by John Kenney
* * *
• • •
Franny had taken a bath. She had ordered Thai and was going to watch something mindless, pop three Advil, go to bed early, and pray for a good night’s sleep.
She had just sat down on the couch, a towel still wrapped around her hair. She was opening the takeout, hitting the Netflix tab on her laptop, when her email started pinging. Her phone, too. Friends. Colleagues from work. Henke.
Franny watched it. Then she watched it again. If she had been able to scan her body, head to toe, like the yoga instructor told her to do, she would have found tension, fear, anxiety, tightness in the back of her head, tingling palms, a knot in her stomach, a sense of disbelief. She took a large pull from a glass of white wine she’d just poured. She watched again. Watched her father’s face, her left hand covering her mouth. This man she knew so well, hated so much. She had refused his money, made it on her own in the world of media. Once, he was everything to her. And now . . . now he was a man who looked vaguely familiar on television, in ads on the sides of buses.
But for just a moment, barely measurable, he was her father. And Franny was terrified for him. She pitied him. Yes, he was rich and white and powerful. He had homes and influence, access and reach. He had cars and stuff and a thin, fit wife who was empirically beautiful. He had a lovely daughter who was—well, used to be—seen with him, the family, out at an event, smiling, the savage screaming and fighting on hold for the photos. Yet she also felt for him. Because it was a veneer. And it was all about to be taken away in a public and deeply humiliating fashion.
Franny saw the future. They were going to crucify him. She needed to call her mother. She needed to call the office. She needed to get on the story.
* * *
• • •
If Claire had walked from Dodge’s king-sized bed with the impossibly soft Frette sheets and stood naked at the large windows with the extraordinary view out onto Central Park, all the way across to the Beaux Arts wonders of the West Side—the San Remo and the St. Urban—she might have spied her soon-to-be-ex-husband walking briskly around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, on his second of two laps. But she did not. She was busy lying nude, enjoying the postcoital bliss of new lust.
* * *
• • •
Ted felt no such bliss as he made the southern turn around the reservoir in Central Park. A low-grade tension wouldn’t leave him.
He was thinking about a story they were preparing on Congress, on the division between the parties. He’d seen some of the interview footage, the representatives and senators talking about the divide. One of them said, “Something fundamental has shifted. I believe the democracy itself is in peril.” They were using that line as part of the teaser campaign.
It seemed true to Ted. The way we interacted now, how we saw each other, as a member of a political party, a cultural group, an affiliation, a sexual identity, a devotee of a TV show. Instead of personality traits, quirks, hobbies, these labels had come to define us. Cable talk shows—comedy, news, the lines blurring—and their easy, crude, relentless, school-yard-bully trouncing of pretty much everything they disagreed with. Others didn’t merely have a different opinion. They were wrong. They were bad. There was anger and self-righteousness and why aren’t you listening to me because I am right. Sarcasm had replaced hope. Cruelty and judgment had replaced empathy.
And what of the great hope of social media? Of technology? That it would bring us together? Sure, there were remarkable blogs out there. People were, in some spaces, connecting and growing and creating. But the hope that we would find common ground with strangers, people with whom we disagreed, that we would find a common humanity, see the truth that we are all the same, deep down, had failed. The technology was new. The traits and insecurities, the biases and anger and hatred that we brought to it were not. Technology hadn’t failed. Humanity had.
This was not something we expressed, ever, to anyone. Because the assumption from people’s Instagram pages and Facebook pages and Twitter feeds was that they lived rewarding, happy lives.
Look at Glen’s goddamned vacation photos at the Grand Canyon! Look how annoyingly happy he and his beautiful family are! They’re fucking perfect!
But, of course, what’s not seen in Glen’s vacation photos and iPhone videos, what’s never seen, is the moment right after the photo, when Glen screamed at his teenage son, Jared, for hitting his younger sister, Missy, and making her cry, Glen overreacting and calling Jared a “little prick” and threatening to smash Jared’s face in, Glen’s wife, Mary Pat, reacting badly to this behavior from her dickhead husband, and also because she much preferred Jared to Missy, who had, in Mary Pat’s mind, always been a problem child, Mary Pat shouting at Glen and the rest of the afternoon at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon ruined, everyone in a mood, wishing only to get back to the crappy motel, pack, get on the plane home, lock the door to their respective rooms, dive into their screens, to their solitude, to their own world.
The nation was angry. And it had a new and wonderful tool to express its anger.
* * *
• • •
Without realizing it, Ted had stopped walking and was staring up at the sky. Joggers made their way around the cinder track in the fading light, their footfalls making an earthy sound, a country sound. Quieter in here, the earth cooling, wisps of cold air circling up, the trees exhaling. Ted could hear his own breathing.
Screw the third lap. Time to get home, a hot shower. He’d order in from Five Guys, a treat to himself. Watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the fifth time. He was feeling good. His phone buzzed. It was Lou. Something about a video on the internet.
* * *
• • •
The quality of mercy, the English poet wrote, is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.
Maybe back in 1620s Stratford-upon-Avon that was a thing. But this was New York City, America, the World Wide Web, in 2016, and, well, the quality of mercy was indeed strained. It was broken, actually. It was a punch line on Comedy Central and a relentless stream of scathing tweets and comment sections. The quality of mercy didn’t make for good ratings and, hey, someone had to pay, someone had to take the blame.
The quality of mercy no longer fell as a gentle rain. It slashed down like a toxic rain, like an acid rain, like a storm of shit upon the crown of whoever had the misfortune of making a mistake. Of having a bad day. Of being captured doing something selfish or rude or foolish. It didn’t matter who you were. If you were in power all the better. If you were famous, then the masses were giddy. People like Ted? Rich, powerful, a white man in a world grown tired of their reign? Mercy? We think not. How about merciless? How about unrelentingly cruel and savage? Yes. Yes, that would do nicely.
Ted goes viral.
The emergency call involved Ted, Lou, several network lawyers, PR people, and Tamara Fine, the president of the network. The head of the twelfth floor, as they liked to say. Where the CEO sat. She’d been with the network less than a year. Prior to this she was head of Sky TV in London.
Most of the people on the phone felt that the situation was containable. The PR people—on a years-long retainer with the network that Tamara wanted to reevaluate—felt that initially the story would cause problems but it would ultimately blow over. Ted, they felt, was too much of an icon and had too much equity in the hearts and minds of TV-watching America.
Tamara listened as Ted explained what had transpired the evening of his meltdown, soaking in a bath in a $4 million home in Bronxville, a ritual before bed, holding her cell phone with one hand and a cold bottle of Sierra Nevada with the other. She was a good listener. She believed this was the secret to business. To life, really. She had taken an improv comedy class in college. Two people, standing on a stage, given a topic by the instructor. Go. The trick, she learned, was not to think of the answer while the other person was ta
lking. The trick was to listen so carefully that the answer formed itself organically. Just listen, the instructor said. You’ll find the answer.
So many people wanted to speak, to talk, forming their sentences while others spoke. Tamara listened and waited. But now, on this call, she listened and was bored because she saw how this ended. Movie watching was hard for Tamara. TV shows, too. She saw the plot points, saw the end, well before it came. She’d taken a first in maths at Cambridge and was fluent in French, Spanish, and Japanese. She’d been a competitive swimmer and still swam two mornings a week at the Field Club pool.
She lifted a wet leg out of the tub and admired the shape and tone of it. She briefly toyed with the idea of pleasuring herself but felt she should listen. She had a decision to make. Tamara’s job, as she saw it, was simply this: to see into the future. To see what the world would be a month from now, a year from now. To read the landscape as it was being written and formed. To date in her career she had been exceptionally good at it.
What should she do, head of a large, plodding American network, an old-school newscast that was losing one million viewers a year but that still made substantial profits? Should she stand behind a man who’d been with the company for twenty-plus years, a loyal and valued employee, the face of the news division, the nightly news leader half a dozen years in a row? Should she mount a campaign of apology and support? Or should she realize that Ted’s time was over, that the past meant nothing now, that he had committed a cardinal sin in the new world; he, a rich, famous, privileged person, had been caught on camera spewing his wrath.
She knew her answer. But she needed to wait for the emergency board meeting tomorrow. In the meantime, it was agreed that an apology was needed. Ted said he would write it. Tamara hung up, called Maxwell, her head of PR, and told him to draft one instead.
* * *
• • •
Murray was in early. He liked the office before the phones started ringing. The newswriting staff worked most nights until seven or eight, so most people didn’t start arriving until nine or ten, unless they were on the morning show.
He sat with a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, black, and read the paper versions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Daily News, and, presently, the New York Post, which he leafed through quickly, holding its pages as if they might have dirt on them. In all of the papers he scanned headlines, read the first graph of a story, sometimes more, looked at the photos, read the captions. He saved the Times book review and crossword for lunch at his desk.
Papers finished, he should have begun work on a long piece they were preparing on an upcoming United Nations assembly. Instead he watched the video again. He’d seen it, of course. Everyone in the newsroom had the previous day, when it had broken. You heard it as you passed an edit bay, as you passed one of the kitchenettes. You heard it from a desktop or an iPhone. Reactions varied. Lots of men laughed. It was the clueless laughter of man-boys, of white guys, frat guys, former lacrosse players, men whose façades projected an All-American decency but whose deeper beliefs were far less attractive, especially about women.
Nice tits.
See that ass?
I’d fuck that.
Laughter all around.
They saw nothing wrong with these comments. So Ted let off a little steam. Lighten up. What’s the big deal?
The three of them had watched it together. Grace, Jagdish, and Murray.
“This does not strike me as the Ted Grayson I know,” Jagdish had said.
“We don’t know the context,” Murray had said, desperate to protect Ted.
Grace shot him a look.
“I’m just saying,” Murray said sheepishly. “Maybe the girl . . .”
“Woman,” Grace said. “She’s a woman. Not a girl.”
“Sorry. Woman. Did she say something to him, piss him off? We don’t know the context.”
“Maybe she was having her period, Murray. You know how annoying that can be for men.”
“Oh my,” said Jagdish.
“I’m just saying . . .”
“Why do you fight so hard for him and not her? Why do you assume she’s to blame when he used those words?”
Grace didn’t wait for an answer, though Murray didn’t really have one. Not one he would ever share, anyway. His only answer was that he simply couldn’t allow himself to believe that the Ted Grayson he had worshipped for twenty years would be capable of saying that.
So Grace worked on a story about Syrian refugees, Jagdish had wildfires in California, and Murray worked on his long piece about the UN. They spoke little the rest of the day.
Jagdish and Grace walked in together that morning and Murray briefly wondered whether they were having an affair but then recognized the thought for what it was: the thought of a jealous man who hadn’t had a girlfriend in many years.
Murray looked up, his version of “Good morning.”
Grace and Jagdish took off their coats and settled in, stared at their computer screens. Each went about their tasks, quietly tapping away at keyboards, cross-referencing facts, double-checking population numbers, casualty statistics, the spellings of names in Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin. The speed at which fire moves. The number of people a wooden boat normally holds, the amount of time a body can survive in fifty-eight-degree ocean water. Arcane, seemingly meaningless things that were the backbone of news. Unalloyed facts. Truth. The last stronghold of democracy. Or so Murray believed.
Murray was in the middle of writing this sentence—“While the Russian ambassador was later found to be drunk during his speech . . .”—when he looked up and said, “He made a mistake.”
Grace and Jagdish looked up at him.
“What was that, Murray?” Jagdish said politely.
“He’ll apologize,” Murray continued, as if to himself, as if trying to convince himself, as if he hadn’t been shocked by the video and deeply disappointed. “I heard talk . . . They’re going to do an apology.”
“That would be wise,” Jagdish said. But Murray wasn’t really talking to Jagdish. He needed Grace to make it right.
“Grace,” Murray said.
“What?”
“It was a mistake.”
She was staring at a spot on the floor. She stood suddenly. “I’m getting more coffee. Anyone?”
Jagdish shook his head.
“Grace,” Murray said again, more urgently.
She turned and faced Murray.
“A mistake? Have you lost your fucking mind? I was on the phone with my sister last night, who urged me to quit in protest.”
“Grace,” Murray said. “Let’s not overreact . . .” He knew it was a mistake, a poor word choice, the moment it was out.
“Don’t you dare,” Grace said, angry.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . .”
Grace stared at him and said, “You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman.”
And she walked out.
* * *
• • •
It was Christmas morning at Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. The websites—TMZ, Vice, Huffington Post—were giddy. They’d caught a great white. Their anchors and bloviators, their consultants in psychology and sociology, on anger management, on brain trauma (a story that surfaced briefly claimed Ted had suffered a head injury years before during a car accident; although the story was totally without foundation, CNN reported it for seventy-two hours). They spoke with earnest expressions, exactly like Ted would have done had he been reporting on some poor sap who had made a mistake. They played their roles, one talking of how we can’t rush to judge, the other talking indignantly about a nation’s trust, about anger, about white privilege, about how we really know so little about people in power, about misogyny. They spoke with the surety of people who knew nothing.
* * *
• • •
Tamara woke ear
ly and went to the pool to do laps. So she missed Hal Winship on the first hour of the Today show. Some smart producer had gotten him in and there was Savannah Guthrie showing Hal the video of Ted on a large screen behind them and asking him the question “Should the anchor of a major network news organization speak this way?”
Before Ted sat in the chair, Hal Winship invented the chair. Hal invented the news. Hal was better in every way than Ted and his phony, coiffed colleagues. Hal was eighty-two with the hairline of a twenty-year-old. He was Harvard when Harvard turned out diplomats, philosophers, and presidents, not bankers and twerps who built websites.
He had covered everything. Moon landings and coups and assassinations and hijackings and armistices. Live. On the scene. No makeup or graphics or theme music. Just raw footage and skilled writing. Nothing but Hal and his chain-smoking producer, Leonard “Boots” Feeney, and a network that believed news mattered. Until it didn’t believe it. Until the networks were taken over by corporations intent on packaging the news, profiting off the news, entertaining instead of informing, when they became obsessed with the three words that would be the ruin of civilization, according to Hal. Marketing. Advertising. Branding.
“No, he shouldn’t,” Hal said. “I have to be honest with you and tell you I think it’s a disgrace. I don’t know what’s going on over there but I’m sure Mr. Grayson will apologize.”
“Have you been in touch with Ted Grayson since this video came out?”
“I haven’t. I’m retired and they don’t really reach out to me anymore.”
“If they did what would you say?”