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The Little Flower of the Newsroom

 

The newsroom of The Star Gazette, where Nick Catellis sat squinting into his monitor, was a large unimpressive space, filled with tightly packed cubicles and glass offices for the big shots along one wall. The carpet was the color of mold, and the banks of fluorescent lights overhead made the pattern dance when you looked down. The effect had tripped him up several times when his brain told him there was a bump in the floor that wasn’t there. The air was bad as well. It reminded him of how those little slices of shrink-wrapped American cheese smelled when you peeled off the cellophane. The opposite wall, directly behind his own cubicle, was all windows. They threw too much light on his screen, making it difficult to work. His shoulders ached from the strain. 

But, on the other hand, the place fairly crackled with the energy of thirty-seven egos rubbing up against one another. It didn’t matter who they were, what their names were, what they were like as people. Nick didn’t care about any of that. What mattered was this privileged space they inhabited, this newsroom, set apart and reserved for those initiated into the rites of journalism. Its energy calmed him. Its buzz reassured him. If the constant click of computer keyboards in the background had been a relaxation CD, he would have paid good money for it. 

    “Ernie’s looking for you,” a voice behind him said.

It was Donovan, the intern. He was a tall, thin, weedy grad student out of Columbia. Nick Catellis hated interns. They reminded him that not so long ago he had been an intern himself. 

    “Tell him I’m busy.”

    “Okay,” Donovan said. His reflection in Nick’s monitor showed a pair of jumpy eyes. Nick could feel the intern’s confusion.

    “What!” he barked.

    “Ernie’s looking for you,” Donovan pleaded.

    There were the people who mattered at the Gazette, who made a difference, who did the hard righteous work of the news, and then there was everybody else. Editors, for instance. A class that, in Nick’s estimation, fit somewhere between croupiers and prison guards. Ernie Potts was the newsroom’s managing editor. 

“Shit.” 

    Nick pushed past the quaking intern and crossed the large floor making for the glass offices. Ernie’s glass office was at the end of the row, in the corner.

    “What’s up?” he asked, opening the door without knocking. Ernie Potts was middle-aged and overweight with reddish-brown hair and thin red eyebrows. At one time, he had been a reporter for a small local newspaper in the Midwest, a fact that earned him exactly zero respect in the Gazette’s newsroom. Ernie knew what they thought of him. He’d learned to live with it, the way people learn to live with leprosy or a criminal record. Nonetheless, over the years the effort had hollowed him out.

He’d been leaning back in his chair with his hands locked behind his head when Nick burst in. Now his feet and the front legs of his chair hit the floor at the same time with a loud thud. Embarrassed, Ernie steadied himself and cupped his hands on the desk. He managed a wilted smile but it didn’t sit well on his worn and sour face.

    “Ah, Nick. Um, take a seat, wouldya?”

In front of Ernie’s desk were two chairs. He motioned Nick into one. In the other sat a girl, twenty-three, maybe twenty-five years old. She had not looked around as Nick entered nor did she acknowledge him as he sat down next to her. Since she was too young to be the new reporter he’d heard they were interviewing, he ignored her.

    “I’d like you to meet Tiffany Bell Starr. Tiffany, Nick Catellis.”

    It wasn’t until after they shook hands limply and Nick had slumped back into his chair that it hit him. 

    “That’s right,” Ernie said. “Miss Starr is, you know, Noah’s daughter. Her Dad believes it would be a good thing if she, um, learned a little something about the news business.”

    Noah Starr not only owned The Starr Gazette. He also owned two radio stations in the city, a TV affiliate and the local minor league baseball team. If he didn’t own anything else, it was only because his father-in-law, Milton H. Bell, wouldn’t sell it to him. The girl in the chair was their one and only collaborative transaction.

    “I’m in the middle of a story,” Nick said, rising involuntarily from his own chair and taking up a defensive position behind it. He grasped its high back and swung it between himself and Tiffany Bell Starr as if he thought she might lunge at his throat. “I’m in the middle of a …of a big story. I mean, I’m in the middle of something, no offense.” He directed this last comment to the girl. She was large-boned, with thick arms and legs, and looked as though she weighed more than either of the men. She’d been staring down into her tightly clasped hands since Nick arrived and she didn’t stop now. Nick felt a twinge of sympathy for her father.

    “Well, maybe you’d be good enough to show her around anyway, spend a little time with her,” Ernie said. His eyes clung to Nick’s face like trapped animals, desperately seeking safety. “You know, give her a feel for the business.”

    “Stop saying that, Ernie. It’s not a business, goddamit. It’s a vocation. That’s what’s wrong with this whole enterprise. That’s Noah Starr’s idea of journalism. It’s not mine.” 

    “Well now, Nick, you’re not showing us off to our best advantage here in front of Miss Starr,” Ernie said, his smile flickering like a 25-watt bulb with a failing filament. “Don’t let Nick here scare you off, Tiffany. He’s a crusader, you know. He doesn’t believe newspapers have any business being in business. They should operate like a public trust, I guess. The market be damned, hey?”

    The girl nodded. Ernie nodded back. Nick glowered at the mold-colored rug. It made his eyes hurt. He blinked and glanced up poisonously at Ernie.

    “Say, though, here’s a funny coincidence,” Ernie said. “You’ll appreciate this, Nick, speaking of vocations. At one time, Tiffany was just telling me, a career path she’d considered was, you ready for this? Becoming a nun. Guess you two have more in common than you thought, hey?"

Both men swung their eyes to the girl now. Her cheeks pulsed with a phosphorescent blush. “It was only a threat,” she murmured. “My father had plans for me I didn't agree with. It was the one thing I knew would change his mind.”

“Well there you go,” Ernie beamed, spreading his arms out wide and opening his eyes even wider.  “You see, Nick? Even more in common. She's  a regular anti-authoritarian. She’s got the makings of a journalist already. That's great inside reporting, Tiffany. Hey, Nick, now when we want to push back on old Noah Starr, that's what we'll do. Threaten to become monks!"

“Hook her up with Donovan,” Nick growled.

“No, no, no,” Ernie laughed. The coward in him was feeling around frantically for a backbone, and not finding one of his own, grabbed Noah Starr’s by proxy. “I think we can safely assume that Mr. Starr wouldn’t appreciate his daughter tagging around with an intern. I don’t think Noah Starr would appreciate that at all. And remember, he does sign our checks, so I think if you were to take Tiffany here under your professional wing, well, I just think that would be closer to Mr. Starr’s expectation…and, and Tiffany’s too,” he added hastily, turning a fatherly eye to the girl.

“I won’t do it, Ernie. Forget it. Why don’t you hook her up with the new guy, whenever he shows up. Maybe they babysit interns where he comes from.”

“But Nick. Tiffany is the new guy.” 

He had spoken without thinking. Now the enormity of the situation hit them both. For a terrible moment, neither spoke. They stared at one another like duelists, each waiting for the other’s bullet to arrive.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Nick said.

“Um,” Ernie mumbled. “We didn’t have any choice, Nick. We weren’t consulted. They didn’t ask me, they told me.”

“You’re fucking kidding me." Nick turned and walked out of the office.

Two hours later, after he’d walked three times around the block and grabbed a sandwich and a beer, he returned to his cubicle. Tiffany Bell Starr had pulled up an extra chair and was camped out next to his empty one. Nick sat down, tapped the keyboard to bring up the story he was working on, and leaned into the screen. He read through what he’d written so far, right from the beginning, leaving the girl to sit there and stew. When he finished, he got up and went to the bathroom. Returning, he found her still sitting there like a statue. She hadn’t moved a muscle as far as he could tell. She seemed to have just one way of occupying a chair, the pose she had assumed earlier, head down, legs together, hands clasped tight on her lap. He could almost believe Ernie had wheeled her out of his office and across the floor and left her here, rolled up next to his desk, except that the chair she was in now was a cubicle chair, not one of Ernie’s leather jobs.

“Who’s your friend?” Donovan’s long thin face loomed above the cubicle wall.

“Nobody here but me. What do you want?” 

“Oh. I finished the backgrounder on the Carter story.”

“Great. Go away.”

Donovan slid around to the opening in the cubicle and introduced himself to the girl. They shook hands briefly, like prisoners sharing a cell.

“Donovan, there’s nobody here in this cubicle but me. Get it?”

     “Okay. Sure. So I emailed it to you, the Carter backgrounder.”

    “Good. Seeya.”

    “Hey,” Donovan said, suddenly brightening. “I didn’t know you were religious.”

    Nick’s head snapped round as if he’d been spit on.

    “I’m sorry! Geez,” Donovan whined. “What’s that, then, a joke?” 

Following Donovan’s eyes to the side of his desk where he kept his dictionaries and reference books, the side against which the girl’s chair was pushed up, he saw it. An incursion from that Hell-World outside the newsroom, an advance scout from The Land of Unreason. With growing horror, Nick realized that it might have stood there for days, hidden among the books, if Donovan hadn’t spied it. 

It was a small religious statue of a woman in a long brown robe and beige veil. She cradled a single red rose in her hands, which were chastely crossed over her bosom. Nick looked at the little figurine as if it had been carved out of solid anthrax. Here was The Enemy, clothed in the hateful garb of superstition. In the artlessly carved face, he saw the ardent vacuousness of the true believer. In the simple, unambiguous features, he saw ignorance, pomposity, judgmentalism and, worst of all, impregnable certitude. To worship this carving was to worship death, the death of the mind. Her pathetic little rose glistened with the hard, bright brainlessness of all believers in all fundamentalisms. Nick pinched it between his finger and thumb like a dead cockroach and dropped in the girl's lap.

"Take your little voodoo saint and move yourself over to Donovan's cube. He'll show you around. I've got work to do."

 

 

The next day, Nick arrived late at the office. He hadn’t slept well and when the alarm sounded, he’d swept the clock radio off the night stand and dropped back into a fitful, angry sleep. He dreamed he was wrestling a large, heavy woman in a brown robe and that he was doing all the work while she lay there on top of him, breathing peacefully. The more he struggled the heavier she got until he could feel the last ounce of his strength draining away. At last, pinned beneath her pitiless weight, he could no longer breathe and darkness closed in on him. He had awoken to blackness. Terrified, he’d jumped out of the tangle of sheets to find himself standing next to the bed, one foot crushing the clock radio, and in his hands the pillow that had been suffocating him. 

Donovan was waiting for him when he got off the elevator. Nick walked past him but the intern scampered ahead. There was a new and annoying energy in his movements; he quivered and pulsed with kinky electricity. Even his voice seemed to crackle with it.

“Where have you been? Ernie’s, like, nuts.” 

“Fuck Ernie.”

“Yeah, well, you better get in there.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“Yeah, well, wait till you see who’s sitting at your desk.” 

Entering his cubicle he found Tiffany Bell Starr sitting in his chair, staring blankly at a web page on his computer. She faced away from him and all Nick saw was a round hump of dirty blond hair atop a thicker hump of shoulders encased in a tight-fitting dark blue sweater. 

“Get up,” Nick hissed.

The girl’s shoulders hunched up toward her ears as if in expectation of a blow from behind.

“Get up, goddamit.”

The girl stood up but did not turn around. “Mr. Potts told me to sit here and wait.” 

“I don’t care what Mr. Potts told you. I want you out of my cubicle and out of my sight.” 

“Um, Nick,” Ernie’s voice said. Nick swung round, his coat still in his hand, his backpack still on his shoulder. Ernie was standing behind him. His hands were stuffed deep in his pants pockets, his tie was askew and he looked as though he hadn’t slept all night. 

“Want to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Nick said.

“Nick, c’mon wouldya? The language.”

“Fuck the language. Tell me what she’s doing at my desk. I told you I wasn’t going to babysit any interns, no matter whose kid they are. And I mean it.”

“I know. I know,” Ernie said, freeing his hands from his pockets. They waved about apologetically, like two fat idiots broken loose from their straitjackets. “Can we, um, take this into my office?”  

Not waiting for Nick’s answer, he lowered his eyes, backed away, swiveled on his right heel, stumbled on a holographic bump in the rug, caught himself against the wall, and lumbered back up the aisle. There had been times—not many—when Nick had grudgingly conceded Ernie’s authority, but always privately. Now he was forced to follow along behind him in full view of the entire office, like a schoolboy hauled to the front of the room for throwing spitballs. He was nearly blinded by the injustice of it. In retaliation, he marched into Ernie’s office and took his stand, arms crossed, in the center of the floor, defiantly leaving the door open behind him. Ernie was lowering himself into his chair but stopped midway, and heaving a tired, beaten sigh, came back around his desk, retraced his steps to the door and slid it shut. 

“I was going to say, whose side are you on anyway,” Nick said, “but I think I can guess.”

“This is Noah Starr’s company,” Ernie said, now back in his chair. He spoke with a nervous flutter in his voice, and loudly, as if there was courage in volume. “Noah’s Ark. And we’re all just the animals in the ark, Nick. That’s all we are. You people can joke about it, but we’re safe as long as we’re in the ark and don’t do anything stupid. We can ride this thing out by everybody understanding their role, you know? But if one of us starts kicking down the walls, then maybe we’ll all sink.”

He picked up a promotional baseball, inscribed with the name of the minor league team Noah Starr owned, from the ashtray it rested in next to his computer.

“They’ve laid off five hundred reporters in New York, Nick. A thousand in Cleveland and Chicago. They’re all drowning, Nick. They’re off the ark. No ark, get it?”

“Which animal are you, Ernie?” Nick asked. “That what kept you up all night, choosing a mascot?”

“No,” Ernie said, his voice softening. He looked sick. “No, Nick. Something else.” He rolled the baseball underneath his hand. “I got a call from Mr. Starr. He’s pretty pissed. Yesterday did not go down well at the Starr home.”

“She squealed to her old man?”

“Uh huh.”

“Fuck Noah Starr. And his ark."

Suddenly, Ernie bolted out of his chair. It was not anger Nick saw in his eyes. Like a withered limb, that emotion no longer functioned.  Fear had replaced it many years ago. Ernie made a show of slamming his fists on the desk, but the effect was greatly vitiated by his lack of conviction. Too long out of practice, he could not recover even the forms of anger. 

“No, Nick. That’s not the right answer,” he pleaded. “You don’t say ‘fuck you’ to Noah Starr, okay? He owns all the ‘fuck you’ there is or ever will be. There’s no loose ‘fuck you’ lying around for anybody else. He’s the Fort Knox of ‘fuck you’, okay? So just cut it out with the ‘Fuck Noah Starr’ crap, Nick. This is serious here. You gotta grow up and play ball.”

“Like you?” Nick asked.

“Yes.” Ernie said. “Like me.”

“You’re a businessman,” Nick said, meaning it as the insult they both knew it was. “Do what businessmen do. Call up old Noah and negotiate a truce. Tell him we’ve had a nice frank discussion, laid all the issues out on the table and we understand one another. Yeah, team! Business as usual shall resume forthwith. Provided you keep that cow away from me.”

“I, um…I will be calling Mr. Starr, Nick. In fact, he’s expecting my call.” 

“You do your editor thing. I’ll do my reporter thing. Everything’s hunky-dory. Just get that person out of my office.”

“Um,” Ernie mumbled. “See, Nick, yesterday was not good, not good. And so…well…that’s not, strictly speaking, your office any more.”

“What the hell are you talking about? There are at least six empty cubicles out there. Why does she have to have mine? What the fuck, Ernie? Just move her to an empty cubicle, okay, and we can all get on with the ‘business’ of the news.”

“I’m sorry, Nick. It’s not my decision anymore.”

“Daddy lets her choose whichever cubicle she wants, regardless of who’s already sitting in it? Un-fucking-believable!”

“Well, technically speaking, nobody’s actually sitting in that one…now.”

Nick made an effort to respond. His chest even contracted to force words out through his mouth. But no words came out. He felt as if his entire vocabulary, especially those cynical and supercilious words that were always nearest the exit, had been erased from his memory. A realization had flashed across his mind like an electromagnetic pulse, wiping out thought and emotion.

“Oh fuck,” Nick said.

“I’m sorry, Nick. Honest,” Ernie said. 

“Yeah. I know. Business,” Nick said and backed toward the door. He turned the knob and walked out into the newsroom. It looked different to him now. The sounds that had soothed him earlier annoyed him. The people, too, seemed different. Instead of acolytes to a high calling, a strange instantaneous evolutionary regression had occurred, and all the reporters and interns and office help now struck him as slower, dumber, uglier, and shabbier precursors of their higher selves. 

Tiffany Bell Starr was standing up in his cubicle, her head above the partition, watching him advance toward her. Nick had the impression she’d been standing there since he’d left her, immobile, attentive, on the lookout, a silent thick-shouldered sentry wearing a greasy blond helmet. 

“Congratulations. You’re Daddy’s little reporter now,” he said with bright sarcasm. He threw his backpack down on the desk in front of his computer and his jacket on the floor. “Excuse me, I’ve got to collect a few things. You don’t mind, do you?”

The girl backed up against the partition, giving him room. 

“Nobody owns the news, you know,” he said, digging through his filing cabinets. “Not even your old man. All guys like him can do is, soil it with ugly advertising and colored borders and self-help columnists and vapid Sunday inserts. And of course, let us not forget, replacing real reporters with their talentless offsprings.”

“I’ll be a better reporter than you,” the girl said. The sound of her voice shocked him. It was her father’s voice pitched higher, as hard and commanding and disdainful as his. “I don’t care,” the girl explained. “That’s why.”

“You know what? I don’t care either,” Nick said, shaken by the voice and frantic not to betray his surprise. “The sooner Noah’s Ark sinks into oblivion, the happier I’ll be.”

 “But it won’t,” she said with certainty. Nick felt her eyes on him. “You, though. You’re screwed now, aren’t you?” 

Nick turned to her.  “Happy?” he asked bitterly.

Tiffany Bell Starr looked at him, curiosity mixed with derision in her eyes. “I don’t know. I guess. I don’t really care.”

Nick tripped over his coat reaching for the pen drawer. He opened it and began tossing its contents into the trash can. Tiffany Bell Starr watched him. After a time, she shifted her weight and crossed her arms and said matter-of-factly, as if she were describing a crime scene, “When I met you yesterday in Ernie’s office, I thought, wow, what a freak. All that talk about the news as a vocation. It made me remember the statue they gave me, the nuns. They hoped it would bring me a vocation. I thought, somebody ought to make a statue of this guy and hand it out to all the interns. A real reporter. A true believer. The Little Flower of the Newsroom.”

"That's right. I believe in the news. You know. Speaking truth to power. That's who I am. And who you will never be. You know why? Precisely because you don't care. You can't not care and sit in that chair. Not morally anyway. Physically, you can do anything you like. You're a real Starr after all."

"I take after my father."

"Shock." 

The urge to get away from her, to get out of that cubicle and out of the building, was becoming unbearable. Nick heaved an armful of his belongings over to the computer and hurriedly jammed the whole pile into his backpack. He hoisted it over his shoulder and kicked his jacket in the air, catching it with his left hand. 

"If he'd been a guy like you," the girl continued. Nick realized she was enjoying this. It made him shiver. "We'd probably have been a nice, comfortable, Sunday-go-to-services kind of family. Morally speaking. And we'd have been brought up to care about stuff. Stupid stuff, but we'd have cared about it."

"Yeah. OK. Whatever. Have a nice life. I sure as hell wouldn't want it."

Tiffany Bell Starr shifted out of his way and Nick lurched past her. She looked after him as he moved toward the elevators. “That’s the difference between you and us. We don’t care about anything, so we can do anything. It's called firing the truth with power.”

He pushed the elevator button. As he waited, he imagined the girl watching him, drilling her eyes into the side of his head, possibly humming some inane ditty that would have made his skin crawl. But instead, as he glanced back, she had turned away and was seated at his station, half hidden by the cubicle wall, over which Donovan was already draped, making nice with an honest-to-god Starr.

The backpack was heavy. It hurt his shoulder and constricted his lungs. The elevator doors sighed open, he entered and let the heavy backpack thud to the floor. He had forgotten to zip the small key pocket. Its contents spilled out onto the floor of the car. There were his keys, a pack of matches, a ball point pen, some change, and the little plaster statue. 

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