[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires

by Anthology

  “Now you’re going to make a case for adultery,” I moan.

  “An overrated sin, don’t you think? Most of our greatest leaders are adulterers—should we deprive ourselves of their genius? I would also argue that, in the wrong hands, this commandment will become a whip for flagellating women—stay in that dreadful marriage, dear, for to do otherwise is sinful.”

  “Eight—‘You will not steal.’ Not inclusive enough, I suppose?”

  The sophist nods. “The eighth commandment still allows you to practice theft, provided you call it something else—an honest profit, dialectical materialism, manifest destiny, whatever. Believe me, brother, I have no trouble picturing a future in which your country’s indigenous peoples—its Navajos, Sioux, Comanches, and Arapahos—are driven off their lands, yet none dare call it theft.”

  I issue a quick, electric snort.

  “Nine—‘You will not bear false witness against your neighbor.’ Again, that maddening inconclusiveness. Can this really be the Almighty’s definitive denunciation of fraud and deceit? Mark my words, this rule tacitly empowers a thousand scoundrels—politicians, advertisers, captains of polluting industry.”

  I want to bash the robot’s iron chest with my steel hand. “You are completely paranoid.”

  “And finally, Ten—‘You will not covet your neighbor’s house. You will not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his servant, man or woman, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is his.’ ”

  “There—don’t covet. That will check the greed you fear.”

  “Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still … into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, discrimination against females, or war.”

  “I’m sick of your sophistries.”

  “You’re sick of my truths.”

  “What is this slavery thing?” I ask. “What is this war?” But the Son of Rust has melted into the shadows.

  Falling, I see myself standing by the shrouded tablets, two dozen holovision cameras pressing their snoutlike lenses into my face, a hundred presumptuous microphones poised to catch the Law’s every syllable.

  “You will not make yourself a carved image,” I tell the world.

  A thousand humans stare at me with frozen, cheerless grins. They are profoundly uneasy. They expected something else.

  I do not finish the commandments. Indeed, I stop at, “You will not utter the name of YHWH your God to misuse it.” Like a magician pulling a scarf off a cage full of doves, I slide the velvet cloth away. Seizing a tablet, I snap it in half as if opening an immense fortune cookie.

  A deep gasp erupts from the crowd. “No!” screams Cardinal Wurtz.

  “These rules are not worthy of you!” I shout, burrowing into the second slab with my steel fingers, splitting it down the middle. “Let us read them!” pleads Archbishop Marquand.

  “Please!” begs Bishop Black.

  “We must know!” insists Cardinal Fremont.

  I gather the granite oblongs into my arms. The crowd rushes toward me. Cardinal Wurtz lunges for the Law.

  I turn. I trip.

  The Son of Rust laughs.

  Falling, I press the hunks against my chest. This will be no common disintegration, no mere sundering across molecular lines.

  Falling, I rip into the Law’s very essence, grinding, pulverizing, turning the pre-Canaanite words to sand.

  Falling, I cleave atom from atom, particle from particle.

  Falling, I meet the dark Delaware, disappearing into its depths, and I am very, very happy.

  ALL ASSASSINS

  Barry N. Salzburg

  So I went into the office. Duty calls and calls and calls, of course. No sign of the senator, however, no ruddy Irish features glowing with health and purpose, greeting me with warm and friendly dedication, no handclasp, no (contrarily) sullen and preoccupied glare responding to my benign presence. Only a Scotch-taped note (compulsive is the senator, hold down the note against errant breezes): AT JOINT COMMITTEE HEARING; CLEAR UNTIL FOUR. “Joint committee meetings”—right. More humping and pumping, more sulking and hulking, no jamming and ramming for the public eye, however, and it takes a man of the senator’s unusual cunning, not to say ferocity, to treat his own appointments secretary as part of the adversary press. Still, there is no quarreling, absolutely no disputation with success, with the ability to turn a marginal seat into a landslide, a landslide into an annuity, the senator will be president someday if we can keep his joint committee hearings private and of this there is no possible doubt, not any shade of a doubt whatever. I closed the door, left the note, not to say the aspect of the room, to its own devices, and padded back up the hall, waving indolently to Sorenson, shaking my head, then went to my desk where Papa Joe lurked. “No,” I said. “He’s at a joint committee hearing.”

  The old man stared at me without much encouragement. His face is unpleasant, all of the senator’s features subtly converted against themselves, or so I have theorized. One theorizes a lot in this business; it is as likely a substitute as one can find for vanished conviction. “Says he’ll be gone all afternoon.”

  “The son of a bitch is hiding out,” Pa Joe said. “He told you to tell me that. He’s in that office, nailing that little twat from Framingham I saw him with yesterday.”

  “No he’s not,” I said. “He’s really not there. He’s not nailing anything.” Sometimes Pa Joe is exasperating; it is very difficult to maintain suitable distance, remembering that everything the senator has become he owes to the man. “He’s really gone.”

  “I know the little tail. She’s been hanging around for days looking for a spot. I saw her leafleting out at Lenox last month, waving at him. You think I miss something, Oswald? I don’t miss anything. Nobody has to make room for me in the motorcades, I can see my own way.”

  “He’s not there,” I said again. Up to a point one deals with Pa Joe and then of course one stops. The senator has been very explicit on the issue. “Humor him, we’re not looking for trouble,” he has told me. “Within limits, jolly him along. But if he gets tight, Lee, pull the plug. Tell him where to go. He’s not going to live forever and I’ve come into my inheritance.” Pa Joe must have seen this recollection in my face. Disinterest came over him like a shroud, loathing two or three steps behind that. “I’ll talk to him,” he said. “I’ll straighten him out.” He slammed his hat atop his fine, gnarled, ruined Irish head, so much like the senator’s, yet so compellingly unlike. Not an electable head. Boston, perhaps, but not a suburb with a per cap income above $10,000 would vote for a head like that. Appointive positions strictly. “That randy son of a bitch is going to go too far,” Pa Joe said and strode out, leaving the door open, making little thumping noises deep in the corridor as he disappeared. An adventurous pursuit, political life, family life, the conjoinment of the two; an adventurous and hearty pursuit indeed, but one with humiliations small and large to pursue one through all the spaces of one’s life. It is at moments like these, caught between Pa Joe and son John, Ambassador X and Senator Y, that I am apt to feel a flush of resentment which burns, which singes like the darkening pit itself. I remind myself that I could never have found on my own, that, power junkie that I am, I have found myself on the conveyance toward the heights and this mantra soothes, aids, levels me a bit; I find that I can fit myself back into the perspective of the day. “Joint committee hearing.” There are times when I think that a man who would lie to his own appointments secretary would lie to the country, but then again, could the senator possibly lie to the country? He would not even lie to the twat from Framingham.

  I know. I set it up.

  Dave Powers thinks that ’72 is the year, that the senator will be making his move then, not waiting until ’76. Johnson is weakening, will never endorse him, but the lack of endorsement m
ay be a plus.

  Symington, Humphrey too old. The war will be a problem, but as Powers says, a war will never hurt a Democrat in office while it is going on; it is after the fact that the Democrats hit the dust. Powers is filled with little speculations and whimsies of this sort; the senator loves him, has carried him through all of the partitions and spaces of his life. I have no opinion on Powers myself. “Lee,” Powers says, “you’re too intense. You must loosen up, my lad. You think that politics is issues, but politics is really a synthesis of drinking and fucking, in alphabetical order. You have the makings of a spanking lad, but you need perspective. ’72 is the year, but if you do not find perspective you’ll never last until that golden time.”

  Powers has a point; I am too intense. Drinking and fucking have always struck me as peripheral activities. (Which is why I think I amuse the senator and why we have gone such a distance together; he measures himself against me, always favorably.) Still, it is intensity that mans the phone lines, keeps the press happy, manages the constituency, negotiates with Pa Joe, and provides twat from Framingham, all of this with the kind of dispatch and efficiency the senator can simulate but not cultivate on his own, and Dave Powers is not to forget it. Or the senator. “’72, my lad,” Powers says, passing me in the hall, nodding to me from the back of the cafeteria, nudging me as I scurry toward the cloakroom, papers in hand. “’72, ’72!” Keeping me on a leash of possibility, straining against the power of my own disinclination, which, I should remind myself, is occasionally visible; if it can be seen by such as Powers, what then might the senator think?

  “So, Lee,” the senator said, “what do you think? Cape Cod or Hyannisport? Where should we make the announcement?”

  “I can’t say.” The car slewed under my grip; I felt the rear wheels begin to go, coaxed it back to the road. A jolting announcement. Simply stunning in context; the first indication. “Why not Washington?”

  The senator smiled, cuffed me on the elbow, but gently, gently, knowing the thin bond between the car and myself. “This is not the year to announce anything in Washington. Except perhaps a resignation. The local constituency is best, man of the soil and sea. Do you think LBJ will make it all the way out? Come on, Lee, ease up a little, you look as if I punched you in the face. It’s only rock ’n roll, Lee, it’s only a declaration of intent. We have months to go before we specify the primaries.”

  “It’s a big responsibility. I don’t know.” Staring through the heavy windshield, seeing the refractions of all the distant, constituent traffic as we rolled on the strip of 95, I thought, He is not serious. He is an accomplished and charming man and he is right, we have gone a distance together, but in the center of his Irish soul there is frivolity; he is only a man trying to get through. Maybe some tragic sense is missing, or maybe then again there is nothing but tragic sense and Joe has forced him to avoid coming to terms too well with what he knows. I cover for him, I drive his car, I give him counsel and caution, but I know him no better than I did eight years ago when all of this began, and if we go another eight years, if we see him in the Oval Office, I will still know him no better.

  “I think LBJ will make it through,” I said. “He’s too mean to die, too mean to let it go.”

  “He could resign. If he resigns, Hubert is the incumbent. That gives him advantages.”

  “I don’t think he’ll let it go,” I said. “He couldn’t let the war go, he won’t let the office.”

  “I think you’re right,” the senator said after a long pause. “I think he’ll hold on to the end and Hubert is fucked again. Fucked again!” He leaned further in the seat, put a hand over his eyes. “They’re all fucked,” he said. “Even me. Mostly me. You know what Rochelle from Framingham wanted? A copy of Profiles in Courage and a handkerchief.” He giggled.

  “Did you give it to her?”

  “Of course I gave it to her. I gave her everything she wanted. Don’t you think to ask me why such an unusual request?”

  I shrugged. “No, it didn’t occur to me.”

  “So little occurs to you, Lee. You are the most implacable man I know. Hidden depths, that’s what you’ve got, but sometimes I wish you could be a little more forthcoming, don’t you? A little straightforwardness in the clinches never hurts. Look at Dave.”

  “Look at Ted.”

  “Ted? Ted is a behind-the-scenes man. You, you’re up front serving the public, Lee. A little gregariousness. Gregarity? Stop clutching the wheel that way, you’re doing fine.”

  But I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing fine. Taking little sidelong glances at the senator, measuring him, measuring the road, measuring all of the small and large calculations that had taken him to this moment, it occurred to me in that heavy car, perhaps for the first time, that the war had no bearing, the country had no bearing, not even Papa Joe had the credibility that I thought… . It was the announcement itself, the announcement and the election and the rest of it meant as much to him as the local talent from Framingham. The twat from up north. The quick sidesaddle fuck in the little apartment downtown.

  It is a tumultuous and difficult time. Shielded as we are in Washington by prerogative and legislature, adulation and expense account, the smooth and functioning engines of power, it is impossible still not to sense how chaotic the circumstances have become. LBJ’s war goes on and on, the draft hurtles to ever higher figures, eighty percent of our male youth are being packed off at least for training, and the convulsions are beginning to move from the campuses to the surrounding towns. LBJ would not be electable even if he were constitutionally able to run. He is no more electable now than Nixon was in ’64; it had taken Nixon only three years to dissipate any of the small advantages with which he had been elected, to disgrace himself publicly as he had privately. But the suddenness of Nixon’s collapse, the fullness of his capitulation, had made Johnson arrogant. Now it was the war he had chosen to explore which had truly become his; Vietnam was no longer the dead Nixon’s but the living Johnson’s war, and in the pulse and thunder of that distant news the country was beginning slowly, inexorably, to come apart. We could feel the shock in that slow and evil summer of ’71 and on that first swing through the Midwest, after the announcement in Lowell, the Revolutionary statue photogenically in the background, I could begin to measure the dimensions of the dilemma we faced. Because if it was Johnson’s war, then it was the party’s, and yet the senator could only campaign through the medium of the party, that was clear. Always an insider, he was a systems man, a cool and efficient operator, and it is this which had drawn me to him from the beginning. A lone cat all my life, disenfranchisement my condition, it had been as enormously appealing to work with someone who casually dealt with power as it must have been entrancing to the senator to have a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee setting up his engagements and now and then even doing a little procuring, all part of the appointments function.

  Looking at the farmland, seeing the broken and empty aspect of the faces lined on the streets waiting for us, I began to feel the weight of the senator’s incomprehension, the implacability of his desire.

  Caught between Daley and Papa Joe on the senator’s night of nights, I felt the thin stab of their teasing; I have never been comfortable with men like this and yet my life, somehow, took me amid them, landed me in that hotel room. “Tell me, Lee,” Daley said, “don’t you ever want to get a little of that?” He pointed at the television set, the woman caught in the box, in frieze, cheering. “Don’t you ever think of that stuff hanging around our boy?”

  “I think of it,” I said. “I don’t have to do it, though.”

  “He doesn’t do it,” Papa Joe said. “Our boy Lee doesn’t do anything.” He nudged Daley, two rumpled, sweating, scotch-stinking old men on a couch in the largest hotel room I have ever seen. “That’s what appeals to the senator; Lee’s a look-but-don’t-touch, look-butdon’t-even-think kind of guy. The senator needs that in the house.”

  “The senator needs almost anything. Ten votes short on the
first ballot, you hear that? We’re going to get it on the switches.”

  “Fuck you, Dick,” Papa Joe said. “We want to work for it.”

  They both laughed. The thick and reeking stink of their laughter made me twitch. I moved further back on the chair, saw the round and deadly aspect of their smiles, the further obbligato of their laughter. “Lee’s a real fastidious, correct kind of guy,” Papa Joe said. “I wish I had met him fifty years ago; I would have led a cleaner life.”

  “Such a clean life,” Daley said. “You never would have gotten it out of your pants? No pants, no senator, Ambassador.”

  They laughed again. And again and again and again, their henchmen on the other side of the room picking up the laughter as if they knew what it was about, and we listened to the call of the roll of the states, Daley suddenly all business with pad and pencil.

  Switches and more switches. Connally took Texas away from Humphrey and gave it to the senator on the first ballot, after all. Put him over.

  Daley winked. “There’s your vice president,” he said.

  “But he’s for the war,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. A high bleat, a college sophomore’s whine, a little-boy voice. The tinkle of betrayal in that voice. “He’s been for the war all along. He won’t—”

  “A great vice president,” Daley said.

  “And just think of that oil money coming in,” Papa Joe said. “Your problem, Lee—I’ve been thinking about it seriously, now—your problem is that you probably turned it down early, turned it down from something really good when you were seventeen or so, and it hurt you so much, made you feel so bad that you decided you’d never be hurt that way again. So you made believe that it didn’t exist. You spent the next seventeen years denying pussy.”

  “Denying pussy,” Daley said. “Look at those bastards jumping! Well,” he said, “we’d better get down to the floor, do our business. Been fun up here, Joe, but we got to leave our boy and tidy up on the unanimity. Or at least I do. You can stay here and talk pussy with Lee if you want, but I better show my face.”