The Editor had always assumed he would be the last to go.
The Boy cracked. The Man, well, was never quite there. Lacan sobbed. But the Editor remained.
He remained because he had to. Somebody had to keep the sentences moving. Somebody had to maintain standards. Somebody had to say things like ‘perhaps we can use this’ and ‘no, absolutely not, not in that tense.’
He had built an entire personality around being the one who knew what was really happening.
Then, one afternoon, he looked up from the page and realised that he didn’t.
The first thing was typing.
He typed with two fingers.
Not in the charming, absent-minded way of a professor who is too busy thinking to learn the keyboard. In the genuinely slow, slightly shameful way of a man who had spent twenty-five years calling himself a writer while pecking at the keys like a chicken.
Then shorthand.
He did not have it.
Journalists were supposed to have shorthand. The proper ones. The hard ones. Men from regional papers with nicotine fingers and women from the provinces who could take down a quote at speed while simultaneously ordering a sandwich.
The Editor had always meant to learn.
He had instead developed a system of half-quotes, fragments, confidence and panic.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it produced an article in which the mayor of Radom appeared to have said something that, on reflection, may have been said by a taxi driver in Łódź three days earlier.
The Boy, still red-eyed from Lacan’s collapse, looked at him carefully.
“You can’t even type?”
“Nope,” said the Editor automatically.
But his heart was no longer in pretending he could. Because other things were arriving now.
The first assignment at DW. Nancy, the tough New Yorker with a voice like a writ.
She had given him the story because nobody else wanted it. Some dreary thing from somewhere. A man in a suit saying he was optimistic despite the challenges.
He had filed it.
Then the email.
You have the name of the main protagonist wrong.
Wrong not by a letter. Not Tomasz instead of Tomas. Wrong wrong. A different name. An entirely different man.
Fuck.
He could still feel it now. The sinking in the stomach. The hot collapse in the chest. The certainty that everyone had finally realised.
Nancy had called.
“Jo,” she said in that terrible flat voice, “who exactly is Marek Kwiatkowski?”
Silence.
“There is no Marek Kwiatkowski in this story.”
The Editor had said something. He did not remember what. Probably something evasive involving confusion, tiredness and notes.
The truth was worse.
He had been bored.
The story had not seemed important.
Which was perhaps the real problem with him. He could write brilliantly, sometimes. But only when he cared. The rest of the time he drifted. Cut corners. Moved paragraphs around like furniture in a rented flat.
“You were always a half-jobber,” Joanna says from stage left.
There had been other things.
Plagiarism. Not real plagiarism, he told himself. Not exactly. More a borrowing. A paragraph here. A sentence there. A bit of colour from another piece because the original colour in his own story had somehow failed to materialise.
Then not changing it enough. Not blurring the source sufficiently.
The prickly journalists had noticed, of course. They always did.
Those terrible little men with excellent shorthand and wives called Kasia and cardigans and grievances and an almost erotic devotion to proper attribution.
“You lifted that from Reuters.”
“No I didn’t.”
“You absolutely did.”
“I reworked it.”
“You changed three words.”
The worst thing was that sometimes they were right.
The Editor hated them.
They wrote articles full of properly sourced quotations. They could spell. They knew the rules but not the thing itself, the Man says. But even he didn’t believe it even while thinking it.
And yet.
And yet.
The Boy, the Man and Lacan were now looking at the Editor with the same expression.
Not hatred. More like disappointment.
“You’re not even a proper journalist,” said the Boy.
“No,” said the Editor.
Lacan, who had cried so much the previous day that he now looked oddly softer, almost human, lit a cigarette.
“He never was,” he said. “He merely desired to be seen as one.”
The Editor wanted to object. To explain that he had been there. Borders. Hotel rooms. Ryanair. Three hundred euros for an eight-hour shift. Bonn. Sofia. Poland. Brussels. Endless coffee. Endless cigarettes. The feeling, occasionally, of being close to something true.
But even as he thought it he knew the problem.
He had wanted the identity more than the work. The one who gets to stand slightly outside ordinary life and explain it to everyone else.
The Editor had always been in love with that version of himself. And now, suddenly, that version looked absurd. A man with no shorthand, bad typing, inconsistent attention, occasional dishonesty and a catastrophic tendency to confuse being clever with being right.
There was a long silence.
Then, unexpectedly, the Man laughed.
Not cruelly.
With relief.
“Oh thank Christ,” he said.
The Editor looked up.
“You too?”
“Especially me.”
Because if the Editor was not perfect, then perhaps no one had to be.
If the great journalist turned out to be a man who sometimes got the name wrong, stole a sentence, filed late and secretly feared he was a fraud, then perhaps the whole edifice could stop.
The Boy sat down beside him.
“You can still write,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” said the Man.
“Yes,” said Lacan, reluctantly.
Because that was the irritating thing.
The Editor could write.
Not always. Not cleanly. Not always to order. Not when pretending.
But now, when the old grandiosity had cracked and the role no longer held quite so firmly, something else began to happen.
Less desperate need to turn every wound into a performance of intelligence.
The sentences became stranger, funnier, sadder, more exact.
Or they just stopped.
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