‘Roy. Stop. I am talking to you like once an hour, maybe more. I couldn’t talk to you more if we were handcuffed together.’
‘Yeah it’s nice it’s sweet it’s one of the treasured parts of my day, but it’s a face business, you know that, and I haven’t seen you in months, and Phil hasn’t either, and I’m afraid it’s getting to be a case of not seen not heard.’
‘Are you establishing a climate change task force?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to ask Diane Chang to be the science advisor?’
‘Yes. He already did.’
‘And are you going to convene a meeting with all the reinsurance companies?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re proposing the legislative package to the Congress?’
This was Charlie’s big omnibus environmental bill, brought back – in theory – from death by dismemberment.
‘Of course we are.’
‘So how exactly am I being cut out? That’s every single thing I’ve ever suggested to you.’
‘But Charlie, I’m looking forward, to how you will be cut out. You’ve gotta put Joe in daycare and come in out of the cold.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘I gotta go you get a grip and get down here bye.’
He sounded truly annoyed. But Charlie could speak his mind with Roy, and he wasn’t going to let the election change that. And when he woke up in the morning, and considered that he could either go down to the Mall and talk policy with policy wonks all day, and get home late every night – or he could spend that day with Joe wandering the parks and bookstores of Bethesda, calling in to Phil’s office from time to time to have those same policy talks in mercifully truncated form, he knew very well which day he preferred. It was an easy call, a no-brainer. He liked spending time with Joe. With all its problems and crises, he enjoyed it more than almost anything he had ever done. And Joe was growing up fast, and Charlie could see that what he enjoyed most in their life together was only going to last until preschool, if then. It went by fast!
Indeed, in the last week or so it seemed that Joe was changing so fast that Charlie’s desire to spend time with him was becoming as much a result of worry as of desire for pleasure. It seemed he was dealing with a different kid. But Charlie suppressed this feeling, and tried to pretend to himself that it was only for positive reasons that he wanted to stay home.
Only occasionally, and for short periods, could he think honestly about this to himself. Nothing about the matter was obvious, even when he did try to think about it. Because ever since their trip to Khembalung, Joe had been a little different – feverish, Anna claimed, although only her closest ovulation-monitoring thermometer could find this fever – but in any case hectic, and irritable in a way that was unlike his earlier irritability, which had seemed to Charlie a kind of cosmic energy, a force chafing at its restraints. After Khembalung it had turned peevish, even pained.
All this had coincided with what Charlie regarded as undue interest in Joe on the part of the Khembalis, and Charlie had gotten Drepung to admit that the Khembalis thought that Joe was one of their great lamas, reincarnated in Joe’s body. That’s how it happened, to their way of thinking.
After that news, and also at Charlie’s insistence, they had performed a kind of exorcism ritual (they had not put it like that) designed to drive any reincarnated soul out of Joe, leaving the original inhabitant, which was the only one Charlie wanted in there. But now he was beginning to wonder if all that had been a good idea. Maybe, he was beginning to think, his original Joe had in fact been the very personality that the Khembalis had driven out.
Not that Joe was all that different. Anna declared his fever was gone, and he was therefore more relaxed, and that his moodiness was much as before.
Only to Charlie he was clearly different, in ways he found hard to characterize to himself – but chiefly, the boy was now too content with things as they were. His Joe had never been like that, not since the very moment of his birth, which from all appearances had angered him greatly. Charlie could still remember seeing his little red face just out of Anna, royally pissed off and yelling.
But none of that now. No tantrums, no imperious commands. He was calm, he was biddable; he was even inclined to take naps. It just wasn’t his Joe.
Given these new impressions, Charlie was not in the slightest inclined to want to put Joe in a new situation, thus confusing the issue even further. He wanted to hang out with him, see what he was doing and feeling; he wanted to study him. This was what parental love came down to, apparently, sometimes, especially with a toddler, a human being in one of the most transient and astonishing of all the life stages. Someone coming to consciousness!
But the world was no respecter of Charlie’s feelings. Later that morning his cell phone rang again, and this time it was Phil Chase himself.
‘Charlie, how are you?’
‘I’m fine, Phil, how are you? Are you getting any rest?’
‘Oh yeah sure. I’m still on my post-campaign vacation, so things are very relaxed.’
‘Uh huh, sure. That’s not what Roy tells me. How’s the transition coming?’
‘It’s coming fine, as I understand it. I thought that was your bailiwick.’
Charlie laughed with a sinking feeling. Already he felt the change in Phil’s status begin to weigh on him, making the conversation seem more and more surreal. He had worked for Phil for a long time, but always while Phil had been a senator; Charlie had long since gotten used to the considerable and yet highly circumscribed power that Phil as senator had wielded. It had become normalized, indeed had become kind of a running joke between them, in that Charlie often had reminded Phil just how completely circumscribed his power was.
Now that just wasn’t going to work. The president of the United States might be many things, but un-powerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil’s had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the constitutional framers had intended – which campaigns made a mockery of the ‘strict constitutionalist’ talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Supreme Court’s justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president were a puppet installed by the interested parties. But never mind; the result of their labors was an apparatus of power that if properly understood and utilized could in many ways rule the world. Bizarre but true: the president of the United States could rule the world, both by direct fiat and by setting the agenda that everyone else had to follow or be damned. World ruler. Not really, of course, but it was about as close as anyone could get. And how exactly did you joke about that?
‘Your clothes are still visible?’ Charlie inquired, oppressed by these thoughts.
‘To me they are. But look,’ passing on a full riposte, as being understood in advance – although Phil could no doubt see the comedy of omnipotence as well as the comedy of constraint – ‘I wanted to talk to you about your position in the administration. Roy says you’re being a little balky, but obviously we need you.’
‘I’m