‘The thing about Night Traffic,’ he said, with a little lick of his lips, ‘is that I made it up. None of it happened. None of it is true.’
I swallowed. Pierce was glaring at me, full eye contact, judging my reaction, as if he were trying to read my thoughts about what he had said.
He wouldn’t be able to. My thoughts were: He doesn’t know about the second DVR. The one that was in my shirt pocket. The one that was still recording.
‘Have you ever been mugged, Jack?’
I had to take a moment to think about the answer. It was a simple question, with a simple, truthful answer. But in this room, at this time, all certainty felt suspect. The man sitting opposite me had taken an event I had experienced twice and described it nearly perfectly. That his version was a giant lie – with an orbiting debris field of lesser lies – was deeply disturbing. My own experiences felt counterfeit. It was a violation, akin to an attack. I should have been angry, but Pierce’s authority and my respect for him were – curiously – unchanged. In a way, a very conditional and twisted way, I admired him: that he could invent an account so detailed, sympathetic and convincing – utterly, utterly convincing – was impressive.
‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘Twice, actually.’
‘Actually.’ Pierce un-crossed and re-crossed his legs. ‘Well, I have never been mugged.’
‘You describe it so well.’
‘Yes, so I’m told. What is it like? Being mugged.’
‘Don’t you know? I mean, even if it hasn’t happened to you, you must have spoken with plenty of people, and your research—’
‘Yes, yes.’ He waved this away. ‘I got emails, letters. People feeling as if they had to share what had happened to them with someone they thought would understand. Some horrible stories. I spoke at the annual conference of the National Association for the Victims of Crime. I tried to get out of it, but they were so persistent and nice. Afterwards people wanted to talk to me … That was towards the end, by the way, right before I decided I’d had enough, couldn’t stand lying to these people any more. But what you learn from all these stories – well, no, listen, this is important. Being a writer is to realise that all experience is unique but analogous. People are good at thinking their way into other people’s heads, much better than most of them realise. Anyway, tell me.’
Again, I had to think about the answer. Though they were technically very similar events – alone, vulnerable, a threat, a theft – the two experiences were very different, and it was hard to establish the common emotional ground between them.
‘Confusing,’ I said.
‘Confusing. Very good answer,’ Pierce said. He sat back in his chair and smiled. ‘Can you expand?’
I shrugged. Once again Pierce had turned my interview into an interrogation of me. I was still trying to mentally accommodate his admission about Night Traffic. A fraud. It was a fraud. And I did not yet know my response to that. There are journalistic clichés: ‘stunned’, ‘shocked’, ‘reeling’, ‘taken aback’. Those would work, but not well. It was more a troubling in-between state, waiting for feedback that isn’t coming, and feeling nothing in the meantime. Being lost, and getting out your phone to check the map – but it doesn’t load. You see the little dot marking your location, but on a field of grey. And here he was drilling information out of me. I was pitted with the sense of having shared too much from my own darkness. Pierce was impressive, for sure. The unembarrassed way he questioned, the way he handled the answers – that ‘very good answer’ there, a bit of positive reinforcement to help the subject, me, along, making me want to share more. A natural journalist, whereas I had spent a decade scraping by and pretending.
‘The first time was very much what you’d imagine, you know,’ I said. ‘I was frightened …’
‘How was it confusing?’
I drank from my beer. ‘There’s a moment, a time when you don’t know what’s happening – you’re being mugged but you don’t know it for sure just yet, you haven’t figured it out, you don’t know what this guy, this stranger, wants – you don’t realise that the rules have been … that they don’t apply any more, that different rules apply, different roles. It’s confusing. You’re moved very quickly from one situation, a normal situation, to an abnormal situation, and it takes some time to catch up. And the second time – the very fact it was the second time, it had happened before, made it different. I knew what was going on, but … it was still a very confusing experience.’
In truth, the second time had not been confusing at all. My emotions, at the time, had been very clear – more than clear, blinding, revelatory. Only in retrospect did I feel conflicted about what had happened and began to see that my reaction had been … perverse. ‘Confusing’ was a handy word to slap on that mess. Pierce was, once more, looking at me to expand, and I didn’t feel inclined to.
‘Let’s talk about you,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be the interviewer.’
‘Why?’ Pierce said. ‘You’re not recording.’
Not as far as he knew. ‘I assume you’ll want to go on the record at some point.’
‘To “set the record straight”?’ Pierce said. ‘That was the expression Quin used. More than once. I had to “set the record straight”. As if everything is disordered now, crooked, and when I … If I go on the record it’ll all be properly arranged and neat and tidy. “The Record”! As if there’s a single, agreed text of the past somewhere, in a big ledger with metal clasps … Or in one of Quin’s servers, now, I suppose.’
He stopped, and stared out of the window, biting his lip, frowning, those hard eyes points of radiant darkness. ‘That’s shit. That’s a big pile of shit. You must see that. Everything would be blown to shit. There’ll be a big storm of shit. Newspapers. I’ll be ripped apart.’
The eyes were avoiding me now, and they swam. For the first time in our discussion, he looked vulnerable. Might he cry? Profile gold …
‘The worst part,’ Pierce continued, ‘is that it won’t even be that big a scandal. Not the front page of the newspaper, it won’t touch the TV. Enough to destroy me, of course. A couple of days of it online, before people move on. I’ll be ruined. But it won’t be that important a story. Just enough to ensure I never come back.’
He was right I had not fully calculated the implications of what Pierce had said about Night Traffic – I had been thinking purely in personal terms, not about the wider world. I had thought, This is a huge story, but not put any real imagination into what that meant. This would bump Eddie’s estate agent friend for sure. Eddie might want it on the cover. Pierce was right, national newspapers would pick it up. The magazine’s name would be everywhere, we’d be at our highest profile for years, maybe since the Errol days. Money would flow: extra news-stand sales, new subscribers, extra ads sold against my piece, syndication rights. In narrow professional terms, I would be a hero. My dismissal would be off the table for a while, six months maybe, enough time for me to get my act together. And the incredible fact was that the story had just dropped from the sky. Quin volunteered Pierce, and Pierce had served up the story.
A wisp of doubt. I hadn’t actually done anything, not yet. I could imagine the finished product: long, New Yorker-ish, bringing in a lot of voices, well-researched, prize-winning. But it had been months since I put words on paper, and that had been the Quin train-wreck. Could I produce 5,000 words of empathy, careful questioning, supporting quotes, legal niceties and meticulous fact-checking? Lawyers would read it, tens of thousands of people would read it, awards judges would