Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  It was the first day of my term and until I decided otherwise I had quite a few people working for me. Carmichael’s Washington staff had remained for the most part intact, keeping as quiet as possible in the hope they wouldn’t be noticed and then fired. Of course, they had been busy—frantic, really—looking for work, sending résumés out to other congressmen, to lobbying groups, law firms, newspapers. But in the meanwhile, they had been collecting their salaries. They ought to have been at this party, but I think they decided that every day out of my sight was another day’s feeding at the federal trough. The only one of them to show up was a tall, stout, boxy-faced, gray-haired woman named Dina Jensen, who had been Carmichael’s secretary for six years and who rightly understood that she was, at least for quite a while, wholly indispensable.

  “This has been the worst week of my life,” she said, coming to my side, tapping her plastic cup against mine: we were both sticking to the club soda.

  “What happened to you?” I asked. She was a tall woman, just about my height, with the solitary, intelligent gray eyes of a nanny in a Victorian children’s book.

  “Oh, the moving. I despise moving. I’ve been living in the same apartment for eighteen years because I can’t bear the thought of packing everything in boxes. It makes everything seem so impermanent. I don’t know why that frightens me.”

  “I do,” I said. “It is a total drag.”

  “Well, anyhow, all of Jerry’s personal effects have been sent. He couldn’t come for them himself, of course. And tons of God knows what have been carted over to your new offices.”

  “I hope you’ll continue to work for the district,” I said. “I really do hope you stay on.”

  “Well, I may as well,” said Dina Jensen, allowing herself a small smile of relief. “After all that sweat labor.”

  The tall windows in Germain’s office went cobalt as the day turned to evening. Isaac and Adele had left with Emil Z. Nichols. Danny, Caroline, and my parents caught the six o’clock shuttle back to New York. I felt unaccountably relieved to see them go. They were from another reality and I needed to cut away.

  Caroline was the first to say good-bye to me. She held me by both hands and then looked around to make sure we wouldn’t be overheard. “Are you OK?” she asked. “I know what you’ve been going through.”

  “I’m not OK,” I said. “But I’m OK about not being OK.”

  “Ha ha?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She looked at me with the peacefulness of family love and then squeezed my hands and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m going to have dinner with Eric when he and the boys get back,” she whispered into my ear.

  “Good,” I whispered back to her. “It’ll help me with the black voters.

  She stepped back and smiled and then, abruptly, held me in a fast, hard embrace.

  Next, I said good-bye to Danny. He’d been drinking hard, but his eyes were sharp. “Maybe I can come to New York next week,” I said to him, “and we can do something.”

  “I’m going to San Francisco,” he said. “I met a guy in Toronto. His family owns all this California real estate. And I’ve got him interested in investing some nice money in Willow Books. That’s the fucking pain of this whole thing. I’m always one hundred thousand short of making a go of it. You know, if I could just push it over the hump, it would be so easy.”

  “The guy from Toronto’s in San Francisco?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Hey, Fielding. I’m sorry I’ve been shitty to you. I’ve been in a terrible mood. But, you know, the nice thing about long relationships is you’ll have a lot of chances to get even.”

  “OK,” I said. “Just make sure I do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Take care of yourself. Don’t let anyone kill you. Not even yourself.”

  Danny smiled: it made all the oozy charm of the Illinois delegation seem like the gruntings of whores. Danny with a grin was a boy again; a true smile put him on the banks of the river with his bare feet in the cool blue water.

  Finally, I said good-bye to my parents. They looked small and vulnerable in their overcoats and they both looked sleepy and shy, like children who’ve stayed too long at the party. Mom’s hands were icy; Dad was looking at me as if I were suddenly a stranger, worthy of respect.

  “Greatest day of my life,” Dad said, with a serious man-to-mannish nod.

  “We’re so proud of you, Fielding,” said Mom, glancing over my shoulder into the hidden camera that she imagined recorded the precious moments of her life.

  “Just don’t forget who you are,” said Dad, grabbing my hand as if it were something he had to capture.

  “As if I ever knew,” I answered, but with a smile so he wouldn’t have to take it seriously.

  The party was breaking up. Dina Jensen had delayed her going home to see if I needed anything and I asked her to help me get from Germain’s office to mine. We took an elevator down to the ground floor and then found another bank of elevators and took one of those up to where we would be working for the next year or so. We were going against traffic; all the lawmakers and the office help were waiting for down elevators, on their way home. There were wheelchair-tire skid marks against the gray elevator walls, a scent of cigar smoke. Dina was softly humming to herself. Her features were placid. Her eyes seemed to be looking at nothing. The elevator went to the second floor, the third. Her humming sounded so pleasant; a warmth went through me, slowly, thickly, like honey out of a broken jar.

  For some reason, I said her name to myself: Dina. DINA was the acronym of the Chilean secret police, the far-ranging death squad of the junta. It stood for Departamento de Inteligencia Nacional. Its leader was a madman named Contreras and it had probably been he who had called for Francisco and Gisela’s assassination.

  I must have begun to stare at Dina Jensen because she slowly turned and looked questioningly at me. Yet what could I tell her? Was she with me for a reason? Even as I stood in that elevator with my heart going cold and going fast and a smell of my own madness up high and back in my nose, like a faraway scent of rain, even then I more or less believed that her name was merely her name and had nothing to do with Chilean secret police, nothing to do with Sarah. My life was simply too heavy and it had struck that fragile, chaotic element called chance like a hammer smashing into a ball of mercury and sent it flying in all directions.

  Dina Jensen led me to my offices. They were small, and looked smaller for the jumble of cartons and the overturned furniture, the ashen patches on the wall where the previous tenant had hung her citations and memorabilia. There was a small black sofa pushed up against one wall, a few reading chairs here and there, and two wooden desks, one resting on top of the other, face, to face. The desk with its legs in the air had its drawers secured with masking tape. Masking tape had also been used to wrap the exit door of the ornately carved cuckoo clock that hung on the wall. As we came in, the hour was just striking and I heard the imprisoned cuckoo pummeling against the shut door, its call muffled and distant.

  “Is your heart sinking?” asked Dina Jensen.

  I shook my head no. And it wasn’t. The squalor was oddly comforting.

  “I didn’t want to make any final decisions about how to put it all together until we had a chance to talk,” said Dina.

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “We hadn’t even gotten the phones straight until yesterday,” she said, shrugging.

  Just then, one of the Capitol guards tapped on the open door. He was a man in his fifties with silver hair; the sole of his left shoe was built up four or five inches to compensate for a short leg. He carried a gun on one hip and on the other was a walkie-talkie.

  “Oh hello, Harry,” said Dina.

  “Hello, Miss Jensen,” said the security guard. He had an airy, wavering voice, as full of holes as a fishnet. “I thought I heard you here.” He smiled and glanced at me and then shifted his watery blue eyes back to Dina: he was
waiting to be introduced with all the slightly injured pride and propriety of a nineteenth-century suitor.

  “This is Congressman Pierce, Harry,” said Dina.

  “Hi,” I said, putting out my hand.

  “Will you be working late?” he asked me.

  “I think so,” I said. “Tonight, anyhow.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize,” said Dina.

  “No, that’s OK,” I said. “You go on and do what you were going to do. I’d do better on my own right now, anyhow. I just want to go through some things.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.” I heard my voice as if it were echoing. Didn’t know if it was the room or just nerves.

  “Well, I’ll be going off duty in an hour,” said Harry. “I’ll leave word that you’re here and when you get ready to leave you just let us know. OK?”

  A few minutes later, I was alone. I closed the door between the reception office and the outer corridor and with my back against that door I looked around me. Cardboard boxes from Mayflower Movers were in a druidical semicircle around the two desks, each one identified by Dina’s bold hand: REFERENCE MATERIALS, SUPPLIES, CLIPPINGS, STATIONERY. There were framed maps on the sofa, newspapers piled onto the chairs, lamps with their cords coiled around their bases stuck in the corners. The wastepaper baskets were filled with white bags from a nearby takeout restaurant, each one printed with a picture of a steaming cup of coffee in which the steam dreamily takes the shape of a doughnut, a hamburger, a roasted chicken.The overhead lights were fluorescent and one of the tubes was dying, shuddering slightly and singing that insecty siren song as it went. I turned it off by the wall switch and the room leapt back and disappeared: I was in total darkness. I turned the lights on again and walked slowly from the reception office into another, smaller office that would be used for staff, and then, through that, into the larger of the offices, which would be mine.

  My desk had been assembled and placed near the window— though the window itself, like a window in a desperate hotel, looked only onto the dark neutrality of a nearby wall. A bouquet of flowers had been placed on the glass-topped desk. Carnations, daisies: very affordable. I sniffed them but they had no scent. They were stuck in a green vase and there was a card taped to a sprig of the greenery. It said “Welcome to Washington!” and it was signed by Dina and four other holdovers from Carmichael’s staff. I felt a flush of emotion, as if I actually held in my hand a genuine token of their goodwill toward me. When I realized how ridiculous it was to feel anything like that, I squeezed my eyes shut, as if the darkness within me was lesson enough. I shoved the card into my back pocket. I was wearing a blue suit, like any other defendant. Someone in the boiler room must have been defying the energy-conscious president because the radiators were pumping out heat and it was hellish in my office. I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves. I sat on the edge of my desk. The desk was clean except for a small box marked CORRESPONDENCE. That piqued my interest. Nothing like reading someone else’s mail, though it did occur to me that if the box had been left on the desk it was probably meant for my eyes.

  I was thirsty. The heat in that room. The inevitable dehydration of a long rolling journey to madness. I slid off the desk with the idea of finding something in the office to drink and then coming back and looking through the box marked CORRESPONDENCE. I wandered around, hoping to spy a can of Coke someone had forgotten. No luck there, but there was a small room off the middle office in which there was a tiny refrigerator and a sink. Next to the sink was a red plastic drainboard in which stood six plastic coffee cups, each bearing the Illinois state seal. I picked up one of the cups and felt an indescribable sense of unease, as if all my inner breath had suddenly become a storm. I placed the cup down next to the sink, as if letting it go would stop whatever was happening to me. But of course that did no good. I was aware of the earth’s ceaseless pilgrimage through space and heard the sound of the wind that was displaced by the long hopeless orbit. I turned the faucet on and brownish water came thundering into the aluminum sink. I waited for the stream to clear and then put my hand into it. I couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold; I could only feel the force of its beating against my palm.

  I pressed my fingers against my face, hoping the wetness could revive me, but all I was really aware of was the weight of my hand over my eyes and nose, like the hand of an attacker. I had only one coherent thought: I’ve got to get out of here, and I believe what I meant was not to get out of that office, or even that building, or even that city, but out of my life, out of the maze through which I’d been walking with all that appalling confidence, as if will were a true compass and desire a true destination, but which now suddenly revealed itself as a path leading only to itself, a mere form of confinement, a path fate places you on when it has nothing better for you to do.

  I turned off the water. The absence of that sound made things a little easier. I stooped down and opened the refrigerator. There was one can of root beer and I took it out. It was one of those pop-top cans, in which you pull a tab and a small aluminum circle goes down into the soda and lets you drink through the hole. It struck me as odd that a society that puts such a high value on sterility in its packaging would think nothing of drinking soft drinks into which had been immersed the outside of the can, without any particular thought that those little disks we were dunking in our soda might be covered with bacteria. I stared at the can of soda and wondered how it could be that no one had thought of this.

  That was when I heard a slight dull tapping on the outer door. At first I thought it was just something else coming loose in my brain but when I listened closely it seemed clearly to be coming from without and so I moved into the reception office and stood near the cartons and listened again. And this time I was certain someone was at the door. I thought it was old Harry or his replacement, making the rounds. I turned around to see what time it was. It was just seven o’clock and the imprisoned cuckoo was once again trying to escape through the taped doors. Its mechanical nightmarish voice seemed to have gone hoarse with frustration.

  “Who is it?” I said. But there was no answer. I waited for whoever it was to make the next move.

  And then mere was a knocking again, a shy tapping, a one-knuckler. Three fast taps and then two slow ones. I walked quickly to the door and opened it, thinking that now the best thing to do was to get them before they had a chance to get away—like an old solitary man trying to catch the neighborhood brats who’ve been pounding on his storm door and then running away.

  And so I opened the door and Sarah was standing there and the first thing I felt was an overwhelming calmness. She was wearing a black wool coat and the wool was sparkling because there was rain on it and her dark hair was braided around her head and her dark hair was sparkling from the rain, too. She put her fingers to her lips when she saw me, the fingers of her left hand, and her right hand was in a red woolen glove and her right hand was holding the other red woolen glove. Her eyes were a lighter green than I had been remembering and they were larger, too. I looked at her and I was waiting for the calmness to turn, to break out into something fast and fierce, but the calmness only deepened, like the delicate color on a pale wall will deepen when you give it its second coat of paint.

  She looked behind her and when she faced me again I saw she was afraid. She stepped into the office and I closed the door and something told me to lock it so I did. The smell of rain came off her, a wild smell, strange and inhuman. She had a scratch, a red line, in the deep crease between her chin and her lower lip. Her lips were pale; her teeth looked uncared for. And older. Of course older. A few more years than the actual years that had passed. She wasn’t really beautiful. I remember thinking that. I jiggled the door to make certain it was locked and now we were facing each other and still neither of us had spoken. It was very grave and full standing there with her, but I needed to touch her and of course she understood that and did not move her hand or even her eyes as I reached for her an
d placed my fingers on her bare hand—so cold, but her hands had always been a little icy, even in summer, even when we made love and they touched the small of my back, my hips, guiding me.

  It was not spirit. I will say this one more time. It was not spirit, it was flesh. It was flesh and it was bone and it was wool and it was rain and, above all, above every other thing, it was her, it was Sarah.

  “You knew I would come,” she said, looking at her hand where I had touched it.

  I shook my head no.

  “But didn’t you see me? I was up there, looking down, when you were standing in front of Tip O’Neill taking your oath. I saw you look up.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  And then abruptly, as if I had fallen through a trapdoor in my own soul, the calmness was gone and I had a terrible feeling that what I was going to do next was strike her with all my strength, right across the face, and this thought was so powerful that it showed itself to me and I could see myself hitting her and see her staggering back after the blow and even that was not enough to express the anger I felt. I stepped away from her and looked down at the ground. I was breathing heavily. I could hear my breath and it was bringing me back.