The Last Magazine: A Novel (4 page)

S
aturday night is closing night. By three on Sunday morning, the new issue is electronically transmitted to seven printers across the continental United States and twelve printers in different regions across the globe, where it is printed, tied in stacks, put in the back of delivery trucks, and distributed to newsstands and delis and bookstores, or shrink-wrapped and mailed to 2.2 million subscribers.

I treasure Saturday nights. The sixteenth floor clears out around three or four p.m., leaving a handful of editorial staffers, whose job it is to make sure all the stories, captions, pull quotes, photographs, and tables of contents make their way safely through the gauntlet of copy desk to make-up to production, to catch errors that might have slipped in along the way.

My role on Saturday night is to be available in case there are any last-second changes the correspondents want to put in the stories. They call me, I pull the story up in the computer system, and I make the changes. I’m the liaison between the correspondents in the field and the editors in New York, who by Saturday night are at home.

It’s mostly downtime. The waiting begins mid-afternoon and ends between eleven p.m. and one a.m., when I get the word from the production staff that I can leave.

I’ve found comfort in waiting: the empty floor, the vacuuming, the dark offices, a warm feeling, a feeling that I am part of something
bigger than myself
, a dedicated servant to the magazine.

My friends tell me that it sucks that I have to work Saturday night. I don’t mind at all—I have no problem working Saturday nights. I would not want to be anyplace else.

But what to do during those seven or so hours of waiting.

Get to know
The Magazine
. I want to learn as much detail as I can about the lives and careers and personalities of the people who work in our little universe. The histories, the disputes, the controversies, the raw copy sitting in the computer system—to know the real story of the stories. To know how the magazine got started, stretching back to 1934, its evolution and many incarnations, and to understand the different factions at work today.

Red Notes are a function in the computer system (called Agile). They allow editors and researchers and copy desk employees to ask questions by writing them in the actual file of the story. They are like the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word. Rather than simply delete something, the editor can write a Red Note so the changes can be seen by the person looking at the file but not by the reader when it finally gets published. The editor uses Red Notes to put questions in the text that the correspondent or writer has to answer, like so: <>

The most important Red Notes are at the end of the story. These are the Red Notes that editors, on each level of the editorial chain, use to give praise. Or don’t.

To know who is up and who is down, you have to look at the Red Notes.

I have access to all the stories in the domestic and international editions.

I can see all the Red Notes. I study what changes have been made and how they have been made and why.

I read the Red Notes at the end first. The praise in Red Notes is an indication of the star power of the writer or reporter, how valuable they are to
The Magazine
.

Nishant Patel’s story “The Case for War?” is being published in both the domestic and international editions. In the international edition, it is the cover story. In the domestic edition, it isn’t the cover story—the cover this particular week is about autism and twins.

I open the story, file name int0114, and scroll to the last page.

Four editors have signed off on Nishant Patel’s essay.

<>

<>

<>

<essay. puts our competition to shame. glad to have you here raj//henry>>

The effusiveness is not unusual. The effusiveness is what a figure like Nishant Patel would expect from Red Notes. What it means on this story is that Henry the EIC took the time not only to read the story but also to actually type a Red Note himself.

Alone, perhaps, this wouldn’t mean much. Out of context, it might just seem the norm. But I contrast Red Notes on Nishant’s story with Red Notes on the next story.

I open the essay Sanders Berman wrote this week, file na0214.

It is about FDR’s speech in Decatur, Illinois.

I skip to the bottom of the page.

There are two Red Notes. Only two.

<>

<>

There is no comment from Henry the EIC. Again, alone, this wouldn’t have much significance. Henry the EIC is a busy individual. He doesn’t have time to read all the stories, so you could easily dismiss the non–Red Noting as an issue of scheduling and time management. But if you are a savvy user of Agile, you know that by clicking on one of the drop-down menus, a list of every user who has opened and made changes to the document is available. (For my Saturday-night readings, I use the “read only” function so my username, mhasti, doesn’t appear on this list.) And sure enough, on the list is Henry the EIC’s username, heic.

Which means Henry the EIC read Sanders Berman’s column and didn’t say anything.

He didn’t leave a Red Note.

A shift in the power balance is occurring, not yet seismic but clearly felt.

I hear a loud banging on the glass doors down the hallway. Not unusual. Means someone has forgotten their company identification.

I get up from my cubicle and walk down the hall, past the men’s and women’s rooms, to the set of glass doors.

I jump back, slightly shocked.

A face is pressed up against the glass, mouth like a blowfish, the full weight of the figure propped up by the door.

The eyes on the face above the gaping mouth are closed.

The eyes open. Bloodshot, one thick eyebrow arching.

“You going to let me in,” says the person. “It’s me, A.E. Peoria. I fucking work here.”

“You might want to step back,” I say.

A.E. Peoria, in the flesh, stumbles back.

I pull open the glass doors.

“Where the fuck is he and who the fuck are you,” A.E. Peoria says.

“I’m Michael M. Hastings, but I just got hired on—”

“Mmmmm, Mike Hastings . . .”

I am holding the door open; A.E. Peoria has yet to step through.

“You sent the story list.”

“Yeah, I did this week . . .”

“Sh . . . Sh . . . Sssssshhhhh.”

There are two bags at A.E. Peoria’s feet. His eyes are opening and closing as he rocks back and forth.

“It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. You can get my bags, right, bro?”

A.E. Peoria walks past me, zigzagging and pushing off from one wall to the other.

“Watch the—”

On his third sequence of zigzagging, he pushes the door to the men’s room. The door swings open easily, and he falls through, losing his balance. His legs are sticking out in the hallway. He groans.

I run up beside him.

“Here you go, let’s get you to your office,” I say, as his blowfish mouth is now half on the white-tile floor of the men’s room.

Kneeling, I notice we are not alone in the bathroom—someone else is in there. I can see his shoes underneath the blue stalls. The shoes are pointed at the toilet bowl, not away from the toilet bowl, which means this person is either urinating standing up in the bathroom stall or doing something else. Whoever’s toes, they have frozen still. Whoever it is, he’s waiting to see if he will have privacy in the bathroom again.

“Thanks for the help, bro,” says A.E. Peoria, getting up, then saying, “I don’t need your fucking help, bro.”

A.E. Peoria stumbles off down the hall, toward his office. I follow him to make sure he doesn’t fall again. We get to his office and he throws himself into his chair.

“I gotta check my email,” he says, sitting in the dark.

I flick on the light switch and go back to get his bags.

I pick up the bags. As I’m turning around, the door to the men’s room swings open slowly and a head peeks out.

I freeze, carrying A.E. Peoria’s baggage, a duffel bag and a North Face hiking backpack slung over my shoulders.

It’s Sanders Berman.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to Sanders Berman, and I can now tell you what he looks like in person.

Sanders Berman looks like he got his wardrobe from raiding Mark Twain’s closet.

“Mr. Berman,” I say, “I’m Michael M. Hastings. I work in
international, saw you on MSNBC, really fascinating what you were saying.”

Sanders Berman shoots his eyes back and forth and he wipes his mouth. What is he wiping from his mouth?

“It’s okay to call me Sanders,” he says. “What are you doing here so late?”

“Oh, I’m here late every Friday and Saturday, making sure the magazine gets put to bed.”

Sanders Berman looks at me.

“Going somewhere?”

“Oh, these are A.E. Peoria’s bags. He just got back from eastern Chad, covering that, uh, mobile genocide there.”

“That was Peoria on the floor?”

“Yes, he tripped.”

Sanders Berman is wearing a bow tie and is hunched over slightly—he’s a thirty-seven-year-old trapped in a sixty-seven-year-old’s body, and from what I’ve read about him, he’s been trapped in a sixty-seven-year-old’s body since puberty.

“Did he hear anything?”

I don’t quite know what he’s talking about.

“I think he heard a lot, I mean, he was in Chad for, like, three weeks, so I’m sure he heard a lot.”

Quizzically, Sanders Berman nods.

“It’s been one of those days,” he says.

“Really honored to be here, Mr. Berman,” I say as he walks down the hall.

I wonder if I made a bad first impression. Fuck, I think. But I start to get a bit giddy, having finally introduced myself to Sanders Berman.

In one week, I’m now on the radar of the two really important men at the magazine. It is strange, though, Sanders Berman being
here so late. I’ve never seen an editor that high up stick around to this hour on a Saturday.

Lugging the baggage, I go back to A.E. Peoria’s office. He’s not there. I put the bags down and walk back toward my desk, where I find a much more awake and lively A.E. Peoria sitting in my cubicle.

“I’m checking my email,” he says. “This is my old cube. It’s nostalgia. It’s like instinct, me coming and sitting back down right here.”

A.E. Peoria is wearing green work pants with extra pockets and black leather hiking boots. He doesn’t look cool. I had this idea in my mind that because he was doing cool things, like traveling to eastern Chad and whatnot, and because he had kind of a cool byline, A.E. Peoria, no first name, that he would look more striking, more tall, dark, and handsome. Can’t judge a man by his byline apparently. He’s short and sort of dark, but he would not be mistaken for handsome, I don’t think, unless we lived in a world where people who looked like pudgy gnomes were considered handsome. He does, though, have a bundled, intense energy around him, even while he is completely shit hammered.

My phone rings.

A.E. Peoria picks up.

He covers the mouthpiece.

“What’s your name again?”

“Mike Hastings.”

“Mike Hastings,” Peoria says into the phone.

“Excellent, that’s fucking excellent, bro.”

He hangs up.

“That was production. We’re free to go get a drink.”

I
have a disorder,” says A.E. Peoria.

It’s two a.m. and we’re sitting in O’Neil’s Irish Pub and Tavern on 55th and 7th Ave. It’s sort of shitty, but it’s upper Midtown we’re talking about, shabby since the 1950s. There aren’t too many good places to go in upper Midtown at this hour. We’re in a strange late-night dead zone. The nightlife in New York is to the north of us, to the south of us, but right here, it’s lame places like O’Neil’s Irish Pub and Tavern, a default location that seems to cater to tourists who don’t have a good guidebook or the courage to go farther than five blocks from their hotel.

“CDD,” he says. “Have you heard of that?”

“Is that like OCD?”

“Maybe it is. Want to take a shot?”

“No, remember, I don’t drink.”

“Really? That’s fucked-up. Are you one of those Mormon interns?”

The Magazine
had a special relationship with Brigham Young University, which meant Mormons had three guaranteed internship slots a year.

“I mean no offense if you are a Mormon.”

“No, it’s not for religious reasons. Moral reasons.”

“What?”

“Moral reasons. When I drink, I lose my morals.”

I’d been saving that line, thinking it was a clever way to parry questions about my nondrinking, but A.E. Peoria doesn’t appear to find it funny. My clever lines rarely pay off in context of the conversation. The last time one worked was in AP History class in twelfth grade. A girl sitting in front of me was debating with another girl how to pronounce the word
schedule
—was it “sked-u-al” or “ssshed-u-al”? The girl asked me to weigh in. I did. “What ssshoool did you learn that at?” I asked. Meaning “school.”

“That’s good, man. Good for you for not drinking.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll take two shots then, one for you, one for me.”

He orders two shots of tequila.

“Fuck I haven’t slept in a while. What day is it?”

“Saturday.”

“That’s why not one of those fuckers was at the office. I got my date and time all wrong—it’s all fucked-up. I’m something like six and a half hours ahead, which means I’d be just waking up, but I was in Thailand before Chad, and that’s like thirteen hours ahead, and I went back four hours and never really adjusted to that, so I don’t really know what time it is.”

“I think it’s two-thirty.”

“Two-thirty for you, but for me I’m talking about.”

A.E. Peoria, four-year veteran, with just over a six-figure salary as a staff correspondent. A.E. Peoria, living the dream. How did he do it? Like a sponge, I want to know.

“How was Chad?”

“Intense,” he says.

The bartender puts two shots of tequila down in front of us. I
thank the bartender and ask for a club soda. The bartender passes me a club soda and puts down a slice of lemon and a saltshaker next to it. A.E. Peoria licks his lips, licks the salt, throws the shot back, his blowfish mouth widening. He coughs and his eyes water.

“Cheers,” I say, tilting my club soda in his direction.

“Ahhhhhahahhahahhahahahh,” says A.E. Peoria. “That’s better.”

Here’s what I know about A.E. Peoria. I got most of this information from the Meet the Staff link on
The Magazine
’s website and the rest from an online profile of him from a recent alumni newsletter posted on the Internet. I know he started at
The Magazine
in 1998. I know that he spent his early twenties working for a midsize newspaper in Virginia. He left the midsize paper and traveled across the country on a Greyhound bus. He talked to the passengers along the way, bag ladies, scratch-ticket junkies, blacks and whites and Hispanics, single mothers en route to visit deadbeat convict lovers housed in the federal and state prison system; dreamers, degenerates, dopers, hippies, whores, keno players, bingo fanatics. He wrote a book called
Desperation Points West
. I’d checked the book on Amazon, and its sales ranking was #1,934,987. It got one review by
Booklist
, a five-sentence critical summary that called it “disappointing” and said, “Hoping to hear from voices of America’s economically deprived, we instead are treated to monologues from the painfully unaware narrator. . . .
Desperation Points West
points nowhere.” Shattered by the absence of the book’s reception, Peoria spent the next eighteen months in Cambodia. It was his magazine work there that got him back on the fast track. “There’s nothing like seeing a field of skulls while listening to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ in a jeep full of ex–Khmer Rouge to give you a new perspective on life,” he’d told his alumni newsletter. He got hired during flush times at
The Magazine
, and they outbid a competitor to bring him on staff as a roving-the-world writer for the international editions.

“Are you going to drink that?” he asks me, looking at the shot of tequila.

“No, I don’t drink,” I say.

“Oh that’s right, a Mormon.”

A.E. Peoria snaps up the other shot, quenchingly.

“I have a disorder,” A.E. Peoria says again. “So I’m not going to be apologizing for this. CDD. Have you heard of it?”

“Is it like OCD?” I ask again.

“Yes, but reverse. Compulsive disclosure disorder. I have no filter, my shrink says. I don’t know boundaries, I’m always revealing very personal and intimate details about my life, and there’s nothing I can do about it unless I want to get on medication, and I just don’t want to get on medication right now because I would have to give up drinking, and it’s just not time for me to give up drinking.”

I nod.

“See, right there. I don’t even know you and I’m telling you I have a mental disorder and I don’t want medication and I see a shrink. Blows my fucking mind. But I’m aware of it now, you know? I’m aware of it, and that’s good progress, right?”

“Sounds like great progress.”

A.E. Peoria orders another shot of tequila.

“How old are you, Hastings?”

“Me, I’m twenty-two.”

This bit of information always has impact, and I don’t really understand why. Age isn’t a big deal to me (yet?). For most of my life, I’ve always been the youngest one at the table, and it’s something I’ve come to expect, maybe take for granted. I can’t imagine that when I’m older I’ll ever ask that question.

“You’re just a fucking baby, bro,” says A.E. Peoria. “Let me tell you something about the magazine. The magazine is shit, but it’s great for
someone your age. You have to get out of the office. The office will steal your soul. The lights in the office—you’ve looked at them? Those fucking energy-efficient fluorescent things, the dimpled plastic, all of that, it’s like it’s radiating soul-suckingness. It’s radiating deadly soul-destroying, like, radiation, and it will fucking kill you if you don’t get out. You really want to end up like Jerry and Sam and Gary and all those guys? Fuck, I mean Gary and Jerry are cool, but shit, you really want to end up like them?”

I nod.

“Know what I should do? I should write up tips, a tip sheet for a successful career. You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, that’d be great. I mean, I wanted to ask you, how did you end up—”

“How did I become A.E. Peoria,” he says.

“Right.”

“Never do the job you have—do the job you want to have. I kept asking for more when I was at the
Fairfax Gazette
. They wouldn’t give it to me, so I left, and I wrote this book—maybe you heard of it,
Desperation Points West
—and then I went to Cambodia. Cambodia—let me say this: There’s nothing like riding in a jeep with ex–Khmer Rouge in a field of skulls listening to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck,’ the wind blowing, high on hashish, to give you a real perspective on life.”

I nod, and he starts nodding too.

“But I don’t know if I’m hard-core enough. I really started to question that in Chad. Like Townsend.”

A.E. Peoria reaches in his left pocket, then his right pocket, then notices that he placed his mobile phone down in front of him next to a bowl of popcorn, provided free of charge by O’Neil’s Irish Pub and Tavern.

“Oh shit, I should go see my girlfriend. What do you think? I think I might love her. I gave her six orgasms. Big orgasms, huge orgasms. I’d never given anyone so many orgasms before. But I don’t know if she’s top tier, do you know what I mean? I want a top-tier girl, and I think she might be second tier.”

Realizing the conversation is wrapping up, I try to think of any other questions I want to ask.

“I mean, how exactly did you become a foreign correspondent?”

“Look, I’m not going to lie. The job is fucking great. But it’s also shit. I mean, my career is shit. Look, what have I done? Okay, so I wrote a book? So fucking what. Okay, so I’ve covered stories in thirteen different countries? Big fucking deal. Okay, so I’m only thirty-four and I’ve accomplished things that most people won’t do in their entire lives. Okay, so I’m probably, give or take a few thousand, one of the highest-paid journalists my age in the country. None of it means shit.”

“Well, I mean, you did write a book. How many people can say that? And like you said, you’re only thirty-four.”

“Yeah, I did write a fucking book. I guess that is pretty elite. Fuck, I really have to go. What do you say, time for one more shot?”

His phone vibrates.

“Oh shit, she just sent me a picture of herself. Here, take a look at her.”

He slides his mobile phone to me on the bar as the bartender pushes another shot of tequila in front of him.

I snap open the mobile phone, and there’s a surprisingly clear digital picture of A.E. Peoria’s girlfriend. It’s an impressive feat of self-portraiture. From knees to face. Shaved to drooping. Nimble fingers. Lips, a toy.

“She got cleaned up yesterday,” says A.E. Peoria. “Timed for me. She’s great like that, you know? She doesn’t like to fuck on the day
she gets waxed because her vagina gets irritated. But look at that—she has a really wet pussy. That ever happened to you? Very adventurous. She calls that one in her mouth the Contender. She’s a little on the heavy side, you know, and she likes it doggy style the best. They have a name for that. I think it’s like Dirty Sanchez or something. Six orgasms I gave her—incredible. She’s a writer. She even does ghostwriting for
Penthouse
letters, but I don’t think that’s going to last much longer with all the porn on the Internet.”

“You’re a lucky guy,” I say as he takes his phone back and stands up from the bar.

“What’s your number? I’ll send it to you,” he says.

A.E. Peoria punches in my number and tries to send the photo.

“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.”

“Bro, I’m fucking drunk. It’s really amazing that you don’t drink. I have a lot of respect for religions, though I think they’re bullshit. Want to share a taxi? I’m going uptown.”

“I’m heading downtown.”

“I’m expensing all of these drinks tonight, fuck
The Magazine
. We deserve it.”

I follow A.E. Peoria outside, and he ducks into a cab and shuts the door, and in the four seconds the courtesy light stays on after he closes the door, I can see his blowfish mouth has already opened to give directions and likely more to the taxi driver.

Seventh Avenue at 3:25 a.m. on a Sunday in August is hot and damp, wafting the smell of trash. Most of the cars are yellow taxis. The storefronts are shut, except for a few bars, chalkboard signs not yet dragged back inside, and the unnatural glow from twenty-four-hour corner delis shining through the temporary-looking but permanent plastic walls set up to protect the fruits, vegetables, and flowers. I wonder how those flowers sell. I decide to walk a few blocks before hailing a cab myself.

I wake up at 10:35 a.m. and leave my apartment to get iced coffee. I spend the day watching television.

On Monday morning, I take the F train to work. I stop at the newsstand underneath Second Ave. and Houston to look at
The Magazine
—“Autistic Twins” is the cover, but over the logo, on what’s called the roofline, it says “Iraq: The Case for War?”

Exciting times, I think.