You often hear newly engaged people say with a bemused, grateful look on their faces: if I hadn’t missed my usual bus, if I hadn’t gotten the address of the bar wrong, if I hadn’t gone to that party I really didn’t want to go to, then I never would have . . . But for that second encounter to occur, the universe didn’t just manifest a measly spilled drink or stalled subway.
Sometime after midnight, a text came in from Margaret confirming what CNN was already saying. No last-minute budget compromise had been arrived at. The U.S. government was shut down. I clicked around the channels, seeing the same banner passing beneath every sitcom rerun: All non-essential federal employees are required to stay home. Meaning all non-employees would be essential.
The next morning, I stepped out into a rushless rush hour. In the schoolyards, parents dressed in sweats were milling instead of dashing off. There was no line at Starbucks. But the drugstore was already completely out of laundry detergent, which tells you all you need to know. Washington standard is to work seven days a week until you have an embolism, but for once the salons were going to be packed. And the vets. And the mechanics. Long-overdue thank-you notes would be written and mailed.
I rounded the corner to Pennsylvania and, even with a few blocks to go, could already see the news vans. The correspondents were trying to summarize the situation for the treadmill crowd: the President wasn’t backing down and the Senate Majority Leader was being a dick, more focused on breeding miniature Pomeranians—his honest-to-God hobby—than on bipartisan resolution. He had a tiny one the size of a furry clementine, named Ronald, that he carried to work with him, like Elle Woods. While voting aggressively against gay marriage. So there was that.
The interns filed inside the eerily empty building, half buzzing with conjecture about what might happen to or for us, the other half struck apprehensively silent as if this had all been an elaborate plot to harvest our organs for aging congressmen.
Brooke, nostrils flared, strode in with what I’d call a Jonestown level of purpose. Headband unprecedentedly left home, she was letting the river run.
“Okay, guys.” Margaret emerged from her office, clapping. Everyone was instantly rapt. “Triage time. For the duration of the furlough, all interns are going to be moved . . .” She paused, and we all visibly leaned in. “Upstairs.” She dropped the last word like the Christmas stocking full of bearer bonds she knew it was.
We had been given a hasty tour through the executive offices the first day, mostly, it seemed, so we’d know the fire exits. A hand had been tossed in the direction of the Oval Office. But now we were going upstairs.
Brooke turned to me as we all scrambled to grab our possessions. “I am going to kill this.”
I believed her.
• • •
The interns were pooled into one very determined, inappropriately euphoric, workforce of people who wanted to kill it. But what became quickly apparent is that few had the clerical skills to do so. While they could prepare an opinion for a senator or make Graydon Carter a dinner reservation, they were lost when it came to anything that could be farmed out to a highly trained hamster. And I was suddenly grateful for every vacation I ended up monotonously filing by my mother’s side at her insurance firm while my friends were candle dipping. And these guys were learning semaphore.
We were set up in the pen down the long corridor from the Oval Office, where the President was on the phone trying to use back channels to get the Senate Majority Leader and his little dog to return to budget negotiations. It wasn’t going well. We knew this because every time the door opened we could hear distinct—and gratifying—swearing. If you’ve ever sat around calling your elected representatives fucking assholes, imagine hearing the President do it.
At noon a few of the interns were dispatched to get subs, then at seven they ran out again for pizzas. We took turns keeping the coffee fresh and the water cooler full. By eleven, Margaret said anyone who wanted to leave, could. No one did.
Around midnight I hung up with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who had given me twenty-step instructions to a two-step task he obviously would have preferred just doing himself. It was like explaining putting on pants to an alien. I scrolled through the late-edition headlines, trying to get some sense of where this was going and paused on a small article, a human-interest link from the Chicago Tribune. A patron had commissioned a bronze statue of Baker that would be placed in Lincoln Park on my dad’s jogging route. I reached for my phone.
“Good morning,” he greeted me brightly, as he always did when I called home after midnight. I love his voice, the hint of an Irish accent from his childhood before his family moved to the South Side. I had always liked talking to him when Mom and Erica were in bed because he seemed to appreciate the company. The only time he slept well, Mom says, was when he drank. “What are you doing?”
“Still at work,” I answered quietly.
“Ma says they called you guys in.”
“Yep. I’m down the hall from the Oval Office. Not too shabby.” I tilted my head down as Todd glanced over, his nostrils dancing disdainfully.
“Eh, Rutland picks and flicks like the rest of us.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, smiling. “Bluebirds might bring him a silk handkerchief, or North Korean children—we don’t know what secrets this guy keeps.”
Dad laughed.
“I just saw about the statue,” I said.
He paused for a second, probably taking a swig from his O’Doul’s. “You know, Jamie, it may just be my age, enlarged prostate or whatnot, but I can’t get through my run anymore without needing to take a big piss. I’d not been sure where to go—the men’s rooms are a little sketchy at that hour and the woods can be buggy. So they’ve just done me a favor.”
“Okay then, so long as you’re taking it in stride.”
“Love ya, kid.”
“You too, Dad.” I hung up, smiling.
• • •
I have no idea when I eventually got home or what time I got back in the next day—in my mind, I passed through Gail’s apartment as if on a conveyor belt, swapping out clothes and swiping on deodorant. The news channels were already saying that the presidential bid of the presumptive Republican nominee, John Partridge, had gone from dubious to posing a tight race.
Anxious, we tucked our heads and hit our piles. Just before lunch the political media film crew came back. The tan man in the tight-fitting suit stalked around with the tip of his rimless glasses between his lips and then jumped on Brooke’s desk. Rachelle, the girl who’d wanted to eat my brain, arrived, carrying coffee in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. She registered our confusion.
“Hi. Okay, so Geoffrey, here, is setting the camera angles. We want to show that you guys are all still hard at work.” She tried to keep her eyes on him as she brought us up to speed, the shifting making her look even more nervous. “This isn’t a vacay.”
Without actually acknowledging her, Geoffrey gestured for the apple and took a bite. “You,” he said, mouth full.
“Me?” I pointed at my chest.
“Switch with him,” he ordered. “That’s an Asian cluster.”
“We don’t want this to look like a cafeteria,” Rachelle explained as Geoffrey thrust the core at her.
“Thank you,” Rachelle said to me as I moved while seemingly weighing whether he wanted her to keep it. “That’s great.”
“It’ll do,” Geoffrey conceded. “Your hair works for me—natural?”
I nodded over the twenty or so people between us, feeling my face turn the same red as they commenced filming. “Don’t look at us,” Geoffrey said sharply. “Busy! Busy! Busy! And serious.”
“Like you’re at a very busy funeral,” Rachelle offered. A few awkward minutes passed while I stared meaningfully at the work of the guy whose desk I had taken.
“Fuck!” Our faces flew to Geoffrey as his darkened over the coffee. “This is . . . skim.”
Rachelle winced. “I’m so sorry—”
“Cut!” He summarily dropped the cup in Brooke’s trash, sending liquid sloshing onto the side of her desk. “Just fucking cut. You and you and you—Lucy!” Geoffrey pointed at me.
“This way, please,” Rachelle implored us, looking miserable.
Having no idea what was happening, we trailed Geoffrey and the cameras.
“How’s it going?” I asked her tentatively.
“I’m thriving on this,” she muttered.
“Really? He seems like kind of a . . .”
“He is. It’s my mantra. ‘I’m thriving on this.’ But I’ll be on the verge of convincing myself and then he opens his mouth.”
“Plus you have that lovely apple core there.”
“I shall sleep with it under my pillow.” She gave me a sidelong smile.
“Now stay,” Geoffrey instructed as we were rounded into the Oval’s reception area. Pick the most intimidating thing you have ever done in your life. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Now multiply that by ten.
The Deputy Chief of Staff came out of the office. She was in a twill pantsuit and sneakers, literally ready to run to the Hill at a moment’s notice. “Oh great, perfect timing,” she said to Geoffrey. “Let’s get that youth footage—show this as a vibrant, young administration and that what Partridge makes up for in seniority he lacks in having any fucking idea what’s going on.” I was starting to wonder if this was some kind of election-year tic, everyone overcaffeinatedly narrating their purpose.
She pushed the door open and the President stood from behind his carved desk. For us. For a split second, I imagined he did a little double-take at seeing me again. But I couldn’t swear to it. We shuffled in, past the eagle seal in the carpet. Holy shit. That was all I could think. Holy shit.
“Hi, guys,” he welcomed us casually, hands resting on the hips of his trousers. “Where do you want me?”
“Oh, that’s just fine, Mr. President,” Geoffrey said, unctuousness replacing his irritation. “If you could just sit there? And work, perhaps. Maybe they can huddle—or take turns passing you things. It’s just B-roll, so there’s no sound.”
“No problem.” He reseated himself and picked up his tortoise-shell frames.
“If you wouldn’t mind, sir, might I suggest no glasses?”
“Makes me look my age, huh?” Rutland smiled. “I don’t usually have a huddle of interns around my desk. What should I . . .”
Geoffrey snapped his fingers in my direction.
“Jamie,” I said in response.
“Jamie, can you hand him a folder?”
The deputy materialized a folder as the camera started recording. I crossed to the President’s desk. We made eye contact as I handed it off—his were so much greener than in the pictures. The side I’d held had a visible damp handprint.
“So, sorry.” Geoffrey shook his head. “It looks like she’s serving you—”
“A subpoena,” Rutland joked presciently. Yes, really.
“I was going to say a steak. Why doesn’t she come around the desk and you could show her something?”
“As if I care about young people understanding things?” Rutland added dryly. As directed, I stepped closer while he opened the file and leaned down to point something out on the blank paper.
“Sir, I’m sorry, sir, your, uh, hair,” Rachelle entreated. Geoffrey cut his eyes at her, but she was right to say something. It had flopped in his face like those pictures from his college days. He puffed his lower lip to blow it up. I noticed he had little freckles along his lip line that must always be airbrushed in photos. His skin was handsomely sun-lined, as though he’d spent a lot of time outdoors doing wholesome things in his almost fifty years. Like his was a life well lived.
“Perfect, let’s keep moving, shall we?” Geoffrey cooed. Rutland leaned forward and the crest of thick blond hair flopped again, revealing a few silver strands. “Sir.” Rutland puffed harder.
“Don’t you use hairspray?” I asked. The two guys from Stanford stepped back as if I’d farted out my mouth.
Rutland put down the folder and looked me square in the face. “The second you start wearing spray you have relinquished your humanity. I wear foundation for the cameras, sure. I’ve even been known to powder. But I draw the line at spray.” How could I not have smiled?
“Cut,” Geoffrey trilled.
“I think we got it,” Rachelle added.
“Have we?” Geoffrey said as if amused, but causing Rachelle to gulp as though later he’d be shouting that question with a raised wire hanger. “Thank you, sir, we appreciate your time. As my lovely assistant has so astutely noted, we’re all set.”
Rachelle backed the interns out of the room, bobbing like a pack of grateful Mitsubishi executives.
The President smiled and the door shut. And that could have been it. The story I tell my grandkids. But spilled drinks and stalled subways . . .
• • •
By the third day I had lost a disgusting amount of sleep, but I’d met Rachelle, a potential friend, and had a great anecdote to reenact as soon as I was with actual human beings and not the Orcs I shared an office with.
The fed-up mood of the nation was impossible to ignore. Partridge gave a speech, the thrust of which asked, Does Rutland hate America? “Commanding words from the Republican nominee,” Wolf Blitzer commented in the nightly recap. “Yes,” the correspondent agreed. “Whatever else comes out of this budget standoff, I think we can agree Governor Partridge seems to be experiencing real personal growth.”
I snorted my cold coffee. “Oh good,” I said, grabbing a napkin. “Silver lining found.” The Orcs looked at me strangely. “I mean, c’mon, it’d be such a shame to shut down the whole U.S. government if Partridge wasn’t going to get to grow as a person. Maybe he’ll make a vision board? Or refinish a bureau.”
“That isn’t funny,” Brooke reprimanded.
But she was contradicted by a deep guffaw from behind us and all turned to see the President holding his sides, his shirttails untucked. Everyone leapt up. “Thanks, Jamie, I needed that.” We all startled at my name. Then I remembered I’d told him over the sweaty folder. And he was a politician. “Sit, sit—it’s the middle of the night.” He waved us down, but nobody moved. There was silence where there’d been breathing. “How are you guys holding up?”
No one knew who was supposed to answer.
“Great, sir.” Todd actually swung his fist in the air, adding, “It’s a pleasure to serve.”
“Is it?” Rutland asked wryly, but his gaze returned to me.
“The pizza’s not bad,” I said with the hint of a shrug.
Rutland walked over to the pile of boxes. He pulled out a long-cold slice and, for want of a napkin, slid it onto a piece of stationery. He leaned on a desk and we watched him take a bite, his eyes closing for a moment as he chewed, his exhaustion evident. “We really appreciate you all being here. You’re making it possible for us to hold their feet to the fire.” On the screen over his head the ticker read, Rutland one-term President? “National Parks were closed today, passport applications went unprocessed, veterans went unserviced, the CDC was shut down.” His chewing slowed. “Gutting Medicaid isn’t an option—this all can’t have been for nothing.” He gestured in a way that seemed to encompass not just the shutdown, but his administration. “Well, thanks for dinner. And the hard work. I’m heading to the residence,” he said as if someone might ask us for the President’s whereabouts. He walked to the doorway, eighty or so sets of eyes on his back. “Gonna try to grab an hour of sleep. I suggest you all do the same.” He stopped and turned, his gaze locked on me for a second.
I knew I should say “Sir” and nod, but I just smiled. Like I was at a party we might leave together.
I dropped back in my chair and plunged my attention to the columns of numbers, aware of the eyes on me, the flush creeping up my neck. Flipping the folder closed, I reached for the next one, sensing the snide thought bubbles popping up around me. I heard my phone buzz in my bag, and, grateful for the activity, checked it.
“Hey James. Recently moved to NJ. Trying to resist the impulse to get big hair or start crime cartel. Hope all’s good in your world. MH.” I stared at the initials. Mike Harnet. On a normal day—not that I knew a normal day, having been cannon-shot from college into the White House, but I believe on a normal day—I would have contemplated what this meant and how to respond for minimally an eternity. If he had texted me even a month earlier, I might have finally broken down and told Lena about him so she could analyze his every possible meaning. But the text had arrived at that moment when, for the first time in a long time, a new Look had fritzed my brain.
Mike Harnet is someone you think you know a lot about. I know a lot about him now, too. But then I just thought of Mike as someone I was long out of touch with, and, with everything else going on, I did what had heretofore seemed impossible: I forgot about it.
• • •
By the fourth day of the furlough it seemed like every hair in the city had been trimmed, every dog groomed, every hedge manicured—people here, across the country, and in unstable economies around the world were ready for this to be over. Germany said something that roughly translated to “Get your shit together.” Standard and Poor’s threatened to downgrade U.S. credit, and by nightfall, Rutland’s approval rating had plummeted.
Meanwhile, on what felt at the time to be the cringingly trivial front, I had run out of clean clothes. So I borrowed a blouse from Gail’s closet and threw on my uncomfortable-but-clean H&M hook-up bra that I had optimistically brought to D.C. because, well, I didn’t picture Todd and his ilk being the norm here.
Todd, whose face was permanently pink from rubbing it to stay awake. As my mascara (mandatory for redheads) prohibited me from doing the same, I instead pushed my index fingers into my temples and blinked up at the fluorescents until a white buzz brought me back. I’d stopped trying to make Margaret love me. I was just trying to survive without making the type of clerical error that would cause a butterfly effect to unknown people in unknown parts of the world years from now.
Rutland, reelection and legacy slipping away, had taken to lapping our bullpen in jeans and a faded polo, eyes on his loafers, motioning us down each time he passed, but we popped up anyway, like we were doing the wave. Brooke permanently hovered over her chair. She probably played a sport.
Sometimes Rutland would walk and talk with his Chief of Staff, Amar Singh, tossing a softball between them. It was something to see Rutland up close, presidential uniform abandoned, a ketchup spot on his shirt from lunch, hair unruly, and caring so deeply about incomprehensible numbers that to him were a line of too-real people that stretched from the Pacific to the edge of his desk. And it occurred to me that, on one level, he was exactly who you’d want doing this job, while on the other, he was so not cut out for it. My grandmother would have said, “He’d give away his last potato,” and not as a compliment. It was actually her gravest insult, thrown my way most memorably in fifth grade when I let the neighbors think I broke their garden gnome so Erica wouldn’t get grounded right before the Spring Dance.
As they walked, they agonizingly agreed on the points of capitulation they would reapproach the Majority Leader with in the morning, each one a social-service bloodletting. My stomach burning, I stole another of Todd’s TUMS.
Sometime close to midnight Margaret dropped a fresh stack on my stacks, this one bound in a distinctive red rubber band. “Jamie, run this to the Chief of Staff’s office. We needed these signed off on two hours ago. Don’t stop walking until you’ve put them in Singh’s hand—even if you have to push into the men’s room to do it.”
His assistant’s chair was unoccupied. Emboldened by Margaret’s instructions, I knocked and pushed Singh’s office door farther open. The dimly lit room was packed with briefing reports, stacked waist-high from the floor, and on one wall was a framed silk illustration of that blue elephant, the one with all those arms and the kind eyes. Beside it, the door leading to the series of private rooms that connected Singh’s office to the Oval was open and I thought I heard footsteps. I walked quickly through, stepping out of the light, and felt for the switch. The chandelier revealed that I was in the executive dining room. The door across the room slammed shut. Admittedly it was a childlike instinct that propelled me the length of the polished table toward the crystal knob, hand outstretched, like the famous fictional girls I grew up reading about. The ones who sought a garden, a city, a rabbit—or a man. On the long list of prohibitions I carry now, I would never open a slammed door. But then, I think it was the slammed door that drew me the hardest.
Unable to see, I heard it first. His breathing. Tight and irregular. A wheeze—like dying. “Sir?” I don’t know how I knew that the form standing in the shadow outside the sliver of light was him, and not Singh, but I did.
“Shut the door,” he spoke on the inhale.
“It’s Jamie, the intern from Scheduling, and—”
“I know.”
“Do you need me to call someone?”
“Shut the door.”
I did, stepping in, and not out as he maybe—probably—meant, confining us in the windowless black. I had no idea what room we were in. “Do you need an inhaler?” I asked. I felt the darkness move and moved toward it. “Sir?”
“No.”
I took another step. I could smell him now, the vestiges of cologne, a faint sweat. I felt a hand brush my leg and dropped the papers. I reached out and he clasped it, hard enough to hurt.
“Sir? Are you having a panic attack?” I knew what that was. “Sir?”
“Greg.”
“Greg.” The syllable. Technically a correction. But also an invitation, one he would explain months later, that allowed me to say, “Breathe. Through your nose.” I felt him buck. “I know. It feels like you’ll die. Like you won’t be able to draw enough air in, but it’ll actually force everything to calm. Trust me.” I took an exaggerated breath through my nostrils, adding my other hand to his. “Greg?” I heard him try, his fingers crushing mine. “That’s good,” I whispered. “That’s good. You’re doing good.” His grip relaxed, his breathing slowed.
It took me a few moments of us standing like that—in the perfect darkness—to realize he was crying.
“It’s okay,” I said, like I would to a little boy, though I didn’t really know that it was. Or probably knew that we weren’t anywhere in the vicinity. “It’s okay.”
His hand pulled slowly into himself, not letting mine go. I took a step, permitting my body to make contact with his.
Then, sensing a second tacit invitation, I allowed my head to tip, coming to rest against his chest, the worn cotton of his shirt damp from his perspiration. We stood like that, breathing in tandem, the world outside on pause. His other arm wrapped around me. I knew his face was tilting down and I let mine tilt up. When his lips contacted mine they were wet and salty.
I was so outside myself. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could catch up enough to actually be there in his kiss, but I also knew once he stopped that this moment—this astonishing moment—would become a strange shard in my past.
“Fruity.” He pulled away to murmur his first word in the after of whatever this was.
“TUMS.”
“The Binaca of Washington.”
“My grandfather used Binaca,” I said, immediately cringing.
We heard the phone ring on the other side of the wall. “Shit.” He abruptly stepped back, leaving me off-balance, a chair-rail molding hitting my hip. “I have to . . .”
“Of course.”
He opened the other door, and I could see a slice of the eagle’s wing in the Oval Office carpet. We squinted. “You can . . .” He indicated the door I had come in.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He nodded, and then it was dark once more.
I didn’t linger. I returned straight to his private dining room, glancing briefly in a sterling candelabra to smooth my hair before shutting the light off. Then, instead of barreling back into Singh’s office, I took the door that opened onto the public hallway that ran parallel to the private rooms I’d just invaded.
Brooke was approaching, her arms piled with briefs.
We both froze. Her expression was inscrutable.
Stalled subways, spilled drinks, a few extra seconds fixing my hair—what would it have taken?
The papers. “Shit,” I said out loud.
Suddenly I heard footsteps pounding behind us in the hallway. Rutland overtook us, striding a few feet on to Singh’s returned assistant, tossing the binder with the red rubber band inside—“Have him sign off on these and get ’em to Margaret ASAP.” He pivoted and walked right past as if I were invisible.
I watched Brooke look from his departing back to me, the way something in a terrarium snaps down its furry meal, as she processed that the President was finishing the errand I’d been tasked.
I found control of my feet and walked back to the pen.
That night none of us went home.
I kept my face away from Brooke’s, glued to numbers I couldn’t make sense of, names that blurred, my mind stuck as I found myself gripping my own hand under the desk to understand the pressure of his fingers. Trying to pinpoint where his terror had led him to kiss me like I was a sip of water in sun-blasted sand. I felt the nuclear sensation of, if only for a few heartbeats, being the answer for the man to whom the world looked for answers. As I sat there, the very high of his need was key-cutting into my brain.
Just past dawn I was taking another swig of tepid coffee as someone called at the TV, “Turn that up!” It would be the clip eventually viewed over seventy million times on YouTube, but that was the first time anyone saw it: the Majority Leader giving that impromptu interview to a fan with a cell phone. Unlike Rutland, he looked like he’d just strolled off the fairway. “It doesn’t surprise me that he’s made us wait a week,” he blustered, even though he was the one refusing to come to the table, buoyed by the rising tide of popular sentiment. “And he should be forced to wait another week,” he said in a hairpin turn of logic toward the truth of his own inaction. “It would serve him right. He’s inconsiderate. He once forced me to leave Air Force One by the back door. We never got a thank-you note for that copy of Moby-Dick we gave his son, and he has never invited me to Camp David. He’s just rude.”
We all know what happened next. Public opinion whiplashed so fast even Fox couldn’t spin it. And to this day you can’t Google him without getting a picture of his head on a baby’s body.
I snuck out so I could be at Ann Taylor when they opened. I charged one perfectly cut suit and a blouse with darts. I vowed to get a really great haircut and new makeup. Because I was following the evaporating trail of a cigarette down the street that I wanted to inhale again.
I walked back through security, thinking I looked like a high-powered attorney, my old suit and Gail’s blouse balled in my bag.
“There she is,” Brooke said flatly.
“Here I am,” I replied brightly. “I had a job interview,” I added to explain my makeover.
“So you didn’t hear?” she asked as I realized she was clearing the administrative drifts on her desk into a box.
“Hear what?”
“All right then,” Margaret said, making her way through the room, collecting the all-access passes from the interns. “Back to the basement.”
I looked up at CNN’s confirming ticker—and just like that, it was over.