hall, his points made.
Sanders Berman comes wandering away from the men’s room, as if in a daze, like he’s just been hit by a dust storm.
I take the chance.
“Hi, Sanders, how’s everything?”
He stops.
“Oh, hi—Walters, is it? Everything is good.”
“Hastings, yeah, that’s great, that’s great. Yeah, I’m just researching Nishant’s column for the week.”
“What’s he writing on?”
“The case for war, really coming down for it.”
“He is? Darnit, that’s what I was going to write this week.”
I start nodding.
“I just had dinner with Ken Pollack last night. I was going to quote him, too.”
Sanders Berman touches his bow tie. He puts his elbows up on my cubicle, a gesture of familiarity. He sees that I have the Brennan Toddly article on my desk.
“Don’t tell me he’s going to use that Iraqi gentleman’s argument . . .”
“Yep, I have a call in to his office.”
He puts his knuckle under his chin, in thought.
Am I going to appear too precocious? Am I about to overstep my bounds? I mean, who am I to suggest any ideas? I’m a twenty-two-year-old former intern, a researcher and an occasional fact-checker.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll come up with something to say,” I say. “Like, no one has made any American historical arguments for the war yet.”
He looks at me, eyebrows up, as if he’s considering humoring my suggestion.
“Hmm. And Hastings, if you had a column, that’s what you’d say?”
“Uh, well, I mean, President James Polk has some good thoughts on these kinds of issues.”
Sanders Berman smiles and starts to walk away. I think he’s regretting even talking to me. He has his head down and I hope he’s not regretting it, but that is the sinking suspicion I get. If I were a femaleintern, at least his ego could have received some flattery, but “There’s never a reason to talk to a young male intern” is probably what he’s thinking. I should have kept silent, mouth shut.
No time to worry or beat myself up over it.
The phone rings.
It’s Kanan Makiya.
“Hi, uh, thanks for calling. Yeah, so, like you said in Brennan Toddly’s piece—”
“Mr. Toddly took me out of context.”
“No doubt, um, really, hunh.”
“Have you read my book?”
“Um, no, it’s on my list.”
“Hmmm.”
We go back and forth a few more times, until, twenty minutes later, he says more or less what he said in the Brennan Toddly story. I thank him and hang up.
My phone rings again.
Kenneth Pollack is on the line.
“Have you read my book?” he asks before we begin.
“Um, no, sorry. It’s on my list, though.”
“Hmmm.”
“But I did see what Brennan Toddly wrote about it, and it sounds like a really great book.”
“Yes, thanks, but that was taken out of context.”
“Right, sure, no doubt.”
“I mean, how do you summarize a five-hundred-and-three-page book in a single page?”
“Very carefully?”
“You lose the caveats.”
Pollack starts in on his theory and doesn’t let up for a goodtwenty-three minutes. Nuclear programs. Weapons of mass destruction. Biological, chemical. UN reports, broken resolutions, aluminum tubes, uranium enrichment, Israel’s reactor strike in 1983. Secret mobile weapons labs. I’m feeling good about it, because it’s the stuff that Nishant Patel wanted him to say, and all I have to do is keep typing what he’s saying.
I spend the next three hours correcting typos and condensing my conversations with Kanan and Ken into a single page, taking the best quotes and putting them up top.
I grab a quick dinner and come back to my desk after eating. Agonizing over each sentence. This is the first time I’ve been asked to do research, and I don’t want to fuck it up.
While I’m proofreading and figuring out the best way to write it up in an email to Nishant, another email appears.
From: Sanders Berman
Subject: James Polk
Mike, per our conversation, could you send me the Polk citations you were talking