The President's Angel (11 page)

And the musicians played and people milled and waiters passed more bottled cheer, which vanished down the open throats.

But Matt Adams, the President, went to his office and sat at his desk, staring out at the dark and empty lawns.

Meanwhile, the world was burning up. The predominant emotion swinging like a comet round the world was … fear.

For some people it came as fear of disease or death, but for many others it was free-floating, like fear of failure or success. There was fear of not being good enough (whatever that meant) to make it (whatever that meant), fear of being found out, or of ridicule or making a mistake, any one of which would lead to rejection, isolation, loneliness. So each fear led to another, but at the root was the fear of separateness, the terrible isolation of being alone, cast out from human company. It was a kind of fear of death. There was fear of economic insecurity, and longing for a sense of safety, as if money could fill the hollow of the heart. Some people were afraid of a punitive, jealous Deity, but few were afraid of losing, or never finding, grace, though that would constitute the ultimate belonging—oneness, Home!

Almost anything was justified because of fear, but the world was also burning up with desire; and what was curious, the most egregious behavior could be excused, forgiven, if it was caused by fear (“I was so scared!”), but hardly any act on the grounds of mere desire (“I wanted it”).

Matt wondered, was there any difference between fear and desire? How do we know when our motives are pure?

In those days terrible acts were committed, atrocities, human against human, for everyone was afraid of pain, and in anxiety created it.

It could be said that the world was burning up with fear. But hardly anyone noticed that it was also burning up with joy.

Hardly anyone ran outside in the morning to cry in wonder at the glorious red dawn; or stopped to hail the pale moon scudding through its clouds on coon-hunting night. Hardly anyone gave in to an appropriate, rapt sense of gratitude for the marvel of a cockroach in the kitchen cabinet (product of millennia of breeding true), or the snails under their little shells eating at the garden lettuce in the spring, or the black-and-brown striped woolly bears crossing the highways on a crisp fall day, while the geologic plates groaned beneath their tiny, hairy feet and the earth shifted and continents moved and ice caps melted and volcanoes tore through the crust of the earth, erupting in ferocious joy.

There was joy and pleasure even in the suffering, depending on how you decided to view the matter. Even pain and illness comes as a blessing when you consider that its purpose is to warn, to give us a chance to set the matter right. So the world was burning up with joy as well as grief! And babies were being born each hour who were more beautiful than any child before (each mother knew it in her heart). You had only to look at skin like silk and the tiniest of fingernails glued to the ends of dainty fingers, eyes that opened and shut and could focus and discern, and growing limbs, and laughter bubbling from unpretentious throats like pear blossoms in May: Oh! It was a fine, good world in those days, a grand, brave, hearty place to be.

And so were the people who lived in it: children crying to their mothers on a summer's afternoon to
Look!
Look at ME! Mom, look! Or the teenagers, struggling with their own brooding, restless, anguished hearts, the growing up and separating from their parents being as painful as for limpets pulled from a seacoast rock. And then the adults, people so old that you'd think nothing further would ever happen in their lives except the toiling, nine to five, and there they were, falling in love, again and again, and making promises they could not keep to love one another for eternity, not remembering that all things change—all hearts, all eyes—and that the only constancy lies in the love of God, which springs up bountifully in our own hearts over and over again, as evidenced by our falling in love like teenagers with lots of different people even up to the age of ninety-two. A fine, good world it was, full of pleasure, if you knew how to look for it in the struggle for shelter and food; full of riches showered on us all. Or full of suffering, if that's what you were happy dwelling on.

The President, lying in bed that night, was struck by the insight. A prayer, he thought, is nothing but a concentrated thought, and if all prayers are answered (as various religions claim) then we constantly create our fate by our own thoughts.

And if we get what we want, he thought, too wide-awake to drop off into sleep, then how can we ever achieve world peace? Humans want thrills, excitement, not serenity; and these are only found in fear.

After the party, the President had a new obsession: to see the little girl again. There were things he wanted to ask her. First, he invited her to a private meeting at the White House, to have her picture taken with him, an official photo that he would then sign and give to her as a memento. Photos with presidents were considered of value, like getting your name in the newspaper or your picture on TV. The invitation to Lily was made at the suggestion of the President's secretary, Rosemary, who had children and grandchildren of her own, and therefore knew what would appeal to them.

Scotty declined. His regrets were polite and cold. He thanked the President but said he did not want his daughter treated with special favors or to have anything made of the unfortunate incident at the Christmas party, when, due to excitement and exhaustion, she had had an hallucination. He was sure the President would understand. Both he and his former wife were disturbed at the newspaper accounts that had come out about the party. It was embarrassing.

The President's first reaction was anger. He checked his impulse to
order
her to come. The idea passed immediately, the beat of a bat's wings; but he was astonished at the intensity of his rage, disturbed and ashamed. His only course, he advised himself, was patience. Something would happen. The way would be made clear. (He had started to think like this in the last few months, as if Fate were leading him.) Yet impatience drove him on obsessively.

That was another reason he thought he was going mad. At times, he felt all the universe and everyone in it was swinging rightly and righteously in a kind of delicate dance, orderly as a minuet. He could hear the singing of the planets, the humming of rocks and sky; he could comprehend the mathematical movements of the universe—atoms, matter, plants, people, seas and stars, right out to the mystery of millions of galaxies sailing through infinite space.

Then, cupped in a calm hope, he knew he had only to wait. Everything would come to him. These moments of exaltation never lasted long. They were wiped out by events and problems and by his habit of command, an urgency to force a conclusion; or else by doubt, in which he knew with the certainty of despair that nothing was as it appeared, not even his fickle thoughts, and that he knew nothing, nothing at all, and had no control and no strength to effect a single thing. He could not even get his laws through Congress! Then his impulse again was to lunge forward, impose rules, force the situation to its knees. He plotted how to get the child alone.

It was strange. What was supposed to occupy his mind was world depression riding on the tides of war, and the starvation in Africa and Brazil, desperate balance of payments, and the slowly collapsing steel and concrete bridges, the disintegrating roads and subways in his own country, and also the photo opportunities with big contributors, and the reelection of his party.

Instead he tested these private sores. There was still, for example, the matter of the beggar. At night sometimes Matt stared out at the north lawn or prowled from one window to another in the Palace, wondering where the man had gone; and why, if his assignment was to help the President, he'd run away. Matt resented the man's absconding with his paperweight, of which, in fact, he was fond. He took it as a betrayal.

I am not fit to rule
, he thought; and his advisors, whose advice on this subject he never asked, agreed. They whispered among themselves. They found it unnerving for the President to be concerned about the meaning of life. Humility is not valued in a monarch.

One day he stopped Jim as he was leaving the office, a stack of papers in his arms. “I've been thinking,” he said, and Jim paused, respectful to his boss's moods.

“Maybe the only thing that's constant is the changing of either our emotions or our minds,” said the President.

“What?”

“It's as if there isn't any reason for living at all except to experience all the emotions, and that that's all we do all day long, have you noticed? Or all week, anyway: anger, fear, joy, sorrow, grief, hate, loneliness, jealousy, happiness. I‘ve been thinking, maybe that's the whole sum of life right there, and all we do is go from one to another, like riding all the horses on a merry-go-round; and maybe all the situations we face are merely tests set before us so that we can experience every emotion in some depth. And try out different answers. What do you think?”

Jim stood in the open doorway a moment, staring at the President, then stepped inside, letting the heavy door close behind him.

“What brought this to mind?” he asked cautiously. He himself had only the most primitive relationship to his own emotions. He wasn't even sure he could name any feeling when he felt it, but he looked at his President, whom he admired more than any human alive, and his mind was racing, searching for the proper response.

“I was thinking how life's a game,” said Matt, and he stood up and walked to the window and back and then continued pacing the large oval room as he talked, hands behind his back, thinking aloud on his feet. “It's a game. But why don't we refuse to play? We think the situations we're facing are real, that they
mean
something. We get caught up in our feelings. Or else in
thinking
. That's another trick of the game, the idea that we have to solve these problems. We're always reacting. You'd think we'd get tired of the game, but instead—”

“Are you saying the situations aren't real?” Jim asked in real dismay. Was the President talking about the war? The economic recession? What wasn't real?

“No, they're real, but they're not important. They're ways for us to indulge in all the pleasures and pain that's possible. That's what we want to do. We love it. When we haven't enough excitement in our own lives, we go to the movies to get a jolt. If there's a bit of intellect thrown in, that's okay too. We think the alternative is boredom. We'd rather do something destructive than be bored.” He saw Jim's face and flushed.

“Well, of course, to some people the most important thing is intellect—thinking. Or the search for knowledge. They think
what
they're thinking about is important, when it's really only the act of thinking they enjoy, the exercise of the mind; or for another type it's battering the body with physical sensations—the way an athlete does.”

He saw Jim's wariness.

“I know. You're thinking the purpose of life is to love thy neighbor,” he hurried on, though it couldn't have been further from Jim's mind. “Or to do some good before we die. But most of us just fumble through; it's hard enough just to keep on going.”

Jim stared at him appalled.

The President, embarrassed, shifted gears. Even mad he knew he'd revealed too much of his inner thoughts. He gave a laugh, head thrown back. “Don't look like that. Do you think I‘m serious?” And he flashed his famous smile and his famous victory sign. “Back to work.” And he dismissed his aide.

Jim returned to his own office slowly, his tread muffled on thick carpeting. Around him the aides and officers of the palace hurried here and there. The secret service paced the walkways, talking to each other through the handkerchiefs in their left breast pockets. On guard. Jim shook his head. Was it a joke? He didn't want to think it could be serious. Had he known the extent of Matt's distress it would have troubled him even more.

Matt Adams spent considerable time these days consolidating a new philosophy. He scratched ideas in a notebook at night. The question was: What is reality?

How strange. All his life he'd battled in the public arena. If he examined his soul, it was after a failure, to excuse his behavior or put the blame on someone else; or else to reconsider strategy, for the President was a cunning politician, a user of people and ideas.

Suddenly, his very method of operations was breaking down. He found himself without a center, and he had the discomfiting sensation as he gave a TV talk or flew to Atlanta for a fund-raiser, or met with ambassadors and heads of state, or conferred with the leaders of the Congress and his cabinet, that he was standing outside himself sometimes, watching himself perform.

He was beside himself, you could say.

Here he was, the head of the American Empire, the most powerful man on earth, whose name filled all mouths with envy or with praise, and he felt … uncertain. How to present his true account?