46.

ALEK WAS OVER BY THE DEEP END. Spencer was somewhere behind him. The press was on top of them.

Literally, Anthony stood under the White House briefing room, below the place the media gathered every day to hear the press secretary and sometimes the president himself spin the day’s news.

But here, underneath the briefing room, they stood in what the chief of staff explained was actually a pool. A person stricken with polio had few other ways to exercise, so Franklin Delano Roosevelt had one built in the White House. Anthony ducked under the cables and wires and servers that now occupied the place where eighty years ago, FDR went about his . . . aquacizing, or whatever it was. Anthony thought about how the three of them were all together in a pool built by their favorite president, about whom they learned in the one class they all liked, and in which they had bonded. Which was probably the reason things had turned out the way they had, and the reason they were here now, killing time before meeting the president of the United States of America.

Anthony thought about that class back in middle school, about that teacher. If he could see them now, standing in the pool that FDR exercised in! On the VIP tour, behind the velvet ropes that blocked other visitors. Being escorted into all the hidden corners of the White House.

“Hey, look at this,” Alek said. “Here’s where it slopes up. This is pretty cool, this must be where the shallow end turns into the deep end.”

The pool was packed with servers and cables and all the technology that powered whatever was happening above, so Anthony didn’t even know he was in a pool until the chief of staff told him, and didn’t quite believe it until Alek showed him an exposed part of the wall. It was a strange sensation, like a movie set collapsing around you, so what you thought was your kitchen turned out to be an airport or a grocery store. To stand somewhere, and in an instant have your whole understanding of where you stood become different.

A slope in the floor, a pattern of tile.

On one wall people had written their names, so Anthony did too: I love you FDR—Anthony Sadler was here on 9/18/15.

They took him to the ladies’ cloakroom FDR had converted into a command center. It was like FDR didn’t just have the biggest impact on the world, he had the biggest physical impact on the White House too. The room had old documents showing Hitler’s advance in Europe, and Anthony thought of the Fürherbunker, where Hitler had killed himself, and which Anthony had seen just a few weeks ago. Huge military maps hung on the wall, marked and annotated in grease pencil, which FDR had updated by National Geographic cartographers whose work allowed him to see, in graphic form, the spread of evil in the world.

The room had a special machine to receive and send coded messages, and a direct line to Winston Churchill. Seventy-year-old technology that somehow still seemed innovative and compelling.

“Let’s see who else is around,” the chief of staff said, and led them up to Cross Hall, where Anthony found himself drawn to one presidential portrait that didn’t look like the others: JFK with arms crossed and head down, internally negotiating some Cold War crisis. Anthony imitated him and had Kelly snap a picture.

Then to a room where the secretary of state was waiting to greet them, along with some of the president’s advisors. They talked for a while, but by then Anthony wasn’t really paying attention. He was back in camera mode again, scanning his surroundings, trying to keep an itemized list in his mind so he’d be able to recall later all the things he couldn’t politely photograph.

Down a hall that was much shorter than expected, in front of a door that was much closer than expected, he saw men in black suits standing a bit stiffer than everyone else. Secret Service. Did that mean the president was right there? He was only a few yards from the president? Everything in the White House was closer than he expected.

And then it was time. A flurry of motion over by the Secret Service men, and people started moving toward them. Before he went in, his dad pulled him aside. Anthony had expected this, some wisdom imparted from the old man before the special moment. “Son,” he said, and Anthony prepared for the solemn word of advice. “One thing, before you go in there.”

“What is it?”

“No matter what you do, no matter what you talk about in there, there’s one thing you need to make sure you do.”

“Okay. What?”

“Well . . . you need to give him my business card.”

“I need to what?”

“Just give it to him. Tell him I know he’s busy, but if he ever needs anything, he can call me.”

“Dad—what? What’s the president going to need from you?”

“Or, you know, if he just has a minute to chat. Tell him to give me a call, I’m around.”

“Obama is not going to call you.”

“Just give it to him.”

Anthony tried to picture how he’d ever have a chance to hand the president a business card as if he was headed to some kind of freshman networking conference, rather than meeting the leader of the free world. But as ridiculous as it was, he knew how much it would mean to his father, a man who crossed the county just for the inauguration, who never thought he’d see a black president in his lifetime, let alone stand outside his office, so what choice did he have?

“Okay, Dad, all right. I’ll try.” He slipped the card into his pocket and walked toward the most influential office in the world.

The door opened. The president was right there. Grayer than expected, the room smaller than expected. Obama walked over to shake Anthony’s hand. The president said his name—the president knew his name. He held out a hand and guided them all into the room, then showed Spencer to the chair next to his own.

“Sorry, guys, this is the chair for if you get injured.”

“No, no,” Anthony said, “he deserves it!” Anyway, Anthony and Alek were sitting where the joint chiefs sat in all press pool photos and TV shows Anthony had seen, so he was fine just where he was. He was sitting across from the president. The other butts that’d been in those seats belonged to the people who marshaled America’s military might all over the world. Anthony didn’t mind that at all.

And then they just chatted. As if it were the most normal thing in the world to chat with the president, in the Oval Office. Anthony let Spencer take the lead, because Anthony was contending with competing impulses: listening to the president’s advice but also taking in the surroundings again. He wanted a clear mental picture of this too, everything around him, to savor later. He tried to take it all in, but to do it out of the corner of his eye so that the president wouldn’t be insulted that Anthony wasn’t really paying attention to him. Brighter than expected carpet. Reddish, almost rust-color drapes, not the dull yellow he expected from TV shows. A bust of Martin Luther King Jr. on the side table. Books about Martin Luther King Jr. on the shelf, which Anthony assumed came with the Obama presidency. The art, nostalgic paintings of barn houses—all the design decisions of the Obama presidency.

The conversation didn’t last as long as he thought it would. Or rather, it moved so quickly, it felt so familiar, that before he could fully register it they’d spent fifteen minutes together and the press was coming in, flashes firing and signaling the end of the session.

The president got up, pressing matters of global import clearly pulling him, his attention surely drifting to the dozens of foreign crises he probably had to deal with before lunch. Anthony felt the card in his pocket, saw his father’s dreams slipping away. Shit, shit, how am I gonna say this? He started to get nervous. He slipped his hand quickly in and out of his pocket, a gesture those close to the president don’t generally love to see. Cameras rose. Anthony held the card inside his palm, hoping the president might just ask him about it and open the floor, but he didn’t; instead he went and said something to Spencer, and now Anthony was stranded, a kid without a partner when the slow song comes on at a middle school dance.

I have to give it to him.

He stood awkwardly close to Obama for a moment; Obama didn’t acknowledge him. But Spencer seemed to sense what was happening; he nodded at Anthony and moved away, letting his own moment with the president end, so that Anthony could make his move. Anthony patted the president on the shoulder.

The president turned, with an incredulous look on his face that said, Did you really just tap me on the shoulder?

“Um, sorry. But my dad, er, sorry, sir, but my dad”—did the president see the business card in his Anthony’s hand?—“he actually really wanted to meet you, he was at the inauguration and everything and he wanted to meet you so he just gave me this and told me to—” but before he could finish Obama interrupted him.

“Is he here? Are you parents here? Tell them to come in!”

“Oh, yeah, okay!” Anthony slipped the card back into his pocket, and the moment changed from one of the few (but ever more frequent) in which he didn’t know precisely what to say, to the single proudest, most selfless moment of his life. A moment in which he prioritized someone else’s joy over his own composure, with the president of the United States no less, and which, in turn, became the first time he actually felt someone else’s joy as if it were his own.

Because he had one more request of the president after the families came in: to take a picture with his dad. In came Anthony’s father, a man who had watched every single episode of The West Wing at least twice, a man who never believed he’d live to see an African American president, and who’d saved up to travel across the country just for the chance to be among two million people watching him be sworn in.

Anthony asked to move away from the president, so that his father could stand closer.

Later that day, Anthony would stand in the center of the Pentagon, feeling like the only civilian for a hundred miles, and receive the Medal of Valor from the secretary of defense while Spencer received the Airman’s Medal and the Purple Heart and Alek got the Soldier’s Medal. They would be honored in front of hundreds of people, including high-ranking military officials whose chests were checkerboarded with ribbons and medals. For three young men obsessed with military history, there could be no bigger thrill. But that didn’t compare. It was here, in this instant, that he was proudest.

Anthony felt, at the moment he moved over so his dad could stand next to the president, that he had done something with his life. He had done something for someone. For one person, at least. He felt that the danger he faced, the family that had believed in him, and these two friends with whom he’d risked his life, had allowed him the happiest moment in his life.

He felt grateful, beloved, proud. He felt able. He felt, for the time being, like things were all right in the world.