Mirinex, Inc. If the paper had exposed its own publisher, the next issue really would have been its last. It would’ve gone out in a blaze of glory.
Topsy Otaka came by, with fresh Monsod sketches. Kit particularly liked an M.C. Escher parody — these days you saw the man’s stuff everywhere — a manipulation of perspective in which tattooed cons and suit-and-tie politicians chased each other in circles within thick prison walls. He showed the piece to Zia, propping it on the halfwall before her desk. This got something out of her at least. It got her to laugh, though darkly, full of smoke. She’d been puffing away, bent close over her legal pad, scribbling hard. As Kit stood before her he got a taste of her Marlboro, and he could pick out a word or two of her bird-like scrawl. “Oedipus,” “basement.” But when Zia spoke, she spoke to Topsy. Abruptly she told her friend about Kit’s decision for the next issue.
Topsy, open-mouthed, blinking, reached for her forearm. Kit wound up writing her a check on the spot, a kill fee.
The one person he didn’t seem to have hurt was Tad Close. The Circulation Manager came in looking happier than any of them, fashionable even, in matching beige turtleneck and mud-brown corduroys. The first issue, he announced, had already sold out both at the kiosks on Arlington Street and over in Harvard Square. “We’re big!” Tad said. “M-tellin-ya!” At least that gave Kit an opening: Yeah Tad now people want to read about Monsod but I’m afraid … Yet Kit’s news had the Circulation Manager looking, if anything, even happier. He took the chair opposite Kit, in the middle of the front room; grinning, he finger-combed his mustache.
“Kit,” he said after a bewildering moment, “you know I realize who I’m working for.”
“Really.” Kit managed a grin of his own.
“I realize, Kit, you’re a true believer. You’re a martyr, man, you’re beautiful. Look at you.”
Tad’s bullshit was a sight for sore eyes. An act of great delicacy. He had only the smallest improvisational space, a sliver between confidence and self-mockery.
“And this is a beautiful thing, closing down awhile. It’s like Carlos Castañeda out in the desert. Not doing, you know? The Yaqui way of knowledge.”
Tad went on a moment about the rightness of Kit’s decision. “But Kit,” he said then, “let me ask you something.”
And the Circulation Manager was utterly unfazed about working in public. He lay both hands palm-up on the desk between them, nothing to hide.
“Let me ask you. What do you think makes people read about the scum of the earth down in Monsod?”
“Tad. Scum of the Earth was what I was going to call the paper. Until I thought of Sea Level, Scum of the Earth was it.”
Corinna gave a startled laugh, behind Tad’s back.
“Yeah, yeah,” the Manager said. “But m’tellin’ya Kit. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred out there, they don’t want to hear about the scum in Monsod. Junkies, killers — they don’t care about those losers. The only way they’ll read about it, is if they think it’s hip.”
“Hip,” Kit said.
“Hip. They need to think it’s part of the scene.”
Zia’s laughter, behind Kit, was refreshingly acid.
“I see,” Kit said. “And what I’m doing now, this beautiful Yaqui thing, it’s also very hip.”
“Well, no offense, Kit. I realize how you feel about it.”
“It’s going to sell papers.”
“When we start up again, Kit — it’s going to be so big, the newsstands’ll have to pay us in elephant dollars. Hey, to be hip, m’tellin’ya, it’s important. It’s a dream to people. The dream business, that’s our business. Unless you’re putting out a paper for sociology professors.”
Kit didn’t take offense. In fact it was a relief bashing away like this, not having to apologize for once. After a moment he asked Tad if he’d read Hamlet.
“Oh great,” Tad said. “We’re expanding our readership base now. We’re reaching out to English professors.”
“Hamlet, Tad. You’ve read Hamlet. You know what Hamlet says he’s reading, in there?”
Tad stroked his mustache, his grin holding steady.
“Words, words, words,” Zia said.
Kit turned sideways in his chair, eyeing the writer. “Words, words, words,” he repeated, smiling. He turned back to his Circulation Manager. “I’d like to think, Tad, that we can do better than that.”
It was a relief to bash away, a relief to hear that at least one person who worked for Sea Level believed the paper would be back on the stands some day. But after the Circulation Manager had finished going over his figures and left — maybe the bank balance would stretch through Valentine’s after all — Zia noisily began to pack up. She was taking the rest of the day off. “In fact,” she said, gathering her bright blue pens, “let’s make it the rest of the week.” And there was her glare again, the equals signs on either side of her nose. Kit went to her, to the half-wall before her.
“I thought,” she said, “like, I’m a writer now, I should write. I thought, okay, this is how I deal with depression now. This is what I do instead.”
Kit checked Corinna. She glared back with eyes very different from Zia’s, very round, two zeros. Some tough arithmetic in the office today.
“I thought like, okay, it’s just a delay. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, young lady. But I’m like, non-functional.”
Kit made a few stabs at calming her: reassurances, reminders. The woman kept shaking her head, slowly zipping up her black leather. “The coming and going, Kit, all this coming and going. It’s too much for me. I mean, when the whole enterprise seems so shaky to begin with.” Kit knew better than to touch her, to give her any provocation. Also he was finding it hard to disagree. He could feel the relief his office had given him that morning, feel its therapy in his neck and his bruises — yet nonetheless Zia was right. Sea Level had to rank among the most ill assorted menageries ever. On the one hand Kit had a fire-eater like Rick Dimirris, storming in with the names of the bad guys, and on the other hand he had a happy-face like Tad Close. And these two women couldn’t have been more at cross-purposes. One was upwardly mobile, the other downwardly. One was full-hipped in full makeup, the other all eyeliner and anorexia. They had the generational difference too: Corinna a Movement woman like Mrs. Rebes, eyes on the prize, and Zia whatever had come since.
Gently now Kit asked Zia to think about it, to check in tomorrow morning at least. But his eyes kept shifting back and forth between her and Corinna. Zia was packing away the last of her writing, smoothing her chicken-scratched legal pages before she slipped them into her satchel. Corinna was ratcheting a fresh sheet of letterhead into her typewriter and beginning to tap out a note.
The checks and balances of the working world, Viddich. And there could be no denying that it was his preferred world, no denying the relief it afforded him or the way it cleared his head of imaginary layout & pasteup. Knocking this hole in his schedule of deadlines and press days, in fact, might well have been the most difficult penance he could set himself. Kit couldn’t dissuade Zia, no. He agreed with her. When the phone rang again, he felt another distinct pick-me-up.
He couldn’t believe who was calling, though. “My uncle?” he asked Corinna.
“Uncle Pete, that’s what he says.”
Zia, her satchel over her shoulder, was coming through the halfwall doorway beside him. “Kit, the best I can tell you is, I’ll try to check in.”