Ordinary Obsessions

by Tom Corbett

  Azita stood there, shivering in the chilled air. She knew that Amar was right and not quite right. “I’m cold.”

  It seemed like a non sequitur to Amar, whose anger dissipated as she looked upon the stricken girl in front of her. She wrapped up her daughter and pulled her tight. “Azita, you have to understand. There was nothing you could do for Ben. He was just a sweet boy, too sweet. He could not break with is family nor could he deal with losing you. I will be honest with you. I loathed involving myself in your relationship with Ben. Frankly, though, I was thrilled when it began to dissolve. I could see what lie ahead. Nothing but disaster. You would have married him out of pity, not love. His parents, his family, could never have embraced you despite any affection they might have had. The chasm was just too wide, just too wide.” Amar stroked Azita’s hair and kissed her head. “I talked with his parents when they reached me. In fact, we talked at some length. They blame themselves, not you. They realize what they had done to him, they had consciously driven a wedge between you two without saying it aloud. Now, they are shattered. They realize the cost of their narrowness. And then, when they realized the price to be paid for their prejudice, it was too late. They did nothing, could do nothing. They watched him decline and did nothing. In the moment, they were yet happy the relationship was over. Then they watched him die. Now, they would go back and do it differently.”

  “My God.”

  “His mother confessed to me,” Amar’s voice now caught, “that she and her husband fully understand that they killed their son, just as if they had put a gun to his head. They understand that they tried to separate him from who he was and what he wanted. Some people are more sensitive than others, they can’t fight back. Ben couldn’t. This was his way of dealing with the intolerable.”

  Azita took a big sigh. “All this…all this is just a tragedy. It all feels so unavoidable…so inevitable. Why are things so complicated?” Her tears slowed but had not stopped.

  “Azita, I want you to remember one thing. Now, listen very carefully. In all our talks recently, I have become aware of one thing. Ben would have been asking you to walk away from whom and what you are. He might never have asked out right but every day, in so many ways, that is what he would have been asking, needing. And it would have torn you apart because you might have been too kind to say no. Sometimes, the supreme kindness is saying no. And you are so kind, saying no to this boy for whom you cared so much would have torn you apart. It did tear you apart, but after marriage the trauma would have destroyed you both. I could not bear to see that. And hear this. I do not know Ahmad well enough to understand if he is the one for you. Still, he came along to shed a light on who you are inside. I sense that at least. We cannot bring Ben back. But I won’t let this drag you down.”

  Azita sighed again. “It will take me some time.”

  “I know.” Amar hugged her. “And I am sorry for hitting you.”

  “Why?” Azita asked, though knowing the answer.

  “Not my finest moment.”

  “But it was.” Azita whispered softly. “It was your finest hour as a mother.”

  “What?” Amar pulled away to look at her.

  “It told me how much you love me.” Azita tried a smile.

  “You have no idea of how much I love you. You could not possibly know,” Amar whispered. “Come, it is getting dark. Let’s go home and have a good cry.”

  “Mr. Crawford. Please go into Ms. Crawford’s office, she wants to see you privately for a moment before the meeting starts.

  Kat was staring out of her window at the panoramic view of Lake Michigan, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. “What’s up?” he asked, more to announce his presence than ask a question.

  She remained silent for a few moments, almost to the point where Chris was tempted to call out again. Then she spoke: “Remember when life was simpler, all you had to worry about was your bratty, younger sister pestering you to take her to the beach? It is not much but I loved walking along the lake shore watching all the joggers, if you were with me that is. Then I felt safe. Nothing would harm me if you were there. I must have been such a pain in the ass to you.”

  “Sentimentality,” Chris affected shock, “what brought that on? And yes, you were by the way.”

  Kat whirled to face him. “Last night, Ricky and I worked late and got a bite to eat nearby. Usually we have food delivered but decided on some fresh air, as if that could be found in the city. It was only a couple of blocks back to the penthouse. I started crossing a side-street first, no traffic, and then a car appeared and swerved right at me. Good thing my husband has the reflexes of a professional athlete. He yanked me back just in time. The car roared away, never even slowed. It just seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if it were waiting for me, and then disappeared into the shadows just as quickly.”

  “You think it was deliberate?”

  She gave him her best ‘are you a total moron’ look. “What do you think?” Her look was grim. “Of course, I cannot say for sure, but I caught a glimpse of a man, just before I was yanked back. There was something vaguely familiar…oh, I don’t know. Perhaps paranoia is taking over.”

  “Well, it is not paranoia if someone really is out to get you. I’ve been tempted to do you in a couple of times myself.”

  She managed to smile. “My God, I believe you will have Satan himself laughing, you know, just before he pushes you into a pit of brimstone.”

  “Well, I think we both have our suspicions about what might be going on. It is almost impossible to believe but still.”

  Kat looked directly at her brother. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about before we joined the group. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I don’t want to put others in jeopardy either. Usually, I make my own decisions but even I must admit, this is beyond me.”

  Now it was Chris’s turn to walk to the window. He looked out over the city and the lake. “I do remember those times. And yes, you were a pain in the butt.”

  “You already made that point, you are repeating yourself, a sure sign of age or maybe premature dementia - probably paying the piper for your misspent youth.”

  “Just making sure you heard me.” Then, he turned to look directly at her. “And look at what this obnoxious pain in the butt has become. I am so proud of you.”

  Kat smiled. “Unfortunately, undeserved flattery does not excuse how callously you treated me when I was a young, impressionable tot.”

  “Damn, disingenuous flattery used to work with all the girls, and what the hell do you mean I treated you with callous disregard. No way, I catered to your every whim and wish.” He turned and took his sister by the shoulders. “Damn, not even I can joke my way through this one. There is not a doubt in my mind that we must at least treat this as real, and we must be fully transparent, totally honest with those in possible danger, no matter how remotely. We must tell our people that there are dangers involved in this work. Perhaps we are being a bit conspiratorial here, but we must act as if the threat is real, even if we lose good people.”

  “And that,” dear brother, “is why I keep you around. Let’s go.”

  The others were all seated around the large conference room table: April, Atle, Beverly, Jules, Pamela, Ricky, and a couple of staffers that were unknown to Chris. This time, there were no introductions, no bonding. The room was serious, businesslike, markedly tense.

  Kat took command. “Everyone - heads up! We will get to the data briefing in a moment. First, we need to discuss a…security issue.”

  Jules looked puzzled. “Security issue, like a leak from one of us? I accuse Chris, probably spilled everything to a cute Russian spy.”

  Kat did not smile, which surprised Jules who suddenly paid attention. “Personal security,” Kat went on, “it is not entirely clear, but Ricky and I think there was an attempt on my life last night.”

  There was silence, and several furtive glances toward Ricky who nodded in affirmation. “Looks like it. I saw it better than she did. As Kat s
tepped off a curb, this car came out of nowhere. I believe it may have been waiting for her. It sped up and looked like it aimed right for her. Then it sped off.”

  “I’m only here because Ricky has cat-like reflexes.” She leaned forward over the table in her aggressive pose. “Now, let’s get very serious for a moment.” She realized her comment was spurious since everyone was totally serious. “We may be mistaken. It might have been just another drunk driver on the streets of Chicago. Maybe it was even a business rival, though we go after one another in the courts. On the other hand, it may have been someone who really does not like what we are up to. No need to get into a guessing game here but you are bright people, it is most likely someone with a grudge against me, Chris, or…Beverly. That would be personal, family.” She paused to let that sink in. Then, in a more emphatic voice: “However, it could be that anyone working on this project is in danger. I cannot, in good conscience, put any of you in harm’s way. So, please, please understand that I would fully understand, we all would, if you would prefer a safer role with me in another part of the organization or to leave altogether. I can easily find a place for any of you in Crawford Enterprises. You all have technical skills I can use to make more money. Questions, concerns?”

  There was silence around the table. Each person looked at the others as if someone else would tell them how to respond. Finally, it was Atle who spoke up. “Shit, if I wanted to make money, I would have gone to work as a quant on Wall Street. Hell, this makes me feel a bit like James Bond.”

  April’s face lit up with a beatific smile. “You forget, Ms. Crawford, I faced down Kim Jong-Un, my parents did at least.”

  “For me, this story just got a whole lot better.” Jules smiled. “You cannot possibly think that I would walk away.”

  “Thank you, but please think about this hard. It might be nothing or everything. If you have any doubts, come to me, please.” Then she turned toward Beverly. “I worry about you the most.”

  “Kat, I know what I want. I finally know. After all these years I am finally a part of this family. That means so much to me. Besides, I have a score to settle with that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Okay, now to the briefing. Who is starting?”

  Atle rose and walked to the screen. April worked the graphics. “As you know, we have focused more on the national election recently and not on the larger, longer-term issues. It was not that long ago that people were talking about a blue wave, about Hillary being a lock. Then, we saw troubling signs…huge Hillary negatives and troubling, unsettling trends in several swing states. Since we last met, we have enhanced the data we have available to us and drilled down into electoral sentiments with even more precision. We number crunchers want to thank Chris for smoothing our contacts with others doing similar work, especially those in non-academic places we don’t normally interact with. The cross-fertilization of both data and analyses has been extremely helpful.”

  ‘That has always amazed me.” Kat tried to feign shock. “People do seem to like him. Go on.”

  “Over the past several weeks, the danger signs have been there. There is tremendous working- class angst out there. It is no secret that wages have stagnated for a long time, life is precarious for wage earners, if they have jobs, and fears for the future are real and palpable. For so many, one accident or illness can push them over the fiscal abyss. That anger and fear is coalescing around a populist message based on xenophobia and racism. There is a kind of ‘let’s blow the thing up and see what happens since it cannot get worse’ attitude.”

  “But it can,” Kat insisted.

  “Of course, it can. Anger and fear are mutating into a viral form of vitriol. The underlying groundswell of hate in this country astounds me. Pick the target du jour - blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants of all stripes, everyone except the elites who really are screwing them.” Atle paused, he had drifted off script. “I thought you were supposed to be the melting pot. But let’s look at the details…” Atle went on making specific points as April put state-specific slide after slide up on the screen. From time to time, someone made a specific comment but mostly they absorbed what was in front of them. He was just making a point about how educated white women and uneducated white males were close in the political preferences in the early 1990s, both tending slightly toward the GOP. Now, almost a generation later, educated white women had swung to the democrats while uneducated white men had drifted deeply into the Republican fold. They had become a firm base on which a demagogue might weave an evil spell.

  Pamela Stuart interrupted at this point. “I have a bad feeling here. You people are looking at numbers, but I grew up among these poor whites you have been discussing. They would sacrifice almost everything to ensure that the ‘others,’ however defined, don’t get public help. It is insane. I remember…”

  Chris cut her off. “It’s over.”

  Pamela stopped mid-thought while Atle tried to protest. “No, we have several more slides to go.”

  “Sorry, the election is over, not the presentation. I can feel it. Trump is going to win.”

  “Bullshit,” Ricky offered, “that’s just your usual Irish pessimism talking.”

  “I wish it were.” The others realized that Chris was about to take over the session and visibly leaned forward. “Listen, the Republicans cannot win a straight-up national vote, even with all the crap they have thrown at Hillary for over a quarter-century. The interests they serve, in truth, only represent a sliver of the total population. They must rely upon misdirection, division, and straight-out cheating. If they can get close enough through the first two, they can get over the top with the third. Most of you are too young. In Richard Nixon’s day, though, he was known for his dirty tricks. They put out fake media bites about opponents like Muskie, they made up stories about prostitutes and top Democrats, they raised mounds of cash for use by operatives doing God knows what. The sad part about tricky Dick is that he didn’t have to do it. He was winning in 72. McGovern was way too liberal for this country and Nixon was a lock, but paranoid. Nixon was, despite of his rhetoric, damn liberal. This year, they have a candidate and an agenda that, by all reasonable standards, should be crushed. Hell, Trump is just as conservative as Goldwater was in 64 but without any of that man’s core principles. Today’s Republican party serves the interests of a smaller slice of the population than back then and the Donald only cares about his megalomaniac delusions. However, what they have is a way, way more sophisticated dirty-tricks campaign under way, and it will put them over the top. Just listen to Trump, he is playing right out of Hitler’s playbook of the early 30s: fanning fear and hate of the outsider, coming up with classic scapegoats, attacking anyone who opposes him. Remember that the Nazi tactics did not work well enough to put Hitler over the top at the ballot box, he topped out at 36 or 37 percent of the vote when their elections were still legit. But economic conditions continued to deteriorate, the Wall Street crash. That should have been just a major correction, but conventional conservative economic policies pushed it into a depression. America had been propping up the Weimar Republic through economic loans but called them in as the U.S. economy tanked. Angst turned to fear in Germany and Hindenburg felt he had no choice. Once Hitler was handed power legally, their experiment in democracy was finished. Is history repeating itself? Trump could squeak in, perhaps a tainted victory but legal on the surface. Once in, what next? This is not the old Republican party. This gang cares not one whit for democracy, they rather loath it.”

  “I am losing your point. Where are you going?” It was Beverly asking the question.

  “Sorry, you know me and my historical parallels. I have this terrible habit of thinking out loud. All that the republicans, and I now mean the hard-right these days, need to do is get close, since winning outright is impossible. Then, they can crawl over the top through a modern version of dirty tricks and the electoral college to squeak in. We have known their ‘dirty tricks’ have been going on for some time. Forget about the incessant cri
es from the right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox or the foreign cash being dumped into the campaign by Russian sources, the real danger lies in the hidden and very sophisticated campaign being waged that targets the tiniest subgroups you can imagine. I’ve been talking to people around the country. They are also picking up weird signals about fake cyber accounts and suspicious server connections that traffic heavy in political crap. People’s fears, left and right, are being inflamed and very successfully. Read up on Cambridge Analytica. They seem to be working just as hard at sowing discord among the liberal left as they are fanning angst among the conservative right. Look at how vicious the fighting has become among the Bernie-bots, the Stein-devotees, and the conventional Hillary supporters. Sure, the DNC fucked up, but party shenanigans are nothing new. Huge rifts are being driven amongst the left, that is not just happening, that is being aided and abetted by design, and from Russia with love, as it appears. Unfortunately, we cannot figure out the details and it is probably too late to respond in any case. I hate to say this but by election day they should be close enough in the swing states to go the last mile.”

  “Meaning?” Kat asked.

  “They will be in a position to hack a few voting machines to push razor thin elections in their favor. However, they need to be close enough on election day so that it is not obvious. I believe they will, and Trump’s coronation will be a fait accompli.”

  “But surely such a flawed election cannot be permitted to stand?” Beverly protested.

  “Hah,” Chris guffawed and then raised his hand as if to apologize. “Sorry. But look back at 2000, the evidence that Gore won Florida was overwhelming to no avail. The highest court in the land acted as common partisan hacks. Back in 1960, Nixon likely won Illinois and thus the election, but Richard Daley stuffed the Cook County ballot boxes and handed the election to Kennedy. It was common knowledge. Remarkably, Nixon decided that it would do the country harm to push the illegality of what happened in the courts. I have no idea what it would take to reverse a national election in this country, aside from an uprising and civil war.”