Begin to Exit Here (14 page)

“It makes me sound like a useful mistake,” I said.

“That's not what I meant,” she said. “You
are
useful, though.”

In the dark, thick, jumble of trees beyond us and everywhere came the hooting of owls, chatting to each other or whatever they did, talking about some rodent they were thinking about eating. Certain pieces of wood in the fire popped and had little explosions, making bigger the wide trail of glowing embers wiggling up into the dark, where we watched them vanish, like the night eating fire.
We always put one more limb on the fire, and another one, to keep the sphere of light big around us, and the warmth.

A snapping sound came from the woods, like a solid limb breaking, and we both jerked around to see if something was coming at us, but there was just darkness. We stared at each other, trying to see how afraid we were, or if it was funny, and I picked up the gun.

“It might be a bear,” I said, and we were both silent, listening hard. But there was a breeze making noise, and some owls way off, so we couldn't hear the padding, giant footsteps of something out there that we hoped was going away.

“Kurt?”

“What.”

“Remember when I told you earlier not to shoot anything?”

“Yes.”

“It's different, now. If it seems reasonable, shoot something.”

“Okay.”

There had been only that one snapping, and no more noises like it, and I wished the breeze would shut up so we could hear. Janice put her arm around mine and drank some more wine, staring into the big darkness as she drank.

“Camping is supposed to be fun,” she said. “It's not fun thinking something might kill you.”

“We won't die. It was probably just a skunk,” I said, then thought of everything it could be. “It was probably just a skunk, or a weasel, or a raccoon, or a possum, or a wild boar with tusks the size of hunting knives.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Or a bear, or a bobcat, or maybe Big Foot.”

“Or maybe it's Elvis,” she said.

“Elvis? I never did like his music very much. I'll shoot the fucker. He'll be dead
this
time.”

“You wouldn't really shoot Elvis, would you?”

“If he comes out of the woods singing ‘Viva Las Vegas,' I will.”

We squinted into the woods some more, and Janice put two more limbs on the fire, making everything a little brighter, except for the darkness around us. She looked at me holding the gun and said, “I just thought of something. Do you know how to use that gun?”

“Not really.”

“That's what I thought. You better give it to me. I went to a shooting range in Raleigh. I know how to aim it and actually hit something.”

“But, Janice. I want to shoot Elvis.”

“You haven't been trained to shoot Elvis. I have. Give me the gun, Kurt.”

So I gave her the gun and she put it down near her foot. It didn't seem like whatever was going to kill us had any real interest in us anyway, and it looked as if the night
was going to resume being just the night, leaving us alone. Janice got out her miniature Sony TV, and it was impossible not to giggle at each other for having a TV with us.

“This is fun, going to this much trouble to get away from civilization and then watching TV in the wilderness,” Janice said.

“I know. It's silly beyond redemption. I like it.”

She fiddled with the antenna for a while until some show came in.

“‘Gunsmoke'! This is great!” Janice said, and we sat together on the ground watching James Arness shoot people with his polite reluctance.

“We have a gun, too,” she said girlishly, holding up her Beretta and comparing it with Matt Dillon's revolver. “This one has a lot more velocity,” she said. “Plus it's prettier.”

“I have a shooter, too,” I said, putting my hand between my legs.

Janice grinned at me with her lips tightly held together. She put the palm of her hand over her mouth so she wouldn't laugh.

“You'd have to wear the holster in the front,” I said.

Her head was trembling a little bit, and it looked like she was biting her hand.

“But I'd hate to walk into a saloon where they made you leave your shooter at the door.”

She laughed, toppling backward in the dirt. Her voice was so pretty when she laughed, and I realized I was elated
to be able to cause that in her. Sometimes I could be elated just by looking at her. She was a lot.

When she sat back up, she leaned her head against mine and hugged me, sniggering a little more and putting her hand between my legs.

“I like your shooter better than mine,” she said. “I'm glad you brought it.”

A
t my desk in the bureau Monday morning, I was sore and tired and filled with a kind of silent exuberance. Vivid pictures of Janice appeared and disappeared in my memory, automatically, like my heart was showing me what mattered, and I sat there quietly at my desk, watching. No one else was in the bureau, and the phone buzzed.

“Fuck you,” I said, waiting for the phone to quit buzzing. The noise seemed to drive away the automatic pictures of Janice, and I was angry at journalism for doing that. My normal impulse was to never answer the phone anyway. Lisa established a rule to answer every call within six rings. No one honored the rule. We established a separate rule to answer within six minutes. The phone wouldn't quit buzzing, so I answered it.

“
News-Dispatch.
Kurt Clausen speaking.”

“Yeah? Well, where's my morning paper?” said an old woman, with deep spite.

I hated it when strangers assumed I was worthy of being abused by them.

“I can't find it, either,” I said. “It's not here.”

“Well, that carrier of yours is worthless. How am I expected to read my paper if I can't find it?”

“I'm not sure, ma'am. I think the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working on that project. One day, you'll be able to read something that's not there. These are exciting times.”

“If my paper isn't in my driveway in ten minutes, I'll be calling you back.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I resumed sitting quietly at my desk, wondering why I was loose in the world, when I'd see Janice again, and how long I could endure being a hard news reporter before the maddening sterility of it poisoned me and drove me into a state of depressed panic, like Victorian housewives suffering hysteria. That was why Justin fired me. I had no will to write orthodox news anymore, or to cover any of the annoying human events that rose above the usual tedium of daily life, distinguishing themselves as news not because they were worth knowing about but because an editor said so. Papers lied when they said their mission had anything to do with describing human events that mattered the most. Their missions were to master uniformity and sameness.
If they inadvertently reported something that more than thirty percent of the readers really cared about, which was unlikely, it was nearly a certainty every time that each competing story began with the same facts, the same emphasis, the same wording and the same phrases. The key wasn't that the readers were being given a story that meant very much to anyone, but that the reporters and editors were getting more successful at reducing all existence to a uniform, deadened sameness, like cells duplicating themselves.

At my desk I typed this note:

Reporter's Workshop, June 23, Washington.

Dare to be the Same.

Panelists from Columbia University, the University of Kansas, The New York Times and The Washington Post will work in small groups to help new and experienced reporters master the skill of sounding like everybody else.

Harold K. Wasserman, 18-year veteran at The Times, delivers keynote speech: “Sameness Makes the Difference.”

Call 202-639-1002 to make a phone ring.

I pinned the note on our bulletin board, where I noticed a new memo from Perrault:

When reporting on prominent homosexuals, always refer to them as homosexuals, not gays. “Gay”
is the preferred euphemism that we don't prefer. When reporting on prominent heterosexuals, it doesn't matter, so you needn't allude to what kind of sex they like.

Whenever I imagined Perrault, I imagined a man in hiding from his brain. I assumed he rose to the position of executive editor through a profound accident we weren't encouraged to know. Like a senile czar, he retained his title and some access to authority, part of which, I hoped, was secretly taken away from him each time he tried to use it.

Back at my desk, I wondered what I'd write that day, and why. If Lisa was in a bad mood, or if her sense of abstract professionalism overpowered her sense of humanness, she'd probably order each of us to write two stories; not because there were that many stories worth writing on any given day, and certainly not because you could turn out two superior stories in one day. You usually couldn't. But because the
Journal
had the asshole rule of forcing its reporters to turn out two and sometimes three stories a day—regardless of how incomplete and sloppily written such stories almost necessarily were—Lisa sometimes forced the same rule on us, the way a military officer would impose hardships on his troops, as if the goal no longer was to excel at a single story but to show the readers how many items we could cram into the paper without justifying why we did any of it.

It was about eight-thirty, at least half an hour before anyone else would be in, and in my luxurious privacy, I began drawing a chart on my pale purple legal pad:

The chart needed refining. I didn't have time to do it because I needed to start planning my next story that not very many readers would be interested in. Regardless of what story I selected, if I began working on it assiduously and did any of the interviewing or writing before the ten o'clock staff meeting, and Lisa didn't like my idea, the story would be held or killed. So if I began working now, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance of accidentally wasting my time by working. If I deliberately wasted my time and did nothing, I'd still get paid the same amount of money as if I accidentally wasted my time.

Faced with that, I went to McDonald's to buy a biscuit.

Having part of a dead pig in my mouth reminded me of a story I could work on: The vegans!

O
n my McDonald's napkin, I wrote “Dead pig in mouth. Vegans.” This was to result in one of my eternal skirmishes with editors. Newspaper editors mainly believed that the only subjects worth unquestionable attention were government, politics, education, crime, and disaster, as if the remainder of life were peripheral. This was, I knew instinctively, dog shit. The vegans were fascinating, and despised dead pigs in your mouth. I didn't care that Lisa or any other editor would sneer at this idea and regard me again as a precocious but regrettably whimsical reporter. This was
life
, not news. Editors often acted as if news were the most refined form of reality, when actually it was just a goddamn side effect.

Why, then, are you a newspaper reporter?

I'm not. That's just my title. They have to call me something.

In the ten o'clock staff meeting, after everyone else announced their appropriate stories for the day, covering government meetings, criminal proceedings, school-board ramblings, a house fire and university affairs, it was my turn to propose my coverage for the day.

“Dead pig in mouth. Vegans,” I read from my napkin.

Lisa blinked at me. “Does that mean something?” she wondered.

“It means the vegans are attacking. They've killed pigs,” Harmon said.

“Vegans don't kill pigs. They only kill plants,” I said.

“And, how is this a story?” Lisa said. “Aren't the aldermen discussing a road-widening project with the DOT?”

“Yes, but roads aren't as interesting as dead pig in your mouth and vegans,” I said.

“We need to find out which roads will be widened, how much it will cost, how many trees might be cut down in the right of way and all that stuff, plus ask someone if the project might threaten a rise in property taxes,” Lisa said, which was like saying to me “Shut up, Kurt.”

“We already know some of that stuff and the project won't start for at least six months,” I said, which was like saying to Lisa “I know more than the news, and no, I won't shut up.”

Then I explained vegans to her. “Vegans are people who don't eat meat or any animal products, for moral and environmental reasons. Some of the local vegans, who object to dead pig in your mouth, are having a meatless Fourth of July picnic to draw attention to dead pig in your mouth and why it shouldn't be dead or in your mouth. They'll have fake hot dogs and fake hamburgers made out of soybeans. It's grotesque. I'm sure the readers will want to be outraged by this.”

“Kurt,” she said with exaggerated patience. “The road-widening story is clearly a more substantial piece of news.”