The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  Clark was still missing. He was anxious. He was depressed. He was probably still in his room. He would be pathetically thrilled to see me and pathetically disappointed not to see her. In his weakened state, it would be easy to persuade him to spill everything he knew about my father.

  The down elevator kept stopping in front of packs of impatient passengers, all of whom wanted to go up. The only other occupant, a fidgety crew member—Noel, from the Philippines—kept shaking his head at them, barely remembering to smile. He was slender and inconveniently tall for cruise ship work, and when the elevator was in motion, he kept scratching at his black, stain-proof pants leg. Chomp security would have thrown him against the elevator’s sidewall and frisked him for a gun. Why would a leader of xenophobes have chosen a cruise for his comeback rally? Why not a NASCAR race or an elk-hunting safari or a beach party in Galveston? Maybe Chomp was more complex than I thought. Having met him, I could confirm that he was impulsive, arrogant, boastful, friendly, and a little lonely. But I also knew that a few minutes’ encounter was far from sufficient to reveal more than a few daubs of personality, especially in a man who was flexible enough to charm so many millions of people across a vast and diverse country.

  Clark, on the other hand, I knew through and through. Not as well as my dad, but well enough. I suddenly pitied him. Always to be summed up at a glance, or from a single remark. He was odd-looking and conventional, predictable in conversation, appreciated by his friends mainly for his availability and his money. And he was aware of all these things. My mother had given his days an unlooked-for sparkle. He had seen her as his best chance to enjoy the last robust portion of his life. He wouldn’t give it up easily. He had survived surgery and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He and my father had more in common than their broken hearts; they had a quiet kind of courage that allowed them to endure disappointment with hope intact.

  The elevator arrived at Clark’s floor—also Chomp’s floor. I walked to the forward end, just around the corner from Chomp’s suite. I wondered if Jimbo was back at his post. I decided not to check. I knocked at Clark’s door, suite 1103. The only human in sight was a male steward unloading linens from a closet in the hallway. All the passengers were at the Sailaway.

  “It’s me, Clark!” I called. “Jacob! I came to talk.”

  No sound came from within. I would wait a moment. He might be in the bathroom. What if, after all, he had a woman inside? I had to be ready for that. I had to be ready for anything. A veteran travel writer should appear always interested but never surprised—not always easy in a world where Chomp had become president.

  The steward kept glancing up at me. I couldn’t blame him. This obviously wasn’t my room, and I was refusing to walk away.

  I pretended to fish in my pocket. “Here it is!” I pulled out Clark’s cardkey. If he was out, I could leave a note. If he was in there getting lucky with his new girlfriend—well, he should have told me to go away. I inserted the cardkey.

  Clark was lying on the bed. Blood had soaked through the sheets. His body was sunk deep in the sagging mattress, like a gemstone in its setting. His baby-blue polo shirt had a wide pinkish-blue stain across the middle, a cummerbund of blood. His eyes were closed. The canyons and crags of his face were flat, as if he’d been lying there, eroding, for eons.

  Someone gasped. It was the steward. He had pushed his cart to the doorway to see what was going on.

  I lunged for the desk phone and hit zero. Some operator’s voice replied. What were you supposed to say? I cried out: “Code blue!” No, that was Grey’s Anatomy. I used to know all the cruise’s secret codes. Cruise writers like to shout them at bars when somebody’s passed out.

  My ear was in pain. The steward was shouting something in it: “Blue star.” I finally understood, and spoke the words.

  The operator had understood the first time.

  Chapter 11

  I escaped Clark’s room as soon as the medical team arrived—they wanted me gone anyway. I left my name with the steward.

  The Lido was crammed full of jittery people breathing hard in anticipation of Chomp’s Sailaway appearance, giving the whole place the warmth of a giant throat. The music was done, and Chomp was set to arrive at any moment. I looked for my mother—there, still at the balcony bar. As I inched my way through the crowd to the stairs, I kept my eyes on her. Even from below, I could see her shoulders bobbing in laughter and her mouth flashing. She was making friends. She was happy. What was I going to say to her? Her sorrow in the face of death had always been tightly controlled, her efficiency and good humor unimpaired. She had organized both her parents’ funerals. At her grandfather’s, old Edward Hennrikus, from my grandfather’s bowling team, burst out crying in the receiving line. The man was a widower, a Korean War vet, a churchgoer, and a jerk—a terror to supermarket cashiers, bank tellers, and bowling-lane attendants. Everyone else at the funeral stepped back, as if afraid his tears were a trap. My mother came forward with a tissue. She sat him down, got him a slice of cake, and regaled him with a memory—not of her father but of Mr. Hennrikus’s oldest daughter, who used to babysit my mother on League Night. You would have thought she loved him. Could she recapture that placid grace, that self-possession? I would soon see.

  I zigzagged up the crowded stairs, where clever (or shorter) Chompians had taken up positions to get a better view. Every step in my ascent was its own separate journey. The promenade was somewhat less packed. At the bar, a boisterous gaggle of middle-aged men had gathered around my mother to do shots. I grabbed her non-drinking arm and announced we had to go. I felt like a dad yanking his daughter from a school dance that was just getting interesting. “My son needs me,” she told her friends, less in apology than in explanation of our relationship.

  I towed her away toward the stairs. She squeezed my hand. Her face was shining with sweat and pleasure. By taking her on this cruise, I had given her this joy. She’d never remember it now.

  The song “Bad to the Bone” began blasting from giant speakers. Cheers flew in from every corner. On the promenade, everyone rushed to the rails for a better view. My mother and I were crushed against them.

  Two RMB crew members were lugging a podium out from the wings of the stage. Shell was among the ecstatic line of Chompians in the front row. They pounded their palms on the stage. The crew trotted away. The pounding deepened. The cheering swelled. The song faded.

  No one emerged. I resigned myself to waiting there. The deck was packed too tight to move.

  Anticipation stretched to its limit. The crowd was euphoric but also a little drunk. “We want Chomp!” someone screamed.

  A man in a dark suit walked out on the stage, shoulders hunched, head bowed, like a horse pulling a load. The crowd roared, probably just at his suit, a harbinger of the suit they were waiting for. He adjusted the microphone and glowered over the deck. His ears jutted out like bats’ wings. The crowd hushed. Those near us pressed even farther forward. It was useless to try to move.

  The man grunted into the mike to silence the last whoops and titters.

  “Sorry, folks,” he said. “No Chomp. There’s been an incident.” He turned away.

  The crowd was stunned, but not quite into silence. Grumbles, groans, and cries popped up and died all around us. People didn’t know how to react—in anger at being jilted, in protest at being swindled, or in fear for their safety.

  “What incident?” someone called out.

  The man twisted back to the microphone. “He’s the one in danger, not you.”

  Gasps and a few shrieks.

  He stalked off the stage. The RMB roadies ran out again, moving quickly to reduce their exposure to the crowd’s anger, and dragged away the podium. Questions were shouted, but there was no one to answer. No one knew what was going on. Chompians were famously intolerant of bullshit, except from their leader. The afternoon was suddenly savagely hot. Fear, ange
r, and discomfort began to mix dangerously. Chomp’s security men were fidgeting and frowning. They looked ready to grab pitchforks and join the mob.

  The RMB roadies courageously returned. They pushed onto the stage a small black box the size of a mini-fridge. The crowd’s swelling uprising settled back into a drizzly grumble. They wanted to see what would happen next. A slim young woman wearing a short white skirt and a headset microphone hopped up first to the stage and then to the box. Her T-shirt read FUN PATROL. She smiled. A thunderclap of outrage came from the crowd. They wanted Chomp, not whatever this brown-skinned RMB woman was selling. I started to fear for her life.

  A chant rose, starting from near the stage: “Chomp, Chomp, Chomp, Chomp!” It spread throughout the Lido, then up to the promenade, like the stomping of some enormous beast. Chomp’s guards joined in.

  The woman on the stage nodded, still smiling, as if the chant were for her.

  “He’ll be at the early dinner, folks!” Her single amplified voice vied with their united legions. “And on the island tonight. Right now we have a job to do.”

  The cannibalistic chant went on, a thousand mallets on a thousand drums. This woman was no match for all of Chomp’s America.

  “A job for him,” she continued. “A job for all of us. And that job”—she paused, and the mighty chant softened just a touch; the crowd was curious—“is to party.”

  The legions missed a beat, stunned by her triviality. Music replaced her voice through the speakers. The music to…“Gangnam Style.” The woman took up a dancer’s ready pose. The crowd gathered itself and its wrath, and the chant returned, mightier than ever, until the music was audible only in gaps between Chomps. A few valiant male staffers in FUN PATROL T-shirts dashed onto the stage to support the dancer and perhaps to protect her. The music was up as loud as it could go. The ship was all in on Gangnam Style. The chanting was unbearable. There was going to be a riot and a massacre.

  But then she began to dance. Her moves at first were gentle, subtle, almost warm-up exercises, but precise and joyful at the same time. Some booed; most kept chanting. But the chant had become somehow richer and more musical, and we realized that the woman was now, softly (but with amplified softness), breathing the word Chomp into her microphone in time to the music. The crowd’s chant began to conform to her beat. A few of them even started, unconsciously, to move their hips. And then she let loose.

  She was the Baryshnikov of Gangnam Style. Her every move—every skip-step, lasso twirl, or cross-handed gallop—was a part of a series of artistic performances, each one a masterpiece. To execute a single giddyup foot stomp, her toe would quiver, then her foot waver, her calf ripple, her thigh undulate, and finally her whole body would surge forth with the music. Every other move was equally brilliant and equally joyful. She maintained the full expanse of her smile during every degree of the 360-degree spin-and-lasso-twirl move. Why wasn’t she in Alvin Ailey or the Bolshoi? It was hard to tell from this distance, but she looked to be from Latin America or Southeast Asia—didn’t they have prima ballerinas in those places? Maybe she had a star’s magnetism but lacked something of the necessary talent, background, or luck to be the celebrity she should have been. Instead she made pure joy out of kitsch.

  Since Chomp’s election, I, like so many others, had come to doubt the character of the American people, especially those I disagreed with. For one moment, all my doubts were banished. That first gradual shift in the crowd’s mood gathered momentum, and suddenly all anger, impatience, and dissatisfaction had vanished. People began not just to move, but to do all the moves, even if they didn’t know them. She had them dancing all over the Lido Deck and the promenade. It was Gangnam Style between the deck chairs and on the deck chairs, Gangnam Style behind the card tables, Gangnam Style at the bars, Gangnam Style against the railings. Swimmers in the pool twirled lassos while treading water. Waiters galloped as they sold drinks. Kids concentrating on the moves backed into pillars and walls and one another. Old people grinned and swayed, even if they were in wheelchairs or electric scooters. The guy next to me just missed punching me with his lasso fist.

  Popular and folk dance performances are staples of the tourist circuit all over the world. On various assignments, I’ve seen some of the finest local performers in Bolivia, Spain, Thailand, Japan, and countless other places create unforgettable, if ephemeral, works of art. But I’d never seen anything like this. This woman had not just shifted but actually transformed the mindset of hundreds, maybe thousands, of dangerously angry people. Forget the Bolshoi. She should be working for the U.N. Chomp should have hired her to defang the opposition forever.

  At the height of the song, I felt a tingle at my hip. I pulled out my phone, and saw a text from my father. He was in his room. He wanted to see me. I woke from the musical spell and remembered my business. I still had to talk to my mother. I tried to get her attention, but she was Gangnaming too hard.

  When the song was over, the DJ gave the crowd just a minute to roar before punching up “Electric Boogie.” The dancer jumped down and a colleague scrambled up to replace her. This new dancer was shorter and chunkier but even more energetic. Because of the platform, she had to march in place instead of slide. It wasn’t the same, but the party mood was unstoppable.

  I was finally able to drag my mother away. The crowd had thinned enough for travel, but we had to dodge dozens of sets of human pistons electric-sliding across the promenade deck. We finally achieved the stairs, which had cleared completely—you can’t electric-slide on stairs—and started down.

  At the bottom of the stairs stood Ms. Gangnam Style. She was both shorter and more beautiful than she’d appeared on stage. Young Chompian bros were milling about her, in admiration more than lust. Desire for her seemed somehow holy, like worship of Aphrodite. Her skirt was as short as a tennis player’s and her top sleeveless, but this was obviously just to show off her dance moves.

  She looked somehow familiar to me. I veered toward her, my mother still in tow.

  Before I could reach her, a Chompian meat slab shouldered me aside accidentally (I assumed) and howled at her: “What? What?” Clearly short for “What just happened? What planet were you born on? What words could express my admiration?” She laughed, still a little out of breath.

  “Excuse me!” I stopped next to her. My mother pinched my hand, impressed with my boldness.

  Ms. Gangnam Style turned to me. My eyes fixed on a beauty mark beside her nose, just a large freckle but still the kind of thing my father would insist on getting checked yearly for malignancy. It was the only blemish on her satiny, if a bit sweaty, face. I glanced down at her name tag: Erica, from New Jersey.

  “That,” the meat slab declared, “was awesome!”

  “Thank you so much!” said Erica, matching and then raising his grin, as if this were the first time anyone had ever complimented her. “I’ll see you out there for the next one!”

  “You’re Carmen’s sister,” I said. “You look like her.”

  Erica turned again. Her eyes narrowed, though her smile held. “Just one sec,” she murmured to the meat slab, and with a loving little push, sent him toward his nearest buddy.

  “My son’s a writer,” my mother announced. “He should interview you. You deserve to be famous.” Then she backed away into the crowd so we could have a private moment.

  “You’re the writer?” Erica asked. “The one in Chomp’s room? I heard about you.”

  I nodded. “I want to ask you about your sister.”

  Still smiling, she leaned closer and said something I couldn’t quite catch. I ducked my head to hear her better.

  The word came again, more clearly now: “Asshole.”

  “What?”

  She kept on with the same low-volume urgency: “They fired her. Three more days and it’s back to the DR. She and her kid’ll have to move in with her shitty husband again. And it’s your
fucking fault.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yours, dipshit. You had to walk in when King Fernando was chewing her out. And you brought Chomp in too. He chewed Fernando out. Now Fernando can’t look her in the eye. So he had her fired. Thanks, fuckhead.”

  “Chomp said her job was safe.”

  “You think he checks? Probably couldn’t tell us apart naked if we fucked him.” She was clearly going to keep smiling and whispering fuck until my ears fell off. A few passengers were watching but no one was close enough to hear.

  “I’ll help her. I—I know the marketing director.”

  “Get real.”

  “She’s really your sister? Your faces are similar, but you don’t sound alike.”

  “I grew up in Jersey, asshole. She stayed in the DR with our mom. I’m an American citizen. She’s Dominican. I’m lucky, she’s fucked. I got her this job, though. It was supposed to change her shitty life. And her kid’s. Thanks to you, that’s over.”

  “Your sister told me she got a new assignment. The suites near Chomp’s.”

  “That’s what Fernando told her. He even made her clean them until the evacuation drill. Then he fired her.”

  “Look, forget the marketing director. Fuck the marketing director.” I tried to speak her language. “I know Chomp. So does my mother. We’ve got pull.” For once, that claim appeared to be true.

  She narrowed her eyes, but I could see the flicker of hope. “Yeah?”

  “Listen. Do you know if she had to clean suite 1103? If she ever talked to the passenger inside?”

  “What?”

  “He was a friend of mine. There was an accident in his suite. Can you just ask her if she noticed anything strange about the passenger? In the meantime I’ll do what I can, I promise.”

  Another Chompian, bro to the meat slab, tried to squeeze between us. “You know ‘Whip/Nae Nae’?”

  “You bet I do!” She turned to glare at me one more time, her grin like a scimitar. “You better do something.” Then she moved away to her fans, snapping her arm—gorgeously—like a whip.