The Frankenstein Candidate

by Kolhatkar, Vinay

  John Hastings, host of the popular Los Angeles–based Hastings Radio Show, called it “the disgrace of American democracy that a billionaire businessman can use his own money to just abuse respected academics and spread long discredited free enterprise mumbo jumbo to serve his own ends.”

  Yes, Quentin Kirby was distressed for the same reasons that Colin Spain was furious. He thought Stein timed his show to perfection, spreading his unregulated gospel moments before the Iowa caucus results were declared and effectively taking away large chunks of media time that rightfully belonged to Kirby and Spain. Actually, Kirby was doubly distressed. Here was a candidate who could have been promised a seat in his administration, perhaps even the Treasury Secretary position given his financial expertise. He could have poured hundreds of millions into Kirby’s campaign, effectively guaranteeing him a return to the White House.

  He was still toying around with that idea when Kevin Heller put an end to it.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Kevin cautioned. “That was weeks ago. Now, even to place his name on the campaign register, even if it came with no strings attached, could be a public relations disaster.”

  Kevin Heller remained confident that Frank Stein would disintegrate of his own accord. His opening salvo alone had hurt a range of powerful people across a broad spectrum. The anger among the establishment was so palpable that Heller could not help but compare it with what he called “the typical Tea Party anarchy from ten years ago,” when in 2010, Tea Party–led activists had stormed the gates of Congress and helped overturn a Democratic majority.

  Kayla Mizzi saw it all with a different lens. With cameraman in tow and microphone in hand, she was standing at ten a.m. at Times Square. She knew from the messages on her website that many would come.

  It was January 12, 2020. It was the day that was going to test the notion that voter apathy had increased and no one cared any more.

  By ten thirty a.m., a crowd of thousands had already gathered. New York Police Department personnel were rapidly deployed along Seventh Avenue, and the crowd kept increasing.

  Frank Stein appeared wearing a thick jacket and scarf, no overcoat, walking shoes, and a relaxed smile. For all their expressed diffidence, Kayla could see television crews streaming in. Overhead, she heard and then saw a CW chopper. In the air, she could smell the change in the public mood.

  Stein got up on a little makeshift podium. He had no mike. Kayla assisted him with hers. He spoke briefly.

  “Welcome, folks. Firstly, I would like to thank Kayla Mizzi of the Net Station for our interview last week and for lending me her microphone today. Today is the day we send a strong message to Washington.”

  He stopped for a brief moment. The crowd chanted, “No more rhetoric, no more rhetoric.” The chanting kept getting louder as it went on. Kayla thought she heard the glass windows of a nearby skyscraper shatter from the crescendo. She looked up to see the CW chopper go perilously close to the blades of another, but the windows resisted the onslaught of the noise and commotion, caught like a tree in a storm with nowhere to hide.

  Frank handed the mike back to her, but it was no use even trying to talk into it until she could shut down the deafening chant. Now there were at least six news choppers in the air, their swiveling blades lifting the public mood into the whirlpool of the electronic broadcast. Caught completely off guard by the sheer size of the crowd, the NYPD was doing a marvelous job, setting up barricades all along Seventh and Eighth Avenues. They were coming from everywhere—the old and the young, black and white, rich and poor—moving east from West Forty-first, north from Fashion Avenue, east from West Forty-second, and north over Broadway and south down Seventh Avenue.

  Twenty minutes before the scheduled eleven a.m. start, estimates of a crowd of twenty thousand were being thrown around. By the time it was ten minutes before eleven a.m., no one was suggesting a number below forty thousand. With a minute to go, Frank Stein got up on his makeshift podium again.

  “No more slogans. I am tired of it. So are you. Let’s go.”

  Someone handed him a placard that said, “No more rhetoric.”

  A last-minute surge in the crowd had numbers around the fifty thousand mark. It looked unmanageable. The NYPD barricades allowed the early birds to settle into some sort of a walking rhythm, with all the late arrivals shouting behind the barricades all the way to Fifty-Ninth Street as the walkers made their way into Central Park. A throng of protesters mingled with tourists and passersby at the entrance to Central Park, waiting for the walking party. As the rally approached, they too began a chorus of “No more rhetoric!” The multitudes poured into the park and marched toward Cleopatra’s Needle.

  At the stroke of noon, Frank Stein and his walking band of several thousand had reached Cleopatra’s Needle. For an hour, no one in Manhattan had heard anything else but “No more rhetoric!” as televisions and local radio channels blared it like breaking news. Around the country, these were the words spoken with disdain or admiration, with pleasant surprise or disgust, with shaking heads or the “What does it mean?” looks. By sunset that Sunday, just about every one of the three hundred million people in America who were old enough to speak had uttered the words.

  Back in Washington DC that evening, Olivia had stayed up half the night trying to finalize her decision. She decided she had no time to consult Dr. Joshy, her psychologist. Gary had increased the time he devoted to tutoring. They wanted him to conduct more classes, he said. She had imagined this would make him reluctant to have her away as well, but he had been wonderful. “Sounds like the chance of a lifetime,” he said, and she could not agree more.

  She was about to call Colin Spain to inform him of her decision when the phone rang. She had her cell phone off that morning by agreement with Colin, but it was Colin who was calling her fixed line at home. It was not unnatural for him to be impatient. He sounded upset.

  “Turn on the TV,” he said. “ABC, CBS, PBS. In fact, anything.”

  “Bloody Stein,” she heard him cursing as she saw and heard the droning multitudes on screen.

  “Fucking bloody Stein,” he kept saying. Now was probably not the time to break the news, but it sounded like Colin could use some good news.

  “I have decided to accept,” she interrupted him.

  “What? Oh! This is a game changer, Olivia; we have to think about this.”

  She had no idea why this march by an independent had so fired him up, nor could she glean how that changed his offer.

  “How so?” She was worried that the deal was already off.

  “It gives us the opportunity to paint Stein as the other side of the Kirby coin.”

  Finally, Colin Spain stopped cursing Stein. He told her the more he thought of using Stein’s popularity against his Republican rivals, the better he felt. As to her reaction, she had dared not admit even to herself that she had quite enjoyed the spectacle of the walking, chanting mob and felt energized and intrigued by it all.

  With the Cleopatra’s Needle rally done, Frank bid farewell. People waved to him as he passed by. It was a new experience to him. He even thought someone was following him. He looked back. A young couple waved to him. He waved back.

  He was hungry after all the walking. Borrowing someone’s hat and sunglasses, he ducked into a café, confident that with his meager disguise, he had eluded any media jumping on him.

  The young couple walked in behind him. So they were following him. They looked harmless. He smiled at them. They took it as an invitation to sit at his table. He didn’t mind that at all. Above all, it was the youth of the country who were more likely to have uncorrupted minds. He noticed that the man seemed to be much younger than the woman, in his twenties maybe, while the woman was perhaps in her thirties.

  “Hello, Mr. Stein,” the woman said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “That was a wonderful speech,” the young man said.

  “Thank you. But I didn’t give a speech today. If you want to read—”

>   “Oh, we have read all your speeches and your Internet addresses, Mr. Stein. We think it is such a refreshing change from the hackneyed politics of the two major parties,” the woman said. “They are so boring.”

  “Thank you. What was the thing that excited you particularly?”

  “Oh, just the difference in the way you are prepared to look at things. Even though it may offend some people, you don’t seem to…I mean…”

  “It’s okay. I don’t seem to care, you think?”

  “Well, if I may say so…it does come across that way…and I know you have your fan base and all that…but perhaps even more people could be reached.”

  As Frank listened to her, he couldn’t help but notice that she looked like a young Daniela. Daniela and his nephew…he had not spoken to them since Thanksgiving.

  “I am Janet Fletcher, by the way. This is my assistant, Ryan Murphy. We run a public relations firm.”

  They are getting younger these days, Frank thought.

  Janet continued, “We understand you do not currently employ any marketing—”

  “I am not looking for any marketing people.”

  “Oh, but we are not marketing people. We do surveys, but we are not seeking to change the message that the firm or an individual wants to give—”

  Janet was interrupted by Ryan. “Mr. Stein, you are running at twenty-five points right now. Did you know that?”

  “No, that’s interesting.” Frank put his coffee down.

  “Quentin Kirby is at twenty-six, Colin Spain at thirty-two. That’s assuming a three-way race. The rest are undecided.”

  “Of course, at this early stage,” Janet piped in, “the numbers are subject to large swings. Indeed, either Spain or Kirby could get knocked from—”

  “Where are we going with this?” Frank said. They were not the young ideologues he thought they were.

  “You could be the front-runner if you only eased the edges of some of your extreme positions,” Ryan said.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  Ryan seemed taken aback. “To be the front-runner. Don’t you want to be president?”

  “I’d rather be right than president,” Frank said, looking straight at Ryan.

  “But—”

  “No, that’s not being a martyr. This campaign is simply about getting the truth across.”

  Frank put his jacket on.

  “By the way, young man, do you know who said that?”

  “Said what?” Ryan looked puzzled.

  “I’d rather be right than president.”

  “No,” he said. Janet, too, swung her head from side to side.

  “Henry Clay. Congressman and senator, nineteenth century. Now, if you will excuse me.”

  With that, Frank left, not picking up the business cards offered to him.

  Kayla was waiting for him outside the cafe. A mother with a young child also wanted to meet him. Frank obliged, but not before he called Daniela.

  It was the first time in ten years that Frank had not spent Christmas with his sister. Neither of them was a Christian, but Daniela had married one. They observed Christmas as a family, and Daniela virtually had no one else to call. Besides, Frank loved his nephew, nine-year-old Jimmy. Daniela lived in New York with her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, and her son, their only child.

  After finishing up with his rhetoric rally, Frank made his way toward Forest Hills in Queens, looking forward to meeting Jimmy and Daniela.

  “Uncle Frank,” yelled the nine-year-old as he came running down the manicured lawn of their upper-middle-class home. Bright eyed, with tousled orange hair, Jimmy was a hyperactive boy.

  “Frankie, Jimmy, call me Frankie.”

  “Uncle is trying to become president,” Daniela said.

  “Oh, wow…can we also live in the White House?”

  Frank laughed. “If I win, yes, that’s a promise.”

  “It’s too complicated, too dangerous,” Daniela said suddenly, trying to push Frank toward a serious conversation, but instead Frank jumped to catch the baseball thrown by Jimmy and raced him out of the house into the backyard.

  Daniela loved the moments when Frank lost himself, when he was no longer the cynical intellectual buried in the morass of his mind, thinking through the problems of the world.

  “Ready, Jimmy?” Frank yelled. “Here comes Frankie’s curve ball.”

  Daniela couldn’t help but smile. She watched Jimmy squeal with delight as he smashed the ball high into the air. Shadow, the family’s German shepherd, had never needed any training to catch balls. The two-year-old had been Jimmy’s constant companion, except for school.

  “Race him, Shadow!” Frank shouted.

  If consciousness is a gift, then a consciousness that could interact with another is an even greater gift. How Shadow instinctively understood to keep the play at a fun level was beyond Frank’s understanding. Here was a four-legged, muscular animal that could have given the world’s fastest human a forty-meter start in a hundred meter race and still won, but the dog zigzagged around, letting Jimmy get from first base to second and from second to third and only then leaping toward home base.

  Shadow knew the routine. As Jimmy slid over home plate, he would touch the ball down just a moment after and wag his tail in delirious joy at the effect he had on the young boy. Then, on a few occasions, the dog would outrace Jimmy, as if to keep up the illusion the game was for real and that Jimmy had beaten him most times.

  “Ready for the slider, Jimmy?”

  “That’s what you say when you are going for the fastball, Frankie.”

  It was only after a hearty dinner and much coaxing from Daniela that Jimmy managed to say goodnight.

  “Goodnight, Jimmy.” Frank scooped the boy up his arms. Jimmy’s father worked long hours and often needed to rush away late at night for emergency surgery. Between her job as a psychologist and home-making, Daniela did the best she could to keep Jimmy entertained.

  “It won’t be long before his circle of friends expands,” Frank said.

  “He adores you,” she said.

  “I adore him too. One day, maybe…”

  “You are not getting younger, Frank. And now you are embarking on an even bigger quest. Like I said, dangerous and complicated.”

  “When did you say that?”

  “You were too preoccupied to listen. Entrenched forces may be against you.”

  “Don’t I know it?”

  “Frank, you are trying to explain things that are beyond the reach of most people.”

  He was pensive for a moment.

  “What if I could explain it to Jimmy?”

  “What?”

  “If Jimmy can get it, anyone can—he is a bright kid for his age, yes. But he is only nine. So that’s what I will do. If I can get to him—”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “What happens if you get killed, did you ever think about that, Frank? What about me? What about Jimmy? He loves you.”

  “What kind of world do you want your son to grow up in?”

  15

  The Imposter

  Dr. Rohan Joshy lit a pipe because he had a meeting with Olivia Allen.

  A psychologist and an academic researcher, Rohan was in his early forties, of medium height and slim build, with a compassionate face.

  Occasionally, some of his research clients wanted therapy sessions. If they met him at his university office, it would disguise the personal session as one between a professional and a business client. This suited some patients. It worked especially well if the patient was a celebrity. Scandal lurked in the shadows for celebrities—what if the media found out a celebrity visited a clinical psychologist?

  Seated in his office at George Washington University that day, Rohan was concerned. He had had famous clients before: federal court judges, company presidents, high-profile artists. In fact, low-profile clients could hardly afford his fee of $300 an hour.

  This, though, was slig
htly different. He was sure his diagnosis of Olivia Allen was correct, in that she had Imposter Syndrome. It wasn’t difficult to get her conscious mind to accept it. Getting her subconscious to overcome it—and that was the only way to eventually overcome it—was proving difficult.

  He needed to think hard about what would get Olivia over the line. Many with this syndrome never did. Olivia, however, was getting increasingly powerful and more successful in her professional life, and as is the case with people with Imposter Syndrome, her confidence actually fell with each success; her fear actually rose with each milestone. Unmanaged, this was driving her toward a complete nervous breakdown. Dr. Joshy didn’t have a way of stopping it, not yet anyway. Tobacco helped him think, it helped him concentrate. So although he never smoked cigarettes, he let himself partake of a pipe, just once in a while, when he needed to concentrate.

  Today was one of those days.

  Olivia was going to be traveling for a political campaign. This meant she would not have regular sessions. It meant speaking engagements, fundraisers. Applause. Attention. Fear. Medication. The cycle had to be broken.

  So lost in his thought was he that he barely noticed Olivia walking in, closing the door behind her, taking her position on the reclining couch, smiling at him, and waiting for him to break the ice.

  Reclining couches had long gone out of fashion; therapists preferred to see clients eye to eye, watching their emotions. But Dr. Joshy let his clients choose whatever felt more comfortable to them; sometimes watching the ceiling let them ease up and talk more.