The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  The facts come to his head: Most deaths are from massive trauma and blood loss. With no bandages, he needs something else, anything. Perhaps his shirt. Okay, my shirt. He undoes his helmet, and unvelcros his body armor, slips off the North Face parka he’s been wearing, and then the sixth slide pops into his head—don’t let your patient lose consciousness.

  “Hey, hey, Salvador, are you awake? Stay with me, man, stay with me.”

  “I’m with you, am I okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. You’re bleeding and a little fucked-up, but you’re okay, sure.”

  “What do you mean, I’m ‘a little fucked-up’?”

  Fuck. Peoria wishes there had been a seventh or an eighth slide that told him, When patients ask for their condition, lie. Tell them they are fine. Perhaps they figured that was common sense, and therefore unnecessary to teach, but if there was one thing Peoria had been told over and over again, it was that he lacked common sense.

  “You’re fine, you’re fine. There’s no bleeding. There is bleeding, but it’s not bad. I think I’ve seen worse. I haven’t, but I’ve seen worse on TV. Me, personally, I haven’t seen worse. I’m taking my shirt off. It’s clean, and I don’t have any other bandages. It’s not clean, actually, I sweated like a bitch today. But once I get my shirt off and on you, I’m going to press it against your crotch and . . .”

  “My crotch? My crotch? Is it gone?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked. I’m not a doctor, so I better leave it for them to check that. I’m just going to stop the bleeding. It’s slide number four, you know. I learned all that from my first-aid class at the security training course in Virginia. That was a good time. There’s a girl in the class who was really hot, you know. Fuck, I should really email her.”

  Peoria takes off his undershirt, and with both hands, presses it up against Salvador’s crotch. He holds it there with both hands. He has to keep him awake. He has to talk to him. Peoria starts to talk.

  “I’m thirty-four years old, and what do I really have to show for it, you know? I have a bunch of magazine articles to my name. I’ve been on TV a few times. I guess I’ve had some cool experiences, the kind no one else has had, or very few, but when you think about it, so what? So what that I’ve done things other people haven’t. What does that really mean in the end? I haven’t been able to write a bestseller, you know, and that’s depressing, because I see so much that gets published that really is shit, and I’m like, Fuck, I could write shit like that. Really . . . I can’t really believe this is fucking happening to me, you know? Here, you hold on to the T-shirt, just hold it tight against you.”

  Peoria searches his pockets. He freezes for a second—is his wallet there? Did I lose my fucking wallet? And then he goes anxiously through a checklist, out of instinct. Wallet, keys, gum, cigarettes. He checks his pockets to make sure of all his possessions. Wallet, keys, gum, cigarettes. Laptop, the laptop is gone. Recorder and notepad, okay. He takes out his wallet and finds a picture—six orgasms he had given this girl in one night—and he stares hard at the picture and asks himself, Is this it, is this her? It depresses him to think he could die in the desert with some mediocre girl as his love, a third-tier girl. He’d dated in New York for years, and he’d gone from relationship to relationship, some lasting six months, a couple lasting a year or more, and he didn’t much see his family, and he didn’t really have anything. He had his career, and that was about it; he’d spent the last ten years on his career, in the office, at work, all the time, and here he was going to die at work, on the job, for his career. Not even a country. To die for a 401(k) and health insurance and a vague idea of success. He could feel the spleen, a fucking mediocre career too, not like his bosses—not like fucking Nishant Patel and Sanders Berman—some of his bosses were legitimate media superstars. He remembers once, when he was on an assignment in Richmond, Virginia, doing a profile of a NASCAR driver, and he was sitting in the airport and watching CNN when Nishant Patel was being fawned over by a fake-blonde anchor with nice tits, who was just pretty enough and had something a little off-kilter about her mouth, which made her unique enough to be on TV. He realized in Richmond that he had so far to go, and wondered if he’d ever even get there. Richmond itself, a third-tier city, and he was shocked when he saw people in Richmond go to work—as a New Yorker, he had forgotten there were other cities put there on Earth to live in, and he saw a guy with a suit and tie head to a glass skyscraper and realized there were other lives he could lead. It didn’t have to be in the Big Apple, Gotham, formerly New Amsterdam. Of course he didn’t do anything about it; he did not make any big career change or life choices. He went back to New York on the 727, back to the office, back to the dimpled plastic sheets hanging over his head, shining that hard yellow light, convincing himself he loved his job. Who could ask for a better job? His investment banker and lawyer friends all hated their jobs. (Actually, does he really know any investment banker friends, or is he just choosing that profession as an East Coast resident chooses the town of Boise, Idaho, or his namesake, Peoria, Illinois, to score an easy point about the cultural backwardness of certain states?) I get paid to have new experiences, to do things no one else has done, and I get to do it for, like, two weeks, or a few hours, and I never have to get stuck with the grind of doing the same thing over and over again. It all became the same thing, it all was a grind, this whole life thing, the steady nasal drip of paychecks and bills and late nights and dinner dates that depressed him.

  Peoria doesn’t know if he has been saying these things out loud or just to himself, and he continues talking to Salvador.

  “What the fuck . . . I think I’m depressed a lot of the time. I was going to show you a picture, but really, it’s not even worth it.”

  It is getting cold. Another factoid from his security training class pops into his mind: People freeze to death in the desert. Despite the popular myths of deserts as sweltering death traps, they are just as likely to transform, once the sun sets, into freezing death traps, with temperatures dropping to near zero Celsius in the middle of the night. And now he doesn’t have his shirt on, though he did put his parka back on. That brings another first-aid fact back to his mind: He needs to keep Salvador’s body temperature up. He moves in closer to him, putting his hands over Salvador’s hands to apply more pressure to the wound.

  “Yes, yes,” Salvador says.

  He has never been in this position before, spooning with a dude whose balls were blown off, but he figures his best bet is to wait. He starts talking again.

  “This is a little awkward, right, but it’s best because we need to keep warm. We really do. I’m not gay. I don’t have a problem with that or anything. I guess you would, because the Army does really have a problem with it, but I don’t. My father’s gay. So is my mother. Pretty fucked-up, right? I never really understood it. Freaked me out. I was twelve and I remember thinking, Does this mean my father wants to fuck me?”

  Peoria goes on talking through the night. The bleeding appears to stop, though he is certain at times that Salvador is going to die.

  14.

  Wednesday, March 19, 2003

  The countdown clock is running on the cable news stations, ticking away in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, synced to President George W. Bush’s final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

  What’s the ultimatum?

  To hand over weapons of mass destruction. No one believes that Saddam is going to do that. Nobody wants him to do it either. It’s too late in the narrative for anyone to back out now.

  Back home after a long day, an exciting day at the office.

  I can’t sleep.

  I don’t want to sleep.

  I have my television set on.

  I have ordered Double Penetration Sluts #4 on the Time Warner Adult Video on Demand. A twenty-four-hour rental. Channel 304.

  From channel 304, I punch in the number for CNN, channel 35
.

  Then I hit the Last button on my remote control, so I can bounce back and forth between my two choices.

  Stop, fast-forward the digital television, rewind, see it again.

  I’m hammering away, touching myself, and it’s onto the next scene. Waiting for the right moment. It used to be easier, but I’ve developed a strong resistance to pornography. As a young teen, the pages of a Penthouse were enough. Then old VHS cassettes, Internet, DVDs, Adult Video on Demand.

  The bar for my porn watching keeps going higher. Rewind again. The man shooting his jizz in the faces of Ying and Yang doesn’t do it tonight. The gaping holes don’t do it. Fast-forward. Maybe the next scene with Gauge will. Gauge is dressed to look like a fourteen-year-old girl. She’s earns her living the hard way—it’s not fair to say just on her back, but with all different parts of her body flattened against floors, walls, designer chairs, soiled mattresses, leather couches, bent and acrobatic, ass pointed to the air, the weight of her body on her neck, knees somehow stretched backward behind her ears. I read on the Internet that she does five scenes a week in a good week.

  I am waiting for what is making me come lately.

  Ass to mouth—shorthand: ATM.

  I watch the man, whose hair could have been styled in 1991 and never been changed, take his penis from her ass and then grab her by the waist to twist her face toward his cock. I wait for the moment when he puts his cock in her mouth, the moment of entry.

  It doesn’t happen. There’s a jump cut.

  I’m pissed. That is no good at all. I need to see the full-body motion, I need to see the uninterrupted movement from ass to mouth because I am savvy enough, my penis is savvy enough, to know that if there is a jump cut, then things could have been done, organs cleaned, wiped off, made more sanitary; my brain is trained to sense these kinds of illusions, to sense when it’s not real enough—when it’s too clean.

  I am disappointed. I should never have trusted Time Warner Cable. They’ve given a nod to some kind of strange decency regulations. Is it a legal thing? Why did they edit it out? Who sets these standards? Who sat around the table, saying gaping assholes okay, assholes to mouth not okay? What does that look like in legal language? Was there a board meeting? “Non-explicit or internal visualizations of sex organs.”

  TWC isn’t going to give me what I want to see, exactly, but I already have been charged $14.95, so I am forced to make do. I am forced to make do with the fact that I will have to settle for representation of ass to mouth. I will have to imagine what happened in the edit myself.

  Fast-forward. Gauge is kneeling and spitting and the man’s hand is on his penis, a point-of-view shot, and he ejaculates in her face. I shoot too.

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  Okay.

  I hit the Last button and jump back to a CNN correspondent with the 1st Armored Division.

  The correspondent has positioned himself on a road to somewhere, and the trucks are rolling by him.

  I reflect. I know I am being somewhat self-conscious. I know I am somehow, in some inexplicable way, being ironic. But I am not being ironic. This is just what life is for me. What else am I going to do when sitting in front of a TV alone? Jerk off. And if my country is going to war, I’m going to watch my country go to war.

  More channels. Anchors shouting about how wonderful the technology is, allowing them to stream live video while they are riding with the troops. Allowing us to see correspondents with satellite phones in Kurdistan, waiting with exiled groups. Allowing us to see inside the Bradleys. The live images of Baghdad getting bombed.

  I’m tired now, so the only fighting I get that first night is a British journalist getting shot at with Americans behind a berm.

  I jerk off three more times.

  I watch the maps of Iraq and the columns of soldiers and I think I’m really missing out on this. I really should be over there. Maybe I’ll go over there sometime. My eyes close, and I wonder how A.E. Peoria is doing.

  15.

  Thursday, March 20, 2003

  Next morning, in the office.

  My computer takes the required few minutes to load up. Iced coffee on the table, eating a croissant. Happy to be back in the office. Happy to be sitting there at the center of things in the newsroom of a major news organization while history shits itself around me.

  Gary is there and he comes up to my desk.

  “Have you heard the news?” Gary whispers.

  “What?”

  “Peoria is missing. The convoy he was with got attacked. They found his phone, and there was blood all around it. They hit Redial and got Dave at the news desk.”

  “No shit, oh my god. Fuck.”

  “Henry has called his parents. I mean, it doesn’t look good.”

  “Fuck, wow, I can’t believe that.”

  A wave of seriousness passes over me. It’s not ironic at all. My friend and colleague A.E. Peoria is presumed dead.

  But he isn’t that good of a friend. I don’t really know him that well.

  I’m excited by the possibility that the war is real and that I have a connection to it. I have an anecdote that I can retell. I do.

  “Did you hear the news? Peoria is missing. Yeah, apparently his convoy was attacked, found his phone in blood. I can’t believe it either . . .”

  16.

  Friday, March 21, 2003

  The sun comes up around five-thirty in the morning. There is an emptiness in the desert, a silence, a chill. It is at this time, though Peoria doesn’t know it, that another convoy reaches the scene of the attack, finds Peoria’s satellite phone and hits Redial.

  Peoria is feeling a new level of all-time discomfort. An ache in the muscles, hugging himself, rubbing as fast as he can, desperate for friction and heat. Hugging himself with the strength he has never hugged another human being with. He feels damp, though he finds this hard to believe. How is he feeling damp when the temperature on the previous day had reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit? A dry heat, a very hot dry heat, but the chill has gotten so bad that it brings a feeling of cold moisture. Eyes half open, thoughts trailing, head on Salvador’s knee, begging for the sun to return to its full power. Rolling over, out of the shadow of the berm he has been hiding behind and into a rectangle of sunlight, sunlight still weak, still not hot enough, the sunlight that’s promise of warmth is still an hour or two or three away.

  Peoria feels he should be more afraid. A dying man by his side, but he is pleasantly surprised that he has reached that point beyond fear. That point that those on shipwrecked lifeboats feel hours before they start to poison themselves with saltwater.

  A.E. Peoria doesn’t care anymore if he lives or dies and he doesn’t care anymore if Salvador lives or dies and there is a relief, a letting go. He feels he has found at the bottom of this berm that Zen place he has had such difficulty finding anywhere else, where fatigue and spent adrenaline and hunger and no cigarettes or caffeine have left him. The second, third, and fourth winds have blown in and blown away, and he isn’t looking for the fifth wind to stand him upright. He’s enjoying this bliss, and he keeps tapping his foot, tapping and tapping and looking up for the sun to start doing its daily life-killing damage on the landscape, tapping and tapping, and he thinks, Maybe this is the first sign of post-traumatic stress disorder, this constant tapping, and then he thinks, Oh boy, my lips are really dry, and he wishes he had his ChapStick, and despite his best efforts, that sixth or seventh wind is creeping up—that nagging for survival and living and action is creeping back into his bloodstream.

  How he wishes he had his fucking ChapStick.

  The Zen is going away. His brain is getting activated, as if by solar power, his brain and neuroses and anxieties are beginning all over again.

  At around seven a.m., Peoria decides to assess the situation—these are the words in his head, “The situation needs assessing.” He asks Sa
lvador if he can walk. Salvador doesn’t answer. Salvador is pale. His light brown skin is lighter. He is in a small dip in the ground in the desert. Peoria hasn’t stood up since diving to the ground nine hours ago. He stands. He can see a long line of American vehicles. Then he understands that it is the noise of engines, that dull rumbling, that must have triggered him to stand, sensing vibrations in the air like a dog.

  He looks down at the Puerto Rican and tells him to stay right there, and Peoria starts to run, waving his arms.

  As he gets closer, he sees there are three men with rifles aimed at him. He puts his hands up.

  “Don’t shoot, I’m an American, I’m an American! I’m with the press!”

  A soldier jogs out to him.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “We were attacked. There’s a guy with me. He’s bleeding bad. Chipotle.”

  The soldier yells back to another soldier, that soldier yells to someone else, the chain of command at work. Peoria points to where Chipotle is lying; he leads a squad to get him and helps as they put Salvador on a stretcher and carry him to what Peoria can now see is a tank. He jogs at Salvador’s side, saying, “You’ll make it, man, you’ll make it.”