A good night.
A happy night.
Taking another hit of whiskey, he noted a light across the newsroom. It came from a cubicle, occupied, he could tell, because of the moving shadows. Picking up the bottle and mug, he walked across the newsroom and through the glass doors of the ExaminerOnline.
Dottie Wyandotte was leaning forward toward her massive monitor. Why didn’t staring at the busy surface all day make her dizzy? Maybe it did.
Every so often her fingers, with their black-tipped nails, would move in a frenzy on the keyboard.
“What’s one of the most common punctuation mistakes?” he asked.
Her head rose fast, surprised someone was present. She looked up at Fitz. Her face was unsmiling, her expression neutral. She was still angry.
The only thing I don’t need is your condescension...
“Come on,” he rasped. “Give it a shot.” Coughed for several seconds.
She looked at the screen, tapped return and sent something somewhere. “My sister’s five years younger. I don’t think she’s ever apologized in her life, not to me. And she’s got a long list of things to apologize for. What she does is she ignores me for a day or two or three and then calls and says something out of the blue. Completely irrelevant. ‘You hear about the new farmers’ market?’ ‘Jim and I are going to see Hamilton!’ That’s what passes for an apology to her.”
“I’m sorry. Not about your sister. About what I said.”
Now, looking his way. Her eyes still weren’t smiling, but the edge had softened. And quite the edge it had been. Impressive. Like his, when he was confronting a corrupt politician or philandering CEO.
He asked, “You drink whiskey?”
She said nothing for a moment. Then, glancing at the bottle: “Does it have wheat in it?”
“Does it have... what?”
“Wheat. I’m gluten intolerant.”
“Whiskey’s made out of corn.”
“Corn’s okay,” Dottie said. “Is it all corn?”
“I don’t know. Maybe rye.”
“Can’t do rye. Mostly I drink cosmos. Gluten-free vodka.”
“That’s a liquor? That they make?”
She nodded.
“Well, whiskey is all I have.”
“I’ll stick with this.” Lifting a Starbucks cup. “Nothing wrong with chamomile and whiskey.”
“Just not together.”
They tipped mug and cup toward each other, then sipped.
“You might’ve been the one who saved him,” Fitz told her.
“How’s that?”
“The woman who solved the riddle? She was overseas. Maybe one of your forty to fifty million.”
“Really?”
He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or not. Looking at the four studs in her cheek, he tried again to figure out what constellation they might represent. Came up with nothing. He’d never done science writing.
“You wrote that story fast,” she said.
“Had to make the deadline. Seven p.m.”
“What do you mean?”
“The print edition, the Examiner? Always been the rule. The copyeditor needs the copy by seven p.m. You get it one minute late and it’s bumped to day after tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s the rule. Nobody’s ever missed it.”
She seemed perplexed; with online publication, of course, you didn’t have to worry about typesetting and printing and getting the papers to the trucks and to newsstands and doorsteps. You hit the return key and, poof, there it was, for the world to read.
“Coyle’s okay?” she asked.
“Okay-ish.”
“Not a word that you’d use in a story.”
“Only in a direct quotation.”
Dottie gave a smile. “‘Quotation.’ A noun referring to a direct statement attributed to a speaker. The word ‘quote’ is a verb.”
He nodded, acknowledging she was correct. He poured another whiskey and downed it.
She was sipping her tea. “I knew who you were before I joined National Media.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“A professor at Northwestern? She mentioned you. She told us to read some of your pieces.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Well, I didn’t look up baby goats in pajamas.”
“You should. They’re really cute. Why do you hate us?”
“Us?”
“Online, new media?”
Fitz set down his drink and popped a lozenge. “Because it doesn’t play by the rules. Real journalists dig, they background, they research. They’re fucking pains in the ass, hounding subjects for statements. They get double attribution — at the minimum — talk to multiple sources... They report facts. Not alternative facts, not sort-of, kind-of facts.”
He was riled up. But no stopping now.
“The social media mafia? No time for mining. They pass off rumors and opinions as news. Half the time they just plain make shit up. And people believe it because it’s in their feed. I read it, so it has to be true.” He lifted the mug and he drank. “Fake news used to be an oxymoron. If it was reported, it couldn’t be fake.”
“Oh, excuse me, Fitz.” Dottie was laughing. “You think this is new? What about yellow journalism? The 1890s, William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer competing for newspaper circulation in New York? Look at the lies they published.”
She had him there. The two publishers lowered their papers’ prices to a penny, to reach as many people as possible, and then slapped outlandish — and completely false — stories on yellow newsprint to draw attention. Historians still believed that phony dispatches from Hearst’s journalists in Cuba started the Spanish-American War.
Fitz parried: “It’s just so much easier to spread lies when you can reach, well, forty or fifty million people by pushing a button.”
She said, “It’s not the medium. Men still shave but they don’t use straight razors. We still listen to music but not on eight-track tapes.”
“How do you know about eight-tracks?”
“I walked down to the public library and looked it up in the Encyclopædia Britannica.”
He snorted a laugh, coughed a bit.
“You okay?”
“Pollen.” Another sip of whiskey got downed. After a moment he said, “I miss the... relationship.”
“Relationship?”
“A newspaper — a paper newspaper — is like a friend knocking on your door and sitting down with you at the breakfast table or desk. It’s a traveling companion when you’re on the train or plane. It’s a thing you can touch, you can hold, you can smell. It’s big, it’s real. That’s what I miss. Okay, enough crap. ’Night.”
He started back to his office.
“Wait.”
Fitz turned.
“What’s the mistake?” Dottie said. “The punctuation?”
“Oh. Using an apostrophe s for the plural; it’s always for the possessive. Never for plural. Irks me to see sentences like ‘There were three Frank’s at the party,’ Frank apostrophe s.”
“You’re wrong.”
He cocked his head. “What?”
“You can use apostrophe s for the plural.”
“No, you can’t,” he grumbled. Now that the apology was a matter of record, he could be curmudgeonly.