Only All the Dead

She wakes with only one thought: bathroom, mouthwash. Before her woman knocks. Oh God, God, tens, hundreds of thousands dead. She rises. The laptop begins telling her day. But the nightmare extrudes. Ezekiel’s wheels, the prophet’s four-bodied creatures, the valley of white bones, their reanimation. Slain are the flesh; breathe upon the slain; cause you to come up from your graves. But those numberless bodies hacked, shot, gassed. Those bodies lay inert across northern Africa. Bulldozers their fate, not the breath of God. Fierce machines, not sinews, would jerk them from their blood-bleached canyons. She feels her irises shake. The other signs could be quelled, masked. But she knew her irises sometimes jittered. Yesterday, before the news came, her chief possibly had noticed. Did he know? Would he confront her if he did? The dead in their valleys know what she hides. Enough. She coughs and stumbles her way to the bathroom, slams the door shut with her back, breaths hard, slumps back, hears, too soon, the punctual knock. All right. Just finishing up here. Out in a moment. She starts on her gums with her electric toothbrush. Cold water shoots between her teeth, stabs below the gum line, searching, whining. She gasps, almost stops, but forces the probing to continue, harder. Finally, it pierces the flesh, the spit flowers red. She bites down, pain flowing with water into the sink. She lifts the lid from the toilet tank, balances the weight, sets it gently on the padded seat. She stops the scouring in her mouth, the bright red fading to clear. The vodka pint comes dripping from the bottom. She unscrews the top. She had searched many stores to find the long eye-dropper made of glass. She watches it fill with vodka. She braces herself against the counter, then squeezes the bulb as hard as she can. Like the angels covered with eyes, caught in wheels within wheels, frozen in Ezekiel’s sixth vision, the mirror flashes white light points. She swallows blood, water, vodka, a cry. Her order could not have been wrong. Everything would have happened as it did if she had decided something different. Wasn’t that true? The flashing begins to ebb, the room to right itself. Another knock, this time on the bathroom door. Almost done. Pick out my clothes for the first part of the morning, please. She shoots one more dropper of vodka down her throat, nearly gagging. Another minute and her face, makeup applied, stares back at her. Certainty fixes itself in her eyes. No, she had been prudent. The living and the dead might rise against her, but nothing she swallowed had made her assess the options wrongly. Back in the bedroom, she speaks clearly, directs her woman precisely, plays the recording from the start. Dressed, hair done, briefcase loaded, she asks for a moment alone. The woman leaves, she crosses the room to the prie-dieu, given to the house by a Greek Metropolitan, nearly falls on it. Crossing herself beneath the crucifix on the wall, she ponders how Ezekiel’s vision of the dead returning to their bodies had crept into the creed she recites every day. The most bizarre image in a book more metaphorical than the Apocalypse of John. Who could take it as anything but a figure? She resists the desire to drop her head onto her hands, pulls back her mouth to block a sob. A man’s voice reaches her through the door. Madame President, absolutely not one more second. She stands.