The footage pixelated as the photog raced across the street. Baseman hated how easily he could hear himself instructing editors to leave this part in for its gritty authenticity. The footage stabilized on a washed-out Chicago housing development courtyard: cherry clapboard gone rosé, plastic deck chairs worn to dirty grays, grass so brittle it was off-white. More vibrant colors stood out: a sparkly birthday banner, half-opened presents, conical birthday hats. Most of the hats were rolling across sidewalk pavement, but a few, grotesquely, remained strapped to the heads of screaming former celebrants.
The first time this room of newspeople saw the full panoply of bodies and blood, there had been actual cheers. This stuff was gold. Ross Quincey’s bank account was going to have a good day, South-Side Chicago gang activity, as a rule, did not merit news coverage. It was what WWN news director Nick Unitas dubbed Bad vs, Badder—a conflict that did not inspire viewer engagement. This footage, though, transcended Bad vs. Badder by featuring the ratings trifecta of endangered children, sobbing women, and desperate heroics.
By now, Baseman knew the precise order in which the characters, dead or alive, appeared on camera. One: a potbellied man spread-eagled between paint-chipped picnic tables. Two: a young woman hyperventilating, lying on her side next to an overturned grill. Three: two birthday-hatted children, possibly twins, crouched under a picnic table, yowling through tears, Four: a matronly woman standing in the center of the courtyard, hands arranged as if holding an invisible basketball, screaming over and over. Five: an adolescent boy with a bloody face reaching through a fence toward the photog. Six: a young man in a powder-blue uniform rushing from one downed person to the next, checking for vitals, shouting for them to respond. Everyone was Black.
So was Nathan Baseman last time he checked, but upon first viewing, he reached the same conclusion as everyone else. Standard retaliatory drive-by, no question. That blood smear on the sidewalk might not even be fresh; it could be a stain left unscrubbed from a previous shooting. Disgusting, but some of these residents had become apathetic to violence.
By the third viewing, those assumptions mortified Baseman. He’d grown apathetic, unable to view the world as anything but a casting pool of stereotypes—some vilified, some exalted, all bullshit—to be arranged in news blocks for the highest possible emotional manipulation.
Ross Quincey had himself a winner even before the clip’s second-half twist. The photog was in the courtyard, panning his camera instead of offering assistance, when the big-bellied man spread-eagled on the grass got to his feet. The man’s surprise survival itself did not shock WWN execs. It was the manner in which he stood up—casually, as if he’d knelt to pick up a quarter.
Another surprise: the man was free of visible gunshots. Instead, it looked like he’d been bitten—there was a tooth-mark crescent on his forearm. When the man looked directly into the camera, everyone in the conference room recoiled. His eyes had gone white; in the courtyard’s sodium lights, they looked like flat, orange coins.
The man’s attention was swiftly drawn by the screaming woman. He moved toward her like a dog to food and, in seconds, had her by her dress and hair. She did not fight back, She only screamed until he took a bite out of her throat. The scream cut off. Sonically, it was a relief. Blood jetted and the woman fell to her knees; the man stood by, indifferent, chewing and swallowing, In the two minutes that followed, the bloody-faced boy dislodged himself from the fence and ripped a ribbon of flesh from the polo-shirted young man’s arm before going after the children under the picnic table.
Even on a third viewing, people gasped and shielded their eyes. These were news pros as hardened as Baseman. They lectured over editors’ shoulders on how to trim Al Qaeda beheading videos prior to broadcast. They sifted through raw feeds of suicide-bomb sites, picking out the TV-ready smoke and bandages from the less palatable loose limbs, spilled skulls, and dead babies. They surveyed aftermath footage of catastrophic natural disasters, assessing piles of recovered corpses before hopping off to business lunches.
The Quincey tape was upsetting in a new way. The footage featured no jihadists, no natural disasters, no villain to assign blame. Victims in minute one became assailants in minute three. It was plainly, profoundly wrong. A chilly, flu-like sensation rippled from body to body, and Baseman worried his colleagues might misidentify it as that good ol’ “nose for news” tingle. He believed the fever might be radiating from a knot of nerves inside each of their brains, embedded there by God or evolution—take your pick—so the human race might be alerted when their extinction was in the offing.
Baseman, goddamn it all, had felt it last night. Why hadn’t he done something? He’d been kicked back with a bottle of whiskey in front of the diverting white-people silliness of Turner Classic Movies, but he’d slapped himself sober and hauled his ass to work at crazier hours before. Hell, he lived for that shit, and nightside editors knew it. Getting on the horn and talking out a story was a welcome respite from the invading shadows of his lonely, groaning home.
A text from night producer Akira Broderick had kicked it off. Multiple affiliates, she texted, were reporting spikes in scanner activity. Orchestras of 911 calls, armadas of ambulances. Baseman did not have to pose the possibility of coordinated terrorist attack; it was the first place a newsperson’s brain went. But the telltale signs were missing, The locations had no symbolic value. There was no chatter about suspects. There were no explosions.
Bad drug? Baseman texted. Wake up our toxicologist. Akira texted back a thumbs-up. Baseman opened his laptop, the final indication he’d given up so-called relaxation, and sifted Twitter for trends. He could click Follow on as many celebrities, musicians, and sports accounts as he fancied; none of it would alter the fact that Twitter had come to replace his beloved old police scanner, which he used to keep at a soft burble all night until his wife, Sherry—his ex-wife, Sherry—had smashed it to pieces with a hammer.
He found no hashtags of note, besides one suggesting that a scandal was about to break about actor Ben Hines. An hour later, Akira texted again: False alarm? DOAs being reversed. Baseman: shrug emoji. Akira: Back to MPWW. Baseman chuckled. What station didn’t default to the ratings mainstay of Missing Pretty White Women? He snapped shut his laptop and made himself return to the black-and-white morals of Hollywood oldies. His first instinct must have been correct: premature death diagnoses were a hallmark of a new drug’s ODs.
He had gone to sleep certain of that.
Quincey’s footage ended by freezing the final frame. The photog had been whirling away from the scene, presumably to run to his car. The image was a smudge of earth tones: yellow windows, green picnic tables, beige grass, brown skin, red blood, Those skilled at finding shapes in digital murks could make out reaching arms and white eyes. This time, however, Baseman noticed another figure standing at the edge of the frame, his arms crossed, his indifference to the carnage making him the villain the video so sorely needed.
It took the blinking red dot of the speakerphone mirroring off the TV to make Nathan Baseman realize that the “villain” he saw was a reflection, and that the villain was him.
Fringe Jabberwocky
“Why is Martin Scorsese Jr. still on hold? Buy the tape already!”
Despite slanderous on-air wisecracks, online campaigns guilting advertisers into dropping support, abusive tirades to staff, and rumors of harassment hush money, Rochelle Glass’s command of the cranky, I’m-only-saying-what-we’re-all-thinking blurt remained effective. The whole room, allies and enemies of Glass alike, laughed, and each person’s ghost twin in the TV screen took swills from coffee and bites from cheese danishes. Glass was being her normal asshole self; thus, everything else in the world must be normal too.
“Look at us,” Glass continued. “We’re like my daughters and their princess movies. We can’t stop watching this thing.”
“This thing.” Nick Unitas sighed and adjusted his thick glasses. He was bald and built like a linebacker, always grimacing like his cl
othing pinched him. “What is this thing? Anyone?”
Rare was the chance to impress the news director in such a setting, and everyone jumped to capitalize on it. People reverted to their worst and truest selves. Taller people blocked shorter people, Years of sensitivity training evaporated. Cuss words were used to gain a toehold in the clamor.
“Few hours ago, I might have said towel heads,” someone said, “Acting under orders from some despot. Why are you giving me that look? I said a few hours ago.”
“Whoever’s pushing the cult theory’s a dumb cunt,” said a second person. “The assailants don’t fit the profile, and it’s too widespread.”
“We’ve got a Dr, Grimes, claims he’s from the CDC, ready to finger someone’s ass to get on the air,” said a third person, “But I think he’s a crank. This thing can’t be airborne. It hits Guy A but not Guy B?”
“It isn’t this, it isn’t that,” Unitas growled. “Then how the fuck do we frame it?”
Even where there was no spotlight, Glass knew how to steal it.
“Since when do we need to frame murder?” she asked. “That’s the beauty of murders. There’s no opposite viewpoint. We all agree murder is bad, yes? We show it, say just how bad it is, everyone agrees, and everyone wins.”
“Not everyone.” Baseman heard the words hum through his sternum. It was a bracing sensation, even as it guilted him for not making his stand last night. He should have followed his gut, sped to WWN HQ, and clung to the story like a tick so there would be no fighting over who owned it. “We dish out for this clip, we’ll want our money’s worth, right? We’ll run this thing 24–7. And we might just cause a race war.”
“The apocryphal race war.” Glass sighed, “We all keep looking for this long-promised event of Mr, Baseman’s.”
Nothing enervated Baseman more than direct address with Glass. He turned to Unitas.
“Let’s lay out the cards. Couple hours ago, there were already people on Twitter swearing up and down this was a race thing. Conspiracy theories, wild shit you can’t even follow. All with the same conclusion, though. Load your guns and gather up the dark skins.”
“That’s fringe jabberwocky, and you know it,” Glass said.
“It’s fringe now, yeah.”
“I thought for liberals like you it was freedom of information or die.”
The room stared like Turner Classic Movies townsfolk watching the bowlegged pacing of Wild West duelists. Baseman had no choice but to face Glass. If the public held one big misconception about cable news networks, it was that the personalities appearing on them represented a united front. Each host was in direct competition with other hosts for top interviews and choicest scoops, with each producer locked in undercard bouts, Rochelle Glass usually won. She was WWN’s marquee name, the host—more accurately, the star—of a culture-shifting eight o’clock opinion show. A caravan of talking heads paid homage every night, laying roses at her feet; she made most look stupid, overpowering their facts with big, booming self-righteousness.
When Glass wanted to drive home a point, like now, she hauled out her Southern drawl. Naturally, she had never lived south of the Mason-Dixon, but she had a knack for knowing what played to Joe and Jill American. The leader these flyover folk craved, Glass espoused, was someone who operated just above their intellectual level and offered boiled-down talking points easy to parrot. It made them feel smart. It made them feel good. What was wrong, Glass liked to ask, with making her viewers feel good?
Case in point: five years ago, midway through a rant on health care handouts, the word mendicant had flown from Glass’s mouth in place of usual favorites like deadbeat, freeloader, and bum. The word was new to most of her viewers, and while responding to feedback the next night, Glass encouraged her viewers not to be mendicants but rather mendicans.
Thus was a catchphrase born (“I’m a MendiCAN!”), and shortly after that, T-shirts, caps, ties, buttons, mugs, mouse pads, pens, doormats, and Christmas ornaments. At the height of the subsequent cash flow, a memo circulated that the word was to be used by WWN staff whenever possible, both on air and off. The memo was ignored, but Baseman had to admit the word had crept into his conversations, if only in ridicule.
Baseman was a foot taller than Glass, and he had no misgivings about exploiting his height with a belittling glare. Glass’s small, blue eyes shone like marbles inside her taut, face-lifted skin, beneath a helmet of shellacked blond hair. From her bemused smirk, Baseman could tell how she, fifteen years his junior, saw him: an obsolete, out-of-shape fussbudget who’d gotten where he was due to affirmative action (a mendicant’s favorite government program) and who ought to do third-place WWN a favor and retire.
Unitas flapped his arms like a duckling.
“There is so much news to cover, people!” he shouted. “Out! Out! Out! Glass, Baseman, VPs, stay put.”
Baseman did not wait for the room to clear to take the sort of small step toward Glass that, in a workplace, was decidedly aggressive.
“Freedom of information, that’s right. That is what liberals care about. Which is why we should decline Mr. Quincey’s kindling here and start gathering every little cell phone video we can—free of charge, I might add—and start running them back to back to back. Pam says they’re coming in from all over.” He jabbed a finger at Atlanta. “That’s the picture of what’s happening out there.”
“Nice idea,” Glass said. “In fact, my staff’s already doing it. They’re writing abstracts of every video we’re being sent—and we’re being sent more than any show on any network, I guarantee it. Here’s what I regret to tell you, Baseman. The, shall we say, demographic details? Practically every video’s got the same thing, Apartment buildings. Ghettos. What can I say? Black people. Black people, Baseman. Those aren’t dirty words, and I’m not afraid to say them! Only difference with this video here”—she indicated the freeze-frame—“is that this doesn’t look like it was shot by an epileptic.”
Baseman fired back. “Where you see Black, I see low income.”
Glass shrugged innocently, “We’re in agreement, friend. Economic distress! That’s why gangs spring up and thrive. That’s my lead, And it’s a lead getting colder by the second. Someone buy this film, get the Face off the desk, and put me on it.”
Chuck Corso, known as “the Face” because of his only notable attribute, was hands down the least capable anchor WWN had on payroll. Baseman had to admit the Face’s helmsmanship added urgency to Glass’s case. But Baseman could think of nothing more hazardous than putting a zealot like Rochelle Glass on the desk right now.
He appealed to Unitas.
“Gangs, Nick? We have Octavia Gloucester’s report from Tampa—not one other station has that—and there is nothing, goddamn nothing, in her report to suggest gangs. Is that really the best we got?”
The change in Unitas’s bearing was slight. The pinch of his forehead loosened; the alignment of his shoulders bowed. It was the look of a trailblazer who’d lost the trail, who was in sudden, dire need of an eagle-eyed adherent to point out the direction to take. Baseman leaned in, but even a second’s hesitation was too much, Younger, hungrier, and wolfish, Glass bit first.
“If you want to take the advice of the man who aired the Jansky shot,” she sighed, “that’s up to you.”
The dozen VPs, who’d been chuffing and nickering to exhibit engagement, found sudden reasons to examine their coffees. Coldness dripped between Baseman’s shoulder blades. It was a cruel comparison; if anything had torn the bandages from his and Sherry’s ailing marriage, it had been fallout from the Jansky shot. Not the shot itself; in the week that followed, in fact, he’d received multiple emails from producers at other networks assuring him they might have made the same call. Baseman deleted them.
It had happened three years ago. Because WWN World Headquarters was in Atlanta, they were the only station to get the live shot. Rumors had roiled for days about the computers confiscated from the reelection office of Savannah congressman Blaise J
ansky. Stolen intel? Illicit affair? Child pornography? The Savannah affiliate had picked up talk of Jansky holing up in his office with a gun, and within the hour, WWN was on the air with a thrilling live feed of Jansky’s face squashed against the window, shouting something to arriving police. Jansky’s gun, visible next to his chest, had Baseman fantasizing over viewer metrics, and when that gun began inching upward and the director began bleating, Suicide, suicide, suicide, Baseman had ordered that they stay with the shot, Jansky would not do it.
Jansky did do it. The gun looked like it caught on something, maybe a sport coat button, before it popped up, the muzzle striking Jansky’s chin. Maybe the surprise of that little impact made Jansky jerk his finger. The director at the controls that day, Lee Sutton, had done his best, slamming the kill switch before bone and brains found surfaces on which to settle, but no one at WWN that day, not to mention the two hundred thousand viewers, could forget the implosion of Jansky’s face or the fountain of purple jelly.
Baseman was given time off for “emotional recuperation.” Somehow, the bullet that killed Jansky became lodged inside him, Sherry, and the shared flesh of their marriage. With his wife tiptoeing around his feelings, he began hating both of them. Four days later—too late—he was back at work, the station’s apologies duly logged and internet think pieces waning. Everyone, including Unitas and Sutton, acted like nothing had happened. Baseman had been grateful, even while wondering if a mistake of this caliber, left undiscussed, might ossify into a guillotine blade that, once in place, could never be trusted not to fall.
The Living Dead Page 13