by John Kenney
“What have we seen in the past twenty years? Who has been born? Who has died? What books have been written? Movies made? Technology created? Wars fought? What have we learned? What has moved us forward? What has set us back? What has opened our eyes? Given us joy and wonder and hope? Cassini mattered.”
She paused, briefly, and, picking up a pencil from her desk, made a small mark on the page.
“It showed us a time and a place. A world we hadn’t seen. We are better for it.”
She looked up at Jagdish. Looked at Murray.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
She walked to his desk and put the copy down. Murray saw the mark she’d made on the page.
“You typed ‘he’ mattered,” she said. “I think you meant ‘it.’”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Typo.”
Grace leaned down and hugged him.
* * *
• • •
“Thirty seconds,” Sean said.
Ted looked around the set. Sean, Lou, Simon, Murray, Grace, Jagdish. They’d gathered, out of eye line, to witness this. Ted saw them now. He’d seen them most every working day for nearly twenty years. And tomorrow, after the drinks this evening, after the promises to keep in touch, he would likely never see them again.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, quietly. He looked up at them. “You guys. Thank you. For . . .”
They applauded. And it moved him in a way that surprised him.
“Sorry. Quiet, please.” Sean. “In five, four, three . . .”
“This is my last broadcast as anchor of the nightly news. It has been a privilege being a small part of your evening five nights a week. I hope this broadcast and the remarkable women and men who make it happen each evening have helped you, in some small way, see the world more clearly. If not, if network news has failed you, then I have failed you as its managing editor. A few months after I first sat in this chair, something extraordinary happened at Cape Canaveral, Florida. A twenty-two-foot-high space probe called Cassini-Huygens rocketed into orbit for a twenty-year journey. It orbited Saturn, the second-largest planet in our solar system, for thirteen years. It had course coordinates, a detailed plan of work, a script by which to go. But, of course, that’s not how life works. We can plan but we cannot see what lies ahead. In my almost twenty years here, we have gone by a script each evening. But who among us could have imagined in 1997 the world we would see. Cassini traveled 4.9 billion miles since its launch. In that same time, we, as a nation, as a world, as individuals, have traveled a great distance, too. We live, today, in a world radically different than just twenty years ago. We have seen extraordinary advances in technology, communication, medicine, transportation. There is, contrary to so much of what we see and hear, remarkable hope. But something fundamental has shifted in America. The advances of technology are extraordinary. But we are living in a new, digital wild west. A world yet to be fully formed. A world lacking rules. So what now? We have a choice. In how we use technology to advance humanity. Kindness. Generosity. It is easy to become a skeptic sitting in this chair night after night. To become callous to the beauty and possibility of the world. My job, the media’s job, isn’t to share the news. It’s to share the worst. To horrify you. Imagine it was different, though. Imagine if the job was to inspire? Educate? Instead of show you the worst of who we are? If I have a regret—and I have many—it’s that we didn’t do that more. Demand that from the news. Demand that from media—social and otherwise. I am a kid from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who never thought he would grow up to sit in this chair. It has been my honor and my privilege. Thank you for the opportunity. This is Ted Grayson. Thank you. And goodbye.”
How do you say “I’m sorry” in Polish?
The Realtor had asked Ted to leave the apartment. It was the first showing and they already had calls, along with two cash offers, from the listing on the Sotheby’s real estate website. The Realtor was actually a team. That’s how it was described to Ted, who would had preferred putting a listing in The New York Times, but that world had died. Now it was a video put on a website and a team of remarkably good-looking people marketing Ted’s apartment. “We’ll make no mention, of course, that it’s your place.”
* * *
• • •
In the days that followed the final broadcast, something seemed to shift for Ted. Not a resignation to this new reality but a lightness. Not joy by any measure. But an acceptance that his life, as he had known it for twenty years, was over. He stopped carrying his cell phone with him, stopped looking at his laptop. He knew only that he needed to leave. A plan began to form.
* * *
• • •
He walked. He had little need for sleep. He planned, took notes, searched online. A small doze here and there but the notion of eight hours of sleep seemed an epic waste. And now, of course, the apartment was largely empty. Claire had movers take the artwork, the fine rugs.
He walked. The air was cool, crisp, but the trees showed signs of life and flower boxes held pansies and daffodils. He wore a ski hat pulled down over his head, his beard unshaven for over a week. He bore little resemblance to that man on television. He wore headphones, a gift from Claire years before. He listened to music he’d come across on YouTube. Trappist monks chanting Latin hymns. He’d found it soothing.
He walked without destination. Side streets, his pace matched by the slow chanting, by the ancient dead language. People around him walked quickly, with purpose, even if they weren’t in a hurry. They were New Yorkers on a weekday and even if they were on the way to the corner store for half-and-half they walked as if they were late for a job interview. Perhaps it was the monks and their Latin. Perhaps it was his lack of sleep and the buzz of too much coffee. But he felt as if he saw people and the world more clearly. The stress on the woman’s face at the corner, holding one child’s hand and strolling another, who was mid-meltdown. Two women, eighty if they were a day, making their way down Fifth Avenue, turning into the park, heads down the whole way, knowing the route by heart. Ted imagined stale bread in their bags, an afternoon feeding birds and talking of . . . what? Ted envied them. Envied what he thought their life might be.
Along the side streets off the park now. Somehow, he had walked up to the Nineties and was in front of the Spence school and the lower grades were letting out, the girls in their uniforms and oversized cartoon-character backpacks. The monks chanted and the girls filed out, large-eyed, looking for their caretaker, which, if it was a mother, elicited a sprint and a neck hug, little soldiers returning home after years at the front. Ted imagined what happened next. Home for a snack and a rest. Then to swim lessons or piano lessons or a playdate. Later dinner, bath, bed. That’s what Claire used to say to Franny. Dinner-bath-bed, as if one word. Franny wanting always to know what was happening. Tell me the day, she would ask each night, before Claire or Ted left the room.
And still the monks sang. How different life is with a music track.
Into Central Park now. It appeared to Ted like a private country club. Like something in Bedford, only it was open to all and French tourists wandered by and couples sat on the lawn and young families kicked a ball. Bicyclists and runners. A tall Sikh man in a turban sat on a milk crate next to his “Nuts for nuts” cart, the sweet smell. Sun broke through dark clouds and the wind made it cool, but the winter was over and the tulips were up, daffodils, too, and the grass was an Ireland green and people needed to be outside, to walk or sit on the benches and look at the trees and the sky and breathe it in.
What did they do, these people, so many of them, that they were outside on a Thursday afternoon? Older women being helped by nurses’ aides and mothers strolling babies and Japanese tourists looking at maps. Here was an off-duty nurse and there was a young couple holding hands and there was an old man asleep on a bench, his chin on his chest, a book on his lap, a woman next to him, reading, holding his hand.
Near the Olmsted walkway two men, maybe twenty-five years old, had a good crowd gathered and were preparing to jump over eight people in a line. On a hill, a man was teaching a woman how to cast a fly rod. The yellow line snapping in the wind. In the playground the children squealed. A horse pulling a carriage went by, leaving the clean scent of manure. In the distance, someone must have been cutting the lawn. The smell almost brought tears to Ted’s eyes.
Ted bought a hot dog and found the taste sublime. Perhaps it was because he’d not eaten all day. Sodium. When he thought of hot dogs he often thought of sodium. A story they had done a while back. Hot dogs are high in sodium. Ted had looked at a chart that Jagdish shared. The periodic table of the elements. Every high school student had seen it. But Ted looked carefully. Bismuth. Seaborgium. Hafnium. These were elements. There were 118 elements in the periodic table. Ted found this out recently, on a late-night Ketel One fest, searching the internet. These names, names he had never heard before. And here Ted was seen as a wise man by eight million people. How was it possible that he had never heard of most of the elements that make up the planet?
He reached the West Side and the monks sang as Ted walked down into the subway at Seventy-Second Street. He rode the local downtown, standing room only, the faces so somber. The construction workers asleep on their way home, the groups of high school kids, the boys too loud and the girls laughing and hitting each other, sharing an earbud, listening to the same song. Crowds poured out at Fourteenth Street and Ted took a seat. He watched a mother and son, a boy of perhaps eight, Down syndrome. The boy sniffed at his hands and made kissing sounds at his mother. Ted assumed she was the boy’s mother. The mother smiled at the boy but mostly stared out the window. Legs double-wrapped around her calf, black baggy pants, white waffle long-sleeved T-shirt. She stared at a spot on the floor. He stuck his tongue out, plump lower lip extended. She looked over at him, stared at him as he looked out the window. He turned and he looked at her with such a look of love that Ted had to look away, the moment so real, so raw, so private.
Why not put this on the news, he thought. Film this and put it on the news with the monks chanting. Would that not tell his audience more about what went on in the world that day than any ten reporters on assignment in Kabul/Jakarta/the Pentagon/The Hague telling stories that were carefully scripted by governments or corporations or breaking news that told of nothing and offered not one scintilla of news? Maybe this was the new news. Micro stories about nothing, about everything.
* * *
• • •
Henke got the email late. The photographer he’d brought in to cover her. The shot was perfect. Franny’s underwear. You could see Franny’s underwear. The photograph showed her getting out of a car, an Uber. The photographer clearly having waited for her to move one leg to the sidewalk. It didn’t help that Franny had been drunk. But the photographer knew that, too. Because the photographer had a stable of bartenders he paid tips to. He’d gotten a call from one of them, heard that Franny Grayson had been in with a few friends, had downed four glasses of wine in ninety minutes, and had left in an Uber. The photographer knew where she lived, of course. He had that from Henke. It was too easy.
So was the headline.
FRANNY GRAYSON. EXPOSED.
He linked the photo with the interview with Lauren. He found a stock photo of cocaine on a mirror and used it next to the picture of Franny stumbling out of the Uber, even though the two photos weren’t related. True, she hadn’t known her father was in the room. But it didn’t matter. She’d gotten the story wrong. He could paint her as a liar. And she’d hidden the drug use. All in all this was a good day’s work.
Yet a curious thing happened the next morning in the office. Some employees found the photo offensive. Five women and three men signed an email saying they would quit unless the photo was taken down.
He thought hard about the email for almost forty-five seconds. He fired all of them.
* * *
• • •
Claire watched the footage in Bedford. She didn’t watch it the way people in offices watched it. The way young men on a trading floor at investment banks watched it, chuckling as the drunken woman stumbled out of the car, freezing the frame on her legs parting. She didn’t watch it the way hipsters at ad agencies and PR firms and design firms did, commenting and laughing. The way they did on university campuses, making a drinking game out of it. She didn’t watch it and then comment on YouTube:
Ha ha! Dumb bitch.
Whore’s got nice legs.
Rich kid drug addict.
She watched it as a mother who couldn’t protect her child. She needed to do something. She picked up the phone to call Dodge. But she dialed Ted.
Ted had seen it, too. His little girl, debased, shown drunk. Her underwear. There for the world to see. Because of him. Because of who he was. It wasn’t Franny’s fault. His rage built. Beware the man with nothing to lose.
“Ted,” Claire said. “Make this stop.”
* * *
• • •
He took the subway, purposefully going one stop past where he wanted to get out so that he could walk back, to see if anyone was following him. He felt like a reporter again. He walked for a time, the clouds bringing on an early dusk. He followed the directions on his phone and found the building. He stood out front and suddenly felt foolish, like an unhinged stalker. One doesn’t show up unannounced at a total stranger’s home.
He entered the building. The main door gave way to a vestibule with mailboxes and buzzers on one side. It smelled vaguely of cat urine and damp wool, the walls covered with half a dozen coats of peeling paint. Six buzzers, a United Nations of last names. Wizbicki. He pressed the buzzer and winced. No camera. Just a buzzer. He waited. She probably wasn’t home. Maybe buzz again. Maybe leave.
Ted had gotten the girl’s address from Lou, who pulled strings with human resources.
Through the metal speaker, an accented female voice. “Who is it?”
Every weeknight for twenty years Ted had said the name to eight million Americans. His name. Bigger than life. The most trusted man in America. Now he could barely get it out.
“It’s Ted Grayson.”
One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand.
“I don’t believe you. You’re the paparazzi. I’ll call the police. Go away.”
It came into his head and was out before he knew it. “You saw my bald spot,” he said. “That night. And you used hair spray. Lou . . . my producer . . . told you to use hair spray.”
Silence.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Just . . . to talk. Just for a minute. Please.”
Nothing. Ted waited. He thought of pressing the buzzer again but didn’t have the courage anymore.
He saw her boots coming down the stairs, through the glass door, arms folded tightly across her chest. She stopped at the landing when she saw him. She had an overcoat on, the kind that looked like it was from a secondhand store. Scarf. Behind her another woman. Her sister. It was the sister who opened the door.
“What do you want?” she said, pure hatred in her voice.
What did he want? He wanted to apologize. Simple. That was a lie, though. I want to be forgiven, he thought. He realized the absurdity of it. The foolishness of standing here, wanting something from her.
“I want to say sorry.”
* * *
• • •
They walked a block or two and then stopped, not saying much, until they found a coffee truck near a construction site. Ted bought them two coffees.
“I just wanted to say how sorry I am. I shouldn’t have screamed. Should never have called you what I did. I don’t have an excuse. I just . . . I was having a bad day, and . . .”
What else to tell her? About Franny? Claire? His birthday? His bald spot?
She stared at
the sidewalk. “I’m sorry about what happened to you.”
“Don’t be. I probably deserved it.” He smiled.
He handed her an envelope. She worried for a moment that there was money in it.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It’s the names and numbers of some people at networks who’ll take your call. They can help you get work.”
She looked at the envelope, then to Ted.
“They call me, you know.”
“Who?” Ted asked.
“The networks. The . . . the cable news and the websites. They ask me to be on TV and talk about you.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. She looked so young.
“But . . . you haven’t,” Ted said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not really anyone’s business but mine and yours.”
She held up the envelope. “Thank you.”
“Przepraszam,” Ted said, and watched her smile.
He’d looked it up online. He’d found a video on YouTube that showed the proper pronunciation.
“Is that . . . przepraszam. I hope that’s right.”
It was right. It was pretty good, in fact. Natalia hadn’t been prepared for this and something about the past few weeks, the fatigue, the hope that maybe it could all be over, made her laugh.
“What?” Ted said, embarrassed. “Was it that bad?”
“No,” she said. “It was good.”
Ted smiled.
“Are you close with your father?”
She seemed surprised. “Yes, of course. Why?”
“Call him. I bet he worries about you.”
* * *
• • •
The tip came in to scheisse at 4:43. And with it a dozen iPhone photos and a twenty-four-second video of Ted and Natalia standing on a sidewalk. It showed her looking sad. Or at least not happy. It showed Ted talking and then handing her an envelope. It was far enough away that you couldn’t hear what was being said. Not a word. It just looked like Ted was lecturing her. And bribing her. They posted it immediately.