“It’s going to be awkward for us now, down there.”
“Oh, I don’t give a damn about South Africa. I never saw much promise there, about as much as throwing a penny in a well to make a wish. And we’re on a different timetable now. But there’s something worthwhile that’s come out of it, for all that.”
“I don’t see it, myself.”
Robinson stood. “A lesson. Bill. A lesson about what can happen when you trust other people to handle your business, people who don’t care about it as much as you do. I’ve made a decision about the initiative. We’re going to do it ourselves and keep it to ourselves. London and Reykjavik can find out about it when Moscow does. I don’t want it all coming apart because some dim-brained bit player fucked up or mouthed off. It’s our play, and we’ll rise or fall with our own people.”
“I’ll tell Madison,” Rodman said with a nod “You can tell him something else, too. I don’t want anyone who had anything to do with that Walvis Bay fiasco working on our initiative. Incompetence is contagious.”
Rodman shook his head. “It’s already too late for that, I think. Madison said something about Xhumo’s controller being with the logistics team.”
“Tell Madison to lose him,” Robinson said coldly. “This is the endgame. Bill. Red’s playing king, queen, and rook against us. We can’t afford mistakes.”
EX POST FACTO
THE STATE OF THE ADMINISTRATION
As President Brandenburg and his staff head north to their Seneca Lake retreat for the holidays, they leave behind a Washington that is still groping to understand the man whom the American people sent here a year ago to take over the helm of government. Reportedly, a major purpose of this “working vacation” will be to begin drafting Brandenburg’s first State of the Union address. We would urge that that be put aside in favor of a hard look at the state of this strange and less-than-wonderful administration.
Beginning with William Wirt and his Anti-Masonic Party in 1832, American politics has endured a parade of one-issue third parties whose entire existence was predicted on virulent negativism: antislavery, anti-immigrant, antiliquor, antitariff, anti-integration, anti-internationalism. Until last year, the American public had never had the occasion to learn the consequences of electing such a candidate.
The lesson has been sobering, at least to veteran Washingtonians. Far beyond the carping about Brandenburg’s refusal to aid and abet the traditional orgy of balls, Christmas parties, and greater and lesser revelry are serious questions about Brandenburg’s refusal or inability to articulate a clear, positive vision of the future. In blocking (for the moment) natural geopolitical evolution by barring American participation in the United Nations Confederation, Brandenburg and his chimerical National Party seem to have exhausted their fund of ideas.
Though the President continues to wave his campaign flags of “self-reliance” and “independent action,” the only reliable feature of his administration to date has been its inaction. Brandenburg has vetoed more bills (and, thanks to a hopelessly divided Congress, sustained more of his vetoes) than any first-year President. The bureaucracy staggers on like a beheaded chicken, its stubborn autonomic functions creating the illusion of life.
Perversely, word of these problems does not seem to have spread beyond the District of Columbia. Eyes still glazed by nationalism, the electorate perceives a dog-jowled sixty-six-year-old divorcé as “the nation’s most eligible bachelor,” credits this grandfatherly man with a wisdom he has not yet demonstrated, and narrowmindedly applauds Brandenburg’s defense of yesterday’s status quo.
But morning walks through the White House grounds, however homey and picaresque, do not a legislative program make. Does Brandenburg have an agenda? More to the point, does the United States have a President? The chances are that our nation can endure without lasting harm a self-indulgent four-year holiday from grappling with change and responsibility. It remains to be seen whether Brandenburg can muster the vigor and vision to save us from having to find out.
—Editor-in-Chief Malcolm Briss
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Tin Roofs and Porch Swings
East-central Indiana, Alternity Blue
Wallace took the old roads home.
Though the automated highway, A-40 east to Ohio, would have taken him speedily to within a few miles of Hagerstown, the old roads were the roads of his memories. Paper-thin black asphalt ribbons draped across Indiana farmland, they decorated rather than altered its gentle contours.
Narrow gravel shoulders. Faded dividing lines chalking into invisibility. Roads laid out on the section lines of 19th-century county surveys, shaped by the refusal of long-dead farmers to have their fields divided. Roads where lumbering harvesters became the heads of segmented metal worms crawling across the countryside. Roads that swallowed up the beams of headlights in black-night drizzle.
They tunneled through groves of trees, widened to become the main streets of one- and two-stoplight towns, then shrank back to their natural size of two narrow lanes, one coming, one going. Except there had always seemed to be more going than coming, familiar faces that took the roads to Muncie and Richmond and never came back.
He drove past silos standing in ranks of four and across tiny bridges spanning sluggish green-brown rivers. He drove through communities he knew only for the teams their high schools had fielded. The Warrington Blazers. The Ashland Tigers. The Millville Panthers, 1965 Sectional Champions.
And yet he knew them, knew every town he drove through. There were no surprises a hundred years in any direction. Tin roofs and porch swings, children in mittens and mufflers. With every passing mile, the tightness in his chest and the queasiness in his stomach grew. The deep breaths he took to calm himself threatened to turn into sobs.
It all looked as it should—brown grass and brown earth, fields of corn stubble, sagging wooden fences, roadside farm markets with hand-stenciled signs saying CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. How could it be so much the same and yet not be real, not be the same little circle of the world in which he had spent nearly all of his first twenty years?
Even the signs were the same. The Lions Club and Kiwanis emblems hanging together on the outskirts of town. A placard proclaiming “Trust Deschlingers—Champion SPF Hamps.” When Wallace came around the last curve west of Hagerstown and saw Roger Eash’s barn it was all he could do to keep the Magic on the road, for the side of the structure bore the same stem reminder:
Life is short
Death is sure
Sin the cause
Christ the cure
Just like home. The same faded black lettering that he and Donald Bash had plastered with wet snowballs until their ten-year-old arms were tired. The same barn with the same musty-smelling loft full of disintegrating leather tack dating from when the Bashes had plowed with horse or ox instead of a noisy gasoline-burning tractor.
How could there be two of them? Like some sort of county-fair funhouse trickery, making you think you were one place when you were really somewhere else. How could it be so real? Like a stage set for the play of his life. Was there a real Roger Eash inside the farmhouse, round-bellied and bald-headed, his wide-brimmed blue Sheriff’s Posse hat hanging on the peg by the kitchen door? How would he like to hear about the son Donald he had never had?
Or maybe there was a Donald Eash, too, a little older or younger, a little more like his gentle mother in the face or a little less like his father in profile. A Donald Eash who would not remember being best friends with a Rayne Wallace in the fifth and sixth grades. Would not remember a Rayne Wallace at all because it’s me that’s not real here.
Suddenly Wallace was afraid to confront the puzzle any more closely, so afraid that the poisonous contents of his stomach threatened a violent upheaval. He slowed the Magic to a crawl as the Hagerstown standpipe and the stiletto steeple of the First Baptist Church came into view ahead, prominent above the stark denuded trees enfolding tin-roofed clapboard houses.
The sta
ndpipe. Powerful memories snapped into focus. The night he and three other YDR members had climbed its endless steel ladder to leave their mark in red paint at the top. The way the wind had grabbed at them. The queasy feeling that the steel cylinder was swaying. Jimmy Fox dropping the brush over the side before their message was finished. A crazy stunt. A great coup—
It was not too late to turn back. He could backtrack to Millville and turn south, get on A-40 at New Lisbon and continue on toward Columbus with all thoughts of a nostalgic personal detour firmly banished from his mind. A Christmas present for himself, he had rationalized when the assignment came down. Walk memory lane for a few hours. No one would know.
As no one would know if he fled from an encounter with his own ephemeral reality. This Hagerstown was not his home. And he knew already that his absence here had left no void. Foolish to think it had, It’s a Wonderful Life notwithstanding—like expecting to see a hole in the lake after you’ve walked up onto the shore.
Another car roared by on the left, the driver shaking his fist at Wallace for blocking the road. Wallace jumped, and the start derailed his thoughts.
Name the disease. Was that what he was afraid of, the fact of his own nonexistence? As if it meant that he was not real.
But he knew what reality was. He had nothing to fear from this place or the people for whom it truly was home. They could not touch him, could not change him. They would look at him with curiosity, wondering at the stranger—it was always a place that took note of strangers. But because they would not know him, because they would expect nothing from him, he could hide. He did not have to touch them. He did not have to fear them touching him.
Wallace’s foot landed lightly on the accelerator, and the Magic eased forward. He would not let himself be afraid.
Bethel Virginia, The Home Alternity
The new woman’s name was Rachel.
Endicott had not asked her name. It was not important to him , as meaningless as any part of her past. She offered it herself, while he was freeing her from the chromed restraints—handcuffs and hobbles—in which she had been delivered.
“Undress,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
With sudden crackling violence, he slapped her, the stinging blow whipping her face to one side and leaving the red imprint of four fingers on her cheek. “Don’t talk.” He did not want to be questioned. The last one had always wanted to talk, alternately whining and cursing him, until he had been obliged to gag her to end the noise. He did not like doing that. There were sounds he liked to hear, and he had been harsher with her for denying that to him.
Rachel’s response to the slap was unexpected. The last one had gone to her knees in tears. The first one, the young one he had picked up himself on the road near Fairfax so long ago, had lunged for Endicott with clawing hands before he knocked her to the floor.
Hysteria and anger. He had been ready for either. But Rachel showed neither. Her eyes wide and wondering, she obediently began to unbutton her blouse. Obedience, but not surrender. “I haven’t really been arrested, have I,” she said as she pulled the tail of the garment from the waistband of her pleated slacks.
“No.” He should have slapped her again, enforcing the point. But she kept surprising him, breaking the patterns.
The blouse dropped to the floor. “And a man like you doesn’t need the money that anyone would pay to have me back.” she said, continuing to size up her situation aloud.
“No,” Endicott said “Now shut up.”
Naked, her true age showed—thirty, perhaps thirty-two. The extra softness in the hips and slightly rounded belly that the high-waisted slacks had disguised. The first hint of slackness in the muscles of her buttocks and upper arms. Her skin was pale white, with no hint it had ever been tanned—the sign of a woman too busy for vanity. Her breasts were beautiful, lush and round and riding a little low without the bra, the right globe slightly fuller than the left.
Endicott placed her on the platform bed on her back, wrists bound together to the headboard above her head, legs pulled back and tied to the top corners of the headboard so that she was doubled over and exposed. She offered no resistance, and yet her cooperation was measured, calculated, placating, humoring. She would learn.
“Why are you doing this?” Calm, no emotional content at all, like a counselor quizzing a patient.
He ran his fingers lightly along the inside of her calf. “Because there’s no reason not to.”
“You could be caught—arrested.”
A faint smile appeared on his Ups, and he shook his head ever so gently. “No.”
“How can you be so sure? They’ll be looking for me—”
He pinched the inside of her thigh, hard. She jerked, made a noise between a squeal and a grunt, and began to breathe faster. A pink flush blossomed on her thigh where he had pinched her, then as quickly vanished.
“Not here,” he said.
She was smart, perhaps too smart. That was something he should have warned Tackett about. Smart women were tricksters, calculating, manipulative, always seeking control, always avoiding conflict. Smart women thought they were better than men, thought they were better men. He had taught more than one the lesson that they were not.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. A hint of a tremor this time.
He ran his fingers through the matted black hair between her legs, fluffing it. The scent of her floated up to his nostrils. “Yes.”
“What did I do? What am I that you need to do this?”
“The fact is, this isn’t about you at all,” he said. “You could have been anyone. Roulette wheel. Wheel of life. Bad luck, Rachel. That’s all it is.”
“You don’t have to hurt me. You can have what you want without hurting me.”
“But what I want,” he said, caressing a thigh, “is to hurt you.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no reason not to.”
“That’s no answer—”
He brought his hand down hard on her most exposed softness, his calloused hand iron against her. She cried out and raised up off the bed, every muscle rigid, straining futilely to bring her knees together to deny him access.
“It’s all the answer you’ll get.”
The woman forced herself to relax., allowing the ropes to support her weight. But her breaths remained hot and shallow, her face pale. Fear-scent joined woman-scent in the air.
“Will you kill me?”
Sitting back on his heels, Endicott reached out and opened the lid of a compartment in the platform beside the bed. “That depends,” he said rummaging quietly among the contents of the hidden cache.
“If you’re going to kill me, don’t you think I at least deserve to know your name?” The words came in a rush, but behind them was that same measured withholding, that same calculating distance.
“No.” he said edging forward to where she could see the black-headed hat pin, its silver shaft nearly three inches long, that he held in his right hand “You shouldn’t be afraid of dying. You aren’t even alive.”
“I’m as alive as you,” she said angrily. “I’m as alive as you and I don’t want to die.”
With the point of the needle as stylus, he scratched intersecting Lines on the delicate skin of her breast. “What, no comforting faith in a life hereafter?” he asked his tone lightly sarcastic. “Through me you may find heaven.”
“I do believe in God and heaven.” Her voice was stronger, defiant “But I’m not finished living.”
“That’s up to me to decide,” he said pressing down lightly on the pin, creating a corneal indentation at the intersection of the scratches.
“Why are you doing this?” she wailed her anguish no longer measured.
“Let me tell you about God, Rachel.” he said his voice soft and soothing as a preacher’s. “They told me He punishes the wicked—He protects the faithful. Are you faithful. Rachel? Did you go to church on Sunday?”
“Please don’t do thi
s—”
He brushed the hair back from her cheek, and she flinched at the touch. “The truth is it’s all a joke, all a hoax,” he whispered. “I defy your God. He’s just a wishful dream. I’m going to hurt you, Rachel. The worst things I can think to do. I’ll do to you. There are rules about how you treat women. I’m going to break them. And when I’m tired of you, I’m going to kill you. Don’t you think if your God existed he would stop me? Don’t you think he’d stop this?”
A sudden thrust, and the pin pierced deep. She screamed, and in that moment his soul stood naked and hurled the challenge heavenward: You’re nothing! See what I do—I’m free and you’re helpless! And he drew his next breath as easily as his last, untouched by the hand of any power greater than himself.
“This is the lesson,” he whispered to her as he withdrew the blood-slick pin. “I am everything there is. The only rules are my rules. The only reality is my reality.” She writhed, drawing gasping breaths, as he touched the point to her other breast. “So scream, Rachel. Your pain only matters when I feel it. Make me feel it, and for that moment you can be real, too.”
He drove the pin deep and felt the familiar surge of defiant self-affirmation. The one thing he could not understand is why, along with the exhultation, he always felt a perverse measure of disappointment at God’s silence.
Hagerstown, Indiana, Alternity Blue
There were no longer any tracks on the long wooden railroad trestle spanning the Whitewater River and the narrow flood plains on either bank. Wallace had once played chicken with slow-moving freights here, walked the railing like a tightrope, used it as a diving platform on sweltering summer afternoons.
Now the rails were gone, the trestle had been redecked as a footbridge linking the two halves of a small town park, and the old railroad right of way was marked as a footpath and bicycling trail. Signs at each end of the trestle sternly warned:
Alternities Page 23