The President's Angel (9 page)

He left town. And he never went back except for his mother's funeral, that was all, and for the unveiling of the memorial they put up for him, favorite and most famous son. He started college and then his political career and left that sad little ragged childhood behind.

Everyone voted for him in his hometown. They claimed him now, and now he couldn't do wrong by them in that place.

So what is life about? Why was he not happy? He had everything he'd ever wanted, and the goddamn pols worrying that he was not pursuing war. He kept thinking about the past—about Randolph, who'd been his best friend in sixth grade. Randy became a dentist, and he was dead too; and Don, who drove a truck till he retired, and now he drove a motorboat; and Jervey Moffett and Beth and Bev, and they were all gone mostly, and he himself President, the most important man in the world, who had indulged in sex with countless women, whose faces and names he couldn't recall. And here he was thinking about Lucy. And what was life about? He didn't have any idea at all.

It was a strange world in those days, with chaos and destruction everywhere. The prince of one country killed 150 soldiers, all by himself, point-blank, a bullet to the back of the head. Chaos and chemical war, and the Ring of Fire waiting for us all. And in each human being a mind so magnificent that every one of us holds a universe, complete and separate; and such order in this chaos that the moon swings full across the sea of night like a God every twenty-eight to thirty days. That's chaos there?
The chaos is inside of me
, he thought,
in me
.

He kept thinking about Lucy, who'd married Randy, actually, and they'd had four children and she was a good mother and she was happy with him and he with her before he died. They never wanted anything they didn't have or couldn't get.

While Matt had always wanted more. So he was President, and still it wasn't enough.

Only now he was responsible not for the boys in the backyard alley wars, but for the whole world. And do you know? He felt he didn't know a thing.

That night he dreamt he was living in a tin shanty, as did three-quarters of the people of the world in those days. He was Monarch of the World, but he couldn't do anything about the slums, and he too was living barefoot in an alley, a beggar, and dying at a furious, fast pace.

One night the President stood before the mirror in the bathroom, peering at his tired eyes. He looked worn. He covered his face with his hands before the mirror, then dashed them down in a vain attempt to catch his image in the glass. But only the mask of his face stared back, blue eyes probing. He turned around, then swung back quickly to the mirror to see if he could catch the man who hid behind his eyes.

You can see how troubled he was.

An angel had appeared. But what had it done? What had it said? An angel was supposed to be a messenger, and all he knew was that it had come and looked at him compassionately, and left him for a beggar. Whatever that meant. The President was caught by the terror that life was more meaningful than he was prepared to accept, and by the horror that it might not be. He was frightened by the responsibility implied.

He still talked to himself.

“Listen, God,” he said fiercely. “You listen to me. You're not doing so good a job down here. What can we expect from a God who is jealous and vain? You're not good enough, you hear? God shield us, anyway”—he turned away—“from the love of God.” Who'd want that love? Look what He did to his Best Beloved Only Begotten Son—tortured, murdered, hung with thieves—or St. Peter crucified upside down; and the other early martyrs, shipwrecked and imprisoned, torn limb from limb, eaten by lions, shot with arrows, castrated and mutilated, the women's breasts cut off, and little children slain. Or, God help us, to the Chosen People! Chosen by God for diaspora and holocaust. Better to be ignored by God than win that kind of love.

“Haven't you any shame?” he called out in the night. “What father would give his child a stone when he asks for bread? Go away,” he muttered to himself. “Go away. Take care of other planets. I have no place for God.”

Another time: “I don't believe in your angel. I reject a spirit world that meddles in our everyday affairs.”

He wanted nothing to do with God, the celestial psychopath.

And yet the angel had come, not once but twice, sent him a wave of love and left him radiant with joy.

He used two tricks of mind, therefore, to get himself off the hook. Either the angel, he decided, had come to him because he was the President, a statesman, a man of power doing a good job, as it were, and come to congratulate him perhaps, or give encouragement. Or else he disbelieved in the event.

But no sooner did that thought take root than he remembered the angel's eyes, the rapturous leap of his heart on looking into them. He wanted more. He brooded. If an angel had come to him, then why not a troop of angels at Auschwitz? Or in the Middle East?

And why, if it came for comfort, did it leave him in this wilderness? He, the President, who had never bothered about epistemological matters before; he, Matt, the problem solver, who had become with the visitation as displaced as a vagrant, full of passions and guilt; and never in his life had he been so vulnerable to pain. It was as if a layer of skin had been torn off him, his heart exposed. That's what the President found; and never had he felt more prey to doubt.

At the time the angel appeared, the world was burning up.

It was in all the daily news: earthquakes and typhoons and people swept away in tidal waves, and whole towns and villages buried by volcanic eruptions or mud slides formed in heavy rain; and there was starvation and famine—bone-deep hunger in the face of plenty—and children born deformed and crippled, and young people suffering from disease, and lovers being killed, or husbands falling in love with other women, or wives with other men, and the elderly dying alone and incontinent and often in great humiliation and pain. You did not need to look far to find suffering in this world.

Some people denied the existence of God on the basis of this suffering alone; and others were subject to a religious fervor that broke over the nation in those days, and still others drowned their terror in open promiscuity or drugs, dancing in the Vanity Fair; for terror was stalking everyone, and especially at the prospect of being snuffed out at any time without warning—or maybe even worse,
with
warning—and never seeing the sunlight again.

Now there were also people who accepted these horrors as the downside of the best of all possible worlds, and enjoyed themselves anyway, heads up, with a smile on their lips. But the despairing ones agreed that such people were insensitive, that attention must be paid to these things, attention must be paid.

Among this group was the journalist Scott Bauer. His business was to find out everything going on in the White House and Government and to spread it like manure at the feet of what was called the People. To fertilize their imaginations.

Scott or Scotty was thirty-nine years old. Cynical, tough, athletic, he had quick, slashing gestures and an aggressive voice. He expected the worst of people and was rarely disappointed. He hated Authority, especially over him.

He thought the world was not behaving as it should (which is to say according to his wishes), and that the only hope lay in the Rule of Law. Only a constant surveillance could prevent wrong-doing. As a good reporter, he opposed Government, which he saw as always ready to teeter into a police state, totalitarianism, dictatorship: He opposed any tightening of the reins of order. On the other hand, he also opposed the intellectual disorder of States' Rights, the private power of international Corporations (fiefdoms in their own right), and any other efforts at the dispersal of authority. What he did believe in (and it was this that led him to call himself an optimist) was Balance of Power, or Law. The two Empires were checked by the Balance of Power; Corporations by laws of States; individual States by the central Government, the central Government by a vigilant Press—which was to say, himself.

If Scotty had had his way, this Rule of Law would have worked in the same effortless way that planets swing in perpetual motion, never falling from their silent, spellbound paths. It annoyed him that human affairs drifted messily, and his frustration spurred him to work harder to compensate.

There were two or three explanations of what purpose the diligent altruism of a Free Press served.

Idealists claimed that the People had a Right to Know, and that the Light of Public Scrutiny, or an informed citizenry, or the threat of public shame, kept the politicians straighter (or less crooked, at least) than they otherwise might be.

But cynics called it gossip, and merely an excuse for advertising, so that media owners could dine on good meats and fine wines. The news, after all, was by definition bad—a dose of depression to make people buy something to make them feel good again.

The politicians, themselves, often felt the Press were wolves snarling at their heels. Every now and again they threw the wolves a hunk of meat or even one of their own, and raced toward safety across the tundra in their troikas; while behind them the Press snapped and grabbed hungrily at the carcass before lifting their heads with a terrible howl and turning to the scent again. Matt felt this as well, though he tried to remember that the Fourth Estate served a purpose in the scheme of Democracy, that the Press acted in a kind of partnership with him, especially when he could manipulate it. There were times when he was ready to damn the Fourth Estate and hated the People anyway, their only saving grace being that they often had more interest in the crossword puzzle, sports, and entertainment than in any news that Scotty and his compatriots were inclined to give.

The President distrusted Scotty. He would have distrusted him even more had he known that for the past few months the journalist had been sniffing out a story about the demonstrators in the park, and that he had dug out of one secretary a curious interest of the President's in these dispossessed people, who were now the wanderers.

At the next press conference Scotty shot to his feet. “Mr. President!”

Matt tensed for this' next effort to embarrass him.

“Mr. President, is it true you invited a tramp into your private quarters last week?”

The President's jaw dropped.

“What's your relationship to this man, and have you known him long?” asked Scotty, stabbing at the President with one finger. “Is it true that he's now in jail?”

A murmur ran round the room. No one had heard the story yet. Matt thought fast on his feet. He gave his engaging laugh and turned his charm like a searchlight on Scott.

“I see there's nothing private in the presidency.” Which made Scotty glow with pride. “Yes, I did invite one of the homeless of this city, a street person, into the White House. It was a private act, as a private citizen. My own investigative reporting, you could say. Unfortunately, he stole an antique paperweight.

As for jail, I can't say. I don't know what happened to him,” he lied.

“What about the paperweight? Was it recovered?”

“What made you choose this man?”

“Are you planning to invite in other street people? Is this going to be a practice?”

But Scotty gave a wolfish grin, for he had verification of what he'd found. That night every paper in the country and all the TV news reported it, but Scotty's story was the most detailed. He pranced around the newsroom, boasting openly of his scoop. His story told of a derelict who sat yogi-fashion either in Lafayette Park or else on the Ellipse, always facing the White House, like a Muslim to Mecca; and of how the President had paid him the courtesy of his attention one rainy night; how the prince and the pauper had talked intimately, long into the night, as cats can talk to kings; of how the President had fed and clothed him and let him spend the entire stormy night on the white linen of a warm, dry White House bed; and finally how, on leaving, it was discovered the beggar had stolen a valuable eighteenth-century paperweight. Perhaps other things as well.

That's the story Scotty told, only slightly off the facts.

Scotty first criticized the President for putting himself in a vulnerable position, unprotected from a possible attack, then questioned the government version of the street person being a thief, and finally the competence of the police; for apparently the beggar had now mysteriously disappeared. Scotty had confirmation of that fact. Police records showed his name, the crime—and then the beggar had walked out of his cell, to vanish without a trace.

The first Matt heard that the man had disappeared was over his morning coffee, as he read Scott's story. The paperweight had also disappeared. Irritating.

The President received letters and telegrams from all over the country, some applauding his hospitality, others critical that he had invited a vagrant into his home, which was also public property and not to be abused. Some expressed heartfelt concern for the President's safety, and others suggested he could do more; use the downstairs White House rooms, for example, as a shelter for the homeless and indigent. Still others spat out their hatred of the poor and ill, and urged their elimination from the world.