The world’s going to hell in a handbasket. That’s what his father used to say. He’d been thinking about it for weeks now, unable to get the phrase out of his mind. What was frightening was that thirty years from now,
these
would probably be “the good old days.” Pack up and move to Portland or Seattle, that’s what they ought to do. Or maybe Tucson, where the sun shines even in the winter, so they say.
At the bottom of the hill, the Volvo turned right and disappeared into the traffic on Market Street. Artie stood there a moment, watching where it had vanished with a deep sense of affection. When Susan said he meant a lot to her, he knew the emotions went far deeper than the words. But when was the last time she had said she loved him? Or had she ever? She must have, but he couldn’t remember when. He’d always considered Susan a shade too good for him, and in the back of his mind was the fear that someday she would think so, too. He needed reassurance, but she had never offered any. She wasn’t entirely to blame, of course—he’d never asked. And then, as he frequently did when he thought about Susan, he felt guilty. She might not be a saint, but as far as he was concerned, she was above reproach. Meeting her at the Club had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. But he would give a lot to know if she felt the same way.
Some men’s lives were wrapped up in their jobs. For him, his job was important, but first and last he was a family man. He would give his life for Mark and Susan but it wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about, and he was never really sure they knew.
He shivered and started up the walk, then came to an abrupt halt, his senses taut as a bowstring. He could hear the soft creaking of the trees in the wind, feel the rough texture of the concrete beneath his slippers, even smell the faint odor where a cat had marked its territory.
He ignored the cold wind fingering his shirt and the chill drops spattering against his face. He turned to stare at the cars parked across the street and the bushes in front of the houses.
Odd feeling. Like somebody was out there watching him.
But there was nobody else around. Nobody was sitting in any of the cars along the curb. Nobody was picking up the morning paper where it had landed in the bushes. Nobody was watching him through slatted blinds in any of the neighbor’s windows, at least that he could see.
He started to shiver uncontrollably and padded quickly back to the house.
Inside, Mark had dressed and packed his schoolbooks in his bag. He was waiting by the front door for the van that picked up the handicapped kids for the private school. One of Susan’s contacts had recommended Bayview Academy to them, and it had been a godsend.
“Last few days before Christmas break, sport?”
“Yeah. Mom’s gonna be gone for three days?”
“Maybe more. Your grandfather’s not doing well and she may want to stay longer.”
“Lots of chances for me to beat you at chess, then.” Mark looked smug, reminding Artie that Mark was up on him by a dozen games. It was also an affirmation of the father-son bond, and for that, Artie was grateful.
Then the bus was honking outside and Mark opened the door and wheeled down the walk. Artie watched through the window as Mark maneuvered his chair onto the lift and was hoisted into the van. My fault, Artie thought. Maybe if I’d been driving, it wouldn’t have happened. But he’d been engrossed in watching an episode of
Cheers
and Susan had offered to drive Mark home from the basketball game.
He was halfway through his second cup of coffee of the morning when he remembered Larry Shea and dialed Shea’s office. No, Dr. Shea wasn’t in yet. Did he want to leave a message?
When he called the Shea house, he got the answering machine.
Nobody picked up.
Artie was late getting
to KXAM—a bus and a bottled-water truck had collided on Van Ness so he couldn’t drive ahead, and the crush of traffic behind prevented him from driving around. He leaned on the horn for a long moment, then relaxed and stared through the rain-streaked windshield at the cars jammed around him. On the sidewalk, pedestrians were using their umbrellas as shields against the wind and the rain, which had become a downpour.
It didn’t matter whether there was an accident or what season of the year it was. Every morning was gridlock, every street a clogged river of honking horns and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Why the hell did he and Susan still live here? The sunlit, whitewashed city of twenty years ago had long since turned a prison gray. What were the old lyrics? “Where have all the flowers gone? … .” The smiling hippies of two decades before had suffered a sea change into the alcoholic homeless, and “Spare change?” had become a mumbled threat.
He never used to have black moods, but lately it seemed like almost every day was a downer, though this time he had good reason: no Susan, the stress of Christmas, and the stinks and strains of city life.
What did he expect?
The traffic lurched forward a few feet and Artie concentrated on tweaking the gas pedal. He parked in the outdoor lot behind the station and hurried through the crowded newsroom to the little glass-walled cubicle that was temporary headquarters for the documentary unit. He was twenty minutes late for his nine-to-who-knew-how-long shift and swore to himself. For the next few weeks he would be wearing the hat of field producer as well as newswriter, and after that maybe it would be his regular assignment.
Connie Lee was waiting for him, leaning back in her chair, hands wrapped around a container of coffee, studying the newsroom outside. Connie would be the on-camera reporter, track the segments, and do the narration and the stand-ups when their series aired. Her hair was loose around her shoulders with just a hint of gray; her high cheekbones and neighbor-next-door smile had been a staple of the evening news forever. On-screen, she came across as honest as Jane Pauley or Diane Sawyer with all the other virtues close behind. She wasn’t “cute” enough to irritate any of the women watching and was authoritative enough that men paid attention when she covered politics or occasionally filled in on sports. Connie’s “Q,” her recognizability rating, was off the charts.
She’d become a legend at the station when, just after they’d hired her, she’d said flatly, “I don’t do windows and I don’t do ethnic.” Connie was the house cynic, but she knew television inside and out, was one of Artie’s best friends, and had the happy knack of being able to make him laugh. These days, that was worth a lot.
Connie’s only fault—if you could call it that—was her belief in tarot cards. Nobody kidded her about it—they knew better. To Artie, it was like the one flaw that made beautiful people truly beautiful: It was Connie’s one flaw and it made her perfect.
She nodded at him, a toothpick firmly clenched between her front teeth. “The new anchor’s here. Take a look, then tell me why Hirschfield hired her.”
Artie looked out at the newsroom, quickly sorting through the reporters and the newswriters hunched in front of their computers. She was the blonde sitting at the workstation nearest the anchor desk, nervously scanning a sheaf of notes she held in one hand while giving her hair a final brushing with the other. She was easy to look at but not pretty enough to be distracting. Her name was Adrienne Jantzen and that was all he knew about her.
“Because she’s a good lay?”
Connie laughed. “You’re a chauvinist pig, Banks. Besides, maybe she likes women.”
“You wish.” Artie studied Jantzen through the glass. She looked a little shy, but he was willing to bet that beneath it all she was cool, reserved, and hard as nails. Probably a lot like Susan when he’d first met her.
“They’re starting her on the midmorning newsbreak,” Connie continued, telling Artie something he’d already heard. “Flaherty’s out with the flu.”
“Another amateur from the Valley?”
“Don’t think so—Hirschfield didn’t offer to throw in bed and breakfast so I figure she must have something on the ball. And her Sacramento ratings were decent.” She watched while Artie opened his briefcase and pulled out a yellow pad. “How’d your show-and-tell go last night?”
“Larry Shea didn’t make it.”
Connie looked surprised. “He get an emergency call from Kaiser?”
Artie shook his head. “He wasn’t at the hospital last night and I couldn’t raise him at home this morning.” He thumbed through his notes, Shea temporarily forgotten. Connie balanced her own yellow pad on her knees and took out her ballpoint.
“Sounds strange to me.” She glanced at her pad. “Got a working title?”
“Nothing I like. You?”
“Same. How’s Susan?”
“She took off for three days to visit her folks, leaving the Christmas shopping to me.” The moment he said it, it sounded like he was whining, and he felt embarrassed. “Not her fault—her father isn’t well.”
Connie half smiled. “Three days without Susan? You’ll never make it.”
“You go three days without Kris, see how you do.”
“I’d do just fine, thank you.” She put down her pen and started counting on her fingers. “Okay, the standard environmental disasters are cutting down the rain forests, global warming, melting of the polar ice caps, the hole in the ozone layer, the spotted owl—and then I have to switch over to the other hand. What do you want to include?”
“All of the above.” Artie grimaced. “Jesus, even the sitcoms have covered them.”
Connie frowned. “That makes a difference? C’mon, Artie, we’ve got four and a half minutes a night Monday through Friday right after New Year’s plus a half-hour recap running as a special the following Saturday. That’s a lot of airtime to fill, and we’ve only got a few weeks to finish the series. Easiest way to go is just update the material on hand, right?”
Artie groaned. “It’s bad enough they canceled the series on the mayor, and then we get this thrown at us.”
“Be positive—it’ll look good on the old resume.”
“I’ve found a home here, Connie. I’m not looking.”
She sounded enthusiastic about the idea of a series but not about the subject, and Artie guessed she would be on automatic for the duration. He started to scribble some notes, then suddenly glanced out at the crowded newsroom. He felt like he had when he was standing in his driveway that morning, all his senses at full alert. He could hear the faint murmur of newsroom conversation even through the heavy glass and smell the slight metallic tang to the filtered air inside their booth.
There was somebody out there who was watching him and Connie, but he hadn’t the slightest idea who it was.
“Any new hires besides Jantzen?”
“Not that I know of …”
Her voice trailed off and she leaned forward, staring through the glass at the news set, where Jantzen was reading off the TelePrompTer.
“Listen—she’s going to blow her lines.”
Artie hastily turned up the volume on the cubicle’s monitor.
“ …
and UN peacekeeping troops were flown in to Miracle—that’s
Miravachi,
Macedonia, a border town near Greece … .”
“Nice recovery,” Artie murmured. “First-day jitters or somebody sabotaged the ’Prompter as a joke.” Then he asked, curious, “You get that from the cards?”
She gave him a long look. “Get what?”
“That she was going to blow it.”
“C’mon, Artie—after ten years? It’s got nothing to do with the cards—it’s reporter’s intuition. Also woman’s.”
“Working title,” Artie muttered, chewing on his ballpoint.
Connie didn’t answer for a long moment, then: “How about ‘Death in the Mine Shaft.’”
Artie wasn’t able to put his finger on it until later, but at that moment the cubicle suddenly seemed stuffy, almost stifling. For a minute he thought he was seeing double and it felt like his heart had skipped a beat. Just as quickly, the feeling passed. He glanced up, frowning. Connie looked pale, sweaty.
“You okay, kid?”
Uncertainly: “Yeah … I’m fine.” Connie doodled on her pad for a moment. “So what do you think?”
“I don’t get it.”
“The goddamned canaries are dying, Artie.” Connie had recovered and now looked irritated. “You remember the canaries miners used to take down into the shafts to detect coal gas? In this case, East Coast songbirds. Loss of habitat, that sort of thing.” Artie bent over his pad and started writing. “Include the frogs as well; they’re in decline, too—and half the ones we find are deformed. Something to do with a fungus. We’ll have to check it out, see if anybody’s done something similar—
Nova
or
National Geographic
, maybe we can borrow some footage, give them credit.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t forget the fish. Too many fishermen coming back with empty boats. The Grand Banks are being overfished, the salmon runs on the West Coast are down. And the epidemic of skin cancer in Australia because of the hole in the ozone layer …”
Artie would have sworn this wouldn’t be her cup of tea.
“You been boning up?”
She frowned. “Haven’t you? You’ve known for three days that we had this assignment.”
His black mood suddenly returned. “Does anybody really give a fuck, Connie?”
“About what?”
“About this crap. People have been crying that the sky is falling ever since they looked up.”
She cocked her head, her voice icy. “Have you been listening to me, Banks? Or are you still mooning about your wife?”
Low blow, Artie thought, wondering if she was serious. It wasn’t like Connie. Not like Connie at all.
“You think it’s a shit assignment, don’t you, Banks?” For the first time since Artie had known her, Connie sounded hostile. “DBI—dull but important. It’s going to air the week after New Year’s when nobody’s watching and nobody’s advertising, so you think we should do a fluff piece. You think if Hirschfield thought it was hot, he’d have scheduled it for the February sweeps when the ratings really count.”
What the hell was bugging Connie? She was out of character, way out. Artie shrugged. “You could say that. Why did he even bother?”
“Because it’s important, that’s why—it doesn’t matter when it airs.” She swung her chair around to study the newsroom again. “It’ll look good when it’s time for license renewal, but over and above that …” Her voice faded away and she whispered, “It’s important.”
Artie concentrated on his notes. Connie was acting weird, and he was beginning to feel a little strange himself.
“So we tape five segments, one for each night,” he said, trying to make peace with her. “Feature the most recent ecological update, then show what’s being done to help. Have the Grub chase down the latest on EcoNet and the Internet.”
“The Grub” was Jerry Gottlieb, the intern, smarter and fatter than anybody else on staff and the one who knew all there was to know about databases.
Connie had closed her eyes and was massaging her temples with her fingers. Artie looked at her, alarmed, then touched her on the shoulder.
“You really okay, Connie?” She was sure as hell fighting something. If she felt this bad, why had she come in at all? Nobody was going to thank her if they came down with what she had.
For just a moment, she seemed confused. “I’m fine … .” She shook her head and opened her eyes wide, focusing on the newsroom just beyond the glass. “We could do it that way,” she said slowly, her voice stronger. “Play it by the numbers.”
She turned back to Artie and waited. Artie searched her face for clues to what she wanted to hear, then gave up. Reading Connie was usually fairly easy, but not this time. Her facial muscles were rigid, the skin taut.
“You have something in mind?”
“Sure—tell them what they don’t want to hear.”
Artie stared.
“Which is what?”
“That we’re breeding like flies in a garbage dump and all our ecology problems are really only one problem.”
Connie was serious—she was
really
serious—she wasn’t putting him on.
Artie fumbled for words. “That’s old, that’s really old—too many people, not enough food, starvation, wars for living space—”
She smiled tightly. “By George, I think he’s got it!”
Artie crumpled the sheet from his yellow notepad and pegged it at the wastebasket. “Goddammit, Connie, nobody at all is going to watch if the series is a downer. And there’s no reason why it should be. The more prosperous a nation becomes, the more its birthrate falls—”
She cut in, her voice curt. “That’s bullshit. No matter how you slice it, there’re going to be a lot more people and some Third World countries are going to be a lot more prosperous. You think they’re going to be nice and tidy about their prosperity? We never were.”