John Kenney - Talk to Me

And it wasn’t merely escape from the outside world. It was escape from ourselves. It was a muting of our inside voice. Once, people sat after dinner on the back porch, as evening gently overtook the day, watched the fading light, listened to the din of crickets, to a dog barking down the road, a train going by in the distance. Alone with their thoughts. The bravest thing. Today we would do anything to run from our own thoughts. The noise of our minds. So we check the phone, the text, the email, the alert. Why look inside for the answers when you can look outside? Hey look, a sale at J.Crew.

Thus, Salma’s plump breasts. A salve. A momentary respite. The mother’s milk (ha!) of escapism. Was that so wrong?

Henke appeared at Franny’s desk, startling her. A thing he did, approaching people from behind, standing too close. He leaned forward, beefy, nail-bitten Teutonic hands on her desk, face close to her screen and Salma’s mighty breast. He smelled of cologne, too much and too strong.

“Christ, Henke.”

Henke ignored her, a man deep in thought, too important, too brilliant for the niceties of life.

“Tit for tat,” he said. “There’s your headline. That’s why I’m a billionaire.”

“You’re a billionaire because of your father.”

Henke turned and stared at her. “Yes, Frances, famous fathers, right?”

He turned back to the screen. “I imagine yours are better,” he said.

He looked at her, smiled an ugly smile.

He did this. All the time. Not just with Franny. One never got used to it, but Franny would never give him the satisfaction of thinking she’d been shocked, offended.

“You’ll never know.”

It had been three days since the broadcast, which had been on a news-quiet Friday evening, a typically lower-than-average ratings night. Ted had canceled his dinner plans and gone straight to the Manhattan apartment, taken a hot shower, downed a Big Gulp–sized Ketel One neat, popped an Ambien (happy birthday to Ted!), and gone to bed, waking ten hours later, feeling rather splendid.

The days passed and the world turned on its axis and humanity did what it always did: fought wars, killed one another, committed perjury. Professional sports teams did noteworthy things; powerful people had intercourse with people who weren’t their spouses and got caught. Nature wreaked havoc. Unprecedented storms ravaged Caribbean islands. A cargo ship disappeared in the Indian Ocean. The Russian army blew things up. A drone strike killed the leader of a terrorist sect on a road from Damascus to Beirut. A blind softball pitcher in Oklahoma continued an uncanny streak of strikeouts for his local team.

And Ted’s network reported on all of it, snippets of bite-sized news-like items that were neither helpful, informative, nor particularly interesting. Much of it seemed déjà vu–like. Haven’t I heard this exact story before, like, a week ago?

The weekly Nielsens were in and they were superb. No one knew why but they attributed it to Ted’s moving Triangle Shirtwaist closing. The hair-and-makeup girl was ancient history. It never happened. Ted was king.

And, to celebrate twenty years in the anchor chair, the network was launching an advertising campaign. They were releasing it Friday evening, during the broadcast, and running it all weekend during college basketball (males, forties to fifties) and the NCAA women’s hockey Frozen Four (the moms of the players: a key Ted demographic). Ted had, over the past few weeks, watched the rough cuts with the marketing team, half a dozen earnest men and women speaking a language Ted didn’t really understand. Click rate . Digital extensions. Transformation imperative .

The campaign was called “You know Ted” and it consisted of a series of TV commercials and web films. Shots of Ted over the years, around the world, at the anchor desk, interviewing heads of state and various popes, sitting forward and pointing at CEOs and mendacious politicians and third-world terrorists. Shots of Ted in war zones and in refugee camps, wading knee-deep in the ocean to help a father and baby off a listing raft, and his time in Bosnia, holding a baby, Ted having been hit by the tiniest piece of shrapnel in the history of warfare, perfectly placed and made for TV, on his cheek, a line of deep red blood mixed with dust and dirt. The first of many Emmys.

A song was purchased, at great cost, from an Austin, Texas–based alternative band called Explosions in the Sky. It was called “Remember Me as a Time of Day.” Ted found it haunting. They’d gotten a Hollywood star to be the voice-over.

“You’ve seen him, in good times and bad. In sickness and in health. In crises and crashes. When lives were at stake, when hope hung in the balance. He was there. And you were there with him. The times of your life have been brought to you by Ted Grayson.” And then the big finish. “This is your life. This is Ted Grayson.” And here, at the end, a shot of Ted and Claire, walking the English gardens of the Bedford house.

Simon Samson, head of the news division and Ted devotee, called a meeting of the news staff and introduced the campaign, showed the commercials to great applause, as Simon had made sure to film snippets of as many newsroom people as possible to boost morale. Young Murray with hair. Grace, Murray, Jagdish, and Ted working on a story. Producers, production assistants, camera operators. Even Ruth Silverman, the longtime receptionist, had a cameo.

Simon couldn’t know for sure but his sense was that the commercials seemed to generate an excitement that permeated the newsroom. A renewed belief, perhaps, in Ted, in the mission of news, in their work. That it still mattered.

As they made their way through the newsroom, Ted and Simon stopped by the writers’ room.

Ted did this from time to time, though less often than he used to. Weeks went by where he didn’t talk with the writers, the producers overseeing the assembly-line–like machinations of the broadcast, ferrying the words that Ted needed to say to the teleprompter. The visits never ceased to thrill his writers. Like a parent in a large family who takes one child out for the day.

“Ted,” Murray said. “How wonderful to be you.” He’d meant only to think that but it slipped out.

They had been together since the beginning, Murray and Ted. Of the original nine writers on the news staff when Ted took over the anchor chair, Murray was the only one left. He’d been there for September 11, their finest hour, when none of them left for five days.

Grace had come on board three years ago, having completed a master’s degree at Hunter College in social work. She took a job in the outpatient psychiatric unit at Elmhurst Hospital, Queens, and lasted exactly four days. She could write about pain. Seeing it firsthand was something else entirely.

Jagdish took the job on a whim. A friend of a friend who was a producer. None of them had expected to be there so long. But unlike so many jobs, theirs was new each day. And when large stories hit, they felt they were at the center of something. And, of course, Ted. Their proximity to Ted, to a man watched by millions of people. “For God’s sake,” Murray would remind them, “the president of the United States watches Ted. Which means he’s listening to the words we are writing in this room.”

Ted sat on the arm of an old couch. His spot. A Christmas morning excitement at having the great man in their office.

“What’s the word, Gracie,” Ted asked. “How’s the world’s greatest band?”

“About to go on tour. Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Greenville, Hampton, Columbia, New Orleans, Lexington, Philly, then to New York May first and second. I’ve got tickets to both shows.”