by Mark Helprin
“Louis Quatorze was a brilliant political operative, a genius who united France,” an aide stated.
“Yeah, but what about Louis the Fourteenth?”
“He was Louis the Fourteenth, Senator.”
“Louis Quatorze and Louis the Fourteenth were the same guy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’d they do that? Jeez, what are our other options?”
“Well, there’s Mooey.”
“Mooey? What’s that for, the dairy farmers? They already like me. I’m the father,” he said, neither for the first time nor the last, “of the cottage cheese subsidy.”
“Not for the dairy vote, sir, for the African-American vote.”
“The what?”
“The African-American vote.”
“What’s that?”
The aide blinked. “Well, you know, the votes cast by African Americans.”
“What are they?”
“They’re those people who are very dark?” another aide said, tentatively, and in the manner of the American generation (of which he was part) that could not make a statement except in the interrogative, not even their names (“Hello? My name is Britney Hitler? I’m, like, very glad to meet you? My grandfather was, like, the Führer? In, like, Germany? Okay?”). When Dewey Knott showed no sign whatsoever of familiarity with African Americans, the aide was stymied.
“Whadaya mean, dark? Who?”
“They make up more than, ten percent of the vote?”
“They do?”
“Yes.”
“Whadaya mean they’re dark? I don’t understand. Are they depressed? Dewey Knott was depressed, then he took Prozac, but that’s a secret.”
“They’re not, depressed? It’s just that, they’re not white?”
“Oh!” said Dewey Knott. “I know them. Blacks! It’s a generational thing. Dewey Knott calls them blacks. That’s my generation, that’s all. I’m white, I’m not a European American. They don’t call us European Americans, do they?”
“No.”
“So, you know, why should we call . . . that’s not the point. Why would changing my name to Mooey take the black vote from Self?”
“Because that’s what Howard Cosell called Muhammad Ali,” the older aide answered.
“Why’d he do that? That’s what you call a cow.”
“Muhammad. Mooey.”
“Oh. Do you think he would endorse me?”
“He might.”
“Would I have to become a Muslim?”
“I don’t think so, but we’ll keep it on the table.”
“What else have you got?”
Dewey was speaking to the leader of the faction that had come to be called the rhymers, who held his tongue in statesmanly fashion, although some of his young assistants were working on Fooey, Stewy, and Glooey, and back to the mail room for them, although, someday in the far future they too would run presidential campaigns.
Unbeknownst to the rhymers, Senator Knott had secret meetings with the plain speakers. They were simple in their approach, having boldly abandoned the pattern based on Dewey. “What about John?” one asked.
“John. John Knott. Sounds good. ‘John Knott will lead you into the future. Vote Knott for president.’ I like it. I’ll think about it.”
That aide left with a glow that came of visions of the flag in his office in the John Knott administration. But, among the thousand, many glowed and danced on air with visions of a flag in their futures, including the proponents of Bruce, Larry, Herman, Arthur, and Cecil, all of which Dewey Knott liked and promised to consider.
They were so desperate to get the votes of women that a faction arose that wanted Dewey Knott to change his name to Alice.
“Why would I do that?” he asked, rather disturbed.
“To get the women’s vote, sir. You know how much we’re behind. Our polling shows that if you changed your name to Alice, Frieda, or Betty, you’d get back between four and five percent of the women’s vote. That could put us over the top.”
“How about Cleopatra?” another aide asked.
“Cleopatra?”
“Cleopatra Knott.”
“Cleopatra Knott. Cleopatra Knott. Gee, I don’t know. I’ll have to think it over. What would be the effect on the men’s vote if I had a girl’s name?”
“We haven’t studied that aspect of the question.”
“I have,” said a young aide, who, for speaking out of turn in the presence of Dewey Knott (thus threatening the position of his immediate superiors), was marked for death by the campaign’s middle management. “You’d drop by forty-seven points among men.”
“It’s not worth it,” Dewey said.
“Definitely not. I mean, no.”
“Don’t ever tell me that you want me to change my name to a girl’s name again,” Dewey Knott said to the lad who led that faction, “but maybe we’ll look at it later on.”
While Dewey had been campaigning in North Dakota—because even if he lost he wanted to sweep the plains states, and, to the delight of the antelope, ended up spending most of his time there—a bunch of young Turks arose at campaign headquarters in Washington. They wanted to change his last name, and they, too, were deeply factionalised. The “timids” wanted him to become Dewey Scott. He rejected this on the grounds of rhyme. He was learning, as the campaign progressed, to understand these things. A small group of senior advisers came to him with the suggestion that he change his name to Washington.
“Dewey Washington? That doesn’t sound right.”
“We know it doesn’t, Senator, but what we didn’t tell you is that while you were in North Dakota we spent a long time thrashing this out and we’ve come to the conclusion that you should be really bold, take the bull by the horns, and change both your names. In for a dime, in for a dollar.”
“Yeah, that’s good, but to what?”
“George Washington. Your polls go sky-high with that name. On trust and integrity, you go through the roof.”
“You polled?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How much did it cost us?”
“A hundred and fifty thousand.”
“It better be good.”
“It is good, it’s very good,” a young politechnician said, and then, reading from the text of the study, he continued: “When asked, ‘For whom would you vote if your first consideration were integrity, trust, and honesty . . . the president, or George Washington?’ ninety-eight percent chose you.”
“Chose me, or George Washington?”
“This is assuming that you change your name to George Washington.”
“Did you tell them that I was going to do that?”
“Tell who?”
“The people you polled.”
“No, we had to maintain absolute secrecy. But what’s the problem?”
So many different factions arose that the senator didn’t know what to do. While it was easy to reject names like The Flying Nun, Admiral Dewey, and Berkeley Yamamoto, nothing was rejected conclusively. “Everything’s on the table,” Dewey had said. “That’s how you win. You don’t rule things out, and you don’t rule things in. You keep those balls in the air. That’s how I got where I am, and it’s how I’ll get where I’m going. By the way, where are we going? I hope it’s not California. They hate me in California. But they love Dot (Mrs Knott). They love Dot in California, but they don’t love me.”
“They do love you, Senator, we just haven’t found the right way to get you across.”
“Idoh know, maybe Harrison is right, maybe I should change my name to La Pasionaria, Idoh know. We should send Dot there. She’s really good. They love her. They don’t love me. What has Dot got that Dewey Knott has not got? Dot Knott is hot, and Dewey Knott is not. Dot Knott is a hot Knott, but Dewey Knott is a Hottentot. She’s hot, she’s hot, and I am Knott, not Knott, but not hot, that’s what she’s got, Dot Knott. What has Dot got, that Dewey Knott. . . .”
This was what his aides termed the Dr Seuss death spira
l, when the plane that held Dewey’s consciousness went into a dive. Nothing could stop it except extreme shock. They always tried to avoid this, because for Dewey to be slapped in the face by his aides would be unpresidential.
“Mrs Knott’s going with you to Nebraska,” an aide said, but this didn’t do the trick.
“They love Dot in California. California’s a big state. Big. Lotta vegetables. Lotta electoral votes. Surfboards. They’d vote for Dot. But they won’t vote for me. They really love Dot there. . . .”
“Senator,” an aide interrupted, knowing that a press conference was about to begin and the press liked nothing better than for Dewey Knott to talk like Dr Seuss. “Senator, someone said that there was a Uganda Tribune story, or something like that, that said the president punched a little girl in a wheelchair.”
“Why Dot? Why not Dewey Knott? Why Dot Knott and not Dewey Knott? Can you figure it? California? They love Dot Knott. . . .” There was a pause. “The president what?”
“He punched, a little girl?” the young aide who could speak only in the interrogative said. “Who was in a, wheelchair? Who was, like, trying to give him flowers?”
“Dear God,” said Dewey Knott, “did he really?” He was out of the spiral.
“No, Senator,” said a non-interrogatively challenged aide. “He didn’t.”
“Why’d you tell me that?”
By this time, the young fellow who had told him had left for a week’s paid leave. “We didn’t.”
“Someone did. Didn’t someone say. . . .”
“No sir.”
“Damn, I thought I heard someone say the president punched a little girl in a wheelchair. Are you sure it isn’t true? Run it down. Get a kid on the computer. It would make all the difference in the world if he had. That could give us twenty-five points.”
“The press conference is starting in five minutes.”
Dewey Knott began to walk, followed by dozens of people, toward the press conference. “Where are we going Monday?” he asked decisively.
“This is Monday.”
“Where are we going next?”
“Siliphant.”
“That’s good. Get back home. Siliphant. My hometown. Maybe if I’m president it’ll stop shrinking. Maybe it won’t die.”
WHEN FIRST they had arrived in Siliphant, to take over the practice of a dentist who had died more than a decade previously, Freddy and Fredericka had seen a ratty sign at the entrance to town. It looked like it was printed in apple butter: Welcome to Siliphant, Nebraska, Birthplace of Dewey Knott.
“Is that the Dewey Knott who’s running for president?” Fredericka had asked whilst still in the Greyhound.
“I assume so,” was Freddy’s answer.
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No. I met his predecessor as majority leader of the Senate, Senator Knuckles.”
“What if he comes back?”
“I don’t think he will, Fredericka. He died a number of years ago, and earthly resurrection is unavailable even to senators, although they themselves may be unaware of this.”
“He died?” Fredericka asked.
“Had you read newspapers then you would have known that, in inaugurating a water slide, he bunched up at an elbow and drowned in the water for which he served as the plug. No one knew where he was, only that he had failed to come out and that the water, which was running at a tremendous volume, had stopped. By the time they understood what was happening, many tonnes of water had collected, and when finally he gave way the force of the water shot him out of the tube and he flew through the air like a cannonball.”
“How can he run for president if he’s dead?”
“Knott is running, Knuckles drowned. Knott is peculiar. It’s rather a miracle that he’s gone as far in politics as he has. As soon as he garners an advantage he throws it away by doing something honourable. In one moment he’s a traditional politician, and in the next he may respond to a crucial question with complete and self-devastating honesty. He’s the one who once lost the nomination by saying in debate: ‘You know, I don’t really know anything about that. I was supposed to read the briefing book, but there was a sale on men’s trousers and I just didn’t have time. Why don’t you ask him’—his opponent—‘I’ll bet he knows.’ ”
“I see,” Fredericka said. “I hope that Knott doesn’t come here. After all, he was born here. He would be sure to bring the press with him, including representatives of the British press, and then what would we do?”
“Why would he come here?” Freddy asked. “What do you think he is, a salmon? He’ll never come to this Godforsaken place. It would remind the whole nation of everything he wants them to forget. Don’t worry. We’re safe.”
“I don’t know, Freddy.”
“And really, Fredericka, even if all of Fleet Street were to arrive on our doorstep, it would hardly matter.”
“Why not?”
“We’d take out our new teeth and put back some big ones, brush our hair in front of our faces, put on sunglasses, and talk like idiots. Why would they think that two American dentists in Nebraska, idiots with huge teeth, would be us? Even our parents wouldn’t recognise us.”
Their first weeks in Siliphant were spent reading dental books and peering into one another’s mouths. They studied for fourteen hours a day, and cleaned one another’s teeth so often that they had nightmares about wearing them down to pointy little stumps. For the first time in her life, Fredericka lost herself in the tumultuous passion of hard study and concentration. Her brain worked as strenuously as a cowboy driving a huge herd of cattle across a wilderness. Never had she felt this particular kind of exhaustion. With illumination from a blue dental spotlight, she raced across the pages, trying to commit to memory in four weeks the expanse of knowledge necessary for completing four years of dental school. They ate as they studied, usually wretched take-out Chinese food drowning in ketchup, which in Siliphant was the only thing available other than huge steaks that looked like the India rubber balls Amazon natives carry in their canoes down to Manaus.
In the dental practice they had bought for less than a song, the lights often burned all night. Fredericka assimilated in a delirium all she needed to know about teeth, and when Freddy tested her he was as pleased as he had been on the hillside in West Virginia. He saw now that her intellect, her capacity for memorisation, the potential depth of her erudition, and her scholarly discipline, were as great as his, or perhaps—and this was terrifying—greater.
Even as they exercised they jammed every bit of dental knowledge they could into their heads. They did calisthenics, they lifted bottles of water from the water cooler, and they ran at night through the few streets of Siliphant, drilling, always drilling: that is, accomplishing feats of memory and mental training; they had not yet turned to their equipment.
Three o’clock in the morning, 101 degrees, windows open, Freddy sitting on Fredericka’s feet and ankles, Fredericka dressed in very short shorts and a royal purple tank top, doing sit-ups, bathed in sweat. Although she had shaved her legs, Freddy could feel a minute stubble on what was otherwise dolphin-smooth flesh, and he found this exciting. Nonetheless, he held in abeyance his intoxication with her sapphire eyes and golden visage, her deep breathing, the taut muscles of her abdomen, the beauty of her movement toward him and then away, the circle of her mouth, through which breaths came hard through brilliantly white teeth that he himself had polished. Her whole body glistened, and though he desired her as one can only when it is over a hundred degrees at three o’clock in the morning and the wind from the plains makes the curtains dance like waves, he said, “Fredericka, tell me about the dental pulp.”
As she rose and fell, water dripping from her lasciviously, she answered, “A soft, vascular, sensitive organ made up of myxomatous tissues, containing many blood vessels and nerves that enter by way of the apical foramina. It does not possess lymphatics. The periphery of the pulp is bounded by layers of cells arranged like columnar epithelium, each ce
ll sending one or more branched processes through the basic substance of the dentine.”
“And what are these?” asked Freddy, entranced by her beauty.
“These,” she said confidently, “are the dentine-forming cells, the odontoblasts of Waldeyer. The blood vessels break up into the innumerable capillary loops which lie beneath the layer of odontoblasts. The nerve fibrils break up into numberless non-medullary filaments, which spread out beneath the odontoblasts, and probably send terminal filaments to the extreme periphery of the pulp outside the odontoblasts.”
She took a breath. “Freddy, I’m rock-solid on the odontoblasts and anything to do with the pulp. Hit me with the biochemistry of the stellate reticulum, and then I’ve got to loosen up after all these sit-ups, so let’s put on some music.”
After she aced the question about the biochemistry of the stellate reticulum and had finished her one thousand sit-ups, they put on the music. In Siliphant, her intellect had exploded like a supernova, and, finally, Freddy had learned to dance.
Freddy was unusual. Why wouldn’t he be? He had grown up destined either to be a king or to die a rotten death. There were many ways of living lively, and one of them, he had discovered, was to live with a perpetual sense of combat—combat against his own limitations and heredity, combat against the prevailing wisdom when it was wrong, combat against the drift and degradation of civilisation. He wanted to win, of course, but this was not his object. His object was to fight on. In fighting, and in risk, was purification. This he had learned from his father, his ancestors, his reading of history and literature, and in the doing. It was why he made his great treks across England and Scotland and climbed to the summit of glacier-clad mountains, why he studied and practised physical combat, parachuted, flew helicopter gunships, ran minesweepers off the Hebrides, and, much more dangerously, took on modernists and the avant-garde, in the bitterest combat of all. He was only one, and they were many, so many in fact that they were a country, an alliance of states, a world. Freddy was not afraid to pit himself, as truth required, against the direction of things. He was well known for participating in disputes of which he had less expert knowledge than the many seasoned gladiators who lined up to bang his shield with their swords. But it was a royal shield, and he held it bravely, spinning in the periphery of his vision those scenes, from deep in his blood, of knights in mortal struggle while encased in gleaming metal. The swords flew in slow motion and the horses accomplished their noble and sacrificial manoeuvres. All of it—the colour and compression of time, the cries, the poignant glances, the risen dust and falling halberds—came to Freddy in intense and wracking silence. Such things were with him even while drinking tea in the midst of vacant chatter, which, at home, he did too much.
