First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Sir, it seemed obvious—”

  “Of course it seemed obvious, Mr. Corbin. You were in my office last Tuesday, were you not? You will no doubt have noticed that the exam questions were stacked on the right side of my center desk drawer, the one with the small padlock on it, the padlock that has been missing since Tuesday. But perhaps you can be so astute as to tell me why you restacked those papers on the left side?”

  “Sir, sir. I restacked? Are you accusing me of—”

  “Your own essay accuses you. As does your classmate.” Ballenger shifted his focus. “Mr. Pollock?”

  “Yes, Professor?” came that mocking voice, so at ease with this monstrous, this nightmare confrontation.

  “Would you tell us all what you reported to me Wednesday morning, before the final?”

  “I saw Jay Corbin at the door of your office, sir.”

  This was a patent lie. I had indeed gone to Ballenger’s office, to discuss a theoretical point with him, and had arrived some minutes after his scheduled office hours. Then I went away. If Pollock had been around to see me, I would certainly have seen him.

  “Yes, yes,” Ballenger fluttered. “But was he entering or leaving?”

  “He appeared to be—” Pollock paused, as if to be certain-sure. “Leaving, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pollock.” Ballenger turned his scowl to me. “Your next meeting with me, Mr. Corbin, will be in the dean’s office, the day after tomorrow. You will be asked to show cause why he should not have you expelled.”

  I was terribly offended by Professor Ballenger’s insinuations. Not just this accusation that I had cheated on the exam, that was bad enough. But it was doubly insulting that he thought I was so inept a thief as to misplace the padlock and forget which side of the drawer the questions had come from.

  At a guess, either Ballenger had lost the lock himself, shuffled the papers, and then grown wildly paranoid, or the real cheater had known the exam question beforehand and still bungled his essay as badly as everyone else. Irrelevant either way—the professor still wanted my scalp.

  In the end, it never came to a formal expulsion, which would have gone on my record. They offered me the choice of resigning from the university or undergoing their formal procedure. Since the case against me consisted of several sets of words against mine, I chose the path of least resistance and fled with my transcript. I passed every subject with honors that semester, except political economy. There I got a simple “fail.”

  The next semester, I enrolled again at Berkeley—but at the Alternative University, a nonprofit, semi-accredited institution in West Berkeley on Fifth Street. It was on the site of the old Urban Commune, a decrepit Victorian where the residents of fifteen years past had baked their human wastes for compost and slaughtered cagefuls of rabbits for protein.

  The curriculum when I went there was a little more practical. Course names were just camouflage to keep the State inspectors happy. “Political economics” at this university meant how to write a Health and Human Services grant proposal, conduct direct-mail fund raising, and launder proceeds from volume deals in alternative pharmaceuticals. “Chemical engineering” introduced us to fifteen types of liquid and solid explosives that could be made from ingredients found in the local supermarket and hardware store. “English literature” was a straight how-to in propaganda. “Music appreciation” taught the finer points of automatic weapons. We studied beginning Arabic—wahid, ithnain, thelatha, arbe’a, and “Where is the water closet?”—in order to sensitize us to the political struggles of the Palestinians.

  My great love in those months was Mandy Holton, one of the teachers. Through all the scatter and the chatter of the Commune, she moved silently, gracefully, like a tigress among the monkey tribes.

  I never saw Mandy wear anything but the same faded jeans—the sort that went white in the seat with wear and washing—an Army fatigues jacket over a rib-knit gray sweater, and waffle-stomper track shoes with white socks. She was utterly unconcerned about appearances. Her dark-blonde hair was chopped off just below her ears and, although it was always clean, she never brushed or fussed with it.

  She was double-jointed, had to be, the way she could sit on the floor in full lotus for hours at a stretch. Other people got restless, shifted, fidgeted. But Mandy, absorbed in the lessons, forgot her body entirely.

  There was a time, about four hours one Sunday afternoon, when I would have picked up an AK-47 and followed her anywhere. It was a rainy afternoon and we were shut up in Mandy’s room on the third floor of the Commune house. She was in a sharing mood and I was hanging around, moth to the flame. I had brought a bottle of not too young zinfandel and she broke into her stash of seedless stuff—hash oil for some twisted cigarettes.

  Mandy rolled her wine around in a plain tumbler and talked about capitalism. The zinfandel got her on the subject of the wine country and the Napa Valley lifestyle, which she detested.

  “… all the white pig and the super rish—rish—rich,” she slurred, high on my wine, then giggled. “But never mind. Someday, when we’ve taken the System apart, put it back together the way the people want it, I’m gonna have a place of my own—our own—up there. F’rall our friends. Place to get wasted. Swing all the facistas right at the gate. You’ll see ...”

  And after we were floating off the floor, quiet for twenty minutes or so, Mandy just said, “Oh, shit!” and unrolled her sleeping bag. It wasn’t some musty old green Army bag, but one made out of red nylon, slick as satin, with a gray plastic zipper that didn’t cut if it got in the way.

  While I was still contemplating the bag’s sexy fabric, Mandy was peeling off her jeans and a pair of green nylon panties. “Come on!” she crooned, trying to work my belt buckle around my waist. Then I had a chance to find out if she was really double-jointed. She was.

  I left her wrapped in that red satin and sleeping like a baby. The last pull in the wine bottle wiped my throat out with acid and musk. I wrapped my pea coat around me and went walking in the rain.

  Doing sex with Mandy, I had imagined, would be some kind of political anthem or maybe an impersonal tumble. Instead, she was sweet, and a little clingy, not to mention good fun, and almost certainly a virgin. Walking along with the big, slow droplets hitting my face, I began to wonder what my responsibilities to her were—a new thought for the brat. No way to tell until we saw each other again, I thought ...

  But soon good sense, or my sense of humor, reasserted itself. Mandy would always be a person who fit into her lifestyle, her doctrine, her opinions, and her capabilities like a ballerina fits her leotards. There were no rough edges, no seams, no gaps for the Bourgeois Bandit, Jay Corbin, to fit into. Her completeness was frightening—and I would do best to keep my distance.

  She must have had the same thoughts. Because when we did meet, the following Tuesday, the cadre leader was back in place, wearing her white-seated jeans and her seamless rhetoric.

  A few weeks later, I graduated from the Alternative University. There was no formal ceremony, no valediction; you just learned as much as you could absorb and then drifted on. But the subterfuges of the curriculum committee made the credits earned there mostly transferrable. By that time, my head was settled and a mean streak of careerism had surfaced: I believed more than ever that law should be my career.

  So I wrote to my father, who wrote to an Old Boy in the Petramin legal section, who wrote on my behalf to an Old Boy in the Harvard admissions office. My Berkeley records were still good and they passed off the semesters at the Commune as a spell of “social conscience,” construing it to my credit.

  Boston is much like San Francisco except warmer in the summer. Both of them were old working-class towns which had, in the closing years of the twentieth century, grown self-conscious of their history. They had tried to preserve it through commercial developments that sandblasted the brick faces of their factories, installed modern glass and air conditioning, and rented charming cubbies to bakeshops, brasseries, and boutiques in the hope
of depriving tourists of their dollars. But the similarities went deeper.

  Both Boston and San Francisco were the hubs of their geographic areas—New England and Northern California, respectively. Both had cashed in early on the Information Society with high-tech colonies near to but not right within the city—Route 128 and Silicon Valley, respectively. Both had long been centers for the ultimate information flow, money—in the form of insurance and banking, respectively. Both prided themselves on regional foods—Maine lobster and Indian pudding, Dungeness crab and sourdough bread, respectively.

  It was the similarities, the consciousness of their own sophistication and tradition, that made these regions natural allies in the war twenty-five years later.

  A San Franciscan, transplanted to Boston and broad-minded enough to overlook superficial differences like winter snow and the catarrhal speech pattern, would claim native status within six months. I did it in three, but then my childhood on Massachusetts’ North Shore gave me a running start.

  For me, coming to Harvard was like coming home. The brickwork and the small-paned windows of the Yard, the winter-barren trees of Cambridge, the smell of old bookbindings and steam heat, the summer boating on the Charles ... after the politics, pot, and saucepan chemistry of the Commune, it was like being reborn in a dream of scholarship. For those three years, I worked like a demon, searching precedents, analyzing cases, drafting and then redrafting briefs, submitting to the Review and finally getting published.

  The law seemed like kumite, the delicate, feather-touch sparring of the Sensei’s karate school. For every attack there was a blocking move and a counter move to the block until your head buzzed with endless permutations of if-he-does-this-then-I-do-that, like a chess master mentally playing out three games in his mind before moving even one piece.

  I thought the law was elegant and beautiful, the highest application of human mind to human, social problems of rights, injury, and ownership.

  Ironically, the proposed Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments to the United States’ Constitution—the same subjects that had brought me low in Ballenger’s class—were the hot topics during almost my whole time at Harvard Law School. We debated endlessly, and smilingly, the enabling legislation, the text of the amendments, the course of the ratifications, the implications. And, like everyone else, we totally underestimated, by at least a thousand percent, the social and financial impacts if these acts were ever ratified.

  When we are young, the political and economic events of the day pass us by too quickly. We have no background of experience to say this assassination will be pivotal in the balance of power, that law will set the course of all that follows. Because of the course these amendments would set for me and my fortunes, I should have fixed them with my whole attention.

  What I had missed was the trend toward “market forces” that had grown in the United States over the past dozen years. Almost every industry had undergone a course of deregulation: banking, airlines, trucking, energy. They had shown what economic efficiencies—and havoc—could follow when a free market replaced modified central planning.

  I had also missed the deficit pressures of the Nicaraguan war. Like Vietnam before it, this war was fought on the margin—financed with promises and with bulges in the national debt and Consumer Price Index, instead of with direct taxation, which would have entailed some kind of popular referendum.

  Also, I could not foresee the crash program the Federal government would undertake in the mid-Nineties to build new central station power plants. A decade of high interest rates and optimistically low projections of load growth had all but shut down the private utilities’ building programs. The incidents at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactors had put a bad odor on the nuclear option—both for the energy companies that would invest in it and for the public that would watch them. The shouting about acid rain in Canada and our own New England States made coal a sour alternative. Oil or gas cost too much and the sun didn’t always shine on solar power. So all the utilities stopped building new plants and assured themselves that, when the crunch came, they could buy excess power from each other.

  Within three years, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would be commanding extraordinary powers to begin building single-design, site-licensed nuclear power plants in the 550-megawatt class. A nation that was facing evening brownouts and two Black Days a week would applaud the effort and never ask what it was costing. It would cost plenty.

  However, I precede myself.

  At the time I was in Harvard Law School, the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments seemed a radical, blue-sky approach to the minor economic problem of the Federal deficit. Just as the Eighteenth Amendment’s ban on making and selling liquor seemed a radical approach to the minor social problem of public drunkenness. The only people who could debate the amendments seriously were the nuts: the Radical Republicans, the Supply-Siders, the “Clean Slaters,” and Deregulationists. Just as the minority Prohibitionists had pushed for the Volstead Act. Their social agendas were so well displayed that the rest of us dismissed them—and those agendas remained effectively hidden.

  But we wouldn’t find that out until the amendments were ratified five years later and the great experiment had begun.

  One of the best things about Harvard was that Gordon Pollock and the crippling envy he represented were at least three thousand miles away.

  In 1994, I graduated seventh in my class. Neither Mother nor Father could attend the ceremonies, but a senior counsel from Petramin’s legal section had come up to take an honorary doctorate of law. He applauded my diploma with the rest of them and then took me to dinner. Within three days, I would report in at the Houston home office, begin studying for the Texas bar, and start earning my way as a bona fide attorney. I was a kid with a lot of potential, and I knew it.

  Veritas.

  Gordon Pollock: On Reflection

  Twenty-Five Years Later

  He was guilty, guilty, guilty! How many times do I have to say that?

  All right, so now he has become a big man: wheels and deals in resources and energy, singlehandedly wins the war in Mexico, welds together the bickering, raggle-taggle TENMAC coalition in the West. Agreed to all of the above.

  But he is not that clean and shiny, no sir. Beneath that bright eye and enameled smile is a corruption as sour and deep as a pus-filled abscess. One day he will break and it will all come seeping out. I tell you I saw him sneaking off around the corner from Ballenger’s office. Saw him! He had the exam questions in his hands. It was for a class in economic history, or some such. Ballenger was the professor. They ran him out of Berkeley for cheating.

  Of course the record says he quit voluntarily. That was the deal they made, they always make. But he had an expulsion order hot on his heels. I know that.

  The point is simply this: His record was excellent. His grades were top notch. Wish I had as good. He was liked and respected. So what was the point in cheating on a God-damned essay question? Unless he was and is, at heart, a corrupt soul. Unless he is so crooked he will make three left-hand turns where one right will do.

  And the further point is: You must not believe his easy explanations on this insurance resolution. He is an attorney, like the rest of us. So why would he cut his own throat and ours and all of his profession’s unless he could take monstrous profit from it?

  And still further: He has ambitions. He wants nothing less than to steal this country. After he has done away with you and me, the Constitution, and the fellow behind the tree. He has it all plotted out in his mind. Step by fiendish, fanatical step. We can stop him now, here, or we will have to stop him later. And then it will take a war!

  You are still not listening. I tell you, you must not trust the man!

  Chapter 5

  Granville James Corbin: Rub’ Al Khali

  Our helicopter took off from Riyadh with a clatter of rotor blades. Otherwise it was quiet.

  The situation had caught me off guard. No, that’s
not right. It was my own swelled head. I had come to the pad thinking that the company was treating its newest Harvard acquisition with the proper respect. Two Saudi pilots—though one turned out to be native American—had been detailed to chauffeur me on a private tour of the northern oil fields. And then this incredibly full-bodied Arabian stewardess, sans veil, was coming over to tuck me in.

  The price of oil had been inching back up toward thirty dollars a barrel so Petramin was starting to flex its fiscal muscles again. Sending the American brass and top staffers out to the field on orientation trips was part of the company’s good-times consumption pattern. “Visiting the money,” our senior counsel in Houston had called my trip which, he’d hinted, would spotlight me as an important player in the organization.

  It’s a wonder my head fit through the helicopter’s sliding door. I was so smug that I forgot to avert my gaze politely when the stewardess lifted one long, nylon-smooth leg over the door’s sill. My eyes took a bite out of her exposed thigh. Then I saw her sawed-off shotgun.

  The social dynamic in the cabin changed immediately. She and the American pilot argued briefly about destinations, which I could follow only from the maps I’d seen pinned to the wall in the airfield’s office. The Saudi pilot seemed to be backing her; so the American shrugged and lifted off with a clatter.

  And by that time, my moment had passed. If I had been more alert, watching her hands instead of her legs—and if I hadn’t already buckled my lap and shoulder belts—I might have broken her wrist, on the hand holding the scatter gun, with a flying side kick while she was busy climbing aboard. Or taken her with a straight kick to the throat: she wouldn’t have had time to bring her weapon to bear and fire if she were busy strangling.

  But the little conference up front ended too quickly and we were fifteen feet in the air before I woke up and remembered all those good karate moves. By then she was settled in and ready, and a single shot from her would have blown out both pilots and the nose of the aircraft. But for the rest of the flight my eyes never stopped measuring distances, angles of fire, the tension in her hands, the focus of her attention. My hand never strayed far from the quick release on the seat harness.