Patty poked her head around the corner and said, “Did it again, Your Grace?”
“Bitch,” he said, throwing the coffee drenched Washington Times at her. Then he grimaced, doubled over in his chair, and rested his forehead against the desktop for a moment, his shoulders heaving.
Eleanor, horrified, looked at Patty for a cue. Patty didn’t seem to notice. She winked at Eleanor and said, “We have a very formal office.”
While Patty cleaned up the mess, Eleanor helped Caleb to a small conference room next door and let him collapse in a chair. Then she sat down across the table from him.
Marshall, slumped down low in his chair, said, “In all seriousness, Eleanor, I thought long and hard about this appointment. I have very little time left. My problem is not arthritis. It’s galloping bone cancer. I have, maximum, three months of useful activity left.”
“Oh, god, Senator, I’m so sorry—”
“Spare me. And call me Caleb.”
“Is there anything—”
“Yes. Shut up and listen for a second.”
“Okay,” Eleanor said.
“I’m stuck in a party that was once for the individual, and now it’s dedicated to controlling the individual. The Bible thumpers and the single-issue people and all of those other control freaks have no idea of what the United States is all about. And they are going to win. But I will make my contribution. And here it is.”
Resting on the table was a book, bound in leather, Western-style. Imprinted on the cover in gold leaf was:
POLITICAL WILL AND TESTAMENT
SEN. CALEB ROOSEVELT MARSHALL
Marshall put his hand on the book and shoved it across the table at Eleanor. She caught it before it tumbled into her lap. “I have a press secretary, of course,” Marshall said. “And he has a whole goddamn staff of flacks. I’ll continue to use them for the run-of-the-mill announcements and contacts with local bubble heads. I want you to work on this and wait for the phone to ring.”
“Senator, I thought you were going to bury me in a corner of your staff somewhere.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“But your constituents are going to hate you.”
“Eleanor, I don’t give a good fuck. Get to work.”
Eleanor carried the book into an adjoining office, a small but nice one with a view of the Capitol. Patty was already in there, straightening a few things up. Eleanor’s stuff had been moved in and unpacked. Her personal things all looked humble and shabby in the magnificent building.
Patty was sniffling. “I love that man, Eleanor,” she said. “He’s the most decent person in this town, and he’s dying.”
“How many people know?”
“Most of the Hill.”
Eleanor settled into her leather chair behind the immense wooden desk and looked at the walls, decorated with Hopi and Navajo art. On one corner of the desk was a recent photo of both her kids, and on the other corner, from Ray del Valle, a dozen roses with the note, “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”
Before she could open the Senator’s book, the phone rang. It was Patty.
“Dr. Hunter P. Lawrence on the line for you, Eleanor.”
“Okay, put him through.”
Eleanor heartily disliked the professor. He was one of the new breed of talking heads who had turned civilized shows like Meet the Press into the intellectual equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation. The format of Lawrence’s show was simple: a victim would be invited to sit in the center chair and then two commentators from the alleged left wing and two from the alleged right wing would abuse them. If they weren’t abusive enough, the Professor would step in and stir them up. It got great ratings.
“Hello?” she said.
“Ms. Richmond, this is Dr. Lawrence of Washington Hot Seat. Welcome to town.”
It was strange to hear that famous voice coming out of her telephone. She felt as if she knew the man, even though she didn’t. “Thank you, Dr. Lawrence. How may I be of service to you?”
“We’d like you to appear on our show next week,” he said cheerily.
“Oh, that’s very flattering, but I’m sure that I wouldn’t be of much interest.”
“Oh, on the contrary. You gained great visibility when you took the neo-Nazi apart. Your advocacy for the Hispanics also was impressive. Your relationship with that troglodyte Marshall is a subject of conversation. And let’s be blunt, there aren’t that many highly visible black women. We’re so tired of the usual suspects.”
Eleanor had come to work in a state of new-job euphoria. If Dr. Lawrence had reached her a few minutes earlier, she might not have taken offense. But hearing about the bone cancer had changed her mood. She hadn’t even had time to process the bad news yet; she felt edgy and deranged.
“What’s the matter, Dr. Lawrence? Did Aunt Jemima cancel at the last minute?”
A long silence. “Uh—”
“If all you want is a black female, why don’t you just go east of Rock Creek Park for once in your life, and just pick one off the street? Some of those girls clean up real nice.”
“We don’t really want just anyone.”
“I could recommend a few nuns from my old school who might be able to give you some pointers on treating other people with common courtesy. Once you’ve learned all about that, why don’t you call my token black female ass back up and talk to me again.” Eleanor hung up so hard that the telephone bounced.
Marshall, in the conference room next door, howled and wheezed with agonized laughter.
“You have a problem, Caleb?” Eleanor shouted.
“You’re some P.R. whiz,” he shouted. “He even called you personally—he usually has one of his munchkins do the scheduling.”
“You got me in a bad mood.”
“It was perfect. This story will spread all over town and you’ll be even more in demand than you are now. You couldn’t have done better.”
“Whom should I be nice to?”
Marshall hooted, “Not one of those cold-blooded, cock-sucking sons a bitches. They crank out these talking-heads programs like bad sausage. They have to fill air time every night. Their Rolodexes are full of white men and everyone nags them about it. If they put you on TV, then they can point to you and prove how racially diverse they are.”
“Oh. I thought it was because of my cogent analysis.”
“That too,” Senator Marshall said.
The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time it was Anita Ross of the Style section of the Post. “Ms. Richmond, we’ve heard how you stiffed Dr. Lawrence. We’d like to do a feature on you for the Style section.”
Marshall was still sitting within earshot, apparently having nothing better to do with his time, so Eleanor hit the mute button and shouted, “It’s the Post.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“Ms. Ross,” Eleanor said, “why not call me in a couple of weeks, when I’ve had the chance to get settled in. Why, the ink on my badge is hardly dry.”
“You’d better know that by taking on the Professor, you could become an instant culture hero. But only if the story gets published.”
“A culture hero in five minutes? Not bad.”
“Some have come and gone here in fifteen minutes,” Ms. Ross said pointedly.
“Well, its been nice talking to you,” Eleanor said. “Call back in twenty minutes and see if I’m still around.”
“Nicely done,” Marshall said. “What do you think of my thoughts?”
Eleanor realized that Marshall was waiting for her to look into the book. “I really can’t say. I haven’t had a chance to open it up yet.”
Marshall tottered into her office, audibly grinding his teeth from pain. “Go ahead, have a look, I’ll just stretch out here on this couch.”
Eleanor picked up the book and opened it. The first page was blank, and the second, and the third. She riffled through the pages. They were all blank.
“Senator, what is this?”
“It is my tabula rasa. A work in progres
s. You’re going to ghost-write it for me. Just like the old song says, ‘Ghost writers in the sky.’ ”
“What do you want me to write?”
“Don’t trouble me with details, woman. I don’t have much time left.”
“But I can’t just go out and write it.”
“Listen to me. When you made the ‘Colorado is a welfare queen state’ speech you set me to thinking. I am as much a part of the problems as Jesse is or Ted Kennedy or for that matter that poor little Shad Harper son of a bitch you nailed in Denver. You know, I love this country. I never had much trouble with money because my dad left me a lot of property and I had the privilege of being a maverick. The one thing I noticed in forty-eight years of public service, forty-four up here, is that the rarest thing in life is a person who speaks the truth. The most dangerous thing in life is a person who constantly refers to ‘values.’ If I was going to write down my testament, that is it. None of us has the right to tell anyone else how to live. None of us has the right to hold back anybody else for any reason—race, religion, income, or what have you. The rest of life is an open field, a crap shoot. The role of government is to make it an equal crap shoot for everybody. Not real profound, but real effective.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“If you feel able to adhere to the general message I just laid out—”
“I do.”
“Feel your way through this P.R. maze, go out and represent me on TV, and keep writing your best thoughts down in this goddamn book. Represent freedom and honesty—whoops, there I go talking about values again.”
“You really think that someone like me is the person to represent a card-carrying member of the power structure, like you.”
“You’re goddamned right. I never got co-opted by nobody. Nobody is ever going to co-opt you. And in this auto-erotic, kill to stay in the Beltway town, that’s a huge advantage.”
“When I go public, how do I identify myself?”
“Why, as Eleanor Richmond.”
“Do I say I’m your spokesperson?”
“If you want to. Lady, you’re my last gift to the country.”
By the end of the day, Eleanor’s calendar had been filled for the summer. One major interview show a week, and two print journalists a week. Her first interview would be with the Alexandria Gazette on Friday. Even Dr. Lawrence called up, full of contrition about his lack of sensitivity, and tried to take Eleanor out on a date to the Maison Blanche. Eleanor was a hot topic for the rest of May and June.
It didn’t take her long to figure out why: she was close to Senator Marshall, and everyone in town had heard rumors that Senator Marshall was dying. They would pump her for information about the Senator, in more or less subtle ways. She would ward off their questions and then talk about whatever she wanted—which is what Washington people always did with the press anyway.
thirty-five
“FLOYD WAYNE Vishniak,” said the digitized voice from the computer, and an array of fresh windows popped into life on Aaron Green’s high-resolution video screen. One of the windows was a photograph, a head shot of a white man with lank blond hair, not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long, sticking out from beneath a blue baseball cap turned around backward on his head. He had pale blue eyes that were turned down at the corners, giving him a sad and bedraggled appearance, and his skin was flushed and glossy under the blaze of an electronic flash. This was not a posed shot. It had been taken from a low angle as Floyd Wayne Vishniak rode down an escalator at a shopping mall somewhere. He was staring down into the camera with a blank and baffled expression that had not yet developed into surprise. He was wearing a tightly stretched, inside-out, navy blue T-shirt with a couple of holes in it and he had the ropy muscles of a man who got them by doing physical labor and not by working out at any health club.
This image was not the only window on the computer screen. There was a smaller one next to it, this one showing a brief video clip that kept looping back and replaying. It showed Floyd Wayne Vishniak sitting in the cheap seats at a sports arena somewhere, leaping to his feet along with all of the other people in his vicinity to shout abuse at some miscreant down below. In this clip, Vishniak was wearing a tremendously oversized, bright yellow foam rubber hand over his real hand. The long finger of the hand was extended. Just in case this message was not clear, it had been printed with the words FUCK THE REF. And in case the ref did not happen to be looking in his direction, Vishniak could clearly be seen mouthing the same words—chanting them over and over—in unison with all of the other sports fans in his section. In Vishniak’s other hand he was holding a plastic beer cup the size of the Louvre. While he was waving his giant yellow digit in the air, beer sloshed over the rim and splashed down on the shoulders of the fan in front of him, who reacted, but either did not care or was afraid to make a big deal out of it. Floyd Wayne Vishniak was not a person that most people would consider picking a fight with. He was not especially big, but he was tightly wound in the extreme.
Other people were waving giant foam rubber hockey sticks and other hockey-related paraphernalia. Though the action below—the source of the controversy—was not shown on this video clip, it was evidently a hockey game, and at least one of the teams was apparently named the Quad Cities Whiplash.
Another window, below the video loop, showed a map of the fifty states with a blinking red X superimposed on the Mississippi River, between western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Under the blinking X was the label DAVENPORT, IOWA (QUAD CITIES).
There were two other windows on the screen, both of them carrying textual information. One of them was a brief c.v. of Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He had grown up in the Quad Cities, straddling the Illinois-Iowa border, dropped out of high school to get a job in a tractor factory, and been laid off and rehired six times in the intervening fifteen years. During the past year he had barely managed to earn his weight in dollars.
The remaining window was a tall narrow one that ran down the side of the computer screen. It was a list containing exactly one hundred items. Each item consisted of a phrase describing a subset of the American population, followed by a person’s name.
As this presentation—this computerized dossier—proceeded from one name to the next, the corresponding item on the list was highlighted, a bright purple box drawn over it so that the user could see which category he was dealing with at the moment. The hundred categories and names on the list were as follows:
IRRELEVANT MOUTH BREATHER
400-POUND TAB DRINKER
STONE-FACED URBAN HOMEBOY
BURGER-FLIPPING HISTORY MAJOR
SQUIRRELLY WINNEBAGO JOCKEY
BIBLE-SLINGING PORCH MONKEY
ECONOMIC ROADKILL
PENT-UP CORPORATE LICKSPITTLE
HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR
MIDAMERICAN KNICKKNACK QUEEN
SNUFF-HAWKIING BASEMENT DWELLER
POSTADOLESCENT ROAD WARRIOR
DEPRESSION-HAUNTED CAN STACKER
PRETENTIOUS URBAN-LIFESTYLE SLAVE
FORMERLY RESPECTABLE BANKRUPTCY SURVIVOR
FROSTY-HAIRED COUPON SNIPPER
CYNICAL MEDIA MANIPULATOR
RETICENT GUN NUT
UFOS ATE MY BRAIN
MALL-HOPPING CORPORATE CONCUBINE
HIGH-FIBER DUCK SQUEEZER
POST-CONFEDERATE GRAVY EATER
MANIC THIRD-WORLD ENTREPRENEUR
OVEREXTENDED YOUNG PROFESSIONAL
APARTMENT-DWELLING MALL STAFF
TRADE SCHOOL METAL HEAD
ORANGE COUNTY BOOK BURNER
FIRST-GENERATION BELTWAY BLACK
80’S JUNK-BOND PARVENUE
DEBT-HOUNDED WAGE SLAVE
ACTIVIST TUBE FEEDER
TOILET-SCRUBBING EX-STEELWORKER
NEO-OKIE
SHIT-KICKING WRESTLEMANIAC
SUNBELT CONDO COMMANDO
REST-BELT LUMPENPAOL
and others . . .
Aaron hit the space bar on t
he Calyx workstation’s keyboard. All of the windows disappeared except for the long skinny one with the list of categories. The next item on the list was highlighted and spoken aloud by the digitized computer voice: RETICENT GUN NUT—JIM HANSON, N. PLATTE, NEBRASKA.
Another set of windows appeared, just like the last set but carrying different images and information. The photo was in black and white this time, reproduced from a newspaper, showing Jim Hanson, a lean-faced man of about fifty, wearing an adult Boy Scout uniform and standing out in the woods somewhere. As before, there was a short loop of videotape. It showed him standing by a picnic table in a backyard somewhere, tending a barbecue and acting as éminence grise to a crowd of small children, presumably his grandkids. The map window was the same except that now the red X had moved to the middle of one of those states in the middle of the country; apparently this was Nebraska.
Jim Hanson didn’t look very interesting. Aaron hit the space bar again, moving on to the next item on the list: HIGH-METABOLISM WORLD DOMINATOR—CHASE MERRIAM, BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. This time, the photo was a glossy color studio shot. The video clip showed Chase Merriam teeing off at a very nice golf course somewhere along with three other high-metabolism world dominators.
Aaron started whacking the space bar, paging through the list, flashing up the hundred photos one at a time. When it worked its way down to the bottom, it cycled back up to the top again, so he could keep it up forever if he wanted to. The red X on the map hopped back and forth across the country, tracing out a perfectly balanced demographic profile of the United States.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak was sitting in his trailer, watching Wheel, when he heard the sound of tires on gravel. He went to the front door, glancing over to make sure that his sawed-off shotgun was sitting in its secret place; it was there all right, craftily concealed in the narrow gap behind three stacked cases of beer, right next to the door. Having thus established his parameters, he looked out the window to see who had come all the way out here to pay him a visit. If it was another bill collector, he was not going to get a very friendly reception.