Lullaby

Chapter 7

During my first cup of coffee, Henderson walks over from the National desk. Some people grab their coats and head for the elevator. Some grab a magazine and head for the bathroom. Other people duck behind their computer screens and pretend to be on the phone while Henderson stands in the center of the newsroom with his tie loose around his open collar and shouts, «Where the hell is Duncan?»

He yells, «The street edition is going to press, and we need the rest of the damn front page.»

Some people just shrug. I pick up my phone.

The details about Henderson are he's got blond hair combed across his forehead. He dropped out of law school. He's an editor on the National desk. He always knows the snow conditions and has a lift pass dangling from every coat he owns. His computer password is «password.»

Standing next to my desk, he says, «Streator, is that nasty blue tie the only one you got?»

Holding the phone to my ear, I mouth the word Interview. I ask the dial tone, is that B as in «boy»?

Of course I'm not telling anybody about how I read Duncan the poem. I can't call the police. About my theory. I can't explain to Helen Hoover Boyle why I need to ask about her dead son.

My collar feels so tight I have to swallow hard to force any coffee down.

Even if people believed me, the first thing they'd want to know is: What poem?

Show it to us. Prove it.

The question isn't, Would the poem leak out?

The question is, How soon would the human race be extinct?

Here's the power of life and a cold clean bloodless easy death, available to anyone. To everyone. An instant, bloodless, Hollywood death.

Even if I don't tell, how long until Poems and Rhymes from Around the World gets into a classroom? How long until page 27, the culling song, gets read to fifty kids before nap time?

How long until it's read over the radio to thousands of people? Until it's set to music? Translated into other languages?

Hell, it doesn't have to be translated to work. Babies don't speak any language.

No one's seen Duncan for three days. Miller thinks Kleine called Duncan at home. Kleine thinks Fillmore called. Everybody's sure somebody else called, but nobody's talked to Duncan. He hasn't answered his e-mail. Carruthers says Duncan didn't bother to call in sick.

Another cup of coffee later, Henderson stops by my desk with a tear sheet from the Leisure section. It's folded to show an ad, three columns by six inches deep. Henderson looks at me tapping my watch and holding it to my ear, and he says, «You see this in the morning edition?»

The ad says:

Attention First-Class Passengers

of Regent-Pacific Airlines

The ad says: «Have you suffered hair loss and/or discomfort from crab lice after coming in contact with airline upholstery, pillows, or blankets? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.»

Henderson says, «You called about this yet?»

I say, maybe he should just shut up and call.

And Henderson says, «You're Mr. Special Features.» He says, «This isn't prison. I ain't your bitch.»

This is killing me.

You don't become a reporter because you're good at keeping secrets.

Being a journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media.

The culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos.

Imagine a plague you catch through your ears.

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.

The new death, this plague, can come from anywhere. A song. An overhead announcement. A news bulletin. A sermon. A street musician. You can catch death from a telemarketer. A teacher. An Internet file. A birthday card. A fortune cookie.

A million people might watch a television show, then be dead the next morning because of an advertising jingle.

Imagine the panic.

Imagine a new Dark Age. Exploration and trade routes brought the first plagues from China to Europe. With mass media, we have so many new means of transmission.

Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable.

Imagine people chanting prayers, singing hymns, to drown out any sound that might bring death. Their hands clamped over their ears, imagine people shunning any song or speech where death could be coded the way maniacs would poison a bottle of aspirin. Any new word. Anything they don't already understand will be suspect, dangerous. Avoided. A quarantine against communication.

And if this was a death spell, an incantation, there had to be others. If I know about page 27, someone else must. I'm not the pioneer brain of anything.

How long until someone dissects the culling song and creates another variation, and another, and another? All of them new and improved. Until Oppenheimer invented the atom bomb, it was impossible. Now we have the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and the neutron bomb, and people are still expanding on that one idea. We're forced into a new scary paradigm.

If Duncan's dead, he was a necessary casualty. He was my atmospheric nuclear test. He was my Trinity. My Hiroshima.

Still, Palmer from the copy desk is sure Duncan's in Composing.

Jenkins from Composing says Duncan's probably in the art department.

Hawley from Art says he's in the clipping library.

Schott from the library says Duncan's at the copy desk.

Around here, this is what passes for reality.

The kind of security they now have at airports, imagine that kind of crackdown at all libraries, schools, theaters, bookstores, after the culling song leaks out. Anywhere information might be disseminated, you'll find armed guards.

The airwaves will be as empty as a public swimming pool during a polio scare. After that, only a few government broadcasts will air. Only well-scrubbed news and music. After that, any music, books, and movies will be tested on lab animals or volunteer convicts before release to the public.

Instead of surgical masks, people will wear earphones that will give them the soothing constant protection of safe music or birdsongs. People will pay for a supply of «pure» news, a source for «safe» information and entertainment. The way milk and meat and blood are inspected, imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption.

People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean.

White noise.

Imagine a world of silence where any sound loud enough or long enough to harbor a deadly poem would be banned. No more motorcycles, lawn mowers, jet planes, electric blenders, hair dryers. A world where people are afraid to listen, afraid they'll hear something behind the din of traffic. Some toxic words buried in the loud music playing next door. Imagine a higher and higher resistance to language. No one talks because no one dares to listen.

The deaf shall inherit the earth.

And the illiterate. The isolated. Imagine a world of hermits.

Another cup of coffee, and I have to piss like a bastard. Henderson from National catches me washing my hands in the men's room and says something.

It could be anything.

Drying my hands under the blower, I yell I can't hear him.

«Duncan!» Henderson yells. Over the sound of water and the hand dryer, he yells, «We have two dead bodies in a hotel suite, and we don't know if it's news or not. We need Duncan to make the call.»

I guess that's what he says. There's so much noise.

In the mirror, I check my tie and finger-comb my hair. In one breath, with Henderson reflected next to me, I could race through the culling song, and he'd be out of my life by tonight. Him and Duncan. Dead. It would be that easy.

Instead, I ask if it's okay to wear a blue tie with a brown jacket.