2
Thirty minutes later, Ian decided to leave for the day following a shouting match in which he called the Foreign editor a "duplicitous gonad," thereby burning his bridges forever with the desk that had hired him. It was barely noon. No longer heading to Paris, he would have to resolve all kinds of practicalities of Life in These United States. Finding a home in suburban Chicago, buying a car equipped for hands-only driving. He had sojourned abroad for a decade, and like most correspondents in war zones, he had always hired a driver. Before that, living in Oz, he had been able-bodied and had motored about in the usual way.
He dreaded breaking the news to his wife Isabelle and his sixteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Zoey. Isabelle had been counting on having her ailing mère live with them in Paris, whereas Zoey was warring with her own mother, a public information officer with the State Department in D.C. Zoey and Mom were not on speaking terms. She had decided it would be a lark to join her journalist dad in France, where she had attended an international school for several years, back when her parents were still cojoined in the barnacled sea chains of holy matrimony. Isabelle and Zoey got on beautifully, but he had been uneasy about the prospect of having his mother-in-law underfoot, her a half-demented insomniac who sneaked glugs from his liquor cabinet and forgot to re-cap the bottles. Still, Isabelle had been distressed by her mother's decline since her father had passed several years ago. The woman was only fifty-five, but when the Landquarts had last visited, she seemed to be sliding into premature senility. Dirty dishes cluttered every room of her flat, and Isabelle had to scrub toilets and sinks that hadn't been cleaned in months. Besides, the hag detested Brits, a class that to her mind included Aussies. She'd endured a dismal holiday in the U.K. back in the nineties - her purse was stolen on a double-decker bus - and she had held the entire Commonwealth to blame ever since.
With the newsroom accelerating into its deadline hum, it was humiliating for Ian to pack up the few possessions he had accumulated in his cubicle over the past three weeks. He stuffed his padded lunchbox into his backpack, as well as his boxed, two-volume Oxford English Dictionary, A-O and P-Z. He checked all the desk drawers in his filing cabinet and found, behind innumerable files concerning a waste management company, a flask-sized bottle of scotch a previous reporter had forgotten there. He confiscated the grog in the name of The People.
In the fourth-floor lobby, Ian's finger hesitated over the lift's call button. Plaques representing the Bullet's twenty-seven Pulitzers hung on the walls.
So, a Pulitzer winner works in the burbs, he thought wrathfully. Soon you'll have two of us out there, by Christ. If I even stick around that long.
The lift dinged, and in the quiet of the interior, he became aware of the tinnitus that had sounded in his head ever since the fall on the hiking trip which had cost him his leg. He also had suffered inner ear damage, forcing him to wear hearing aids. The noise within his skull was a devil's symphony of roars, shrieks, cicada buzzes, fax machine whistles, grinding sounds, and screeches like a cavern full of covid-infested bats. The doors opened into a ground-floor lobby marbled in a High-Church style that underscored the sacerdotal nature of the journalist's calling.
Here the walls echoed with the scream of stonecutting tools. Scaffolding had been erected, and stonemasons in coveralls were removing marble slabs chiseled with inscriptions celebrating Freedom of the Press. This project had been sparked by a St. Ignatius College Prep sophomore's Change.org petition, launched after a school tour of the Bullet building. Voltaire was a racist and antisemite, and therefore should not be quoted in a newspaper lobby, the student said in an accompanying TikTok video. Thomas Jefferson, literally a freaking "slaveholder" (the boy clawed quotation marks in the air), was totally the ideal defender of liberty, amirite? And why feature epigrams encrusted with sexist language? "Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe," Jefferson mansplained from the walls of the Bullet. So, like, women shouldn't learn to read? Besides, what about speech that was literal violence, like Tucker Carlson?
"Is Fox News 'free speech'?" the boy wanted to know, clawing violently. "What about speech that makes me feel 'unsafe'?"
His campaign had trended on social media just as Bullet Tower was about to go on the market, and the paper's Realtor worried the scandal would scare off buyers. The sale of the building was essential to warding off bankruptcy. So this week the disfavored quotes were being replaced with inspirational aphorisms from Cesar Chavez, Al Sharpton, Michelle Obama, and other more diverse voices.
An extra tall forklift was hoisting a slab that read:
I believe that love is the only thing that matters, and I would hope that anybody would leave themselves open - not to gender, but to love.
- Jussie Smollett
At the main entrance Ian punched the automatic door opener, but nothing happened. He struck it again. Nada. He struggled on his crutches into the Mississippi paddlewheel of a revolving door. "Shit!" A prodigiously bosomed and -bottomed individual - she/her, by all appearances - powered through from the other direction. Her gaze met Ian's, then dropped to take in his crutches. She threw her shoulder into the door. He was hurled out onto Michigan Avenue. In a victory over the laws of physics, he maintained his footing on crutches.
He crossed the street and raised his arm to signal a cab. His eyes scanned the granite façade of Bullet Tower, its crown and buttresses looking like a painted backdrop against the pastel Midwestern sky. Again, there was the poster of that bearded ballerinx, four stories high and striving like Prometheus to free himself (herself?) of those cables. One could almost smell the body odor and beery breath. He or she? Xe, they, something else? There was a bulge in the groin, but that told you nothing. Women often had penises. Ten years ago, you would have called him a cross-dresser, a man in a tutu. A marketing joke. Nowadays, however, misgendering him could get you rampaged on Twitter and possibly fired. It irritated Ian to think that he resembled the model.
What was the name again of the bureau where he'd be working? DuPriest? DePaul? Now he would be stuck in some outer Chicagoland nightmarescape of strip malls and office parks. Bloody, sodding hell.
As a cab pulled over, it occurred to Ian that facing his wife, daughter, and infant son might be easier if he fortified himself with a drink. He directed the driver to a dive bar in the Loop. Ian had been passing the hours there when he had nothing to do. "You got it, buddy," said the driver, a spotty-faced male-presenting individual in a black mask. A vaguely heretical sermon was playing, something about becoming the godhead. The driver said, "Did you know that unbelief is based on fear?" Ian closed the window in the Plexiglas between them. Upon arrival he paid the man, clambered out, and shrugged on his backpack, but as he looked about, it hit him that he had gotten the intersection wrong. Balancing himself with one hand on the door, he stuffed his crutches back in the taxi. "Hang on," he said. Just then a bus behind him blasted its horn. The cab raced off, the door flapping closed, taking Ian's crutches with it.
He was blocks from the long-stay high-rise where the Bullet had been housing him and his family for the last month. Like one of C.S. Lewis' Dufflepuds, he hopped one-legged up onto the curb, gripped a concrete planter filled with wilted flower stalks, and lowered himself to the sidewalk beneath the bolted superstructure of the "L" train. Nothing to do but phone home.
Isabelle would have her hands full with the baby, while Zoey was on summer vacation and ought to be available. But there was no answer when he texted and rang the girl. He left a message, not that she ever checked her voicemail. Finally, he called Isabelle.
"Oh, you poor thing," she said. "I'll phone Zoey and ask her to go to you."
"She's not answering. Do you know where she is?"
"She just said she was going out. She never tells me anything. I'm the evil stepmother."
Isabelle tended to use the word "stepmother" with an ironic lilt, given that she was only eleven years older than Zoey. "Can you come?" he said.
"As soon as I change the baby. I'll hurry."
"Oh, I got all the time in the world, darling."
Hanging up, Ian dug out the stolen scotch and partook. Nearby, a torn FBI poster was peeling from the surface of the covered bus stop:
SEEKING INFORMATION
Assault on Officers at the U.S. Capitol
The faces were cartoonishly photoshopped like characters in a metaverse game.
An "L" train rumbled overhead. Strange to think, he had arrived in Chicago eager to spend a month making a name for himself in a city he knew nothing about except that its river had once been choked with hog entrails and its streets were crowded with mobsters who spoke in lockjawed snarls as they ducked in and out of speakeasies and traveled in motorcars with running boards. Isabelle had been desperate to...
