The Night Crew

they’re making some kind of cartoon out of it.’’
    ‘‘What?’’ She was annoyed, but only mildly. Strange things happened in the world of broadcast television.
    ‘‘He said they’ll be running it on the Worm,’’ Louis said. Channel Seventeen called it the Early Bird News; everybody else called it the Worm.
    Anna glanced at the kitchen clock: the broadcast was just a few minutes away. ‘‘I’ll take a look at it,’’ she said. She went back to the piano and worked on the Liszt until five o’clock in the morning, then pointed the remote at the TV and punched in Seventeen. A carefully-coiffed blonde, dressed like it was midafternoon on Rodeo, looked out and said, ‘‘If you have any small children watching this show, the film we are about to show you . . .’’
    And there was the jumper, up on the wall like a fly.
    Anna held her breath, fearing for him, though she’d been there, and knew what was about to happen. But seeing it this way, with the TV, was like looking out a window and seeing it all over again. The man seemed unsure of where he was, of what to do; he might have been trying, at the last moment, to get inside.
    Then he lost it: Anna felt her own fingers tightening, looking for purchase, felt her own muscles involuntarily trying to balance. He hung there, but with nothing to hold on to, out over the air, until with a convulsive effort, he jumped.
    And he screamed—Anna hadn’t seen the scream, hadn’t picked it up. Maybe he had been trying for the pool.
    Anna and the night crew had been there for the pictures, not as reporters: Anna had gotten only enough basic information to identify the main characters. She left it to the TV news staffs to pull it together. At Channel Seventeen, the job went to an intense young woman in a spiffy green suit that precisely matched her spiffy green eyes:
    ‘‘. . . identified as Jacob Harper, Junior, a high-school senior from San Dimas who was attending a spring dance at the Shamrock, and who’d rented the room with a half-dozen other seniors. Police are investigating the possibility of a drug involvement.’’
    As she spoke, the tape ran again, in slow motion, then again, freezing on the boy’s face—not a man, Anna thought, just a child. He hung there in midair, screaming forever on Jason’s tape. The Madsons, from Tilly, Oklahoma, were also shown, but their faces at the window were cut into the jump, so it appeared that the Madsons were watching—as they had been, though not when the tape was shot.
    At the end of the report, the tape was run again, and Anna recognized the symptoms: They had a hit on their hands.
    Too bad about the kid, but . . . she’d learned to separate herself from the things she covered. If she didn’t, she’d go crazy. And she hadn’t seen the jump, only the aftermath, the heap of crumpled clothing near the pool. Less than she would have seen sitting at her TV, eating her breakfast, like a few million Angelenos were about to do. Anna drifted away from the television, sat at the piano and started running scales. Scales were a form of meditation, demanding, but also a way to free herself from the tension of the night.
    And she could keep an eye on the television while she worked through them. Five minutes after the report on the jump, the blonde anchor, now idiotically cheerful, said something about animal commmandos, and a version of the animal rights tape came up.
    The tape had been cut up and given a jittery, silent-movie jerkiness, a Laurel-and-Hardy quality, as the masked animal rights raiders apparently danced with the squealing pig, and dumped the garbage can full of mice. Then the Rat was bowled over by the pig—they ran him falling, crawling, knocked down again; and falling, crawling and knocked down again: they had him going up and down like a yo-yo.
    The guards, who’d come and gone so quickly, had been caught briefly by both Creek and Jason. Now they were repeatedly shown across the concrete ramp and up the loading dock; and then the tape was run backward, so they seemed to run backward . . . Keystone Kops.
    The tape was funny, and Anna grinned as she watched. No sign of the bloodied kid, though. No matter: he’d get his fifteen seconds on another channel.
    ‘‘Good night,’’ Anna said, pointed the remote at the television and killed it.
    She worked on scales for another ten minutes, then closed the lid of the piano, quickly checked on the back to see that the yellow dehumidifier light wasn’t