Chapter 38

“And you didn’t have the experience of waking up to a financial page announcing your death!  God Damn it!  So, don’t tell me to not get excited,” yelled Harrison, his right hand flailing the air with the Wall Street Journal editorial section.  He sat in his wheel chair, the oxygen tube to his nose hung loosely beside his cheek.  Wires danced loosely from his wrist and chest to the monitoring device beside him.  The graph on the screen moved with the energy of a child’s first attempt at a cursive writing exercise, the vertical lines peaking like a 7.2 tremor on the Richter scale.

Nurse Bennington pushed the heavy door open and lunged into the room with the subtlety of a Sherman tank.  “Mr. James, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?  I’m chatting on the phone.”

“Chatting?  Jesus!” Yelled the nurse as she put the oxygen tube back into his nose and moved into her calming approach, her voice passing into a soothing, maternal persuasion.  “Now you mustn’t remove your oxygen if you’re going to “chat.”

Harrison’s eyes darted back and forth and drifted threateningly toward her, “You know, Bennington…”

“Nurse Bennington,” she corrected.  “We want to respect the hand that feeds your life, now don’t we?”

“Nurse Bennington, you bug the shit out of me sometimes.  Right now, is one of those times.”

“Well, I’m sure the person on the other end of the line…” she gestured to the phone that Harrison had all but forgotten about, “…would like for you to finish your ‘chat,’ yes?”  She glanced at the monitor and nodded.  “Now, you’re back to normal half dead, so let’s not push it again, Okay?”  she leaned down toward the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece, “Don’t push him that hard again or he’s gonna die on you, hear?”

“Out!  Out!” said Harrison calmly but with the intensity of a man about to pull a trigger on himself.

Nurse Bennington quietly left, closing the door as if Harrison were sleeping.

Harrison took a deep breath.  “Wally, you still there?”

Walton, the magazine’s design manager sat at his desk, the phone cradled under his chin as he shuffled through a stack of typical tabloid cover pictures.  “Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.  Some girlfriend you got there.  You might need to hold onto her.”  He picked up a shot of Pence looking snookered at an award ceremony in his honor.  “You know, Harrison, this shot of Mike Pence that Oslo took is perfect.  It’s topical, it’s a good guy looking bad, and it’s a time-tested winner… a big shot drunk on himself and sparkling water.’

“Jesus, Wally, I’m not going backwards after all this.  “Who gives a shit if Pence is under his own weather.  He’s a fucking politician about to become a has been.  Scumbaggin’ him is considered normal.  If you want to go that direction, dive into the cob webs and get me Jerry Falwell or that do-gooder Nader for Christ’s sake.  Believe it or not, sacred cows are what’s selling.  Our competition is killing us with the right stuff… sacred cows.”

“C’mon, man,” chimed in Walton.  “You trying to convince me… now don’t get excited again.  I don’t need that devil-woman coming after me… but are you trying to make me believe that Turner is a sacred cow?”

Harrison leaned his head back on the wheelchair and peered out the window.  Snow was falling heavily now, the buildings all taking on a surreal calm all too unfamiliar to New Yorkers, the kind of peaceful image that made all the clamoring for power and survival of the city disappear “I’m thinkin’ about it.  He didn’t call back, did he?”

“Who, that little shit Ari?” Walton fired back.

“Guess he didn’t.  You know, I read that prediction this morning in the Journal and all I could think was ‘what the hell do they know?’  Those people out there buy this stuff because their own lives are such bores.  Samantha has played so damn many roles they identify with that they’ve all but sainted her.  Along comes this man that can peel away all that stuff they think is real and gives us images that make even you stop in your tracks and ask, ‘is this for real?’  That’s what Ari’s images are all about.  Taking the obvious and turning it upside down, shaking it, and watching what comes out.”

“Harrison, he resigned, remember?” said Walton.

“And then he finds he can’t handle it anymore… like an exorcist, discovering and dragging out all the buried secrets and essence of unknown personality traits in someone and maybe feeling overwhelmed with it all…”

“Harrison, Jesus, you there?”

“…And he wakes up one day to find he’s just human and worn out… so he resigns.”  Harrison paused, watching out his window the snow fall on the roofs of the apartment buildings.  Several men dressed in thread bare coats were shoveling snow off the roof of a penthouse to the alley fifteen floors below. “You know, Wally, roofs can cave in, even in New York.”

“What?” questioned Walton, “I didn’t hear that.”

“Yeah, you did.  Unless I wake up in the morning with a miracle better than Ari’s #33, print it… and run the bio Stacy worked up on both Max and Samantha.”

“I don’t get it.  That’s not the one you wanted in the first place.  Have you lost it?” said Walton, his voice sounding fearful for the first time.

“The Journal says Hurito’s expecting lower profits than anticipated and they’ve written our obituary for a dissolution.  Got nothing to lose.”

“Jesus, Harrison.  Run Pence.  That’s more of a sure bet than experimenting when your magazine is on the skids.”

“Now you’re getting excited.  Number 33.”  Harrison hung up his phone and continued to watch the workers shoveling on the roof.  “You keep shoveling, guys, and that roof is gonna hold.” 

***

Walton’s eyes wandered from the telephone to the stack of photos in front of him.  Like a magician who knows where the right card is in a deck, he lifted his hand and fingered the pictures, his body still in shocked repose.  12,20,24, his finger coming to rest on 33.  He hesitatingly pulled it out… Samantha’s face filled the frame, her hair twisted and contorted, wildly moving freely in an invisible wind.  Behind her, like a shadow, another image of her as Sam, behind that, another shadow as Samantha, then another Sam, each bearing a resemblance to the others, but each with an expression that belied the existence of the others.  Piercing the images like a harpoon amidst a raging ocean was an abstract of a ladder, clearly depicting it’s falling through the pictures.  Struggling to hold onto the ladder was an image of Max losing his balance and falling with the ladder, falling through the layered images of the woman all the world adored and respected… the same woman venerated by many, loved by few, and feared by the two men in her life… the same two men who loved life as only she could present it, and yet were now living each day with fear of losing her.  Unfortunately, no one would recognize that truth.  Instead, the majority would only respond as Walton did in that brief moment of revelation.  “This is madness,” he said, closing his eyes.  “Madness.”

And perhaps he was right, for the next few days were anything but sane for the few who truly had something important to gain or lose from being connected with Samantha Turner.