The Human Price (Part 2/3)
Title: The Human Price
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Political backlash turns violent after Rachel Maddow's reporting on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda.
Disclaimer: All copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. This work is not created for profit and constitutes fair use. References to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
“You’re a symbol.”
“I am a snare drum, at least.”
-- Keith Olbermann & Rachel Maddow
( Part 1)
Keith didn’t go on the air that day, so he never found out if he could have maintained his composure as news of the shooting broke in erratic waves. He later explained that his bosses had ordered him to stay home. “They actually thought that it was too dangerous for me to step outside. It felt like we were under siege.”
He spent the morning making calls, dragging information out of every reporter within his reach. Rachel had been rushed to the emergency room - no word on how badly she was hurt. There was a witness. Police had a lead, then they didn’t, then they’d made an arrest. They were organizing a press conference but they didn’t know when it would happen. Still no word.
It was early afternoon before one of his contacts got through to a reliable source at the hospital. She was being moved out of surgery. Serious but stable condition, they were saying. The official statement would be out within twenty minutes.
“What else can you tell me?” Keith said. He’d stopped shaking but he still felt sick; pain throbbed behind his eyes.
“It wasn’t a robbery. There’s a rumor that the suspect has been seen wandering around the area before, but we can’t confirm it. The police are shutting us out even more than usual.”
He went to the hospital soon afterwards, calling from the taxi to find out which entrance was furthest from the cameras. The press conference was enough of a distraction to get him inside. He knew - and everyone from Katy to MSNBC’s top management would remind him for days - that it was beyond reckless and he’d be lucky if he didn’t make things worse. He knew that, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Some of Rachel’s friends had made it to the hospital before the media onslaught. Keith was led to the foyer where they were being held, monitored by security guards and nervous administrative staff. There were a few people he recognized from radio or television; the rest were strangers to him. Most of them knew who he was, not that it mattered now. He met their glances and saw only pained sympathy.
But when he saw Susan among them he nearly called out in surprise. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs along the wall with her coat clutched in her lap. A friend was sitting with her, holding her hand. He edged through the room and crouched beside them.
“How long have you been out here?”
Susan stared at him. Her face, half-hidden behind her hair, was raw and swollen from crying. “They won’t tell me anything,” she said.
“Who won’t? Susan, have you spoken to a doctor?”
She couldn’t answer. Her friend told him, in a low trembling voice, that the staff wouldn’t let Susan into the ICU - “because she’s not family.”
Keith let his breath out slowly. He remembered Rachel talking about how they could have married in Massachusetts but didn’t, how proudly they believed that their love didn’t need anyone’s approval. He also knew they were prepared; they had advanced directives, power-of-attorney documents. There was no reason to keep Susan out. It was an absurd bureaucratic mistake, the kind of thing that would become a PR disaster if the media latched onto it.
That was his job.
Keith looked over his shoulder at the staff behind the desk; they’d already noticed him. “I’m going to talk to them,” he told her. “Stay here.”
***
For the first 48 hours, everyone in the media seemed stunned. All discussions of politics, the wars, the healthcare debate - everything was put on hold while they tried to understand what had happened. Much of the coverage focused on the vigils that sprang up in New York and around the country, thousands of people from all backgrounds who gathered to pray for Rachel and support each other.
On the evening of the second day, new details surfaced about the man in custody. He had ties to a fundamentalist group that had been calling for a holy war against homosexuality and abortion - a group that was publicly associated with right-wing activists and several US Congressmen. “I am marked,” he’d posted on their website, “to become a martyr for God.”
All hell broke loose.
Keith went back on the air that night. It might have been a mistake. Viewers were shocked at how haggard he looked, as if he’d aged ten years. He veered into helpless fury more than once - “All of you bastards have blood on your hands!” - and his voice was in constant danger of breaking.
But he kept moving. He painstakingly reported the developments of the investigation, and when there was news of Rachel’s condition he passed it on with whatever words of comfort he could manage. “We continue to be deeply moved by the love and courage you have expressed,” he said. “Our hearts go out to Rachel and her family.”
***
It was the end of a long week - the third long week, in fact - when Keith visited her in the hospital. He couldn’t have explained why he’d put it off this long, or why he suddenly couldn’t put it off any longer.
He called a cab from the studio after his show was over, considered buying flowers, thought better of it. It was past visiting hours but the staff let him through. One of the nurses escorted him to Rachel’s room and then scurried back to her station as if he was about to start throwing things. As usual, he’d made a reputation for himself.
The room was littered with newspapers. They lay in stacks on the floor, crowded vases of flowers into corners. Rachel was awake, reading an issue of Newsweek by the harsh yellow light of the bedside lamp. It took her a second to realize he was there.
“Keith.”
“Hi.”
For a moment she looked startled, almost worried. Then it passed, and she waved him to a chair next to the bed. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. You?”
“I’ve been better.” She winced a bit as she pulled herself upright, bracing her hand against the bandages on her right side. Keith gripped the bed’s railing to stop himself from trying to help her. She was thin, and her hair was longer than it had been for a while, curling against her neck.
“Where’s Susan?” he said.
“I told her to go get some rest.”
“At the apartment?”
Rachel frowned. “Hotel. I’m not sending her back there.”
Keith nodded, wondering what to say next. He looked up when Rachel took hold of his wrist.
“She told me what you did for her.”
“It was nothing.”
Her fingers tightened briefly. “Don’t play modest, it doesn’t suit you. And thanks. Really. I won’t forget it.”
“You’re welcome.”
She let him go and fidgeted with the magazine she’d been reading. It was open to a page emblazoned with her picture, an airbrushed promo shot with the network logo in the background. Abruptly she flipped the magazine closed and tossed it to the floor.
“You’d think that after the hundredth Harvey Milk comparison, someone would come up with a new angle to push.” There was an unfamiliar bitterness in her voice.
“I suppose it’s better than the Evil Gay Agenda idea,” he joked feebly.
Rachel swept a glance over the stacks of newspapers around the room - week after week of headlines and outraged editorials. “I hate this,” she said. “It isn’t some abstract political allegory, I don’t embody anything. It’s meaningless and brutal and stupid.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I’m a wreck, Keith. My family are terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
It was a warning as much as it was a confession. A heavy silence stretched between them as Keith tried to imagine the world of mainstream media without her and realized with bleak clarity that he could, that she’d always been an unlikely fit and they’d had unbelievable good luck to hold onto her at all.
None of which he could possibly have said to her. He cleared his throat and busied himself digging through the bag he’d brought with him. “Are you on medication at the moment?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
She peered at him. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He pulled out a half-empty water bottle and handed it to her. She unscrewed the cap, smelled the clear liquid and sighed, dropping her head back against the pillow. “You do know I love you, right?”
“Well, you’d better.”
Rachel smiled, drank twice and tilted the bottle toward him. He took a mouthful himself and passed it back. For a few minutes they shared the gin without speaking. Down the hall they could hear orderlies chatting, a laugh track from a sitcom.
“Some Friday night,” she said.
***
She was released not long after that. The cameras caught a glimpse of her and Susan on the icy sidewalk outside the sliding doors, their faces lowered and their arms around each other, as nurses helped them into the car that would take them back to Massachusetts. They were followed closely by a snowstorm that buried the roads for nearly a week.
MSNBC quietly took her name off the 9 PM timeslot. They scheduled reruns of other shows until they could find someone else to step in - temporarily, of course, while Rachel recovered. There was a handful of days when everyone in the office went through the motions and thought things they didn’t want to acknowledge to each other.
Then the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti broke over them, shoving everything else aside. Keith struggled forward along with the rest, filling in as news anchor when he was needed, shaping a grim narrative from the footage and reporting that came in. Most of the time he managed to distance himself appropriately, but he was exhausted and it was difficult. He lost sight of Rachel in his mind then, and his only concrete sense of how much he missed her was in the unusually late nights he kept spending in his office, studying the minutiae of the relief effort as she might have done.
It was shaping up to be one of those nights, sometime in early February, when a member of his staff knocked lightly on the door. “Hey, it just came in over the wire service. They’re shelving the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. Too much pressure from American religious leaders, apparently.”
He sat back and weighed that somber relief for a moment. “Good. Thanks.”
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Political backlash turns violent after Rachel Maddow's reporting on the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda.
Disclaimer: All copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. This work is not created for profit and constitutes fair use. References to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
“You’re a symbol.”
“I am a snare drum, at least.”
-- Keith Olbermann & Rachel Maddow
( Part 1)
Keith didn’t go on the air that day, so he never found out if he could have maintained his composure as news of the shooting broke in erratic waves. He later explained that his bosses had ordered him to stay home. “They actually thought that it was too dangerous for me to step outside. It felt like we were under siege.”
He spent the morning making calls, dragging information out of every reporter within his reach. Rachel had been rushed to the emergency room - no word on how badly she was hurt. There was a witness. Police had a lead, then they didn’t, then they’d made an arrest. They were organizing a press conference but they didn’t know when it would happen. Still no word.
It was early afternoon before one of his contacts got through to a reliable source at the hospital. She was being moved out of surgery. Serious but stable condition, they were saying. The official statement would be out within twenty minutes.
“What else can you tell me?” Keith said. He’d stopped shaking but he still felt sick; pain throbbed behind his eyes.
“It wasn’t a robbery. There’s a rumor that the suspect has been seen wandering around the area before, but we can’t confirm it. The police are shutting us out even more than usual.”
He went to the hospital soon afterwards, calling from the taxi to find out which entrance was furthest from the cameras. The press conference was enough of a distraction to get him inside. He knew - and everyone from Katy to MSNBC’s top management would remind him for days - that it was beyond reckless and he’d be lucky if he didn’t make things worse. He knew that, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Some of Rachel’s friends had made it to the hospital before the media onslaught. Keith was led to the foyer where they were being held, monitored by security guards and nervous administrative staff. There were a few people he recognized from radio or television; the rest were strangers to him. Most of them knew who he was, not that it mattered now. He met their glances and saw only pained sympathy.
But when he saw Susan among them he nearly called out in surprise. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs along the wall with her coat clutched in her lap. A friend was sitting with her, holding her hand. He edged through the room and crouched beside them.
“How long have you been out here?”
Susan stared at him. Her face, half-hidden behind her hair, was raw and swollen from crying. “They won’t tell me anything,” she said.
“Who won’t? Susan, have you spoken to a doctor?”
She couldn’t answer. Her friend told him, in a low trembling voice, that the staff wouldn’t let Susan into the ICU - “because she’s not family.”
Keith let his breath out slowly. He remembered Rachel talking about how they could have married in Massachusetts but didn’t, how proudly they believed that their love didn’t need anyone’s approval. He also knew they were prepared; they had advanced directives, power-of-attorney documents. There was no reason to keep Susan out. It was an absurd bureaucratic mistake, the kind of thing that would become a PR disaster if the media latched onto it.
That was his job.
Keith looked over his shoulder at the staff behind the desk; they’d already noticed him. “I’m going to talk to them,” he told her. “Stay here.”
***
For the first 48 hours, everyone in the media seemed stunned. All discussions of politics, the wars, the healthcare debate - everything was put on hold while they tried to understand what had happened. Much of the coverage focused on the vigils that sprang up in New York and around the country, thousands of people from all backgrounds who gathered to pray for Rachel and support each other.
On the evening of the second day, new details surfaced about the man in custody. He had ties to a fundamentalist group that had been calling for a holy war against homosexuality and abortion - a group that was publicly associated with right-wing activists and several US Congressmen. “I am marked,” he’d posted on their website, “to become a martyr for God.”
All hell broke loose.
Keith went back on the air that night. It might have been a mistake. Viewers were shocked at how haggard he looked, as if he’d aged ten years. He veered into helpless fury more than once - “All of you bastards have blood on your hands!” - and his voice was in constant danger of breaking.
But he kept moving. He painstakingly reported the developments of the investigation, and when there was news of Rachel’s condition he passed it on with whatever words of comfort he could manage. “We continue to be deeply moved by the love and courage you have expressed,” he said. “Our hearts go out to Rachel and her family.”
***
It was the end of a long week - the third long week, in fact - when Keith visited her in the hospital. He couldn’t have explained why he’d put it off this long, or why he suddenly couldn’t put it off any longer.
He called a cab from the studio after his show was over, considered buying flowers, thought better of it. It was past visiting hours but the staff let him through. One of the nurses escorted him to Rachel’s room and then scurried back to her station as if he was about to start throwing things. As usual, he’d made a reputation for himself.
The room was littered with newspapers. They lay in stacks on the floor, crowded vases of flowers into corners. Rachel was awake, reading an issue of Newsweek by the harsh yellow light of the bedside lamp. It took her a second to realize he was there.
“Keith.”
“Hi.”
For a moment she looked startled, almost worried. Then it passed, and she waved him to a chair next to the bed. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. You?”
“I’ve been better.” She winced a bit as she pulled herself upright, bracing her hand against the bandages on her right side. Keith gripped the bed’s railing to stop himself from trying to help her. She was thin, and her hair was longer than it had been for a while, curling against her neck.
“Where’s Susan?” he said.
“I told her to go get some rest.”
“At the apartment?”
Rachel frowned. “Hotel. I’m not sending her back there.”
Keith nodded, wondering what to say next. He looked up when Rachel took hold of his wrist.
“She told me what you did for her.”
“It was nothing.”
Her fingers tightened briefly. “Don’t play modest, it doesn’t suit you. And thanks. Really. I won’t forget it.”
“You’re welcome.”
She let him go and fidgeted with the magazine she’d been reading. It was open to a page emblazoned with her picture, an airbrushed promo shot with the network logo in the background. Abruptly she flipped the magazine closed and tossed it to the floor.
“You’d think that after the hundredth Harvey Milk comparison, someone would come up with a new angle to push.” There was an unfamiliar bitterness in her voice.
“I suppose it’s better than the Evil Gay Agenda idea,” he joked feebly.
Rachel swept a glance over the stacks of newspapers around the room - week after week of headlines and outraged editorials. “I hate this,” she said. “It isn’t some abstract political allegory, I don’t embody anything. It’s meaningless and brutal and stupid.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I’m a wreck, Keith. My family are terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
It was a warning as much as it was a confession. A heavy silence stretched between them as Keith tried to imagine the world of mainstream media without her and realized with bleak clarity that he could, that she’d always been an unlikely fit and they’d had unbelievable good luck to hold onto her at all.
None of which he could possibly have said to her. He cleared his throat and busied himself digging through the bag he’d brought with him. “Are you on medication at the moment?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
She peered at him. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
He pulled out a half-empty water bottle and handed it to her. She unscrewed the cap, smelled the clear liquid and sighed, dropping her head back against the pillow. “You do know I love you, right?”
“Well, you’d better.”
Rachel smiled, drank twice and tilted the bottle toward him. He took a mouthful himself and passed it back. For a few minutes they shared the gin without speaking. Down the hall they could hear orderlies chatting, a laugh track from a sitcom.
“Some Friday night,” she said.
***
She was released not long after that. The cameras caught a glimpse of her and Susan on the icy sidewalk outside the sliding doors, their faces lowered and their arms around each other, as nurses helped them into the car that would take them back to Massachusetts. They were followed closely by a snowstorm that buried the roads for nearly a week.
MSNBC quietly took her name off the 9 PM timeslot. They scheduled reruns of other shows until they could find someone else to step in - temporarily, of course, while Rachel recovered. There was a handful of days when everyone in the office went through the motions and thought things they didn’t want to acknowledge to each other.
Then the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti broke over them, shoving everything else aside. Keith struggled forward along with the rest, filling in as news anchor when he was needed, shaping a grim narrative from the footage and reporting that came in. Most of the time he managed to distance himself appropriately, but he was exhausted and it was difficult. He lost sight of Rachel in his mind then, and his only concrete sense of how much he missed her was in the unusually late nights he kept spending in his office, studying the minutiae of the relief effort as she might have done.
It was shaping up to be one of those nights, sometime in early February, when a member of his staff knocked lightly on the door. “Hey, it just came in over the wire service. They’re shelving the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. Too much pressure from American religious leaders, apparently.”
He sat back and weighed that somber relief for a moment. “Good. Thanks.”