davidm
12-21-2004, 09:21 PM
The Night Editor
A work of fiction
I'm the night editor.
Bulletins scroll down my computer screen: a mine collapse in China. Beheadings in Iraq. An earthquake in Micronesia. Each night the death toll is staggering; it's a wonder that enough bandwidth exists to convey this carnage.
In addition to accounts of the dying, my computer brings me updates on the misery of the living. Entire nations are sunk in poverty; droughts as large as continents leave millions starving, and millions more are dying of wasting diseases for want of affordable drugs.
My window on the world also apprises me of religious and ideological clashes. Last month, the leader of a sect in an obscure Southwest Asian nation issued a fatwah against that nation's generalissimo, who had seized power in a military coup. The latter responded by ordering the army into action. Riots ensued, and temples were profaned. The episode reached its climax when a monsoon killed thousands on the nation's coast, while the army gunned down hundreds more in the streets outside the capital city's Presidential Palace. (That palace is built in the shape of an enormous, abstract elephant wearing a crown of sacred thunderbolts, an ancient symbol among that nation's people attesting to the benevolence of nature and the brotherhood of man.)
I ignore the babble of my colleagues: the copy editors in front of me, and the desk editors behind me. The latter are forever on the phone with foreign correspondents who are breathelessly conveying urgent bulletins of fresh disasters from the hellholes that they cover, while the former are bent over their page proofs like misers counting coins. Their conversation is the easist to ignore, because it consists of little more than threats to retire. Some people think that one of the copy editors is dead, because apparently he hasn't moved from his chair in 18 months. But union rules preclude the company from replacing him.
Mr. Ergaster, a senior editor, is devoted to deadlines and drink. For him, meeting deadline is an idee fixe, probably because he wants to start boozing as soon as possible. When we fail to close the editions on time, he shambles over, cursing and waving a fist. Still, people respect him, because he has a fund of amusing newspaper stories from the old days, which he repeats endlessly at the corner bar for the retired pressmen with whom he bends elbows. They, in turn, repeat their stories, so that the exercise suggests mirrors facing one another, with identical images of each mirror reflected in the others to infinity.
As I scroll the wires and edit copy, I sometimes think we are not reporting the news, but making it. I fantasize that the reports from our correspondents and wire services are fictitious; that the world is a tabula rasa upon which we write each evening. We set the stage and the props, and arrange the actors. Then we publish our account of the play, which our subscribers read each morning. We choose to publish a particular set of stories, and pretend they give an account of events that actually happened. But, I think, were we to choose an alternate set of stories, then those stories would make a different reality. If this is true, it means that when I (after midnight, I'm nominally in charge of the foreign section) choose to publish, let's say, an account of a devastating flood in Bangladesh that has killed hundreds, then I am playing God, sentencing hundreds of people to die. Were I to withhold such a story from print, I would spare their lives. Needless to say, I never refuse to publish such stories; in fact I shoehorn them into the paper. In journalism, there's an old saying: If it bleeds, it leads. Death is the lifeblood of the press, the manure that hammers up the daisies.
How did I come up with this odd idea that our stories are fictitious? Secretly, while working on copy, I keep my computer's browser active on a certain Web site, one that contains a heterogeneous message board. I can't disclose the URL of this archipelago in cyberspace, because it's a secret. The site is password-protected, though anyone might find the password by seeking it. But few seek, and so few find. Anyway, I've long forgotten the exact name of this place. I know it, simply, as -- The Boards.
On The Boards, an alternate world already exists. As Mr. Ergaster stamps about, as the copy editors grumble and the desk editors take dictation -- in short, amid the blooming and buzzing confusion that attends the arrival of deadline -- I am serenely reading an essay on Dostoevsky. Yes, Dostoevsky appears on The Boards, for entire threads are devoted to him. He comes vividly into focus, with his penetrating yet humble dark eyes staring out in a hooded way from the other side of an abyss. Strangely, as Dostoevsky grows sharper, those around me become vaguer. I am like a man meditating in traffic. On the other side of my computer's looking glass, ontological proofs are constructed and then demolished. Consequents are fallaciously affirmed, and affirmations are consequently questioned. There are no coups, unless they are juntas of the mind. No one dies -- rather, people are banned. Controversies grow like kudzu from a single opening post, splitting and resplitting into competing threads from the original seed, which then stands in relation to its progeny as the common ancestor of all earthly life does to the phylogentic tree that grew from it.
Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Wittgenstein, and many others live on The Boards. Borges may be found making his endless pilgrimage through his infinite library, and people practice Biblical hermeneutics. All this stands in contrast to the contents of the newspaper, and to my own life, in which -- three years ago -- my wife died. At night, alone -- long after we have put the paper to bed -- I dream about the infinite hexagonal galleries of Borges' library, infested with their enigmatic books.
Why do I write these words?
Listen: I'm no longer the night editor, and I haven't been at my work station in 18 days. Nor do I type these words on a word processing program. Instead, I scratch them on foolscap with a quill pen that I must occasionally dip into a bottle of ink under the light of a gas lamp, as the snow blows outside the little window of my cramped hovel and the icy wind makes the pane rattle. I was fortunate to obtain this room, squalid though it is, owing to the kindness of a stranger.
Here's what happened: One night, Mr. Ergaster, who normally leaves the building after the close of the midnight edition, stayed on to spell the late news editor, who got sick and had to leave. The newspaper publishes postscript editions at one, two and three in the morning, and as the night wears on, the vast building becomes nearly empty. By 2:30 only Mr. Ergaster and I remained. He was on the far side of the room, and I studied him as he brooded like some retardate buddha over a curious collection of objects on his desk. I watched him for a long time, first with unease, and then with hatred. Tearing my eyes away from him, I brought to the front of my screen the browser window that contained the wire reports, allowing it temporarily to hide the window that showed The Boards. An urgent bulletin was blinking. Hundreds had been killed in a military attack. A moment later the phone rang. Mr. Ergaster, who had seen this same bulletin on his computer, demanded that I shoehorn this atrocity into print. As he spoke, I had the odd idea that he was clacking his teeth, and that his words were senseless grunts and howls.
I carried out his repulsive order, printed a proof, and walked it over to him. He snatched it from my hand and turned in his chair to study it. I looked at his desk. Crude stone tools covered it. I felt a knot of fear in my stomach as I studied Mr. Ergaster's profile. He had a sloped forehead and a lantern jaw in which he clacked his teeth. Moreover, he no longer wore clothes, and coarse black hair covered his body.
At that moment I knew that Mr. Ergaster stood in the way of progress. If he could be removed, I reasoned, then we would not just understand, but admit, that the entire newspaper was a fiction, devoid of content and lacking a single reader. Man would be liberated – at last able to perceive directly “the thing in itself” rather than imperfectly infer it. I involuntarily picked up a crude arrowhead from Mr. Ergaster’s collection of tools and raised it above my head. You will understand that my action was involuntary. We are at the mercy of blind forces, and whether these forces are deterministic or random, it all comes to the same thing.
So I brought the tip of the stone arrowhead crashing down into the top of Mr. Ergaster’s skull.
He screamed and fell to the floor.
“Ecce homo ergaster!” I babbled.
I looked around. Nothing had changed. The empty newsroom remained as before, a warren of cubicles and workstations.
I jogged back to my desk, and brought to the front of my computer screen the browser window showing The Boards. Uncomprehending, I transferred all its files – tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of posts – into the news production system. And then I -- I struck the key issuing the command to insert the entire contents of The Boards into the press run, replacing all the "news" that had been there before.
I then wandered over to a window that looks down on a bustling street. A blizzard raged outside, reducing the people on the sidewalk below to furtive, shadowy forms and the streetlights to fuzzy blobs of illumination. I had never seen snow in August.
I had no coat. Still, I hurried down the stairs and into the street. I crossed my arms across my chest and bulled forward as the wind whipped needles of ice into my face. I staggered as snowdrifts piled up around my ankles. I quickly grew exhausted, and I must have passed out. When I awoke, it was morning. I was curled in a doorway, under some rags and old newspapers. I held one of the papers in front of me: It had no pictures, and Cyrillic letters clotted it.
People say St. Petersburg is beautiful in the summer, and distinctive for its white nights, but I found myself in the middle of a soul-killing winter. With one exception, I won’t bore you with the details of what I had to do to secure my existence in this impossible situation, made worse by my lack of familiarity with an archaic metropolis full of church steeples, gas lamps, cobblestone streets, mobs of wailing beggars, and Russian troikas, those carriages that clattered madly down the roads pulled by teams of three horses abreast. Life is hard enough for a stranger in a strange land, and harder still when that stranger finds himself marooned in the year 1861. Still, I had hope, never doubting the inevitability of a certain encounter – for I knew I was not really living in St. Petersburg in 1861, but rather in one of the Dostoevsky threads inside the data base of The Boards. I saw him one day striding up Nevsky Prospect, head bent in thought, beard billowing, baroque old bard bearing his cargo of dreams in the solitude of his soul. I intercepted him, stretching out my hand like a beggar. He stared piercingly at me as I gestured frantically and babbled in broken Russian in a desperate effort to explain my plight – for which, after all, he was at least partly responsible. Somehow I made myself understood and – despite his debts and doubts – he stuffed a wad of rubles into my hand, and later arranged for me to rent the room that I now occupy (for he was the kind stranger of whom I have already spoken). In the days that followed I had many adventures. Once, I wandered into what I thought was the Hermitage, only to find myself confronted by a vertiginous library full of hexagonal galleries that stretched above and around me toward infinity. I barely managed to escape out the door just as it was swinging shut. I met Immanuel Kant. (He spoke just as he wrote, employing meandering clauses separated by battalions of commas.) I witnessed great, shining mathematical formations athwart the sky, vast auroras of abstraction before which the Northern Lights paled. I attended a patient lecture by Christ before a discipleship of Biblical scholars. In another blinding snowstorm I walked all the way to the horizon, beyond the core of the city, to the edge of the Baltic Sea, the sky before me as gray as soapsuds; and in reaching this frontier a glassen barrier blocked my way. I rubbed the obscuring moisture off a small patch of it with the sleeve of my coat, and then pressed one eye to the clearing. I could see them towering above me on the other side, bustling about as always. Desk editors were on the phone, or hunched before their computer terminals. Copy editors sulked over their proofs. Clerks printed e-mail messages. Naturally, there was no sign of Mr. Ergaster. Moreover, someone had taken my place – her giant figure, fuzzy and obscure on the other side of the semitransparent wall, now sat down in front of what had been my computer terminal, her eyes staring down at me without seeing me. For the browser window to The Boards remained open! No one had thought to close it – indeed, no one had even noticed it. I considered rapping on the barrier, but concluded that my effort would be in vain. She did not see – had never seen. They would not look. They would not look.
Das Ende
Copyright 2004 by David Misialowski
<aka davidm at iidb and Hyperboreans, and The President at the Ebla Forum.>
Feedback appreciated. :writer: :popcorn:
A work of fiction
I'm the night editor.
Bulletins scroll down my computer screen: a mine collapse in China. Beheadings in Iraq. An earthquake in Micronesia. Each night the death toll is staggering; it's a wonder that enough bandwidth exists to convey this carnage.
In addition to accounts of the dying, my computer brings me updates on the misery of the living. Entire nations are sunk in poverty; droughts as large as continents leave millions starving, and millions more are dying of wasting diseases for want of affordable drugs.
My window on the world also apprises me of religious and ideological clashes. Last month, the leader of a sect in an obscure Southwest Asian nation issued a fatwah against that nation's generalissimo, who had seized power in a military coup. The latter responded by ordering the army into action. Riots ensued, and temples were profaned. The episode reached its climax when a monsoon killed thousands on the nation's coast, while the army gunned down hundreds more in the streets outside the capital city's Presidential Palace. (That palace is built in the shape of an enormous, abstract elephant wearing a crown of sacred thunderbolts, an ancient symbol among that nation's people attesting to the benevolence of nature and the brotherhood of man.)
I ignore the babble of my colleagues: the copy editors in front of me, and the desk editors behind me. The latter are forever on the phone with foreign correspondents who are breathelessly conveying urgent bulletins of fresh disasters from the hellholes that they cover, while the former are bent over their page proofs like misers counting coins. Their conversation is the easist to ignore, because it consists of little more than threats to retire. Some people think that one of the copy editors is dead, because apparently he hasn't moved from his chair in 18 months. But union rules preclude the company from replacing him.
Mr. Ergaster, a senior editor, is devoted to deadlines and drink. For him, meeting deadline is an idee fixe, probably because he wants to start boozing as soon as possible. When we fail to close the editions on time, he shambles over, cursing and waving a fist. Still, people respect him, because he has a fund of amusing newspaper stories from the old days, which he repeats endlessly at the corner bar for the retired pressmen with whom he bends elbows. They, in turn, repeat their stories, so that the exercise suggests mirrors facing one another, with identical images of each mirror reflected in the others to infinity.
As I scroll the wires and edit copy, I sometimes think we are not reporting the news, but making it. I fantasize that the reports from our correspondents and wire services are fictitious; that the world is a tabula rasa upon which we write each evening. We set the stage and the props, and arrange the actors. Then we publish our account of the play, which our subscribers read each morning. We choose to publish a particular set of stories, and pretend they give an account of events that actually happened. But, I think, were we to choose an alternate set of stories, then those stories would make a different reality. If this is true, it means that when I (after midnight, I'm nominally in charge of the foreign section) choose to publish, let's say, an account of a devastating flood in Bangladesh that has killed hundreds, then I am playing God, sentencing hundreds of people to die. Were I to withhold such a story from print, I would spare their lives. Needless to say, I never refuse to publish such stories; in fact I shoehorn them into the paper. In journalism, there's an old saying: If it bleeds, it leads. Death is the lifeblood of the press, the manure that hammers up the daisies.
How did I come up with this odd idea that our stories are fictitious? Secretly, while working on copy, I keep my computer's browser active on a certain Web site, one that contains a heterogeneous message board. I can't disclose the URL of this archipelago in cyberspace, because it's a secret. The site is password-protected, though anyone might find the password by seeking it. But few seek, and so few find. Anyway, I've long forgotten the exact name of this place. I know it, simply, as -- The Boards.
On The Boards, an alternate world already exists. As Mr. Ergaster stamps about, as the copy editors grumble and the desk editors take dictation -- in short, amid the blooming and buzzing confusion that attends the arrival of deadline -- I am serenely reading an essay on Dostoevsky. Yes, Dostoevsky appears on The Boards, for entire threads are devoted to him. He comes vividly into focus, with his penetrating yet humble dark eyes staring out in a hooded way from the other side of an abyss. Strangely, as Dostoevsky grows sharper, those around me become vaguer. I am like a man meditating in traffic. On the other side of my computer's looking glass, ontological proofs are constructed and then demolished. Consequents are fallaciously affirmed, and affirmations are consequently questioned. There are no coups, unless they are juntas of the mind. No one dies -- rather, people are banned. Controversies grow like kudzu from a single opening post, splitting and resplitting into competing threads from the original seed, which then stands in relation to its progeny as the common ancestor of all earthly life does to the phylogentic tree that grew from it.
Hume, Kant, Berkeley, Wittgenstein, and many others live on The Boards. Borges may be found making his endless pilgrimage through his infinite library, and people practice Biblical hermeneutics. All this stands in contrast to the contents of the newspaper, and to my own life, in which -- three years ago -- my wife died. At night, alone -- long after we have put the paper to bed -- I dream about the infinite hexagonal galleries of Borges' library, infested with their enigmatic books.
Why do I write these words?
Listen: I'm no longer the night editor, and I haven't been at my work station in 18 days. Nor do I type these words on a word processing program. Instead, I scratch them on foolscap with a quill pen that I must occasionally dip into a bottle of ink under the light of a gas lamp, as the snow blows outside the little window of my cramped hovel and the icy wind makes the pane rattle. I was fortunate to obtain this room, squalid though it is, owing to the kindness of a stranger.
Here's what happened: One night, Mr. Ergaster, who normally leaves the building after the close of the midnight edition, stayed on to spell the late news editor, who got sick and had to leave. The newspaper publishes postscript editions at one, two and three in the morning, and as the night wears on, the vast building becomes nearly empty. By 2:30 only Mr. Ergaster and I remained. He was on the far side of the room, and I studied him as he brooded like some retardate buddha over a curious collection of objects on his desk. I watched him for a long time, first with unease, and then with hatred. Tearing my eyes away from him, I brought to the front of my screen the browser window that contained the wire reports, allowing it temporarily to hide the window that showed The Boards. An urgent bulletin was blinking. Hundreds had been killed in a military attack. A moment later the phone rang. Mr. Ergaster, who had seen this same bulletin on his computer, demanded that I shoehorn this atrocity into print. As he spoke, I had the odd idea that he was clacking his teeth, and that his words were senseless grunts and howls.
I carried out his repulsive order, printed a proof, and walked it over to him. He snatched it from my hand and turned in his chair to study it. I looked at his desk. Crude stone tools covered it. I felt a knot of fear in my stomach as I studied Mr. Ergaster's profile. He had a sloped forehead and a lantern jaw in which he clacked his teeth. Moreover, he no longer wore clothes, and coarse black hair covered his body.
At that moment I knew that Mr. Ergaster stood in the way of progress. If he could be removed, I reasoned, then we would not just understand, but admit, that the entire newspaper was a fiction, devoid of content and lacking a single reader. Man would be liberated – at last able to perceive directly “the thing in itself” rather than imperfectly infer it. I involuntarily picked up a crude arrowhead from Mr. Ergaster’s collection of tools and raised it above my head. You will understand that my action was involuntary. We are at the mercy of blind forces, and whether these forces are deterministic or random, it all comes to the same thing.
So I brought the tip of the stone arrowhead crashing down into the top of Mr. Ergaster’s skull.
He screamed and fell to the floor.
“Ecce homo ergaster!” I babbled.
I looked around. Nothing had changed. The empty newsroom remained as before, a warren of cubicles and workstations.
I jogged back to my desk, and brought to the front of my computer screen the browser window showing The Boards. Uncomprehending, I transferred all its files – tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of posts – into the news production system. And then I -- I struck the key issuing the command to insert the entire contents of The Boards into the press run, replacing all the "news" that had been there before.
I then wandered over to a window that looks down on a bustling street. A blizzard raged outside, reducing the people on the sidewalk below to furtive, shadowy forms and the streetlights to fuzzy blobs of illumination. I had never seen snow in August.
I had no coat. Still, I hurried down the stairs and into the street. I crossed my arms across my chest and bulled forward as the wind whipped needles of ice into my face. I staggered as snowdrifts piled up around my ankles. I quickly grew exhausted, and I must have passed out. When I awoke, it was morning. I was curled in a doorway, under some rags and old newspapers. I held one of the papers in front of me: It had no pictures, and Cyrillic letters clotted it.
People say St. Petersburg is beautiful in the summer, and distinctive for its white nights, but I found myself in the middle of a soul-killing winter. With one exception, I won’t bore you with the details of what I had to do to secure my existence in this impossible situation, made worse by my lack of familiarity with an archaic metropolis full of church steeples, gas lamps, cobblestone streets, mobs of wailing beggars, and Russian troikas, those carriages that clattered madly down the roads pulled by teams of three horses abreast. Life is hard enough for a stranger in a strange land, and harder still when that stranger finds himself marooned in the year 1861. Still, I had hope, never doubting the inevitability of a certain encounter – for I knew I was not really living in St. Petersburg in 1861, but rather in one of the Dostoevsky threads inside the data base of The Boards. I saw him one day striding up Nevsky Prospect, head bent in thought, beard billowing, baroque old bard bearing his cargo of dreams in the solitude of his soul. I intercepted him, stretching out my hand like a beggar. He stared piercingly at me as I gestured frantically and babbled in broken Russian in a desperate effort to explain my plight – for which, after all, he was at least partly responsible. Somehow I made myself understood and – despite his debts and doubts – he stuffed a wad of rubles into my hand, and later arranged for me to rent the room that I now occupy (for he was the kind stranger of whom I have already spoken). In the days that followed I had many adventures. Once, I wandered into what I thought was the Hermitage, only to find myself confronted by a vertiginous library full of hexagonal galleries that stretched above and around me toward infinity. I barely managed to escape out the door just as it was swinging shut. I met Immanuel Kant. (He spoke just as he wrote, employing meandering clauses separated by battalions of commas.) I witnessed great, shining mathematical formations athwart the sky, vast auroras of abstraction before which the Northern Lights paled. I attended a patient lecture by Christ before a discipleship of Biblical scholars. In another blinding snowstorm I walked all the way to the horizon, beyond the core of the city, to the edge of the Baltic Sea, the sky before me as gray as soapsuds; and in reaching this frontier a glassen barrier blocked my way. I rubbed the obscuring moisture off a small patch of it with the sleeve of my coat, and then pressed one eye to the clearing. I could see them towering above me on the other side, bustling about as always. Desk editors were on the phone, or hunched before their computer terminals. Copy editors sulked over their proofs. Clerks printed e-mail messages. Naturally, there was no sign of Mr. Ergaster. Moreover, someone had taken my place – her giant figure, fuzzy and obscure on the other side of the semitransparent wall, now sat down in front of what had been my computer terminal, her eyes staring down at me without seeing me. For the browser window to The Boards remained open! No one had thought to close it – indeed, no one had even noticed it. I considered rapping on the barrier, but concluded that my effort would be in vain. She did not see – had never seen. They would not look. They would not look.
Das Ende
Copyright 2004 by David Misialowski
<aka davidm at iidb and Hyperboreans, and The President at the Ebla Forum.>
Feedback appreciated. :writer: :popcorn: