Born to Run

by John M. Green

  Isabel smiled at the reporter, “There’s no irony. It’s just plain irrelevant.” No one seemed to mind she’d ducked the question.

  47

  THE REAL GOAL—panicking voters into Hank Clemens’ arms to deliver the election—had failed. But after the guerrilla “ImposterFoster” campaign to destabilise Foster’s new presidency had gone viral, it had paid off in an unexpected way. Levering Isabel into a post that was prize Democrat booty was a sign of Foster’s desperation, which the conspirators had been able to relish for the few days prior to it becoming public knowledge.

  “Outstanding press conference,” said Dwayne. Despite being voice-masked, as they all were, his code-name flashed up on all the phone screens.

  Isis snapped, “What was that?”

  “The press conference. I said it was…”

  “No, the background noise.”

  “Oh? I was riffling through the newspaper. Sorry,” said Diana. “That line, There’s no irony. It’s plain irrelevant. How good was that?”

  “Boot-licking isn’t your forte,” said Isis, though Diana wasn’t quite so sure.

  Dwayne spoke, “Some lawyer wrote it up in the Post.” No one said anything, so he continued, “He says if the President dies, the Vice-President becomes President—we all know that, right, but the crucial word is becomes, okay? That’s the word the Twenty-Fifth Amendment uses… becomes—and to become President, the VP has still got to qualify with all the eligibility doodads, including the natural born citizen thing. But listen to this: if the Vice-President himself is dead or he won’t stand… whatever… and succession slips to the next-in-line, which as we know is the… ta-da… Speaker, she actually doesn’t become President under the law, she only gets to act as President, and… boom-boom… no eligibility criteria to interfere…”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Isis, cutting him short.

  48

  BACK IN THEIR home in the Hamptons, Isabel was stretched out with Davey on one of the soft lounges in the great room, struggling with the instruction manual, trying to decipher how to operate his birthday camera. George was watching from the red Regency récamier, and kept switching from one end to the other. No matter which way he lay, he couldn’t get comfortable on the double-backed day bed, so eventually swung his legs off and moved to the chaise longue. Ed was stuck in a meeting in New York.

  “It’s totally intuitive,” the camera salesman had told Isabel. Not for her it wasn’t, though it was clearly different for Davey. He was way ahead of her, snatching for the camera, pressing this button, twisting that dial, tapping an icon on its screen, discovering shortcuts here and new tricks there. Naturally, she was worried he would press, pull, tap or twist something wrong and wreck it, but so far the slim-line digital camera with a thousand-image memory chip seemed Davey-proof. And apparently intuitive.

  By noon, the boy fancied himself as a modern-day Ansel Adams, the photographer famous for his idealised landscapes of the American West. She’d recently taken Davey to an Adams retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where back in the 1940s Adams was instrumental in establishing the first museum department of photography. Contrary to Isabel’s expectations, even after two hours traipsing around MOMA’s tiring concrete floors, there hadn’t been a single shuffle or yawn out of the boy. Davey was hooked and she knew what his birthday gift just had to be.

  Davey dragged Isabel off the lounge and posed her on several of the antique chairs, first one way, then the other. And he had George prancing around like an arthritic old ballet dancer despite having an arm in a sling.

  Davey scampered off to download his new snaps onto the computer in the family room. George fell back onto the sofa for a bit of shut-eye and Isabel kicked her feet up onto the glass coffee table to read a little more of the camera manual. Interesti…

  SHE woke up to one of Davey’s pinches. He was flapping computer prints in her face while jigging a little dance and, when he had her attention and pushed her feet off the coffee table, he spread the shots out, like a breathless artist revealing his portfolio for the first time.

  “Very artistic,” she said as she rubbed her eyes before even seeing the snaps. He had printed only six shots—his best, she guessed—and positioned them in two horizontal rows of three, temporarily masking the bottom row with blank sheets. The top three were grotesque blowups: Isabel’s left nostril, her left eye and her shoe. “Excellent,” she nodded. “At least you got my good side!” and she rocked her head back for a good laugh.

  He peeled off the blank cover sheets on the three below. An eerie Dorian Gray intensity haunted the first, where Davey had snapped himself in a mirror. And the shot of George’s bandaged wrist with his head lolling back, snoring on the sofa, bordered on the melancholic.

  The third was a shot of Isabel’s scar. Davey must have noticed her eyes avoiding it; he took her finger and pressed it to the photo, tracing along the line but he almost recoiled when he felt the shudder tremble from her finger up her arm.

  Isabel looked over at George, hoping for a diversion, but he was still asleep. She hadn’t felt this in weeks. She’d even been entertaining a tentative optimism that she’d got her dark cloud under control.

  Why now? And with a photograph?

  Her fingers found themselves combing through Davey’s blond locks as tears streamed down her cheeks. He slid up on her lap and nestled his head into her shoulder. His stringy arms wrapped around her, holding her tight and then he did something he’d never done before: he lifted her hand from his hair and pressed it against his voiceless throat and, in turn, he stroked her scar.

  Isabel caught her breath, and she felt it at the same time as she heard it.

  A breath of a whisper.

  “What?” she snapped her head back in shock. “Did you say someth…?”

  Davey quivered a brave little smile. His tongue touched his top teeth and his breath blew a second time… slow and deliberate. The husky breathy sound was “love”, she was sure of it.

  She watched as his mouth formed an “O” and he exhaled again.

  “Oo”? No, she decided, it was “you”. It had to be.

  “Love you.”

  Her bottom lip bled as she threw her arms around him.

  “ED! Ed! Davey spoke to me…”

  “Wha…? Tell me.”

  “He’ll tell you himself,” she said, crying with joy, and handed the phone to Davey.

  Davey took it and held it, gazing into the handset. Finally, he put it to his head but made no motion to speak.

  “Go on,” Isabel encouraged him, wiping a tear from her eye.

  “Davey,” said Ed. “Isabel said you spoke… That’s wonderf…”

  Davey pulled the phone away from his face and stared into it again. He lifted his eyes to meet Isabel’s and after a second, he passed it back to her and shook his head. He slid off her knee and, as she watched, he walked slowly to his room.

  49

  THE NEW FIRST Lady, Marilyn Foster, wriggled into the white silk pillows and surveyed the bedroom with a serenity she’d not felt for months. The Inauguration over, it was their first official night in the White House. She watched over her husband and toyed with his boyish front curl but stopped when she saw he was rousing. His blue eyes opened and fluttered a look around the hand-painted birds that dotted the walls.

  “They match your eyes,” she spoke softly. “Michelle was a clairvoyant.” Michelle Obama had overseen the last major decoration of this room.

  Bobby Foster stretched an arm over and caressed his wife’s cheek. “Can you believe this, Marilyn? You and me… us… here?”

  “We almost weren’t,” she whispered. “Hey, Mr President,” she said with a lilt, “d’you think they video this room?”

  “I checked. No way.”

  “Perfect.” She slid down and billowed the sheet over the two of them.

  50

  ELIA CACOZ RUGGED up for her trip to La Paz but hadn’t bargained for this. She’d skied whe
n she was younger, so whistling mountain winds weren’t new, but cheek-burn took on a new meaning at over 13,000 feet above sea level.

  It was Elia’s first visit to Bolivia and apart from the cold she’d prepared for it well. Her experience with Close-up had taught her to keep a lid on leaks and her new boss at FOX, Mr Devine, had approved of her precautions.

  He was Mr Devine to everyone, though maybe not to Mr Murdoch himself. She was still pinching herself, though not from the cold. When she’d initially proposed her project—deep, deep research on Isabel’s past—Mr Devine wasn’t keen since Isabel was out of the race, old news. But Elia was positive she had a new angle and worked it up in her spare time. Six weeks later, on the day of the Inauguration, and with four other stories under her belt, good stories, she braved a knock on Mr Devine’s door.

  His head was bowed over some copy, his shiny liver spots flashing like idea bulbs as Elia swayed from side to side hoping her movement would attract his eye. The customary cigarette—in breach of office rules—drooped from the corner of his mouth. Still he didn’t acknowledge her. She gripped the back of the lonely visitor’s chair and held her breath as the smoke curled up and fingered through his salt-and-pepper comb-over.

  Finally, she blurted it out.

  Devine swung his head up at her, the sudden action seeming to drain the purple out of the alcohol veins on his nose. Heaving himself out of his seat, he waddled past her to shove the door closed. On his journey back to his chair, he plucked at the cigarette and stubbed it out in his famous water glass; it looked like water but there were rumours.

  “Who else knows about this?” he wheezed, sprawling his vast bulk over the mottled green sweat towel draped over his chair.

  “Just my researcher in La Paz,” she said.

  “Perfect. Better than perfect, missy,” he said and, with the leaden point of a freshly sharpened pencil, scraped out a flake of tobacco, or maybe it was peanuts, from between his stained teeth.

  Elia didn’t like being called missy, or lovey, or sweetie, or any of the other endearments her old-school boss bestowed on every young woman who toiled for him, but she was new and they were only words, and since no one else who worked there had the guts or the boorishness to fuss about it, she wasn’t about to rock the boat; especially not now; now she was better than perfect.

  He gazed at her through his smudged spectacles, saying nothing, sizing her up. Eventually his hand, palm down, directed her to sit. “Let’s get to work.”

  Within thirty-five magical minutes, he’d organised a crew, a plane, and a face: a TV reporter who’d front the camera and take as much credit for the story as the late Mike Mandrake would have wished he hadn’t taken for his. She hadn’t noticed it before but with the window behind Mr Devine, the wisps of his hair seemed to make him radiate. The harmless old coot could call her missy, or lovey, or sweetie, any time he liked.

  “You’re flying out at the crack of dawn tomorrow.” He lit up his Zippo, a signal for her to leave. “You know,” he added as he aimed the flame at his cigarette, “you get this in the can, Close-up will have more egg on their face than a year’s worth of breakfasts.” He took a long sip from his water glass, Elia watching in disgust. “Ah. That was good,” he winked and licked his wrinkly yellowing lips. “Well, off you go, sweetie.”

  IN her excitement, Elia phoned Simon as soon as the Falcon tri-jet they’d chartered reached cruising altitude. She’d forgotten her boyfriend would still be asleep at home. “You won’t believe this thing. It’s got phones… well, obviously. And beds.”

  Simon wasn’t impressed; he would have been if Elia had confided why she was going to an unnamed destination, or if he was the one sipping French champagne for breakfast, though Elia and the other FOX crew would have been wiser not to have indulged. By the time they were preparing to land in La Paz, even the burly cameraman—who’d guzzled more fizz than the others combined—had to pause taping the view from the air to press the sick bag up to his face.

  Elia looked up in time to be sick again herself. In that instant before her head plunged into the brown bag, she noticed that the plane was on final approach into La Paz-El Alto airport, travelling at a crazy high-blower speed with the snow-capped mountains looming above them. Her eyes clamped shut as the wheels screamed along the icy runway.

  The pilot ignored all the groans and, over the intercom, explained that, while fighting a thirty-knot cross-wind, she had needed to make the landing at twice the normal speed to avoid the engines stalling in the wispy thin air.

  Elia reached for another sick bag.

  51

  YEARS AGO, LA Paz had attitude, but now, altitude was virtually all it had left to hang onto.

  Spilling down the sides and across a rugged mountain bowl at around 13,000 feet, the Bolivian capital city had once held up its head, poised in a strategic sweet spot between the nation’s bountiful silver mines and its critical Pacific Ocean ports. But things turned sour over a century ago when Chile and Peru ganged up on their small neighbour, with Chile nabbing the seaboard and Peru the rich lodes of ore.

  Today, La Paz’s remaining accolade—that it was the world’s highest city with the highest airport—didn’t feed the 30 percent of Bolivians living in poverty. They couldn’t give a miéchica that their airport could headbutt Switzerland’s Matterhorn on a clear day. Instead, with many scraping by on a measly five dollars a week, they hankered for the Swiss banks to reimburse the loot that some of their former kleptocrat leaders had secreted in their vaults.

  In La Paz, the air was so thin that jogging would turn your legs to jelly. But few jogged here. There weren’t too many places worth going.

  ELIA had organised to do the shooting up in the slums of El Alto that evening, so her plan meanwhile was to wrap herself in the traditional aguayo shawl she was about to purchase and stroll around the old part of La Paz city. With snippets from Lonely Planet that she’d read aloud to the others on the plane, she’d captivated enough of the crew to join her; all except Shannon Reynolds, the face who Mr Devine had assigned to front the interview.

  Reynolds decided to stay in. The flight had been nauseating enough but when the hotel bellhop slid the van door open, the precious star’s stomach almost upended at the reek of the puddle of piss he’d stepped into. Spontaneously, he decided to leave exploring the marvels of this place to others. A market where you could buy llama fetuses, even dried ones, was suddenly of zero interest to him.

  He commanded the bellman to wipe his boots. The withering look Elia gave him had nothing to do with the sharp smell. Disgusted with his Don’t you know who I am arrogance—and no, the locals didn’t have a clue—she and the others left their bags and a tip and made off, leaving him to drink alone.

  Along the cobblestoned streets, the group kept bumping into women wearing shawls like the one Elia had bought, as well as voluminous layered petticoat pollera skirts and black bowler hats. According to the guidebooks, if a woman’s hat was tilted to the side, she was single; square on top, she was married. Their skirts and striped shawls, brilliantly vibrant, were something else. Bizarrely, the shawls were often smeared with thick oily pig fat; at least they smelt like it to Elia. She’d bought one without the fat. It cost her less, though she would willingly have paid more.

  Beggars wrapped as tight as mummies lay asleep, or dead—it was hard to tell the difference—under awnings or in doorways, and a loud gang of soldiers passed by, leering their gap-toothed smiles at Elia from under their riot helmets and waving their assault rifles. The grease they used on their weapons hung heavy in the still, dry air mixing with the thick fetor of pig fat. She decided that breathing through her mouth was a good option.

  The wispy river Elia had spied as they had corkscrewed down the eight miles from the airport was nowhere to be seen, having oozed its squalid water under the city, the roads having been built over it decades ago.

  CARLOS, Elia’s local researcher, had arranged for them to meet the woman he claimed was Isabel Diaz’s mother,
Maria Rosa, up in El Alto over a watia, a dinner cooked in a traditional Andean earth oven. For colour, Elia had planned to stretch the interview across the meal.

  Reynolds scowled as they drove into the worst slum he’d ever seen, or smelt. He knew of the Juhu slum in Mumbai, India—though the closest he’d come to it was watching the movie Slumdog Millionaire—and this was far worse. For starters, he was physically here. It was not a good place for someone with his finely honed nose for wine, or so he whinged.

  “Let’s skip the meal thing,” he said, his throat gagging with the thick cloying stench of human sweat and shit, as well as other odours he couldn’t avoid picking out: pigs, decomposing trash, rotting damp cardboard, wood smoke and the pungent ammonia tang of yet more urine.

  “Is fixed, Señor,” said Carlos. “We cannot cancel.”

  “Sure we can. We’ll peg our noses, pick her up and take her back to the hotel. We can do the interview there.”

  “Not possible. Señora Diaz is spending many hours to dig meal for dinner.”

  The street—if you could so dignify a dusty dirt track strewn with scrabbling chickens, wandering pigs and, despite the chilly conditions, half-clothed urchins—was hemmed in by squalid shanties and lean-to huts.

  An old woman shuffled out of a rickety metal and cardboard shack as their van approached. Maria Rosa’s bowler hat sat flat on her head. Even if the bent old lady could stretch straight, she was nowhere near as tall or attractive as the woman she claimed was her daughter.

  A few times, Carlos had to repeat things to her, and Reynolds got more and more irritable. “She’s deaf, can you believe it?” he asided to Elia. “Of the five senses you’d be willing to lose up here, you’d go for smell, right?”

  Carlos asked a question in Quechuan, slowly and loudly. Señora Diaz replied in broken English, “Paper is inside.” She loosened her shawl and slipped through her doorway curtain, shortly re-emerging with a metal cash box, its red paint peeling. Pulling on a string around her neck, she drew up a key from between her ample breasts, then unlocked the box.