The Last Magazine: A Novel (18 page)

F
orty-five minutes later, I turn up the volume on the television on the pillar next to Dorothy’s and Patricia’s cubicles.

“A CNN exclusive interview,” the anchor says, “with the reporter who wrote the now infamous story that sparked the
Magazine
riots in Iraq.”

Although Peoria has gone to the studio, they don’t actually put him in the same room with the anchor. He is, as he tells me later, brought down to a dark room on the second floor, behind a wall of glass, where production assistants and assistant producers and other young-looking people in headsets mill around, slamming phones down, rushing, wound-up. The anchor is on the fifth floor. Peoria is put on a chair to look straight into the camera.

They at least have given him a spray of makeup, I think, as his face flashes on screen, the green tone of his cheeks removed.

Isolated below, he doesn’t have the comfort of seeing a human face—he feels trapped, cornered, staring at a camera with the words of what the anchor is reading scrolling underneath.

“In Iraq’s holiest city, riots broke out after allegations in a
Magazine
story offended tens of thousands of Iraqis and others across the Muslim world. The story alleged that Iraqi detainees were victims of abuse at the hands of U.S. soldiers, a claim that both the White House and the Pentagon have strongly denied. The riots have now claimed the lives of thirteen Iraqis. With us is A.E. Peoria, the
Magazine
reporter who wrote the controversial story. First, let’s look at the words that have caused the deadly violence.”

On screen, the offending paragraph is put up, with a number of ellipses.

According to a U.S. military official, detainees were told to strip naked . . . subjected to “debilitating noise levels” of rock music like AC/DC . . . and told to flush the Koran down the toilet. In one incident, the Koran was used to capture the ejaculate of a soldier who was reading aloud a page of
Hustler
’s letter section to the captured insurgents. . . .

I hear Peoria clear his throat.

“Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology?” the anchor asks, as a way to ease into the conversation.

“An apology, I mean, I’m sorry that they got so offended, but—”

“The sources in the story—everyone has backed off this. Our own CNN reporting also couldn’t confirm your story. You can’t really confirm it, can you?”

“I mean, we quoted—we had quotes from an eyewitness.”

“But you never saw this yourself?”

“No, we had quotes from an eyewitness, like I said, uh, I never saw this myself, but I think, you know, we reported on this investigation that is going on into it—”

“But the government says that this investigation doesn’t contain
anything like what you described, that it is just a routine checkup of the facilities, and the claims that you make in the story haven’t been confirmed by the investigation.”

“Right, well, the other reporter, who wrote this, his sources told him that they saw a draft of the report—”

“A draft, so this was just a draft of a government report? And you’re blaming Matthew Healy, one of the most well-respected journalists in the profession? As I know, from personal experience covering the government, the final version often has many things that are taken out, and so don’t you think it was reckless to go ahead with this?”

“I don’t think, I mean, you have to understand that I’m sorry that this rioting happened, but you know that cleric, that guy, he’s a real jerk—he’s not like a good guy, you know?”

“We have to go to a commercial, and when we get back, we’ll bring in a Middle East expert to discuss the fallout. To join in the discussion, log on to CNN.com.”

It is the first time I have seen a friend melt down on live television. It is a brutal experience. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I know the adrenaline is flowing through his mind. I know what he should say, I know that he should just say, Stop this madness, your questions are asinine. It’s worse, too, when I put myself in the place of an average viewer who happens to be tuning into CNN at an airport lounge or as background noise as he makes the second pot of coffee in the kitchen, or the first pot of coffee if he’s watching on the West Coast.

I know they will take one look at Peoria and think: This guy is fucked-up, this guy doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s not making any sense at all. Because the words Peoria says jumble together. They don’t fit in sound bites. I know he needs time to explain himself, to explain the story, to have the viewers see the context. He just wants context. If he can just give the context of the story, if he can just make
a few simple points—that the story is accurate, that perhaps they could have been more careful in how they reported it, but that other reporters had been digging around, hinting at similar activities by American forces. If he could have cited an Associated Press story from November, if he could have cited a Reuters story from last week, if he can just explain himself. But Peoria can’t explain himself, because once you start trying to explain yourself on television, it’s hard to win—you can’t explain; you just have to state yourself, without hesitation.

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt—to take out the “ums” and “ahs” and how his eyes keep darting to the left and right. (He will explain later that his eyes were looking at the other television monitors, and he will swear the producers were cutting back to him at exactly the wrong moments.)

“We’re back with noted Middle East scholar Daniel Tubes. Daniel, what did you make of the—”

“Can I just respond to what Mr. Peoria said first? What he’s doing is classic. He’s blaming the victims for his own reckless reporting.”

“How is he blaming the victims?”

“He’s saying it’s their fault for rioting, their fault for reacting to the erroneous information he put out. And I think that’s just despicable.”

“Uh, no, I’m just saying—”

“He obviously knows nothing of Middle Eastern culture,” Tubes continues. “I hate to be blunt, but that’s so clear to me.”

“Why do you say that?” the anchor asks, lobbing another softball to Tubes.

“
Hustler
? The Arabs don’t have a culture of masturbation,” Tubes says. “The story has so many holes in it, it’s an embarrassment. It’s offensive, because in the Arab world, and I don’t think I can put this more politely, there just isn’t the culture of masturbation that we have in the West.”

“Mr. Peoria,” the anchor says. “Is this true? Were you unaware of the cultural sensitivities you were reporting on?”

“No, I guess I wasn’t aware of the, uh, lack of cultural, um, in that sense. I mean, the Iraqis I knew, um, they really liked looking at pictures of naked women and things. Um, I mean, they didn’t even need to be naked, just like, you know, advertisements of a girl in a robe or a bra, or a girl in a dress that doesn’t fully cover, you know, that was pretty shocking to them—”

“And so you thought it was a good idea to write about
Hustler
magazine?”

“I mean, I’m there to report on what’s happening. I don’t really—”

“This is the smoke screen that the liberal media have been hiding behind: they want to do their best to undermine the Americans. They hate the troops, they don’t care that what they report actually puts American lives at risk. And by the way, a source at the Pentagon told me that pornography isn’t even allowed among Americans in Iraq! It’s against General Order Number 1. So how did they get this so-called
Hustler
magazine, this so-called November edition? How, I ask, did they get that? And flushing the Koran down the toilet? I spoke to another high-level source who told me that there are no flushing handles at the detention facility Peoria so inaccurately depicts as hostile. They don’t even have toilets; they have little holes to squat in—and they have porta-johns.”

“I mean, it is just to get at the idea they were throwing the Koran in the toilet, you know?” Peoria says.

“Oh, so he’s changing his story again, right here! Admitting to another mistake! They don’t flush; they throw! Next think you know, it’s going to be, Well, there was a Koran that fell off a table in the room next door!”

“All right, we’re going to turn to the viewer email, see what our audience is saying. Sam from Georgia writes, ‘Peoria is a disgrace to
America. I’d cancel my subscription to
The Magazine
but I don’t even have one.’

“Caroline from New Mexico says, ‘I’m so disappointed in how the media always gets things wrong and no one holds them accountable. Kudos to your show for calling that reporter out for his bad news.’

“We’re heading to commercial. Mr. Peoria, thanks for your time. Daniel Tubes will stay with us, and we’ll be right back. You’re watching CNN.”

Peoria disappears from the screen, scratching his nose.

I turn off the television and go back to my cubicle. Within minutes, a story appears on the wires: “Journalist apologizes for erroneous story.”

I click on the story and scroll down. In the second paragraph, the story says
The Magazine
has released a statement. This is news to me. The statement says that A.E. Peoria is suspended from his duties at the magazine, and the magazine is instituting new regulations to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again. The story quotes Delray M. Milius. It’s clear they had the statement ready before Peoria even went on air.

I
know I’m jeopardizing my job, for sure, but every once in a while, I’m supposed to stand up for what’s right—at least that’s what I’d absorbed from all sorts of morality tales I’d heard over the years.

What can I really do, as a cubicle slave, as a desk jockey, as a kid just one step removed from an internship?

I know what I can do, actually—I can leak the real story. I know I can go to Wretched.com.

I type in the URL, and wait for the screen to upload. I open another window to log into my personal email account, on Gmail. The Wretched.com site is coming up. It’s the most popular media gossip site on the web.

The top story that day happens to be about an assistant producer at Fox News who’d gotten drunk at a party and had an accident in her pants that was picked up by a camera phone video. The editors at Wretched.com are loving that story, but I think after Peoria’s appearance on CNN, they’ll probably write something about him, too.

Sure enough, after I refresh the screen, there is a YouTube clip with Peoria, with the choice quotes printed below.

On the sidebar, there is a link for people to send anonymous tips
to Wretched.com. I start writing up an email, putting down the real story, the cover-up.

Thirty minutes later, I see my email, name redacted, printed in full.

It would have worked, or perhaps helped save Peoria’s reputation, but at almost the exact same time, the governor of Virginia got caught getting a blow job in the bathroom of the Amtrak Acela Express, DC to New York. The guy who broke the story? Healy. He must have been saving that one.

If Peoria had just waited a few hours, maybe he could have survived the damage, as the
Magazine
riots were forgotten with the new round of blow job news.

But then I hear screaming down the hall.

R
eeling, reeled, rocked, slipped, sliding. What is the right word?

A.E. Peoria stares at his computer screen, sitting in his boxers, the white bandage visible through the slit for his penis. He scratched another bandage on his thigh covering up a puncture wound.

The Word document is opened up to his journal, file name wd35. When he had started this Word file during his senior year of college, he didn’t want to name it something like “diary” or “aejournal,” because if he ever lost his computer or if someone was looking in it—“someone” meaning a girl he was dating—then they’d know where to look, they could go straight to the source. He had transferred and resaved the file thirty-five times since that first document, in one of the early versions of Microsoft Word, and making its way from outdated laptop to outdated laptop, the journal now stretched to 1,700 single-spaced pages.

It isn’t the most coherent document. There are so many spelling mistakes and typos that the red-line function, which marks a misspelled word, stopped working in late 2001.

But on the evening after the CNN appearance, it is to the wd35 that A.E. Peoria turns.

He knew that it couldn’t have gone well. In the five minutes after removing the earpiece, being shuttled into the elevator by another large-breasted assistant producer, and being dumped out onto the street in the cold, he kept waiting for his mobile phone to light up with text messages and voicemails from friends and family who’d seen him on the program. Usually, after a TV appearance, he would be flooded with words of encouragement and support: great job, you looked great, excellent. He’d get notes from people he hadn’t seen or heard from in years, all of a sudden impressed with him because he had managed to get onto a television screen.

Nothing this time.

When he got back to the office, the silence was even louder. He passed the security guard, and in the lobby there was a TV screen turned to CNN, and the security guard, a large African American woman, asked him for his ID.

“I was just on TV,” he told her.

She looked at him.

And she waved him by. The doors opened to a crowd heading out for lunch, the clique that always seemed to hang out together, a group of assistant editors and senior editors who, Peoria had always felt, were replaying their high school fantasies of being the cool kids—and how he wanted to be among the cool kids! And Peoria thought that he had been finally making inroads into this crowd: one of them had asked him, at the homecoming party, if he would join their table for dinner Friday night, and this little group had come out in a bunch and blown past him, pretending they didn’t recognize him, or at least pretending that they didn’t know him well enough to say hello in the hallway.

On his floor, he walked by that kid Hastings’s desk, and even Hastings just said hi, nothing special, no “Great job, man,” and he knew Hastings was the kid who would have said “Great job” no matter what he had done.

And then he sat down at his desk and the email from Delray M. Milius was there, asking him to come into his office.

Peoria walked down the hallways again, and stood in front of the secretary sitting outside Delray’s office.

“It was that bad, hunh?” Peoria said, fishing for at least a little encouragement. The woman at the desk didn’t even smile and waved him in without answering his question.

“Alex, sit down,” Delray M. Milius said. “We need to talk.”

Peoria sat down and inhaled.

“We’re putting you on administrative leave. We think you should take some time off.”

“I don’t think I need to take time off,” Peoria said. “I don’t think the story is getting any bigger now, I mean, what more could we do?”

“No, we think it’s best for you to take time off, at least for a few weeks.”

The conversation went back and forth like that for fifteen minutes, and Peoria finally agreed that he would take time off.

“Okay, Milius, I’m a team player and everything and I don’t mind doing that at all, you know, so I only ask that we keep this confidential, because you know if it gets out that I’m taking time off, it’s like I’m admitting I’m guilty and admitting I fucked up, and I really don’t think I did, you know. I mean it was Healy’s story and I just added that quote, so I don’t—”

“Right, right,” Milius said.

“I guess, because I don’t want this to hurt my career here at
The Magazine
, so if we could keep this confidential, that would be great, you know, between us.”

“Yes, of course, it won’t go farther than this room.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” Peoria said, mildly shocked. Was he really getting suspended? He couldn’t really believe it, and he felt like he wanted to do something—cry maybe, and if he were a girl, he
probably would have started to cry, but Peoria really didn’t cry when he was sober.

He got up and actually started to thank Milius for
The Magazine
’s generosity, for keeping quiet about his leave, and started to convince himself, feeling the bandage on his dick and the extra two Xanax in his pocket, that maybe taking a few weeks off to let this story die down wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And as he left, he looked back to thank Milius one more time, and saw Milius had picked up his phone.

Five minutes later, back at his office, he looked on the Drudge Report to see if the story was still getting top billing. It had been moved above the headline.

There was a new headline, which said “RIOT JOURNALIST SUSPENDED.”

Healy got suspended? Strange that Milius hadn’t mentioned it. He clicked on the story.

He read it. He saw a quote from Delray M. Milius, a statement that said they had grown concerned with A.E. Peoria’s behavior and they were suspending him, pending further investigation.

Peoria sat back in his chair, numbed, and took out a Xanax. He reached into his desk drawer and found a bottle of whiskey and took two quick shots. There must be some mistake. He started to feel a number of uncomfortable sensations that reminded him of the humiliation he hadn’t felt since
Desperation Points West
was reviled in a
Booklist
review.

It was as if he’d been kicked in the nuts—and for some reason he thought of Chipotle for a moment, Chipotle squealing and bleeding from the groin. He thought of Chipotle and knew, or had some idea of, what it must have been like to get shrapnel in the balls, to feel like the world had betrayed him with a quick and unexpected blast to the groin—even knowing that these things happened and it was a
cutthroat world and reputations rose and fell. Peoria had been lied to by the best of them over the years as a journalist who had been shot at, had been rocked by explosions, but none of it had felt personal, none of it had felt like he had been betrayed—politicians lie, people lie when they talk to journalists, bad guys and insurgents try to kill you, nothing more or less should be expected of them, but there was no sense in taking it personally.

This, however, felt personal.

His first instinct was to write an email, a scathing email, but he stopped himself, remembering a line he’d read in a business memoir: Make war by phone, make love by email.

Okay, he thought, so maybe sending an email wouldn’t be the right move. Then how could he get proof that Delray M. Milius had lied to him?

He would have to talk to him again, that’s how. He was a reporter and he’d go over there right now and get him to go on the record, get him to admit that he had lied.

He grabbed his digital tape recorder and a notepad and a newly sharpened pencil, and holding them in his fists (the Xanax, or was it Percocet he’d been taking, made his hands feel heavy; he felt like he was in physical therapy, the way he was moving his hands around the pencil), and he took off down the hallway, choosing another route, past the cubicle area where the cool kids hung out, swinging past Sanders Berman’s office, until he saw Delray M. Milius standing at his door and talking to his secretary.

And then Peoria tripped, stumbled over a man purse that had been left out in the hallway, and the strap, as if it were a bear trap, snagged his leg and he tumbled over, falling. He saw the corner of the secretary’s desk and jerked his head out of the way quickly. He felt a squishy feeling on his thigh and wondered if his pen had busted, then he stood up, rocked backward, and looked at Milius.

“You said you were going to keep it confidential—”

That’s when the secretary who hadn’t even smiled started screaming.

Delray M. Milius had a disgusted look on his face.

“What? What are you screaming at? I want you on the record. I want you to tell me that you lied.”

With his left hand he grabbed the notepad and with his right he searched for the pencil.

He put his hands in his pocket and it wasn’t there.

Delray M. Milius was staring at Peoria’s lower half.

Then Peoria looked down and saw that the pencil was sticking out of his leg.

Perhaps it was the Xanax that hit him, or the Percocet, or the shots of whiskey he had taken, but he all of a sudden felt both heavy and light-headed and he fell backward, this time not missing the sharp edge of the desk.

Peoria felt comfortable on the floor and closed his eyes. He heard shouts of “Nine-one-one,” and he felt he could open his eyes, but thought it was better to just lie there. His eyes were closed and Delray M. Milius moved next to him.

He heard the southern drawl of Sanders Berman, and Milius saying, “We clearly made the right decision.” Fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and in that time he lost consciousness and started to snore, and he woke up with a paramedic looking down on him.

“Are you Nicolas Cage?” Peoria asked.

The paramedic pulled the pencil out quickly. The secretary screamed again.

“We need to take your pants off to put the bandage on,” the paramedic said.

“No, I need my pants,” Peoria whispered.

“We need to take them off,” the paramedic said.

“No, I already have a bandage on my dick,” he said. “Let me keep my dignity, let me keep them on.”

Peoria grabbed hold of his belt, as if he were protecting his chastity, and closed his eyes. He was much drunker than he’d originally thought.

“Okay, but that means I’m going to have to cut a patch out.”

He felt the cold metal of scissors clipping away around his pants, and then he passed out again. He woke up on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance.

He was released from the emergency room six hours later. He put his pants back on, a large hole in the leg, and on the subway, normal businessmen and good-looking women gave him space as he sat in the car, with his legs crossed, hoping that no one could see through the large patch in his left leg and up to the bandage. He should have taken a cab, he thought.

He didn’t feel well at all, and everything that had just happened seemed like some kind of nightmarish dream—that dream where you try to confront your boss and end up impaling yourself on a pencil.

—

So there he is, back in his one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, staring at the screen at wd35.

Reeled, reeling, slipping, sliding. He starts to write about how he has ended up alone, in his apartment, and almost out of a job.