Alternative Truths

by Bob Brown

  The thing is, I miss her. I guess that’s really why I’m making this recording. She’s still here, of course. They all are. But I know it’s not her anymore. Her body still looks the same. Still feels the same. Her face is still her face. But she’s somebody else. It used to be electric. I can’t describe it. There was a tension that made it good between us. Some back and forth. The friction and differences were kind of hot, to be honest. She was cute when she yelled back at Rush. I didn’t even mind when she scolded me for calling people ‘Libtards’. Sometimes it was even better between us after we made up.

  I remember when she marched on the state capital in that stupid pink pussy hat. Seems like a long time ago now. I told her it was ridiculous. I told her that she already had plenty of equality, and Trump wasn’t really going to take anything away from her. She kissed me anyway when I dropped her off. I loved her standing there with the rest of the Feminazis, smiling like a gorgeous, brilliant idiot. I’d even helped her make her damn sign. When she got out of the Silverado, I actually wanted to go with her. But I didn’t.

  That night I told her I was proud of her though. For speaking her mind. For standing up for what she believed in. I told her I still thought the protest was stupid, and I didn’t really understand why she needed to complain. But I kind of liked that she did. We talked a bit about how we used to argue in the online forum for that stupid General Ed. Philosophy class we both took in college. Really, she helped me pass that class. I ended up with a C. I don’t remember why, but when the class was over, we started going out for coffee. That night after the protest we remembered that too. I think she was more alive to me on that night than any time before or since.

  She started noticing the changes first, in the things she was reading, social media, what her friends were saying. I told her it was just that people were finally coming to their senses. The liberals lost the argument, lost the election, and maybe some of them were finally starting to get smart.

  But she made me read this blog post by our old Philosophy prof Amanda Deckard. She had this new theory that epistemology and ontology are actual dimensions of reality like space and time. So the idea was that stuff happening in one dimension could warp the other, like how space and time are connected together. There was all kinds of stuff about collapsing probability waves and a cat in a box with poison. I didn’t get it all the first time, but basically she was saying that the facts we choose to observe can have an effect on reality.

  Now, I would just call bullshit on it. But something weird was going on that caused people to change, like that guy on the old Fox TV show. Not just what they said and did in public. But it changed their spirit, you know? Who they are. Whatever the hell, pretty soon it started to have an effect on my reality.

  Did you ever see that Twilight Zone where the burglar dies and goes to Heaven and he always wins and gets what he wants, and then he finds out that isn’t Heaven? That’s how it is with her these days. For about a week I thought she was trying to butter me up or something. She’d been a little different for a while already I guess, but when she started doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, even in bed, I knew she had changed. The sex was great, at first. But that was when I really noticed she was gone. She was like a doll. Not a doll, really. I mean, she still does stuff on her own. But she wasn’t her anymore.

  She used to do yoga in a shaft of sun in the living room. I loved to call it yogurt just to yank her chain. She’d just flip me off and smile. She was so beautiful. She still looks the same as she always did, but somehow she isn’t beautiful like she used to be. I don’t feel anything when I look at her, when I hold her. Just loss. She still smiles, but it doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Now she gives me her body in ways she never did before, but I don’t care, if you can believe it. I wish she would give me the finger instead. She went out and bought a treadmill.

  So I confronted her. I don’t know, two months ago? I told her she was different. She didn’t seem to care anymore about the stuff that used to be important to her. Why? What was that all about? I didn’t know who I was living with anymore.

  And she denied it. She denied it all. She told me she never went to any protests or marches. Said I was making stuff up. I was the one changing. I literally couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  I went to the closet and grabbed her pink pussy hat. “What’s this, then?” I said. “It’s your pussy hat. You wore that to the march on the capital! All your friends had ’em on. You were protesting Trump talking about grabbing pussy. You can’t tell me you don’t remember your pussy hat!”

  So she says, “It’s just a cute cat hat. You don’t need to be crude. I mean, we can be crude if you want. You want to see me in the hat? I can wear just the hat if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s not what I want,” I told her. “Not right now. I want you to be like you were before. I want you to argue with me and tell me how backward and sexist I am. I want you to tell me how I don’t get it, and my family’s a bunch of rednecks. I want you to show me some video about women or black folks protesting. I want you to get all excited about some damn cause and try to convince me I’m on the wrong side of history.”

  Then she says, “I don’t think you’re wrong, baby, and I really don’t know what’s gotten into you. Why would I want to go to protests? You want me to turn into some kind of a liberal?”

  That’s when I slapped her in the face.

  She looked stunned for a second. And then she just smiled. She changed the subject. Tried to bring me a beer.

  I felt sick. I had to go outside. I puked in the driveway, and then I had to go drive around for a while. I’m no feminist, but I had never hit her before, or even come close. It couldn’t have been me who just did that. But she wasn’t herself anymore, either. Before, she probably would have slapped me back. She might have left me. Now she wasn’t the one I’d argued with and gone out to coffee with. She wasn’t the one I’d skipped class to make out and hook up with. She wasn’t the one I loved anymore. When I got back, everything was back to normal. Well, it was the new normal anyway. All different.

  I wanted to go back and read the Philosophy prof’s blog post again. See if I could get more out of it the second time around. Maybe there was some way to reverse the changes. Put things back the way they were by paying attention to different facts. Or maybe it’s like melting ice sheets, and once it gets past a certain point you can’t stop it. But when I went to look for it online the next day I couldn’t find it. I Googled the prof’s name, and everything I could remember about the post, but I didn’t get any results at all. It was like it never existed. But that’s not the kind of thing I could ever make up. It was real once. But then it just wasn’t anymore.

  I found all her yoga videos in the trash yesterday. I pulled one out and put it in the DVD player. It didn’t even try to play. It just said “No Disc”. So I dug them all back out and tried six or eight of them. They were all the same. Nothing left on them.

  Not everything has changed though, and some of the libtard stuff came true. Lettuce and stuff got really expensive because nobody wants to pick it for cheap. But the FDA says it really isn’t as important as they used to think. The last couple winters have been really warm. But now they’re calling that “temperature scale dilation” and I heard Congress is going to make them correct the degrees to compensate.

  The thing that scares me most is that I know I’m going to forget too. The same thing that happened to her is going to happen to me, eventually. The thing is, she got under my skin, you know? I’m not the same guy I was before I met her. She changed me, and that change is going to be undone by whatever it is that’s happening now, and I won’t even remember who I was, or how I got that way. The worst thing is, I won’t remember who she was, and how she was. How we were. I won’t even remember that things could have been different.

  I’m going to write myself a note to listen to this audio file tomorrow, so I can remember how things were for at least one more day. But I don�
�t know how long it’s going to even be on the hard drive. Sooner or later, the file is just going to vanish, and the note reminding me to listen to it will disappear.

  END

  THE FRAME

  Bobby Lee Featherston

  Donald Trump, smiled for the White House photographer as he hung the framed letter symbolically in his new office. He pursed his lips as he looked closer at the aging wall with the dull, vertical-striped wallpaper. Something with a bit more gold and maybe some velvet might improve the looks. This was, after all, the Oval Office, not a cheap hotel. As soon as the photo flash faded he waved the photographer out. He wanted to be alone for this moment.

  He was here, the 45th President of the United States of America. He wished he could have been the fiftieth. People always remembered round numbers. Then he wondered who the tenth president was and changed his mind. If he didn’t know, it wasn’t important. But the idea of the Golden Jubilee of the Presidency brought a satisfied smile to his face.

  Thirty Seven. He did know that number. Richard M. Nixon. The most unfairly maligned politician in American History. A great man, he thought, such a great man. Such a waste. The dogs, those liberal media dogs, had dragged him down.

  The gilded frame he adjusted on the wall one tenth of an inch had been a gift to the White House, something to do with Jefferson and the French and somebody called Cardinal Richelieu. Screw the French he thought. They were already goners. More mosques per capita than Pakistan.

  The hand-written swirls of Dear Donald topped the letter. Nixon had written this letter almost 30 years ago. Now the phrase that had guided Trump’s dreams for 30 years lay where it belonged: “Whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner,” Nixon had written to a much younger Donald. Hell yes, Trump thought. Very much the winner. The biggest winner in the entire history of the nation.

  He walked across the room to where his chair sat behind the huge desk. He was alone in the office for once. Sometimes that was what he needed. To his left the stern glare of Andrew Jackson gazed down, to his right the letter hung, a small thing surrounded by a great deal of blank wall. His office. The Oval Office.

  He ran his hands, spread fingered, over the desktop. The wood was not the flawless mirrored surfaces he was used to, it had once been part of an English warship. At least that was what the cranky little man had said when he was laying out what he called “historical artifact rules.” The desk was the same desk used by Kennedy and Reagan, and Obama. He thought about Michelle Obama. He grinned openly at the thought of what might have taken place on this desk if he had been married to a woman like her when he was still as young as Obama. This led to a frown when he realized that Obama was young and this had been his office.

  He pulled his hand back and reached in his pocket for his hand sanitizer. A deep sigh escaped him. But that ship had sailed, he wasn’t that young man anymore. Outside, the lights of the White House grounds came on. He had plenty of work to do, but he preferred the desk in his study and he left the Oval Office.

  ~o0o~

  Darkness. No, now light. The darkness has passed. Was passing. Had he been asleep? No. He was dead. He thought he was dead. Pretty sure he remembered that.

  He knew this place. He knew this room. But where? When? There was darkness. And waking. And weariness. Such weariness. He let himself slide back into the darkness.

  ~o0o~

  A woman screeched.

  Donald Trump resisted the urge to smile. Management 101: let them fight it out with each other before you made the decision. They get it out of their system, you demonstrate you are in charge, and they are mad at each other, not you, and will compete wildly for your favor.

  The Press Secretary dropped the folder on the burnished table where once Albert Einstein had briefed Roosevelt. “You cannot ask me to go out there and say that!”

  “You already have,” said Kellyanne. “It was in the press packet you released yesterday. Now put on your big boy pants and get ready to say it out loud.”

  “Martin Luther King would not be opposed to the Civil Rights Act.”

  “He was for equality? Right?” Kellyanne, stroked her fingers over the head of the bust that sat on the white pedestal.

  Martin Luther King was dead. He died the year I was elected President.

  Awareness came quicker this time.

  He was President. The windows. Those three glorious windows.

  Chanting. He could hear them. Even through those glorious windows.

  “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.” He heard it. Echoes of it.

  The draft. It had been the draft. And Cambodia. And Kent State. Those bodies. They wouldn’t listen to him. Nobody wanted the war. He didn’t want the war. The students. They were angry. At him. He was President.

  “Are you questioning the policy?” Kellyanne tilted her head and adopted the heavy-lidded smugness that had become beloved by a nation of old white men wearing red hats. “Or are you just too chickenshit to go out there and say it?”

  “No—”

  “Just do your job,” she snapped.

  “Mr. President—”

  It felt good to hear those words again.

  Donald looked up from the keyboard on his phone. He held up a hand. “The order is written, Bannon says it’s what the people want. The AG bought off.” He smiled at his Press Secretary. “And you can tell them this. Since it affects the colored people, I even called Dr. Carson. He told me that if anybody had a problem with this they just want something for nothing and should get a job. Just do it.” He instantly regretted saying it. If the tapes ever got out. He shook his head in regret, those Nike bastards would have him saying their catch phrase. Oh well.

  “Yes, sir.” The press secretary nodded and picked up the folder. “I’ll be sure to quote you.” As he exited the room, he pulled his beeping phone out of his pocket. Even as the door closed, Donald could hear his muffled curse.

  “He doesn’t have to follow you on Twitter,” said Kellyanne.

  Donald laughed. “It’s just so damned much fun.”

  She walked over to the desk and picked up the phone. “Equal rights are Civil Rights. No special privileges on my watch.” As was her habit, she checked to ensure the response filters were on. No responses could be viewed beyond those specified. His tweet would receive glowing reviews. She had seven interns in Georgetown who typed the only responses the President would ever see.

  Where is twitter and why would that little man follow him there?

  “Where is twitter?” Donald cocked his head. Had he said that?

  “Very funny sir,” said Kellyanne.

  Donald stood and looked out the window. He waved toward the street, past the iron fence. Protesters had gathered. “I don’t want them there.”

  “They are here to cheer you on, sir. They are protesting the media’s coverage of your successes.” She said it without ever looking up from her phone.

  There were times, Donald thought, when her enthusiasm, so critical in the campaign, had waned. Was she used up? He made a mental note to talk to Steve about it.

  She looked at her watch. “You have the Royal Rangers in six minutes, sir.”

  “Rangers?” He stomped a foot. The gold lame curtains shimmered as he spun, the fury contorting his face. “I will not have those traitorous—”

  “Sir,” she said urgently. “Not Park Rangers, sir. This is a Church Youth Group, we’ve slated them to fill all of the Boy Scout slots. You remember, they have allowed,” she lowered her voice, “transgendered into the Boy Scouts now. It’s an image thing. We can’t risk them sneaking one in just to embarrass you. Besides that, the Mormons are still a bit slow coming around.”

  I never liked Boy Scouts. Always had to fight to keep the fags out.

  “I never liked the Boy Scouts,” said Donald. He stopped, had he just said that. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Boy Scouts, but Ike thought they were important. And he was vice president.

  “What the fuck?�
� Donald shook his head. He needed to get focused. He didn’t know who the hell Ike was and he sure as hell wasn’t vice president.

  My name is Dick Nixon.

  He could see Eisenhower sitting at the desk. He could see himself at the desk, now he wore another face, a different body. He looked down at his hands. They were like his mother’s hands, small, manicured, and soft. Not his hands.

  More memories flooded back. “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” It was his voice, Dick Nixon’s voice. He had asked that question.

  Checkers was a dog. Pat had loved that dog. Pat was a woman. His wife. Images of a slender woman, a model, she had an accent. His wife. No. No she was this other man’s wife.

  Dick needed to think. Memories rolled back.

  “I am not a crook.”

  His words. He wasn’t a crook. The communists. He had to stop the communists.

  Peace with Honor.

  He forced the thoughts back. Order. He needed to make order. There was light. He swam to the surface. This time he broke through. Suddenly the hazy images were gone. He saw clearly. He knew who he was.

  This was like one of the Jenki movies. He was inside the President. He could see, not the soul. That wasn’t the right word. The pattern. That was it. People now had a pattern. The woman’s pattern was easy, it moved, it shifted, always to mirror the form of the President’s pattern. No specific form, not of its own. Whatever uniqueness that existed lay deeper, not on the surface.

  A new man was in the room. Darkness was his pattern, an obscuring shifting darkness. Whatever was visible became obscured, replaced with a dark and faulty replica. The shifting pattern forever cycling toward darkness.

  “We have the votes,” said Steve Bannon. “The Environmental Protection Agency will not be in next year’s budget.” He clasped meaty hands together as if relishing a victory.