He hesitated, wanted to say no, thought he’d say no, but ultimately said yes. He had no idea why she wanted this, but it happened almost without pause. She led him to the bed and sat behind him massaging his shoulders, the skin of her calf pressed against his arm, and after kneading his neck for a bit—which, admittedly, felt wonderful—she turned his face and began kissing him. He stopped to ask her what she was doing.
“That out of practice?”
In truth, yes, he was, and though he was sure he acquitted himself poorly in the ensuing activities, Emii seemed satisfied by the end of it all and lay with her head on his chest.
“I don’t really understand,” he said.
“What’s not to understand?”
“You’re a beautiful woman. I’m a decaying old man who’s told you to fuck off in multiple forums.”
It was dark, so he couldn’t see her face, but there was no trace of humor in her voice when she said, “I admire you. I always have.”
She visited his room every night after that. They did not speak of these late-night encounters during the day. They didn’t even eat meals together. Yet she kept coming to his room, and he had to admit how good it felt to hold someone again, to simply feel another person’s skin and warmth. It pushed back his fear of what was happening within his cells. He knew his daughters wanted him to find somebody, but it had never clicked. From his many hours spent by Gail’s side, he understood that the thing that broke her heart the most was not her own death but that she’d never see Holly and Catherine grow up. She’d never know what they’d become as their own women; she’d never meet their terrible boyfriends or move them into their college dorms; she’d never watch Holly discover all the books she’d love, and she’d never get to argue with Catherine about the appropriateness of certain outfits. Gail claimed she wanted Tony to find someone who cared about him, “Even if she’s a dirty climate groupie whore.” But he did not want to find someone. The memories of watching the girls grow into women, the specificity of each landmark, he could never give those moments to anyone else. They were Gail’s, and in her absence, they would just have to be hoarded and buried with him and him alone.
The task force was getting close, though, and he was feeling the urgency of his disease. He’d spent much of his downtime reading about what ten of twenty-six cancerous lymph nodes meant. He was also getting tired more frequently, feeling a deep fatigue every morning. He told Hasan over dinner that he could not go to D.C. to help push the bill through. He had to get back to New Haven. Ash wiped his mouth and said nothing until they signed the check. Then he suggested they take a walk.
Though Tony had no interest in leaving the safety of the hotel for the sweaty, teeming streets of downtown Cleveland, he followed. They’d been assigned a security detail, but Ash did not contact them. Beyond the doors of the lobby, the city had the raw, panicked edge he saw everywhere now. The police presence was overwhelming. They wore tactical equipment and carried automatic weapons; their faces masked behind plexiglass helmets. But for now, the peace was intact, the lights of the casino sparkling.
“We need you, Tony.” Ash walked with his hands in the pockets of his slacks, head bowed. “We’re close to completing an acceptable omnibus bill, but we will need to convince a good number of frightened and recalcitrant politicians. If we fail, I don’t think I need to explain the consequences.”
“Yeah, I get the consequences. Thing is,” he barreled ahead, “I have a health issue. Not a good one. I’ve put off treatment the whole time we’ve been working on this.”
Ash took this news without surprise or interest, really. He didn’t even ask what the issue was. What a goddamn freak.
“My condolences. Nevertheless.” They stopped beside a statue of some old dead white guy. Bartholemew Fucking Cleveland or something. “What I’ve always admired about you, Tony, is that you look at everything in a straightforward manner. Even a wound. Even death.”
“Yeah, well, I tried on rose-tinted glasses once, and they looked like shit.”
Ash favored him with a gaze as clinical as a mortician’s.
“The man who murdered Kate Morris and your daughter’s other friends. He was a troubled obsessive with access to a military weapon. No links to militias or hate groups. He was just a man with a computer full of musings on Ms. Morris. Nothing more.”
“Sure, the lone gunman. I’ve heard that one.”
“My point being, the political violence unleashed over the last few years has actually been rather mild so far. It will certainly grow much, much worse if we fail. You have a responsibility, Tony, to help arrest this breakdown. You are a father and a grandfather. To think that this chaos will not come to your doorstep is naive, particularly for Holly, who is now a highly public figure.”
The chill crawled through him as he heard his truest fear spoken aloud. Hasan then stepped far too close, almost like he was going to attack him.
“I don’t accept your resignation because you don’t have the option of resigning. You and I have no choice but to throw ourselves in front of this train.” He turned and began walking back toward the hotel. Over his shoulder, he added, “So to speak.”
In D.C., they hammered away at the nation’s political class, delivering 3D presentations, inveighing about the quickly collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, trying to keep one caucus together and fracture another to draw off defectors. What he concluded, however, was that he’d wasted precious months forgoing treatment so he could listen to imbecilic senators and congressmen prevaricate while failing to read even the most elementary briefing materials on the most important vote of their lives. Meanwhile, the Chinese government convulsed, the governor of Kansas executed more people live on VR, and the riots, arson, and clashes in cities grew worse. Reading a book about the Covid-19 crisis, he marveled at the relative ease of the situation. Turn a few policy knobs here, pull a few levers there, stimulus, vaccine, no big deal, problem solved. What they were dealing with here was a game of nine-dimensional chess, and they couldn’t even get people to sit down at the goddamn board and start trying. Russ Mackowski was a particularly odious exemplar of the overall problem: a hypermasculine buffoon who was content to let the world incinerate as long as it furthered his ambitions. As jaded as Tony was, to hear him admit in their meeting that he had no intention of ever letting their bill come to a vote was truly shocking. Mackowski held up a meaty butcher’s palm and told them he was going on vacation. When he left, Tony released a string of expletives into the ears of Ash and Emii.
“It was an opening bid,” she said with her standard calm. “He understands he holds a very good hand in one of the most important poker games of his career. We can work on him,” she assured them. In the weeks since returning to D.C., he and Emii had seen each other only twice. Even in the midst of freefall, the human animal longs for the simplest carnal pleasures. Ash called him the next day.
“My brother-in-law, Peter, and Haniya will follow Mackowski to the Blue Crystal Mountain Resort during the August recess.”
“What, are they all going fucking fly-fishing together?”
“That he’s acquiesced to hearing out Haniya, Peter, and Ms. Li Song means we could still have an opening. Peter thinks he’s not the ideologue that he claims. If this is about horse-trading, we can have them quietly negotiate to bring him to a yes.”
That night, he texted with Emii, laying out the stakes, the arguments, anything that might help.
I’m well aware of all of this, she wrote back to him. Her typical curt manner.
I know, I’m just losing my mind.
And he really was. That week had been The Pastor’s Loyalty March, and the sight of all those people bleeding from their scalps as they tore through the streets nationwide was about the most pants-shitting thing he’d seen in his adult life. Every day that passed, every dollar sucked out of the economy, every spasm of violence, it all ticked by with a deadly finality. There were things you could not come back from.