Hard News

of the Sony, dragons swooped down from Redhead lights and trolls had abandoned bridges and were fox-trotting on the misty dance floor of her desk. Weird amoeba were floating everywhere.
    It was six P.M. on Tuesday and the reason for the hallucinations—and sleeplessness—was a small plastic cassette containing a one-inch videotape master of a news story to be shown in a few hours on that night’s
Current Events
program. The story was called, “Easy Justice.” The voice-overs were mixed, the leads and countdown added, the “live” portions of Piper Sutton’s commentary inserted.
    The tape, which ran the exact time allocated for the segment, rested somewhere in the bowels of the Network’s computer system, which acted like a brilliant, never-sleeping stage manager, and would start the segment rolling exactly on time, at 8:04:36 P.M. The system would then automatically broadcast the Randy Boggs story for its precise length of eleven minutes, fourteen seconds, which was the Network’s version of a quarter hour—a bit shorter than in Edward R. Murrow’s time, but back then each additional minute of advertising didn’t mean another half-million dollars in revenue the way it did today.
    Rune squinted away a few apparitions and sat back in her chair.
    The last few days had been a nightmare.
    Piper Sutton had been satisfaction-proof. “What’s this? What do you call this?” she’d shouted, pacing back and forth behind Rune, who sat terrified, willing her hands not to shake as she typed. “Is this supposed to be fucking
poetry?
Is it supposed to be
art?”
    Sutton would walk another ten feet, leaving behind a wake of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5.
    Nothing she’d write could please Sutton. “Is that a fact? Is it supported? Who’s your attribution? … What the fuck is this? A figure of speech? ‘Justice is like a lumbering bear’? Sure, I know a
lot
of lumbering bears. Our audience is really going to relate to lumbering bears. Just look out on Broadway Rune, you see many bears? Come on, babes …”
    Rune would write some more then Sutton would lean over and look at the word processor screen, focusing on the words like a sniper.
    “Here, let me …,” Sutton would say and practically elbow Rune aside.
    Tap, tap, tap
… The delete code would chop another dozen sentences. Sutton’s nails never chipped. They were like red Kevlar.
    But finally the story had been finished.
    Sutton and Maisel approved the completed script Monday night (the twenty-eighth draft). Sutton had recorded her on-camera portions and sent those to editing, along with the clips from Rune’s interviews and atmosphere footage. As she was leaving the studio Tuesday morning at one A.M. Rune asked her, “You, like, always spend this kind of time with producers?”
    “No, I don’t,
like
, spend this kind of time. Most producers can spell.”
    “Oh.”
    Now, though, Rune had nothing to do but try to stay awake and watch the show itself while she fought the sensation that she was levitating. There were a couple options. Her first choice: She wanted to be home watching it with Healy. But he’d gone to investigate a package sitting in front of an abortion clinic in Brooklyn. Another possibility: There was a bar not far from the houseboat— Rune was a regular there—and everybody there would be glad to watch her program (fortunately this was Tuesday so no Monday night sports programs would create difficult choices for some of the regulars).
    But that involved standing up and walking somewhere. Which at the moment was a feat Rune believed she was incapable of.
    So, she sat where she was—at her desk. There was a nice color monitor in front of her and maybe—just maybe—Piper and Lee would come and join her. They’d all watch the show together and they’d tell her what a good job she’d done then take her out for a drink at some fancy bar afterwards.
    Her thoughts shifted and she found she was thinking of Randy Boggs. She hoped the guards were letting him watch
Current Events
. That thought sounded funny—
letting
him watch, like when she was a kid and she’d begged her parents to let her stay up to read more fairy stories or watch TV.
    “Hey, Rune.”
    She looked up, thinking the hallucinations were getting stranger: Some heavyset guy was disattaching himself from a camera and coming toward her. How did he do that? Like the monster in
Alien
, climbing out of the pipes to eat Sigourney Weaver.
    “Rune,” he said again. She