The Ex-President

by Jeff Soloway

  “Ha! You, my liberal friend, are living in the land of Wrongovia. Okay, the villas are a little delayed. We got an email update about it. What do you expect? Contractors are contractors. Chomp knows real estate. In the meantime, they built us air-conditioned yurts on the beach. Classy yurts. The best yurts! You’ll see. Even you have to admit, Carlton Chomp is a closer.”

  Like all too many closers, Chomp had the reputation of washing his hands of a project once the check cleared. Could even he really make a nation out of nothing but beach and yurts? A nation that people would believe in as they believed in America? It would require all his immense powers of emotional manipulation. The upcoming speech, I realized, would have to be both magnificent and terrifying.

  “I don’t see any yurts,” I said.

  “Guys always want to see my yurt.” She giggled and swung my hand.

  The tiki path curved, and I could now see in profile the procession of pilgrims in their flip-flops, bare feet, and loafers, journeying not to a shrine but to an audience with God. They were laughing, chatting, waving their hands at the beach, the palms, the sea, the stars. They were as giddy as Shell; they had earned this audience. Only God could build Heaven, but they had funded it.

  And then I saw up ahead, beached on a sand dune, an enormous wrecked ship, like Noah’s Ark on Ararat. It was a pirate ship. I knew that because the flag snapping atop its foremast bore the skull and crossbones, and the flag just below that one bore, in scarlet letters, the word HARRR!

  The ship was floodlit as dramatically as any ancient pile in modern Rome, but its mainmast rose up beyond the artificial light, a spear thrust into the heart of the glittering sky. Its hull was thick and graceless, only perfunctorily curved; the thing could no more have floated than a TGI Fridays detached from a strip mall. As we approached, I could see that a handicapped-accessible ramp ran straight up from the sand to a pair of double doors in the hull, over which a sign read THE RUM ’N SCURVY BEACHSIDE BAR. A worker was busy trying to pry the sign off with a crowbar. In fact, workers were scurrying all over the structure. The closer we got, the more the effect of kitschy grandeur was diluted by cheap architecture, cheesy signage, and imported labor.

  I kept staring at the mainmast. Halfway up was a fake crow’s nest shaped like a hot-air balloon basket, accessible by a spiral staircase hidden by some fake rigging. Two workers had just finished hauling up a block of wood. They dropped it on the floor of the crow’s nest. Then I understood. The object was a podium. That fake crow’s nest, the high-altitude perch normally reserved for the emcee at RMB’s Party Me Hearties Island Groove (or something), would now serve as the stage for Chomp’s first island speech, his Declaration of Independence.

  “Look!” Shell pointed to the sand beyond the ship’s near end (stern was not the word), where a different group of workers, these as pale as vampires, were unsnapping plastic packing cases and assembling what looked like sound equipment and a satellite dish. Fox News had arrived.

  “They came!” she said. “I knew they would.” Words that suggested their opposite. “Good thing I cleaned you up. You and me are getting on TV.” She carefully patted the sides of her hair arrangement, which was still in place despite the breeze. She added, in a voice as gentle as her fingers, “I mean after we find your mom.”

  The tiki path curved again to skirt the ship. The pavilion tent was now a hundred yards away. The guests up ahead were snatching up champagne flutes from loaded tables that lined the approach. Inside the pavilion, Chomp’s unmistakable head towered over his guests. He was talking to some woman, not my mother. Even at this distance I could tell he was gazing into her cleavage.

  I stepped off the tiki path toward the water.

  Shell stopped. “Where are you going?”

  “Down the beach to those rocks.”

  “What about the party?” She glanced at the Chompians passing us by, beating her to the fun. “What about your mom? Chomp’s right there. Can’t you see him?”

  “But my mom’s not. I think I can find her.”

  Shell said nothing. But even through the groaning of the surf and the chatter and huffing of the guests passing by, I could hear the quickening of her breaths.

  “We’re so close,” she finally said. “He’s right there. He’ll talk to you. Give him a minute. He’ll answer all your crazy questions about your fight and your mom and everything else. Explain the b.s. right out of you. Give him a chance. Give me a chance. I want to meet him.”

  “Go up to him, Shell. You don’t need my help.”

  “But I want it.” She smiled shyly. She held out little hope for my conversion, but some hope, despite my obstinacy, for me. Her face reflected the warmth and liveliness of the flickering tiki torches. Maybe I could fall in love with her despite our different opinions on a particular megalomaniac. After all, parents continue to love their children even after they convert, or sell out, or enlist, or otherwise reject the family’s deepest political or social principles. Surely romantic love could also surmount such differences. Shell was a little crazy, but no more than about half of America. Interfaith and interracial marriages worked; this would be an inter-rational marriage. Perhaps she would even, someday, convert for me.

  “You’ll come around,” she said. “I know you will. Just talk to him.”

  I grinned at my own naïveté. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be open-minded. Okay, fine. Go find your mother. Tell her I say hi. Meantime, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll go talk to him. Don’t worry, I won’t mention you. But I’ll get all the answers. I’ll clear everything up. And then afterward, you’ll find me. When I’m done explaining everything to you through and through, just like he’s gonna explain to me, you’ll be satisfied. Just watch. And then you’ll stay.”

  “Stay?”

  “On the island. With me. You’ll see.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and walked away to the tent, her feet pushing hard into the yielding sand.

  She had hidden me from Chomp’s men and smuggled me off the ship. She had betrayed her people for me. What could I do for her?

  Chapter 24

  I set off down the wide pewter road of the beach. I refrained from glancing back toward the tiki torches, but I listened for a shout, warning, or whistle behind me. Until now, my date, my clothes, and my path among fellow pilgrims had camouflaged me. Now I was alone and exposed in the moonlight.

  I could now make out individual rocks in the distance. One boulder loomed over the rest, like a mini Mount Kilimanjaro over its foothills. In the note in our cabin, my mother had said to meet her “on island at usual.” I thought I knew what she meant. In those long-ago vacations, when the two of us would take our nightly strolls down the beach, we would always aim for the farthest rocks we could see from our starting place. This set would be far enough.

  To my left the surf sighed as it dragged itself up to the sand, again and again; to my right, at the beach’s frontier, was a jungly murk of sand dunes, grass, and those tall pinelike trees the Bahamians call cedars. If I heard a voice crying out, or a gunshot, I would have to sprint to the trees for shelter. Most of my body felt almost normal, even my head, but my sore foot was aching worse from the long walk. Scrambling through tropical foliage would be a nightmare. I glanced back. None of the passengers still streaming along the tiki track seemed to be looking my way. To those figures, I was, if not invisible, then at least anonymous. Or so I hoped.

  I turned and gazed past the distant boulder to the treasury of stars above it. Nothing could extinguish their glory, not the floodlights or tiki torches behind me, or the giant bauble of the cruise ship even farther behind, or the lustrous half-moon overhead. I always look at the stars when I travel; you can never see them in New York City. I once visited an observatory near the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. There, on a moonless night, the stars were so bright you could see their light reflected off the waxy to
psides of leaves. It made you understand how jaguars can hunt at night. The stars of Chomp’s island were neither as abundant nor as piercing, but a pale reminder of a greater glory is still a path to that glory. Every place I visit seems to remind me of a better place. Like Chomp, I was mired in nostalgia. He planned to colonize an island to bring back America as it never really was—fully employed, Christian in faith if not practice, reverent of its European colonizers, content with its victories and its virtues. He had weaponized nostalgia. To rally his supporters to his side, he needed to contrast the dangerous new world with the harmonious old. The murder was not just a publicity stunt. It was a reminder, to every Chompian, of the evil that stalked them. The evil of social disorder. Of modernity itself.

  A set of footprints crossed my path. I followed them as they angled down to the smoother sand near the water. There they turned to parallel the shore. Only one set. The gentle, self-assured waves fell just short of the prints and my feet. I kept walking. The harder sand was better for my foot.

  Almost there. On one of our nighttime journeys down the beach—perhaps on our one trip to Florida?—my mother described to me a winter vacation she took as a girl to Europe with her wild, charming, relatively young, and prematurely demented grandmother. Late one night she woke up in her hotel room to the sight of her grandmother, hair all Medusa and cheeks and nose a clownish scarlet, arguing in the doorway with two policemen. They had just escorted her home after catching her bodysurfing down the bobsled run with a bellhop. That was the last trip my mother had been permitted to take with her, but it lived on in her memory forever. And in my memory too, because of my mother’s storytelling. I remember telling her that someday I would travel to Europe too. My mother had laughed and said, “Be sure to go with the right person.” I wanted to go with her.

  At last I stood in the boulder’s moon shadow.

  Someone said, “You. Who.”

  I stared into the deeper darkness, and finally saw my mother, perched on one of the littler rocks nestled against the huge one.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “Napping, I suppose.” She was smiling. She was okay.

  “You escaped.”

  “Escaped what? You know I love parties. Say what you want about Carlton’s friends, but they have had experiences.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “I had arranged to meet you. I could hardly bring Carlton. Besides, I wanted to gossip about him. I was hoping you’d come. And here you are.” She smiled indulgently, as if I’d been fishing for the praise. “This night has been—fateful.” She shrugged, to let a little air out of the word, which just made it sock me harder.

  “Does he know where you are?”

  “I didn’t tell him. He won’t miss me. He has to practice his speech, or so he said.”

  “We have to get back to the ship. They’re looking for me. Maybe for you too by now. We’ll wait till everyone’s watching the speech and—”

  “Jacob! I’m not quite ready for bed yet, thank you. I want to stay to see this speech. I want you to see it too. Plus there’s another party afterward, and I’d prefer not to leave him alone with all those starstruck young deplorables. He’ll be expecting me.”

  “I already saw him ogling some girl in the party tent. Come on. I’ll explain on the way.” I held out my hand.

  She resettled herself on her rock to emphasize her noncompliance. “I suppose no one ever told Carlton that discretion is the better part of lust. In any case, at this particular moment, he’s not likely up for more than ogling.”

  “Mom, you didn’t.”

  “Oh yes I did! After dinner, he took me to his private pavilion thingy on the beach. He called it a yurt. You should see how it’s decked out. I felt like Genghis Khan’s concubine. But how could I refuse the ex-president? He had to take a pill. One of those fast-acting ones. You know how it is.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “You will someday. I know it’s a little soon, but he’s a romantic and I’m a pragmatist. Do you know what he said afterward? Will you still like me if I stop winning? It was very touching. I did a bang-up job reassuring him. Of all my talents, I think it’s the one I’m proudest of.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes as she relived the moment. She had come to this rock to share her triumph with me.

  “He was so pleased with himself when we were done,” she went on, relentlessly, “but he could still laugh. So many can’t. I know I say all men are the same, but they’re not really. He only did one thing I hated.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “What?”

  “Grabbed his cellphone while we were cuddling. Can you believe it? I knew he’d been texting his staff, he’s always micromanaging. So I snatched it from him. But that’s not what he was looking at. He’d sent two texts during dinner to guess who? The ex. Hellania. I was wrong about his girlfriend. He’s been hung up on the ex-wife all along. I stuffed the phone under the mattress so he wouldn’t be distracted—from his speech or from me. He laughed, I’ll give him that. He told me Hellania was the first thing he had ever really lost. I said he must have wanted, subconsciously, to lose her, to prepare for the next phase in his life. He liked that. They’re all different, Jacob, but I know the right thing to say to all of them. He kissed me and said he was looking for someone even more terrific than her. That’s me, Jacob. He gave up the presidency to find me. The whole world is nothing compared to the love of a good woman.”

  She finally slipped off the rock and moved out into the moonlight.

  “Really, Mom?”

  “Perhaps that’s a bit much, but he did give up his phone for me. I made him leave it in the yurt when he walked me back to the party tent.”

  “A phone is not exactly the whole world. There’s no cell reception out here anyway.”

  “Don’t I know. Someone from his team had to come to the yurt to get him. But we were ready. We all spent some time in the pavilion tent brainstorming about his speech. One of the Fox producers was on a satellite call. My suggestions were very well received, as they had been in our earlier session, before dinner. I’m getting good at this! But then he told me he needed practice time with his speech coach. I’m beginning to doubt he has one. No worries, Jacob, no one will pull another Clark on me, not even him.”

  “Mom, Chomp had Clark killed.”

  “Let’s not argue about Clark, not tonight.”

  “His bodyguard admitted it. We even have a photo of the murderer. I think. It was a stunt, Mom. Chomp needs the world to pay attention to him again. His plan for the island depends on it.”

  “Who has a photo?”

  “Some—passenger.”

  “Have you seen it? I thought not. Sounds like someone’s after a book deal. You’re too trusting, Jacob. And you don’t understand Carlton. Yes, he’s a fool, a buffoon if you will, but he’s only spiteful to political enemies. He’d never hurt someone like Clark. And even if he did…”

  “Then what?”

  She stretched her pale, moonlit arm out in front of her and gazed along that thin runway to the stars for a long moment, as if the evening and all its events had rendered her own body strange to her. Her face radiated pure awe. It was as if all the cynicism she displayed every other moment of her life had existed just to balance out this moment. “Then he did it for me.”

  “Oh. No, Mom.”

  “Listen, Jacob. He faces more temptations than most men, so of course I’ll never entirely trust him, but he loves me, I know he does, more than any man has since your father. Clark’s death was obviously a suicide, whatever Carlton’s handlers prefer to tell their adoring legions for publicity purposes. However! Just the fact that you and I both thought, for a moment, that Carlton might have killed someone for my sake—well, isn’t that a testament to his, shall we say, enthusiasm? To the power I possess as the object of that enthusiasm? I plan to use th
at power, Jacob. I’m not likely to get it any other way. So, no, I won’t return to the ship. I’d rather stay with Carlton and be a queen in his new country. The world will thank me. Especially when they see what he can still do. He’ll have more influence than ever. And I can encourage his sensible side.”

  Are you in love too? I couldn’t ask her. She would lie to spare my feelings, but she would lie perfunctorily, perhaps even with obvious irony, to spare her own. And then I’d feel like a chump.

  “His bodyguard beat me up,” I said. “He’s looking for me. He wants to kill me too, because I know what he did. What Chomp had him do. They won’t trust you anymore. We have to get to the ship. We’ll be safe there.”

  My mother stepped backward toward the rock, as if to feel its hulking strength behind her.

  “Thank you,” she said formally. “I asked you to come for me and you did. I appreciate that. I now have a new request, which I hope you’ll take seriously. I’m asking you not to abandon me again. Since you were a child, I’ve admired your expectations and your devotion to yourself. I wished I had your confidence and your ruthlessness. I’ve forgiven what you did, but I can’t forget.”

  I took a few deep breaths. To my surprise, the fury that she could always light in me quickly died away, choked in the humid evening air. “I don’t understand.”

  “That Christmas when you refused me. After I finally left your father. You had promised to come with me. It was a lie. But I’ve forgiven you.”

  I stepped closer. She was as still as the rock behind her. “I couldn’t leave Dad.”

  “Of course not. You were always so sweet to your father. I didn’t need all your sweetness, just a little of your time. A few days at the most, to help me settle in. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I asked for. I stayed with him for so long. I gave up so many years. For you. You gave me nothing.”

  She had no idea how close I had come to leaving with her. If I tried to explain, she would never believe me. I had always thought of that moment as the end of my childhood. It had never occurred to me that to her it was also an end—the end of something she valued much more than youth.