The President's Angel (3 page)

“Nonsense!” snorted the President, annoyed to discover the responsibility for denouncing it lay fully on himself.

“You prefer a stroke?” Frank teased him gently.

The President laughed appreciatively. “Can't be that, because I‘m fit and fine.” He flexed his healthy biceps. “It was just a dream.”

Then one night he sat up in bed with a gasp. The angel lit the room. It was garbed in gold, and the ceiling vanished in its burnished hair. The President's mouth went dry. Why didn't it speak? Its eyes burned into his soul, and what he felt was fear at its awesome majesty. He reached for a weapon—the brandy glass beside his bed—and threw it at the phantom with all his strength. The Waterford crystal skimmed through the figure of light to smash in splinters against the opposite wall.

“Demon,” he breathed. “Who are you? What do you want with me?” His heart was running like footsteps in his chest.

The angel collected its aura into a firmer, smaller, more human shape. It shook itself, and ripples of light fell from its wings as it sent out a wave of love, of hope. Then to the President's wonderment, he saw the shattered glass begin to rise, re-form, rebuild, and the crystal was floating through the air, its drops of brandy at the bottom, to land softly on the table again.

At that moment the angel approached, until it towered gorgeously above his bed, and now Matt saw that it was composed of stupendous colors, and down its flanks and, yes, off its wings, fell stars, cascading like liquid gold. It moved toward the President as if to enfold him.

“No!” he cried—but suddenly felt seized and then pulled forward, to plunge after the figure that swept through the bedroom door.

The halls were empty. The angel was a quivering, glorious presence ahead of him. He hurried on, down the red tongue of a rug, around a corner. He passed one sentry, sleeping, and wondered if this was all a dream.

The angel stopped at the north window. Again it gathered into human form, and again the President was stunned by a wave of such feeling that his knees went weak. He stepped back. He felt too dirty for such love.

It held up one hand—in caution? in blessing?—and flung itself through the closed glass pane.

The President ran forward. Had it disappeared? But no, he could see it shining in the night. It made him faint. Was this the same compassionate angel child that had first appeared to him, innocent as dawn? It crossed the lawn, melted through the metal bars of the spike fence, and floated across Pennsylvania Avenue, which was devoid of traffic at this hour.

In Lafayette Park across the street, the political protestors slept among their signs. MURDERER, one sign called silently, and ASSASSIN STOP WAR POLLUTION HOLOCAUST SAVE THE CHILDREN PRAY. The signs, intended to grab the President's attention, were as large as billboards. His reaction was disgust. Some of the others said:

The park was populated by protesters, some of whom kept house in tents.

The angel turned, and the President knew it was directing his attention now to one ragged man, seated on a worn gray rug. He saw the angel flare with light. He saw him touch the beggar's shoulders, and felt a pang of jealousy, because now the beggar, too, was flaring, flashing luminescent.… The angel towered above the trees.

And then went out.

The President was left startled, staring, at black night. Across the street under the harsh glow of an incandescent street lamp, he could barely make out the beggar on his rug. He could see (but not read) the hideous signs about the President being a puppet of militarism, capitalism, and a fascist tool.…

The dry autumn leaves blew across the lawn in a little gust of wind.

In those days people were terrified of nuclear war. It had become a metaphor for the terror of their souls.

Since nuclear war posed a true and dazzling threat, no one remembered that for six millennia, or maybe ten, most of the people living on the planet had felt this anguish of existing, which comes from the grief at not; or that fear is the comrade of desire, or that their great desire was to fill the hole of sorrow around the heart. That's what they were trying to do. As soon as people named something of value, they found they were afraid of losing it. The more they valued it, and the more precious it appeared to them, the more they feared its loss, which would bring that sharp reminder of the void. Yet life is nothing but loss, beginning with the loss of the darkness at birth, when comfort explodes into pain, then the loss of childhood, the loss of innocence, the loss of friends, the loss of much-loved animals, of brothers, mother, father, the loss of investments, the loss of homes with their creaking floorboards and cribs and cozy nooks, the loss of jobs, the loss of dreams, and the repeated loss of self-esteem, and always hanging over them the loss that would be produced by their own death, the loss of the self that they would not even have gotten to know before it would be gone. Which is to say, the loss and extinction of the whole subjective world.

But here is the question: Why did the people in that generation elect to transfer their individual fear to the nuclear war? Or the Ring of Fire out in space?

There had always been war.

Indeed at the very time when the President saw the angel, no fewer than sixty-three wars were raging in one area or another. People didn't try to stop these wars, although they claimed to have a terrible concern for death. Or life, depending on how you look at it.

War had always been with them. War was fun. When the Moguls swept into India in the 1400s, they killed every man and male child and raped every woman they could find in order to spread their seed. They burned towns and villages. And then they built gardens and palaces, because no civilized people could live without gardens, they said.

To those who would eventually be killed, the devastation undoubtedly appeared as violent, ruthless, dramatic, and final (the light blinked out) as would any nuclear holocaust. No one in the area was left unaffected by the Mogul attack.

In all centuries wars raged like a contagion.

Why was the Ring of Fire different? Because it did not permit the dance to continue between human aspiration and despair, since people could no longer enjoy gambling at the game of Loss. It did not permit the terrible tension between the urge to create and the urge to destroy, or the paradox that from destruction springs the creativity of birth.

The winds of the Earth would whirl the radiation from even the smallest explosion right around the planet, and poison the mothers of the very people who set it off. Their skin would boil like milk; and if the eyes of bees would burn, what would happen to the eyes of their own little children, or of themselves?

The thing that scared the world was that the victors were threatened with destruction too, merely in order to play a little, to dice at the game of Loss.

Many people thought it took the fun out of killing.

The President knew he was going mad.

The morning after he saw the angel wrapped as a ball of fire, he called Jim Sierra, of Domestic Affairs, to the Oval Office.

“Who the hell is that beggar in Lafayette Park?” The words hit with no introduction, as Jim, thin, wiry, stepped in the door.

“Sir?” he asked.

“There's a tramp in Lafayette Park.”

Jim gave a laugh. “There're a lot of tramps in Lafayette Park. Give me a clue which one.”

The President smiled his famous grin. He appreciated Jim's humor and didn't want to make things worse. Right: nice and easy now, or surely Jim would diagnose him as insane.

“You know that bunch of demonstrators across from the White House? There's a whole camp of them there, with their ugly signs, their tents. Some are living on the sidewalk. One of them sits cross-legged on a gray blanket, staring at the White House door.”

“Yes?”

“I don't give a damn how you do it, but get them out of there. I don't want to see them again.”

“All of them?” Jim's shock registered on his face. He thought of the demonstrators, twenty, forty, maybe fifty of them at any given time; they came and went; they took a turn of so many hours or so many weeks and were replaced by other Believers from other states. They were organized. They sat, stood, slept, spoke soapbox speeches in Lafayette Park, marched to other cities as a protest, waved flags and banners, and camped on the grass.

“They're protected by the Constitution,” he said thoughtfully. His first loyalty was to the presidency. His second was to the pleasure of solving problems efficiently, with mathematical purity. “We can't just clear them out by the police. The Press would get on it. You'd have a hundred more demonstrators tomorrow, and five hundred after that, if you kept carting them off. They're permitted to sit there.”

“I don't care how you do it.” The President was ashamed to say his interest lay in one man only, one filthy vagrant who might not even belong to the demonstrators, who sat on a gray blanket on the cement sidewalk—sleeping on the heating grates, perhaps—who knows what he did when it got cold?

“Get an ordinance,” he said. “Get the courts to say they can't demonstrate so close to the White House.”

“They used to sit right in front of the White House, on the sidewalk there,” Jim said, shooting the cuffs of his immaculate tailored suit. “They were moved across the street to Lafayette Park.” The homeless. The wanderers. The ill. The nomads. All of them eyesores in an unsightly world. No way to care for them in a depressed economy.

They had been moved out once before in the 1980s, only to return after a victorious ACLU suit.

“Then they can be moved again. Or pick them up for loitering and take them to a shelter. Clothe them. Feed them. Lock 'em in jail. Just get them the hell out of my sight.”

He turned back to the papers on his desk.

In those times, weapons had names. Like gladiators. Some of the names were fashioned from letters and numerals: ABM, MX, SSN-21.

Another group of weapons had names of charming innocence: Cruise missiles. They sounded like friendly postcards from romantic ports of call. Some had affectionate nicknames or diminutives, like Midgetman. Or Daisy Wheel. And some had names to strike terror in the hearts of man: Sleuth, Stealth, Strike, Storm.

Mostly the harsh glottals were preferred by the military poets. (It is a mistake to presume the two words form an oxymoron: military/poet. Simply that they hear a different drum.) The poets who named the gladiator weapons wore stars on their uniforms and gold braid on their hats. Their mouths, like those of fish, were composed of a single curving line, downturned.

Their business was destruction. They took it seriously.

In those days the poets were also playing with intergalactic laser-beam weapons. It was the Ring of Fire, pure mathematics, which is synonymous with poetry. A balance. Purity. Like a fine golf shot.

In their efforts to make the opposition aware of the perfect beauty of the perfect mathematical golf shot, in an effort to express their thoughts more clearly, they repeated their same arguments louder. Their opponents were also poets, who saw not the perfect balanced shot, landing a hole-in-one in space, but a fatal accident in which the club itself falls back to earth and probably incinerates the whole course, including the city they themselves lived in, their house and dog, and also their own children, their immortality. Given the perfect inconsistency of chance and accidents (itself a kind of mathematical poetry), they preferred safer games than intergalactic golf.