In his anger, Mort didn’t pay much attention to my return. He asked perfunctory questions about the trip and reimbursed my expenses, but it seemed as if he barely recalled the subject of my story.

There was a burgeoning mania in him that I see, now, as that of someone losing his grip on history. Mort had been formed by the LBJ and Nixon years. He saw journalism as the shield of democracy. I don’t think he was prepared for how the press was unraveling. Reading the news, you might think Saddam was developing warheads in a bunker beneath a hospital in Baghdad. You might think Iraqi agents conspired with a 9/11 hijacker in Prague. You might think Bin Laden met with high-level Ba’athists in Khartoum.

We never recovered from the fissure of those months, when the press did such a miserable job of sifting fiction from its facts. Since then it’s become common to meet people, on the left and the right, who categorically discount whatever the media reports. When asked why, they invoke the lead-up to Iraq, and there’s nothing you can say.

Mort was lost in this new reality, or perhaps it would be better to call it a realm, an adjacent zone where fact and fiction mingle freely, and the effort to distinguish them is wasted. Mort’s vision of journalism assumed a reader with a common understanding of facts, facts as solid things, the foundation of meaning. It seems ridiculous now that an entire industry could go so long believing people wanted facts, when in fact they crept, like me.

3.

A few days passed without word from Dr. Kriss, so I tried getting started on the story.

I’d begin with Zeke’s stabbing and use him as a case study to dramatize the crisis of blood shortage, the permanent drought. Zeke’s struggle for survival would punctuate the narrative beats of the piece, each of which I’d join to another aspect of the trial. Along the way, I’d paint my portrait of Dr. Eva Kriss one stroke at a time, until she came to preside over the whole. I felt the pressure of the story in my chest. I wished for a friend to tell about where I’d been, what I’d seen, and all it meant to me.

About a week after coming home, I arrived at the office to find an e-mail. The sight of Dr. Kriss’s name in my inbox carried the thrill of a reunion.

Whitney,

Please accept the attached report with sincerest gratitude for your hard work and kind attentions. You’ll notice that Rubicon has redacted some sections, but those contain proprietary information and would be immaterial to your article anyway. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

I look forward to seeing the story.

Yours,

—Eva