Artie sat at his desk in the inner office of the headquarters, performing a meditative task in which he retraced the moments of mundane routine before he had opened the envelope. He breathed, thought through waking to his alarm, shutting it off, rising from the bed. Marisol had stirred, murmured something to him before nestling into her pillows. He took himself through his morning jog with the new dog, trying to recall as many details as possible—where the puppy stopped to do his business, which cars had been parked on his block. He recalled the sweat, which instantly covered his skin in the early morning humidity. In the outer office his staff answered phones, typed emails, sent volunteers out on door-knocking trips. They stapled signs to wooden stakes, they piled up boxes of church fans printed with his image.
Artie continued his process of long slow exhales, recalling his shower after the run, the sounds in the house, his children talking to his wife in their chirping little voices, the steam condensing on the marble tile. He remembered the texture of the towel on his skin, the sound of the dry cleaner’s plastic as he peeled it from a fresh shirt.
He wasn’t doing this meditation to calm himself. Artie was already calm, he could control his emotions better than anybody. It was one of his talents, this unflappability. He’d developed it as a teen, cultivated it as an adult.
But the envelope had a strange property. Once he had read its contents, he noticed an odd collapsing of time. The twenty years between today and the event that had prompted him to leave New Orleans, to leave his family, to go out on his own—those decades shrank down to nothing. Artie marveled at this effect, the thoroughness of it. Here he was, not twenty minutes from the place where it had happened, and though he had operated under the belief that he was not that child anymore, that he had become someone different and better, someone powerful, he realized now this belief was an illusion.
He needed his context back: the skin of his wife’s soft cheek, which he nuzzled on his way out; the girls’ sticky hands, the weight of little Pearl hugging his leg and sitting on his foot as he poured a go-cup of coffee, chanting in that impossibly high pitch, bye daddy bye daddy bye daddy bye daddy; the color of the traffic cones he maneuvered around, they were still tearing up the avenues, there was no way to avoid the construction, it was one of his talking points, how to update the infrastructure more efficiently, with less disruption to neighborhoods; the smells of the sidewalk outside the bakery on Magazine where he picked up pastries for the staff; the weight of the pink box, heavy with filled brioches, butter already seeping through the cardboard as he carried it to his car; sunshine bouncing off the plastic beads in the trees above his parking place.
Artie noticed, with nearly perfect detachment, that as he approached the recent memory of walking in the door and handing the pink box to Kirk in exchange for the pile of mail containing the envelope, he experienced new physical sensations. Clamminess, a swimmy quality to his vision. Stay in the moment, he told himself. He closed his eyes. He stood in his headquarters, an important man, still young, bursting with energy, ready to do great things for the city he loved, holding a stack of mail addressed to him, surveying the office bustling with people who devoted their time and energy to him, who believed in him.
Artie watched Marley, his volunteer team leader, organize her people. They were delivering yard signs today, in every neighborhood from Riverbend to the Lower Ninth. His name and his face repeating in yards from the river to the lake. After today, anywhere he went in the city, he would see his own image.
The letter threatened to reveal details of the accident to the Times-Picayune, Nola.com, Twitter. He considered his options. He could ignore the letter, let whatever happened run its course. Maybe the letter writer would follow through on the threats, and maybe not. He wondered what the newspapers might do? The story would be tempting in its scandal, but there was no evidence. Reporters required facts, required proof. They might, feasibly, discard the whole thing. Artie had contacts at the paper and at Nola.com, he could possibly finesse that situation. Twitter was another matter. If the story got any traction, the media might report on it. But would it make a difference with the voters? Maybe not. He could still win. His campaign could get out ahead of it, he could break the story himself. He’d been a child, after all, he made a mistake, he let his father handle it the way he thought best.
But this would mean he’d have to tell his wife, Marisol, who knew nothing of the incident. She was a lovely, warm person, a great mother, energetic and kind. Everything in their lives together thus far had gone exactly how they planned. He had no idea how she would react to this news, to the ordeal this might become. And he’d have to tell his mother, who believed the story his father had told her twenty years ago, that Artie had taken the car and wrecked it, had been arrested, that Bert’s friends at the police had kept it off the books, that the best thing for Artie was to take him out of his social environment, get him a new start at a new school. His mother hadn’t been the same since Bert’s death. She was frail, too thin. She deserved better than this story coming out. No one would believe she hadn’t known. He couldn’t do this to her, not now.
The easiest thing was to do what the letter said. Artie didn’t like the idea of being beholden to the whims of a stranger, a criminal. But getting the money together would be simple. He could pull ten grand from his money market account, tell Marisol he was investing it. It was an investment, in a way. He could think of it as a campaign expense. He would swing by the bank before lunch.