"One take," I said.
He nodded like he'd expected nothing else.
And something in me — something I'd been keeping very carefully below the surface for weeks, maybe months — tipped over.
It wasn't jealousy.I want to be precise about that, because jealousy was something I understood and could manage.This was different.This was the particular vertigo of standing next to someone who was running full speed toward a future you could see clearly, and realizing that you couldn't find yourself in it no matter how hard you squinted.Nelson's future was already in motion.Mine was a fog bank I kept telling myself would clear.
I set the camera down and started rewinding the tape.Nelson was making notes on his script.The fluorescent lights hummed.Out in the hallway someone was laughing at something, and the sound floated under the door and died.
"I got a call this morning," Nelson said, not looking up from his notes.
"From who?"
"NY1."He said it carefully, like he was trying to keep the excitement in and couldn't quite manage it."They want to meet.It's not — I mean, it's local.It's not what I'm aiming for, but it's a real newsroom.They saw the opioid piece I did and they want to sit down."
I kept rewinding the tape."That's great."
"It's a foot in the door."He looked up."Bruce Coleman at Beacon wants to meet with me too."He stopped.Nelson was looking at me the way he sometimes looked at me when he was deciding how much of himself to put on the table."It's going to happen, Jimmy.I can feel it, the way you feel a story when it's real.Beacon Broadcasting.The national desk.That's where I'm going."
He said it without arrogance.That was the thing that broke something open in me — he said it the way you state a fact.The sky is blue.Water runs downhill.I'm going to be the star anchor at Beacon Broadcasting.
I looked at him.At the gray shirt and the blue eyes and the notes in his hand and the absolute, terrifying certainty of him.
And then I heard myself say: "You're turning into a sellout."
The words landed in the room like something dropped from a great height.
Nelson went very still.
"What?"
I knew I should have stopped.The sentence had come from somewhere I hadn't authorized, from the part of me that had been keeping score without admitting it, and it was out now and it was wrong — I knew it was wrong even as I was saying it, knew it the way you know you're going to regret something a half second before you do it anyway.
"Corporate news," I said, because apparently I was committed now."Cable.Nelson, you used to talk about documentary work.About PBS.About stories that—"
"That what?"His voice had gone quiet.I knew that voice.Quiet Nelson was the dangerous kind."That matter?You think homeless veterans on a national broadcast don't matter?"
"I think you care more about the camera loving you than you do about the actual story."
Nelson set down his notes and straightened the pages against the desk — a precise, controlled movement — then he looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.Not anger.Something that lived behind anger.Something that looked, for just a second, like I had touched something real.
"Nelson—" I started.
"You don't get to say that to me."His voice was still quiet."Not you.Not about this."
"I know."The words came out before I'd decided to say them, and they were true, and they were not enough."I'm sorry.I didn't — I shouldn't have said that.Nelson, that was wrong."
He looked at me for a long moment.Then he picked up his notes again and smoothed them once against the table."Set up for the closing stand-up," he said."I want to get it before we lose the light through the window."
I picked up the camera.My hands were steady.His were too.
But something had shifted in the room, and even as I set the camera back on its tripod and Nelson found his mark, I understood, with the quiet certainty of someone watching a door close from the wrong side of it, that I had not said the true thing.
The true thing was worse.The true thing was: I'm afraid you're going to get exactly what you want.And I don't know if there's room for me in it.
ChapterTwo
Nelson- 13 Years Ago