Crooked

by Austin Grossman

  I looked at the portraits around the room. The presidents who could have told me something were all dead. Truman lived, but they’d never told him. Nor Johnson. Herbert Hoover was six years dead and took his secrets to the grave. Who else? The Supreme Court? I was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren, but he’d given no hint.

  I had to admit it to myself: I didn’t feel any different. Why should I? The United States of America is logically the least magical place in the world. Planned by committee, not even a country, just a legal umbrella for fifty associated provinces, an elaborate polling system for creating other larger and more permanent committees. No mysteries; no demons; one God at the most.

  Sure, it had its own folklore and tall tales, but it wasn’t the same. Its rulers weren’t descended from men and women who spoke with birds and rode dragons. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were hayseeds, folksy also-rans compared to the madness in the ancient royal blood going back to the Druids, to Byzantium, to Mithraic cults. Eisenhower claimed to have spoken with a member of the house of Windsor who’d told him, in confidence, that the royal family had a cordial agreement with an adult kraken whose tentacles spanned tens of miles of open ocean and who had plucked Messerschmitts from the air over the Channel. Where was my damned kraken?

  I paced the room, round and around, already getting sick of it. Clock, window, horse statue, desk, dresser, bookshelf, door, bookshelf, fireplace. There was the presidential seal, a pattern of colored carpet fibers I’d walked over a thousand times. What the hell was it? An eagle, wings extended, ringed by fifty stars. It had a shield on its chest, a spray of radiance coming up from behind it. Thirteen clouds, thirteen stars, a scroll that read E Pluribus Unum, “from the many, one.” In its right claw, an olive branch. In its left, a bundle of thirteen arrows, nastily barbed. Peace on the right, war on the left. Thirteen for the thirteen colonies, I got that. It was still a weird collection of stuff for a bird of prey to be carrying around. What was the lesson here? Why couldn’t I read it? What’s the matter, Dick? Come on, Tricky Dick. Show us a trick.

  I couldn’t feel a thing. I got down on my hands and knees. I prayed to no one in particular. More begging than praying. I thought of Eisenhower’s grandiose posturing. Eisenhower spoke Latin. He called lightning; his thunder rattled the White House walls. He folded time, he spoke to the man in the woods in his own language. Eisenhower was born in Texas, raised in Kansas, the real America, not a flat little housing development in Orange County. What was I doing here?

  There was a tapping on the door, and I had a moment of panic at being caught in the Oval Office before remembering.

  “Come in,” I called out, and Kissinger came shuffling in.

  “It is only me,” he said. “I came to see how you are. Big day, yes?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “Today we begin! We must locate and destroy this man Gregor, whom I believe to be operating in Southeast Asia. Aggressive measures will be necessary. With your approval, of course.”

  “Well…yes, I suppose, but it’s a delicate business. Isn’t it?”

  “I suggest you do not concern yourself with such matters.”

  “What matters?”

  “Your policy agenda—forgive me, Mr. President, but it does not matter. I will handle such things.”

  “But I have plans—”

  “Mr. President, I need you to do what only you can do. Find these secrets Eisenhower possessed. There is a power here but it lies dormant. It must be found if we are to begin an offensive infrastructure. Little else matters.”

  “But—”

  “The rest of it I will take care of.”

  “I’m the president, Henry.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. “We will discuss such things at Monday’s staff meeting, which I have scheduled. Your secretary will keep you informed.”

  I thought about the other presidents. It was impossible not to; their portraits and busts frowned and grinned at me from every corner of the place, reminding me that I would never have Eisenhower’s broad easy smile or Teddy Roosevelt’s boyish violent charm and that I should learn to ride a horse. At times their faces seemed to speak. You’ll never be what I was, said Washington to all of us. And jug-eared Eisenhower, whose voice I could still hear: I’ll be gone soon, Dick, and only you will remember what we hoped to accomplish.

  I’m sure the American people would like to hear me say I’m sorry I obstructed justice, sanctioned domestic spying and intimidation tactics against my political enemies, bribed and lied and bullied, and was a lousy president. Sad Nixon, confessional Nixon. Sorry.

  Do I maintain my innocence? It’s complicated. It’s a difficult word to use in the face of what I’ve seen and done, and there are many ways you can be innocent. Of wrongdoing, of bad intention, or of facts about the world.

  But whatever happened later, I’ll argue before any court there has ever been or will be that I hoped I would be a good president. Even I, even Nixon, daydreamed then about what I’d do now that I’d made it. Eisenhower gave us the golden age of America. Kennedy brought us the New Frontier, a bold era of science and social reform. And then Johnson’s Great Society reforms of civil rights and Medicare, which was a messy and expensive and angry business, but it mattered, anyone could see that. What would they call the great wave of Nixonian reforms?

  There’s a diary entry left over from late on my first night as president that reads (I had time for only a few fragmentary thoughts):

  Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous…Zest for the job (not lonely but awesome). Goals—reorganized govt. Idea magnet…

  Mrs. RN—glamour, dignity…

  Open Channels, for Dissent…Progress—Participation, Trustworthy, Open-minded.

  Most powerful office. Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone. Need to be good to do good…the nation must be better in spirit at the end of term. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration.

  That’s what went into the presidential archives anyway. There were a few extra pages, and I remember writing, I will discover the secret mystical force locked within the presidential residence and/or West Wing thereof. I will become Eisenhower. Oh God and Jesus, what am I going to do now? And there were several pages after that, the kind of thing that is, I suppose, why the Oval Office has a working fireplace.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  February 1969

  For anyone interested in the policy decisions of my first hundred days, or thousand, or the whole two thousand–odd mornings, afternoons, evenings, and regrettable midnights, I refer you to any of the estimable scholarly works on the subject or the public record. It may not surprise you to learn that with the benefit of hindsight, I would do some of it a bit differently.

  We were a Republican administration but the Democrats held both the House and Senate against me. I’d gotten a bare plurality, 43.4 percent of votes cast, less than a percentage point over the opposition. I’d lost Texas and New York, and it was a good thing I was born in California. These electoral numbers didn’t look like a mandate; in fact, it was on the border of historical accident.

  I’d campaigned on the slogan “Bring Us Together” and it already seemed like a bad joke. I checked the Gallup opinion polls almost daily, and on the day I took office there was a substantial bounce: Approve: 59 percent; Disapprove: 5 percent; No Opinion: 35 percent. Then again, people threw beer cans at my inaugural parade. They shrieked and jeered at me and burned pictures of me. The moment I swore that oath I became, basically, a powerless minor god; I was the grinning, capering effigy of everything that was wrong with their lives. I’d be burned at the stake, caricatured, my name uttered as a curse word. They would wear my face.

  I sat down at the Wilson desk and, after some agonizing over the mot juste, wrote at the top of the page the heading ENEMIES. And then:

  Communists. In the years since I’d been out of office the Soviets had replaced Khrushchev with a new general secretary, Brezhnev, who had rolled tanks through Prague
six months ago to crush dissent.

  Since I’d left office they’d increased their nuclear stockpile tenfold, matched us in ICBMs, greatly outmatched us in conventional forces. In the occult war they’d left us far behind: hybridization, extradimensional capability, exobacterial-weapons payloads, and those were only the ones Henry knew about. We were fighting a proxy war in Southeast Asia and political battles in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Egypt, Libya, every region in the civilized world. The Soviets were digging in Antarctica.

  Gregor. Malevolent and uncontrollable; evidently he changed his face at will and had intervened in a dozen proxy wars that we knew of.

  China. A vast unknown. Communist, of course, but they had clashed with the Soviets. But then they were actively supplying the North Vietnamese.

  Hippies. Campus radicals, antiwar protesters, beatniks…who were these people? The young men were like exotic bearded foreigners to me. Even Henry had only theories, but he believed they possessed a supernatural potential unknown to us. Harmless children? A malign occultist fifth column for the Soviets? Or something else entirely, a powerful force with no known motive? Well, one known motive: hatred of me. Enemies.

  Hollywood. Everyone apart from John Wayne, evidently.

  Musicians. Beloved of hippies, q.v.

  The Media. The television news ran a continual apocalyptic montage of street violence and rampant inflation. The less said about the New York Times, the better.

  The Intelligentsia. Whoever they were. Academics? Poets? Unclear.

  And then, after a long pause:

  Pat. I didn’t like to think about it. She did what she needed to in the election but we were nearly strangers. We slept apart, sat apart on the campaign airplane and bus. In private, we barely spoke. But she watched me, and there were even times when I’d found my belongings disturbed as if they’d been searched. Maybe not an enemy. But not a friend. Wife.

  And I had no powers. No fucking powers. All that madness outside, and I had four small sections of the Constitution to work with; three, really, given that the fourth was nothing but thirty-one bleak words: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” No help there.

  What did I have? Yes, the unauthorized domestic wiretapping, coordinated smear campaigns, secret funds, physical surveillance, obstruction of federal agencies, blood rituals, and flagrant abuses of power, which is to say, the aforementioned Crimes and Misdemeanors. But apart from these, what?

  The one thing I could count on? The thing that really might Bring Us Together: In June of that year, on my watch, America was going to change the world, change man’s very relationship to the cosmos. It was going to make my presidency unique in all of history.

  “Only a few short weeks ago, we shared the glory of man’s first sight of the world as God sees it, as a single sphere reflecting light in the darkness,” I’d announced in my inaugural address. In March there would be Apollo 9, the next in a planned series that was going to send us to the Earth’s satellite. Three men put the lunar module through its paces with exacting care, and everything went perfectly. We were going to the moon. I assumed that this part could not be screwed up too badly. We’d been working on it for nine years now.

  Week by week, the scaffolding at Cape Canaveral mounted. By day it steamed in the Florida heat, and in the bloodred moonlight, it shimmered. Altar to the god of prophecy.

  If you want to know what it’s like to become president, think about one of those horror movies, the kind where a happy family moves into an old house in which terrible crimes have been committed, only no one knows it. There’s the first part, where there are home movies of everyone smiling and waving at the camera. People run all over the house and find the rooms they want to stay in. They hug and talk about the future and about how everything’s going to be absolutely perfect. Maybe there was some trouble in the past, a secret affair or a failure at a job, but they’ve left that behind. A new beginning. What could possibly go wrong?

  And then, for at least a little while, it really is perfect. The shadows of the past have been banished. The husband’s new job is working out great. Everybody’s happy. So far, so good.

  Sooner or later, though, it always happens: the happy, perfect family starts to notice one or two little things, nothing terribly obvious but just a tiny bit odd.

  I started a notebook where I kept track of anything out of the ordinary.

  Like that the White House was supposed to be a residence but it looked and smelled like a hotel, and a lot of people had lived there but only for a short time. And it’s great, and you can call it your home, but you know the staff is always thinking ahead to the next guest, and you know that more than a few people have died here; you’re just not sure which rooms it happened in.

  Like that the servants in the White House were oddly silent. I watched them move with exaggerated care, as if they were afraid of startling someone. They averted their eyes when I passed them. I wondered what Johnson had told them about me before he left.

  Like that the door to the Lincoln Bedroom was stuck fast, and a tiny plaque informed me that it had been closed off for decades. People had been disappearing into the nondescript Victorian bedchamber and not returning ever since the late 1880s. The last man to enter did so in 1922, armed with camping gear, climbing equipment, two pistols, and a month’s worth of provisions. Several months later he was heard crying out for assistance in the hallway near a third-floor closet, but when the walls were broken through, there was no trace of him, and then the voice went silent forever.

  Like that no one has ever heard of or mentioned a North Wing at the White House.

  Anyway, as the movie goes on, the father in the family gets crazier and more obsessive and secretive. But by this time the family is unable to leave the house. Perhaps it’s financial, or perhaps it’s because leaving will do no good, the strangeness will follow them forever. No matter how compelling the reason to go, they cannot leave.

  Late one night I stood on the lawn and watched the house while Secret Service agents eyed me curiously. The mansion sat there, mute and hunched and squat and elephantine in the way its facade distended toward me. An Irish architect named James Hoban had designed it. Washington ordered it built and supervised its construction but he never lived there.

  Was the building itself dangerous? A day’s research told me that two presidents and three First Ladies had died there. A son and a daughter, two fathers, and a mother. A press secretary. The kingdom of Hawaii’s minister to the United States. Hardly enough for a mass grave, not over a span of a hundred seventy–odd years. No trail of bodies here. Ghost sightings were similarly paltry, given the possibilities. People saw Lincoln’s ghost slouching around the place, which felt a little too predictable to me, like a madman claiming to be Napoleon. People saw Lincoln everywhere. It was just a house.

  Except for the color, naturally. I remembered Melville’s diatribe in Moby-Dick on the subject of the color white, how it was part of the peculiarly terrifying quality of the polar bear and the great white shark. I looked up his words: the vague, nameless horror of the white whale. He can’t get over it. And yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

  I understood his feelings. The house was all colors and no color at once, the blind blankness of the End of Days, the white rays of an annihilating sun. They’d built a throneless palace for a country without a king—what other color could they have chosen? I looked up to the sky above the house and to the other grayish-white shape dominating the scene.

  And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  March 1969

  I waited to enter last, just the way Eisenhower used to do. It used to enrage me as a piec
e of petty one-upmanship but now it seemed the only possible way to play it if you were the president. The opinion polling for the week had just come in: Approve: 62 percent; Disapprove: 10 percent; No Opinion: 27 percent. Stay on top, a little voice told me. Keep them down.

  I came in to find them seated around the broad circular table I had had installed in one of the wide empty chambers below the White House. There’s a surprising amount of space down there and after a while you get tired of being disappointed that there isn’t a cavernous secret room with a circular table and a giant map with blinking lights on it that you can go to for discussions like this, so I had one built. It’s sealed now, silent and cold and forgotten, the access stairway bricked up, my lost architectural legacy. Every president has left his own stamp on the White House. Rutherford B. Hayes installed the first telephone. Chester A. Arthur had Louis Tiffany redecorate the interior, his work now tragically lost. Truman gave us the Truman Balcony; Edith Wilson, the China Room. What I’m remembered for is giving the White House its second bowling alley. Not even the first one—Truman’s was first. So I fucked that up too.

  They were mostly military types at this meeting. Senators with an interest in defense and intelligence. Melvin Laird, secretary of defense. William Rogers, secretary of state. Alexander Haig, a four-star general, advising on defense. Hard faces, gray suits, military insignia I’d never learned to read, racks of medals brought to the party. I tried to repress the instinctive helplessness and deference that a civilian feels toward senior people in the armed forces. They all knew, and I knew, that I’d gotten to be their commander in chief by winning a very dubiously certified popularity contest.

  But there I was in the center seat. At the last minute, I’d added two cherry-red telephones that might plausibly have been linked to something interesting. In fact, they connected to a number that told the correct time.