Final Edition1949 

In the dream I see the Moorish domes and tile floors of the Examiner building in downtown Los Angeles, my father’s world, model for Hearst Castle. I smell the paper and the ink and the hot lead, and I feel father’s hand holding mine as we walk the high catwalk from the editorial building to the press building, hearing the growl of the trucks at the loading docks below. 

Across the bridge a door opens onto the top landing of a cast-iron stairway bolted to the wall, half-way up the four story height of the great web presses that stand side by side in the cavernous vault, ten feet from our perch. The machines rise out of darkness and tower above us in the charcoal light of ink-misted windows, an iron-age cathedral. I’m only seven but I know it’s a mythic scene.

I’m frightened to look down through the grillework, but father tightens his grip and I cling close and we descend the open stairs, down and slowly down, like lowering into a coal  mine, down and down onto a second landing, and we’re below Earth’s surface now and there are no windows and we continue on down into lamp-lit darkness and step off onto the floor of the world. 

The ancient floor is crossed with dolly tracks that transport great wheels of paper to turntables where pressmen load the presses. The broad white ribbons are stretched taut now, waiting. Pressmen with lamps roam the hives of iron above, traversing narrow bridges from one dark tower to another, into which they disappear.

It's almost time, father says. We climb back up the stairs to the first landing and I stand close to him, and now red lights flash and a ringer rings loud and there’s a lurch somewhere and the mighty engines begin to groan into ponderous motion, begin to move their unthinkable gears, winding them forward like the drivewheels of a legendary locomotive, and the sonorous drone of smooth-moving steel begins to rise with the gathering momentum into a steady thunder that drums my stomach and thrills me. 

The rushing river of paper screams through its zig-zag web with an air-splitting pitch that loosens the letters from their words and whirls them into alphabet clouds that print a fatal text on my father’s lungs with each breath he takes. It wasn’t the ink that killed him. It was all those lies.