The Last Magazine: A Novel (6 page)

M
agazine journalist A.E. Peoria is in a career crisis. The crisis of what to do next.
Thirty-four, thirty-four, thirty-four.

A.E. Peoria likes to say that he doesn’t trust anyone who loves high school, and he especially doesn’t trust anyone who loves college. He likes to say that the twenties are a time in life when things are uncertain and still painfully anxious, the twenties are rough, and he is suspicious of anyone who enjoys their twenties too much. He likes to repeat that it’s the thirties, the fourth decade in life, when you really get that perspective and finally get that comfort of who you are. The thirties are when you begin to understand limitations in life, a time when the things that stressed you out so much in your twenties don’t seem as important anymore. This is what he likes to say when he is invited to speak to young people at colleges and high schools: that by the time you reach thirty-two-ish, the childish dreams of childhood, the teenage illusions, and the stresses of the overreach of your twenties fall into their appropriate place in the memory bank.

Then why, he wonders, am I in a career crisis yet again?

He thinks it’s the inverse proportional response to his CDD. It is the silent CDD. He is always compulsively disclosing and dissecting
in his mind
to himself
. He has no control over it. He doesn’t quite have the science to back it up, but it is this theory of his.

He cannot stop thinking about his career. What is
career
? There is no time to search for a meaning, because meaning cannot be found until the question of career is put to rest. Why is career always in crisis? It is a looping crisis. It is the crisis of reaching goals. The crisis of setting goals then reaching goals then setting more goals and reaching more goals. The crisis of five-year plans and ten-year plans and other evil baby boomer inventions. He cannot escape this vicious looping circle of career thinking. It is never far away from his mind. It’s always there, career, he’s always thinking about it, analyzing, plotting, planning, worrying, fretting.

He likes to think of himself as Icarus, probably because that’s the only Greek myth he can remember accurately without the aid of a search engine. The only Greek myth that, after reading Sophocles and Euripides and all the other one-named Greek pederasts in school, he can remember and draw a detailed meaning from that he can relate to life today.

Icarus flies too close to the sun after his father gives him wax wings, and then the wings melt and Icarus falls into the ocean, maybe the Mediterranean, so it’s not that bad, beats the North Atlantic, but he falls into the ocean and he drowns. A.E. Peoria likes to think of that myth and say to himself, or others if he’s on drugs: Fuck you, father. Fuck you, Icarus. I am Kid Icarus, like in that Nintendo game from 1987, leaping from free-floating graphic structure to free-floating graphic structure. I fly too close to the sun and crash into the goddamn ocean! But I know how to swim, I know how to swim, I know how to swim to shore, and when I’m on the beach, I look at the sun again. The sun as it is drying the saltwater from my skin. I yell out to the sky, “Fuck you, Sun! I’ll be back! With a new set of wings, just you wait, you shining, spotty-flaring, cancer-causing fuck.”

Maybe it is New York.

A.E. Peoria likes to think maybe it isn’t him, maybe it’s this place, this city. New York, Peoria knows from reading Evelyn Waugh, is a city where “there is neurosis in the air which its inhabitants mistake for energy.”

Couldn’t say it better myself, A.E. Peoria thinks, could not say it better myself.

The city of New York is always causing this career crisis. An insidious conspiracy to remind him on every block about the state of his career.

What other reason for glass skyscrapers, glass windows everywhere, all this glass that was erected and positioned so that you cannot escape your own reflection—he is always getting himself bounced back at him in glass, as if whoever designed these glass buildings likes to keep putting him in his place. Look at what you’re wearing.

The word
career
, A.E. Peoria knows, because he looks it up, comes from the Latin
carrus
, or “wagon,” via the French
carrière
, or “road.” A person’s progress and general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as in some profession or undertaking. Success in a profession, occupation, etc. A course, especially a swift one. Speed, especially full speed. A verb meaning “to run” or “to move rapidly along.” Careering, rush. “My hasting days fly on with full career”—John Milton. A third definition,
career
, a racecourse, the ground run over. Fourth, falconry, the flight of the hawk. “Careering gaily over the curling waves”—Washington Irving. Archaic: to charge ahead at full speed.

Rushing ahead at full speed on his life’s vocation, in control, out of control, a little of both.

Up until when—recently?—he had viewed the path of career unimaginatively, like some kind of long hallway in a poorly designed international airport, where the architects seemed to have gotten
great pleasure making sure that every connecting flight was mathematically at the farthest point away from any other point in the terminal. A long hallway, low music, beeping golf carts with oxygen tanks. As if the architects had taken to heart Zeno’s paradox of never being able to cross a room and so designed an infinitely divisible hallway between points A and B at each transit underpass.

In his imaginary career-fantasy metaphor, there are those who are curiously choosing to walk the hallway, those who are standing to the right on the people mover, and those who are walking on the left of the conveyor belt, rushing along. That third lane was the lane he thought—from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-four—he was finally on. At some point he had jumped over the hand railing where he’d been walking, paused for a brief moment, and then he’d stepped on the fastest track, a track that he had just been watching other people use, as if it had been protected by a thick plastic barrier. And he was cruising along on this fast track, thinking, I did it, I am finally on the fast track, I’m going to catch my flight—but until when—recently?—that feeling changed.

A.E. Peoria had always thought of himself as lucky, and this luck, he felt, made him somewhat superior to other people his age. It was not the luck of good things happening to him, but the luck that he could always say, “I know what I want to do with my life. I’m lucky.”

A.E. Peoria never questioned that he wanted to be a magazine journalist. Had always known it. Even when it was rough during his twenties, when all of his wandering and drifting college classmates were anguishing in this kind of existential variety of what to do. I just don’t know what I want to do, his friends would tell him, and that was something he could sympathize with sort of, but not completely. Because if the conversation continued, he would always say, “I’m lucky, I’ve always known what I wanted to do,” and they would respond, “Yes, you are lucky. I wish I always knew what I wanted to do.”

Peoria, though, was getting worried that maybe he wasn’t lucky anymore. Maybe he’d made a grave mistake by becoming a magazine journalist. Maybe it wasn’t what he’d always wanted to do.

So, in his office—though the career crisis wasn’t limited to his time in the office; how he wished it was limited to his office and not his bedroom, his bed, his showers, his jogging, his dinners with his girlfriend, his phone conversations, his commute, how he wished it was just limited to his office!—he had started for the first time to think about other careers.

He looked on the CIA website. He looked at Harvard Law School. He looked at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He looked at NASA. He looked at MCATs and LSATs and GREs and the Foreign Service Exam. Film school. He looked at job openings with small newspapers in places like Malone, New York, and Yaak, Montana. He looked at business school—Stern, Wharton, Stanford. He looked at financial aid documents. He looked at everything, and he fretted about everything. He looked at doctoral programs and master’s programs and technical institutes in TV/VCR repair and forensic criminology. Dental school. He looked at intensive language programs for Urdu and Arabic and Russian and Spanish. He looked at teaching English in Katmandu and microfinance initiatives in Ghana. Those professions seemed so much simpler—doctor, lawyer, astronaut, accountant, linguist—professions where the path to success was clear. Why had he stupidly chosen to be a magazine journalist—now, that was a career with pressure! That was a career with stress, with uncertainty. How much simpler life would be if he were a brain surgeon or a physicist or designed helicopters for a defense contractor—a simple, stable career path with a well-defined destination, so much easier than this constant and vicious battle he was in with himself over this New York magazine media world he lived in. Those were careers with real skills, real sellable skills. What skills did he have?
Diagnose what? Consult on what? Fix what? No, he could gather information half decently and present that information half decently, but it was always other people’s information, others’ doings, always the observer—to make a career out of observing other careers, what did that say of him?

His girlfriend, to whom he had given six orgasms, had given him some of her Xanax, and that helped some.

Thirty-four, and never had a book party!

So, A.E. Peoria, door to his office closed, window shades clinched, drunk as fuck, pale light from the computer screen zebra-ing his face, is considering a change in careers, drastically, when he sees that another magazine has been delivered to his desk, the middle-highbrow magazine that Henry the EIC once clipped a cartoon from. He flips open to a story called “A Professor in Exile,” and it’s by a guy he’s never heard of before but who seems very serious, and this guy’s byline is Brennan Toddly, it’s fifteen thousand words, very detail-oriented and persuasively reported from the halls of northeastern joint conferences and the cloistered monklike apartments off Ivy League campuses, leather-bound bookshelves, dust, reported with a forcefully humorless I-narrator, laying out in genius fashion the case for war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and predicting that the war will happen, needs to happen, within six months.

A.E. Peoria forgets about his career crisis and starts to make his own phone calls, all his anxiety relieved because he gets a urinary tract–like tingling that a big career-making story is on the way, something he can really sink his teeth into. He starts to think about the ways he can make sure that when this future war does start, he’s in place to cover it. He sees the fast track again and its name is Brennan Toddly.

Before he gets too far, he passes out and falls asleep, curled underneath his desk, the book party six floors above him temporarily forgotten.

D
ing.

I get an email, and it shoots me up in my swivel.

Nishant Patel. No subject.

come by my office np

Do I reply? Or do I just go?

I hit Reply.

My fingers freeze over the keys.

Dear Nishant . . .

What else? How formal do I make it? Or should it be as informal as Nishant Patel’s? Am I at a stage where I can write “ok” and put my own initials: “ok/mmh”? Or do I need to sign off with at least my first name?

Five minutes pass.

How deferential do I need to be? I freeze. Does Nishant Patel understand the impact of an email from a boss? To see his name in my inbox, to see it, and to think, How am I going to answer this?
Does he realize how much time it takes to compose a response? I want to choose the words perfectly. I am still at a stage where I think people are going to actually read my email somewhat closely, and there’s all sorts of etiquette issues that will probably just disappear in the technological informality of communication that seems to be heading our way. No punctuation, no salutations, no goodbyes, just initials and shorthand and all caps or no caps.

I come up with:

Dear Nishant, I will come by now, if that’s okay.

Sincerely,
Michael M. Hastings

I get up from my cubicle. I walk toward his office. The door is closed.

I stand next to Dorothy’s cubicle for permission from her to go in.

Dorothy and Patricia are in dueling phone conversations. They aren’t talking to each other. They seem to be in endless negotiations with other people’s assistants. “Dr. Patel will call Mr. Rose back,” says Patricia. “Yes, Dr. Patel called Mr. Rose and now Mr. Rose is calling Dr. Patel back.”

The unknown figure on the end of Dorothy’s line is acting pushy, and Dorothy is saying, “We very much understand how busy the Ambassador is, and I’m sure you can understand how busy Nishant is, and we appreciate Mr. Holbrooke’s call and we’re sure to find a time later this afternoon or tomorrow?”

Dorothy hangs up.

“Patricia, mark down that Nishant has a call to Holbrooke tomorrow,” but Patricia doesn’t hear Dorothy, over the cubicle divider and with that deaf ear. She just knows that Dorothy has commanded her
to do something, so she says, “Yes, can you please hold, please hold, yes, is this Mr. Rose’s office, this is Dr. Patel’s office, please hold for a moment,” and she covers up the mouthpiece with her hand and calls over to Dorothy, “What, Dorothy? What, Dorothy?” and Dorothy snaps, “Tomorrow, one-thirty, a call with Holbrooke’s office,” and Dorothy looks up at me.

“Yes, Mike?”

Dorothy, though aging, was once a real knockout, single but with former lovers who were diplomats and war correspondents, and weekend getaways with captains of industry and nights in the late sixties and early seventies in the West Village. She lives for the magazine now, and she is the gatekeeper, both physical and electronic, to Nishant Patel, the magazine’s number-one or -two most valuable commodity, depending on who you ask. I’m lucky because Dorothy likes me, because if Dorothy doesn’t like you, you have to wait in line.

“Hi, Dorothy, Nishant—I mean, Dr. or Mr. Patel asked me to come by.”

Dorothy smiles, and nods.

“One second.”

Dorothy stands up and says to Patricia, teaching her, “Patricia, we know the rule. If you have ‘former’ in your title, then we return the phone call in twenty-four hours. If you are current, then we return the phone call in six hours or less.”

“What about Mr. Rose?” says Patricia.

“For TV, one hour or less,” says Dorothy. “Go ahead and knock, Mike.”

I knock on the closed door, and I hear the slightly accented British lilt of Dr. Nishant Patel, and he says, “Come in,” and as I walk in, he’s on the phone. He points to a seat in front of his desk.

I sit down.

Nishant Patel is in a corner office. There are hundreds of books, mostly his books, and they are all in different languages. German language, French language, Portuguese language. Spanish. Dutch. Italian. Indonesian. The books line the shelves and are neatly stacked on every free flat surface, tables, coffee tables. There are two couches and three chairs and a ledge on the window to sit, if he’s having a meeting with everyone in his office.

Nishant Patel’s legs are crossed, and he leans back in his Executive 3000 black swivel chair, perfectly tailored tan pants riding up to mid-ankle to reveal lightly patterned argyle socks, probably from Paul Smith, which are a perfect contrast to his brown Gucci loafers, going up to his thin waist and off–powder blue Ermenegildo Zegna dress shirt, knotted green silk cuff links from Bergdorf Goodman, silk Brooks Brothers–looking tie, though probably not Brooks Brothers, probably something a few steps above that, like Thomas Pink, hair cut and effortlessly styled every two weeks by the Grooming Lounge.

He’s turned at about forty-five degrees to my right, his left, tilted a precise sixty-seven degrees backward, talking on the phone.

“. . . Yes, it was an interesting meeting. . . . The undersecretary invited us there—Kaplan, Friedman, Haas, Brennan Toddly, a number of others from the Council on Foreign Relations. Oh, he wanted to get our opinions, our ideas. No, it was all very off-the-record. . . . We’re not allowed to say anything or mention it in our columns. . . . No, Berman wasn’t invited. . . . To convince us, and it was quite, quite convincing. I have to go. I’ll be taping the show tonight, but I should be home after dinner.”

Patel gently hangs up the phone and turns toward me.

“Hastings, thank you for coming. I need you to do research for my column this week. Have you seen this story?”

He tosses a copy of the middle-highbrow magazine on his desk, folded up to a story by a man named Brennan Toddly.

“Have you read this?”

I haven’t read it, but nod yes, because I have learned that this magazine is the only one that the editors at
The Magazine
read on a regular basis—certainly, they never actually read our magazine, unless it is to see who got in the magazine that week and who didn’t.

“He quotes an Iraqi man in there, and he cites Kenneth Pollack’s book
The Threatening Storm
. Call Pollack and the Iraqi man, and have them say basically what they say in that story.”

“Sure, Nishant, no problem.”

“My column this week, to give you an idea, is going to go further than I had in my last cover story. I left my argument open—the case for war? Now I am going to answer the question. I will be making the argument primarily for national security reasons, but also, humanitarian reasons. We cannot forget about the Iraqi people, et cetera. You follow this stuff, don’t you?”

“Of course, of course,” I say.

“I’ll be writing tomorrow afternoon, get it to me before then.”

“Okay, Nishant, no problem.”

And he doesn’t say “Dismissed,” but he does re-angle his chair, forty-five degrees back to the left, and hits the intercom button and tells Dorothy to get him the host of the TV show he’s going to be a guest on tonight.

Taking the copy of Brennan Toddly’s article with me, I go back to my desk, nervous and excited—getting to do research for Nishant Patel.

This is the big time.