The Innocent Victim

In April a boy had died in Indiana who had been on television for five years, and the country, which had watched him barred from a school and then let back into it under a settlement and a set of rules about which water fountain, had a word ready for him the day he died. The word was innocent. It had ridden along with him through all of it, in the anchors' mouths and on the placards of the people who wanted him kept out and the people who wanted him kept in, a word both sides could hold, because both sides agreed that whatever he had, he had not gone looking for. He had gotten it from a needle a doctor put in him, out of a bottle meant to fix a different thing his blood did. The funeral was on the news at the end of the week, a famous singer carrying the coffin, a governor in a pew, and the word went into the ground with him and then came back up, because a word like that does not stay buried; it wants the rest of a sentence.

Meridian was the last-word magazine, and its last word that spring was going to be about the word. The June book carried an essay called "The Innocent Victim," and the essay was not about the boy so much as about the adjective, and what the adjective did to everyone it had never once been offered — the men whose deaths the papers gave a different set of words, a long illness, no immediate family, his companion of many years, the vocabulary the obituary desks kept for the thing they had all agreed among themselves not to print. The magazine would arrive at the end of the month. By then the boy would be six weeks gone.

Nora Kessler had the flat plan for June on the corkboard and on the table both, and she read it as she read a face across a party, all at once, before deciding what she thought. It was a good book. The essay page held the boy's word. The well held the money: a profile of the financier who had pleaded guilty in April to six of the ninety-eight things they had charged him with — Six Felonies, the room was calling it, and it would keep the name — and beside it a piece on the man who had opened a pleasure palace on a boardwalk in April on three-quarters of a billion dollars of borrowed money at fourteen percent and had spent the run-up to it telling everyone who would print it how large the thing was going to be. The essay on the dying and the two essays on the money sat on the same page of the plan, in the same width of column, and no one who read the finished magazine would think for a second that this was strange, because a magazine was the one place left where the dying and the money were laid out to the same measure and nobody apologized for it.

The eleven-thirty did the well fast, because the well argued itself. The financier's piece would run from inside the room that had clapped for him — the magazine had put him near a pedestal in a paragraph in 1986, and the paragraph was in the drawer, and it would be in the piece — and the boardwalk piece would run without the ending, because the ending had not happened yet.

"Every number that man says out loud is the ceiling," Martin Kaye said. Martin turned the Yale ring once. "Not the floor. The ceiling. You want the piece to be about the borrowing, not the building. The building is a press release with a fountain in it."

"The building is what the readers have seen," the executive editor said.

"The readers have seen the ad for the building. That's my point. He sold you the ad and you're calling it a landmark." Martin flattened his hand. "Run the debt. Fourteen percent on that much is a clock. Somebody should count the ticks."

It went in the minutes, and the room let the camera essay through in ninety seconds — the one on what a photograph was now allowed to be, the retouching desk and the fabrication line and the magazine that had slid two pyramids closer together on a cover eight years back and called the sliding a point of view — and did the front, where a pop single released in March had taken the name of a downtown dance up onto the national chart and the piece would explain, gently, to the reader who lived above Fourteenth Street, where the dance had come from. Somebody at the table placed the dance in a club that had closed two years back, and somebody else placed it three clubs east of that, and neither of them was going to be the one who wrote it; it would go to a stringer, eight hundred words, and it would name the single and the chart and stop at the door of the rooms the dance had come out of, which the magazine did not have the person to enter. Then the room emptied, and Nora took the essay into her office and shut the door.

The writer came in with her own carbon and sat where the writers sat and waited, because she had been edited by Nora before and knew the shape of it.

The piece was strong for five thousand words and lost its nerve in the sixth. Nora went down it clause by clause with the pen capped, which the writer had learned to dread more than the pen uncapped, and stopped in the third paragraph, where the sentence was.

"This one," Nora said. She turned the galley around. "'To grant the boy the word is to convict everyone it is withheld from.' You wrote the piece and then you wrote the sign that goes in front of the piece telling the reader what the piece is."

"I want the reader to be sure."

"The reader who needs that sentence isn't going to be moved by the essay, and the reader who's moved by the essay just had the sentence taken out of his mouth." Nora drew the line, one stroke, top to bottom of the sentence. "You keep the word. You use it as they use it. You call the boy innocent, in your own voice, on the page, and you do not once, anywhere, say the thing your fifth paragraph is dying to say, which is and so the others are not. You let the reader be the one who can't hand the word to the others. He'll do it himself, in his own head, walking to the train. If you do it for him he gets to disagree with you. If he does it himself he has to live with it."

The writer looked at the struck sentence. "It reads colder without it."

"It reads truer without it. Cold is the price." Nora moved the pen up two lines. "Here — 'a child, guilty of nothing.' Guilty of nothing is the sign again, smaller. Cut guilty of nothing. A child. Let a child carry it. You've got the word doing the work in the title and the lede and you keep reaching back to reassure it, and every time you reassure it you tell me you don't trust it, and if you don't trust it neither will he."

They did the rest in forty minutes, the writer taking back a clause here and surrendering two there, and knowing the arithmetic of that, and at the end the word innocent stood on the page in three places, naked, unglossed, indicting nothing out loud and everything underneath, and the paragraph that had wanted to explain it was gone. Nora wrote stet in the margin over the title, out of habit, though no one had questioned the title, and initialed it, and set it in the tray for the desk.

She did not think, doing it, about a galley from the summer before with her own red the full length of both margins and a paragraph struck top to bottom with a single diagonal line. She had not laid the two side by side, and she was not going to. She reached for the next galley in the pile, and the next galley was the boardwalk, and she began to count the ticks.

The memorial was on a Thursday in the middle of May, at the round-windowed church on the south side of the square downtown, and Sana Farid arrived early enough to watch the room fill, because she always arrived early enough to watch a room fill, and hated, before she had taken her coat off, that she had already found the light.

It came in through the high arched windows and lay across the front pews in long bars, and the dust stood up in it, and the people arranging themselves under it did the arranging in dark colors that were not black, because it was a memorial and not a funeral and everyone in the room knew the difference as you know which fork, navy and charcoal and a deep bottle-green, one woman in aubergine, nobody in the flat true black you wore to bury a Catholic uptown. Sana stood at the back with her coat still on and her eye did the thing her eye did, moving along the row of heads, finding the one bowed at the right angle, the pair of hands folded on a program, the bar of window-light crossing a man's shoulder and stopping at his collar, and she took the frames without a camera, in the place behind her eyes where the frames went, and each one was good, and she stood in a church full of the dead man's people making pictures she would never take and could not stop making.

The front three rows were young. That was the thing you saw first if you had an eye, and she had an eye: men in their thirties, mostly, in good coats, and they had come in and found their places without being shown, and they sat as men sit who have sat like this before and recently, and knew when to stand and where the programs were stacked and which end of the pew the family would want. How to do this was a thing they already knew. Half the front rows knew the seventh floor of the hospital on Twelfth Street the way commuters know a platform — the visiting hours, the good elevator, the nurses who bent the rules — and nobody had ever compared notes to learn it. Nobody counted anything out loud. The counting was in the room the way the light was in the room, and Sana stood in both of them and framed the backs of the young men's heads against the window and hated her own eye for how well it held them.

The program said the man's name and two dates thirty-nine years apart, and under the dates, in the italic the church used, it said he had died at home after a long illness and was survived by his companion of eleven years and by his mother and by his work. Sana read it standing up and folded it once and held it. The word was not on the program. It was not going to be in the room. She had known that walking in.

The companion spoke first, because that was the order, and after him the oldest friend, from the years before any of them had money, and then a woman who had set type beside the dead man for a decade and could not get through the second thing she wanted to say and stood at the lectern until she could, and the room let her, because the room was good at waiting. The last was not on the program, which was itself the tradition: a young man came up from the third row unannounced. His collar stood off his neck when he bent to the microphone; the suit had been cut for a wider man, and the wider man had been him, not a year before, and the belt was taken in a notch that gathered the trouser at the waist, and he read three minutes about the man who had first put a loupe in his hand, in a voice that did not break, and sat down, and a friend beside him put a hand flat on his back and left it there.

Somewhere in the oldest friend's remarks a watch went off. A small electronic sound, four notes, from the middle of a pew, and three men reached down at once without looking up from the lectern, three wrists, and the sound stopped, and the friend did not pause, and nobody turned, and the four notes and the three hands were over so fast that a person without an eye would have filed it as a beeper and lost it. Sana had an eye. She let it go anyway, because there was nowhere for it to be put.

Across the aisle and four rows up, a woman Sana knew was moving her lips very slightly over the program in her lap. Nora Kessler sat with her coat folded on her knees and her gaze on the middle distance and her mouth going, barely, around a sentence that was not hers to fix, taking the third line of the companion's printed remarks and setting it right in the air where no one would ever see it, because she could no more not edit the sentence than the dust could not stand up in the light. Sana watched her do it for the length of a breath and looked away and did not think anything about it that had words.

At the end there were slides. The Kodak carousel stood on a cart in the aisle and threw the dead man up onto a screen beside the altar, the tray advancing with its ka-chunk every four seconds, and the sound over it was Cole Porter, a woman's recorded voice from before any of them were born singing about every time we say goodbye, and the man came up on the screen young and then younger and then at a drafting table and then, near the end of the tray, thin, in a garden, in the sun, smiling, thin. The tray went around once and stopped, and the last slide held a second on the screen, and then the lights came up and someone reached over and stilled the cart, and the room began, quietly, to stand.

On the way out there was a dish on a table by the door, a plain white dish with a card folded against it, and people were putting bills into it as they passed, folded small, without breaking stride, and Sana did not read the card and put a folded bill into the dish and went out into the square, where the afternoon was ordinary and warm and the dog-walkers were out and a man was playing something on a saxophone by the arch.

Dez Washington had come alone and Tomás Vega had come alone and they ended up in the same pew because it was the pew that had room when they each came in late off the same clock, and they filed out into the square within a body's width of each other and stood a second in the sun not sure whether they were together, and then walked to the train together because it was the same train for the first part.

They took the Lexington line up from under the square, and the car that came was one of the old red ones, painted a red gone dull and chalky under years of cleaning, riding rough on the express track after the new bare-steel cars everyone had gotten used to, and neither of them remarked on it, because you did not remark on a train. They stood in the door well and held the pole. Tomás had four days of the country still on him, the shirt loose at the collar, the beat of lateness in his laugh that the floor knew to give room to, and Dez had learned in six months to give room as the floor gave it, and so they rode two stops not saying anything, and it was not uncomfortable.

"You keep the count," Tomás said. He was looking at the black window. "In a room like that. You can't help it. How many, and how young." He was quiet a moment with the train's noise. "I came back from the last one and I couldn't file for two days. Not the war. The room after. Everybody went home. That's the part I couldn't get down. Nobody died and everybody went home and I sat in the chair in the lobby until the sun came up because I didn't know how to write and then it was just Tuesday." He turned the pole a quarter under his hand. "That's the true thing about it. You wait your whole life for the ending and the ending is everybody going home."

Dez looked at the red door and the map behind its scratched glass and said nothing, because there was nothing she was going to say, and because she was carrying, folded in the place where she carried things, the knowledge that his four thousand words had come home two-thirds of the way and that a carbon of the rest was under an almanac at the window end of seven where she had put it, and that this was not a thing to hand a man on a train, or ever. She let him have the quiet. At Twenty-Third he came off the pole.

"This is me," he said.

"Night," Dez said, and he went, and she rode on up the line alone with the count he had named going in her too, and changed for the Bronx at the station where she always changed, and walked the last blocks with her heels in her bag and the getting-home five unspent.

The frame was on the contact sheet, and she had known it would be, and she had developed the roll anyway.

She had not lifted the camera in the church. She had lifted it once outside, on the steps, after, when the young man who had read last came out into the light in the too-large suit and stood for a second at the top of the stairs not knowing where to go, his friend's hand still at his back, the square opening out below them ordinary and bright, and Sana had taken it from the hip without composing it, as she had taken the nurse's aide on Church Avenue, and the frame was undeniable. She saw it come up wet in the tray under the amber, the man on the steps and the light and the whole unbearable ordinariness of the day going on below him, and she pinned it to the homasote over the wash sink to dry, beside the other two that lived there now, and she looked at it a long time, and then she did the thing she should not have done, which was to leave it on the June contact sheet when the sheet went up to layout.

She told herself it was for the essay. There was an essay about a word and a boy, and here was the word's whole other half, the half the word was never offered, standing on a set of steps in a too-large suit, and a braver book would find a way. She marked it lightly on the sheet, a grease-pencil bracket, pull for essay?, and sent the sheet up with the fashion frames and the boardwalk frames, and it reached Nora's desk on a Wednesday.

Nora killed it with the grease pencil in the room, in front of her, which was worse than a slip and cleaner than a fight. She went down the contact sheet with the loupe, the small strip of frames, choosing the two she wanted for the well, and she came to the man on the steps and did not pick up the loupe for it, and her hand made the red X across the frame, corner to corner, one stroke and then the crossing stroke, and moved on to the next, and it took her about two seconds. "Not ours," she said, not unkindly, marking the frame she did want. "We didn't go. You can't run the picture of the funeral you didn't send anyone to."

"It's the essay," Sana said.

"The essay is a word on a page. The picture is a man's worst hour." Nora slid the sheet back across the desk. "Print it for yourself. It's a beautiful frame. It doesn't run in a book that stayed home." And she was already reaching for the boardwalk, and the meeting was over, and Sana took the sheet with the red X on the man on the steps and went back down the stairs to the room with no clock.

She printed it that night, full frame, the whole rectangle the lens had seen, and pinned it to the homasote beside the woman on Church Avenue and the girl in the studio with all the lights showing, and the wall held three now. Then she loaded the next roll and put the June fashion frames in the wash and set the timer, because the book closed the following Thursday and the well was waiting on its two frames and the two frames were good and were hers to make, and she made them.

The morning after the memorial the office had two of its own who had gone home together, and Tomás Vega saw it the second he came off the elevator, because seeing it was the thing he could still do when he could do nothing else.

They were an associate editor and a checker, and they had not come in together, they had come in fifteen minutes apart and were not sitting near each other, and it was in them anyway, in the bodies, the way a thing is in a square before it goes. The checker had last night's shirt on under a borrowed cardigan and was eating a hard roll at her desk with a hunger that had nothing to do with the roll, tearing it, and she was bright, too bright, laughing at the copy chief's dry nothing a half-beat quick, and under the brightness was the other thing, the thing that was in every one of them that year in the mornings after, riding just behind the eyes, a fright with no face on it. She had a paper cup of the machine coffee going cold at her elbow and she kept lifting it and not drinking and setting it down a half-inch off from where it had been, and once her free hand went up to her own throat, at nothing, and came down. Tomás knew the compound. Giddy and afraid in the one body, hungry, and not sorry, not for a second sorry. He stood at the coffee machine and watched the associate editor cross to her desk with a query he did not need to deliver and stand over it a moment, and heard her say it, low, under the floor's noise, the whole of it in one ordinary sentence.

"You'd tell me," she said. "If."

"I'd tell you," he said.

That was all. Behind the sentence stood the machinery the year had made everyone learn: the clinic that took first names only, the draw on a Monday morning before work, and then the fortnight — fourteen days between the needle and the phone call, during which a person did their job and ate their lunch and was bright — the wait half the floor had done and nobody had ever done out loud. She took the query she had not needed and went back to her desk, and the fright behind both their eyes stood down a notch, provisionally, as it did, and the two of them went back to being bright, and Tomás poured his coffee and did not think anything with an edge on it, because he had spent twenty years learning to see a room without arranging a verdict over it. He carried the coffee to the foreign desk, where his own next thing was waiting to be scheduled, and Martin Kaye was there with the Foreign File calendar.

Martin had backstopped the desk while Tomás was in Managua, and had it running clean, and he laid the summer out generously, better than generously — a good long window for the thing in the east that Tomás wanted, three weeks of runway before anyone would need copy, the cover held soft so the piece could breathe, the kind of scheduling a correspondent got maybe twice a decade. "Take the time," Martin said, turning the ring. "You always file long and they always cut you, and half the cutting is because you're filing into a closed book. File into an open one and see what holds."

"They," Tomás said.

Martin looked up from the calendar.

"You said they always cut me." Tomás had the coffee in his hand and had not drunk any of it. "I read the April book at the airport. Somebody took the last third out of Managua — the plaza, the boy with the flag, the ninety seconds nobody else stayed for. Four numbered points on a memo, I'm told. I've been cut by everyone in this building, Martin. You're the only one who cuts clean." His voice did not go up. The floor had never learned this about him: the war voice was the quiet one. "It was a good edit. It took out the only thing I went there for."

"The book was closing," Martin said. "The piece was long."

"The piece was the length of what happened." Tomás set the cup down on the calendar, on the soft-held cover, and left it there. "Next time sign it where I'll find it. Not four points upstairs after I'm on the plane." He took the cup back up and drank from it, finally, looking at the schedule. "I'll take the summer. It's generous. I know what generous is for."

He went to make the phone calls a departure was made of. Martin sat a while at the foreign desk with the calendar in front of him. The cover stayed soft. The ring stayed still. There was a damp ring on the July page where the cup had stood, and he did not wipe it off.

Dez Washington got "The Fare-Beaters" on the second night of the close, and it was a relief, because a City piece with numbers in it was a thing that could be made to prove out, and she had been wanting, for a week, something that would prove out.

The transit police had a new chief that spring, and the new chief had a theory and a number, and the theory was that you started with the small things, the man who went over the turnstile, and the number was how many of them there were: two hundred thirty-one thousand nine hundred thirty-seven a day, the chief said, after the fare went to a dollar-fifteen, which was six and nine-tenths of every hundred riders, and the piece the City desk had built took the chief's theory at arm's length and his number straight to the checking desk, where Dez picked it up and would not put it down until it did what the desk required, which was agree with itself.

It would not agree with itself. She called the authority's press office and got the number, and it was the chief's number, two thirty-one nine thirty-seven. Then she asked how they got it, because the desk did not check a number, it checked the arithmetic under the number, and the arithmetic under this one was a survey of turnstiles run for a set of hours across a set of stations and multiplied up to a day and a system, and when she did the multiplying herself off the figures the press office read her, she got a different day and a different system, close but not the same, off by tens of thousands in a way that a number said to the tenth of a person had no business being off. She called back. A different person read her a slightly different set of hours. The two sets of hours made two different daily totals, and neither of them made the chief's total exactly, and all three were being said aloud in the city that spring as if they had come down off a mountain cut in stone.

She wrote it up plain. The number could be attributed to the authority and the theory could be attributed to the chief, and the survey behind the number rested on an extrapolation the authority's own two desks did not perform the same way twice, and she recommended the piece say two hundred thousand a day, roughly, and attribute it, and not print the tenths of a person. She did not recommend the piece say whether the theory was right, because the theory being right was not a thing on any turnstile, and the desk checked turnstiles. The exposé the number wanted to be — the one where you proved the whole grand theory stood on a survey that could not add — that piece was not this piece, and would not be, because to write it you would have to stand somewhere the checking desk did not stand. She flagged the number soft, attributed the theory, and let the grand thing that could have been go into the query and no further.

The comedy was in the arithmetic and the desk found it, as it found the funny in everything true. Somebody worked out, over the cold takeout, what the fare-beater saved in a year of beating the fare against what he'd have made standing on the corner where the transit police now stood, and the numbers said the man was losing money by the hour to save a dollar-fifteen, and the desk enjoyed this as it enjoyed the Connecticut tokens and the reverse directory, as a small true absurd thing the city was doing to itself while everyone argued about the meaning of it. Dez confirmed the fare itself against the day it had gone up, a dollar-fifteen since the first of the year, twice, off two references on two days, because the number under the number had to hold before the argument on top of it could be had at all. Then she went back to the authority's extrapolation and ran the multiplying a third time and got a third total, close to the first two and equal to neither, and wrote that down too. And when the front piece came through the desk the same night, the one about the dance and its new name off the March single, a checker who had been checking the queer weeklies for a year for the naming pieces read the word House in the copy, capitalized, the ballroom kind, and knew exactly what it meant and where it came from and who was in them, and checked the spelling and the date of the single and green-dotted it and said nothing at the desk about knowing, because knowing was not the query and the query was the date.

Down the L somebody had the back-of-book notice on a philosopher's book out that spring, and was confirming the publisher and the title against the jacket and nothing else, because there was nothing else on the jacket a desk could hold; the checker read one sentence of it aloud, twice, to see whether it would come apart on the second pass, and it did not, and neither did the desk understand it any better, and the spelling was right, and it got the green dot and went up.

The June book closed on the Thursday, clean, the last board walked to the elevator flat on a production man's palms, and went to the plant, and came up out of the grey with the boy's word on the essay page and the money in the well and, in the back, one clause about a strange slow television show that had premiered in April to a size no television movie had ever drawn, that half the country was watching and the other half was being told to. It went out into the steel racks at the end of the month at $3.95, the word innocent standing on the essay page indicting nothing out loud, and on a wall one floor down, in a room with no clock, a man in a too-large suit stood at the top of a set of steps in the light, and the book had never seen him, and the woman who kept the wall said nothing to anyone.