by James Smythe
‘Mom!’ Alyx says. ‘You won’t get sick of us.’
‘I will. I’ll be on Xanax by the time you go back.’
‘What’s Xanax?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘And you,’ she says to Alyx, ‘bag, now.’ They disappear, and Lane walks off, clutching an apple in her hand. Deanna turns to Laurence as he eats his toast. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Knock ’em dead, you hear?’
‘If they’re dead they can’t vote for me,’ he replies.
‘Then knock ’em into a coma until the election.’
‘Better.’ She kisses him, and she tastes the butter, the marmalade. The same taste every morning for eighteen years.
‘Right,’ she says, pushing away from him. ‘Time to go. Call me.’ She shouts for the kids and Laurence leans to one side and watches down the hallway as they all leave. They wave at him from the front door and wish him luck, and he smiles and waves back. He watches them as they get into the car. The Hendersons are walking on the other side and Deanna talks to them, as she always does, every single morning. She tells them that she’ll be along later to pick up one of their fresh loaves. They tell her that they’ll put one aside. She laughs, because every conversation about anything here is somehow gently amusing. Laurence watches it happen; he’s seen this a thousand times before. His car is waiting as well, and he grabs his jacket and briefcase. As he gets into the car he asks which way they’re going because there’s probably going to be traffic going into the city their usual way. The driver tells him a route.
‘You want me to go a different way?’ he asks. Laurence brings up the ClearVista app and searches the route finder. All the options are just as likely to get messy at this time of day.
‘It’s fine,’ Laurence says, ‘whatever you think is best.’ He watches as the driver lets the app pick the route for them. Hell or high water, it’s what’s easiest.
Deanna is at home and writing – or rather, the laptop is open, along with document that’s meant to be her new book; and she has reread what she wrote the last time, deciding that it’s fine and can stay, for now, when she hears Laurence’s name mentioned on the news, saying that it’s time for the live coverage of the press conference. She turns the volume up and watches him at the podium, surrounded by blue banners and badges. And his tie has been replaced with one that matches the color of everything else, a blunt-force sign of unity and support for the party that he seems so estranged from, at least on paper. He’s a new breed, a potential future. These are the words that he’s introduced with by the ex-President who stands by him, who is diametrically opposed to so many of his policies, but is tucking that behind them for the sake of what Laurence could do. This is an opportunity, they all know.
‘So – and I realize that I am getting ahead of myself, but what the hell, that never did me any harm before in life – let me introduce you to the future candidate for the Democratic party, and the next President of the United States, Laurence Irving Walker!’ He stands to one side and applauds so loudly that it’s all that can be heard for a beat over the microphones on the podium. Laurence looks slightly sheepish, humbled by the words, and he shakes the ex-President’s hand, almost cupping it, a gesture that’s focus tested and proven to show security, strength and power. He stands up at the front, and he smiles. The crowd cheer and he works it like a comedian; letting them have their moment, stepping back as the applause overwhelms him. He nods, and he laughs, and he steps back.
‘You’re too kind,’ he says. ‘I haven’t done anything yet.’ That gets a laugh, and he puts a hand on the podium, the other into his trouser pocket, which brushes back his jacket. Deanna can hear Amit telling him the things he can do, the gestures and phrases that will work in this situation. Humble, but not too humble; strong, but also showing that he’s human; a leader, but not unable to listen. She recognizes these things as being a part of Laurence, but not like this. This way they’re exaggerated, offered up like evidence. ‘But I hope to. And that’s what today is all about, really: hope. That’s something that the people who live in New York State tell me all the time. They say: we feel like our hopes for our children, our health, our homes – our hopes for the future – they’re being lost in the chaos of life. You wouldn’t believe how common it is to hear that.’ Everyman, but not too casual. The camera focuses on him, shows him in a good light. He’s got make-up on, Deanna thinks, and his hair has been coiffed, like something from that old TV show about advertising, a slick and neat look that’s pushed back from his face. It says he’s a family man, but not too married.
She’s heard the speech, and she knows he won’t fumble it. He’s never fumbled a speech in his life. He’s going to slyly announce his intentions, set this all up. This is how it works, now. It’s all about starting a quiet storm. She shuts off the TV and walks around the kitchen, thinks about what happens next. This house will be gone, sold to somebody else. They’ll start a family in it, and the place will get its own memories. And Deanna and the family will live … where? An apartment in Georgetown until they move. She doesn’t want to think about the end of this: a giant house where their every movement is monitored, where they can’t go for a walk without somebody wondering if they’re okay; what they’re doing; if somebody might make some foolish attempt on their lives.
She sits at her laptop and minimizes her book, and she opens a browser window. She types www.ClearVista.com into the window, and the site loads.
Will Laurence Walker ever be President? she asks. The site does its thing, the little icon spinning and folding itself into itself, a perpetual loop of folding and unfolding, and then spits out an answer. There is a sixty-three percent chance of Laurence Walker becoming President.
She stares at the screen. That’s based on today. It’s based on right now, the data mining – she hates the idea of it, as if thoughts, emotions, journalism and tweets and whatever else can be broken down into something that’s utterly tangible and totally immutable – having trawled the latest reactions to Laurence’s statement. She imagines that Twitter is full of #Walker2020 advocates, buying into both the message and the man.
For a second she hates this. For a second, she wonders what might have happened if she’d given a different answer when he told that her wanted to run; when he asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She had said, ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted’, and now she thinks that saying that wasn’t really an answer at all.
Laurence’s team takes a detour to Nassawa after the speech is done, already arranged but spontaneous-seeming. This is the start of the process: a meeting with Laurence’s current constituents, the beginning of the handshaking and baby kissing. They stop off at the town hall, and they walk in, unannounced, and the people working there laugh and smile and take photos. Somebody from the Nassawa Tribune comes down and writes an article, takes a short interview with Laurence.
‘Earlier on, your speech? Seemed like you were hinting at a bigger platform for your message. Any chance you can confirm, absolutely, your intentions of running for office?’ the interviewer asks, and Laurence almost laughs at their moxie, at their attempt to get an answer far bigger than their paper probably would usually get. Despite what others are saying, he hasn’t shown his hand yet. Everyone in the room smiles; they all know what the reporter is asking.
‘Not a chance am I answering that one,’ Laurence says, with a smile, and that gets a laugh; and he shakes the journalist’s hand and grins for another photograph. They move on, to a local café, and they eat lunch with the locals there, and Laurence fields questions about the current government, the policies being pushed through. He takes his platform stands: he believes in free healthcare for all, and he believes in the right to a free education that stands head-to-toe with the best that private education can offer. That’s where money should be going. He wants to siphon off far more money from the richest 0.5% – this isn’t about the 1%, he says, it’s those earners who manage to somehow take in the bulk of the country’s income in one fell swoop �
� and put that back into the country itself. ‘If you’ve got an income that would allow us to give everybody in the country a personal doctor and teacher, why shouldn’t we be taking more from you? If you’ve got money you won’t miss, that you won’t even notice is gone from your accounts, why shouldn’t you help where you can?’ That gets applause, the people cheering over their sandwiches and salads. When they’re done they go to the local high school, and there’s a buzz because this doesn’t happen often – Nassawa isn’t big on the map, one school and one hospital – so there’s an impromptu assembly, all the kids brought into the gym for the chance to ask Laurence questions. He’s one of them, and he sells it like that. He grew up in the city, sure, but he lives in the sticks now – ‘The boonies,’ he says, and that gets a laugh, because he’s old and he’s using language like that – and he answers more questions. One younger boy asks if he wants to be President somebody. ‘Someday, sure,’ Laurence says. ‘That, and an astronaut. But President most of all.’
When he’s done, Laurence calls home.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Met some people. All very nice.’
‘That’s what it’s about,’ she says.
‘It is. Love you.’
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ she says.
‘With the big shots? They’ll take what they can get, I’m sure.’ He breaks everything down to casual dismissals. ‘We should go out for dinner when I get back. A proper night: dinner and drinks. A hotel. Maybe a weekend away, before this goes insane.’
‘It’s not insane already?’
‘It’ll get worse.’
‘I don’t even know who you are any more,’ she jokes.
‘Probably for the best,’ he replies. ‘We have a party tonight, for the team.’
‘Party hearty,’ she says, ‘then get some sleep.’
‘Yes, boss,’ he replies.
The party runs all night. Laurence’s people have hired a bar in Midtown, taken the entire place over, and they’ve had a cocktail created for the occasion, some luridly blue thing called the Walker All Over ’em, that tastes like Jolly Ranchers and the cheap flavored wine that teenagers drink. Laurence necks two before he’s even found a seat, and then is handed a third when he’s asked to make a speech. This, he’s told, is the speech for them. Not self-aggrandizing: boosting the troops. He drinks faster as he starts to slur his words (‘Couldn’t have done this all without all of you,’ he says, letting the façade slip only slightly) and then a fourth. There’s an area at the back with a dance floor and somebody puts on some new song that’s been a huge hit pretty much across the world, music made for memes, and he’s dragged out to dance, which he does. Amit stands at the side and watches and laughs, and he takes a photo – expressly banned at the party, because this stuff lingers on the Internet, and there’s always somebody on one of the political blogs who’s desperate to print anything that looks as if it could be the start of a scandal – and shouts that he’ll use it as leverage.
‘You ever fuck up, guess what’s being sent to TMZ?’ he says, and his whole team laughs.
Deanna has trouble sleeping. It begins to rain, and the weather’s so close that she can barely stand it, even with the air-con jacked up as high as it will go. It’s something about the sort of humidity they get here, because at its worst it’s a warm breeze off the top of the lake, dragging along whatever from the base of the mountains, the warm smell of somewhere else entirely, somewhere with a logging industry and factories and a whole other way of life.
She gets out of bed and goes downstairs, and she opens her laptop and the file for what’s meant to be her new novel, years in the making. It’s a book that’s three years late already, if only by her own deadlines rather than those of a publisher that it doesn’t yet have, and she’s so behind. It used to be that she could sit at a table and just write the things, and the words would come out exactly as they were always meant to: from her head to the page, in the right order, the way that she had imagined them (for better or worse). But this one has become stuck, and she can’t move past it until it’s done. She can’t abandon it, that’s for sure. She never gives up on anything. When she first hit the wall she was frustrated: a year of struggling against certain words, of rearranging sentences until they fit the best they could into what was inside her head. After a while, she almost got used to being blocked. The wall was there every time she tried to write, and it never left. Some writers she knows have cats that sit with them while they work; she has the wall.
She tells herself to not rush, because there’s no contract. She never had a real audience, the previous books appearing on shelves one day and then slowly fading from them, until you had to go online to track them down; and how would you even know to? Her agent emails every so often, asking how the book is, how life is, if she’s still writing, and she says that she is. She tells him that she’s working on it, that it’ll be worth it when she’s done. But then she hits send and looks at the word count: not quite static, but close. A few words here and there, up and down. She thinks that she should give up almost every day of her life. Laurence tells her that it’ll be different when he’s done whatever it is he’s going to do. He laughs that people will be desperate for a novel written by the First Lady. It’s only half a joke. She wonders if that’s the pressure that she needs: that maybe the scrutiny of her earlier books, people tearing them apart, looking for truth between the words, might actually drive her to finish this one. And maybe that’s why this book has been so hard, she thinks. It’s more personal than anything else she’s ever written. It’s part of her, in places: of her childhood, and about her sister Peggy, who has been missing ever since she was a small child. It’s about family, mostly, and she knows what will happen to it. The women will be read as proxy for her, the men for Laurence. She wonders if that’s why she’s so hesitant to get any further with it. She began it when Laurence first mentioned running, back when he was doing a talking-head spot during the previous election, and it’s been written in the shadow of his career ever since.
She writes the same sentence over and over, tweaking words. She tweets – which she does anonymously, because these things never die on the Internet and one day some of things she’s said could really bite her in the ass. She exercises on the floor of the kitchen, lying flat on the dark slate tiles, the moon outside, the blinds left up, doing push ups and sit ups until she leaves a patch of sweat the breadth of her body on the tiles themselves.
Twenty-three words. She counts them, and reads them, and tries to evaluate them, two sentences that she knows can’t live up to, and that can’t actually mean anything, not taken like this. She reads them so many times that they start to disintegrate, ceasing to look like actual words any more, starting to be just shapes on the page that she happened to type.
In his hotel room, Laurence dreams: of his children and his wife. And there’s a pale room, pale because the light is so bright, and pale because it’s not a place that he knows. Maybe that’s how dreams are, he thinks through it, because he knows that he’s dreaming. If they’re not grounded, if they’re not somehow stolen from what is actually real, maybe they’re just faded before they even begin. So Deanna and the kids are clear as day, but the room, the background – it’s not a thing that exists and they are taken away from him. They’re pulled backwards into the pale, and there’s nothing that Laurence can do to stop it.
When he wakes up, the dream is a memory that is barely there.
The representatives from the party’s higher echelons all stand to shake Laurence’s hand, and they smile and laugh and pat him on the back.
‘You ready for this?’ one of them asks. ‘You ready for what’s going to happen to your life, son?’
‘Not especially,’ Laurence says, moving around the room, ‘but I’ll do my best.’ They grin, waiting for him to speak more. This is him as a show-pony: put him in front of a crowd and watch him perform. ‘I’m highly adaptable, that’s my thing. That’
s always been my thing. Adapt, don’t stop talking, don’t let the others get a word in edgeways.’
‘It’s his major skill,’ Amit says, ‘and it means that he never ends up listening to me as well.’ That gets a laugh, because they know it’s not true. Amit knows his own reputation, and he knows what he’s worth to the campaign. Everybody in the room does.
There are two empty spaces at the table, the chairs already pulled out for them, the glasses already filled with water, and the two men take them and sit down. The smiling doesn’t stop, nor the gentle laughs that accompany the comfort of the situation for the panel.
‘So, you’re going to be formally announcing Monday,’ an older woman at the far end of the table says, ‘making sure that we get the full week’s cycle. Are you ready for that?’
‘Yes,’ Laurence says.
‘Of course, it’ll mean you’ll have to slightly scale back your day-to-day work, but you’ll still be working for them for a good while yet.’
‘And there’s no race? No contest?’ Amit asks.
‘Nobody with any weight,’ another man says. ‘A few senators are batting their lashes, but your man here tests off the scale.’
‘What about Homme?’
‘He’s thrown his hat into the ring, sure. But you throw a hat onto the floor, it’s likely to get trodden on.’
Another of the old guard interrupts him. ‘Senator Walker, you have our full support. You go out there, you work the states you have to work, shake the hands and kiss the babies. That’s a cliché, Laurence, but clichés exist for a reason. There’s always truth packed inside them.’
‘How long are we talking?’
‘Usually it’s a twelve, fifteen-month race from announcing the intent. This time, we’re winding it back. Let’s try for six before anybody else concedes and then we can concentrate on putting the pressure on POTUS, see if we can’t get him a little scared about what we’re bringing to the table.’ The man who says this, who once ran for President himself, back in the latter part of the last decade, grins. ‘Laurence, you’re a threat. You’re what the party needs, let’s be honest. You’re going to shake this up. You’re going to drag voters in by their bootstraps and coat tails, and you’re going to win this thing.’
