First They Kill the Copyeditor

***

Worthington’s was a long, dim rectangle with a dully gleaming tin ceiling and Tiffany sconces lighting the booths. The group sat down and ordered breakfast. Margie asked for a screwdriver. Within a few seconds everyone had ordered one, or a Bloody Mary. From where he sat, Griffin could observe the bar, where night crew people nursed beers and read newspapers. Oh, to be a night crew person, he thought. But not really.

“Griffin, tell them what Josh said to you,” Margie said.

Before he could open his mouth, she answered for him.

“He told him, Have a good one! Isn’t that weird?”

“His last words,” Paolo said. “Why you, though?”

“It wasn’t me in particular. I just happened to be sitting there.”

“No, I think it was you.” This from a tall, thin woman with red hair and a slight overbite who had a reputation for being brilliant and bitter. “You’re the youngest on the floor. Rather guileless. A tabula rasa.”

“You’re overthinking it, Beatrice,” Margie said.

“I actually kind of love that he said that to you,” Paolo told Griffin.

The food came and everyone began eating. Sipping at his screwdriver, Griffin started to feel warm and mellow. He barely knew his colleagues, but they seemed to have accepted his presence, were even looking upon him with interest. He hoped he had finally found some work friends in New York, although, to be honest, this bunch had a slightly tattered air. The publishing company was known as a mill, spitting out people through endless layoffs and reorgs, and soon many of them would be back on unemployment, pulling their old novel manuscripts out of drawers.

Aside from Beatrice, Paolo, Margie and himself, there was the couple he thought of as the Moles—a small, blonde, pale and myopic husband and wife team whom he continually misidentified in his mind as brother and sister—as well as the one relatively cool person present, Ariel, who had somehow ended up with them. Ariel affected a ghost child look, with thrifted, cinched-waist dresses and fine brown hair that hung down to the middle of her back. Even better, from Griffin’s point of view, she had a slight limp due to a childhood accident which left one leg shorter than the other. She had recently published three poems in The Massachusetts Review.

“What kind of suicide note would that be, though?” he asked, hoping to keep things going. “I mean, for Josh to say, Have a good one?”

“I think Josh had to be very angry to do what he did, the way that he did it,” Beatrice said. “So he wasn’t telling you, Carpe diem! He meant, Get past the horror of this scene today, if you can.”

“Are you people really this shallow?” asked Ariel, standing up. She held a cigarette and a lighter in one hand.

Margie pretended she was seeing Ariel for the first time. “Why, Ariel—hello!” 

“He was an actual flesh and blood person in terrible pain.” 

“Want to tell us how he got that way?” 

Ariel grabbed her coat and limped from the bar. “Go write a poem about it, honey,” Margie called after her. She pushed Ariel’s drink over to Griffin. “Don’t let this go to waste.”

It wasn’t entirely clear to Griffin that Ariel was leaving for good, but he took the screwdriver anyway. There was a smear of lipstick on the edge of the glass and he angled his lips over it as he drank. 

“Were those two an item?” asked the female Mole. Her husband had his wallet open and was squinting at its contents, clearly hoping to find enough cash so they could pay their share without having to wait for the check to arrive.

“I feel like a pond with a shiny glass surface,” Margie said. No one spoke. Her cheeks flushed, she leaned over to Griffin. “Was I mean to Ariel?” 

“Not at all,” he told her. “Excuse me.”

***

On his way to the bathroom, which was down a flight of wooden stairs and along a hallway lined with metal shelving that contained napkins, glassware, and canned goods, Griffin wondered what it would be like to have sex with Margie. She was a little heavyset but had very good hands with graceful fingers flecked by red mark-up pen. She worked on the YA version of the magazine, often found in dentists’ offices, and next to her monitor was a small plaque that read: First They Kill The Copyeditor. She insisted on having hard copies of the layouts and he liked to watch her carefully going over them before transferring her corrections to the screen, head cocked, eyes cool and intent. 

Griffin had only been to Worthington’s once before and hadn’t been a little bit drunk, as he was now. The bathroom did not appear and he seemed to have wandered into a 19th-century sub-basement. The air smelled colder and damper, like a root cellar, and the walls had turned to bare brick, roughly mortared. He heard voices and stopped, staring straight ahead into the dimness. One of the voices said, “Careful, now,” and another, somewhat breathless, said, “Fuck.” 

The voices came from the airshaft into which Josh had jumped, which Worthington’s abutted along with the other buildings on the block. Up ahead of Griffin was a splintered, wooden door that had once been painted green. He told himself not to open it. 

Shoes scraped on asphalt and someone started gagging.

“Jesus, Bob,” said the first voice.

Griffin pushed the door open and stepped forward into the airshaft. The two EMTs he’d seen in the lobby had laid Josh’s body onto a zipped-open body bag, and now he was completely splayed out, his head twisted back. Griffin thought he looked like some entity that had once inhabited Josh but had now been expelled.

There were still people peering down from the windows, heads appearing, disappearing, reappearing. High above them, Griffin could make out flying dots which circled lower and lower until they became a flock of pigeons. Even though he saw them coming, the fact that they landed in a rush of fluttering wings around Josh, strutting and pecking and cooing, still surprised him. 

“Hey,” the EMT yelled, waving his hands, kicking with his feet. It was almost like he was dancing. “Scram. Shoo!” 

***

When Griffin returned to the main floor of the bar, the night crew people were nowhere in sight and his colleagues had disappeared—the booth was empty, already bussed and wiped down. Stepping outside, however, he found Ariel and Margie standing under the wide awning, smoking, deep in conversation. 

“I think I drank your screwdriver,” he told Ariel. 

He realized he had never spoken to her directly before. He now saw that the look he thought she affected was actually the sign of a person who was fraying; in sunlight, her hair and skin appeared unwholesome, her clothes not exactly clean. She had been staring at her feet as she ground a cigarette beneath her heel and, at the sound of his voice, casually glanced up at him then looked away. 

“We’ll catch up with you, Griff,” Margie told him.

***

Back up on the floor, people talked in small groups, although some were working. The windows were X’d over with yellow police tape and someone had looped chain locks through the handles. Josh’s desk was as Griffin had left it—the jacket over the back of the chair, the newspaper, the coffee cup. His phone was still off the hook. Griffin picked it up and replaced it on its base and sat back down at his desk. He felt like throwing up, which was probably the screwdrivers—too much orange juice never agreed with him. Instead, to his surprise, he began to cry. The tears were the kind that burned his eyes but didn’t actually run down his cheeks, which was a relief. He was crying, not over Josh, he realized, but Josh’s father. Why had he left him hanging there? 

Griffin got up and hurried out of the office and back down the stairs. Once outside, he began walking, barely watching where he was going. After an indeterminate time, he stopped and put his back up against a building where other office workers stood, smoking. It had turned into a clear and warming forenoon and Manhattan bustled. If he listened carefully, Griffin thought he could make out each separate component of the clamor—honking horns, echoing sirens, rumbling buses, a thousand fragmented conversations. He felt the noise as an urgent human wind hustling across the streets and down the avenues and soaring up to the distant floors of the tall buildings, and imagined Josh tumbling through the din and tumult, his eyes wide open.