The Frankenstein Candidate

by Kolhatkar, Vinay

  It was as if Colin read her thoughts.

  “She is only thirty-two and new at this game. But she has this way, a way of finding material and exploiting it, and I need someone to take the pressure off Larry.”

  “I see.”

  “Your role, Olivia, if you want it, is to be my understudy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “At the end of the day, we could go too far and lose sight of the big picture. We are here for the people. And I do not know anyone who holds that dearer than you.”

  Olivia smiled.

  “What this means, though, is that you will be part of the campaign, in effect. You will be part of the strategy meetings with Larry and Katrina. You will need to accompany us on the campaign trail. We hit Iowa straight after Thanksgiving, on December second, so we fly out Monday, a week from tonight.”

  He let that float in the air before he added, “Sorry about the late notice. I don’t need an answer right now. I know you have two lovely young children, and God knows there is enough here in Washington to worry about anyway. But perhaps you could tell me by Wednesday.”

  “I’ll certainly think about it,” Olivia replied.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Larry Fox. He looked a lot older than she remembered.

  Larry had not even closed the door when Katrina Marshella made an entrance. She was strikingly beautiful, like a Hollywood A-list star. Olivia had not expected that.

  They exchanged a few trivialities and got down to business.

  “Well, it is indeed a tumultuous time in America,” Larry said. “This election is shaping up like no other. There are voters out there, in the tens of millions, harboring deep suspicions. Last election, in November 2016, the voter turnout was 44 percent of the population, the least that it has been for a very long time.

  “Now, what does this tell us? One, that voters are largely disillusioned with both the major parties. Two, that they simply do not believe there is a credible alternative. Now, the second part is actually the good part. This means that if a candidate staked out a good middle ground, neither left nor right, neither hawk nor dove, neither conservative nor liberal, he could accomplish what Barack Obama did in 2008—which is to bring new voters into the equation.

  “And if you can do that, everything is suddenly up for grabs. Even the most red of states.

  “The question is what is the message we need to get out there that will not just keep the faithful but bring new people into the fold, Mr. Spain.”

  “Colin,” he said. “Call me Colin.”

  “What’s the common theme, the common thread?” Katrina asked.

  Larry continued, “I think it is Middle America. We stand for Middle America. The middle road, the middle class. We are not ideological, we are practical. Practical, family values, that’s what America wants. But most importantly, we govern. Govern in the interests of Middle America, we compromise when we need to.”

  “I like it,” Colin said.

  “A touch too predictable,” Katrina said.

  “What do you think, Olivia?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Olivia found herself saying. Her mind was repeating what Larry had just said—practical, family values is what America wants—weren’t they supposed to think about what America needs?

  “You don’t know or you don’t like it?”

  She didn’t want to disparage the old sage. Diplomatic words slipped from her lips. “I think it does not differentiate you enough. It may be enough for the nomination, but perhaps it is not enough for the real race.”

  “I don’t mind that,” Colin said. “The first challenge is to win the nomination.”

  “You will,” Larry added, “it will be clear by Super Tuesday who you are against, and we can then adjust the bigger game plan.”

  A text message sent to Larry Fox made the four of them sit up and turn the TV on. An announcement was expected.

  It was the billionaire investor Frank Stein.

  Frank Stein had announced his candidacy, earlier than people expected. He said he would have a program called the Ten Commandments. Commandments that would transform America, make it glorious again.

  “Just a gimmick,” Larry said, “but not a bad one for a newcomer. Anyway, Stein is not someone I would be worried about.”

  The TV was still on. Frank Stein was saying, “The major political parties hire spin doctors who spin meaningless slogans. Before we can think of governing, we need to get rid of the slogans and the bromides. You the people have every right to expect that your elected representatives stop sidestepping every difficult question. Exercise that right, starting now. No more rhetoric, that’s the message for today. Thank you for your time.”

  “Isn’t that itself rhetoric?” asked Olivia half-heartedly, wanting to belong, desperately, to the elite club whose doors had just opened to her. What better way was there than to demonize the opposition?

  Larry agreed, “Yes, in a sense, he is sloganeering too. Even senators and governors need complex bills broken down into simple formulae. The people? Rhetoric is the only thing they will ever respond to.”

  Olivia thought she had handled herself well on the first day on the elite circuit—she had expressed herself and offended no one. She belonged—maybe that’s where she did belong, an even higher place than the Senate—in the ranks of the rulers, men and women who could change things.

  5

  In the Home of the Homeless

  Olivia left the meeting on Capitol Hill, energized by the vote of confidence expressed in her. Her cell phone beeped as soon as she turned it on. There was a message from one of her assistants—they had found him!

  It had taken almost three weeks for her staff to locate the man she was looking for: the bearded giant. When Olivia had got into the ambulance with Jacques, she’d had the presence of mind to take his picture with her cell phone. It wasn’t a close up, and the man had since shaved. Nevertheless, they had eventually found him. Now she knew his name: Dan Curtis. She knew where he lived. She was on her way.

  She drove there herself. It was a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the District zone, not far from where the incident with her driver occurred.

  She stopped half a block away from her destination. Perhaps he’s not at home, she thought. She should have rung first, but she was keen on surprising him. With her car still parked, she called his cell. A voice message confirmed that it was indeed a Dan Curtis whose cell phone she had called.

  She made her way to a decrepit apartment building in an inner-city neighborhood famous for its crime statistics. The streets were quiet and littered with waste. At least three older men were lying on the sidewalk, a bottle or two of whiskey at their side. Perhaps I’ll leave a message to meet elsewhere. But Compassion, the name of her father’s voice, was inside her head, urging her to go. Her legs obeyed even as her mind hesitated.

  Two African American youths stood near the entrance to the building. They looked wasted. She strode on, unfazed.

  The pungent odor of garbage swirled in her nostrils. One of the youths whistled. Then the other one yelled at her.

  “Hey, babe, nice ass you got there, huh?”

  She ignored him. He sniggered at her. The other one jostled his friend with his elbow. Undeterred, she stepped into the building.

  Once inside, she looked for a residents’ name board. There was none. She looked around. She did not have the apartment number, and the last thing she wanted to do was to knock on every door.

  “Looking for something?” An old woman startled her from behind.

  “Uhh, yes…Dan Curtis. Does he live here?”

  The old woman looked her over from head to toe without saying a word. She didn’t need to. Her look said, “You do not belong here, lady.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t, I guess,” she said. Fighting Compassion, Olivia decided it was better to wait until she connected by phone and began to retrace her steps.

  “Fifth floor, second door. The door is painted,” the old la
dy said on her way out.

  Olivia walked to the stairwell and commenced her nervous ascent up the creaky floors. She had an eerie feeling that the youths were following her, just a floor behind. But there was no turning back. If Dan wasn’t there, she’d have to confront them on her way out.

  She stopped on the landing between the fourth and the fifth floor. She heard footsteps below and saw a glimpse of the two youths. They stopped.

  She hurried up the last floor. Her heart was beating fast. Why did Compassion make her ignore such obvious risks? She thought of Georgia and Natasha and Gary. How she wished Gary was with her here now.

  The second door was the only one with paint on it. She knocked. There was no answer. The youths came around. The cat-calling one wore a nasty sneer.

  She knocked again, hard.

  Someone finally answered. Over six foot six and wide, he filled the doorway. Although the beard was gone, she recognized him. He nodded, as though he expected her. She glanced at the stairwell as he opened the door, noticing that the youths were gone.

  “Jesus, what are you doing by yourself in this part of town?”

  He unhooked the door lock. She went inside.

  “I had to…had to see you…to thank you.”

  “Your staff already did.”

  She looked around. There was an old sofa, a television set, some lounge chairs—all probably picked up in a garage sale. The paint on the walls was peeled and flecked. Besides a well-worn rug in front of the sofa, there was no carpeting. The windows had no curtains.

  The apartment had an attached kitchen and only one other door—probably a bathroom. There was nothing else. The walls were bare. Any sign of alcohol was conspicuously absent.

  “Not the sort of place you are used to…”

  “Oh no, it’s perfectly fine” she replied.

  “Please make yourself comfortable.” He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Perhaps I can offer you some coffee.”

  His diction did not place him with the street people. He must have seen better times, she thought.

  “Oh no, it’s all right, I won’t be long.”

  “They tell me you are Senator Olivia Allen from New York.”

  “That’s right, but I stay in DC, I moved my family here.”

  “I am Dan Curtis, as you know by now. I used to work with the homeless, first as a paralegal for a DC law firm and then with the Department of Housing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, we had budget cuts, as you know. Cuts you may have voted for. The Hill never helped us. The cuts meant many of us lost our livelihood.”

  She lowered her head. Guilty as charged.

  “And you repaid me by saving my life.”

  “He wasn’t going to kill you.”

  She looked at him.

  “Or even maim you…they do this just to scare the living daylights out of the rich.”

  She was going to say, “But I’m not rich,” then she thought the better of it. It was relative, wasn’t it? She noticed that he spoke without anger or resentment.

  “In this decade alone, the number of homeless in DC has doubled,” he said. She already knew that.

  “But what you probably don’t know,” he continued, “is how many of them come from white-collar professions. Engineers, architects, designers, middle-level managers, civil servants…out of work for ten, eleven years. Most have never found proper jobs since the 2009 recession. Also veterans. The number of homeless vets has grown fivefold this last decade. How do you like that, huh?

  “They are ready to lay their lives down for this country, and sometimes this country asks them to lay their life down for another country…a blob on the map that most lawmakers need an atlas to find, for a people who hate us for helping them. So then they get PTSD, get discharged, and no one wants to give them a job. They take to the streets. They steal, get drunk, get high, and never get back to the cycle of life. The person with the baseball bat? He was no hobo. He used to be a sergeant in the Thirty-Seventh Field Artillery Regiment that served in Iraq in 2007.”

  She sat and listened to more. Dan rambled for an hour, and although some of his rambling was emotional, he was driven by a sense of purpose, a mission to help the helpless, at any cost. She more than just liked him, she respected him. She accepted his second offer of coffee.

  Expecting to meet a good-hearted and brave drifter, she had come prepared to write him a check for twenty grand. But she could not insult him.

  Instead, she gave him her business card.

  “I know someone in the DC office who needs a staffer. Department of Veteran Affairs. I could also use someone like you in my New York office. I visit New York at least once a month.”

  “Thank you, but I can’t leave DC. My kids go to the public school here.”

  She looked around to see the signs: a school bag, a poster, a game, kiddies clothes…something. Yet again, he swiftly read her mind.

  “They live with their mother,” he said. “But Vets Department, I can give it a go.”

  “Well, call me anytime, and I’ll arrange a meeting.” She meant it.

  He smiled.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said. “Once you get in, just drive…there are three traffic lights before you hit the highway…do not stop at any of them even if they are red…the last guy who did that got mugged and beaten.

  “Or you can drop me off at the highway gas station…I need some cigarettes.”

  That sounded infinitely better to Olivia. Somehow, she felt incredibly safe with him.

  He collected his coat. She saw him put a gun in his coat pocket.

  “You just never know,” he explained, double-locking the door behind him.

  For a change, he let her do the talking as they drove out toward the highway.

  “It is possible,” she said, “I absolutely think it is possible to have a humane and productive society. In fact, one can’t have one without the other. We can have programs that look after our servicemen and servicewomen till their final years. We can reorient our education system so that the skills in demand are the skills that are taught. We can create economic growth. It will need time, effort, and resources. But it can be done. It has been done before in this country, many times. We need more educators, particularly in some districts, and we need more police on the beat. We can create more jobs and get this country moving again—”

  “Here’s where I get off,” Dan said.

  He muttered a quick good-bye as he got out. She wanted so much to believe it was not the last she would see of him that her vivid imagination quickly gave her a vision of a clean-shaven Dan Curtis in a nice suit, working at her New York office, where she often visited.

  6

  The Commandment of Honesty

  In the cold of a Boston winter, on the Sunday evening of January 5, 2020, Frank Stein strode out to take the podium at the Rabb Lecture Hall of the Boston Public Library for the first of his Ford Hall Forum addresses. It was a medium-sized auditorium with a capacity for only 342, but it was less than half full. The first two rows were full of reporters; the rest were a scattering of what Stein imagined must be typical rich, East Coast liberals.

  His first sentence got everyone’s attention.

  “I hate politics,” Stein said. “I never wanted to be a politician. But then I realized that politicians have been wrecking this beautiful country of ours and something had to be done.

  “Government should only protect individuals from being exploited by other people by violence, the threat of violence, fraud, or deception. If any of these occur, government must administer justice according to a known set of laws.

  “Above all, government itself must not lie to us or deceive us.

  “This is all pretty simple. So where did this country go wrong, and how can we fix it?

  “Primarily, it went wrong because the government began to meddle in economic affairs in the mistaken belief that it could improve them.

  “The good thing is that it can b
e set right. The first thing we must have is a proper discourse of the affairs of government. All we have had are demagogues telling you what you wanted to hear, not what you needed to hear.

  “You need to know that your government is bankrupt, but it will print trillions of dollars in order to prevent an official bankruptcy. You need to know this will cause rampant inflation.

  “You need to know that, by waging war, America cannot unilaterally prevent underdeveloped nations from obtaining nuclear weapons.

  “You need to know that governments cannot create jobs, wealth, or any sort of economic value, nor can they create freedom-supporting democracies anywhere in the world.

  “You already know that favors are bought with campaign money. You already know that the rich and the powerful protect themselves from competition, using the apparatus of government to do so. But you need to understand how that can be prevented.

  “Above all, you need to know that presidents and high-ranking officials are not your leaders. They love to believe that. But they are simply office bearers, nothing more. Never treat your politicians like leaders—you will invite the wrong kind of people into power.

  “To understand politics, the first thing you must do is reject the language of politics.

  “The language of politics is rhetoric. Empty words and hot air. You must learn to identify rhetoric, and, I speak particularly to those of you who have chosen careers in the media, condemn it the way you would condemn perjury.

  “That is our first commandment. The commandment of honesty is about the end of deception.

  “Politicians engage in deception because it has been the ticket to getting elected and re-elected. That is the ticket to wealth and power.

  “I already have wealth. Quite a lot of it, in fact. I am not seeking public office for securing a cozy retirement.

  “I do not and will not employ any spin doctors. All other campaigns will. Governments always do. That should be your first clue.