The next day, my dream and my time in Lucas’s home were infecting everything as I biked to my office through the syrupy streets, the air smelling of wilting trees. Young people were picnicking in patchy grass at LeDroit Park, laughing and toasting with plastic cups. Families were out on their stoops, reclining in lawn chairs, reaching into coolers of beer and soft drinks on ice. Toddlers splashed in inflatable wading pools set up on the sidewalk. There was merriment, a prevailing sense of safety and wonder. It was clear that none of these people had just seen their father’s spleen fall out of his body. Or walked out of the house the person they were in love with shared with his wife. I cycled tentatively, wary of speeding cars, the uncertainty of my relationship with Lucas burning in my stomach.
At Apogee, it was just me. Because I was a newish hire, I was supposed to “cover” the holiday weekend, spend the afternoon at the office in case anything newsworthy happened, while everyone else was outside barbecuing and eating pie. I was relieved to have a reason to be alone at work; I wanted to chase this osprey story, the Larry story. I wanted to have something else to think about, to matter on my own merits. By the time I’d pulled my laptop out of my locker and sat down, my head was clear, and I was ready to work. Jane Ostrawicz-Jones had sent me three emails. Look at Twitter, she wrote in the first.
Twitter!!! the second one said.
OSPREY!!!!!!!!!!!!! was the third.
If Jane had stooped to using exclamation points, I was in trouble. I’d gone to bat for this osprey story, and now I had to perform under a spotlight. And I had to prove to Larry that I was worthy of his attention after I’d lied, deluded him, forced my father’s baseball into his hands.
On Twitter, I searched #savealan&abby and saw that Larry had engaged with the protesters again, just as Lucas had warned against.
LARRY TAYLOR We’re touched that many people are thinking of the Choptank River osprey and chicks. However, we have a responsibility to understand the natural world, and part of that is witnessing even the sad or savage. We won’t be taking down the camera.
In response to the protesters’ overidentification with the birds, Larry had removed the name he had given Luna more than twenty years before. In death he had taken away their relationship. The Choptank River osprey and chicks: I thought of Larry wrapping Luna in a towel, depositing her on the back seat. Ropy strands of seaweed appeared before my eyes, as though I were swimming through briny water.
The #savealan&abby petition was gathering momentum, with signatures from Illinois and California, Canada and the UK. Memes had been generated from screenshots of the chicks with their pink mouths open, Muppet-like, waiting for phantom morsels of fish. Someone had called the Maryland Birders’ Association an “amateurish bunch of sellouts.” Larry was accused of being cruel and heartless.
A few days ago I had been writing an obscure story about how pollution and overfishing were causing a decline in the numbers of fish that osprey liked to eat. That version of the story was yawn. It had required many layers of explanation. What kinds of fish made up their diet, why did osprey have to search harder for those fish, and how did that decrease their chicks’ survival rates and increase their vulnerability? And then there was the basic question of convincing people why they should care about osprey. Why did it matter to have a biologically diverse earth? What if the forage fish died off, and the osprey died off, and a great cascade of extinction spread like a virus, like outrage on social media?
That story, even if focused on a personality—Larry—would probably not have been a big story, read only by those for whom a bird’s nest in a quiet corner of the Chesapeake Bay was a fascination, but now I was writing a story about a subject that was trending on Twitter. I realized that if I wanted to, I could blow it up into a thing, capitalize on all this attention, and hit the Leaderboard for the very first time.
From deep inside the kitchen came the shriek of an espresso machine, followed by a weak cough that I recognized immediately as Steve’s. I wasn’t alone after all. I braced myself for the appearance of my boss. Technically, my boss’s boss. In every industry there were people on their way up and people on their way down; like some kind of corporate Rota Fortunae, they counterbalanced one another. At Apogee, though, everyone was on their way up except for Jane, and as a result there wasn’t much to offset the soaring ascent of all those hotheads, Steve the king of them all. Steve hit the board all the time. And a few weeks ago, there was that viral post about the Arkansas congressman hog wrestling. Maybe, just maybe, these orphaned osprey were my Arkansas congressman’s deviant passion for pigs.
But I didn’t want to sensationalize. Jane had specifically asked me to come up with a new way to communicate science to readers. She’d wanted an interesting personality, and I had found her one, except his name was Larry M. Taylor, and he spent his free time in rubber boots, peering through a pair of binoculars, keeping close watch over a seabird.
I started writing. I described the way the river looked as Luna plunged toward it in death—translucent, thin as tracing paper. It wouldn’t have taken long for the sea lice to find her as she lay on her side in the channel. The crustaceans would click their way toward her on eight legs, nibble at her eyes. Feathers heavy in the murk.
Luna would have stayed there, I wrote, at the bottom of a channel in the Choptank River, were it not for the president of the Maryland Birders’ Association. A man who recovered Luna’s body to understand more about the suffering of the Chesapeake Bay osprey. His goal was to keep osprey breeding and nesting in good habitat with abundant fish to eat. Yet he was being villainized on Twitter for a situation he hadn’t caused and was simply trying to prevent in the future. The Twitter protest, #savealan&abby, was a story about two orphaned chicks that detracted from the larger story about climate change and overfishing, water pollution and the destabilization of the natural world. It was the more important story by far. It was the one we’d be telling for generations.
I banged out paragraphs, inserting facts about the osprey disappearance, quoting some of the online reaction, focusing on the science. There were plenty of reports to cite. I gave Larry a long comment, using my notes of our conversation. I loved his phrase witnessing even the sad or savage. I threw that in the piece. It may have been the boring version of the story of Luna’s death, but it was the fact-based, scientifically sound, foolproof way to reach the climate-change people and possibly zero other readers—i.e., the kind of reporting Jane loved. I hoped that it would be like a laser beam of apology directed at Larry. He would read it and, I hoped, be impressed. While Twitter lost its mind, Apogee could stand up for truth—and for Larry. Maybe it would even make him soften toward me enough that I could someday learn what happened between him and my father.
“You working on the osprey piece?” Steve said from behind me. Without getting up, he scooted his ergonomic desk chair across the room from Quality Control to the Conveyor Belt until he was seated beside my workstation, his head just below the sloping brass lamp.
“There’s kind of a Twitter situation,” I said, “so Jane wants to get this up ASAP.”
“I saw it. Great stuff. Let’s capitalize on it. Emphasize the suffering of those baby birds. That’ll get us baseline clicks and we can build from there. Photos, tweets, the works.”
“The works,” I repeated.
“Keep me posted.”
“Got it.”
Steve scooted back to his man cave. Apogee reporters were two types of young men: the Brooks Brothers types, who could tell you how the junior congressman from Indiana voted on the third rider in the last farm bill, and the carabiners, guys who wore skinny jeans with carabiners of keys dangling out of their back pockets, who when they weren’t riding or repairing their bicycles were making frequent, reverential references to John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
Steve Glanz was a Brooks Brother. He wore loafers, and I’d once heard him talk about his “tailor,” as if that service was native to a twenty-something who occasionally went home to his parents’ house to do laundry.
An hour later, I uploaded the draft of my article to the “Save for Review” folder, which triggered an automatic email to Jane and Steve that it was ready to be edited. I went into the kitchen to make coffee. Steve poked his head in a few minutes later. “Ellie, this isn’t what we talked about.”
“What?”
“Your osprey piece.”
“It’s the direction Jane gave me for ‘Rising Tides.’ It’s mostly a profile of Larry Taylor and his work with the osprey cam. The series is supposed to be teaching readers about climate change.”
“But we talked about using the human-interest angle. You know, the osprey chicks and how their parents abandoned them?”
“Well, they didn’t really abandon them. The mother died. The father has a biological imperative to find a new mate.”
“Exactly. A cheating osprey. That’ll be gangbusters for Web traffic.”
“It’s not what Jane asked for—”
“Leave Jane to me,” Steve said. “By the way, have you read the John McPhee book about shad?”
“Nope.” I didn’t know what a shad was, but I wasn’t going to ask Steve and suffer through his explanation.
“Take a look. It’s real long-form journalism. Probably the greatest fish book ever written. He has a style that reminds me of yours, actually.”
I tried to look pleased. He was comparing me to a giant in journalism. But I knew I was nothing like John McPhee, which meant Steve was trying to flirt with me. He continued to sit beside me, smiling with anticipation. Oh God. Talking to him was like getting tapped repeatedly on the shoulder by an octopus with one wet tentacle.
“I noticed you were on ErosAble,” he said. “Word around the office was that you were seeing someone.”
“Uh-huh.” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation, that my boss’s boss was crossing this line with me. There was nowhere to hide from Steve; I didn’t want to offend him, and I didn’t have an office to escape into, and even if I did, it would be made of glass.
“Hey, if you ever want to talk about it at all, let me know,” he said.
“I’m not really sure that’s office-appropriate.”
He watched me thoughtfully. “What we’re trying to do here is really revolutionize the whole concept of ‘office.’ ”
“Right.”
“Well, I should get going. I’m headed to a party at Maureen Dowd’s.” Steve tried to say this with nonchalance, but it was clear that I had to make noises that suggested how impressed I was.
“Ahhhmn!” I arranged my face into an expression of delight.
“Don’t pull an all-nighter. Bad for the skin,” he said. The glass doors swooshed open and the hallway swallowed him up.
I looked up Jane’s home phone number. She answered on the first ring, and I explained the situation. “Leave Steve to me,” she said.
Back at 1938 House, Nick and Adrian were playing poker. Adrian clerked for a federal judge who played cards after hours in her chambers. Her weekly Friday-night poker game was the best chance for junior staff to get to know her. Adrian had been through twenty-two years of schooling, summa cum laude from Bowdoin, law degree from some Ivy League, I couldn’t remember which one, but he knew nothing about cards. Nick, on the other hand, had no such résumé but had spent his formative years playing Texas Hold’em in his childhood bedroom while his mother leafed through JCPenney catalogs in the next room.
It looked like he and Adrian had been at it for hours, amassing empty IPAs, tossing bottle caps into the cardboard sleeves of six-packs.
“Hard at work, you two?” I said.
“Sort of. We have beer if you want.” Nick slid a poker chip from his pile.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“You bluffed, but you one hundred percent should have folded,” Nick explained, the two of them with their shirtsleeves rolled back and their black leather office shoes on, even though it was a weekend, hunched over the poker chips with the somber dignity of two people determining our nation’s political future. Which, to some extent, they were.
Sometimes it seemed as if people in their mid-twenties did all the work in D.C. A twenty-five-year-old junior policy wonk would write the position paper that the twenty-five-year-old Hill staffer would read in order to write a policy speech for a congressman that would be covered by a twenty-five-year-old cable-news producer pushing it out into the world in a chyron for a twenty-five-year-old junior reporter to cover in the echo chamber that was D.C. congressional news. Real expertise was often an illusion. And a costly one. Many of Washington’s young professionals seemed inflated with self-importance and burdened by ignorance, coming home each night to their group houses. After a few years, they’d burn out and head to graduate school, or into finance or law, skittering across the country and back to the cities and states they came from, feeling clean and pure in the mountain air, mowing the lawns of their suburban ranch homes—their days of moral turpitude behind them.
Some did remain, like Lucas, into their thirties and forties. Like Mina, his wife. Like Jane. Building entire careers around the singularity of the federal government, or the fourth estate, or the consulting class that catered to both. Would I be one of the ones who stayed?
Mal was holding court in the living room. From behind the closed door I heard the oratory of someone in her Marxist study group. I did not have the fortitude at the moment to engage with a bunch of people who called one another “comrade.”
My phone pinged—Jane telling me my article had been posted on the Apogee site. From the look of things, she had prevailed over Steve; my spirited but factual defense of Larry Taylor was intact, though she must have compromised on the headline, which definitely had a whiff of Steve about it: THINK BIRDS ARE MONOGAMOUS FAMILY MEN? THINK AGAIN. I pulled up a new email and sent the link with a note to Larry.
Dear Larry,
I didn’t write this awful headline, but the article is about why we shouldn’t allow a sentimental approach to a particular wild animal to distract us from the importance of conservation in the face of climate change.
Best,
Eleanor Adler
I read it over and then added another paragraph:
I’m sorry about what happened. I deeply regret my actions and how they must have hurt you. If I can ever do anything to make it up to you, I would welcome that opportunity.
I pressed send.
Stories could have such unsatisfying and unlikely outcomes. More and more, I felt we willingly built entire worlds on very little information. Like sandcastles, if you poked them anywhere, the whole structure would revert to its components. It was our nature to do that, to fill in the details and become convinced they were true and not our own fantasies and imaginations bumping up against someone else’s reality. I thought of all the stories I’d concocted: My father and Linda. My father and Larry. Larry and me. Lucas and Katherine. Lucas and me.
“You guys want to go to the Rattling Panther? There’s live music tonight.” Nick collected the poker chips in a sweep of his hand.
“I’m beat,” I said. “Going to head to bed early.” I wanted to be alone, in the dark cave of my bedroom. Upstairs, I rooted under the bed for my pajamas. My mother had helped me put the futon on risers to make space underneath for a plastic bin of what she called “leisurewear.” I imagined myself in Lucas’s house, the handsome chests of drawers and dustless surfaces. All the above-bed storage! I could have run my hands over the wood for no purpose other than to feel the grain.
I got into bed and turned off the light. I was jealous—that’s what it was. I checked Twitter to see if the Maryland Birders’ Association had posted a link to my article. Great journalism. We are proud to represent the Chesapeake Bay osprey in the media, Larry had written before the shortened link. I retweeted his tweet, feeling enormous relief; maybe Larry wouldn’t forgive me, but at least I had done some small, redeeming thing.
Sometime later I woke up, disoriented, to loud thumping through the wall. “Adrian,” a woman shrieked, and a headboard banged three times. Charmaine must have come over.
I knew what all my roommates sounded like when they had sex, except for Nick, whose room was on the other side of the bathroom and who never brought anyone home. Nick had been engaged for a few years and was devastated when she left him for a woman; he’d moved out of their shared one-bedroom into 1938 House, where he’d been ever since. The worst was when Katherine had someone over. Katherine, who had no door on her attic bedroom, must have learned to make sex noises from Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. It was like every partner she’d ever been with touched her deep in her core. I once heard her scream the word orgasm! The next morning I ran into her and Arvind in the kitchen, making smoothies.
Fireworks split the sky. I opened my curtains to watch them. Someone in my neighborhood was still celebrating the Fourth of July. In the intermittent seams of colored light, I ran my hands over my breasts, touching the places Lucas had touched. On my dresser was the necklace he’d given me. He loves my optimism, I thought. He doesn’t want to lose me. The fireworks broke, scattering bursts of yellow and pink across my skin. “I’m coming,” said the woman through the wall. The headboard banged: one, two, three, four. I imagined Lucas touching himself, groaning, thinking of the sex we had. “Oh, Ellie,” he moaned, and then his words were in my mouth, and I was him, lying in my wife’s bed and thinking of my young lover, her body a wet gash into which I’d spill my seed.
The next day, I was still tired. I took a long nap in the afternoon, waking past three. Steve called as I was poking around the fridge, trying to figure out what my stomach wanted. I greeted him chirpily to cover up my sleep voice. I hated when the very first words out of my mouth after waking up were to my superiors.
“Hey, so you’ve seen the protests?” Steve asked.
“What protests?” I pictured a revival of Occupy D.C., imagined myself at McPherson Square surrounded by radical young people, notebook in hand, reporting on a real movement.
“The osprey protests,” Steve said.
“Oh.” A flicker of unease passed through me.
“You have to get out there and write this up. This story is getting bigger by the minute.”
“Actual, real live people are protesting over two osprey chicks?”
“There’s videos of them carrying signs on Twitter. And they have some kind of chant? I’ll text you the link. There’s apparently a whole busload of people coming in from the Midwest.”
“Okay. Yes. I’ll go right away.” I wondered about Larry, what he was thinking about all of this, though I was pretty sure I knew. He had earnestly tried to explain himself online, and now I imagined he was going to earnestly explain himself to a bunch of bright-cheeked zealots who had just taken an eleven-hour bus ride from the Midwest with Magic Markers and oaktag. There was no way that could go well. I needed to stop him from engaging, if he hadn’t already.
“Listen, this isn’t a climate change thing anymore,” Steve said. “This is a big piece now. Front-page stuff. It’s a great chance for you.”
I got off the phone and pulled up the video. A small group, seven or eight people, had recorded themselves circling the marsh around Luna’s nest. They held posters glued to plywood sticks. JUSTICE FOR ABBY AND ALAN! one read. Another had a photo of Larry Taylor’s binoculared face on it, with a big red diagonal slash through it. Had poor Larry fanned their flames by responding to them with such patient firmness?
I turned up the volume on the video and heard them chant. “One, two, three, four, we won’t take this anymore! Five, six, seven, eight, change the baby ospreys’ fate!” A woman in a bright-yellow shirt was reaching into a bag and pulling out handfuls of birdseed, tossing it into the air like confetti.
A few minutes later I was in Adrian’s car, this time with promises not just to pay for gas but to get Apogee to throw him some dollars to make up for all the miles I’d been putting on it. I didn’t have Larry’s number, but I would stop by his house first and, with any luck, intercept him before he made things worse.
I was close to the turnoff from the highway when my phone rang: I was relieved to hear that it was Larry.
“I’m so glad you called,” I shouted into the speakerphone. “I’m actually on my way to Luna’s nest right now.”
“That’s what I’m calling about. Please,” he said desperately. “Please don’t write another article. Don’t write another word. I need this to go away.”