Oikos Gnosis

A Novel

by Lawrence Abby Gauthier

Chapter One

The Biggest Story in the World

(Paris, 2023)

Scene I

“I’m done writing,” Benny announced plaintively, ending a long, contemplative silence.

Virginia recognized the Sad Sack look of a Basset hound waiting for a really big dog to finish eating. Benny was having one of “those days.”

A few hundred kilometers to the east, Ukraine was on fire, a killing field. To the west, the sun was setting on Europe, birthplace of the first civilization to go to the moon.

Through their hotel window, Benny looked down and out over and across the rooftops of Paris towards the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against a dirty pink horizon while Virginia folded clothes, arranging them in neat piles, preparing for the nine-hour flight back home to America, to Colorado, where most of the killing was on the other side of the world.

Benny was wandering around in his underwear and a coffee-stained t-shirt.

Virginia had learned to ignore him when he got like this. By now she knew him well enough to know that it would pass. She’d talked about his recurring dark days with close friends. They said it was important for her to remember that it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was because he was a writer, they said. They’d heard that writers are like that.

In a tone once reserved for the Confessional, Benny went on… “I’ve seen the future and it’s coming, like tomorrow, no matter what I do. Why write if there’s no effect?  I’m getting old. I’m tired. I’m wasting my time, and your time, too. We’re in Paris, for Chrissake, and I’m uninspired. What kind of writer is uninspired in Paris? I’m done, I swear. Finis. I’ll spend more time in the garden, maybe get involved in local politics, join a yoga class for old people. We’ll have more sex. But as a writer, I’m defeated. I’m dry. I can’t write the story.”

Ahh... the story.

The biggest story in the world.

Benny had been working on the story for forty years of days and nights, since 1979. He was just 31 years old when a city editor first handed him the assignment.

With all the naïve confidence of a young man unaware of his own limitations, and without situational awareness, Benny was sure that he’d be the one to crack the case. He knew how to do it. He’d learned how from Jake.

Jake had been his first editor when he was a rookie reporter. That was in 1971, the year Nixon officially ended Bretton Woods.

At the end of his first day on the job, Jake called Benny into his office and closed the door. Jake was old but didn’t want to retire. He kept a pint of Jack Daniels in a desk drawer. He poured a couple half-glass shots and leaned back in his chair. Like he’d been told, when he was a rookie, back in his Chicago days, when Capone was big news, he told the new kid about the Golden Rule, like revealing the secret code of a medieval guild -- the 5-W’s

who, what, when, where, why

“Follow the rules,” Jake said, “and you’ll crack the case.”

So, nearly a decade later, in 1979, when the biggest story in the world fell into his lap, Benny knew what to do with it.

Getting the first four W’s wasn’t too hard. By the late 70s it was obvious to anybody with half a brain. The war was over, but America’s industrial heartland was quickly being turned into a rust belt. Small town’s boarding up. Empty spaces in factory parking lots like an old wino’s mouth with missing teeth.

With just a few phone calls to contacts who trusted him, Benny knew who was doing what, when and where.

For the next 40 years, however, he would struggle with the “why.”

Why would anybody do anything like that?

Why?

Some days he didn’t even want to know.

(to be continued)