“I understand that you’re from Maine,” said the vice president. “We’ve fought hard to preserve the wilderness there.”
“I prefer hotels,” said the bear. “They wash your underwear.”
The vice president smiled, feeling it was best to smile, as a photo op would be coming up, and he didn’t want to be frowning at the man who’d saved him from being exploded all over the lobby of the Ritz Carlton. But he knew he was far from plumbing the depths of Hal Jam.
“Do you like room service?” asked the bear.
“It’s all right,” said the vice president, trying to stay light.
“There’s no room service in the woods,” said the bear, nodding sagely as he dispensed this valuable information.
“Here comes the president,” said the vice president with relief, as Secret Service agents appeared at the west corner of the Executive Mansion. “We’ll be meeting him, and then there’ll be a luncheon with a number of people from the arts. I’m sure you’ll be seeing folks you know.”
The bear sniffed the air, trying to pick up the cooking smells from the White House. “Have you got candidacy on the menu?”
“Glad you asked. Because we’d like your help.”
The president came toward them, hand outstretched, smiling. “Mr. Jam, I sure am proud to meet you.”
The bear noted that all the other males were showing deference to this one. Must have kicked a lot of ass, reflected the bear.
The president did all the talking as they walked. The bear didn’t understand anything that was said, which was fine. Sometimes when he tried to understand human beings he got into trouble.
They entered through the south side of the building, Secret Service agents moving ahead of them. The president said, “We’re going to have our luncheon in the Green Room today.”
“I bet it isn’t green,” said the bear knowledgeably.
Across the president’s brow passed the same puzzled frown which had ruffled the vice-presidential forehead. “Yes, it is. The walls are green silk, and the drapes match. Mrs. Kennedy did the redecorating herself.”
The bear didn’t know who Mrs. Kennedy was. But he was glad she knew enough to make the Green Room green.
“I hope you won’t be a stranger here at the White House, Hal,” said the president as he prepared to fork away to other matters. Lowering his voice, he said, “The far right is mobilized, Hal. The fight is tougher than ever. I hope your next book will treat us as fairly as the last one did.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you, Hal,” said the president, and gave an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction to the vice president.
“I change my underwear every day,” said the bear, just to keep things friendly, at which point he was quickly handed over to a staff member. He followed her to the Green Room, which was filling with guests from the world of arts and letters. Eunice Cotton was there, as her angel books were popular in Washington; angels were felt to be politically neutral and gave a gloss of piety without committing anyone on Capitol Hill to anything too muscularly Christian.
“Here you are!” cried Eunice, rushing toward the bear. “There’s someone I’m dying for you to meet. He’s a saint.”
Eunice conducted them toward a frail old man standing by himself in a corner of the Green Room. “He’s been in a Cuban jail for almost thirty years,” explained Eunice under her breath. “Castro just let him go. Senator Loveman was telling me all about it.”
The old man extended a shaking hand to the bear and smiled vaguely at Eunice. His English was perfect—he’d been educated at Eton and had spent much of his life at Oxford, where he’d produced his abstruse philosophical works—but his voice was thin and weak. Castro’s prison had broken him; deep creases marked his mouth and eyes, and the skin was stretched tight to his skull. “Delighted to meet you,” he said, but his focus was on a far-off place. Eunice sensed he was seeing the angelic plane which awaited him in the not-too-distant future. But in fact he was thinking of the companion with whom he’d shared his last years in prison, a rat of whom he’d grown terribly fond. Ratty would have enjoyed this banquet, thought the old man to himself. Such a lot of food.
“It’s a thrill for me to bring you two together,” said Eunice. “My two living angels.”
The old man listened to Eunice politely, but Ratty was on his mind. The dear little chap would have had such fun nibbling at everything today. I’d have to caution him to go slow, wouldn’t I, or he’d overeat and bloat himself.
“I don’t know much about philosophy,” admitted Eunice, “though of course my heavenly angels do.”
“How charming,” said the old man with a senile smile. Apparently he’d been an important philosopher, everyone said so, but Ratty was the philosophical one. Now, there was a brilliant mind.
“At times when you were in jail,” said Eunice, “you must have thought the whole world had forgotten your existence.”
The old man listened, in a silvery fog. After his first years of imprisonment, his philosophy had failed him, and he’d escaped grim reality by writing a fantasy, furtively, on scraps of toilet paper. It became his central focus, a work not of political revolution, but of love, a romantic story he’d set in New England, a place he’d visited only once, before returning to the wretched island of his birth, where he’d fallen foul of Castro. Because his glimpse of New England had been so brief, it shone brightly in the novel. Having been deprived of female company, he’d created a heroine of great beauty and sensitivity, who then inhabited the imaginative spaces of his soul, helping him to cope with his overwhelming solitude and deprivation. Even so, he finally succumbed to the rigors of prison life, to maltreatment, poor diet, fever, parasites. On the day he finished his novel, he’d begun his relationship with Ratty. Oh, thought the old man, if only Ratty were here today, how much pleasure it would give me.
“We know you haven’t had much time to adjust to freedom,” said Eunice sympathetically, “the way they whisked you right up here to Washington. But Senator Loveland’s committee is hoping that your presence will be a rallying point for freeing other political prisoners around the world.”
It seemed to the old man that it was only yesterday that he’d walked out of prison with his novel under his arm. It was under his arm now, in a battered leather briefcase. No one knew of its existence, only he, and now he hardly knew what it contained—something about love—or was it about Ratty? He hoped it was about Ratty.
The old philosopher gazed around the room. Such excitement, so many people. It was really too much, he felt quite weak. There was a peculiar bubbling in his chest … a fountain was erupting.
“Oh!… oh dear … catch him, Hal! Quick, a doctor!”
The bear gently carried the little old man through the crowd and laid him down on a couch. A doctor was there in moments, took the old man’s pulse, and shook his head.
The bear backed up slowly through the craning figures in the crowd. Once outside the Green Room, he hurried down the hall. The guards, recognizing him as the president’s personal guest, nodded to him as he passed.
He stepped out of the White House and was met by the Secret Service agent who’d been with the vice president in Boston. “Hey, how’re you doing?” asked the agent with a grin, and made the gesture of bopping someone on the head.
“Fine,” said the bear, and signaled for his limousine. The signal was relayed to the VIP holding area, and his limo was brought forward. He ducked into the backseat, and there, behind the tinted windows, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yessir,” said the driver. “Where to?”
“New York City,” said the bear.
“New York City?”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No problem.”
The limo pulled out onto E Street, and the bear opened the battered leather briefcase.
There, inside, on fragile, wrinkled squares of paper, in the crabbed, spidery hand of one who writes by night, surreptitiously, was every
thing a bear needed for his much-awaited sequel.
He reached into the limo’s bar, which had been stocked according to his special instructions. He removed a jar of honey and put it to his lips.
Wild blueberry. You can’t beat that.
He opened a bag of Cheesy Things and settled back into the seat for the long ride home.
William Kotzwinkle is the author of such enduring classics as The Fan Man, Doctor Rat, Swimmer in the Secret Sea, Fata Morgana, and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. His most recent novel, The Game of Thirty, was hailed by Stephen King as “top level entertainment … a suspense novel to rank with classics of the genre.” Mr. Kotzwinkle lives with his wife, writer Elizabeth Gundy, on an island off the Maine coast.
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