Lewis turned the bottle on the table so he could read the label. I knew what it was: Glenfiddich, a good single malt. I’d been sipping it from a hotel tumbler most of the afternoon.
“Why’nt you turn on some lights in here?” Lewis said.
“I’m fine in the dark.”
Lewis grunted. After a moment, he fetched the other glass. He wiped it out with his handkerchief and poured.
“So tell me.”
Lewis tilted his glass, grimaced. “January fourth. The president signed the bill twenty minutes ago. Protective cordons fifty yards from polling stations. Only the living can vote. Jesus. I can’t believe I’m even saying that.” He cradled his long face in his hands. “So you in?”
“Does he want me?”
“Yes.”
“What about you, Lewis? Do you want me?”
Lewis said nothing. We just sat there, breathing in the woodsy aroma of the scotch, watching night bleed into the sky.
“You screwed me at staff meeting the other day,” I said. “You hung me out to dry in front of everyone. It won’t work if you keep cutting the ground out from under my feet.”
“Goddamnit, I was right. In ten seconds, you destroyed everything we’ve worked for. We had it won.”
“Oh come on, Lewis. If Crossfire never happened, it could have gone either way. Five points, that’s nothing. We were barely outside the plus and minus, you know that.”
“Still. Why’d you have to say that?”
I thought about that strange sense I’d had at the time: another voice speaking through me. Mouthpiece of the dead.
“You ever think about that little girl, Lewis?”
He sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He lifted his glass. “Look. If you’re angling for some kind of apology—”
“I don’t want an apology.”
“Good,” he said. Then, grudgingly: “We need you on this one, Rob. You know that.”
“January,” I said. “That gives us almost two months.”
“We’re way up right now.”
“Stoddard will make a run. Wait and see.”
“Yeah.” Lewis touched his face. It was dark, but I could sense the gesture. He’d be fingering his acne scars, I’d spent enough time with him to know that. “I don’t know, though,” he said. “I think the right might sit this one out. They think it’s the fuckin’ Rapture, who’s got time for politics?”
“We’ll see.”
He took the rest of his scotch in a gulp and stood. “Yeah. We’ll see.”
I didn’t move as he showed himself out, just watched his reflection in the big plate glass window. He opened the door and turned to look back, a tall man framed in light from the hall, his face lost in shadow.
“Rob?”
“Yeah?”
“You all right?”
I drained my glass and swished the scotch around in my mouth. I’m having a little trouble sleeping these days, I wanted to say. I’m having these dreams.
But all I said was, “I’m fine, Lewis. I’m just fine.”
I wasn’t, though, not really.
None of us were, I guess, but even now—maybe especially now—the thing I remember most about those first weeks is how little the resurrection of the dead altered our everyday lives. Isolated incidents made the news—I remember a serial killer being arrested as his victims heaved themselves bodily from their shallow backyard graves—but mostly people just carried on. After the initial shock, markets stabilized. Stores filled up with Thanksgiving turkeys; radio stations began counting the shopping days until Christmas.
Yet I think the hysteria must have been there all along, like a swift current just beneath the surface of a placid lake. An undertow, the kind of current that’ll kill you if you’re not careful. Most people looked okay, but scratch the surface and we were all going nuts in a thousand quiet ways.
Ahh, who’s digging on my grave, and all that.
Me, I couldn’t sleep. The stress of the campaign had been mounting steadily even before my meltdown on Crossfire, and in those closing days, with the polls in California—and all those lovely delegates—a hair too close to call, I’d been waking grainy-eyed and yawning every morning. I was feeling guilty, too. Three years ago, Gran broke her hip and landed in a Long Beach nursing home. And while I talked to her daily, I could never manage to steal a day or two to see her, despite all the time we spent campaigning in California.
But the resurrection of the dead marked a new era in my insomnia. Stumbling to bed late on election night, my mind blistered with images of zombies in the streets, I fell into a fevered dream. I found myself wandering through an abandoned city. Everything burned with the tenebrous significance of dreams—every brick and stone, the scraps of newsprint tumbling down high-rise canyons, the darkness pooling in the mouths of desolate subways. But the worst thing of all was the sound, the lone sound in all that sea of silence: the obscurely terrible cadence of a faraway clock, impossibly magnified, echoing down empty alleys and forsaken avenues.
The air rang with it, haunting me, drawing me on at last into a district where the buildings loomed over steep, close streets, admitting only a narrow wedge of sky. An open door beckoned, a black slot in a high, thin house. I pushed open the gate, climbed the broken stairs, paused in the threshold. A colossal grandfather clock towered within, its hands poised a minute short of midnight. Transfixed, I watched the heavy pendulum sweep through its arc, driving home the hour.
The massive hands stood upright.
The air shattered around me. The very stones shook as the clock began to toll. Clapping my hands over my ears, I turned to flee, but there was nowhere to go. In the yard, in the street—as far as I could see—the dead had gathered. They stood there while the clock stroked out the hours, staring up at me with those haunted eyes, and I knew suddenly and absolutely—the way you know things in dreams—that they had come for me at last, that they had always been coming for me, for all of us, if only we had known it.
I woke then, coldly afraid.
The first gray light of morning slit the drapes, but I had a premonition that no dawn was coming, or at least a very different dawn from any I had ever dared imagine.
Stoddard made his run with two weeks to go.
December fourteenth, we’re 37,000 feet over the Midwest in a leased Boeing 737, and Angela Dey drops the new numbers on us.
“Gentleman,” she says, “we’ve hit a little turbulence.”
It was a turning point, I can see that now. At the time, though, none of us much appreciated her little joke.
The resurrection of the dead had shaken things up—it had put us on top for a month or so—but Stoddard had been clawing his way back for a couple of weeks, crucifying us in the farm belt on a couple of ag bills where Burton cast deciding votes, hammering us in the south on vouchers. We knew that, of course, but I don’t think any of us had foreseen just how close things were becoming.
“We’re up seven points in California,” Dey said. “The gay vote’s keeping our heads above water, but the numbers are soft. Stoddard’s got momentum.”
“Christ,” Lewis said, but Dey was already passing around another sheet.
“It gets worse,” she said. “Florida, we’re up two points. A statistical dead heat. We’ve got the minorities, Stoddard has the seniors. Everything’s riding on turnout.”
Libby Dixon, Burton’s press secretary, cleared her throat. “We’ve got a pretty solid network among Hispanics—”
Dey shook her head. “Seniors win that one every time.”
“Hispanics never vote,” Lewis said. “We might as well wrap Florida up with a little bow and send it to Stoddard.”
Dey handed around another sheet. She’d orchestrated the moment for maximum impact, doling it out one sheet at a time like that. Lewis slumped in his seat, probing his scars as she worked her way through the list: Michigan, New York, Ohio, all three delegate rich, all three of them neck-and-neck races. Three almost physical blows, too, you could see t
hem in the faces ranged around the table.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Lewis muttered as Dey passed out another sheet, and then the news out of Texas rendered even him speechless. Stoddard had us by six points. I ran through a couple of Alamo analogies before deciding that discretion was the better part of wisdom. “I thought we were gaining there,” Lewis said.
Dey shrugged. I just read the numbers, I don’t make them up.
“Things could be worse,” Libby Dixon said.
“Yeah, but Rob’s not allowed to do Crossfire any more,” Lewis said, and a titter ran around the table. Lewis is good, I’ll give him that. You could feel the tension ease.
“Suggestions?” Burton said.
Dey said, “I’ve got some focus group stuff on education. I was thinking maybe some ads clarifying our—”
“Hell with the ads,” someone else said, “we’ve gotta spend more time in Florida. We’ve got to engage Stoddard on his ground.”
“Maybe a series of town meetings?” Lewis said, and they went around like that for a while. I tried to listen, but Lewis’s little icebreaker had reminded me of the dreams. I knew where I was—37,000 feet of dead air below me, winging my way toward a rally in Virginia—but inside my head I hadn’t gone anywhere at all. Inside my head, I was stuck in the threshold of that dream house, staring out into the eyes of the dead.
The world had changed irrevocably, I thought abruptly.
That seems self-evident, I suppose, but at the time it had the quality of genuine revelation. The fact is, we had all—and I mean everyone by that, the entire culture, not just the campaign—we had all been pretending that nothing much had changed. Sure, we had UN debates and a CNN feed right out of a George Romero movie, but the implications of mass resurrection—the spiritual implications—had yet to bear down upon us. We were in denial. In that moment, with the plane rolling underneath me and someone—Tyler O’Neill I think it was, Libby Dixon’s mousy assistant—droning on about going negative, I thought of something I’d heard a professor mention back at Northwestern: Copernicus formulated the heliocentric model of the solar system in the mid-1500s, but the Church didn’t get around to punishing anyone for it until they threw Galileo in jail nearly a hundred years later. They spent the better part of a century trying to ignore the fact that the fundamental geography of the universe had been altered with a single stroke.
And so it had again.
The dead walked.
Three simple words, but everything else paled beside them—social security, campaign finance reform, education vouchers. Everything.
I wadded Dey’s sheet into a noisy ball and flung it across the table. Tyler O’Neill stuttered and choked, and for a moment everyone just stared in silence at that wad of paper. You’d have thought I’d hurled a hand grenade, not a two-paragraph summary of voter idiocy in the Lone Star State.
Libby Dixon cleared her throat. “I hardly thin—”
“Shut up, Libby,” I said. “Listen to yourselves for Christ’s sake. We got zombies in the street and you guys are worried about going negative?”
“The whole…” Dey flapped her hand. “… zombie thing, it’s not even on the radar. My numbers—”
“People lie, Angela.”
Libby Dixon swallowed audibly.
“When it comes to death, sex, and money, everybody lies. A total stranger calls up on the telephone, and you expect some soccer mom to share her feelings about the fact that grandpa’s rotten corpse is staggering around in the street?”
I had their attention all right.
For a minute the plane filled up with the muted roar of the engines. No human sound at all. And then Burton—Burton smiled.
“What are you thinking, Rob?”
“A great presidency is a marriage between a man and a moment,” I said. “You told me that. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“This is your moment, sir. You have to stop running away from it.”
“What do you have in mind?” Lewis asked.
I answered the question, but I never even looked Lewis’s way as I did it. I just held Grant Burton’s gaze. It was like no one else was there at all, like it was just the two of us, and despite everything that’s happened since, that’s the closest I’ve ever come to making history.
“I want to find Dana Maguire,” I said.
I’d been in politics since my second year at Northwestern. It was nothing I ever intended—who goes off to college hoping to be a senate aide?—but I was idealistic, and I liked the things Grant Burton stood for, so I found myself working the phones that fall as an unpaid volunteer. One thing led to another—an internship on the Hill, a post-graduate job as a research assistant—and somehow I wound up inside the beltway.
I used to wonder how my life might have turned out had I chosen another path. My senior year at Northwestern, I went out with a girl named Gwen, a junior, freckled and streaky blonde, with the kind of sturdy good looks that fall a hair short of beauty. Partnered in some forgettable lab exercise, we found we had grown up within a half hour of one another. Simple geographic coincidence, two Californians stranded in the frozen north, sustained us throughout the winter and into the spring. But we drifted in the weeks after graduation, and the last I had heard of her was a Christmas card five or six years back. I remember opening it and watching a scrap of paper slip to the floor. Her address and phone number, back home in Laguna Beach, with a little note. Call me sometime, it said, but I never did.
So there it was.
I was thirty-two years old, I lived alone, I’d never held a relationship together longer than eight months. Gran was my closest friend, and I saw her three times a year if I was lucky. I went to my ten year class reunion in Evanston, and everybody there was in a different life-place than I was. They all had kids and homes and churches.
Me, I had my job. Twelve hour days, five days a week. Saturdays I spent three or four hours at the office catching up. Sundays I watched the talk shows and then it was time to start all over again. That had been my routine for nearly a decade, and in all those years I never bothered to ask myself how I came to be there. It never even struck me as the kind of thing a person ought to ask.
Four years ago, during Burton’s re-election campaign for the Senate, Lewis said a funny thing to me. We’re sitting in a hotel bar, drinking Miller Lite and eating peanuts, when he turns to me and says, “You got anyone, Rob?”
“Got anyone?”
“You know, a girlfriend, a fiancée, somebody you care about.”
Gwen flickered at the edge of my consciousness, but that was all. A flicker, nothing more.
I said, “No.”
“That’s good,” Lewis said.
It was just the kind of thing he always said, sarcastic, a little mean-hearted. Usually I let it pass, but that night I had just enough alcohol zipping through my veins to call him on it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lewis turned to look at me.
“I was going to say, you have someone you really care about—somebody you want to spend your life with—you might want to walk away from all this.”
“Why’s that?”
“This job doesn’t leave enough room for relationships.”
He finished his beer and pushed the bottle away, his gaze steady and clear. In the dim light his scars were invisible, and I saw him then as he could have been in a better world. For maybe a moment, Lewis was one step short of handsome.
And then the moment broke.
“Good night,” he said, and turned away.
A few months after that—not long before Burton won his second six-year Senate term—Libby Dixon told me Lewis was getting a divorce. I suppose he must have known the marriage was coming apart around him.
But at the time nothing like that even occurred to me.
After Lewis left, I just sat at the bar running those words over in my mind. This job doesn’t leave enough room for relationships, he had said, and I knew he had in
tended it as a warning. But what I felt instead was a bottomless sense of relief. I was perfectly content to be alone.
Burton was doing an event in St. Louis when the nursing home called to say that Gran had fallen again. Eighty-one-year-old bones are fragile, and the last time I had been out there—just after the convention—Gran’s case manager had privately informed me that another fall would probably do it.
“Do what?” I had asked.
The case manager looked away. She shuffled papers on her desk while her meaning bore in on me: another fall would kill her.
I suppose I must have known this at some level, but to hear it articulated so baldly shook me. From the time I was four, Gran had been the single stable institution in my life. I had been visiting in Long Beach, half a continent from home, when my family—my parents and sister—died in the car crash. It took the state police back in Pennsylvania nearly a day to track me down. I still remember the moment: Gran’s mask-like expression as she hung up the phone, her hands cold against my face as she knelt before me.
She made no sound as she wept. Tears spilled down her cheeks, leaving muddy tracks in her make-up, but she made no sound at all. “I love you, Robert,” she said. She said, “You must be strong.”
That’s my first true memory.
Of my parents, my sister, I remember nothing at all. I have a snapshot of them at a beach somewhere, maybe six months before I was born: my father lean and smoking, my mother smiling, her abdomen just beginning to swell. In the picture, Alice—she would have been four then—stands just in front of them, a happy blonde child cradling a plastic shovel. When I was a kid I used to stare at that photo, wondering how you can miss people you never even knew. I did though, an almost physical ache way down inside me, the kind of phantom pain amputees must feel.
A ghost of that old pain squeezed my heart as the case manager told me about Gran’s fall. “We got lucky,” she said. “She’s going to be in a wheelchair a month or two, but she’s going to be okay.”
Afterwards, I talked to Gran herself, her voice thin and querulous, addled with pain killers. “Robert,” she said, “I want you to come out here. I want to see you.”
The Living Dead Page 5