by James Kiehle
But Judy knew that with Russ and her combined DNA, Iris would one day be prettier than she ever had been. Judy faced the mirror with trepidation, and considered her own looks to be pleasant and All-American, but depending on light, shade, and time of day, Judy could almost extract a vision of herself as a sex icon.
The fact is, Judy had been mistaken for the actress Keri Russell more times than she cared to count. “Did you know you look exactly like that girl from Felicity?” was asked by strangers in Russell’s early career; later only the movie titles and TV shows changed as the years went on. Judy could see the resemblance, and it was flattering at first, but now the novelty of the comparison had worn off.
Russ, sympathetic but secretly proud that Judy was mistaken for an actress, (especially when her last name was the same as his first) once gave Judy a tee-shirt that read: I’M NOT HER. Strangers laughed, but still asked for autographs.
Judy wanted to be distinctive, not a shallow impression of a movie star, but transform from thirty-eight-year-old small market public relations executive and generic weekend soccer-mom-type (though Iris didn’t play soccer, but golf) into someone as overtly sensual as the Maggie monster, not a vague wannabe of a film star she’d never meet.
Of course, the resemblance did win Judy minor notoriety—a front-page newspaper clipping “EUGENE’S OWN MOVIE STAR?” read the headline—illustrated with two side by side shots of Keri Russell and Judy Brand-nee-Perry, who, aside from the haircut, were almost identical.
So now Judy wondered: Was this the beginning of her mid-life crisis? Doomed to be a doppleganger?
Judy felt loved and cared for but she didn’t seem to ignite that sexual spark she’d once aroused in her college years when she personified the BJ Queen. Now, her sensuality long gone, she wondered: What changed, besides the forces of gravity and time?
Or had it changed? Maybe Judy was always plain-looking and boring. An ex-boyfriend once described her as “sexy but not sexy in a way that makes me want to fuck you,” an assessment that stung. Right now, Judy wanted sexy back. Just once. To compete with Maggie Chapin, if nothing else.
That bitch.
Iris looked at her mom’s changing expressions, then tapped her shoulder.
“You good?”
Judy pretended to smile. “Terrific.”
“If you could be going anywhere in the world right now, Mom, where would it be?”
Judy flipped her daughter’s bangs and grinned. “Home.”
“Me. too.”
Emotionally, socially, Judy and her daughter were alike in so many ways. But Iris’s brain was filled from Russ’s end of the gene pool; often out of the box that the box came in.
Somewhere over the Pacific, the sky bright, winds calm, Judy looked below and saw nothing but black ocean stretched to the horizon, appearing like polished wet marble under a magnifying glass.
“So, are you good?” Judy asked her daughter. “You know, panic-attack-wise?”
“This isn’t so bad,” Iris nodded enthusiastically, though her grin was sheepish. “How long is it? The flight?”
“About five hours total.”
Iris noticed all the water below, then rested her chin on her mother’s shoulder. “Know what, Mom? Bright side.”
“What?”
“There isn’t a mountain between here and Hawaii.”
•
After dropping off his flying girls at the Portland airport, Russ Perry began the 160 mile drive back to Bend but stopped at a chain restaurant in Madras and watched a press conference on the company iPad while he chowed down a BLT and sipped a Royal Crown Cola. In the lower third, the news crawl showed the temperature in remote Canada, from where the newscaster was reporting.
Russ thought: Cool even for winter but twenty-nine degrees in June?
Strange, but sadly not the record low, set the previous Spring. The world’s weather had gone bizarro over the past ten years and in the Canadian wilderness, the effects were extreme. Global warming? You wouldn’t know it in that place.
Two hundred miles northeast of Vancouver, Canada, parka-clad reporters had once again gathered for yet another press briefing at the southernmost point of what was called the Ice Shelf. Rivers swollen by runoffs for the last three years were stalled, backed-up by a skyscraper-tall dam of ice, frozen into lacy white fingers swelling a series of rivers and streams in the new coldest place in British Columbia. The frozen pack had developed with alarming speed and the Pacific Northwest, especially B.C., had registered the lowest temperatures since record-keeping began; minus-fifty was not uncommon during recent winters. This icy aberration here while cities like Chicago and Moscow had well-above normal temps all the previous winter; New York City hit seventy-eight-degrees on New Years Day. Aberration was becoming the new normal.
The Ice Shelf, a major story for weeks, had been pushed off the front page by recent tensions between China and Taiwan, but the flood danger was very real. If the shelf should break, a collapsed ice wall would unleash widespread flooding over a vast area. Solutions to the potential impact were yet to be found. Scientists, engineers, and government representatives had gathered to study it, followed later by tourists and swarms of reporters, reduced now to a small hive.
The big buzz this day?
“There is no change in the status of the Ice Shelf,” a spokesman for the Canadian authority announced to a collective groan. “It remains at the same density as the last time we spoke. The backup spreads five hundred miles north, but there has been an incremental development of the arrow.”
The arrow—so called because satellite pictures showed an arrowhead-shaped indent dead-center of the thickest part of the wall—was ten miles deep but gradually enlarging.
Of primary concern, near the very spot where the reporters were standing, the ice wall might crack and would let loose a wet hell.
“Is there any reason to think the shelf is in danger of collapse?” a reporter Russ knew from Seattle wondered.
“We don’t think so,” the spokesman smiled. “It’s not likely to be a Missoula event anytime soon. Don’t lose sleep over that.”
This talking point about Missoula came up often, with the same answers. The Missoula Flood—also called the Cordilleran ice sheet—last occurred about 17,000 years ago when 300,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest had been swamped after a natural dam break, and the water volume exceeded all the rivers of the world combined. Some scientists think the collapse of the glacial dam—and the resulting release of waters backed up from Clark Fork river on north—was among the top three worldwide calamities of all time. Aside from the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, it was certainly the worst in the Western Hemisphere between the North Pole and the Equator. Beginning 2.5 million years ago, the ebb and floe of glaciers let loose similar floods more than a dozen times.
This version wouldn’t be that bad, the theory went, but it would still cause a huge mess.
“How much water is backed up?” an evidently fresh off the boat reporter from a paper in Cleveland, Ohio asked. “I mean, compared to, say, Lake Erie?”
The spokesman, having answered variations of this many times, made a sour face. “That’s very hard to say, but our experts believe this body would fill Lake Erie roughly five times.”
“That’s a lot,” the reporter said and some of her colleagues laughed.
One concern was recent seismic activity in the Northwest, particularly around Mt. Hood in northern Oregon. A strong earthquake, volcanic eruptions, or something equally devastating could make the Ice Shelf the new Missoula, with flooding possible as far south as the California border.
But activity was stalled now, though endless rain or snow continued to fill the new lake; today only a few reporters bothered to file stories that news outlets would use. They asked more questions, got nothing more informative, and the meeting broke up.
“Call us back when you have actual news,” one reporter told the spokesman. “Until then, this is a non-event and I am bored out of
my skull.”
Russ powered down the iPad, paid the bill and continued his drive home, an unsettled feeling embracing him the entire way.
5. POTUS Interruptus
Washington D.C. was beautiful in the Spring, though Peter Grant didn’t have time to admire the gardens surrounding the White House. Ushered directly to the West Wing, Peter stood stiffly in the Oval Office as the president said to General Spivey, “Before I take this call, who’s this guy again? Grant, is it?” while looking up and down Grant’s uniform as if to try to determine his rank.
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Colonel Peter Grant.”
“And this gentleman is here because?”
The general had known the president since his businessman days, well before his first run for office, but was a close ally. He’d mentored Peter Grant since recruitment fresh out of college. Spivey, now the go-between, could be casual and candid with the newish leader of the free world.
“Well, sir, is it because Peter graduated in the lower third in his class at West Point or sustained a two-point-nine GPA at Beijing University? No, mister president, I would suggest that it’s because, during his sojourn as an American graduate student in China, Colonel Grant, then a mere lieutenant, became best friends with a rising, now most influential Chinese diplomat, currently the Chinese deputy consul to the United Nations, one Li Cai Wen. Have you, by the way, read Colonel Grant’s white paper on the Iran near-apocalypse?”
“Refresh me. Was it on Twitter?” the president joked.
“Sadly, more than two hundred and eighty characters, sir,” Spivey grinned. “Colonel Grant predicted the entire disaster before it happened. We cut it off at the knees. Enough said?”
“We’ll hear what Grant has to say,” the commander-in-chief said as he picked up the phone. “But give me a sec.”
Peter Grant had been in the White House before but never to sit on the hot seat. Looking around, ignored for the moment, he noticed that its really more of a den than an office and doesn’t really look lived in despite its age and storied history. Everything in the Oval Office is neat and tucked away, except for a few piles of papers and manila folders stacked on the desk. There’s an aroma to the place, a mix of smells, like ancient pipe smoke, wood polish, and fresh orchids, but subtle, like a mist of perfume after an elegant woman has left the room.
The dimensions alone do not make the Oval Office sound like much. Expanded in 1909 and completed in 1934, it was called an ‘elliptical salon’ by its designer. The room features an apsidal-bowed end about 36 feet long with a short axis of 29 feet, an arched ceiling eighteen and a half feet in height. Two couches face a coffee table, at least for this leader.
And this leader was new, elected after four rollercoaster years with the previous administration that finally ended. The American voters, weary from a full term of daily tsunamis, were hoping the new commander-in-chief could calm the waters. So far, so good.
Hopefully that peace would continue.
General Spivey was writing on a pad he pulled from his coat pocket while telling Grant some facts about the room they were in. “Forget the size, because dimensions aside, this room was designed to be imposing, not in scale but in purpose.” The general slipped a piece of paper to Grant that read: Room bugged. Careful what you say. CIC is paranoid.
Grant tore up the note and put the pieces in his pocket. Across the room, chief of staff Deborah Lansing, reed-thin and Bryn Mawr refined, tucked loose brown hairs behind her ear, then blinked her root beer-colored eyes rapidly as she listened in on the president’s call. She caught Peter’s eye and smiled. He grinned back, shyly.
“Don’t know if you know this,” the general said to Peter, “But originally this room was intended for hosting formal receptions—they called them ‘levees,’—so the Oval Office wasn’t the center of state business or a place for the president to sign papers and give away pens. The whole idea of the oval was to make all those assembled stand equidistant from the speaker; partly so that all could hear the president plainly, but mostly to validate that he was the most important person in the room. The idea was picked up from the Maharajahs of India because the president wanted to be treated as royalty. Ego, Peter. Ego.”
“Interesting, sir, but can we talk about the dinosaur in the room?” Grant asked.
Spivey held his tongue against his teeth and tilted his head. “I’m showing off and stalling. Wait just a bit. But the answer is ‘probably.’”
Into the phone, the president said loudly, “I realize fully that Taiwanese independence was your campaign platform, madam, but the timing is rather suspect.”
A female aide entered the room carrying a silver tray, matching coffee pot, and three Wedgwood cups, along with a huge white mug with the words Biggest Cheese silkscreened on it. She poured coffee for the president in the large cup and set the tray on the table in front of the general, who prepared a cup for Lansing and carried it to her. She mouthed thanks, while still listening in on the phone call and grimacing.
“‘Suspect’ means that if you stay on this course, you’re about to be in an uncomfortable situation,” the president said.
Grant leaned close to General Spivey and whispered, “Sir, it’s important. I need to give you a heads up.”
“Quietly then,” Spivey replied.
“Alright,” Grant adjusted his posture. “As I mentioned on the phone, Li Cai Wen said China thinks Taiwan has nukes. That’s the cause of all this saber-rattling. The Arleigh-Burke shipment is giving Taiwan the confidence to act on independence, but if Taiwan also has the bomb—”
“They do,” Spivey said, sipping his coffee. “Or they will, once the Catalina arrives.”
Grant was puzzled. The year before he’d been briefed on the juiciest intel available to anyone below a Joint Chiefs pay grade but no one ever mentioned Taiwan having nuclear capability.
“We gave Taiwan atomic bombs?” Grant asked, barely able to keep unease out of his tone. “Isn’t that like giving Sirhan Sirhan an M-sixteen?”
“Uncle Sam can be very generous,” Spivey said in a frequency just above Fido whistle level. “Especially when China has been thumping its chest and making suspect moves, politically, giving that old war horse, the defense minister, more and more power.”
Shaking his head, Peter said, “Still, I do not understand the logic of giving Taiwan, a little island country that—”
“No one cares about?”
Peter shook his head. “A nuclear weapon. Pardon my French, but my God.”
Spivey gripped Peter’s knee. “To those now in office, it’s the only means we had of stopping a Chinese invasion. We’ve known for weeks that they mean business. Six divisions of Chi-com marines on the beach at the Taipei Four Seasons by this time next week. But it’s not up and running.”
“Sir, not up and what? The nukes?”
Spivey grinned. “Batteries not included. Some assembly is required.”
“Do the Chinese know that?” Grant wondered.
Spivey said, “That the nuke isn’t live? I doubt it. CNN doesn’t tell them everything.”
“How many bombs have we gifted them?” Peter asked.
“One would be enough to cause China to lose some sleep, get an itchy trigger finger,” Spivey replied, then changed subjects. “You mentioned the four Chinese rockets to Li Cai Wen?”
“Five now, maybe six. I haven’t been to the office to verify this,” Peter told him. “My hunch is that these birds are nuclear-tipped and hovering at the same altitude as our command-and communication birds. That was Li’s conclusion anyway.”
“Set them off and knock out everything,” Spivey said. “Makes for a dark world.”
“If it comes to that, sir, then yes,” Grant admitted. “If Li was telling me the truth, their preemptive aim before Taiwan is to disrupt the entire electronic world if we don’t play ball.”
“Then, no bones, we’re fucked,” Spivey said. “Oh, and for Christ’s sake, don’t swear around the president.”
Pe
rhaps the foremost feature of the Oval Office, beyond its shape, is the Resolute Desk, used by almost every president since Taft, with some notable exceptions—Johnson and Nixon among them. Originally a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880, the desk was constructed from the timber of the retired British ship, H.M.S. Resolute, and is intricately carved, if not particularly large.
The president sat with his right foot propped on the edge, scratching his ankle with the heel of his shoe. Behind him were three tall windows with a tranquil view of the green trees and brilliant flowers and discreet secret service agents outside.
On the phone, the president, resolute, was speaking with the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China—aka Taiwan, aka Formosa—soon to be a sovereign nation, an act of defiance against the People’s Republic of China and a brazen declaration sure to have repercussions globally. Though the minister’s words were unheard, Grant could guess the substance of her message by what the American president was saying.
“It’s a mistake,” the president said forcefully. “If you proceed with this course, your country is asking for major trouble. From what I understand of China’s position, expect an embargo, at the very least.” The president pinched the bridge of his nose. “Around here? My generals think you are in for a can of jumbo-sized whup-ass.”
Not at all curious, Peter Grant thought, that this president was hand-wringing over the danger of a foreign conflict. After the neo-isolationist platform of his predecessor’s America First, Second and Third, this first-termer had taken the pulse of the nation and read the polls knowing that the citizenry of the USA was sick of war. A pundit had called the president a “big picture Mitt Romney capitalist with a brain for business but not for the intricacies of government.” He was also one of the last politicos to think that communism was still an issue, though on the campaign trail he’d owned up to the fact that Red China had become Greenback China.