Crack-Up (40 page)

She palmed the top of her head as if it had a lid that wouldn’t stay down.
 
“Oh, Boo, all these years . . . you’ve carried that around?”

“So you admit it?”

She let go of her head.
 
Sighed.
 
Nodded.
 
Spoke into the carpet.
 
“You don’t know how it is.
 
How it was.
 
I still lived in the hood in those days, and a brother, he could get away with it some, but not a sister.
 
‘Sleeping with the enemy’ is what they called it.”
 
She studied me with moist eyes.
 
“I’m sorry, Argus.
 
It was stupid of me.
 
Cowardly.
 
I know that now.”

“Don’t cry, Keisha.
 
I still love you.”

She threw her arms around my neck and hugged me.
 
“I love you too, Argus.
 
Don’t . . . don’t ever forget that, okay?”

“Why would I?”

That’s about the last thing I clearly remember saying before waking up sprawled on my side in a fairly dark place with slivers of light slanting down on my face through horizontal slats, my wrists bound behind my back, my skull throbbing in pain, and my ears ringing.
 
I strained to sit up and then I peered through an opening in the slats, which my nose identified as wooden.

My gaze fell upon Keisha’s bare brown legs, pacing back and forth beside a wet spot in the carpet, where some cut tulips lay, along with several broken shards of blue porcelain.
 
She’d conked me on the head with a flower vase, I would later learn.
 
I could hear her speaking loudly.
 
It didn’t take long for me to realize she was speaking to a 911 emergency operator.

“Where are the cops!” she said.
 
“I don’t hear them coming yet . . . Well, can’t they get here any quicker?”

Betrayed
! I thought.
 
It was an easy leap to make, especially in my condition.
 
I nearly dislocated both shoulders while slithering my arms beneath my buttocks as fast as possible.
 
Then I curled into a ball while my bound wrists passed beneath my feet and over my toes to the front of my body.

One lick of the binding and I recognized the material.
 
Nylon stockings.
 
It would be easy to free myself once out on the street, I decided.
 
I could shred the nylon simply by rubbing the material up against the corner of some brick building.

I stood up inside Keisha’s closet and rammed my shoulder against the door as hard as I could.
 
Keisha screamed.

The door gave way—hinges and all—on my second attempt.
 
As I stumbled into sight, Keisha aimed a gun at me.
 
But she didn’t fire it as I ran out of the bedroom, though she did chase after me down the hall and call to me as I flew out the front door and into a siren-pierced dawn.

I got away without much trouble, though, and those forces from another dimension soon gave up trying to steal my clothes.
 

Late that morning, a few miles from Keisha’s place, I spotted one of the suit-and-sunglasses men tailing me again.
 
He was inside a Starbucks, sitting alone at a table beside a big storefront window with a cup of coffee and a bagel, pretending to read the newspaper.
 
I ran inside to confront him.
 
But he got up and left through another door, waved down a black limousine, and sped away before I could reach him.
 
I went back inside to see if he’d left anything behind by accident.
 
He had.
 
The newspaper.

But it was no accident.
 
He’d left a message for me.
 
The bottom half of the front page of his Washington Post had been left facing up on the table, and the headline to an article titled,
4th of July Gala to Be Bigger Than Ever
, had been circled by the wet stain of a coffee cup rim.
 
I read the article, and at once I knew what was expected of me.

Two days hence, in front of half a million people—and many millions more watching live on television—I was to assassinate the sitting president of the United States on the National Mall during the annual 4th of July festivities.

What happened during the next forty-eight hours I would prefer to blame on my disease alone.
 
But I don’t know if that’s entirely fair.
 
Perhaps another factor, some underlying fault of mine, made all the difference—an insufficient love for humanity, or some flaw of character, or weakness of will.

What I do know is that on the morning of the 4th of July, I made a terrible decision for the sake—or so I believed—of my dear loved ones.
 
For the sake of five million dollars—enough money to secure my young family’s financial future—and a
Hinckley
verdict, I prepared to defile my entire life’s work.
 
I planned to grieve a nation—my nation—with my own assassin’s arrow.
 
The blood I would spill would not be that of an innocent man’s, but my nation would never know that, I felt fairly sure.

That Independence Day, I walked to the National Mall from beneath the
14th Street
Bridge, where I’d spent the night, and as I passed by the
Holocaust
Museum
, I caught my image in the tall window glass and froze, hardly recognizing myself.

Dirt had deepened the lines of my sunburned face.
 
My cheeks had hollowed, and I had an odd mix of blond, untamed hair with a thick black and gray beard.
 
Most disturbing of all were my eyes. The eyes of my father.

Chapter 41

Humanity swarmed the Mall.
 
Patriotic multitudes converged from north, south, east, and west, and they seeped out of the Earth from underground metro stops, like ant colonies on the move.
 
I wandered among them, losing myself, yet somehow, the cabal found me.
 
Quickly.
 
And they let me know it too.
 
On such a hot, steamy holiday, they stood out prominently in their dark business suits.
 
I counted four of them at various distances from me.

I’ll bet they never lost me
, I thought.
 
There’s got to be a microchip planted on me somewhere.

But what does it matter now
?
 
I strode along a wide path of crushed sandstone at the outer edge of the Mall in front of the Smithsonian museums, dodging street vendors, helium balloons, slow walkers, and racing, sticky-faced children.
 
I was headed for the Capitol building to see how close I could get to the performance stage erected there on the steps, where President Eliot Ames would speak in just under two hours, where the crowd was thickest and a marching band marched in place making the sounds of John Phillips Souza.

I caught glimpses of the blue-haired dwarf, weaving through the crowd ten yards ahead of me, sliming the ground where I might step, no doubt, as well as the nearby temporary fence erected for the day by the National Park Service.
 
I kept away from the fence and stepped carefully, like a farm hand cautious of cow patties.

The ground turned thick with little slime blobs.
 
I stepped in one.
 
Damn!
 
And in my bare feet too
!

The cops on horseback and riding bicycles and patrolling on foot seemed more numerous than blades of grass on the Mall.
 
At least they were easier to spot than grass blades by now with so many thousands of people treading ground.

Below the performance stage and over by Constitution Avenue, two television trucks were setting up—hydraulic masts unfolding, satellite dishes rotating, technicians unrolling cable—and parked between the pair I recognized one of those three-ton government Suburbans used to transport Secret Service agents and sometimes their protectees.

It meant the first wave had arrived for the event, the sharpshooters, Secret Service men and women who would fan out as sentries high in buildings or on rooftops, monitoring the canyons of windows with their telescopic sights for random movements at high vantage points, for the flash of sun on glass, for would-be long distance assassins aiming rifles.
 
The second wave wouldn’t be far behind.
 
It would include the canine unit, used to clear buildings and sniff for bombs.
 
The third wave would include the protectee.
 
The president.
 
My heart felt heavy.

I’d already brought great shame to the men and women of the Secret Service.
 
Soon, that shame would increase a thousand-fold.

From out of the crowd in front of me the impersonator appeared abruptly.
 
He came to a stop face-to-face with me.
 
His attire hadn’t changed.
 
He was still in my father’s old farming get-up, ensuring that I’d recognize him.

“Follow me,” he said and sped away, crossing the Mall in the direction of the National Gallery of Art.
 
It wasn’t easy keeping pace with him, especially with my aluminum foil-lined underwear chafing me again.
 
I fell behind.

He disappeared inside the National Gallery’s
East
Building
.
 
For some reason, the dwarf wouldn’t follow, lingering at the edge of the Mall, watching me intently.
 
I went inside.

I stood in the atrium, searching for the impersonator.
 
A voice from an intercom announced the museum would be closing in thirty minutes.
 
The building was still packed with visitors.
 
I found the impersonator a few floors above me on a glass-encased walkway, staring down at me.

Behind me a security guard’s radio squawked.
 
“Stupid little shit stain!”
 
I spun around.
 
Again the radio squawked.
 
“What do you think you’re doing!”

Oh, great
, I thought.
 
Darth Vader’s back
.
 
I raised my eyes to the walkway again.
 
The impersonator had moved on.
 
I stepped into a crowded elevator compartment going up.

Darth began to broadcast from the elevator’s ceiling.
 
“He’s in search of his father.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.
 
“The man’s an impostor.”

“He’s going to betray everything he’s ever stood for.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“Why doesn’t he just kill himself?”

“You know why I can’t do that,” I said.
 
“I’ve got a wife and kids to think about.
 
Now shut up.”

“Kill them too.
 
That’ll end their pain.”

“Go away!
 
I’m not listening to your stupid, sick ideas anymore, you hear me!”

Everyone else had departed by the time I reached the top floor.
 
My floor.
 
For I had no doubt the impersonator was leading me to my assassin’s perch.

The Tower Level, as it’s called, contains only one small exhibition space.
 
A handful of visitors meandered admiring the current collection.
 
The rest of the floor houses administrative offices and an academic study center.
 
I could see book stacks through a set of interior windows, but no one at work inside, due to the holiday, I assumed.
 
The intercom broke through the air again, announcing the building would be closing in ten minutes.