The best thing about hatred as opposed to love was the absence of any feeling on Tad’s part that he was here to somehow, against all odds, redeem these people. That illusion, at least, was long gone. He didn’t want to rescue the administration from its folly: he wanted to see it blown to atomic dust or drowned in a sack. And he badly wanted to outlive it — to know it had been judged by history before he passed on.
So he surfed the Net, partly to fuel his outrage, partly to probe for symptoms of terminal disease — leaked secrets, crashing poll numbers, the rotten whiff of scandal yet to break. Over the years, the administration had packed the judiciary with yes-men and yes-women to the point where it could now usually operate comfortably above the law, but there were some honest judges left, and lately there’d been an increasing trickle of defectors, whose enthralling tales of government malfeasance gave Tad some hope that even the Department of Justice would have to recognize, however halfheartedly, that at least a measure of justice needed to be done.
That much was sane. What was insane was the giddy excitement that overtook him on these virtual nighttime adventures — the quickening heartbeat, the sweating palms, the acute mental arousal in which he took such involuntary pleasure. This was being in hate, and Tad, when truthful with himself, had to acknowledge that he liked being in hate. A lot. He was aware that if and when this wretched government really did fall, he’d rejoice, of course, but that a part of himself would feel as bereft and purposeless as when Thanh had been led away under a black hood, in police cuffs.
Sometimes he’d pretend that his rage was noble, altruistic, all on Ali’s behalf: how dare they fuck over the world into which she was just now beginning to step out? These crookedly elected, braggart thugs in business suits were systematically poisoning the future of Ali’s entire generation — and not just of her generation, either, but of every generation yet to come. But if that were truly Tad’s concern, his only emotion would be sorrow, and sorrow, strangely, was the least of his feelings. When he saw the browning of Mount Rainier, read of the melting arctic ice cap or the murderous inferno that blazed across the Middle East and South Asia, when the U.S. military practiced besieging American cities with tanks, artillery, and armored checkpoints in the name of “quarantine,” when the Supreme Court became the brass-knuckled enforcer of the presidential will and whim, what Tad felt was an adrenaline rush of angry elation. It was like getting off on porn, this secret relish for the wicked drama of it all.
Maybe he’d spent too long working in theater and could no longer distinguish real life from a thrillingly gory production of Tamburlaine, whose title role Tad had long dreamed of playing, and whose speeches he’d sometimes used as audition pieces for roles whose directors might doubt his capacity to do butch with suitable conviction:
Now hang our bloody colours by Damascus,
Reflexing hues of blood upon their heads,
While they walk quivering on their city-walls,
Half-dead for fear before they feel my wrath.
Certainly, if you looked for an author of this administration, it’d have to be Marlowe, or possibly Webster. Only an Elizabethan with a strong stomach for Grand Guignol could possibly have written the script for what was going on now.
Tonight the bloggers were off on the trail of laundered money that went straight through the back door of the White House, and the case of the former director of the FBI who’d either jumped or been pushed from the eighteenth floor of a hotel in Baltimore on the eve of his appearance before the grand jury investigating the Vasico affair. The president had made another speech — the usual Tamberlainish stuff about scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. Great strides were being made in the war of Good against Evil, most of them in secret, the president said, but it would not be long before the American people learned of the noble victories already accomplished in their name. The bloggers were sifting through the text of this speech like soothsayers reading goats’ entrails. It was noted that when the president said “Patriotic America knows its strength. To all nations, we say…” the initial letters of the first eight words ominously spelled out “PAKISTAN.”
Codes, portents, plots, chicanery: Tad was up to speed on them all. Swigging from the bottle of Evian water beside his rainbow mouse pad, he thought of how the ambit of his loathing must now widen to include his new landlord, yet another grinning monkey face in an outsize plumed helmet, as Le Canard Enchainé portrayed the president. Far from being depressed by Charles Lee’s blatant threats, he felt hyped by them. Tad Zachary had always enjoyed fights on stage, and he looked forward to this one: a labor of love and hate, whose twin poles he’d increasingly, during the last five years, become unable to tell apart.
LUCY, too tired to sleep, lay in bed watching the news on the postcard-size screen on the TV-clock-radio on her dresser. So that was what all the commotion that evening had been about — they’d evacuated Safeco Field.
A man “of Middle Eastern appearance” had been spotted hurrying out at the start of the seventh-inning stretch. Police had followed him to his car, a blue Chrysler with Canadian plates. When the mobile forensics lab was summoned, “traces of explosive residue” were found in the carpet of the trunk.
It was the clown on the ferry — of course — and Lucy knew exactly what must have happened. Shaking down his car at the terminal, the National Guardsmen, with their ammo-tainted fingers, would have left traces of explosive all over everything. The guy had left in disgust at the performance of his blessed Blue Jays, down five-nothing to the Mariners, the losingest team in the American League.
Now they were still frantically searching the stadium for a bomb, and reporters on the scene were hyperventilating over the capture of a terrorist “believed to have links with Al Qaeda.”
For a nanosecond, Lucy thought of dialing 911 and correcting the police’s misreading of his flight from the game: he was no more Al Qaeda than she was the Klan. But she’d be on the phone half the night — on hold for ten minutes at a time, asked to spell her name a dozen times over, stuttering wildly, failing to make herself credible to the goon in charge. Let them figure it out in their own sweet time; and it would do that pestering nuisance no great harm to cool his heels for a few hours in the pen.
News just in: Woman dies of heart attack in Seattle stadium evacuation.
So he’d actually killed someone. Or rather, they had. “Woman dies of someone else’s overheated imagination,” more like.
“…reporting live from Safeco Field, this is Tamara Gold for KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.” The tiny screen barely contained the bug-eyed, breathless Tamara, who looked as if she herself were about to go off like the so far undiscovered bomb.
With thirty thousand people summarily pitched into the streets, and with fears of an imminent explosion, there was no other news — no weather, even, and certainly no mention of a fatal car accident on Whidbey Island, which was why Lucy had tuned in.
JOLTED AWAKE from a dream just after midnight, Alida was multitasking: shiny-faced with Clearasil, she was listening to “Wake Me up When September Ends” on her iPod and reading Agatha Christie in the cone of light cast by the hooded halogen bulb on its metal stalk. Insomnia, once a cause of anguish to her, was now a source of pride. While the rest of the building slept, Alida had the world to herself, in the heady company of Jane Marple and Billie Joe Armstrong. With a book propped on the quilted comforter and good music in her ears, she was in charge of her life in these secret watches of the night as she never was during the day.