Chapter 1 (Complete Text)

1

The National Hero of the Republic of Palatiparvu

You ask about the President’s state of mind, and I will tell you that he has been happiest, lately, on our drives north from the capital to the National Ruins. These are marvelous journeys, and marvelous in more than one way. There are, to begin with, obviously, the simple pleasures of travel, of road travel, of listening to tires on pavement while the world slides by. The rear seats of the Presidential limousine are upholstered in thick, polished leather, and they welcome bottoms with sighs as soft as the exhalations of satisfied lovers; it is deep, the serenity to be found on such plush thrones, as you gaze out the glass at the scrolling wilds of Palatiparvu. Ours is not, it is true, a traditionally beautiful country, but we have plenty of horizon, and for most of the drive along the Great Salt Spine it is possible to see for miles on all sides of the car; for hours there is little between you and the shy curve of the earth but packed dirt and swirling dust and magnificent ruts and cracks in the terrain, the land as rough and cold as the top-crusts of a hundred million gretappan pies. The grandeur of it all is dour and lunar and ungraspable, and what heightens the splendor is the memory of what you, of what we, have left behind.

For the President the capital is an acrid bog of risk and struggle and intrigue, and as the humped bric-a-brac of the skyline recedes into the distance, the face of our Most Humble Federal Executive sheds years. He relaxes, he smiles, and with grunts and throat-clearings and sharp intakes of breath he and I are able to acknowledge to one another all that we have accomplished, all the services we have performed, for the nation rushing past. The highway along the Great Salt Spine is, as you may know, the route the President and I followed to the capital in the days of the Non-Rectification, and therefore the opportunities for nostalgia, as we trace our old path, are as vast as the sky. The engine hums, and the moonscape unfurls, and the President and I recollect all that used to be. Through the windows, meanwhile, we see the changes that have come to Palatiparvu, since independence. Not all of these changes have been for the better — and how could they have been? That is not the way life, the way governance, works — but I believe that the majority of what we have wrought has done the people good. The President knows this. He knows that it is what I believe, and he knows that I am probably right to believe it, and therefore it is as an agent of confirmation and bucking-up that I am brought along.

Brought along, and gladly. I am almost always pleased when the President glances up at me in the middle of a meeting and suggests with his eyes that we go for a drive. Obviously, it is not within my power to demur; I am not and never will be in a position to say No, sir, I do not think that this is the time. But still. I am not entirely without influence in these matters. By means expert and practiced I am able now and then to adjust the President’s ideas about what is in his own best interest, at whatever given time. A disapproving look from me is not without effect. Does this surprise you? It should not. I know, my lovely Langley friends, that you believe yourselves to be quite clear on the division of labor, here in the Palace; but you are wrong. Your files are studded with dangerous inaccuracies. For example: I am not merely a butler. A servant. A Tea Slave. Yes, Tea Slave is my official title, translated — as well as it can be translated, which isn’t very well — from Palatiparvunian. But jobs can shrink and grow with the people who fill them, can they not? I bring the President his tea, his coffee, his newspapers, his women, and a hundred other things; but to suggest that I have only to do with life’s small comforts and the incidentals of power is absurd.

What do I also have to do with? I also have to do with the President’s youth, departed. I have to do with what he was, and can never be again, but must constantly remember. It is, really, a time machine that I’m requesting, when I phone the Palace garage and indicate that a cross-country motorcade is to be readied. Yes, sir, reply the limousine-minders. Yes, right away, Maglibenot. There is respect in their voices. I’m just saying.

It takes about an hour for the whole parading circus to be fueled up and lined up and armed. There are also the police to be dealt with: they need to be called and instructed to shut down this and that street, intersections here and there; they need time to brief and station their men and sweep the plazas and sidewalks for lunatics. The Palace chefs need to cook and store in wicker baskets the President’s favorite sandwiches, salads, and nut blends; my cocktail subordinates must mix and pour and pack in ice his favorite traveling beverages; and various local magazines and international newspapers need to be stacked in proper order, by date, in the leather folio that goes in the pocket on the back of the limousine seat in front of the President’s. I pack and place this folio myself, always, personally. The President rarely reads what is inside, but he likes to check and see that all has been arranged correctly. The man adores protocol and details. In some senses, he does.

Therefore I phone ahead to the front desk at the National Ruins. I tell the clerk who answers that we are coming, and I suggest that he and the rest of the lazy sons of bitches who staff the place tuck in their shirts and comb their hair and choose a job to pretend to do by the time we arrive. And meanwhile, yes, there are all the cars and vans and jeeps and motorcycles, the limousine and the decoy limousine, the ambulance, the helicopter: all of these must be fueled and armed and lined up and set aloft. The Presidential motorcade is a fantastic beast: a long and black steel undulation that insinuates itself through the chaos of the city and the void of the countryside like a terrifying snake, ultimately harmless.

There are, of course, any number of routes from the Palace to the mouth of the National Turnpike, but the President is fond of routine, and we always go the same way. It’s a left out of the main gate, a quick left after that, a right, and then a straight stretch along the northern edge of the Gardens of the Revolution. Every ride, the President glances out the window and murmurs, “Not very aptly named.” He is right. The Revolution wasn’t really one, and its “gardens” have no flowers. What you have instead are seven city blocks of thin lawns and crooked trees wound with gravel paths. Tulips and roses are expensive, and a leader must be firm with his budget. Once his quip has been issued, the President tends to go quiet for a while. He rests the palms of his hands on his thighs and taps his knees with his fingers and gazes out the window without quite seeming to see very many of the families and couples and solo pedestrians, the snack carts and the hobos, flashing by. On many occasions, his breathing slows. I believe that at these moments the President is thinking of the past. A specific part of it.

You see: in the brief period of time that came between my and the President’s return from Boston, and the start of the National Non-Rectification — in that brief period of time our future leader carried on a ferocious and doomed romance with a charcoal sketch artist from Monaco, a woman several years older than he was, and beautiful, and lame. The President never discussed their doings with me directly, but I knew anyway that they spent much of their time as would any two ordinary lovers in the capital, strolling along the paths of the Gardens, hand in hand and desperate for the future not to come. But it did come; it had to; the President knew it; and we began our journey, left the city, changed the nation. The girl was lost. Left behind.

But the President remembers, and I would bet my children’s lives on the fact that he does at least occasionally look for Chloe’s face in crowds at the edge of the park, as we roll by. I know that he does this because there is a particular thing that happens, right at the corner of his eyes. It is a tightening, this particular thing. It is a special kind of tension in the skin. A sort of three-part twitch, rare and apolitical. Never, of course, do I say anything about it. Do we know, after all, sir, what became of Chloe? No. I ask no such question. The President and I discuss the past, but not every piece of it. Our motorcade growls on.

At the corner of the Gardens furthest from the Palace we trace the loop of an enormous nameless traffic circle. The circle has at its center a thistle-rimmed turtle pond, and around the pond and the thistles runs a gray brick plaza swarming from breakfast to dinner with sharp-eyed jewelry and pipe merchants. These men recline in steel-and-canvas folding chairs designed for American back lawns, they play dominoes, they suck peanut brittle, and they cackle praise for their wares for the benefit of wandering, sunburned tourists. Here, incidentally, is the place where your idiot agent, or courier, or whatever undeserved title you have given him — here is where the fool approached me for the first time. But we will come to that. As for the circle: we enter from the west, and we exit at the southeast, and once we’ve done that, the buildings start to change.

We are to begin with at the feet of the capital’s great glass towers, the soaring malls and offices and condominiums that we built with so much pride and private equity, at such a different time. These buildings all sit halfway empty, now — halfway, at best — and the patios and arcades and checkerboard lawns between them are overrun once school is out with packs of wild roaming teenagers on roller skates and stunt bicycles. The President does not like this part of the city. Nor would you expect him to! Regardless: it must be crossed. There is no other way but this way to get to Old Palatiparvopolis, and that, the Old City, is the part of the journey out of town that the President likes best.

And all sadness passes, after all: the buildings begin to age, once you’ve navigated the thicket of abandoned banks, and fickle glass and steel make way for time-worn stone. Everything is fifty years old, and then a hundred, and then two-fifty; and soon you notice that the parking meters, the ones at the sides of the roads, are gone. Now, instead, there are horse-hitching posts, wrought-iron and thick as a wrestler’s forearms, with the fake-bronze heads of various Queens soldered to their tops. These posts are decorative, of course, but the tourists love them, and all the guidebooks say that when you start to see the Queens on iron you’re very nearly there. Old Palatiparvopolis.

Inside the car the President slides forward to the edge of his seat; outside the car the buildings cease to look anything like anything that is built anymore. They did not underestimate their own importance, our oppressors. They were not afraid of grandeur. Like swollen brick and mortar wedding cakes, is how the colonial buildings always look to me. I am not alone. I swear to you that I have seen children run their fingers along the walls of these onetime hubs of imperial governance to see if the frosting will come off. It will not. Meanwhile balconies and columns and rotundas seem everywhere to have had sex with one another and birthed the fruit of their unions; from facades and corners hang reliefs and gargoyles and, occasionally, shame. The cornucopia of nations that commandeered Palatiparvu, each in its turn, had variant philosophies of color, and therefore grays and tans and whites as white as babies’ teeth stand beside and between riots of soft pastels and hard primaries and the barber-pole stripes of the Turks.

But this is in the main part of Old Palatiparvopolis. Once you’ve put behind you the epicenter of sovereign theft the quainter colonial sectors appear. The streets narrow and wobble and begin rather haphazardly to bend. The motorcade slows, because it has to, and you realize that the President’s whims, in bringing you here, are not in any navigational sense very sound. Never -- if your priority were speed or safety or the minimization of the effects of the President’s movements on the public at large — never, in this case, would you send our cortege through the colonial enclaves. The townhomes are lovely, and the plazas delightful; the bistros and snack bars and luxury shops and curio bogs that have been crammed into the ground floor spaces of almost every structure are a breathtaking and photogenic testament to the power of hunger and envy. But as a thoroughfare, the place is shit.

Centuries ago, when brains in heads with faces shaped and decorated very differently from ours laid out Palatiparvopolis, thought was given to things like the needs of the visiting administrators, the management of the smells from the native districts, and the best block-to-block geometry for the accurate discharge of cannonballs into crowds. What did not get much attention from the planning authorities was the possibility that hundreds of years in the future an indigenous — yes, an indigenous — head of state might want to thread his motorcade through this, the most vibrant and pedigreed part of the city. It is true that the eateries and hotels that stand behind the Queens’ head-posts bring to Palatiparvu more hard currency than anything and everything but the Great Salt Carotid, but my goodness. One sometimes wishes that they and the neighborhood they populate did so in a safer and more orderly way. The streets are cobbled, and slick in the rain, and they tilt so sharply toward the gutters as to be nearly diagonal, in places. It is so ludicrous as to be funny, the idea on which the municipal government insists: that two cars on these streets might ever comfortably pass one another. They are truly few, the vehicle-owners and taxi-takers in the capital who have not been involved in a collision in Old Palatiparvopolis.

Part of the problem is visibility. It is dark in the warren. The thinness of the streets and the height of the buildings make the light of the sky weak and distant; you feel there as though you’ve fallen into a teeming, gridded well. A smoggy one. The automobile exhaust is as thick as you’d think, and on top of that there is the stove smoke from the informal and illegal chicken-grilling stations that pop up on the sidewalks here and there and linger until just prior to the arrival of the police. Then there are the clouds of steam that billow from the Sea Menu Cauldrons — best translation possible, unfortunately — teetering on their rickety wooden roadside platforms. These occupy half the street corners in the Old City, and all of them are tended by identical squat and aproned women with paddles in one hand, ladles in the other, and cash between their teeth. Cubes of spine salt the size of carnival dice mix in these pots with boiling heaps of the morning’s catch, and every time a lid is lifted for a bowlful a swirling and blinding pink cumulus puffs up and out and wafts into the road.

And now here come the children. They spill into the street from the sidewalks, mostly clothed and mostly shoeless, howling and shrieking with joy and desperation. They are usually too numerous for the police or the security men to control, and they tend to be disinterested in the polite and silent suggestions made by plastic fences and concrete barriers. They scramble and tumble and climb and leap: they chase the pink clouds, they plow through them, they elbow and scrap their way to their centers.

Each of the children carries an empty Fanta bottle, some carry two, and all attempt to capture the smoke. It is a question of money and sustenance. The children receive from their vicious toothless bosses two Palatiparvitsi for each bottle visibly full of Sea Menu steam that they collect; if a child turns in a bottle particularly thickly brimming, he also gets a cheese baguette and another Fanta, to drink and carry on with. Gullibility is to blame. Someone, somewhere, somehow, convinced the Korean and Argentinian traveling classes that the hot mist from the Cauldrons is a reliable aphrodisiac, if inhaled. Therefore the street children, who would only blink and tilt their heads if you asked them to describe a school, roam like wolves from pot to pot. The President looks away from the largest of these packs. They make, for a humanitarian, an unpleasant sight, and do not speak well of his governance.

Aside from the Fanta children, however, yes: it is for the chaos that we pass through the colonial district. The President wants a look at life. Regular life. He wants simply to gaze upon his people as they go about their days. And can you hold this against him? It has been remarked — by the girlfriend of the President’s eldest son, a mouthy blonde from Connecticut who does not know her place and seems possibly to be aroused by the act of baiting our head of state, verbally — that on these processions through Old Palatiparvu, the President treats, looks at, his own citizens as if they were animals in a zoo; and fine. Maybe he does. But what option does he have? The president cannot get out and walk. Obviously. He would be stabbed to death immediately. Not because he is disliked — simply because there is always a crazy somewhere, everywhere, all the time, waiting.

So a safari of the commoners is what is possible, and a safari of the commoners is what the President takes. It is all stop-and-go and impromptu and disheveled, but it soothes his aches and sates his hunger. The president is himself, was himself, an ordinary man, and it is necessary for him in a possibly-biological way to reconnect as best he can from time to time with his tribe. The exigencies of the man’s job keep him at a thick and stale remove from the public, and the distance drives him mad. It is a torture, a tragedy. The president loves to be with his people, and the reason is that he loves them; because he loves them, he accepted power; because he accepted power, he cannot be with them. Not in any genuine sense! To be sure, the President is on a nearly daily basis welcoming to the palace this delegation or that, or else traveling somewhere to award a medal or cut a ribbon or give a banquet speech. But these events and the encounters they permit are not and never could be satisfying to a man who feels toward his nation as does a man toward his wife. The President wants intimacy and grit. Truth. His desire is to help, but to help he needs to know exactly to whom they belong, these lives he means to aid.

However. When people come to see the President at the palace, or when they receive him at their homes — or at their places of work, of leisure, of worship, of healing — they are simply not themselves. They are uncomfortable. Their clothes are too clean, their spines too straight, and they are afraid to show their teeth. They are afraid to laugh! Almost to speak. The President finds himself talking to farmers who say they don’t know much about farming, tailors who insist that they know little about clothes, mothers unwilling to claim any special experience in the raising of children. Tell me about yourself, the President says to these people. Tell me about your life. Tell me what it is like, out there in the country. People nod politely. They bob their heads up and down, as if Yes were a possible and appropriate response to such prompts. They press their lips and smile, and although the President never seems quite to grasp the fact, what these smiles mean is that their owners hope the time has come when they will be permitted to slip away, to leave, to exit the center of the President’s attention. It is not that they are afraid of the man, these people; no. That is not it, exactly. But power, like light, can be difficult to look at directly.

Therefore, in order to catch the people of Palatiparvopolis unawares, we visit and lurch through the Old City. Which, yes, the visiting and the lurching could probably take place more or less anywhere in town. But Old Palatiparvopolis, as I say, is where the world comes up most flush against the windows, and so that is where we go. Nothing is perfect, however. No place. The President is never going to be able completely to surprise his citizens. His automotive retinue is large and loud and visible, and therefore by the time we reach whatever particular block or corner or face, the people on that block or corner, the person with that face — they are already going to have seen a dozen cars and motorcycles roll past. They are going to know that someone important is approaching, and they are not, as a result, going to be at their most relaxed when we arrive. People have usually, by the time we reach them, ceased to do what they were doing in quite the natural and unthinking way they were doing it before.

But the show is better than you’d think. As the cobblestones thump beneath us we see Palatiparvopolians glancing up from drinking coffee, eating chocolate, grilling chicken, stirring soup, making change, walking dogs, riding bicycles, chatting in doorways, checking the mail – the tourists we ignore, obviously; there is nothing to be learned from tourists — and there remains, always, about all of these fine citizens, and notwithstanding our presence, at least a little of that glorious sheen, so elusive to a president: the gleam of ordinary life being lived ordinarily, right up in front of your face.

There is, of course, astonishment, too, on the faces of these people, when they see who it is in the limousine. Regarding which. I would ask you to imagine a mother. A young mother, let us say — pretty and haggard. Her life is heavy, as are her bags. She carries them, laden with bread and milk and cheese and shoes and a new electric fan, by their handles and in a single hand, the right. In the left are the fingers of her son, as tall as her hips and following along just beside and behind her. She makes her way down the street, the sidewalk, in Old Palatiparvopolis, and she wishes it were possible to sigh as deeply as she’d like to sigh without alarming her boy. She is sore in the neck and the shoulders and the feet; she is angry with her boss for the way he touched her back, four hours ago; she is worried about her son’s sniffling, now ongoing for at least three days; and she is utterly unable to understand how it could be possible that she is expected now to go home and cook dinner.

What could all of this, all of life and its burdens, possibly mean? What could it all add up to, in terms of — and then she hears the sirens. She turns and sees the lights. They flash blue and red, and in her breastbone she feels the puttering rumble of the motorcycles coming on. She squeezes her son’s hand, brakes him, stops walking, looks.

And then, and now, before her thoughts about work and sniffles and dinner have entirely faded from her mind — or from her expression -- she finds herself looking through a thick pane of glass into the eyes of her president. They are like the lights on the motorcycles, these eyes: they flash, blue at their centers and red at their edges, from too much work and too little sleep. Which is important, somehow. This fact about the eyes. It is important in a way that the woman feels ill-equipped to explain, either to herself or to her child, tugging now at her elbow and asking who the man was in the fancy black car. But then, finally, she realizes — now she does, or else later; perhaps it is not until she is at home and stirring the dinner she cannot believe she has to cook that she recognizes the fact — that the reason the President’s eyes mattered so much was not that they were exactly like the lights on the motorcycles. The reason the President’s eyes mattered so much was that they were exactly like hers.

And the woman will tell people this, all about the motorcade and the President’s eyes, and the President knows that she will, and he grasps that this is one of the most significant outcomes of his progresses through the city: that this woman and others like her, men and women and kids, will for the rest of their lives tell anyone willing to listen the story of the time they found themselves suddenly standing close enough to the passing face of the father of the nation as almost to be able to touch it. It will not really be much of a story, but the men and the women and the kids will tell it, all the same, and everyone who hears it will comprehend its threefold significance.

One: the President is, he really is, an actual person. Two: he might, at absolutely any time, insert himself into absolutely any life in Palatiparvu. Three: he is, therefore, in a sense, absolutely everywhere, absolutely always. Am I saying that the President is a god, or that he wants to be one? No. Stop reading those briefings. They are nasty and untrue. I’ve told you already, and I’ll say it again. If the President wanted to play at being a deity, he wouldn’t be taking these drives. Not through the Old City. The balconies would on their own constitute an unacceptable risk! So many of them, and so very nearly hanging all the way over the road! Here is a rule for leadership, my lovely Langley friends: never, if you are unwilling to chance having shit dumped on you, put the people of your nation in a position, physically, to dump it.

Twice in the last six months, milk pails full of excrement, presumably human -- though, really, exactly how would you know? — have been emptied onto the presidential limousine from balconies, in the rougher sections of Old Palatiparvopolis. Although. To be precise, I should say that the first dumper only hit the decoy. The limousine that travels directly ahead of the President’s. The second time, the dumper, a different man from the first, hit his mark. The security services have as yet been unable to determine whether or not there existed a link between the two dumping operations, or between the two dumpers. Neither man is talking, and investigators aren’t going to get overly ugly with a suspect for something as silly as a shit bucket.

The larger question is this. Exactly what kind of a man, what kind of a leader, is willing to return again and again to a part of his capital that has pooped on him twice? This kind of a man, my lovely Langley friends. The President’s kind of man. He takes encouragement from the hecklers! Strength, and confidence! Certainly from the dumpers, he does. Why? It is a question of definitions. The mongrels at the New York Times like to use words like “police” and “state” in nefarious conjunction, when referring to Palatiparvu, but one really has to wonder: if our land were in fact an authoritarian hellhole, would any Palatiparvanians be willing to pour feces on the President’s car? Would any have the courage?

I think not. The citizens of that Palatiparvu, the imaginary one, would expect to be shot for such an act. As it is, shit dumpers are only to be hunted down and beaten. This is policy, and everyone knows it. Common knowledge: never has anyone been executed, never will anyone be executed, for spilling human waste in the general direction of the President’s automobile. Therefore how can you call the man a dictator? This is what the president and I would like to know. How — especially — when most of the people on those balconies are not, in fact, throwing shit? When most of them are throwing nothing? Are just waving and blowing kisses? By choice, they are. The typewriter gremlins on West 42nd whine about the President’s wish to be worshiped, but I grant their moans only this: one more important question. Exactly who, in the largest and glossiest of the photos on my desk, is genuflecting to whom?

The picture is of the President, of course. I took it myself, years ago, in the days before I was asked not to carry a camera anymore. The President, in the photo, is in his limousine — I am in it with him, obviously, right there on the bench in the back — and he is sitting forward, tense with pleasure, neck twisted, looking up. His eyes are trained on, trained through, the glass of the limousine sunroof. And above us, high above — so high that you cannot see it in the picture, not at all, but I’m telling you, it was there — is a crowd of men and women and children, gleaming.

They are dressed all in white, presumably for a wedding, and the sun catches, the sun caught, their clothes in the way it catches clouds. The people are a family, it seems, and they are gathered on a fire escape, floating out over the street on steel rods and slats and ladders; they flutter their hands at the President and call to him with wide-eyed joy. Two seated girls with their legs swinging free swirl tiny Palatiparvanian flags in the Old City air, and the eldest of the group, a thin bent woman in a kerchief and glasses, laughs. Hers is the glee that comes from serendipity and silliness and making eye contact with your president. We are looking down at you, says her expression, and you are looking up at us, and what a marvelous bit of absurdity that is!

The President agrees. He is tickled, in the photo. He gazes up at the people, his people, and smiles. His rare and tiny dimples appear. His face is lit from above and beatific, devoted, at peace.