by Josh Lieb
I rip it in half. The pieces float to the floor like dying birds.
“Fellow students,” I say. “Honored teachers. Distinguished guests.”
I can’t hear my voice over the buzzing.
“We have heard today about the beauty of the democratic process. About the ‘gift’ we both receive and bestow. My esteemed opponent . . .” Here I bow rather grandly in Randy’s direction. He looks at me strangely, like a confused animal. “I say, my esteemed opponent has promised to fight for each and every one of you if elected.”
I cock an eyebrow.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I say. “Students and Teachers. Children of all ages. I put it to you: What will he fight for ?”
Now I have an audience full of confused animals looking at me.
“Yes, the sentiment sounds pretty. But there’s precious little fighting to be done around here, isn’t there? Any important decisions about the school are made by Mr. Pinckney and his able staff. I’ll go further: Any unimportant decisions about the school are also made by Mr. Pinckney and his friends. The truth is, the student government of this school—the student government of any school—doesn’t really do anything.
“Maybe next year’s council will decide to hold a bake sale. Maybe they’ll decide which charity they should give the proceeds of that bake sale to. Maybe they’ll decide what the color scheme should be for the eighth-grade formal.”
I raise my hands in mock wonder. “Huge decisions! Gargantuan choices! The sort of judgments mere mor tals shrink from making! But the brave children of the student council have sworn to fight, have sworn to make exactly these hard decisions—so decide they must.”
I let my breath out in a long, audible hiss, like a pool toy deflating. “Unless, of course, Mr. Pinckney decides that they shouldn’t hold a bake sale. Or he decides they should give the money to an old folks’ home instead of the dog pound. Or he decides that green and black will better suit the formal than red and blue.
“In the end, what does all that fighting, what does all that deciding add up to?” I pause. I let my question sink in. “Pretty words on an empty stage.”
The buzzing is louder now. I thought talking would make it quiet down, but I was wrong.
“Student government is meaningless,” I proclaim sadly. “Worse, it is empty. Null. Void. My distinguished opponent”—I throw another grand bow Randy’s way—“says that this is not a popularity contest. But he speaks an untruth. I would not call him a liar. Let us say, he is misinformed.
“If there are no issues to decide, no battles to fight, what else can this be but a popularity contest? What else can you, the voter, do but pick the one of us you like best?
“That, my learned friends, is the very definition of a popularity contest.”
I put a melodramatic hand to my troubled brow. “Ladies and Gentlemen. Messieurs and Madames. Niños, niñas, and assorted bambini. Allow me, if you will, to veer off course for a moment.
“I spoke before of an emptiness. I said, if you’ll recall, that student government was empty. I’d like now, if you’ll permit me, to speak of a greater emptiness. This is the emptiness of real government. This is the emptiness of democracy itself.
“Every election year, we’re treated to the spectacle of politicians pandering for our votes, pretending they like us so we’ll like them. Every year, the pundits bemoan the fact that the issues are getting ignored, that rhetoric is triumphing over facts, that charisma is trumping truth. They complain, in short, that our elections are a popularity contest.”
The buzzing is in my eyes now, too. My retinas vibrate in time with the sound in my ears. The faces in front of me shake and blur. It’s like I’m looking at the world through the beating of dragonfly wings.
“My friends, my friends, my friends . . . what else can those elections be, when the very first elections most Americans experience, the ones that teach us what elections are—and I speak of student-council elections like this one—are quite literally popularity contests.”
I shrug. “They beat it into us when we’re young. And we never forget it.
“Now, my comrades, my droogies, my pals, you are probably thinking that I’m advocating some sort of reform. I’m leading you up to some place where I’ll say, ‘We must make these elections matter!’ and, ‘We should be casting our votes based on issues, not personality !’”
I give the fools my warmest smile. “I am saying nothing of the sort. Because the truth is I want you to waste your time picking between popinjays.
Now I frown at them, like a family doctor giving an unpleasant diagnosis. “The truth is all these posing politicians and empty issues—they’re just distractions. A few baubles to keep you busy while you live and breathe and squirm. Because the real truth is a magic trick. Somehow, magically, all of you, even the poorest, are born clutching a dollar bill in your grubby little paws. Even the starving children on the Amazon basin, even the forgotten babies of Appalachia—they’re born holding that dollar. And it’s the life’s work of people like me to steal or trick or sweet talk those bucks from your grasp.
“And if you’re too busy worrying about which candidate is cuter to notice what we’re doing, well, so much the better.”
I give them the smile of a saint. I feel suddenly clean. So much poison leached from my soul in one geyser of vomit. The buzzing in my ears dies. My eyes stop vibrating. They focus.
And I see a crowd of stunned and angry animals. I see confusion. I see curiosity.
And on Tatiana’s face, I see delight. She’s a giggling, clapping, joyous nymph.
But “Daddy” isn’t clapping. I mean, of course, he isn’t clapping. But he doesn’t look sad, either. Just . . . worried.
And “Mom” looks like I’ve punched her in the stomach.
This is wrong.
In one self-indulgent rant, I’ve ruined myself. With five minutes of truth, I’ve destroyed a dozen years of lies. I am exposed. Naked. Weak.
My brain races. There must be some way to save the situation. Some way to reassert my idiocy. Some way to reclaim my cover.
And because I am a genius, I come up with the only solution possible.
I step slowly to the front of the stage.
And I pee my pants.
Chapter 40:
(SEE PLATE 18)
PLATE 18
Chapter 41:
GO AWAY
Chapter 42:
SERIOUSLY, GO AWAY
Chapter 43:
FINE
I am walking home. I am walking home and no one can stop me.
I am in a pair of green shorts I stole from the gym. They are too small, and I can feel the elastic cutting an ugly red welt around my waist.
“Burn it,” I say. “Burn it to the ground.”
In retrospect, peeing my pants in front of the entire school doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Yes, it was the only thing I could have done, but is anything, even an empire, worth that kind of humiliation?
Mom’s dumb confusion.
The shame on my father’s face.
Tatiana laughing. Laughing harder than I’d ever seen anyone laugh, till tears ran down her lovely face. Tears of joy. My campaign manager, my pink and golden empress laughing, laughing, laughing at me.
Somewhere in this whole mess, I’d forgotten that she’s the Meanest Girl in School.
“Strafe it,” I say. “Raze it. Reduce it to a pile of ashes.” I’m giving orders to my squadron of jets. I’m sending them to my school. I will erase my shame. I will burn it from the Earth. “Destroy it. I want rubble piled upon rubble.”
My airbase is in Grand Island, but that’s only a five-minute flight at their speed.
“Don’t leave a single stone standing.”
No one tried to stop me when I ran out of the auditorium. No one wanted to touch me. I left my favorite jeans on the floor of the locker room and slipped into these sweaty green shorts. I ran out the back and passed Mr. Moorhead in the parking lot. He didn’t even noti
ce me. He was sitting in his car, tearing open a carton of cigarettes, examining every single one for a message that wasn’t there. That would never be there.
“Destroy the walls, then salt the earth. So nothing will ever grow there again.”
I hear the distant hum of a squadron of jets roaring in from behind me.
“Rake it. Raze it. Burn it.”
“Hey, champ.” There’s a hand on my shoulder. I look up and see it’s attached to my father, who’s red-faced and out of breath. “Thought I might find you walking this way.” He looks at me and says, “Oh, hey. You’re . . . Here, let me clean you up a little bit.” He pulls a Kleenex from his pocket and wipes at my eyes and cheeks.
“Break it. Bomb it. Crush it.”
Daddy ignores this. “That was . . . that was some speech you gave, Oliver.”
I don’t say anything. I keep walking.
“That something you saw on TV? Was that in a movie you saw?”
Again, I don’t say anything. The hum of the jets is louder. They’re close. I can almost feel the wind of their engines on my back.
“You . . . you didn’t win the election, Ollie.” My father is a master of understatement. They haven’t even voted yet, and I didn’t win the election. I’ve removed even the possibility of plausibly fixing the election. “You need to get used to that idea.”
I’m used to it. “Pound it. Demolish it. Obliterate it.”
“But you should also know something else. Stop walking, Oliver, and look at me.”
I stop. He’s not pretending to smile or anything stupid like that. “The way you’ve handled yourself, this whole election. Getting as far as you did . . . a lot of boys wouldn’t have the guts to do what you did.”
The jets hum like a swarm of approaching locusts.
“I . . . Maybe I was too involved with work to pay enough attention but . . . you did good, son. You did good.” And he forcibly grabs me and makes me hug him. He gets down on his knees and presses my head against his bony shoulder.
It would be expensive.
I’d have to arrange for a series of electrical accidents to erase all videotapes of the assembly. I’d have to bribe those FBI agents to leave Mr. Pinckney alone. They must be suspicious by now. I’d have to forge an entire TV show, make it look like it’s ten years old, and put a speech in it that’s enough like mine that people will believe I just stole it from there. I’d have to fix the television listings so it looks like the fake show was playing the night before the election.
The jets are screaming. Just a few miles away now.
Daddy slaps me on my back. “Heck,” he says. “I bet someday we’ll look back on this and laugh.”
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,”118 I mumble.
“What was that?” says Daddy with a furrowed brow. I keep forgetting he took Latin in high school.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Come on. Your mom is at home making snickerdoodles.” He gives me another hug. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t celebrate. It takes a lot of courage to run for office, to get up in front of everyone like that. And you . . . Well, I tell you what . . . I’m proud of you.” He squeezes me hard. “I’m just so damn proud of you, son.”
I pull away and look in his eyes. He means it.
“Cancel that order,” I murmur. “Hold your fire. Repeat: Hold your fire. Maybe some other time.”
“I didn’t hear what you said,” says Daddy.
“Nothing important.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders and walks me home. Lollipop comes bounding down the street to greet us. Overhead, a flock of black fighter jets screams past us and races for the horizon until they’re lost in the blue.
1 Which he does.
2 Probably the name of Aaron Sorkin’s next project. Ha.
3 I plan on having a Fahrenheit 451 party one day. To get in, you have to bring a copy of Fahrenheit 451. Then we build a big fire and . . . well, you do the math.
4 She wants him to read a poem she wrote about lowering carbon emissions. Absolute garbage. Sample verse: Carbon credits are the answer/ To our planet’s dreaded cancer.
5 Unless you have deep-seated psychological problems. Or happen to be named “Snugglepants Lovebottom”—in which case, you have my sympathy.
6 He hates it when I call him that.
7 Daddy is a bit of a hippie.
8 Of course he does.
9 Of course they do.
10 . Of course they do.
11 First grade.
12 No, I don’t have any cameras in the bathrooms. Why would you even think such a thing? What’s the matter with you?
13 In fifth grade, when he was the tallest boy in school, he was so stubborn he picked on me every day for a month. That was a stinky, stinky month for Barry Huss.
14 Go look up “counterpoint” in the dictionary.
15 To quote the title of an awful short story. Why do people insist on ranking it among Carver’s best work? It’s a perfect showcase of everything that’s wrong with his fiction.
16 Interesting fact: I actually can’t cry; it’s physically impossible. At least, I’ve never done it before. A hypothesis: My brain is too powerful to be overcome by simple animal emotions. This was very confusing for Mom when I was a baby, until I began faking it after a few weeks to make her happy.
17 The story, not the puke. Again, what’s wrong with you?
18 Yet. I am working on that.
19 Well, I cheat on my taxes a little.
20 I even have a submarine base on the Missouri River. Just in case I want to blow up Iowa or something.
21 I paid Granny a hundred bucks not to tell my parents I’d won. They’d have made me put the money in a bank.
22 I have a tape of her saying this. I also have a tape of her crying when my finance company repossessed her Corvette.
23 It was actually more like, “There’s pwenty more where that came fwom.” I had the cutest little speech impediment back then.
24 i.e., rich.
25 I ate the ice cream anyway.
26 A surprisingly difficult trick. It was much easier for her to learn how to load and fire an armor-piercing missile.
27 Plus over a dozen nonverbal commands. Maybe your vocabulary will be that big someday!
28 Again, you do the math.
29 I can’t arrange for her to win prizes in contests too often. It looks suspicious.
30 Usually by pretending to be scared of him. It’s funnier that way.
31 I actually bought the company where her mother works, several years ago, just so I could transfer her to another office in some barren, godless place, like Death Valley or San Diego. Then Tati would have to move far, far from here. I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
32 The first time I’d ever seen her raise her hand before speaking in class.
33 I don’t mind; it feels like a little hug.
34 Don’t be such a baby. He just got the breath knocked out of him.
35 Actually, my memory goes back a little farther than that. I can remember the royal-purple walls of my mother’s womb. Beautiful.
36 I had learned to understand English by listening to the nurses at the hospital. Some Spanish, too.
37 I soon put that computer to much better use.
38 According to my Research Department: Rhena Vinson grew up to be a divorce lawyer in Fargo, North Dakota; Louis Goldberg is a massage therapist; Heather Grich was the most successful—she was president of a bank in Chicago. Then she had a nervous breakdown. She now works as a middle-school teacher.