Cyclorama, page 22
The door opened. Patricia stood before him in a plain white T-shirt, white pajama pants with black musical staffs on them, and bare feet. No makeup or jewelry. She looked smaller and younger than she had before. There were dark shadows under her eyes. She forced a smile.
“You’re the only person in the world I feel like seeing right now,” Patricia said.
Declan handed her a coffee, didn’t ask what was wrong, just started talking. “I did it,” he said. He told her everything that had happened since he had seen her: his conversation with Officer Tounslee; his Facebook comment on Eileen’s party page; the outpouring of love and concern from old friends and strangers. “It’s happening,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, but it’s happening.”
Tears streamed down Patricia’s cheeks. “I’m so proud of you,” she said.
“Jesus, Patricia,” said Declan. “What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “Ezra.”
“Who’s Ezra?”
“My boyfriend. I told him what happened and what I was going to do. I told him and he broke up with me.”
Declan didn’t know whether he should feel excited or terrified. “I am sorry,” he said. He held her close even as hot coffee sloshed on his shirt and jeans. “I am so, so sorry, Mistress Quickly; I am here for you always.”
Peter Van Daan
As soon as Franklin read Declan’s response to the Tyrusfest invite, he knew that this could be the start of a good story, one that might generate—God help him—clicks. He just didn’t think he was the right person to do it.
Yes, in a small way, the tale of Tyrus Densmore dispensing favors, trampling boundaries, and sexually humiliating his charges in his Annex like some authoritarian thug was a variation on the tales of social justice and systemic inequality that Franklin specialized in. At the same time, though, Franklin had always avoided writing articles in which he appeared as a character. In the best journalism, the writer disappeared, showed people in their own environments, and let readers draw their own conclusions. Although he shared most of his late father’s political convictions, he experienced a visceral revulsion at the man’s need to put himself and his opinions at the center of every damn story he wrote. And, really, with a new administration coming to Washington, sending dog whistles to white supremacists and threatening to hunt down refugees and shut down borders, could he really justify writing about something that happened when he was fifteen?
Still, for the first time in his career, Franklin was scared. Journalists had always been an endangered species, but the business was worse than ever. He’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by aggregated news sites, by automated news bots, by publishing empires that had rebranded writers as “content providers,” by once-proud newspaper buildings turned into ghost towns or sold off and converted to condos. Of the reporters and editors he had come up with, save for the ones who had family money or successful spouses, just about all were out of the business: they taught in J-schools; they made big money in PR, advertising, and marketing; they worked for billion-dollar corporations that peddled “branded stories” that posed as journalism. The most farsighted or the most cynical of his compatriots, depending on your point of view, had cashed in their bylines and masthead positions at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal for consulting gigs where they took six-figure payouts to advise the elimination of the editorial positions they previously held.
When Franklin had come back to Chicago to take care of his dad in his last years, make as much sense as anyone could of his finances, organize the man’s pack-rat clip files, and donate them to the Carter Woodson branch of the Chicago Public Library, he had never intended to stay. His plan had been to go to Oakland, Detroit, or Mexico City, somewhere interesting and cheap. Falling in love with Juliana Fuentes, one of his dad’s home care workers, had not been part of the plan. He had vowed never to have children; his globetrotting, sleep-on-a-yoga-mat, and live-on-black-coffee-and-street-food lifestyle did not lend itself to being a decent father. He couldn’t have imagined he would fall for a woman who already had a kid. He had never wanted a full-time job; he figured he could just keep writing investigative pieces for the Atlantic and Harper’s, record stories for This American Life, edit book-length collections of his essays, and collect the occasional five-thousand-dollar honorarium for lecturing journalism students at Berkeley.
But someone had to take care of Maria Graciela and pay for her childcare while Juliana was studying for her social work degree; and after Juliana’s first job was eliminated when Chicago’s previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, shut down the school where she was working, someone needed a job with health insurance. The Tomorrow gig had sounded like the most reasonable option when he took it—an (admittedly small) office in Pilsen with an (admittedly meager) view of the elevated train tracks and an (admittedly paltry) expense account, plus a small staff of (admittedly inexperienced) research assistants whom he mentored while the rest of the editors performed the hard labor of running a once-influential alternative weekly turned digital news site during a time of increasing competition and decreasing ad dollars.
The journalism awards Franklin won didn’t translate into ad money, though, and ten-thousand-word exposés, no matter how worthy, got fewer page views than five-hundred-word quick hits aggregated from articles in The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, and the Tribune. During his seven years as investigative editor, the paper had been sold twice and had gone through three publishers; it was now led by Violet Dinh, a twenty-nine-year-old Atlanta transplant and turnaround artist who had never spent more than a year and a half at any publication.
It was a Monday. Juliana had left home early for another substitute teaching gig that would never turn into a full-time job. Franklin had dropped their younger daughter, Emma, off at daycare, then Maria Graciela at Walter Payton Prep, arriving at work just in time for the nine o’clock staff meeting.
He used to love newsrooms: the ones he had visited when his father was alive, the ones where he had interned when he was starting out—AP and UPI wire machines buzzing and clicking; typewriters clacking; reporters on phones, conducting interviews, badgering sources; heated arguments about politics in the commissary and by the vending machines. But entering the Tomorrow building was like walking into a war-torn city after a neutron bomb had gone off. Half the offices were empty or filled with their downsized occupants’ detritus. Eerie silence predominated; cubicles were occupied by beaten-down millennials scrolling Twitter, listening to music through headphones, surreptitiously filling out job applications or updating their CVs on LinkedIn. People barely talked, just messaged each other on Slack.
Today, though, the mood in the conference room was unusually jubilant. There were platters of doughnuts, bagels, fruit salad; coffee from Intelligentsia; pitchers of fresh OJ; bottles of sparkling grape juice.
“What are we celebrating?” he asked Violet. With her black sweater set and glossy black hair, she could have passed for an Orthodox Jew in his old neighborhood had she not been the daughter of Christian pastors from Vietnam.
Violet threw an arm out, gesturing to the Big Board, the nickname Franklin had given to the mounted computer screens in every room with their constant stream of data: how many page views; how many articles shared; how many retweeted.
“We’re celebrating TEN THOUSAND, BABY, YEAH!” Violet said.
The number of page views on the Big Board was at 10,037, and some young staffers, most of them members of the disproportionately robust advertising and marketing departments, were snapping photos of the screen, posing in front of it, taking selfies. Violet popped a grape juice bottle, someone said, “Hey-O,” and Violet echoed that sound: “HEY-O!” She poured cups of the purple bubbly and hollered as if trying to make herself heard at a bar during Happy Hour. “They told me this shit would be IMPOSSIBLE,” she said. “They said we’d never hit more than five thousand views. And this morning—look! We’ve DOUBLED IT, BITCHES!!!” She held her grape juice cup aloft.
“Twenty thousand by 2018!” someone shouted, and Violet downed her glass and said, “I will drink to THAT!”
Franklin didn’t drink when the others drank, didn’t applaud when they did. He just kept staring at the Big Board.
“Feelin’ all right there, bud?” Violet asked.
Franklin nodded. “Yeah, fine.”
“Not eatin’? Not drinkin’?”
“I had breakfast.”
“Something botherin’ you?”
“Well, yeah, actually, it is.” Franklin pointed to the top stories on the screen: 10 REASONS TRUMP WILL BE A ONE-TERMER; MELANIA’S 8 BIGGEST FASHION FAILS; WHY PEOPLE ARE CALLING “LA LA LAND” A BLAH BLAH MOVIE. “None of it’s original,” he said. “All of it’s reactive, all of it’s just regurgitated from somewhere else, and no one’s reading any of it for more than thirty seconds.”
“Our advertisers don’t count how long people spend reading a story, just whether they open it or not,” Violet said.
“So,” Franklin said, “it makes no difference? One hour? One second? Content is content? Who cares what people read as long as they click?”
“We’re gonna have to take this conversation off-line, Frank.”
Franklin left the room, once again mentally walking himself through scenarios in which he either quit or got fired. But he felt trapped: What else was he qualified to do? Work in a bookstore? How many were even left in Chicago? Teach high school? He didn’t have the certificate or the money to go back to school to get it. Fix bikes? Yeah, maybe that: move to Oregon, open a bike shop. He’d do it if he wasn’t married; he’d do it if he didn’t have kids. He always thought he would spend his life in constant motion, and since he got married, all he’d been doing was running in place.
Violet caught up to Franklin later that morning when he was pouring himself his fourth coffee of the day in the otherwise empty cafeteria. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Frank?”
“That’s actually not true,” Franklin said.
“Then what’s your problem?” Violet asked.
“I just think you’re wrong,” Franklin said.
“About?”
“People. You don’t give them enough credit. You don’t have to—”
Violet made sarcastic air quotes. “ ‘Dumb it all down’?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Violet sat on a table and put her feet on a chair. “Can I ask you somethin’, Frank?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever looked at your stats?” Violet took a couple of pages and pie charts out of her purse and unfolded them.
Franklin made a face as if she’d just thwacked him with a broom. “Yeah, I don’t need to see those,” he said. “I’m not an idiot. I see what people click on; I know it’s not what I write.”
“You’re not gettin’ the whole story, though.” Violet pointed to a number and said that Franklin’s articles were read less than those of any other writer on the site.
“Yeah, I get it.” Franklin sipped his coffee. “Read you loud and clear.”
“But stay with me.” Violet showed him a chart labeled TIME ON SITE. No, not many people read Franklin’s stories, but when they did, they spent more time with his articles than anybody else’s. “Do you know what that means?” she asked.
“Tell me.”
“You’re the best writer we’ve got, but you choose the most boring-ass topics. Get the right one, we’ll be golden. What’re you workin’ on now?”
Franklin told her he hadn’t decided what he would be writing next. He mentioned a dispute over whether a collection of skeletons at the Field Museum of Natural History should be returned to their countries of origin.
“Sounds great; I’m sure the five hundred people who read it will totally dig it,” said Violet. “Work on it in your off hours and sell it to Harper’s or Atlas Obscura.”
Franklin said he’d been researching modern-day redlining, how real estate agents were weaponizing Instagram to keep Black and brown people out of majority-white neighborhoods.
Violet pantomimed a yawn. “Important piece. Get an intern to do it and split the award money.”
Violet registered zero enthusiasm for stories about the pollution of the Cal-Sag Channel, the gerrymandering of Chicago public school districts, the dark money that linked Chicago Cubs’ ownership to the Republican National Committee, the sagas of undocumented immigrants fearful of the incoming administration in Washington.
“That’s all you got?” Violet asked.
“Well, there is another thing, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to do it.” He opened Facebook and clicked on the Tyrusfest page. “These people I knew in high school, they’ve got a story that’s probably worth telling. I haven’t looked into it too much yet, but there’s a lot of chatter and whatnot.”
Violet leaned over Franklin’s computer and scrolled through the comments, at first skeptically but then with increasing interest. “This was your high school?” Violet asked.
Franklin nodded.
“This Densmore guy, you were in one of his shows?”
“I was, yeah.”
“Anne fucking Frank?”
“Uh-huh.”
She kept reading. “And Calvin Dawes was in it?”
“He was.”
“And Rob Rubicoff?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s written about this?”
“No one as far as I can tell. But I know everyone in the story. It would be impossible for me to be—”
Another set of sarcastic air quotes from Violet: “ ‘Objective’?”
“Something like that.”
“Can I drop some knowledge on you, Frank?”
“Yeah?”
“Just because you don’t use the word I in a story doesn’t mean you’re being ‘objective.’ You stop being objective the moment you choose to tell one story instead of another. Stop worrying about if you’re ‘objective’ and tell the story people will want to read. Or else—”
“ ‘Or else’?”
“Or else we can get someone else.”
“To write it?”
“Or else we can get someone else.”
*
Franklin started researching the story using old yearbooks and alumni lists. Each source led him to more. Todd Merritt, who had been one of the first commenters on the Tyrusfest page, told Franklin about his New York trip with Densmore. At a Swedish diner, Franklin met Declan, his lawyer Will Newson, and a sprightly, nervous young woman named Patricia whose exact relationship to Declan was unclear. “It’s complicated,” Declan said, then looked at Patricia, and the two of them burst into sexually charged laughter.
Ray Tounslee Jr., the police officer investigating Declan’s claims, was tight-lipped at first, but after he realized Franklin knew who he was and remembered him meeting Fiona after rehearsals, Tounslee clapped him on the shoulder. “Dah-yumn!” he said. “You’re like the first white dude in this town who remembers me from back in the day.”
“I wouldn’t have seen you becoming a cop, Raymond,” said Franklin.
“Me neither,” said Ray. “But I figured it like this: if someone’s gonna be hasslin’ kids the way I got hassled, I’d rather it was someone like me doing it.” He leaned in closer to Franklin. “You haven’t managed to track down Fiona for this, have you?”
“She’s hard to reach,” Franklin said.
“I know it,” said Tounslee. “Let me know if you do.”
Franklin met Carrie in the main office of her Casa Segura neighborhood health clinic with the door shut to block out all the hubbub: English as a second language classes, job training sessions, Carrie’s teenage daughter answering phones, nurse practitioners administering shots, conducting physical exams. It seemed to Franklin as if he and Carrie spoke often, but he couldn’t actually remember the last time they’d been alone in a room together. Even though they now lived closer to each other than they had since high school, whenever they saw each other, their conversations got awkward quickly. During their last dinner at Carrie’s house, her husband, Adrian, avoided eye contact with him for the whole meal, then started cleaning up, shutting off lights, and telling their daughter to go upstairs and finish her homework before coffee and dessert had been served.
At Casa Segura, Carrie answered Franklin’s questions about Densmore in a distanced, clinical tone, as if she’d been someone else back in high school and had only a passing familiarity with what that person was like.
“You don’t think being in that show made any difference in your life?” Franklin asked. “You gave your daughter the same name Anne gave her diary. You saw how Densmore treated people who were too afraid to speak up for themselves. You don’t think that has anything to do with why you’re running a clinic down on Howard Street and not at Northwestern or the U of C?”
“That’s just a really simplistic way to think about it. There’re a million different events that contribute to where you wind up; it’s never just one,” said Carrie. “Anyway, I was already on that path. If anything, it just made me realize it was the right one.”
“But you wanted to be a pediatrician back then; you never said anything specifically about poor kids or immigrants.”
Carrie shrugged. “It’s just such a long time ago, Frank,” she said. “And when I think about the patients who come in here, it’s really hard to compare them to us or to compare who I am now to who I was then.”
“You don’t ever think of yourself as being a victim of trauma?” Franklin asked.
“Not like them.”
Still, over the course of his interviews, Franklin began to see how universal this story was. Save for some North Shore administrators who refused to comment, everyone he talked to seemed to have a Densmore in their lives: a coach, a teacher, a camp counselor. Some version of Densmore’s story had played out in just about every article Franklin had ever written. It was the story of pimps beating illegally trafficked sex workers who tried to escape brothels in mob-run suburbs; it was priests and altar boys, cult leaders and their flocks; it was the president-elect sowing divisions between white and Black, red and blue, American and foreigner.
