Janet picked up her salad bowl and headed for the patio. ‘Well, it’s never been good. You’ve never remembered my birthday, or Lee-Anne’s, or our wedding anniversary,’ she said, ‘so I don’t think it’s going to be much of a loss,’ and she was gone, out into the filtered sunshine of the patio.
Grafton sat sulking. It was true that Janet always had to remind him that these anniversaries were coming up but it wasn’t because he didn’t remember the dates; it was because he seldom knew what day it was today.
‘I thought our anniversary was in April,’ he would say.
‘Yes. And we’re in April,’ Janet would reply, and Grafton would be mystified as to how it could be April when it was February just a couple of weeks ago. What had happened to March? How did whole months just disappear?
In any case, he did not forget all anniversaries. There was one which he always remembered and mentally commemorated each year: the date he first slept with Janet. That was a date to remember – the true beginning of the relationship. The subsequent wedding was just a formality. He wondered if women remembered the dates when they slept with people and, if so, did they privately celebrate them. Probably not, he thought. And therein, he mused, lay the intrinsic asymmetry of men and women. For men, that first private, physical communion was the important one while, for women, it was the public, utterly non-physical, one. Weddings were all about dressing up and standing in front of a lot of people – including your parents and even a member of the clergy – and expressing love in words. Sex was all about taking your clothes off and lying down, with no one else around – least of all parents and priests – and expressing love through actions.
Of course, once upon a time, marriage and the first sexual encounter occurred in tandem – a piquant combination of opposites like yin and yang, sweet and sour, Baked Alaska. Since the sexual revolution of the twentieth century, sex had tended to occur well in advance of the nuptials which, while reducing the frustration of courting couples, also removed the pay-off for enduring the embarrassment, discomfort and tedium of the wedding.
Thus pondered Grafton Everest.
He then wondered how he had got onto the topic of sex – to which the answer was simple: sex was never far from Grafton’s mind even if, as though by some divinely imposed restraining order, it maintained a considerable distance from his body. He and Janet did indeed have regular sex but it was according to a timetable not unlike the child access arrangements of divorcees – every-second-weekend. Spontaneous sex was now as much a memory as backpacking across Europe (which Grafton had to admit he had never done) or staying up all night to watch the sunrise (which he also never could actually recall doing, but it seemed a good example).
Alas, he had no time to reminisce about that distant, short, halcyon period when he and Janet seemed to spend more time in bed than out of it. He was due to attend a meeting with his one-time teacher, sometime stepfather and long-time advisor, Mr Lee Horton, about his impending appointment.
‘There’s always something,’ he moaned.
*
Having rummaged through the clothes on his bedroom floor to find the least creased and crumpled garments, Grafton arrived, still looking as if he had slept in his clothes, at a small café overlooking Sydney Harbour. At a far table near the window sat the lean figure of his lifelong mentor. Grafton puffed across the room and sank down in a chair.
‘How are you, my son?’ said Mr Horton.
‘Hungry,’ replied the flustered President Presumptive. He had made a mistake thinking about Baked Alaska earlier and had not been able to get the image out of his head.
‘Have a look at the offerings then,’ said Mr Horton, spinning round the menu which to Grafton’s failing eyes seemed to have been written with pen and ink on wet linen.
As a waiter arrived and sloshed water into glasses then hovered just out of vision, Grafton peered at the text, trying to make out the words, and wondered if he should just heed Janet’s advice and order a salad. He hesitated, however, because most salads these days seemed not to be made from any known plant. Luckily, the waiter cut the Gordian knot of his indecision by reciting the specials.
‘The specials today are sea bass with a thyme and lemon jus and veal parmigiana …’
Grafton immediately surrendered to the parmigiana and handed back the menu.
‘So, how are you?’ asked Mr Horton as the waiter departed.
‘Confused. I mean, I don’t know how this has all happened. How am I … why am I the President Presumptive?’
‘Because you are the best person for the job,’ replied his mentor.
‘Are you telling me,’ said Grafton, ‘that this country is in such bad shape that I am the best person they could find to be the first President of the Republic?’
‘Not you, as such,’ said Horton, ‘but the Grafton that we have created. Who only slightly resembles you.’
‘So who is this public Grafton? I would like to meet him.’
‘He exists only in the digital realm,’ explained Mr Horton. ‘Which is to say, everywhere.’
Seeing Grafton’s look of confusion, Mr Horton leant forward and started to explain, much as he had explained the basic principles of biology when he was Grafton’s science teacher at Forrest Hills High School, many eons ago.
‘My boy, democratic governments lost power the minute the Internet was invented,’ he said. ‘Political power comes from the power to communicate. Once upon a time that meant a wooden soapbox in the park. Then it became radio and television but only major political parties could afford to broadcast on radio and television so they dominated until cheaper avenues arrived. Let me ask you a question.’
Grafton knew this was probably just going end up with him displaying his ignorance but he said, ‘Okay.’
‘What invention enabled the youth revolution of the sixties?’ Mr Horton leant back as the waiter delivered their meals.
Grafton thought about it for a moment and then, not wishing to offer a long list of suggestions, all of which would probably be wrong, just said, ‘What?’
‘The Roneo machine,’ said Mr Horton. ‘The spirit duplicator. It enabled student activists to cheaply run off hundreds of fliers with information about protests and demonstrations, distribute propaganda, announce meetings. They could hand them out on street corners, stick them up on noticeboards and walls. It gave every radical group their own little printing press. The big anti-war demonstrations could not have happened without a Roneo machine or a Fordigraph or a Gestetner. The Internet today is like a Roneo machine on steroids. Everyone is now a broadcaster.’
During this explanation, Grafton was trying to extract his knife and fork from a napkin that appeared to have been wrapped by someone trained in a cigar factory. As he ran a nail around the damask, looking for an edge as one might with a roll of sticky tape, Mr Horton continued.
‘Once, we elected farmers, miners or timber-cutters as leaders. We even had a Prime Minister who was a train driver. But in the modern world, these kinds of people ceased to “resonate”, as they say. The key to political success is “media presence”. ’
‘The Kennedy versus Nixon syndrome,’ added Grafton, finally freeing the cutlery from its bindings and sticking the now permanently curled napkin into his collar – parmigiana sauce being one of the most indelible fabric dyes known to humankind.
‘Exactly, my son. As a result, in America, we’ve seen actors elected to state Governorships and the presidency. Minnesota even elected a wrestler as Governor. And we have had the recent unpleasantness of a TV reality show host becoming POTUS.’
Grafton wasn’t sure what ‘potus’ was but it sounded like a nasty condition and he could think of no one who deserved