Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [11]
There was a time many years ago, when I first became a reporter, when I thought I could fake it. Go through the motions, not give away pieces of myself in return. I focused on the mechanics: storytelling and structure. I had conversations, conducted interviews, and I wasn’t even there. I’d nod, look in others’ eyes, but my vision lost focus, my mind turned to details. People became characters, plot lines in a story I was constructing in my head. Their mouths moved, I heard only lines of track, bites of sound. I listened for what I could use; the rest I fast-forwarded through.
When I had what I needed, I’d pull out. I thought I could get away unscathed, unchanged. The truth was I hadn’t gotten out at all. It’s impossible to block out what you see, what you hear. Even if you stop listening, the pain gets inside, seeps through the cracks you can’t close up. You can’t fake your way through it. I know that now. You have to absorb it all. You owe them that. You owe it to yourself as well.
“Sometimes you have to look very narrowly down the path,” an aid worker in Somalia once said to me. “You can’t look at what’s lying on either side of the road.”
I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I certainly get it now. Crystal clear. If you are going to engage, then there’s only so much you can stand. It’s best not to stop in one place too long. A week or two, maximum. You can buy yourself more time if you have somewhere to stay away from the carnage. Then the story becomes a place you go to, venture from. It’s an office, one that you prepare yourself for every morning.
In Sri Lanka, we sleep in a luxury hotel a few hours’ drive away from the worst of the devastation. Each night we return to edit our footage and wolf down some dinner. A few tourists lounge in the last light of day: black-bikinied painted blondes with collagen lips, and Speedo-clad men with overhanging bellies and sunburned scalps. I see them laughing by the pool, sipping drinks with umbrellas, telling jokes in Russian and German. At first I’m shocked; I scream at them in my head, “Don’t you know people have died here? How can you still lounge by the pool?” But I say nothing, of course. Why shouldn’t they lounge? Elsewhere in the world life continues. That’s just how it is.
When we leave Kamburugamuwa, I notice that we’re quiet. Even Phil has been silenced by the sadness of it all. A truck filled with Buddhist monks chanting through a loudspeaker passes us by. Their deep-throated droning wafts over what remains of the small village. Maduranga is standing by the water’s edge. Alone on the beach. A sad little boy. He throws stones at the sea.
IN APRIL 1988, my brother showed up at my mother’s apartment and said he wanted to move back home. She lived in a duplex on New York’s Upper East Side. It was a penthouse we’d moved into when my brother and I were in high school. The building faced the East River, and each floor had a wrap-around terrace, which gave anyone in the apartment the feeling of being on a ship. Driving along the river, you could see the balcony off my room silhouetted against the skyline. Whenever I was approaching the place in a taxi on the FDR Drive, I’d count to see how many seconds it took me to see the ledge.
My brother was living in his own apartment in the city. He was an editor for American Heritage, a history magazine, and also wrote book reviews for Commentary. He’d recently broken up with his girlfriend. They’d met in college and had dated for several years, but I wasn’t aware how serious it was. The truth is, I didn’t pay much attention. When they broke up, we talked about it on the phone, but not in any great detail. I’d never broken up with someone I was in love with, and I didn’t appreciate the pain of such a loss.
That day in April, when Carter told our mom he wanted to move back home, he came to a race of mine. I was a junior at Yale, a coxswain on the lightweight crew, and the team was in New York competing