David Wallace - Oblivion

The associate editor wore a headset telephone and was engaged in certain other editorial tasks at the same time he was talking to Atwater. He was a large bluff bearish man, extremely cynical and fun to be around, as magazine editors often tend to be, and known particularly for being able to type two totally different things at the same time, a keyboard under each hand, and to have them both come out more or less error free. Style’ s editorial interns found this bimanual talent fascinating, and they often pressed the associate editor’s head intern to get him to do it during the short but very intense celebrations that took place after certain issues had closed and everyone had had some drinks and the normal constraints of rank and deportment were relaxed a bit. The associate editor had a daughter at Rye Country Day School, where a number of Style’ s editorial interns had also gone, as adolescents. The typing talent thing was also interesting because the associate editor had never actually written for Style or anyone else — he had come up through Factchecking, which was technically a division of Legal and answered to a whole different section of Style’ s parent company. In any event, the doubletime typing explained the surfeit of clicking sounds in the background as the associate editor responded to a pitch he found irksome and out of character for Atwater, who was normally a consummate pro, and knew quite well the shape of the terrain that Style’ s WHAT IN THE WORLD feature covered, and had no history of instability or substance issues, and rarely even needed much rewriting.

The editorial exchange between the two men was actually very rapid and clipped and terse. The associate editor was saying: ‘Which think about it, you’re going to represent how? You’re going to propose we get photos of the man on the throne, producing? You’re going to describe it?’

‘Everything you’re saying is valid and understandable and yet all I’m saying is if you could see the results. The pieces themselves.’ The two payphones had a woodgrain frame with a kind of stiff steel umbilicus for the phone book. Atwater had claimed that he could not use his own phone because once you got far enough south of Indianapolis and Richmond there were not enough cellular relays to produce a reliable signal. Due to the glass doors and no direct AC, it was probably close to 100 degrees in the little passage, and also loud — the kitchen was clearly on the other side of the wall, because there was a great deal of audible clatter and shouting. Atwater had worked in a 24 hour restaurant attached to a Union 76 Truck ’n Travel Plaza while majoring in journalism at Ball State, and he knew the sounds of a short order kitchen. The name of the restaurant in Muncie had been simply: EAT. Atwater was facing away from everything and more or less concave, hunched into himself and the space of the phone, as people on payphones in public spaces so often are. His fist moved just below the little shelf where the slim GTE directory for Whitcomb-Mount Carmel-Scipio and surrounding communities rested. The technical name of the Holiday Inn’s restaurant, according to the sign and menus, was Ye Olde Country Buffet. Hard to his left, an older couple was trying to get a great deal of luggage through the hallway’s glass doors. It was only a matter of time before they figured out that one should just go through and hold the doors open for the other. It was early in the afternoon of 1 July 2001. You could also hear the associate editor sometimes talking to someone else in his office, which wasn’t necessarily his fault or a way to marginalize Atwater, because other people were always coming in and asking him things.

A short time later, after splashing some cold water on his ears and face in the men’s room, Atwater reemerged through the hallway’s smeared doors and made his way through the crowds around the restaurant’s buffet table. He had also used the sink’s mirror to pump himself up a little — periods of self exhortation at mirrors were usually the only time he was fully conscious of the thing that he did with his fist. There were red heat lamps over many of the buffet’s entrees, and a man in a partly crumpled chef’s hat was slicing prime rib to people’s individual specs. The large room smelled powerfully of bodies and hot food. Everyone’s face shone in the humidity. Atwater had a short man’s emphatic, shoulder inflected walk. Many of the Sunday diners were elderly and wore special sunglasses with side flaps, the inventor of whom was possibly ripe for a WITW profile. Nor does one hardly ever see actual flypaper anymore. Their table was almost all the way in front. Even across the crowded dining room it was not hard to spot them seated there, due to the artist’s wife, Mrs. Moltke, whose great blond head’s crown was nearly even with the hostess’s lectern. Atwater used the head as a salient to navigate the room, his own ears and forehead flushed with high speed thought. Back at Style’ s editorial offices on the sixteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center in New York, meanwhile, the associate editor was speaking with his head intern on the intercom while he typed internal emails. Mr. Brint Moltke, the proposed piece’s subject, was smiling fixedly at his spouse, possibly in response to some remark. His entree was virtually untouched. Mrs. Moltke was removing mayo or dressing from the corner of her mouth with a pinkie and met Atwater’s eye as he raised both arms:

‘They’re very excited.’

Part of the reason Atwater had had to splash and self exhort in the airless little men’s room off the Holiday Inn restaurant was that the toll call had actually continued for several more minutes after the journalist had said ‘. . pieces themselves,’ and had become almost heated at the same time that it didn’t really go anywhere or modify either side of the argument, except that the associate editor subsequently observed to his head intern that Skip seemed to be taking the whole strange thing more to heart than was normal in such a consummate pro.

‘I do good work. I find it and I do it.’

‘This is not about you or whether you could bring it in well,’ the associate editor had said. ‘This is simply me delivering news to you about what can happen and what can’t.’

‘I seem to recollect somebody once saying no way the parrot could ever happen.’ Here Atwater was referring to a prior piece he’d done for Style.

‘You’re construing this as an argument about me and you. What this is really about is shit. Excrement. Human shit. It’s very simple: Style does not run items about human shit.’

‘But it’s also art.’

‘But it’s also shit. And you’re already tasked to Chicago for something else we’re letting you look at because you pitched me, that’s already dubious in terms of the sorts of things we can do. Correct me if I’m mistaken here.’

‘I’m on that already. It’s Sunday. Laurel’s got me in for tomorrow all day. It’s a two hour toot up the interstate. The two are a hundred and ten percent compatible.’ Atwater sniffed and swallowed hard. ‘You know I know this area.’

The other Style piece the associate editor had referred to concerned The Suffering Channel, a wide grid cable venture that Atwater had gotten Laurel Manderley to do an end run and pitch directly to the editor’s head intern for WHAT IN THE WORLD. Atwater was one of three full time salarymen tasked to the WITW feature, which received.75 editorial pages per week, and was the closest any of the BSG weeklies got to freakshow or tabloid, and was a bone of contention at the very highest levels of Style. The staff size and large font specs meant that Skip Atwater was officially contracted for one 400 word piece every three weeks, except the juniormost of the WITW salarymen had been on half time ever since Eckleschafft-Böd had forced Mrs. Anger to cut the editorial budget for everything except celebrity news, so in reality it was more like three finished pieces every eight weeks.