Norman was at the door. He said, “Working on your speech? Great,” and he marched in to have a look. Thurlow hid the screen.
“Sorry. It’s just that the crew is here and we’re ready to go. Everyone’s waiting.”
Thurlow clapped his PC shut. “Look, we only have one shot at this. And I want to get it right. You of all people should appreciate that.”
“I do, of course, but I also — okay, just look at this”—and he waved a DVD in the air.
It was a video taken by a Helix Head who’d been emailing them views of Covington, on the Kentucky side of the river. It was a quaint spot, minus the National Guard, stationed in the farmers’ market.
Norman rolled back on his heels. “So this is exactly as you planned, right? International coverage. Because, just to reconfirm, that is the point, right?”
“It’s going to be fine, Norm. Don’t worry.”
Thurlow leaned in close to the computer screen, trying to count heads. Plus the Guard, there were probably one hundred special ops in the market, and more en route.
“In any case, the artists are ready to go,” Norman said. “I assume, once the tape’s out, we’ll let them go, right? Send them off and, what, pay a fine or something?”
They paused in this exchange until Norman said, “Oh, you know what I mean. Half of D.C. is Helix. You’ve got friends. I predict you spend one night away from home, tops.”
Thurlow sat back in his chair. Breathing in, letting out. But it was no good. His body had taken over the discharge of what Norman had roused in him, which was anxiety. Fibrillations of heart and eyelid, a throbbing wen on his forearm that had not been there minutes ago. Water coming down the ducts but stopping short of notice.
“Certainly no more than a week,” Norman said. “And in the meantime! Anyone skeptical about what we’re doing here is going to change his mind.” Norman freed a sheet of notebook paper from his back pocket. “Not to be presumptuous, but I’ve been pushing some words around and wonder if maybe you’ll consider including some of them in your address.”
Thurlow pressed the wen with his fist. “What address?”
“On the ransom tape? Maybe something about how there’s thirty million single people in the country. Or ninety million. How the system is designed to keep us apart. The class divide. The housing gap. Work ninety hours a week in a cubicle at a soul-sapping job whose chief enterprise is to proliferate dialogue about last night’s TV fare, and what are the odds you find someone to hold your hand under the covers at night? Something like that, maybe?”
The wen seemed like it might erupt. Or migrate up his arm and into his brain.
“Norman, get out. I don’t need your help.”
“Okay, but just in case it wasn’t clear, the United States government has sent the army for your artists.”
“Hostages, Norm. They are hostages. But they aren’t mine. I did this for the Helix.”
“Right-o,” he said, and he lifted his palms, which exposed his cuffs, his cuff links, and with them a suspicion Thurlow had been trying to repress since the moment Norman walked in. Cuff links? Really? Because even a conscientious, exemplary worker among men does not wear cuff links in the day-to-day. He told Norman to leave them on the table, which Norman did with vigor, so that they fell to the floor and to a hollow between the baseboard and parquet. Thurlow waited for Norman to leave and shut the door behind him before going after the links. The link-microphones. But they were gone. He took stock of the room. He’d always liked this room. But never mind. He would pack up his computer and papers of import and seal off his study forever.
But first: rest. He flopped into an easy chair and splayed all the limbs he had. He thought about the hostages. The troops in the market. His wife and daughter and the life they had together, pillaged by a lonely guy who screwed up every chance he got. The lights went out. A siren cried.
He buzzed for Vicki. At least Vicki would kiss him hello and put her arms around him and be happier for it. He buzzed for her again and got no answer.
The commissary: Impersonal and square. No weird angles to negotiate, no family photos to remove. Potted plants arranged around a director’s chair. Dean wearing a boonie hat with chin strap and black aigrette pinned to the side, not fancy but more like he’d plucked a duck.
Thurlow watched him and the gaffer spar in one corner and Norman preside over the hostages in another. Their hoods were still on, though Norman had procured an emollient for the Indian’s neck, which was aflame with rash.
Dean said, “Almost ready,” and dragged a bouquet of assault rifles across the floor. They were arranged in a tin stand like umbrellas. He prodded a floodlight with the tip of his boot. “Except it’s too dark in here,” he said. “Too Goddamn dark. Hey, Edison,” he said, and he frowned at the gaffer, who was hell-bent on chiaroscuro. “Watch it!” Dean said as the gaffer’s ladder tipped and fell into the director’s chair.
“Not the chair,” Dean said. “We don’t have another one here. Okay, let me think. I need an hour.”
Norman, who had been standing by the cheese platter — his idea of craft services for the crew — smacked his head. “An hour? What makes you think we have an hour? Just use a different chair.”
Thurlow stood. “And get rid of the rifles. Seriously. That’s not what we’re about.”
Dean looked bereft, as if the seat of passion once vacated by his wife’s death was now vacant all over again. He took Thurlow aside. He said, “You know it’s my job to read everything that comes in here. So you know I’ve seen what the North Koreans have been saying. And I’m all for it. So are a lot of people. So you just say the word. Whenever you’re ready.”
“I appreciate that,” Thurlow said, and was about to say more when a fist of disappointment and upset grabbed his voice and closed it off.
He made for the cheese platter. Nine kinds of curd, sliced thin. Those rounds with the red and yellow wax. Antipasto and toothpicks with tinsel finials half-mooned by a swath of wheaty biscuits.
Then he went back to his room and shut the door.
03:12:53:12: Some people know their destiny from the start. But not me. And even if I did, it’s not like there’s a manual for how to become what I’ve become. It’s not like there’s a school for brinksmanship or a ladder with rungs visible from the bottom up. There’s not even a school for the presidency of the nation, and yet the road to that job is still clearer than mine. And so, a little about me, because I want people to understand how I got here. Plus, I think my time is running out.
My parents were part of the middling salariat that votes right but acts left. Men who tout family values while dropping a load at Tart’s Bigbar. Women who abort their kids in secret. They were Reaganites who imposed an old-fashioned aesthetic on the scheduling of our lives, so that we seemed to meet only at dinners, which were opportunities to know each other that we never took. Our family congress was more like antecedent to purdah among friends, which is, not coincidentally, the experience and philosophy I have spent the Helix trying to retire.
As for my parents, for parents in general, there’s the education they mean to give you and then what they actually give you; in a good family the two are discrepant because at least they tried to give you the best.
Our kitchen was meat and potatoes and squash, carrots in stock, brisket with pineapple Os, short ribs and stew. By age ten, I could out-girth a keg of beer. Or so I was told by my dad, who found in this razzing a way to be intimate that did not humiliate him. For many dads, the way is violence, so I consider myself lucky.
We were not excitably poor or evangelical, but we were striking for how little capacity any of us had to dream of a life outside the one we had. My mother collected Tweety Bird figurines. My dad was a facilities services manager for the convention center. We lived in a shingled bungalow-type residence in Anaheim.