The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  I tried to see my son in that way—a deranged assassin with a maniacal scheme—but my brain literally refused to make the connection. Danny was a normal kid from a normal home. Okay. The product of divorce, but isn’t that considered normal these days? Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, and you don’t see all those kids growing up to be lone gunmen. No. This was a mistake. And I would put it right.

  “Listen,” I said. “I demand that my son get medical attention immediately.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” said Green, “fuck you and your son.”

  Those were the last words we spoke until we arrived at the secure facility.

  Twenty-eight minutes later we pulled up outside a nondescript office tower in Stamford, Connecticut. A guard with a machine gun waved us through a gate. We came to a fast stop beside a rear entrance. Armed agents climbed out of all three SUVs, slamming doors with a sound like gunshots. The night was warm. The air smelled like French fries, the aroma wafting from a fast-food restaurant on the other side of the highway. Entering the lobby, we passed men in suits carrying assault rifles. We rode the elevator in silence, six men watching the LED numbers rise. Arriving on the fifth floor, I saw a mechanized hub, men and women in suits manning telephones, hunched over keyboards, navigating online chatter, collating data. There was an air of controlled panic. Men walked quickly, ties flapping. Women on cell phones hustled down hallways, carrying urgent faxes.

  The agents steered me down the hall. Passing a conference room I saw a white board pasted with details of my son’s life; all the information federal agents could draw together in two hours. The story of my family as cataloged by banks and federal databases. How surreal to see them there. Dates and events that, when we lived them, we called our lives, but to these men now, putting together the pieces, were just facts, data collected forensically. Anniversaries to be studied; decisions we had made, the places we had lived, the people we had known.

  I saw pictures of Daniel, an arrest report, the black whorl of fingerprints. There were stills of the video images taken from the auditorium. Later I’d learn that this was how they’d identified him. Fingerprints had yielded a name, a recent arrest for vagrancy, an alias. A timeline had been started: my son’s birthday, the dates of his schooling. There were yearbook photos, copied and enlarged. I saw all this in the time it took to walk ten feet.

  From the command center I heard somebody say, “I don’t care who her father is. Nobody leaves the hall without a thorough screening.”

  I was led into a windowless room and told to wait. There was synthetic tan carpeting on the floor and a sink hanging on the far wall. It was a strange thing to see in an office. A sink. Was this where confessions were beaten out of men? I wondered. It seemed silly to put carpet in a room that might see blood.

  Sitting there I tried to assemble what I knew about the kinds of young men who took shots at public figures. Hinckley, Chapman, Oswald. The details of their crimes were fuzzy in my mind. Loughner was the clearest, being the most recent. I’d been as shocked as everyone else by the violence, had read the articles and watched the endless coverage. A twenty-two-year-old high-school dropout with a 9-mm bullet tattooed on his right shoulder, a burgeoning crackpot who railed against our currency. This was not my Danny. Loughner was a kid who once showed up at his high school so drunk they had to take him to the emergency room. A kid who wrote on Facebook that his favorite books were Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. As a teenager he made people nervous by smiling when there wasn’t anything to smile about. He was an angry young man who tried to enlist in the army but failed the drug test.

  Sitting there I tried to find similarities between Loughner and my son. Did the kids at Vassar think Danny was creepy? Did my son make strange outbursts in the middle of class or verbally threaten the teachers who critiqued his schoolwork? If he did, I had never heard anything about it. I had visited the school several times, had met the dean. Danny’s grades were average, his attendance adequate. Everything I knew told me that Danny was a normal student, hardly an overachiever but not a nut case.

  Loughner, on the other hand, had been expelled from community college and told he wouldn’t be welcomed back until he presented certification from a mental health professional that said he was not a threat. At twenty-two, the signs of mental illness were clear. He was evolving from a troubled teen into a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic.

  Danny was a quiet kid, a little withdrawn, but no one had ever suggested he was mentally ill. The newspapers said that when Loughner walked into his local bank, tellers would put their fingers on the alarm button. He struck people as creepy, menacing. Loughner believed women should not hold positions of power. He told the tattoo artist who drew the bullet on his shoulder that he dreamed fourteen to fifteen hours a day. He said he could control his dreams.

  That was not my son.

  The night before he opened fire on the crowd at a political rally, Loughner took pictures of himself in a bright red G-string holding a Glock. When the cabdriver dropped him off at the supermarket the next morning, Loughner asked if he could shake the man’s hand. And then he pulled a gun and began killing people.

  This was not my boy.

  Sitting in the cold fluorescent glow, I found myself getting angry. I was not intimidated by the authority of this place. I had faced death in all its forms. As a doctor I was used to being in control. The decisions I made saved lives. I would not be bullied by government bureaucrats. If Daniel had been shot, he must be treated. He was an American citizen. He had rights. I wished I had thought to call Murray Berman, my lawyer. Daniel should have representation immediately. I took out my cell phone, started to dial. The door opened. Moyers and Green entered accompanied by an older man in a gray suit. His gapped teeth were yellow from years of smoking.

  “Mr. Allen, my name is Clyde Davidson. I’m the assistant director of the Secret Service. I am here to talk to you about your son.”

  “It’s Doctor Allen.”

  “Of course. Dr. Allen.”

  “I’m told my son has been shot. I want to go on record saying I will not answer a single question until I’m certain he’s receiving treatment.”

  Davidson sat, adjusting the crease of his trousers. He was a heavyset man with short white hair. At his age he should have thought about getting more exercise, losing weight. He should also quit smoking immediately. The human heart starts to congest after fifty. Arteries clog. The risk of stroke increases dramatically, the threat of cardiac arrest.

  “Dr. Allen, a lot has happened very quickly. I think we both need to take a deep breath.”

  I studied him as if he were a resident fresh out of medical school.

  “People say shot in the leg,” I said, “like it’s nothing. But a bullet literally crushes the tissue it hits. A high enough caliber can shatter the femur. A low-caliber bullet can ricochet off the bone and slice up into the bowel and abdomen.”

  Davidson looked at Moyers. Moyers nodded, spoke into his wrist. Davidson opened his hands in front of him in a gesture meant to be magnanimous.

  “Your son will be treated immediately,” he said.

  “I want to speak to his doctor.”

  Davidson sat back, crossed his legs. “Dr. Allen, let me explain something to you. I can have the president on the phone in fifteen seconds. This is the level of my authority. When I say something will be done, it is being done as we speak.”

  I thought about this.

  “There’s no way Daniel did this,” I said.

  “We have video and still photographs. He was caught with a gun. Ballistics and fingerprint tests are outstanding, but rest assured, your son has been positively identified.”

  “He needs a lawyer.”

  “He’s twenty years old. If he wants a lawyer he must ask for one himself.”

  I sat back, rubbed my temples. It was beginning to dawn on me that I was not in control here, that, in fact, I never had been. Control was an illusion, a luxury of the mind. If they wer
e right, I had created a life, and that life had taken another life. The low-lying nausea I had felt for the last hour became a wave of sickness. I gritted my teeth against it.

  “Have you ever heard your son use the name Carter Allen Cash?” Davidson asked.

  “No. Who is that?”

  “It’s an alias your son has been using for the last six months. We still don’t have all the details, but it appears he registered at motels in both Dallas, Texas, and Sacramento, California, using that name.”

  Carter Allen Cash. It sounded like a country singer.

  “We call him Daniel or Danny,” I said.

  “When was the last time you spoke with your son?”

  “I don’t know, three weeks ago, maybe. He was on the road. I bought him a cell phone last Christmas, but he lost it.”

  “You and his mother are divorced. Is that correct?”

  I rubbed my eyes.

  “We separated when Danny was seven.”

  “He went to Vassar College.”

  “For a while. He dropped out last spring without telling us.”

  “Would you say you were close to your son, Dr. Allen?”

  I checked his tone for traces of sarcasm but found none. For a moment I saw myself through his eyes: an absent father who had not seen his son in months, had not spoken to him in weeks. A man who was too busy building his résumé to be a father.

  “Agent Moyers said the senator died of his wounds,” I said.

  “About thirty minutes ago. The first bullet punctured his aorta as well as his lung. Dr. Harden did everything he could.”

  “I know Dr. Harden. He’s a good surgeon.”

  “Not good enough,” said Moyers. Davidson silenced him with a look.

  I thought about what Seagram’s insides would have looked like. A bullet enters the human body like a sledgehammer. Once punctured, the chest cavity filled quickly with blood, compressing the lungs, suffocating its victim. And if, at the same time, his heart were also compromised, Seagram never had a chance.

  “His wife,” I said.

  “Rode with him in the ambulance. His two children are at home in Montana.”

  Two children; Neal, ten, and Nora, thirteen. I had seen pictures of them on the news. They would grow up now without a father, children who slept with photographs of the dead under their pillows.

  “What’s going to happen to my son?” I asked.

  “That depends,” said Davidson. “Officially your son is a terrorist.”

  “He’s what?”

  “Political assassination by definition is an act of terror. This gives the federal government great leeway in terms of punishment and prosecution.”

  He paused, letting me process this. When does a criminal act become an act of terrorism? I wondered.

  “You should know,” I said, “that the publisher of The New York Times is a patient of mine.”

  If Davidson was impressed by this, it didn’t show.

  “If we choose,” he said, “we can have your son classified as an enemy combatant. He can be tried in a military court. We can control his access to legal counsel. He could be held, if not indefinitely, then at least for several years without a hearing.”

  “I won’t let you do that.”

  “It’s sweet,” said Davidson, “that you think you could stop us.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Luckily for you,” he said, “this administration needs a victory. Too many terror-cell prosecutions without positive outcomes. Not enough evidence, groups arrested before a crime was committed. Conspiracy to commit what? Here we have witnesses. We have video. There is a smoking gun and a dead senator. This is our slam dunk.”

  Looking at him, I caught my first glimpse of the scope of this event. A presidential candidate was dead. Danny was accused of his murder. In a split second my son had become public property. A tool to be used for political gain, an effigy to be burned. He was no longer a child to most people, no longer even human. If I didn’t act quickly, my boy would become a slave to history.

  “My point,” said Davidson, “is don’t worry about Daniel. Or should I call him Carter? It is in our best interest to keep him safe and well.”

  Slow down, I thought. Stay cool.

  “The last time I checked,” I said, “in this country a man is innocent until proven guilty.”

  Davidson shrugged.

  “There are questions we’re trying to answer,” he said. “Who were your son’s friends? Why did he go to Texas? Why Sacramento? Was he meeting his handler? We need to know whether your son was working as part of a team.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The last time he called me he said he was in Seattle.”

  “As far as we know,” said Davidson, “your son has never been to Seattle.”

  By the door, Moyers put his finger to his ear, came over, and whispered something to Davidson.

  “Interesting,” said Davidson, “it seems your son volunteered for the Seagram campaign in Austin, Texas. Did you know that?”

  I didn’t. I knew nothing about my son, apparently.

  Moyers whispered something else to Davidson. He stood.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  They left me alone. My jaw was tight. I had sweated through the armpits of my shirt. There was a metallic taste in my mouth. I could hear the nasal hum of the fluorescents overhead, mixed with the dim buzz of chatter from the war room outside. I tried to picture my son holed up in some interrogation room, a crude tourniquet around his leg. He would be answering questions to the barrel of a gun, surrounded by angry men with bruised knuckles. If I thought about it too long I felt faint. Had it really been three weeks since we’d last spoke? Worse, it may have been five. There was an ache in my side. Is it possible my Danny had shot a senator?

  In medicine, when grave errors are made, hospitals hold a morbidity and mortality conference. At Columbia these meetings were held on Thursday afternoons at five. Attendance was mandatory. There, all the botched cases were presented. An emergency tracheotomy. An accidental overdose of pain medication. We reviewed the patient’s symptoms, the chronology of events. We weighed the choices that surgeons and residents made. We looked not to assign blame but to learn from our mistakes. This was the only way we could improve. As doctors we knew it was only a matter of time before each one of us made a fatal mistake. It was the nature of our business. Thousands of patients treated in the course of a career, thousands of life-or-death decisions. How could you possibly get them all right? The M&M conferences were considered privileged under the law. Nothing said there could be used in a court of law. How could we punish others for crimes we ourselves commit every day? This was why only the grossest negligence was ever punished at hospitals. We took our failures as an opportunity to learn.

  Sitting in that room I allowed a shred of doubt to sneak through my resolve. What if he’d done it? What if they were right, and my child was a murderer? Why would he do such a terrible thing? Was it political? Was he sick? Or was it my fault? His mother’s? Had we broken him, ruined his childhood in some deep and profound way? There were too many questions, too many miserable combinations. As quickly as the door opened, I slammed it shut.

  Slow down, I thought. Think it through. There weren’t enough facts yet to make a diagnosis. I needed to see Daniel. I needed to review the evidence. Until I could see the whole case, all I knew for sure was that my son was in the crowd, and now he was in custody. I would get to the bottom of it. I was the man who took nothing for granted, who showed no bias, who didn’t let his emotions get in the way. Until the authorities showed me undeniable proof my son was guilty, I would remain objective. I would collect the facts and form a studied conclusion. This was the case I’d been training for my entire life.

  It would be months before I knew the whole story.

  There is a quality some politicians have. A grandeur. They seem to fill whatever space they’re in. People have said this about Jack Kennedy. They have said it about Ronald Reagan and Bil
l Clinton. These men (and they are usually men) bring an intensity and focus to every interaction, no matter how mundane. Friends of mine who have met Clinton remark that they have never spoken to anyone who hung on their every word the way he did, who focused with such totality on what was, to be fair, a slight encounter, brief and inconsequential. His attention overwhelmed them, flustered them, put them at the center of a miraculous universe, if only for a second. It left them wanting more.

  Jay Seagram was a character like this. He had been a federal prosecutor before entering politics, a crusader who believed that all crime should be punished, whether committed by an individual or a corporation. The child of a single mother, he grew up poor. He won his first Senate seat when he was only thirty-four. He was six foot one and handsome. He had the smile and he had the voice, that Baptist pulpit swell. From years of jury trials he understood that his delivery was just as important as his message. In his six years in the Senate, he’d risen to the top of the Democratic leadership. He was always quick with a joke, a man who relaxed the people around him. In a room full of empty smiles his was a stare of substance. And in January 20__ when he announced his candidacy for the presidency it was as if a switch had been flipped all over the country, like all the lights on a city straightaway turning green at once.

  There was buzz. There was hope.

  Many people around the nation, Democrat and Republican alike, felt that our country had lost its way. They believed that the administration was filled with liars. In the last few years, political discourse had turned snarky and barbarous. We were a nation of enemies, vengeful and disenfranchised. Into this climate of distrust, Seagram emerged, a character without guile. A candidate who said what he meant, who fought his battles in the open.

  Voters looked at Seagram and saw a man who had married his high-school sweetheart, Rachel, a sensible brunette with kind eyes who now chaired the Red Cross. There was love in their eyes when they looked at each other. Photos in the newspaper invariably showed them absently holding hands or stealing a kiss. But theirs was a family that had survived tragedy. Their first child, Nathan, had drowned at the age of six, falling through thin ice during a family vacation in Vermont. Afterward, Seagram had taken to his bed for three weeks. He didn’t bathe. He didn’t shave. He wouldn’t eat. When he emerged from his grief, he had decided to run for public office. As he described it, he felt a powerful need to give something back.