The Race (14 page)

She turned to look at him. "How so?"

"Where do I start? Take politics as practiced by Magnus Price: inflame your supporters by defining those who don't think like they do as the enemy, hell-bent on tearing down the 'real America,' until half the people in this country hate each other, and the rest think politics is so toxic they don't even bother to vote. Or take the media as perverted by Alex Rohr, which teaches you to despise people you don't even know. It's all a cynical exercise in marketing—find your demographic, and then exploit it." Corey's voice was etched with frustration. "In the America of Price and Rohr, voters are lab rats in a political-science experiment, programmed to be even more frightened of 'the other' than the folks I grew up with—Lord knows that my own parents certainly are. But they're really not much different than the liberals on both coasts who call them 'flyover people,' making no effort to imagine how the world looks to them. Instead of
seeing
one another, we've started living in gated communities of the mind created by jerks like Price and Rohr. It makes me want to puke."

Lexie's eyes widened in mock surprise, and then she began to laugh. "That's quite a speech, Senator Grace. How come you've only given it to me?"

He shook his head. "I'm tempted, all the time. But it would be the last nail in my political coffin. Besides," he added wryly, "it'd probably come off like a talk-show rant—totally unpresidential. Or so my advisers tell me."

Lexie grimaced. "Because truth is a terrible thing, right? We need our leaders to be robots, 'cause we're too dumb to elect real humans. Next time I hear some failed presidential candidate say, 'Next time I won't let my handlers keep me from being me,' I'm throwing a brick through my TV screen."

"But that's exactly what Democrats
do,
" Corey rejoined. "They haven't nominated a human in years—just androids whose speeches sound like a tape recording spliced from focus groups. I'd ask where the hell you find these people, except I know—the Senate."

Lexie's eyes glinted with the amusement that served as a warning of some conversational laser. "All that's very interesting. Especially the part where I found out for the first time you're actually not an orphan. So how come I never hear any heartwarming anecdotes about Mom and Dad—or brothers and sisters, for that matter? Or are you like me, an only child?"

Corey felt the question transform his mood entirely. Turning from her, he gazed at a farmhouse in a distant clearing. "I am now."

"What does that mean?"

"That it's a very long story, with a very bad ending."

"Would you like to tell me about it?" she asked quietly.

For an instant, Corey thought of Clay as he had last seen him, then felt Lexie watching his face.

"If it's all
that
bad, Corey, don't. I understand about secrets. But I'm also better at keeping them than you could possibly know."

His own emotions, Corey realized, were a minefield of contradictions: the desire to break his silence as deep as his desire to preserve it; the fear of how he might appear to her, both as a senator and a man; the mixture of hope and self-contempt as he perceived that baring his soul might draw her closer. "Corey Grace," he murmured at last. "Such a sensitive guy. Not all shut down like your ex-husband."

"What do you mean?"

"That I don't want to use my brother's death."

Lexie shook her head. "If you think I'm going to sleep with you as payback for opening up, forget it. I'm talking to you as one human being to another. What you do with that depends on whatever else it is you need."

Corey stared straight ahead, feeling a constriction in his chest. And then, without inflection, he began to tell her what he had never told anyone.

AFTER THE GRUELING DAYS AND EVENINGS OF HIS FIRST CAMPAIGN FOR the Senate—a blur of airports, buses, motel rooms, and, above all, people who were skeptical, or avid, or simply wanted to see or touch him—Corey Grace relaxed by reading his brother's letters from the Academy.

Corey was good at politics, he now understood—in part because he had begun to rebel at regurgitating pat talking points, relying instead on candor and his increasing mastery of the issues. But the campaign was not easy: his opponent was skilled at implying, without quite saying so, that Corey's lone qualification for the Senate was crashing an expensive airplane—a sentiment that not only earned Corey's private agreement, but that reminded him, as if he needed reminding, of Joe Fitts and his family. And he was also lonely: Janice rarely appeared with him. When she did, although her graciousness was impeccable, Corey understood that he was watching an ironic and thoroughly self-aware performance as a species she disdained—the general's perfect wife—which, in Janice's case, involved a haunting impersonation of her own dead mother. So, at first, reading Clay's letters was a welcome relief from solitude.

With laconic fatalism, Clay cataloged the initial phase of becoming a "wad": they took your belongings, shaved your head, jammed you into a room with three other guys for a few hours of sleep, and woke you up by banging garbage cans with sticks. Clay started waking up five minutes before the others, and he'd lie there dreading the banging of the cans; accustomed to sleeping eight hours or more, he now was lucky to get five. At the brink of exhaustion, Clay described his equanimity slowly fraying, his demeanor becoming numb and robotic—all of which seemed normal to Corey, except for a recurring theme in Clay's more recent letters.

Their focus had become an upperclassman named Cagle.

To Clay, Cagle was the embodiment of unreasoning malevolence. Clay described Cagle's animus as being directed less toward him than a classmate identified only as Jay, but with whom Clay seemed to identify so closely that, troubled, Corey began to wonder if Jay was a pseudonym for Clay himself.

Cagle had made Jay his special project. He woke Jay at night to run wind sprints until he vomited, or do push-ups in a field turned to muck by a sprinkler system until, muscles twitching, Jay collapsed face-first in the mud. At meals, Cagle required Jay to hold his knife and fork at a forty-five-degree angle, sitting upright with his body three inches from the back of the chair; Cagle peppered him with so many questions that it became impossible for him to eat and Jay, already thin, seemed to become slighter with each passing day. Reading the letters, Corey envisioned an upperclassman who reveled in tormenting cadets, but who also sensed in Jay something that so inflamed him that he had resolved to drive his victim out of school. If the ostensible point of the abuse was bonding classmates, it was surely working—Clay's letters described his efforts to buck up his flagging classmate, trying to stave off the prospect of a nervous collapse. But Corey began to worry about Clay himself. "Watch your buddy," he advised his brother, "but also yourself. Your survival isn't tied to Jay's."

When the summer of indoctrination ended, Corey felt a deep relief. His brother had survived.

Clay stopped mentioning Jay. But as the fall began, Cagle resurfaced in Clay's letters, this time as a petty tyrant who conducted random "room inspections" at odd hours, breaking Clay's and his roommate's sleep to scour the room for imaginary contraband. In letter after letter, the raids were so unpredictable, yet so frequent, as to border on obsession. Though sometimes couched in humor, Clay's letters gradually took on an increasing tone of darkness, one focusing on a cadet who, abruptly cracking up, had been talked out of jumping off the roof of a building, another on two female cadets who had vanished overnight amid whispers of lesbianism. "No one ever talks about them," Clay wrote. "But last night I lay awake wondering what they told their families."

Without responding to these stories, Corey sent back a letter of encouragement. "We're all proud," he told Clay. "Dad's actually begun bragging about you, and Mom's given up on exiling you to Carl Cash University. Maybe next year you'll even have time to get laid."

Two days later, in mid-October, General Hall's successor as commandant tracked down Corey by telephone at a hotel in Toledo. There was no good way to say this, General Pierce told him somberly—his brother had killed himself.

For a long time Corey could not speak.

"How?" he finally asked and felt himself shrivel inside at the inadequacy, the sheer stupidity, of his question.

"By jumping off the roof of his dormitory." The general paused. "It's five stories, you'll remember, with concrete below."

Corey felt his eyes close. "What have you told my parents?"

"Nothing. We wanted to call you first. As a courtesy to someone we all respect, for whatever help it is."

Corey forced himself to think ahead, the reflex of an officer. "Please don't contact them," he requested. "I'm coming out there myself."

"Make it soon," the general responded soberly. "I'm not comfortable sitting on this."

"I understand." Corey hesitated, then asked, "Before Clay did this, did you have to talk another cadet out of jumping?"

"No," the general answered in a puzzled voice. "Where did you hear that?"

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Corey felt sick. The letters had been a window into Clay's own torment, marbled with clues that Corey had overlooked. And then, as the whole, horrible truth seeped from his subconscious, Corey grasped the reason he wished to keep his parents clear of this.

"I'll be there tomorrow," he promised Pierce.

COREY HAD NOT returned to the Academy since graduation.

Once he was there, his memories were curdled by Clay's death. The Terrazzo level of the campus, a thousand feet above Colorado Springs, offered Corey's favorite vista, a majestic view of the Rockies that had always made him ponder the miracle of flight. But even amid this grandeur, the campus now seemed cold and antiseptic. Arms folded, he gazed at his old freshman dorm, so recently home to his brother. Another memory returned to him: the cadet in his class who, fearful of returning home as a failure, had jammed a pencil in the barrel of his M-1 and shot himself in the eye. But all he had done was blind himself, and now Clay's eyes, too, were sightless.

Corey drove to the morgue.

His brother lay in a drawer, his skull crushed, his face bruised and distorted by the impact of his fall. His death had required a grim resolve—he had jumped headfirst, a witness said, a near-perfect dive guaranteed to break his neck. Hand trembling, Corey gently traced the bristles of his hair.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I never knew."

BEFORE VISITING THE commandant, he asked to see Clay's room.

The commander of Clay's squadron, Major Kelleher, escorted him in silence. The room was as Spartan as Corey's own had been: a tile floor, a closet, a sink, a chest of drawers, two steel-frame beds. But this room was absolutely bare.

"Where's Clay's roommate?" he asked.

Kelleher seemed transfixed by the empty beds. "Gone."

Corey was no longer surprised.

THE COMMANDANT COVERED his embarrassment by recounting the facts in clipped military fashion.

One week ago, shortly after two A.M., an upperclassman holding a flashlight had conducted a surprise room inspection. Throwing the door open, he'd captured in a beam of light an act that called for expulsion: Cadet Clayton Grace as he performed oral sex on his roommate.

Corey listened impassively. "This upperclassman," he asked, "does his name happen to be Cagle?"

The commandant's lips pursed. "I'm afraid that's confidential."

"Then tell me this," Corey inquired softly. "When your nameless cadet turned in Clay to Major Kelleher, did he still have an erection? Or did he jerk off first?"

Pierce's eyes narrowed. "Your point?"

"That the sickest cadet in this story isn't the one who's dead. I'd think very hard before I made this man an officer."

"The upperclassman broke no rules," Pierce answered in a monotone. "Your brother did. Any cadet in this man's place would be honor-bound to turn him in."

"But not every cadet, General, would
be
in this man's place."

The general's silence, Corey sensed, was meant as a sign that he understood this. "So his roommate's gone, too," Corey said at length.

"Yes. He accepted what we offered Clay—an administrative discharge for reasons that will, to the best of our ability, remain confidential."

"At least as confidential," Corey amended, "as your vigilant upperclassman cares for it to be."

Pierce contemplated the desk as though pondering how much to say. "This upperclassman was reminded of our policy. But, yes, your brother expressed that concern to Major Kelleher."

Corey tried to imagine his brother's turmoil. "How did Clay act?" he asked.

"Frightened—much more than his roommate, Kelleher thought. When we quarantined them—separately, of course—during the time needed to resolve the matter, your brother stopped eating."

"And you didn't watch him?"

The general's eyes were veiled. "Not closely enough, it seems."

It was pointless, Corey told himself, to turn his guilt and self-disgust on General Pierce. "I'd have thought," Corey told him softly, "that Clay would leave a letter."

"Not that we've found." Pierce frowned, then added, "According to Bill Kelleher, he did express a terrible shame, and a deep fear of exposure. He was certain that your parents would reject him—"

"Why didn't you call me then, for Christ's sake?"

Pierce gazed across the desk. "He implored us not to. You were a hero, he told Bill—and a hero or a senator doesn't need a 'fairy' for a brother."

Head bowed, Corey touched his eyes.

For numberless seconds, he sat there, barely conscious of the man across from him. Looking up, he said wearily, "Then at least you can honor Clay's request."

"In what way?"

"With secrecy. He was right about our parents."

Pierce nodded slowly. "As far as our records go, and subject to review by General Lane, I think we can all agree that your brother was depressed. As to his roommate, I can only assume that he'll stay quiet. I take it you don't know him."

Corey felt the final piece fall into place. "Only that his name was Jay."