by Mark Helprin
“But how are you going to practise?”
“Moofoomooach is going to put it on the prompter himself. Buck showed him how. That way, there’ll be absolutely no leaks.”
“But how will you have time to practise it on the prompter?”
“I’m not gonna,” said Dewey, enjoying Finney’s distress. “When I get up there, it’ll be the first time I see it. I’m gonna wing it. Moofoomooach said it’s the only way for it to seem entirely natural.”
“Senator,” Finney said, his prudent ancestry arising, “no presidential candidate in modern times has ever ‘winged’ his acceptance speech.”
“What about Prescott Lindy?”
“Who?”
“Prescott Lindy.”
“Who was that?”
“Didn’t he run against Wickwire?”
“Who?”
“Wickwire? There was a President Wickwire, wasn’t there?”
“No.”
“Finney, I didn’t go to a gold-plated prep school, like you. When I studied the presidents it was in a one-room schoolhouse and there was another class nearby studying accounting. I sometimes get presidents and famous accountants mixed up.”
“Everyone does,” said Finney.
“Maybe it’s true. Maybe no presidential candidate has ever winged his acceptance speech. But no presidential candidate has ever had a Moofoomooach. Seventy points! Seventy points in two days! If he asked me to read the telephone book, Finney, I would.”
THE LAST NIGHT of a political convention is always the most spectacular, because, as in war, everyone, even those of the highest rank, has something to do, but no one controls, no one sees all, and no one fails to understand that events take on a life of their own. The great excitement comes of more than noise and the otherworldly wash of white light that, emanating from so many sources and directions, seems brighter than the sun. It comes because the night runs away from its planners, history is made, and the battle begins. The silver-tinted darkness on high near the ceiling, where the balloons ride at anchor, is like something astronomical, a Milky Way with smudges of bioluminescence that suggest life impossibly distant in space and time. The ocean in a high wind on a light-filled June day could not be more exciting.
At the no-frisk door the Secret Service had half a dozen agents and no metal detector. This was the door through which Dewey, Dot, Finney, Moofoomooach, Mrs Moofoomooach, the living Republican presidents, the governor of California, and Charlton Heston would walk. But in addition to these ten were fifteen more whose faces the agents did not necessarily recognise. They were the next highest officials in the campaign, and because the Secret Service agents were rotated among different assignments, they didn’t get to know all of them.
The badges, however, were foolproof, with photographs and descriptions of the bearer protected by hair-thin fibre-optic filaments that were connected to a battery and glowed in the colours of the rainbow. Were one fibre cut, all would go dark. “May I see your badge, sir?” or “madam?” the agents would say, and then very carefully compare. Everything went well until, ten minutes before Dewey’s speech, the arrival of one of the last outstanding pass holders prompted the entry detail to phone their chief.
“Checking on a late entrant.” The agent read the number from the pass. The chief matched it on his computer. The codes were valid.
“Is he the guy?”
“He’s the guy, and everything’s in order except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s got a bone in his hair.”
“A bone? What kind of bone?”
“I don’t know. It looks like a chicken bone, but it’s thin and a foot long. Wait a minute, I’ll ask. Sir, is that a chicken bone?”
“No,” said the very strange person, who was, nonetheless, totally legitimate. “It’s the bone of the yellow flamingo of Sarawak.”
“Should I let him in?” the agent asked.
“If he’s genuine, let him in.”
“What about the bone of the yellow flamingo of Sarawak?”
“Young people do that kind of thing. Remember Lucy-Bird?”
“He’s middle-aged.”
“Figure it out, Eisen,” the chief said. “He’s one of Knott’s top aides. This is San Francisco. He was probably at a party. Come on.”
“Should I frisk him?”
“Let’s think. He’s been with Knott since before you were born. Should you frisk him?”
THEY KEPT THE convention hall quiet for as long as they could before Dewey took the stage, so that the explosion of music would shock the senses (which Dewey thought was the word for a tally of the population). Finney, Freddy, Fredericka, and Dot stood around Dewey in the greenroom. Just before the call, Dot walked up to Dewey and embraced him. They said nothing, having been married for so long that they could speak without words. Then Dewey marched out.
The next thing they heard was a tidal wave of music and voices, and they knew that Dewey was out there, bathed in a million watts of white light, smiling, ramrod straight, and looking the whole world in the eye. Staffers who had come to escort them to their seats onstage held them back until the assigned moment during a lull, before the volume rose again almost intolerably.
Finney turned to Freddy. He had to shout, and was hardly audible even though he did. “I’ve never been this much out of the loop,” he yelled. “Is the speech on the prompter?”
Freddy nodded.
“Is it good? It better be good.”
“Don’t worry,” Freddy shouted over the din. “When I wrote it I drank a whole bottle of Scotch to loosen myself up. After half a litre, the speech came like a flock of wild geese chased by an eagle.”
“But, Moofoomooach, when you read it afterward, was it still like a flock of wild geese chased by an eagle? Did it hold together? Was it moving?”
“Read it afterward?” Freddy asked.
DEWEY KEPT RAISING his arms like a Japanese railway crossing guard, first the left, then the right, to request silence, but the sounds had a life of their own and ricocheted around the hall like a plasma in a tokamak. It made Dewey think of the ocean. He had loved the ocean before he was too busy to go there. Dot never had time for the ocean now. She said it was flat and boring and full of “Jellofish,” but for Dewey it was the only place in the world where his heart floated. He hoped and expected that Moofoomooach would talk poetically about the sea. What a lovely way to start a speech.
When at last the audience was expectantly quiet, Dewey looked at the invisible glass plates upon which the speech appeared. With his left hand, he would turn the pages of the paper copy on the lectern each time a bright red turnip appeared in the projected text. With his right hand, he kept lively on the forward button to scroll the text, and was always ready for what Mushrom was fond of calling “a little backward action.”
Because Dewey had never seen it, the speech would have a quality of absolute freshness. He thought that if he could carry it off he might build his lead and take all fifty states, and thus he began in a noble, confident, ringing tone. His voice reflected that this was perhaps the greatest moment of his life.
“Have you ever had a hair on your tongue?” he asked the entire world. Thousands of people in the hall, and hundreds of millions elsewhere, nodded. An anchorman perked up, and glanced at his guest analyst, who had written Self’s inaugural address and was hoping to write another.
Dewey continued. “I have. What a rotter! What a disgusting, uncomfortable feeling! After all, it combines the gag reflex and a natural aversion to serpents. The best thing to do after removing it is to suck on a sweet. I myself prefer Singleton’s Lemon Puffs. The American kind—what are they called? Hershorns?—taste like yak pee, and I ought to know: I’ve drunk yak pee.”
Dewey read out loud a notation in the text that said, “Pause and count to twenty.” Then he said, “I have?” and, then, thinking he had made a mistake, “Pause and count to twenty. One, two, three, four. . . .”
Before he hi
t five, the message from a hundred producers to a hundred correspondents on the floor was “What the hell is he saying?” but the correspondents and anchors alike were stunned. The former dropped their pencils, the latter stared at the tiny figure below and at his magnified image on a gigantic screen above and behind him.
“It was in a tent in India near the Tibetan border. I was visiting a team of biologists, who had prepared tea for me, but I drank from the wrong flask. A state in India has a commemorative stamp of it. Funny,” Dewey interrupted, commenting on what he had just said, “I’ve never been to India.”
As he pressed on, not a sound could be heard. Had a canary chirped among the armada of balloons, even though invisible and far away, it would have enjoyed the one moment in its life when it seemed to thunder like a train.
“Which,” Dewey read, “that is, that I drank yak pee—(here Dewey argued with himself) but I didn’t—leads into the body of my speech.” He looked up, and read, “Disregard the entire first part and start immediately below.” And then he added, “Oh, thanks for telling me.”
He paused for a long time as he read ahead. His lips moved as he took in the text. Everyone strained forward to see what he was doing. Then he returned to the text. “I mean, really,” he read on, “we are thoroughly disgusting creatures, are we not, who eat dead animal flesh, inhale the smoke of burning leaves, and savour, like vultures or the French, rotted and putrefied foodstuffs such as wine and cheese. We dress in the skins of the dead animals we eat, rub their secretions on our bodies and in our hair, and spend a third of our lives lying unconscious, mute, and vulnerable.”
Everyone knew by now that Dewey had dispensed with the conventional opening: “Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of the Golden State, my fellow Americans. . . .”
“Once, when I was playing polo—I’ve never played polo in my life—a chap was thrown from his pony, and. . . .” Dewey looked up. “But I don’t play polo. I’ve never been on a horse.
“And yet, and yet, we exist in one another’s presence as cleanly as gods. It’s as if we aren’t transient flesh but some impossible royal lobster. How is it that we are able to accomplish this? Is it illusion? Is it accommodation? Is it force majeure, or accident? No. What is it? Look up imploringly at audience and say again, what is it? Then say, as if in metred verse, it is, pause, I assure you, pause, nothing more and nothing less than, pause, civilisation.
“That is why I am a Tory. What’s a Tory? I believe in civilisation, and what is civilisation if not restraint? What is civilisation if not delicacy of manners; deep concentration; the seeking of truth; the holding in abeyance of actions, which otherwise would result in personal advantage, purely for the sake of justice?
“It is not, pause, the never-ending and always expanding aggrandisement of administration. It is not, pause, the ceaseless and voracious institutionalisation of schemes. It is not, pause, the redistribution of income or the codification of envy. It is not, pause, a perpetual appeal to grievance. Indeed, it is more sacrifice than grievance, more forbearance than scheme. It is a thing almost as silent and pacific as a great and luxuriant tree, pause, that stands in rain and sun, through nights of wind and stars, in snowstorms and on perfect days, without a single word, unbent by the wind, for hundreds of years, growing beautiful without presumption, ever suffering, ever silent, ever noble, ever great.
“Do not trust or follow promises of action unless they are in response to a threat against that very civilisation to which I ask you to dedicate yourselves tonight.
“I have been in this country for only a little more than a year. . . .” Dewey stopped dead, staring at the prompter. “That’s not true. I was born here. If I was here only for a year, how could I have served in the Senate for so much of the century? I wouldn’t even know the language, unless I came from an English-speaking country. And I couldn’t be president.
“I have been in this country for only a little more than a year,” he read again, not arguing with himself any more, “and what I have seen has taught me many a lesson and inspired me to exceed myself. There is much that I have permanently taken into my heart, and will keep with me when I ascend the throne.
“The throne?” asked Dewey. “What is this? I feel like I’m in the fucking Twilight Zone.” The only thing he could do was push the forward button, but, going too far and getting ahead of himself resulted in his saying, “Nor monkeys, nor macaques, nor blasé gelatinous sea creatures, nor the Red-Tailed Obfusian, nor mice and rats sequestered in their foetid subterranean burrows, nor the fluffy white cousins of Japan, nor cat, nor dog, nor ibex, skunk, tortoise, bird, or mink. Pause. Look wounded. Look Biblical, a bit like Lear or Father Time.
“No product of nature. No sound. No coalescence of form. No chance encounter of things molten and hot.” This was the end of a section.
In Freddy’s view, Dewey was ruining the speech, and Freddy’s expression betrayed his annoyance. Fredericka seemed vaguely disturbed as well, in a patient, detached fashion. The former presidents were, for some reason, filled with glee. Finney was astounded but fearless. And Dot sat with the same immovable grin that she always had when Dewey was making a speech.
Dewey felt that he hadn’t quite connected with his audience. So he raced ahead. “Oh, this debauched and unbearable world,” he read. “I would not be bothered were my wife not with child. . . .” At these last words, forgetting that the speech was not his, Dewey turned to look at the sixty-something Dot. The words, “Dot, are you pregnant?” echoed from Spokane to Perth.
Dot tapped her left hand against her chest. “Me?” she asked. “No, Dewey. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a sexagenarian.”
“You are?” asked Dewey, putting the back of his hand to his forehead. “Oh boy. This isn’t my night. In all those years, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Finish the bloody speech,” Freddy yelled, extremely annoyed at the interruptions.
Dewey nodded and turned back to the lectern. “Debauched and evil and full of suffering as this world is,” he read, “and quick as our life may bustle and fade, I have found, and only of late, the consolation I have been seeking all my days, and it is in love. My dear wife, whom I married from royal obligation and pure sexual attraction, has become for me an angel of God.” Dewey looked up, extremely puzzled. Then he shook his head and resumed. “Though I may be wrong and suffering illusion, this illusion heals my heart. In her, the open questions have been closed, and in her I am content, and to her, as we grow old, I profess my love and proclaim an island of satisfaction in an imperfect world.”
Dewey looked at Dot. A tear was slowly descending her cheek. Though he had always loved her, he felt more tenderness for her, and love, than he had since the Bataan Death March. Strangely enough, Mrs Moofoomooach also had tears. Radiant-looking, she gazed at Moofoomooach, who was awkwardly clearing his throat.
Dewey turned solemnly to the lectern once again. “I do love you, Dot. Everyone thinks you’re stiff and mean, but I don’t. I know you, and I love you. It’s true,” he said, and now no one knew if he were reading or merely speaking. “Nothing could be truer. All of this,” his left arm moved in a simple gesture that took in the great hall and the whole world, “is as nothing to those simple and beautiful things that we ignore in favour of vanity and illusion. I came here for glory, but I find that my heart aches for what is beyond these walls.”
Dewey looked out at the crowd. Those in elephant hats had taken them off. They blinked by the thousand, waiting for the words that would follow. They had no idea what words could follow, which was why they were transfixed. Their nominee smiled at them, as if for the first time in his life he were perfectly content, at ease, and in a state of lucid equanimity.
In this graceful elision between one world and another, a figure glided from the wings quite smoothly. The first person to notice him was a Secret Service sniper hidden high in the rafters, who put him in the cross-hairs immediately and called in to request guidance, speaking quietly and calmly into the microphone
of his headset.
“Unscheduled walk-on, stage right. I have him in the cross-hairs. Guidance.”
At control everything jumped up like a cat that touches a live wire. “Hold,” was the command. Then, to the network of agents, “Who the hell is that?”
Six voices at once said, “Mushrom.”
“Is he supposed to be there? He isn’t supposed to be there. What’s he doing?”
“I don’t see a gun,” someone said. No one saw the gun in his hand, in his jacket pocket, because Mushrom was the kind of person who would not appear to be carrying a gun even were he bent under the weight of twenty rifles.
Many voices at once were talking, rapidly losing their professional quality as no one did anything and the tension mounted—all in a few seconds.
“He’s got a bone in his hair.”
“He’s the guy with the bone in his hair.”
“It’s Mushrom. Hold. Hold.”
“Get someone out there. Get him off stage.”
Because of the pin-drop silence, the desperate chatter across the Secret Service net was faintly audible. It sounded otherworldly, and even if no one could hear the exact words just the tone was enough to tighten every muscle in the convention hall.
Nothing seemed to move until Dewey noticed Mushrom and turned to him, smiling, because now he understood that he had to be kind to Mushrom, and that previously he had been very unkind. How best to communicate his deep sorrow? How best to treat Mushrom, finally, like a son?
He was thinking of this, and the solution was clearly on its way, for little else could explain the aura of benevolence that now surrounded Dewey like a halo, when Mushrom, full of sorrow himself, elevated the barrel of the gun in his pocket and pulled the trigger. The noise of the shot was amplified by Dewey’s microphone, and everyone in the giant convention hall jumped. Dewey doubled over and stood on his right leg alone, as if he had been shot in the left. “Campbell,” he said, before he tumbled forward onto the stage.