The door to the briefing room opened. John Miller, a staff aide, stepped halfway into the waiting room.
"Mr. Bouquette, the President's ready for you." Bouquette marched across the room to retrieve his briefcase from its place beside Daisy's thicker, heavier attaché case. Grasping it confidently, he turned:
"Is the President ready for Daisy, Miller? Or does he want to see me alone first?"
The aide considered it for a fraction of a second, while all the politics and intricacies of his job raced through his mental computer.
"She can come in too. Just remember, the President s tired. It's been a long day."
Bouquette nodded. "For all of us."
Daisy hastened to fit her notes back into her attaché case, feeling clumsy against Bouquette's polished manner. She had only recently reached the level where she personally briefed the President and the National Security Council, and she remained in awe of this holiest of realms, despite the years she had spent learning how very, very mortal and fallible the men were who governed the nation.
At first, the familiar faces were a blur. The room was slightly overheated, the air surprisingly stale. She hastily put down her attaché case, then stood awkwardly, trying to look both alert and at ease. Inevitably, her eyes were drawn to the black man in the navy pin-striped suit.
President Waters had loosened his tie. Normally, he was every bit as fastidious as Bouquette, and Daisy read the opened collar as a sign that the man had truly grown weary. President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society. Even after the disastrous trade war with the Japanese, as well as the long sequence of military humiliations and hard-won successes, even after Runciman's disease had cut a broad path across the continent, the United States remained a relatively wealthy country in an impoverished world. Yet the decades had more and more turned its society into a solvent majority and a number of marginalized subsectors whose members had fallen ever farther behind contemporary demands for an educated, highly skilled work force and the need for cultural integration to facilitate competitiveness. Then the United States had given sanctuary to the Israelis who had survived the final Mideast war, and although the Israelis settled largely in "homelands" located in the least promising areas of the Far West, they soon constituted a powerful force in post-epidemic America, where the shortage of skilled, dedicated workers had grown critical. The resulting explosion of anti-Israeli sentiment from minority groups that had isolated themselves ever more drastically from the mainstream manifested itself in demonstrations, confrontation, and, ultimately, in bloodshed. The candidacy of Jonathan Waters in 2016 succeeded on the premise that all Americans could live together — and succeed together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man's black and the black-man's white… and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation. Yet, the first term of President Waters had been shadowed by a wide range of international issues, while his domestic solutions remained promising — but the stuff of generational rather than overnight change. As Cliff Bouquette was fond of putting it, "The poor bugger's totally lost in all this, and he's about to be equally the loser at the polls." Everyone believed that Jonathan Waters was a genuinely good man. But a series of nationwide surveys indicated that he had lost his image as a leader.
The President looked first at Bouquette, then at Daisy, before settling his noticeably bloodshot gaze back on the tanned, perfect man at Daisy's side.
"Good evening, Cliff," the President said, "and to you, Miss Fitzgerald. I hope you've brought me some good news."
President Waters wanted a cheeseburger. It seemed unreasonable to him that so trivial a desire could haunt a man in an hour of grave discussions and fateful decisions. But, he told himself, the body could go only so long without fuel. Countless shots of coffee and some scraps of doughnut, even cut with the spice of adrenaline and nerves, could carry a man only so far. And now, faced with the prospect of Clifton Reynard Bouquette, whom he could not abide, and his sidekick, who was as nerve-rackingly intense as she was genuinely good at her work, the President wished he could just put everything on hold for fifteen minutes of quiet. Spent alone. With a Coke and the sort of monumental, dripping cheeseburger that his wife went to great lengths to deny him, in the interests of the presidential health.
But there was no time. And, the President reflected, you could hide behind a cheeseburger for only so long, in any case. Then you would have to return to this obstreperous, all too violent world, where the very best of intentions seemed to have no power at all.
He had dreamed of going down in history as the President who taught his people to join hands, to understand one another, and to go forward together. He wanted to be the President who spoke for the poor, the ill-educated, the badly nourished, the men and women whom the streets had educated to make the worst possible choices, and he wanted to speak for them in a voice that did not threaten, but that softened life's harshness — for all Americans. His vision had been of a great returning home — by all those socially or economically crippled citizens who lived as exiles in the land of their birthright. He valued, above all, kindness — generosity in spirit and in fact — and peace. But the world demanded a man with the strength to order other men to kill, to ruin, and to die. In his gestures and words President Waters took great pains to remain firm, strong, commanding. But, in his heart, he wondered if he was a man of sufficient stature for the hour. He had even taken to praying, in private, for the first time since the age of fifteen, when he had watched his father die unattended in a hospital hallway.
He smiled slightly, wearily, dutifully, greeting Bouquette and his assistant. Bouquette looked so damnably pleased with himself. Waters had first met the Bouquettes of the world at Yale, and he had been forced to recognize their genuine importance, their utility. But, even though he suspected it might be owing to sheer jealousy on his part, he had never learned to like them — even as he had laboriously taught himself to imitate their dress, their choice of words, their confidence…
His smile grew genuine for a moment, as he considered the reaction he would get if he asked Bouquette to run along and fetch him a cheeseburger.
Bouquette was already bent over the audiovisual console, feeding in the domino-sized ticket that held the classified briefing aids. Momentarily, the monitor sets perched above and behind the conference table flickered to life.
"Just a second, Cliff," the President said. "I've got some critical business to attend to before you begin." He turned his attention to Miller, the lowest-ranking man in the room. "John, would you mind sending down to the kitchen for some sandwiches? I suspect we're going to be here for a while. Call it a working dinner."
Miller stood up. Ready to go and do his president's bidding. "The usual for you, Mr. President?"