Creamy White Thighs

It would have been so difficult for Garrick to explain how he ended up working on floor two-and-a-half that he was almost glad no one was close enough in his life to ask. He had attended college in Bloomington, Illinois, with the intention of becoming an astronomer; enrolled in the journalism program due to what amounted to a misunderstanding; stayed for no particular reason except that it was easier than leaving; and now he spent his days in a small office with a foul office-mate in a loud profession that required him to be at the center of the scene, near the campfire, when he would rather be sitting off alone in a patch of grass, scanning the heavens.

Garrick couldn’t say he actively disliked being a reporter, but the profession fit him like a cheap suit. He had the mind of a scientist, a mind for numbers. It was a quality that newspaper editors ranked about as low as fashion sense, which was pretty low. He could name scores of distinct heavenly objects with nothing to go on but specks of light in the black sky, but political shades of gray all looked the same to him. His foul office-mate Colleen Brenner and the other reporters who covered the state Capitol reveled in it, the grayness. They grumbled about the low pay and surly editors but they never wanted to stop talking about the work. They wrote their stories and then they talked half the night in the Springfield bars about their stories and then, Garrick could easily believe, they went home and dreamt about their stories. His stories never did that for him. Looking at them glowing green on his computer screen, smaller-than-life words, disposable sentences that would end up in trashcans throughout Peoria and the surrounding central Illinois region within hours, he found himself increasingly wondering if this was all there was. His mind would ask him the question, more and more lately—is this all there is?—and he was beginning to fear the answer was yes.

Mrs. Janovik was, Garrick sometimes thought, his only connection to the world outside the Mural, to the place where some things held true all the time, regardless of whether it was the end of a legislative session or the start of an election cycle. His relationship with her was, he knew, a peculiar one. It certainly would have been difficult to explain to his fellow reporters, most of whom were of or near his own generation, why he got up early every morning and sat at a kitchen table in a medicinal-smelling apartment drinking metallic coffee with a seventy-four-year-old woman.

The relationship had started two years earlier as a cynical one. Garrick had just moved into the second floor of the small three-story blue-shingled building, which Mrs. Janovik owned. The rent was more than Garrick the journalist could comfortably afford, but Garrick the astronomer had to have it. It was on the edge of the city, away from the downtown lights, and had a flat roof accessible by a stairway off the main hall, his own little observatory. He spent half his first night there out on the roof with his telescope, happily scanning the sky. The next morning, Mrs. Janovik appeared at his door in her housecoat to announce curtly, with her hint of an eastern European accent, that he had better stay off her damned roof if he wanted to continue living there.

For a week he stayed off her damned roof, spending his evenings missing the sky and going over his devastated budget. He finally knocked on her door one morning to explain the whole thing and try to get out of his lease. “Why do you want to stand up there and look at the sky anyway?” she asked. “Doesn’t it look the same as it did yesterday?” That wasn’t true, he told her. The night sky was a churning black cauldron of lights, big and complex enough to find something new to look at every night for a lifetime, like—in his desperation, he actually said this—like a wide, grassy beach, bustling with activity and changing with every tide.

Mrs. Janovik stared stoically, watching him redden. Then she smiled and said: “A poet, huh?” With that smile, Garrick knew he had her. Feeling whorish about the thing but desperately wanting his roof back, he smiled in return, then asked if that was coffee he smelled, and then he was in.

For a month, their morning coffees in her cluttered apartment were strictly, mutually parasitic, him providing the patient ear for her stories, her providing the roof (she’d lifted the moratorium after their second meeting). It was only gradually, and without realizing it was happening, that Garrick began to look forward to rapping on her door in the morning and taking his spot at the kitchen table. She talked about meeting her husband, six years dead now, and raising her two children, who might as well have been for as much as she saw them, and spoiling her three grandchildren, as perfect as any angels God had ever created. Garrick had heard variations of the stories before, from other old women—there must have been some kind of mass seminar, some time around 1960, to allow them all to get their stories straight, he thought with a little smile during one of her monologues—but, to his surprise, he found himself increasingly enjoying the stories, even when they started looping back on themselves after the second month.

Behind the counter of the press room lobby on this morning, as every morning, sat Macy, the mustached press room clerk, sipping black coffee and reading a splayed newspaper, the wood-encased speaker buzzing on the wall behind him. It was part of a system of wired wood boxes that ran throughout the press floor and dated to the Ford Administration. The squawk boxes, as they called them, piped House and Senate debate from the third-floor legislative chambers directly into the press room and the individual newspaper and radio and television offices. Each office had one of the toaster-sized polished dark wood boxes mounted prominently on the wall. Recently, a state technician, looking for an excuse to stand around and drink coffee, told Macy that he expected to be yanking those grimy old wood boxes out of the walls within a year or two, once the House and Senate started feeding audio of their floor debate directly into the “Internet” and once the reporters learned how to find it there. Macy betrayed only the most diplomatic smile at the prediction. He knew that, other than the one “blogger” on the floor—who by everyone’s standards didn’t count because no one understood what it was that he did—the reporters, as a whole, technologically speaking, couldn’t find their own asses with both hands. True, computers had been facts of their professional lives for a generation now: big boxy necessary evils connected to desk phones, Frankenstein-like, via plastic-and-rubber modems whose piercing voices rose at deadline every afternoon in a chorus of electronic screeching that echoed through the halls of the press room like a flock of maniacal bats. But these were ultimately just flashier versions of the electric typewriters on which some of the older reporters continued to peck. The “Information Superhighway,” as it still was called without irony, was something altogether different and, most of them believed, irrelevant to the serious men and women whose job was to record the first draft of history. No, Macy was certain, those sturdy wooden squawk boxes wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. The one by Macy’s head was diligently buzzing live audio from the House floor, already in session this morning, debating a bill about ratites.

Garrick nodded and said: “Macy.”

Macy, without looking up from the page: “Garrick. The ratites are back.”

Ratites: Pronounced “ra-tites,” an order of large, flightless birds, including ostriches, that were raised in herds on Southern Illinois farms like gawky, two-legged cattle. They were the basis of a tiny but determined Illinois ratite industry that produced oils, feathers and a stringy meat that was gaining a cult following among those few New Age-ers who weren't vegetarians. Garrick, Macy and everyone else at the Capitol knew this and more about ratites because, a year earlier, the bird had become the unlikely subject of controversy. Representative Harry Clemens, a Downstate Democrat whose constituents included several ratite farmers, had introduced a legislative package of tax incentives and market enhancements that would put ratites on equal legal footing with pigs. This outraged those legislators who represented pig farmers, Illinois pigs outnumbering ratites “about a gazillion to one,” in the words of Danville Republican Bill White. White’s constituents included many pig farmers and, as far as he knew, not a single ostrich.

White was known for a bombastic, furious debating style—he once debated himself right into an ambulance, after collapsing during a screaming fit on the House floor while arguing against new utility taxes—and he led the anti-ratite charge that year. In debate, White taunted and infuriated Clemens by repeatedly referring to the ratites as ostriches. White alleged that Clemens was cynically using the word “ratite” in the legislation because no one knew what it meant. White was going to make damned sure everyone understood what Clemens was talking about spending valuable state resources for: “Ostriches! Ostriches, I tell you! Ostriches!” White almost managed to bury the thing, too, until Clemens dragged the Chicago Democrats into it. The Chicagoans: largely black or Jewish, hopelessly urban, they wouldn't have known a ratite from a prairie chicken, and viewed the whole ratite controversy as some peculiar Downstate Hatfield-and-McCoy thing that they didn't wish to step in. But they desperately wanted state funding for a new convention center on Lake Michigan. Clemens was in a position to deliver enough Downstate votes to put the convention center over the top, for a price: ratite relief. So the Chicagoans voted with him, making ratites a bona fide part of Illinois' agricultural montage. Now, a year later, Clemens was back, arguing that existing laws protecting cattle from people's unruly dogs should also protect ratites.

On the House floor, the debaters spoke to each other through microphones at their respective desks, calling across the crowded chamber, people milling around between them, talking, arguing, throwing things, sloppy and chaotic representative democracy in action. But listening to floor debate through the squawk box, all that was heard were the voices of the principle debaters, disembodied orators who sounded as if they were alone together in an echo chamber.

“This is a fledgling industry that is struggling enough without constant harassment by poorly controlled dogs,” said Clemens, his voice echoing through the squawk box. “You may not think this is a problem, ladies and gentlemen of the House, but if you had your life savings tied up in ratites, you would.”

Representative White, once again leading the anti-ratite forces, answered: “Representative Clemens, do you have any evidence that any dog in the state of Illinois has actually bothered an ostrich?”

“They're ratites, Representative White.”

“The truth is, for all you know, it's the ostriches that are bothering the dogs, isn't that true?”

“Ratites, Representative. Ratites.”

White and Clemens appeared to be doing their best to sell a sequel to the ratite controversy—Ratite II—but Garrick wasn't buying any tickets and he doubted anyone else would. The whole press corps had had great fun with the original ratite showdown, which transcended Story of the Day to become Story of the Week, but this one wouldn't merit more than a few lines in anyone's copy, the punchline having become a pretty old one. Macy, reading his paper, was only half-listening to the squawk-box.

Macy: middle-aged white male, gray-flecked mustache, short-sleeved button shirt with a tie—the uniform of a state government bureaucrat, which, technically, he was. One of the one-hundred-thousand-strong army of Illinois state government workers, Macy's job was to make the coffee and make the announcements in the press room and make sure the reporters knew if the Governor was coming up the stairs outside the wood-and-glass press room doors. Macy had been there longer than most of the reporters and had greatly intimidated Garrick early on, in part because Garrick wasn't clear on why the state of Illinois would provide the Capitol press corps with a clerk or why the press corps would accept such a gift from the government. It was a question that, four years later, Garrick still couldn't have answered. Macy was, like so much of the Capitol culture, just there. But Macy's long association with the press corps had given him a sharper news sense than other bureaucrats and most reporters, and Garrick ultimately found him to be a valuable resource. Macy would occasionally stick his head into Garrick's office to tip him off to something happening—a bill introduction, an agency announcement—that was of particular interest to readers in the Peoria region. Macy would sometimes even tip Garrick off to a statewide story, something the other reporters would have wanted, Something Big. Those tips, Garrick pondered with some discomfort, seemed based in sympathy, as if even the press room clerk understood that Garrick was sitting off on the sidelines and that the only way he could ever get into the game was if someone tossed him an easy pass now and then. He gratefully caught the passes anyway. Macy once tipped him off to a statewide story that turned out to be big enough to require working on it for four glorious days, his office door closed the whole time, the other reporters pacing around out in the lobby wondering what the hell he was up to. It had been the most gratifying week of Garrick's career.

Garrick rounded the corner of the first hall to the right and found his office door open, evidence that Colleen was already at her desk. He exhaled slowly. When he'd started in journalism, he had been surprised, first, by the thick presence of women in the profession and, then, by how much they talked like men. Colleen Brenner talked like a man who had spent time in prison. She was definitely a woman, short, heavy, ten years older than Garrick, with graying hair that had once been brashly red, a college-educated professional without any criminal record as far as Garrick knew. Yet obscenity, insult and various levels of threat rolled off her tongue in the casually unthinking way that a reserved soul like Garrick might say good morning. She didn't even have to be angry. In everyday conversation, Colleen casually used words that most people would use only in duress. When angry, she made up new ones. Between these conversational peaks were deep, wide valleys in which she said nothing at all, eschewing small talk with Garrick in the close quarters of their office, perfectly content with dead silence until he gave her some reason to violently shatter it. Garrick knew he should view the silences as gifts, but they, too, made him uncomfortable, and even after four years he still caught himself yammering half-conversations in the small silent room, as he waited for the next verbal grenade to go off.

Garrick's discomfort with Colleen was made worse by their physical surroundings. The Peoria Post bureau, like most of the press offices, was so small that stepping into it felt like climbing into an old-fashioned space capsule, one that had perhaps been taken over by bureaucrats. Stacks of documents, binders, reference books and press releases covered most surfaces. Cork boards hung on three walls, covered with more press releases, some of which pre-dated Garrick's graduation from college. Colleen's desk faced one wall, Garrick's faced the other and the backs of their chairs almost touched when both were sitting. Eye-to-eye contact involved twisting of necks and backs, so on the rare occasions that they talked to one another, they generally looked straight ahead at their respective, press-release-covered walls, their voices aimed in opposite directions. Since Colleen had made it clear early on, in the most creative of language, that she wouldn't relinquish the single low window, and Garrick had taken the same stance, the window stayed between them, its light partly obscured by stacks of press releases.

Garrick nodded at Colleen and sat, taking care not to let their chairs collide. He talked to the wall: “ ’Morning. What's up today?”

Behind him, Colleen’s eyes remained fixed on her newspaper.

Garrick said: “See the rally downstairs? Education funding, I think.”

Colleen turned a page.

Garrick cleared his throat, then offered, weakly: “The ratites are back.”

Across the hall, visible through Garrick's open door, was the open door of the Chicago Herald office, from which there now emanated the noise of someone gathering up papers and pushing in a chair. Garrick and Colleen both looked up and, for the briefest of moments, both imagined themselves in there, causing the noise. The Herald was the state's largest newspaper, one of the largest in the country, with bureaus in Washington, New York, London, Moscow. The Herald's Springfield bureau was the largest corner office in the press wing—two half-windows, instead of one—with an equally lopsided share of prestige. It was the Herald, the pinnacle of Midwestern journalism. Even Garrick, whose professional ambitions were as muted as any, found himself occasionally picturing his own by-line under that classically scripted white-on-blue masthead.

From the Herald office now emerged one of its two Springfield reporters, Harvey Rathbone III: late-forties, paunchy, bearded, unkempt in a slightly academic way. Harvey the Third had ended up at the Herald after a few years of playing musical chairs in the Capitol press wing: first the Bloomington Examiner & Bugle Capitol bureau, then the Decatur Courier-Review & Intelligencer Capitol bureau, and finally, the big chair at the Chicago Herald Capitol bureau. The majority of the occupants of the cubbyhole offices in the press wing had, at some earlier point, been occupants of different cubbyholes in the press wing. Every time the Capitol bureaus for the Herald or the Chicago Sun-Times or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of any of the other larger newspapers or television stations had an opening, there was a graceless scramble among reporters at the smaller-market bureaus to fill the seat—sometimes spawning spinoff scrambles among the smallest of the bureaus to fill their seats. The newspapers usually hired away reporters who already worked in the press wing at competing bureaus because those reporters knew the territory, had demonstrated their political reporting skills, and it saved money for the newspapers on moving expenses. The moving, in those cases, just involved putting one's personal belongings into a few boxes and walking a few feet up the hall, abandoning one geographic chunk of readers and picking up another. Some of the older reporters on the floor had spent their whole careers hauling their picture frames and coffee cups from one cubbyhole office after another, always landing just down the hall from their roots. It made for unsteady loyalties, friends coveting one anothers' jobs, newspapers coveting one anothers' employees. But the alternative was for the smaller-market reporters to resign themselves to sitting forever out in the weeds, away from the important business going on near the campfire, and none but Garrick could even comprehend accepting such a fate.

Harvey, emerging from the Herald office and into the hallway, paused in front of the Peoria Post office to slip into a too-small sports jacket and stuck a thin notebook into his lapel pocket. His tie: a red and green design, vaguely Christmasy, though it was early April. He paused and nodded at the two seated reporters. Garrick nodded back and said: “Harvey.” Colleen issued a deadpan stare at the red-green tie and said nothing.

Then Harvey the Third was gone, Colleen's nose was back in her newspaper and Garrick's eyes were on his computer screen, going over the wire schedule: the one-line summaries of stories or possible stories that the Associated Press planned to offer to the state's newspapers later that day. The Associated Press was the world's largest news organization, with hundreds of bureaus worldwide—including one fifteen paces down the hall from the Peoria Post’s Springfield bureau—sending stories to thousands of newspapers every day, to be published under the omnipresent byline “A.P.” The Illinois A.P. daily schedule generally determined what would be the Story of the Day at the Capitol, but Garrick had a more personal motive for carefully studying the list: to see what story Claire Ottoman, the A.P. Illinois Capitol bureau chief, would be working on that day, so Garrick could arrange to cover that story as well.

The wire schedule crawled across Garrick's screen, a line of glowing ants. One: Illinois Supreme Court set to rule on `Baby John' adoption case.'We will have an advance story. Another: School advocates rally at the Capitol for more education funding. Possible story on merits. Another: Illinois sets an execution date for the `I-57 Killer'.

Garrick looked up from his computer screen, a thought having buzzed in his ear like a mosquito. Behind him, at the same moment, Colleen, too, looked up from her newspaper, suddenly thinking the same thought.

Garrick said the wall: “Why is Harvey wearing a jacket?”

Colleen, picking up her phone: “Fuck if I know.”