“I’ll take two more questions. Anne?”
“What is the president’s position on her proposal?”
“What proposal? Whose proposal?”
“Voluntary Transitioning.”
“No. No, no, no. I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
“What do the president’s economic advisers have to say about it?”
“They don’t- Look, there are no conversations about this…no one in the White House is having discussions about this. No one in the White House, or, or anywhere in the entire U.S. government-”
“Are you saying that the president isn’t discussing with his advisers the Social Security crisis? The stock market fell another five hundred points yesterday on news that the Nippon Bank-”
“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. Please. I’ll take one more.”
“Has he talked to anyone about Voluntary Transitioning?”
“All right, that’s it. We’re done. This briefing is over. Thank you. Good morning.”
“Maybe,” Terry said to Cass as they watched it all on C-SPAN, “the line dividing reality from absurdity in this country has finally disappeared. I guess it was inevitable, the way things were going.”
“I don’t know,” Cass said. “Maybe it just shows that people are tired of hearing the same old bullshit.”
“Right. They demand fresh bullshit.”
“Is it?”
Terry stared at his protйgйe. “Whoa. You been drinking your own Kool-Aid? I warned you about that.”
“Come on. We did it. It’s on the table. They’re certainly talking about it.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“They asked me to be on Greet the Press this Sunday.”
“Well, well. Very good. Who else they having on?”
“Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Gideon Payne.”
“The White House must be pretty freaked out if they’re sending the OMB director out to do battle. He’ll dismiss you as a nut.”
“I’ll say, ‘You’re borrowing two billion dollars a day from foreign banks-or were, until they stopped lending it to you-and I’m the nut? Okay, let’s hear your solution. Other than making twenty-year-olds pay for thirty years of incontinence.’ I’ll tell him, ‘Hold on, pal. You’re the budget director of a locomotive headed off the cliff, in the middle of an earthquake, on fire-’”
“Easy on the metaphors.”
“Whatever. But it is a runaway train. The White House is talking about wage and price controls. They’re desperate.”
“They’re also leaking it that it wasn’t their idea to let you walk. I wouldn’t go making them too mad, if I were you. And watch out for Payne.”
“Payne? He’s just another preacher on steroids.”
“Rule number one: Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid. Rule number two: Never, ever, underestimate the enemy. Gideon Payne didn’t get to be Mr. Pro-Life by being an idiot.”
Cass reflected. “Did he really kill his mother?”
“That’s what they say. Why don’t you ask him, on the air? That’ll break the ice.”
Cass’s phone rang.
“Ms. Devine?” said the voice. “I have Senator Jepperson for you.”
“Well, well. Hello, Senator.”
“Cass? Voluntary Transitioning! Best euphemism I’ve heard since ‘ethnic cleansing.’ I love it. With all my heart, I love it. I knew this was a winner from the get-go.”
“Randy,” Cass said coolly, “when I presented it to you, you practically threw me out of your office.”
“Darling girl, I had a committee meeting. On that moronic monorail that my distinguished colleague wants to build in the middle of Alaska. Someone has to stand up for the caribou. Now listen up. Pay attention. I’m calling to say-I want to sponsor the bill.”
“To save the caribou?”
“Screw the caribou. No, child-Voluntary Transitioning. It’s big, it’s bold, and I love it to death. Pardon the pun. Now you and I both know that it doesn’t stand a chance of a snow cone in Dante’s Hell. It redefines reductio ad absurdum. It’s the policy equivalent of Pickett’s Charge. We may go down in flames, but they’ll be writing ballads about us. Oh, how I love it.”
“And you want to go down in flames?”
“Honestly?”
“Randy, why do I cringe when I hear you say ‘honestly’?”
“Don’t be too hard on me, Cassandra. I’m disabled.”
“Don’t go there, Randy.”
“I want to sponsor it for the same reason you came up with it. To make waves. To make those lily-livered weasels in the White House wet their pantalones. I’m going to get Ron Fundermunk to co-sponsor it with me. The junior senator from the great state of Oregon. You know how they are in Oregon. It says the ‘ Assisted Suicide State ’ right there on the license plate.”
“Watch Greet the Press this Sunday,” Cass said. “I’m on with Gideon Payne.”
“Loathsome little toad,” Randy said. “Did you know his ancestor shot my ancestor?”
“What?”
“In the Civil War.”
“Sedgwick?” Cass said.
“Clever girl. He was a brilliant soldier and by accounts a lovely chappie. Distinguished himself in every battle-Antietam, the Wilderness, Gettysburg. They were getting ready for a big clash at Spotsylvania. He was inspecting the Union artillery position. There were Confederate snipers. The officers were nervous and told him he should take cover. He said, ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.’ His last words. Story is, the sniper who drilled him is related somehow to Gideon Payne. Give him a good kick in the macadamias for me, would you?”
Greet the Press was the premier Sunday morning news show. Its opening theme music consisted of trumpets and kettledrums, affecting a tone of earthshaking momentousness, as though an electronic curtain were about to rise to reveal the chief justice of the Supreme Court, a prime minister, and the pope.
The host was a genial, ruddy-faced man named Glen Waddowes. He began his career as a Benedictine monk, left the order under circumstances never entirely clarified, then became a speechwriter and ultimately chief of staff to the governor of New York. He ran for Congress, served two terms, and, with eight children to feed (he had apparently remained Catholic), accepted a job running a network news bureau, ultimately taking over Greet the Press, whose motto was, “Since 1955, more important than the people who appear on it.”
Beneath Waddowes’s jolly, rubicund exterior lurked a mind armed with brass knuckles, a shank, and a blackjack. He had famously derailed the presidential campaign of Senator Root Hollings by asking him, “Senator, with all due respect, what makes you think that a man like you has the right to run for president?”
Cass had done her homework. Still, as she sat in the greenroom before the show, her palms were clammy and her chest felt tight.
In two other corners of the greenroom, eyeing her with barely concealed disdain, sat Gideon Payne and the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. They were carrying on polite conversation, the purpose of which was-mainly-to exclude her. The OMB director was pretending to be interested in what college Gideon Payne had attended. Gideon, for his part, was pretending not to notice that he was being flattered. As the saying goes, what flatters people most is that others feel you’re worth flattering. Gideon knew he was worth it and accepted it as nothing less than his due. He was a short, fat, elegant man in his late forties. He wore his hair slicked back, gave off a warm, clovelike aroma of French cologne, had a neatly trimmed beard, carried a silver-tipped cane, and dressed in bespoke suits from Gieves amp; Hawkes of London.
Cass overheard him saying to the OMB director, “As I said to the president just last week…” She mused that the only way really to top that was to say, “As I said to the president in bed this morning…” But the OMB director, apparently not being able to make this boast, merely nodded and pretended to be impressed by Payne’s easy familiarity with the summits of Olympus-on-the-Potomac.