The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  Delray M. Milius keeps tapping the glass.

  “Thanks, everyone, for coming to Sanders Berman’s celebration,” Milius says. “I especially would like to thank our esteemed guests. Without going on, it is of course, and has always been, an honor to work with Sanders, and those of you who know him know that this success is the perfectly natural result we would have expected. But without going on, Tabby Doling would like to say a few words.”

  Tabby Doling is bone-thin, rail-like, brown hair held in a pretty coiffure. She’s maybe sixty.

  “When my mother first met Sanders, he was a senior at Tulane, and she was there on a speaking engagement. What, Sanders, you were still in seminary studies?” she says.

  “God and war, my two favorite subjects,” Sanders says.

  Everyone in the room gives a nice and expected laugh.

  “Sanders is a prize, and I’m very pleased so many of us are here to recognize this, especially my guests—”

  Notice the word my. Tabby Doling’s thing is that she’s friends with a bunch of famous and important people, media types, heads of state, Academy Award winners from the ’70s. Though she’s partial owner of The Magazine’s parent company, on the masthead she’s listed as “Special Diplomatic Correspondent,” which is kind of a joke, because that would lead readers to assume there are people above her in the hierarchy, which there are not—she even has a floor to herself, the notorious twenty-third floor.

  Tabby is one of those people who, if you bring up her name in conversation around New York, you’ll most likely get three or four really great anecdotes about. Everyone who’s met her has a moment to recount, told with the bemused acceptance that if you’re that rich and that eccentric, it’s par for the course. Gary’s Tabby Doling story, for instance, is that he was standing in the hallway on the sixteenth floor when he heard a knocking on the glass; someone had forgotten their ID. When Gary went to answer it, he saw Tabby through the glass and decided to make one of his customary jokes. “How do I know you’re not a terrorist?” he said, as if he wasn’t going to let her in. And she responded, “I’m Tabby Doling,” with a real flourish and emphasis on both her first and last names. Gary thinks that’s why he got passed over for the domestic sci/tech gig and has been stuck in international. That’s a pretty low-level story, too, not one of her best.

  I don’t know her at all and haven’t spent time with her, which isn’t surprising, as she has a $225,000-sticker-price Bentley and a driver I always see idling outside the entrance on Broadway for her—though she did say hello to me in the hallway once, so in my book that’s a plus. She keeps talking about what a wonderful man Sanders Berman is, and everyone agrees and claps and laughs when appropriate.

  I’m looking over the room, and I notice that most of the people look more or less like they’re up here for a reason—because they’re supposed to be—or are here because they’re the kind of name that goes in a New York gossip column, which is great for Sanders Berman’s book, because the gossip items, whatever they will say, will also mention The Greatest War on Earth. I’m not telling you anything groundbreaking or new, but it’s good to explain a few things every once in a while.

  There is one guest, a man, I’d say sixtyish, who would stand out less if he weren’t planted back in the corner against the glossy brown paneling. I’ve never seen him before, which isn’t that unusual, but he’s wearing a baseball cap—the baseball cap says “POW/MIA,” and so I think, If he’s wearing a baseball cap, he probably works in the mailroom.

  Sanders Berman starts to speak, a perfunctory address, and the book party—and the “party” part of book party is a bit of an overstatement, as there’s not really much partying; a more accurate phrase would be something like “mandatory book gathering”—starts again.

  The guy with POW/MIA is still planted there, and I end up next to him.

  “How long have you been with The Magazine?” I ask.

  “Not with the magazine, son,” he says with a southern drawl. “That’s my boy up there.”

  “You’re Mr. Berman’s father,” I say, for lack of anything better.

  “That’s right.”

  Times like this are when it really pays off for having done so much research and reading about my colleagues. I did get around to reading the “Vietnam Syndrome” story, and in it there’s a reference, in, like, the sixteenth paragraph, to Sanders Berman’s father, a “Vietnam veteran.” It stood out because Sanders Berman is never one to write about his personal life; I think that’s the only reference to his personal life I’ve seen.

  “That’s great that you could make it up to New York,” I say.

  “He didn’t ask me here. I don’t think that boy wants me here. I’m here because I’m trying to save him,” he says.

  “Right, of course,” I say.

  “Did you know that Sanders, and that other one, Nishant Patel, are members of the Council on Foreign Relations?”

  “That’s right, I did know that.”

  “Did you know that Tabby Doling’s mother, Sandra Doling, used to meet every year in Germany, a little something called the Bilderberg Group. Freemasonry, you know?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of the Bilderberg Group.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  What it tells me is that rich people like to hang out with rich people, and that guys who fancy themselves foreign policy experts like to hang out and talk about foreign policy, but I know he’s looking for a more History Channel “Conspiracy Revealed” insight. The problem with talking conspiracies is like the problem with talking religion: you’re either preaching to the choir or arguing with the inconvincible.

  “You were in Vietnam,” I say.

  “I was. Phoenix Project. Air America. Blackest of black ops. Over the border, Cambodia, Laos. I drink because of it. I’m angry because of it. I killed people, and I don’t say they were innocent—no one is innocent in this fallen paradise. I always told Sanders that killing and war are man’s most horrible things, the most deadliest things. I will admit that it takes a lot of courage to kill like I have killed, and I made that clear to Sanders, but now here he is, hobnobbing with the Illuminatos.”

  “Illuminati?”

  “Illuminatos, more than one. Hispanics influence nowadays. You know, Davos?”

  “I see what you mean. So, you’re from the South?”

  “Rolling hills, bootlegging country, hollows. I haven’t set my eyes on the boy in years, he doesn’t visit much, but I tried to teach him as best I could. We’re right near Chickamauga, and every weekend I would take Sanders out and let him loose, to teach him what it means to be afraid for your life, dress him in camo from the Army/Navy, face paint, and we’d play the special ops kind of hide-and-seek. He teethed on the KA-BAR. I think I failed, though. Look at him now.”

  I’m no Jungian, but the thought does occur to me that Sanders’s loving embrace of Apple Pie and all that starts to make more sense after meeting his father and getting a glimpse of the kind of twisted upbringing in the American dream he was apparently subjected to. Rebelling in reverse—growing up under the PTSD fringe, when he was bombarded with all sorts of ideas about the bullshittingness of our national myths, it makes sense that he’d want to immerse himself in national myths, and in fact, start to believe in the exact opposite of what his father told him.

  I’m sort of looking for a way out of this conversation when I see A.E. Peoria walk in, head straight to the bar, and say loudly, “No shots? Wine only?” And as Papa Berman keeps a running commentary on the insidious nature of his son’s current endeavors—The Greatest War on Earth is published by Simon & Schuster, SS, the name of the elite Nazi unit, and Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS, and “CBS” backward is “SBC,” and “SBC,” in Greek letters, is the exact same sequence of letters engraved on the inside brass door knocker at the secret society, you guessed it, Skull and Bones, on the Yale campus in
New Haven, the location of an underreported 1913 meeting where J.P. Morgan and some Jewish guy devised the illegal income tax—A.E. Peoria breaches etiquette by bumping up next to Tom Brokaw and Henry Kissinger, who is short, no comment, and they are talking to Sanders Berman and Tabby Doling, and even from thirteen feet away I can hear what he’s saying—“Chad . . . Penthouse letters . . . where do you think I should go next?”

  For five minutes Peoria stands there, before abruptly twirling around and leaving from where he came, and I hear Sanders Berman say, semi-uncomfortably, “That’s a magazine foreign correspondent for you,” and they all laugh at Peoria’s expense.

  By this time, I’m swept back toward Gary, and I ask him, “Did you see Peoria?”

  “That was ugly,” Gary says.

  “Yeah, I think he was pretty drunk,” I say.

  “Hastings, you have ambitions to be a foreign correspondent, right? Just remember, really, do you want to end up like Peoria? I mean, he’s a cool guy and all, don’t get me wrong—but he doesn’t have a home or a family or anything, and there’ll come a time when you’ll have to ask yourself, do you want to end up like that?”

  10.

  After the Party

  Magazine journalist A.E. Peoria is in a career crisis. The crisis of what to do next. Thirty-four, thirty-four, thirty-four.

  A.E. Peoria likes to say that he doesn’t trust anyone who loves high school, and he especially doesn’t trust anyone who loves college. He likes to say that the twenties are a time in life when things are uncertain and still painfully anxious, the twenties are rough, and he is suspicious of anyone who enjoys their twenties too much. He likes to repeat that it’s the thirties, the fourth decade in life, when you really get that perspective and finally get that comfort of who you are. The thirties are when you begin to understand limitations in life, a time when the things that stressed you out so much in your twenties don’t seem as important anymore. This is what he likes to say when he is invited to speak to young people at colleges and high schools: that by the time you reach thirty-two-ish, the childish dreams of childhood, the teenage illusions, and the stresses of the overreach of your twenties fall into their appropriate place in the memory bank.

  Then why, he wonders, am I in a career crisis yet again?

  He thinks it’s the inverse proportional response to his CDD. It is the silent CDD. He is always compulsively disclosing and dissecting in his mind to himself. He has no control over it. He doesn’t quite have the science to back it up, but it is this theory of his.

  He cannot stop thinking about his career. What is career? There is no time to search for a meaning, because meaning cannot be found until the question of career is put to rest. Why is career always in crisis? It is a looping crisis. It is the crisis of reaching goals. The crisis of setting goals then reaching goals then setting more goals and reaching more goals. The crisis of five-year plans and ten-year plans and other evil baby boomer inventions. He cannot escape this vicious looping circle of career thinking. It is never far away from his mind. It’s always there, career, he’s always thinking about it, analyzing, plotting, planning, worrying, fretting.

  He likes to think of himself as Icarus, probably because that’s the only Greek myth he can remember accurately without the aid of a search engine. The only Greek myth that, after reading Sophocles and Euripides and all the other one-named Greek pederasts in school, he can remember and draw a detailed meaning from that he can relate to life today.

  Icarus flies too close to the sun after his father gives him wax wings, and then the wings melt and Icarus falls into the ocean, maybe the Mediterranean, so it’s not that bad, beats the North Atlantic, but he falls into the ocean and he drowns. A.E. Peoria likes to think of that myth and say to himself, or others if he’s on drugs: Fuck you, father. Fuck you, Icarus. I am Kid Icarus, like in that Nintendo game from 1987, leaping from free-floating graphic structure to free-floating graphic structure. I fly too close to the sun and crash into the goddamn ocean! But I know how to swim, I know how to swim, I know how to swim to shore, and when I’m on the beach, I look at the sun again. The sun as it is drying the saltwater from my skin. I yell out to the sky, “Fuck you, Sun! I’ll be back! With a new set of wings, just you wait, you shining, spotty-flaring, cancer-causing fuck.”

  Maybe it is New York.

  A.E. Peoria likes to think maybe it isn’t him, maybe it’s this place, this city. New York, Peoria knows from reading Evelyn Waugh, is a city where “there is neurosis in the air which its inhabitants mistake for energy.”

  Couldn’t say it better myself, A.E. Peoria thinks, could not say it better myself.

  The city of New York is always causing this career crisis. An insidious conspiracy to remind him on every block about the state of his career.

  What other reason for glass skyscrapers, glass windows everywhere, all this glass that was erected and positioned so that you cannot escape your own reflection—he is always getting himself bounced back at him in glass, as if whoever designed these glass buildings likes to keep putting him in his place. Look at what you’re wearing.

  The word career, A.E. Peoria knows, because he looks it up, comes from the Latin carrus, or “wagon,” via the French carrière, or “road.” A person’s progress and general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as in some profession or undertaking. Success in a profession, occupation, etc. A course, especially a swift one. Speed, especially full speed. A verb meaning “to run” or “to move rapidly along.” Careering, rush. “My hasting days fly on with full career”—John Milton. A third definition, career, a racecourse, the ground run over. Fourth, falconry, the flight of the hawk. “Careering gaily over the curling waves”—Washington Irving. Archaic: to charge ahead at full speed.

  Rushing ahead at full speed on his life’s vocation, in control, out of control, a little of both.

  Up until when—recently?—he had viewed the path of career unimaginatively, like some kind of long hallway in a poorly designed international airport, where the architects seemed to have gotten great pleasure making sure that every connecting flight was mathematically at the farthest point away from any other point in the terminal. A long hallway, low music, beeping golf carts with oxygen tanks. As if the architects had taken to heart Zeno’s paradox of never being able to cross a room and so designed an infinitely divisible hallway between points A and B at each transit underpass.

  In his imaginary career-fantasy metaphor, there are those who are curiously choosing to walk the hallway, those who are standing to the right on the people mover, and those who are walking on the left of the conveyor belt, rushing along. That third lane was the lane he thought—from the age of twenty-eight to thirty-four—he was finally on. At some point he had jumped over the hand railing where he’d been walking, paused for a brief moment, and then he’d stepped on the fastest track, a track that he had just been watching other people use, as if it had been protected by a thick plastic barrier. And he was cruising along on this fast track, thinking, I did it, I am finally on the fast track, I’m going to catch my flight—but until when—recently?—that feeling changed.

  A.E. Peoria had always thought of himself as lucky, and this luck, he felt, made him somewhat superior to other people his age. It was not the luck of good things happening to him, but the luck that he could always say, “I know what I want to do with my life. I’m lucky.”

  A.E. Peoria never questioned that he wanted to be a magazine journalist. Had always known it. Even when it was rough during his twenties, when all of his wandering and drifting college classmates were anguishing in this kind of existential variety of what to do. I just don’t know what I want to do, his friends would tell him, and that was something he could sympathize with sort of, but not completely. Because if the conversation continued, he would always say, “I’m lucky, I’ve always known what I wanted to do,” and they would respond, “Yes, you are lucky. I wish I always k
new what I wanted to do.”

  Peoria, though, was getting worried that maybe he wasn’t lucky anymore. Maybe he’d made a grave mistake by becoming a magazine journalist. Maybe it wasn’t what he’d always wanted to do.

  So, in his office—though the career crisis wasn’t limited to his time in the office; how he wished it was limited to his office and not his bedroom, his bed, his showers, his jogging, his dinners with his girlfriend, his phone conversations, his commute, how he wished it was just limited to his office!—he had started for the first time to think about other careers.

  He looked on the CIA website. He looked at Harvard Law School. He looked at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He looked at NASA. He looked at MCATs and LSATs and GREs and the Foreign Service Exam. Film school. He looked at job openings with small newspapers in places like Malone, New York, and Yaak, Montana. He looked at business school—Stern, Wharton, Stanford. He looked at financial aid documents. He looked at everything, and he fretted about everything. He looked at doctoral programs and master’s programs and technical institutes in TV/VCR repair and forensic criminology. Dental school. He looked at intensive language programs for Urdu and Arabic and Russian and Spanish. He looked at teaching English in Katmandu and microfinance initiatives in Ghana. Those professions seemed so much simpler—doctor, lawyer, astronaut, accountant, linguist—professions where the path to success was clear. Why had he stupidly chosen to be a magazine journalist—now, that was a career with pressure! That was a career with stress, with uncertainty. How much simpler life would be if he were a brain surgeon or a physicist or designed helicopters for a defense contractor—a simple, stable career path with a well-defined destination, so much easier than this constant and vicious battle he was in with himself over this New York magazine media world he lived in. Those were careers with real skills, real sellable skills. What skills did he have? Diagnose what? Consult on what? Fix what? No, he could gather information half decently and present that information half decently, but it was always other people’s information, others’ doings, always the observer—to make a career out of observing other careers, what did that say of him?