Despite the hand-to-hand combat of decades of budgetary infighting, despite having tendered his own resignation multiply, despite having physically menaced members of Congress, Vance Gibraltar still found the citadels of power to which he occasionally traveled intimidating. Intimidating was such an unbecoming word, true. He didn’t betray intimidation. There were no visible symptoms, no rashes, no sores.
Still, coming to the president’s weekend retreat in West Virginia was not something he’d done before. And it was not something he hoped to do again soon. He suspected that he had been summoned for reasons that were not going to burnish his curriculum vitae. He and Debra Levin had both been requested to appear to answer for the emergency response that was playing out in the desert Southwest. He was going to be part of a team that was to suggest the difficult choices that lay ahead. And at the end of this conversation, he was, he believed, going to be pastured. For the rest of his days.
On the surface, there was nothing that a casual observer would not have found civilized, even genteel, about the presidential weekend residence. After having passed through several layers of Secret Service, Gibraltar and his driver had nosed down a cypress-lined way, bordered by woods fecund with kudzu and other viny opportunists, toward an antebellum porch with a fresh coat of paint. It was a structure of the sort that Gibraltar associated with dramas of the Southern Gothic variety. Upon disembarking from his limousine, and after suffering through the retinal scan, the fingerprint scan, the DNA test, and every other kind of security procedure imaginable, Gibraltar was invited into the residence proper and shown to a sitting room decorated in gay calicos and painted in a mild linen white. The chairs were arrayed at a circular meeting table with keyboards inlaid for note-taking. All four corners of the ceiling had cameras secreted in them.
The rumors about the president had come as relentlessly as all the other bad news in the past twelve months. As the economy racked up another quarter of negative growth, as the undocumented emigrants began to scale the walls both north and south, as populations moved into negative terrain, as the health care industry collapsed beneath the sagging weight of the aging population, Xers and Yers, and the drag of antibiotic resistance, as grand theft and rape and murder reached new levels of cultural acceptability because of the OxyPlus addiction epidemic, as the warlike rhetoric flared anew in Central Asia, it was rumored that the commander in chief had fallen prey to some kind of psychiatric complaint that involved what the DSM-VIII referred to as persecution delusion, legitimate, with nomadic presentation, the manifestations of which involved removing himself from location to location, never staying longer than a few days in any one redoubt. Some of these surprise appearances coincided with regional emergencies of various kinds: the president today appeared at the site of a plane crash; the president toured a floodplain. And yet the appearances were never followed by a return to Washington, not for any length of time.
What was also clear was that the last campaign had never ended, whether the president could be reelected or not; the never-ending campaign, featuring listening tours that touched down in Laconia, NH, or Odessa, TX, or Bridgeport, CT, didn’t reflect his lame-duckhood. There was talk of a network of underground bunkers. His aides would neither confirm nor deny. The president, according to policy briefs, held that the Sino-Indian Economic Compact had its eyes on the raw materials and resources of the United States; the president further believed that attack from a westerly direction was imminent. When meetings were scheduled, he often did not turn up, and when no meeting was scheduled, you sometimes got a call suggesting that the president was just up the street, and coming by.
A presidential double also appeared. The double was not to be confused, however, with the presidential disguise, another relic of the times. He had taken, it was said, to wearing disguises occasionally, so that he could pass among his constituents. The costume was considered so effective that even the Secret Service was not sure if the president was the president, and on at least one occasion, according to rumor, a plumber working on one of the executive toilets found himself interrupted by a member of the president’s Secret Service staff, who attempted to yank on his mustache in order to ascertain if it had been glued on with mineral spirits. Was the plumber, in fact, the chief executive? While there had been calls for the president to step down, based on his erratic behavior, based on his persecution delusion, legitimate, with nomadic presentation, the president had nonetheless managed in the second term to sign some legislation into law and to prevent some things from getting dramatically worse. Things got worse at a slower rate. His approval rating was moving northward from the twenties, despite guerrilla war, famine, emigration, and contagion.
Who believed this stuff? Who believed in belief? Who believed in the political process? Who believed in the institution of the presidency? Who believed in the future? Who believed in anything but grinding it out, as the young people said, hoping only to forestall the worst that loomed? Who believed that the markets could right themselves? Who believed in the markets? Who believed in the market prognosticators? Who believed in the public servants? Who believed in the political process? Who believed that there was a functioning idea of government on the face of the watery planet besides despotism? Who believed that there were any forces arrayed that might put an end to despotism? Who believed that multilateral corporate capital cared for anything except shareholder value? Who believed in generally accepted accounting principles? Who believed that nations were an idea that had any merit in the era of multilateral corporate capital? Who believed faith communities could fill in where the government had ceased to operate? Who believed in the Abrahamic faiths? Who believed otherwise? Who believed in the mythologies that came out of the deserts of the earth? Who believed that the desert wasn’t growing a hundred square miles a year? Who believed in the inevitability of desertification? Who believed that the president was still alive and that he had not fled to some South Pacific atoll noted only for the way introduced species there had wiped out all the other predators and deforested the littoral ecosystem entirely? Who believed that the islands of the South Pacific would survive the upcoming glacial melt? Who believed that the United States of America could wake from its decades-long slumber and return to the forefront of developed nations? Who believed that it was important that it do so? Who believed that the United States of America still existed? Or that the European Union was any better? Who believed that human ingenuity could rise above the spate of problems that beset the watery planet now? Who believed that a space shot containing five hundred hardy souls bound for the Martian planet, or the moons of Saturn, would not reproduce the same problems there, in addition to despoiling the vast undeveloped latitudes of that planet? Who believed that the human race was not itself the pestilence? Was it possible to wish for the best, these days, without requiring a nearly lethal dose of some intoxicant in order to do so?
Gibraltar was the first to arrive. When the attendant in the foyer of the president’s weekend retreat returned to check on Gibraltar again, he set down a dish full of lavender pills, and when he looked closely at the stamp on these trifles, Vance realized that they were the popular vitamin-and-antidepressant combo Satisfactor that some people were trying to have introduced into the filtration systems of the larger metropolises, so as to make the labor force more productive. And contented. The direness of the situation that prompted the meeting apparently suggested the chemical option.