Others of My Kind Read online

  Later I would wonder if my dreams had somehow been spooky premonitions.

  It was the very stuff of high drama and high ratings: the elephant chain of dark limos on the freeway, Secret Service agents spilling from vehicles and spreading across parking lot and grounds, helicopter thwacking away out of sight, shuffle of the crowd assembling behind hastily set traffic barricades.

  The anchor appears. His suit fits superbly. There is no wildness in his eye; everything is under control. “Here is what we know,” he says.

  Which means they know next to nothing.

  And yet there is all this space to fill. So they go on, rolling the few solid crumbs back and forth in their mouths, spinning the web out ever thinner, long pan, split screen, reporter on the scene, authority on CVAs speaking by phone from his office at Brigham Young—trusting that all the fast footwork will distract us from thoughts that the big glittery bag has nothing inside.

  President Burke, dining at a local restaurant with Justice Daniels and a childhood friend, had lifted his fork before him as though to make a point, stopped speaking, stared at the fork for a moment, and collapsed. Secret Service agents were at his side before he hit the floor, the restaurant cleared within minutes, the caravan in motion soon thereafter to George Washington University Hospital, where a crack team of trauma specialists waited.

  Now President Burke lay in there (insert long shot of the ER dock and entryway), his fate in the hands of, etc.

  Though unspoken, etceteras were much in evidence. Boil it down to pot’s bottom, the whole spectacle was little more than one long etcetera.

  Almost everyone, naturally, had a theory, guess, surmise, or conjecture free for the asking. Stroke, myocardial infarction, food poisoning, Satan, aneurysm, terrorism, a new virus.

  Days later, when the story broke—that President Burke had a congenital heart condition, the fact of which had been kept securely under wraps—the conspiracy jockeys had a long run with it. I’ve always suspected such passionate scrambling after threads of influence to be another side of religiosity, a hunger for clear explanations (however befuddled they in fact are) in a world governed by chance.

  The phone rang again and I picked it up.

  “Well?” Mickie said.

  “Damn.”

  “That about says it.”

  “We need to address this tonight?”

  “I’m here already. Luis is on his way. Don’t think there’ll be much before morning, just endless recycles.”

  “See you in the morning, then.”

  Later I woke to the sound of Cheryl sobbing. Only then did I realize that in my sleep I’d heard the front door, heard her quiet and careful steps, had known that she was standing silently by my open bedroom door.

  I went to her doorway now. She was sitting by the window, looking out.

  “You okay?”

  “I saw him, Jenny.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Gus.”

  “You can’t have, Cheryl. He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “But you still think you saw him.”

  “It all came back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She turned her face from the window. Not to meet my eyes, only to gaze at the lamp on the table beside her bed, which had flickered. She reached out to tighten the bulb.

  “I don’t know if I’m sorry, or what. I don’t know what I feel.”

  “That’s because there’s so much of it.”

  “So much of what?”

  “Feeling.”

  After a moment she nodded.

  “Will this go on happening?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “We’re all different.”

  I sat on the bed, close enough easily to touch her, though I didn’t.

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “here’s what I think. At some point we realize that it’s not going to just happen, that we’re going to have to make the decision to become human and put some effort into it. Most start young as a matter of course. Others, people like you and me, we have good reason for being late starters. But the struggle’s the same. We work at making a self for most of a lifetime, only to find that the self we’ve created is inseparable from the struggle.”

  The lamp flickered again.

  “Maybe I should unplug it? There could be a short.”

  She did, and darkness came up around us. Though in a city, of course, there’s little enough true darkness. I sat watching her face in the mingle of streetlight and moonlight that spilled in the window. Headlights from a passing car lifted her features into sudden relief, then were gone.

  “I should probably try to get some sleep now,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “Jenny?”

  At the door I turned back.

  “You said earlier that we’re all different. But we’re all the same, too.”

  “We are. Both.”

  “Dollars,” an administration spokesman was saying as, back in my own bedroom, I turned on the radio, “are the hard currency of principle.” How this related to the president’s illness I had no idea, but obviously it did. Everything did, that night, that week. The stock market stood on the high board pinching nostrils shut before its dive. I had kindly thoughts for Sarah Courtney-Phillips, who I’m sure wished she’d had the decent good sense to get out of Dodge before it came to this.

  It’s all economics, Karl Marx insisted. Everything is water if you look long enough, poet Robert Creeley said.

  Chapter 13

  Water manifest: such quantities of it that I’m unable to see past the windowpanes it runs down.

  Following upon two hard-won hours of further sleep, morning also brings, besides the rain, the harder though hardly unanticipated news that, yes, President Burke is dead, dead after heroic measures at George Washington University Hospital. At the studio, myself half dressed, Luis and Mickie and much of the staff looking like refugees from some undisclosed war, we witness the swearing-in of Sarah Courtney-Phillips.

  “How much weight can one person bear?” Luis said.

  “And this is who’s running our country,” one of our two anchors said.

  “There’s no better educator than pain,” Mickie said. “No better leveler.”

  Her eyes met mine. I wondered, not for the first time, if she might know more about my past than she’d ever let on.

  “The networks are all over this,” Luis said. “They’ve got everything we don’t. Clearance, privilege, hordes of stringers. Money.”

  “They don’t have Jenny. Or her thirty-minute piece on Courtney-Phillips. And they don’t have you, who’s about to recut Jenny’s piece with a new intro. The magic goes on.”

  “Presto,” Luis said. Briefly, blink and you’d miss it, the two of them smiled at one another. They had a bond few of us would ever attain. Sea meeting shore. Sulfur rubbing up against potassium nitrate. That kind of bond.

  Retreating to my safe room of screens, dials, and control boards, I sat watching revamps of the swearing-in. Grace brought in coffee and, when I asked after her husband, told me he was still in the hospital. “I think he’d rather be there now.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t know Jeb. Nothing he hates so much as feeling a burden. ‘I didn’t mean to take over your life,’ he told me last week. ‘I only meant to be your life.’ ”

  On one of the screens opposite us, Sarah Courtney-Phillips, asked about her son’s abduction, opens her mouth only to find no words there. Her speechless, stunned face hangs in suspension.

  “And here I am whining about my problems,” Grace said.

  Grace left, and I sat watching rain beat at the window. It came in tides: fists, fingertips, tiring open hands, fists again. Past the rain I could make out nothing of the larger world. Behind me, on multiple monitors, small portions of that world hung suspended for a moment in high resolution, sharply defined, then gave way to others. I turned to them, on one of which the newly appointed president p
ro tem of a tiny African state held forth. His chains of prefabricated Communist rhetoric were like echoes of a thunder long since passed overhead.

  It’s not hatred, ignorance, greed, or blind nationalism that will end our world, I often think, but some system of ideas too dearly held. The idealogues, those who go on insisting upon simple solutions, who believe that the world in all its marvelous variety must be put up in a single jar of preserves—they’ll put an end to us all.

  That was a pale, stumbling Saturday. Days then in which we ran off coffee, adrenaline, general ruckus and rumor, trying as newsmen to fund the checks overwritten, waiting for the world to resettle.

  Two weeks after, I walked in to find Cheryl talking on the phone, many Yes ma’ams involved. She looked up and held out the phone. “It’s for you.”

  “Jenny Rowan?”

  Not Mickie’s voice as I’d expected, but familiar nonetheless.

  My turn for the Yes ma’am.

  “This is Sarah Courtney-Phillips, Jenny. I’m calling from home, on my personal line.”

  Not that either of us, though we pretended, had much faith that our conversation wasn’t being overheard. Later she’d tell me how it hardly seemed her home anymore. She was rarely there, and when so, was surrounded by polite strangers in dark suits. “Like a reef of coral.”

  Six days earlier I’d sat at the desk and, in three minutes flat, written a letter to her, taking still less time to reconsider before sending it.

  Dear Mrs. President:

  My name is Jenny Rowan. Rowan is adopted from all those Russian poems in which rowan trees seem so magical, Jenny is what I was called when I was young. I have worked for eight years as news editor for station WAAT. If you wish, I can provide my supervisor’s name and contact number. Years ago you may have heard of me as Mall Girl. When I was eight, I was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath my abductor’s bed. His name was Danny. Escaping, I lived, as it were, off the land—in Westwood Mall, eating discarded food, dressed in abandoned clothing. From hunted to gatherer.

  All my life I have felt at one and the same time an exception from ordinary life and a deep kinship with all those others passed over, relegated, forgotten. With much the same emotions, not to mention great reluctance and trepidation, I approach you now. If by some slim chance this reaches you, and should you feel the scarcest tug of kinship and want someone to talk with, please get in touch.

  “A glass wall’s come up between myself and the world I used to live in,” she would tell me. “I can see what goes on out there, the sounds reach me, but all I’m able to feel when I put my hand against the glass is the simple heat of it.” That was further along, well after this first phone call.

  “Thank you for your letter, Jenny. Though I have to say that such impulsiveness hardly seems your style.”

  “Message in a bottle. I’m surprised it reached you.”

  “Surprise is still possible.”

  “Less and less seems to be. I take it there’s no further news of your son?”

  “Every lead’s being actively pursued, they tell me.”

  “I wish you the best, ma’am. I wish you surprise.”

  “Thank you.” She was silent a moment. “The Secret Service is not altogether happy about your background, you know.”

  “Who would be?”

  I laughed. She didn’t.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to men in dark suits, Jenny. They’re in your future. And chances are good that, sooner, later, your story will get out.”

  “I knew that when I contacted you.”

  “I’m sure you did. So all these years you’ve kept the lowest possible profile, doing everything you could to stay off the radar, and now you’re willing to give it all up. Why?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said.

  Late that night I lay still awake in bed remembering, of all things, how Michael, that first time, had so lovingly overlooked my scars.

  Chapter 14

  Saturday’s rain, as it turned out, was only a harbinger. Briefly the skies cleared, then came a storm that flooded low-lying streets and took out power in a full third of the city. Cars slid sideways into culverts, patio furniture was swept like spawning salmon toward the sea, water and mud came up under the doors of downtown shops. Standing inside the glass doors of the studio, we saw a cat in a garbage-can lid, paw lifted as though in greeting or entreaty as it spun past, down the middle of Connecticut Avenue. Lightning threw itself against the sky again and again, tossing our faces from sudden, ghostly light to near dark there behind those heavy doors. Never before had I noticed how much lightning resembled something human—our circulatory system, or the many branches and sub-branches of trachea, bronchi, bronchioles.

  I really didn’t have the slightest idea, and that bothered me. Logic and common sense were the cornerposts of my life, stars I steered by. Whatever problems emerged, I liked to think, I could assess them coolly, decide how they could best be resolved, take action to that end. But now I found myself sailing boldly out, and with no map. Why was I willing to endanger this life I’d so carefully sculpted for myself, only to bring scarce comfort to a woman I hardly knew?

  Question the motives, Mickie always said, especially those of altruists.

  “Impressive,” she said now as we stood watching the storm. “Even in a town so accustomed to shows of power.”

  I’d passed the morning fulfilling my function as Waring blender. Chunks of videotape, feeds from the networks, odd bits of documentation, and the occasional still photo get thrown at me, and I snicker-snack them down to a palatable paste. The rough cut goes to Mickie, who while she watches is thinking about getting the whole story told, contrast, balance, and flow, possible voice-overs or superimpositions; then it comes back to me with her notes, from which I remix. We’ve worked together a long time, like to think we’re off the block before other runners ever realize the gun’s been fired.

  “The cut’s okay?” I asked.

  “Luis’s cleaning and framing as we speak.”

  “It’s thin.”

  “So is the air we’re breathing right now. Got a minute, Jenny?”

  We turned from the glass doors outside of which the world was dissolving and its remains being washed away, back into the studio, to her office. Things she insisted on calling tikis hung thick on every wall: a couple of primitive masks from a trip to Tahiti, gold-rimmed souvenir plates bearing likenesses of JFK and Martin Luther King, a pair of roller skates in a shadow box, paper tole icons of butterflies, birds and a beach scene painstakingly crafted, layer upon layer, by her mother, set in plastic frames grained to look like wood.

  Mickie sat, waited till I did the same, looked off at one of the windows, then back at me. “You should know that word is getting out, Jenny. A slow leak for the moment. But.”

  “It’s not the leak, it’s the pressure behind it.”

  Mickie nodded.

  “From somewhere in the Secret Service?”

  “Presumably. An assistant, a secretary or scheduler …” Rain slammed against the window. Mickie glanced that way again. “Be careful, Jenny. Lot of people out there’d want to use you to their advantage.”

  “We’re talking about the president.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you know the rest, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “All these years, you never once said anything.”

  “It’s your life, Jenny. Others have a right only to those portions of it you offer.”

  Odd sentiments from a newswoman. Neither of us spoke for a while. Finally I thanked her and said that I should get back to work.

  Power was shut down in the lobby where we’d stood watching and in nonessential parts of the studio, but emergency generators served the rest. Back in my safe haven, I sat for a long time lost, window behind me streaming with rain, screens before me streaming with images. Not much difference in the two.

  That night I sloshed my way over to the
neighbors, to see how Snake and his squatter band had fared with the storms. Even as I approached, I somehow knew. Then I saw the plastic garbage bags lined up at curbside.

  They were gone. They had put the house in order, left the place just as they found it, put all their discards, everything they weren’t taking with them, in the bags out front.

  On the kitchen table was a note.

  TIME TO MOVE ON

  THANKS FOR EVERYTHING JENNY

  On the back, they’d made a list of everything—all just things—I’d given them, the food, the blankets and sheets, the utensils and dishes and tableware, patent medicines. No way I could know, but from the variety of handwriting I had the notion that every one of them had a part in the note. I imagined them standing around the table, Snake or Josie or Buddy jotting down a few words, looking up to say Your turn.

  Chapter 15

  Just over a month later, Grace handed me a mug of coffee as I rushed past (think trains and mail bags and you’ve an apposite image) and said, “Please tell the president how sorry we are, and that we’re praying for her.”

  So the cat wasn’t just out of the bag, it was sitting on the wall in bright sunlight for all to see.

  “I will, Grace. I definitely will. How’s Jeb?”

  “He passed last night. Peacefully, in his sleep.”

  “At the hospital?”

  She nodded.

  The collar of her blouse was hiked up in the back. I reached to set it straight, and when I did, for just a moment, I thought she was going to pull away.

  “I’m so sorry. Why are you even here?”

  “Because I need to be.”

  She saw what I was about to protest: that, yes, news was breaking and, yes, we all depended shamefully upon her, but.

  “I need to be here for me, Jenny.”

  “I understand.” Better than most, I suspect. It’s work that’s saved me and goes on doing so.