All the Houses

by Karen Olsson

  MR. RUDMAN. How were these machines used?

  MR. ATHERTON. Instead of putting everything on paper, members of the staff could send messages by computer.

  MR. RUDMAN. Just to be clear on this, one computer could send a message to another computer?

  MR. ATHERTON. That’s correct. Meaning one person could send a message to another person, directly through the computer.

  MR. RUDMAN. And did that alter the way work got done?

  MR. ATHERTON. Traditionally, we had a procedure in place so that memos would be seen in a certain order, first this person and then that person. Once the computers were there, some people stopped following the procedure.

  MR. RUDMAN. Were you aware at any point of efforts on the part of your superiors to destroy sensitive computer messages?

  MR. ATHERTON. I was not, no.

  MR. RUDMAN. Were you aware that copies of the messages were stored on the system’s mainframe?

  MR. ATHERTON. I was not aware of that. I don’t think anyone was.

  A few years earlier, the White House had been no more technologically capable than a bank branch, but just recently a man who’d worked on the president’s campaign promoted, then installed, an office computer network. Now every desk has a machine, its rounded screen traversed by letters and numbers, a glowing green armada of characters arranging themselves into directives and updates and schedules. Now messages can be sent directly from one person to another, rather than by the standard routing arrangement. Nobody has oversight over the flow of it all.

  It was part of Tim’s job to review the documents intended for the national security advisor, forwarding some of them along and rerouting others. He has tried to maintain an equivalent control over the computer messages, but often he’ll ask for a document only to be told that it has been sent straight to the boss. There’s no controlling the little green characters. North, he knows, sends everything directly to Poindexter and McFarlane.

  The men who do still observe the old procedures come to Tim with their complaints. Exhibit A would be Red Menace, who works in one of the staff offices across the street. He has a way of darting into the White House, of standing at the threshold before he enters a room, making quick, dull eye contact before stepping softly inside, reaching behind him to shut the door. Then he presses his hands against his gray blazer and stares at the wall and insists that there are bad actors at State, undermining everything the president has set out to do.

  Has McFarlane read my memos yet? he asks.

  Tim has received paper copies of four memoranda from the Menace, directed to McFarlane. If memory serves, they all outline variations on a theme: the threat of a communist takeover of Mexico. It is one of the Menace’s bugbears—today the villages of Nicaragua, tomorrow the beaches of Cancun.

  I’ll ask him when I see him, Tim says.

  Will you?

  Yes, I will.

  And as for a meeting—

  He’s traveling with the president all week, Tim says. It’s unlikely.

  All I’m asking for is five, ten minutes every so often. Otherwise why have experts on the staff?

  It’s not just you.

  It’s my duty to keep him informed. I have twenty years of experience in the region. For all I know he hasn’t even received any of my updates. He’s spending all his time with the news media. At least he could learn enough to speak intelligently to these reporters whose company he so enjoys.

  I will ask him, Tim says.

  I know it’s not just me. I’ve been talking to some of the others. We have no access. We are spinning our wheels.

  Tim keeps most of the Menace’s memos in a file drawer. He rarely passes them on to McFarlane, who dislikes their tone, the implicit suggestion that the national security advisor isn’t doing his job properly. He knows that the Menace has been whining to people on the outside, people like the U.N. ambassador, about the way things are going. It’s not as though Tim doesn’t have sympathy for the analysts whose white papers and memoranda McFarlane barely skims, but this one does himself no favors by piping up in every single meeting or flooding the boss with written appeals.

  * * *

  He goes across the street, looking for North.

  Inside the Old Executive Office Building, the grand rooms that once housed the Department of War are themselves embattled, in disrepair, spattered with bits of chipped-off paint, stalactites of dust in the corners. Distinguished area experts bring in box fans during the summer and space heaters during the winter. Exposed wiring dangles from the ceiling in one of the men’s rooms.

  Within this massive and sodden building the rhetoric of crisis is slung about. He waits outside a meeting of the Outreach Working Group on Central America, where North is holding court, and after the meeting breaks up he intercepts North. He wants to discuss the computer messaging system. Let’s walk back to my office, North says. In his head he has rehearsed what he means to say. I think we need to get something straight. These are the rules. An organization has to abide by its own rules, or else chaos will result. But those are words in his head, spoken to an image of North, and here is the man himself, swaddled in his noble causes. Rules and procedure and caution are impediments, obstructions to right action. Tim has to portray himself as a fellow warrior.

  All messages from you are considered high priority, Tim says. I’ll see to it that he gets everything right away—

  You bet, I’ll route everything through you, North says.

  I only ask because that hasn’t been the case recently.

  What happens is, I’ll be working late, I’m here at ten p.m., or on a Sunday, and since you’re not here I just send it directly.

  But if you route it to me, it’ll still go to the boss as soon as he’s in.

  You bet.

  Room 392 is North’s command center: There are multiple terminals and a printer with paper spilling out onto the ground, and several different-colored phones, one of which is answered by the prettiest woman in the building. As they walk in, she calls out messages like numbers in a bingo game, ending with, And you-know-who came by to say that Motley still hasn’t sent the draft directive you asked for.

  That’s just what we were talking about upstairs, this BS from State. If we didn’t have one or two friends over there, I don’t know what we’d do.

  Then he turns to Tim and grabs him by the forearm. Hey, listen to this.

  He proceeds to tell Tim a variation of the story Tim told him in Miami, but now it’s the secretary of state making the joke about the man and the elephant, the story exaggerated and turned into a parable of ineptitude. He clearly has no idea that Tim told it to him originally, and that it was about a different man, no memory of that at all.

  My neighbor Daniel didn’t seem to observe the same rules and precautions, socially, that the rest of us did. He invited me to do things with him and his daughter, and had I been in L.A., or some other place where I had more friends, I would’ve been more leery of his overtures. I probably would’ve avoided him. But at Nina’s basketball game, he’d asked whether I wanted to come along with the two of them to a museum that weekend—Nina had a school assignment that required her to go there—and I said that I would. I didn’t have other plans. As it turned out, Daniel had to catch up on work that day, and so I went just with Nina.

  The stone archway that spanned the museum entrance was decorated with bas-relief figures of every kind: bulls, cherubs, small-membered satyrs, miscellaneous pineapples. Nina studied a poster about upcoming events, as though she might go to one of them. She wore the same Converse sneakers drawn on with marker that she’d worn at the Hunan Palace, the same black hoodie. She was just a girl, I kept being reminded of that.

  “You have so many buttons,” I said as we presented our bags to the security guard.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I don’t even know how I got all these.” On her backpack were at least a dozen pins, one with a rainbow, another with a peace sign, some with demands (End the War), others with band names th
at I only knew to be band names after she’d told me so. If I said she carried the weight of the world on her back I wouldn’t only be referring to all the buttons. What is that one? I asked, pointing to a white squiggle on a black background, and she said it had something to do with political prisoners.

  We made our way to the basement. For all the pomp of the exterior, the museum’s lowest floor was as plain as a county administrative building, except that the gray, low-ceilinged halls had been lined with oil portraits of deceased Americans. We prowled around in search of the people f.k.a. Indians. There was a special exhibit, demarcated by dark brown walls and dramatic lighting, with headdresses and spears and maize grinders and such things on display, which Nina noted in a notebook, while I began to feel accosted by fatigue and by a suspicion that Nina might want to get away from me, since after all she was not the one who’d invited me to come. I watched her stare hard at a specimen of pottery, then pat down her hair, and I realized she hadn’t been looking at the pottery with that unmerciful face but at her own reflection in the glass.

  Hanging on the walls were paintings by George Catlin. The name had been only vaguely known to me beforehand. A sign explained that in the middle of the nineteenth century he had attached himself to Western expeditions so as to paint portraits of tribesmen and tribeswomen, on the eve of what was then called “the Removal.” He had completed more than six hundred of these, his gallery of a “vanishing race,” and had taken the paintings from city to city, lobbying the government to purchase them. The government declined, then bought them after he died. Sixteen of those portraits now hung in a grid. Mash-kee-wet. Man of Good Sense. He Who Kills the Osages. Little Wolf. Black Coat. Old Bear. In the other rooms were paintings from the museum’s permanent collection, among them portraits of the nineteenth-century statesmen who’d done the removing, all equally dead now, though the vanished natives in their pelts and headdresses seemed much more remote than the Clays and the Calhouns.

  Nina turned back to me. “That one, Black Hawk. He kind of reminds me of our principal.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, he just does.”

  “Your principal doesn’t dress like that, does he?”

  “Only on Fridays,” she said.

  “I wonder what they thought of Catlin?”

  “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just sat there and got painted, and they were thinking about what to have for dinner, and then he left and they forgot about him or made fun of him or whatever.”

  Tossed off as this was, I found myself envying her. Nina bought into the reality of these paintings in a way I did not, she saw her principal in Black Hawk, while I saw the Oppressed as Depicted by the Oppressor, and for a moment I wished I’d never gone to college.

  I decided to give her some space, so that she could take notes for her assignment. I roamed around the other rooms, strolling past slaves and soldiers, statesmen, stage actors. When I circled back she was still glancing at the same wall of Indians and writing in her notebook.

  “Are you getting what you need?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  I told her I was going to look around a little more and would meet her back there. This time I wandered farther and found myself in the middle of Reconstruction. There were portraits of black congressmen and white Klansmen, carpetbagger cartoons, a display about rice growers. All that nation building, it made my head hurt, and I returned to the room where I’d left Nina. Only she wasn’t there any longer.

  I did laps of the downstairs and upstairs, at a speed too quick for museums, until a security guard asked whether I was looking for a tall girl with a backpack. She pointed to a nearby room, and inside, yes, was the girl in question, seated on a bench, baroque backpack by her side, gazing up at a painting not of a Sioux or a freedman but another girl. Actually a society woman on a sofa, but a young one, clean and fresh-eyed, though she was trussed in an elaborate gown, arms stiff by her sides.

  When I reached the bench I saw Nina’s face, and there was such a left-out look in it that I felt a throb in my chest. I sat down. I didn’t say anything then. I hadn’t completely forgotten what that age was like, before you learn to wrap your heart in something hard. I waited. For an instant I swear she glowed like something just pulled from the fire. Peripherally I could see this without looking, feel it on my skin, and I was overwhelmed by images of my own self-pitying tenth-grade existence, listening over and over again to a cassette of Chopin nocturnes, plastering myself with makeup and then scrubbing it all off again, etc. I hadn’t wanted to be sixteen but also hadn’t wanted to grow any older, hadn’t viewed adulthood with much optimism. Even now I resisted it. So please don’t blame me if I wanted the light to stay lit, if I didn’t want her to cool to gray like the rest of us. But seconds later the sadness had disappeared from Nina’s eyes, and I wondered whether I’d really seen what I’d seen, or whether I’d just been seeing what I wanted to see.

  And then we were hungry. On the ground floor of the museum was a cafeteria that opened onto an atrium, formerly a courtyard but lately covered and climate-controlled, so that it was just the sort of place I imagined future humans would inhabit, a simulacrum of the outdoors closed off from the threat of genuine air. I bought Nina a sandwich and chips, and a cookie for myself, and we sat down at a table “outside.”

  “So it was your birthday? How was that?” I asked.

  “It was all right.”

  “What’d you do? Did you go out?”

  “My dad took me to dinner. It was sick.”

  “You got sick?”

  “No, I mean the dinner, it was really good.”

  “Just you and your dad?” I asked.

  “My mom died, of stomach cancer. When I was six.”

  She took a huge bite of her sandwich, as if to fend off the expressions of sympathy she’d heard too many times already. Ten years of pity from strangers. That didn’t stop me from saying how sorry I was, but I kept it brief and then tentatively changed the subject.

  “Did you get your driver’s license?”

  “My dad won’t let me.”

  “Why won’t he let you?”

  “He keeps saying he’s going to teach me but then he forgets or else something’s wrong with the car. Something’s always wrong with our car. We really need a new one. I want him to get an El Camino.”

  “Can’t you get lessons from one of those driving schools?”

  “He says it’s a waste of money when he can teach me himself.”

  “That sounds frustrating.”

  “My dad’s not very organized.”

  A few tables away from us, a tray full of plates and cutlery and drink bottles tipped over and fell to the floor, and without giving it a thought I jumped up and scurried over to that place where everything had spilled and scattered as though I had been the cause of it, not the employee in a dark green uniform who was now crouched next to the mess. I dropped to my knees. One might suspect that my effort was for show, and maybe no good intention is free of vanity, but it’s also the case that in life as in lunch venues, I’ve tried to make the accidents disappear. The woman in uniform recoiled from me. “Is okay, is okay,” she was saying, and more than once she craned her head around, perhaps to check whether her supervisor was watching, yet I stayed there on the floor with her, holding a bunch of forks and knives in one hand and trying to keep my unbelted pants up with the other. Under my knees it was wet. Her expression was three parts dismay to one part disbelief, and I could tell that if roles had been reversed she would never in a million years have stooped to assist a cafeteria employee, and because she felt that way, or because I felt she felt that way, the roles were somehow reversed, I the flunky and she the superior, and no she wouldn’t have been dressed the way I was or confused the way I was, she would have worn nice jewelry and stylish things and avoided cafeterias altogether. (Oh, but I loved sliding a tray along metal rails, I did, and even more than that I loved to see all my options lined up there in a row.) />
  Nevertheless: the fact was that I had in typical American fashion intervened where I didn’t belong, the solicitous fool in my sliding-down pants and too-small shirt, and I was only making things worse by handing that woman pieces of silverware, by sticking my knee in a puddle of Coke as not only Nina but also a puzzled German or maybe Dutch family looked on, and really, what was my excuse? I felt again how improper it was for me to pose as any sort of role model, and I wished I could reassign Nina for instructional purposes to the small scornful woman in uniform, who had at least remembered to wear a belt.

  When I got back to the table Nina was eating her chips, and I formulated apologies without speaking them, without knowing what exactly to apologize for. “So can you teach me to drive?” she asked.

  I probably should’ve given it more thought before I said that I would.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, Dad found out about the break-in at my building. I blamed my mother for that. He called on Sunday and insisted he was coming over to check my locks, and though I tried to discourage him, suggesting we do it the following weekend, by which time I hoped his too-urgent state of mind would’ve passed, he refused to be postponed.

  He appeared at the door wearing a windbreaker loaded with pockets and snaps and zippers, and carrying a black messenger bag. I let him in. He walked around without saying anything. He’d seen the apartment when I moved in, but it looked even worse now. Some flowers that I’d bought the week before in an effort to brighten things up had wilted, and it smelled of dying flowers and microwave dinners.

  He pressed his forehead with thumb and finger. “Remind me, how much are you paying for this dump?” Then he inspected the door bolt and both window latches and told me one of them was busted. “There are three empty bedrooms at home.”

  “I’m fine here. And the landlady’s cool.”

  “The landlady is not cool. The landlady needs to keep up the place.”

  “So I’ll call her. It’s not a dump.”

  “It’s a damn rathole,” he said. “Pardon my language.” He set the bag on the table. Something inside it went thud. He opened the bag, and I flinched.