I waited to respond. It was a safe bet more was coming.
“Of course, it’s all for naught, isn’t it?” he said.
The “naught” hit my ear flatly—such a false note, as though to be deliberately antiquated was the lone prerequisite to seriousness.
“China could be a superpower, and who could compete?” he said. “But right now it’s all built on sand.”
He weighed his words for another second. He could sometimes be caught in the act of thinking, which is a rarer quality among the elected than one hopes. But it was the ruts and certainties where his thinking left him that disappointed me. Leo was a Republican cul-de-sac on which there stood three churches: anti-tax, business-anything, and Jesus Christ.
“It profits little, you know, to gain the world and lose the soul,” he said. He reached into a corner of his eye and flicked out an invisible crust.
“Christ,” he added. Whether he meant that as an endorsement of the Messiah or a curse, I couldn’t say. We spent so much time with each other that he sometimes talked to himself like he was alone. He’d get annoyed when I answered his rhetorical questions, but he’d snap at me, too, if I ignored some pearl of wisdom for which he awaited praise.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said.
Leo turned his back to me and hunched over, bulging his shoulder blades out into the space of the middle seat between us. I cracked his neck then started kneading my knuckles into his back.
I’d worked for him nearly two years. Leo gave me my first job out of college, my first paid work anywhere, if you didn’t count summers at my dad’s office reorganizing the law library. My second day in Congress, Leo took a call from a legislator who’d won a few presidential primaries, and for all I knew I was sitting at the center of the world. It stirred all my aspirational feelings. Still, I was under no illusions about my hiring. My father had arranged the interview, only weeks before he’d died.
My father and Leo had been five years apart in school, nodding acquaintances in a small town. The passing years, and their professional lives, had slowly entwined the two men, though my father’s political interests always remained strictly bounded. The national squabbles bored him, but he’d staked a tribal claim to our corner of California, the deep southeast where the state turned from coastal cities to lettuce and feedlots. The way our district was drawn, all our previous congressional representatives were from the suburbs of San Diego, so my father had seen Leo in a simple light: a local, and good for our desert town. Every year in the blistering heat of Fourth of July, my father’s law firm hosted a huge fundraiser for the congressman. He’d turned out to be right about the benefits. Our town rejoiced in the jobs when Leo steered us prisons and slaughterhouses. Even before I’d worked for our congressman, I’d spent more time around him than I had with some of my cousins and uncles, and I knew him at least as well as I had ever known my grandparents.
I don’t know what ends my father envisioned for my nascent political life—we were never able to discuss it—but I did know it was his name that gave me a start. Soon after, he’d been sapped by a cancer that was assumed to be slow and unthreatening but was not. Leo, to his credit, had helped me adjust to the long shadow of loss. To me, it wasn’t a question of my emerging from the shadow. What was perhaps possible was adaptation to a life with dampened colors, where every object felt cooler to the touch. More than once, in those first months, Leo had paid for a plane ticket, or arranged work for me in the district office, so I could be closer to home. I owed him that much.
But for a long time now, I’d been creeping toward pessimism about my work. Perhaps it was still just missing my father—a pessimism about the world at large. I’d told Leo it was time for me to move on. I did not tell him his office was a constant reminder of death. In response, Leo promised that if I would stay just one more year, he could find me a position with one of his foundation contacts, something gentle and gloriously funded. “Arts outreach. Or humanitarian shit. Twice the pay,” he’d said. “How happy would that make you?” I wasn’t sure that happiness was on the table, but I wasn’t opposed to the amelioration of suffering.
Among my current duties—unmentioned when I’d been hired—was to loosen up the pinched muscles near Leo’s spine and work out the painful bended kink in what the doctor called his “frozen shoulder.” When this first started, I’d emailed friends (other assistants, all of us) about this mission creep from legislative aide to part-time masseuse. They had no sympathy. They’d all done worse. One aide had written, uncredited, her boss’s entire book on leadership and the importance of integrity in public life. Another was required every morning to prick his boss’s finger and run the diabetes blood check, and when it was time for the shot of insulin to be administered, it was an assistant—it was one of us—with untrained hands planted on the furry lower back of the member of Congress. We retrieved enema kits and scheduled colonoscopies. We were next to our bosses when their doctors delivered the results of biopsies. We lied to their wives. We flattered their children. We made airport pickups at Dulles and brought along ice chests stocked with their favorite sodas and snacks. And we had, some of us, driven to Baltimore in Thanksgiving traffic to pick up a senator’s granddaughter from Johns Hopkins. We traded these stories, exacting what we could of revenge through exposure of our bosses’ privacies. This did not preserve any of our dignity.
I rubbed the knot out of Leo’s neck. It occurred to me to strangle him, for a passing second. I noticed the collar on his shirt was looser. He’d been losing weight on doctor’s orders.
“You heard the story about Kissinger?” he said.
“His consulting firm? Is Polk talking to them?”
“No, no,” Leo waved me off. “Early Kissinger. Kissinger and Nixon. China, in ’71.”
“’72, I think.”
“In ’71 they had Kissinger sneak in through Pakistan,” Leo said. “Before meeting Mao.”
He loved old stories of cloak and dagger, admired the exquisite details like an art historian talking about Vermeer.
“They can’t risk blowback in the States before any meeting even happens,” Leo said. “So they want Kissinger to get to China undercover. Set it all up with Zhou. You know Zhou?”
“Not personally, no.”
“Mao’s right hand. Whole burden on Kissinger is to read Zhou close, make sure Mao is really game.”
“I guess I hadn’t heard this,” I said. I was waiting for the part where Leo would claim he was the young pilot flying Kissinger’s plane, or the advisor whispering strategy in his ear.
“I love it,” Leo said. “They get Kissinger to Pakistan for all the usual bullshit. They’ve got press around, but they make it look pretty dull. Kissinger goes to a dinner one night, and the next morning his people start passing it around, ‘Oh, he’s got Delhi belly. He’ll have to spend a few days resting up.’ They send him to some villa up in the hills.”
“They got away with that?” I said.
“Probably harder then than it is now,” Leo said. “They didn’t have all this Internet shit, but in those days there was still a US foreign press. Anyway, they dress Kissinger up in a big old droopy hat and sunglasses and fly him out of Rawalpindi at three o’clock in the morning. They don’t tell the State Department—they don’t tell anyone. Kissinger twists the screws, and then, boom, all of a sudden Nixon’s going to China. They scare the piss out of the Soviets, push the Chinese on Vietnam. Two guys did it—two fucking guys.”
He wagged two fingers in my face.
“Look at me,” Leo said. “I’m getting wistful.” He laughed. I was happy he’d forgotten about our lost schedule. Only what Leo forgot could be forgiven.
Compared to Kissinger in China, Bund International’s