“It’ll be like a movie without cameras,” Bernard said, handing me the speech in the hushed backseat of the town car. Before long we arrived at the fairground where a makeshift stage, festooned with orange bunting, stood before the defunct Ferris wheel. There was an air of frenetic activity behind the stage, a mill of anonymous people excitedly performing tasks.
When the presidential candidate and former senator Rory Stengel finally entered the backstage area, applause traveled swiftly through the crowd. It was a pleasure to watch him smile and greet people and shake his head with warmth and enthusiasm, a head taller than everyone. When he came to me, he held my shoulder and frowned terribly, as if chagrined by gratitude. I don’t remember exactly what he said. Something like, “So glad, really, an honor, we’re gonna thank you for the yes we’re glad.” This was my first time meeting a politician, and it surpassed by far the company of actors. A politician, I learned that afternoon, cannot part with a gesture until he’s blown it up to maximum size. As Senator Stengel thanked me, his face shining with makeup, I began to understand the event. It didn’t matter what my speech said, it mattered only what gestures I made.
The speech itself, as I said, had been written, so, when the time came, all I had to do was stand at the podium and declaim it. Already the crowd thought of me as a kind of hero because of the supposed political undertones of Everyman and No Man’s Land, the second film starring Harry Knott, even more popular than the first. By then I had lived in Fantasma Falls for five years.
I maintained through that time a comprehensive scrapbook larded with articles, profiles, photographs, and puff pieces about Harry Knott. The headlines, in their factuality, pleased me to flip through: THE TOTAL ACTOR, an article about my unflinching commitment, both on film and in life, to the role of Harry Knott; A PATRIOT ONSCREEN AND OFF, a glossy-magazine profile on the extent to which my character’s political views mirrored my own; RETIRED MILKMAN CLAIMS TO EYE REAL BERNINI AT LOCAL BOWLING ALLEY, a small item (among many others like it: one week, it was a garbage man spotting me weeping outside Fantasma Falls Hospital; another, a bus driver claiming I, wearing a hula skirt and blue eye shadow, boarded the M30 at midnight and handed him $200 with stern instructions to drive due east), in which a man named Gary Evershed claimed to spot me “violently cursing a gutter ball” at lane four of the Happy Hall bowling alley; WHO IS SHE NOW?, with capsule images of the Julie Darks as they sauntered down the red carpet or emerged from a limousine, along with epithets purporting to describe each woman (Melanie, a young actress; Tabitha, a nurse and hobby painter); TEN QUESTIONS WITH HARRY KNOTT, a teenybopper questionnaire in which I listed my favorite type of ice cream and the politicians I most admired; THE PRODUCER INSPIRED ENOUGH TO JOIN, a rare profile of Bernard and his choice to imitate the character Harry Knott, moved, as he was, by the character’s patriotic actions on film.
That many of these articles were imprecise or wholly fabricated only enhanced their meaning. If anything, I began to see the scrapbook as an act of preservation, aided precisely by these layers of invention. The lies in them helped protect Harry Knott, in the way Knott concealed my imitation of Bernard, in the way my being Bernard, in turn, helped conserve somewhere, however deep or buried, Giovanni himself, surviving in the scrapbook’s photographs, if nowhere else.
He no longer existed in letters, it’s true. Since the incident at the Desert, I had not written to Mama. For a time she regularly sent her own, claiming to be ill. First her lungs, then an infection in her toe lately replaced by a heart palpitation or arrhythmia that “will be the end of me,” she swore. “If you want to leave it like this, fine. But I’m close to the end. A body knows these things.” I’d called once and knew immediately, from her voice, that she was in fine health, and stopped writing again.
A few days after the episode in the Desert, Bernard had sat me down for a talk at the Chateau Ravine bar. She was trying to sabotage me, he said. However much Mama claimed that she was helping me, that was the exact degree to which she was seeking to destroy me.
Sanctioned by repetition, the theory grew more persuasive. For what, really, had been Mama’s plan in coming to the City all those years before? (There was a delicacy, a succulence to these speculations, insulated from fear by Bernard’s remove.) Why, after all, had she encouraged me to imitate Lucy on Marguerite’s roof, knowing that Lucy was herself at the party and might very well come up at any moment? And even if the resulting row had not been Mama’s strict intention, why, all along, through letters and in person, had she encouraged the pursuit of Lucy’s thread? How could such a search have ended well? And why, really, had she surprised me at the Desert? Was that scene she’d caused with Nathan and Bernard truly an accident? Why had she gone if not to stir up trouble? To throw my career in jeopardy and lure me back home? After all, what had she been doing all my life if not making me dependent on her and her alone? Why had she trained me to seek threads? If not to yoke me to her and separate us, on an island of two, from every other living soul?
This logic, however, could be easily derailed. Late at night, in the blue-black of four a.m., with Julie Dark fast asleep in bed (one of the worst parts of any evening in her company, for each woman slept differently, some on their back, mouth gapingly open, others on their stomach, creaking like an unclosed door in light wind), I would begin to see Mama anew, as a framed savior. Perhaps she was right, I would think, starting to pace. Perhaps this whole Harry Knott stunt represented a crime against my instincts. Hadn’t Bernard betrayed me with Lucy? Why should I trust him? Perhaps he, from the beginning, had so relentlessly campaigned against Mama because he knew she represented the sole threat to his authority. And so I would go back and forth, these doubts spiraling into my chest, where my heart beat more quickly, my legs, too, speeding up until in my quickened motions the mirror reflected an alien silhouette, a man to my terror, that looked not at all like Harry Knott. The need to call Mama would bolt through me, but then, always, the man in the wedding dress would come to my ear saying, “Quite something, really,” and I would need to swallow two green pills to steady myself again.
An hour later, I would lie in bed. Julie would stir or lightly moan, and the bursting moment, now past, would seem the best proof of Bernard’s case. After all, if thinking about Mama caused such tumult, imagine what writing her would do?
And in those moments when I ached to call or write her (moments that grew both less frequent and more extreme), I consulted the scrapbook, which, I knew even then, existed only for her. Each curly-eared article, each tape-mummified photograph awaited her fingers. And one day, we would collect in the Sea View living room, where she would dim the lights, and I would present the completed book, and with each page she would giggle and shake her head, relishing this immaculate trick I had pulled on the world.
And what an addition this political speech would make! That day at the fairgrounds, I read each sentence. When I reached the period, the audience applauded. “The Communist threat is still present and will remain present without the vigilance some deem excessive.” Applause. “It takes a spy to know one.” Applause. Now and then I would look up from the paper to see the concerned, pink-faced men in straw hats holding papers rolled into batons. The women fanned themselves with the same papers, shaking their heads at an indignity I had named. I kept waiting for someone to yell, “Cut!”
As these appearances galloped along, the newspapers, to my shock, reported them as fact. I didn’t know which I preferred more: giving the speeches or reading about them a day later in my bungalow at the Chateau Ravine. In truth, it was hard to divide the two, for the event seemed to happen only when it had been written about, or rather, it was only then that it was confirmed to have happened—its having happened, its being preserved in the gel of that tense, made it delectable, like hearing of a stranger you happened to be.
On those mornings when I expected a newspaper article, I’d open the door to find the West News rolled on the black doormat. Feigning a light curiosity, I’d page through before turning to the Politics section. There I would happen upon the headline, reading the article in a gulp before cutting it out and adding it to the scrapbook.
ACTOR BERNINI ENDORSES SENATOR STENGEL
Former senator Rory Stengel addressed a mixed and boisterous crowd of seven hundred supporters today on the steps of the Old Municipal Tower, marking his third such appearance in Fantasma Falls this month as he, along with his opponents, make their final preparations for the statewide presidential primary on the 21st. While Mr. Stengel has failed to gain a foothold in Fantasma Falls, let alone nationally, his candidacy was bolstered today by the appearance and public support of actor Giovanni Bernini, famous for his role as spy Harry Knott in the films Everyman and No Man’s Land.
Political endorsements from entertainers are nothing new, of course, in this heated primary season. What distinguished this appearance from others was Mr. Bernini’s decision to appear as the character Harry Knott, the fictitious spy the actor plays onscreen. Mr. Bernini took to the podium this afternoon in a suit identical to the one worn by Harry Knott, delivering a twenty-minute address praising Mr. Stengel’s right-wing positions in a manner indistinguishable from that of the character.
These eccentricities did not appear to faze the energized crowd, however. When this reporter canvassed them after the addresses, many confirmed they had attended solely to see the movie actor. “I’d vote for him if I could,” said Carl DeWee, a high school senior. “Have you seen his movies? Now he’s taking it into real life.” Said Timothy Michaels, a retired engineer, “He hunts pinkos in the pictures, and he’ll do it right here, too.”
Opponents may well seize upon this appearance as evidence of the former senator’s reactionary positions. Given the robust turnout at today’s rally, however, it seems a trade the candidate is willing to make. “Mr. Bernini is going to continue to stump with us,” a spokesman from the campaign confirmed. “We’re delighted to have him.”
I campaigned with Rory Stengel for six months, rarely interacting with him backstage and then hugging him or gripping his hand and hoisting it with mine once on it. In this proximity, I learned the strategies. The sanctity of eye contact, for instance. How eruptive a grin can be. Above all, the key was to have said things so many times that when you were delivering the line, whether solemnly or casually, whether to a cigar-chewing reporter or tongue-tied voter, you weren’t ever thinking about the words, but about some essential, misdirected thing—the way you touched a man’s shoulder, for instance, or seemed to smile unthinkingly to yourself—in the way a magician talks always but never about the palmed ace or hidden thrumming dove.
By the time Stengel was defeated in the election, I had stolen what I could from him. Little time passed, perhaps a month, before my appearances recommenced at political rallies and in convention halls up and down the state, at which events I delivered speeches deviating little from the message I preached with Stengel, the primacy of patriotism, mainly, and the specter of communism. “I am a patriot in the stories I tell and in the life I live,” I must have said a thousand times, becoming the master of certain phrases and mottoes, whose syllables I’d run up and down, like melodies. We traveled in a motorcade from event to event, winding our way as far north as Red Rock Shoals.
By that time there had developed a cult of admirers, zealots who attended rallies in my suit and bolo tie and cowboy boots, waving placards and vicious signs. These men seemed to grow in number with each new appearance, and security men often mistook Bernard for one of their lot, checking his passage or giving him a skeptical once-over. “Committed, huh?” a burly organizer once asked him. Bernard answered, “Why, sir, I’m committed to any cause that will awaken this country to the real.” After making it past this guard, I expected Bernard to wink, but he looked solemn, if anything, strutting ahead with the bellicose energy of a football player taking the field. During the rallies, I would sometimes spot him in the crowd itself, waving a sign or joining a chant as if electrified, genuinely, by the policies I described. “Meet the most natural politician this country’s ever produced,” he said when showing me off.
In truth, the content of my speeches mattered little to me. No, what mattered was the performance, of which these addresses were but a small part (and the meaning of them hardly relevant at all). How I walked onstage, waving to the peopled bleachers, the style in which I descended stairs—these mattered as much as my rhetoric or tone of voice, and to test these gestures I began to use the mirror every morning.
Previously I had used it sparingly: to verify, say, a look I’d caught on the traffic-scanning face of a jaywalker. I think I saw it as a cheat. But after we announced that I was running for governor, I began to rely on the mirror, to practice in front of it in the morning, usually after reading an article about me, in order to solidify certain details. How I looked flipping the page on the dais, for instance, or sighing.
As I soon discovered, however, the bedroom mirror wasn’t big enough. I made the request to Frankie and Lou, and it was taken care of: a larger, multipaneled mirror replaced the length of the wall opposite my bed, so I could examine the full sweep of a gesture. Even this was insufficient, though, and, upon my request, was expanded again. Wrapping around the bed, a semicircular mirror came to be installed, but this, too, disappointed me—seemed to emphasize the lack of mirror elsewhere—and I eventually told Frankie and Lou that I wanted the entire room mirrored, three hundred sixty degrees, and the ceilings, too.
The Chateau Ravine staff, who already considered me a permanent resident (informally referring to the property as the Knott Suite), was happy to oblige. It was achieved with surprising speed, but my first night in the mirrored room, I could barely sleep, kicking the sheets, the innumerable Giovannis spitting it all back so that I had to shut my eyes, the bursting feeling coming again. I vowed to call Mama first thing in the morning, to book a flight back to Sea View, when at some hour sunlight nosed the edge of the curtains, which I parted, flooding the room in angles, and I understood the mirrors were no mistake at all but a miracle.
For there are innumerable points of view, of course. A man might choose to see you from a variety of locations in the stands, and it was best to learn how you might appear to him standing wherever he was. Soon I had props brought in from the lot: a dais, a set of stairs, a small desk on wheels. At my request, Julie Dark joined me in that chamber, part of my effort to be comprehensive. Once she was a tall Swede with a lightly cruel sense of humor. Another a woman with black bangs who kept stroking my cheek with her finger. And yet I soon found that sex itself was too homely an act to bear to watch in the mirrored room, and I asked Julie to simulate more practical positions, such as shaking my hand or asking me a question at close range, with that upraised, auditor’s tilt of the head.
So when our advertisements began to appear on the radio and on television, I was not in the least surprised by how I sounded or looked. When I posed at the desk, I knew how I appeared to the camera crew, sitting upright, as I was, my hands clasped to connote both firmness and fairness. When I rubbed the hair of the towheaded kid at the library of the kindergarten, I knew how my slight, seemingly unconscious grin must have charmed the long-skirted teacher, was in fact watching myself as I did it. I perceived how immersed and engaged I must’ve seemed reading The Forgotten Cat, an illustrated book, better than any of the actual onlookers did in that school library. Better than that prim teacher, who rested her hands above her knees when bending to scold her students. Better than Frankie or Lou standing against the yellow wall. Better than Max, who sat in an undersized wooden chair, biting his nail with the impatience that ruled him more and more. Better even than Bernard, whose grin seemed the tic of an actor whose films I’d seen too many times.
The mailbox at the end of my block gulped down the letter. I regretted the action instantly, with the kind of trembling regret that occasions a vital risk. The library made me think of her, but it was more than that. I could perform for every soul in the world, and it wouldn’t count unless she saw it.
I sent a brief note with clippings. She responded that week.
Yes, I’ve followed this, of course. You know how I feel about this Bernard, you know quite well, and I never thought you one for politics. But I need to see you, Giovanni. I will be quiet as a mouse.
The day I received this note I gave an address at a soon-to-be-shuttered oil derrick on the outskirts of Palm Haven, a desert town an hour outside of the city. The men wore hard hats and blackened gloves, their expressions yoked together by rage. My voice echoed among the black machinery, the brown-red hills of the desert visible beyond the derrick chuckling with its work like a railroad car. The whole time I was speaking, I was wishing Mama were there, but, no, it wasn’t that—it was that I had mistakenly felt her presence, I understood only then. When I raised clasped hands with Senator Stengel, for instance, or leaned in to hear a voter’s nervously muttered name, always I felt she was there, her eyes hovering above the events, and only then, at the mouth of the desert, understood that she was not and had never been.
When I returned to the trailer, Lou said I had a visitor. Bernard encouraged these callers as part of our effort to win votes. By then I relied on a playbook of phrases and questions. Depending on what was first said, the conversation, like a game of chess, could branch out to a limited number of topics.
“Guy says he’s an old friend,” Lou told me.
At that, a tall, rakish figure entered the trailer. He used a cane, wielded for the purposes of style, it was clear. His long face passed in and out of the trailer’s slatted shadows, and as he approached, I found that my heart was beating quickly. When he got closer, I saw he was tall and lean, wearing a canary-yellow suit. Soon he settled into the chair. There was a crease, a dissonant ring in his eyes, his features gaunt and time-bitten. I had no old friends.
“Hey, pal,” he said and stuck out his hand. “Don’t recognize a buddy?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Look at you. Damn, just look at you.” He smiled. “Big-time politico and all that.” He added, “Jesse Unheim. From Sea View.”
“Jesse Unheim,” I said. This was a technique Bernard used: saying a person’s name. I felt myself relax. I was going to relish dismissing him.
“Remember the principal’s office? Always you and me stuck down there all but banging our heads for sheer never-ending boredom. God, those were times. Whole time I’m thinking, why they got me down here with this freak. No offense. I mean, now look at you. Heard the speech today. I’m thinking, gee whiz, look at this guy.”
“How can I help you?”
“Well, I live out here. Acting a little. Like you. I mean, not like you. Trying to. Anyhoo, one day I flip open the paper and what do I see? Giovanni Bernini’s giving a big speech right in Palm Haven, my neck of the woods. And I thought, well, how about I pay him a little visit. Have us a parley. I mean, jeez, bud. Haven’t seen you in, what, fifteen years?”
“Long time,” I said.
“Too long, too long.” He scratched his nose with a slightly opened mouth. “So, listen, your mom and I, you mighta heard, had a bit of a dispute. I know you’re a busy guy, but this thing—it wasn’t quite finished.”
“I did hear about that,” I said. “As I understand it, you left town before the jury came to a decision.”
“Well, my lawyer was on loan, you see, from some interested parties out here. And I could chew your ear off and so on, but my point is—” He exhaled. “See, I just need a little something. A piece. And you and your mom won’t hear a peep from me no more.”
“Do you think it’s my obligation to give it to you?”
“No, no, I don’t mean it that way at all. See, your mom, well, she’s the one who split up that dough, right? What was rightfully mine. Now, I saw you coming into town and I figure to myself, why not make this simple for all parties involved. Payment won’t be felt on your end one bit. I’m talking about eight grand.”
“You can talk about it all you want. Just don’t do it anywhere near me.” I nodded to Frankie and Lou. Soon enough they got him in a grip, hoisting him up like professional movers. It was right out of a Harry Knott film.
“Hey, hey, c’mon.” He seemed to be in his natural state, getting thrown out. “Your dad wouldn’t approve of this, I’ll tell you that.”
“What?” Too quick. “My father?”
Looking at each other and then at me, Frankie and Lou understood to release him. Unheim, once seated, made a gloating expression. “Thought that might perk you up.” He propped his right foot on his left knee. How he used to sit in detention. “Might a big wheel such as yourself rate it a tale worth paying for?”
“I see you have more to say.” It was like being on set: you had to deliver each line slower than you thought. “I don’t have my book with me. But you have my word that if you give me accurate information about my father, I will pay you eight thousand dollars.”
He nodded, frowned. “See, he was in Dun Harbor when I was coming up. Helped me get in with some of the guys there. He talked about it—how the old lady threw him out after his first bid.
“For some guys, really, it ain’t the money at all. It’s like the thing food does to a bitch. Lifting someone’s wheels. Juicing a candy bar. ‘They a-call to me,’ he used to say. Smart enough, but he was one of those guys—only one kind of luck, right? First, it was the horse he got caught smuggling in. That’s what lost him the gig with the longshoremen. After that, he got wrapped up in an insurance scam at the dock with guys he used to work with. Arson. He torched the office and old storage house like he was supposed to, but two teens were having a time down there, and they got torched with it. Sentenced to thirty years at Dun Harbor.”
“The prison?” That dismal building. I pictured a visiting room lined with picnic tables. A handcuffed figure in a tux shuffling through the door.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Stole some fucker’s cigs, apparently, fifteen years in. Got his throat cut. I brought you up once. Told him about some of the shit you got into, about detention. He said, ‘He even worse than me.’” This bad Italian accent stolen from radio ads for spaghetti sauce—that was as close as I would get to my father’s voice. “Check or cash,” Unheim said. “Either way.”
I made sure not to rush it. “If you think my mother owes you money, you ought to take it up with her. As for me, I think your story’s worth about as much as the teller.”
Lou and Frankie lifted him again.
“Big head now, I got it. I heard you had to sleep with a muzzle on, that true? You fucking cunt. I heard your mom wore earplugs around you, so she couldn’t hear you, cunt.” Dragged outside, he continued to yell, his boot heels scraping the ground.
• • •
Inside Nathan Sharp’s ballroom the fifty guests inspected me over duck and Bordeaux. These fund-raisers required little of me except to seem amused by the donors’ jokes or improved by their advice. From the swamps in the southeast and the windy states to the north they had been drawn to this mansion. I stepped out for a smoke and saw their shiny cars in a ring. Behind them the ocean rumbled in the starless night.
Fantasma Falls was a misnomer. There were no known falls yet found in a terrain marked for miles by desert, coastline, and canyon. According to one version, the title was the outright invention of Rutger Smitt, a paper baron, landowner, and amateur versifier from the previous century. Smitt, it was said, scoured the Dictionary of Geographic Terms, concocting the most alluring names he could to ease the settling of a land considered mean if not downright uninhabitable. Something of a pioneer in the field of branding, he was rumored to have coined the name Joy Beach, a waterless dump twenty miles north of the city, and Hallowed Hills, a stretch of accursed flatland to the east. Others, though, insisted the name preceded Smitt’s arrival and could be traced back to the slaughtered native population, who twice a year had visited a magical falls where ghosts were believed to take the shapes of men in order to reenact the scenes of their death. A committed minority held firmly to this latter view and were known to go on long hikes and walkabouts in the summer, searching for these still-undiscovered falls.
After dinner we retired to Nathan’s den, where Bernard had me do a show. A southerner bravely raised his hand. Next, a real-estate magnate named Gerald Picaso. The laughter stoked in that smoky, paneled room, decorated with the murdered heads of bears and moose, grew like a blaze, the faces of clannish men gathered around it, grinning and covetous. “This one’s ours!” a fat man said to much applause.
After dinner, Max pulled me aside, into an alcove decorated with paintings of flamingos.
“Do you believe any of it?”
“What’s that?” I said.
“All these speeches you give.”
“I don’t care what I do.”
“You know your mom and I talk. She doesn’t like this one bit. Not one bit!”
Soon after my encounter with Jesse Unheim I had Frankie and Lou look into Jesse’s claims about my father. A few days later, Bernard appeared in my room to confirm that a prisoner 8BA94 named Giovanni Bernini had, indeed, been murdered fifteen years into a thirty-five-year bid for arson and manslaughter at Dun Harbor Correctional.
“How do you feel?” he’d asked.
“Why, do you care?”
“Don’t be sore with me.”
“All right. I won’t be sore.”
“Another instance of her misguided way of protecting you. Ask me, this is a confirmation that what we’ve been doing has been right all along.”
“And what is it we’ve been doing?” I raised the cigarette to my lips. To sit at the kitchen table and ask this question while Bernard stood in the partial light of the vertical blinds was to create a poem. One made of time, not words. He liked to look between the blinds at the scrubby little garden, setting one back with his finger, like Harry Knott himself.
“Don’t be thick.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m giving you freedom,” he said.
“Okay, good,” I said with a slight smile.
“That’s right, it’s good. Freedom from being like your fuckin’ daddy, who apparently couldn’t keep his hands off another man’s cigarettes, that’s what I mean.”
Perhaps Bernard had filled me with freedom, for in that moment, as he paced in that easeful way, resting his hand in his back pocket (and in so doing slightly opening the flanks of his jacket), preparing, I knew, some diatribe, I experienced no dread. In fact, a kind of serenity—electrically charged—imbued the light tinkling of the blinds, the shard of shadow on the gray couch. Bernard, himself, but another phenomenon.
“Max probably told you I ran for Congress years ago. It wasn’t out of vanity. You of all people should know I have none. No, I ran because this country needs people who know the character of our enemies. I wanted it very badly. When people looked at me, they were looking at an idea disguised as a man. Twice I lost. Why? What wasn’t working? I asked myself again and again. Then it occurred to me.” He threw up his hands. “See, even then it had started. Senators, governors, congressmen. Aldermen, comptrollers, all the way down to the fucking garbage man—everyone, Giovanni, was an entertainer. An actor, a comedian, a tambourinist from the county grange.
“So I got into show business—the only business. Every business these days is show business. And it’s easy and it’s boring and it made me want to do a William Tell with about every last shit that walked into the Communiqué. But then I saw you.” He set his hands on his hips. “Now I hope you appreciate what we’ve all helped to do. What Frankie, Lou, and Nathan have helped me do. I don’t mean that you’re a movie star. No. Right now, I’m not talking to Giovanni Bernini, the actor, I’m talking to the spy Harry Knott, a man who has stepped out of the screen into the world. And even better, even better, yes! You’re them”—he flung his arm in the direction of the blinds—“at any moment you could be any voter in the world, and they know it. Don’t you see how rare this is? You’re both their movie hero and them at the same time.” He smiled. “What is it you think we’re up to, Giovanni? Why stop at governor? Hell, you’re gonna run this country, for, tell me, please, who in the hell can defeat a make-believe president?”
He ground out his cigarette, a favorite maneuver of his when approaching the coup de grâce. “About Lucy and me?” He laughed to himself. “Hell, I was hoping you’d hear about it. Really, what interest could I possibly have in a piece of ass like that? No, I was thinking of you, Giovanni. I got hard thinking of you: how you of all people thought you could have a girlfriend. Really, you think you’re gonna find some sweet little piece and sit by a lake and exchange rings? No, the family you’ve been allotted is the audience, the public, voters, customers—whatever the fuck you wanna call them. They alone preserve you, you understand that? Because you’re imaginary. Get it?”
“Sounds good.”
I stood and emptied the ashtray into the kitchen trash. When ballplayers say of a home run, “I knew as soon as it left the bat”—so I felt after this remark. Bernard tried some things, even patted me on the back. “Anyway, we’ll talk more about it,” he said as he left. “Absolutely,” I answered, with a grin. If his goal had been to make this sound bad, he had failed, for what could be better than becoming fictional?
That night, or one soon after, I wrote a letter to Mama explaining that she was not to visit. Calls followed. Letters. Most I tore up without reading. I knew what they would say. In fact, I almost mailed her a parody of my own, a note riddled with oh, my boys, and I was only trying to help yous. That gray prison in Dun Harbor. All those years I’d passed it on my way to the train station, and my father, my namesake, had been there.
At Nathan Sharp’s mansion, in that alcove with paintings of flamingos, Max said, “Goddamnit! He’s using you, don’t you see? He’s gonna have you get into office and use you.”
That was one moment I wished I could have seen on camera (or viewed in the mirror or, for that matter, read about in the paper) because I knew I took the right amount of time. “And what use do you have?” I asked. And Max was such an unwitting actor—he huffed, shook a fist, even turned one last time to shake his fist again before tramping down the hall, and away, it turned out. Later that night, I did it again in front of the mirror.
• • •
From the wings we could hear the herd of reporters: jittery-kneed, pens-at-the-ready, like the old crowds at the Communiqué.
Bernard and Lou waited backstage with me, as did Michael Martet, the owner of the theater. When we first met, Martet had subjected me to his gratitude, squeezing my hand at this rhythm: down, up, down (held), then a pat on the back, down, up, down (held), pat on the back. “This sure means a lot, Mr. Bernini,” he said six times. Martet was a head shorter than I was, his face forgettable except for a colorful and bulbous nose. Like a Christmas ornament on a thin stem, plum-shaped and plum-colored, it lent to his restless person an availability of spirit. The nose was meant to be shared. “This sure means a lot” accounted for ninety percent of what he said to me, and I was pleased when he left me in order to pace by Lou. For a long time I remembered his nose. Because of what happened, I remembered and wondered if there had been signs in it.
I was worried the feeling would come. I worried about this often. When I had greeted my opponent with a mean vigorous shake, for instance, equidistant from our podiums before the moderator, a silhouette from waist to head like a target at a shooting range. Or at the VA hospital when shredded, hopeful men thanked me as I came around and at the Jade House, where I knew how everything looked because I had practiced in the mirror taking off my belt and cumming. When admirers outside the rally in Redwood Park swaddled my back or when they reached over several rows of people unself-conscious to grab my hand, I thought then, surely, the bursting feeling would come, and at the condemned house, too, where the photographers broke their bulbs over me and the men without jobs smiling. At a fund-raiser in the hills, when it happened, I pretended it was something I ate. The pills by then didn’t always help. A butler led me to the upstairs bathroom, where my expression in the mirror looked only slightly puzzled. Relieved, I lay in the cold hard tub, the murmur of party guests below. It was this way. Some expressions felt like shotgun blasts to the nose but weren’t really so bad when you took them to the mirror. Tearing up her letters, for instance. Or waking from a dream of rattling grates and dumb heads bobbing through slatted shadows. “An inspiration to the conservative majority, if still a mystery to many . . .” the newscaster said in his professional voice. The television made Bernard’s grinning face the same blue it made all the hotel suite, lively at the time with balloons and jubilant people whose names I didn’t know applauding.
Now we stood at the backstage of the abandoned Jupiter Theater. Bernard had selected it as the site of my first address as governor-elect. A symbol of decay, soon to be resurrected, was the idea. The cobwebs in the rafters were thick. Light bored through the warped paneling. This was not the place I wanted to be: in that musty backstage speared through by light, and yet I could think of no better place. I riffled through all the places I’d been, and none was the right place. More and more this was the feeling. I was not dreading the press conference. If I could dread certain places, like that neglected theater, it would spur me to find the better place, if only as a kind of negative search.
When Bernard and Senator Stengel took the stage, a hubbub broke out in the theater. The two sat at a microphone-laden table. The photographers’ bulbs flashed. Stengel was beginning his introductory remarks when Mr. Martet tapped me on the shoulder with news of a phone call.
The short walk to the office, Martet expressed his surprise that the man on the other line could track down the number. On his metal desk sat the heavy receiver.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
I said nothing.
“It’s Ken,” the voice said. “Ken Kessman. Your mother’s neighbor.”
“Go on.”
“The police . . . Giovanni, there’s been a . . . he tried to rob her . . .”
I said nothing.
“Giovanni—Jesse Unheim—he—”
When I walked onto the stage, the reporters shouted. Their flashbulbs cut me like glass. “You’re not supposed to come out yet,” Bernard said, looking over his shoulder at me.
“My mother was shot,” I told him. “She’s dead.”
Bernard looked like he might speak when I punched the back of his head. I yanked his hair until his chair toppled over, I shoved his face into the stage, punching it again when the stage broke under us, and we landed in cold dirt. I punched him until my hands were bleeding, and then I reached into my jacket for the gun. Against his forehead I put the nose and cocked the hammer. It clicked. I pulled it again. “A toy,” Bernard said, when I was scooped up by the armpits. Lou was holding me, suspended over the crater in the stage, flailing like a swimmer stolen out of the water, while the reporters made the cameras perpendicular to their faces. A sound was coming from inside the hole in the stage: Bernard, on the ground, his teeth pink with blood, like some half-fleshed skeleton. “A toy,” he said.