by Mark Helprin
“Senator Knott,” began a disgusting, scrofulous fiend whose name was actually Glister Heinie, “a statement was issued, in your name, criticising the administration for circumvention of the MTCR in return for alleged campaign contributions from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Senator,” Glister Heinie asked, about to plunge the knife into flesh, “what is the MTCR?” He knew, of course, that Dewey Knott was famous for his inability to understand the basic principle behind acronyms, having publicly asked the CEO of International Business Machines, “Why in God’s name do you call it IBM, and what’s a CEO?”
“The Missile Technology Control Regime, obviously,” said Freddy.
“And how does this figure in?” Glister Heinie asked, waiting for a famous Dewey Knott special, such as when he somehow got it into his head that Greek Orthodox nuns were called nymphomaniacs, or when, confusing the words tornado and volcano, he told a group of stunned Nebraska farmers, “When I was young, I looked up and there was my father, running as fast as he could from a volcano. No one knows why God chose to put so many volcanoes in Nebraska, but He certainly did, didn’t He?”
But, luckily for Dewey, he was unconscious. “It figures in,” Freddy answered in his behalf, and as if with cold steel, for the Prince of Wales did not enjoy arrogant impertinence, “in potential contractor-sanctioned and thus government-sanctioned (for it was government that created the exceptions attributed to the contractors) violations in regard to certain category-one items.”
“Like what?” Glister Heinie insisted, hoping to chase Dewey out from behind his briefing.
“Like guidance sets capable of achieving system accuracy of three-point-three-three percent or less of the range; that is, a circular error probability of ten kilometres or less at three hundred kilometres. Like technical assistance in regard to rocket engines having a total impulse capacity of one-point-one times ten-to-the-sixth-power seconds, or two-point-five times ten-to-the-fifth-power pound-seconds or greater, as specified in paragraph two, section G, subsection one, part five, ‘Consulting Services.’ To put it bluntly in terms that can be understood other than by mandarins, the president took from the Chinese government laundered campaign contributions not laundered well enough to escape detection, and, in a double scam, from American companies that provided the Chinese missile forces with the guidance capability they require for reducing their CEP, or, rather, for better accuracy, which is essential in the strategic nuclear calculus. It was done ostensibly to help the Chinese launch our communications satellites, but precision in hitting an orbital aim point is all a ballistic missile needs to achieve a trajectory for hitting a terrestrial aim point. That, Mr Heinie, is the substance of my comment.”
Freddy continued in this vein for half an hour, humbling his questioners not only with the force and precision of his answers but with stray erudition that softened and adorned his necessarily technical responses. Of Glister Heinie, who tried to stump him on the characteristics of the North Korean Nodong-2 missile—the Prince of Wales knew even that its diameter is .88 m—Freddy asked, “You speak of the Nodong, but do you know what it means?”
“Means?”
“In Korean.”
“No.”
“It means labour, which is what I recommend to you so that you may hone your so-called expertise.”
He quoted La Rochefoucauld to vitiate the sweetness of the moderator’s astonished praise, saying, in perfect Freddy French, “Si nous résistons à nos passions, c’est plus par leur faiblesse que par notre force.” He cited, at first in French, Napoleon’s comment about a commander’s original sin being to form a picture, and held forth about the pitfalls of various approaches to international relations. He was, all in all, scathing, brilliant, funny, noble, and precise, even as he spoke through a wad of absorbent cotton. And when the little fellow on the mushroom in front of the blue curtain closed the interview with an expression of amazement and delight, Freddy said, “Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe corta est seditio, saevitque animus ignobile volgus, iamque faces et saxa volant (furor arma ministrat), tum pictate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus adstant; ille regit dictis animos et pectora mulcet.”
“I beg your pardon, Senator? Most of us have long forgotten our Latin. What does it mean?”
Freddy informed him that it was from Book One of the Aeneid, and translated: “And as, when oft-times in a great nation tumult has risen, the base rabble rage angrily, and now brands and stones fly, madness lending arms; then, if haply they set eyes on a man honoured for noble character and service, they are silent and stand by with attentive ears; he with speech sways their passion and soothes their breasts.”
“Senator, I’m astounded. And, I have to say, I’m excited. I congratulate you, sir. And, please send my best to Dot.”
“To what?” Freddy asked.
“To Dot.”
“What is that?”
“Dot, Senator.”
“Yes, but what is it?”
“Your wife, Dot. Dot Knott.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Freddy said. “That’s a name?”
“It’s your wife’s name, sir,” said the host, even more astounded than he had been.
“Dot,” said Freddy, listening to the sound, “Dot.” He looked at the absorbent cotton. “Bloody hell.”
Usually the host of Nightline gave a fairly eloquent summation at the close of the show, but on this night he did not. He just sat there, unmoving, deaf to the shouted importations in his earplug. He didn’t even say good-bye to Dewey Knott, and they rolled the credits over him as if he had been paralysed by a Pygmy arrow.
AFTER A SHORT INTERVAL in which Finney walked moon-dazed from the communications van to the house, Freddy and Fredericka heard a quiet, polite knock accompanied by Finney’s by-now-familiar voice through wood: “You can let me in now. I know he must be unconscious.”
Freddy unlocked and opened the door. Finney’s immense anger was held in check by nascent gratitude. Then he looked at Dewey, motionless in the chair. “Is he alive?” he asked.
“Yes, he’s alive,” Fredericka answered indignantly. She had been making sure that his heart was still beating.
“Is he in a coma?”
“We are a dentist and a dontist,” Fredericka said. “We’re not brain surgeons. We’re not veterinarians. We don’t know what a coma is.”
“Nonetheless, you can put someone in a coma by starving his brain of oxygen, can’t you,” Finney asked rhetorically without so much as a question mark.
“Well,” said Fredericka, with what Finney took to be astounding gall, “they should have a warning on the machine, don’t you think?”
“Do you realise,” Finney asked, “that this is the majority leader of the United States Senate, and his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, and you may have made him brain-dead?”
“Really, I don’t think so,” Freddy offered, “and, besides, it’s just a colony.”
“What’s just a colony?” Finney asked. “Is this a dream?”
“I think your leader, or whatever he is, is perfectly all right,” Freddy said firmly.
“You do. That’s terrific. But he is unconscious. You have no idea what trouble you’re in. And I’m not impressed by your fake English accents. Bad job. You’re trying for Oxbridge, but it’s off somehow, like cheese or fish, or a record that revolves just a bit too slowly. You sound like Terry Thomas on Benadryl. You’re not dentists, you’re con men.” He looked at Fredericka. “Con people. But guess what, con people? This house is surrounded by a protective cordon of the Secret Service, and you will be held responsible for what you’ve done.”
“Come come,” Freddy said in the buck-’em-up tone that he had inherited from his father (who used it exclusively for dogs and horses), “it’s not all that bad. He may wake up.”
Both Freddy and Fredericka had been deeply impressed by Finney’s diagnosis of their manner of speech, because they did not speak with Oxbridge accents. Theirs (
and particularly Freddy’s) was a royal dialect that was unique. Freddy was frequently mistaken for affecting a fraudulent tongue. He wanted to tell Finney that it was probably due not merely to the isolation of the royals and the need to speak with what Freddy called a certain blasé favösh, but also to the family’s German origin. Thus, no one could tell the difference, when Freddy’s father was speaking, between pleasure and pressure, both of which were rendered more or less as pwreh-shah. Even the queen tended to pronounce book as booook, after the German Buch. But of course he could tell Finney no such thing, even if Finney were indeed the first person they had met in a long time who had some awareness of the wider world. They knew that many Americans were erudite and well informed, but they hadn’t met any. The oceans seemed to have washed away the immigrants’ connexions to their pasts.
As for Finney, he thought they were cheap and peculiar quacks feebly attempting to capitalise upon a vague resemblance to the Prince and Princess of Wales. She was, no matter how attractive, not nearly as stunning as Fredericka, and he was ignoble and his ears were even bigger than Frederick’s. They were nothing more than flea-bitten white trash affecting fake English accents to run a dental scam in a dying town where they could scratch out a living by pulling and polishing teeth. The contempt he felt for them was limitless. If you were going to impersonate a dentist, or a dontist, you might as well do it in Biarritz or Beverly Hills, where you could make some money, not in Siliphant. But how did they know so much diplomatic history and Latin?
As Finney was about to use his cell phone to call the Secret Service, it rang. This seemed to affect Dewey, who said, “Hello?” and swung his right arm off his chest, where it had been resting. Finney took the call while Fredericka put a dripping cloth on Dewey’s forehead and squirted some mouthwash into his mouth. “Hey, whadaya gonna do?” he asked, sitting bolt upright. Freddy used the foot control to bring the back of the chair up to him.
“That’s magnificent,” Finney said into the phone, but he was not alluding to the resurrection of Dewey Knott, not, at least, as it was playing out in Dewey’s body. “It’s amazing. I don’t believe it, but it’s true.”
“What’s true?” Dewey asked, but soon forgot his own question as he realised that he was no longer in pain. “My tooth,” he said, feeling gingerly about his face, putting a finger or two in his mouth, “my abscess. It’s gone. How’d ya do that?”
“The abscess caused a wrinkling and tangle of the nerves in the interlobular spaces of Czermak, or, as some choose to call it, the granular layer of Thappy. We went in through the peristootial odontoblastic tubuli,” Fredericka said earnestly, “and spliced the quadrigeminal bigemina with the upper mesial epiplastic pons. Voilà!”
“Dewey Knott doesn’t have pain,” said Dewey. “I owe you.”
“Senator?” Finney said.
“Hello, John. These guys are terrific. How much do I owe them? How much do we owe them? Can we pay for this with soft money?”
“Senator. . . .”
“When you’re in Washington,” Dewey said to Freddy and Fredericka, “stop by. See me. I’ll give ya a tour. The Capitol. Big building. Beautiful. Great view.”
“Senator!”
“John! What?”
“We just got the results of the instapoll.”
“What instapoll?”
“After Nightline, Senator.”
“What for?”
“To see how you did.”
“I haven’t been on Nightline in years. They don’t like me. It’s that goddamn elf.”
“You were just on, Senator, half an hour ago.”
“I was?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. What did the polls say?”
“Senator, what happened is a miracle. Your performance on Nightline has closed the gap. You’re now running in a statistical dead heat with the president, and you pass him on charisma, honesty, and expertise. It’s predicted that, among likely voters, if you stay on track, by November you’ll go to sixty-five percent.”
“What’s a statistical dead heat?”
“You’re even, neck and neck.”
Dewey left the chair. He brushed aside Freddy and Fredericka and came fully awake. “It’s a landslide!” he said. “How’d I do it? How’d I do it?”
“Your magnificent performance on Nightline, sir.”
“My magnificent performance on Nightline!” Dewey said, beaming, glowing, bouncing on his laurels.
“Yes!”
“But, Finney. . . .”
“Senator?”
“I wasn’t on Nightline.”
“You were, Senator, this evening.”
Dewey dredged his memory. “I was?”
“In a way,” Finney said.
“Whadaya mean, ‘in a way’?”
“Actually, your answers were relayed, as you were in treatment.”
“I didn’t answer anything. Who relayed my answers?”
“Dr Moffat.”
“Who the hell is Dr Moffat?” Dewey asked, more nervous as each second passed.
“He is.”
“Him?”
“Yes.”
“You gave answers for me?”
“I had to. Your mouth was in traction,” Freddy said.
“About what? What did you say?”
They told him.
“I don’t know anything about those things. How could you have. . . . You just did this on your own?”
“You were unconscious,” Freddy said. “I had to.”
“It was brilliant,” Finney declared. “The Washington Post is going to lead with it tomorrow and say that not since Theodore Roosevelt and JFK has a public figure been as forceful, erudite, and charismatic. The New York Times will also lead, I’m told. They say you’ve revolutionised American politics merely by not being dumb. Someone from Time called in to leak that their cover is going to read ‘American statesmanship awakens from its slumber of half a century.’ We’re back on track. We are, as you like to say, Senator, smoking!”
The phone rang. It was Dot. Dewey spent the next ten minutes saying, “Yes, Dot. Yes, Dot. Yes, Dot,” and then hung up.
“What did she say?” Finney asked.
“All her friends are calling her. They say it’s a miracle and that she should forgive me. What did I do? What’s a miracle? I was sleeping. What the hell happened?”
For the next forty-five minutes, Dewey and Finney plotted strategy, answered calls, and worked on the terms they would offer Freddy and Fredericka in regard to their employment. During this time, Freddy sat at a little desk the colour of summer sausage and wrote furiously without any sense of what was going on around him. Outside, the press agitated like rabid squirrels. Phone lines in newsrooms were jammed. Planes were chartered.
When Freddy finished, he looked up to see Dewey Knott smiling at him. It was the political equivalent of a come-hither look.
“Is that your real name, Moffat?”
“No,” Freddy admitted.
“Whoever you are, I want you to work for me, but we’ve got to keep it quiet,” Dewey said. “What’s your real name?”
“My Druidical name,” Freddy said, “is Lachpoof Bachquaquinnik Dess Moofoomooach. And this is Mrs Lachpoof Bachquaquinnik Dess Moofoomooach.”
“What kind of a name is that?” Dewey asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Freddy told him, “but I do know that we can’t work for you. You have too much television around you. If we’re on television, we’ll turn into gourds.”
“Hell, you were just on Nightline, and you didn’t turn into gourds, did you? Biggest political audience in the country.”
“Visual blackout,” said Freddy.
“Are you fugitives?” Finney asked.
“Are you?” Fredericka returned, stingingly.
“No,” Finney retorted, “and I’m not afraid of being turned into a gourd, either.”
“We’ll come to some kind of understanding,” Dewey said. Although he had yet to see a tape of Nightli
ne, he realised that his hope of being president would, in Freddy’s absence, be dashed in his next appearance before the press. “I need a really capable adviser, and the press seems to like you, even if they don’t know you exist. You see,” said Dewey, letting everyone in on what he had discovered, “they think you’re me.”
“Look,” said Freddy, “we can’t work for you, but do this and give this speech”—he handed Dewey the papers he had written—“and you’ll soar in the polls.”
“Do what?” Dewey asked. Finney seemed to sit back, although he was standing, as if he were watching something not quite subject to the laws of nature.
“Resign from the leadership of the Senate and from the Senate itself. That will be very dramatic. It will show the American people that you aren’t interested in position, that you’re decisive, that you can concentrate, that you can risk, that you have gravitas, that you put them, and the country, ahead of yourself. Announce this in the speech I have prepared for you. It’s about Siliphant, the Plains, and America. These campaigns are concerned too much with the candidates and too little with the country. Change that.”
THE LAST THING Dewey Knott ever wanted to do was to leave the Senate, which was his life. He never felt natural there, and had not quite gotten used to it even after decades of service, which was all the better. Unlike the patricians and egomaniacs who had grown up assuming that they deserved election to it and that by their association with it the Senate would vastly improve, Dewey was the son of a small farmer who had been wiped out in the Depression. It hadn’t mattered to Dewey’s father that one dust storm after another killed his crops, that when he was able to grow something he had so little of it and the market price was so low that it didn’t cover the cost of planting, or that half the farmers in Siliphant went under with him. Such facts were, in his eyes, excuses. And he knew that he was not being punished for sinning, for he had not sinned, not enough, anyway, to justify what had happened to him and his family. His view was that he had failed, as his father before him had failed, because he was not as good as other people, not part of a natural aristocracy so broad that it included people like the druggist and the town clerk, the people who had parlours and pianos. There were the lords and there were the peasants, and the peasants had something about them, as did the lords, that kept them in their place. It had been decided over thousands of years, in combat after combat, contest after contest, in which those who were better rose to the top. In America, the impulse was always to start the pieces at the same line, and the rules were not asphyxiating, but, still, blood was blood, and the great ones rose, making a new aristocracy and reconfirming the old. In this aristocracy the Knotts had never had a place and never would.