At 12:41, the call came in from the chief’s desk. Print. The edition was locked and there were no more corrections and any typos left were the fault of the Lord. First the presses, they KaCHOCKED the news onto the thick, unspooling reels of grayish shit-paper, and then the rollers did so, looping the endless stories around and over, and then the sorter with its blades and shelves to install order; the collator is last, and–just before two in the morning–there she is: the Cenotaph. Circulars and samples of toothpaste were inserted, and then the run went out in the swinging bags and wire baskets of the Paperboys. Pre-dawn THWAP against the  dirty porch or newly-paved driveway, and no sound after that: the Paperboys rode well-greased bicycles. Mountain bikes on the Downside, and ten-speeds on the Upside. No one was awakened, no sleep was disturbed; you woke up and the Cenotaph was there: it was a function of the night just like the morning’s dew. Seven days a week, and Christmas, too. Cows need to be milked every day, and a newspaper needs to be printed every day: both of these things are devoured; both of these things are full of shit.

The presses were on the first floor; the newsroom was on the second; there was no third to the Braunce Building. It took up all of Pryor Street. Brick with rebar innards and concrete pilings sunk deep into the loam. Otherwise, the floor would crack under the weight of the machines: they were made of iron; the were made from exacting tolerances; they required skilled labor to attend to them; they needed regular greasing; they made a thunder like tomorrow; they would outlast the reporters and photographers and editors; they accumulated union members around themselves. The presses were built so right that they would run forever if properly maintained. (As opposed to the reporters. Most of them hadn’t run since grade school, and none of them maintained themselves properly.)

ThrumbleTANKthrumbleTANK was the sound of the machines–all one interlinking monster that the men’s grandfathers had wrangled–and the whole building quaked pleasantly. Like one of those Magic Fingered beds in a sleazy hotel. They had ’em at the Hotel Salt Wharf, where the sailors stayed when they were off the water. Iffy Bould lived there sometimes when his wife threw him out. When the presses roared, he would lay down on the thin carpeting of the newsroom floor and let the vibrations relax his back. When the chief made the call to print, and the building began to idle full-throated, that was the part he loved. Made the paper again. Got the story one more time. He could have a minute before tomorrow’s edition started yowling for attention. Just a minute, a smoke and a minute supine on the shitty carpet of the Cenotaph‘s newsroom on the second floor of the Braunce Building. He would die here. The wife would throw him out one last time–she was the second wife, anyway–and then maybe there would be another wife or maybe there wouldn’t. Who knows? Reporters shouldn’t conjecture, he thought. He’d die in the newsroom, or running down some story so he could come back to the newsroom and peck it out at lightning speed. He’d die under deadline, he knew.

Big Pete Braunce was big, and named Pete. The original press that was installed into his storefront on the Main Drag in 1863 was a rotary machine with a broad wheel that turned through manual labor; it had been made in Philadelphia and humped all the way out to Little Aleppo. The press was cast-iron, and therefore resistant to humping, so it cost Big Pete a fortune to ship. He didn’t care. He had ink in his veins. And he owned a third of the Turnaway Lode. Money had become less and less of an obstacle since Big Pete and his family ventured over the Segovian Hills and staked claim. He wasn’t cut out for mining, anyway. Mineshafts were narrow and cramped, and he was big. Besides, a newspaper can serve a business concern as ably as ten men with pickaxes, Big Pete figured. The Cenotaph was born. No accident ever occurred within the Turnaway, at least within its pages; the Braunce conglomerate was never even mentioned, except for Big Pete’s name on the masthead. When the neighborhood got large enough that politics erupted, the Cenotaph pushed the candidates that had taken the Braunce’s money. When the seam ran dry, the Cenotaph kept printing. The conglomerate had bought up most of the land in the neighborhood by then. Big Pete died in ’91, and Little Big Pete took over.

Little Big Pete was bigger than Big Pete, just a mammoth of a man. It was a good thing he was rich, as clothing his size had to be custom-made; there was no such thing  as a Big & Tall Shop in the 1890’s. Little Big Pete expanded. He moved the offices over to a new brick building on Pryor Street and installed the massive presses. He got a deal on typewriters, both because he was buying in bulk and because the typewriters in question did not have their J keys. There was no radio, certainly no teevee, and the paper was the only notable change in a static world. The news was new as shit in 1891, and for the years following. Little Big Pete sold a morning edition and an afternoon one, too. The paper grew from one page to two, to four and then eight and sixteen, and 32 on Sundays with the Supplement. It was amazing, Little Big Pete thought: the amount of news always matches exactly the number of pages I’ve sold advertising for. He was sure there was a math equation in there somewhere.

There was the news, and that was upfront. “Splashed” is the verb so often employed. The big stuff, the fun stuff, the sex stuff: that was for the Front Page, the ever-holy headline. Right under the mast, in type that was sized commensurately for the situation. A community meeting that broke out into a fight/orgy got an 18-point banner, but the squatch’s last stand at the Battle of the Main Drag got a 72-point blast. You want to sell the story, but not oversell it. Newspapers are built on trust. After that came the national stories, rewritten from a pirated wire subscription, and then the editorials. The editors would write them, sometimes, and they would be reasonable diatribes about the common good, and Little Big Pete would write them, sometimes, and they would be profane screeds threatening Harmonico’s Steakhouse with arson because they lost his gloves. There was also a sports section. The society pages reported on the Upside, and the crime blotter took care of the Downside. The classifieds had led to marriages, murders, screenplays, the sales of quite a few Chevys. The crossword had clues to the Apocalypse, and the movie listings were ironic, and the obituaries were mercenary. Little Aleppians did not mind. Little Aleppians did not read the paper so much as interpret it.

Little Big Pete died in 1941–on Pearl Harbor Day, as a matter of fact–and his son took over. The boy was nicknamed Shit Salad, and for good reason; the editor-in-chief took over the day-to-day operation, as Shit Salad was so often distracted by shiny objects or titties, or drunk. Shit Salad liked to drink, and he liked titties. Beyond that, he had no interests that any investigative reporter could discern. Shit Salad got shitfaced, took his dick out, slapped it on some boobs, and called it a night. The man had a routine. The Cenotaph flourished under his ownership. Stupid and rich were the best qualities a newspaper owner could have.

Newspaper editors, however, needed to be clever.

“Bould.”

“Goose.”

“I told you to call me Chief.”

“You really should come down here. It’s invigorating.”

Gabe Gooseman was still lean, and did not hunch at all, and had all of his white hair. His pants were twill, wool, creased like a well-made paper airplane. It was 12:44 at night–technically in the morning–and the newsroom was wrecked with the litter of another cycle: crumpled balls of paper all over, and spilled coffee, and smoldering ashtrays. It was 198-, and smoking was still permitted in the office. The staff of the Cenotaph took full advantage of this fact. Barry Cho was at his desk by the window already drunk and staring off into the distance; he was the business reporter, which meant everyone he covered tried to either bribe him or run him over, sometimes both in one afternoon. Numerous ham sandwiches, some with cheese and some without, had been abandoned. The Copyboys were sparring in the Bubble. That was Goose’s office. It was glassed-in  and smack in the middle of the newsroom. The morning meeting was in there, all the section heads would sit on the couches and him behind his desk with his feet up. In the Bubble, his suit jacket came off, to be draped around a ceder hangar that hung from a coat rack. He would have hung it directly from the coat rack’s prong, but he wasn’t an animal. When he left the Bubble, even if it were so late at night with the floor empty, he put his suit jacket on.

“I’m fine.”

“Just the once.”

“Just the never. Do the Batman story.”

“There’s no Batman story.”

“We’ll come up with a new name.”

“Well, obviously, but that’s not the point.”

Goose had a cigar in his breast pocket. He took it out, wetted down the tip, leaned over. Iffy raised his right arm and CHANK-FFT lit his Zippo on the first snap. Goose went PWOFF PWOFF and Iffy waved the smoke away from his face with his left hand, which was holding a Kool.

“There’s no story. Some muggers got beat up. People get beat up here; it’s a shitty neighborhood.”

“Yes, they got beat up. By a giant in a pervert suit who leaps on and off of buildings.”

“In a single bound?”

“No, he’s got a grappling gun.”

“Are you even listening to yourself?”

Goose perched on the edge of Iffy’s desk after examining it for alien substances.

“Five eye-witnesses.”

“None of whom are reliable.”

“Pshaw.”

“Two of whom are that jerkoff from the bookstore who likes to call in pretending to be from the college so the junior reporters will quote him saying something stupid, and his employee, who seems like the same kind of jerkoff that he is. Another of whom is a blind man.”

“Omar said that Argus saw the guy,” Goose said.

“Good for Argus.”

“You’re not going to mention the other two witnesses because it hurts your case, huh?”

“Nuns lie all the time. Remember my story about Sister Gladys? Big embezzler. Can’t trust a nun, Goose.”

“Are you denying that this is happening, or do you just not want to cover the story?”

“Which answer will make you go away?”

Iffy’s leg was starting to hurt, and he wanted a drink.

“And I’m on a story.”

“The land deal,” Goose said. “Yeah. Back burner it. The land isn’t going anywhere.”

“You never know around here. Remember that time the Gangeedesh Cult stole all the swimming pools?”

“And who broke that story? You. My prized reporter. My number one guy.”

“The story really didn’t need breaking, Goose. Everyone noticed that the pools were gone.”

“My number one guy.”

Ash dripped off of Iffy’s Kool onto his chest; he blew it off; the flecks settled into the carpet with their brothers and sisters.

“This is a dumb story.”

“But fun. And civic-minded.”

“How exactly is a violent lunatic preying on criminals civic-minded?”

“Promotes the neighborhood. Masked vigilante? That’s big-city stuff. This moves us up at least a notch. Much better than the minor-league ballpark.”

“Amazing how many people got killed by a stadium that never got built.”

Goose popped his cigar in his mouth and crossed his arms, which was his signal that the conversation was over and you were going to do what he told you.

“Just do the fucking story.”

Iffy crossed his arms, too, which was his signal that Goose should go fuck himself.

“It’s gonna be dumb.”

“You’re my number-one guy.”

“Got any ideas on the name?”

“You’re the writer,” Goose said, and walked back towards his office. Iffy called after him.

“Copyboys still fighting?”

“Yes.”

Iffy Bould climbed off the floor using his desk for support, and scrunched out his Kool in an overflowing glass ashtray. He followed Gabe Gooseman down the row of typewriters and deadlines to the Bubble, where the Copyboys waled on each other, bare-chested. There was a sexual component to the matches. Iffy offered three-to-one on the fat kid, and Goose took the action for a tenner.  They had done all they could, and would again tomorrow. The floorboards of the Braunce Building  hummed with the news; it’s where they make the Cenotaph, the paper of record in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.