by Melody Clark
“Okay, okay,” T.J. said, “I know better than to talk you out of anything. Do you have your cell phone charged?"
"Yes, Marmee."
"At the first sign of trouble, call?"
"No," Jack said, walking away slowly to where he needed to be going. "I'll let them beat me severely and drag me away to their evil otter kingdom in Secaucus."
"Jack -- " T.J. said and waited till he turned around.
When he did, T.J. mouthed "I love you".
Jack smiled, pretended he caught something then acted like he tossed it back. "Gotta book it. Here comes Max."
The room was soundless and almost airless, with that stale, cold smell common to all modern office buildings. There hadn’t been an attempt made at warmth with a picture on a wall or a real, living plant. It wasn’t till you left the central hallway that you reached some dose of personalization. Even that seemed contrived.
That was just as well. T.J had no intentions of staying a moment longer than necessary.
Miller Alexander never looked up from whatever he was poring over. He merely gestured him in through the open door.
“Be with you in a moment,” he muttered.
“Be with me now, I don’t have a moment,” T.J. said sharply. “You left a message for me to come alone once we met with Piper. I’ve already had to lie about it to someone I detest lying to. So tell me what it was you wanted to discuss so surreptitiously?”
Miller flung him a grumpy glance. “I hear you were much more polite to Piper.”
“Word does travel fast, doesn‘t it? As it happens, I’ve no particular reason to despise Piper. Out with it. Come on.”
Miller pitched his pen across to his desk set. “Very well. I have an offer for you.”
“Already?”
Miller nodded, stretching out his hands together to crack his knuckles. “Already. It seems Pandora’s box has had the lock jimmied. Word is out. Capitol Peach has names. Not many but some.”
“That cable access gossip show? Who cares?”
“Half the younger members of Congress. It’s popular. Granted, it has a reputation for accuracy similar to your average supermarket tabloid, but it’s damned near impossible to unring a bell. Where they go, the Post will follow. People will start checking around. One of the names they’re announcing is Lon Waldie. Another is Deke Mendelsohn.”
“Dear god,” T.J. said, craning his head back to shut his eyes, looking for something not to see. “Why Lon? He’s a ranking member. Everyone likes him. Deke is new.”
“Who knows?” He tilted in his chair a moment, locking his fingers together behind his head to lean back against them. "The point is we have to head this off now. No one wants this list to get out. We all have a personal stake in it staying under wraps."
“I don’t. Other than concern for the innocent people on the list, I don’t care whether it comes out or not. I’m not on it. And the chief reason I’m not on it is that I’m out.”
Miller’s grim smile flickered a little. “What about concern for your friend?”
“Who? Jack? Why?” T.J. insisted, staring him down. “If you’re looking to leverage the situation with intimidation tactics -- “
Miller held up a hand to stop the topic of conversation. “Not at all. It’s just that we need to take a stand. I'm ready to broker a deal between you and my contacts. And it involves your friend."
"Involves him how?" T.J. asked harshly.
"As a sacrificial lamb.”
T.J. turned quickly and walked toward the door. “This meeting is over.”
“This will happen with or without you,” Miller said sharply before Thomas could leave. “If you want to moderate the impact on your friend, you’ll listen to me. These guys I represent are Social Darwinists, Thomas. They call poor people useless eaters. They make Ebenezer Scrooge look like Andrew Carnegie. You could send ten years’ worth of chain-rattling ghosts after these bastards and they’d still sleep through the night like babies.”
“I know all of that. What I want to know is how you live with yourself while allying with them?”
“I’m not an ally. I’m just their goddamned go-between. They have me by the balls just like they do half the people on the Hill. Except for a few. Your buddy Jack Paulson is as incorruptible as Saint Bernadette. You know how many bribes he’s turned down? Plus, he’s impossible to blackmail because he isn’t ashamed of anything. And, to top it all off, he’s the descendant of a fucking founding father. His House years were neutralized by his lack of influence in Congress. His wife’s dying kept a lid on him too. But now he’s back with a whole new sense of purpose. A dangerous one, from my contacts’ point of view.”
“I think all of that is a wonderful thing,” T.J. snarled back, still not moving far from the door. “So would you if you were an actual Democrat and not a paid shark for the have-mores. I’m a Republican and I may disagree with Democratic methods, but most legitimate Republicans understand the other party is trying to do what they see as best.”
Miller laughed darkly. He shook his head. “I live in reality where most Democrats fear to tread. With the idiot Republican we have in the White House, the right feels like the left is emboldened. They want to spin what would have been a positive for the Democrats into a negative. The same thing the Democrats would do if the shoe was on the other foot. These Republicans want to make an example of one of the neo-bleeding hearts.”
T.J. crossed his arms, trying to rein in his anger. “And that’s Jack?”
Miller nodded. “The mid-term election’s rallying cry will be fiscal conservatism against socialism. We need a good conservative issue to pimp along with a socially moderate one. Your pal will be the face of their bulwark agenda against liberal spending initiatives. If you don't stop him and his push for social spending, he’s going to be the Jew they nail up before the throngs.”
"By doing what?"
"Primarily by killing that pointless, feel-good Break Fast bill of his. The one he’s at a meeting about now, I’m told.”
“That pointless, feel-good bill, as you call it, will feed millions of poor children,” T.J. said, at the very edge of his ability to contain his anger. “It’s an emergency allocation which must be made.”
“Come on, you’ve played the game here long enough. These aren’t the days of reasonable people building consensus … Goldwater and Simon are dead. Nowadays, everyone would sign onto it as a big political spit-swapping fest and then damn it with faint funding. A million dollars sounds like big bucks to Main Street but a million won’t even cover the fucking budget to administrate the thing.”
“But Jack was too smart for you,” T.J. said, the edges of his mouth curling up in a small, proud smile. “He built the rapid funding into the bill.”
“Exactly. And oh, John Adams’ ancestral grandson demanding money to feed the poor children of America? The press will eat that with a spoon. Just one little watershed event to open up the taps of the public coffers for a whole new era of liberal freeloading.”
“Yes, heaven forbid we use some of the public’s money to benefit them. Much better to hand it off to bankers and CEOs.” T.J. shut his eyes in the slow realization, shaking his head in response. “Let me guess from here. Your bastards want my ancestral grandfather’s name to counter it.”
“Precisely,” Miller said, with a daring gleam in his eyes. “Democrats may see themselves as Jefferson’s descendants but your ancestor was a big-time states rights man. That’s GOP territory. Here’s what they ask. Break with your buddy on Break Fast. Side with your party. Lend your name to the cause to counter his name and I'll broker the deal to get your Gay Marriage thing pushed through.”
“You can’t be serious. You honestly expect me to believe the No-Homos -- “
“The party faithful will do what they’re told. You know the names that the real powerbrokers call these moronic religious zealots behind their backs. No one gives a rat’s ass about anyone’s sex life. But people kept stupid enough to think that cavem
en rode dinosaurs can be made to buy anything. We already managed the Supreme Court to get sodomy laws off the books. So we'll sell it as a human rights issue just like that. Have our media snake oil men close the sale with the audience. If you'll be sure to keep this list quashed and neutralize your friend, I can work the deal."
"Well, you may shove your deal up your skinny whoring ass,” T.J. said. “I would never do that to Jack."
"You'll be doing it for Jack. Persuade him to table his agenda. For everyone's sake. Including his. Don’t be silly -- you know what these people can do. You know what they did to Peter Milestone. You know what they will do if they have no other choice. Jack is a threat to them –”
“Is that supposed to be a threat to Jack?”
“It’s friendly advice. Don’t say no now. Think it over. Get back to me.” Miller checked his watch. “That’s all I have to say.”
T.J. turned around, feeling like he was moving in a cloud of numbness. He stopped inside the door and then looked around to ask, “How the hell do you sleep at night?”
Miller paid him one last glare before he went back to his work. “With one eye open like everybody else in this town.”
The only real substance of any senatorial meeting spanned maybe thirty minutes. It blew thirty-five if they included a roll call.
From there it was all parlor politics. Parlor politics was nothing but an enthusiastic sleight of hand demonstration by a falling down drunken magician. The experience was weird and awkward and fumbling and he usually came away less amazed at the magic than embarrassed for the bibulous magician.
Jack had perched on his chair as he listened to the steady, endless, brain-deadening drone of unctuous grandiloquence and pompous pontification to the point he was certain his eardrums would explode. Then somebody suggested "a trust building exercise" and Paulson got the hell out of there as fast as he could move.
He had almost reached the cross halls which fed into the older structure which he was not about to look at even once before he left when he felt a small, cool hand slip securely into his.
Little girl. Maybe nine. Wearing a mob cap. Big trusting smile. She held fast to his hand as if she worried he might let go.
“Are you lost?” Jack said, not knowing what else to say.
She shook her head. “Come please and I’ll show it to you,” she said and pulled on his arm.
She pulled in the wrong direction. Entirely in the wrong direction. And he didn’t seem to have a whole lot of choice in the matter.
“You see the wall,” she asked. “Remember the room?”
“Yes, I do,” the voices kept coming out of him and through him, “But why do I remember the wall?”
“Because it cannot be opened,” she said. “And it must be opened. You must open it again, and soon.”
“It’s a wall. I can’t do anything to it.”
She smiled. “It only seems to be a wall. There is more to it than that. That’s what you have to remember.”
Trying to jolt himself out of this reverie or hallucination or whatever the hell it was, he looked toward the wall. But the scenery that appeared to him was not a 21st century office building. It seemed a very old, very closed-off part of what seemed to be an office.
He looked away from the wall, across what was now a tethered terrace abridging a picture window. Puffs of dust from construction blasted into the air beyond it, puffs like ghosts being born to the mist.
“You told me once it must always, always be open,” the young girl said. “It isn’t just a wall, Uncle. It’s a very important door. You must remember. It is a very important door.” She pulled his hand toward a piece of molding. He felt there a long piece of wood. “Turn the knob, Uncle, and it opens.”
Jack heard himself sigh with the breath of a man who had tried so long and so hard to remember everything that he had forgotten how to rest. Suddenly, his hand was set free.
The sunlight filtered into his eyes. The sun reflected in a bright, white wall of light that solidified into modern glass. There was no picture window. No abridgement of terrace. There was only another wall and beyond it the usual bank of glass doors. There was yet more afternoon sunlight splashing through the series of partitions. Twenty-first century sunlight.
He turned to survey his surroundings. People with briefcases and vague looks on their faces. Someone with a cell phone. Someone else with a smart phone. He listened to the blessed sanity of a loudspeaker announcing a car parked in a temporary loading zone.
And then he groped his way down the steps toward the glass doors and got the hell out of that fucking place before he could lose his mind again.
Drinking himself into a state of mental paralysis seemed like just the thing to do at that point in time.
Sitting in Pepper’s Place, a little bar near Ambassador, he occupied a corner booth. He looked long into the dregs of his Scotch and water with its watery residue of melting ice. Specks of dust once locked in ice now floated on the amber-colored liquid in his glass.
Would you come up with a hallucination that wouldn't serve the delusion? he asked himself. Someone had dosed his drink at T.J.’s party. It had been a very vivid daydream locked into the psychopathology du jour. Like the specks, he thought. Remnants of grief melting out of ice and floating to the surface. That was it. That was all.
Or remnants of something else?
Get hold of yourself, he yelled internally again.
He decided he didn’t need mental paralysis. After three drinks, he concluded he needed strong coffee before he could drive. He decided any other state might not be conducive to getting his dumb ass home alive.
He found his way to the only place he knew where he could still get a basic cup of coffee at the original sticker price, without the dealer add-ons that dressed it all the way up to five bucks a pop.
Cuppajoe's was a little honest coffee bar with next to no pretense. And it was on Ambassador. Okay, just off Ambassador. Okay, by happy accident, just around the corner from the gallery. But it was just coincidence he went there. Really.
He made a call to T.J.'s voice mail, since he didn't pick up his cell, and let him know it was around 4:45 and he would be running some errands.
"What errands?" he asked himself as he climbed from his frumpy little import. The import, as usual, had no answer.
Their humble cup of decent coffee had gone up in the world to $1.25. Still better, he wagered, than a five dollar half-caff-decaf with a full-gainer and twist. So he bought his coffee. He took it out to the street to sip from his cup and breathe in the darkened afternoon.
He found himself looking toward it. By chance. And he saw two people standing beside it. Jack had never met an art buyer before. Had Jack ever met one before, he would have bet serious cash that he’d look just like this man. The man was staring at the drawing with something of a fleeting professional interest. Finally, the buyer pointed at one watercolor then another etching. He made some uncertain gesture toward Jack's drawing. His gesture toward Jack’s drawing was uncertain -- he neither seemed to accept or dismiss the drawing but left enough doubt in the matter to make Jack feel distinctly sick.
The buyer wandered away and the assistant stayed behind apparently to hash out details with the gallery rep. The gallery representative was nodding and smiling and just all-in-all looking inordinately pleased. The assistant said something that seemed to be words in parting. She followed in the footsteps of the buyer.
Jack didn't like the look of this. Didn't like the look of it at all.
And he didn't even goddamn know why.
And so it was that he set his cup inside his car and found himself walking into an art gallery.
A part of him felt queasy and desperate but the rest of him was just wondering what the hell he thought he was doing.
"Did those people buy the Ann Stewart drawing?" Jack found himself asking the rep.
She looked around, obviously surprised. "Not yet."
"How much is it?" he was almost shocked to hear
himself ask.
"The Stewart? Twenty-five."
It was an art gallery and he didn't want to look like an ignorant schlub ... but at least he would look like a wealthy ignorant schlub. "Twenty-five-thousand?"
"Yes, of course," she said, continuing to smile.
"Thanks anyway," he made himself say. Twenty-five thousand dollars? That was a car. A new car. A new car with a couple of options. It was ludicrous to consider. Just thoroughly insane. And he made it all the way to the doorway to see the buyer and his assistant talking animatedly while looking in the drawing’s direction. Then Jack turned back around to the gallery rep and simply said, "I'll take it."
"Art is an excellent investment," he repeated like a mantra to his package in the backseat as he drove all the way to T.J.'s neighborhood entry gate.
