The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

Mama Cass suffocated by a sandwich.

  Is this the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a banana peel?

  I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure what all that has to do with it, but that image in my head immediately came down from its own Sierra Maestra and became this story. I sat right down and wrote it.

  Sierra Maestra

  Sitting here on my mountaintop watching their world crumble, I feel, at this advanced age, neither elation nor remorse, only the entropic force of history following its inexorable course. Did Fidel Castro feel thus watching the Batista regime sagging into decay from its own weight from his remote stronghold in the Sierra Maestra? I doubt it, for Fidel was a much younger man and those were much younger days, when revolution was a word we all took seriously and literally. But de Gaulle, waiting in haughty isolation as the Fourth Republic slowly collapsed toward his inevitability, and Juan Peron, watching Argentina flounder in the vacuum of his long, long exile, I think, would both have appreciated the irony of what I feel as this night slowly falls.

  Far below me, Central Park is an oblong island of darkness in the pattern of lights that still covers most of Manhattan, a foreflash of what is soon to come. Even now, I can see the blackout rolling up the West Side from 34th Street to 59th, and the searchlight beam of a police helicopter probing the dark and empty streets for the creatures of night. It is all too easy to fantasize guerrilla armies marshaling in the secret shrubbery of permanently blacked-out Central Park, battalions of legendary muggers imbued with revolutionary consciousness at last.

  But such fantasies are for the police, peering down from their helicopters into the shadows. In truth, the muggers are long since gone from the Park for lack of victims mad enough to brave the blackout, deprived of prey by the power of their own mystique. It is even possible to sympathize with them; in the early days of the blackout there must have been a time when they lurked behind their bushes fondling their saps forlornly like Indians hopelessly awaiting the return of the buffalo.

  Automatic weapons fire crackles and sparkles for a few moments over the mid-40s and helicopters begin to converge. Watching the beams of their searchlights and listening to the ominous whunk-whunk of their rotors from my penthouse balcony, I feel a surge of adrenaline course through my old arteries, and it is easy to imagine this as the opening rounds of long-awaited Armageddon. But the firing is over before this fantasy can even take shape—just a routine patrol taking pot-shots at suspected looters in the free-fire zone.

  I take a last private toke from my joint, fling the still burning butt over the parapet, and watch the glowing ember fall thirty stories into the darkness. “Roaches,” we used to call them in the old days when pot was illegal and the smoking of it therefore a sacrament, a tiny act of revolution. In that sense, perhaps, the legalization of marijuana may be seen as the last act of true political cunning of which our enemies were capable, the final co-option. Now, of course, they are no longer capable of even being our enemies—we all become allies of necessity against entropy in the end. How foolish it seems, to have waged such a protracted and debilitating struggle over the THC molecule. But then, haven’t men fought longer and deadlier wars over pure symbols like the cross, or even the interpretation of random snatches of scripture, while the true enemy of us all cackles up there in the vacuum?

  The burning ember, like its half-forgotten symbolic import, disappears into the arms of darkness, and I finally turn and walk back into my chambers to confront those who have gathered at my bidding. How spiderlike that thought seems as I think it. How spiderlike we have become in our long secret sojourn in the Sierra Maestra of the soul. Have we finally made ourselves unfit to wield power by the very process we have put ourselves through in order to ensnare it? I smile ruefully and feel more at peace as I encompass the reality of this moral doubt, for only when those who wield power maintain a healthy fear of being wielded by it may justice yet live.

  As I walk into the plushness of my huge living room and see those who have gathered there, I am suddenly struck by the unpleasant realization that we all have become old and we all have become rich. In the old days, we feared the one and at least professed to eschew the other. But we chose long ago not merely to survive but to attempt to prevail. To accumulate power without spending it is to accumulate money, and to acquire wisdom and patience means accumulating years. So here we are, heirs and paladins of what began decades ago as a “youthful rebellion” about to come into our own as graybeards and elder statesmen. We believed in those days that no one our present age was to be trusted; hopefully this lesson has been deepened and enriched by irony, rather than unlearned. If we can be rulers who do not trust ourselves, America may yet be salvaged.

  “Heavy thoughts?” Sandra says. Once, in Berkeley, in the flush of the ’60s, we were lovers, and once again, longer and deeper, in the ’80s. In the wrinkled parchment of her face, I can see the young girl inside her, and the full blossom of her beauty in middle years. I have loved them both and some part of me loves them still.

  “We’ve become the people we warned ourselves about,” I say, blunting the edge with slyness. “Old fogies conspiring to rule the world from a penthouse. Senators, Congresspeople, capitalists and media barons.”

  She laughs her bright changeless laugh as we walk across the room to the square of sofas where the others are waiting, and it drives the shadows from my mind. Long ago, she was with me when we so solemnly dedicated our lives to changing the world by next week, and later we were together once more when the Compact was made and we all went our long-term temporary ways to infiltrate by osmosis. Always that laughter made me sing inside, and now I suddenly decide that when the inevitable occurs, Sandra will be with me again, as my Vice-President. Thus do we-decide high policy, and why not, it is part of what makes us who we are. We shall be a government not of laws but of living, feeling men and women, a government not of structures but of souls. Still, I cannot help but feel the shade of Juan Peron smirking knowingly over my shoulder in this moment.

  As Sandra and I seat ourselves together, I feel the eyes of the others following my movements with a new and disquieting expectancy, as if I am already a figure in some historical diorama, and it seems as if I can already feel the leaden mantle of state falling upon me. Fear comes over me, a ghastly sort of loneliness, a pall of isolation descending. And I resolve that as President I will walk the streets and eat in the restaurants like an ordinary citizen. Better to risk assassins’ bullets than this terrifying and certain distancing, this death-in-life. It will be called bravado. Only I will know that it is fear.

  “Mr. President,” Bart Lorenzi says with gentle sarcasm, and the rest smile. This is as close to a vote as we are prone to come. We have known each other, our destinies and our trajectories, for so long that nothing beyond this is necessary. We am tike a family, each with his role, each with his place.

  “Aren’t you being a bit premature?” I say archly, and at this we all laugh together, for the pattern that has brought us to this moment is decades old, built slowly and carefully like a stone cathedral, no hot-blooded coup d’etat.

  As medieval architects drew up plans for cathedrals whose completion they would never live to see, so did we draw up the Compact and assign ourselves our eventual positions in the completed structure according to our inclinations and opportunities. Bart Lorenzi to become our banking baron, financier of industries and minor governments, intimate of the Gnomes of Zurich. Eric Winshell to move slowly up in the hierarchy of the State Department into his present position. Warren Hinckly to build Ecomotors General. Ted Davies to ascend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sandra, Lillian Margulies, Julian Clay, Fred Banyan, Roger Pulaski to cautiously, quietly, and carefully move upward through the conventional political processes until now we have a Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Senators and Representatives of high seniority and Sandra as Speaker of the House.

  All of us accumulating subordinates and allies personally loyal to us on our way up, secreting them
into the interstices of government, finance, industry, and the military, furthering their careers discreetly as best we could, until now the score of people in this room represent the tip of an enormous iceberg. Not a conspiracy, but an infinitely subtle web of personal loyalties, shared consciousness, common goals, and yes, love.

  And I too was chosen for my distant destiny long decades ago. In a sense, I have been running unsuccessfully for the Presidency for a quarter of a century—first almost as a national joke; then as a visionary from my secure Senate seat, accumulating weight and solidity; now, finally, as a remote elder statesman whose old prophecies have long since come to pass, whose far-out and impractical proposals are now seen by the millions as the right roads not taken in the easy clarity of failure’s hindsight.

  No, there is nothing like prematurity here.

  Roger swirls his glass of bourbon, cubes of ice tinkling against the glass, talisman of long years cultivating friendships with southern Senators. “Just got the word from the White House. The Vice-President’s letter of resignation has arrived. Your appointment to succeed him will be announced tomorrow morning.”

  I nod. Even this endgame strategy has been planned for decades. The Agnew resignation and the Nixon resignation pointed the way back in the ’70s. The Vice-President resigns or is removed, the choice of a new Vice-President is forced upon the President, he is confirmed by Congress, then the President resigns. Technically, all that is required is Congressional acquiescence to the choice of an incumbent President and the necessary leverage on two men. And Constitutionality is scrupulously maintained. In the beginning this did not seem important to us, but now the decades have taught us the wisdom of remaining within the Constitutional framework. Once the Constitution is successfully breached, the entire document is destroyed and we become a nation of tooth and claw. I shall not play Caesar to our republic.

  “Do you expect any trouble in the Senate?” Sandra asks.

  Roger shakes his head. “We’ve had the votes for a long time. Sanderman may try a filibuster, but I think we have the votes for a quick cloture too.”

  “Sanderman won’t try it,” Bart says authoritatively. “I’ve bought up his notes on that Coastal Island development and he’s been made to understand his position.”

  “It’s all in place,” Julian says.

  The words are like the final stone placed at the top of the last cathedral arch. The coup—and I might as well admit to myself that it is a coup d’etat, albeit a Constitutional coup—is but the mechanism for bringing about the technical transfer of power, for midwiving the inevitability we have engineered. For catching the ripe fruit dropping from the tree of history, if one prefers a more dialectical viewpoint.

  I turn to Katherine Broxon, publisher of Time since Bart acquired it for us seven years ago, and cock an inquisitive eyebrow. “We’re printing already. The cover story on the President hinting at his failing health. He’ll be able to step aside gracefully.”

  “No problems with recognition,” Eric says. “Even the Japanese will be relieved to have you in office. At least for the time being.”

  “The polls?”

  “It’ll be one big sigh of national relief,” Katherine says. “The people don’t want to wait till the next election. The mood is that they’ve waited too long already.”

  I relax against the plush piling of the couch. In addition to a Constitutional coup, we are going to have a democratically approved coup like the return of de Gaulle in ’58 or that of Peron in ’74. The people are bone-weary of economic depression, fading electrical power, unemployment, permanent inflation, protein starvation, and a government that can only throw up its hands and admit its helplessness. Like a hard granite boulder buried under geological layers of soft sandstone, we bided our time, content to merely endure until the inevitable forces of erosion ate away the strata around us. Until now we stand alone on the desolate plain, the only rock to cleave to. Until even our former enemies turn to us in despair.

  I look slowly around the room, each face in turn, confronting each pair of eyes like tunnels through time, seeing beyond the gray hair, the tapestries of wrinkles, the succession of personas we have assumed down the decades, to the changeless essences within. Or changeless they seem from this strange perspective crosswise in time. Are we not the same beings whose eyes met in this same soul-to-soul contact so many years ago when the communal organism that we have become was given birth? In the long-gone terminology of the ’60s, have we not remained forever young?

  But why do I feel this blossoming of dread, this void unfolding the cold petals of its flower within me? Why do their eyes seem to recede down long stone corridors of perspective, why does my own living room seem like an immense cavern of millennial gloom rimed with the mineral accretions of ages?

  I rise from the couch and I can feel the creakiness of my knees, the softness of my internal organs, and my head is like some great hollow globe tottering atop a fleshy structure grown too frail to support it.

  “I think I’d like to be alone for a bit,” I say, and the simple sentence sounds ridiculously theatrical as my mouth moves around the words; my movements seem exaggeratedly slow and fluid, pregnant with meaning, as I walk across the soft carpet toward the balcony. Images out of films and history books pile up in my mind as I walk—Mussolini stepping out on his balcony to bask in the cheering of the masses. Imperial Caesars accepting homage. John Kennedy walking down a lonely beach with head bowed, white smoke rising over the Vatican and a sepulchral voice intoning, “Habemus Papum.”

  But when I emerge onto my balcony, there is no sudden ovation, no waiting crowd; nothing greets me but the night. The blackout has spread itself over Manhattan now, only rectilinear islands of : light remain in a sparse checkerboard pattern, and to the south the giant buildings of midtown are a cruel and jagged cordillera of dark mountains against a sky in which faint stars shine like the dying lights of America’s faded glory far below. Police helicopters whunk-whunk over the somnolent city like carrion flies buzzing around a bonepile, their white searchlight beams moving like ghostly fingers over the empty streets. It is a scene, a moment, of utter loneliness, unfit for the eye of man.

  I light another joint, take a tiny puff, and let it glow between my fingers as a candle against the darkness. I force myself to think of the future, of the weeks and months to come, of the “steps that must be taken,” as the news magazines will ! phrase it. Bart will announce the forgiveness of the government notes he has bought up by stealth, nearly a quarter of the National Debt, and that will give the dollar a stability it has not had in decades. But banks will fall like Southeast Asian dominoes and the financial community will scream in rage. The hundred percent tax on profits in excess of ten percent will move the GNP toward full employment stasis, but industrialists and stockholders will fly into a fury as the stock market plummets, perhaps into oblivion. The ban on even private electric cars will hit the ordinary citizen in his pocketbook and his psyche, even though their largest manufacturer, Ecomotors General, will patriotically urge support of the move in the national interest. The food export quotas will make America an object of loathing in Asia and Africa. It is going to get so much darker before the dawn.

  I am going to be a hated man.

  This first cold realization squeezes my heart like a fist. No souls will sing at the sound of my name, no voices will cheer my motorcade. The transformation will be a decade in the making; I have always known it, but now I feel it in the hollow places of my brittle bones. I will not see the lights come on again, I will not taste the freshened air. I will not see the food factories churning out their endless bounty. I will never bask in the love of the people. I will be cursed and reviled and assassins will mutter my name as they oil their guns in secret cellars. One day a bullet will burst in my brain, sic semper tyrannis.

  I look out over the spectral city and doubt creeps into my soul. What if we were wrong? What if we have let too much history slip by as we waited in our Sierra Maestra for the day
of vindication to arrive? What if it is too late; perhaps entropy has already won its final victory while we husbanded and conserved our lives and substances to no avail. Perhaps we should have risked all in hot-blooded revolution and died in fire rather than ice. We chose and we became that which we had chosen. Now as we come into our own, we have no choices left. I am one with the inevitability of history and I will never know whether for good or ill.

  Nor will I be granted even the luxury of sharing my doubts, for now I must become a man of iron, a monument of stone, an icon of the certainty I can no longer feel. A current of wind whistles around my parapet. It is so cold and lonely up here on the mountaintop.

  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Sandra has come out onto the balcony beside me. I do not look at her. I do not have to, I can feel her presence with me; with me yet apart, for now even she will forever be distanced from me by the geometries of state. This is what we must share in this final phase, this is the dowry of our last affair.

  I force a laugh, and an advertising jingle from the long-gone ’60s. “We’ve come a long way, baby, to get where we’re going today.”

  “A little afraid?” she says softly.

  I nod. “And lonely.” I suck on the joint and hand it to her. Let this cup pass from me, I think, knowing all too well that it will not. “This is as good a time as any to tell you,” I say, grateful to move on to matters of state, already hiding myself in the machineries of power, “You’re going to be my Vice-President.” I allow her no choice, no pro forma gesture of refusal, as none has been allowed to me.

  We turn to each other. She merely nods. There is no surprise, no false disclaimers, thank God. Our eyes meet over a distance that suddenly has widened. We take each other’s hands and squeeze old warm flesh.

  “It’s getting chilly out here,” she says, turning to face the lights of the living room where the others wait with questions of cabinet posts and policy with the eagerness of history waiting to be born.