PRL Serials

“The first time that I ever traveled to the Congo, specifically the DRC, was in 2008 to cover the violence and refugees who managed to escape to nearby Uganda. It was a completely different time for me, I was a completely different person then. Being there was exciting. It’s was sad, of course, so many people were losing everything or dying and I was there writing my impressions alongside a group of journalists that included a photographer, a war correspondent with his camera person, and a research fellow with the UN who was fluent in local languages and was charged with gathering accounts from people on the ground. We witnessed all the things that you would expect from a conflict like that as we traveled with a large group of refugees. I remember seeing it all, and writing about the horror of it, but it didn’t really penetrate my surface, you know. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but even though I felt for those people who had no security at all, no idea where their next meal would come from, or if they would even be able to sit in the dirt long enough to catch their breath. I was just an outside observer. Sure I sweated with them, my black skin baking under the sun like theirs and I recognized my kinship with the people, even if it was superficial. But I wasn’t one of them and when I look back on it now, I know that I was chasing something other than the capital T Truth. I wasn’t there to help anyone because I wasn’t interested in what they needed. I was applying for a job in the department that I head now, and I knew that the trip would make me look worldly and knowledgeable, worthy of trust and reverence. 

“Soon after we arrived at the refugee camp in Uganda, we left with a group of refugees who were resettled to England, and we all ended up in London. The UN guy went back to Geneva or whatever, but the photographer and the war correspondent stayed with the group of refugees to complete the story of their journey. I was not interested in staying at the hostel where they were being housed. Instead, I wrote a piece for the New Yorker from my room at the C— that the magazine paid for. Thinking about it now blows my mind. I went from ducking bullets in the Congo, to the opulence of the C— in the span of a couple weeks. I can’t imagine doing that today. I would feel so strange having someone clean up after me after traveling with refugees who had lost their entire lives. But back then, I knew that I deserved to be waited on hand and foot for my labors documenting the horrors of war and I insisted that the magazine pay for the suite that came with a personal butler. I woke up every morning for about five days to the view of the Thames while I enjoyed my proper English breakfast. 

“My butler was a white man and he was older than me, my parents’ age. We got along well and I looked forward to talking to him about why I was there and what I would do before I came back to New York. ‘You should see the old York,’ he said jokingly. I looked into it, but York was three hours away from London by car and I didn’t want to pay someone else to drive me. I asked him a lot about his job, what it was like to serve the rich people who could afford the rooms at the hotel, and he insisted that he liked his job because the guests were nice and made the job easy. ‘I must say, and I do say it genuinely, that you are amongst the nicest of the guests I have had the pleasure to serve.’ I don’t think he was just saying that because he wanted to continue to receive the generous tips that I gave him. The way he said it was so genuine that it made me question his earlier statement about the kindness of the other guests he’d worked for. 

“Eventually, I wandered around the hotel after a couple days there. It’s a beautiful place and you know you’re inside of a luxurious experience that only exists for the privileged. I’d been to places like the C— before, there are more impressive hotels in the world, but I was excited to be in the C—. I’d heard before that it was Graham’s favorite and I wanted to be there myself. I knew of Graham at the time, I’d heard stories about the places he’d been and I’d read his stories. He was a prolific man. He was a reporter and for most of his career, he was the man that people trusted to provide the Truth. For the majority of my education and the beginning of my career, everyone used him as the example of what a real journalist was. I came up just as cable news was becoming a phenomenon and the biggest names in news were the loudest voices with the most extreme opinions. Graham seemed to resist it. He was trying to continue the good work, be a one man Bartlett and Steele or Woodard and Bernstein in a time when print journalism was on the decline. He was dogged in his love for the newspaper and he resisted the transition to digital because he knew that it would devalue the hard work that writers put into crafting their work. I don’t think he presaged anything, honestly I think he was just a stubborn dinosaur, the last of a dying breed who tried to resist reality, but that is a Quixotic mission and he was crushed when layoffs started. He worked at the Times then and they were scaling back the type of in depth, on the scene reporting that Graham did, in print anyway. They told him that he could continue his work, flying all around the world and reporting on destabilization in emerging democracies, but he would have to generate traffic on the website to justify the budget. That was the day the news died for him, he wasn’t the same after that.

“I learned a lot about Graham at the C— when I ventured out of the opulence of my suite on my second day there. When I left my suite, I heard people talking at a distance down the long hall that had the gravitas of a museum. There were square panels of color in the carpet that coordinated with wooden molding on the wall to create the sense of moving through multiple entryways. There were three butlers talking at the end of the hall and I flattened my back against a wall in hopes of hiding behind the wooden molding to eavesdrop on them. 

“‘He just threw it in my face, I couldn’t believe it…,’ one of the young men said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I was so mad, I wanted to hit him.’ ‘Imagine!’ one of the others said with a laugh that spread to all of them before a third voice said more somberly, ‘He likely wanted you to hit him, he’s the type to push just because he can, just to see when someone will break. He’s just destructive, I wonder why the hotel let’s him stay here.’ ‘That’s no real mystery, is it? He’s rich enough to afford the stay and to pay any damages. And who cares if he’s terrorizing butlers? What do we matter when there’s a line of people waiting to take our place? The tips we get are double-edged, it’s way more than we can get most anywhere else and we put up with nearly anything for it.’ ‘I always say it’s not worth it until I see that tip.’ ‘You let that old man feel you up in the writer’s suite, if you can handle that, everything else should be a breeze.’ ‘That hardly ever happens, but Mr. Graham is here four times a year!’ ‘Good thing he’s leaving today.’ ‘It couldn’t come soon enough.’ ‘That red haired guy that always seems to show up when Graham is here will be gone too. He’s a nice guy, but his room always smells so weird when he checks out. And he would definitely pay me to have sex with him.’ ‘He offered, but that’s a line I’ve yet to cross.’ 

“I’ve never heard of staff at the C— reporting abuses from the guests, but maybe it happened a lot and there was just always enough money to toss around to keep it quiet. I tiptoed away from the conversation before they finished and took the elevator down to the lobby. There are a lot of places to sit and wait for things and I tried to position myself so that I had an eye on the main entrance. Apparently Graham was checking out that day and I thought maybe I could bump into him and chat him up. He didn’t have a nice reputation then, the butler conversion that I had overheard didn’t sound out of character for the Kurt Graham I’d come to know from other people’s stories, but he was known to be very pedantic and he loved to impress young writers with his stories, so maybe I could get him talking. Or at the very least, I would finally see him. I realized then that I had never laid eyes on the man. No pictures of him ever ran with his articles, and even then, the internet wasn’t as pervasive as it is now, and a man Graham’s age wouldn’t have had social media of any kind. He was hostile to cable news and was known to avoid cameras altogether. I also realized that I had never been curious about his physical appearance before. I knew he was a man, but his dedication to the Truth that I identified in his work made it easy to forget that. He seemed to achieve a sort of outsider view, like he was above all human emotion and drifted around the world like a specter merely documenting. It was easy to trust his objectivity because his body, his face, was removed from his work. 

“I sat watching people drift through the lobby, and a lot of time passed. What does it look like to have money, enough of it to afford a hotel like that one? Some things are obvious tells. I don’t know a lot about fashion, but expensive clothing is fairly easy to spot, though some people are good at making cheap things look much more expensive. I was most surprised by the families that seemed to be on vacation who would gather in the lobby like a pack of birds settling in the grass. They bustled in loose groups and were excited about whatever activity they congregated for or had just arrived from. Despite the variety of languages the families used, they all seemed like normal, middle class families and I wondered how much a vacation that included a stay at a thousand-dollar-a-night hotel must cost for a family of four. My family growing up was by no means poor, but when we did travel as a family, we generally stayed in hotels that charged less than a hundred dollars a night. Maybe that’s why I don’t have kids, they cost so much and traveling must be complicated and frustrating from the parents’ point of view. The families at the C— didn’t seem to be stressed about money. They didn’t look like overtly rich people, mostly like people from clothing catalogs that most people can afford, but they were all happy and enjoying their time in London.

“I’d been to the city multiple times by that point and there were definitely restaurants and pubs that I revisited when I forced myself out of the comfort of my room, but mostly I was in London to relax and do nothing so I didn’t plan to venture into the city for any tourist activities. The thought of seeing Graham had given my day a purpose beyond relaxing.

“As I was sitting in the lobby and contemplating what I would have for dinner, there was a commotion at the main entrance and I heard someone shouting for the manager. A tall woman in a suit that matched the colors of the uniform of the hotel workers, approached the group of young adults who were the source of the commotion. I got up from my seat and walked closer to hear their conversation.

“‘My bag isn’t here!’ a male voice said angrily. ‘You all were so pushy about me and my friends being out of the suite on time, but your staff was supposed to bring our bags to load them in the car.’ The man didn’t yell, but his voice filled the space and the longer he spoke, the more members of the staff accumulated in a rank and file reminiscent of a military unit. They all looked on with genuine worry, not aggression, like they wanted to be of some help that would put an end to the ordeal. 

“‘There must have been some misunderstanding, sir,’ the manager said confidently and politely. ‘My staff tells me that all of the luggage designated to be transported by staff has been loaded into your car waiting outside. Have you confirmed that the bag in question isn’t already inside?’

“The man yelled as the group moved outside to the car followed by the manager and a few of the staff. The rest of the ranks seemed to disappear as quietly as they had appeared and there was something eerie about their presence. I thought about the butlers that I had heard in the hallway and if I hadn’t heard them complaining, I never would have spotted them at the end of the hall. The staff of the hotel seemed to only appear exactly when they were needed, as though they always waited just out of sight for the right cue to come around a corner. Don’t get me wrong, the staff of the C— are all very nice and professional people who are very good at their jobs and I have never had a bad encounter with any of them. But there is a spectrum of kindness and accomodations and if you go too far in the wrong direction, attention to the needs of guests can veer into the creepy and make a guest feel surveilled. 

“‘Did that group leave already?’ I heard a man next to me ask. He seemed out of breath, as though he had rushed to the lobby. I told him that the group had left and he cursed.

“‘Dammit! I always miss him. I’ve charged so much to my account staying here, I’m gonna get fired.’ I asked him who he had missed. ‘Graham, Kurt Graham. The Kurt Graham, legendary newsman, the last journalist. He always checks out like that, ever since that first time I talked to him. When I found out a few years ago that he always stays here when he’s in London, I got a room and stalked the lobby until he came down and I forced a conversation. I shouldn’t have done it, I knew he wouldn’t be able to appreciate me going to the lengths that I did to see him, but it was very necessary for me to meet him. People our age can’t know what the world was like before we had computers around everywhere. There was a time when the news meant something. Digging up the truth and exposing corruption, or traveling to a far off destination to report life there, that was precious. Now there’s just so much out there, so much information, everything gets blended into a cacophony of noise. And I wanted to meet the last man whose writing really touched me, really cut through all the noise and informed me about injustices that I believed to have been corrected a long time ago that were still thriving in the present. He didn’t want to be anything but the words that told his stories and I can understand that, I should have respected it, but I wanted him to tell me that my work meets his standard. I’ll never know until he tells me.’

“The man was white and he had wild red hair that matched the intensity of his eyes. It was strange that he talked so much, but I listened to him and asked him to sit with me at a table in the interior lobby and tell me more about Graham.

“‘He always has someone cause a commotion to bring the brigade of hotel staff and then he slips out the front unseen. I haven’t seen him since that first time, he’s very good at hiding.’

“I asked what Graham looked like, and the man looked confused for a second, then said, “I remember his eyes. They pierced me, held me at a distance. His voice, when he talked, I was stunned…I was something. I had to listen, and he wasn’t kind. I violated his privacy, I know, but I just need to know what he thinks about my work. I hope one day he can tell me. Maybe I can join his group.’

“I wish that he hadn’t said that last thing. Then I wouldn’t have been tempted to ask, and if I hadn’t asked him what he meant, he would have continued babbling. But he did say it, and I did ask, ‘What group does he have?’ I regret those words more than anything that happened after. Nothing that ensued was possible without that idiotic question.”