The President's Angel (15 page)

That was how Jim set up Scotty, the lover of his adulteress wife.

And meanwhile Jim still sneaked at night into other people's offices, read their memos, answered the mail, signed their signatures, burying himself in work, to keep from thinking of the adulteress back home; and if Susan screamed at him at night, locked him out of the bedroom, while he pounded furiously on the door, if the neighbors woke from the noise of their quarreling, and the children crouched in their beds, hugging each other in tears, he felt justified in the fact that it was all her fault. He refused to give her a divorce. She refused to leave the house. She insisted it was hers as much as his, and twice she changed the locks, so that he had to break a window to get inside (the same one twice).

He drank a lot.

Meanwhile, Matt's condition did not go unnoticed. Jim was concerned enough to convene a secret meeting of advisors, after which a series of small meetings with two members of the military and Chief of Staff, with Steven Dirk and a senator from Wyoming, and the Majority Leader of the House. A secret conclave, respectfully considering the removal of the President. There was cause for concern. The President had gone sour on the job.

Perhaps he had. By much care, Matt had managed to extricate himself from certain duties, so that every day after lunch he stole time for himself, but this time was not productively spent in athletics or games, in chasing women or tasting wines or in reading history or government reports. It was spent doing nothing. That's what Jim found disconcerting. The President sat on the White House balcony, wrapped in a blanket against the chilly weather, and gazed unseeing across the lawn to the Washington Monument and thence to the Jefferson Memorial. Or he sprawled in a chair in his private rooms and stared at the fire in the hearth. Forty minutes later Frank would knock discreetly, bringing him a demitasse of espresso or a hot China tea in a Limoges cup. Then the President's day would begin again, rushing to ceremonies, meetings, photo sessions, and more meetings with advisors, with congressmen or senators, with members of his cabinet, with lobbyists and constituents, conferences over breakfast, over cocktails, over dinners, and more ceremonious events and formal appearances at theaters or concerts at which, being President, he never got to stay to the end.

To an outsider observing him on the balcony, wrapped in his blankets (the secret service nightmare), he might have appeared to be brooding darkly. Actually, he was praying for God's will.

This is what Emily had told him about prayer:

Imagine there's a dog that is attacked by a pack of wild dogs, tearing and biting. The dog manages to pull away and run for its life. Limping, it drags itself home and drops at its master's feet. What does it do? It cannot speak. It can only look miserably at its owner, whine, beat its tail in the dust. And what does the man do? He picks up the dog, takes it inside, washes and bandages its wounds and gives it food and water, antibiotics, a warm bed to sleep on, maybe some brandy down its throat. He takes it to the vet. Every day he changes the dressings, and soon the dog is well.

The dog has asked for none of these things. All it did was to present itself and beat its tail in the dust. That (said Emily) is how you pray to God. Because if you ask for a shirt, you will get a shirt, and if you ask for a pair of pants, you will get a pair of pants. But if you merely present yourself, then God will give you … everything.

“That's how you pray,” she'd said. “You ask to know God's will.”

“I can't do that,” he had muttered.

“Then pretend.”

So he prayed, black dog.

I said he found decisions hard, lives hanging in the balance. He comforted himself that his intentions were good, that purity of intent sufficed. But did it? Slyly, he asked advice. Sometimes he ignored the counsel once given, and made no decisions, but meekly deferred to the nonaction that was a form of action too, the decision to do nothing. Other times he took the advice of the majority, or sometimes of the counselor he liked best, independent of political consideration.

Sometimes, in private, behind closed doors, he flipped a coin. Or he took a pack of cards and turned up two (or three), the high card being winner (or the red, or the diamond of the suit).

There were people who thought the country was never better run than during this time when, going mad, the President left decisions to the angels with the flip of a coin. His wisdom was praised, especially by those whose advice he took. But he was walking on eggshells all the time.

Did he know the Party was divided into factions, waiting for his mistake?

Meanwhile other items hit the Press: a famine below the Equator, an earthquake in Turkey, a typhoon that wiped out two Pacific islands. Attention focused on finding food for refugees. Little wars broke forth and were stamped out like brushfires.

And then there were the personal cruelties inflicted by ignorance or mistake, and these flared truer, brighter, for being isolated horrors of abnormal moment, and not all of them were crimes.

A Montana man murdered his two daughters and fed them to his pigs. He was judged insane.

A son shot both of his violent and abusive parents with a double-barreled 20-gauge. He was charged with murder.

A runaway girl, only fourteen years old, telephoned her mother, begging to come home. “I want to come home,” she sobbed, and the way she hovered on the word
home
, holding the sound in her mouth, spoke of her yearning. Her mother told her no, she'd found a man she was living with and he wouldn't put up with a child. “Mom, I want to come home!” A pimp took her in and treated her relatively decently, meaning he beat her only when he could not afford his drugs. The girl was picked up by the police and jailed dozens of times. Her mother was never charged with any crime.

Oh, there were many things to occupy our minds, lawsuits and taxes and diseases and eighteen-year-old sons who left college to play the guitar as traveling minstrels; and the family men who engaged their little daughters in sex. One of these was a violinist who accosted his niece from the ages of nine to fourteen, and afterward went to the symphony hall, where he played like Orpheus. Women wept at his rendition of Beethoven's violin concerto. So emotionally removed was he from his acts that when, at fifteen, his niece slashed her wrists, it never crossed his mind that his gifted hand had held her knife. He played at her funeral so poignantly that everyone agreed his powers were increasing with every passing year.

Pain lay everywhere. There were vandals and street gangs shooting themselves with dope or their enemies with guns, and terrorist bands that took hostages for ransom or threw bombs, sublimating their helpless rage into political acts, and feeling nobler, thereby, than the common rapist or gangster; and in almost every country of the world there were secret police who were paid by their governments to inform against the very people whom they served.

Just as you despaired, you saw babies were born in all the colors and tones of the earth, each with their tiny fairy fingernails and lungs like a blacksmith's bellows. There were heroes in hospitals returning the dead to life, and heroines battling against disease, and common folk who merely held out daily hands to one another, giving heart.

Yes, the world was a fascinating place in which to live in those years, and not much different than in other periods, though it was burning up. Hardly anyone, man or woman, had learned to eliminate anger from his heart. Or loneliness. Or jealousy. Or any of the excesses of compulsive desire. So everything continued burning up.

Like Jim. Like Susan. Like Scotty. Like the President himself, burning up with longing to see God.

This is the story of a spiritual experience and the dismantling of a man of power. Did it happen in this way? It always does. This is not a unique event. It happens all the time, though not usually so dramatically as with an angel at your bed.

Nonetheless, thousands, maybe millions, of people reach a moment in their lives and are shown … what? What cannot be spoken of, and so they don't. Many hesitate even to share it with their best beloved friends, perhaps especially not with them, not with mother or father or husband or wife or lover or close friend. For one thing, what is there to tell? That for a moment a curtain fell before their eyes, exposing them to light? Or to knowledge they have no language to describe? Sometimes this experience comes soft as mist, curling slowly into consciousness over many years, seeping through the chinks in their protective doors until they are filled, though there is no single event with which they mark a revelation. Grace. To others it comes as glimmers in the night, half discerned from the corner of an eye and gone when they turn their head to look—except, with a shudder, they realize that in that moment everything has changed. The world is no longer as before. They are different, though they cannot say how or what exactly is new, unless it is a kind of lightheartedness, a luminous equanimity that they carry with them even in distress.

To still others, this knowledge comes bowling over them in a vision or a voice—Epiphany!—Moses on the mountaintop, the burning bush and all that. It tears the blinkers of the material world from their eyes, cracks open consciousness. Some go mad with God-consciousness. Some are saints, and others are just ordinary people who try the patience of family and friends by talking about God, or Christ, or Allah to any stranger who sits beside them on a bus.

There are a lot of them out there.

You would think this thing, happening to so many people, would change the world. You would think that this man or that woman—become a god now, a goddess, having been given this glimpse of immortality—would trumpet it from the rooftops.
Ladies! Gentlemen! Thieves! Clowns! Brothers, sisters mine! Listen to what I find!

You would think that people would hear about an angel, or a burning bush, and tell others, and they in turn would pass the good news on, so that whole populations would convert. Isn't that what should have happened when the papers printed how a little girl had seen an angel in the Presidential Palace over the holidays? True, some of the papers reported it as a cute Christmas tale, a human interest story, but with no more significance than you would give to a recipe for cheese soufflé.

Why did readers not become inflamed with the meaning of the news? Because they couldn't. It is part of the Law. Oh, if you tell your dearest friend about an angel that you saw, then she might believe. She might believe because she would hear the softening and passion in your voice, see the trembling of your body. She would catch your emotion and be moved by it, and, because she knows you, she would suspend disbelief and let her heart lift up in trust. And if she continued, defying doubt for days, or months, a year, her faith would be replenished by experiences of her own, so that she'd have her own stories to pass on.

But if she tried to tell the news about the angel to a third party, the whole thing would fall flat. The angel wasn't hers, and the third person is left untouched.

Why is that?

I think it is to save us. It is a protection for the material system in which we live. Because the whole world would go mad with God-knowledge. People would run out into the streets laughing and dancing and throwing their arms around one another in their joy. They would stand weeping at the vision of a flowering crab-apple tree. And as for a sunset … can you imagine!

Everyone in the world would run outdoors on that day the News was known. Drinkers in bars, and commuters on their travels home, and lovers in each other's arms, housewives cooking dinner, and mothers feeding their little children, torturers in prisons—they would all run outdoors at once to see this miracle, the gorgeous violent choir of a sunset; and like a great hum this marvel would pass right around the world, so that an observer on another planet (if he had a strong enough telescope) might think that the scurrying of footsteps as they hurried after the view, the populations running west, was turning the globe on its axis, millions of moving feet. And a cry of wonderment would burst from every throat, a great sigh, a sound equal to the visual adoration spread before them, if they knew the News; and the cry would ripple westward all the way around the world, till it hit us in the back again at dawn.

Oh, we'd all go mad with God-knowledge. And that is why the News can only be received shyly, one-on-one.

Otherwise it would destroy the game. The game of hide-and-seek, that is, in which each individual gets to make up the rules of whichever game he wants to play. Hide-and-seek with intellect. Or warfare. Or with fame and glory. Hide-and-seek with hunger and starvation, death and disease and grief. Jealousy, rejection, isolation. Hide-and-seek with material possessions. Or sex. Or loss. Or love. It's all one game, the hide-and-seek with God.

And what of the person, man or woman, who is smitten with God-knowledge, either glimpsed through mists or seen in revelations?

The spiritual journey is a serious pastime.