“He’s not dead yet,” Nick called out to the kitchen. His chin was trembling; Anna’s despair was infecting him.
Charlie clung to hope. That was what he had at that moment. Anna, he knew, hated to hope. It was to her a desperate and furious emotion, a last gesture.
Now she stormed past them to the front door, yanked her coat blindly out of the closet. “God damn this country,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I’m going for a walk.”
“Take your phone!” Charlie cried as the door slammed behind her.
The Quibler boys stared at each other.
“It’s all right,” Charlie said, swallowing hard. “She’ll be right back. She just needed to get away from—from all that,” waving at the screen.
Already all the channels were deep into the tabloid mode that was the only thing the American media knew anymore. Phil’s struggle for life was now that beat that came right before the commercials, that moment when they were left hanging, on the edge of their seats, until the show returned and the story was resolved one way or the other. It was all perfectly familiar, rehearsed a million times,
ER
meets
West Wing
. Charlie watched it feeling sick with fear, but also increasingly with disgust, feeling that all those TV shows somehow brought things like this into being, life imitating art but always only the worst art. His stomach was a fist clenched inside him.
For him, as for all the older viewers, there were other reasons than TV shows to feel this sick familiarity: not just the big assassinations of the sixties, not just 9/11, but also the attempt on Ford, the attempt on Reagan. It happened all the time. It was a part of America. In reaction to it they would all mouth the same platitudes they had said before. The lone assassin would turn out to be a nonentity, hardly noticed by anyone before; and no one would point out that the constant spew of hatred against Phil in the right-wing media had created the conditions for such madmen, perhaps had even directly inspired this one, just as no one had said it about the Oklahoma City bomber back in the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when for lack of anything better to hate the hatred had been directed at the federal government. Their culture was a petri dish in which hatred and murder were bred on purpose by people who intended to make money from it. And so it had happened again, and yet the people who had filled the madman’s addled mind with ideas, and filled his hand with the gun, and even now were sneering in the commentaries that Chase had risked it after all, daring so much, flouting so much, the only surprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner—these people would never acknowledge or even fully understand their complicity.
These dismal thoughts ricocheted around Charlie’s mind as he quivered with the shock of the news and of Anna’s sudden revulsion and exit. He was trembling, curled over his stomach. He sat beside Nick, swept Joe up into his arms, then let him struggle free. But for once Joe didn’t go too far away, and Nick leaned into him, crouched in his enfolding arm. They watched the reporters breathlessly reporting what they had already reported, waiting right there on camera for more news. Charlie turned down the sound and tried to call Roy, but Roy’s cell phone was now busy, and he didn’t pick up call waiting. Probably he was deluged with calls. The fact that he had called Charlie at all was a reflexive gesture, a reach for an anchor. Roy needed Charlie to know what he knew. But by now he was no doubt overwhelmed. Nothing to do but wait. “Come on, Phil,” Charlie prayed in a mutter. But it didn’t feel good to say that. “Hang in there. The longer it goes on,” he said to Nick, “the better the chances are that he’ll be all right. They can do amazing things in intensive care these days.”
Nick nodded, round-eyed. Phrases splintered in Charlie’s mind as he watched his boys and tried to think. He wanted to curse, mindlessly and repetitively, but for the boys’ sake he didn’t. Joe knew he was upset, and so occupied himself in the way he usually did when that happened, getting absorbed in his blocks and dinosaurs. Nick was leaning back against him as if to shore him up. Charlie felt a surge of love for them, then fear. What would become of them in such a fucked-up world?
“What’s so wrong?” Joe asked, looking at Charlie curiously.
“Someone tried to hurt Phil.”
“A guy shot him,” Nick said.
Joe’s eyes went round. “Well,” he said, looking back and forth at their faces. “At least he didn’t shoot the whole world.”
“That’s true,” Nick said.
“You get what you get,” Joe reminded them.
Anna barged back in the door. “Sorry guys, I just had to get away for a second.”
“That’s okay,” they all told her.
“Any news?” she asked fearfully.
“No news.”
“He’s still alive,” Nick pointed out. Then: “We should call Frank. Do you think he’s heard?”
“I don’t know. It depends where he is. Word will have spread fast.”
“I can call his FOG phone.”
“Sure, give it a try.”
Anna came over and plumped down heavily on the couch. “What, you have the sound off?”
“I couldn’t stand it.”
She nodded, the corners of her mouth locked tight. She put her arm around his shoulders. “You poor guy. He’s your friend.”
“I think he’s going to be all right,” Charlie declared.
“I hope so.”
But Charlie knew what that meant. Hope is a wish that we doubt will come true, she had once said to him, on a rare occasion when she had been willing to discuss it; she had been quoting some philosopher she had read in a class, maybe Spinoza, Charlie couldn’t remember, and wasn’t about to ask now. He found it a chilling definition. There was more to hope than that. For him it was a rather common emotion, indeed a kind of default mode, or state of being; he was always hoping for something. Hoping for the best. There was something important in that, some principle that was more than just a wish that you doubted would come true, some essential component of dealing with life. The tug of the future. The reason you tried. You had to hope for things, didn’t you? Life hoped to live and then tried to live. “He’s going to be all right,” Charlie insisted, as if contradicting someone, and he got up to go to the kitchen, his throat suddenly clenching. “If he was going to die he would have already,” he shouted back into the living room. “Once they get someone into intensive care they hardly ever die.”
This was not true, and he knew it. On TV it was true; in real life, not. He slung the refrigerator door open and looked in it for a while before realizing there was nothing in there he wanted. He had not eaten dinner but his appetite was gone. “God damn it,” he muttered, shutting the door and going to the window. In the wall of the apartment wrapping the back of their house, almost every window flickered with the blue light of people watching their TVs. Everyone caught in the same drama. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
He went back out and joined the family.
P
HIL SURVIVED.
It turned out as Charlie had hoped, which was mere luck; but once they got him into intensive care, they gave him transfusions and sewed up the damage, which luckily was not as bad as it could have been—stabilized him, as they said, and got him through the crisis hours, and after that he was “resting comfortably,” although from what Roy told Charlie, in a call at five the next morning, neither of them even thinking yet of sleep, still deep in the horrible hours, it was not comfortable at all. The bullet had ticked the edge of his kevlar vest and then run up through his neck, tearing through flesh but missing the carotid, the jugular, the vocal cords. A lucky shot. But he was in considerable pain, Roy said, despite the sedation. The vice president was nominally in charge, but obviously Roy and Andrea and the rest of the staff were doing a lot of the work.
By the time Charlie got to see Phil, over a week later, they had moved him back to the White House. When Charlie’s time came he was sitting up in a hospital-style bed located in the Oval Office, with a mass of paperwork strewn on his lap and a phone headset on his head. It seemed possible he was trying deliberately to look like FDR, headset mouthpiece resembling in its cocked angle FDR’s cigarette holder, but maybe it was just a coincidence.
“It’s good to see you,” Charlie said, shaking his hand gingerly.
“Good to see you too Charlie. Can you believe this?”
“Not really.”
“It’s been surreal, I’ll tell you.”
“How much of it do you remember?”
“All of it! They had to knock me out to operate on me. I hate being knocked out.”
“Me too.”
Phil regarded him. It seemed to Charlie that for a second Phil was remembering who Charlie was. Well, fair enough; he had gone on a long journey.
Now he said, “It always seems like there’s a chance you won’t wake up.”
“I know,” Charlie said. “Believe me. But you woke up.”
“Yes.”
There was a tightness to Phil’s mouth which looked new to Charlie, and reminded him of Anna. Also his face was pale. His hair was as clean as usual; nurses must be washing it for him.
“But enough of that.” Phil sat up farther. “Have you had any ideas about how we can use this to really take over Congress at the midterm elections?”
Charlie laughed. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?”
“No.”
“I guess. Well, how about handgun regulation? You could call for it with this Congress, then use their lack of response to beat on them during the campaign.”
“We would need poll numbers on that. As I recall it’s not a winning issue.”
Charlie laughed at Phil’s bravura, his everything-is-politics pose. He knew Phil didn’t really believe in that kind of style—but then again, Phil was looking serious. It occurred to Charlie that he was looking at a different person.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie said. “The NRA wants us to think that, but I can’t believe most Americans are in favor of handguns, can you?”
Phil gave him a look. “Actually I can.”
“Point taken,” Charlie conceded, “but still. I wonder about it. I don’t believe it. It doesn’t match with what I see.”
“People want to know they can defend themselves.”
“The defense doesn’t come from
guns
. It comes from the rule of law. Most people know that.”
Phil gave him the over-the-glasses look. “You have a lot of faith in the American electorate, Charlie.”
“Well, so do you.”
“That’s true.” Phil nodded and then winced. He took off the phone headset with his right arm, keeping his head as still as possible. He sighed. “It’s good to remind me. All this has left me a bit shaken.”
“Jesus, I’ll bet.”
“All he had to do was shoot a little higher and I would have been a goner. He was only about thirty feet from me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and looked over. That’s probably what saved me. I can still see him. He didn’t look that crazy.”
“He was, though. He’s spent some time in institutions, they say, and a lot more living at his mom’s, listening to talk radio.”
“Ah yeah. So, like the guy who shot Reagan.”
“That’s right.”
“Same place and all—it’s like a goddam rerun. ‘Hi honey, I forgot to duck!’ ”
“That’s right. He also said to his surgeons, ‘I hope none of you are Democrats.’ ”
Phil laughed so hard he had to rein himself in. “That poor guy didn’t know whether he was in a movie or not. It was all a movie to him.”
“That’s true.”
“At least he thought he was playing the good guy. He was a cloth-head, but he thought he was doing good.”
“A fitting epitaph.”
Phil looked around the office. “I’ve been thinking that JFK was really unlucky. A lot of these people are so crazy they’re incompetent, but his guy was an expert marksman. Amazingly expert, when you think about it. Long shot, moving target—I’ve been thinking that maybe the conspiracy folks are right about that one. That it was too good a shot to be real.”
Whatever, Charlie didn’t say. Instead he said, “Maybe so.”
It was a gruesome topic. But natural enough for Phil to be interested in it right now. Indeed, he went methodically down through the list: Lincoln had been shot point-blank, Garfield and McKinley likewise; and Reagan too; while the woman who took a potshot at Ford, and the guy who had tried to fly a small plane into the White House, could hardly even be said to have tried. “And a guy shot at FDR too, did you know that? He missed Roosevelt, and Roosevelt got a good night’s sleep that night and never mentioned the matter again. But the mayor of Chicago was hit and later on he died.”
“Like John Connally in reverse.”
“Yeah.” Phil shook his head. “FDR was a strange man. I mean, I love him and honor him, but he’s not like Lincoln. Lincoln you can understand. You can read him like a book. It’s not that he wasn’t complex, because he was, but complex in a way you can see and think about. FDR is just plain mysterious. After he had his polio he put on a mask. He played a part as much as Reagan. He never let anyone inside that mask. They even called him the Sphinx, and he loved that.” He paused, thinking it over. “I’m going to be like that,” he said suddenly, glancing at Charlie.
“Hard to believe,” Charlie said.
Phil smiled the ghost of his famous smile, and Charlie wondered if they would ever see the full version again.
Then there was a knock on the door, and Diane Chang came in.
“Hi honey,” Phil said, “I forgot to duck!” And there was the full smile.
“Please,” Diane said severely. “Quit it.” She explained to Charlie: “He says that every time I come in.” To Phil: “So stop. How do you feel?”
“Better, now that you’re here.”
“Are you still doing Reagan or are you just happy to see me?”
The men laughed, and again Phil winced. “I need my meds,” he said. “President on drugs!”
“Rush Limbaugh is outraged about it.”
They laughed again, but Phil really did seem to be hurting.
“I should let you go,” Charlie said.
Phil nodded. “Okay. But look, Charlie.”
Now he had a look Charlie had never seen before. Intent—some kind of contained anger—it would make sense—but Phil had always been so mellow. Hyperactive but mellow. Or seemingly mellow. Maybe before the shooting was when Phil had worn the mask, Charlie thought suddenly; maybe now they would be seeing more of him rather than less.