Boomsday

by Christopher Buckley

  “Prisoners are supposed to share confidences. We’re all in here together.”

  “No. I didn’t. But the earth did move.”

  “He’s cute—in a scary sort of way. Didn’t he date what’s-er-name, the Tegucigalpa Tamale?”

  Cass watched Randy on TV as she shuffled the deck. Had to be Terry’s handiwork.

  By nightfall, the footage of Randy’s speech had caused the crowd to swell to thousands. Terry orchestrated the chanting from the van by radio.

  “Just like the sixties,” he said, looking out the van’s one-way windows, “only cleaner. Where are you going?” he said to Randy, who was opening the door.

  “To mingle,” he said, “with my people.”

  “Don’t get yourself overexposed.”

  “Overexposed?” Randy chuckled. “Don’t know the meaning of the word.”

  The moment Randy emerged from the van, he was swallowed up in an admiring scrum of twenty-somethings carrying signs.

  FREE CASS!

  HELL, NO, WE WON’T PAY!

  BOOMSDAY NOW!

  CASS WAS RIGHT!

  IT’S THE DEFICIT, STUPID!

  SOCIAL SECURITY = DEATH

  Terry watched him get swallowed up in the throng until he was only a head illuminated by bright TV lights. There were three TV monitors inside the van, so he could watch him be interviewed live.

  A reporter from the Fox network thrust a microphone at Randy.

  “Senator, one of your colleagues, Senator Meltinghausen, says you’re a, quote, craven opportunist. Isn’t that harsh language for such a normally collegial body like the Senate?”

  “I don’t know about craven.” Randy smiled. “Certainly I crave justice. And if by ‘opportunist,’ my very good friend from the great state of Virginia means that I believe in seizing every opportunity to repair our broken government, then yes, put me down as an opportunist. By all means. But the important thing here, Chris—if I may—is to . . .”

  Terry sat back with the satisfaction of a mentor who has seen a pupil come fully into his own. Always a bittersweet feeling. He reminded himself sternly that this was no time for nostalgia or its evil stepsister, complacency. If anything, it was the moment of maximum danger, the moment when the client thinks he can do it all by himself. Washington was littered with the bleached bones of many who had succumbed to that form of hubris.

  “What are you saying? We just let her go?”

  President Riley Peacham was in no good temper. The economic situation had the government in crisis mode. No one was getting much sleep. “It’ll look like we’re caving.”

  “We are caving,” said his chief political counselor, Bucky Trumble. “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  The president stared expressionlessly across the expanse of his desk, made from recovered planks from the USS Maine, sunk in Havana harbor. In retrospect, it was perhaps an inapt desk to have chosen from the government’s attic.

  “What am I missing here?” he said.

  “The e-mail is running nine to one against us on this.”

  “She’s advising people not to pay their taxes. For God’s sake. We’re having enough trouble raising revenue as it is.”

  Bucky Trumble explained that the attorney general was not confident of convicting Cass in the event she mounted a vigorous defense on First Amendment grounds.

  “Then how will it look? We’ll have invested our prestige—what’s left of it—on throwing the book at some twenty-something blogger chick. Who’ll probably walk out of court giving us the finger. Ask yourself, Do you really want that douchebag Randy Jepperson in our face? I’d rather eat caterpillars off a hot sidewalk. Now look at him—Pied Piper to the just-out-of-diapers generation. He’s milking this thing like a Jersey cow. His PR guy, Tucker, has his fingerprints all over the udder. The girl, Devine—she works for him. This thing’s more incestuous than an Arkansas family reunion. I say get out the ten-foot pole and don’t touch it. We’re going to have a hard enough reelection campaign as it is.”

  “What’s motivating this woman? Why’s she got her panties in such a damn knot, anyway?”

  “She was the one who was with Jepperson in Bosnia when he lost his leg. I talked to someone in the Joint Chiefs shop. Word is they were doing it in a Humvee in the middle of a minefield. She took an early discharge rather than a court-martial.”

  “Women in uniform,” the president snorted. “God save us.”

  “Well, now she’s out of uniform and raising hell. So. What do you want to do? Make a martyr out of her?”

  The president hesitated, to give the impression that he hadn’t yet made up his mind.

  “All right,” he finally said, affecting a Solomonic aura. “Tell Killebrew to make it go away.”

  “Good call, chief.” Bucky Trumble always complimented the president for taking his advice.

  Early the next evening, after a terse nolle prosequi—Latin for “We think we’d lose the case, so we’re dropping it”—announcement from the Justice Department at four forty-five p.m., Cass was released from detention. A thousand people cheered her with V-signs as she drove off. Pulitzer Nation gave her a going-away do-rag from Victoria’s Secret.

  “Should we try to lose them?” Cass said. They were being followed by at least four, possibly more, cars full of news photographers. She’d just gotten off the phone with her weepy mother.

  “Ix-nay,” Terry said. “Just what we need, a high-speed car chase. We’ll do an availability when we get to Randy’s. They’ll go away after that. I think.”

  “Why do we have to go to Randy’s? I want to go home.”

  “Because he wants us to. And because he’s the reason your ass is not still back there.”

  “You had to involve him?”

  Terry rolled his eyes. “He’s a United States senator. If you’ve got any others willing to stand up and shout on your behalf, by all means send ’em to me.”

  “Now I owe him.”

  “Count your blessings, Miss Life Without Parole. And smile for the cameras. Say a few words. We’re looking for a twenty-second bite on how good it is to be out, how good it is your message is getting out—”

  “Are you telling me how to do a press availability?”

  “Your lawyer, a decent guy, by the way, is on Prozac because of you. I’ll be standing behind you with a gun pointed at your back. So stick with the script.”

  “I have friends in the Pulitzer Nation.”

  Randy lived in a large Federal-style mansion in Georgetown that in its day had been home to a future president of the United States, two distinguished ambassadors, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state, and a famous Georgetown hostess who conducted simultaneous affairs with a king of England, the Count of Paris, Haile Selassie, and Josephine Baker. She died, it was said, of exhaustion.

  Randy greeted Cass and Terry on the front steps. There was already a horde of media gathered around, a mounted policeman to keep order.

  “I’m not going to kiss him,” Cass said to Terry in the car before getting out.

  “No one is asking you to kiss him.”

  Randy extended a hand. She shook it, formally.

  “I’d like to make a brief statement,” Randy said. “First, I want to welcome Ms. Devine back to freedom.” There was applause from the well-wishers. “Second, I’d like to congratulate her for her sacrifice on behalf of what she believes in and stands for. Third, I would like to congratulate the president of the United States for doing the right thing. For once.” Laughter, applause. “Fourth and lastly, I’d like to say that I’m proud to be a foot soldier in this woman’s army. And I look forward to being at her side in the battles to come.” Applause.

  Cass looked at him. He looked older than the young congressman she’d met at the airport at Turdje years ago. She had no idea where all this was going, and a thousand misgivings about him, yet she found herself oddly glad to have him at her side.

  Chapter 12

  Randy, Terry, and Cass plunged in.
They formed a grassroots coalition, always a good thing to have. They also formed a political action committee and a 527, another good thing to have, since it gives the impression that everyone is behaving legally in the matter of raising soft money. Evincing sincerity while raising “hard money” is harder.

  Cass went on TV and wrote endless thoughtful op-ed pieces and gave a blizzard of speeches to any group that would listen. Randy made thunderous orations from the Senate floor, usually to empty seats. In time the media, as is their wont, moved on.

  One day, a month after her release from jail, Cass said to Terry, “Is it me, or do I sense a certain . . .ennui out there?”

  “I wouldn’t call it ennui,” Terry said. “I’d call it boredom. Social Security reform, entitlement reform, deficits—face it, it’s dry stuff. The beast is averse to dry stuff. It needs red meat. Pictures, not charts showing ‘out-year revenue shortfalls.’ It was more interesting when the people—as you like to call them—were ripping up golf courses and chucking Molotov cocktails at the cops. Speaking of which, Allen called. You’re being sued by another gated community. It’s called Pine Haven.”

  Cass looked depressed.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Terry said. “You gave it a good shot. A great shot. You moved it right to the top of the agenda there for a bit. And now, kiddo, it’s time to move on. I need your help on the insecticide account. Larry’s driving me nuts.”

  Bucky Trumble was one of very few White House staffers who had “walk-in” privileges in the Oval Office. He did, however, knock before walking in.

  “What is it, Bucky?” the president said suspiciously. He didn’t much like the look on Trumble’s face, which resembled a fallen soufflé.

  Trumble took a deep breath. “Cass Devine is Frank Cohane’s daughter.”

  The president’s face went the color of New England clam chowder. “What are you telling me?”

  “Just that. Devine isn’t a married name. She had her name legally changed. She and Frank apparently had some falling-out. She took her mother’s name.”

  “Oh, goddamnit.”

  “Yes.” Bucky waited for the explosion he knew was coming. Sometimes it took a while to build, like a volcano.

  “Jesus fucking Christ in the . . .,” the president spluttered, his face now the color of Manhattan clam chowder, “morning! You’re telling me that we instructed the attorney general to spring the daughter of a major fucking donor to the party?”

  “That would . . .unfortunately appear to be the substance of what I’m . . .yes, sir.”

  The president hurled his pen onto the desk with such force that it skittered off the surface and onto the carpet.

  “Who knows about this—this twenty-four-carat calamity?”

  “That’s the good news, sir. No one. I mean, I suppose Frank knows, but he isn’t saying anything. He’s probably embarrassed by her. At any rate, this information didn’t come from him.”

  “Who did it come from?”

  “You don’t need to know that, sir. I made some inquiries. She’s Frank Cohane’s daughter. They haven’t spoken in years. He lives in California—”

  “I goddamn well know where he lives. I’ve spent the goddamn night at his goddamn house.”

  “Yes, sir. Last October. After the Countdown to Greatness event. You presented him with his Owl pin.”

  Owls, of course, are those who contribute over $250,000 to the national party, making them eligible for “special White House briefings by top officials,” “front-row seats at inaugural festivities,” “special issues bulletins,” and of course the odd ambassadorship, cabinet post, or commission position.

  The president made a groaning noise.

  “He’s donated five hundred thousand,” Bucky Trumble continued. “The other quarter mil ostensibly from his wife, Lisa. Presumably not Cass’s mother. She seemed more the . . .evil stepmother type. You presented her with a pin, too.”

  “This is atrocious staff work, Buck.”

  “I do not disagree, sir. The question is how to go forward. I’m of course willing to take the fall here.”

  “Goddamnit, we’ve got a campaign coming up. How the fuck is throwing you over the side going to help?”

  “Well, I . . .if you really—”

  “Rearrest her.”

  “Sir?”

  “Throw her butt back in jail. Call Killebrew and tell him—whatever you need to tell him.”

  Bucky Trumble puffed out his cheeks. “I’m not sure Fred would really go for that. Rearresting someone—it’s . . .um. . ..?tricky.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “It does?”

  “Well, Buck, it had better goddamn well better happen this time.”

  Bucky Trumble flashed forward in time. He saw himself sitting before a grand jury as an independent prosecutor asked him, Did the president specifically instruct you to tell the attorney general to fabricate evidence that would lead to Ms. Devine’s rearrest?

  As it happened, President Peacham—who from the first moment he went into politics began to be haunted by the homophonic possibilities of his surname—was himself having a similar reverie.

  “That’s all, Buck,” he said, leaving Bucky Trumble in the position of being unable to tell the grand jury that the president of the United States had specifically instructed him to commit a crime.

  “Sir, I’ll do what needs to be done. But I really don’t think he’ll go for it,” Bucky tried again.

  The president leaned back in his chair. “If we win reelection, how many Supreme Court vacancies do we anticipate?”

  “Two, minimum. Possibly three.”

  “It’s a bit early to have the conversation with him. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the matter at hand. But you know, Fred Killebrew has been a helluva good AG. He’d make a helluva good Supreme Court justice. Don’t you think?”

  Mr. Trumble, in that same meeting with the president, did the president instruct you to offer the attorney general an appointment to the Supreme Court in return for—

  “Uh . . .”

  “I do,” the president said brightly. “I do.”

  “I could . . .relay that to him. Along with—”

  “I’m sure you’ll handle it, Bucky. With your usual flair.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After they throw her cute little ass back in jail, make sure you put it out that the White House is pleased. That we always thought it was a bit hasty to let her walk.”

  “Fred’s really not going to like that.”

  “Fuck him. He’ll be too busy measuring himself for judicial robes to care.”

  It came to her late that night, sometime between two and three in the morning, while she was blogging away on CASSANDRA.

  She decided not to post it right away—cognizant that epiphanies time-stamped “2:56 a.m.” tended, in the harsher light of midday, to arouse suspicion.

  First thing in the morning, she called a meeting with Randy and Terry for that afternoon. They all met in Randy’s office on the Hill. She’d prepared a quick-and-dirty PowerPoint presentation. She took them through it. They listened in silence.

  “So?” she said when she was finished. “What do you think?”

  Randy and Terry stared.

  “You want me to introduce this?” Randy said. “In the U.S. Senate?” He began to laugh. “Cass, Cass, Cass. I have to hand it to you. You are a piece of work. You really had me, there.”

  “I’m totally serious,” Cass said. “I don’t think it’s got a prayer. But as a meta-issue, it would force the debate like nothing else.”

  “Meta-issue?” Terry said. “What the fuck is a meta-issue? Is this one of your Ayn Rand deals?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that. Meta means . . .you know . . .transcendent. Bigger. Higher. Beyond. Above. Metaphysics. You were the one who told me the media was bored. Well, let’s wake ’em up.”

  Terry and Randy exchanged glances. My God, she’s serious.

  “Look
at these figures.” Cass called up one of her PowerPoint slides. “That’s a one-month-old Gallup poll. Attitudes are shifting. Fewer and fewer people equate longevity with happiness. They’re ready for something like this. And while I realize that it would never in a thousand years fly, there’s evidence to suggest that it’s a debate people are eager to have. Let the government dig in its heels. Fine. Then we say to them, ‘All right, so what’s your solution?’ Two workers to support every retiree? They don’t have a solution. Things are already starting to fall apart and they still don’t have a solution.”

  “It’s nuts, Cass.”

  “No, it’s bold.”

  “Boldly nuts.”

  “Since day two at TSC you were always telling me, ‘Throw long.’ So. This is long.”

  Randy looked at his watch. “I hate to be the party pooper, but I’ve got a committee meeting. Grand seeing you both. Let’s keep up the dialogue. Ta-ta.”

  “What’d you expect?” Terry said in the car on the way back to the office. “That he was going to agree to introduce a bill in the U.S. Senate encouraging Boomers to commit mass suicide—in order to save Social Security?”

  “Not suicide. Voluntary Transitioning,” Cass said.

  “Whatever. What time of night did you dream this one up?” Terry was quiet for a moment, then said, “I’ll give you this: It’s definitely out-of-the-box thinking. Now if you could just apply this kind of brain sweat to Larry’s insecticide—”

  “Did you ever read Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’?”

  Terry sighed. “You mean at Harvard? Or was it Princeton? Remind me, which Ivy League university did I attend?”

  “The Gulliver’s Travels guy,” Cass said. “You heard of him, surely.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “In 1729, Swift published an article proposing that the way to solve poverty in Ireland was for the poor Irish to sell their children for food.”

  “Today he’d make millions on the diet book. What does this have to do with your scheme? Other than also being completely insane?”

  “It’s the whole point. It got people’s attention. It got them debating the Irish hunger problem. He was a minister. He was on the side of the poor.”