by Anne Rice
“That’s right. The casualties are two specialists I borrowed from Adamson. They were supposed to be quite expert at their jobs.”
He suppressed a nervous laugh. “You might have mentioned this to me in advance. I could have told you it wouldn’t work, and by trying and failing, you’ve made us a very powerful enemy.”
She shrugged. “Did you really expect me to let him become governor of Louisiana?”
Norton dropped onto the small couch and ran his fingers through his hair. “I suppose not, but I don’t think you realize how powerful Djibwa is. He’s not one of your everyday voodoo priests, you realize. If there is any single human being alive capable of carrying the mantle of Baron Samedi, it’s Djibwa.”
If Frakes was concerned, she concealed it well. “We underestimated him. It won’t happen again.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Wait, at least for the moment. He’ll surface somewhere. I have no doubt he realizes who was behind the attack. Most likely he’ll show up with some media people, try to convince them that we’ve turned the President into a zombie.” She laughed grimly. “No one will believe him, of course, and once we know where he is, we’ll pick him up and slap him into the nearest sanitarium.”
Norton shook his head. “That’s not his style. It lacks … art. Voodoo is dependent upon rhythm, balance, integration of the soul into the flow of the universe. A direct confrontation would be inelegant.”
Frakes made an inarticulate, impatient sound. “We’ll integrate his soul into the universe, all right, and free him of all his worldly cares.”
Several weeks later, there had still been no sign of Nelson Djibwa, and Frakes responded angrily whenever his name was raised.
“He’ll want revenge, you realize,” Norton told her on more than one occasion. “Not so much because of the attempt on his life, which he probably expected from the outset. But we reneged on our word, and that makes it imperative that he restore the equilibrium.”
“Restore it? What can he do? There’s no way he could reverse the spell on Torgeson, is there?”
Norton sighed, searching vainly for the right words. “It’s not a spell, and no, he doesn’t have any direct way to reverse the reanimation. That wouldn’t be artful anyway. But he won’t fold his tent and go home. Voodoo is a religion; he cannot refrain from acting without committing a dreadful sin.”
At the same time, the elaborate pretense that Torgeson was still alive had settled down into a smooth routine. It was so smooth, in fact, that Norton felt occasional twinges of regret that it had become so easy to effectively scam the public.
Some public appearances could be handled by his doubles, who were accustomed to filling in for Torgeson when the President was committed to brief, boring ceremonies, convocations, and the like. None of them had been made privy to the truth. Norton had a staff member leak rumors to the media about a Quebec-based assassination plot to explain the President’s sharp curtailment of most public appearances, and there had actually been a few editorials praising Torgeson for exposing himself at all.
Frakes ran the chimerical re-election campaign with her usual skill, and in fact Torgeson’s approval rating had climbed steadily back to 54 percent, still low for an incumbent seeking a second term but considerably better than the 42 percent he had been polling at the time of his death. Part of this was because none of the Republicrats had yet emerged from the pack as a potential contender, but some of the improvement was surprising.
“Politics is a peculiar science,” Frakes told Norton one evening. “I’m beginning to wonder if a dead candidate might be more viable than a live one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, since Torgeson obviously doesn’t give live speeches anymore, we’ve been able to customize them for maximum impact. There are certain phrases, tones of voice, inflections, and patterns of sound and speech that are more reassuring than others. Torgeson was never particularly animated or articulate, but even though he moves slower than ever now, our enhancements have managed a net gain in his personal appeal. Our latest polls show that people describe him as calm, controlled, fatherly, and strong willed.” She shook her head. “Controlled he is, but strong willed?” Her voice cracked a little.
“How’s Bergeron coming along?” Stan Bergeron had been chosen secretly by the Unionist Party leadership to be the real candidate in the next election. The strategy was for him to provide a credible but unthreatening challenge in the primaries, thereby keeping Curtis in line, later to be nominated at the convention after Torgeson withdrew “for reasons of health.”
“He’s doing all the right things, but he’s still slipping in the polls. You saw how he did in New Hampshire.”
“Eight percent.”
“Right. But that’s because everyone assumes Torgeson will be the nominee.”
The primaries rolled past, each awarding Torgeson an overwhelming percentage of the delegates. His approval rating nationwide rose to 61 percent by the end of April, 66 percent by the end of May. Dorothy Baldwin now seemed certain to secure the Republicrat nomination, but she was trailing Torgeson in the polls by over thirty points.
Then, three days prior to the California primary, Stan Bergeron was killed in a plane crash while flying to a rally in Oakland. Torgeson had long since sewn up the unofficial nomination, of course, but now there was no viable candidate waiting to step into his shoes … except for the Vice President, Samuel Curtis.
“What are we going to do?” Norton had called Frakes at home, on their secure line.
“It looks like we’ll have to run Torgeson for re-election.”
“Run Torgeson! Are you out of your mind?” But he didn’t argue for long. It had all begun to make some kind of bizarre sense. Or perhaps he’d been living in the political world so long that nothing surprised him anymore.
Norton was eating by himself in a small dining room in the White House when one of his aides rushed in and turned on the television.
“Dorothy Baldwin has been assassinated!” She was nearly breathless with excitement. And they both watched several replays of the taped assault—Baldwin just finishing her remarks about the state of the economy, raising her arms high above her head, then the series of sharp reports, a popping noise that didn’t sound at all dangerous. Baldwin’s head snapped back as the first round struck high on her forehead, then dropped out of sight as those surrounding her exploded into kaleidoscopic panic.
But Dorothy Baldwin was not dead, they discovered a few hours later. She had received only a single, glancing wound along the side of her head, and would be recovered enough to resume her campaign within a few days.
When she made her first televised appearance five days later, one side of her face swathed in bandages, it was Norton who called Frakes to an emergency meeting at the White House.
“What’s the problem?” The strain of recent events was clearly taking its toll. Her face was drawn, hair in disarray, and there were tension cracks in her voice.
“Just watch this.” He replayed Baldwin’s press conference on the overhead monitor, first at normal speed, then again in slow motion.
“Notice anything?”
“She looks a little pale, but considering how close she came to being killed, I suppose that’s understandable.”
“Now watch this.” On a second monitor, he played back the assassination tape, then hit pause at the point where Baldwin’s head snapped back. “If you’ll look closely, you can just see where the round struck her forehead.”
“It looks pretty bad from that angle, but the bullet was deflected by her skull. A very lucky woman; she’ll be a formidable opponent in the fall.”
Norton shook his head. “Not lucky at all. The first shot went directly into the skull.”
Frakes frowned. “Impossible. If it was that serious, they’d never have been able to get her back on her feet so quickly, if she survived at all.”
“Torgeson is back on his feet, and he’s dead.”
&nb
sp; Frakes shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
Norton rewound the tape of the press conferences and started it again. “Watch the crowd this time, particularly the members of Baldwin’s personal staff.” He waited for a frame he’d examined closely for almost an hour, then froze the picture. “Two rows back and slightly to the left.”
A few seconds later, Frakes drew her breath in sharply. “Djibwa!”
“Right.”
“Do you suppose he told Baldwin what we’ve done, and that she believed him?”
“No, I don’t think that at all. In fact, I think Djibwa engineered the successful assassination of the Republicrat nominee for President.”
“Engineered? You mean, he had Baldwin killed? But why?” But even as she spoke, her eyes widened.
“I told you he’d find a way to strike back artistically. Baldwin has already announced that she’ll be reducing her schedule of appearances. No one will fault her for it under the circumstances. My guess is that we’ll find out Baldwin is in the midst of a major reorganization of her staff, and the only ones who will survive are those Djibwa can bend to his will, or who aren’t in a position to spot what’s really going on.”
“Oh my God.” Frakes seemed sincerely shaken. “And we have no choice now but to run Torgeson against her. Whatever happens, no matter which candidate wins, we’re facing another four years with a zombie as President. This is a complete disaster.”
“Maybe.”
Frakes turned to face him, her composure cracking for the first time since Norton had known her. “What do you mean?”
“Frankly, Jennifer, I doubt most people will even notice a difference.”
As it turned out, Norton was right.
THE TODDLER PIT
A. R. MORLAN
“Children have to go through a period of going crazy. I mean, of course, you don’t want it to end in death. That’s kind of the limit, death. You don’t want it to go that far.”
Mick Jagger
THE Toddler Pit’s been gone from the Fine Arts Center of my alma mater for many years now; the last time I returned to the college, that particular wing of the campus had been invaded by the art department. The cloying odor of near-stale peanut butter and damp bib overalls had been replaced with the reek of slow-drying oils and whatever mysterious chemicals the photography majors use to develop their latest roll of snapshots in the darkroom. And the occasional crayoned scrawl on the painted cement block walls had been refined, enlarged, to life-size black silhouettes of artists—O’Keeffe, Renoir, DaVinci—each adorned with a flesh-tone life mask painted across their flat black heads.
Whoever created the mural was talented, more so than the usual art majors I’d known during my years at this college. The row of flesh-faced flat black bodies are uncannily lifelike, yet abstract, at once. A little like those foot-high dolls based on whatever television show is currently occupying the minds—and draining the allowances—of the preteen set; a realistic, almost death-mask perfect face, surmounting a completely inhuman, impossibly proportioned doll body.
Or the type of scrawled drawing a small child will produce, once he or she gets the essentials of human anatomy fixed in his or her still-growing mind; a huge head, dotted Mr. Potato-Head style with mismatched eyes, nose and mouth (ears optional), then a ruler-straight body bisected with arms that form perfect right angles to the torso, perched on inverted “V” legs. The body is easily dismissed, but sometimes, the face can be telling … no, not just the smile, or lack of it, or even the way the child usually matches the eye color correctly to his or her own.
It’s never so much as what you can see in a child’s first attempt at self-portraiture, it’s more like what the child is trying to say through the actual effort….
When I worked in the toddler pit, during those seemed-like-they’d-never-end six weeks required by my Introduction to Education class, I saw a lot of drawings, and built a lot of bristle-block towers, and helped a lot of little kids who were barely old enough to perch themselves on the toilet bowl unaided get their elastic-waist pants pulled back up all the way before letting them venture out into the hallway beyond the women’s room, where we customarily herded the toddlers before and after naptime. I wasn’t even an Early Childhood Education major, or into Elementary Ed—but the number of student-teacher slots at the town junior high school were limited, so I wound up doing my Intro to Ed hands-on practice teaching stint in the little day care housed in two large adjoining rooms (and one small one, where they kept cribs for the sniffly or slightly retarded kids) in the Fine Arts Center, a.k.a. the Toddler Pit, close cousin to Olivia De Havilland’s 1948 cinematic home away from home, The Snake Pit.
It wasn’t hard to sense the connection; when you’re only five feet four, yet loom over dozens of arm-flapping, block-throwing, runny-nosed, vaguely ammonia-smelling, shrieking children all under the age of five, the instinct to curl up in a protective ball and just wait it out until all those Mommies and Daddies show up to claim their baby demons is almost too strong to resist.
And what the kids thought of me, and the other women (some paid, some draftees from Intro to Ed, like me), was difficult to tell; some would wake up from their naps crying, while others would hug and slobbily kiss any adult human in sight. (I actually worried more about the latter; these were the days of the endless McMartin Preschool case, after all.) And then … there were the unreachable ones. Nearly blind Jennifer, whose mother had lived on chocolates and ulcer medicine while carrying her, or her seemingly normal sister Darcy, whose back was dotted with keloid scars in a lineless connect-the-dots pattern. Sarah, who cried silently after naptime, while I coaxed on her socks and shoes. And happy, mindless, cooing Stephen, and his sister, Nancy, she of the strange, strange crayoned pictures drawn for an audience of no one….
Pictures I eventually plucked from the Toddler Pit garbage pails, prior to the college janitor hauling the pails out to the big chained dumpster located alongside the FAC parking lot.
All these years later, I still have the pictures … and in many ways, they are no less lifelike/surreal than the flat black shadows masquerading as long-dead artists which now grace the halls of the former Toddler Pit—even if they portray things none of those esteemed artists would dared have painted; things more suited to Goya or Bosch, perhaps, if those men had been literally immersed in their art….
Yet, I have to remind myself that they were the efforts of a child, only a mere child.
That … that is the important thing to remember. Nancy was a child….
“Stephen … shut up,” the little girl mumbled as I rubbed her back during naptime, while her brother—dark blonde-brown hair neatly combed, plump face almost split in two with an infectious, brainless smile, fat clean hands and feet waving spasmodically while the rocker-seated teacher’s aide tried to calm him down with a nearly hissed lullaby—happily resisted all efforts to calm him down enough to make him sleep. Stephen’s sister was stretched out stiffly on one of the low webbing-slung cots scattered in the darkened half of the toddler pit, in a random configuration akin to the arrangement of buried bodies under John Wayne Gacy’s crawlspace down in Chicago.
All around us, the rest of the day-care kids were either asleep or successfully faking it; they were attended by my fellow teacher’s aides, each rubbing the tiny back of a prone, shoes-and-socks-off toddler until the child became drowsy enough to sink into sleep—and give the old woman who ran the day care a few precious minutes of undeserved peace.
I loathed this part of the day; I didn’t think it was right to touch the children that much, my back felt like someone was tattooing it with a darning needle after I’d bent over a couple of kids, and the gentle Mapping sound most of the kids made when they snored lightly was maddening. From her expression and demeanor—as much of a constant with her as the always-perfect matched clothing she and her brother wore—I sensed that Nancy wasn’t actually into naptimes either. Perhaps that was why I tried to
make sure I rubbed her back come the afternoon break time; she knew and I knew that her brother was a massive pain, even though the day care manager and the other women professed to “just adore” Stephen. Not that I held his retardation against him; don’t get me wrong on that account. It wasn’t his fault, any more than it was his mother’s fault, or his father’s, or anyone’s fault—least of all Nancy’s.
And true, at the time Stephen was adorable-looking; that nicely cut and styled soft hair, those huge blueberries-in-cream eyes set in that soft-skinned pale face, the pursed doll-pink mouth, the chubby fingers and toes. Just like a boy-doll from Sears … and that was the problem, the just part.
Aside from some gurgling coos and sharp, happy-seeming shouts, Stephen couldn’t talk. Couldn’t think much, either; he seldom played meaningfully with even the most basic of toys, nor could he follow any sort of verbal or visual directions. Not potty-trained, either. But his clothes were exquisite, not unlike the doll fashions shown in the Wish Book come Christmas. Little sailor suits, tiny rugby tops, jackets with buttons along the minuscule arms. Always clean, never stained, worn, or frayed, like the togs worn by many of the other inmates of the Pit. And his sister’s clothes were just as perfect, just as unreal.
(“Their mother cares so much about them,” Mrs. Day Care would gush. “She keeps them so clean—” even as Nancy would be sitting off near the corner of the noisy, peanut-butter scented kitchen/play area, glowering at her oblivious brother.)
I bent down and whispered to Nancy, “It’s okay, hon, he doesn’t know … he’ll settle down soon,” all the while wondering how the poor kid could stand living with Stephen once she got home.
Just turning her head toward me, letting the rest of her body remain in place, the dark-haired little girl said so softly I almost couldn’t hear her, “Stephen never stops … he never sleeps.”