The Last Magazine Read online

  “Cheaper than NASA.”

  “So is that like a couple hundred million?”

  “We think we can do it for a couple hundred million. Hell, a new hotel that just opened in Las Vegas cost one hundred and twenty million, and that’s on Earth.”

  “Right, right.”

  Phone tucked under my ear, typing what Douglas Dorl is saying, I peer over my shoulder at the television screen, and VP Cheney is still talking.

  VP CHENEY: U.S. MUST TAKE ACTION, NOT APPEASE

  “And how much a night, do you think?”

  “Between three thousand and ten thousand a night.”

  “Does that include travel cost?”

  “Goes back to what I was saying—making an economy of scale.”

  “Right, right. Tell me more about your company, how you founded it, why you’re interested in space.”

  This is a throwaway question to get him talking—I’m distracted by the news on the television set, and I’m not as focused as I should be on what Mr. Dorl is saying: As a kid watched the moon landing. Worked for NASA. Designed a part of the shuttle. Enjoyed the film The Right Stuff.

  Then I catch sight of the TV screen again.

  Sanders Berman is on, as a guest, giving analysis.

  “Okay, great. Yeah, thanks, um, if I have any follow-up questions, mind if I give you a call?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I hang up the phone and walk quickly two cubicle rows over.

  “Hi, Dorothy, mind if I turn the volume up? Sanders Berman is on.”

  “Ohhhhh, Sanders Berman,” she says, her tone suggesting a familiarity with Sanders Berman, years of anecdotes about him that she’s not about to share with me.

  I kneel on the desk of one of Nishant Patel’s three assistants and hit Volume Up once.

  Sanders Berman is discussing what Vice President Cheney just said.

  “. . . certainly,” Sanders Berman answers.

  “Sanders, now, you’re the expert, you’re the historian, give us some historical idea of what you make of the vice president’s speech.”

  “In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt gave an underlooked address to a Lions Club in Decatur, Illinois. Now, no one pays attention to that address today, it’s been overshadowed by the ‘Day of Infamy’ speech after Pearl Harbor. But what I hear in the vice president’s language, in his somber delivery, his cadence, the timbre of his voice, is what FDR said in Decatur—he’s quietly preparing the American people for what clearly is a dangerous and imminent threat. I suspect the discussion, going forward, is not going to be a question of if we should go to war in Iraq, but when. The vice president is warning of a great evil we face. It’s not Japan or Germany; it’s Iraq, Iran, North Korea. It’s the 9/11 terrorists, a great evil. Of course the audience here is the American people, but there’s also a second audience—our allies—and this is a call to the Winston Churchills out there, a warning to them that we need them, and I hope they will stand on our side.”

  The door to Nishant Patel’s corner office opens, and he walks out.

  “Dorothy, can you have Patricia bring my lunch?”

  “Yes, Nishant,” Dorothy says, and she stands and looks over the cubicle wall at Patricia, a thirty-seven-year-old Korean woman who lives with her family in Queens. Patricia is deaf in her right ear and blind in her left eye.

  “Patricia,” Dorothy says, “can you please go get Nishant his lunch.”

  “What, Dorothy?”

  “Patricia, Nishant’s lunch,” she says.

  Dorothy sits down, Patricia stands up, and Nishant Patel asks, “What are you all watching?”

  “Mike turned the volume up, Dr. Patel,” Patricia says.

  Dorothy looks at me.

  “Vice President Cheney, I think, just sort of said we’re going to war in Iraq,” I say.

  “Oh, yes, of course, I had heard that the vice president was going to do that. I had dinner with the undersecretary in Washington on Monday.”

  Nishant Patel walks around the corner of the cubicles and looks up at the TV, just as the cable network is about to cut to a commercial.

  “Mr. Berman, a pleasure as always,” says the host. “The Magazine’s managing editor and also author of The Greatest War on Earth: The New History of World War Two,” says the host, holding a copy of Sanders Berman’s book.

  I’m not looking at the TV; I’m looking at Nishant Patel. He winces when the MSNBC host bangs Sanders Berman’s book on the table.

  “We’ll turn the volume down right away, Nishant,” says Dorothy.

  Nishant Patel goes back in his office. I go back to Space Tourism.

  Three hours later, I get an email forwarded to me. It’s a forward from Dorothy, forwarded from Sam, who forwarded it from Nishant Patel.

  Subject: Fw: Int’l story list change

  From: Dorothy

  To: International Staff

  See below from Sam/NP, dorothy

  Subject: Int’l story list change

  To: Dorothy

  From: Sam

  Subject: Int’l story change

  All, we are going to go with a new cover this week. “The Case for War?”

  Dropping sci/tech and Mobile phones.

  Subject: [blank]

  To: Sam

  From: Nishant Patel

  Change in cover. See me in my office. np

  It’s 5:30 p.m. and the editors are leaving the office. Gary stops by my cubicle.

  “Hastings, you’re off the hook for Space Tourism this week.”

  5.

  Friday, August 23, 2002

  Thirty-four-year-old magazine journalist A.E. Peoria sits in first class right now, right fucking now, just sits down, and there are two women standing over him. DBX to JFK. One has a tray of hot hand towels, and she gives him one and smiles; the other has a tray with a variety of liquids: booze, waters, juices—sparkling water, nonsparkling water, tomato, mango, grapefruit. Peoria takes three glasses—sparkling water, grapefruit juice, and wine—and he gulps them down and starts to pat himself down, rubbing the tiredness from his eyes, the days in the African bush getting soaked up in the warm hot towel. He removes the towel from his face and the three glasses have already been taken away, replaced with a four-page menu.

  He didn’t have to suffer the indignity of finding the menu in the seat-back pocket.

  The flight attendant is asking him if he’d like something else to drink, and he says, “Yes, give me a gin and tonic,” and as he is scanning the menu—whipped summer squash, couscous, goat cheese and beet salad, Asian wheat noodles with shrimp, a seven-ounce grilled flank steak, potatoes and chicken curry, and more, and flambéed ice cream and rice pudding and bread baskets with thirteen different kinds of bread and a cheese plate with grapes and orange slices and bananas and cheese and apples and olives—he gets the gin and tonic delivered to him, and it’s in a glass glass.

  Another indignity avoided: the woman—what a fucking angel—is unscrewing the cap of the small bottle of gin and pouring it into his glass and mixing it for him. Even as the cabin doors close, everyone in first class is still talking on their mobile phones, and even as the plane is taxiing, people are still talking on their mobile phones and the stewardesses are letting it happen, until the last possible moment, when they ask them, politely, to please finish their conversations, as we are about to take off.

  Politeness, no glowers or glares, politely requesting that you turn off your mobile phone. They are treating him like some kind of human being up here, not an animal that needs to be prodded and kicked in the seat.

  Eight hours or more and the magazine gives correspondents a first-class ticket. Until he became a star foreign correspondent, a roaming-the-globe international affairs reporter, he had flown first class only once. Sixteen, visiting a friend in the Bahamas for spring break, an upgrade. That wasn�
�t real first class. That was Delta domestic first class. This is real first class, and real first class makes him wonder how he had ever traveled in economy/coach class without developing a severe class hatred. When did economy become coach and coach economy anyway? He thinks it was around 1997. Must have been an advertising or marketing study. Coach is a respectable word, he never thought anything was wrong with coach—stagecoach, almost classy-sounding, or even coach as in a bus, where everyone has an equally comfortable or uncomfortable seat. Coach is an equal opportunity word, a normalizing word. Economy is a word for “cheap.”

  Cheap.

  It’s another way, he thinks, the mix of liquids giving his thoughts the appearance of great profundity, for the airlines to subtly rub it in the passengers’ faces that they are screwed in life and made bad decisions every step along the way and are forced to pay attention to money, forced to pinch pennies.

  The airlines, he now realizes, had been trying to make him feel bad his entire life, or at least since 1997.

  For years in coach, with the rest of the fellow failures, he had gotten off the plane last. This meant that he’d had to walk past the first-class seats and business-class seats. Before getting to the first- and business-class seats, he had to go through at least two or more cabins of economy.

  Economy always looked like shit after a fourteen-hour flight. It looked like a bunch of preschoolers had been stuck in a fallout shelter. Empty plastic water and juice cups, tangled headsets, ripped plastic bags, crumbs from never-go-stale biscuits, bright blue thermonuclear fleece blankets, weird puke smells, torn packaging, yes, lots of shredded plastic and mutilated packaging, as if a scarce amount of resources had been consumed in a frenzy.

  The flight attendants didn’t bother with cleanup in coach—no, they wanted the evidence of the savagery on display. And by the time the disembarking economy passenger got through the coach wasteland, the single business-class cabin was a relief and went by in a blur. It wasn’t so obvious that a major shift in socioeconomics had taken place. In fact, the business-class cabin seemed designed to ease the shock that those traveling in coach would have experienced if they’d just stepped directly from coach to first class, from one socioeconomic sphere to the other. Like letting a bum into the country club. Yes, that would have been too much of a shock, that might have backfired. Best to use business class as a buffer zone. The airlines wanted you to know what you were missing, but they didn’t want to spark any social revolts, any impromptu pummelings, anyone to take a protest dump on an aisle seat.

  So Peoria would walk through business class and see nine seats per row instead of twelve, and this wasn’t too jarring, and then when he got to first class or, on some planes, just got a glimpse through the curtains ahead, there were only six seats—and what big and comfortable-looking seats they were. And where was the evidence of a fourteen-hour flight?

  The evidence, Peoria now knew, had been quietly picked up and cleaned along the way by these angel flight attendants. Angels pushing dangerous and embittering illusions without rubber surgical gloves to protect their hands from economy-class parasites and filth. The evidence of the disgusting humanness of adults locked in a capsule of recycled air and sleep breath and hunger had been erased and sterilized even as the first-class passengers were getting off the plane. Even as the first-classers were exiting, the flight attendants, an entire team of them, would rush to perform an instant cleanup. It gave the passengers in economy, who had to pass through the cabin before deplaning, the unconscious impression that perhaps they were truly savages at heart, truly disgusting people who deserved to sit side by side in the cattle car, making a mess of their environment, using thin polyester pillows, hauling luggage with rolls and rolls of clear plastic tape and big handwritten notes with foreign names and impoverished zip codes, digesting single-serving chicken and beef on a single-page menu.

  All of this, all the service, the high-touch service that had taken over his thoughts, had been so engrossing to him that he hasn’t even bothered to look at who he is sitting next to or any of the other people sitting in his first-class cabin.

  He is sitting next to a woman.

  Two hours, four gin and tonics, and he is looking out the window of the plane.

  Why so emotional on night flights?

  Hour three and a half and he goes to the bathroom and snorts the cocaine he bought in Dubai on the twelve-hour layover.

  Hour five, he is going to the bathroom, and he is talking to the woman.

  “It’s so rare to sit next to a pretty woman my age in first class,” he says. “Usually they can’t afford it or they’re with some older rich guy.”

  The woman nods, and across the aisle, there’s an older rich guy who smiles at A.E. Peoria.

  “Oh shit, is that your boyfriend?”

  Hour seven, there’s a knocking on the bathroom door, a glowing sign that says PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR SEAT, with a little figure of a dickless man and an arrow.

  “Sir, are you all right?”

  Wobbling, A.E. Peoria opens up the bathroom door, which folds up like an accordion, and he laughs at this, and the pretty stewardess woman who gave him the menu and poured what he estimates to be five out of his seven drinks is standing there.

  “You’re the one who gave me that menu! Thank you, thank you. You’re Miss Five-out-of-Seven, Miss Laila. ‘Laila’ is Arabic for what?”

  “Look how much legroom I have,” A.E. Peoria says, returning to his seat.

  “I always wanted an electric chair as a kid, one of those electric La-Z-Boy chairs where I could move it around like this,” A.E. Peoria is saying while he adjusts every control on the seat. There are sixteen different ergonomic portions of the seat to calibrate, five just for the upper torso and seven for different leg positions. How do you even describe all of these positions? Stretched, outstretched, slightly stretched, partially stretched, a quarter partial stretch, a half partial stretch, three-quarters partial stretch. He would need to resort to math to describe all the things his seat could do.

  “You know what I like about first class,” he says to the older man, who is now sitting next to him, having changed places with his girlfriend or wife. “I like that there’s no evidence that I’m drunk. If I was back with the fucking beasts and vampires back there, sucking the fucking marrow from bones, you know, if I was fucking back there, there’d be all these little bottles in front of me because the service back there sucks and there’s no way I could have even had that many drinks because the service is slow, so it’s like a catch-22, you know?”

  Hour nine.

  “You don’t fucking know what I saw out there, man. You don’t fucking want to know what I saw. Heads on pikes.”

  Hours ten and eleven.

  “Hey man, fuck, sorry dude. But here’s the thing. Here’s what you’re missing. Don’t worry about getting sleep and rest. I’ve been thinking about this, and the irony is, if you travel a lot, if you do a lot of travel, it’s ironic, because nowadays . . .”

  A.E. Peoria pauses.

  “The irony of international travel is that you spend as much time or more time going nowhere as going somewhere. You spend time sitting in the same fucking place.”

  He pauses again.

  “Even right now. You can’t even tell that you’re moving.”

  Hour twelve.

  The stewardess hands A.E. Peoria an immigration card, and this reminds him to take one more trip to the bathroom, where he flushes the small and empty plastic bag of coke down the toilet after ripping it and licking the insides so he can numb his gums.

  A car is waiting for him at the airport, and when the driver asks for directions, he tells him to bring him straight to the office, to West 57th Street. He wants to talk to someone, whoever the motherfucker was who killed his story.

  6.

  Saturday Night,

  August 24, 2002

  Saturday nig
ht 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.