Then the videotape starts to roll, and what do you know, what do you know, Barbie doll changes into the She Creature before his eyes, goes into a jam about how when he bought the building “for a song,” he’d hired contractors to “totally gut and renovate the lower stories that would house your offices, putting off repairs and improvements to the thirty or so crumbling rental apartments on the third, fourth, and fifth floors — in large occupied by working poor black families — for some unspecified future date.”
All the while she’s saying this, she’s smiling at him like a shark.
“Do you see,” she asks, moving in for the kill, “how it is that charges of opportunism and hypocrisy have been leveled against you from various quarters?”
For a minute Grover was tempted to ask what she expected to find here, somebody in a Huggy Bear pimp suit sitting around some kind of piss-and-shit stinking junkie shooting gallery, and you want to please explain who you’re referring to with that phrase “various quarters”? But even though she’d got an irritation going in him, Grover reminded himself that this was what you called a media opportunity, a chance to mainstream himself, and took a deep breath. The plan here was to give her Reverend Nate Grover Lite, formulated for popular consumption so the Great White American Unwashed didn’t develop a mass case of acid reflux.
“Try doing too much at once, no way anything gets accomplished,” he replied. “The improvements to the rest of the building have been temporarily delayed, I underscore the word temporarily, because as a civic leader representing the black community, I’ve been forced time and time again to react to various acts of unprovoked brutality by the authoritarian powers that be, whose agenda is the continued oppression of my people.”
Grover figured he’d done okay, given her an earful while staying cool for the camera, but She Creature was determined to stay on the attack.
“Speaking of agendas,” she said, “I’d like to give you the chance to explain some of your own recent statements, which polls indicate the vast majority of white people and African-Americans find incendiary and frankly disturbing. You have in numerous speeches accused the federal government of flooding urban neighborhoods with narcotics and automatic firearms, specifically targeting high-school-age children in — this is a direct quote—‘a covert program to instigate their mass suicide-murder through the evils of violence and addiction.’ You also called for African-Americans to refrain from all transactions with white-owned businesses, withdraw from the democratic election process until a political party open only to black candidates and voters is established, and, I’m quoting you again now, ‘assume the license to make war upon our enemies and achieve a noncapitalist economic system,’ referring to the police as ‘a demonic army of persecution that must be brought to its knees by any means necessary,’ which seems to espouse the very violence that you acknowledge is devastating inner-city black youth. What’s still more controversial, you’re said to have begun echoing the separatist policies of the Black Panther movement in its earliest days, explicitly advocating…”
The partition of several states into an independent black territory, possibly in the South, that was absolutely what he’d been talking about at his campus engagements, though he’d known it to be about as achievable as an exodus of the people to Shangri-la on a giant magic carpet. But every so often, when he was in front of a crowd, something would kind of pop out of his mouth that caught their attention, just shook the room, you know, and when that happened, he’d take off improvising, get them more fired up, reasoning that part of his job as an orator and motivator was to keep his listeners from falling asleep in their seats, and moreover that it didn’t actually matter if some his declared goals were way, way in the outfield, as long as he stuck to his general message. In his mind, he was like a kid making a wish list, asking for twenty, fifty, a hundred different presents for Christmas, figuring he’d be lucky to see even one or two of them… but also figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask, because you never knew what might turn up under the tree, all gift-wrapped and shiny. That was the thing in life, you really never did know.
Still, as Grover had sat in his office with the television cameras from the big-time, number-one-rated network news magazine rolling away, conscious that his interview would be seen in millions of homes across the country, it had occurred to him that maybe he ought to ease off some of his positions, soften his earlier comments, take another deep breath and remember that he was supposed to be Reverend Nate Grover Lite.
And then, just as he was about to respond, he’d seen this out-for-blood look in She Creature’s eyes, seen that she was ready to get in his face again no matter what he said, and all at once he flashed red hot with anger. And he’d thought, What the fuck, give her what she wants.
“I have come to believe that coexistence between blacks and whites within a single society is impossible,” he’d abruptly found himself answering. “I have come to believe that until the day all my brothers of color remove themselves from this wicked nation and form a North American state governed by and for themselves, they will continue to wear the chains of enslavement that brought them to its cursed shores. I have come to believe anything short of complete separation of the races is futile and will bring on their mutual destruction. And as to the comments you’ve mentioned, I emphatically and unapologetically stand by them.”
Grover’s single modification, which had jumped right off the top of his head, was that he would be willing to consider the state of New Jersey and sections of Pennsylvania and Ohio as components of an exclusivist black territory, should the southern states prove somehow unobtainable.
It went without saying that Grover’s interview had made a huge splash in the ratings. It also went without saying that he’d for sure kissed his ticket to mainstream U.S.A. good-bye, along with any frequent flyer offers that might have come along down the line if he’d held his temper. But he had refused to worry about what might’ve been if he’d done this or if he’d said that, because he’d done what he’d done, said what he’d said, and none of it could be taken back.
And besides, look what it had led to.
Just look.
The day after the program aired — the very next morning, in fact — was when the E-mail arrived. Who it came from was a surprise; Grover hadn’t done business with him for ages, since he’d agreed to wash some dirty money through the movement’s tax-free charitable accounts in exchange for a percentage, which had gone toward subsidizing his first Liberty Uprising March. And before that, it had been the ecstasy distribution deal in Los Angeles… but the e thing was years ago, a lifetime ago far as Grover was concerned, when he was just a few shaky steps out of Rampart and needed the green to make sure he didn’t fall flat on his face. These days, he practiced what he preached, damn well did, and would never again under any circumstances help put poison into the bodies of black youth.
No way he was going to do that again.
Out of curiosity, though, he’d opened the E-mail before any of the others on his queue.
That was when Reverend Nate Grover learned about the Sleeper bug.
If the message had been from anyone besides the man who’d sent it, Grover would have dismissed it right off as a weird prank. But he’d known that man didn’t play games. That his bulletin about the super germ he’d developed, customer satisfaction guaranteed, was something that could be taken dead seriously, wild as it seemed.