After the party, the President had a new obsession: to see the little girl again. There were things he wanted to ask her. First, he invited her to a private meeting at the White House, to have her picture taken with him, an official photo that he would then sign and give to her as a memento. Photos with presidents were considered of value, like getting your name in the newspaper or your picture on TV. The invitation to Lily was made at the suggestion of the President’s secretary, Rosemary, who had children and grandchildren of her own, and therefore knew what would appeal to them.
Scotty declined. His regrets were polite and cold. He thanked the President but said he did not want his daughter treated with special favors or to have anything made of the unfortunate incident at the Christmas party, when, due to excitement and exhaustion, she had had an hallucination. He was sure the President would understand. Both he and his former wife were disturbed at the newspaper accounts that had come out about the party. It was embarrassing.
The President’s first reaction was anger. He checked his impulse to order her to come. The idea passed immediately, the beat of a bat’s wings; but he was astonished at the intensity of his rage, disturbed and ashamed. His only course, he advised himself, was patience. Something would happen. The way would be made clear. (He had started to think like this in the last few months, as if Fate were leading him.) Yet impatience drove him on obsessively.
That was another reason he thought he was going mad. At times, he felt all the universe and everyone in it was swinging rightly and righteously in a kind of delicate dance, orderly as a minuet. He could hear the singing of the planets, the humming of rocks and sky; he could comprehend the mathematical movements of the universe—atoms, matter, plants, people, seas and stars, right out to the mystery of millions of galaxies sailing through infinite space.
Then, cupped in a calm hope, he knew he had only to wait. Everything would come to him. These moments of exaltation never lasted long. They were wiped out by events and problems and by his habit of command, an urgency to force a conclusion; or else by doubt, in which he knew with the certainty of despair that nothing was as it appeared, not even his fickle thoughts, and that he knew nothing, nothing at all, and had no control and no strength to effect a single thing. He could not even get his laws through Congress! Then his impulse again was to lunge forward, impose rules, force the situation to its knees. He plotted how to get the child alone.
It was strange. What was supposed to occupy his mind was world depression riding on the tides of war, and the starvation in Africa and Brazil, desperate balance of payments, and the slowly collapsing steel and concrete bridges, the disintegrating roads and subways in his own country, and also the photo opportunities with big contributors, and the reelection of his party.
Instead he tested these private sores. There was still, for example, the matter of the beggar. At night sometimes Matt stared out at the north lawn or prowled from one window to another in the Palace, wondering where the man had gone; and why, if his assignment was to help the President, he’d run away. Matt resented the man’s absconding with his paperweight, of which, in fact, he was fond. He took it as a betrayal.
I am not fit to rule, he thought; and his advisors, whose advice on this subject he never asked, agreed. They whispered among themselves. They found it unnerving for the President to be concerned about the meaning of life. Humility is not valued in a monarch.
One day he stopped Jim as he was leaving the office, a stack of papers in his arms. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and Jim paused, respectful to his boss’s moods.
“Maybe the only thing that’s constant is the changing of either our emotions or our minds,” said the President.
“What?”
“It’s as if there isn’t any reason for living at all except to experience all the emotions, and that that’s all we do all day long, have you noticed? Or all week, anyway: anger, fear, joy, sorrow, grief, hate, loneliness, jealousy, happiness. I‘ve been thinking, maybe that’s the whole sum of life right there, and all we do is go from one to another, like riding all the horses on a merry-go-round; and maybe all the situations we face are merely tests set before us so that we can experience every emotion in some depth. And try out different answers. What do you think?”
Jim stood in the open doorway a moment, staring at the President, then stepped inside, letting the heavy door close behind him.
“What brought this to mind?” he asked cautiously. He himself had only the most primitive relationship to his own emotions. He wasn’t even sure he could name any feeling when he felt it, but he looked at his President, whom he admired more than any human alive, and his mind was racing, searching for the proper response.
“I was thinking how life’s a game,” said Matt, and he stood up and walked to the window and back and then continued pacing the large oval room as he talked, hands behind his back, thinking aloud on his feet. “It’s a game. But why don’t we refuse to play? We think the situations we’re facing are real, that they mean something. We get caught up in our feelings. Or else in thinking. That’s another trick of the game, the idea that we have to solve these problems. We’re always reacting. You’d think we’d get tired of the game, but instead—”
“Are you saying the situations aren’t real?” Jim asked in real dismay. Was the President talking about the war? The economic recession? What wasn’t real?
“No, they’re real, but they’re not important. They’re ways for us to indulge in all the pleasures and pain that’s possible. That’s what we want to do. We love it. When we haven’t enough excitement in our own lives, we go to the movies to get a jolt. If there’s a bit of intellect thrown in, that’s okay too. We think the alternative is boredom. We’d rather do something destructive than be bored.” He saw Jim’s face and flushed.
“Well, of course, to some people the most important thing is intellect—thinking. Or the search for knowledge. They think what they’re thinking about is important, when it’s really only the act of thinking they enjoy, the exercise of the mind; or for another type it’s battering the body with physical sensations—the way an athlete does.”
He saw Jim’s wariness.
“I know. You’re thinking the purpose of life is to love thy neighbor,” he hurried on, though it couldn’t have been further from Jim’s mind. “Or to do some good before we die. But most of us just fumble through; it’s hard enough just to keep on going.”
Jim stared at him appalled.
The President, embarrassed, shifted gears. Even mad he knew he’d revealed too much of his inner thoughts. He gave a laugh, head thrown back. “Don’t look like that. Do you think I‘m serious?” And he flashed his famous smile and his famous victory sign. “Back to work.” And he dismissed his aide.
Jim returned to his own office slowly, his tread muffled on thick carpeting. Around him the aides and officers of the palace hurried here and there. The secret service paced the walkways, talking to each other through the handkerchiefs in their left breast pockets. On guard. Jim shook his head. Was it a joke? He didn’t want to think it could be serious. Had he known the extent of Matt’s distress it would have troubled him even more.
Matt Adams spent considerable time these days consolidating a new philosophy. He scratched ideas in a notebook at night. The question was: What is reality?
How strange. All his life he’d battled in the public arena. If he examined his soul, it was after a failure, to excuse his behavior or put the blame on someone else; or else to reconsider strategy, for the President was a cunning politician, a user of people and ideas.
Suddenly, his very method of operations was breaking down. He found himself without a center, and he had the discomfiting sensation as he gave a TV talk or flew to Atlanta for a fund-raiser, or met with ambassadors and heads of state, or conferred with the leaders of the Congress and his cabinet, that he was standing outside himself sometimes, watching himself perform.
He was beside himself, you could say.
Here he was, the head of the American Empire, the most powerful man on earth, whose name filled all mouths with envy or with praise, and he felt … uncertain. How to present his true account?
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.