The Times’s local rovers, native floaters, chatted circles around her—they were Germans whose English was so competent that the paper had been able to discard its regular permanent foreign correspondents like second swizzlesticks. Laidoff, forgotten on a tray, as the budgets melted to water everything down. With ad revenue shrinking and so pagecounts shrinking it was better to downsize a single staff job with benefits into two dozen freelance gigs, relying on Germans to cover Germany, musicians to cover Music, artists to cover Art, dancers to terpsichore on the generalist’s mass grave. Media being the last limit of our culture, this woman was one of the last culture staffers left, for the last major paper published in America’s last major publishing city—or, to put it directly, like a journalist would, the Times put her on a plane from NY to write about NY people at the bookfair—they would’ve sent her to Abbottabad had wahhabi warlords bought fullpage ads for Allah.

Finn especially, I’m sure he’s had to do with her—fill in a byline, whichever might be remembered from such filings as “Slicing, Dicing, Ebook Pricing,” or else “Remote Revision: Amazon Alters Ebook Content Without Consent.” Say Finn’s ergosedentarily decumbent with feet propped atop the slushpile of a lazy day, pondering out the window whether that pigeon below him is crippled or just resting, and the phone rings, she has his directline, and he picks up, and she goes all Torquemada inquisitive.

I can’t speak to anything about any layoff/reshuffling, he says. Regrettably. A Joshua Cohen memoir? Who? Hang up. Out amid that sixth floor catchment pool subroofed over Broadway, a pigeon either crippled or resting.

She extracted herself from the klatsch of Germans, taking appetizing nips out of every other server. Dipping crudités. Making cocktail napkin waves. Leaving her pda with a kebab skewer on a tray, turning, retrieving it.

She was big in her little black dress, lashed to it with lathered beads. Pageboyed, her complexion the result of mixed and matched 10 sites’ cosmetic tips, glimmer, shimmer, comedogenic, an It girl who then had to earn It.

“Hey, Cohen, is that you?”

“This is me,” I said, “and this is a vodka soda.”

“Fuck, Cohen—are you alright?”

“Just fine.”

“Seriously?”

“Allergies, it’s an allergic reaction.”

“To the vodka? Or small quiches?”

“Smalltalk.”

LOL, “It’s been since, what? The New Yorker holiday party, 2000s ago?”

“The Copper Age. Early Church.”

“So?”

“What?”

“So who are you here for?”

I popped the quiche and chewed, which kept the expression straight and the tears in check and with a green mouth said, “On spec.”

“Nope, no way.”

“I’m a visiting scholar at the Institut für Sozialforschung,” swallowing, frigid crusts and core.

“Legit?”

I wheezed, “I just happened to be in Frankfurt on assignment for a blog about Euro men’s fashion.”

“Fuck you.”

“Negotiating the reorganization of IG Farben? Or attempting to overthrow the landtag of Hesse?”

“Fuck you limp,” and she went to flip around my lanyard, but I put my hand over hers and prevented her, held her.

Then she withdrew and smoothed the stripe in her hair, puce until the roots, “Why don’t you just promise you’re not filing tonight?”

“Lots of plans tonight but none include filing. Swear on my totebag.”

“Then you can be a source.”

“I’ve been called worse, even nonanonymously.”

“Mind if I ask you a question?”

She, Mary, Mariana (her own lanyard listing free from her breasts), was after the story—I’d better capitalize that, the Story—a tale that functioned like a sixth sense organ alive and proprioceptive, without which it didn’t matter what’d happened in Frankfurt, it might as well have been that nothing had happened.

The Story wasn’t everything, of course, but its telling had to convince editors that it was, or at least had to convince readers that it was—had to story its way into obliterating any intimations of alternative or individual experience. This was the worst of journalism—the realization that no matter how diligently you worked to be impartial, your presence alone was the slant, the tilt, and that even transcendence would have to become narrated, narratized, plotted.

The true story of the fair—she’d clutched for clickerpen, flippad—was that the world rights in every format to every fair’s true story were determined beforehand. All the year’s significant bookdeals were already arranged prior to Frankfurt, in emails, priority whispers. Frankfurt, then, was just where they were announced—when you brought a media property to market, you brought it presold to show it off, or show its price—though details such as the ebook royalty percentage on “copies” exceeding 100,000 might still have to be parsed by the carving stations, untangled on the dancefloor. What other industry has been so neuroticized that it needs a party as an excuse to do business? and needs a business as an excuse to party?

Everyone in this industry was a frustrated writer, which is like all Chairpeople of the Board being frustrated assemblyline workers or machinists, everyone had been a humanities grad with a dream—and that and that alone was the Story, perennially, a tale of people who’d bargained their ways into the business side of books and then once annually were given the opportunity to live their delusion of being crucial to a culture with a trip to a barbarian land conspicuously lacking in the one presence that depressed them at home: writers.

Mary, myself, and the other journalists gawking nonchalance as we sidled to the bar—awkward malcontents mentally annotating who I might’ve been—might’ve been the only writers around.

“The story is two writers discussing the story,” I said, “two writers afraid of missing the story and so inventing the story, inventing whatever it would scare us to have missed, nicht wahr?”

“Off the record?”

“Off, on, background, foreground—we’re doing Jäger shots in Germany.”

“Are we? Why don’t you have another kebab and then we’ll consider?”

“The story’s the same as it always was, what are the sums. The biggest advance is the biggest story, vice versa. It’s how one print industry rewards another for paying out its confidence so recklessly. I’m fine, I’m fine—two Jägermeisters, bitte.”

“You sure?”

“I’m saying the shareholders. Can’t read. Do they even issue stock certificates on paper? Don’t they just expect you to download and print nowadays?”

LOL again, and we cheersed and took the shots down.

I spilled and either she was indulging me by refusing to notice or her break was over and it was back to her job. She recounted which panels she’d attended before asking which were my faves—the oldest reporting trick in the—and I told her, inventing who spoke on what and what they said, she asked my opinion of the opening speech, and I gave it to her, and either she was fucking with me or fucking lying too because she agreed with me, then she went on to describe the Messe hall architecture so effectively that I’ve plagiarized her—all the roach/armadillo/Transformers comparisons were hers, above—and then a male Magyar bonobo swung over and said in a menthol dialect, “Congratulations, it is very [unintelligble], New Ink,” or “News, Inc.,” “Jew Kink,” “Next Drink,” crawled on.

“Congrats—to you?” she said, the pad open again.

“Can’t imagine on what. He must’ve gotten me confused with someone else.”

“Someone like Caleb Krast?” and she twitched her pen along my ribs.

“So we’ve finally gotten to the point of this flirtation.”

“Don’t you know him?”

“Guy with chronic stink breath from an oral hygiene aversion, the cashmere sweaters that cloy at the midriff, still trying to squeeze into slimfits, preshredded—Cal, I know.”