“Did she do drugs?” I asked, thinking about Quinn.

“Like what?”

“Meth.”

Carmen shook her head and said, “Anyway, that’s not what I saw.”

“What did you see?”

“Don’t spread lies,” Tori said.

“Her lips,” Carmen said, “it was like they’d been eaten away.”

“Eaten away?”

“Carmen—” Tori said.

“Like she was eating her face.”

THE FACT-CHECK

1.

“My friends and I have this conversation all the time,” says the girl from Vice. “We wonder if it’s possible to have a family and still succeed in media. Everyone has their own opinion, and no one knows for sure, but I like to bring you up as an example. You never married, never had kids. Did you have a partner back then?”

“Nothing serious.”

“That’s what I thought. Of course, there are counterexamples, but my own instinct is that you have to keep your distance. Maybe if you could have kids at fifty, you could still do what you need to do in your prime. But considering the obstacles we already face, it’s too much to overcome.”

“I was just unlucky,” I say. “I wasn’t taking a position.”

“Would you rather not talk about this?”

“We can talk about anything you like.”

“I have a boyfriend,” she goes on, “and he’s pretty progressive on these questions. But he eventually wants a house, a kid, a lot of our parents’ stuff, you know? I wonder how long he’ll last in the city. I tell him I want to be like you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true.”

“Be like Oriana Fallaci.”

“Wasn’t she a racist?”

At a glance, I can tell this journalist will have a house, and kids, and she won’t live in New York forever. At some imperceptible point, in a moment of awesome relief, a kind of homecoming, she’ll surrender to what she once considered her opposite. I’ve seen it a million times.

“Stay true to your own path,” I tell her, “and follow where it leads.”

Who knows, maybe love would’ve come for me too, had I not strayed from the culture file. But after what I saw, and what I did, it wasn’t possible anymore.

2.

The terror risk was orange for elevated when I returned to the city from Florida. While I’d been gone, the Iraq fixation had intensified at the Bystander, but Mort had suspended the debates in his office. Everywhere he looked, he sensed a pandemic of misinformation, and didn’t want his magazine contaminated. The latest outrage was that Cheney had gone on CNN and said Saddam was developing nuclear weapons.

“They’ve already got the will for war,” Mort told me. “Now they’re looking for the way. And the press is just letting them improvise it, right out in the public arena.”