The President's Palm Reader: A Washington Comedy

by Robert MacLean

  Well, I mean, the wretched man was already a predecessor. A deposed rival, I guess she felt sorry for him. The prestige of his discipline had passed its zenith and professionally speaking he was toast. One tries to understand.

  Still, this was my Kool Aid stand. “What’s your problem,” I challenged.

  (Establish Authority!)

  “Love,” he said. “Love and money. I have a little of both, you understand, but in neither case is it the real thing. And, I’m getting older. Feeling less and less like a figure in myth. You want to hear about this? What do I care if you want to hear about it, just shut up and listen. Where was I? Oh yes: mental health. You see? Mental health. My father, bless him. My father. He said to me, Sol—don’t know why he called me Sol, my name is Oskar, God damn it. Oskar, I used to scream, my fucking name is OSKAR! He used to say to me, Sol—completely ignored me—Sol, he’d say, I never thought about the laundry. Now, what the fuck did that mean? Never a thought for the laundry, he says. Right out of Rabbinical Hall, I can still see the disappointment in his eyes. What does your palm say?”

  “I never look.”

  “That’s good. That’s a good rule, hang onto that one. Mental health, Boobie. Mental health. They just want to function out there, get from A to B without bowing down to too many false gods. True gods, what do I know. I can’t hold ‘em together any more. What am I supposed to do, tape electrodes to their heads and transform them, zap? Press reset? I can’t! There’s something wrong with them all! I left a sign on the door, it says”—he leaped to his feet and primal-screamed—“YOU’RE ALL CRAZY!” He threw his arms in the air and did a grotesque little dance.

  The waiter came in and left a tray and Finkle seized some ice and tried to force it down the neck of the bottle, hammering frantically at it with his fist. As unobtrusively as I could I slipped some into a glass and nudged it forward.

  “Ah!” He fell to bartending. “My wife is afraid of me. Thinks I’m going to fire her and tries not to let on she knows. Cultivates me. Flatters me. Pretends to like the same movies. Complicates things. Can I have a drink? Oh, I’ve got one. How’s yours?”

  He overfilled my glass and eased ice in studiously with a spoon.

  “She’s a barker, my wife. In the psychiatric rather than the aesthetic sense. Absolutely out of her box. They’re all fuckin’ nuts, take it from One Who Knows.”

  He handed me my drink.

  “I have a theory,” he said, putting his feet up. “A theory so elegant, so indisputable that it leaves me aghast at the implications. A theory that strikes at the very heart of civilization as we know it today. You want to know my theory?”

  I sipped off a few gulps and licked my lips. It made my eyes water. “Sure,” I belched.

  “For some time now, as you may know, I have been studying human behavior. Trying to make sense out of the whole circus. And I have noticed that everybody, with remarkable consistency, who comes into my office—every single body who comes to see me (me at least; if we’re going to be scientific about this we’l1 have to canvass other practitioners)—feels guilty. About something. Some inconsequential little crime, some disgusting little practice. Everyone has some sordid secret in his basement locker that he wants to unfold for me if only I’ll let him, and he pants with relief when he’s done it, kid, he is released from the unbearable weight of his guilt at least for that evening and they all, all feel guilty. All of them.

  “And I, I have reached a conclusion. A shapely, inevitable conclusion. The simplest hypothesis that meets the case, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.

  “They are.

  “They are guilty. We are guilty! It’s the only way I can balance the equation! We have all, each of us, done something unspeakable and we’re serving time here in this—penitentiary! We’re not even allowed to place our guilt in any way we can understand it, but we know we’re guilty. This we know.” He leaned towards me and held my eyes on it. “That’s why we’re all crazy,” he whispered.

  “Stands to reason,” I said.

  By now we both had our feet up and were passing the bottle. I was relaxing into a collegial feeling. It was like being at a conference.

  “Guilt!” he said. “Or, if you prefer, fear of punishment.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” I said.

  “How could we hope to sustain it?” He smiled and tapped his temple. “That’s why we’re nuts. You think this is a paranoid fantasy, don’t you.”

  “You have an enormous respect for pain,” I said.

  “You think I am merely menopausal.”

  “Finkle,” I said, “you’re too old to be menopausal.”

  “Yeah but the theory. Don’t you think it’s a nice theory?”

  “Oh, there’s no question of its niceness,” I said. “It’s nice.”

  After a few drinks I was beginning to feel jolly.

  “It heavies things down,” he admitted. “Not that useful for front-line work.”

  “Don’t give up your night job,” I said. The beeper went on the tape machine. “Your hour’s up.”

  We laughed.

  I was as pissed as a parrot.

  “Hi don’t know,” he sighed, “I’ve lost it. Can’t sew em together anymore. Too old to give a fuck.” He winked at me. “You do it.”

  Certainly the sentiment was very agreeable.

  So that pretty well shot the day. When I was myself again, armed with Finkle’s blessing, I plowed forward into my schedule.

  An appointment had been arranged for Fes—the bodyguard on the boat?—and it looked like the screening process was getting into high gear. Not only did he report back to the Treasury Department, he was part of the personal police cordon at the White House where interested Staff members would be sounding him out.

  He came in and sat without smiling like let’s get on with this. Teardrop sunglasses. Folded his fingers and hunched forward sulkily.

  Six-five, armor-plated forehead, general demeanor of a tractor. After my session with the dwarf it was like sitting there with the Incredible Hulk.

  I didn’t know what to say to the guy! He’d been pretty disdainful on the boat and he didn’t look easy to impress. And I didn’t know anything about him! I couldn’t tell him his mother’s name began with Q or anything. Best to keep it abstract.

  I got him printed and studied the maps, looking for an opening. Sometimes you can start by getting them to tell a little about themselves if they want, but he didn’t strike me as a talker. Had that I-smell-a-conspiracy look they have. Being cool about it.

  I could always count his offspring lines, tell him he had a kid he didn’t know about, that wakes them up, but you need something to segue to. Figured I’d get his name, work in some numerology until something came to me, but my first shot hit a tree.

  “What?” he said.

  “Your name. Can you tell me your name.”

  I couldn’t see his eyes through the glasses.

  “My name?”

  “Yeah.”

  The curtain breathed in the breeze.

  “Fes!” he said.

  I nodded and was on the point of pushing him on it when I changed direction. Call it lightning intuition, call it genius, I don’t know. “What’s my name,” I said.

  He frowned at me and took off the shades. Glared at me. For a moment I knew doubt.

  Then he brightened. “You’re Word!” he said.

  “That’s right!”

  He smiled proudly.

  I adopted a Captain-Kangaroo tone. “Do you want me to tell you all about your future?” I waggled my eyebrows gaily.

  “Okay! I guess so!”

  He wasn’t grim at all! Just a cloth-head.

  “Don’t be scared,” I said. “Now, you’ve got a lot of stars here along your fate line.” Just shaking the bottle to see if anything fizzed.

  His mouth hung open. He was trying to follow.

  “On your hand,” I said.

  He held it too close to his face and sta
red at it. I didn’t like to interrupt.

  See, the thing with Fes was, his brain was all in his earpiece. Not that he wasn’t good at his job or anything, crack-force good, but outside a given range he didn’t function that fluently. He’d been trained to follow specific procedures and picked up the mannerisms from his colleagues but the Ray-Bans suggested a sinister cunning far beyond anything that was actually there. His fireplace was pretty well bricked in. Sort of a Slow Joe.

  “Can you really tell things?” he wanted to know.

  “Yup. Tell your whole life for you. Now wait.” I closed my eyes, put fingertips to forehead. “Wait. I’m getting images. I see you—I see you at the pistol range. The mask is down, your arm is out, you’re squeezing one off—” I opened my eyes and shook my head at him. “You’re off-center, Fes!”

  He slammed his fist into his hand. “I can never get that fuckin—” He looked around and came down to a whisper. “I can never get that grouping down! How far was I off?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t even want to discuss it. “Got a birthday comin’, huh, Fes?” Eight to five it was before Christmas.

  “You been readin’ my file?”

  I touched the forehead. “Files are all up here, Fes. Now, let me see. Let me get this right. For your birthday, you want—a watch. Big thick black watch with a compass, dial settings tell you the phase of the moon, what time it is in Tokyo, good for fifty meters under water and lights up when you press a button, am I right?”

  He shook his head and set his teeth. “I really want that watch,” he said.

  We got to talking. He’d grown up in a small town. Took night courses on how to be a farm hand but couldn’t stick it. Had a job interstate hearse driving but one of his co-pilots passed him a joint on an overnight trip once and that finished that. Still shivered when he thought about it.

  For a while he worked for Customs at the airport, turd-watching. They got this plastic pipe comes down from the toilets in the Customs hall and if somebody flushed a dime bag at the last minute Fes would see it go by and pull the dam down, stop traffic, lift up the trapdoor and feel around for the offending substance. Hit the buzzer.

  After a while he got tired of that. May have let a few slip by.

  Then he heard about the Service, filled out the forms. These guys were the elite, of course, half of them had law degrees, and Fes figured they’d sit him at a desk somewheres figuring shift schedules, but the election started and he’d had to fill in for someone guarding one of the candidates.

  That night the candidate threw up in the washroom before he was to give a speech. Normal case of nerves and everything but during the disburdening his denture had fallen into the toilet and had eluded the candidate’s somewhat enfeebled attempts to fish it out. He couldn’t go out there with his lips all puckered and he leaned on the sink, defeated.

  Well, Fes had a surer hand at this and to make a long story short he came up with the plate and the candidate, reassembled and considerably bucked, went out there and scored. After that he had a sort of feeling for Fes and when he was President Fes was a favorite among the personal guards at the White House, a post of considerable status.

  He’d have preferred a Camp David situation where life was a little easier but this wasn’t bad. Too much tell-the-boy-to-keep-my-egg-warm and I-want-my-grapefruit-segments-at-ten-and-not-ten-fifteen and like that, but it wasn’t bad.

  Best was drawing duties on the boat. When it was just Mrs. Rawlins and Keesh they took him water-skiing. Made him nervous when they rubbed sunscreen on him though, and when they got him up on the parasail it seemed to him they were just trying to look up his trunks. Kept him up there for hours jerking him around.

  I didn’t know what kind of life to lay on this guy! How complicated could it be expected to be? But the beeper went before I had to deal with it and he stood to leave.

  “Am I gonna get ‘em all in the oh, ever?”

  “I see some tight shooting coming up, Fes, it’s all there. I wouldn’t worry about that watch, either.”

  He shook hands with indecent enthusiasm. “I feel better now!” he said.

  So did I. My dossier was in good hands. I had Made A Friend.

  It may be well to mention also one Norman Podwurst, a member of the First Lady’s staff who came to see me so as not to he left out. A matter of office politics. Covering his rear.

  He was a bag-eyed, droop-faced sort of Sad Sack. Oppressed-looking. The Clark Kent glasses and conservative suit of the careerist but none of the psychotic drive in the gaze.

  He had a cold, which no doubt enhanced the effect, and there was a boil on his nose that reddened and distorted the whole organ, made the glasses sit crooked. He stood around stoop-shouldered until I bade him sit and as he did so he forgot himself and touched his nose nervously, which made him wince at length and blink back tears.

  I waited while he composed himself.

  “So,” I said. “What’s wrong?” It was the kind of thing you asked this guy.

  He sat there breathing through his mouth. Didn’t know where to begin.

  I improvised some comments on his basic hand type, being careful not to touch him, observing that he had the short spatulate fingers of the Miserable Wretch.

  He nodded submissively, and under my subtle prodding the following confession assembled itself.

  He had always been more or less of a, well, a dick. The sort of person who puts the hangers on the racks backwards and nobody can really stand it.

  He thought things would change when he got out into the world, realized himself, but he’d been fired out of one job after another. He’d be sitting all alone in his accoustic-partition corral clipping his nails and people would send around a petition about it. He tried it for a while as a teacher but the kids just imitated the way his mouth hung open, peeked under the stall and mocked him when he went to the toilet, and drove him further into himself .

  He was a nice guy and everything, there was nothing on his conscience there, but somehow that just didn’t seem to be enough. He was beginning to wonder if life wasn’t just sort of an imposition!

  I nodded. His dentures whistled when he said his s’s.

  When the election came along he’d volunteered at the local level just to try to do something, and in the wake of some fortuitous defections he’d been promoted up to national and found himself a minor campaign official!

  The victory was the first he’d ever participated in and his reward was a position in the new Executive—assistant-to-the-Administrative-Assistant-to-the-Secretary sort of thing, nothing fancy, but here was the larger American project that could validate the individual life of service, was it not?

  Not really. The Secretary—he didn’t want to say which one—was a coarse person who enjoyed taunting him. His own manners were as correct as a valet’s, he didn’t like to disturb the bedclothes when he slept, but it amused the Secretary to break wind in his presence and make Norman say excuse me.

  His colleagues closed ranks against him. He wasn’t much more than an office boy but he knew he’d be the goat if anything Went Wrong. He tried to change Departments, there was an opening if he was willing to down-grade, but someone else was peeing on the same lamppost as it were and he was shouldered out.

  The Secretary laughed indulgently and, catching him alone at the photocopier, gave him a mean Southern smile and told him to drop his pants. Thinking it was some kind of drug test or something, fearing for the adequacy of his morning toilette, he had just got bent over the machine when the Secretary sexually harassed him! Forced a dry entry!

  Mortified into compliance, paralyzed by the lack of precedent, the sheer baldness of the thing, he clung awkwardly to the paper tray, feeling none of the thrill his fantasies had once in a way hinted at. Afterwards his hemorrhoids bulged like marbles and the Secretary resumed his cold neutrality.

  “Not very sensitive,” I said.

  Then suddenly he’d been transferred to the First Lady’s staff. His relief was as profound a
s it was brief for there was something, he couldn’t say what at first, in Mrs. President’s manner, some extra tact in the way she avoided him as he moved his things into his new office, some coyness in her memos to him.

  Then one day she had crept up behind him at his desk, covered his eyes with her hands and guess-whoed. The First Lady—he looked around carefully, reached forward and turned off the tape—was in love with him!

  His face kneeled for mercy.

  (See? Ns!)

  He didn’t know why, how. Girls hated him, he’d pretty well given up. Whenever he got interested in someone the big herpes came out on his lip, it was the stress or something. He breathed too loud at the symphony even when he didn’t have the cold.

  Of course Mrs. President was too restrained, too conscious of her position to want to actually do anything. She was infatuated! Drawn by his semi-youthful seriousness! He laughed unconvincingly, then darkened. In love she had a smile like a catfish. Suppose she did want him to, to touch her! How would he—What would he—

  And what if the President found out? The FBI, they knew these things! They had up-to-date files on who was in l. with who, who was snuggling with who, giggling over secrets! He trembled like Joseph K. when he thought what they already must have on him!

  He’d considered suicide. He’d driven out onto the Bay Bridge and stopped, left the flashers on and had a leg over the railing. But a photographer had pulled up behind him, got out with his camera and wound up. Stood there waiting.

  Norman had driven angrily home and gobbled a bottle of librium caps without looking at the label. Laxatives. It was days before he could leave the apartment.

  His analyst said he didn’t really want to do it and refused him any more appointments till he’d paid his bill. He’d sent a check for what his plan didn’t cover but it got lost or something and a collection agent was hounding him at work, calling his mother.

  He didn’t know what to do any more. You had to ring him three times and hang up twice to get him on the phone, not that anybody wanted to. Was there anything in his hand that suggested things might perhaps possibly change?

  I steepled my fingers and looked at him.