations and regrets, even from the three other correspondents that had been to the war and come back.

With club soda in hand, I watch the progression of magazine dignitaries approaching Henry, saying a few words of consolation, shaking the hands of the three other war correspondents. Sanders Berman arrives, Delray M. Milius on his heels. Fashionably late, Nishant Patel strolls in, his assistants Patricia and Lucy behind him, carrying two of his BlackBerrys and his personal mobile telephone.

And as Nishant and Sanders go up the line, each working different sides of the room, they are both headed to meet at the towering figure in the center, Henry the EIC.

As the two contenders to his throne are about to meet, I move closer to listen. I feel a sharp stab in my side, then a liquid discharge, and looking down I see I’ve been bumped out of the way by Matt Healy, the crack investigative reporter, blue ink on my shirt leaking from his busted pen.

“Argrg, excuse me,” he mumbles, timing his break in the scrum for when all three editors meet.

Henry, enjoying the moment, silences Berman and Patel, opening the floor to Healy.

“Matt, great you could make it,” Henry the EIC says.

“I’m on deadline, so I can’t stay long, but I want to make the case for going big on this,” he says. “I’ve uncovered allegations of abuse by Americans of Iraqi detainees. You wouldn’t believe what I’m hearing is coming down the pike.”

Healy goes into some detail—blaring loud music, standing in stress positions, dogs sniffing, laughing, and other indignities that will be very well known by next summer. But, it’s not well known now—the photos from Abu Ghraib aren’t going to be released for months.

“Matt, it sounds like a great story, but making these accusations without having seen anything more than some government report that might or might not come out, that’s dangerous. We need something more solid,” says Henry.

It’s always a risk for a subordinate to jump into a conversation with four elders, with four people who can make or break your career, who may not be too keen on your insight. You never want to contradict them in public or to say something unwise, but I feel I have something that they may not know of.

It’s a file that A.E. Peoria had written for one of the larger Iraq stories; he’d filed ten thousand words, twenty-five pages single-spaced, and there’s a good chance that I was the only one in the building who had actually read every last page. I’d come across two paragraphs where A.E. Peoria had described the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners, as told to him by an American officer at a detention facility in Baghdad. It was the kind of confirmation that Healy didn’t have.

A.E. Peoria isn’t here yet, so I figure I’m doing him a favor—dropping his name among the power elite at the magazine.

“Um, you might want to read A.E. Peoria’s file too,” I say.

The four esteemed gentlemen stop talking. Nishant Patel gives me a look that means, You have overstepped your precociousness. Sanders Berman, a fan of hierarchy, also looks uncomfortable. Healy, though, doesn’t give a shit, and says, “Peoria? What does it say?”

“It quotes an American captain about some of the things they do to detainees, and—”

I catch a whiff of cigarette and vomit covered over with cologne, and Peoria enters the conversation.

“Sorry I’m late. I’ve had a hell of a time, you wouldn’t believe what happened today—”

Peoria is lucky that Healy has another skill of the reporter—the sharp question to redirect a talkative subject back to where he wants the conversation to go. If he hadn’t, Peoria probably would have started talking about molluscum contagiosum and his breakup.

“This guy says you have a detainee file?”

“Oh, yeah, I never knew why Jerry cut that out, it was great stuff. They’ve taken detainees, the real Islamic-types, and started slapping them around with the Koran, literally, the captain slapping, pissing on it, bringing it in the shower with them, even. I think they said they were jerking off in it, saying that Allah likes sticky pages, tossing it in the toilet, all sorts of stuff like that. Yeah, I don’t know why—”

I back away, my place in pushing the story done, a role that would be forgotten by everyone (except for Delray M. Milius, whose eyes are on me, gauging the threat).

Henry the EIC, Nishant, and Sanders all agree that it sounds like a great story. It gets the cover. Healy and Peoria get the byline.

I’m around twenty-five now—I think I’ve said that. I feel like a relic, like an ancient. I feel like I’m a blacksmith in the days of Henry Ford’s assembly line, an apprentice scroll writer in the months following Gutenberg’s great invention, or a poet in 1991.

Meaning: I feel my skill set is obsolete.

This book is an insurance policy against my dying field: maybe I can write novels, and if that’s not a sign of desperation, a jump from one sinking ship to another, I don’t know what is.

But for the sake of history, I’ll explain the soon-to-be-lost art. Take my descriptions with you into the next century for research when Disney or some other corporation decides to build a tourist trap of what late-twentieth-century America was like, like they do now with those old villages of Pilgrims and settlers in funny hats and clothes: demonstrations of manual butter churning, candle making, and typesetting in a printing press.

This is what, the tourist guide will say, is called a “newsroom”; it’s where they produced information content on paper, like newspapers and magazines. (Kids will nod: Oh, that’s where the word
paper
comes from in
newspaper
.)

A slice of life: the cubicles, animatronics or live action—dozens of people to put out one single page of print, how extraordinarily quaint.

This is how a magazine story gets written.

Before 1969, stories in
The Magazine
had no bylines. There’s a single authorial voice, the voice of
The Magazine
, omniscient in its power of observation, a fullness of perspective that transcends individual insight to bring the hefty weight of an institution. It works to much effectiveness.

But then 1969 happens.
The Magazine
catches up to the culture. The individual man, the yippie, the hippie, the hip and the square. Voices that are too institutional and too authoritative are suspect. Institutions inherently are co-opted by the immoral status quo, all slightly to massively oppressive, all involved in the insane desire of the Establishment to keep Blacks feeling Black, to keep White Kids from smoking dope and feeling love, to make the Working-Class Man consume, to reduce all the peoples of the world to their sole human value of becoming efficient actors in our economic system, and to keep undermining the beliefs of the Vietnamese people, particularly in the northern part of that country.

The Magazine
, to its credit, adopts positions throughout the ’60s that start to border on the radical, at least compared with those of its main competitor, Brand X. It is, as the editors see it, a time when smart business strategy and positive social policy converge.
The Magazine
promotes Negro rights, peacenik rights, Mexican rights, worker rights, and occasionally the rights of napalm victims.
The Magazine
mourns equally for Altamont and Kent State and Watergate.

In practice, though, it is undermining the labor movement.
The Magazine
writers don’t have a union. The writers live with the hypocrisy until 1971. The writers go on strike.

It is a brief moment in history: magazine writers will never have the chance to go on strike again.

The writers and reporters win an important concession: the byline.

The institutional voice of the magazine is never the same again.

But the byline, too, is misleading to the laymen. A magazine story is not the work of one man or one woman.

The byline gives the impression that the name on top actually wrote and reported the story. Not true. The writer, in this ancient formulation, takes the reporting from others and weaves it into a narrative. There are also layers of editors and copy editors and fact-checkers and writers and reportorial changes.

Each paragraph and each sentence that finds its way into print, hand-delivered to subscriber homes, resting casually and arrogantly on the newsstands, takes at least eight or nine hours of close inspection: tweaking, polishing, rubbing, beautification, sullification, hyping. These hands are hidden; it is the writer with the byline who gets the glory.

Drawback: the writer also gets the blame.

Advantage: the name in bold print is treated as if the brilliant insights and omniscience are all his own.

The ’80s and ’90s: The byline takes on a life of its own. The byline separates itself from
The Magazine
brand. Bylines become brands. Layoffs mean that there are no more layers of fact-checkers and researchers and editors. The strategy of
The Magazine
is to enhance its many brands by making brands of bylines.

Healy is a brand. A.E. Peoria is a brand in the making.

I
’m anticipating the reaction, monitoring the media waves from my cubicle.

Peoria and Healy’s story is met with silence. Nothing. Doesn’t crack the ether. Doesn’t make
The Magazine
part of the conversation. Doesn’t move the debate or get any television hits or radio hits. No responses from the White House or the State Department. Even Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch shrug it off.

The Magazine
’s public relations department is disinclined to touch it. Nobody wants this story. Complaining about Iraq when Saddam Hussein has been captured?

Three days, nothing.

What happens during those three days?
The Magazine
goes global. It is translated into six different languages: Polish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and Arabic.

By Thursday, an Islamic cleric in Najaf, a man who you wouldn’t think would be in the magazine’s target demographic—though, to be honest, by the year 2004, anyone who picks up the magazine is welcomed into its demographic—has a copy in his hands. It gets
delivered to his mosque. (Or maybe he found it in the seat-back pocket on a first-class flight from Tehran to Baghdad, thanks to a promotional deal
The Magazine
has with Royal Jordanian Airlines.)

The cleric does what all truly holy men do when they come across an outrage, an indignation, an affront to what is good and decent in the world: he calls a press conference.

Only the Arabic-language press attends—the video shows, with the production value of a New England public access channel, a card table, and a filter of cigarette smoke in an elementary school classroom, Arabic script and loud trumpeting music on, a scratchy audio.

It’s another twelve hours before what he says gets translated back into English. That’s when I pick up on it. That’s after the damage is done. The Internet has the story.

By Friday, followers of the cleric have taken to the streets in Najaf, waving copies of
The Magazine
, burning copies of
The Magazine
, and even mentioning things like death threats (though not taking it as far as a fatwa).

The Magazine
’s role gives a new theme to the usual riots and fighting following Friday prayers.

The local authorities, called in to stop the riots, are persuaded, after having the damning allegations on page 21 paraphrased for them—probably an inaccurate paraphrase, at that—to join the riots as well.

Furious excitement—religious, political, illiterate, a change of pace from relaxing though resentful unemployment—sweeps the streets outside “one of Islam’s holiest shrines.” It means only one thing: a trampling.

Crowd deaths follow. More deaths come after unknown guns fire bullets lengthwise.

Thirteen is the total.

It’s clear in the first headlines I read from the Associated Press and
Reuters how this story is going to play:
The Magazine
is the cause of the riots.

The political fallout in America begins.

The administration in Washington goes on the offensive—an example of the liberal media, the pantywaist liberals in New York trying to undermine the war effort. Because of reckless reporting, the White House spokesperson says, thirteen people are dead.

The spokesperson pauses at the lectern.

Thirteen, he repeats.

The right-wing websites seize the deaths to attack
The Magazine
’s credibility. “The Magazine Murders,” writes one blogger. “Thirteen innocents dead at the hands of the MainStreamMedia. Despicable.”

There is no room in the discourse to mention the hypocrisy that in other circumstances, these same people would be cheering the deaths of thirteen Islamic extremists. But today they have taken up their cause with mourning blog posts.

I’m waiting for
The Magazine
to respond, to issue a statement.

Nishant Patel ducks by the cubicle, Sanders Berman hustles past. No time for chitchat today. I hear an “Arrgh” from Healy, notepads flapping in his pockets. Peoria, three Xanax already ingested, wearing an off-the-rack suit and tie, is the only one who stops by to tell me what’s going on.

“Healy’s sources are backing off,” he says.

“What about your captain?”

“He’s not answering emails. Fuck, he might be dead for all I know. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“They want me to go on TV to defend it.”

Peoria says this and leaves me at the cubicle.

Choosing Peoria to go on TV? Bad idea. The two people who can
offer the best defense for
The Magazine
: Nishant, a man many Americans assume to be Muslim because of his darker skin and accent, and Sanders Berman, a southerner who counts conservatives among his most devoted readers. Or Healy, whose reputation—the Pentagon Paper of Blow Jobs—could survive the blistering assault.

But Peoria, God bless him, so deranged from painkillers, war flashbacks, and the trauma of a benign STD, has been chosen to take the fall.

I hear a whispered conversation outside my cubicle.

The voice of Delray M. Milius, echoing off his hand, which he has put to his mouth. Sanders Berman stands next to him, looking panicked.

“. . . stay out of the way . . . lay low . . . don’t be associated with this story . . .”

I have an urge to pop up, to say, What the fuck, guys? But I don’t. I just take a few notes. The time of the conversation, the words that I heard, the participants.

A door in the corner office shuts.

“Patricia, Lucy, is my car waiting for me?”

“Yes, Nishant,” says the chorus.

Delray M. Milius’s hand drops from his mouth. Sanders Berman stands upright. Nishant, a Burberry peacoat hanging over his arm, comes around the corner.

“Professor,” Berman says.

“Milius, Sanders,” he says.

“Off to CNN?” Sanders asks, a note of hopefulness.

“Oh, no, no time for television today,” Nishant says.

“Me either,” Berman says.

Two men who, as their reputations confirm, find it very difficult to go forty-eight hours without finding a way to a television studio,
who carry makeup removal swabs in their pockets, are now both unavailable.

“I have a speech to give on Milton Friedman,” Nishant Patel says. “An award ceremony. Hastings, you have that speech for me?”

“Right here, Nishant,” I say.

Delray M. Milius’s doughboy face flinches; he hadn’t seen me, hunched behind the velvet cubicle walls.

“Lucy, Patricia, is my car ready?”

“It’s waiting, Nishant,” they respond.

Patricia snatches the manila folder from his hand, and Nishant leaves two of his assistants trailing.

Sanders Berman gives me a pained smile and turns the corner back to his office. Delray M. Milius follows him.

Peoria comes charging out of his office next.

“I’m supposed to be on CNN in forty-five minutes,” he tells me.

I follow Peoria outside while he smokes a cigarette. The CNN studios are only two blocks away on Columbus Circle.

“Peoria, man, I think they want you to take the blame for this,” I say.

He looks at me, inhaling, his cheeks turning Granny Smith–apple green in the cold.

“We have nothing to apologize for,” he says. “All sorts of fucked-up shit is going on at these detention facilities. I know that, Healy knows that. We just need to stand by it, you know, and since I’m the one who was over there, I really have the credibility—that’s what they told me, and I liked that, having the credibility to speak for the magazine. It shows that they really have put their faith in me, to choose me to do this, you know?”

“I don’t think so, man. I think they’re ducking for the fucking hurricane shelters while you’re standing out there with the microphone, dodging telephone polls.”

“You’re a fucking cynical person for your age. You know, I was never that cynical when I was coming up. Now . . .”

Maybe it’s the drugs or another hangover or the prescription meds or just the numb stressed-out feeling he’s described to me since coming back. He doesn’t get it.