“You’ll have to claw your way into a permanent position,” she told me. “It won’t be easy. Make every clipping count.”

When we shook hands, I felt her searching my eyes, seeking last traces of the creep.

“Get it right, Whitney.”

I said, “I will.”

4.

By the time I finished transcribing the Daniel Eastham interview, I’d worked my way into believing there might be a story in it after all. Maybe I could fold Rogue Winter into a survey of various cultural artifacts fatefully deprived of marketing velocity by the attacks. The essay could be a commentary on that velocity, its necessity, what that says. But then I felt myself projecting my own recent anxieties onto the subject, as if I could disguise my desire for a serious story with Eastham’s desire for an audience. Only a truly bad article could emerge from such confusion.

Still, I stayed late at the Bystander, helping out where I could with captions and headlines. We’d recently lost a couple fact-checkers, and some of the interns had gone home for the holidays, so I also assisted with checking Ben’s last-minute report on the Bonn Agreement.

Toward midnight, Mort emerged from his office with plastic cups and a case of cheap wine Lewis Lapham had sent him, along with a card on Harper’s stationery: Standing by, for your return…

He stopped at my desk and poured out a cup.

“What have you been working on, Whitney?”

I told him I’d just interviewed Daniel Eastham.

“A fascinating writer.”

Mort had such a bottomless appetite for reading, for all I knew he’d found time, in some inexplicable recess of the 24-hour day, to actually consume Rogue Winter.

“Anything there?” he said.

I wanted so badly to say yes. Mort inspired that in you—think harder, apply pressure, squeeze the story out. Already the details of the interview were coalescing into new, convenient images. Eastham’s copy of Rogue Winter had been open on the table, but perhaps it was closed, off to the side a little, as if shunned. He’d only had two glasses of wine, but maybe he finished the bottle. The better story crept into my memory.

“No,” I said, fighting it off, “there’s nothing.”

THE TOMAHAWK

1.

I’d planned to go home to Los Angeles for Christmas, but Mom was having a couple good months with her MS and wanted to spend the holidays on her friend’s ranch in Arizona. She asked if I’d bought my ticket yet and I said no.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad it’s okay.”