“Get off—” I gasped. “Lane—”

Now he was pressing on his dick like he wanted to take it out and play with it.

I freed an arm and punched him in the padded ribs. He coughed and I wriggled off the couch. I touched my face where he’d grabbed it. Some of the scabs had opened and I was bleeding.

Lane stared up at me, confused, and it was the hypocrisy of his confusion that enraged me. How brutally harsh did you need to be to a man?

I’d later doubt the wisdom of all the things I shouted at him then. “You really think I find you attractive? How many signals have I sent you? How blind are you, actually?”

He sprawled on the couch, disheveled and squinting, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I love you,” he said, as if it couldn’t be refuted.

As I pulled on my shoes, I said his feelings didn’t matter, and in a moment of terrible change, something burned behind his eyes.

THE WEST

1.

“What happened that last year?”

I’m startled to attention. The girl from Vice and I are coming to the end of the interview, and I realize I’ve been answering automatically, reaching for the nearest canned phrase as I watch the fading daylight cut across a neighboring tower. I wonder if she sees how the question interests me, if she can sense the weight atop my story, muting it.

“What do you mean?”

She opens The Complete Bystander and says, “In the introduction, Gordon Stone writes about the magazine’s unraveling.”

“Right.” I settle back in my chair.

“Can you talk a bit about that?”

“Everyone in the industry was dealing with the same thing at the same time,” I tell her. “Ad revenues were declining and all the magazines were wondering how to reckon with digital. Should we give it all away? Can we make people pay? Do we publish original stories online and, if so, does that alter the nature of the stories? A magazine has to have a digital aesthetic almost as refined as its print aesthetic, and no one really knew what that meant. Anyway, I can’t think of an editor less prepared to answer those questions than Mort.”

Back then, the end of journalism seemed like the only conversation my colleagues wanted to have, but despite our apocalyptic visions, we had no clue what was really coming. We always pictured ourselves unemployed, not retrofitted into single-person, twenty-four-hour news franchises, each expected to dispense scoops all day and night and be funny online. I wonder if the Vice writer is funny online. She probably has to be.

“Mort was in denial?”

“I wouldn’t say denial. He had the numbers crunched, he had a bird’s-eye view of the revenue streams. It’s more that he genuinely, wrongly thought it was all a kind of fad, that like the dot-com boom it wouldn’t last, and any outlet invested in digital was doomed. He just couldn’t see it. His idea of the future looked like the ’90s. He was the sort of person who’d say the fate of print magazines was secure because no one was ever going to take a computer monitor into the bath.”