The Capsule on the Cover

That spring the magazines made the news, and the news was other magazines. On the twenty-sixth of March a national weekly put a pill on its cover — a single capsule, green and ivory, magnified past the size of a fist and set floating over an empty desert, with a line that called it a breakthrough — and a drug that a month before had been a prescription became, on the newsstand, a mood the whole country could suddenly recognize in itself. It had a name a person could say at a dinner. It could be gotten from a family doctor in the time it took to describe a bad winter. Somewhere underneath, in a journal nobody at a kiosk had heard of, a small alarm had started about the drug and the people who took it, but the alarm was months from the newsstand and did not travel; what traveled was the capsule over the desert, and the country looked at it and decided, that spring, that sadness was a thing with a chemistry.

Eight days earlier another cover had named a dead man. A publisher, rich and courtly, had died in February and been buried in the manner of his class, and a small downtown weekly had put his face on its front and printed the part of his life the obituaries had agreed among themselves to leave out — had said the thing that the great gray newspaper uptown would not print his name beside for the better part of a year. There was a new word for it that month, coined by the very magazines that were arguing about whether it could be done at all.

Meridian was the last-word magazine, and its last word that spring was to be about the other magazines' first ones. The May book would carry an essay on the pill and an essay on the naming, and would put, on its own cover, a competitor's cover, reproduced — the capsule again, smaller, on a field of the borrowed red — which the room would call either the cleverest thing it had done all year or the laziest, and would call both, at the same party, before the night was out.

Sana Farid ran the spring fashion page on a Tuesday, in a rented studio on the far West Side with a freight elevator that opened straight into the room, and she ran it as she ran everything, mostly by not talking.

There were nine people on the floor and they were all, in the end, arranged around her silence. The ad book had wanted the page — six looks, the season's clothes, a thing the well needed the way a body needs a meal it does not especially want — and the magazine had given her a stylist from an agency and two assistants and a woman for hair and a woman for the faces and a man whose entire profession was the light, and they came in loud, as that trade came in, and by ten they had gone quiet, because the room took its temperature from the person behind the camera and the person behind the camera used four words an hour.

She built the light with the light man and did not flatter him and did not fight him; she stood where the camera would stand and looked, and half-closed her eyes until the room went to planes and edges, and said lower, and kill the fill, and he killed the fill. She pulled a Polaroid off the back of the camera every few frames and held it at arm's length under the modeling lamp and read it as the desk read a galley, for what was standing and what had fallen, and dropped the used ones face-up on a stool where they curled and darkened into a little archive nobody would keep. The model was nineteen and frightened of her and did not know why, because Sana had not said an unkind word, had in fact said almost nothing. Sana moved the girl's chin a half-inch with two fingers and stepped back and the girl's whole face changed, and that was the frame, and Sana knew it was the frame the second before the strobe went, and did not say so.

At one she let them break, and ate nothing, and stood at the window looking down at the river with the camera still on her chest, composing the barges. At six she had the six looks and forty other things nobody had asked for, and she thanked the room in a sentence, and the room was grateful to her out of all proportion to the sentence, and went off to a bar to say she was impossible and to mean it as the highest thing they had.

The film went home with her, because she developed her own black-and-white and always had, and did not trust the lab with the frames that mattered, and the frames that mattered were never the six the ad book wanted.

Meridian's darkroom was at the inside corner of seven, a windowless room the photo department shared, and after the floor had gone dark she let herself into it and shut the door on the day. It was the one room in the building with no clock in it. She loaded the reels by feel in the black, the film sliding onto the spiral under her thumbs, and then there was the ordinary alchemy she never got tired of and would not have called that: the developer poured, the timer set, the tank inverted in its slow rhythm, D-76 at sixty-eight degrees doing in eleven minutes the thing that could not be undone or hurried, turning what the light had merely promised into something that would hold. Stop bath, sharp and vinegar, catching in the back of the throat. Fixer after it, sulfur-sweet, the smell that got into her hair and that the man she sometimes saw said he could find on her a day later. She washed the film in running water and hung it dripping from a line with a clothespin and a second pin for weight, and stood in the safelight's low amber reading the negatives wet, the world in them reversed, the dark faces and the white shadows, and knew already which four she would print.

The print was the part that was still, after ten years, very close to magic and she was careful never to say so to the freelancers, who said so constantly. The paper blank in the developer tray, rocking under the amber; and then the grays arriving out of nothing, the image coming up from underneath — a smudge, then a weight, then a face — the girl's changed face, the half-inch of chin — climbing up out of the white until it was the thing itself and she pulled it with the tongs into the stop, and it stopped, fixed where it had decided to be. There was a stretch of board on the wall over the wash sink, homasote gone soft with a thousand pushpins, where work prints went up wet to be looked at and pulled down again. She pinned four there to dry and study, and stood in the amber and studied them, and pulled three, and left one.

She did the visa letter at home, at the table by the window, still smelling of fixer.

It had come in a window envelope from the firm the magazine used, and it was a procedural letter, a renewal of the permission that let her stay and work, the paper that stood under the whole New York life as a footing stands under a house. She read it once fast for the verdict and once slow for the language. The verdict was that the thing was in motion and would take, in the firm's estimate, most of three years — the longer permission, the one that ended in the card, the one that would fasten her to this magazine and no other for the duration, because the magazine was the sponsor and the sponsor was the ground she stood on and you did not, it turned out, argue in quite the same voice with the people who owned the ground. Her passport was British and smoothed the consular part; her birthplace was printed two lines down and roughened it again; the two facts had ridden together on every form she had filled since she was a girl and she read them without surprise. She read the letter twice and folded it along the firm's own crease and filed it in the accordion folder with the others, under the tab in her own hand, and squared the folder to the drawer's edge and shut the drawer.

On the twenty-first, a Wednesday, she set the table for the new year alone, because the year turned when it turned and did not consult her calendar.

She had cooked since the afternoon light was still good — the herbs washed and chopped fine, the rice built in its layers, the whole apartment gone green and fragrant with it — and she did not photograph any of it, though the freelancers would have, though it was the most beautiful the rooms ever looked. She set the cloth and set the mirror and squared the mirror to the cloth's edge with the flat of her hand, and set the dish of sprouted greens she had started on the sill a fortnight before, and a book, and the small precise remainder, each thing placed and then adjusted a finger's width and left. She did it exactly. She did it as her mother did it four thousand miles east in a house in Islington and as her grandmother had done it in a city her grandmother no longer lived in, and there was nobody in the room to see that it was exact, and she did not do it for anybody in the room.

The phone call ran its Friday shape on a Wednesday because the year moved it. Her mother asked after her health, and the New York weather, which Nasrin distrusted on principle, and what she had eaten, and answered her own questions about the food before Sana could, correcting the amount of the herbs across the ocean; and then, lightly, arriving at it as a person arrives at a step they have stopped seeing, whether there was anyone, whether Sana was seeing anyone, and Sana said no one to speak of, Maman, in the tone that closed it without a sound, and her mother let it close, and the two of them almost enjoyed the closing, which had become, over the years, a thing they did together. Her father came on at the end for the two minutes he took. He asked about the camera. He had read that the new bodies focused themselves now and wanted to know whether she trusted it, whether a machine could be trusted to find the thing a person meant, and Sana said it found the wrong thing beautifully and she turned it off, and Farhad made the small sound that was the closest the engineer came to being delighted, and told her to sleep, and hung up first.

She sat at the set table and ate the new year's dinner, alone, and it was very good, because she was a very good cook, and the sprouted greens on the sill went on growing toward the thirteenth day. Afterward she washed the plate and the glass and set them in the rack.

She saw the man on Thursdays, mostly, at a bar on the Lower East Side that the door knew her at without her ever having worked a night in the place.

It was where the photographers were — the freelancers and the gallery people and the ones with a show coming up and the ones whose show had come and gone and left them talking about the next — and they took her for what she was there, which was an artist, not a staffer, not the quiet one in the field jacket at the back of somebody else's meeting. They argued about pictures as the eighth floor argued about sentences, with the same cruelty that meant respect, and she spent more words in an hour there than in a week at Madison Avenue, and left, always, before it turned into the other kind of night. The argument that spring was a program: one of the printers had watched, at a trade show, a Macintosh lift the sky out of one negative and set it into another in under a minute — no knife, no airbrush, no seam — and half the bar said it was the airbrush all over again and therefore nothing, and the other half said the airbrush had never lied this well or this cheap, and the argument went around twice and settled nothing, and Sana, who did not trust even the lab, spent no words on it. The man was one of them, or near them, a printer with good hands and a loft he could not afford much longer, and it had been going on quietly since the winter on terms she had set and never stated.

The terms were hers. She decided the Thursday and she decided the loft over her own walk-up because the walk-up was where she kept her life, and she staged the room before he arrived without appearing to, the lamp turned to throw the shadow she wanted, the window cracked for the cold she liked on her back. The loft's one bookshelf held, between the monographs, two tape spines hand-lettered HEAD CLEANER in a printer's neat capitals, and she had read them for what they were the first Thursday and never mentioned it — equipment of a private life, like the decoy wallet, like the lamp. It was 1990, and before anything she asked it, in the dark, in her flat clear voice — when were you last tested — and he said February, and negative, and nobody since, and she gave him the same back in fewer words, and that was the whole liturgy; the condom sat by the lamp with the matches and got used without ceremony, because the caution had been worn so far into the act by then that it was the act. She liked his hands, which were a printer's hands and smelled faintly of fixer like her own, and she liked the cold on her back and his weight, and she took what she had come for without hurry and with some noise, which after a winter of Thursdays still surprised nobody but him; and for four or five minutes after, flat on her back with her heart loud, she was a woman with no camera at all. Then she left first, as always, dressing in the dark and composed by the door before he had found the lamp.

He had asked her twice to photograph him. Once drunk, once not, which was worse. He wanted the thing she gave the people she loved, the frame that said this is how I see you, and it was the one thing she would not give him, and she told him no both times in the same three words and did not explain the three words, and he took it for coyness the first time and understood it the second and stopped asking, and something went slightly cooler between them that was hers to have made cooler.

That week he left a message on her machine. She came in Friday to the red light blinking and pressed it standing in her coat with the fixer still on her, and his voice came up into the apartment asking, easily, without weight, whether she was around this Thursday, and she stood and listened to the whole of it and to the click at the end and the tape resetting, and she did not call him back. She took her coat off and hung it, and the red light went steady, and she rewound the tape to the start, so that the next voice would record over his.

On the first Sunday of April she took the camera to Church Avenue, because a piece about that block had died in a meeting she had never sat in and nobody had thought to send a photographer, and the block was still there whether the magazine came or not.

She had heard the pitch was killed as she heard most things, sideways, months ago — a piece the building wanted and could not get, no one on the masthead who could cross the picket line and be let in on either side of it — and she had filed the block in her head under the places the magazine did not reach, and gone, on her own Sunday, on her own film, for nobody. She came off the train into the Flatbush cold and walked it with the Nikon down at her hip and the field jacket's pockets full of canisters, and she photographed as she breathed, half-lifting the camera, letting it down, the frames accumulating without ceremony.

The picket was there and it was ordinary now, three months in — a handful of people and a folded card table and a bullhorn nobody was shouting through at that hour, the anger gone from the pitch of an event down to the maintenance of a position, which did not photograph as anything. One of the two stores was dark, gated, the produce gone from the window, and outside it a woman in the pale uniform of a nurse's aide, off a shift or onto one, stood a moment reading the empty glass and then turned and walked on, three blocks further into the cold, to the store that was not being kept from her. Sana let the camera find her back going away and did not lift it to her face, and got the frame anyway, from the hip, without composing it, and knew it was the frame as she had known it in the studio.

The sidewalk under her had its own grit. Among the ordinary litter, caught in the seams of the pavement and along the base of the gate, the small glass vials with their colored caps lay where they lay all over the borough that year, so common the eye stopped ranking them among the things worth seeing, and she saw them and did not photograph them and walked on over them. Halfway down the block a woman with a government satchel was working the doors for the count, the decade's census taking itself on a Sunday because the weekdays had produced nobody willing to be counted, and getting the doors a stranger with a satchel got.

She went into the second store, the open one, for a bottle of water she did not need, and while she was in it, at the crate of fruit by the door, her hand took a lime and put it in the Barbour's pocket, small, green, unpaid, and she bought the water and said thank you to the man at the register in her flat clear voice and went out into the street. She had done it since the first war she had ever photographed and she did not do it for a reason and had never been caught and never once explained it to herself or to anyone, and it lived in the same hand that had squared the mirror to the cloth four nights before, and she walked to the train with the lime in her pocket and did not think about the lime.

That night she printed the block.

She printed the nurse's-aide frame full, the whole rectangle the lens had seen, the woman's back and the dark store and the three blocks of cold implied past the edge, and it came up out of the developer under the amber and stood, and she fixed it and washed it and pinned it to the homasote over the wash sink, and left it up. It was the first one she left up on purpose, not to study and pull but to keep, a thing the magazine would never run because the magazine had never gone.

Nora came down while it was drying, which Nora did perhaps twice a year, on her own feet, because the fashion page had a layout problem the phone could not solve. She wanted a crop. She had the six looks up on the light table in her mind already and she wanted the lead frame tighter, the girl's changed face brought up to fill the page, the studio cut away to nothing, and she said so precisely and she was right, it was a better page. Sana looked at the work print and agreed it was a better page and marked the crop for her, the two grease-pencil corners that told the platemaker where to cut, and Nora took it and was gone back up the stairs inside four minutes, the problem solved, the book moving.

Then Sana printed the lead frame again, for herself, uncropped — the girl and the whole studio around her, the light stands and the seam of the backdrop and the stool of curling Polaroids, everything the page was about to lose — and pinned it up on the homasote beside the woman on Church Avenue, the two of them wet and side by side, the crop gone up to eight to be a cover-clean page and the full frame staying down here on the wall where nobody came. She pinned the second print and stood back and the wall held two now where a week before it had held none.

The Bronx thing had gone around the light table the Thursday before, one clause of it — a fire in a social club the week past, dozens of them dead behind a door somebody had blocked, and a man's name, and gasoline — and a photo assistant had said it and a second one had said it was a hell of a thing and that had been the whole of it, because the piece had died upstairs at a water cooler before it was ever a piece, nobody had gone, there had been no one to send with a camera and no meeting anyone could name where the not-sending was decided. Sana had heard the clause and gone on marking her contact sheets.

Dez Washington got the OutWeek essay on the second night of the close, and it was the hardest thing she checked all month, and none of the difficulty was in any fact.

The piece was called "What OutWeek Named," and it was Meridian's cool late look at the naming of the dead publisher — not the naming itself, which the downtown weekly had done three weeks back, but what the naming did to the rules, and it came to her blotter with the weekly itself clipped to it as source, the dead man's face on the front of it, the sentences underneath that no uptown paper would set in type. She read the essay once through with the pen down. Then she took it apart, and it came apart wrong.

The desk checked a claim against the person it was about; that was the floor of the religion, older than she was. You did not print what a man was unless the man, or the record, or someone who stood behind it, would answer for it. And the man was dead, and had spent his whole life arranging that this exact sentence would never be printed, and the sentence was now printed, by other people, on the strength of sources the other people would not fully name because the naming was the danger, and Meridian's essay proposed to quote all of it and stand behind the quoting. She sat with the query she could not write. Confirm as quoted went to a writer; there was no writer here to send it to, only the fact of what a rival magazine had already done, which was itself the only thing the desk could actually verify — that the weekly had printed it, on this date, in these words. She could check that the naming happened. She could not check the thing the naming asserted, because the one man who could clear it had spent a fortune of discretion making sure she never could, and was in the ground, and the whole essay was about that impossibility and did not solve it either.

She checked what could be checked. The date the weekly ran, confirmed off the masthead in her hand. The spelling of the writer who wrote it. The date the publisher died, February, confirmed twice off two references on two days. The word that was new that spring, the one for the act — she confirmed which magazine had coined it and when, and green-dotted it, and it held. The rest she wrote up as plainly as it would go, that the central assertion rested on the rival's unnamed sourcing and could be attributed but not independently confirmed, recommend attribute throughout, and she stapled it to the margin under her initials and it was the most careful thing she wrote that week and it settled nothing, because nothing about it could be settled at a desk with a phone.

The desk argued it at carton-height, over the cold takeout, as the desk argued the things that had no answer. The oldest checker said the rule was the rule and a thing you couldn't verify you attributed and washed your hands, and washing your hands was not cowardice, it was the job. Somebody younger said the man was dead and couldn't be hurt and the rule was built to protect the living. Somebody else said the rule was built to protect the true, and being dead didn't make a thing true or false, it just took away the one person who'd know, and the desk chewed on that and did not rule on it, and went back to work leaving the thing unresolved on the table between the cups.

Around it the night ran its ordinary economy. The personals checker had her ad going in the Voice again, the new kind, with a box number that sent a man to a phone line where he heard her recorded voice and left his own at a dollar and change a minute of his money, and she played the night's messages back with the receiver held off her ear so the desk could vote, and the desk voted by lifted chopstick between the arguments about the dead man, and she took her private notes and let each caller reach the end of himself before she ruled. Her ad ran thirty pages ahead of the paper's other classifieds, the ones in smaller type whose abbreviations every checker on the desk could expand at sight and nobody ever expanded aloud. At six a copy assistant took a call at the coin phone by the elevators rather than at his desk, read a number off a scrap into it, and forty minutes later rode down to the lobby to meet a livery cab that took no fare, and came back up with his evening arranged, and nobody at the desk looked over, because it was the close and the floor spent its bodies as it always did and nobody had ever made it mean anything.

The desk kept one more ledger it kept nowhere: which assignments followed which closed doors. The March travel piece had gone to the writer who was sleeping with the section's editor, and everyone at the desk knew the order of those two facts without agreeing on it, and when the piece came through it was checked like any piece, harder if anything, because the desk's one revenge on the arrangement was to make the arrangement's copy prove out to the letter.

The fire had been the borough's that week, not the desk's. A woman on Lorraine's shift had lost a nephew behind the blocked door — the radio gave the club's name for two days and then stopped giving it — and the ward passed an envelope, and on the Sunday walk Lorraine said the family's name in the voice she kept for the sick list. There was nothing about any of it on Dez's blotter and there was never going to be; she had learned by now where the pieces died, and this one had died standing at a water cooler, upstairs, unassigned, before the smoke was out of the papers. She put five dollars in the ward envelope on Monday.

The photo query took her across seven to the darkroom near ten, because the essay wanted the weekly's own cover reproduced small inside it and the credit had to be right, and the caption desk had sent the question over to whoever was still developing at that hour. She knocked and went into the amber and it was the photographer, the quiet one, alone at the sink, and Dez asked her the credit question and Sana answered it in a sentence, exact, and Dez wrote it down. And over the sink, on a wall gone soft with pushpins, two prints hung drying — a woman's back in front of a gated store, and a girl in a studio with all the lights showing — and Dez took them in as she took in everything, in one pass, without turning her head to do it, and said nothing about them, because they were not the credit and the credit was her business and the wall was not. She thanked the photographer and went back to the desk and filed the credit and did not mention, to the desk or to anyone, that the building's photographer kept a wall of the pictures the building would not print. It went where the carbon under the almanac went, into the place she kept the things that were not yet anything, and she uncapped the green pen and went back to the essay about the naming of a man who could no longer answer for himself.

Nora Kessler edited the capsule essay on a Wednesday, with the door shut, and cut its ending with the red pen because the ending consoled.

"The Mainstreamed Mood" was six thousand words on the pill and its cover — on the season a private weather became a public diagnosis, on the family doctor and the fifteen-minute visit and the name a person could now say at a table, on what a country was buying when it bought the idea that the ache had a molecule — and it was a good essay and it did the thing well until its last paragraph, where the writer, having been cool and exact for five thousand words, lost his nerve and reached for comfort, and told the reader that this was, on balance, a mercy, that suffering relieved was suffering relieved and only a snob would mourn the mystery. Nora read the paragraph twice with the pen capped, which was worse than uncapped, and then she drew the red line down the whole of it, the long single stroke top to bottom, and wrote in the margin the piece knows better than this — end on the pill, not on the blessing, and the essay ended, after her, on the capsule floating over the desert saying nothing. She did not examine why the consoling paragraph had bothered her. She cut it because it was false, and it was, and she reached for the next galley.

The essay conference had been the day before, and it had held its usual grain, which was Martin and Susan agreeing and hating it.

They agreed on almost nothing about the world and on nearly everything about a sentence, which was the arrangement that made the two of them unbearable to each other across a table. Martin Kaye thought the piece too long by a third and said so in the numbered way he said things; Susan Drake, closing that week and down from the copy floor for once to sit in, thought it too long by a third and could not stand that Martin had said it first, and said the same thing again in her own dry register as though it were a different thing, and read three of the writer's semicolons aloud in a voice with a fine edge on it to show exactly where the fat was, and Martin said that's my point, and Susan said it is not your point, it is the opposite end of your point, and this round the room gave it to her — the semicolons read aloud had done it; evidence beats numbering — and Martin heard the room give it to her, and that week the cuts he put through the copy floor's pages ran to an exactness that was not quite spite and not quite not. Eight years of it, and nobody at the table expected a resolution anymore. The building was large enough to hold it, barely.

The back of the book carried a designer's obituary, dead the same week as the pill's cover, and the desk had his dates confirmed twice, and the notice said what the house style said for that particular long illness and let the reader who could read it read it and troubled no one who couldn't. The Foreign File carried a single item off the wire, East Berlin, a coalition seated after the first free vote, the first freely chosen government the place had ever had and possibly the last it would need before the two halves became one, the arithmetic of the reunion running faster now than anyone had booked it for, and Nora set the clause and the dateline and moved on, and if the words the first free vote sat in her chest a half-second longer than a clause required she did not stop for it, because the book closed Thursday and a clause was a clause.

The May book shipped clean, and went to the plant, and came up out of the grey with a competitor's cover on its cover — the borrowed red, the capsule reproduced and shrunk and set behind Meridian's own serif — and it went out to the newsstand to stand in the steel rack beside the very cover it was quoting, so that a reader could buy the pill twice.

The party was the ordinary close party and the room said both things about the cover before midnight. It was the cleverest stroke of the year, a magazine eating a magazine, the last word made literally out of the first; and it was the laziest, a book too tired to make its own picture reproducing someone else's and calling the theft an argument. The same people said both, some of them within the same drink, and Charlie moved through it pouring the good bourbon and finding it very clever indeed, and Martin found it lazy and said so to Susan, who found it lazy and could not bear to agree and called it clever to his face out of pure friction, and somebody asked somebody else, of a third editor just back from vacation improbably calm, whether it was the pill, and it was a joke, and the third editor laughed hardest, and the Freixenet held out, and somebody's boombox flipped its tape, and the cover was clever and lazy and shipped and gone, past changing now, a quarter million of it warm off the press and heading for the racks. On a wall one floor down, in a room with no clock, two prints the book had never seen hung dry by now and stayed up, and nobody at the party knew the wall had started, and the woman who kept it was not at the party, and had not been asked, and would not have come.