3. Kinetic
These are things about Theroux that are true.
His girlfriend did leave him.
His cat did die. More on those things later.
He once had a beard in college, until he discovered that college girls don’t actually like that sort of thing.
He used to love taking apart telephones, not to better understand how they worked, but just because he liked doing it.
These are words and phrases that people have used to describe him: kinetic, frantic, tilt-a-whirl, annoying, asshole, selfish, brilliant, wonderful, muppet-like, ergotic, awful, fearsome, lame, dynamic. Odd.
Even when his life was on the rails they used to say that he was strange. This is an actual conversation about him that took place once:
PERSON 1: Have you met that Theroux guy?
PERSON 2: Throw? What?
PERSON 1: Theroux.PERSON 2: I don’t know what you’re saying right now.
PERSON 1: Thuuuur – oh.
PERSON2: Oh that guy. He’s fucking weird.
There are a few people who know him well and they say to each other – when the subject comes up – that it is not so much that he suffered some sort of nervous breakdown when Olivia – that was her name – left, but rather that he was finally given the perfect excuse to have a nervous breakdown. It was as if he had always been waiting for the perfect convergence of events that would allow him to shake off life and embrace some sort of chaos. “He’s a pistol,” his mother used to say to people.
This is something about him that is true. He is, in fact, a pistol.
4. Preamble
The 1,784 words that preceded this sentence were entirely preamble.
The story is about to begin.
It is kinda of love story (because every story really is). It is kinda the story about the assassination of a president. It is also kinda a dirty, sweaty story about sex and the things that people really want.
This is how it will probably end:
Theroux clutched his hands against the hole in his chest, looking down to see that the blood – his blood – was forcing its way out between his fingers, that it was coating his hands, that it was flowing down the once-white tuxedo shirt, that it was covering his pants as he slumped against the hard concrete of the wall. He looked around him and saw that the blood – his blood – was forming a red puddle on the floor and that he was exactly at the center of it. He watched the blood – his blood – as it spread with the mindless insistence of a rising tide across the floor.
Somewhere, it seemed distantly, he heard footsteps nearing him, and then he saw – he couldn’t raise his head up – he saw just her shoes. Black, sexy, sharp-heeled, she always had the best shoes. He saw just her shoes.
She didn’t say anything to him.
Next, he only heard the first half of the gunshot.
But it might also end like this:
He leaned in close to Olivia’s perfectly shaped ear. He was behind her and his skin remembered hers and a wickly perfect sort of recognition occurred between their bodies. Flesh drawn to flesh by some physical memory of past fucks. The curves and edges of their bodies fitted into on another while his arms wrapped around her and his fingers slipped ghostly and barely touching, down the whole length of her, parting her. Touching her just there.
And he leaned in close to her perfectly shaped ear and he whispered to her, into her, just barely letting the words leave his mouth, barely allowing them to ripple in the air, he whispered to her, “This is where I belong” and it was true.
But it is impossible to know right now how it will end. Everything – right now - is possibility and there is nothing which isn’t.
There will, however, most certainly be an assassinated president and something kinda like a love story.
Here is how those things start.
5. Resolute
A copy of the President’s dreams hit the internet and went viral in less than ten minutes. At first, no one knew if they were legit, but everyone wanted them to be.
The images were cloudy, like watching television through the rain. That was to be expected - the tech-dorks of the internet said on their forums - because whoever did it was sourcing them out of the air. If the dreams had been recorded by a deck hooked up to a direct tap pressed against the President’s head, the resolution and general quality would have been much high.
No, the tech dorks said, someone did this from a distance, with a tap that was professionally calibrated to the level of sub-atomic particles. Probably - they said - it was fitted with an IR laser and it picked up the fizz of the President’s dreams as vibrations against a window. They said that who ever did it would have had to spend weeks editing down through all the ambient clutter - people hundreds of yards away breathing, a bug fidgeting, carpet fibers expanding and contracting with temperature variations - in order to isolate the particles of free energy that leaked out of the President’s brain. They said that it was a project of startling ambition and stellar execution. They were correct about that. They were not correct about anything else.
But no one knew who had done it.
The FBI went looking though. The Department of Homeland Security threw a quiet, shadowy net over the whole dream tapping industry. People got questioned at night. Websites got shut down, server banks got raided, but even the bulk and power of the government of the United States of America was unable to stop the viral outbreak of dreams along the digital synapses of the internet. So the President’s dreams were out there, in the world, for everyone to see, view, and comment on. Whole strange wikis were dedicated to analyzing them, scores of thesis would be dedicated to the unfolding cultural episode; to its meaning. Discussions permeated the very fabric of American life. Every friend and coworker and acquaintance had a theory about the images, the point of hacking dreams, the political motivation behind it. Hundreds of parodies and recreations were uploaded to Youtube, Youporn, Funnyordie.
The President said little publicly about it.
At first his Press Secretary, Elliot Pail Bayles, denied that the dreams were real. An adversarial press pool reporter from the Boston Herald lured him into a lengthy discussion or whether or not dreams are real at all, or can be. It ramped up into a semantic debate on the meaning of the word ‘dream’. The discussion ranged from the metaphor of dreams to the metaphor of the word ‘dream’ and what it this Presidental dream stealing might mean about the relationships that Americans have to their ‘dreams’. Bayles a former communications and media professor at the University of Chicago and then Pepperdine – waxed poetic and almost convulsively heartfelt for fifteen minutes about the role of dreams in American life and how foundational they have always been to fundamental American identity.
When he was done, there was an eerie quite in the White House Press Room. A strange and almost embarrassed sense of quiet was heavy in the room. Bayles seemed to return to earth and he cleared his throat self-consciously. The press pool reporters – being journalists – were not inclided to believe in anything, least of all things that other people believed in. They looked at him. A few sighed and clicked their pens.
Bayles smoothed his tie down, adjusted his rimless eye glasses. He smoothed down his tie again. “Yes, well. The point is that what is circulating on the internet is not real.”
Later that very same day, Bayles was called into the Oval Office. Other members of the senior staff her present, including Kefauver the White House Chief of Staff. Kefauver was forty-one, but had always looked forty-one, so in a way he was in the prime of his life. His widow’s peaks were high, his hair shaved down ultra-short. It was said that he had the sexiest of any White House Chief of staff in all of American history. Secretly, he always knew that this was true. He was respected and liked by many. Respected and hated by some. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him, that sort of thing, which was impressive because he was less than six feet tall and had looked forty-one his entire life.
He was sitting on the front corner of the President’s desk. The President was sitting behind the desk. The others were arrayed around the room. Kefauver was drinking bourbon on the rocks. An extra one was sitting on the President’s desk. Kefauver picked it up and held it out to Bayles, who took it and nodded solemnly.
Kefauver said, “Today, that was the strangest fucking press conference that I have ever seen in my life. And I have had a very interesting life.”
“I let it get away from me,” Bayles said.
“I think that you got away from it, but that’s not the problem. In fact, it might even be the opposite of a problem . . . “
“A good thing? Bayles asked.
“Yes,” Kefauver said, “that would, in fact, be the opposite of a problem.”
“How?”
Kefauver took a big pull off his glass and stood up so that he could pace. He paced a lot. He was very active when he thought. “I have been talking to the President,” he was addressing the entire collected senior staff in the room now, “and he feels that we should take ownership of this. The smokescreen of denial is eventually going to dissipate and they will be able to see a lie for a lie and call it a lie, or we just own up to it, Yes that is a copy of one of the President’s dream. No, we don’t know who stole it and we don’t know why. And yes, we are actively treating it as an issue of national security. The President wants us to be clear and concise from now on . . . want you to pay special attention to that one word Professor Bayles. Concise. I want nothing but artful concision to come out of your mouth from now on. Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
Kefauver looked to the President, who just nodded.
Bayles took a delicate sip of his bourbon.
Kefauver looked over his assembled staff the way that a shepherd surveys his flock, with tenderness and concern, but also with the knowledge that they are his work. “Anything else?”
Bayles smoothed down his tie, “Sir,” he said toward the President, “what would you like me to say when I am asked about the . . . nature of the dream?”
Kefauver didn’t look at the President, not directly, and neither did anyone else. Just Bayles.
The President inhaled through his nose, more than a little tired. He leaned back in his chair, away from the desk, which was made from timbers recovered from the sunken HMS Resolute and given to the White House as a gift by Queen Elizabeth II. Many Presidents had used that desk. Many Presidents had leaned back away from it in exactly this way.
“Hmmmm,” the President said.
6. Confabulation
The President was an unlikely in many ways.
He spoke well but seldom.
He voice was low, almost on the decibel of a whisper, but he never whispered.
During the campaign, he was often called ‘joyless’.
That is not precisely true.
But it is true enough.
He is not a man given to joy. He is not a man who gives himself over to joy.
He is not a man who gives himself over to much of anything.
However, he is not without feeling. He is not without emotion or empathy. He is just not a man who expresses these things often.
Historians were saying on the very night of the election that he would never have gotten close to the White House had not been for a perfect storm of random and unlikely events.
Though, in truth, the events were not the least bit random or unlikely.
He was a thin, narrow, wire figure of a man, but did not ever seem that way to the people who had been in his presence. Strangely - when polled - American men consistently estimated his weight to be 15 to 20 pounds more than it actually was. His face was thin to the point of being gaunt. Days after his election, the Iranian state-run newspaper The Kayhan Daily ran a caricature of him as a Holocaust survivor, in striped outfit, standing near barbed wire. The point of the cartoon was only to poke fun at his weight. It literally did not even imply that he was a Zionist provocateur. Incidentally, it still stands as the only time that any Iranian state-run newspaper has ever been allowed to even tacitly acknowledge that the Holocaust may have actually occurred.
This is not unusual for him.
In some preternatural way he consistently conflates ideology by forcing it
to bend its orbit around him.
Additionally, he had never wanted to be President any more than any other American does. All Americans want to be president a little bit. His degree from Brown was in Political Science, but as a young man he had worked as a music industry A & R man. In four years, the bands he scouted collected 28 Grammys. At the formerly small and formerly unknown Confabulation Records, they took to adoringly calling him The Mint, because of all the money he made them.
He found and rep-ed the new vanguard of bands. Bands like Sonic Death Monkey, Hypothetical Apostrophe, Kathleen Turner Overdrive, The Invisible Band and The Gutters.
These were to become seminal bands.
These were to become legends.
A writer for Rolling Stone once said of him, ‘… he is an unlikely, but none the less, mad phonic prophet. A man who has nearly singlehandedly altered the course of twenty-first century music without ever playing an instrument or writing a single lyric.’
Always a subtle man, he didn’t spend his money on much of anything - except for the simple, slim, understated three-piece black suits that would later become his public signature – so he began donating it. To this cause, to that one; whales, gays, illegals, justice, fairness. In this way he was still fulfilling the ideological proclivities that had pushed him toward political science in the first place.
As time went on, his donations became more and more specific, until finally he was giving directly to individual candidates and his money bought him serious face time with them, and though he did not say much, what he did say often proved valuable. And so those very same candidates tended to accept him as a confidant. And soon he was a political consiliere on both coasts and numerous places in between.
Those who knew or noticed things slowly became aware of the gravity of his presence, and it was always there: a Congressional race in Idaho, a governor’s race in Pennsylvania, a school board election in New Hampshire, a mayor’s race in Fresno. Not yet a kingmaker, but a puppet master of some kind.
In an editorial for NEWSWEEK magazine, Fareed Zakaria – widely accepted as one of the smartest Americans ever to have lived – compared his quiet and ghostly influence to that of the infamous but phantasmal arms dealer Viktor Bout, “Both wield a sort of nebulous power and authority over the events of their particular spheres. There was a time when no government on the entire continent of Africa existed outside of Bout’s violent orbit. And there is a time – it is now – when there’s no political moment or movement which is not somehow actively absorbed in, or at least passively and cautiously aware of, him.”
In his autobiography, five star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thomas Carlyle wrote of him, “Not being particularly political – as I had spent most of my life on a boat of one size or another - I had never heard of the man until I was told one day that I had an appointment with him, on a Tuesday no less. I remember that I called an old friend at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to ask who the hell this guy was. My friend told me - and I will never forget this – my friend told me, ‘He’s a civilian operator. He is known for getting exactly what he wants by saying exactly nothing. He waits for you to talk until you agree with him. He’s frightening, but you won’t realize it at the time.’
Carlyle went on to write, “When I met him he was wearing one of those black suits, with a white shirt and a black tie. The kind of thing that he always wears, but I didn’t know that then. We shook hands and he was very polite. He thanked me for taking the meeting. I asked him how he got onto my schedule and I don’t think that he ever actually answered that question, but about ninety minutes later I left that meeting with the germ of an idea and that idea would later grow into our revamped defense policy toward East Asia.”
( . . . more tomorrow . . .)
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