With these major acts of reform, the stage would finally be set to attack the nation’s real problems. This had to be done without malice, without frenzy, and without repellent attacks of partisan histrionics. Oscar felt that this could be done. It looked bad… it looked very bad… to the outside observer, it looked well nigh hopeless. Yet the American polity still had great reserves of creativity — if the coun-try could be rallied and led in the right direction. Yes, it was true that the nation was broke, but other countries had seen their currencies annihilated and their major industries rendered irrelevant. This condi-tion was humiliating, but it was temporary, it was survivable. When you came down to it, America’s abject defeat in economic warfare was a very mild business compared to, say, twentieth-century carpet bombing and armed invasion.
The American people would just have to get over the fact that software no longer had any economic value. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, but it was a fait accompli. In many ways, Oscar had to give the Chinese credit for their cleverness in making all English-language in-tellectual property available on their nets at no charge. The Chinese hadn’t even needed to leave their own borders in order to kick the blocks out from under the American economy.
In some ways, this brutal collision with Chinese analog reality could be seen as a blessing. As far as Oscar had it figured, America hadn’t really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World’s Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people’s military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character really wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of so-cially responsible centurions.
Oscar turned on the brown ribbed sands of the beach and began retracing his steps. He was enjoying being out of touch like this; he’d abandoned his laptop back in the krewe bus, he’d even left all the phones out of his sleeves and pockets. He felt that he should do this more often. It was important for a professional political operative to step back periodically, to take the time necessary to put his thoughts and intuitions into order and perspective. Oscar rarely created these vital little moments for himself — he’d somehow dimly intuited that he’d have plenty of time to develop his personal philosophy if he ever ended up behind bars. But he was giving himself some time for thought now, in this forgotten world of sand and wind and waves and chilly sunlight, and he could feel that it was doing him a lot of good.
An internal pressure had been building. He’d learned a great deal in the past thirty days, devouring whole reams of alien data in order to get up to speed, but hadn’t yet put it into an organized perspective. His data-stuffed head had become a disassembled mass of jumbled blocks. He was keyed up, tense, distracted, getting a little snappish.
Maybe it was just that long drought between women.
They were expecting Greta before noon. Negi had prepared a lovely seafood lunch for her. But Greta was late. The krewe ate lav-ishly inside the bus, popping corks and keeping up appearances, even joking about the no-show. But when Oscar left them, his mood had grown much darker.
He went into the beach house to wait for Greta, but the rooms that had once seemed louche yet charming now revealed themselves to him as merely sordid. Why was he fooling himself, taking such pains to imitate a love nest? Genuine love nests were places full of real meaning for lovers, full of things conveying some authentic emotional resonance. Little things, silly mementos maybe, a feather, a seashell, a garter, framed photos, a ring. Not these hired curtains, that hired bedspread, that set of fatally new antiseptic toothbrushes.
He sat on the creaking brass bed and gazed about the room, and the world turned inside out for him suddenly. He had been prepared to be charming and witty, he had been so looking forward to it, but she was not coming. She had wised up. She was too smart to come. He was alone in this small ugly building, marinating in his own juices.
A slow hour passed, and he was glad she hadn’t come. He was glad for himself of course, because it had been stupid to imagine a liaison with that woman, but he was also glad for her. He didn’t feel crushed by her rejection, but he could see himself more realistically now. He was a predator, he was seductive and cold. He was a creature of trembling web lines and shiny bright chitinous surfaces. Wise gray moth, to stay inside her home.
His course seemed very clear now. He would go back to Wash-ington, file a committee report, and stay there at his proper job. No one would really expect much from his very first Senate assignment. He had more than enough material for a devastating expose of the Collaboratory’s internal workings. If that wasn’t in the cards, he could play up the Collaboratory’s positive aspects: the profound effect of biotech spinoffs on the regional economy, for instance. He could trumpet the futuristic glamour of the next big federal breakthrough: high-tech industrial neuroscience. Whatever they wanted to hear.
He could become a career Hill rat, a policy wonk. They were a large and thriving tribe. He could invest ever more elaborate amounts of energy on ever more arcane and tiresome subjects. He’d never run another political campaign, and he’d certainly never win political power in his own right, but if he didn’t burn out as a policy cog, he might well flourish. There might be something pleasant at the end, maybe a cabinet post, a guest professorship somewhere in his final declining days…
He left the beach house, unable to bear himself The door was open in the tour bus, but he couldn’t face his krewe. He went to Holly Beach’s single grocery store, a cheerfully ramshackle place, its floors unpainted and its raftered ceiling hung with old fishing nets. It had an entire towering wall of shiny floor-to-ceiling booze. Souvenir fishing hats. Fish line and plastic lures. Desiccated alligator heads, eerie knickknacks carved from Spanish moss and coconut. Tatty, half-bootlegged music cassettes — he found it intensely annoying that Dutch music was so popular now. How on earth could a drowning country with a miniscule, aging population have better pop music than the United States?
He picked up a pair of cheap beach sandals, a deeply unnecessary impulse buy. There was a dark-haired teenage girl waiting behind the counter, a Louisiana local. She was bored and lonely in the cold and quiet grocery, and she gave him a dazzling smile, a hello-handsome-stranger smile. She was wearing a bad nubby sweater and a flowered shift of cheap gene-spliced cotton, but she was good-tempered and pretty. Sexual fantasy, crushed and derailed by the day’s disappoint-ments, flashed back into life, on a strange parallel track. Yes, young woman of the bayous, I am indeed a handsome stranger. I am clever, rich, and powerful. Trust me, I can take you far away from all this. I can open your eyes to the great wide world, carry you away to gilded corridors of luxury and power. I can dress you, I can teach you, remold you to my will, I can transform you utterly. All you have to do for me is… There was nothing she could do for him. His interest faded.
He left the grocery with his purchased sandals in a paper bag, and began walking the sandy streets of Holly Beach. There was something so naively crass and seedy about the town that it had a strange deca-dent charm, a kind of driftwood Gothic. He could imagine Holly Beach as queerly interesting in the summer: straw-hatted families chatting in Acadian French, tattooed guys firing up their barbecue smokers, offshore oil workers on holiday, dredging up something leathery and boneless in a seine. A spotted dog was following him, sniffing at his heels. It was very odd to encounter a dog after weeks in an environment infested with kinkajous and caribou. Maybe it was finally time for him to break down and acquire his own personal exotic animal. That would be very fashionable, a nice memento of his stay. His own personal genetic toy. Something very quick and carniv-orous. Something with big dark spots.