Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (2 page)

By now, the copyboy had dutifully responded
to the racket and delivered the wire copy to George Locke. Though
Al’s eyes remained fixed blankly on the headline sheet, they could
see the boy rip the paper from the wire-service machines and hurry
to the managing editor’s desk. And, while his ears were deaf to
Herb’s urgent whispers of concern, Al was fully aware of Locke’s
instructions to the copy chief:

“Hold on over there, Herb,” Locke called out,
pausing to bite off the end of a fresh cigar. “Has the Roberts
story gone through yet?”

“No,” Herb answered. “Al was just finishing
up. It’s ready to go, though.”

“Well, you’d better give him this and have
him rewrite the head. Seems some folks on the scene were a little
too quick to write Roberts off. He may still make it.”

Clearly annoyed about the inaccuracies in the
earlier reports, Locke brought the new wire copy to the desk and
handed it to Deutsch.

“When I was a general assignment reporter, I
made damn sure about things before saying someone was dead. These
new kids go to some fancy college where they learn all about
‘journalism’ and nothing about how to be a reporter. The TV
influence, I think. They’re in such a big hurry that they don’t
bother to check.... 

“How ya doin’, Al?” Locke said abruptly,
doing a double-take as he observed Al’s glazed look. Without
thinking, he glanced in the direction of Al’s stare and saw the
headline.

“Hey, Al, that’s pretty good. We can still
use the head. There’s still a chance of rioting, even though
Roberts may pull through after all.”  Locke scratched his
cheek thoughtfully. “Did you hear something on the way in? 
Did the radio boys get it on the air already?  Hell, you heard
the alarm—the story just came in on the wire!”

Slowly, Al felt the world coalesce around him
once again.

“You mean Roberts
isn’t
dead?”

“Come on, Al, you must have known he was
alive!  I don’t have time for games now. It’s not just this
story we have to fix up. There’s Vickie’s sidebar and a few others,
too. If you knew Roberts was alive when you walked in here, you
damn well should have said something!”

“Lay off, George,” Herb said quietly, handing
Locke the story and headline. “Al didn’t know. Look at the copy. It
says Roberts was killed. Al wouldn’t have let that go if he knew
better.”

“Then why doesn’t the headline say Roberts is
dead?”

Herb glanced anxiously at Al before
answering. “I don’t know, George, but I don’t think we have time to
figure  it out right now.”  He tapped his wristwatch. “We
still have a paper to get out.”

“Yeah,” Locke grumbled, as he walked back to
his desk and began barking orders.

“Vickie, let me see what you’ve got.”

The mention of Vickie’s name seemed to rescue
Al from his mental fog. He watched her working feverishly across
the city room, her long, black hair occasionally falling across her
face and interrupting her work as she brushed the offending strands
out of the way. She added a final touch to her copy before removing
it from her typewriter.

“Be right with you, George,” she answered in
a self-assured voice that contrasted sharply with the look of
childlike vulnerability that characterized her face. “I assume
you’ll want a new lead on this,” she added as she approached
Locke’s desk. “Looks like most of the stuff I got from my
interviews is still okay. Especially about the chance for rioting.
Lots of angry people out there.”

Locke grunted and puffed on his cigar as he
took the story from her and began inspecting it. After a few
seconds, his bald head bobbed approvingly. “Okay,” he said, making
a few changes with a copy pencil. “Better add a graf explaining the
mix-up in those first reports.”

Vickie nodded and began walking back to her
desk. Al looked up from the story before him, hoping to catch her
eye as she passed, but before he could say anything, he saw Herb
gesture to her. “Trouble,” the gesture seemed to say. “Your
boyfriend here’s losing his mind.”  Al hoped his beard would
camouflage the blush he could feel spreading over his usually pale
face. Meanwhile, Vickie kept walking, but her pace slowed, and she
glanced back over her shoulder.

She quickly made the necessary changes in the
sidebar, then deposited the story on Locke’s desk.

“Hey, Al,” she called out as she turned to
face the copy desk. “I’m about through for now. Are you working on
something, or can you buy me a cup of coffee?”

Al looked up from the story that had been
battling vainly for his attention.

“Go on,” said Herb. “I think you can use a
break.”

Al nodded and pushed the copy toward the desk
chief. “Yeah,” he said, rising from his chair. “That sounds
good.”

Vickie took Al’s arm and led him out of the
city room. Flanked by walls badly in need of a paint job, they
proceeded down a short hallway to the staff lounge.

“Hmmmm. Nobody here,” Vickie observed.

“Good,” Al answered, heading for the coffee
urn. “I need to talk to you in private.”

She grinned. “I know what it is. You’ve
decided we should elope now instead of waiting until fall!”

He smiled half-heartedly, warmed by the
thought of their marriage plans, then drew two cups of black coffee
and dropped some change into a can on the counter.

“Two teaspoons of sugar?” he asked. “It’s
probably pretty strong again.”

“Well.... I’ve been trying to cut down.
Putting on a little weight lately.”  Vickie patted her
stomach. “I wouldn’t want my ‘plump’ to get any more than
‘pleasing,’ and, after all, every little bit helps.  Here. Let
me taste it—”

She took a cup from Al’s hand.

“Yuck!” she said rolling her eyes heavenward
and reaching for the sugar. “I’ll find someplace else to save
calories!”

Their coffee prepared to their tastes, they
seated themselves at a small table, each waiting for the other to
say something.

“So. What happened in the city room?” Vickie
finally asked.

“I...I’m not really sure,” he stammered. “I
think I wished Roberts alive.”

“What
?” she responded with a
laugh.

He swallowed nervously. Then, striving for a
matter-of-fact, journalistically objective tone, he recounted the
events in the city room.

Vickie listened attentively, measuring him,
watching him as if she expected to learn more from what he did than
from what he said. It unnerved him. He was telling her all this
because he needed her support, but all he was getting right now was
her professional skepticism. He had never felt more alone.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“Not crazy, Al. Maybe a little confused,
though.”  She studied him for a few seconds. “When it comes to
the news business, you’re one of the best. You know more about more
people and things than just about anyone, and what you don’t
already know, you know how to find out. But sometimes,
well....”

He clamped his teeth together and waited for
her to continue.

“Look,” she said, “I know how you get. Every
once in a while, I feel that way, too. You just want to wish all
the pain and suffering away. But life doesn’t work like that. You
know it as well as I do. Better, in fact.”

Al sipped his coffee, trying to soothe a
suddenly dry throat.

“It’s happened before,” she continued. “You
pretend to be some kind of hard-headed cynic who doesn’t feel a
thing, but then you get into these moods, like when you handled the
story about the Nazi-hunters a few weeks ago.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“With magically changing headlines? 
Maybe not. But the Nazi story sure set you off. For days, you kept
talking about how you ought to be doing more than playing the
professional observer.”

She ran a finger over the hand he had wrapped
around his coffee cup.

“Vickie,” he began uncertainly, “you know
that I was born in Berlin on the day Hitler became chancellor of
Germany. That day was the beginning of the end for our family in
Europe. Every year, on my birthday, my parents would take the time
to remember relatives who didn’t see or couldn’t believe what was
happening in Germany and paid for it in the death camps. That’s a
memory I can’t just forget.”

“And you
shouldn’t
forget it, Al. But
that doesn’t mean you have to pay some sort of debt just for
surviving. I’m
glad
your parents were smart enough to see
what was  coming and get to America before it was too late.
I’m Jewish, too, and—”

“You don’t understand!” Al exclaimed, nearly
spilling his coffee as he jumped to his feet. “I survived! There
must be a reason for that. I
know
I’m supposed to
do...something! That’s one of the reasons I went into this
business. I thought being a newspaperman would help me understand
the world better, help me figure out what I’m supposed to do.
Instead, I just sit at that desk day after day after day, and
nothing changes. At least it didn’t until today.”

Vickie blinked, as if shifting mental gears.
“Listen,” she said as Al sank back into his chair.  “You say
you saved Roberts’ life more or less by wishing it, but  you
know that can’t be so. The first reports were wrong. You wanted
Roberts to be alive, and then you found out he
was
alive.
But it wasn’t a miracle. Roberts was never dead in the first
place!”

Al sighed and ran his fingers through his
coarse brown hair. The soft ticking of the old-fashioned school
clock on the wall resounded in his ears, and the air felt heavy and
oppressive. Suddenly, he laughed. It was a bitter, ironic laugh.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly, shaking his head
sadly.

Vickie stood and leaned across the table to
kiss him tenderly on the mouth. “Al, I love you. Maybe it’s the
romantic idealist in you that I love most. But you’ve got to see
that what you’ve told me doesn’t make any sense. It’s plain
impossible.”

With a considerable effort of will, Al
hardened his features into what he hoped was a resolute expression.
The less certain he felt, the more firmly he defended his version
of what had happened—not only to Vickie, but also to himself.

“There has to be a rational explanation,”
Vickie said. “I know it
seemed
the way you described it,
but—”  He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Look,
Al, headlines just don’t change by themselves!”

He took a deep breath and looked away.
“E
pur si muove,”
he muttered.

Vickie frowned in confusion. “Huh?”

 
He gazed deeply into her
dark-brown eyes.

“This
headline changed!”

 
Sunday, May 16, 2021

 “
Stop it!” Rayna Kingman begged
the tall, muscular man at her side as she knuckled away tears of
laughter and opened the door to her apartment. “Don’t be
mean!  I only did it once. Besides, I warned you that I wasn’t
a particularly good tennis player.” 

“Yes,” Keith Daniels responded, “but you
didn’t tell me you attack your doubles partners from the
rear!”  He bent forward, screwed his tanned face into an
expression of mock agony and stumbled around the room, groaning and
clutching first at his back, then at his head, then at his
rump.

“I guess your 37-year-old bones just can’t
take it anymore!” she taunted.

He straightened abruptly and turned toward
Rayna, his deep-blue eyes tracing the contours of her slender body
from head to toe and back again. “C’m’ere, Teach,” he said, as he
took her in his arms.

Their lips met in a kiss that melted away all
pretense.

Rayna’s long, thin fingers played with the
curly locks of light-brown hair at the base of his neck. “I love
you, Mr. Attorney,” she told him. “I don’t think I could have
gotten through the last few days without you.”

It was a magnificent spring day, and the
morning’s tennis match had helped divert her thoughts, but she
couldn’t put it off forever. Eventually, she was going to have to
open that box.

“How about getting a little light in here?”
Keith suggested.

The gloom inside the apartment reminded Rayna
once again of the awful hole Al Frederick’s sudden death had left
in her life. Wordlessly, she moved to the wall and activated an
electronic circuit to countermand the “opaque” instruction she had
last given to the sliding glass door that separated her living room
from a small patio outside.  

“The permastore’s still on the coffee table,
I see,” Keith noted, jerking his head toward the environmentally
sealed container.

“Right where I left it last week.”
  

“Yeah,” Rayna nodded numbly. “I haven’t
touched it. I was going to open it half a dozen times, but
I—I....” 

He walked over to where she stood, still
facing the wall, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s
been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, babe?  Especially
yesterday—going through all his things like that.”

Rayna grunted affirmatively and turned to
face him.

“That was the first time I’d been inside Al’s
place since it happened. Even with most of his stuff sold off, it
was eerie. There were just enough of his personal things to remind
me of where I was. But it seemed so...so...so
empty
. I guess
I still find it hard to believe he’s dead.”

Keith nodded. “Yeah, well, you have to expect
that sort of thing when somebody dies unexpectedly. It’s not 
like he’d been sick, so that you could have prepared yourself. Give
yourself a chance.”   

“But it’s already been more than a month,”
she said, exasperated with herself. At 34, she should be able to
handle these things better. “Intellectually, I know Al’s dead, but
until yesterday, I still had the crazy sense that he was in his
apartment, just tending to whatever it is he’s been tending to all
these years and waiting for me to visit him again.”  She shook
her head slowly from side to side and laughed bitterly. “Funny,
isn’t it, this inclination to see the world as if it’s a piece of
theater. I’m the star of this particular little drama, and I expect
all the supporting players—including Al—to be there when I need
them.”