“Do put your clothes back on, though, will you, please?”
McGee then cleared his throat and spoke much more quietly, with much more gravity. There was one last job Charles could do here, in the time he had left in the land of ten thousand lakes, a job that was actually quite dangerous, something only a daredevil political operative could take on, and certainly one that would be forbidden him as he rose to greater and greater power. It would be, McGee said candidly, his only real chance to indulge himself in the kind of hard, necessary work that most men — not just the lazy cheats who tried to ride other men’s backs into cushy situations, but good, honest, practical men, scholars, soldiers, leaders! — tried assiduously to steer clear of, but which one of TR’s boys would seek avidly. One needed clean hands and a cool head and an unresentful acceptance of the world for what it was. One needed a kind of indifference.
Charles looked up at this word, frightened, and Winter looked at him as if he had been reading Charles’s mind all along and knew everything. Yes: one smart daredevil was called for, and a young man who was going to be president of the United States someday soon could not hope for even once chance to be a real daredevil. He would have to content himself, if that was how he wanted voters to see him, to merely act the part as his responsibilities grew exponentially every day he remained alive, as more and more people came to depend on his presence, as America became the mightiest nation on Earth.
He would also be able pluck his trollop from the net, and whatever fate might await her once she was entangled.
The opportunity Charles was presented with was clearly to hang himself: he was to organize and manage the planting and blowing of a small bomb at a rally of striking streetcar operators, similar in nature and scope to the Preparedness Day Parade bomb, in the lost city of San Francisco, but hopefully without any loss of life. It was the simplest kind of frame-up, maybe even one people were getting tired of — thus the wish to keep the bloodshed at minimum — in which the streetcar union would look like the usual bunch of mad foreign nihilists, and the owners of the line straightforwardly the good American businessmen they in fact were. But because it involved railroads in some way, and therefore the loathsome idiot Durwood Keogh — the Midwestern “railroad” Minots might as well have been Martian Minots for all they appeared to care, which was perhaps a snub to the high-living Western dandies — and because his troubling but profoundly real love of his late father was finding a kind of expression in the desire to harm “railroad people,” he thought he might turn, as it were, the bomb around. He knew that in any case he had to play along for a while longer, if only because he didn’t understand everything that was at stake, everything that might be at stake. What he knew incontrovertibly to be at stake was the health and welfare of Vera and the foetus she was still somehow carrying.
Charles told Vera that he had taken his clothes off, and that while he was standing there naked, he smoked a cigarette that Winter had offered him. As the three men smoked they had conversed as if sincerely about Charles being the president of the United States. He told Vera that though he remembered it clearly, vividly, the way he had just described it, he did not think he could believe it. Vera, however, had no trouble believing that it had happened, and happened just like Charles said it had. She said she had to wonder at Charles’s confusion and disbelief: Did he think he was in a play where there were rules and regulations about how people appeared and acted in reality? He readily admitted that he did not, but was nevertheless surprised that Winter and McGee did not, either.
“They don’t care if you’re naked or flayed or covered in tar and feathers or dressed up like Pierrot for a fancy ball!”
“And they sounded so bloody sincere about me being president! I had to wonder myself, if such a thing was possible! That they could create me and work me like that! When I know good and well that for all TR’s faults, he would lead a revolution before he allowed something like that to happen! Those men are mad, aren’t they, Vera? I have to ask. I mean, truly, clinically mad? As in, they ought to be in straitjackets in a hospital?”
“Yes, they are mad. Yes, they create reality.”
“Why did Rejean tell us he was going to shoot us, and then not do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Rejean perhaps actually shoot us?”
Vera stared at Charles with a kind of languid fear that brought goose bumps out on him and made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Was his intention to shoot us, and he changed his mind at the last second?”
Vera said nothing, but looked away.
“Maybe he was talking to someone else but looking at us?”
“Maybe,” said Vera, “we’ll never know.”
They were in a rented house on the other side of White Bear Lake from Commissioner Winter’s monstrous folly, and walked from the white- and gold-painted gazebo with fluttering flags of every other color to the shore. The two-bit spring had become lush and humid, balmy and four different shades of green: dark, earthy soil green; airy green that almost passed for blue; a saturated, dripping green; a startling fiery lime. The lake was still cold and a warm breeze was moving over it. There were clouds in the sky, just enough to soften the glittering of the water.
And yet it was not soft. The air was clammy and the light was sharp, like pinpricks into her sweaty eyes. To say she was tired was euphemistic to the point of falsity. She felt weak, so weak it was unpleasant to move at all, and stupid, so stupid she hated herself. These were unprecedented feelings and she would have found them frightening in their dreadful unfamiliarity had she had the strength and consequent desire to examine them. The thing, she believed, was still alive inside her, but once again she found she had no desire to contemplate it. She felt nothing. She did not want to talk to Charles. He was trying to compare life and death as he imagined it was being experienced on the Somme, for instance, with life and death as they were experiencing it. The death was methodical, he opined, and continuous and unremarkable to everyone observing the action, even the actors, whereas here the method was only just being discovered and explored, death happened unexpectedly, in clots that trailed off in streams and drips into the past. It was remarkable only insofar as it was largely unpredictable. He was remarkably tiresome and, even though she had no interest in being right, remarkably wrong: wrong to taxonomize it. She had always known how to act. She had always known how to be alive in that wholly mysterious “moment” between the past and the future, and all those things Charles had maundered on about — pretentiously or mock-pretentiously, she still did not know — in rehearsals she actually found corresponded with her truth, with her understanding of what it meant to be alive, what it had meant to be alive in every moment that she could remember having, a reality both transcendent and immanent that had been there before her birth and would be there after her death, a manifestation of which she was both the greatest instance and the greatest illusion. Death had existed only and as exactly as life had. But then she had become weak. How had that happened? She had become weak and stupid and the deaths she had witnessed had been far more real in their screaming violence than anything she could have imagined possible, far more hideous, far more terrifying. Life was everything now, and death was now torture, a torture that would deprive a person only of the means by which to live. It was eternal horror. Death had been there in the friendliest and most natural way, making life possible, continuously and eternally possible — then had suddenly become what the poor human brain, with its insistence on paired contradictions, had always suspected it was: the opposite of life, nemesis, terrifying end of life and beginning of torture, unimaginable horror becoming relentlessly imaginable, and cosmic anomie. Death had become life. When she closed her eyes all she could see were scenes of violence and degradation; and when she opened them she could see nothing except a screen on which images were projected, the shadows on the wall of the cave. shadows in the shape of people, who were pointing at her and gesturing like they had on rehearsal, demonstrating and wishing to evoke laughter, derisive, bitter, mocking, hysterical, terrifying laughter. Death had destroyed the illusion of life.