“Please forgive me for not being here when you arrived. The . . . irregularity in protocol is sincerely regretted.” Tea was served, along with some light snacks. There hadn’t been time to prepare a proper meal, either.
“Not at all,” Daryaei responded. “Speed makes for inconvenience. For myself, I am most grateful for your willingness to meet under such special circumstances.” He turned. “And to you, Madam Prime Minister, for joining us. God’s blessing on this meeting,” he concluded.
“My congratulations on developments in Iraq,” Zhang said, wondering if the agenda was now entirely in
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Daryaei’s hands, so skillfully had he posed the fact that he’d convened the assembly. “It must be very satisfying after so many years of discord between your two nations.”
Yes, India thought, sipping her tea. So clever of you to murder the man in such a timely jashion. “So how may we be of service?” she asked, thus giving Daryaei and Iran the floor, to the impassive annoyance of China.
“You’ve met this Ryan recently. I am interested in your impressions.”
“A small man in a large job,” she replied at once. “The speech he gave at the funeral, for example. It would have been better suited to a private family ceremony. For a President, bigger things are expected. At the reception later, he seemed nervous and uneasy, and his wife is arrogant–a physician, you see. They often are.”
“I found him the same when we met, some years ago,” Daryaei agreed.
“And yet he controls a great country,” Zhang observed.
“Does he?” Iran asked. “Is America still great? For where comes the greatness of a nation, except in the strengths of its leaders?” And that, the other two knew at once, was the agenda.
“JESUS.” RYAN WHISPERED to himself, “this is a lonely place.” The thought kept returning to him, all the more so when alone in this office with its curving walls and molded three-inch doors. He was using his reading glasses all the time now–Cathy’s recommendation–but that merely slowed down the headaches. It wasn’t as though he were a stranger to reading. Every job he’d held in the past fifteen years had required it, but the continual headaches were something new. Maybe he should talk to Cathy or another doc about it? No. Ryan shook his head. It was just job stress, and he just had to learn to deal with it.
Sure, it’s just stress. And cancer is just a disease.
The current task was politics. He was reading over a position paper prepared by the political staffers across the street in the OEOB. It was a source of amusement, if not consolation, that they didn’t know what to advise him.
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Ryan had never belonged to a political party. He’d always registered himself as an independent, and that had managed to keep him from getting solicitation letters from the organized parties, though he and Cathy had always ticked the box on their tax returns to contribute their one dollar to the government slush fund. But the President was not only supposed to be a member of a party–but also the leader of that party. The parties were even more thoroughly decapitated than the three branches of government were. Each of them still had a chairman, neither of whom knew what to do at the moment. For a few days, it had been assumed that Ryan was a member of the same party as Roger Durling, and the truth had only been discovered by the press a few days before, to the collective oh, shit! of the Washington establishment. For the ideological mavens of the federal city, it was rather like asking what 2 + 2 equaled, and finding out that the answer was, “Chartreuse.” His position paper was predictably chaotic, the product of four or so professional political analysts, and you could tell who had written the different paragraphs, which resolved into a multi-path tug of war. Even his intelligence staff did better than this, Jack told himself, tossing the paper into the out basket and wishing, again, for a cigarette. That was stress talking, too, he knew.
But he still had to go out to the hustings, a word whose meaning he’d never learned, and campaign for people, or at least give speeches. Or something. The position paper’s guidance hadn’t exactly been clear on that. Having already shot himself in the foot on the issue of abortion– higher up and more to the centerline, Arnie van Damm had remarked acidly the previous day, to reinforce his earlier lesson–now Ryan would have to make his political stance clear on a multitude of issues: affirmative action at one end of the alphabet, and welfare at the other, with taxes, the environment, and God only knew what else in between. Once he’d decided where he stood on such things, Gallic Weston would write a series of speeches for him to deliver from Seattle to Miami and God only knew where else in between. Hawaii and Alaska were left out be-
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cause they were small states in terms of political importance, and poles apart ideologically, anyway. They would only confuse matters, or so the position paper told him.
“Why can’t I just stay here and work, Arnie?” Ryan asked his arriving chief of staff.
“Because out there is work, Mr. President.” Van Damm took his seat to commence the latest class in Presidency 101. “Because, as you put it, ‘It’s a leadership function’–did 1 get that right?” Arnie asked with a sardonic growl. “And leading means getting out with the troops, or, in this case, the citizens. Are we clear on that, Mr. President?”
“Are you enjoying this?” Jack closed his eyes and rubbed them under the glasses. He hated the goddamned glasses, too.
“About as much as you are.” Which was an altogether fair comment.
“Sorry.”
“Most people who come here genuinely like escaping from this museum and meeting real people. Of course, it makes people like Andrea nervous. They’d probably agree with keeping you here all the time. But it already feels like a prison, doesn’t it?” Arnie asked.
“Only when I’m awake.”
“So get out. Meet people. Tell them what you think, tell them what you want. Hell, they might even listen. They might even tell you what they think, and maybe you will learn something from it. In any case, you can’t be President and not do it.”
Jack lifted the position paper he’d just finished. “Did you read this thing?”
Arnie nodded. “Yep.”
“It’s confusing garbage,” Ryan said, quite surprised.
“It’s a political document. Since when is politics consistent or sensible?” He paused. “The people I’ve worked with for the last twenty years got this sort of thing with their mother’s milk–well, they were probably all bottle babies.” “What?”
“Ask Cathy. It’s one of those behavioral theories, that
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New Age stuff that’s supposed to explain everything about everything to everybody everywhere. Politicians are all bottle babies. Mommy never nursed them, and they never bonded properly, felt rejected and all that, and so as compensation they go out and make speeches and tell people in different places the different things they want to hear so that they can get the love and devotion from strangers that their mothers denied them–not to mention the ones like Kealty, who’re getting laid all the time. Properly nurtured infants, on the other hand, grow up to become–oh, doctors, I suppose, or maybe rabbis–”
“What the hell!” the President nearly shouted. His chief of staff just grinned.
“Had you going for a second, didn’t I? You know,” van Damm went on, “I figured out what we really missed when we set this country up.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Jack said, eyes still closed, and finding the humor in the moment. Damn, but Arnie knew how to run a classroom.
“A court jester, make it a Cabinet post. You know, a dwarf–excuse me, a male person with an unusually large degree of vertical challenge–dressed in multicolored tights and the funny hat with bells on it. Give him a little stool in the corner–‘course, there isn’t a corner here, but what the hell– and every fifteen minutes or so, he’s supposed to jump up on your desk and shake his rattle in your face just to remind you that you have to take a leak every so often, just like the rest of us. Do you get it now, Jack?”
“No,” the President admitted.
“You dumbass! This job can be fun! Getting out and seeing your citizens is fun. Learning what they want is important, but there’s also an exhilaration to it. They want to love you, Jack. They want to support you. They want to know what you think. They most of all want to know that you’re one of them–and you know what? You’re the first President in one hell of a long time who really is! So get the hell off the bench, tell the air scouts to fire up the Big Blue Bird, and play the damned game.” He didn’t have to add that the schedule was already set sufficiently in stone that he couldn’t back out.