The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  His girlfriend, to whom he had given six orgasms, had given him some of her Xanax, and that helped some.

  Thirty-four, and never had a book party!

  So, A.E. Peoria, door to his office closed, window shades clinched, drunk as fuck, pale light from the computer screen zebra-ing his face, is considering a change in careers, drastically, when he sees that another magazine has been delivered to his desk, the middle-highbrow magazine that Henry the EIC once clipped a cartoon from. He flips open to a story called “A Professor in Exile,” and it’s by a guy he’s never heard of before but who seems very serious, and this guy’s byline is Brennan Toddly, it’s fifteen thousand words, very detail-oriented and persuasively reported from the halls of northeastern joint conferences and the cloistered monklike apartments off Ivy League campuses, leather-bound bookshelves, dust, reported with a forcefully humorless I-narrator, laying out in genius fashion the case for war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and predicting that the war will happen, needs to happen, within six months.

  A.E. Peoria forgets about his career crisis and starts to make his own phone calls, all his anxiety relieved because he gets a urinary tract–like tingling that a big career-making story is on the way, something he can really sink his teeth into. He starts to think about the ways he can make sure that when this future war does start, he’s in place to cover it. He sees the fast track again and its name is Brennan Toddly.

  Before he gets too far, he passes out and falls asleep, curled underneath his desk, the book party six floors above him temporarily forgotten.

  11.

  Friday, October 25, 2002

  Ding.

  I get an email, and it shoots me up in my swivel.

  Nishant Patel. No subject.

  come by my office np

  Do I reply? Or do I just go?

  I hit Reply.

  My fingers freeze over the keys.

  Dear Nishant . . .

  What else? How formal do I make it? Or should it be as informal as Nishant Patel’s? Am I at a stage where I can write “ok” and put my own initials: “ok/mmh”? Or do I need to sign off with at least my first name?

  Five minutes pass.

  How deferential do I need to be? I freeze. Does Nishant Patel understand the impact of an email from a boss? To see his name in my inbox, to see it, and to think, How am I going to answer this? Does he realize how much time it takes to compose a response? I want to choose the words perfectly. I am still at a stage where I think people are going to actually read my email somewhat closely, and there’s all sorts of etiquette issues that will probably just disappear in the technological informality of communication that seems to be heading our way. No punctuation, no salutations, no goodbyes, just initials and shorthand and all caps or no caps.

  I come up with:

  Dear Nishant, I will come by now, if that’s okay.

  Sincerely,

  Michael M. Hastings

  I get up from my cubicle. I walk toward his office. The door is closed.

  I stand next to Dorothy’s cubicle for permission from her to go in.

  Dorothy and Patricia are in dueling phone conversations. They aren’t talking to each other. They seem to be in endless negotiations with other people’s assistants. “Dr. Patel will call Mr. Rose back,” says Patricia. “Yes, Dr. Patel called Mr. Rose and now Mr. Rose is calling Dr. Patel back.”

  The unknown figure on the end of Dorothy’s line is acting pushy, and Dorothy is saying, “We very much understand how busy the Ambassador is, and I’m sure you can understand how busy Nishant is, and we appreciate Mr. Holbrooke’s call and we’re sure to find a time later this afternoon or tomorrow?”

  Dorothy hangs up.

  “Patricia, mark down that Nishant has a call to Holbrooke tomorrow,” but Patricia doesn’t hear Dorothy, over the cubicle divider and with that deaf ear. She just knows that Dorothy has commanded her to do something, so she says, “Yes, can you please hold, please hold, yes, is this Mr. Rose’s office, this is Dr. Patel’s office, please hold for a moment,” and she covers up the mouthpiece with her hand and calls over to Dorothy, “What, Dorothy? What, Dorothy?” and Dorothy snaps, “Tomorrow, one-thirty, a call with Holbrooke’s office,” and Dorothy looks up at me.

  “Yes, Mike?”

  Dorothy, though aging, was once a real knockout, single but with former lovers who were diplomats and war correspondents, and weekend getaways with captains of industry and nights in the late sixties and early seventies in the West Village. She lives for the magazine now, and she is the gatekeeper, both physical and electronic, to Nishant Patel, the magazine’s number-one or -two most valuable commodity, depending on who you ask. I’m lucky because Dorothy likes me, because if Dorothy doesn’t like you, you have to wait in line.

  “Hi, Dorothy, Nishant—I mean, Dr. or Mr. Patel asked me to come by.”

  Dorothy smiles, and nods.

  “One second.”

  Dorothy stands up and says to Patricia, teaching her, “Patricia, we know the rule. If you have ‘former’ in your title, then we return the phone call in twenty-four hours. If you are current, then we return the phone call in six hours or less.”

  “What about Mr. Rose?” says Patricia.

  “For TV, one hour or less,” says Dorothy. “Go ahead and knock, Mike.”

  I knock on the closed door, and I hear the slightly accented British lilt of Dr. Nishant Patel, and he says, “Come in,” and as I walk in, he’s on the phone. He points to a seat in front of his desk.

  I sit down.

  Nishant Patel is in a corner office. There are hundreds of books, mostly his books, and they are all in different languages. German language, French language, Portuguese language. Spanish. Dutch. Italian. Indonesian. The books line the shelves and are neatly stacked on every free flat surface, tables, coffee tables. There are two couches and three chairs and a ledge on the window to sit, if he’s having a meeting with everyone in his office.

  Nishant Patel’s legs are crossed, and he leans back in his Executive 3000 black swivel chair, perfectly tailored tan pants riding up to mid-ankle to reveal lightly patterned argyle socks, probably from Paul Smith, which are a perfect contrast to his brown Gucci loafers, going up to his thin waist and off–powder blue Ermenegildo Zegna dress shirt, knotted green silk cuff links from Bergdorf Goodman, silk Brooks Brothers–looking tie, though probably not Brooks Brothers, probably something a few steps above that, like Thomas Pink, hair cut and effortlessly styled every two weeks by the Grooming Lounge.

  He’s turned at about forty-five degrees to my right, his left, tilted a precise sixty-seven degrees backward, talking on the phone.

  “. . . Yes, it was an interesting meeting. . . . The undersecretary invited us there—Kaplan, Friedman, Haas, Brennan Toddly, a number of others from the Council on Foreign Relations. Oh, he wanted to get our opinions, our ideas. No, it was all very off-the-record. . . . We’re not allowed to say anything or mention it in our columns. . . . No, Berman wasn’t invited. . . . To convince us, and it was quite, quite convincing. I have to go. I’ll be taping the show tonight, but I should be home after dinner.”

  Patel gently hangs up the phone and turns toward me.

  “Hastings, thank you for coming. I need you to do research for my column this week. Have you seen this story?”

  He tosses a copy of the middle-highbrow magazine on his desk, folded up to a story by a man named Brennan Toddly.

  “Have you read this?”

  I haven’t read it, but nod yes, because I have learned that this magazine is the only one that the editors at The Magazine read on a regular basis—certainly, they never actually read our magazine, unless it is to see who got in the magazine that week and who didn’t.

  “He quotes an Iraqi man in there, and he cites Kenneth Pollack’s book The Threatening Storm. Call Pollack and the Iraqi man, and have them say basically what t
hey say in that story.”

  “Sure, Nishant, no problem.”

  “My column this week, to give you an idea, is going to go further than I had in my last cover story. I left my argument open—the case for war? Now I am going to answer the question. I will be making the argument primarily for national security reasons, but also, humanitarian reasons. We cannot forget about the Iraqi people, et cetera. You follow this stuff, don’t you?”

  “Of course, of course,” I say.

  “I’ll be writing tomorrow afternoon, get it to me before then.”

  “Okay, Nishant, no problem.”

  And he doesn’t say “Dismissed,” but he does re-angle his chair, forty-five degrees back to the left, and hits the intercom button and tells Dorothy to get him the host of the TV show he’s going to be a guest on tonight.

  Taking the copy of Brennan Toddly’s article with me, I go back to my desk, nervous and excited—getting to do research for Nishant Patel.

  This is the big time.

  12.

  Two Hours Later

  Before I look at the Brennan Toddly story, I want to find out who Brennan Toddly is. There is a Wikipedia entry for him, a single paragraph:

  An author of three books, two nonfiction, one fiction.

  1989: A Peaceful Village—an account of a Peace Corps building effort in Uganda. (Out of print.)

  1996: The Typewriter Artist—a novel. The main character is a writer who lives in New York. He is a mild depressive and everyone ignores his work. (Out of print.)

  1999: Awash in Red—a personal journey of self-discovery, as the author struggles with whether or not to remain a socialist.

  I find out that Brennan Toddly, according to his bio, spent two years at The Magazine in the mid-nineties, has been the recipient of a number of government grants, and seems to have landed at his new magazine just this year. An impact hire, to be sure.

  I power-read the story. It is impressively full of nuance. A representative paragraph:

  After the panel discussion, I made my way backstage, where I encountered Kanan Makiya. I introduced myself to Makiya. He invited me to his home for tea. We walked across the campus yard, where a new class of coeds had just arrived, playing Frisbee and hacky sack. Easy, carefree thoughts. The opposite of what Makiya was thinking. “This is what Iraq was like when I was a child, before I had to leave,” he told me. “You Americans are finally paying attention. You must finally take action.” Three hours later, I had left his office, a bladder full of sweet chai, convinced. But the arguments with myself would continue.

  I call the university where Makiya is living out his exile and request an interview for a Nishant Patel column.

  For Kenneth Pollack, I call his publisher and ask for a copy of his book The Threatening Storm to be sent over. It is getting so much attention, thanks to the Brennan Toddly story, that the publisher tells me they are doing a rush second printing of it. But he says they’ll messenger me a copy and get Pollack to phone me later this afternoon.

  Now I wait.

  A blur of a human being passes by my cubicle, high-pitched voice trailing.

  “Sanders, Sanders, Sanders.”

  I jump up in my seat to see the human comet. I recognize the man calling Sanders. It is Matt Healy, Chief Investigative Correspondent, based in DC.

  Healy broke The Magazine’s (and the country’s) biggest story in the nineties, the Pentagon Paper of Blow Jobs, that whole business with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Without Healy, the nation might never have known the details of things like cigar vaginal penetration. Then where would we be? Well, the Internet would have solved that problem within a few years anyway.

  Yes, there is no doubt in the mind of anyone at the magazine that Healy is the closest thing the magazine has to its own Woodward and Bernstein, rolled into one. A regular Neil Sheehan—revealing the past decade’s version of Watergate, but easier for most to imagine, as it just involved a slightly chubby chick, infidelity, and a hard-on. The evolution of American journalism: three decades coming full circle, a source with the name Deep Throat leaking information about the chief executive’s illegal behavior to investigating the actual mechanics of deep-throating a chief executive. There’s no need to even point out that Healy himself isn’t exactly a model citizen of marital behavior—the “ass gape cocksucker” email about Milius, for instance, a couple of divorces, smoking crack, rumored affairs, the whole deal—but of course, Healy never had the chance to lie about it under oath, in a grand jury, so ethically speaking, the magazine is in the clear from charges of hypocrisy.

  Healy is pigeonholing Sanders Berman, right outside the men’s room. A real bulldog type. Three spiral notebooks on his person. Two flopping out of his back pockets, one in his hand.

  “We should make it a cover, a cover,” he yells. “Three sources—CIA, DOD, the VP’s shop—are all saying and confirming it. They are saying the links are there, they are saying there are links. Al Qaeda in Baghdad!”

  Healy rushes off down the hall, his points made.

  Sanders Berman comes wandering away from the men’s room, as if in a daze, like he’s just been hit by a dust storm.

  I take the chance.

  “Hi, Sanders, how’s everything?”

  He stops.

  “Oh, hi—Walters, is it? Everything is good.”

  “Hastings, yeah, that’s great, that’s great. Yeah, I’m just researching Nishant’s column for the week.”

  “What’s he writing on?”

  “The case for war, really coming down for it.”

  “He is? Darnit, that’s what I was going to write this week.”

  I start nodding.

  “I just had dinner with Ken Pollack last night. I was going to quote him, too.”

  Sanders Berman touches his bow tie. He puts his elbows up on my cubicle, a gesture of familiarity. He sees that I have the Brennan Toddly article on my desk.

  “Don’t tell me he’s going to use that Iraqi gentleman’s argument . . .”

  “Yep, I have a call in to his office.”

  He puts his knuckle under his chin, in thought.

  Am I going to appear too precocious? Am I about to overstep my bounds? I mean, who am I to suggest any ideas? I’m a twenty-two-year-old former intern, a researcher and an occasional fact-checker.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll come up with something to say,” I say. “Like, no one has made any American historical arguments for the war yet.”

  He looks at me, eyebrows up, as if he’s considering humoring my suggestion.

  “Hmm. And Hastings, if you had a column, that’s what you’d say?”

  “Uh, well, I mean, President James Polk has some good thoughts on these kinds of issues.”

  Sanders Berman smiles and starts to walk away. I think he’s regretting even talking to me. He has his head down and I hope he’s not regretting it, but that is the sinking suspicion I get. If I were a female intern, at least his ego could have received some flattery, but “There’s never a reason to talk to a young male intern” is probably what he’s thinking. I should have kept silent, mouth shut.

  No time to worry or beat myself up over it.

  The phone rings.

  It’s Kanan Makiya.

  “Hi, uh, thanks for calling. Yeah, so, like you said in Brennan Toddly’s piece—”

  “Mr. Toddly took me out of context.”

  “No doubt, um, really, hunh.”

  “Have you read my book?”

  “Um, no, it’s on my list.”

  “Hmmm.”

  We go back and forth a few more times, until, twenty minutes later, he says more or less what he said in the Brennan Toddly story. I thank him and hang up.

  My phone rings again.

  Kenneth Pollack is on the line.

  “Have you read my book?” he asks befor
e we begin.

  “Um, no, sorry. It’s on my list, though.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “But I did see what Brennan Toddly wrote about it, and it sounds like a really great book.”

  “Yes, thanks, but that was taken out of context.”

  “Right, sure, no doubt.”

  “I mean, how do you summarize a five-hundred-and-three-page book in a single page?”

  “Very carefully?”

  “You lose the caveats.”

  Pollack starts in on his theory and doesn’t let up for a good twenty-three minutes. Nuclear programs. Weapons of mass destruction. Biological, chemical. UN reports, broken resolutions, aluminum tubes, uranium enrichment, Israel’s reactor strike in 1983. Secret mobile weapons labs. I’m feeling good about it, because it’s the stuff that Nishant Patel wanted him to say, and all I have to do is keep typing what he’s saying.

  I spend the next three hours correcting typos and condensing my conversations with Kanan and Ken into a single page, taking the best quotes and putting them up top.

  I grab a quick dinner and come back to my desk after eating. Agonizing over each sentence. This is the first time I’ve been asked to do research, and I don’t want to fuck it up.

  While I’m proofreading and figuring out the best way to write it up in an email to Nishant, another email appears.

  From: Sanders Berman

  Subject: James Polk

  Mike, per our conversation, could you send me the Polk citations you were talking about?

  Regards,

  SB

  This really, really is the big time now.

  INTERLUDE

  I’M VERY SORRY

  I think it’s about time for me to apologize to all of my colleagues.

  I’m sorry.

  There, that’s out of the way.

  I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m a nice guy, at heart, and I have to say it weighs on me whether or not to write about everything that happened at The Magazine.