The President's Angel (12 page)

The President was not the only person, he told himself, filling journals with the illusion of insight through those long winter nights. Marcus Aurelius had done it before him, but Matt had the advantage of knowing that no matter what he wrote—even blabber—he could sell on retirement for fifteen or twenty million dollars. He was not a saint, by any means. Greed spurred him on; and vanity (he mocked himself) insinuated that much of what he wrote was wise, though doubtless it had all been thought or said before by lesser men or women, and phrased more simply too.

None of his thoughts, indeed, was worth the paper it was scribbled on with those bold, furious, frantic strokes; for none was reread, revised, cut, edited, reviewed. A torrent of words poured out of him, poor helpless words.

Poor madman, writing in his room.

When he was not writing, he read. Emily, the wife of the mining magnate, had sent him a parcel of books. Thomas Merton and Evelyn Underhill and Burke and Gurdjieff and many others whose names were not as widely known.

His work in the presidential office suffered; his assistants caught his mood. He was delegating more and more, and now a sense of uncertainty pervaded the halls. No one at the rudder of the ship of state. Jim Sierra watched in horror, not knowing what was going on. His temper frayed. He snapped at his secretary, savaged a transportation paper, the product of eight months' work, and sent the Border Treaty back.

He worked relentlessly. It was not only the President's brooding that affected Jim, but the disintegration of his marriage. To forget, he threw himself into work. Sometimes, prowling late at night, he would unlock the office of an insubordinate and start in on the papers on that desk. He left complaining memos on Matt's desk about how these others were failing in their tasks.

As weeks passed, he grew openly vicious. Pete Ferrante, one personal assistant, wrote him a memo suggesting how to make an administrative procedure more efficient. Jim rocked back in his big leather chair, one foot propped casually on the desktop, and waved the young man in to wait. Pete was new in his job. He would have preferred to leave the room while his boss took time to contemplate the plan. His palms broke out in sweat. The memo was only three paragraphs long. Jim read it in one glance, stared at the boy, and slowly, with the deliberation of a mime, tore the paper top to bottom, opened his fingers and let the pieces flutter to the floor.

Then he motioned to the door. The young man went red, eyes bulging slightly, and swiveled on his heel. “Pete,” said Jim. He turned back. Jim gestured to the papers on the floor. “Take that trash out as you leave.”

The women in the outer office spent more time than usual in the bathroom in those days, often in tears.

Jim assumed that he was right and the universe was wrong. He surrounded himself with a kind of righteousness that is often the mark of frustration and anxiety. So, while the President was cogitating about God and nature and man's relationship to both, Jim was transferring his anger and hatred, his sense of powerlessness, onto the Eastern Orthodox. He saw in the Enemy all his own unrecognized worst traits: It was untrustworthy, violent, vengeful, and tyrannical. The only thing Jim did not notice was its fear, the mirror of his own.

Jim advocated the Ring of Fire. He believed in military control. He had only the dimmest idea that the Eastern and American Empires were allies, in unspoken collusion, each tied to the other as strongly as combative marital partners.

The President wrote pages on such abstractions as Justice, Honor, and Patriotism. To the list, he added Freedom, Fascism, Nationalism, Communism, Capitalism, and God. In the names of these ideals, colossal crimes had been committed.

He decided these great words—Justice and Honor—were less significant than the urge that sparked them, the longing to sacrifice oneself to a higher cause. They represented no purpose other than our blind human efforts to find purpose; and the attempt itself, the energy of sacrifice, was the important thing.

Sacrifice. From
sacer
and
ficare
: to make holy.

He wondered if humans had an innate need to give themselves away, and if so, how this possibly contributed to the survival of the species. The more he considered the matter, the more he thought that the finest was often found in the lowliest activities of humankind. Little things of no importance to the world had the power to lift us to our highest moments; like the semen on Lucy's dress, and his little son's moist, hot, blond hair on the pillow as he called out, “Daddy? Daddy?” He recalled his pain the night his mother died, and the feeling of being intensely alive during the war as he drank water from a canteen. That was it, the act of struggling against loneliness or loving one's child or sorrowing in sympathy with another's grief or helping a stranger to find the way—such events put to shame the work on the Border Treaty or the purchase of new multibillion-dollar subs that could swim for three years without once surfacing for air.

So, how could humans sacrifice to a high ideal when the highest was most ordinary, when the lowest was what gave us pleasure now?

Desire lay at the root of suffering, he wrote one night; and you must not laugh, for he had never read the Buddha and did not know how ancient was the thought. If men and women could eliminate desire (attachment to desire, was what the Buddha said), then they could eliminate much pain. But how? How could he no longer care? Another night he wrote in derision of that restless, willful, self-pitying, small, crawling “
I
” that sets itself at the center of the universe without regard for others, demanding adoration, without humility or gratitude. It was the willful “
I
” that kept desiring; yet it was this “
I
” that also longed for its own extinction and attempted the task, one way or another, with death-defying feats of adventure (throwing oneself out of airplanes with light parachutes, or sailing single-handed across the seas), or else in destructive escapades with drugs and drink and sex, or sometimes by violent sacrifice to the famous Higher Cause (Justice, Honor, Freedom, Country, Party, and Revenge), which always—always?—led to war.

And so he wrote, trying to work out further this tenuous idea that the mystical yearning for Something Larger was no more than the ego's death-desire—when suddenly he was overpowered by the very transcendence he sought to ridicule. He was caught in a transport of feeling that had nothing to do with any love he had known before—brief sexual affairs, or the passion of romance—and trembling, he saw the perfection and the orderliness of man's killing for Honor, Justice, or Law—or
not
doing so. Killer or killed, tyrant or victim, each participated in the perfect dance. For suddenly he knew (had he not seen it already?)
there is no death
.

At that moment his heart was filled with such gratitude for life, for man, for this little planet Earth with its silver moon sailing round and round it, that he thought his bones might break. He was filled with sweetness. He loved the beggar who had been lost, and the little girl, Lily, who had brought him hope; he loved his wife, his two dead boys, and Jim's anger at his wife's desire for divorce; and all the rivals and enemies he had made in his own long climb to rule. He loved humanity with all its painful, often horrible deeds of passion and stupidity, malice, sorrow, and grief, the endless lovely strainings of heartsick humankind. He loved the desire and delusions that caused such suffering, and the fear that fueled them. He loved those flickerings of happiness that encourage and illuminate us before being replaced again by pain and loneliness and fear. And he loved the pain and terrors that led to further illumination. Poor little humankind. He loved the angel he had seen, and all the invisible spirits that he could not even imagine, but whose beneficence he felt around him at that moment. He thought of God, this Source, this creative and majestic matrix of the universe, pouring out abundance like the goddess-mother in one of his books, breasts bursting with milk, the mother-cow, gorged with milk that it pours unstinting into the mouth of its blessed suckling calf. And milk comes out in such quantity that it runs down the muzzle of the calf and smears its nose and wets its chest with its abundance. God the laughing, generous, passionate giver of all things.

Oh, he was certainty mad.

After that night he could not love enough. It was as if his heart had been opened—how? Not even by a woman's touch. And he had flown out of a cage, freed! He could not get enough of the beauties of the world—the colors, sounds!

He simply loved.

Simply he loved.

A doctor of the soul would say he was perhaps compensating for the terror of the responsibility that lay on him. For now the convoys were moving across the sands of Bessarabia and Byzantium, armies moving in cars, in tanks; and other armies were forming on the snowy passes of the Hindu Kush, where the cold was so intense you couldn't safely touch the metal of your gun; and guerrilla armies were trotting in small hungry bands through the southern jungles, furtive, full of fear, while overhead, so high they could not even be heard, planes passed screaming from day to night, carrying their fireballs.

The Ring of Fire coming.

It was the President who would give the word to begin. And now he was meeting every day with advisors about the movement of the military arms.

He wanted no responsibility for war.

Foreign ambassadors ran in and out of his office.

The war. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs
, he told himself. But he was afraid. War was in the air, and the President wondered if it was the Angel of Death that had come to him that night. He felt the fragility of life. It was all so frail.

Was that why he was swept by love?

One night, late, he padded down the carpeted hall to Anne's room. Softly he opened the door. She lay on her back in the large bed, one hand flung up as if to shield her eyes. He sat on the edge of the bed and placed his hand gently over hers. He observed in the dim light the shape of her small square fingers under his.

“Matt?”

“Don't wake up,” he said.

But she shifted sleepily, bogged down in dreams. “What are you doing here? What time is it?”

“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “I'm just loving you.”

She mumbled something, but she was already asleep again. He stayed a few minutes more. He wanted to say a prayer, but did not know how. Time ticked by, and sitting here, half bored but unable to leave, he remembered his own mother teaching him prayers, only traces of which remained, like wisps of smoke at the back of his mind. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” he began silently, not knowing what he really wanted to say anyway, until his heart found words.
Protect us all, help us all, keep us all
, he said over and over.
Protect this woman. Forgive me, Lord, for hurting her
. Then, that done, he could not stop.
Help us all, this pretty world. Help me to serve you, guide me, keep our little world, dear, loving God
.

Returning to his room, he did not remark how tenderly he had spoken to God.

The next morning Anne tracked him down at his breakfast. He sat alone at the table, the newspaper propped against a stand, reading despondent news. Anne was still in her bathrobe, her long hair loose on her shoulders, her tone of voice accusing him.

“Did you come into my room last night, at four-thirty in the morning?”

He looked up with a smile. “Four-fifteen.”

She gave a laugh of disbelief. “I thought I was dreaming! Whatever were you thinking of?” She was half suspicious, half shy.

“I apologize for disturbing you.” It was morning now, a different mood on him, and he didn't care about her anger anymore.

“Well you should. You did disturb me. Whatever were you in my room for anyway? People don't do that,” she said. “Four in the morning. Do I have to lock my door? I don't want you in my room,” she blurted.

He looked up at her. He had not noticed before how her eyelids drooped. The skin on her neck was crepey. She was getting old. He was getting old as well.

“I started thinking how much you've given me,” he said. “I wanted to say thank you.”

She gave him a sharp, puzzled, querying look. “Well!” Then dropped her eyes to the table. “Don't eat too much butter. It's bad for the heart. Well.” She stopped uncertainly at the door to look back at him, started to speak, changed her mind and went out. The President turned back to the papers, his responsibilities, the Ring of Fire, the Offensive his staff proposed.

For a month he did nothing about Lily. The country lay encased in snow, but the Barbarians had occupied neutral territory, and it was war that occupied the thoughts of everyone. In space the Ring of Fire turned obediently, recording with little clicks and clacks the miniature movements of toy armaments far below. And were they silent, these clicking shutters, the computer counters, when there was no atmosphere to carry sound and no one in the vacuum of space to hear?