But, he thought, perhaps he had just come up with an idea of how to get around that. . . .
He stared a moment longer at the dim reflection coming back at him from the antiglare screen, which now informed him that his cover feature had been chopped. Truthfully, it was happening more and more; this was the third time in eight months that a major muckraking piece had been axed. Also, as he stared at it, the reflection told him he wasn't getting any younger. The hairline was no longer where it had been in his college photos—it was up about half an inch—and the blue eyes were sadder, the lines under them deeper.
Still, the tousled brown hair was thick enough, the brow mostly wrinkle‑free, and he still had hope. He wasn't exactly young anymore, but neither was he "getting on." The "Willy Loman" years remained safely at bay. He was thirty‑nine and divorced, with an ex‑wife, Joyce, who had departed to be a garden designer in northern California, taking with her their daughter, Amy, on whom he doted. He had a one‑bedroom, rent‑controlled apartment in the East Nineties, on the top floor of a fashionable brownstone. He was socially unattached, as the expression goes, but he was so compulsive about finishing the book that he spent weekends hunched over his IBM Aptiva, nursing a six‑pack of Brooklyn Lager and writing deathless prose. The truth was he was lonely, but he didn't allow himself to think about it.
He'd always vowed he'd amount to something by forty. And now it was as much for Amy as for himself. She lived with his ex‑wife near El Cerrito, California, and she meant the world to him. The mortifying part was, he was a week behind with this month's support check. And he knew Joyce needed the money. It made him feel like a callous deadbeat dad when the real culprit was an unlucky confluence of inescapable bills. He’d make it up next week, but he’d sworn he would never let this happen.
That was why he had a larger game plan. Get out of this frigging day job and finish the book. The time for that plan to kick in was approaching at warp speed. This last insult was surely God's not‑so‑subtle way of informing him that his future was in the freelance world. Every day out there would be a gamble, but he could write anything he damn well pleased.
There was a parable set down by the ancient Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu that Stone Aimes reflected on more and more these days. It was the story of two oxen: One was a ceremonial sacrificial ox who, for the year before he meets the axe, was feted with garlands of lotus flowers and plied with ox goodies. The other was a wild ox who had to scrounge in the forest for every scrap. But, the story went, on the day the ax was to drop, what wouldn't that ceremonial ox give to change places with that haggard struggling, underfed wild ox?
That's the one he empathized with. The one who was out there, half starved but free.
The Sentinel was an iron rice bowl that normally never let anybody go except for grossest incompetence or flagrant alcoholism. On the other hand getting ahead was all about office politics, kissing the managing editor's hindquarters, and copying him on every memo to anybody to make sure nobody else took credit for something you thought of.
On the plus side, he knew he was a hell of a medical journalist. There was such a gap between medical research and what most people knew, the field cried out for a Stephen Hawking of health, a medical Carl Sagan. The way he saw it, there was room at the top and he was ready for a major career breakthrough. He had done premed at Columbia before switching to journalism, and these days he read the Journal of the American Medical Association from cover to cover, every issue, along with skimming the many other journals now on the web.
The piece that just got cut was intended to show the world that investigative journalism was alive and well and trying to make a difference. He'd documented that hospital mistakes were actually the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. The Institute of Medicine estimated that medical errors caused between fifty and a hundred thousand deaths a year—rivaling the number from auto accidents or AIDS. (He'd gotten enough data to be able to quantify how many of those deaths were in leading New York hospitals.) Yet there was no federal law requiring hospitals to report mistakes that caused serious injury or death to patients.