The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “Right over my head.” It wasn’t. Barrington meant that handwringing of any description bored him silly.

  “And I also worry,” said Edgar, “about getting caught.”

  “My innocuous prank, illegal?” Barrington scoffed.

  “Oh, nobody could do you for murder or conspiracy. But at the very least, you could be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Wasting police time. The FBI’s involved; bingo, federal offense. Frankly, I don’t understand why you’ve never been arrested.”

  “Low tech,” Barrington advised. “That’s the secret. In all those film thrillers, it’s getting fancy that trips the culprits up. All you need for this gambit is a telephone. Even the SOB statements, which are optional—bit of stationery, a stamp.”

  “The risk still isn’t zero.”

  “The escapade wouldn’t be much fun with no risk at all.”

  Granted; the adrenal rush of the last twenty-four hours had been intoxicating.

  “On the other hand,” Edgar reckoned, “I don’t feel like going back to New York.”

  “Better,” Barrington commended. “Solid self-serving argument.”

  “And as you’ve said, there’d be no harm done that hasn’t been done already.”

  “Not so far,” said Saddler brightly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Saddler faced his palms up in coy innocence. “As I said. Not so far.”

  Edgar eyed Barrington warily. “And if the hoax is neither good nor bad, well. It’s more interesting to keep the SOB alive a while longer, isn’t it?”

  “Now you’re talking. But what about your King for a Day option? That would be ‘interesting’: turning me in.”

  Edgar averted his face, abashed. “That might feel, um—traitorous, at this point.”

  “You feel loyal to me? We’ve never even met.”

  “I know you’re sick of folks liking you. And I haven’t quite decided if I like you, frankly. But I do feel a warped kinship with you. Maybe that makes me loyal, by way of being loyal to myself.”

  “I don’t see how we’re the least bit similar,” said Barrington cuttingly.

  “The main thing we have in common is we both bore easily.” Edgar stood to strip off his soggy T-shirt and wipe down his chest. “And I’m bored. I’m even bored with blabbing to you. I didn’t become a journalist to sample the world’s suck-ass beers.”

  With that, Edgar marched into the living room and picked up the phone.

  “Are you insane?” Barrington shouted at his back.

  “Probably.” Edgar dialed.

  Barrington pressed the button to disconnect. “The secret is low tech, not low IQ. Take minimal precautions, please. I thought you read the files. There’s a pay phone in Terra do Cão whose location is apt.”

  Edgar did feel stupid. A call to a newspaper was unlikely to be traced, but there was no need to run that risk. Red-faced, he trooped upstairs, grabbed a fistful of escudos from atop the jar in the study, tripped quickly up the tower’s spiral staircase to snap on some rubber gloves, and ducked into the bedroom to pull on some jeans. After running, he should have washed up first, but this impulse was so wild and patently foolhardy that he was reluctant to test it with a contemplative bath.

  Downstairs, Edgar paused at the front door. “You think I’m a copycat.”

  “Of course,” said Barrington cheerfully.

  “Well, I’m not arsed if you do.”

  “That’s the spirit! Oh, and before you go. May I assume that you’re taking full responsibility for this decision?”

  “Why?” asked Edgar suspiciously.

  “We agree that if anything regrettable happens as a consequence, it’s not my fault.”

  “What could happen?” asked Edgar brusquely. “The bomb’s gone off already.”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I simply don’t . . .” Barrington fluttered his fingers.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, is all.”

  “What’s to hear about?”

  Barrington smiled with a bashful shrug. Escudos clinking in one pocket and the other bulging with Saddler’s goofy homemade kazoo, Edgar lunged out the door. Foom, the vento slapped him in the face with the sure knowledge that in crossing that threshold he had also crossed a line that could prove difficult to sneak back over.

  Chapter 24

  Barba Is No Longer Boring

  IF BOREDOM PUSHED him over that threshold, Edgar had a gift for it. A knack for boredom was a knack for spoliation, like being good at ransacking bars, tearing up rose beds, or vandalizing subway cars.

  As a kid in Wilmington, Edgar had taped pennies to the railroad tracks near his house. Once run over by a freight train a copper was ruined, but the penny had also been appropriated. No longer legal tender that could be traded for a one-cent fireball, the squashed oblong disc had been wrested from the clutches of the U.S. government to become entirely Edgar’s. When he grew a bit older, he graduated to dimes and quarters. Older still, Edgar had placed lovers, hobbies, whole cities on the tracks, flattening what was formerly precious. Anything tamed into the thoroughly dull had been as thoroughly dominated, as thoroughly possessed. Boredom, like penny-mashing, was a form of ownership.

  Case in point: Edgar had taken an expensive holiday to southern France four years earlier. As he scuffled around Arles, the town’s aloof antiquity was so enchanting that he grew resentful. Narrow passageways twisting from the crumbled coliseum, the Rhône coursing out of reach, knotty branches of apple trees reaching skyward like the arms of candelabras: the scenes might as well have been crummy postcard reproductions of late van Goghs. Edgar couldn’t get into the place; rather, he couldn’t get the place into him. In fact, he wondered if the bloated American tourists bulging at café tables were suffering from the same frustration, and kept ordering more courses because coq au vin and coquilles Saint-Jacques were the only elements of the bafflingly picturesque landscape they could take in.

  After two days of squinting down dusty, infuriatingly fetching ins and outs, Edgar returned fire and got bored with it. Profane, maybe, but ennui was his only hope of participating in his own holiday. He’d been traveling with a girl then, and vengefully he got bored with her, too. The last night of the sagging trip she cried. Helpless, Edgar got bored with having to console her.

  Edgar learned to scuba dive; he got bored with it. He learned to ski; he got bored with it. He got bored with Angela and Jamesie, he got bored with New York. He got bored with being a lawyer, and with half a chance he could get good and bored with journalism, too. Captivation was slavery. Boredom macht frei.

  Insidiously, Edgar had been growing bored with Barba. Already he’d deadened the drive into Cinziero until the austere vista inspired only, Oh, that. The wither in his mouth after a swig of Choque no longer took him aback. His colleagues Edgar now liked to regard as Known Quantities. He took the absurdly palatial Abrab Manor aggressively for granted. He accepted dinner dates with Henry and Nicola as his due, if he hadn’t quite perfected a blasé carelessness about what to wear. Running, Edgar plowed through the vento insano with the prow of his refusal to be impressed. Though at first Edgar had been privately enthralled by access to a local journo watering hole, a welcome reprieve from NYPD Blue reruns dubbed over in Portuguese every evening, nowadays he shuffled off to his regular bar with a worldly sigh: Christ, another night at the Rat.

  The exceptions to Edgar’s swashbuckling nonchalance were two: Barrington, and Nicola. One was imaginary; the other was married.

  Deep down, Edgar realized that deliberately making your life dull was criminal. It was an irrational defacement, like scraping obscenities into the finish of your own car. The aim of changing careers had been not to be bored, so to leap at the opportunity to find his new profession passé was perverse. There was precious little point to adventuring abroad if the first mission he undertook once washed on a faraway shore was to busy about finding the odd ordinary and the foreign familiar. Yet he couldn’t stop h
imself. If boredom didn’t make him happy, it did make him comfortable, and like most people he preferred comfort most of the time. Happiness, by contrast, was hard work.

  But then, abruptly, Edgar was moved to industry anyway. Abruptly, there was no danger that Guy Wallasek would snarl and put him on hold until the line disconnected, that Edgar would have to trim his wordage down to a squib lest he get squeezed out of the Record all week, or that his fledgling career as a journalist would hurtle from the nest and ker-splat on the pavement. Abruptly—like it or not—Edgar wasn’t bored.

  For promptly after Edgar puttered off to the pay phone in Terra do Cão, poured escudos into the slot, reached a frightened girl at the New York Times foreign desk, growled the magic code phrase left on Barrington’s last floppy through the kazoo (“last laugh,” which seemed gratuitously provocative), and announced in a thickly accented Portuguese lisp that the SOB had bombed Grant’s Tomb, Barba transformed.

  Sullen local patrons at the Rat became louder, drunker, and more garrulous. Portuguese newscasters delivered the day’s tidings in urgent gasps. When the Lisbon news was over, the barkeep switched to CNN, and Rat regulars pricked their ears for mention of their very own shit hole from the glassy towers of Atlanta. Anxious to strike just the right note between emotive shame and shy pride, shop assistants practiced rusty school English on Edgar as he laid in another stack of Weight Watchers lasagna. Tomás Verdade’s schedule was purportedly packed, and his slimeball press officer João Pacheco no longer returned phone calls. Even the wind picked up.

  Edgar soon came to appreciate that Cinziero’s core hack pack had long been dependent on not only Saddler but a steady stream of visiting journalists whom regulars could show up, lure capriciously to bed, ply slyly with their first Choques, and poke fun at once they’d left. After Grant’s Tomb, the generous expense accounts of transient TV crews leveraged up the general level of nightly entertainment by an average of two drinks per head. Better still, full-time Barban correspondents could tag along to lavish dinners at Moroccan hash houses, where the couscous and balaclava were actually edible and the ambiance was spiced with political risk. On boozy, soup-to-nuts evenings out, Nightline crews welcomed even Trudy Sisson as an informed source.

  Of course, compared to these scavengers, the dizzy Floridian qualified as a shrewd pundit. Blow-ins varied in their political predispositions, from burn-’em-at-the-stake authoritarians to liberal hankie-twisters frantic to understand, but their ignorance was universal. These professional information-mongers hadn’t the sketchiest notion of Portuguese history (“Who’s Salazar?”—deposed in 1974, the fascistic dictator had only tyrannized the country for fifty years), much less had they mastered Barban politics. While after twelve hundred years of North African invasion, settlement, and intermarriage the veins of every Barban coursed with Moorish blood, visiting journalists still aped Creamie references to Barba’s “indigenous culture,” when neither its ethnicity nor its traditions were distinct from the Barba-ry Coast. Hacks turned a blind eye to polls repeatedly documenting that regional support for Barban independence ran to a mere 25 percent, a figure that undermined the drama of a province overrun by illegal aliens in spontaneous, unified revolt. Every instant expert accepted Tomás Verdade’s inflated immigration figures as gospel. (Verdade’s projections assumed not simply that the current rate of immigration remained constant, but that the latest rate of increase remained constant—a cunning if statistically underhanded method of sending any rising trend into the near vertical within two inches of graph paper.)

  Moreover, if one hack ever put a mistake into print, it was reiterated all over the world. A small but telling example: the Chicago Tribune ran a long, widely reprinted exposé about the Creams, citing their home neighborhood as “El Terra do Cão” (which the author mistranslated “dock land,” not “dog land,” although the slum was nowhere near the water). But Terra do Cão was never named with an article by the people who lived there. Worse, el was masculine, terra feminine. Worst, el was Spanish. Portuguese for “the” was o or a.

  Picky? Maybe. Nevertheless, following on that Tribune erratum, Terra do Cão became “El Terra do Cão” in every article about Barba henceforth. In fact, Edgar discovered that his own copy was being doctored at the Record with the inserted “El,” presumably for enhanced verisimilitude. The El epidemic betrayed the fact that, although journalists were supposedly sent out into the field to harvest fresh data, their primary source of information was one another.

  To give his colleagues credit, after Grant’s Tomb the hierarchy of the Cinziero hack pack subtly reordered, and Edgar’s eminence ratcheted up farther than his few months on this beat should have merited. With Barrington hovering over his shoulder as he typed, Edgar developed virtuosity in Barba-speak, and his copy soon exuded the confidence of a seasoned hand. Wallasek was sufficiently impressed to assign him a couple of news analyses—one of which laid bare Verdade’s statistical fallacies, to the embarrassment of other hacks too suggestible to have examined the figures.

  In person, Edgar gave off a nebulous air of knowingness, which while off-putting as a style was magnetic as a genuine condition. His colleagues couldn’t have had any idea what Edgar knew, nor could they have identified what tipped them off that he was onto something. He’d stopped asking questions, but the early onset of complacency was a common side effect of their occupation. It was unlikely that any of his colleagues had ever articulated, “That Edgar Kellogg knows something we don’t.” Yet despite being the most junior correspondent posted here, Edgar was the one to whom a freshly arrived GQ writer instinctively turned, and if Martha wanted to float another theory about SOB “strategy” she tried it out on Edgar first. He became the arbiter of the probable, and rumors circled back to him that he had inherited Barrington’s brilliant paramilitary connections—which he had, rather.

  More than once when Edgar was kicking back at the Rat, a pimply nineteen-year-old local would whisper an agitated request for a private chat. After insisting on buying Edgar another drink and formally asking after the health of Edgar’s family in set-phrase school English, the boy would refer nervously to the reporter’s notorious “contacts.” The supplicant reliably wanted to be a man, to defend his people, to sacrifice for his country’s liberdade. He couldn’t bear sitting at home with Mamãe and shelling fava beans into a pail while his heroic brothers-in-arms risked their lives in bold operations abroad. The terrorist wannabe had reliably called by O Creme first and been turned away, on the preposterous pretense that the leadership knew no soldados ousados! The boy was desperate to join up, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his noble SOB comrades. Could Edgar put the kid in touch? Edgar’s blanket mandate to protect his sources rescued him from coming across, and he always sent these poor bastards packing with the hackneyed advice that they get themselves an education—which was precisely what they were after.

  As for Barrington, Edgar saw somewhat less of his host, often coming home late and hurrying off to bed rather than lingering by the fountain for a jaw. Exultantly, Edgar was coming into his own. Yet his enhanced prestige, his authority, his knowingness weren’t the result of any hard-earned self-realization, but were the natural outgrowth of having been handed the punch line when the rest of the crowd was still listening with earnest expectancy to the joke. The ghost of Abrab Manor was an unwelcome reminder that Edgar owed his elevated station to the warped ingenuity of Barrington Saddler.

  Edgar did keep his end up, however, and in the maintenance of any tradition the latest standard-bearer took some modest credit on his own account. Edgar’s articles—interpreting SOB “statements” anonymously posted from Cinziero, describing moves afoot in Lisbon to offer Barba regional autonomy—were all composed with the textual equivalent of a straight face.

  In retrospect, Edgar couldn’t castigate himself for having done anything malevolent. True, one of those Japanese tourists in intensive care had died, but that wasn’t Edgar’s fault. He was genuinely sorry, and the creepy afterthought t
hat mortality would increase the political impact of the bombing for the SOB he shoved hastily aside. In the plus column: Edgar was having a wonderful time, Edgar was rapidly becoming man of the hour, Edgar was getting his articles published, and Edgar wasn’t bored.

  Having enlisted himself as a good little soldier, naturally when another story broke a few weeks down the line that a bomb had been placed outside the Moroccan embassy in DC, Edgar could only consider the event heaven-sent. The embassy had been evacuated, the bomb defused. No especial opprobrium would be conferred even on the incompetent terrorists who had left their toys behind, and by a staggering stroke of luck the SOB bombing a North African embassy would make an iota of political sense. When no other acronym took credit, after dark Edgar gunned the Saab off to El Terra do Cão, fed the phone the escudos he’d been stockpiling since Grant’s Tomb, and asked for Cindy.

  In late October, a fellow prankster claimed to have planted a bomb at the final game of the World Series, forcing the crowd to decamp and the game to be delayed by two days while sniffer dogs snuffled through the stadium. No device was found. The whole country was subsequently in such an uproar that Edgar was a bit sorry to miss the hoo-ha. Nothing melted barriers between strangers like shared indignation, and it would have been open season on chatting up attractive women in supermarkets for a week.

  As a baseball fan, Edgar was admittedly torn. The most venerated of American institutions had been defiled. On the other hand, one more year and the fucking Orioles hadn’t made the Series . . . Besides, how better to punish the real culprit than to steal his thunder? Edgar’s gas tank was full, his pockets jingling. Thereafter, his compatriots leapt at the chance to blame the un-American scare on foreign riffraff.

  Edgar gave the strafing of the Indianapolis Planned Parenthood a miss (too much of a political stretch). Likewise, though philosophically sympathetic, he passed on a dud fertilizer car bomb outside the Holtsville IRS. Officers at the scene had derided the detonator wiring as inept, and Edgar was averse to association with the unprofessional.