The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  Robespierre took these war letters home with her, read them over dinner and through the night. They would not let her sleep. She drank a pot of coffee and beat everyone into the office, fired up her computer, and typed. No filters, no calculations—she mined honesty and truth, the rising fluid she felt between her lungs. Individual responses, with direct answers, apologies, and a plan, a policy enacted overnight: that the wars would end. Speaker Pelosi would not support the fighting, would not commit another dollar of taxpayer money to support it, would never let this happen again. These wars were wrong, they were lies, their children were dying for nothing, for less than nothing. Dying for losing. With judicious copying and pasting she was through the stack by noon, then printed off the responses, applied the Speaker’s autopen signature, stuffed them and mailed them, then hit the cafeteria for a salad and Diet Coke.

  Three days later she returned from her lunch break to find Maeve sitting at her desk, clicking through her computer. “Let’s walk,” Maeve stated, taking Robespierre’s elbow and moving her through the stately hallways and down elaborate winding staircases and outside into the swamp-heat sun, a little park across the street.

  “Are you trying to ruin us?” Maeve asked, her voice separating into a fusillade of razor-tipped spears. “Everything a Democratic Congress stands for can be ruined by this.”

  “By what?” Letting Maeve feel in control.

  “Don’t act stupid. The fucking letters.” She held up one of Robespierre’s better missives, a searing three-page discourse on the institutionalized hypocrisy wrought by the military-industrial complex. “The lies you spread.”

  “I didn’t spread any lies.”

  “You impersonated Speaker Pelosi and made policy promises the Speaker never would or could enact. Lies.”

  “Everything you send out is an impersonation!” she burst out, silly stupid with the doublespeak and side lingo and made-up shit. “Pelosi doesn’t do any of it herself!”

  Maeve’s face arranged like a keyboard, jaws out and teeth like yellow wood, hair stretching back like piano wire. “Approval. That’s the difference. I never authorized any of these.”

  Pieces fit inside of her and she knew this was how it was done, a perfect political dumping. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

  “I found the letters on your computer. And the print logs. And a roomful of witnesses who saw you working there during the hours in question. Overall, real sloppy work.”

  The high slipped from her head and she landed square in the center of the jungle heat; these points were too true, she was tostada with a side of eggs, exercises littered with rookie mistakes. The only alternative was to take down as much as she could with her, make herself too knowledgeable to turn in. “I never had any instructions,” she claimed. “There were no approval processes in place. I just used common sense.”

  No movement in Maeve’s face, eyes barely open, a death mask before burial. “There are clear approval processes in place, posted on the wall of every cubicle. All communications from the Speaker of the House’s office require review and approval from me.”

  Robespierre vaguely recalled a laminated form on the wall of her cubicle printed in attention-getting, eye-paining red type, over which she’d pinned several photos of President Obama playing basketball and a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge drowning in fog. “You’ve been frank with me, so I’ll be frank with you,” Robespierre said. “You can either go down with me for not telling me about your approval process, or you can blame it on a computer problem. I want a transfer. Somewhere important.” But what was more important than the Speaker’s office? “The White House. And not the Old Executive Office Building either; I want the real deal, 1600 Pennsylvania and the Oval Office and little Obamas running around the White House lawn with Bo the dog.”

  “Can’t do it.” Unbelievable in every contour.

  “Maybe not. But you better try.”

  The death mask fell away and Robespierre sat down on a bench, watching the pigeons peck at sandwich crusts and bike messengers slurp Gatorade under trees and pasty-faced suits racing back and forth across the sidewalk with their heads down, as if the fate of the world hinged on their attendance at meetings or project outlines or coauthored reports on fiduciary processes. She walked back to her rented dorm room and fell on her bed like a stone, sleeping straight though dinner and on through the night, until her cellphone rang in the morning with an official by-the-book secretarial voice informing her to report for work at the White House as soon as she could get there.

  In the spring of 2012, still reeling from her failed bid for Stanford class president the previous year—she’d lost by five votes to a guy who’d literally handed out free beer—Robespierre put on her sexiest skirt and a double dose of lipstick and collected signatures to get on the ballot for San Francisco supervisor. She staked out parking lots and approached shoppers loading their cars, chatted up moms pushing strollers, trotted out the two lines of Mandarin she’d memorized the night before, flashed a laminated copy of her intern photo shaking hands with President Obama. To young men she blew slow, fat-lip kisses; when asked for her number, she gave out the campaign hotline, an answering service in Fremont. Incredibly, donations came in: friends’ parents and Stanford alums and prominent city businesses looking to hedge their bets on the supervisor race while building a record of supporting minorities. She spent her funds on dinners out with potential endorsers, spa treatments and makeovers, pricey designer outfits to reel in the votes. On policy she was inconsistent, contradicting herself on a sales tax initiative within the space of two sentences, pulling a triple reverse on a transportation proposal, not having any position at all on homelessness, other than that she was against it. A disorganized campaigner, a knockout on television, her campaign gave great photos and vapid vibes, more L.A. than San Fran, culling no traction with voters.

  Up late on a Tuesday night with her advisory committee, punchy student organizers and a couple of political science professors excited to test-drive some of their more radical thought experiments. Her first door-hanger order was due in four hours, with a round of final exams shortly after that. She needed more than a slogan, Robespierre observed; she needed a creed, a philosophy of courage and candor and just enough dreaminess, something San Francisco voters would love to love.

  “But no rhyming,” she decided. “It’s a cheap trick. They’ll see right through it.”

  “So what if it’s a cheap trick?” countered David, a gay teaching assistant with perfect hands. “It’s effective. Like a jingle on the radio.”

  “But everybody hates it when it gets stuck in their head.”

  “But it gets stuck in their head and they remember it and you win.”

  “Like McDonalds,” chimed in Sheila, a pink-haired Asian chick.

  “This campaign is not like McDonald’s,” Robespierre declared.

  “Nobody’s saying that,” David said, “but you can’t argue away their market dominance.”

  They paused to watch the Iranian War on the television she kept on the closet floor. Creaking tanks, men coated with dust, bombs breaking in lightning bolts. The Khorasan Offensive was overextended, a journalist reported by satellite videophone; attacks on supply lines disrupted the American advance from Turkmenistan. Women launched rockets at cooking fires; children hurled Molotov cocktails at medics. Somewhere in the background Marat humped on patrol, conducting strip searches and shooting first and learning bigger ways to hate. Her contribution to the problem.

  “Nukes can’t be far off,” Robespierre muttered, citric acid mixing in her mouth.

  “No way,” said Jenny Prescott, a Barbara Boxer-styled Marin yuppie who was exploring the nuclear prospect thoroughly in her dissertation. “Not in an election year.”

  “Worked for Harry Truman,” a young poli-sci professor pointed out.

  Snapshots of KIAs scrolled onscreen, names and hometowns, scowling photos in uniform. A camera tottered through a village of amputees, victims of bom
bs from both sides sitting in wagons, leaning on crutches made from sticks, signing documents with pens between their teeth. Legless, armless, smiling people, overjoyed from living, ecstatic with life.

  “This is what I care about,” Robespierre said, feeling skin tighten over her arms, a buzz in the room building into live particles and energy waves. “We gotta stop the war.”

  “Jurisdictional issue,” yawned one of the older professors, an emeritus chair-holder up way past his bedtime but enjoying his consulting role as a way to stay relevant. “As a San Francisco supervisor, that’s significantly beyond the—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. We go big. Real big. Ultra-fucking big.” Robespierre was up and walking, a quick lap around the room. “Write this down. Stop the war in District 4.”

  The room bobbed with heads, yes, no, maybe, tired. “People want comfort,” retorted the emeritus professor. “They want politicians who can lead, who are like them, who reflect their values. Not to mention hitting the issues they can understand. Like the economy, or local services.”

  “But if there’s any place you can get away with a bigger story, something more than taxes or trash delivery, it’s San Francisco,” the younger professor added.

  “I’m not sure about the District 4 part,” Robespierre said. She stopped in front of the television and watched the grainy images, chaotic images, undirected unspecified images, light and dark scored to the sounds of destruction. “It’s misleading, like there’s a war in District 4 that needs to be stopped. And there’s something to be said for the blunt power of Stop the War. It’s easier to remember. And grander. A grand vision. A grand unstoppable beautiful vision of what could be. What should be.”

  “I like it,” murmured a dreadlocked freshman everybody thought was sleeping.

  “It’s not bad,” assessed the younger professor.

  “Stands out,” the emeritus prof agreed.

  “Whatever,” David sniffed.

  “It’s right, isn’t it? Doesn’t it feel absolutely fucking honest?”

  And though her advisory committee members were bushed and hungry and propagating an unpleasant communal odor, slightly delirious, too much time sitting in the same clothes, offkilter from the circular arguments and extended brainstorming and concentrated mental focus, they felt it work on their spirits, sensed a little lift in the arches of their feet, detected a fresh-tasting smell perfuming the inside of their clothes.

  Three days later, when they received their shipment of one hundred thousand STOP THE WAR! door hangers, nobody remembered ordering the exclamation point. Energized by their powerfully punctuated policy position, the younger political science professor gushed to an alternative newspaper columnist over espressos that Robespierre would block city services to the federal government unless the troops came home, stop policing the Federal Building unless the troops came home, introduce legislation that called for reclaiming the Presidio from federal control unless the troops came home. The columnist pumped his fist three times when the professor left to canvas doorknobs, the headline ANARCHISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! bursting into his head in eighteen-point type.

  That same morning, Robespierre told a columnist at the rival alternative newspaper that, if elected, she would travel on official city business to Iran to stop the war in any way she could. This columnist, an analytical journalist with daily news experience, who enjoyed teasing out offbeat ideas and either pinpointing the hidden sincerity or dissecting the ludicrousness, asked her with a straight face how exactly she would do that.

  “Simple,” Robespierre said, swabbing her lips with a circular tongue-mop, “I’ll lie down in front of tanks.”

  “U.S. or Iranian?” the columnist asked.

  “Both,” she decided.

  “What about body armor?” he asked. “Protection? An escort?”

  “Not sure,” Robespierre said. “Depends if the city will cover it.”

  The two columns hit newsstands the next Wednesday morning; by lunch, Robespierre’s volunteer database had swollen from 9 to 418, her campaign website had crashed, and she’d been called by three national news programs. Her interviews were slapped on the end of nightly broadcasts, the “only in San Francisco” story intended to give viewers a break from gruesome war footage. “It’s what I care about,” she explained, her steadfast, serious face radiant on the television screen. “I’m fortunate enough to live in a rich city with nearly everything we could possibly need. Stopping the war is what matters. So let’s stop it.” The networks rolled back to smiling anchors, sitcom reruns and rumor-mongering entertainment news shows, millions of viewers disagreeing on what to think of her—naïve, prophetic, a traitor, a hero, your classic San Francisco wackjob—but registering her fortitude, the guts to take a stand.

  J. Malcolm Fletcher, attorney at law, rang her doorbell at 7:30 the next morning. Having fallen asleep a few hours earlier following a rum-heavy orientation with the new batch of volunteers, Robespierre gingerly wheeled open the door, kicked pizza crusts out of the hall, and asked the guy in the trench coat if he’d like any coffee, because personally she needed a fucking vat of the stuff.

  “That’s fine,” said Fletcher, removing his hat. “Thanks.”

  Robespierre took his response as a no and stuck a half-filled mug from the day before in the microwave. “So,” she said, distracted by the electromagnetic hum, “what do you want?”

  His flighty smile was lined with gray stubble. “A campaign donation,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “I see.” She checked her wrist where a watch would be. “Look, I gotta get going.”

  He shook his head. “A check,” he said. “A client of mine asked me to deliver it to you. On his behalf.”

  A green-gray force field descended around her skull, teeming with alcohol and teslas. “Great,” she managed. She noted how he held his hat upside-down with both hands, like a religious offering, perfect for catching puke if she couldn’t make the trash can.

  “Well,” said Fletcher, his grin broadening. “That’s wonderful.”

  Crappy luck, a roundabout talker. She couldn’t put up with this for long. “I can take that for you,” she offered, angling her shoulder toward the lawyer, who was antique and stooped and would be a cinch to force out the door if it came to that. “The check.”

  Fletcher reached into a scraped suitcase and removed a gold card the size of a lottery ticket. “For you,” he announced. He held the card with both hands and presented it to Robespierre with a slight bow. There was a charm to the gesture that penetrated her defensive earthworks—the slight dip in his hips? the unwrinkling of his forehead? the lacquered fingernails?—and she took the card and returned his smile and handed him the mug of coffee from the microwave.

  “Coffee,” he said. “That’s fine.”

  “Sure thing,” she agreed.

  He set the mug down on the counter, picked up his suitcase, and walked out the door. Robespierre followed him as far as the sofa, when her knees gave way and her head disintegrated into a billion bone fragments and she fell unconscious for seventy-six minutes, until she was awoken by hangover groans, toilets flushing, the suck of the fridge pulled open and shut. The gold card adhered to her sweaty hand, and she peeled it off and opened it:

  Heard you making a stir. Long time, huh? Guess you’re all grown now. Saw you’re running for government, so I thought, why not win? I can always use a favor from the big cheese.

  See you on the finish line,

  Pop

  Cavernous breathing took over her body; she pushed her back against a wall and sank. Then she found the check on the floor, all the decimal places crammed into one line.

  Her phone rang, and she let it drone on until an intern picked up.

  “It’s for you,” somebody said, and she shuffled over on her knees, receiving the handset as if it were an ancient talisman.

  “What?” asked Robespierre, but the dial tone was all that was there. She stood up, suddenly white-faced and heavy, and staggered over to the kitche
n.

  “You OK?” asked the intern, who looked like a fifteen-year-old version of Salma Hayek.

  “We got money,” she drawled. “A lot.”

  “Cool! That’s awesome!” But all Robespierre felt was emptiness and hopelessness, knowledge lost forever. “Do you want to, you know, put it in the bank?”

  “Not that,” she whispered. “My dad.”

  The intern pulled her into port, a total embrace, kneading her jerky shoulders through her sweater. “What about your dad?” the intern asked.

  “Nothing,” Robespierre said, and went down the hall and started the shower. She sat on the toilet with all her clothes on and dove into a stump speech practice session, reciting campaign promises mixed with out-of-tune humming, errant spray from the showerhead spritzing her face until her blouse was soaked and her hair hung like heavy rope and she finally felt the slightest bit clean.

  The quiet house chipped away at her. Even with the television always on and the fresh bag of low-cal Jiffy Pop that Esmerelda heated in the microwave each night, the building felt ghostly without Marat’s island rhythms, Robespierre clacking out communiqués on her computer, Esmerelda reporting on her weight loss with jubilant shouts from the bathroom scale. She screened Fanny’s beloved soap operas but couldn’t get past the low production values; she found reality television repulsive; athletics barbaric. She watched her collection of Paul Newman movies, but even those ran out of juice after the third or fourth screening, his gentleman’s ease feeling old-fashioned and unrealistic, reminding her of her age. The phone didn’t ring for months, not when Robespierre announced her run for supervisor, or when it became mathematically certain that Marat had a day or two on leave, or even when she finally paid off the last of the collections agencies, so she brought the handset down to Best Buy after work to have it tested. It went off on the first try, and she could only withstand two lonely rings before ripping the cord from the wall and charging out of the store.