The President's Angel (6 page)

He lay awake a long time, thinking of these impossibilities.

Suddenly it was clear to the President that he had no control over anything.

Some of the problems beyond the President's hands were:

Famine in the sub-Sahara, fostering exiles and war.

The spread of deserts to the east.

The burning of forests in the Southern Hemisphere.

Wars on almost every continent of the globe.

Drought in the Midwest grain fields.

Disease in the cattle of the West.

Flood in the Southwest deserts. The water stood eight feet deep in the streets of one dry town, while rivers to the north were drying up.

Meanwhile, restless nomads pushed across the frontiers from the south. The intrusion was illegal, but the hordes were poor and hungry, drawn by hope. They walked at night and melted into urban alleyways by day. The police could not find a fraction of them, and those they did remove simply turned around when once released and attempted the crossing again.

The President ruled an ungovernable nation. The military was growing in power, as the possibility of war increased. In a reluctant peacetime the officers had nothing to do but skulk in their offices, play golf, and plan for wars that often did not come; or else form petty factions, and dream of more belligerent times. But now, the blast of war blown in their ears, they were like tigers, pacing, ready. Throughout the world rode the four Horsemen of fire, famine, disease, and death. With them trotted war, sniffing at the carrion of distress.

The President had won election on a platform of Four E‘s, or For Ease: Energy, Education, Equality, Economy. But any action seemed to provoke an opposing counterforce of harm elsewhere.

I won't describe specifics of the policies nagging his decisions every day. But one night the President had a thought about the Border Treaty at the fringes of the war. He telephoned his aide at home.

“Is Jim there?”

It was one A.M. The pause lengthened. “Hello?” he repeated. “Is Jim Sierra there?”

“Jim doesn't live here.” Her voice came at him taut, through clenched teeth. “He lives at the White House.”

“This is the President calling.” He had no time for games. “Can I speak to Jim?”

“Listen, it is one o'clock in the morning. I don't know who you are and I don't care. Jim Sierra hasn't lived here for weeks. He lives in the White House, with the other automatons. Or else he's with some chick. So don't come clamoring around real people—his wife and kids. If you're looking—”

“Is this Mrs. Sierra?” He was openly confused. “This is the President.”

“Oh, sure,” she answered, though she should have recognized his voice, and might have, had she been less upset or less certain it was a practical joke played on her by Jim. “And I‘m the King of Siam. Why aren't you asleep like decent people, getting enough rest so you can do your job? Why aren't you letting your staff and advisors sleep? Give them time with their families? You think they make better decisions by never relaxing? You all run on adrenaline, you're hyped up, and then you think it's normal, what you do. In fact you think we owe you something for behaving like addicts, drugged on power. We owe you worship, right?”

“Mrs. Sierra—”

“You're drunk, aren't you? You get sotted and call the Old Lady in vengeance because she wants to kick out Jim. Well, you listen to me, buddy—”

For the first time Matt remembered Jim and Susan had split up. “Mrs. Sierra, I‘m—”

“I'm better off without him. He's nearly psycho. You go tell that to the President. Jim's interested in one thing only.”

“What's that?” She had Matt's full attention now.

“Power. He's hungry for power. And why? Well you may ask! Why indeed? To do good? Save mankind? No, but just to have a sense that maybe he exists. If you're the President, you understand that, don't you? Isn't that what you want too?”

“What? Explain it to me again?” How unlike him it was to hang on to the phone, tongue-tied. He could not take it from his ear.

“To feed your needy little ego. To delude yourself of your own importance. It's all a lie. You're little children playing in a sandbox with your toys. Who's got the biggest truck? That's the game. Where do you stand in the pecking order? This entire city's sick. The journalists think they don't exist unless they get a front page story once a week, and not only a byline, but above the centerfold. The Congress—for God's sake, those men don't even know the power they enjoy is the power of an office. They think it's
theirs
. The White House staff are sycophants, telling the President only what he wants to hear. You want to know how I know that too? Ha! I live with one. They ignore their children, their parents, their wives. Ask Jim how his mother is. When was the last time he went to visit the nursing home? Ask him what he's working for till all hours of the night, screwing the secretaries, I suppose. Ask him. I'd like to hear the reason why.”

She stopped. The pause lengthened.

“Are you there?” she said.

“I'm listening.”

“Then don't. Go away. Go to sleep. I have two children to raise. Go play with your trucks in the sandbox. Leave me alone, I don't care who you are.”

“I profoundly apologize,” he said. “I'm sorry to have woken you.”

When she heard the phone click dead, she burst into tears. She cried uncontrollably, though she could not have told you why.

In the morning, the President had his secretary send a bouquet of camellias to Mrs. Sierra, with a handwritten apology on White House paper.

Matt wondered if Susan Sierra was right about Jim wanting power. He thought Jim wanted what all of humankind is longing for—acknowledgment. He wanted to be
seen
. He wanted someone to say, “I hear you; yes, I understand”—and thereby know that he was not alone.

It was not so difficult to comprehend. Matt guessed that Susan wanted the same thing. They both, probably, wanted the satisfaction of knowing that they, their work, would make a difference to the lives of others. True, Jim was rigid, controlling. True also that he worked to shut out a growing sense of futility. But why not?

When the President looked around him, he saw only men and women suffering. Was no one free of it? He looked at himself and he could see he had everything in the American dream. He was handsome, rich, competent, powerful. He walked in halls fit for princes and thousands at his bidding speed. He had hundreds of wonderful toys with which to play—boats and horses and airplanes and women and swimming pools, and pianos; houses in Vail and Martha's Vineyard, with food and furnishings in abundance. He had fishing rods, and ice skates and tennis rackets and rowing machines, weights and skis and billiard tables, whole libraries of books and a bowling alley; ranches in Montana, and computer rooms with all the information in the world. He could meet anybody he wished in the whole world. Yet what was any of it worth? Over him lay a cloak of desolation, which he thrust out of his consciousness as best he could—by play, by work. In work, especially at his level as monarch, he hoped to make his contribution, though usually he felt like an ancient king he'd read about as a boy, making proclamations to the tides.

Then the President, thinking of this despair and frustration, of his own futile efforts to make a difference to the world, wondered, for the very first time in his life, why? Why make a difference?

Lying in bed at night, he was struck by a thought he'd never bothered with before. Who am I? And why? Why bother with the betterment of humankind? He was ashamed, for this was the stuff of college kids' debates, not questions for grown men. To work for the betterment of anything implied belief in Progress (when in fact, he thought, there was no betterment, only constant change), and also it implied dissatisfaction with matters as they were. Was he so dissatisfied?

It took him many hours of consideration. This is what he decided. Humanity divides into two types. Some people want to make a difference to the lives of others. They work for Progress, or world harmony, or medical breakthroughs, or the rights of animals, or to create a masterpiece of art. Some few even consciously strive to heal or alleviate suffering or raise the consciousness of humankind.

Others—pirates, thieves, pickpockets, cutthroats, rapists, assassins, cheats, and con men—are out to help themselves.

Yet both types have a similar motive: to justify the fact that they are alive, the one by paying for the privilege somehow, the other by grabbing more of what they can.

The strategy differs, in other words, but the motives (he decided) are the same, for the former gain by giving, and the latter by taking. Yet Matt also imagined a third alternative. Could there be a person who works with no set goal, no particular outcome in his mind? This person would be neither giving nor grabbing, but rather
delighting
in or playing at what engages him, as if all thoughts and work and social intercourse were merely an adventure to be enjoyed. Matthew Adams, the President, didn't know anyone who lived like that, himself included, but it appeared to him to be a liberating attitude. Then all work would be play, without struggling to effect a particular result. You'd always win.

And it also occurred to him how utterly simple the answer to his question was: Who am I? What for? The answer was simply:
Yes! For Joy!

The President understood all this with a clarity that astonished him. Life, the whole business, was a game, a dance. Susan was right. It was a bit of sandbox play. The only thing she hadn't understood is that that's the way it ought to be.

The President knew he was going crazy. He could no longer control his feelings, which swept through him like summer rainstorms—tears of horror or sorrow would be followed only hours later by delirious joy—or rapture, at the sight of … nothing! A vase of irises, for example, in the upstairs hall. He could have fallen to his knees in worship of the color blue, each petal licked by a gaudy yellow tongue. The spring flower had been flown in especially for the upstairs hall, and was exhibited against a stark white wall. He felt he had never seen before, as if his eyes had been veiled by cataracts, which, stripped away, left him dazzled by ordinary sights.

One day he saw a secretary walking up ahead and stared as if he'd never seen the human form before. He was startled by his gratitude. Jim, seeing it, clucked his tongue in shared respectful lust, and the President, grown cunning in his madness, laughed and slapped his aide on the back and gave a rueful shake of the head. But his heart twisted in his chest like a dishrag, because what he had seen had everything and nothing to do with sex. Earlier that day, he had glanced out the window at an elm and been caught by the space between the branches, so that for a moment he felt the tree was he himself, and if he cut into the bark, he would hear it scream and see its blood, and his own arm would bleed in sympathy and his own tongue give cry. It was the same with the girl. She was Matt, he was her, though he had never tottered on high heels.

He jerked himself back to being President. “Not here,” he muttered to his erection. He knew he was not well. He took to rubbing the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, then sliding them out to the corners of his eyes to wipe away the tears.

Or he turned gruffly away from his aides and staff, lest they see how moved he was.

He wanted the angel to come back. He looked for it. He had questions to ask, but it did not reappear.

Sometimes he woke up in the mornings, his heart flooded with joy and his body with a radiance so exquisite that he would lie in bed, eyes closed, quivering as the waves of light pulsed through him. He was being made love to by waves of warmth and light. Then he turned to the window and saw the dawning of the new day, the cloud formations piling up beyond the trees, and felt his heart pulled out of his body by the rush of gratitude.

He wondered if anyone could see his rapture. Sometimes at work he pushed the papers aside, or cut the conversation short, unable to bear one more word of distrust, or to play “put-down,” a game he had always enjoyed, though he'd called it “competition” then, or “playing to win.” Why had he wanted to smash and shame the other fellow? To win a point? For what? To triumph over another, only to discover he was alienated from humanity.

He was too crafty to say all this out loud. He would push aside the papers and rise to his feet. “Gentlemen, we need more information. Write me a memo, Bob.” (Or Jim, or John, or Jeffrey, or Jed.)

Neither could he bear the mystery novels any longer. He wanted something with more meat, though he could not have said what that meant. Or he wanted nothing to read at all. He wanted to dissolve into radiant light.