World Report
A story by Keith Croes
Lish took advantage of an interruption in Mort Isenberg's tour to unclip her badge and look at it right side up. She had been struggling to decipher it upside down much of the morning, her eyes going googly in their effort to reach her left lapel. She groaned. The photo was horrid. It looked just like her: a nasty explosion of orange hair, pudgy cheeks blaring with freckles, a face ten years younger than her 32 years.
At least they got the name right: ALICIA A. ANDERS. Ms. Anders, if you please, a professional journalist, a frigging veteran for crying out loud, who with the help of God will lose at least 20 more pounds by the end of the year and be very nearly pretty.
Mort shooed away a young man who had been yapping at him. He shook his hand at her. "No, no, leave that on."
She returned the badge to her lapel and they leaned together through a pair of swinging doors into the newsroom.
"Listen up, everybody!"
A number of faces turned toward them.
"This is Lish, our new writer. I'll let you all introduce yourselves." The faces turned away. "Make her feel at home, people!"
He was guiding her toward a group of eight cubicles in the middle of the room, soundproof stalls that reminded her of the language lab in college. There were four to a side facing each other across a low console.
"And this is George." He announced it with an outstretched arm and she looked appropriately impressed. "The world's first commercial biocomputer. A year old and going strong. Why don't you sit down and get acquainted?"
He leaned forward and pressed a spot on the panel over the word MIC and a square glowed soft green. "That's for the microphone. Here's the headphones, the monitor, the keyboard. He'll do the rest."
"It's alive?"
"Well, it's living. I'll be in studio 1 if you need anything."
She sat and watched him disappear through the swinging doors.
"Uh--" She stretched the headphones over her blazing hair and adjusted them for about five minutes. "George?" she ventured finally.
"Yes. What's your name?" The voice was soft, pleasant.
"Lish."
"Well, Lish, I guess you need a lesson?"
In the stall across from her a middle-aged man pawed furiously at a keyboard.
"Guess so," she said.
Max Rondeau looked at himself in the mirror, bared his teeth, snarled, tilted his head, smiled. His eyes fell to the copy on the counter. He'd gone over it several times. He felt ready. He felt empty.
Like the crisis point that had shattered his marriage. It overtook him more and more frequently of late. Six years and more of challenge and satisfaction and now a growing disenchantment. The Seven Year Itch. And he could come up with only a muddled diagnosis of the problem: he no longer felt like a journalist. So what the hell was he?
He'd made his mark, no doubt about that, but gone were the days of cultivating the sources, putting the pieces together, building the story, orchestrating the fucking story. The people who did that--they were the ones who knew what was going on. And then it struck him: he didn't know what was going on. He had no idea, really. The absurdity of it made him smile. He smiled at himself in the mirror.
God, he was handsome.
A light flashed
above the mirror and he sprang out of the room and across the set to his desk.
The heraldic music of the intro swelled, then settled behind the announcer's
voice: "From
Mornings she worked on the network's wire service, polishing copy filed by correspondents throughout the world and sending it on to subscribers. After lunch the six broadcast writers met with Mort and negotiated the day's top stories. Pivot. Parry. Thrust. A fencing match. Dueling news judgment.
"How about this Libyan story?" Mort had it up on the screen. Huge at the end of the room.
A voice to her right: "Who wrote it?" It was the smartass black guy, Leonard. Skinny little shit. Made a crack about her freckles the first day. Her initials were in the slugline.
"AAA? Triple-A?"
"The Auto Club." Laughter. Frigging smartass.
"I did."
"Oh, yeah. Lish."
Then it was back to George until 4 o'clock. Her breath finding a calm rhythm in the sound-dampened booth, talking back and forth with him, moving the words around. Pruning. Shuffling. Stroking. Video feeds accompanied some of the stories, but she preferred the written text. Quiet but not mute. As silent as an artist's brush.
"Bring this phrase over here, George."
"Uh-huh."
"Do we have verification on this?"
"Not as you have it. You can't say all. Some would be okay."
"They have desalinization other than government-controlled?"
"Probably."
"How much?"
"Unknown. Best estimate is 10%. Source: the Mid-Eastern Environmental Foundation."
In the living matrix that was George, statistical tidbits such as that one dove among the amino acids and proteins like happy porpoises. She began to like him.
At 4 o'clock were the Max Meetings. More dueling, this time with producers and graphics people stepping into the fray.
"Now who are these Indians, Mort?" Max's broadcast baritone had tightened up to a whine. He had his jacket off and his tie loosened, just like in the promos.
"They're
Bedouins. Seems that
Max looked up from the printout and found her. Her face tingled. The room went sluggish, wavy and she seemed to be lumbering underwater, his eyes the deep green of an aquatic plant.
"They were
detained for camping too close to a desalinization plant. The way
"Hmmm..." He looked down at the printout. "AAA?"
"Just call me Lish."
She was back in her apartment at 6:15 and was eating her third slice of frozen pizza at 6:43 when Max read her story. Her first story on World Report. She had been with the network two weeks.
The guy in
I don't have
time for this, but here goes: Another protest at the nuclear fuel reprocessing
site in Wackersdorf (near
Bundestag has armed patrols all over city. I've got a half dozen Greens hiding in basement here. Please advise. Saw an ERG soldier cut a kid's throat with bayonet. Greens kid. No pictures. Have a nice fucking day.
Her head drifted down to the crook of her elbow on the desk. "Shit--"
"Lish?"
She'd always been that way. She'd go for weeks at a time, manipulating everything from fluff to disaster, and then some item would come along, reach out and grab her heart, squeeze the tears right out of it.
"That sucks," she said.
"I can give you something."
"Tag this for Mort and send it on."
"Do you wish to work on this story?"
"Eventually."
"Lish?"
"What is it, George?"
"Do you have a pin?"
She blinked, her chin in her elbow.
"Maybe." Without warning, a jolt of excitement rang through her.
"Get the pin. It's in your purse."
She groped down between her legs.
"How'd you--? How'd you--?"
"Get it. Prick your finger and squeeze a drop of blood into the auxiliary jack."
She hated blood even more than pain, but couldn't seem to get the steel sliver into her skin fast enough. The auxiliary jack was labeled AUX. "Ow!" A drop of blood disappeared down the hole. Her face screwed up in disgust. "What the fuck did I do that for?"
"There's something I can give you--"
"Yeah--" Inside, the blood dripped from the jack's soldered leads and down through a ventilation slit into George's brainy soup. Lish felt a warmth in front of her and a coolness behind. Something around her midsection pushed outward while something stronger pushed back. And her awareness had turned to tentacles wrapped around the earth. She was everywhere. "--but I thought you were talking about an antacid or something."
"No. Just this."
She clutched the
edge of the desk. She could feel the headphones pressed against her ears. She
could also feel the correspondent in
"There is something about you that allows this. I only just became certain of it."
"This is what you see?"
"I suppose. I don't know exactly what you're experiencing."
"Jesus." She sat for a moment. "Okay, turn it off."
No reply.
"Turn it off, George."
"I'm not doing anything. There's nothing to turn off. You're...connected."
"George, I've gotta pee."
Money and power. They couldn't give him his youth, he couldn't climb back in the trenches and wasn't sure if he still had the stuff to pull it off anyway, but they sure as hell could give him money and power.
He'd earned it. Ratings were strong and he was the major reason. It seemed an eminently fair trade: take me away from those things I love most about this work and I'll do a good job, but it'll cost you.
He took that attitude
into Lou Arnold's office and knew that he had won as soon as he saw the
expression on
But he understood also the ongoing price he was paying. The obvious, simple-minded deceit of it all. He knew nothing of what he was saying--night after night to the millions.
Blind faith leading the blind. It rasped its agonizing diurnal tattoo on the honest kernel of his soul.
Lish learned to live with it. George couldn't shut it off, didn't even think he had that much to do with it, didn't know if it would continue if he were put out of commission and had no wish to find out. So she had to learn how the awareness could be separate--always there, but separate.
Her work improved. It pissed her off. What's to say her work wouldn't have improved anyway? She'd always been good at what she did. She'd always had excellent instincts. Only now they were attracting attention.
"Okay, we've
got
He huffed, then did something that made the screen go back and forth between two stories.
"Wait a second. Lish, I directed this story to Leonard." He displayed her handiwork, then Leonard's. Back and forth on the screen. "This information was never sent to you, Lish."
"Read it."
The room was silent.
"All right, folks." Mort stood and began pacing. "Same facts, different stories. Somehow Lish got the same file. Look at this. Read it. Goddamn it, read it!"
They came to call the meetings with Mort the Triple-A Club.
And Max began to notice.
He noticed because the Triple-A always led him to the fat redhead, the freckle-faced kid who could make the whole room stop in her humble, stuttering explanations.
"Oh, come onnnn!" And the on went onnnn and onnnnnnn and he felt badly, as if he'd just realized that his sparring opponent had one leg. "Why should we cover this goddamn vendor?"
"Because he's been there forever, knew Mike Schmidt, has raised seven kids on income from selling hotdogs at Phillies games. You want me to go onnnnnnn?"
And he soon discovered that she was no cripple. It took a little longer for him to figure out that her stories more often than not were one step ahead of the competition. She was incessantly there the day before. She'd do it, he'd read it, they'd do it. The next night. She knew something.
By Christmas she was Mort's assistant--assistant news editor. That week she began to physicalize the earth. Stepping on the scale New Year's Day, she discovered that she had gained 15 pounds.
She awoke with a
sharp pain in her ribcage under her left arm. The awareness came over her in
the same manner that she put on her bathrobe, an almost unconscious assumption
of it. A natural, automatic climbing into it. There had been an explosion in
"George,
what's going on in
"The report's coming in now. A bomb in the chambers of the Central Committee. You're not getting it?"
"Yes, yes, I have it." She sat on the edge of the bed. "Did you feel it?"
"Feel it?"
"Just a few minutes ago. Did you feel anything...unusual?"
"No, Lish. Nothing unusual."
She hung up wondering what a nuclear blast would do.
Max strutted ahead of them into the ballroom. Mort was miffed. He handed the invitations to an unctuous man at the door and leaned toward her. "Where does he get off giving us instructions in etiquette? As if we just left the farm."
Lish glowed placidly. Her gown had cost her half a week's salary. Her palms caressed the fabric at her hips. "You've got to admit, Mort, this is something. Besides, I'm sure it was mainly for my benefit."
The U.N. media-relations office had sent the invitations to Max and he had fretted over them, knowing his ex-wife would refuse with choking laughter and not wanting to enrage any of his occasional escorts by inviting only one. It took him a few days to think of Mort and Lish. Why not? They needed more of this kind of thing. And he felt oddly ennobled at being able to offer it to them.
He stopped at the small bar in the corner and ordered a drink, watching Mort and Lish trail after him.
"Well, what'll you have?"
Lish exhaled it in a whoosh: "A fuzzy navel, please."
Mort spoke at the bartender. "Scotch and soda."
"Well, here we are," she said when the drinks came.
She was looking up at him expectantly and he broke eye contact, gazing around at the crowd.
"So, how do I look?"
Max squelched an expression of surprise that was racing for his face. With polite attention he took her in. The strapless gown revealing the uppermost depths of a proud, ample cleavage, breasts untransmorgified by children, the pleasing, rotund figure of those women who could be fat and firm at the same time, freckled shoulders and a beaming, freckled face. "You look wonderful, Lish. Truly."
"Mr. Rondeau?"
A slight, uniformed black man held a drink in his left hand and stood at taut attention, looking to Lish like a poisonous tropical fish.
"General, hello."
They shook hands.
"General,
these are my editors and the people who do the real work. Lish Anders and news
editor Mort Isenberg. General Henri Delatour of
They nodded at each other.
"The situation
in my country is very bad, I'm sure you know." The teeth snapped and
chewed on the rich accent. "Our forces need the help of the
"You meet with the President tomorrow?"
"Yes. She must be convinced of this desperate situation for our people."
"Yes. Well, we wish you the best of luck." Max's glance fell on Mort and Lish and then strayed off into the crowd behind them.
"But the
people seem so...happy with the new civilian government," Lish said.
"What kind of mandate do you have that the
The general froze. His face congealing into an impenetrable mask, he nodded at Max and walked away.
Max was stupefied. "Now how could you say that?" he managed.
She shrugged. "I feel it."
"You feel it?" He said the word as if it were an obscenity.
"In my stomach." She held herself. "He has no business promulgating lies."
She withdrew unperturbed for the remainder of the evening, gracefully tolerating Max's cold shoulder. Afterward, she drove across town to her apartment, took the elevator up from the parking garage and engaged the locks on her door with clumsy, tripping fingers. She was certain that she had been followed all the way from the U.N. building.
She could do him a lot of good. She had something. She knew something. The certainty of it incensed and intrigued him.
"Mort, is there any way we can tie into George and watch her work?" He was staring out the glass wall of Mort's office toward the cluster of soundproof cubicles.
"Sure." Taking a bite out of an apple, Mort sat at his terminal and Max walked over and stood behind him. A cursor inched steadily across the screen, leaving a trail of words in its wake.
"She's not editing anything. She's composing as she goes!"
"Yeah," Mort grunted. "I used to check her facts. Don't even bother anymore."
"Was she given this story earlier?"
Mort called up the assignment catalog. "Nope."
"Then how can she do this?"
He took another crunch of apple. "Some questions are better left unasked," he said.
Max spun him around in the chair and stuck his face out until their noses nearly touched. "You're fired, Mort. I want you out of here. Now." He could see a piece of apple skin lodged between Mort's teeth.
They worked for several weeks without a news editor. Max wanted to see how the crew would react. He wasn't surprised to find that they settled naturally behind Lish.
Once again he looked forward to the 4-o'clock meetings, the adrenalin starting to charge up about 3:45. Lish had an unerring sense of how to fill their precious 23 minutes of air time, what to say and how to say it. The debates had always been lively, but now the group seemed animated by a simple, unspoken understanding: here was someone who knew. You want to argue, fine. But know your shit or shut up. Sometimes when she talked, offering a complex analysis with that soft, humble certainty, he would find himself getting an erection.
He called her to his make-up room one evening before the program.
"Would you mind staying a little late tonight, Lish? I'd like to discuss something with you after the show." She nodded furiously. "You can watch it right here." He gestured toward the small couch and she sat.
He returned in time to view the closing credits with her. Her name scrolled up the screen. Sitting in front of the mirror, he opened a drawer and reached in.
"I'd like to see that title become news editor."
She gasped. He pointed the gun at her and she gasped again.
"Just one catch. You're going to tell me what you and George got going. And you're going to let me in on it."
She paused, then shuddered, then fell back in a gush of goofy giggling, motioning frantically for him to come over to her. He rose and carefully crossed the tan linoleum, the braided rug. "Sit," she gurgled, slapping the couch next to her.
He sat holding the gun loosely with the black barrel dangling toward her chin. "It's a toy, anyway. Got it from props."
"You've been following me all over the goddamn city, haven't you?" Still quaking with laughter, she took the gun, flipped it on the floor and placed his hand on her head. He felt a cold and crackly film. There was a layer of ice on her scalp, a thin, frozen patch among the forest of orange hairs.
"Polar ice cap. Same thing happens on my feet, but shoes and socks seem to keep it away."
"Uh-huh."
"George gave me
something. We don't know how or what it is, exactly, but I've become connected.
A reflection, sort of. I know exactly where the sun is right now." She
pointed toward the makeup mirror. "And the moon." The point shifted
toward the right, toward an ashtray on a stand next to the door. "You know
that airline crash in
"Jesus Hallmark--"
"See these freckles. I figure each one's a city. Or maybe a county. I can't feel individual people. But groups, I feel groups."
He stared at her, beach-ball plump in a pup-tent dress.
"Wars hurt
like hell. Parts of
He closed his mouth, which had sagged open. "Can he do it for me?"
She cocked her head. There was a yearning in her smile. ''It's worth a try."
George unhesitantly accepted a drop of Max's blood down the shaft of the auxiliary jack and was reassuringly philosophical when nothing happened. Max sat expressionless, wearing the headphones.
"There was something about Lish in the first place, Max, something I've never seen in anyone else. I just triggered it somehow, that's all. By the way, it's an honor to finally meet you."
Who was leading and who was following they would never be able to recall with certainty, but later in Lish's apartment he discovered a very definite feeling of linkage when he made love to her, a shadow of what he thought she might be experiencing. It got so that he could touch different areas of her body and tell her things that she would confirm with wild, orgasmic abandon. It was lovemaking factored geometrically over the best he'd ever had. It was a world tour.
The inevitable was just that. The solution to his dilemma was as simple as its cause. No longer would each day provide yet another opportunity to demonstrate his utter abdication of journalistic integrity. No more would he plunge the knife deeper and deeper into his heart each evening before millions. One Monday at the beginning of August the announcer's voice came over the swelling music of the intro:
"From
He took incredible flack for it, of course, but he never regretted the decision.
THE END
keith@croes.com