The Briar Archive

2. The Times

The Times

“All ideas are good ideas. Who knows what might come into play later?”

Kelsey

In the weeks that followed, I had become so obsessed with Ackerly Green that I spent more time looking for the unnamed book than on the stories I was being paid to research. But there was nothing out there to find. None of it made any sense to me. I remembered reading the book as a boy, I remembered the hippocampus as clear as the logo of any baseball team. Yet it seemed I was the only one.

Eventually, I knew I had to push the book to the back of my mind and focus on the work I was supposed to be doing. I was incredibly lucky to have the gig with the Times, and I wasn’t going to throw it away because of a curiosity. I was meant to be a reporter. It was the one thing I knew for certain in this world, the one driving constant in my life.

I could trace the origins of that certainty back to my very first memory. My mother sat at the kitchen table, a puke green ashtray overflowing with smoldering cigarette butts in front of her as she chain-smoked through her wet, snotty sobs. My father yelled into the phone receiver, his every guttural curse punctuated by a wild gesture toward the black-and-white images of confused and frightened people flitting across the screen of our tiny television set. President Kennedy had just been shot. I was only three years old, but that moment remains vivid in my mind.

I was too young to understand what was happening, but as the years went by and the turbulence of the 60s singed the edges of my childhood, I came to understand that the world wasn’t a good and just place for most people. Instead, the world was cause for heartache—particularly for those without the power or resources to stand up to the moneyed elite. The injustice left a bad taste in my mouth, and though I toyed with the idea of donning a cape or finding a way to be bitten by a radioactive spider, some part of me knew journalism was the only real way I could fight it.

I started by writing for my high school newspaper, the Newtonian. My assigned columns were on the topics one would expect from a benign and impotent rag led by a gaggle of nerdy teenagers and a journalism teacher only three inches away from tenure: the football team, the basketball team, the swimming team. Whenever I asked to write about something with a bit more substance, more relevance, I was told not to rock the boat.

I didn’t listen. It was 1974 and the president of the United States had just been brought low by Woodward and Bernstein, showing me firsthand the power and responsibility of quality journalism. Their example spurred me on.

Every day I followed leads on real stories: the favoritism shown toward athletes, how select students cheated on the SAT with the help of the head of the math department, even an ugly end to an affair between the vice principal and a school board member that resulted in a substantial cut to the school’s fine arts program (back when public schools actually had fine arts programs). And every time I presented a story to Mr. Loughmiller, he grew apoplectic.

In those heady days before bike helmets and play dates, students had complete control over the content published in the paper. But Mr. Loughmiller was so scared of losing his chance at tenure that he threatened to fail me if I dared to try and print such a thing. Loughmiller even spoke to my editor, a senior and Ivy League hopeful, named Harold Spinx, and warned him that if such a story ever graced the pages of the Newtonian, he’d fail him, too. Any story about anything other than sports or an academic club was to go straight in the trash. And there went any chance of getting my stories into the school paper.

So, I took them to the city papers instead.

At first, no one was interested. I was sixteen, after all. But one young reporter, Howard Doshen, humored me after I ambushed him on a cigarette break outside the Times building. He gave me the time it took him to smoke a Camel to convince him I had anything interesting. By his third drag, Howard was ready to kick me to the curb as some angry teen looking to embarrass his teachers. But by drag number seven, I had him convinced of my tenacity, and curious to test my talent.

I learned more from Howard Doshen in the following week than I did in my entire high school career. He ended up rewriting most of my article (I really was a s**t writer at sixteen), but it was published in the Business section, page C-3 above the fold. Howard gave me a co-byline.

Loughmiller gave me an F.

I didn’t care. Howard was on a fast track to becoming an editor and was more than willing to put in a good word for me with any college I wanted to attend.

I chose NYU, and despite Mr. Loughmiller’s petty protests to the dean, I was accepted into their journalism program. I devoted myself wholly to my studies, never once doubting the path I was taking, though I wasn’t so focused as to miss out on getting to know a beautiful co-ed.

I met Isabella when I was a college junior, and by the time we were both ready to graduate, we were married with our first child on the way. Howard had been sitting at an editor’s desk for the better part of a year and hired me before my graduation cap hit the ground. All at once I had a new family, a new job, and a new world of possibilities open in front of me. For the first and only time in my life, I felt invincible.

When our boy, Sebastian, was born, that invincibility shattered. He was tiny and perfect and, thankfully, blessed with his mother’s Mediterranean beauty. Sebastian was also fragile. Every time I looked at him a gallery of horrors paraded before my mind’s eye. There was so much danger in the world, and I was nearly paralyzed at the idea of how to protect him from it all. How could I keep him safe from disease, war, muggers, skinned knees, broken hearts, and the discovery of his father’s fallibility?

Eventually, I did fail him. I failed my boy in ways I couldn’t have imagined in even my worst nightmares. In ways I still struggle to understand. But in the end, I knew what had happened to my son. What I had done to my son.

I had exposed him to magic.