by Nell Zink
They paused to greet Flora, who said, “Hey! Where’d you put the Mary Janes? I don’t see them.”
Victor handed over the plastic jar and said, “Have all you want, but make them lock her up.”
“How can you call her crooked when she’s running against Trump?” Pam retorted. “That guy never stops lying.”
“He’s a self-made man,” he said. “He started with a small business like us.”
“I think I read somewhere that he inherited a lot of money,” Flora said, peeling the sticky paper off her candy.
“His wife is an immigrant like us.”
“That’s his third wife,” Pam reminded him. “Remember Ivana and Marla?”
Frowning, he turned to face the TV set. “I never watched a political speech from beginning to end before,” he said with grudging admiration, as though Fox News were a surprisingly captivating viewer-sponsored civics course on PBS. “Trump got me really into politics for the first time.”
Pam reflected that he must have seen clips from other cable channels. There were so many hilarious comedy shows devoted to parodying Trump. They were surely as entertaining as Fox News. It crossed her mind that Victor might simply despise black people. She launched a trial balloon. “I sometimes get this feeling,” she said, “like maybe he doesn’t really dig minorities.”
“We’re all minorities now, even you white guys. The problem is criminals.”
“The crime rate is lower than it’s ever been! Remember the eighties?”
“Those people are in jail, thanks to people like Trump.”
“He never held office in New York. He’s a real estate developer! How can you say he’s putting people in jail?”
“I said people like him. Successful guys, like Bloomberg. They make the best politicians.”
With her mouth full of candy, Flora said, “I don’t know, Vic. You really think we’ll be happier with Trump? He seems kind of obnoxious to me.”
“Yes,” he said. “We stop taxing our most productive citizens and let people take responsibility for themselves.”
“But if people don’t take responsibility for each other, there are no schools or hospitals,” she said, “or even police or armies.”
He changed the subject by presenting her with a can of Mountain Dew and a glazed fried doughnut.
“See, Flora?” said Pam. “God will provide!”
FLORA AND DANIEL WALKED UP TO THE UNION SQUARE GREENMARKET TO BUY FRESH fruits and vegetables. They were waiting for a light to change on Fourth Avenue when he said, out of the blue, “I guess I’m basically a happy person.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Walking around like this makes me happy, even when you’re not here, and it’s really not a whole lot to ask.”
“This is a great city to walk in.”
“So is D.C.,” he said. “I like those high bridges over Rock Creek Park.”
“They’re a little scary to me.”
“They’re like New York turned upside down. Washington’s a flat city with gaping chasms. Here, you start out at the bottom of the abyss looking up. There’s nowhere to fall.”
“Are you afraid of heights?”
“I used to love going on helicopters with Joe. Why do you ask?”
“Because we never went up in a high building just to look down.”
They made a minor detour around some trash bags and attained the opposite curb. “They’re too touristy for me,” Daniel said. “The Roosevelt Island Tram is fun, though. It’s kind of like a helicopter. Did you ever go on there with him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he didn’t know about it.”
“How would he not know?”
“He wasn’t a big map reader. He lived in the here and now, like a Zen master.”
She shook her head dismissively and said, “Everybody idealizes him in such a weird way.”
“That’s because you can stop idealizing most people when you realize they’re normal. With him, I’m still waiting for that to kick in.”
“He wasn’t abnormal!”
“You were a little young to be copping to the weirdness. His whole world was put together out of superlatives. Like instead of living in Plato’s cave with the rest of us, he was facing the eternal forms of perfection. He’d be like, ‘The Hudson is the best of all possible rivers, so it needs the best of all possible names, which is Monongahela!’ He took things seriously in a way most people only do inside their most cherished private delusions. He certainly thought you were the ultimate little girl.”
“That wasn’t a private delusion.”
“Your point is well taken, but it’s not like he knew a lot of little girls.”
“Everybody knows, like, three people.”
“I read that too. Three close friends, nine casual friends, twenty-seven something else, eighty-one acquaintances, something like that. Except he didn’t differentiate. If you’d asked him to list his friends, you would have been sitting there all night listening to him enthuse.”
“He sounds like a social media activist,” she said. “Like me, when I’m online for work.”
As she palpated fruit, she pondered how thrilling his life must have been. To live in a world charged with meaning, everything appearing as its hyperbolic essence. Totally wired. Forever in the inspired attitude of an excitable, charismatic person. Every river the Monongahela. Every friend a friend. She brushed off an organic fig and bit into it, expecting it to be as sweet as a doughnut. How she envied Joe.
Daniel pondered how it was probably thanks to Gwen that Joe hadn’t known a lot of little girls. She’d been adamant with groupies about the age of consent, letting amorous underage fangirls cry in the hallways until hotel security drove them out. She had started curating his reputation long before he died.
FLORA COULD SENSE BULL’S FRANTIC STATE EVERY TIME THEY GOT TOGETHER, WHICH wasn’t often enough. He couldn’t give her a lot of support. He was in meetings nearly every hour of every day. He didn’t have much time for nights with her or even naps. He was working off his sexual energy on the fly with the assistance of a Clinton campaign staffer named Ikumi Sakuragi. Their encounters were unplanned but frequent. They satisfied an intense and fleeting mutual curiosity in semipublic venues such as handicapped restrooms, where she renewed his faith that words of mythic provenance, properly timed, can work wonders.
Flora suspected nothing. She picked up only his worried vibe about outcomes. She wanted Stein to drop out of the race and endorse Clinton. Everyone at her office knew how she felt, because she told them. She expected the pink slip to come any day.
It came in the form of energetic new staffers who shared her office and ultimately her desk. She got bumped out to the receptionist’s counter and went back on duty answering the phone that never rang. For something to do, she rewrote her white paper on soil quality in the United States to incorporate new findings. She spent several half days at the nearby Howard University library researching it. She waited for Elaine to fire her. After each weekend or nightly phone call with Bull, she wondered how many minutes away from him she’d be willing to go to grad school.
Around Columbus Day, Elaine said, “Hey, listen up, Flo. We need more boots on the ground in PA. Can you see spending the rest of the campaign up there, maybe activating some canvassers in Pittsburgh and lighting a fire under Towanda?” Her main intent in exiling Flora was to quarantine the virulent worried vibe. It was bringing the whole office down.
Flora raised her eyebrows. Pittsburgh was an island of Hillary love in the heart of the Marcellus Shale. She wanted to cry out, “How can you send me to a swing state? That’s impossible!” She had no qualms about working for Stein in D.C., where (as Bull had remarked in an earlier, happier time) the Democrats could have run Pol Pot and won in a landslide. Three percent for Stein in D.C. would put a star on her résumé. Three percent for Stein in Pennsylvania would make her a hunted criminal. Flora’s second impulse was to remember that she’d be there on her own, as h
er own boss. She didn’t think much after that. She said yes.
PITTSBURGH WASN’T SO BAD. IT HAD SHOPPING DISTRICTS WITH FOOT TRAFFIC. SHE could set up a table with pamphlets outdoors and feel that she was accomplishing something. The sidewalks in the shopping districts were public, so the store managers couldn’t throw her out. It was easy to find a place to stay. She looked on Craigslist, but before she could even rent something, the field office offered her its couch.
She canvassed during the day. In poor black neighborhoods, it was hard to get people interested in a third party or even in voting. The sense of an ownership stake in the public sector had become tenuous. People were paying cash for services such as lifesaving medical treatment and public schooling. They were frightened of authority.
Poor white neighborhoods were even less productive. In black neighborhoods, she had at least benefited from white privilege. If a black guy opened the door half naked and invited her inside for a beer, she could say, “Not right now, thank you.” The Caucasian edition of the same guy made her nervous. The poor white women were less polite to her than the black women. It was depressing.
In the evenings, there were meetings. The Greens had a strong local organization, with fifteen active members. They suffered from the same delusion as all such organizations—that they were the tip of an iceberg—but at least the active members were active. When they put out a call on Facebook to promote an event, she could count on seeing them there.
She got several of them to join her canvassing. They weren’t intrepid about invading hostile territory the way she was. It was understandable; she could afford to make enemies, because she’d be leaving town soon. They preferred to canvass acquaintances. If she attached herself to one of them, she could be assured of a pleasant morning drinking coffee with kitty cats in renovated craftsman homes. Sympathizers being rare and acquaintanceship a hall of mirrors in the ghettoized communities of twenty-first-century America, the Green social bubbles consisted mostly of Democrats. Democrats were unconcerned with outcomes. They knew Hillary would win, so they were open to the possibility of pulling the lever for Stein at the last minute.
Whenever she took them seriously, the stress made her antsy. She wanted to raise her hand and say, “The answer is ‘Not Jill Stein!’” If she didn’t take them seriously—if she let her mind wander—they and their porches and kitchens melted away, and she started to wonder what on earth she was doing so far from Bull at this most interesting political moment of her admittedly short adult life. On the phone he sounded fearful and resolute. He had emotional needs, and she was missing it.
After she’d slept on the couch for two weeks, her replacement in D.C. expressed surprise that she wasn’t expensing a motel, so she moved to a motel. To celebrate having a room of her own, she stopped off at an ABC store to buy red wine and Coca-Cola. Following a brief facedown collapse on the motel bed, she staggered the length of the balcony to the utility room and filled her ice bucket. Her limp was mental, not physical, but she felt it ought to be visible, her role in her own drama being that of the casualty who waits to be airlifted home.
She pulled a chair onto the balcony and sat down to mix the least pretentious cocktail she knew. She tried to strategize—Bull’s word for direct ethical intervention in other people’s lives. What would Flora do if she were Bull?
She fantasized about launching a fake news vignette: Trump assaults the daughter of a Muslim real estate developer in Istanbul. Add some grainy pictures of the victim wearing an Arabian-style niqab, nothing visible but her sad, dark, unmarriageable eyes, irreparably violated by the sight of Donald Trump’s dick. You too can sign the petition to grant her asylum.
She imagined starting a rumor that the All Lives Matter movement (a white supremacist response to the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality) was led by tree-hugging anarchists who supported animal rights.
She finished her drink and got up to make another. It would be so easy, and so wrong. It wasn’t her role, much less her job. It was a résumé killer, not a résumé builder. She was in Pennsylvania to get people fired up about Jill Stein.
She got a text from Bull that said he was too busy to talk that night. She finished the second cup much faster.
She stood and looked down from the balcony to the motel pool, still full of water despite the approach of November. The water was greenish, with beech leaves floating on top and a wet mass of them clustered in a corner near the drain. She imagined a dramatic swan-dive suicide set to music, à la video clips of Lana Del Rey.
The problem was that instead of falling majestically and drowning Ophelia-like, she’d take half a second to break her neck and smash her face. It didn’t seem worth doing.
XXIII.
Late on Sunday morning, she left Pittsburgh to drive to Towanda, five hours straight through without a break. Occasionally she glimpsed that the world to the right and left of the highway was beautiful. There were geologic features and rivers and trees, a sky, clouds, green meadows, maples still flame orange, stone farmhouses, tall steeples. She kept her eyes to the band of black asphalt that surged doggedly backward under her tires, gunning the engine through every curve on highways that zigzagged like rickrack. Driving was a symbolically charged act, a magical rite meant to keep her life, the election, and everything else on track toward a goal of unknown utility.
Her phone rang on the passenger seat. She put it on her lap, on speaker. It was Bull.
“Hey, Superman,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Oh, not much. I found out the party brass is up to its neck in child trafficking for purposes of illicit sex, holding them captive at a pizza place near Politics and Prose on Connecticut. Nobody saw fit to tell me. Even Hillary’s in on it. The ringleader’s Podesta.”
“Which pizza place?”
“Comet Ping Pong. I haven’t been there.”
“I don’t like their pizza. It’s too cheesy.”
“For the record, ‘cheese pizza’ is how we Democrats say ‘child pornography.’”
“So in Democrat I guess I just said, ‘I don’t like their pornography; it has too many children’?”
“Don’t you read the headlines?”
“They scare me. It’s like there’s nowhere to go but down.”
“I sure could deal with some flower pizza right now.”
“I’m losing my mind up here too, in my own way. I’m almost in Towanda. It’ll be over soon.”
“Oh, shit, I have another call. Gotta bounce. It’s important. Kendall from Ron Lacey’s office.”
“Stay out of trouble. Bye-bye.”
“Bye. Love you.”
She picked a tree to smile at, thinking it wasn’t right to cut herself off from all pleasure. Then she stared back at the road, or what she could see of it from between the heavy trucks.
IN TOWANDA SHE PARKED UNDER THE MARQUEE OF A RED ROOF INN ON THE BYPASS. IT was four o’clock in the afternoon, but the receptionist, wearing a sari, lay on a folding cot, asleep. She checked Flora in, rubbing her eyes.
“You must be tired,” Flora said.
“We’re going to sell this place soon,” the woman said. “I can’t work so hard. I have chemotherapy.” The half-moons under the woman’s eyes were almost black. Her hands were red with eczema.
“I’m so sorry,” Flora said.
“Are you alone?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“I will not put you on the ground floor. There is sometimes a problem with the drug addicts. If you have a problem with them, you let me know, okay?”
Nodding, Flora signed her name and took the two key cards. She went to the breakfast buffet and pried a cup off the inverted stack. Pumping the thermos elicited a slurping sound. A doughnut with a bite out of it lay on wax paper in a tray. The receptionist had already gone back to bed.
She called out, “Feel better!” and drove around back to the stairwell leading to her grimy room upstairs. There were streaks and prints on every surface. There was a u
sed tissue under the bedside table and a wet bar of soap in the shower. But the sheets had been changed—no wrinkles, no hairs—and the towels were fresh. She took a shower. She put on a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans and drove to the local chain coffee shop five driveways over.
Taking possession of her giant cappuccino, she saw that there was no table free, inside or out. Each four-top played host to some kind of computer and a solo human being. Seven were hostile, intense young women in stretch jeans and sexy tops. Six were men in slacks and easy-care polyester blend short-sleeved dress shirts who looked ready to clip on neckties and go to job interviews at any moment. The remainder was a smallish, curly-haired, lightly bearded, physically fit boy who was smiling and texting on a thick off-brand smartphone.
He looked up at Flora. Despite her shapeless outfit and hangover, she looked like herself. She couldn’t tell whether his smile was intended for her or the text he had just received, but she smiled back and moved toward him. He put the phone facedown on the table and turned his hand palm up to indicate the chair diagonally opposite his.
“Thanks,” she said, sitting down.
“You’re welcome.”
“These places are always crowded.”
“People can’t afford broadband at home.”
“I’m a tourist,” she said.
“In Towanda?”
“I could be looking at the fall colors.”
“But you’re not. Where are you from?”
“D.C.”
“So am I.” They eyed each other cautiously. He held out his hand and said, “Aaron Fleischer, Clinton fellow.” That was a kind of elite campaign volunteer, just below a paid staffer in the hierarchy.
She sighed and said, “Flora Svoboda. Jill Stein. I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Aaron said. “So are you canvassing, or what?”
“Yeah. But I’m tempted to blow off the organization and just go around badmouthing Trump. I’m getting scared. I still haven’t reached out to the Towanda Greens to tell them I’m here.”
“He can’t possibly win. So, are you a volunteer?”