The Last Magazine: A Novel (2 page)

M
agazine journalist A.E. Peoria is kneeling on top of a 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser in eastern Chad. It’s night, and he’s up on a small hill to get reception. The engine is running so that the electronics he has plugged into the jeep stay charged. A.E. Peoria is swearing. He believes that his Uniriya mobile satellite phone must be pointed 33 degrees southeast, and that should make it work.

The Toyota Land Cruiser is making a beeping sound because the keys are in the ignition and the door is slightly ajar. It’s actually more like a dinging sound than a beep, and Peoria would close the door but he needs the interior ceiling light from the car to see what he is doing. His seven-inch black Maglite, which he usually would be gripping in his teeth, has run out of batteries. Or so he thinks.

Before climbing onto the roof of the Land Cruiser, he had tried to turn on the flashlight. When the light didn’t come on, he checked the batteries to make sure the + and − were correctly in place. Unscrewing the top, he saw that the two double-A batteries inside weren’t the Energizers he’d purchased at the Dubai Duty Free Travelers’ Shop and Market at the Dubai International Airport. These were batteries
with Chinese characters on them, the word
MAJORPOWERY
in pink English.

Someone had switched his Energizers for
MAJORPOWERYS
.

Why hadn’t the person just taken the flashlight—that would have made more sense. Why did the thief bother replacing the Energizers with dead knockoffs? The thief either was trying to be clever and/or knew him, swapping dead batteries so he wouldn’t notice the difference in the flashlight’s weight. The prime suspect, he reasoned, was his translator, David D. Obutu from N’Djamena.

“It’s dark, man, don’t go up there. It’s stupid shit,” David D. Obutu had told him twenty minutes before Peoria had decided to drive the Land Cruiser to the top of the small hill.

“I have to get reception to check if there’s anything from New York.”

“Stupid shit, man. You have a light up there they can see for fucking kilometers, man. They’ll start shooting again.”

“They haven’t shot in three days. I should be okay. I’ll do it quick.”

“It’s some stupid shit, man.”

“This
is
stupid shit. I’m here to do stupid shit. I’m not asking you, I’m just telling you.”

“The villagers aren’t going to be very happy with you.”

“Fucking villagers have more to worry about than me checking my email for twenty minutes.”

That was how he’d left things with David D. Obutu, translator turned battery thief.

Now kneeling atop the Land Cruiser, Peoria understands why David D. Obutu didn’t want him to go up to the hill. Obutu knew he’d need his Maglite. When the Maglite didn’t work, he might check the batteries. David D. Obutu’s motives, A.E. Peoria thinks, were not pure. His motives were not to protect Peoria’s well-being, or
the well-being of the village (really a refugee camp), but to prevent the detection of the theft.

Still, magazine journalist A.E. Peoria knows that Obutu did have a point, even if it was secondary to hiding the double-A rip-off—kneeling atop a Land Cruiser at the crest of a hill next to the refugee camp that had been victimized, in the strongest sense of the word, by various tribal/warlord/bandit factions in the previous weeks, was stupid shit. Especially with the door to the Land Cruiser left slightly ajar.

He had thought he’d need the light for just a few moments—a minute at most—while he plugged the Ethernet cable connection into the Uniriya, then booted up his laptop, then aimed the Uniriya in the appropriate direction to pick up the satellite signal.

But the fucking thing isn’t working, and he needs the light on as he keeps trying different angles and different settings.

It is doubly bad,
MAJORPOWERY
bad, because now the screen on his laptop adds to the illumination.

Ten minutes I have been fucking around with this thing, A.E. Peoria thinks.

He feels like he is being watched. What is that kind of feeling anyway? How does that work?

Sitting cross-legged, Native American style, on the roof of the Toyota Land Cruiser, he can see the tent village/refugee camp to the west and to the east he can’t see anything clearly but knows there is a border. He sees that about one hundred of the refugees have crowded together near the bottom of the hill. It’s so dark he knows people are there only because they are a mob of blackness, and he thinks this might be taken as a reference to skin color, but it’s actually a reference to the fact that the gathered crowd has just taken on a shadowy shape. They are watching him; he is entertainment.

He uncrosses his legs and kicks the driver-side door shut. The interior car light stays on a few more moments, then turns off.

The dinging, too, ceases.

He decides to use his laptop screen for light, which is annoying because the dial that adjusts the angle of the Uniriya satellite modem is very small. The digital glow, even after he opens the laptop like a book, flattening it out so that he can get the screen close to the dial, isn’t very helpful.

The laptop and the satellite modem are tethered together by a blue Ethernet cable, making the movement even more awkward. Other wires come down off the car through the rolled-down window on the driver’s side to stay charged in a contraption hooked into the Land Cruiser’s cigarette lighter. The cigarette lighter is rarely used for lighting cigarettes anymore, A.E. Peoria thinks.

What is that noise?

Oh, it’s just a new dinging. It’s his laptop making the new dinging noise, no longer the car door, which means the software for the Uniriya is trying to “acquire” the satellite,
ding, ding, ding
.

He presses the mute button on his laptop so it stops making the dinging noise. He’s sweating and worried and very much discomfited. That fucking David D. Obutu. The country to the east, where the refugees came from and where the attackers came from, looks very flat and peaceful and serene and unthreatening—though admittedly he can’t really see much of it in the dark. And A.E. Peoria knows that scenery in this region is not a good way to judge the chance of catastrophic violence occurring at any moment.

Satellite found. 123 bps.

Is that a whistling?

No.

He gets on his email. The web browser allows him to pull up his account, and there’s the email he’s been waiting for, the story list from some kid named Michael M. Hastings. Must be an intern.

He sees the list:

Cover: Global Housing Boom

Nishant Patel on TK

Rise of Islam In Europe?/townsend

Mobile Phones/Outsourcing/E. Africa Genocide/peoria

The Swedish Model

TK Columnist on Financial Scandal

Three Novels on Exile

Space Tourism

Mobile phones? Out fucking what? What moron wrote up this story list?

He refreshes his screen, and there’s a new email from Jerry, the World Affairs Editor.

Hey A.E., the story is on for this week—just going to make it more of a business story pegged to a new report about the increase in mobile phone sales across Africa. Would be good if you interview a mobile phone vendor or talk to some Africans about their use of mobile phones. What colors, styles? What kind of brand? How many phones do most families have? How much do the phones cost in USD? What are the Chinese really up to? We’ll have an intern here call the authors of the study, so no need to worry about that. We’ll wrap your on-scene reporting lower down in the story. Can file thursday ayem? many thanks, j

A.E. Peoria is about to hit Reply, about to cc the entire top editorial staff. He gets only to the words “Jerry that sounds like” and doesn’t
get to “absolute bullshit” when he notices that the crowd that had gathered to watch him from the bottom of the small hill has dispersed. To move silently away, in a herdlike fashion, as if sensing an earthquake or a thunderstorm or some kind of major weather or geological event. He listens closely. There is actually a deep and frightening whistle. He understands that perhaps a mortar shell or a rocket is on the way. Right when he thinks that, he hears a very loud boom and grabs his laptop and satellite modem, and while flipping the screen down, he hits Send by accident and falls off the roof of the Toyota Land Cruiser. He protects his laptop, falling on his back, but the Uniriya satellite mobile modem, which looks like a gray plastic box, falls on the ground next to him. Peoria scrambles to his feet and opens the door to get back in the car and the overhead light goes on, and he thinks, Oh fuck, fuck me, this is stupid shit.

He slams the door and puts the Toyota Land Cruiser in reverse and starts driving down the hill, thinking he should try to get back to the refugee camp. The electronics he had been charging in the cigarette lighter are tangled on his lap, and the interior of the car is a fucking mess. He feels liquids, like spilled water bottles or something.
Ka thunk, ka thunk, ka thunk.
Without a seat belt, each twenty-foot stretch on the dirt path down to the village sends him up high in his seat. He keeps bumping his head. Finally he gets to the bottom of the small hill and stops outside the tent that he and David D. Obutu are sharing. David D. Obutu is standing outside the tent and smiling and shaking his head.

“You lucky the Ibo tribe can’t shoot RPGs for nothing,” David D. Obutu says.

“That was an RPG? I thought it was a mortar.”

A.E. Peoria and David D. Obutu smoke a cigarette.

“We have to get back to N’Djamena tomorrow. We need to go to the market and talk to someone who sells mobile phones.”

“No problem. Everyone in Chad has mobile phones now. Two years ago, nothing! Now we are all talking on the mobile phones. Makes a good story—I worked with Granger from
USA Today
last week, and we did a big report on how Africans love mobile phones. Big business. Fucking Chinese.”

“That’s what I hear. Did you take my fucking batteries?”

M
y desk is on the sixteenth floor, at an intersection of cubicles and two hallways, a listening post for office gossip. Every day, the section editors gather on the other side of my cubicle wall before going out to lunch.

Today, Jerry is the first out of his office, then Gary, then Anna.

“Want to come to the Crater with us?” Gary asks me.

It’s the first time I’ve been invited, suggesting I may not just be another temp, replaced each season.

The Crater is two blocks west from the office, on 57th Street. It’s cramped and greasy, an atmosphere of frequent foodborne illnesses. We’re at a table in the corner underneath framed pictures on the wall of unknown famous people who have dined there and have taken the precaution of bringing aspirational publicity shots, signed with Magic Marker, made just in case.

“Ask for the burger well done if you’re going to get a burger,” says Jerry. “Nishant is really getting to me.”

“Did anyone read his book?” asks Anna.

Jerry and Gary don’t say anything. I wait a second.

“I read it,” I say.

“What did you think?”

What did I think of Nishant Patel’s book? It doesn’t matter what I think of his book. I bought the book to find out as much about the boss as possible, not for any particular love of the subject matter. Reading it gave me insight into his thinking, insight into who he was or at least what he pretended to think. It was preparation for the moment, assured by probability, when I would be stuck in the elevator with him and I could say, “Gee, Mr. Patel, I loved your book, especially Chapter Seven, where you talk about transparency and corruption.”

“I thought it was good,” I say. “Especially the parts about transparency and corruption.”

“What’s it about again?” says Jerry, who makes a point not to pay attention to anything Nishant Patel–related that does not directly affect his stories or mood or job security. “Outsourcing, right? That fucking bastard.”

“Uh, sort of. It’s really about benevolent dictatorships.”

The editors are listening to me.

“Benevolent dictatorships. How, you know, democracies evolve, and how they really take time to evolve, and so, though human rights activists like to push for changes really quickly, stability is preferable to quick or immediate change, and expecting immediate change, you know, is really, really a folly. Illiberal democracies. You know, like Tiananmen Square was a good thing, because look at the economic growth of China, when a democracy there could have really fucked—sorry, excuse my language—really slowed everything down.”

“What countries does he talk about?” says Anna.

“Oh, you know, the Middle East, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, the, uh, warm countries. But America too, and he makes this kind of interesting argument that the problem with our government is that it’s too transparent, that it should, I guess, be a little more
secretive—that the transparency sort of paralyzes us and prevents good decision making.”

Jerry isn’t really listening to what I’m saying.

“He’s just getting on my nerves,” Jerry says.

“He might not be with us much longer,” says Gary.

“No way—he’s staying,” says Anna.

There are three competing Nishant Patel tea-leaf readings. (1) Nishant Patel might accept some kind of government position at the NSC or State. (2) Nishant Patel might accept some kind of position in academia, president of Princeton or something—considered the most unlikely, as he has already spent much of his time in academia (Harvard, Yale, Ph.D., youngest professor, youngest editor of
Foreign Relations
, etc.). (3) And this is the juiciest: Nishant Patel is a contender to take over the domestic edition of
The Magazine
after the editor in chief retires. The EIC is named Henry and he’s been EIC for seven years, and seven years is the historic average for EICs.

“They’re not going to give him EIC. That’s what Berman is being groomed for,” says Jerry.

Sanders Berman, official title Managing Editor of
The Magazine
, ranked number six on the
New York Herald
’s “Top 20 Media Players Under Age 38.”

“Why do we keep coming here?” Jerry says, looking at his chicken potpie.

“It’s cheap,” says Gary.

“Do you guys like Berman?” I ask.

“Ummm,” says Jerry.

“He’s okay,” says Gary.

“Don’t really know him,” says Anna.

“Have any of you read his book?” I ask.

The Greatest War on Earth
. A book about World War II. It’s currently competing with Nishant Patel’s book on the national bestseller
lists. I’ve been keeping track of whose book is up and whose book is down.

“I’m thinking of reading it,” I say.

The editors give a smile, condescending.

“How old are you?” says Gary.

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two.”

“So young,” the three, in unison, say at the table.

“I remember when I was twenty-two, walking around, change jingling in my pocket,” Gary says. “Got the assignments I wanted, the jobs I wanted. No responsibilities. Just wait for the disappointments.”

The check comes, and Jerry says he’ll pick it up and expense it—it’s only $43.37, but he likes to stick it to the magazine when he can.

“Man, Nishant is getting on my nerves,” says Jerry. “I’ve got to quit.”

Out on 57th Street, cabs and delivery trucks don’t slow at the Eighth Avenue crosswalk, and Anna tells me that Jerry has been saying he’s going to quit for fourteen years.