by Ana Simo
He sat on the maid’s bed, licking the mayonnaise off his fingers and finishing his second beer. I sat across from him on the only chair with a bottle of Evian at my feet. The food tray on the night table was a repellent mess of chewed ham fat, gnawed bread, and ketchup-soaked napkins. Rafael belched before his hand could reach his mouth, and thanked me for the first time since his arrival. I removed the tray from my line of vision and hoped he would go wash his hands and greasy mouth, from which still hung a few distracting crumbs. Rafael had always been a slob, but I could not believe he ate like this in front of his masters. His down-home minstrelsy was for my benefit, I suspected. He took a wallet out of his back pocket and showed me a picture of a blond girl and boy standing on the exact kind of fastidiously clipped lawn that calls for a seersucker suit. They were twins, he said, just turned twelve. A good-looking blond woman could be seen in the background. The kids were almost as tall as the mother, who was not precisely short—“Five foot eleven,” said Rafael, flattered when I asked. (He was five four and a half in his socks, although he always lied about his height. Had he dared lie about it to his current employer?)
So far, my day with Rafael had been a succession of rancid clichés, from his unannounced arrival, haunted and hunted, to the picture of the predictable blond, white giants. We were trapped in a B-movie medley. I was not I anymore, but a ventriloquist’s dummy channeling my own discarded voices from the past. Who was he? “This situation is spiraling out of control,” I heard myself say, teeth martially clenched. Some malicious prompter was feeding Rafael and me these trashy lines. I sank deep into the chair. When I opened my eyes, Rafael was leaning over me with a wet towel. “You passed out,” he said. I was still clutching the proof of his successful safari in Upper Blancoland. He pried his trophy family out of my fingers and sat on the bed to look at them. It was considerate of him to let me be, to spare me from further embarrassment. I had never fainted before in front of him, although I had been on the verge twice: when they drew blood from my wrist at age eleven, the Elmira school district having gotten it into their heads that all spic children were either asthmatic or tubercular, and when I cracked the back of my head on the curb during an after-high-school brawl.
“I haven’t done anything illegal,” Rafael finally said, cleaning his black-framed glasses with a corner of the bedspread and putting them on. He now looked like the Kissinger of the Paris Agreements, down to the kinky hair creeping up under the thick pomade. “Nothing at all that could get you or,” and here he hesitated, searching for the prudent term, “the main tenant of this house in trouble.” Lawyerly mendacity had replaced the telegraphic style. He stole a glance at his family picture. Did he wink at them? “You gotta leave right now,” I said. The corners of his mouth went up slightly. “I swear you’re gonna be sorry if you don’t. You’re gonna lose your job and bring grief to your family, and shit’s gonna rain on your boss if you stay here.” He blinked twice behind his thick lenses, but his mouth remained almost gleefully upturned. “You’ll lose everything, Rafael,” I said. He studied his family picture under the bedside lamp. Did he get his instructions from them? Was he trying to find his genetic imprint in the two Brobdingnagian children? Where I saw none, a father’s eye might see a dozen tiny hereditary signs such as curved toenails or unusually thick earwax. He put the picture back in his wallet. Then he retrieved the wet towel from my lap and hung it from the shower curtain rod. “I already have,” he said from the bathroom.
Rafael told me his story in the one hour of grace I consented to give him. He promised to leave when he was done if I still wanted him to. I assured him it was unlikely I would change my mind. He finished at 3:15 p.m. McCabe must have landed two hours and fifteen minutes earlier at the state capital. She might already be in the car that would bring her here. Rafael put on the borrowed winter clothes and took his belongings to the blue sedan. I did not follow him. I was already traveling with McCabe inside a black limo moving through the snowy flatlands. The snow was bone-yellow at this hour. When Rafael came back to say goodbye, I asked him to stay.
I will not repeat here the many twists and turns of his story, its tortuous illogic, logistics, and soap-opera betrayals. I did not follow half of them. Many of the characters, and there were dozens of them, I had never heard of; I cared for none. Nor did I know the meaning of most of the government agency acronyms involved, although at the end of his account each had become a living character, with its own morality, face, smell, and body mass. My physical and political topography of the nation’s capital and ruling elite is willfully inadequate. Growing up in Shangri-La, I never paid them much attention. None of us did. Then, I erased them entirely from my mind when the grotesque venality and hypocrisy that have been both the strong and the weak points of my parents’ adoptive country thoroughly tipped in the direction of the latter. That was in 1984, the year the Great Hunger erupted, killing or displacing half of the country’s population, and emptying the heartland; the year the Caliphate opportunistically gobbled up Anatolia, cutting off Constantinople from Asia. Two utterly avoidable cataclysms provoked by our rulers. In 2008, the year Rafael entered government, I was happy to see his picture in the paper behind the President-elect. I would have been equally happy if he had been made capo. There is only one measure of success. Six years later he was in a maid’s room telling me how the other side suffers.
“Allow me to recall Rafael’s swift ascent to power,” Rafael said. Even if the official media had rehashed it ad nauseam, “our memories are short.” He relished telling his story, in spite of the melancholic third person. Eight years ago, when the Caliphate first started digging anti-nuclear bunkers on either side of the Bosphorus near besieged Constantinople, Rafael, then an obscure adjunct at MIT, published an essay in Foreign Affairs provocatively entitled “The New American Racialism.” In it he proposed a simple and elegantly final solution to the Caliphate menace: mix and ultimately replace the genetic stock of the border populations threatened by the Caliphate—and in time, that of the Caliphs themselves—with the DNA of America’s black, yellow, and Hispanic peoples, with its unmatched genius for sociocultural malleability. NAR’s race-based Wilsonian idealism would succeed where centuries of mutual mass slaughter had failed.
The essay caught the eye of the presidential front-runner, who asked to meet the author. They hit it off. Rafael took a leave of absence from his university to devote himself to the task of sharpening the candidate’s capacious, if mediocre mind. When she was inaugurated, in 2008, he was rewarded with the number-one position at the National Security Council. When she was re-elected by a landslide three years ago, the President asked Rafael to remain in his post. He hated the limelight as much as the President loved it, was unconditionally loyal to her, and carried out the NAR revolution with the ruthlessness often found in shy, selfless people.
At first, most of the action had been internecine. As DNA harvesting centers went up in suburban ghettos and refugee and resettlement camps, drawing enthusiastic and patriotic crowds, the White House, hiding behind the National Security Advisor, purged enemies and doubters from government and military-industrial bureaucracies, among them the remaining, ossified neocons, liberal multiculturalists, White Canon lovers, Bible literalists, and assorted fellow travelers. The battle had been won last summer. NAR was then projected worldwide. It had been glowingly received abroad, not only in the proud ancestral homes of America’s spics, niggers, and chinks—all of whom dreamt of their own genetic Trojan Horse empire spreading after America fell, as it inevitably would one day soon—but also in Europe intramuros (except France). All praised its enlightened realism, its preference for humane intervention instead of force, and the entente of races and civilizations it promised.
Rafael’s nails were still bitten to the flesh. The Patek Philippe watch and the J. M. Weston shoes were new developments. A lighter line on his finger betrayed an absent wedding ring. “They’re going to drown them,” he said, hiding his watch inside the cable-knit sweater’s slee
ves. “They’re going to drag them out of their beds after midnight tonight, once it’s not Christmas anymore. Then they’re going to shove them in a container and dump it off the coast of Delaware. Near international waters, but on our side, so they can keep away nosy people. Not that anyone will know what’s in there.” His eyes got watery. “They,” he explained, were the President’s loyalists; “them,” soon to be at the bottom of the Atlantic, were the leaders and intellectual instigators of a failed coup, “a rabble of white evangelical Air Force majors, Negro notables, white supremacists, embittered neo-cons, and Aztlán fundamentalists,” Rafael spat. The coup had been attempted yesterday, on Christmas Eve, and had lasted seven and a half hours. The White House had been the sole target. Officially, it had never happened. Few inhabitants of Washington, D.C. had heard or seen anything, given the one-mile restricted zone around the White House. And those who had would never talk. Neither the media nor history books would record it. The President had managed to escape unharmed and was now safe in a bunker somewhere along the Mexican border. Rafael had survived by locking himself in an East Wing broom closet until the loyalists regained control. He had seen hundreds of dead, both assailants and defenders.
“So your side won,” I said brightly, standing up, ready to show him the door. He looked past me, his head mournfully bobbing up and down. “She wouldn’t listen to me,” he said. “I tried to reason. Then I pleaded. I begged her.” He stood up and flapped his arms as if about to take flight. “A container! In the Atlantic!” He sat again on the edge of the bed and began to pull the sweater sleeves over his big hands. “And you know what?” he said. I shook my head. “She’s right.” The star pupil had outgrown the teacher.
I was relieved by his tone of resignation and was about to say something cowardly, like “You did what you could,” or “Maybe you could take some time off from your job,” when he rasped, “I think she’s gonna pull a Vince Foster on me.” That is why he had fled his office in a panic after hanging up on the President’s secure line, first on a stolen motorbike to a refugee camp far beyond the restricted zone, then several miles on foot to a derelict garage in a suburban Salvadoran slum where out of sentimentality he had kept his old used car, still registered to the original owner and bearing its original Maine plates. He had driven directly here “because I know you won’t rat on me.” He refused to say how he had found me: “The less you know, the safer you’ll be,” was his noble answer. I almost socked him in the nose, but his glasses steamed up. “They’ll get me in the end, you know.” He wanted me to drive back to New York immediately, so he could wait for them, alone. He wanted me to tell his wife and kids that he had not killed himself. “Suicide is contagious. I don’t want to put that curse on them, and their children, and their children’s children.”
It was three thirty when I told Rafael he could stay. He gave me a bear hug. It made me unexpectedly sad. Without knowing it, I had been thirsting for brotherly affection. Now that I had it briefly, I felt its painful lack. Since my father, Ezequiel, and Rafael had disappeared from my life, no other men had taken their places. Rafael felt beefier than the last time we had hugged, while my mother’s ashes were lowered into her grave. I did not want to cry in front of him, so I ran to the kitchen with the excuse of getting him more food. I’m not sure whether the ticklishness in my eyes and throat was impeding tears. It’s been so long since I last cried that I’m not sure I can recognize the warning signs, even retroactively. A few trips to the kitchen were needed before I was satisfied with Rafael’s stock of food and drink. He had enough for a week. To humor him, I promised I would leave before sunrise, as soon as my guest was gone. She was due to arrive any time and just stay for dinner, I explained. It was imperative, for her safety, that she did not see him, or vice versa. He fought me tooth and nail on this, wanting me to cancel the appointment, or at least leave with my guest as soon as she arrived. He did not want our deaths on his conscience. “You should have thought about that before coming here,” I said. That shut him up.
It was hard not to feel vindictive toward Rafael for having fallen from the sky at such an inopportune time. Once the warmth of the hug faded, the best I could do was to soften my vindictiveness with selected childhood memories, deliberately played over and over. This behavior modification exercise produced a semblance of kindness that Rafael mistook for the real thing. Luckily. He had learned about wines at his masters’ table, so I brought up half a dozen good bottles from the cellar. It was almost four thirty. Before going back to my bedroom lookout, I gave Rafael several blank notebooks and the Judge’s Mont Blanc pen. “Write your story,” I said. He looked at the writing materials with suspicion. Was he paranoiac? Did he think I was trying to extract a confession from him? I could be part of the presidential cabal. I could have phoned the authorities from the kitchen. I would not trust me if I were him. For the first time ever, I was afraid of Rafael. He had never lifted a finger against me or anyone else, as far as I knew. He was more the doormat type. But he would not have risen as high if he was not, in some way, a fighter. Besides, insanity makes people superhumanly strong, and he was not entirely sane. That coup story was a madman’s fantasy. Dumping a container full of political enemies in the Atlantic was a cheesy remake of Pinochet’s discharging them from a plane into the Pacific (a less costly option). True, the inconceivable had become ordinary. I could not tell which articles of our yo-yo Constitution were suspended at the moment. Years ago, the first time it happened, the country roared, or so the already tattered media said. Even I, still a child, sneered. Now no one cared. No one was keeping the score. A coup? In Aracnida, the Beautiful, nothing was too grotesque anymore to be true.
“You could write a letter to your children,” I said ingratiatingly, promising to deliver it. How many promises had I made already, none of which I seriously considered keeping? Rafael asked me to swear by my mother’s ashes to do it. He became agitated when I tried to weasel out of that. So I was forced to look him in the eyes and reluctantly swear on my mother’s memory to hand the letter to his daughter and son. Do broken promises have any consequences for the dead on whom you swear in vain? I didn’t think so, although I would not have been surprised if St. Augustine had a different opinion. He was a vindictive fellow himself. I decided to check the Confessions, and do whatever had to be done to lift the burden off their souls. I was, and still am, a cautious unbeliever.
Back in my room, I took a lightning-fast shower and changed my underwear and shirt. My travails since Rafael’s arrival had left me smelling sour. Through the binoculars, I saw a rabbit hopping across the driveway as it looped down the hill. The rabbit stood in the middle of the road, my advance lookout, the first that would hear and see McCabe’s car coming up the hill. I had cleaned and oiled a Mauser Gewehr 98. It was the only rifle in the Judge’s collection that was specifically made for war. The other seven were all antique hunting shotguns, even if humans were often killed with them, the earliest being an 1866 Winchester Henry Iron Frame Rifle. The Gewehr 98 had a glorious history. It was the German army’s standard rifle between 1898 and 1935. It killed or wounded Rupert Brooks, Apollinaire, and hundreds of thousands of others in World War I. I would have never used a hunting rifle: McCabe was not an animal, but all too human, a sublime woman, fit only for the company of poets and heroes. Honor, purity, and cleanliness were owed her. If I had had the guts, I would have chosen a sword; but I am a coward. I do not mind acknowledging it. On the contrary, my cowardice enhances my accomplishments. Never did someone do more with so little, morally speaking.
The rabbit was now a grey smudge on the road. The Mauser was back in the Judge’s gun cabinet, first from the left. It was loaded with the only two bullets I had found, one in each of its twin chambers. The second bullet was there in the unlikely event the first one missed, or did not finish the job. I did not want McCabe to suffer. The key to the cabinet was in the right pocket of my jacket. Target practice with the Judge’s rifle had been out of the question: too noisy, too risky to t
ry buying bullets online, let alone in person. I was not concerned anymore about my future; I just did not want to be stopped from doing what I had to do. So, I had practiced my movements with the unloaded gun until I could do them with my eyes closed. Every day I slashed a few seconds from the sequence of unlocking the cabinet door, grabbing the Mauser, loading it, pointing at her forehead, and shooting. I would drive a bullet into her forehead, right above the nose, while she was sitting at the dinner table, between dessert and coffee. I would approach her from behind and to the right, call her name, and when she turned her head to look at me, I would pull the trigger. At such close range, about ten feet, I could not miss. I was a pretty good shot; I grew up shooting rabbits with Ezequiel, which my mother stewed and we all ate, except for Rafael. Even now, when I had not shot at a living creature in twenty years, my hands did not shake. I had been an avid carnival shooter in New York City, a provider of ugly stuffed animals to embarrassed dates. That had kept me sharp.
The flight from Chicago had arrived on time at one o’clock. Airport information would not tell me if McCabe was on board. It was six o’clock now. Five hours to drive the 180 miles from the state capital airport to the Judge’s house on a secured military expressway? Not impossible, but like Rafael’s operetta coup, unlikely. Even then, I did not doubt McCabe would come. That was my only certainty. Everything else, even the roundness of the earth, could be questioned. The dilemma was whether I should start roasting the venison at once, even if McCabe had not arrived. My faith in McCabe’s arrival, however absolute, lacked a precise time frame. I peered into the dark with the binoculars, not expecting to see anything, but to help myself think. My brain worked better when my eyes were focused on the light grey landscape turning into charcoal grey and then black velvet. I would start cooking the venison at 6:30 p.m. sharp. The outside lights went on, circling the house in gold. I again aired McCabe’s room and turned on the lights throughout the house, which now glowed with Christmas warmth. After removing a few tired flowers from the vases, I put the venison in the oven, at a slightly lower temperature, anticipating a longer cooking time than the recipe called for. To give McCabe time to get home.
