“What the hell is this, George?” the shout would come.
The morning paper provided his main source for the endless stream of assignments that flew on white sheets to reporters’ desks. By eight-thirty, when reporters were moving into their cubicles with coffee cups and their own papers in hand, he had already cut his to shreds. He clipped the stories to the assignment sheets along with his suggestions of whom to call or, if he already made the calls, whom to interview on camera. He set the times, lined up the people, posed the questions, if he had the time.
The newspaper stories that ran on to other pages, and most of them did, were cut in strange geometrical shapes, circumventing, bordering the backs of other stories which also must be cut. That took time, the cutting. If it was impossible to save the stories with scissors, he made copies of their second page continuation and cut the copies instead.
Under his system, the evening newscasts were filled with stories at least twenty-four hours old and already fed numerous times to the public by radio news. Oh, there might be some variation, a national story made local. There might be some updating, press conferences held after the newsmakers realized television was interested.
Sometimes the news was even older, days, weeks, months old. He had a hold list that some claimed had run for years. He wanted it long, this list of stories already completed and waiting for that perfect hole in some future newscast. Bad quality video or audio, problems long ago solved or forgotten, he didn’t care. Any story worked when you had a space to fill.
Sometimes, when the panic high to get more stories didn’t override everything else, he could feel the satisfaction that another newscast had been filled. It was a satisfaction not shared by others.
“Man, you don’t understand,” Steve Kramer told him. “It’s only time. It’ll get filled no matter how many stories you pump out. It’ll get filled somehow. It has to.”
No, he didn’t understand that, not at all. He wanted more than enough stores. He wanted too many stories because too many was never enough.
“Debbie, what have I got you on?” he called out.
“That abortion thing and something about mentally retarded people getting married.”
“Interesting combination, George,” Ellen’s voice reached over the cubicles.
He smiled to himself.
8
“She hears voices.”
That is how her father first brought her into his office. He held this big girl by the hand and, as though presenting his daughter at the altar, handed her over to him.
He saw how the man took stock of him, head to toe, how he judged and hoped all in that one look.
“I really don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I hope you can help. Doctor Cohen told me you were the man to call.”
Cohen made his own call. “Known the girl since she was a baby. Hanson is a good man, a good friend. She says she needs a doctor. From what he tells me, I think she’s right.”
*
Debbie stopped only once in her drive from the border and that was to fall onto a motel bed in a room frozen with air conditioning. Six hours later she was back in her van and counting hard. She could almost reach one hundred and seventy before losing track of the count. The fear would fill in the void and the voice would begin again.
“You didn’t even love him and now there is no one,” she called to herself from the end of the tunnel.
“And I didn’t go away, did I? I’ll never go away, never,” the voice promised.
Her father was not home when she finally reached the house. She didn’t bother to unload the few things from the van. She took a bath and began to cook an evening meal.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said after his first surprised hug.
“Michael stayed down there,” she told him.
He said nothing. He had not seen her for six months and that visit lasted only a few days.
“You’re a little too close to your father,” Michael told her. “Try breaking away for a while, be on your own.”
“Are you okay?” her father asked.
“Yes, Dad. Why?”
“You look a little drawn or something.” His blue eyes searched shyly for hers.
“I think I need a doctor, Dad. I think I need a doctor bad. Hey,” she tried to laugh, “it rhymes. Dad, bad.”
The tears poured from her eyes.
*
“I really don’t hear voices. It is my voice I hear,” she told him after the father left her with the assurance that he would be back for her.
“It’s like talking to myself. You know?”
“What are you saying to yourself?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “That I don’t love Michael, I guess. He’s the man I was living with and we went to Baja. I left him there and came home.”
“Is that when this voice started, after you left him?”
“No, before, a little before.”
“And what did it say?”
“That I didn’t love him.”
“Is that what frightened you, that you didn’t love him?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said as her eyes filled and her mouth crumbled, “because I don’t love anybody else. And,” she raised her brimming eyes to his, “nobody loves me.”
“What about your father, Debbie? Doesn’t he love you?’
“Yes,” she said, “but he has to, doesn’t he? And something else.”
“What is that?’
“Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”
He leaned toward her, hands clasped together.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she licked her lips, “I know who I am, my name and where I live and all that. But, I don’t know what else I am. Does that sound crazy?”
“No, Debbie,” he leaned back again. “It sounds like something we can talk about, but it doesn’t sound crazy.”
“Good,” she said, her face relaxing. “I don’t want to be crazy.”
She tried to smile and he realized how pretty she was.
*
She was different from so many of the
