~ ~ ~
A few weeks after the frenzied campaign rally where he almost is trampled to death, an eighteen-year-old boy recognizes on television the woman who pulled him to safety from that terrible sea of human hope and then whispered in his ear something he’ll never forget, even as he has no idea what it was.
It’s late on the night of the state’s primary election. The news pictures are broadcast from the back kitchen of the old L.A. hotel that several decades ago hosted movie stars and presidents nearly as notable, where the Academy Awards took place; in the early-morning hours of this night, the unspeakable thing that’s on everyone’s mind finally happens. He lies in bed in his dormitory room at the university, listening to the primary returns on the radio. He’s about to turn it off, the candidate having given his victory speech, when the newscaster reports hearing shots.
~ ~ ~
Not knowing where the shots are fired or exactly where they come from, the newscaster audibly trembles. Some semblance of professionalism in his voice struggles to keep catastrophe at bay.
Zan gets out of his dorm bed and pulls on some clothes and goes into the room next door where other guys who live on the same floor play cards. Without asking, he turns on his neighbor’s small black-and-white television and there’s the young black woman in the tumult, none of the fear in her eyes that Zan saw that afternoon weeks ago but rather now a dead release. “What’s going on?” one of the guys says looking up from his hand of cards, and Zan says, “Something’s happened.”
Forty years later, the original exhilaration felt by the country that greeted the new president on his election is supplanted by an opposite hysteria for which Zan can only wonder if the first hysteria is in some measure responsible. On the express Eurostar that pulls out of London’s St. Pancras station off King’s Cross and hurtles beneath the Channel toward Brussels and Paris, while his son, wreathed by a rare quiet, stares out the train window at the Chunnel walls, Zan reads newspapers scooped up beneath the skylights of the station arcade and, from the dispassionate vantage point of foreign shores, realizes that his country has lost its mind.
~ ~ ~
At citizen meetings in towns around the country, people are becoming unhinged about. . everything. These are people who were not part of the small era of good feelings that followed the election; these are people who held their tongues. The hysteria isn’t really about what’s proposed or opposed or the facts of these things, no more than was the original hysteria. As was the original hysteria, it’s about the president himself and how into a time of tumult and anxiety has come someone that some regard as so alien that now the emotional tenor of every debate is separated from reality. It’s the dark nihilist brethren of the euphoria that greeted the new president’s election, the commensurate response to a hope and promise too uncommon and maybe delusional to last any longer than fleetingly.
In the dark of the Chunnel, the train comes abruptly to a halt. As they wait for the train to begin again, Zan mulls the article in The Times that reports death threats against the new president up four hundred percent. Over the months that have followed his assumption of office, first there have been openly expressed hopes that he’ll fail, then accusations that he’s a radical, then questions whether he was born in the country and really is president at all. “When are we going to move?” comes Parker’s voice out of the dark.
~ ~ ~
Then he’s accused of hating white people. Then he’s accused of fostering a presidency under which white people will be attacked and beaten. Then it’s claimed he’s setting up death tribunals that will condemn old people to termination. Then he’s compared to fascist dictators, then people bring guns to events where he speaks, then a widely-read blogger calls for a military coup, then a minister in Arizona calls from the pulpit for the president’s death. A popular website runs a poll asking respondents whether he should be assassinated.
Following such a linear progression, Zan asks himself in the dark two hundred feet below the surface of the English Channel, what else could be next? Or, put another way, what possibly could not be next? A new source of dread invades Zan amid all his other more prosaic trepidations. While this has been a country of murder since Zan was a teenager, and though Zan has lived through other assassinations and seen the country find a way to go on, he’s uncertain whether this time the country could endure such a thing: Too much history attends this presidency. However much anyone resists it, this president is too much the asterisk of the dream’s last four hundred years; he wears asterisks like a crown of thorns. Zan feels vested like he hasn’t before — no doubt, he thinks in the dark, to an extent that’s unhealthy, politically and any other way. But he isn’t the only one so vested and then there are those vested in the man’s fall — so should the unspoken thing happen, then how does a country that has invested so much stand it? Or does the very improbability of his rise suggest that he’s fated to be martyred.
~ ~ ~
Zan knows he’s not the only one contemplating this. He’s not the only one nursing a fear terrible enough that no one wants to name or give voice to it, just as few could stand to name or give voice to the fear that accompanied another prospective president forty years ago whom Zan, as a freshman, saw in the campus quad. Something about such men lets loose in the country a fury which no one names and to which no one gives voice; but then if it comes to pass, will everyone be left to wonder whether it would have been better to say it out loud after all? Now some do, in whispers so that fate might not overhear. From the flattest part of the Texas Panhandle, Zan’s anarchist friend writes, I can’t stand him — and I pray for him every day.
~ ~ ~
Zan wonders if they should get off the Eurostar at Brussels and change trains there for Germany. But the disadvantage of changing in Brussels is that it would involve yet another change of trains in Cologne; if the father and son continue another hour south onto Paris, they can catch a direct overnight train heading to Berlin. Zan was planning to get a couchette for his son on the Paris-Berlin train but the boy insists he doesn’t want to be in one part of the train while his father is in another, and Zan remembers years before when he went to Berlin, during his breakup with Viv before Parker was born, learning the hard way that european trains subdivide in the night while you sleep, whisking you off, if you’re on the wrong car, to somewhere else.
The flaw of Zan’s Paris-connection plan is that there’s only half an hour between the Eurostar’s arrival at the Gare du Nord and the departure of the train to Berlin from the nearby Gare de l’Est. Counting too much on the newly teutonic timeliness of London trains, including the sleek Eurostar, and the ease of maneuvering the ten-minute walk between stations, Zan leaves his plan behind him in the dark of the Chunnel, once the express finally begins to move.