Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [46]
“No! Steve Irwin?”
“Yes.”
“What killed him, a crocodile?”
“Stingray. Right through the heart.”
“Jesus.”
“So—front page?”
“Perfect. We have nothing else.”
“It’s definitely of global significance.”
Luke pops into my office often, to chat or to trade stories. A half hour later, he walks in holding an enormous jar of amber liquid. “I just accidentally bought thirty dollars’ worth of honey,” he says.
“Accidentally?”
“Well, I was with al-Asaadi, and there was this guy he usually gets honey from, so I ordered some too, but I didn’t realize it would be this big! Or that it would cost thirty dollars.” He looks forlornly at the enormous jar in his hand. “I have enough honey to last me a year.”
“Well,” I say, “I guess you’d better learn to bake.”
“You don’t bake with Yemeni honey! It’s too special for that.”
“It can’t be really good Yemeni honey,” says Zuhra, who has just walked in. “If it were really good honey, it would have cost you eighty dollars. At least.”
Later in the afternoon, al-Asaadi pops his head into our office. “How about we don’t have a front page this issue? What do you think?”
I shrug. “I can live without it.”
But the banter hides a growing panic. The later it gets, the more we shuffle stories from page to page. We don’t have enough local stories, so I suggest we move a story on the back page to the local page and that I quickly write the story on the batik exhibit to replace the back page. It is infinitely easier to churn out a story myself than to rewrite one of theirs. I feel some guilt over this, but not much. It’s just one story.
ZUHRA LEAVES WORK around three P.M., as she and the other girls must be home before dark. She is distressed to leave me on my own, worried I will never survive without her.
“I’ll be fine,” I say with a complete lack of conviction. “We just might not have a front page.”
She looks at me with concern.
“Do you maybe need to swim?” she says.
I laugh. “Not today,” I say, gesturing toward the stack of pages waiting to be edited. “Tomorrow.”
AL-ASAADI RETURNS from a long lunch around four P.M. and throws a handful of qat next to my computer. “This will help,” he says. My energy flagging, I follow his lead. The qat tastes extra bitter, and the shiny leaves are hard to chew. But I imagine that al-Asaadi knows where to buy the best qat, so I assume it is a good vintage. It must be, given how much I immediately perk up. With newfound vigor, I whip out a 955-word story on the batik exhibit in less than an hour. No wonder everyone loves this drug.
I file the story and run upstairs to choose photos with Mas, the paper’s precocious nineteen-year-old photographer. When I return, a pile of new things to edit is waiting on my desk. Ibrahim’s election stories are thin; everything I edit ends up half its original length. My reporters repeat themselves ad nauseam.
Around ten P.M., when I finally start to crash from the qat, dinner arrives. We all eat outside in the courtyard, standing around a table piled with roti (Yemeni baguettes) and plates of fasooleah (beans), eggs, ful, cheese, and tea. We fall upon the food like a pack of wolves. I am the last to leave the table, reluctantly, with a fistful of bread.
My energy is back. Good thing, too, given how much is still left to do. The flash-drive-passing between me and Luke accelerates. I edit the stories, then he edits them, then I see them again on the page, and then he sees them one last time. I don’t take a step out of the building from the time I get there—eight thirty A.M.—until the time I leave, in the early hours of the following morning. Yet I am so busy that the day feels short. So many times in those first few weeks, when my reporters come to me with a question, I instinctively think I should run it by someone else. Someone in charge. But slowly, it begins to sink in that the only person responsible for these decisions is me.
MIRACULOUSLY, BY THREE A.M. we have a front page. And a Local page. And an Election page, a Health page, a Reports page, and Panorama and Middle East and Op-Ed. In fact, we have an entire