Begin to Exit Here (8 page)

“Hope,” I said. “I think I need too much hope for one man.”

“It'd be a ludicrous mistake for the paper to fire the
only reporter on the staff who openly despises journalism,” Rebecca said.

“And if the dumb bastards do fire you, I hope you firebomb the bureau and injure dozens of innocent bystanders in town for a world peace seminar.
That'd
be a story,” Harmon said.

This jolted Janice a bit, so I had to explain Harmon, somewhat.

“Harmon's not evil,” I told Janice, wondering if that was true. “It's just that like about sixty or seventy percent of the reporters in the nation, he wants something repugnant and horrifying to happen because you can't win a Pulitzer Prize for anything harmless.”

“That's sick,” Janice said.

“It's insane,” Rebecca said.

“Those are two qualities that advance careers,” Harmon said, staring kind of severely at Janice, then saying to her, “And by the way, Kurt hasn't said much about you at work, but he did tell us you work at the university in viral epidemiology or something, which I think translates into things like herpes and AIDS. So, what kind of secret projects are you working on that we should write about?”

Janice shook her head. “I don't think much of it's particularly secret, or even interesting, unless you're an epidemiologist.”

“But you're wrong,” Harmon said. “
Every
thing's interesting, with the right angle. What do you
do?”

“She's not a subject, Harmon. Don't interview her,” I said.

“I just want to know what she does,” he said, ignoring me. I thought of hurting him. The boy regarded Janice as a potential story, a piece of work. I focused on him like a death ray, thinking of walking around the table and slapping his head onto the concrete floor. I think I smiled dangerously.

“All we do is a lot of tedious statistical stuff,” Janice said.

“Like what?” Harmon said.

“Oh, hell, like, well, it's just, for example,” she said, “we get pathology statistics, disease statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, primarily on AIDS, and we take these masses of numbers representing the incidence and frequency of AIDS cases in specific areas within a city or a geographical region and figure out where the disease is growing or diminishing and maybe help people predict where it will grow or slow down. It's just numbers.”

“But it represents the new plague,” Harmon said in a somber and fascinated tone. “We don't have any more Dark Ages rats with fleas killing off the public, but we have AIDS, the new plague. Someone should interview you. May I?”

Janice laughed with confusion or uncertainty, looking at me for an explanation, then just said to Harmon, “We're having dinner. I'm ready for food, not an interview.”

“Then later,” Harmon said insistently.

I must have been staring at him with such unnerving hostility that he blinked and looked away.

“I won't interview her,” he said defensively.

“I know you won't,” I said.

A
t first it didn't look real when the Harper's Plaza Shopping Center blew up, possibly because I'd never seen a shopping center explode before, so it didn't seem probable. In the night in Wellington County as I drove by, returning from a county planning-board meeting where I suffered severe depression from taking notes on a controversial mobile-home park that I genuinely didn't give a fuck about, a painfully loud and terrifying explosion vibrated me and my car. In the second it took to glance toward the shopping center, about one hundred yards away, a huge, billowy mass of orange flames erupted from the roof of the supermarket. One or two more smaller explosions followed, and as I slammed on my brakes, slid along
the highway, and finally stopped at the edge of a drainage ditch, something shattered the rear, side window of my car, spraying little chunks of glass onto my cheek and into my hair. My cheek stung and felt damp, meaning I was probably bleeding. Looking into my backseat for whatever section of the building evidently landed there, I saw a canned ham. I was too scared to be hungry.

Once I realized that almost certainly no one could have been killed or injured, because it was about ten-thirty at night and no one would have been in any of the stores, I hoped, I ran across some grass and up to the edge of the parking lot, as if staring at the burning grocery store from a slightly closer distance had improved the quality of my uselessness then. Orange and yellow flames waved across nearly the entire top of the store, lighting up the huge parking lot so brightly I could see large and tiny shards of plate glass glittering on the asphalt. Chunks and shattered parts of the building lay here and there in the parking lot. Much of the debris looked like groceries, and I spotted near my feet, when I didn't want it or need it, a dented and fizzling can of Foster's lager spurting beer and its powerful odor toward me. I studied it, watching the little geyser of beer, smelling it, knowing that before it was fully wasted I could open the can and hold it in the dark like a vanished enemy who had, ha-ha, found me again. It would never stop looking for me.

But this wasn't the time, however convenient, to resume
destroying my life, and I walked away from the spewing can and—why was I thinking
this?
—began worrying about looters. A small mobile-home park was located only a few hundred yards down the highway. I didn't know what I'd do if looters came.

“The store's closed,” I'd say.

I noticed my cheek was still stinging, and when I touched it, I felt a sharp piece of glass, not very big, stuck in my cheek. I rolled it out with my fingertip and looked at the fresh blood that trickled down my fingers. I wished Janice was there so she'd be worried for me and fix my cheek and hold me. I liked it when she held me. It came to me that, when I was a boy, if you got hurt and some girl liked you, she'd give you the affection she normally concealed or withheld. Briefly, I thought it was good that I was bleeding because Janice would like me, although she liked me anyway and I wished I wasn't bleeding.

Some people driving by stopped their cars and ran across the grass and up to me in the parking lot. One of them, a tall, fat man in an Atlanta Braves hat, asked what happened.

“It blew up,” I said, annoyed that he had to ask.

He seemed breathlessly horrified, then stared at my cheek and said, “You got a gash in your cheek.”

“I know,” I said. “And there's a canned ham in my car. I didn't pay for it.”

I was feeling light and sick to my stomach. Perhaps
shock. I never could remember what shock was, exactly. Probably I was just dizzy. About seven or eight people stood near me and the fat man, all of us holding our hands over our eyes like visors as the building burned, and then I remembered who I was.

“Fuck,” I said irritably. “Now I'll have to write about this. Goddammit.”

“What're you talkin' about?” the fat man asked a little worriedly.

“A building blows up, somebody expects a description of it. This pisses me off. I'm tired,” I said, walking away and back down the grass toward a pay phone at the convenience store across the highway. Andrew Christopher answered the phone.

“Andrew, this is Kurt. Not that I care personally, but the Harper's Plaza Shopping Center just blew up in Wellington County.”

“What? Well get your ass down there quick and get me a story.”

“My ass
is
down here. It blew up while I was driving by. How convenient. A canned ham broke out my car window and cut my cheek open. I don't think there were any injuries, except me.”

“Reporters don't count as injuries,” he said.

“Well, put that in the story: No humans were hurt, but a reporter was cut by a flying ham.”

For about an hour and a half I remained as a diligent
witness to the rapid destruction of a shopping center, as several dozen firefighters eventually used enough water to cause flash floods in the parking lot and put out the fire after four businesses were leveled. Then I got to go home. Home wasn't my apartment but Janice's apartment, where I arrived at maybe twelve-fifteen in the morning with some gauze taped to my cheek. She was still awake, watching Johnny Carson, and got scared when she saw the gauze.

“My God, what happened to you?” she said, touching my skin around the bandage and making me sit on the sofa.

I put the canned ham on the coffee table and said, “I love it that I can come here and you wonder about me.”

“Kurt. What the hell
hap
pened?”

“Janice, Janice,” I said, smiling because she was so close and I loved her dark eyes. “On the way back from the planning-board meeting I didn't want to go to, just as I drove by Harper's Plaza, it blew up. Boom. It was a very big explosion, Janice, and just as I almost wrecked my car in a ditch because I think I was horrified and disoriented, that canned ham smashed through my rear window, and a small piece of glass stuck in my cheek. It's not very deep. And look, I kept the ham. Do you like ham? I do.”

“Kurt, you look faint. Just lie down,” she said, pushing a pillow behind me and making me lie down. She soaked a dishrag in cold water and rubbed it slowly across my
forehead and eyes, and she gave me some Coke to drink. It was always conspicuously Coke.

“I want some wine,” I said.

“No you don't. You don't really.”

“Yes I do. That's why I'm not supposed to have any. I'm tired of being an alcoholic. I want it to stop. Why won't it stop?”

“You're doing real well. You have to be brave, like you are.”

“Being brave hurts. I wish it would stop.”

She rubbed the cold dishrag over my forehead again and put the soft palms of her hands on my cheeks, like she was fixing me.

“I'm helping you be brave,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What did you do, Kurt? What the hell did you do?”

I explained, in my rambling, incoherent way, the impact of the explosion and the ball of fire and how there was some Foster's lager needing me to drink it and no one would know, but I walked away, and how, according to the rules of journalism, reporters weren't human. She liked the story, even when it didn't make sense, and smiled at me and laughed, one of the most soothing sounds I'd ever heard. I told her that. She kissed my eyes. We went into the bathroom so she could take the gauze off and wash my cut and put some new goo on it with some new gauze, so it would be personal. Even though I had a home, a place
where it was said I lived, it was really here. We knew that, and Janice put me to bed with her, covering me with one of her legs and both of her arms and she fell asleep like that. I loved her. That's what I did then, and wondered if in her sleep she knew I was doing that.

I
n the morning as I read my story on the front page I discovered that my sardonic joke over the phone to Christopher was placed prominently in the story by Christopher, so that everyone reading about the startling explosion of the shopping center saw this sentence: “There were no injuries from the explosion and fire, except a reporter who was cut by a flying ham from the grocery store.” It was a nice touch, and I was glad Christopher put it in. But then the inevitable officiousness and tedium of serious journalism struck like a disease. After our first story with photos ran, and reporters from the afternoon paper, the
Journal
, scrambled that morning to put together a couple of long and annoying pieces about the possible cause of the explosion,
what was at first just a pretty interesting shopping-center explosion was transformed by competing editors into the urgent issue of the community, and the two papers began exchanging stories like gunfire to see who could amass the most maddening and essentially unimportant facts. When it was adjudged that a large gas leak from commercial ovens used to bake breads and pies at the grocery had caused the explosion, Christopher ordered Lisa to order me to reach the company that made the ovens, reach the gas company, reach the fire investigators, contact a national association of firefighters in Washington, interview store employees, contact the corporate office of the store, interview the Wellington County commissioners, ask two or three local lawyers if anyone could successfully be sued over the explosion and fires, call other retail bakers in Vermilion and Wellington counties about their ovens, and find out from the St. Beaujolais and Small town halls if they had any ordinances governing safety inspections of big ovens.

We were going to suffocate the readers with facts. But I, the reporter, was the first victim. The editors at our paper and the
Journal
all acted now as if no events anywhere in the lives of the nearly 40,000 people in the community were as important or interesting to our readers as the history of a goddamn blown-up shopping center. Two other reporters worked with me on a daily series of stories on the continuing investigations and the matters of rebuilding the stores and collecting insurance money. For every two stories
turned out by the
Journal
, we retaliated with three or four. In a computer message to our executive editor, I wrote: “Dear Al Perrault: Now that we've written ten stories in three days on the shopping center, and we're working on two more, wouldn't it be appropriate to quit calling our paper the
News-Dispatch
and start calling it
Grocery World?”

On the day that I was trying to write three stories on the shopping center because I was ordered to, I was so pissed off at the untiring dumbness of journalism that I also began writing a sidebar with this headline: “The history of exploding ovens.”

Lisa, who saw me writing it and was getting mad because I was mad, leaned over me at my desk and said in a quiet, peevish tone, “Kurt, I know you're pissed off about the amount of attention we've been paying to this shopping center, but it's just responsible journalism to find out as much as we can.”