American Taboo (revised)

Note: I will be submitting this story for publication next month, and I'm trying to snuff-out any and all errors. Any in-depth line editing, criticism, and praise is much appreciated. Thanks.

American Taboo
a short story by Jeff Minton

Through the rectangular window in the door to her boss’s office, Ray could see Mr. Chick Deets sitting at his desk, staring off at nothing, a bottle of whiskey and a glass within reach, which was strange as she had never seen him drink anything other than wine or expensive beer. Chick sipped the whiskey, swallowing sourly, and continued staring at the other side of his office. The palm of his hand opposite the whiskey glass rested against his forehead with his faded maple hair sticking out between his fingers. He looked old sitting like that, like a statue of an old drunk deep in thought, and old was a new look for him. Normally the man carried this sort of George Carlin go screw yourself defiance in his face that distracted you from noticing his aging signs: the crows feet branching from the corners of his eyes, the grayish stubble on his chin, and, if you looked close enough, the hairs creeping out of his ears. Now that’s all you saw in the man, even when you were looking through a small window across the room.

“How’s he look?” came a voice from behind her. It was Littlefoot. Everyone around the office operated on a nickname basis. She had become Ray after--eight years back in her second or so week as an intern--she had kicked one of the fact checkers in the chest following the “accidental” brushing of his hand across her left breast, and Chick had told everyone not to step on this one, she had the bite of a stingray hiding in the sand. Littlefoot stood at least 6’4” with dorky clipped hair and a sweater-vest and a long-sleeved dress shirt for every day of the week, and he wore absurdly disproportionate size ten shoes. At least one person a day would call him by his full name Littlefoot-we-all-know-what-that-means, but it was rare that anyone called him Jeff.

“See for yourself,” Ray said, moving aside.

Littlefoot glanced inside, said, “Yep, that’s bad. Can’t fix it staring through a window,” and he was gone.

She backed away from the door a bit, and glanced up at the name plate, Chick Deets, Chief Editor, and tried to imagine any other name in front of that title. It wasn’t right. Not at all.

The uproar of the office hit her again as if she had removed cotton from her ears, and she turned and walked back to her desk.

The main floor of the office stretched the length of a high-school gymnasium, an open design full of long desks topped with computers and papers and various printing machines. Department “regions” sectioned off the room: Washington handled politics, The Vatican handled religion, Hollywood took care of anything celebrity, Wall Street dealt with economic issues. Most of the time the office made for a fairly relaxed environment. Usually people would be huddled around one computer laughing at some online video, or sitting quietly and grinning at their computers, or out of the building getting ideas, except for about three days out of the month, just before next month’s issue went to print, when mayhem stole in.

Today, however, was unlike anything Ray had seen. It was still early October, fifteen days before November was scheduled to print, but after the news that was dropped on them earlier in the week, that Chick Deets was being ousted, the staff had taken it upon themselves to set a new deadline, and that was up at the end of the day. Everyone was scrambling about, typing on laptops as they walked, eating lunch at their desks, ripping papers and throwing them to the floor. The sound of a million printers going off at once harmonized with the yelling and the ringing and the crunching coming from everywhere.

Rumor had it that everyone was going to quit after November went out. A big F-you to the company. If Chick was going down, they were going to do everything in their power to bring the magazine down with him and bury the two in glory. Ray knew it wasn’t going to happen, though. When it came down to it, the people wouldn’t quit for one, and even if they did it still wouldn’t work. The magazine was property of its corporate parent, and corporate could do what they pleased with it, no matter how bad the last issue made them out to be. Chick would be forgotten, and the staff would hold tight to their jobs, and the bible-thumpers would turn the magazine into a joke to discredit Chick’s legacy. It was a conspiracy; she could just smell it.

Littlefoot came at her again. “Hey, Ray...what’s the squeeze on the cover?”

“End of the day,” she answered. “That’s all Chick would give me.”

Littlefoot was head writer under Chick. Ray had spent the first five years of her employment thinking very little of the man. Then, one night, she gave him a ride home after his tires got slashed in the parking lot; they got blasted, and he turned out to be quite the funny guy. He was just annoying as all hell if you didn’t get him.

“Then we’ll have it by the end of the day,” he said, and swept his head down and around as he headed off in the opposite direction. Then, calling back over his shoulder, he added, “See if you can’t make the end of the day come around three.” Littlefoot was a strange one. She kind of loved him.

The giant circular desk that occupied the middle of the main floor was hers. She bore the title Senior Editor now, after eight years of fighting her way up--intern to part-timer while she finished up her journalism degree, through just about every department in the place, and finally right under Chick, which was as far as she wanted to go. There were probably a dozen or so people more qualified for her current position, but no one wanted it as bad as she, and Chick could see that, which was why she was the one sitting in the center of the floor.

At her desk, she had a personal area with a computer and her collection of trolls and gargoyles and little figures. The rest of the space served for sorting. There were baskets embedded into the wrap-around desktop, one for each department. These held the final printouts that made up the bulk of the magazine. Ray’s job as senior editor was to proofread, arrange for continuity, and cut it all down to a final draft. She did this with hardcopies. Once organized, it all went to Chick for final approval, and then to the design department where it was typeset into a digital medium and sent off to the press and to website development.

This month everything was backwards. Normally, the inspiration for the entire issue came from the unveiling of the front cover on the second Monday of every month. The cover was Chick’s baby, his reputation, and he really cared about anymore.

He was a genius, and that was none too strong a word as far as Ray was concerned. She had moved to Chicago for the sole purpose of working for the man. It was a dream that had spawned out of her obsession with the magazine, which began when she discovered it in 8th grade after seeing Kurt Cobain on the front cover: a particularly gory arial view of his head as his brains are exploding out, with the superimposed caption, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” She had landed an internship through college, which got her a foot in the door, and from there earned a full-time position after finishing up her degree in journalism. She was now studying very part-time for an online master’s degree in business--she wasn’t quite sure why, considering she had the perfect job--and writing her thesis on the unlikely ascendancy of Chick Deets.

The man did have a very interesting story. He started as a cartoonist, a real sci-fi dork from what she could gather. He left college in his senior year to volunteer for the war. In Vietnam, he was a helicopter gunner, a real “asshole cowboy” in his own words. A year into it, he was injured. He spent his time in the hospital drawing pictures, where he earned the attention of a visiting American Journalist. One thing led to another and instead of going home, Chick went to work making political cartoons for the man to send back to the states.

When Chick returned to America, after seeing another side of the war, he found an outlet for his work in a local newspaper funnies column. That didn’t last long due to the gravity of his cartoons. The next decade or so led him through a series of defeats. In the late 70’s he found a taker. He got a column in a no-name porno magazine. The column was originally titled Tabooty, for which he was supposed to draw offensive sex scenes—sisters going at it, bestiality, the nastier the better, they said, but funny too. Something to make people smile and cringe at the same time.

What Chick came up with blew the magazine off the shelves. It was so popular he earned the power to take the sex out of it altogether, and he changed the name to simply Taboo. In 1982, the column was sold to a bigger and better name, and made into a full magazine, and Chick had total creative power. The magazine became American Taboo, with its sole purpose, according to Chick, being to piss everyone off, and maybe make them think a little bit, which was something Americans by and large liked to avoid.

Little had changed since then, though Chick had turned his full attention now to designing the front cover. That’s all he said people had time for anymore. And no more than two seconds at that. He put himself to the task every month of affronting the American people in two seconds time. To do that he said you had to bend a lie into the truth. Get inside them, crap on their souls, and leave them to clean up the mess.

For Ray, seeing these covers, month after month, was somewhat of a religious experience. It was like she had been a part of their creation somehow, like they were hers. She owned every issue--mint condition and sealed in plastic comic book covers--and she decorated her desk with her three favorite covers, framed and signed by the man himself: January 2007’s, which had Saddam Hussein hanging by his neck with a book in his hand titled “How to Stop American Terrorism for Dummies;” August 1996: a woman doctor giving birth to a baby sheep with God at her feet bowing in worship; and, recently, a long line of dirty American workers clocking into a Chinese factory headed by a smiling Chinese man with pockets full of American dollars and a whip in his hand. Ray particularly liked the sheep one; it just killed her.

The thought of next month coming around without a new Chick Deets masterpiece made her ill. Physically ill.

Ray returned to her desk and took a heavy seat, sitting back dizzily. The traffic in the office blurred. It was just after 2:00. Chick was expected to announce his resignation at 4:00 at a small press conference in the basement.

“Hey, Ray…” It was Littlefoot again. “Where you at, girlfriend? Washington and Hollywood are yellow, everyone else is sitting green except for the Vatican. Chuckie, Mouse, and Spiderlady’re on it full on. Pre-flight’s coming in, maybe an hour max. You gotta get on it, Ray. Use some of that fairy dust, and I mean fly!” He ran off.

She looked around at the jumble of papers. Normally this was easy, her favorite time of the month. The day flew by in a second and it was all done, but she couldn’t think right now. She didn’t care about any of this political-corporate-socio-eco-religious crap right now. This was about a great man. And she under him. And the rest of the office under her. And everyday was one to remember, and they were trying to take it all away. And she’d be damned to work for some visionless quack without purpose or merit, someone without vision, someone who’d complain about her choppy black hair, who wouldn’t let her wear the stud in her eyebrow, or her pot-leaf earplugs, or the bitchin’ green miniskirt and black leggings combo she was rocking today, someone like her mother who took every opportunity to remind her that she was 29 years old.

“Afternoon, Ms. Ferris. Not too busy for a word, I hope.”

“What do you want?” she said without looking.

“Minute of your time’ll make an old man’s day,” the man said. She recognized his voice and turned to look at him. “Frank, oh my god, good to see you. I’m so sorry. Come on up. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I get a phone call this morning tells me Chick Deets is giving up his magazine? Like blue hell he is, I say. Came down here to get the news straight.” He took off an old brown hat that was almost black from the rain outside, and exposed in the fluorescent lights a pair of bushy white eyebrows and a bald head covered with liver spots and surrounded by wiry patches of colorless hair.

It was awkward and a little sad talking to him. Frank had been fighting prostate cancer for the past year. He was on some special diet, and you’d never know he was sick, but Chick had told her it was getting worse. Frank was Chick’s old journalist mentor from Vietnam, the one that discovered him. He was officially retired now, but, he still came to Chick’s aid whenever the magazine needed some good PR. Frank had connections with USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Times, the Washington Post, and a bunch of smaller newspapers. When a story had to come out, Frank made sure to get to it first, and he had a knack for keeping Chick out of trouble.

“I’m dripping all over the place.”

“Let me get that for you, here,” she said, taking his jacket and hat. She walked them to the break room just across the floor and returned.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me the same about Chick?”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” she said.

“Well...that’s not at all what I wanted to hear...that’s a damn shame.”

“I don’t know what to do, Frank. He won’t fight back. He’s just sitting in there, all pathetic and stupid, drinking and staring at the wall.”

Frank looked across the room at Chick’s closed office door. “What’s he drinking?”

“Whiskey.”

Frank sat back.

“What?”

“He’s done in.”

“Because of that?”

“I’ve seen that man drink hard liquor exactly three times in the forty years I’ve known him. Once in the war, once when Caroline ran off on him, and now over this; two of those time’s have been in the last year.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe not,” he said, standing up. “Bring the man some bread or something. He’s got the stomach of a kitten. Don’t tell him I came by, alright.” Frank started off.

“Wait.”

He turned back.

“Are you gonna help us?”

“If Chick wanted my help he’d have called me. He doesn’t need me to see him like this.”

“Then what can we do?”

“Well, it’s up to him ultimately, but you could give it a shot. What’s the politics?”

“Corporate’s going in a new direction. That’s all they’ll say.”

“Classic line,” Frank said. “So what’s all this hustle about?” he said, twirling his finger around the office.

“We’re sending November out tomorrow. Try to spread the word to rally the people or whatever. It wasn’t my idea.”

“That’s a place to start,” Frank said. “Won’t be enough to save Chick, though.”

“I know. So what can we do?”

“People need to be more than mad over this. You’ve got to light a fire in their britches. You got to get them in the streets, with signs, burning magazines, looking for a fight. You need mass media coverage, and you’ve got to sell it.”

“Can you help?”

“I suppose I could make some calls.”

“Ray, touchdown in fifteen minutes! Get it together!” Little-foot yelled from behind her. “Howdy, Frank. Good to see you.” Frank raised his hand to wave but Littlefoot was already gone.

“Can you come to the press conference this afternoon?” she asked to Frank.

“That’s up to Chick, and he didn’t invite me. I can make some calls. I’m afraid that’s all I’m good for in this.”

“Can you just talk to him, at least? I know he wants you there; he’s just too proud to ask. Just try? For a minute? Please?”

The lines in Frank’s face darkened. He blew air from his nostrils.

“You’ve gotta talk some sense into him. He can’t lose this. You know he can’t.”

Frank slapped his knees. “Ahh, hell,” he said, pushing against the armrest to stand. His elbows wobbled under his weight. He labored his way across the floor to Chick’s office, knocked, and disappeared inside.

“Ray, seriously, you got to get this out like ten minutes ago,” Littlefoot said.

“Will you stop!” she snapped back.

Littlefoot’s face went blank.

“I don’t care about the goddamn magazine right now, alright. You do it.” She threw a handful of papers at him, jogged off to the break room, shut the door, sat down in a recliner, took a Kool from a pack on the end-table, and lit it with a match. The room had loungy feel if you left the main lights off: low lighting, soft jazz, even a mini-bar. Ray inhaled deeply, the cherry glowing brightly in the soft light.

Soon the hot taste of filter burned her mouth. She put the cigarette out, sat back, and tried to sort her thoughts, but they were exploding in her mind like fireworks, and burning out just as fast. Then they stopped coming altogether. It was quiet in there. The music seemed to fade away. The room purred with the gentle sound of rain against the roof.

Her body jerked and sent an image to her head: a crowd of people yelling. They held huge signs and metal baseball bats and ran wildly through the streets. They carried someone high above their heads. Then they began to fade, their voices distant, then calm like rain.

The door opened and Frank came into the break-room. He flipped a switch that turned on the overhead fluorescents and cancelled the music. Ray sat up with leaden eyes, and folded her arms across her chest. She was deeply cold, like sleep cold, and she was trying to figure out if she had actually fallen asleep right in the middle of all this.

Frank gathered his coat and hat, which were dry now, she noticed. He was moving slowly, a terrible look on his face. He approached Ray with an envelope, dropped it in her lap, and then placed his hand on her shoulder. “From Chick,” he said. “He said to read it carefully. You should get on home.” He patted her shoulder gently and left the room.

She opened the envelope. Inside was a note written in Chick’s sharp handwriting: “It’s not worth it.” That was it. She read again, trying to sort out what he meant by that.

The sound of rain had stopped, and the silence in the room was deafening all the sudden. Ray stood up, put the note in the pocket of her jeans, and went out to the office floor. Most everyone was huddled over in Vatican City. Little-foot was at her desk.

“Hey,” she said.

Littlefoot didn’t respond. He kept rolling back and forth across the floor, sorting the mass of papers.

“Jeff,” she said.

He looked up.

“I’m sorry, okay. For real. Thank you for taking over.”

He nodded.

“So where are we at with all this?” she asked.

“Everything’s green except for one big lead in the Vatican. Spiderlady might’ve found a link between Corporate and the Archdiocese of Chicago. There’s a transaction between the two in the corporate records titled donation, only there’s no parenthesis around it like all the other negative transactions, so we’re thinking it might be going the other way. If we can prove the church paid Corporate off, we’re home free. Everyone’s working on it now.”

“No way,” she said. “I knew this was a conspiracy. Do you think we even need proof? The rumor alone might be enough.”

“Bad idea.”

“Yeah, probably,” she said. “Does Chick know about this?”

“I doubt it. He’s been in his office all day.”

“I gotta tell him. It’ll piss him off royally.”

“Let me know what he says.”

Ray ran for his office and opened the door. The smell of puke and alcohol hit her hard. He wasn’t there. “Damn,” she said. She went back to her desk. “Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know,” Littlefoot said.

“You didn’t see him leave?”

“I’m a little busy,” he said. “He probably went to the conference.”

“Oh my god, it’s almost a quarter to four?” Ray said. “I gotta stop him.”

“Go,” Littlefoot said. “I’ve got things under control up here.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Seriously.”

The conference room was in the basement. She was there within the minute. Fronting several rows of chairs were a stage, and a podium with the American Taboo logo on it and Chick Deets written in bold red print. What was odd were two streaks of red running off the end of his name like the paint was dripping. There were a dozen or so reporting crews setting up their lights and cameras and microphones. Chick was nowhere.

A man with a tripod almost knocked Ray to the ground, and she decided to take a seat. She took the first row center seat so she could at least shoot darts out of her eyes at Chick the whole time he was speaking, if she didn’t have time to talk to him before he started. She doubted she would. He was hiding.

Those next ten minutes lasted forever. Individual voices that Ray did not want to hear began to break from the drone of people like burst embers from the roar of a fire.

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” one woman said.

“More’an likely a lawsuit,” a fat man behind her answered with labored breath. “Nothin’ to get too excited about. These people get sued more’na federal government.” He rasped a laugh at himself and threw a white Tic Tac into his mouth.

Ray felt horrible just sitting there. She should be doing something. Maybe start breaking all the cameras and thrashing the place. That’d get their attention. Or she could start that angry mob. They could strip naked and run wildly through the streets until they got arrested, holding Chick up high for the world to see.

“You want a piece of gum, or something?” The voice came from a young man sitting next to her.

She realized she was rocking in her chair, her foot tapping rapidly like a drug addict. She stopped and looked forward to the empty podium, ignoring the man with the gum.

This was it. The end. There was no escaping it. Chick was going to coward out. The magazine would die. She would be looking for a new job in some lame office somewhere where you couldn’t smoke, or worse, she’d end up back home in Southern Illinois, arguing with her mother about when she was going to settle down with a man and how she might need to start thinking about children before it gets too late.

Her cell phone rang. It was the office upstairs calling. She answered in a whisper: “Hello?”

“Hey, did you find him?” It was Littlefoot on the phone.

“No, we’re just waiting.”

“Not cool,” Littlefoot said. “We’re pretty much set to go up here, but we still don’t have the cover. When you see Chick put the pressure on him, okay?”

“I’ll try,” she said.

“Oh, and you know that whole Archdiocese thing. Turns out Bingo from Wall Street has a grandmother who works for the church. When Bingo told her about what was going on, she was so mad at the church she found and faxed us over some of their records. We don’t have much, but we have enough, I think, and this goes all the way to Rome, baby. It’s beautiful. Chick must’ve pissed off the pope himself. I bet it was that gay orgy cover he did of all the cardinals at Coronation back in o-five.”

“Wow,” she said. “I knew it was something like that. I gotta go. I’ll talk to him if I can. I’ll be up soon.” She clapped her phone shut and put it away.

The room went quiet. Reporters took their seats. Cameramen got behind their cameras. Ray ground the base of her palms together as if to keep her hands from thrashing out at everyone. She wanted so badly to stop this.

Then Chick was there. He came right out of the walls. She cocked her head when she saw him, a smile growing. He was dressed up like an 18th century politician with a curly white wig and a judge’s robe. He wore a golden sash across his chest that read, “I plead the 1st!” and he held a megaphone loosely by his side.

This wasn’t the same man that she had seen earlier today. His face was shining; there was a wry arch to his lip. His eyes met Ray’s for a moment, and he shot her an almost imperceptible wink. Ray moved to the edge of her chair, eyes wide, back straight, her body tingling.

Chick stepped up to the podium. All was silent. He lifted the megaphone and put on a greasy politician’s smile and said: “My fellow Americans...” Then he paused. The color slowly left his face. He looked all at once sick and sad and scared. Ray thought he might cry or puke. He swallowed hard and seemed to heave his facial muscles into a theatrical look of utter hatred. His eyes did not sell the expression, but he held it as if by will alone. He raised the megaphone in one hand and an American Taboo magazine in his other and he leaned his face in between the two objects. Ray was thinking how the magazine he was holding was unfamiliar, that this was the new cover. Then, through a gritted snarl, Chick Deets growled at the top of lungs: “Wake up!”

And then Ray’s eardrums exploded into ringing pain. She saw first the megaphone flying, then Chick stumbling backwards, then a splatter of red across the white backdrop. She couldn’t hear. The man next to her knocked her from her seat and lay atop her like a shield. Something was crushing the fingers of her left hand. A black cyclone of motion tore through the room.

Then the man was no longer on top of her. He was trying to pull her to her feet. She kicked at him and he said something she could not hear and he ran off. She pulled her hand out from under a metal rack. Everyone was running away.

She stood, dazed, and took off her converse sneakers, and she almost fell down again, but she saw Chick lying on the stage, and she ran to him.

He was on his back, blood pooling above his left shoulder. He was twitching a little, his eyes open but not seeing. She slapped him and screamed in his face but she didn’t know what she was saying. His cheek, so pale now, was splotched with bright red blood that had not been there a second before. She held the hand she had slapped him with in front of her eyes. Two fingers were stiff and crooked looking, and half of her pinky finger was hanging by a piece of skin. Blood ran from it like syrup. She wasn’t sure if she could hear anything or not. She tried to stand and she felt a rush to her head that stopped her on her knees, then it was drowning her thoughts, and she swayed, and sank into it.
*
Ray woke into another life, it seemed. The void between had been empty and timeless. She was alone in an unfamiliar room. It was a hospital room, she gathered. Several assortments of flowers sat on the table by her bed. She felt numb and dizzy and cold. Cloth covered her left hand.

Ray hit the red button on the rail of her bed.

“Nurse,” a voice answered through a speaker next to the button.

“I don’t know…” she said. “I…don’t know…”

A second later, a middle-aged woman in Garfield scrubs came into the room. “Glad to see you’re awake Ms. Ferris,” the woman said. Her name tag read Cindy.

“What happened? What day is it?”

“You nearly cut your finger off, honey. Right now it is the very early morning of October eleventh. You’ve been here for almost twelve hours. It seems Doctor Martin may have saved your finger, but we’ll have to keep you here a couple of days to know for sure.” Cindy set a large powdery pill on the tray table next to a plastic cup of water. “Take this pill and go back to sleep now, honey. Okay?”

“No…what, where’s Chick. A man…he was bleeding.”

“If you absolutely can’t wait till morning...perhaps it’s best you speak to your friend about it. I’ll send him in.”

The nurse made her take the medicine and left. A minute later Littlefoot came in.

“Jeff, what happened? What’s going on?” she said.

“Are you okay? How are you feeling?” he said.

“I don’t know. What happened to Chick?”

“It’s a little complicated.”

“Tell me.”

“He’s alive...for now. He’s in ICU. The bullet hit an artery in his shoulder. He lost a lot of blood. Hasn’t woke up yet. They don’t know if he will.”

“He was shot?”

Jeff gave her a strange look.

“You were there. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Who shot him? Why?”

“Umm...it’s sort of complicated.”

“Why aren’t you telling me.”

“Look,” he said, holding up a magazine. She took it with her good hand.

The cover was done with dark colored pencils in Chick’s usual comic strip style. The image stole the blood from Ray’s face:

A man dressed as an old politician with white curls and a long robe stood in front of a podium. On the podium was the American Taboo logo and “Chick Deets” in red print with two streaks of red dripping from the last two letters. He wore a golden sash that read “I plead the 1st!” A horrible expression twisted his face. A dialog box displayed the words: “My fellow Americans…Wake up!” In his right hand he held a megaphone, and in his left hand was a magazine that showed a miniature version of the entire scene over again, and in that picture another magazine and so on until all that could fit was a black dot. In the foreground of the image, off to the side, was a first person perspective of a hand aiming a revolver at the man on stage. A chain with a cross hung from the wrist of the shooter. Fire blew from its barrel. The title at the top read

American Taboo
And So They Killed Me…

The image brought incredible clarity to her memory.

“It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?”

“What?” Ray said, drawing the word out as if she couldn’t believe what he just asked.

“He won, I mean.”

“Are you serious?” Ray said.

“Hell yeah I’m serious,” he said.

“What’s wrong with you.”

“Hey, don’t take this out on me. I didn’t shoot him. I’m just saying...terrible yes, but he did it. You should hear what people are saying. We’ve had more hits on the website in the last twelve hours than in the past ten years combined. He’s a hero. The magazine’s ours again. They can’t touch us now.”

Ray had her teeth clenched. She couldn’t figure out how to feel. “I need to sleep,” she said.

“Ray, if I could rewind time and make it different I would, believe me. I’m just saying this is what happened...and it’s obviously what he wanted...and it worked.”

“I don’t know, just, I need to sleep.”

“Yeah, right, sure,” he said. He set a plastic gift shop bag on her blanket and turned out the light as he left.

In the bag was a little gremlin statue, and it made her smile. She held it in her hand and fell back into her bed. She felt high all of the sudden. The medicine was in her head. The bed seemed not to hold her up. She was falling through it.

The next thing she knew a brutish lady in a hair net was waking her up. “You eat,” she said with a Russian accent.

Her stomach rejected the idea, and when the lady left she pushed the food away. A nurse that was not Cindy came in next. She said good morning and that she was going to take out the catheter and IV and get her up to the bathroom. The nurse worked quickly and without conversation, and she helped Ray to the toilet. Once there, Ray said, “I’m okay here,” and the nurse left.

Ray spent a minute stretching out. She looked for some real clothes to wear but there were none. She thought for a minute about calling her parents in Southern Illinois, but figured she’d be out of the hospital before they could make it anyway. She tied her gown as tight as she could, stole a few bites of an orange muffin and some bacon off her breakfast plate, and then walked out into the hall. The nurse tried to stop her, but Ray demanded that they take her to Chick.

The ICU room was mostly empty except for an old woman in the far corner that had a breathing tube down her throat, Chick in the first bed by the door, and a visitor sleeping in a chair to Chick’s side with a brown hat over his face. She walked in with caution, afraid she might trip on a vital cord or something.

“Hey,” she whispered to the man with the hat. “Frank...is that you?”

Frank sat up and sniffled under his hat. He looked down and to the side as he removed it from his face. When he raised his head, despite his best effort to hide it, she knew he had not been sleeping but crying. “Morning,” he said in a weak voice.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Don’t know?” he replied shakily. The tiny muscles in his face seemed to be firing at random.

Looking at him made it hard for her not to cry. She didn’t know if she felt worse for Chick, or Frank, or herself.

“You want to get some breakfast?” she asked.

Frank did not respond. He was staring at the floor with great intensity.

“Frank,” she said. “Frank, you can’t blame yourself for this. Chick did it to himse--”

  “I shot him,” Frank blurted. The words came out in a burst of air that tapered off into a long, percussive sob.

Ray froze in mid-speech.

  Frank breathed in deep and, half-crying, spoke in a frenzy: “I told him I’d do it. He had someone hired, and he told me about it because he couldn’t hide it, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. It was something he had to do, no matter what. I thought if I hit him in the shoulder he’d be okay. The other guy would’ve killed him. I thought if I hit him in the shoulder he’d be okay.”

Ray looked at him for a long time. Frank was crying out loud now, rambling. He slid out of the chair and hunched over himself on the floor with his legs sprawled out. Without realizing it, she had backpedaled almost to the door, and when the draft from the hallway bit her bare ass through the paper nightgown, it broke her from the trance, and she backed the rest of the way out of the room, and walked away trying to figure out if she was still upset.

The rest of the day she spent in bed. She rejected the nine-thousand reporters and any other guests that came to see her. She asked about Chick a couple of times and nothing had changed. The cover of that magazine occupied a great deal of her time. Mostly she stared into the cycle of miniature magazines within the picture. She could make out three of them, and maybe a hint of a fourth, before they got too small.

The next day the doctor told her that her finger was doing fine, they were worried mostly about the shock, that she could go home if she felt like it, it would be a good idea to consult a phycologist about what happened, and that she needed to come back in a couple of days for a checkup.

Ray dressed in the drabby clothes the nurse had brought her. She grabbed the Gremlin statue off the end table. On the bed, a box held the belongings she had come in with. She left her eyebrow stud in the box, put some coins and a guitar pick into her pocket, and picked up the note Chick had written to her. “It’s not worth it,” the note said. She grabbed the magazine with the same hand and looked at Chick’s unsightly image for a long minute. Then she threw the magazine in the trash, and put the note in her back pocket.

Jeff came in just as she was about to leave.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s the finger?”

She nodded without smiling.

“Ray, I’m really--”

“Sarah,” she interrupted. “It’s Sarah...please.”

He nodded. “Right...Sarah.”

He just stood there for a second as if trying to think of something to say, or how to say it, and she realized then that he was there for her, not Chick, and in any way she would have him. On instinct, she leaned in to kiss him, but her lips landed friendly-like on the corner of his mouth instead of square on, and she withdrew, eyes falling to the floor. “Let me know what happens with the magazine. Good luck with everything.”

“What do you mean? You’re not leaving are you?”

“You’ve been a real friend, Jeff.” She held up the gremlin statue as if to say thanks. “See you around.” She felt a tear begin to collect in her eye for the first time since this whole thing started. Then she moved past him, and walked fast for the exit.

“Ray...Sarah. Come on. You can’t leave now. We’ve never been bigger.”

Sarah ignored him. She shut out thoughts of the office, of celebrating with everyone, and putting together next month’s issue, and all the great things there were to be said, and she went home.