Sole Survivor

With the passage of time, the Post had begun to break even. The brilliant and visionary Mr. Chase subsequently designed numerous striking interiors, which were celebrated in Architectural Digest and elsewhere, and then died in spite of his genius and talent, just as the billionaire would one day die in spite of his vast fortune, just as Dewey Beemis would die in spite of his commendable variety of skills and his infectious smile.

‘Joe!’ Dewey said, grinning, rising from his chair, a bearish presence, extending his big hand across the counter.

Joe shook hands. ‘How’re you doing, Dewey?’

‘Carver and Martin both graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in June, one going to law school now, the other medical,’ Dewey gushed, as if this news were only hours old and about to hit the front page of the next day’s Post. Unlike the billionaire who employed him, Dewey’s pride was not in his own accomplishments

but in those of his children. ‘My Julie, she finished her second year on scholarship at Yale with a three-point-eight average, and this fall she takes over as editor of the student literary magazine, wants to be a novelist like this Annie Proulx she’s always reading over and over again—’

With the sudden memory of Flight 353 passing through his eyes as obviously as a dimming cloud across a bright moon, Dewey silenced himself, ashamed to have been boasting about his sons and daughter to a man whose children were lost for­ever.

‘How’s Lena?’ Joe asked, inquiring about Dewey’s wife.

‘She’s good. . . she’s okay, yeah, doing okay.’ Dewey smiled and nodded to cover his uneasiness, editing his natural enthusiasm for his family.

Joe hated this awkwardness in his friends, their pity. Even after an entire year, here it was. This was one reason he avoided everyone from his old life. The pity in their eyes was genuine compassion, but to Joe, although he knew that he was being unfair, they also seemed to be passing a sad judgment on him for being unable to put his life back together.

‘I need to go upstairs, Dewey, put in a little time, do some research, if that’s okay.’

Dewey’s expression brightened. ‘You coming back, Joe?’

‘Maybe,’ Joe lied.

‘Back on staff?’

‘Thinking about it.’

‘Mr. Santos would love to hear that.’

‘Is he here today?’

‘No. On vacation, actually, fishing up in Vancouver.’

Relieved that he wouldn’t have to lie to Caesar about his true motives, Joe said, ‘There’s just something I’ve gotten interested in, a quirky human interest story, not my usual thing. Thought I’d come do some background.’

‘Mr. Santos would want you to feel like you’re home. You go on up.’

‘Thanks, Dewey.’

Joe pushed through a swinging door into a long hallway with a worn and stained green carpet, age-mottled paint, and a discoloured acoustic-tile ceiling. Following the abandonment of the fat-city trappings that had characterized the Post’s years in Century City, the preferred image was guerrilla journalism, hardscrabble but righteous.

To the left was an elevator alcove. The doors at both shafts were scraped and dented.

The ground floor — largely given over to file rooms, clerical offices, classified ad sales, and the circulation department — was full of Saturday silence. In the quiet, Joe felt like an intruder. He imagined that anyone he encountered would perceive at once that he had returned under false pretenses.

While he was waiting for an elevator to open, he was surprised by Dewey, who had hurried from the reception lounge to give him a sealed white envelope. ‘Almost forgot this. Lady came by few days ago, said she had some information on a story just right for you.’

‘What story?’

‘She didn’t say. Just that you’d understand this.’

Joe accepted the envelope as the elevator doors opened.

Dewey said, ‘Told her you hadn’t worked here ten months, and she wanted your phone number. Of course I said I couldn’t give it out. Or your address.’

Stepping into the elevator, Joe said, ‘Thanks, Dewey.’

‘Told her I’d send it on or call you about it. Then I discovered you moved and got a new phone, unlisted, and we didn’t have it.’

‘Can’t be important,’ Joe assured him, indicating the envelope. After all, he was not actually returning to journalism.

As the elevator doors started to close, Dewey blocked them. Frowning, he said, ‘Wasn’t just personnel records not up to speed with you, Joe. Nobody here, none of your friends, knew how to reach you.’

‘I know.’

Dewey hesitated before he said, ‘You’ve been way down, huh?’

‘Pretty far,’ Joe acknowledged. ‘But I’m climbing back up.’

‘Friends can hold the ladder steady, make it easier.’ Touched, Joe nodded.

‘Just remember,’ Dewey said.

‘Thanks.’

Dewey stepped back, and the doors closed. The elevator rose, taking Joe with it.

The third floor was largely devoted to the newsroom, which had been subdivided into a maze of somewhat claustrophobic modular workstations, so that the entire space could not be seen at once.

Every workstation had a computer, telephone, ergonomic chair, and other fundamentals of the trade.

This was very similar to the much larger newsroom at the Times. The only differences were that the furniture and the reconfigurable walls at the Times were newer and more stylish than those at the Post, the environment there was no doubt purged of the asbestos and formaldehyde that lent the air here its special astringent quality, and even on a Saturday afternoon the Times would be busier per square foot of floor space than the Post was now.

Twice over the years, Joe had been offered a job at the Times, but he had declined. Although the Gray Lady, as the competition was known in some circles, was a great newspaper, it was also the ad-fat voice of the status quo. He believed he’d be allowed and encouraged to do better and more aggressive reporting at the Post, which was like an asylum at times, but also heavy on ballsy attitude and gonzo style, with a reputation for never treating a politician’s handout as real news and for assuming that every public official was either corrupt or incompetent, sex-crazed or power mad.

A few years ago, after the Northridge earthquake, seismologists had discovered unsuspected links between a fault that ran under the heart of L.A. and one that lay beneath a series of communities in the San Fernando Valley. A joke swept the newsroom regarding what losses the city would suffer if one temblor destroyed the Times downtown and the Post in Sun Valley. Without the Post, according to the joke, Angelenos wouldn’t know which politicians and other public servants were stealing them blind, accepting bribes from known drug dealers, and ha**ng s*x with animals. The greater tragedy, however, would be the loss of the six-pound Sunday edition of the Times, without which no one would know what stores were conducting sales.

If the Post was as obstinate and relentless as a rat terrier crazed by the scent of rodents — which it was — it was redeemed, for Joe, by the nonpartisan nature of its fury. Furthermore, a high percentage of its targets were at least as corrupt as it wanted to believe they were.

Also, Michelle had been a featured columnist and editorial writer for the Post. He met her here, courted her here, and enjoyed their shared sense of being part of an underdog enterprise. She had carried their two babies in her belly through so many days of work in this place.

Now, he found this building haunted by memories of her. In the unlikely event that he could eventually regain emotional

stability and con himself into believing life had a purpose worth the struggle, the face of that one dear ghost would rock him every time he saw it. He would never be able to work at the Post again.

He went directly to his former workstation in the Metro section, grateful that no old friends saw him. His place had been assigned to Randy Colway, a good man, who wouldn’t feel invaded if he found Joe in his chair.

Tacked to the noteboard were photographs of Randy’s wife, their nine-year-old son, Ben, and six-year-old Lisbeth. Joe looked at them for a long moment — and then not again.

After switching on the computer, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the Department of Motor Vehicles envelope that he’d filched from the glove box of the white van at the cemetery. It contained the validated registration card. To his surprise, the registered owner wasn’t a government body or a law-enforcement agency; it was something called Medsped, Inc.

He had not been expecting a corporate operation, for God’s sake. Wallace Blick and his trigger-happy associates in the Hawaiian shirts didn’t seem entirely like cops or federal agents, but they smelled a lot more like the law than they did like any corporate executives Joe had ever encountered.

Next he accessed the Post’s vast file of digitized back issues. Included was every word of every edition the newspaper had published since its inception — minus only the cartoons, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, and the like. Photographs were included.

He initiated a search for Medsped and found six mentions. They were small items from the business pages. He read them complete.

Medsped, a New Jersey corporation, had begun as an air ambu­lance service in several major cities. Later it had expanded to specialize in the nationwide express delivery of emergency medi­cal supplies, refrigerated or otherwise delicately preserved blood and tissue samples, as well as expensive and frangible scien­tific instruments. The company even undertook to carry samples of highly contagious bacteria and viruses between cooperating research laboratories in both the public and military sectors. For these tasks, it maintained a modest fleet of aircraft and heli­copters.

Helicopters.

And unmarked white vans?

Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware Corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in

the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.

When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.

He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.

While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the Post had published about the crash of Nation­wide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.

Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.

Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.

He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low sky.

He searched for and found the name of the NTSB Go-Team leader in charge of the investigation — Barbara Christman — and the fourteen specialists working under her.

A couple of the articles included photos of some of the crew and passengers. Not all of the three hundred and thirty souls aboard was pictured. The tendency was to focus on those victims who were Southern Californians returning home rather than on Easterners who had been coming to visit. Being part of the Post family, Michelle and the girls were prominently featured.

Eight months ago, upon moving into the apartment, in reaction to a morbid and obsessive preoccupation with family albums and loose snapshots, Joe had packed all the photos in a large cardboard box, reasoning that rubbing a wound retarded healing.

He had taped the box shut and put it at the back of his only closet.

Now, in the course of his scanning, when their faces appeared on the screen, he was unable to breathe, though he had thought he would be prepared. Michelle’s publicity shot, taken by one of the Post’s staff photographers, captured her beauty but not her tenderness, not her intelligence, not her charm, not her laughter. A mere picture was so inadequate, but still it was Michelle. Still. Chrissie’s photo had been snapped at a Post Christmas party for children of the paper’s employees. She was caught in a grin, eyes shining. How they shone. And little Nina, who sometimes wanted it pronounced Neen-ah and other times nine-ah, was smiling that slightly lopsided smile that seemed to say she knew magical secrets.

Her smile reminded Joe of a silly song he sometimes sang to her when he put her to bed. Before he realized what he was doing, he found his breath again and heard himself whispering the words: ‘Nine-ah, Neen-ah — have you seen her? Neen-ah, nine-ah, no one finah.’

A breaking inside him threatened his self-control.

He clicked the mouse to get their images off the screen. But that didn’t take their faces out of his mind, clearer than he had seen them since packing their photos away.

Bending forward in the chair, covering his face, shuddering, he muffled his voice in his cold hands. ‘Oh, shit. Oh, shit.’

Surf breaking on a beach, now as before, tomorrow as today. Clocks and looms. Sunrises, sunsets, phases of the moon. Machines clicking, ticking. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions.

The only sane response is indifference.

He lowered his hands from his face. Sat up straight again. Tried to focus on the computer screen.

He was concerned that he would draw attention to himself. If an old acquaintance looked in this three-walled cubicle to see what was wrong, Joe might have to explain what he was doing here, might even have to summon the strength to be socia­ble.

He found the passenger manifest for which he had been search­ing. The Post had saved him time and effort by listing separately those among the dead who had lived in Southern California. He printed out all their names, each of which was followed by the name of the town in which the deceased resided.

I’m not ready to talk to you yet the photographer of graves had said

to him, from which he had inferred that she would have things to tell him later.

Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.