The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “Why do you like him so much?” So eager to know she nearly shouted it.

  “Well, he’s gonna be different, you know? Work with everybody across the aisle and stay positive and bring people together. Restore our national reputation. Because we really need some of that, you know? And he’ll end the wars too.” Something in his face ticking here, a valve releasing, his voice switching to heavy, sincere evaluation mode. “So much bad stuff. All those people dying for no reason. It has to stop.”

  “My brother’s fighting in the Middle East,” she said, a creeper of guilt winding round her neck. “And my dad,” she lied.

  “Really? Wow.” Sweeping the sidewalk with the sole of his shoe. “Wow.”

  “They both hate it,” she continued, inventing a sturdy foundation for antiwar credentials.

  “Well yeah, right? We all hate war.”

  His words caught in her head, the simple surfer poetry of it. “We all hate war,” she repeated, feeling how it dropped and held. Words to chew on and stretch out with her teeth, pack solid against her gums, snap through with her tongue. Words that could move feet.

  “If you don’t hate war, you’re an asshole,” he pointed out. “It’s life and death.”

  Whereas acting was wasteful entertainment and a smoothie stand was a superfluous capitalist extravagance. “I want to help,” she said. “What can I do?”

  “Cool!” He fumbled in his backpack for some stickers and a sign-up sheet. Already she felt firmer and squared away, saturated with the focus of deep reading or making music alone in a soundproof studio. Trivialities gushed away through her feet, a sensei’s mind controlling the room.

  She stayed with the bronzed Obama ambassador, learned his name was Ryan, made up stories about working on Governor Schwarzenegger’s task force for climate change and registering the homeless to vote, watched his eyes sharpen and stare down her shirt. Back in his room she let him fuck her twice with all the lights on while she slapped his cheeks, squeezed his nipples, pinched his ass, called him filthy names. He was crying when she left, she wasn’t sure why, and by the time she made it back to her room, he’d sent three emails and left two voicemails begging her to return. She didn’t.

  The next day she prowled the Stanford Mall, introducing herself to makeup counter ladies as a Palo Alto Daily reporter seeking out cosmetic trends. She received exhaustive makeovers at three different department stores and took copious notes on the attendants’ chatter on makeup pairings with outfit style, recent earth-tone trends, weight-concealing strategies, who looked good in what and when. They all said she needed concealer and foundation, something to mask the blemishes bubbling on her cheeks and also to pull her face together, to distract from her spaced-out alien eyes. Focus on those thick lips, they all said, boost your average-looking mouth up to phenomenal with gloss and lip liner, make the men pay attention to your mouth, the juicy possibility of your tongue and throat. Licking your words into being, a glandular promise of fornication and pure primal attraction. She walked out of each store with a shopping bag full of lipstick samples and a pledge to lick her lips saucily before making to any public statement.

  The next week she went back to the ladies’ clothes section, her cover a follow-up assignment on winter fashion styles. The gleeful attendants had her changing in and out of dresses and skirts the whole day, establishing that she needed color and flair, something to distract from her noticeable behind—not that it wasn’t beautiful, they added quickly, it was just a detour from her face, her ideas, herself. Loose bottoms and attention-getting tops drew attention upward, they advised, diverting the eyes onto a collision course with that succulent mouth. Robespierre smiled with her lips turned out and thanked them for their help, then hung around alluding to possible photo spreads and fashion shoots, a chance for significant free advertising, maybe they could donate a few of the more outstanding ensembles for the project, it was fully taxdeductible—but the shopgirls blathered on about favorite brands and all that weight Jessica Simpson put on, and she left before her head exploded. She thought about sneaking out a few of the choice designer outfits underneath the dark and flowing oversized skirt and trench coat combo she’d worn for that very purpose, even made it halfway to the exit smuggling a Prada ensemble, when she spotted the security guy standing just outside the mall entrance slurping innocuously on a soda, everything in place for the easy bust. She snaked her tongue across her lips and went back to the changing room, tore off the Prada outfit, and stuffed it under the bench in angry balls. The security guard burped filthily as she strode by him on the way to the parking lot, and she decided to never again issue a lip lick in the mall so long as he stood a chance of seeing it.

  She hit five thrift stores on the drive home and followed up with an evening on eBay, snatching up every ten-dollar designer suit and colorful attention-getting top that was remotely close to her size. Decked out in baggy if eye-jarringly effective outfits, she slathered on tubes of concealer, base, and lipstick, and set out in full costume for political union events, Democratic club meetings, bars at power-brokering restaurants, rallies and marches and coffee-shop bitchfests, the occasional park drum circle. She read up on the issues and called for decisive action, the need to get people back to work through investment, an end to the wars, wild hard belief set in her eyes like stones. With time she learned to sew, slicing and stitching her ragtag wardrobe into a bona fide power closet. She got noticed for eloquence and intelligence and her provocative looks, toeing the line of angry but not stepping over it; a committed front-line fighter who made her points stick, with the men drawn to her seductive lip puckers that came every twenty minutes on the dot.

  She quit the plays and sold the smoothie stand and dove full-on into political science courses, investigating how to entice people to give her the power to control the course of history. All of acting’s thrill of persuasion but with a much bigger payoff, the chance to direct human civilization, working the biggest stage there was. She studied Reagan’s avuncular charisma, Clinton’s ease and sax solos, Kennedy’s huge eyes and knockout wife. Obama did it better than anybody: inspirational and cool but above all inviting, a guy you’d never dream of hanging with in high school but here he was sliding in next to you in the cafeteria with a free BLT and chocolate milk and an offer to do your homework before making long and groovy love on a candlelit waterbed over hectic jazz scats.

  That was the style; she needed the substance. The topics du jour did not excite: the economic debate all went the same way, with everyone agreeing on the importance of growing wealth but no real idea how to pull it off; energy reform was too distant, average voters didn’t understand power grids or what a carbon ton was; gay rights had slumped into a second-tier issue that didn’t promise a whole lot of electoral upside; nobody liked homelessness; and the impossible, intangible frustration of health care was a monster she did not know how to slay. She took sides on these fights and supported them but still searched for something emotional and visceral, the blade cutting skin, the electrifying angle to make her a star.

  Her first day in Washington was sloppy hot and depressing. A flat-faced butch chick named Sushi introduced herself as Speaker Pelosi’s summer intern coordinator and led Robespierre and a paunchy Asian kid from Bernal Heights on a five-minute office tour before putting in coffee orders and handing her a twenty. Robespierre introduced herself to all the staff and the rest of the dork patrol interns, licking her lips and offering her services to help with speechwriting or strategizing; she could call around and broker bipartisan agreements, maybe take a stab at drafting some of the simpler legislation. Instead they gave her a few thousand copies to run off and asked her to keep an eye on the fax machine.

  The legislative aides took note when she turned around the copy job in record time—her mother had kept her on top of the latest tricks for time-saving document reproduction—and rewarded her with the office lunch order. When those came back early and under budget, they knew she was a threat. They ignored her for the rest
of the day, leaving her to putz around on the computer and fend off date requests from wonky geeks who tracked down her bobbing butt in the hallway.

  Day Two was more of the same, the executive staff feigning preoccupation with reports and memos, the administrative support pool chatting endlessly on the phone, a couple of jerkier policy analysts simply turning their chairs around when she puffed her lips in their direction. They ignored her emails, failed to answer her calls, and rebuffed her in-person requests for expanded duties with long-winded nonanswer stalls. She let them have their kicks—sniffles in quick, laughlike succession, eyes wrought with impossible stained-glass disinterest while they overtly played Sudoku online—and told Sushi she was heading out to a doctor’s appointment. Instead she wandered over to the House of Representatives and took a seat in the balcony.

  Luxurious marble and crafted wood and the great American flag hoisted behind the Speaker’s podium. The floor was empty, except for a representative from Colorado reading off the accomplishments of a recently deceased Steamboat Springs rancher, a man who’d helped slash the unemployment rate by half and made significant contributions to agricultural development and the science of animal husbandry. Intermittent votes took place on a giant scoreboard as old men banged gavels and read inscrutable texts. It was like watching a cafeteria swell and contract, a subway station at rush hour. Everyone passing through.

  She went back to the office and headed for a cluster of cubicles and lower-level staff that Sushi had introduced with a finger down her gaping mouth. Shuttling keyboards and repetitive yawns, humming climate control, a large clock over the door where the minute hand glugged through the day like the passing sun. This was the government she’d feared, the dozing administrative guts, lifetimes of passionless execution and paper passing. She slipped into an empty desk and composed a snarkalicious insider essay for the biggest blog in the land, razing the Pelosi organization for its dopey management hierarchy; its inability to do more when the resources were there; the conservative, do-things-the-old-way philosophy that alienated bright-eyed and bushy-tailed supersmart plugged-in-to-the-realities-of-2009 summer interns. Three lines into her rousing conclusion the scent of paper and cherry perfume overwhelmed her, followed by the uncommon sensation of being found out.

  She minimized the program on her screen. Too late. “Delete it,” a voice said.

  “What?” Stalling for an excuse, nerves jerking in her head, followed fast by a chasm of disappointment, how authority still froze her.

  “You’re a smart kid, so don’t do something stupid.”

  “It’s nothing,” she mumbled, fumbling with the mouse and turning the screen away. It had been so long since she’d been busted at anything, she wasn’t good at playing dumb.

  “I know what it is. Used a computer before too.” The woman pulled up a chair, crowded her into the cubicle. She was in her mid-sixties and Asian, gray hair wrapped tight around her head, Elvira-style reading glasses dangling around her neck on a shoe-lace. “Delete it.”

  Robespierre nodded mechanically and opened the blogging window, removed the post, signed out of the website, and shut down her browser.

  “Good girl. Now why don’t you make yourself useful?”

  “I tried,” she said, thinking of her perfect load of copies, coffee orders filled in record time, standing offers to do any and all bitch work lobbed in her direction.

  “You made yourself annoying. You think we don’t see this? Hot-shot summer interns come in and think they’re world-beaters?”

  “I never said that,” she mumbled.

  “This is the major leagues,” the woman said crisply. “We don’t have time for that. Now, with this—” she tapped the computer monitor with her fingertips “—the real question is: why should I help you out, when you already tried to burn this place down?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said dourly, opting for the time-tested ass-kissing apology road. “I made a mistake. Please, let me make up for it.”

  The lady nodded. “Good. I’m Maeve. You are?”

  “Robespierre.”

  “Unh-huh. Well listen up, Robes, this is the bullpen. Which I run. In essence we are the public engagement arm of the Speaker’s office. We receive, on average, five thousand letters, emails, and calls per day. Depends on the day, the issue, election cycles. But call it five thousand. Probably the most in all of Congress, since she’s been around a while and is the Speaker. As you might guess, Ms. Pelosi does not have time to personally respond to all five thousand pieces of correspondence, especially as a large percentage of them are form emails or prewritten postcards, impersonal prewritten communications that people sign up for via an email forward or at the grocery store. You follow?”

  She did follow, the long webs of connection and the power of people and demagogues and grassroots organizations and polls. “You tally them up?” she asked.

  “Correct. Issues with the most correspondence get nudged toward the top of the Speaker’s agenda. Naturally, that can be gamed. But we assume anybody who really wants something is gaming the system, so in essence it’s a minimum threshold of legitimacy. In fact, if you’re not gaming the system, you’re really not on the radar. That said, we also get plenty of people who write in about anything and everything. ‘I saw a fire truck run a red light without its siren on,’ or ‘where’s my tax return,’ or ‘my pants are missing.’ Any topic you can think of, and more.”

  Robespierre imagined the crazies of San Francisco, dancing naked in the Tenderloin and operating candle shops and replanting parks by hand and overall making the city the bewitching, iconoclastic place it was. “And you respond,” she concluded.

  “Got to. We need their vote. And we get free mail, franking privilege. Paper letters stand out from email. There’s authority to it, finding you at a fixed address. And people appreciate the labor involved, that we took the time to print something and sign and mail it. Now, the overwhelming majority of correspondence covers the same twenty or thirty issues, for which we have regularly updated responses prepared. Basic structure’s acknowledgement, explanation, and either agreement or call for understanding. Constituents write in on different sides of an issue, but we don’t get too deep. Most people just want to know they’ve been heard.”

  Which fit in with everything Robespierre knew about ego massaging and flattery, the keys to psychic conquest. It was a beautiful bureaucracy—people-powered, scalable and systemic, timely, simple, embracing democratic ethos and capitalist gamesmanship, the full splendor of America. “Maybe I can help write response letters,” she suggested, “for the new issues that come in.”

  Maeve wrinkled her upper lip in a smirk of semi-respect. “Do a good job and I’ll see if they need help over in speechwriting. You can start with these.” A mail bin loaded with paper landed on her desk like a Yule log. “Plenty more where that came from.”

  She pulled out the top envelope, unfolded a loose-leaf sheet out of eighths. Wild handwriting recommended repurposing mothballed antiaircraft weaponry to stop dangerous hurricanes, as fired bullets would disrupt hazardous wind patterns with counterattacking air currents and the sheer force of hot lead. The next letter was typed, all caps, and contained profanity of a class not observed since Sven’s sailor mates swilled beer by the gallon on weekend nights back on Stillwell Road. Following that was a lengthy exposé on the devious connection between military officials and the Vatican, involving parallel universes and subatomic weaponry, all of it explained by invisible ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls. One treatise on spies dressed up as farmers and seeding fields with toxins; another pointing out the indefensible sluttiness of the Speaker’s wardrobe, her leg flesh visible from five yards or closer. Rants against homeless people, corporations, governments, nonprofits, flaccid passive every-men who didn’t ask questions, annoying liberal brats who wouldn’t stop with the questions, right-wing hotheads who screamed too much, idiot activists, idiot cops, idiot criminals, intelligent criminals, tight-assed media dopes, scamming banks and fucked-up CEOs
, dumbass Mexicans who tried to buy their houses on orange-picker salaries, xenophobic blowhards who conveniently ignored their own immigrant heritage, greedy real estate agents and exploitative mortgage brokers, preps and hipsters, yuppies and too-cools, environazis and polluters, single mothers, single dads, married losers, useless children and seniors, faggot-ass homos, scumbag gay bashers, trannies, anti-transsexuals, crackheads, squares, drunks, gangs of kids throwing trash in the street, sanitation companies and their unions, exploitative national chain stores forcing their way into local neighborhoods, moronic communists who blocked well-meaning businesses from opening up. The Speaker, the Speaker’s parents and husband and children, anyone who’d ever met the Speaker, the Speaker’s ancestors and descendants, every last one of them to burn in hell for eternity-plus.

  That accounted for about half the letters. The rest drove down on the wars in epic poems of battle and freedom, recounting specific attacks and missions, names of dead men and women, requests for memorials and remembrance. Screeds against military contractors and America-hating camel fuckers and all the evil that built this into being. Flags to fly at half-mast until the guns were put away. Some demanded bigger deployments and hydrogen bombs—might as well throw the kitchen sink and get out, like Japan in World War II—but most were tired and sick of it and drained and far beyond done. Personal essays on selling their dead son’s car and donating clothes and living in orphanages. Pictures of kids growing up parentless. Needing an explanation. Why was America fighting in these places, why people mixed with explosives, why high school kids flew ten thousand miles to absorb a car bomb outside a restaurant. How they loved the country lots but these questions required answers. Teardrops and grease stains, small careful signatures, respectful salutations and congenial farewells.