1

I think our senator is in a state of shock,” Nell had said, and Patrick Dunn had trouble imagining that: Charlie Martin shocked by love; shocked by anything.

Once, early in the 1980s, Dunn had traveled to Washington with thencongressman Martin. Their plane hit an air pocket—or, perhaps, something more drastic—and plummeted about ten thousand feet in a matter of seconds, the oxygen masks popping down, screams and groans and panicked glances from the passengers. It was as if the sky had simply vanished beneath them. The middle-aged man sitting across the aisle, a study in hawklike executive composure till then, lunged over and latched on to the congressman’s arm. At which point, Charlie turned to Patrick Dunn—slowly, it seemed; in slow motion—and smiled slightly, his eyes dead calm.

Then, an upward whoosh—like a balsa wood glider caught by a breeze, only more extreme than that: you could feel the metal straining, creaking against the mortal pressure of gravity, a colossal exertion—until finally, blissfully, the plane was righted, and stable once more. The pilot apologized, said something about “a little” turbulence. The stewardesses replaced the oxygen masks. The passengers relocated their stomachs, laughing and chattering—a community, suddenly; the executive retrieved his vagrant hand, apologized and, shedding his attaché case, chatted about other near-misses and weird aeronautic occurrences; he’d been an air traffic controller at Tan Son Nhut during the war. In the end, everyone applauded as the pilot executed an utterly miraculous and perfectly routine three-point landing and then they tripped, light-footed and grateful, into the terminal.

From time to time, Pat or Charlie would laugh and reminisce about the close call. People still came up to Charlie and said, “Hey, Senator, I was on that plane with you, the one that almost crashed.” But Pat never asked about the most memorable part of it—that smile. He assumed it was a warrior reflex; Charlie had been trained for such moments, trained not just to be calm but to welcome the challenge of adversity. Pat thought his protégé’s nonchalance was reassuring, but also slightly terrifying: the absence of fear wasn’t a terrific quality in a politician. The most successful practitioners, if not always the best, were born cautious. On the other hand, here was a guy who would never lose his head, who might have the courage to do something memorable with his career.

And then Charlie seemed to lose his head. And not just over Nell. The decision to run for president had been precipitous, and the failure of that campaign had initiated a very un-Martin-like period of uncertainty. Over time, Pat came to realize that Charlie’s bout of severe turbulence was a far more purposeful phenomenon than standard postdefeat discombobulation. It was a measured reaction to a political environment that was being pulled in opposite directions, becoming more noxious and also more sterile as the century staggered home. Charlie was conducting an experiment in reckless calm: he wanted to see if public life could be made habitable.

*    *    *

As late as two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, the Martin presidential campaign had almost seemed hot. The Boston Globe said he was gaining momentum. The polls had him sneaking into double digits. There was a motorcade, including a bus full of reporters, some of whom were beginning to question the standard party pooh-bah wisdom about the senator’s campaign: that Charlie was running for president an election cycle too soon.

But Governor Jack Stanton had snuffed the Martin moment and he’d done it in the most maddening fashion possible—unintentionally: the press evaporated when the tabloid stories hit. The Stanton scandals overwhelmed everything. The week before the primary, Pat Dunn and Charlie’s press secretary, Jim Drake, and the rest of the inner circle scuffled to come up with a creative way for their candidate to avoid the cruelest of political fates—irrelevance. They had to get him back in the news. The only way to do it, of course, was to trash Stanton. But Charlie wasn’t buying. Stanton had been arrested protesting the war twenty-five years earlier. He’d had an affair with his wife’s hairdresser. These were not, to Charlie’s mind, mortal sins. “Am I supposed to pretend I’m shocked?” he asked. “Are you shocked, Dunnsie?”

Finally, after much prodding, the senator agreed to raise the “character” question in the final New Hampshire debate. He wasn’t very good at it. “You’ve got to wonder, after all this,” he’d said, halfheartedly, “if Jack Stanton is, um, damaged goods.” He immediately felt foolish, smarmy; a cad—the sort of politician he sneered at when he saw them on television, the sort who rehearsed and market-tested and polled a phrase like “damaged goods” before he went public with it. Someone like Jack Stanton. “Don’t you ever, ever,” he said to Patsy afterward, quietly, “ask me to do something like that again.”

He would go down proud. He would disappear in a drizzle of press releases about defense spending and farm subsidies. “You know, Dunnsie,” he said on the road to Manchester near the end of the campaign, “the truth is”—he laughed, overcome by toxic giddiness—“the truth is, the guy who really got screwed by the Happy Hairdresser—was me.”

And then, when New Hampshire was over, Charlie didn’t know what to do next. He lacked the proper vocabulary for losing. In Vietnam, battles were rarely won or lost: you were ambushed, you called in air strikes, the enemy disappeared. But air strikes were not an option after New Hampshire. He didn’t have the money or the desire to pummel his opponents. He stood at arm’s length from the defeat, whimsically disoriented—still that calm smile, after the plane scare—unable to clear the battlefield.

At first, he tried to organize—to lead—his way past the humiliation (that was what he’d done in Vietnam, too). But there wasn’t much to organize: no resupply, no fresh troops; most of his volunteers—the press had said they were the best-looking college students assembled by any candidate—went home after New Hampshire. Ten days passed. He lost more primaries. He did so with charm and grace; he refused to mope. Not even his closest friends could penetrate his reinforced bunker of good cheer.

And then, on the Monday before the Colorado, Maryland and Georgia elections, Pat Dunn advised him—by phone, and for the third time—to throw in the towel. “Before you say no,” Patsy said, “you want to know the damages?”

“Okay . . . no.” Then, initiating diversionary action—because he really didn’t want to hear the unbelievably depressing number that Pat was about to unload on him—Charlie said, “Look, Dunnsie, I know I’ve been wearing this one out, but if I can get Stanton one-on-one somewhere, I’ll nail him—I’m sure of it.”

“Charlie.” Patrick Dunn knew two things: Charlie was right, and Charlie was wrong. They might well beat Stanton one-on-one, if they ever got the chance. But the campaign was too broke and battered to ever get the chance. Charlie’s complaint was a cliché: the death rattle of the mortally wounded candidate. Pat guessed Charlie knew that, too.

“Hey, I’ve finished ahead of each of these guys somewhere,”Charlie said now, with a laugh, trying to charm him. “If I can beat them all in the same place at the same time, I’m back in it.”

“Name that state.” Dunn sighed into his telephone, a message sigh.

“The one I’m driving through right now—Colorado.”

Indeed, at that very moment Senator Martin was entering Colorado Springs in not exactly triumphant fashion, in a sky-blue Dodge Aries—the sort of car that county governments purchase for use by building inspectors and tax assessors. He was being chauffeured by a chunky blond college student named Martha Something-or-other, who had been thoughtfully provided by the local Democratic party organization and who represented the sum total of Charlie’s campaign entourage as they chugged into a Colorado Springs dulled by massive but unthreatening prairie-putty clouds.

The traveling staff had been laid off after South Dakota. The last to go was Jim Drake, the press secretary, hired away by the House majority leader, William Larkin. Drake announced his departure as he and Charlie were landing in extremely modest commercial fashion—a United commuter flight, the money for chartered planes long gone—at Stapleton Airport in Denver four days earlier. “C’mon, Ducky,” Charlie said, “you’re backsliding. No one goes from the Senate to the House.”

“Larkin’s leadership,” Drake replied as the small plane landed and began to taxi toward the terminal. “And he’s got this weird reputation: he’ll actually talk things over with staff before he opens his mouth.”

“Will he let you have a ponytail?”

“I’m cutting it off,” he said. “Look, Senator. There comes a time . . .” He shook his head, unbuckled his seat belt. “I’ll give you two weeks’ notice, if you want, but the campaign doesn’t have the money to pay me—and I’d like to take a few days off before starting the rest of my life, and anyway, there’s a Continental to Dulles in forty-five minutes.”

“Aw, c’mon, Ducky—”

“Larkin probably won’t be calling me ‘Ducky,’ either,” he said. “I’m really going to miss that.”

Drake had carefully avoided looking his boss in the eye throughout the conversation, but he knew the deal wouldn’t be closed—the senator wouldn’t believe him—until he cleared that hurdle. “I’m going to miss you, Senator,” he said, as evenly as he could, turning to Martin. “You can call on me anytime, but—”

“But you think I’m history,” Charlie said, probing.

“Shit,” Drake said. “I don’t know what you are—except a . . .”

“. . . A?” the senator said, playfully. “. . . Eh?”

“A really great boss. Would you please stop making this hard on me?”

And now Charlie was drifting through the usual triple-canopy tangle of golden arches, flying tires, Chevrons, color tiles and carpet stores: the Great American Anywhere. Colorado wasn’t a different state. It was the same old state. It had the same old Americans—the people who were his people back home, but strangers here. They didn’t know diddly about him, and weren’t motivated to learn. He would lunch with the Lions in Colorado Springs. If he was lucky, there might be a reporter from the local paper—maybe a camera crew from the local TV.

“Charlie?” Pat Dunn knew his candidate had drifted.

“Yeah?” the senator replied. “Guess I just got caught up in all the excitement I’m generating out here in Colorado.”

Dunn snorted. “You seen the polling? You owe points. How are the crowds?”

“Encouraging,” he said, using an official voice.

Pat laughed. This was progress; the senator was acknowledging the futility, maneuvering himself toward splashdown. “Look, kid, here’s what we’ve done. We shut down the Washington and Des Pointe campaign offices. Donna’s quietly doing what needs to be done—scheduling and so forth—out of your Senate office. Won’t be much. Oskar’s prepared to run a similar skeleton operation for you in Florida, if you make it past tomorrow, which, I might add, every last one of your friends—the people who know and love you best in the world—hope you won’t.”

“Where did you get the polling from?” Charlie asked. Dunn realized he’d been foolish to bring it up. “We’re not paying for it anymore, are we?”

“Rathburn got it from Mike Coleman. You know where Mike gets it.”

“Yeah, they’re all lining up with Stanton now, aren’t they?” Charlie said, wistfully. “All my pals, except Linc—and he’d go, too, if they asked. Well, maybe not. . . . How come Linc didn’t call me himself? He never hesitates to reach out and touch someone when the news is grim.”

“He said you would probably be in your bullshit, macho, snake-eating mode,” Pat said. “He said he didn’t have the stomach to watch you mangle yourself again. . . . He said you could call him if you were ready to think about getting sane.”

“ ‘Mangle’ myself? He said that?” Charlie glanced over at Martha, who was pretending not to be listening, but she shot a quick look at his hand—which had most of a thumb and a delicate, perfectly formed index finger, but not much else: shiny smooth roseate scar tissue stretched tight over uneven stumps of knuckles.

“Yeah, he did,” Pat said. This was, he realized, the first time in twenty years of friendship that Charlie’s injury had ever come up—directly—in conversation. The senator never talked about it. That Linc would even mention it was drastic, that Dunn would repeat what Linc had said was truly unprecedented—a form of shock therapy Pat immediately regretted. “I liked the ‘snake-eating’ part,” he said, trying to move to safer turf. “We had snails in my war, not snakes. The only snake we had was Hitler.”

“It’s gruntspeak for special forces,” Charlie explained. “Linc thinks it makes him authentic.”

“Charlie,” Pat tried, “one thing you Vietnam guys should’ve learned over there is when to bail.”

“I’m bailing from this phone call right now, partner,” the senator said. “Roger and out. . . . No, Patsy, wait a minute.”

Martha had pulled into a Ramada: dull redbrick, white plantation house columns—a ridiculous riff on Tara, a strange and ancient marketing conceit. More of the Great American Anywhere. The prospect of another sad motel room drenched in sticky-sweet disinfectant had, he realized, produced an insight of stunning clarity: it was over. His race was run. And thank God: Having it over would be good. There were things to do.

“Charlie?” Dunn had sensed the change in tone.

“Dunnsie, even if I won tomorrow—”

“Yes?”

“I’m—” The senator looked over at his driver. He didn’t want to announce the end of his presidential campaign in front of a stranger. “Pat, let me call you back in a few minutes.”

His mind was suddenly filled with tasks: he would have to get the Senate Caucus Room for an official resignation fandango on Wednesday morning. He would call Don O’Brien, the majority leader, and let him know the party was over. He’d catch up on his committee stuff—maybe he’d go straight off to Russia, check out the missile reduction program that he’d proposed and then dragged through a recalcitrant Congress (a historic diplomatic triumph that apparently meant nothing, not a thing, to residents of the Great American Anywhere). He needed to get inside, get to a private phone, end his campaign, start the rest of his life.

“Do we have a room here?” he asked Martha, who seemed startled by the sudden burst of energy.

“What do you mean?” She looked at him, terrified.

“Excuse me?”

She was staring at his hand. What on earth . . . ?

“Marsha,” Charlie said, “you didn’t actually think I was asking if you wanted to do anything—”

“Martha!” she said, embarrassed—or angry, or something. He remained clueless, slightly irritated, not quite there (indeed, still mostly preoccupied by the exhilaration of his decision). He wondered: was this misunderstanding, or whatever it was, somehow his fault? Had he been flirty? In all the flesh-pressing and simulated hail-fellow horse flop of the campaign, he’d begun to worry that he was losing track of the basic grammar of human interaction. He’d been performing so relentlessly for so many months, he couldn’t always remember what his face was doing.

And now her eyes were filling with tears. He figured he should try to comfort her, get her to calm down, stop this nonsense.

He made a mistake then, reaching over with his good right arm—he didn’t want to frighten her with his left hand—to touch her shoulder. But she was turning toward him, and his hand brushed her breast—he pulled it back lightning fast, but not nearly fast enough. “Get your hands off me!” she screamed, and he reflexively leaped from the car, and she, remarkably, drove off with his cell phone and luggage and the assorted detritus of what official Washington had once thought was a “promising” campaign for the presidency of the United States.

Standing in front of the Ramada several hours later, having almost allowed himself to be “encouraged” by the smatterings of appreciation that his standard stump speech had elicited from the Lions, having shaken—but not stirred—every available hand, Charlie Martin found himself dragooned into a moment with the inevitable Flip Hunstiger of KGAA, or some such station, and his hulking hippie cameraman, Lars, and thinking—thinking hard—about how he was going to get himself to Denver without a driver, while Flip tried to position him for the shot: “Okay, Senator, now, d’ya mind standing over by the Ramada sign welcoming you . . . ?”

“Now, there’s a brilliant idea,” Lars scoffed. He had long, greasy blondish hair and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and one of those khaki, multipocketed combat photographer’s vests.

A completely ridiculous situation, Charlie thought. He had made all the necessary phone calls and arrangements ending this phase of his life—except for the most immediate arrangement. He had called Dunnsie and told him about his decision to quit. He’d also told him about the Martha incident. In retrospect, Pat would kick himself for not focusing more on the latter—but he couldn’t imagine Charlie ever finding himself in a seriously awkward situation with a woman. Far more important, he was thrilled that his candidate had finally agreed to stop the bleeding.

“Dunnsie,” Charlie said, laughing. “It’s a lovely irony: My campaign is over, but I don’t know how to get out of town.”

“You’ll announce it when?”

“Wednesday, Senate Caucus Room.”

“Okay, we’ll want to start planning the press part, especially with Drake gone,” Dunn said. “Hamblin’s gonna want an exclusive.”

Bob Hamblin of the Register-World had been the world’s greatest Charlie Martin expert for the past few months—an occasional guest on Mac-Neil/Lehrer and Nightline—and he’d be bitter now, forced to fade into sullen localness. There were so many details to work out. Pat assumed Charlie would arrange the Colorado Springs exit strategy with Donna Mendoza, his Washington chief of staff. And Charlie did call Donna, telling her he was getting out of the race, setting up the arrangements for a farewell press conference. He called Don O’Brien, the Senate majority leader—but Don wasn’t in. He called his friend and campaign finance chairman, Oskar Millar, in Florida; he tried to reach Lincoln Rathburn. . . .

But he hadn’t remembered to arrange a ride out of town. It was, Charlie realized belatedly, yet another way running for president had caused him to lose touch with reality. In a campaign, staff has responsibility for moving the candidate around. He hadn’t had to think about travel arrangements for more than six months. Once this silly local TV interview was over—his last as a presidential candidate—he’d find a phone, call Washington, have them advance him a rent-a-car or something. Actually, he was exhilarated by the novelty of a drive, alone, to Denver, with the radio turned as loud as he could bear it—if he could ever liberate himself from Hunstiger and the Fellini of the Foothills, who was now down on his knees, practicing his shot, shooting from below.

“Hey, guys?” Charlie asked, allowing a slight edge into his voice. “You think we could do this?”

“Okay, okay . . . Senator, you ready?” Flip asked.

At which point, a sky-blue Dodge Aries pulled up—and for just the slightest hint of an instant, Charlie Martin was hopeful: Martha had gotten herself together and was back, ready to take him on to Denver—except that it wasn’t Martha getting out of the car, but a tall, solidly built man, with a craggy western look including longish, neatly trimmed side-burns turning gray. He was wearing a white pharmacist’s jacket (“PharmLand” was embroidered on the pocket) and a string tie and snakeskin boots, and he was saying—almost rhythmically, as he was striding, “How dare you? Who do you think you are? What gives you the right?”

He stopped directly in front of Charlie, about six inches too close for comfort, ruining the composition of Lars’s shot, among other things. “You Washington guys think you can get away with any darn thing,” he elaborated, with a country music catch in his voice, as Lars scurried to get a better angle.

Charlie Martin softened his eyes reflexively, tried to go political, turn on the charm. “You must be Martha’s—”

“Father,” he said.

“Hey, look, I don’t know what she said, but—”

Stars. No, not stars. An illumination round; searing white phosphorus fireworks. Charlie didn’t even feel the man’s fist, except for the metal of his cheesy pharmacology school class ring, and his face didn’t hurt nearly so bad as the back of his head, which cracked against the doorstep, or the curb, or something. . . .

He tried to regroup, but lost track of time and place. He drifted back to the last time he’d been hurt badly. He had been knocked flat that time, too; but not quite flat on the ground—knocked more precariously, on a sharp incline, the side of a paddy dike. He remembered staring into the sun, squinting, sweat and mud and maybe blood in his eyes, with his feet higher than his head somehow, his head down in the squish at the base of the dike—with an enormous weight on him. The weight turned out to be Richie Radio, who had been blown back on top of him, the field radio smashing into Charlie Martin’s nose, his face; and there were other problems, too. But those had only been physical problems and Charlie hadn’t realized their severity, at least not immediately (the things that hurt most—his face, for example—had been hurt the least). No real pain at all, in fact, right then. The pain and constant, almost hilariously incandescent, discomfort came later. No, in those first moments, Charlie had studied his situation with an odd, detached curiosity: he had just experienced something amazing. He had been blown back—how far? Five, ten yards, maybe? Wow. He could barely focus on the most obvious things, like Richie Radio, who had shielded him—well, most of him, except for a few extremities, particularly his left hand—and who had caught most of the toe-popper in his groin and gut, and was now worse than dead: dead and on top of Charlie, twitching uncontrollably, as if his ganglia had short-circuited; he felt Richie fibrillating from a distance, at the edge of his awareness. Charlie didn’t know how many others had been blown up. He wanted to talk about it, though. He wanted to compare notes with the guys. He was thrilled when Spazio—Spaz, the Spaz-master—leaned in over him: the Spaz always had a lateral take on everything, always saw Vietnam as stone strange as it was. But he was looking at Charlie now, terrified. “Sir,” he said, “I found the, uh—your, uh—the finger with, uh, the wedding ring....”

“Spaz,” said Corporal Solomon Purifory, a majestic African-American farmer from the Virginia mountains. “Spaz, put a fucking lid on it.”

“Right. Sorry, sir,” he said to Charlie. And he began to cry. And Charlie loved him, and he loved Purifory, and Richie—who had been rolled off him, now—and the others. They were brothers. They were with him. There was a medic. There was morphine.

And now, through the haze, he could hear Flip Hunstiger saying in his best professional voice, “Senator, can you tell me what happened?”

“Flip, you’re interviewing me?” he said, working to sit up. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Senator, what impact will this incident have on your campaign?”