T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I squinted through that dark little porthole at the great black fathomless universe and saw the moon, palely glowing, looked at the moon probably for the first time in twenty years. Lorna was right. It did look pretty cheesy.

  She hummed a few bars of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” and then turned to me with those big pale eyes—still beautiful, still enough to move me after all these years—and said, “You know, if that moon was a loveseat I’d take it out to the garage and send to Bloomingdale’s for a new one.”

  One of my aides—Colin or Carter or Rutherford, I couldn’t keep their names straight—was telling a joke in dialect about three Mexican gardeners and an outhouse, another was spouting demographic theory, and the stewardess swished by with a smell of perfume that hit me like a twenty-one-gun salute. It was then—out of a whirl of thoughts and impressions like cream whipped in a blender—that I had my moment of grace, of inspiration, the moment that moves mountains, solves for x, and makes a musical monument of the “Hymn to Joy,” the moment the mass of humankind lives an entire lifetime for and never experiences. “Of course,” I blurted, upending the salad in my excitement, “yes,” and I saw all the campaign trails of all the dreary, pavement-pounding, glad-handing years fall away beneath me like streamers from heaven, like ticker tape, as I turned to kiss Lorna as if I were standing before the cheering hordes on Inauguration Day.

  Colin or Carter or Rutherford turned to me and said, “What is it, George—are you all right?”

  “The New Moon,” I said.

  Lorna was regarding me quizzically. A few of the other aides turned their heads.

  I was holding my plastic cup of 7-Up aloft as if it were crystal, as if it were filled with Taittinger or Dom Pérignon. “To the New Moon!” I said with a fire and enthusiasm I hadn’t felt in years. “To the New Moon Party!”

  The American people were asleep. They were dead. The great, the giving, the earnest, energetic, and righteous American people had thrown in the towel. Rape, murder, cannibalism, political upheaval in the Third World, rock and roll, unemployment, puppies, mothers, Jackie, Michael, Liza: nothing moved them. Their worst fears, most implausible dreams, and foulest conceptions were all right there in the metro section, splashed across the ever-swelling megalopic eye of the TV screen in living color and clucked over by commentators who looked as alike as bowling pins. Scandal and horror were as mundane as a yawn before bed; honor, decency, heroism, and enterprise were looked on as quaint, largely inapplicable notions that expressed an inexcusable naïveté about the way of the world. In short, no one gave a good goddamn about anything. Myself included. So how blame them when they couldn’t tell the candidates apart, didn’t bother to turn out at the polls, neither knew nor cared whether the honorable Mr. P. stood for Nazi rebirth or federally funded electronic walkers for the aged and infirm?

  I’d seen it all, and nothing stirred me, either. Ultraism, conservatism, progressivism, communism, liberalism, neofascism, parties of the right, left, center, left of center, and oblate poles: who cared? I didn’t even know why I was running. I’d served my two terms as a fresh-faced, ambitious young representative during the Eisenhower years, fought through three consecutive terms in the senatorial wars, wielded the sword of power and influence in the most armor-plated committees on the Hill, and been twice elected governor of Iowa on a platform that promised industrial growth, environmental protection, and the eradication of corn blight through laser technology. And yet, for all that, I wasn’t satisfied. I guess, even at sixty-one, I was still afflicted with those hungry pangs of ambition that every boy who can’t play center field for the Yankees will never wholly shake: I wanted to be top dog, kick off my shoes in the Oval Office, and stir up a fuss wherever I went; I wanted to climb high atop the mountain and look down on the creeping minuscule figures of queens, rock stars, matinee idols, and popes. It was a cold life in a comfortless universe; I didn’t believe in God, afterlife, or leprechauns. I wanted to make my mark on history—what else was there?

  And so I—we—came up with the issue that would take the country—no, the world itself—by storm. From the moment of my epiphany on that rattling howling DC-10 I never said another word about taxes, inflation, Social Security, price supports, or the incumbent’s lamentable record on every key issue from the decentralization of the Boy Scouts to relations with the Soviet Union. No, I talked only of the New Moon. The moon we were going to build, to create, to hurl into the sky to take its place among the twinkling orbs of the night and recover the dignity and economic stability of America in the process. Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn ten, Uranus five. What were we? Where was our global pride when we could boast but one craggy, acne-ridden bulb blighting the nighttime sky? A New Moon. A New Moon Soon: it was on my lips like a battle cry.

  In Montpelier they thought I’d gone mad. An audience of thirty-seven had turned out at the local ag school to hear me talk about coydogs and maple-sugar pinwheels, but I gave them a dose of the New Moon instead. I strode out onto the stage like a man reborn (which I was), shredded my prepared speech, and flung it like confetti over their astonished heads, my arms spread wide, the spontaneous, thrilling message of the lunar gospel pouring from me in evangelical fervor, LUNACY, mocked the morning headlines, THORKELSSON MOONSTRUCK. But the people listened. They murmured in Montpelier, applauded lightly—hands chapped and dry as comhusks—in Rutland. In Pittsburgh, where I really began to hit my stride (I talked of nothing but the steel it would take to piece together the superstructure of the new satellite), they got up on tables and cheered. The American people were tired of party bickering, vague accusations, and even vaguer solutions; they were sick to death of whiz-kid economists, do-nothing legislatures, and the nightmare specter of nuclear war. They wanted joy, simplicity, a goal as grand as Manifest Destiny and yet as straightforward and unequivocal as a bank statement. The New Moon gave it to them.

  By the time the convention rolled around, the New Moon was waxing full. I remember the way the phones rang off the hook: would we take a back seat to Fritz, throw our support to John, accept the VP nomination on a split-issue platform? Seven weeks earlier no one had even deigned to notice us—half the time we didn’t even get press coverage. But New Moon fever was sweeping the country—we’d picked up a bundle of delegates, won in Texas, Ohio, and California, and suddenly we were a force to reckon with.

  “George,” Colin was saying (I’m sure it was Colin, because I’d canned Carter and Rutherford to avoid the confusion), “I still say we’ve got to broaden our base. The one issue has taken us leagues, I admit it, but—”

  I cut him off. I was George L. Thorkelsson, former representative, former senator, and current governor of the Mesopotamia of the Midwest, the glorious, farinaceous, black-loamed hogbutt of the nation, and I wasn’t about to listen to any defeatist twaddle from some Ivy League pup. “Hey diddle, diddle,” I said, “the cat and the fiddle.” I was feeling pretty good.

  It was then that Gina—Madame Scutari, that is—spoke up. Lorna and I had discovered her in the kitchen of Mama Gina’s, a Nashville pasta house, during the Tennessee primary. She’d made an abbacchio alla cacciatora that knocked my socks off, and when we’d gone back to congratulate her she’d given me a look of such starstruck devotion I felt like the new Messiah. It seemed that the Madame (who wasn’t Italian at all, but Hungarian) was a part-time astrologist and clairvoyant, and had had a minor seizure at the very moment of my epiphany in the DC-10—her left arm had gone numb and she’d pitched forward into a platter of antipasto with the word “lunar” on her lips. She told us all this in a rush of malaproprisms and tortured syntax, while cauldrons of marinara sauce bubbled around her and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rose and fell like a shuttlecock. Then she’d leaned forward to whisper in my ear like a priestess of the oracle. Leo, she’d said, hitting my sign on the nose, Scorpio in the ascendant. Then she drew up her rouged face and gave me a broad Magyar wink and I could feel her lips moving against my ear: A New Moon Soon, she rasped. From that m
oment on she’d become one of my closest advisers.

  Now she cleared her throat with a massive dignity, her heavy arms folded over her bust, and said, in that delicate halting accent that made you feel she could read the future like a Neapolitan menu, “Not to worry, Georgie: I see you rising like the lion coming into the tenth house.”

  “But George”—Colin was nearly whining—“gimmicks are okay, but they can only take you so far. Think of the political realities.”

  Lorna and the Madame exchanged a look. I watched as a smile animated my wife’s features. It was a serene smile, visionary, the smile of a woman who already saw herself decked out in a gown like a shower of gold and presiding over tea in the Blue Room.

  I turned to Colin and tersely reminded him of the political realities his late colleagues were currently facing. “We need no naysayers here,” I added. “You’re either on the bus or you’re off it.” He looked at me as if he were about to say something he would regret, but the Madame cut him off, her voice elevated yet soft, the syllables falling together with a kiss that cut through the confusion and the jangling of telephones like a benediction: “Promise them the moon,” she said.

  The convention itself was child’s play. We’d captured the imagination of the country, restored the average workingman’s faith in progress, given America a cause to stand up and shout about. We split the thing down the middle and I took my delegates outside the party to form the first significant rump party since the days of Henry Wallace. We were the New Moon Party and they came to us in droves. Had anyone ever stopped to consider how many amateur astrologists there were out there? How many millions who decided their every move—from love affairs to travel plans to stock purchases and the most auspicious time for doing their nails—according to the conjunction of the planets and the phases of the moon? Or how many religious fanatics and sci-fi freaks there were, Trek-kies, lunatics, werewolves, extraterrestrialists, saucer nuts, and the like? Not to mention women, who’ve had to carry that white-goddess baggage around with them since the dawn of time. Well, here was an issue that could unite them all. Nixon had put men on the moon; I was going to bring the moon to men. And women.

  Oh, there were the usual cries of outrage and anathema, the usual blockheads, whiners, and pleaders, but we paid them no heed. NASA was behind us, one hundred percent. So were U.S. Steel, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Big Oil, and just about anyone else in the country who worked for a living. A New Moon. Just think of the jobs it would create!

  The incumbent—a man twelve years my senior who looked as if he’d been stuffed with sand—didn’t stand a chance. Oh, they painted him up and pointed him toward the TV monitors and told him when to laugh or cry or make his voice tremble with righteousness, and they had him recite the usual litany about the rights of the rich and the crying need for new condos on Maui, and they prodded him to call the New Moon a hoax, a technological impossibility, a white elephant, and a liberal-humanist threat to the integrity of the interplanetary heavens, but all to no avail. It almost hurt me to see his bowed head, smeared blusher, and plasticized hair as he conceded defeat to a national TV audience after I’d swept every precinct in the country with the exception of a handful in Santa Barbara, where he’d beaten me by seventeen votes, but what the hell. This was no garden party, this was politics.

  Sadly, however, unity and harmony are not the way of the world, and no leader, no matter how visionary—not Napoleon, not Caesar, not Mohammed, Louis XVI, Jim Jones, or Jesus of Nazareth—can hope to stave off the tide of discord, malcontent, envy, hatred, and sheer seething anarchy that inevitably rises up to crush him with the force of a tidal wave. And so it was, seven years later, my second term drawing to a close and with neither hope nor precedent for a third, that I found the waves crashing at my very doorstep. I, who had been the most heralded chief executive in the country’s history, I, who had cut across social strata, party differences, ethnic divisions, and international mistrust with my vision of a better world and a better future, was well on my way to becoming the most vilified world leader since Attila the Hun.

  Looking back on it, I can see that perhaps my biggest mistake was in appointing Madame Scutari to my Cabinet. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of experience—I understand that now—but her lack of taste. She took something truly grand—a human monument before which all the pyramids, Taj Mahals, and World Trade Centers paled by comparison—and made it tacky. For that I will never forgive her.

  At any rate, when I took office back in January of ‘85, I created a new Cabinet post that would reflect the chief priority of my administration—I refer to the now infamous post of secretary for Lunar Affairs—and named Gina to occupy it. Though she’d had little formal training, she knew her stars and planets cold, and she was a woman of keen insight and studied judgment. I trusted her implicitly. Besides which, I was beleaguered by renegade scientists, gypsies, sci-fi hacks (one of whom was later to write most of my full-moon address to the nation), amateur inventors, and corporation execs, all clamoring for a piece of the action—and I desperately needed someone to sort them out. Gina handled them like diners without reservations.

  The gypsies, Trekkies, diviners, haruspices, and the like were apparently pursuing a collective cosmic experience, something that would ignite the heavens; the execs—from U.S. Steel to IBM to Boeing to American Can—wanted contracts. After all, the old moon was some 2,160 miles in diameter and eighty-one quintillion tons of dead weight, and they figured whatever we were going to do would take one hell of a lot of construction. Kaiser proposed an aluminum-alloy shell filled with Styrofoam, to be shuttled piecemeal into space and constructed by robots on location. The Japanese wanted to mold it out of plastic, while Firestone saw a big synthetic gold-ball sort of thing and Con Ed pushed for a hollow cement glove that could be used as a repository for nuclear waste. And it wasn’t just the big corporations, either—it seemed every crank in the country was suddenly a technological wizard. A retired gym teacher from Sacramento suggested an inflatable ball made of simulated pigskin, and a pizza magnate from Brooklyn actually proposed a chicken-wire sphere coated with raw dough. Bake it with lasers or something, he wrote, it’ll harden like rock. Believe me. During those first few heady months in office the proposals must have come in at the rate of ten thousand a day.

  If I wasn’t equipped to deal with them (I’ve always been an idea man myself), Gina was. She conferred before breakfast, lunched three or four times a day, dined and brunched, and kept a telephone glued to her head as if it were a natural excrescence. “No problem,” she told me. “I’ll have a proposal for you by June.”

  She was true to her word.

  I remember the meeting at which she presented her findings as keenly as I remember my mother’s funeral or the day I had my gall bladder removed. We were sitting around the big mahogany table in the conference room, sipping coffee. Gina flowed through the door in a white caftan, her arms laden with clipboards and blueprints, looking pleased with herself. She took a seat beside Lorna, exchanged a bit of gossip with her in a husky whisper, then leaned across the table and cleared her throat. “Glitter,” she said, “that’s what we want, Georgie. Something bright, something to fill up the sky and screw over the astrological charts forever.” Lorna, who’d spent the afternoon redesigning the uniforms of the Scouts of America (they were known as Space Cadets now, and the new unisex uniforms were to feature the spherical New Moon patch over the heart), sat nodding at her side. They were grinning conspiratonally, like a pair of matrons outfitting a parlor.

  “Glitter?” I echoed, smiling into the face of their enthusiasm. “What did you have in mind?”

  The Madame closed her heavy-lidded gypsy eyes for a moment, then flashed them at me like a pair of blazing guns. “The Bonaventure Hotel, Georgie—in L.A.? You know it?”

  I shook my head slowly, wondering what she was getting at.

  “Mirrors,” she said.

  I just looked at her.

  �
�Fields of them; Georgie, acres upon acres. Just think of the reflective power! Our moon, your moon—it’ll outshine that old heap of rock and dust ten times over.”

  Mirrors. The simplicity of it, the beauty. I felt the thrill of her inspiration, pictured the glittering triumphant moon hanging there like a jewel in the sky, bright as a supernova, bright as the star of Bethlehem. No, brighter, brighter by far. The flash of it would illuminate the darkest corners, the foulest alleys, drive back the creatures of darkness and cut the crime rate exponentially. George L. Thorkelsson, I thought, light giver. “Yes,” I said, my voice husky with emotion, “yes.”

  But Filencio Salmón, author of The Ravishers of Pentagord and my chief speech writer, rose to object. “Wees all due respet, Meeser Presiden, these glass globe goin’ to chatter like a gumball machine the firs’ time a meteor or anytin’ like that run into it. What you wan eeze sometin’ strong, Teflon maybe.”

  “Not shiny enough,” Gina countered, exchanging a hurt look with Lorna. Obviously she hadn’t thought very deeply about the thing if she hadn’t even taken meteors into account. Christ, she was secretary for Lunar Affairs, with two hundred JPL eggheads, selenologists, and former astronauts on her staff, and that was the best she could come up with?

  I leaned back in my chair and looked over the crestfallen faces gathered round the table—Gina, Lorna, Salmón, my national security adviser, the old boy in the Philip Morris outfit we sent out for sandwiches. “Listen,” I said, feeling wise as Solomon, “the concept is there—we’ll work out a compromise solution.”

  No one said a word.

  “We’ve got to. The world’s depending on us.”

  We settled finally on stainless steel. Well buffed, and with nothing out there to corrode it, it would have nearly the same reflective coefficient as glass, and it was one hell of a lot more resistant. More expensive too, but when you’ve got a project like this, what’s a hundred billion more or less? Anyway, we farmed out the contracts and went into production almost immediately. We had decided, after the usual breast-beating, shouting matches, resignations, and reinstatements, on a shell of jet-age plastic strengthened by steel girders, and a façade—one side only—of stainless-steel plates the size of Biloxi, Mississippi. Since we were only going up about eighty thousand miles, we figured we could get away with a sphere about one-third the size of the old moon: its proximity to earth would make it appear so much larger.