He will, but barely. She’s behind on everything—she’s always behind, always chasing a deadline that is instantly replaced by another—and soon enough she’s going to lose more time to family. Tomorrow she’s scheduled to have a celebratory lunch with her niece, Hannah, who is getting fitted today for a retinal prosthetic. Lela hopes it works. For her niece, of course, but also for herself, for the story.
She could pitch it any number of ways—human interest if she pushes the personal, Metro if she pushes innovation at OHSU, Science if she pushes the biotech boom. No matter which direction, the story has legs, front-page potential, the kind of feature that could get picked up for syndication.
Her sister, Cheryl, is always giving her a hard time about this kind of thinking. “Can’t you ever have a thought that’s unpublished?” she says. “Don’t you ever feel like a vulture?” No. Yes. Maybe. Whatever. Her sister will never understand. They aren’t hard-wired the same. That’s what it means to be a writer: everything is material. You are never not paying attention. There is nothing that is not worth learning and processing into a story. And if somebody feels used, gets their feelings hurt, too fucking bad. That’s the business.
At the elevators she punches the DOWN button and watches the numbers—red and dotted, like needled skin—click their way up to the fourth floor. Brandon is winded from chasing her and breathes forcefully through his nose. She refuses to look at him, though he stands so close she can smell him, his standard odor of Barbasol and chai tea. She hates his face, the weak chin, the eyebrows constantly knotting over his nose, his forehead rising high into a receding hairline—and she hates his edits, the way he double-checks her sources and trims away all her good, meaty descriptions. The elevator dings and the doors open, and she walks through them and hits simultaneously the LOBBY and CLOSE DOOR buttons.
“What about a follow on the OES choir? Their experience singing at Carnegie Hall with all those other private high schools?”
“That doesn’t deserve a follow.”
The doors start to close, and he puts out a hand to stop them. “I’m getting pressure from above. The reader survey says people want more stories that make them feel good.”
“I didn’t get into this business to make drooling idiots feel good.”
“Then maybe you should get out, Lela. Apply for a staff position at a magazine.”
She pushes the button again. “Not until I accomplish my goal of frustrating you into a heart attack.”
The doors start to close, and Brandon puts out a hand to stop them again. “Oh, and the Halloween parade. You’re on that?”
She raises a hand in a swatting gesture. “On it. I guess.”
“And the storm—do you know about the storm that’s headed our—”
His words are clipped by the closing doors. The elevator sinks.
?
She drives a beater Volvo station wagon that used to belong to her parents. She never locks the door. The radio was stolen years ago, a black rectangle with wires dangling from it. Now there is nothing to steal but gum wrappers and coffee cups. She ripped out the backseat to make room for her dog, a German shepherd named Hemingway, and the car is shagged over with his hair. It takes a few cranks to turn the engine over. She hears her phone buzzing in her purse and doesn’t bother answering it, knowing it is likely Brandon pestering her further. She doesn’t own a smartphone. She owns what her friends call a Flintstone phone, whatever the rep at Paradise Wireless offered her for free five years ago. It looks a little like a scarred bullet. The numbers are worn off the keypad. When she is having a conversation, other voices ghost in and out, due to some echoey distortion or a faulty antenna that pirates other calls.
She does not text. She does not Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of that other digital nonsense, the many online whirlpools that seem to encourage boasting and bitching. She doesn’t care about your crazy cat, your ugly baby, your Cancún vacation, your Ethiopian meal, your political outrage and micro-complaints and competitive victimhood. She doesn’t want social media eroding her privacy or advertisers assaulting her with customized commercials. There’s too much noise and too little solitude in the world. Everybody should shut the fuck up and get back to work.
The Oregonian assigned her an email address, but she hates to use it, prefers to call or write letters. She likes things that are tactile. That might be one of the reasons she became a reporter: the memory of her father reading the newspaper at the kitchen table every morning until his coffee went cold and his finger pads blackened with ink. Last Christmas her sister, Cheryl, bought her an e-reader, and Lela held it with the tips of her fingers like something found moldering in the back of the fridge. She returned it and used the money at REI on a Gerber belt knife, a fleece headband, a pair of SmartWools.
Now she drives to the Pearl District, the semi-industrial area that has been, over the past fifteen years, slowly redeveloped. There are homeless men slumped on benches and pushing grocery carts, muttering to themselves. There are shelters and psychic readers and soup kitchens and tattoo parlors. But alongside the cracked windows and boarded-up doorways, there are lofts and theaters, Peruvian restaurants and French bakeries, bars and coffee shops, so many coffee shops, as if the city were under some narcoleptic spell. Old buildings of marble, cream brick, red brick are interrupted by new buildings of glass that jut up sharply. Bronze water fountains—called Benson Bubblers—burble on almost every street corner, making it sound as if it were raining even when it is not.