The Last Magazine: A Novel (3 page)

S
pace Tourism.

I’m excited about this story, and I’ve been working on it for two weeks. The story is pegged—“pegged” is a news industry word—to an American centimillionaire who’s scheduled to go up in a Soyuz rocket in Novorossiysk, Russia, on September 14. He’ll be the seventh private citizen to make the trip to space, and the private company, working with the Russian government to send him up, is called Orbital Access Inc. Orbital Access Inc. has one industry rival, Great Explorations, and they aren’t very friendly. The two CEOs are quoted in most stories on the subject explaining their two different business models on monetizing the “nascent space tourism industry.”

I’m supposed to do an interview by phone, in fifteen minutes, with a businessman, an engineer who lives in Colorado and is designing a space hotel. I’m preparing for the interview. I had printed out a stack of clips about the gentleman two days earlier, and I’m trying to find those pages. They are somewhere in the vicinity of my cubicle, but I am very messy, and there are stacks of newspapers and magazines and Post-it notes and binders and folders left open and creased at the spine.

I start to dig for the papers, throwing open the metal cabinet drawers underneath the desktop, tossing and shifting piles of eight-by-eleven sheets.

My cubicle is in a process of fossilization. The process, as far as I can tell, began when the magazine started to rent space in this building in 1987. None of the interns who have sat in this cubicle has ever completely removed all of their belongings. Decaying bits of personality, deposits of forgotten headlines, inexplicable artifacts.

I’ve been getting the sense lately that someone, perhaps the Mexican cleaning service woman or the Polish cleaning service old man, is messing with my documents and cleaning my desk for me when I go home, so the papers could really be anywhere.

I pull open a drawer where I think the stack of papers could be.

Inside is a pile of comic books, with a graphic novel on the Palestinian territories on top of the stack, and I assume these are from four interns ago, because that was when A.E. Peoria started his career at the magazine. In this very cubicle. He’d become a star foreign correspondent, and it would make sense that a star foreign correspondent would be reading comics about war.

Tossing through another drawer, I find a green construction helmet and a gas mask with a broken rubber strap—I date this find to October 2001, after the terrorist attacks in New York convinced Human Resources to provide protection from chemical and biological threats targeted at media organizations. The construction helmet and gas mask are on top of a manila folder with notes from a story about the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision to make George W. Bush president; those notes are piled on another folder, red, with photo caption information about the Balkans, notes on a graphic illustration breaking down population levels and ethnicities in the ratio of numbers killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, etc.; there are lots of spelling mistakes and red pen on this document.

Underneath the folder is a pile of back issues, the newest one dating from 1996, working backward at uneven intervals to 1991. Whoever chose the issues to collect in this pile was making some kind of time capsule point or editorial critique. All the headlines on the covers either contain the word “new” (“The New Happiness,” “The New War on Drugs,” “The New Normal,” “The New Hollywood,” “The New Aging,” “The New Parent Trap”) or end in a question mark (“Did the President Lie?” “The Candidate to Beat?” “Is the Globe Warming?”)—and sometimes have both (“The New Mystery of Mary Magdalene: Can Science Tell Us What History Can’t?”). According to this compiler’s count, marked by a yellow Post-it, either a question mark or the word “new” was used more than thirty-nine times in that five-year stretch.

What catches my eye is another Post-it note, hand-scrawled, on the last issue in the pile. There is no question mark or word “new” in it, so I wonder why it’s there. The date says January 3, 1991. There is a picture of a desert and an American tank. “The Vietnam Syndrome,” blares the headline.

This story is famous in the magazine’s lore. It was written by none other than Sanders Berman while he was finishing up his final year at Tulane. Quickly flipping through the other issues, I see that a good 90 percent of them carry the Sanders Berman byline—it dawns on me that I might be sitting in the exact same cubicle that Sanders Berman once sat in, though I find that hard to believe. Legend has it that he was only in the cubes for three months before he got his own office, before he was made the youngest editor of the National Affairs section of
The Magazine
. Perhaps I am sitting in the cube of Sanders Berman’s old assistant?

I place the “Vietnam Syndrome” issue on top of my desk—I’ll get to this soon—and continue my search for the papers, when I’m distracted again.

Did I mention where
The Magazine
’s TVs are? It’s a matter of some dispute, as there’s a shortage of television sets. For some reason, most of the sets are on the fifteenth floor, where the production and photography staff are, not the news reporters. This helps the fifteenth floor follow important sporting events on Saturday, like the Kentucky Derby or March Madness. But in the southeast block, near me, there is only one television shared by sixteen cubicles—it’s on a swivel attached to a column.

The column is outside Nishant Patel’s office. The TV hangs over the three cubicles surrounding the column, and those three cubicles are manned by Nishant Patel’s three assistants: Dorothy, Lucy, and Patricia. The highest person in the hierarchy of the three assistants is Dorothy, and Dorothy has been at the magazine for three decades. Dorothy does not like to have the volume of the television set on. Dorothy always puts it on mute.

So it is a fluke that in my search for the Space Tourism papers, I turn around 180 degrees to catch the BREAKING NEWS ALERT on MSNBC.

The vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, is standing at a lectern, speaking to men and women in military uniform. You know what Dick Cheney looks like, so I won’t waste time on that, and I can’t hear what he’s saying. Luckily, MSNBC has taken what it thinks are the most important themes in his speech and keeps scrolling them across the screen while he speaks.

VP CHENEY: IRAQ HAS CHEMICAL WEAPONS

VP CHENEY: IRAQ IS PURSUING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

VP CHENEY: WE CANNOT ALLOW IRAQ TO ACQUIRE WMD

My phone rings and I pick it up.

“Michael M. Hastings.”

“Mr. Hastings, this is Douglas Dorl, from Outerlimits Hotels.”

“Mr. Dorl, great, thanks for calling me back. Is this a good time?”

“I called you, yeah.”

“Great, great, great.”

I spin back around, and though I’m not entirely prepared to do the interview, I do remember the list of questions that I more or less wanted answers or quotes about.

“Oh, so, uh, when will the space hotels be ready?”

“If our models are correct, we hope to get the first space hotel in orbit by 2015.”

“And, uh, what, are, the, uh, challenges, to, uh, this?”

I have a tape recorder hooked up to the phone and press Play/Record, so I’m not too worried about listening that closely.

“Customer confidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to avoid catastrophe. Look at the airlines. The first national airline began in the early 1930s. But it took years of proving to the consumer that it was safe to fly. Almost didn’t—an accident in 1938, a crash over the Alleghenies that killed forty people, almost ruined the airline industry as we know it. There’s a reason for that. There was a law in Congress trying to ban air travel! Can you believe that? So I’m talking bulk. We need to have regular tourist space flights, at cost, at a price point people can afford. One tourist flight blows up, and we’re sunk as an industry. Funding dries up, the public won’t have trust in us.”

“So, your hotels, um, how expensive are they to build?”

“Cheaper than NASA.”

“So is that like a couple hundred million?”

“We think we can do it for a couple hundred million. Hell, a new
hotel that just opened in Las Vegas cost one hundred and twenty million, and that’s on Earth.”

“Right, right.”

Phone tucked under my ear, typing what Douglas Dorl is saying, I peer over my shoulder at the television screen, and VP Cheney is still talking.

VP CHENEY: U.S. MUST TAKE ACTION, NOT APPEASE

“And how much a night, do you think?”

“Between three thousand and ten thousand a night.”

“Does that include travel cost?”

“Goes back to what I was saying—making an economy of scale.”

“Right, right. Tell me more about your company, how you founded it, why you’re interested in space.”

This is a throwaway question to get him talking—I’m distracted by the news on the television set, and I’m not as focused as I should be on what Mr. Dorl is saying: As a kid watched the moon landing. Worked for NASA. Designed a part of the shuttle. Enjoyed the film
The Right Stuff
.

Then I catch sight of the TV screen again.

Sanders Berman is on, as a guest, giving analysis.

“Okay, great. Yeah, thanks, um, if I have any follow-up questions, mind if I give you a call?”

“Be my guest.”

I hang up the phone and walk quickly two cubicle rows over.

“Hi, Dorothy, mind if I turn the volume up? Sanders Berman is on.”

“Ohhhhh, Sanders Berman,” she says, her tone suggesting a familiarity with Sanders Berman, years of anecdotes about him that she’s not about to share with me.

I kneel on the desk of one of Nishant Patel’s three assistants and hit Volume Up once.

Sanders Berman is discussing what Vice President Cheney just said.

“. . . certainly,” Sanders Berman answers.

“Sanders, now, you’re the expert, you’re the historian, give us some historical idea of what you make of the vice president’s speech.”

“In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt gave an underlooked address to a Lions Club in Decatur, Illinois. Now, no one pays attention to that address today, it’s been overshadowed by the ‘Day of Infamy’ speech after Pearl Harbor. But what I hear in the vice president’s language, in his somber delivery, his cadence, the timbre of his voice, is what FDR said in Decatur—he’s quietly preparing the American people for what clearly is a dangerous and imminent threat. I suspect the discussion, going forward, is not going to be a question of
if
we should go to war in Iraq, but
when
. The vice president is warning of a great evil we face. It’s not Japan or Germany; it’s Iraq, Iran, North Korea. It’s the 9/11 terrorists, a great evil. Of course the audience here is the American people, but there’s also a second audience—our allies—and this is a call to the Winston Churchills out there, a warning to them that we need them, and I hope they will stand on our side.”

The door to Nishant Patel’s corner office opens, and he walks out.

“Dorothy, can you have Patricia bring my lunch?”

“Yes, Nishant,” Dorothy says, and she stands and looks over the cubicle wall at Patricia, a thirty-seven-year-old Korean woman who lives with her family in Queens. Patricia is deaf in her right ear and blind in her left eye.

“Patricia,” Dorothy says, “can you please go get Nishant his lunch.”

“What, Dorothy?”

“Patricia, Nishant’s lunch,” she says.

Dorothy sits down, Patricia stands up, and Nishant Patel asks, “What are you all watching?”

“Mike turned the volume up, Dr. Patel,” Patricia says.

Dorothy looks at me.

“Vice President Cheney, I think, just sort of said we’re going to war in Iraq,” I say.

“Oh, yes, of course, I had heard that the vice president was going to do that. I had dinner with the undersecretary in Washington on Monday.”

Nishant Patel walks around the corner of the cubicles and looks up at the TV, just as the cable network is about to cut to a commercial.

“Mr. Berman, a pleasure as always,” says the host. “
The Magazine
’s managing editor and also author of
The Greatest War on Earth: The New History of World War Two
,” says the host, holding a copy of Sanders Berman’s book.

I’m not looking at the TV; I’m looking at Nishant Patel. He winces when the MSNBC host bangs Sanders Berman’s book on the table.

“We’ll turn the volume down right away, Nishant,” says Dorothy.

Nishant Patel goes back in his office. I go back to Space Tourism.

Three hours later, I get an email forwarded to me. It’s a forward from Dorothy, forwarded from Sam, who forwarded it from Nishant Patel.

Subject:
Fw: Int’l story list change

From:
Dorothy

To:
International Staff

See below from Sam/NP, dorothy

Subject:
Int’l story list change

To:
Dorothy

From:
Sam

Subject:
Int’l story change

All, we are going to go with a new cover this week. “The Case for War?”

Dropping sci/tech and Mobile phones.

Subject:
[blank]

To:
Sam

From:
Nishant Patel

Change in cover. See me in my office. np

It’s 5:30 p.m. and the editors are leaving the office. Gary stops by my cubicle.

“Hastings, you’re off the hook for Space Tourism this week.”

T
hirty-four-year-old magazine journalist A.E. Peoria sits in first class right now, right fucking now, just sits down, and there are two women standing over him. DBX to JFK. One has a tray of hot hand towels, and she gives him one and smiles; the other has a tray with a variety of liquids: booze, waters, juices—sparkling water, nonsparkling water, tomato, mango, grapefruit. Peoria takes three glasses—sparkling water, grapefruit juice, and wine—and he gulps them down and starts to pat himself down, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes, the days in the African bush getting soaked up in the warm hot towel. He removes the towel from his face and the three glasses have already been taken away, replaced with a four-page menu.

He didn’t have to suffer the indignity of finding the menu in the seat-back pocket.

The flight attendant is asking him if he’d like something else to drink, and he says, “Yes, give me a gin and tonic,” and as he is scanning the menu—whipped summer squash, couscous, goat cheese and beet salad, Asian wheat noodles with shrimp, a seven-ounce grilled flank steak, potatoes and chicken curry, and more, and flambéed ice
cream and rice pudding and bread baskets with thirteen different kinds of bread and a cheese plate with grapes and orange slices and bananas and cheese and apples and olives—he gets the gin and tonic delivered to him, and it’s in a glass glass.

Another indignity avoided: the woman—what a fucking angel—is unscrewing the cap of the small bottle of gin and pouring it into his glass and mixing it for him. Even as the cabin doors close, everyone in first class is still talking on their mobile phones, and even as the plane is taxiing, people are still talking on their mobile phones and the stewardesses are letting it happen, until the last possible moment, when they ask them, politely, to please finish their conversations, as we are about to take off.

Politeness, no glowers or glares, politely requesting that you turn off your mobile phone. They are treating him like some kind of human being up here, not an animal that needs to be prodded and kicked in the seat.

Eight hours or more and the magazine gives correspondents a first-class ticket. Until he became a star foreign correspondent, a roaming-the-globe international affairs reporter, he had flown first class only once. Sixteen, visiting a friend in the Bahamas for spring break, an upgrade. That wasn’t real first class. That was Delta domestic first class. This is real first class, and real first class makes him wonder how he had ever traveled in economy/coach class without developing a severe class hatred. When did economy become coach and coach economy anyway? He thinks it was around 1997. Must have been an advertising or marketing study.
Coach
is a respectable word, he never thought anything was wrong with
coach
—stagecoach, almost classy-sounding, or even
coach
as in a bus, where everyone has an equally comfortable or uncomfortable seat.
Coach
is an equal opportunity word, a normalizing word.
Economy
is a word for “cheap.”

Cheap.

It’s another way, he thinks, the mix of liquids giving his thoughts the appearance of great profundity, for the airlines to subtly rub it in the passengers’ faces that they are screwed in life and made bad decisions every step along the way and are forced to pay attention to money, forced to pinch pennies.

The airlines, he now realizes, had been trying to make him feel bad his entire life, or at least since 1997.

For years in coach, with the rest of the fellow failures, he had gotten off the plane last. This meant that he’d had to walk past the first-class seats and business-class seats. Before getting to the first- and business-class seats, he had to go through at least two or more cabins of economy.

Economy always looked like shit after a fourteen-hour flight. It looked like a bunch of preschoolers had been stuck in a fallout shelter. Empty plastic water and juice cups, tangled headsets, ripped plastic bags, crumbs from never-go-stale biscuits, bright blue thermonuclear fleece blankets, weird puke smells, torn packaging, yes, lots of shredded plastic and mutilated packaging, as if a scarce amount of resources had been consumed in a frenzy.

The flight attendants didn’t bother with cleanup in coach—no, they wanted the evidence of the savagery on display. And by the time the disembarking economy passenger got through the coach wasteland, the single business-class cabin was a relief and went by in a blur. It wasn’t so obvious that a major shift in socioeconomics had taken place. In fact, the business-class cabin seemed designed to ease the shock that those traveling in coach would have experienced if they’d just stepped directly from coach to first class, from one socioeconomic sphere to the other. Like letting a bum into the country club. Yes, that would have been too much of a shock, that might have backfired. Best to use business class as a buffer zone. The airlines wanted you to know what you were missing, but they didn’t want to
spark any social revolts, any impromptu pummelings, anyone to take a protest dump on an aisle seat.

So Peoria would walk through business class and see nine seats per row instead of twelve, and this wasn’t too jarring, and then when he got to first class or, on some planes, just got a glimpse through the curtains ahead, there were only six seats—and what big and comfortable-looking seats they were. And where was the evidence of a fourteen-hour flight?

The evidence, Peoria now knew, had been quietly picked up and cleaned along the way by these angel flight attendants. Angels pushing dangerous and embittering illusions without rubber surgical gloves to protect their hands from economy-class parasites and filth. The evidence of the disgusting humanness of adults locked in a capsule of recycled air and sleep breath and hunger had been erased and sterilized even as the first-class passengers were getting off the plane. Even as the first-classers were exiting, the flight attendants, an entire team of them, would rush to perform an instant cleanup. It gave the passengers in economy, who had to pass through the cabin before deplaning, the unconscious impression that perhaps they were truly savages at heart, truly disgusting people who deserved to sit side by side in the cattle car, making a mess of their environment, using thin polyester pillows, hauling luggage with rolls and rolls of clear plastic tape and big handwritten notes with foreign names and impoverished zip codes, digesting single-serving chicken and beef on a single-page menu.

All of this, all the service, the high-touch service that had taken over his thoughts, had been so engrossing to him that he hasn’t even bothered to look at who he is sitting next to or any of the other people sitting in his first-class cabin.

He is sitting next to a woman.

Two hours, four gin and tonics, and he is looking out the window of the plane.

Why so emotional on night flights?

Hour three and a half and he goes to the bathroom and snorts the cocaine he bought in Dubai on the twelve-hour layover.

Hour five, he is going to the bathroom, and he is talking to the woman.

“It’s so rare to sit next to a pretty woman my age in first class,” he says. “Usually they can’t afford it or they’re with some older rich guy.”

The woman nods, and across the aisle, there’s an older rich guy who smiles at A.E. Peoria.

“Oh shit, is that your boyfriend?”

Hour seven, there’s a knocking on the bathroom door, a glowing sign that says PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR SEAT, with a little figure of a dickless man and an arrow.

“Sir, are you all right?”

Wobbling, A.E. Peoria opens up the bathroom door, which folds up like an accordion, and he laughs at this, and the pretty stewardess woman who gave him the menu and poured what he estimates to be five out of his seven drinks is standing there.

“You’re the one who gave me that menu! Thank you, thank you. You’re Miss Five-out-of-Seven, Miss Laila. ‘Laila’ is Arabic for what?”

“Look how much legroom I have,” A.E. Peoria says, returning to his seat.

“I always wanted an electric chair as a kid, one of those electric La-Z-Boy chairs where I could move it around like this,” A.E. Peoria is saying while he adjusts every control on the seat. There are sixteen different ergonomic portions of the seat to calibrate, five just for the upper torso and seven for different leg positions. How do you even describe all of these positions? Stretched, outstretched, slightly stretched, partially stretched, a quarter partial stretch, a half partial stretch, three-quarters partial stretch. He would need to resort to math to describe all the things his seat could do.

“You know what I like about first class,” he says to the older man, who is now sitting next to him, having changed places with his girlfriend or wife. “I like that there’s no evidence that I’m drunk. If I was back with the fucking beasts and vampires back there, sucking the fucking marrow from bones, you know, if I was fucking back there, there’d be all these little bottles in front of me because the service back there sucks and there’s no way I could have even had that many drinks because the service is slow, so it’s like a catch-22, you know?”

Hour nine.

“You don’t fucking know what I saw out there, man. You don’t fucking want to know what I saw. Heads on pikes.”

Hours ten and eleven.

“Hey man, fuck, sorry dude. But here’s the thing. Here’s what you’re missing. Don’t worry about getting sleep and rest. I’ve been thinking about this, and the irony is, if you travel a lot, if you do a lot of travel, it’s ironic, because nowadays . . .”

A.E. Peoria pauses.

“The irony of international travel is that you spend as much time or more time going nowhere as going somewhere. You spend time sitting in the same fucking place.”

He pauses again.

“Even right now. You can’t even tell that you’re moving.”

Hour twelve.

The stewardess hands A.E. Peoria an immigration card, and this reminds him to take one more trip to the bathroom, where he flushes the small and empty plastic bag of coke down the toilet after ripping it and licking the insides so he can numb his gums.

A car is waiting for him at the airport, and when the driver asks for directions, he tells him to bring him straight to the office, to West 57th Street. He wants to talk to someone, whoever the motherfucker was who killed his story.