Al-Tounsi

by Anton Piatigorsky

  “Shudder to think.”

  “Well, that’s what Killian does every time he opens his mouth or picks up his pen. Just rude, rude, rude.”

  Standing by the net, remembering that conversation, Elyse squeezed the tennis ball. Her fingers barely dented its yellow fuzz. It still had most of its pressure, so it would bounce high off the clay if anyone hit it hard enough.

  She walked back to the baseline. She could play it out consciously. She could capitalize on Laura’s weakness, just like Killian’s, as long as she set up her opponent properly. Elyse would have to appear to lose. She couldn’t blast her serves or aim for winners. Even if the ball landed in on her next attempt—a big if, this morning—Laura would be waiting for a hard shot, expecting it to remain low against the court, and would be prepared to respond with a quick swing. Laura’s anger had predetermined her response. If Elyse was going to set up Laura Elmwood properly, it meant offering her a serve that worked against her decision to strike at it with full force—namely, a slow floater, a dinky and amateurish thing that would bounce high off the clay and hang at Laura’s shoulders rather than at her waist, far from the ideal placement. Elmwood would see that ball and think she’d got Elyse beat, but she would not adjust her stroke in time. She was not that talented. Laura would follow through as if the ball were low, grunting, smashing it long. Elyse’s serve wouldn’t look pretty, and it wouldn’t feel anywhere near as satisfying as an ace, but it would have a better chance of winning.

  That wasn’t what Venus Williams would have done. Well, so be it. Elyse would have to abandon her embodiment of the Wimbledon champion. Because any version of herself as one who lost a tennis match was not one worth preserving. Truth was, Elyse was more flexible than Venus William. Elyse was not just one kind of person who did one kind of thing. Flexibility might be a less poetic or romantic character trait in a champion than unwavering talent, but it was all that Elyse had, and it was her way to victory. And that’s what really mattered: winning 91 percent of the time.

  “Ad Out.” Elyse bounced the ball on the gray clay. She prepared herself for a dinky little serve to her opponent, who had sunk deep into her return stance.

  Elyse tossed the ball high but came around lightly, tapping rather than hitting it. The ball floated in an arc over the net and landed shallow in Laura’s court, so delicately hit that it would have easily bounced three times before reaching the base line if Laura hadn’t run up to intercept it. Laura charged forward with her racquet drawn and swung with full strength, hoping to drive a winner into the alley on Karen’s side, but just as Elyse had predicted she hit the ball with too much force and not enough topspin, and her shot sailed out beyond the sideline.

  “Damn it!” Laura Elmwood clutched her fists to her head. “That was mine!”

  Elyse smiled broadly. A sharp pain stung behind her left eye. It was startling and severe. She turned away from the net and hung her head so she might get a hold of it, but the pain didn’t diminish. It only increased. It was a cold and intense cramp, as if her brain had been wrapped in ice and then squeezed. The pain radiated through to the back of her skull. Elyse pressed the heel of her palm against her eyebrow and stood motionless, hoping it would pass.

  The other three players shifted their positions and waited for Elyse to reset. Elyse didn’t move. Karen called her name and asked if she was okay.

  “Yes. Fine.”

  She gazed at the live oaks behind the court. The pain gripped her harder. Elyse squinted at the intensity of the afternoon light, a brightness that now seemed much stronger than it had been even a minute earlier. Sunbeams illuminated every speck of dust, and that dust made the air seem as thick as water. She grew more and more aware of it with each blink. She felt submerged in a warm bath, her skin drenched in light and heat, such an intense and pleasurable sensation that it was difficult for Elyse to tell where the hot sunlight ended and where her skin began. She closed her eyes. Her body emanated rays of light. Elyse suddenly understood that there were two suns in the solar system, one external and one internal—or no, that wasn’t right, it was something more magnificent, something greater still. There was only a single sun, but it had been divided into two parts that yearned to connect, that leapt toward one another, their rays touching on the thin, almost transparent surface of her skin. She opened her eyes and noticed that the trees behind the fence were gigantic and ancient, so much grander than she recalled. Their thick branches twisted above the court in an enormous canopy. Most of those branches dripped with Spanish moss. They were living arms, and they wrapped the court, encroaching in a hug. The icy pain in her head began to wane, but then returned to squeeze her brain with greater strength. She looked at the rough surface of the court. Elyse noticed that someone had swept the fallen strands of silvery-gray Spanish moss into large piles in the corners, and that the new, thin white hairs of the moss’s seed, which had fallen throughout the day, were sprinkled across the gray clay. The seeds were like a delicate dusting of icing sugar. Elyse distinguished each individual strand of the gathered moss and every wisp of the downy seed. She inhaled. The whole world smelled green and fresh, but also strong and suffocating. It was as if a wet sponge saturated with the essence of Spanish moss was pressed against her face. She inhaled again and realized that she could no longer distinguish a boundary between that all-pervasive perfume and the receptors of her nose. Was there nothing in the world but Spanish moss? It hung from tree branches above her; it surrounded her in piles on the court; it even seemed to grow from the pores of her own skin.

  A shrill voice pierced the air somewhere behind Elyse, high and discordant. It spoke a word that Elyse had certainly heard before; but for the life of her she couldn’t tell what that word was or what it could possibly mean. The sound was cutting and harsh, quite out of place with the background murmur of the trilling crickets and chirping birds.

  The ice pressing against Elyse’s brain melted and released but refroze instantaneously, gripping her head again.

  Her intense bath of sensory pleasure dulled, and Elyse turned toward the court to face her tennis partners. All three ladies were staring at her with looks of great concern. Laura Elmwood and Alma Epp had lowered their racquets and were now approaching the net.

  Elyse recalled that there was a game in progress. She had been busy playing it. There had been some strategy to the game, something that involved Killian Quinn’s anger—or no, his red face—or no, something about using that anger to jockey the others for their votes. But how could that be? Killian wasn’t here under all this hanging moss and brilliant sunshine. These were only old ladies. And what was that game, exactly? Did it have some kind of purpose? It was something about cutting and limiting one’s words, being careful with the language, distinguishing this from that, for the purpose of winning the others over. Something about affirmative something. Medical school. Black skin. What did those words mean? Medical school. Black skin. Strange sounds. Elyse looked down at her feet and saw a fluffy yellow ball on the clay beside her shoe. She saw that her claw-like hand was holding the rubbery grip of a racquet. This game had something to do with hitting that ball with that racquet. There had been some importance attached to the phrase Ad Out. Yes, Elyse was supposed to say Ad Out and then hit the ball over the net, she suddenly remembered, but how would that ever win Killian Quinn’s vote? And vote? What is vote? Just another strange sound. It seemed absurd, absolutely ridiculous, to hit a yellow ball and then care about where it landed when there was so much light penetrating her skin, and also emanating from inside her, and such a fresh, sponge-like smell, and so much joy associated with this overpowering, sensory bath, which was all so present, so here and now, and which eliminated the possibility of anything else ever existing. Elyse blinked and tried to distinguish the faces coming toward her. Icy pain pulsed through her eye. A whispered voice in her head reminded her that it was proper to say Ad Out.

  “Wuuuu wuuu.” Was that her own voice? That did not sound right at all.

  Her mouth hun
g slack. Her right arm suddenly felt like it had been turned to stone. The racquet fell from her grip. She gazed down at it, lying on the clay, and wondered how that racquet had traveled so far from her hand so quickly, so many millions of miles away, and then she realized she was swooning, that the sky was below her, that the whole world had been turned upside down and that she was standing on the blue sky, and then she was hitting the ground. The pain from her icy brain distributed across her body, but refocused like a pinprick inside her head. She blinked and saw gray grit just beyond her nose. The rough clay scratched and tickled her exposed flesh, the grains embedding themselves into her, and now Elyse couldn’t distinguish the border between that grit and her own rough skin. She was a piece of sandpaper. Her skin was the craggy bark of the surrounding trees. She squinted and turned her head into the light. She saw panicked, silhouetted faces of wrinkled women hovering above her. They looked so old, all of them.

  They have names, these women. Every old face is named. But what are those names? What is the purpose of a name?

  Elyse closed her eyes. The fierce sunshine and trilling insects and spongy sweet scent of the Georgian paradise dissipated into a gray haze, a peaceful emptiness. She felt soothed and exhausted by the quiet around her, and she let her body relax. She would open her eyes again only once, fifteen minutes later, to discover she was lying on a stretcher inside a racing ambulance. The voices and sirens, the obnoxious fluorescent lights and bright red beams on the black screens, and all the bumping and jostling of the vehicle in rapid motion—it was all so artificial and overwhelming. And each of those sensations was indistinguishable from the others. Elyse felt fingers poking at her, and metal pricking her skin, and plastic smothering her breathing, and an additional pain in her limbs and head that was much too hot and angry to categorize. She pushed it all away and closed her eyes. And although the last of Elyse Van Cleve’s internal organs wouldn’t shut down for another 41 hours, she was, for all effective purposes, already dead on that ride to the hospital.

  PART 2

  ARGUMENT

  5

  THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE

  Reclining in first class on an early-morning flight from San Francisco to Washington Dulles, Judge Emmanuel Arroyo sipped his coffee and cracked open a new book by his favorite radio host. Four pages in, he grew weary with the pundit’s tone, which was cutting and sharp on air, but on paper read more like a semiliterate and puerile screed. He stuffed the manifesto into his briefcase, took out a legal pad and a stack of briefs. Each year it seemed increasingly crazy to have a draft opinion due in early August, when federal courts more reasonable than the “nutty ninth”—as that same pundit called his notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit—were in the midst of their summer recesses. But this would be his last torturous August, thank the good Lord in Heaven, if he passed the test awaiting him in D.C. Manny skimmed his briefs, refreshed himself with the substance of the case, and decided what to write. He scribbled his first draft over the pale desert of western Utah, and only stopped when the flight attendant laid his steaming breakfast before him.

  “Would you like more coffee?”

  “Why yes, I would. Thank you.” Such uncharacteristic politeness. And his omelet smelled a whole lot better than airplane food should. The world right now was a perfect place.

  Just yesterday afternoon, carrying two hot dogs—one for himself, one for Lonny—he had emerged from the dark concrete tunnel in the upper tier of AT&T Park into the open air, and felt so overwhelmed by the world’s perfection that he had to stop to take in the view. The water of San Francisco Bay shimmered beyond the center-field wall and scoreboard, and the Oakland hills in the far distance were muted beige silhouettes in the summer haze. He was at a Giants game with his son, about to eat a hot dog under a cloudless sky. And finally, finally, he had received that call from the White House.

  Manny ate more of his omelet than he expected, and drank his coffee. His anxiety had receded under the pleasant ache in his arms and chest, the strain in his shoulders and throughout his back. He had worked out hard last night in his condo’s gym, and the pulsing, warming throb in his muscles would calm him all day, just as it had allowed him to sleep soundly last night. He pinched his shoulder blades together and stretched his traps. He felt fantastic. Strong, alert, calm.

  He was ready for this. He had worked his whole life for this. But of course he would have to be careful in his interview with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Gordon Kale. Kale was a political animal who would read Manny’s posture, his pick of suit and tie, his choice of words, how closely he had shaved. Those incidentals would be as important as any substantive jurisprudence. As long as Manny remembered he was being watched, as he did when he was in the courtroom, he would be fine.

  His flight landed on schedule. Manny was gripped by faint nausea as the plane taxied to the gate. He shouldn’t have had that third cup of coffee. As soon as the flight attendant opened the airplane door, he strode onto the jet bridge and into the terminal. He discovered a tall, thin limo driver—probably Sudanese—waiting for him by baggage claim, loosely clutching a sign printed Moreno, the cover Kale had suggested. Manny grinned at the man’s bony, dark-skinned face. Subterfuge was thrilling. They exchanged quick nods and Manny was led outside into the sweltering heat and humidity, toward a black Town Car with tinted windows and government plates, his heart pounding as though he were midway through a set of heavy squats.

  They drove into town. Manny half-expected the limo to pull in through the front gates of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, but instead it stopped at a curb on 17th Street, by an unadorned entrance to the Old Executive Office Building. No security. The driver put the car in park.

  “Here you go.”

  Manny stepped out of the car, smacking into a solid wall of heat so severe it bent the light into shimmering waves that rose off the asphalt. He immediately started to sweat. He had forgotten that Washington summers had all the fire of Waco’s, but worse humidity. The streets were quiet, except for a handful of tourists lumbering through Farragut Square toward the White House, cameras in hand. Two boyish young interns, the sleeves of their dress shirts informally rolled above their elbows and their boldly colored ties knotted tightly around their necks, were waiting for him by the door.

  “Welcome, Judge.”

  Arroyo nodded a brusque greeting.

  The interns ushered him into the building and past the security guards, flashing laminated passes, and then into a small elevator inside a roped-off alcove, which was most likely reserved for the executive branch’s privileged guests. The two interns stood awkwardly beside him.

  “How was your flight?”

  He wanted to tell this taller intern to shut up, but instead mumbled “fine.” He dug around in the pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew a crumbling tissue, which he used to wipe his sweaty brow. Kale would notice his sweat.

  They emerged from the elevator by a doorway with a small plaque that read: Office of the Vice President. The interns led him inside, through an empty room with several cubicles, and stopped at the threshold of a boardroom. They gestured for Manny to enter, and closed the door behind him.

  All the powerbrokers of the executive branch were standing in the room but for President Shaw himself. Their skin looked pasty in the fluorescent light, and their eyes drooped wearily, like they had been standing around and waiting for him all day. But Kale had said it would be one interview, just “preliminary stuff.” He hadn’t said anything about Manny meeting all these people at once! Manny’s fingers tingled, and he closed his hands into tight fists, his gaze darting from face to face. He was still goddamn sweating, although this office was heavily air-conditioned.

  “Emmanuel Arroyo, good to see you.” The White House Chief of Staff, Jeremy Rimm, showed his horsey teeth, walked around the table and stuck out his stubby hand.

  Manny wished to God that he could wipe his sweaty palm before shaking anyone’s hand.

  One by one they came around the table to
greet him. Deputy Chief Gordon Kale was next in line, followed by Attorney General Rolando Nicolaides, White House Counsel Lorna MacKneer and Vice Presidential Chief of Staff L. J. Batherson. Arroyo took care to meet each set of eyes as he shook hands, concentrating on offering just the right suggestion of power with his sturdy grip. Too strong a clasp might indicate a will to dominance, maybe even violence, but too limp a grip would expose a timorous nature. The perfect handshake would show just enough strength to resist pressure, and indicate his ability stick to a textualist position in conference. Arroyo’s last handshake was with Vice President Bloomfield, whose fingers felt fat and swollen. Probably poor circulation. To Manny’s dismay, Kale asked him to sit on the near side of the long conference table while the entire White House staff shuffled around the corner to sit on the other side of the table, opposite him. Manny again clenched his hands into fists in preparation for an old-fashioned grilling, an assault.

  “I heard Gordon caught you at a ball game yesterday with his phone call.”

  “I was with my son, Lonny. When Gordon asked if I was alone, I said, yeah, just me and 40,000 Giants fans.”

  They all laughed—a good sign.

  “Giants win?”

  “Of course, Jeremy. Barry Bonds homered into McCovey Cove.”

  Baseball talk put Manny at ease, which was probably what Rimm had intended. They moved on. In 90 minutes of amicable questioning, led by MacKneer and Nicolaides, they asked Manny about key cases on the Ninth Circuit during his tenure, about his strict constructionist jurisprudence, and his opinion on the so-called “rights” that liberal justices and leftist law professors freely espoused, none of which had ever been enumerated in the Constitution. All standard stuff, and he could feel the correct answers slipping effortlessly from his mouth. He only struggled to figure out which of these officials he should be working hardest to impress. Attorney General Nicolaides and White House Counsel MacKneer were the most obvious targets, given their legal expertise and important advisory positions, but Nicolaides bobbed his head like a kowtowing servant, muttering mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm, an annoying mantra, implying he was a robotic functionary, not an opinionated decision maker; and MacKneer squeezed her wide, owl-like eyes shut and snarled her upper lip in a disfiguring twitch, which indicated some inner reservoir of insecurity and fear. Who in their right mind would let emotional weaklings like those two make Shaw’s final pick for the Supreme Court? As for the three chiefs of staff, Rimm, Batherson and Kale, they were clearly sharks, watching him with sly, sidelong glances, searching for his weaknesses, considering points of attack. They were doing what Manny had expected them to do: calculating tangential factors like his vocabulary and how his ethnicity might play, his tone and grammar, his looks and manners. Manny made sure to acknowledge all three of them equally, and addressed his answers to them, even though Nicolaides and MacKneer posed all the questions. But most importantly, he never lost awareness of that ominous presence at the far end of the table. Vice President Bloomfield sat like a king on his throne, in the only chair with armrests. He said nothing, not a word, and hardly moved. Bloomfield was the real authority here. His thumbs up or thumbs down would be as consequential as Nero’s back in the day, at least during this early round of questioning—before President Shaw got involved. Manny ceded full authority to Bloomfield, and allowed himself to be the object of the man’s scrutiny. He did not turn his own gaze to the Vice President, and he did not speak to him directly. Subtle deference. Only when Nicolaides asked Manny for his take on executive power did it seem right to directly address the Vice President, a man who had built his entire career on that issue. “I think the Court has grossly weakened the executive’s proper power in recent years. If I were a member, I would help correct that imbalance.” He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to stare squarely at Bloomfield, to meet him eye-to-eye. The Vice President’s ashen face was as bloated as his fingers, but Manny’s comment seemed to elicit a faint smile at the corners of his lips.