The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  Satellite found. 123 bps.

  Is that a whistling?

  No.

  He gets on his email. The web browser allows him to pull up his account, and there’s the email he’s been waiting for, the story list from some kid named Michael M. Hastings. Must be an intern.

  He sees the list:

  Cover: Global Housing Boom

  Nishant Patel on TK

  Rise of Islam In Europe?/townsend

  Mobile Phones/Outsourcing/E. Africa Genocide/peoria

  The Swedish Model

  TK Columnist on Financial Scandal

  Three Novels on Exile

  Space Tourism

  Mobile phones? Out fucking what? What moron wrote up this story list?

  He refreshes his screen, and there’s a new email from Jerry, the World Affairs Editor.

  Hey A.E., the story is on for this week—just going to make it more of a business story pegged to a new report about the increase in mobile phone sales across Africa. Would be good if you interview a mobile phone vendor or talk to some Africans about their use of mobile phones. What colors, styles? What kind of brand? How many phones do most families have? How much do the phones cost in USD? What are the Chinese really up to? We’ll have an intern here call the authors of the study, so no need to worry about that. We’ll wrap your on-scene reporting lower down in the story. Can file thursday ayem? many thanks, j

  A.E. Peoria is about to hit Reply, about to cc the entire top editorial staff. He gets only to the words “Jerry that sounds like” and doesn’t get to “absolute bullshit” when he notices that the crowd that had gathered to watch him from the bottom of the small hill has dispersed. To move silently away, in a herdlike fashion, as if sensing an earthquake or a thunderstorm or some kind of major weather or geological event. He listens closely. There is actually a deep and frightening whistle. He understands that perhaps a mortar shell or a rocket is on the way. Right when he thinks that, he hears a very loud boom and grabs his laptop and satellite modem, and while flipping the screen down, he hits Send by accident and falls off the roof of the Toyota Land Cruiser. He protects his laptop, falling on his back, but the Uniriya satellite mobile modem, which looks like a gray plastic box, falls on the ground next to him. Peoria scrambles to his feet and opens the door to get back in the car and the overhead light goes on, and he thinks, Oh fuck, fuck me, this is stupid shit.

  He slams the door and puts the Toyota Land Cruiser in reverse and starts driving down the hill, thinking he should try to get back to the refugee camp. The electronics he had been charging in the cigarette lighter are tangled on his lap, and the interior of the car is a fucking mess. He feels liquids, like spilled water bottles or something. Ka thunk, ka thunk, ka thunk. Without a seat belt, each twenty-foot stretch on the dirt path down to the village sends him up high in his seat. He keeps bumping his head. Finally he gets to the bottom of the small hill and stops outside the tent that he and David D. Obutu are sharing. David D. Obutu is standing outside the tent and smiling and shaking his head.

  “You lucky the Ibo tribe can’t shoot RPGs for nothing,” David D. Obutu says.

  “That was an RPG? I thought it was a mortar.”

  A.E. Peoria and David D. Obutu smoke a cigarette.

  “We have to get back to N’Djamena tomorrow. We need to go to the market and talk to someone who sells mobile phones.”

  “No problem. Everyone in Chad has mobile phones now. Two years ago, nothing! Now we are all talking on the mobile phones. Makes a good story—I worked with Granger from USA Today last week, and we did a big report on how Africans love mobile phones. Big business. Fucking Chinese.”

  “That’s what I hear. Did you take my fucking batteries?”

  3.

  Afternoon, Tuesday,

  August 20, 2002

  My desk is on the sixteenth floor, at an intersection of cubicles and two hallways, a listening post for office gossip. Every day, the section editors gather on the other side of my cubicle wall before going out to lunch.

  Today, Jerry is the first out of his office, then Gary, then Anna.

  “Want to come to the Crater with us?” Gary asks me.

  It’s the first time I’ve been invited, suggesting I may not just be another temp, replaced each season.

  The Crater is two blocks west from the office, on 57th Street. It’s cramped and greasy, an atmosphere of frequent foodborne illnesses. We’re at a table in the corner underneath framed pictures on the wall of unknown famous people who have dined there and have taken the precaution of bringing aspirational publicity shots, signed with Magic Marker, made just in case.

  “Ask for the burger well done if you’re going to get a burger,” says Jerry. “Nishant is really getting to me.”

  “Did anyone read his book?” asks Anna.

  Jerry and Gary don’t say anything. I wait a second.

  “I read it,” I say.

  “What did you think?”

  What did I think of Nishant Patel’s book? It doesn’t matter what I think of his book. I bought the book to find out as much about the boss as possible, not for any particular love of the subject matter. Reading it gave me insight into his thinking, insight into who he was or at least what he pretended to think. It was preparation for the moment, assured by probability, when I would be stuck in the elevator with him and I could say, “Gee, Mr. Patel, I loved your book, especially Chapter Seven, where you talk about transparency and corruption.”

  “I thought it was good,” I say. “Especially the parts about transparency and corruption.”

  “What’s it about again?” says Jerry, who makes a point not to pay attention to anything Nishant Patel–related that does not directly affect his stories or mood or job security. “Outsourcing, right? That fucking bastard.”

  “Uh, sort of. It’s really about benevolent dictatorships.”

  The editors are listening to me.

  “Benevolent dictatorships. How, you know, democracies evolve, and how they really take time to evolve, and so, though human rights activists like to push for changes really quickly, stability is preferable to quick or immediate change, and expecting immediate change, you know, is really, really a folly. Illiberal democracies. You know, like Tiananmen Square was a good thing, because look at the economic growth of China, when a democracy there could have really fucked—sorry, excuse my language—really slowed everything down.”

  “What countries does he talk about?” says Anna.

  “Oh, you know, the Middle East, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, the, uh, warm countries. But America too, and he makes this kind of interesting argument that the problem with our government is that it’s too transparent, that it should, I guess, be a little more secretive—that the transparency sort of paralyzes us and prevents good decision making.”

  Jerry isn’t really listening to what I’m saying.

  “He’s just getting on my nerves,” Jerry says.

  “He might not be with us much longer,” says Gary.

  “No way—he’s staying,” says Anna.

  There are three competing Nishant Patel tea-leaf readings. (1) Nishant Patel might accept some kind of government position at the NSC or State. (2) Nishant Patel might accept some kind of position in academia, president of Princeton or something—considered the most unlikely, as he has already spent much of his time in academia (Harvard, Yale, Ph.D., youngest professor, youngest editor of Foreign Relations, etc.). (3) And this is the juiciest: Nishant Patel is a contender to take over the domestic edition of The Magazine after the editor in chief retires. The EIC is named Henry and he’s been EIC for seven years, and seven years is the historic average for EICs.

  “They’re not going to give him EIC. That’s what Berman is being groomed for,” says Jerry.

  Sanders Berman, official title Managing Editor of The Magazine, ranked number six on the New York Herald�
�s “Top 20 Media Players Under Age 38.”

  “Why do we keep coming here?” Jerry says, looking at his chicken potpie.

  “It’s cheap,” says Gary.

  “Do you guys like Berman?” I ask.

  “Ummm,” says Jerry.

  “He’s okay,” says Gary.

  “Don’t really know him,” says Anna.

  “Have any of you read his book?” I ask.

  The Greatest War on Earth. A book about World War II. It’s currently competing with Nishant Patel’s book on the national bestseller lists. I’ve been keeping track of whose book is up and whose book is down.

  “I’m thinking of reading it,” I say.

  The editors give a smile, condescending.

  “How old are you?” says Gary.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “So young,” the three, in unison, say at the table.

  “I remember when I was twenty-two, walking around, change jingling in my pocket,” Gary says. “Got the assignments I wanted, the jobs I wanted. No responsibilities. Just wait for the disappointments.”

  The check comes, and Jerry says he’ll pick it up and expense it—it’s only $43.37, but he likes to stick it to the magazine when he can.

  “Man, Nishant is getting on my nerves,” says Jerry. “I’ve got to quit.”

  Out on 57th Street, cabs and delivery trucks don’t slow at the Eighth Avenue crosswalk, and Anna tells me that Jerry has been saying he’s going to quit for fourteen years.

  4.

  Wednesday,

  August 21, 2002

  Space Tourism.

  I’m excited about this story, and I’ve been working on it for two weeks. The story is pegged—“pegged” is a news industry word—to an American centimillionaire who’s scheduled to go up in a Soyuz rocket in Novorossiysk, Russia, on September 14. He’ll be the seventh private citizen to make the trip to space, and the private company, working with the Russian government to send him up, is called Orbital Access Inc. Orbital Access Inc. has one industry rival, Great Explorations, and they aren’t very friendly. The two CEOs are quoted in most stories on the subject explaining their two different business models on monetizing the “nascent space tourism industry.”

  I’m supposed to do an interview by phone, in fifteen minutes, with a businessman, an engineer who lives in Colorado and is designing a space hotel. I’m preparing for the interview. I had printed out a stack of clips about the gentleman two days earlier, and I’m trying to find those pages. They are somewhere in the vicinity of my cubicle, but I am very messy, and there are stacks of newspapers and magazines and Post-it notes and binders and folders left open and creased at the spine.

  I start to dig for the papers, throwing open the metal cabinet drawers underneath the desktop, tossing and shifting piles of eight-by-eleven sheets.

  My cubicle is in a process of fossilization. The process, as far as I can tell, began when the magazine started to rent space in this building in 1987. None of the interns who have sat in this cubicle has ever completely removed all of their belongings. Decaying bits of personality, deposits of forgotten headlines, inexplicable artifacts.

  I’ve been getting the sense lately that someone, perhaps the Mexican cleaning service woman or the Polish cleaning service old man, is messing with my documents and cleaning my desk for me when I go home, so the papers could really be anywhere.

  I pull open a drawer where I think the stack of papers could be.

  Inside is a pile of comic books, with a graphic novel on the Palestinian territories on top of the stack, and I assume these are from four interns ago, because that was when A.E. Peoria started his career at the magazine. In this very cubicle. He’d become a star foreign correspondent, and it would make sense that a star foreign correspondent would be reading comics about war.

  Tossing through another drawer, I find a green construction helmet and a gas mask with a broken rubber strap—I date this find to October 2001, after the terrorist attacks in New York convinced Human Resources to provide protection from chemical and biological threats targeted at media organizations. The construction helmet and gas mask are on top of a manila folder with notes from a story about the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision to make George W. Bush president; those notes are piled on another folder, red, with photo caption information about the Balkans, notes on a graphic illustration breaking down population levels and ethnicities in the ratio of numbers killed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, etc.; there are lots of spelling mistakes and red pen on this document.

  Underneath the folder is a pile of back issues, the newest one dating from 1996, working backward at uneven intervals to 1991. Whoever chose the issues to collect in this pile was making some kind of time capsule point or editorial critique. All the headlines on the covers either contain the word “new” (“The New Happiness,” “The New War on Drugs,” “The New Normal,” “The New Hollywood,” “The New Aging,” “The New Parent Trap”) or end in a question mark (“Did the President Lie?” “The Candidate to Beat?” “Is the Globe Warming?”)—and sometimes have both (“The New Mystery of Mary Magdalene: Can Science Tell Us What History Can’t?”). According to this compiler’s count, marked by a yellow Post-it, either a question mark or the word “new” was used more than thirty-nine times in that five-year stretch.

  What catches my eye is another Post-it note, hand-scrawled, on the last issue in the pile. There is no question mark or word “new” in it, so I wonder why it’s there. The date says January 3, 1991. There is a picture of a desert and an American tank. “The Vietnam Syndrome,” blares the headline.

  This story is famous in the magazine’s lore. It was written by none other than Sanders Berman while he was finishing up his final year at Tulane. Quickly flipping through the other issues, I see that a good 90 percent of them carry the Sanders Berman byline—it dawns on me that I might be sitting in the exact same cubicle that Sanders Berman once sat in, though I find that hard to believe. Legend has it that he was only in the cubes for three months before he got his own office, before he was made the youngest editor of the National Affairs section of The Magazine. Perhaps I am sitting in the cube of Sanders Berman’s old assistant?

  I place the “Vietnam Syndrome” issue on top of my desk—I’ll get to this soon—and continue my search for the papers, when I’m distracted again.

  Did I mention where The Magazine’s TVs are? It’s a matter of some dispute, as there’s a shortage of television sets. For some reason, most of the sets are on the fifteenth floor, where the production and photography staff are, not the news reporters. This helps the fifteenth floor follow important sporting events on Saturday, like the Kentucky Derby or March Madness. But in the southeast block, near me, there is only one television shared by sixteen cubicles—it’s on a swivel attached to a column.

  The column is outside Nishant Patel’s office. The TV hangs over the three cubicles surrounding the column, and those three cubicles are manned by Nishant Patel’s three assistants: Dorothy, Lucy, and Patricia. The highest person in the hierarchy of the three assistants is Dorothy, and Dorothy has been at the magazine for three decades. Dorothy does not like to have the volume of the television set on. Dorothy always puts it on mute.

  So it is a fluke that in my search for the Space Tourism papers, I turn around 180 degrees to catch the BREAKING NEWS ALERT on MSNBC.

  The vice president of the United States, Richard B. Cheney, is standing at a lectern, speaking to men and women in military uniform. You know what Dick Cheney looks like, so I won’t waste time on that, and I can’t hear what he’s saying. Luckily, MSNBC has taken what it thinks are the most important themes in his speech and keeps scrolling them across the screen while he speaks.

  VP CHENEY: IRAQ HAS CHEMICAL WEAPONS

  VP CHENEY: IRAQ IS PURSUING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

  VP CHENEY: WE CANNOT ALLOW IRAQ TO ACQU
IRE WMD

  My phone rings and I pick it up.

  “Michael M. Hastings.”

  “Mr. Hastings, this is Douglas Dorl, from Outerlimits Hotels.”

  “Mr. Dorl, great, thanks for calling me back. Is this a good time?”

  “I called you, yeah.”

  “Great, great, great.”

  I spin back around, and though I’m not entirely prepared to do the interview, I do remember the list of questions that I more or less wanted answers or quotes about.

  “Oh, so, uh, when will the space hotels be ready?”

  “If our models are correct, we hope to get the first space hotel in orbit by 2015.”

  “And, uh, what, are, the, uh, challenges, to, uh, this?”

  I have a tape recorder hooked up to the phone and press Play/Record, so I’m not too worried about listening that closely.

  “Customer confidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to avoid catastrophe. Look at the airlines. The first national airline began in the early 1930s. But it took years of proving to the consumer that it was safe to fly. Almost didn’t—an accident in 1938, a crash over the Alleghenies that killed forty people, almost ruined the airline industry as we know it. There’s a reason for that. There was a law in Congress trying to ban air travel! Can you believe that? So I’m talking bulk. We need to have regular tourist space flights, at cost, at a price point people can afford. One tourist flight blows up, and we’re sunk as an industry. Funding dries up, the public won’t have trust in us.”

  “So, your hotels, um, how expensive are they to build?”