• • •
The first doctor knew who Jefferson was and delivered the news fearfully, uncertainly. The manner of delivery was, at first, more irritating to Jefferson than the news itself, and he took a certain pleasure in letting the doctor know.
“If you’re going to tell a man he will die,” Jefferson said, “have some balls while you do it.” He decided he needed a second opinion.
The second doctor was more professional, and spoke in rapid, clipped words about the necessity of “palliative care.”
“What’s important now is quality of life,” the doctor said.
“I have never given any importance to quality of life,” Jefferson told him. “I’m not going to start now.”
The doctor paused. “I’m talking about managing what could be, without significant intervention, a significant amount of pain,” he said.
Jefferson, who had never shied from pain, found that funny. “I don’t give a damn for any man who can’t handle pain. The more pain, the better. That’s life.”
“Yes . . . but . . .” the now somewhat flustered doctor said, before pausing and collecting himself. Then he proceeded to explain how the tumors would grow and expand and begin to press on the organs, how Jefferson would feel it, and how it would begin to inhibit every aspect of his life unless interventions were made to limit their size. And then, delicately, he began to discuss psychological care. Jefferson silenced that talk with a look.
As the man left, Jefferson told him, “If you mention my condition to anyone, I’ll cut your dick off and fuck you with it.” The doctor nodded gravely, as if this were a normal way of speaking.
Over the next couple of days, Jefferson made no significant changes. The possibility of death was always a part of the business he had spent his entire life engaged in. What did it matter if it was a disease or a bullet, a tumor or a bomb? Natural causes are, of course, crueler. Slower than even the worst tortures he’d inflicted on men over the years. But Jefferson felt no particular fear. He’d never been able to excite himself in that way, with that strange emotion he’d observed so often in other people. It could, he knew, reduce men to paralysis in the face of coming death. Loose their bowels, make them cry out, betray themselves and all they imagined they were. It was a curious thing, and he didn’t have it.
What did develop, slowly, was nostalgia. He found himself thinking of the great days in Cesar, where he had risen through the ranks. Of the trust they’d conferred on him when they sent him to Norte de Santander. Of the network he’d built across the border in Venezuela.
He was made for great things, it was clear. And if he had less time left on this earth than expected, that was no problem. It was merely a spur to action.
And it was in the midst of these thoughts that he heard about the death of El Alemán.
• • •
When she bought the plane tickets, it had made sense. Bob had told her, just between the two of them, that there’d be an opening in Bogotá soon. It wasn’t for five months, but, she told him over Skype, that was perfect. “I want time to write something a bit more long-form.”
Just looking at Bob’s face, she could tell, even through the grainy, stuttering video feed, that he did not think that was perfect.
“Long-form? Oh, fuck me. Et tu, Liz?”
Lisette shrugged, tried to play it off. “I just want to—”
“I know what you want,” he said. “You want eight thousand words in The New Yorker. Fuck you. I hope you get a listicle in BuzzFeed.”
“What’s wrong with—”
“Eighteen Totally Empowering Ways to Brew Coffee, by Lisette Marigny. I can’t wait.”
Lisette sighed. She’d known he wouldn’t approve. And she didn’t need his approval. But still.
“BuzzFeed does great reporting. And what the fuck would be so wrong with eight thousand words in The New Yorker?”
The video stalled, jerked forward, like cheap animation with too few frames to connect the movement of the characters, making Bob’s voice disembodied, and, oddly, more authoritative.
“You don’t know anything about Colombia. I let you stretch a bit here because you’d put the work in. What, you think just because you can write a good sentence you deserve an opinion? You haven’t earned opinions yet.”
Then he went off on a rant she’s heard before, one of Bob’s old-man, oh-the-kids-these-days rants, about how too many young journalists thought the work they did was just a stepping-stone. How they think just because they’re smart they deserve to talk, but a real journalist doesn’t need smarts and definitely doesn’t need even a college degree but needs only the ability to get people to tell you things. And that’s it. The spade work of the wire services, before the color commentary, before the spin and polish. It’s the only thing that actually matters.
Lisette, sitting in her sublet in Brooklyn, wanted to believe him. Go out, find what happened, report it as straight and as succinctly as possible—that’s the real work. His voice floated in over his frozen face. “All the hot takes in the world shrivel up and die in the presence of one well-reported fact.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “You’ve said that before.”
She considered laughing it off, gently conceding his point but then telling him, “It’s my four-month vacation, I can do with it what I’d like. Why not let me fuck around with a vanity project?” Or she could have told him what she’d been telling herself. That she did know Colombia, because she knew Iraq and Afghanistan. That this was an extension of the same war, not the endless war on “terror” but something vaguer, harder to pin down and related to the demands of America’s not-quite-empire which was always projecting military power across the globe and just shifting
