The Question Before the Answer
The correspondent carried two notebooks.
The first was for facts.
The second was for the questions she realized she should have asked after the interview was over.
She had started carrying it years ago.
The commander noticed it almost immediately.
“You’ve come prepared.”
“I’ve come prepared to discover I wasn’t.”
He smiled.
“That’s rarer.”
The first hour produced exactly what both expected.
Timelines.
Procedures.
Operational decisions.
She filled pages with careful notes and found almost nothing she wanted to remember.
Then, almost absentmindedly, he said,
“We could use less theatrical fog.”
She circled the words.
He noticed.
“Don’t.”
She looked up.
“Don’t what?”
“Turn that into the story.”
She smiled.
“It is a good sentence.”
“It may not be.”
She rested her pen.
“What did you mean?”
He looked toward the observation window.
“I’ve spent enough time around theatres to know that fog has a purpose.”
She waited.
“It isn’t there to help you see.”
“No?”
“It’s there to help the lights.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.”
Another pause.
“It becomes a problem when the audience mistakes the lights for the play.”
She looked back at the notebook.
The sentence was still attractive.
She could already imagine it becoming tomorrow’s headline.
She closed the notebook.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
“Tell me about the play.”
For the first time that afternoon, he looked uncertain.
“You’ve changed the question.”
“I think you asked me to.”
He laughed quietly.
“Fair enough.”
Silence settled between them.
“You care too much about this to be talking only about journalism.”
His eyes stayed on the table.
“Who taught you?”
He didn’t answer.
She let the silence remain.
Eventually he said,
“A witness.”
“We were investigating him.”
“For what?”
“We believed two transcripts proved he’d lied.”
“You believed it?”
“I argued it.”
She didn’t write.
“What happened?”
He leaned back.
“I can still remember the questions.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
“The first was:
‘Did your office obtain the contents of those messages from the telephone company?’
“He answered,
‘No.’
“The second came weeks later:
‘Did your investigators later review those same messages after they had been preserved elsewhere?’
“He answered,
‘Yes.’”
The commander fell silent.
She looked down at her notes.
She read the two questions again.
Slowly.
Once.
Then a second time.
The room became very quiet.
She frowned.
“They…”
She stopped.
“They aren’t asking the same thing.”
He said nothing.
She read them again.
The contradiction she had seen only moments before seemed to dissolve without anyone touching it.
She looked up.
“So you hadn’t caught him lying.”
“No.”
“You’d separated the answers from their questions.”
He nodded.
“We were very pleased with ourselves.”
She closed the notebook.
“What did he do?”
“He waited.”
Another silence.
“Then he apologized.”
She looked up sharply.
“He apologized?”
“He said he could understand why we’d thought they contradicted each other.”
“And did you apologize?”
“I did.”
“Was that difficult?”
“No.”
He looked down at his hands.
“The difficult part came later.”
She waited.
“I kept wondering what those three weeks had been like for him.”
The room was quiet enough that she could hear the ventilation behind the bulkhead.
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never asked?”
He shook his head.
“I should have.”
She let that answer remain where it landed.
She looked down at the notebook again.
Less theatrical fog.
It was still a good sentence.
It simply wasn’t the story anymore.
She drew one careful line through it.
He noticed.
“I’ve never seen a journalist do that.”
“I haven’t crossed it out.”
“No?”
“I’ve moved it.”
He smiled.
“To where?”
She tapped the first notebook.
“After the witness.”
He looked puzzled.
She answered before he could ask.
“I thought the story was about a clever metaphor.”
She closed the notebook.
“It turns out it was about a man who spent weeks proving he wasn’t a liar.”
Neither of them spoke.
Outside, traffic drifted soundlessly across the darkness beyond the station.
She reached for the second notebook.
The one reserved for forgotten questions.
She opened it to the first blank page and wrote:
Who pays the price when an answer loses its question?
She closed it.
Then she opened the first notebook again.
“Let’s begin again.”
He nodded.
“Where?”
She looked at him.
“With the witness.”
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Travel in Life 