Begin to Exit Here by John Welter

do?”
    I explained, in my rambling, incoherent way, the impact of the explosion and the ball of fire and how there was some Foster’s lager needing me to drink it and no one would know, but I walked away, and how, according to the rules of journalism, reporters weren’t human. She liked the story, even when it didn’t make sense, and smiled at me and laughed, one of the most soothing sounds I’d ever heard. I told her that. She kissed my eyes. We went into the bathroom so she could take the gauze off and wash my cut and put some new goo on it with some new gauze, so it would be personal. Even though I had a home, a placewhere it was said I lived, it was really here. We knew that, and Janice put me to bed with her, covering me with one of her legs and both of her arms and she fell asleep like that. I loved her. That’s what I did then, and wondered if in her sleep she knew I was doing that.

14
    I n the morning as I read my story on the front page I discovered that my sardonic joke over the phone to Christopher was placed prominently in the story by Christopher, so that everyone reading about the startling explosion of the shopping center saw this sentence: “There were no injuries from the explosion and fire, except a reporter who was cut by a flying ham from the grocery store.” It was a nice touch, and I was glad Christopher put it in. But then the inevitable officiousness and tedium of serious journalism struck like a disease. After our first story with photos ran, and reporters from the afternoon paper, the
Journal
, scrambled that morning to put together a couple of long and annoying pieces about the possible cause of the explosion,what was at first just a pretty interesting shopping-center explosion was transformed by competing editors into the urgent issue of the community, and the two papers began exchanging stories like gunfire to see who could amass the most maddening and essentially unimportant facts. When it was adjudged that a large gas leak from commercial ovens used to bake breads and pies at the grocery had caused the explosion, Christopher ordered Lisa to order me to reach the company that made the ovens, reach the gas company, reach the fire investigators, contact a national association of firefighters in Washington, interview store employees, contact the corporate office of the store, interview the Wellington County commissioners, ask two or three local lawyers if anyone could successfully be sued over the explosion and fires, call other retail bakers in Vermilion and Wellington counties about their ovens, and find out from the St. Beaujolais and Small town halls if they had any ordinances governing safety inspections of big ovens.
    We were going to suffocate the readers with facts. But I, the reporter, was the first victim. The editors at our paper and the
Journal
all acted now as if no events anywhere in the lives of the nearly 40,000 people in the community were as important or interesting to our readers as the history of a goddamn blown-up shopping center. Two other reporters worked with me on a daily series of stories on the continuing investigations and the matters of rebuilding the stores and collecting insurance money. For every two storiesturned out by the
Journal
, we retaliated with three or four. In a computer message to our executive editor, I wrote: “Dear Al Perrault: Now that we’ve written ten stories in three days on the shopping center, and we’re working on two more, wouldn’t it be appropriate to quit calling our paper the
News-Dispatch
and start calling it
Grocery World?”
    On the day that I was trying to write three stories on the shopping center because I was ordered to, I was so pissed off at the untiring dumbness of journalism that I also began writing a sidebar with this headline: “The history of exploding ovens.”
    Lisa, who saw me writing it and was getting mad because I was mad, leaned over me at my desk and said in a