Dylan was suddenly aware that he and Meghan were the only two patrons in the bar. The television above the bar, which had been off when they arrived, was now on, displaying images from a riot that had broken out downtown at IDD Energy Stadium. The sound was turned down—Johnny Cash was still playing in the background, letting everyone know what happens when the man comes around—but the news crawl at the bottom of the screen added details to the images of riot police, of protesters with bandanas wrapped around their noses and mouths, of a young woman lying unconscious on the concrete, of Heffernan’s people spinning the day’s events, all while the stadium burned in the background.
“No,” Dylan said, signaling to the bartender, “I want you to stay. Let’s see if I have any stories about my old man you haven’t already heard.”
The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 3
To Dylan,
When Michael Morrison approached me to run under the Progress Party banner, I thought it might be an opportunity to vanquish my feeling of alienation—to connect with my fellow man. Instead, my alienation has been amplified. Newspapers in Tiber City are heralding a new “political awakening” driven by an “unprecedented connection” between candidate and citizenry. If only they knew the darker truth: that the connection is completely one-sided. My life is a blur of legislative sessions, fundraisers, fundraisers, fundraisers; rallies and late-night phone calls and people whispering terrible things in my ear. I miss votes on the floor. No one cares. I am told I have star power. I am told I am the voice of a generation. I can only recall the past in the third person, as though I were watching a movie: my parents, my childhood, my first love—all storyboard concepts I am familiar with but don’t know by heart.
I miss you and your mother but I have begun to spend less time at home because I am afraid; my behavior is growing so erratic, so unpredictable. I have lashed at your mother on several occasions—my mask of control is growing harder to sustain. There are periods where I black out for 10, 20 minutes; sometimes for up to an hour: I’ll come to on the couch, in the shower, even on the kitchen floor, sobbing.
So I look for other ways to eclipse this growing darkness, the anxiety and unease that waits for me around every corner of every anonymous convention center or when I sit alone in my darkened hotel room, after the rallies and the flesh-pressing, the flashbulbs and fake smiles, staring out across the illuminated skylines of a thousand cities, every single one the same, glass after glass of scotch to wash down the fistfuls of pills I’ve started taking. I watch the people go home from work and the light slowly leak from the land. The neon lights roar to life and a new wave of people wash across the city streets and below me there is life: some good, some bad but it is all life and it is in these moments when my sense of alienation is most acute. There is a rhythm to the world but while I can apprehend this rhythm, which I can understand as a concept, as something I might learn from a textbook, it is forever beyond my grasp. I feel as though something crucial is missing, that I am somehow incomplete and therefore I can only sense this other; I can never experience it directly.
So instead, I sit here in the darkness, numbing myself until they come to get me. And when they do, I will turn on again, like a machine. I will stand before the very people I now watch and they will believe in me, despite the fact that I have come to believe in nothing.
Love,
Your Father
Chapter 12
Tiber City
Aug. 31, 2015
7:16 p.m.
Springwood Rest Home had always disturbed Dylan. It was not simply the fact that the woman who gave birth to him was essentially incarcerated here, doped up for the majority of her waking hours and dependant on an anonymous, revolving cadre of administrators. That was certainly part of his disgust but there was something more to Dylan’s loathing of the hospital—a still-evolving philosophical revulsion.
Part of this loathing, Dylan considered as he approached the main building, the rain coming down hard and soaking his jacket, was generated by the phrase “rest home.” Over the past few decades, a vast societal consensus had formed: By adding or subtracting a few syllables, man could put enough distance been himself and reality to make it through the day. Of course, reality wasn’t altered; it was just enhanced.
In Dylan’s opinion, this trend—the embrace of the euphemism—only made the inevitable breakdowns in civilized behavior all the more atrocious. It was as though when the stark realities of life finally slithered their way under, over, around, and through all the artificial constructs man threw up, the strain was too great and people just snapped. And not snapped like punching a hole in the wall, but snapped like shooting up your office then cannibalizing your boss. Or driving off a bridge with the family in the car because the kids were possessed and DCS frowned upon DIY exorcism—that kind of snapped.
One such solution devised to keep these existential demons at bay was the rest home. But unlike, say, substituting police action for genocide or vision clearance engineer for a fucking window washer, the name rest home was quite apropos; just not in the sense most people applied it. A rest home, Dylan had come to discover, was not designed to provide “rest” for its occupants. However, it did provide a great deal of rest for those on the outside, relieving the arbiters of sanity of any further responsibility. Keeping the undesirables under chemically induced lock and key was just another means of keeping reality at bay; no need to interrupt life.
Although Dylan assumed that there was such a thing as genuine, biological insanity, he also knew that, sometimes, people just broke. And when our fellow citizens shattered like porcelain dolls swept off an end table, society couldn’t be bothered to put down the remote or log off the Internet long enough to consider why. Not that Dylan had been interested in playing existential investigator after his mother collapsed. He was as guilty as everyone else. When Dylan’s mother broke, he never asked why. He simply accepted it, swallowing the medical jargon bandied about by the legions of shrinks whom the court-appointed guardians paraded through his parents’ home just like he swallowed the drab off-blue pills pressed into his palm.
Over the past year, Dylan’s visits to his mother—while still erratic—had at least begun to increase. Maybe it was his growing sense of guilt over his own culpability, his recognition that he should have pushed harder to learn why she broke, why his old man decided to redecorate a hotel suite with his frontal lobe. It was because of these reasons that, a week after his 24th birthday, he was standing in front of the entranceway to Springwood Rest Home.
From the exterior, Springwood was nondescript. No freaky ramparts with gnarled stone fingers clawing at the heavens. No electric fences ready to stop foaming escapees before they could contaminate the sane. In fact, Dylan still remembered the night before the first time he visited his mother at Springwood: He hadn’t slept a wink, terrified by visions of a cruel warden, leather straps, and shock therapy. The real shock, however, came at how normal Springwood appeared. Dylan remembered initially finding comfort in the sanitized confines of Springwood. It was such an enormous relief to realize his childhood preconception of mental institutions was so divorced from reality that, departing after his first visit, he considered that Springwood might in fact be the best thing for his mother. But as time passed, and Dylan spent more time at Springwood, he began to dread the place, although not at all for any of the reasons that fueled his initial nightmares.
Rather, the horrors of Springwood were more subtle and thus, felt Dylan, much more sinister. For starters, the entire operation depended on a deluge of anti-psychotics and tranquilizers. And not just the shit Dylan would pop to come down off a coke binge, but hardcore stuff that left the residents subdued for days.
But it wasn’t just the over-reliance on a one-size-fits-all doping scheme that freaked Dylan out: A distinctive heaviness mingled with the smell of antiseptics, suffocating the entire grounds, so while there was never any overt indication that anything was wrong at Spring
wood, everything felt wrong. The physical grounds were pretty, but in an absolutely typical fashion. The hospital’s exterior was the same as its surrounding grounds: by no means an eyesore, but instantly forgettable. It was as though someone felt the use of color or architectural imagination would have sent the inmates into a frenzy, or at least wake them from their FDA-approved stupor.
The two glass doors serving as the entrance to Springwood were “automatic,” or so a large yellow sticker proclaimed in bold black font, but as Dylan approached nothing happened. Dylan took a step back in case he had moved too quickly past the motion detector—nothing. Dylan could see through the doors, past the metal detector toward the front desk, which was deserted. The wind kicked up, a hot gust sweeping sheets of rain sideways, and Dylan was pounding on the glass, shouting. Finally the doors came to life with an electric whir, moving out toward Dylan in a slow, stuttering arc. He moved through the doorway and into the lobby of Springwood Rest Home.
After emptying his pockets—all he had was a Heffernan for Progress flyer, which on his way out of his building that morning someone had shoved into his hands, and, for some inexplicable reason, he had kept it—into a filthy plastic bin waiting on conveyor belt, Dylan took off his jacket, laid it next to the bin, and stepped through a metal detector while the conveyor belt carried his belongings past a security guard—mid-30s, obese, with a mess of red curly hair—who was so engrossed in whatever was showing on the television mounted on the other side of the room that he didn’t even offer a perfunctory grunt as X-rays of Dylan’s iPhone and keys drifted past his monitor. On the other side of the metal detector, Dylan waited for the bin to emerge from the X-ray machine, shifting his weight from his right leg to his left leg then back to his right as he tapped his fingers against the end of the conveyor belt. Finally the machine spit out the bin and Dylan collected his belongings, threw his jacket on, signed into the visitors log and moved toward the door at the end of the lobby. A few seconds later, he was through the door and into Springwood’s main wing.
As Dylan’s footsteps echoed down the linoleum corridor, cries, not unlike the bleating of sheep, became audible, drifting out from several half-open doors along the stark white hallway. It was primitive noise—all other forms of meaningful communication were forsaken once one entered the residential wings of Springwood. After all, the rest home was not designed to cure. It was designed contain. Yet in this amorphous alien noise Dylan sensed an impulse of resistance to the heavy medication thrust upon Springwood residents. Physical resistance was unlikely; the heavy sanitized air of the hospital had strangled most of this dissidence long ago.
Now all that remained was these soft yet insistent moans, cries proclaiming that there was something sinister behind the well-manicured front gate and colorful foliage that greeted the residents as they stared out the windows during the daily recreational hour. Even after her break from reality—another euphemism for “fucking crazy”—Dylan’s mother had continued to project an aura of defiance, some internal commitment to struggle against the shadow draining her identity. Yet, over the course of her stay at Springwood, Dylan’s mother slipped even further into her insanity, slowly yielding ground to the madness.
Last time he had come to visit—three, maybe four months ago—his mother had not spoken a single world. Instead she sat next to Dylan, staring out the window, breathing heavily through her mouth. Dylan could still recall fighting the urge to shake her until the past and the Halcion tumbled out onto the cold linoleum floor. Her once striking blond hair had begun to give way to a washed-out gray and when he kissed her on the forehead as he got up to leave, she began to cry. When Dylan asked her what the matter was, her mouth opened, then shut. Then she turned away from him and resumed staring through the walls and into nothingness.
120. 121. 122. The room numbers seemed to rush by. Each time he went to visit his mother, things seemed too fast, out of control—like he was propelled down the hall, rather than moving under his own volition.123.
Dylan stopped in front of 123, staring at the stark white door to his mother’s room. He used to bring decorations for her door—pictures of their family’s old beach house, of his mother and her sisters at her college graduation, of his mother standing on the edge of a pier smiling as the sun set behind her, of the life she used to have and love—but the staff took them down. No more pictures, thank you, they said, with a practiced smile perfected by human resource directors and mid-level government bureaucrats over the course of the last century.
Dylan knocked softly on the door. There was no response. He knocked again. Still no response. Maybe she was sleeping. He pushed the door open a crack.
“Mom?”
His mother was sitting on the edge of a crisply made-up twin bed, her back turned to him as she stared out the window across the manicured lawn toward something. Toward nothing. This was how it had been since his father pussied out and pulled the trigger—she just turned off, unable to deal with what happened. Or, perhaps more likely, why it happened.
Dylan walked into the room, wincing as he placed his hand over her terry cloth covered back, protruding shoulder blades only hinting at the frailty Dylan could sense surrounding her.
“Mom,” he said again, moving around the side of the bed before taking a seat on one of the wood and vinyl chairs provided for visitors, chairs Dylan swore were designed to minimize the length of Springwood visitations.
“How are you?”
When his mother turned to face him, turned away from wherever she was, whenever she was, he could see—clearer than he had seen anything for quite some time—the extent to which this place was destroying Elizabeth Fitzgerald. She had aged terribly: Gone was her Vanity Fair beauty, replaced by dry, tight skin pulled taut across her stooped frame. Drained of all color, her legendary blonde tresses were listless strands of gray, the same color as her skin, pulled backward into a bun.
“My God,” she whispered. “You look so much like your father.”
Dylan just nodded and smiled as he moved to embrace his mother. But she pulled back, raising her hand and pressing it against his check as she studied him. The room smelled like cleaning products and stale perfume—the glamour of his mother’s old life strangled by the hyper-sanitary existence that replaced it. She was breathing hard through her mouth now, her warm breath wafting toward him in waves and he began drifting around her room, fingering the leaves on the fake plant resting on the wooden dresser in the corner of the room, telling her how good she looked, how healthy, asking about the food, the staff, if she made any new friends but when he noticed her wedding ring on a glass finger on her nightstand he fell silent.
“Why are you here,” she asked, her voice a flat monotone.
“It’s my birthday,” Dylan replied. That it was days after the anniversary of his father’s death went unspoken. “Actually, my birthday was a couple of days ago but…” he trailed off, tired of lying.
“But I just couldn’t make it down any sooner.” Because I’m a piece of shit he wanted to add but instead just looked away, out the window and into the rain still strafing the landscape. The air looked heavy and Dylan could see a fog forming along the perimeter of the grounds, pressing forward toward the institution, the natural world determined to asphyxiate the rest home.
“I’m never coming home, am I?” his mother asked, breaking the silence.
Dylan turned back toward his mother, who, now sitting in one of the broken down chairs provided for visitors, looked smaller than he could ever remember.
“No Mom. That’s not true at all. You’ll be home as soon as the doctors say you’re well.”
She snorted. “Well. What does that mean? They give me so many pills, how can they even tell? I…” she paused, her voice cracking, “I don’t even remember what I felt like…before coming here. I can still recall everything. Sometimes…sometimes I dream about the past, about when you were a baby…but mostly about your father. But when I dream, I never feel anything. I simply observe. I have th
is one dream where I’m with your father in that hotel, on that night. And I’m watching him put on his suit, drain the bottle of whiskey, load the gun. But the whole time, I feel nothing. Even when he puts the barrel in his mouth.”
“But Mom, that’s good, right? Isn’t that what you wanted,” Dylan inquired. “To not be afraid? To be able to get past what Dad did to us?”
“Maybe once. I don’t know anymore.”
She paused, any remaining hint of color vanishing from hard, dry cheeks.
“What is that?” she asked.
“What is what?”
“Sticking out of your coat pocket. That flyer. What is that for?”
“Oh that,” Dylan said, confused at the shift in the conversation, at his mother’s sudden interest in the flyer. “When I was on my way here someone was passing them out by the subway…lotta people have been talking about this guy lately so I just took one. I meant to throw it out but…”
“Give it to me.”
“What?”
“Dylan. Give me that flyer.”
His face frozen in a quizzical half-smile, Dylan reached into his pocket and pulled free the still-damp, crumbled red and blue flyer, smoothing it against his chest as he studied his mother as she stood in front of him, her arm reaching out for the flyer, her hand opening and closing and then opening again in accordance with some internal rhythm.
“Yeah…sure thing, Mom…it’s just a stupid flyer.”
But before he could even finish his sentence his mother was ripping the flyer from his hand, holding it up toward the harsh LED lighting imbedded in the ceiling, and Jack Heffernan was staring back from the flyer at both of them, and it was in that moment—maybe it was the lighting or the angle of the shot or the way the rain made the ink run, blurring the details of the photo—the would-be president’s resemblance to Dylan’s father was uncanny.
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