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"The choreography blows my mind," Ogle said.

"I love her," Tricia Gordon said. "And she lights well."

"She's telling the truth," Schram said. "Whatever she's saying, I
believe her."

"The drama of this thing is unreal," Myron Morris said. "One
woman standing alone, all these trailer-park Nazis shrinking away like rats."

Cut back to Earl Strong, now looking straight down at her so
that his face was completely obscured by a sinister shadow.

Myron Morris suddenly went nuts! He fell out of his chair,
dropping to his knees below the television set, and clasped his hands
together as if in prayer.

"Zoom in! Zoom in! Zoom in and his career is over!" he
screamed.

The camera began to zoom. Earl Strong's face grew to fill the screen, grew into a devastating extreme closeup.

"Yes! Yes! Yesss!" Morris was screaming. "Slit the bastard's
throat!"

Once the backlighting had been removed by zooming in tight,
the camera's electronics were able to pick up every nuance of Earl
Strong's face in clinical detail. A storm front of perspiration had
burst through the powder and pancake on his forehead; individual drops of it began to run down. One of them made a beeline for the
corner of his eye and that eye began to blink spastically. Earl
Strong's mouth was half open and his tongue had come forward,
sticking half out of his mouth as he tried to think of what to do
next. A huge Caucasian blur burst up through the bottom of the
frame: his hand, brushing the sweat away from his stricken eyeball,
stopping on the way down to shove one thumb into a nostril and pick out something that had been troubling him there.

Morris suddenly jumped to his feet and thrust an accusing finger directly into Earl Strong's face on the screen. "Yes! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead! You are dead and buried, you inbred
booger picking little shit! We gotta find the cameraman who did that and give him a medal."

"And a decent job," Ogle said.

Back to the black woman, still standing there. Her face was alert,
her jaw set, her eyes burning, but she remained solid and still, a
perfect subject for the camera. The camera zoomed in a little closer
but still found no imperfections. There were a few wrinkles around
the eyes. It just made her look even wiser than she already did, standing next to Earl Strong.

"Ronald Reagan eat your fucking heart out," Shane Schram
said.

"There's something about her face, too," Ogle said.

"She's been through some heavy shit, you can tell. An American
Piet
á
," Tricia Gordon said.

"Let's go down there and represent her," Shane Schram said.

"What's she running for?" Morris said.

"Nothing. She's a bag lady," Ogle said.

A look of ecstatic fulfillment came over Morris's face.

"No!" he said.

"Yes," Ogle said.

"It can't be. It's too perfect," Morris said. "It is just too fucking
ideal."

"She's a bag lady, and according to our polls, she knocked
twenty-five points off of Earl Strong's standings today."

Morris threw up his hands. "I quit," he said. "There's no need
for me. Real life is too good."

"We have to run her for something," Tricia Gordon said, staring fixedly at the TV screen.

"Excuse me," Aaron said, "but aren't you all forgetting
something?"

"What's that?" Ogle said. They were all staring at him, suddenly
quiet.

"We haven't heard a word the woman's said," Aaron said. "I
mean, she could be a raving lunatic."

They all burst into dismissive scoffing noises. "Screw that,"
Shane Schram said. "Look at her face. She's solid."

"Fuck that shit," Morris said. "That's what writers are for."

21

Mary Catherine was expecting a car, not a limousine,
so
she
didn't know that the shiny black behemoth was hers until the driver
got out, walked around, and opened the door for her. By that time,
the sight of the limousine was already drawing a crowd; not many
of these showed up in this particular neighborhood of Chicago.

Her lunch date had told her that he would send a car around to
pick her up at the hospital. Instead, he had dispatched a limousine.
Which didn't make a lot of difference to Mary Catherine. Both of
them were just vehicles to her, just ways of getting around town.
She had been around enough not to be bowled over by the gesture.
It was just another exercise in being William Cozzano's daughter and trying to keep things in perspective.

The limousine had a TV and a little bar inside of it. The driver
offered to give her a hand mixing a drink. She laughed and shook her head no. She was going to have to come back from this lunch
and keep working.

She knew that there was a certain kind of person - a certain kind of
man,
to be specific - for whom the back of this limousine was
like a natural habitat, who felt as comfortable sitting on those
leather seats and drinking Chivas in the middle of the day as Mary
Catherine felt behind the wheel of her beat-up old car. During the
time that Dad had been Governor, she had run into a lot of those
people, gotten to know their peculiar rhythms and their particular
view of life. They had always seemed completely alien to her, like cosmonauts or Eskimos.

Then Dad had proclaimed her the quarterback. As if her regular
job wasn't enough responsibility. Now, she had to dash out of the
neurology war, filled with gunshot-paralyzed drug dealers and
demented AIDS patients, and dash down the stairs and jump into
the back of a limousine where the decisions were all different: what
kind of drink to mix, what channel to view on the TV.

She had club soda and watched CNN, which was what the TV
set was already showing when she climbed in. The timing was
fortuitous: it was high noon, the beginning of a fresh news
broadcast. The Illinois primary was tomorrow. The elections were still very much up in the air, not much else was happening in the
world, and so the campaign was being covered pretty heavily.

The out-of-power party had their front-runner (Norman
Fowler, Jr.), their runner-up (Nimrod T. ["Tip"] McLane), and
their plucky underdog (the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel).
And just to make things interesting, they also had a popular
favourite: Governor William A. Cozzano, who wasn't even
running. But wildcat Cozzano petition drives were popping up all
over the place and so the media had to treat him as a serious
candidate.

All three of the legitimate candidates got roughly the same sort
of coverage: shots of the great man flying or driving into a
prefabricated campaign event, a rally at a high school or whatever.
They shook hands, they smiled, and they all did something just a little bit wacky, hoping that it would gain them just a little more
recognition among TV viewers.

Mary Catherine was tired and stressed and she quickly zoned out,
found herself watching all of this stuff without really processing it.
She had slumped way down in the soft leather seat of the limo,
displaying posture that would have driven her late mother to
hysterics, and was gazing through heavy lids at the colorful images
on the screen, letting them pass directly into her brain without
hindrance. Which was exactly the way you were supposed to watch TV.

As if on cue, there was her father.

CNN was showing her a wall of glass windows. The camera was
aimed upward at the outside of a building. Ceiling light could be
seen in a few rooms, and many of the windows were festooned
with mylar balloons, flowers, and children's artwork. Mary
Catherine saw an IV bottle hanging from a rack and realized that
she was looking at a hospital. The camera zoomed in on a particular
window with lots of expensive flower arrangements. A man in a wheelchair was dimly visible peeking out between the bouquets.

Then it all snapped into place. This was Burke Hospital in
Champaign, and they were zooming in on her father's private room. The TV crew must have gone to the roof of the parking
ramp directly across the street, five stories high, and aimed the
camera up and across to his window.

Dad was nothing more than a silhouette. The windows were all
metallic and reflective; you could only see into them when it was
dark outside. But sometimes when the sky was profoundly overcast
in the middle of the day, it was possible to look in those windows
and see dim shapes underneath the silvery reflections. And that was
what some enterprising cameraman had captured on videotape: Dad, sitting in a wheelchair, looking out his window.

The image was gray and indistinct and so you couldn't tell that
Dad was, in fact, strapped into the wheelchair to keep him from
slumping over. He had been turned squarely toward the window
and so you couldn't see the support that rose up behind his head to
keep it from flopping around. He was lit from behind so you
couldn't see the drool coming out of his mouth and the moronic
expression on his paralyzed face.

A couple of standing silhouettes were visible behind him: a nurse
and a slender young man. James. James pushed the wheelchair
closer to the window so that Dad could see out. Then he left Dad
alone there and disappeared from the frame. The camera panned
180 degrees.

The parking ramp covered about half a square block. Parking
was not hard to find in the area, so few cars ever made it all the way
up to the rooftop level. Right now, half a dozen vehicles were scattered around. Most of the remainder of the roof was covered with people.
Hundreds of them. They were carrying signs and banners. They
were all looking straight up in the air. Straight up toward Dad. And
now that he had appeared in the window, they were all rising to
their feet, reaching into the air, shoving their signs and banners up
into space as if Dad could reach down and pluck them out of their
hands. But it was a strangely silent demonstration.

Of course it was - they were in front of a hospital. They had to be quiet.

The camera zoomed in on a long, crudely fashioned banner, like
the ones that fans hold up at football games: WE LOVE YOU
WILLY! Others could be seen in the background: FIRST AND
TEN FOR Cozzano! GET WELL SOON - THEN GET
ELECTED!

There were a couple of shots of other hospital patients, in their
flannel jammies and their walkers, looking out windows and pointing. Then back to the shot of Dad's silhouette, just visible
from the chest up, in front of his window.

He waved out the window.

Which wasn't possible. Most of his body was paralyzed after the
second stroke. But he was doing it. He was waving vigorously to
the crowd.

Something looked funny: his hand and arm weren't big enough.

It was James. He must be down on his knees next to Dad,
concealed behind the windowsill, holding up his hand and waving for him.

Cut back to the crowd, waving their banners hysterically, going
nuts.

Cut back to the window. James was till waving, pretending to be Dad. Then his hand stopped waving and became a fist. Two fingers
extended from the fist in a V sign.

Mary Catherine shot upright and spilled her club soda on the limousine's wool carpet. "You bastard," she said.

Back to the crowd. Finally they lost it, forgot they were in front
of a hospital, started screaming and cheering. Hospital security cops
jumped forward, waving their arms, telling them to keep it down.
And then they cut back to network headquarters, where all of this
was being watched by their afternoon anchorman. Pete Ledger.
Former pro football player, turned sportscaster, turned newscaster.

A well-respected, middle-aged black guy with a sharp, fast tongue
who'd probably end up having his own talk show one of these days.

His eyes were red. He reached up with one hand just for an instant and wiped his runny nose with the back of one finger,
sniffled audibly, took a big deep breath, forced himself to smile into
the camera, and announced, in a cracking voice, that they were
going to break for a commercial.