Fiction

Altogether Fitting and Proper

Noah Milligan

Election night. I hadn't slept in days, felt jittery from the four Red Bulls I had already chugged, the fifth in my hand, and paced from the east to the west wall at the Skirvin Centennial Ballroom in Oklahoma City, eyes locked on the projection screen and the eight-feet-tall Wolf Blitzer as he read off exit poll numbers. The younger demographic-eighteen to twenty-four with zero to some college education-overwhelmingly voted for the President. Big surprise, they're naive. Idealistic. But the older and more educated voted for Oklahoma Governor Jacob Koch. Too bad the majority of Americans didn't have a college diploma. Hell, I would've settled for only having an educated majority in swing states.

Red, white, and blue balloons waited to be dropped from the ceiling, cameras scanned the ballroom from every corner, anchormen and women conducted interviews with guests and Governor Koch's staffers, women wore their hair up and dressed in sequin gowns, men walked around in ill-fitting rented tuxedos, champagne, secret service, laughter, overpriced and nauseating perfume, roast beef, diamonds, an ice sculpture of Lady Liberty. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I can remember every presidential election since I was eight years old the same way other guys my age remember their first car or the first time they felt up a girl. When Clinton had beaten H. W., I had worn my horsey pajamas and had sat cross-legged in between my dad's legs, wondering why in the hell did Bush always sound like he had a sinus infection. Did he refuse to take allergy medicine? Why would you want a president who sounded like he spoke out of a kazoo? The whole spectacle of politics fascinated me. By the time I had turned nine years old, I had memorized the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Governor Koch revolved around the room, taking time to have a conversation with every guest, with every paid staffer, with every single volunteer present. No small task, more than five hundred people attended the watch party. Having worked on his campaign as head speechwriter for the past two years, I had seen him work a room thousands of times. Pure genius. No one in the game was better. He glided from one person to the next, and although he only spent a few minutes with each guest, he gave them the most tiresome and fulfilling focus anyone anywhere has ever received. A hundred times more fulfilling than the best orgasm you have ever experienced, I promise you. And, with practice, you can tell the type of conversation he's having even if you can't hear a word. Like right then. Koch was locked in his important-issue mode: broad shoulders hunched forward, dimpled chin up, slightly nodding, his green gaze locked on the man speaking, lips puckered in concentration as if to say this is the most brilliant idea anyone has ever given me on the national debt, on how to curb inflation, on how to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, basically insert any political talking point here. The other man, short and bald and sweaty, spoke with animation, flailing his arms around, excited to be speaking with, possibly, hopefully, the next President of the United States. He probably believed he impressed the Governor so much that he could've locked down a cabinet consideration. Koch made you feel that important. Hell, he made me feel that important.

The sound guy turned up Blitzer. "CNN can now make the first predictions of the night. Virginia and South Carolina will be won by Republican Governor Koch, giving him twenty-one electoral votes. And the President has won New Hampshire and Vermont which totals seven electoral votes." The ballroom erupted into cheers and the ring of champagne flutes toasting and hugs and applause.

I continued pacing, drank the remainder of my Red Bull, dodged the groups of three or four here and there talking about what needs to be accomplished as soon as Koch gets into office, "eliminate capital gains taxes," "take a harder stand against Tehran," "Like Koch said, 'find a Secretary of Defense with a trigger finger that works,'" I had written that line, and headed for the concession table, chomped a few cheese cubes, not that I was hungry, but I hadn't eaten a decent meal for days, had lost twenty-five pounds the past two months alone, grabbed some champagne, drank about half and poured some Red Bull into it. Tasted like a mimosa sort of. I had never been much of a drinker, but tonight I needed something, otherwise I would go crazy. Too much stress. Too much sugar. Too little sleep.

A hand gripped my shoulder, gave it a squeeze, turning around, Governor Koch smiled at me, like a father would. "Eli," he said.

"Governor." Despite working for the man, being in his presence on a regular basis, going over talking points, which syllables to inflect, when to pause, when to project, and when to hold back, I became nervous in his presence, like a child who had broken a prized family heirloom and kept trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade his parents that he didn't do it.

"You look like shit."

"I haven't been sleeping well."

He took my drink and laid it on the table, straightened my bow-tie, my lapels. He wore his concerned expression, nostrils flared, biting his wet lower lip, so much worry, so much compassion, almost as if he wanted to adopt me.

"You've been working too hard. I appreciate everything you've done, of course. You gave my campaign the voice it needed, but you need to start taking better care of yourself."

"Thank you, sir. I will."

"I wanted to talk to you about something." He pulled out some pages from his breast pocket. "In my concession speech, did you call the President a 'wanker?'"

Crap, I thought I had deleted that. I needed sleep.

He laughed. "He is a bit of a wanker, isn't he?"

"I'm sorry, sir. That wasn't supposed to be in the final draft."

He waved away my apology. "Don't worry about it. It's already been fixed." He leaned in close, whispered in his I-share-an-intimate-secret-with-only-you mode, "If it wouldn't be political suicide, I would've kept it in there. Besides, we're not going to lose. The people are tired of the Democrats." He leaned back and winked at me. "And you made the voters realize that."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"That's another reason why I need to speak with you."

"Sir?"

"You're indispensible. You have to come with me to Washington. I need you to help me explain the direction this country needs to go."

"Of course, sir. I'm honored."

We shook hands, and I knew mine were moist with sweat, but the Governor gave no indication that he cared, kept that same fatherly smile on his face, and I felt elated. Head speechwriter for the President of the United States at twenty-six years old.

"Together," he said. "We've burned the democratic party. 'A nation of small government, of liberty, what our founding fathers had dared to dream so many years ago, can now recommence,'" he quoted from the acceptance speech. "It's the best you've written."

It was good; I admitted that-you can't be too damn humble in politics-but it was no Lincoln. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

The Governor returned to his host duties, leaving me at the concession table. I downed my Red Bull and champagne and made another, a woman, middle-aged, snub-nosed, gaudy pearl necklace, shot a judgmental look in my direction, and I raised my champagne flute toward her, "To the next President of the United States," and she smiled, half-heartedly, and snuck away. But I didn't care; let the bitch think what she wants. I was going to Washington.

As I moved back into the crowd, the giant Blitzer announced, "Governor Koch has won Alabama and Tennessee, widening his early lead." More cheers, some even sang "God Bless America." Several groups throughout the ballroom donned coned party hats and blowouts that, when extended, pictured an American flag. The atmosphere resembled New Year's Eve, and I almost anticipated the band to play Auld Lang Syne.

Ironically, I had met the Governor at a small New Year's Eve party. I had just resigned my post at The New Republic-forcibly, they hadn't taken too well to repeated articles calling the President a Marxist ideologue more akin to Mao Zedong than to FDR because of his constant attempts to suppress political opposition-had no job prospects to speak of, had been considering going to law school somewhere, when, out of the blue, I had gotten a call from Barry Ashford, the legend and Koch's campaign manager, who had coined the term "passionate conservative," and, it's rumored, drank his own urine (not true, by the way), inviting me to meet the Governor. I had accepted, of course, and, because of my liberal credentials as a writer for TNR and because of my detraction from the left, they had recruited me as a person who could help swing independent voters. I had been weary of the offer at first. Hell, I was still technically registered as a Democrat at the time. But that's when I had first seen the Governor work a room. And I had realized this man could be my generation's John F. Kennedy. Only a Republican and without Marilyn Monroe.

The media swarmed the ballroom like parasites, little feeders that flocked to political power, but, having worked in both arenas, I had learned politics and journalism exist in a state of symbiotic mutualism, much like the bacteria that live in cows' intestines, and that one must respect the other or else both would die. I merely preferred feeding the words to the ones in front of the camera rather than being the one in front or with the camera. But here came Donna England, the perky blonde from KFOR 4, the local NBC affiliate, heading my way with her signature pink lipstick, out-dated polyester pantsuit, and microphone leading her to me like a tractor beam. I tried to slip away, but her cameraman flanked me.

"Elijah McClure, how does the Governor view these early results?"

"You should ask him, Donna, not me. I have to go."

"Please, I only have a few questions. You guys still owe me."

We, meaning the campaign, did. That I couldn't deny. Early in the campaign, some unfavorable photos of the Governor had surfaced from a holiday in the Virgin Islands-he had been drunk and gambling, not sleeping with a young twenty-year-old masseuse like some have speculated-and Donna, hoping to further her career, had bought the only copies from the gullible owner, some accountant from the suburbs of Oklahoma City, and had traded them for an exclusive interview with the Governor. We had gotten to burn the evidence, and she had gotten to interview a presidential candidate for half an hour. She still felt, obviously, that she had gotten the short end of the proverbial stick, so to speak, because she had never been offered a network position like she had hoped, and maybe she was right. The Governor had looked like the populist giving a local journalist some national attention, and she had come out looking like an amateur. She had actually asked the Governor who he was wearing. Dolce? Prada? She probably would have gotten the network job offer if she had released the photos, but I wasn't about to tell her that.

"Fine."

"Thank you." To the camera she said, "Here I am with Elijah McClure, the head speechwriter for the Koch campaign. Mr. McClure, the President has repeatedly attacked the Governor's proposed tax cuts for those making over a quarter million a year. He says that doing so would make the pay-as-you-go budget solutions he implemented impossible to maintain. Would this not increase the risk of large national deficits?"

She had gotten better, exponentially better. She sounded like a journalist, not a red carpet TV personality at the daytime Emmys. "I am not an economist, Donna, so you should direct those questions to either Rudy Gunter or the Governor himself."

I turned to go, but she grabbed me by the forearm, dug her pink nails into my flesh. It was sad really, the poor girl trying so hard. She still wasn't resigned to the fact that she had already peaked like a prom queen turned trailer trash. It was endearing, in a way.

"The Governor ran on fiscal responsibility," she said, "and many economists from the CBO estimate that the government will lose nearly a trillion dollars in revenue because of these tax cuts. What is the Governor's response to this?"

"Donna, once again, I am not an economist."

I knew the Governor's talking point on this, hell, I had written it, and he had repeated it at debates with the President, in town hall meetings, during interviews with Ellen DeGeneres and Keith Olbermann and John King hundreds of times over the past year: "The wealthy act as the fuel for the economy. When they spend they ignite growth, they create demand. That causes manufacturing production to increase and that leads to job creation. That means the middle class and the working class has more money. If you stifle the job creators, you stifle the economy. It's supply and demand, not rocket science." Although true, that wasn't the whole story. Political offices aren't won by votes. They're won by political contributions, and since the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations could donate without restriction back in 2010, they're won by pleasing the Warren Buffets and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world, not Janitor Bob. Koch knew this. I knew this. But it was impolite to talk about it, like ugly babies. So, I deflected, like Nixon would've, like Koch had mastered, denying Donna her thirty-second sound bite she so desperately wanted.

"That still doesn't account-"

"Excuse me, Donna," the Governor's daughter, Kate, said as she grabbed me by the elbow. "But I need to borrow Mr. McClure for a moment." She dragged me away, and I smelled her strawberry shampoo. "You looked absolutely frightened by the Fashionista Batista. Are you losing your touch?" She poked me in the chest then folded her arms in front of her yellow, silk gown. I wanted to reach out and touch her.

"Maybe a little. Where have you been?"

"Watching you. You look like Ted Kennedy after a trip to Vegas. What happened?" She grazed my cheek with her fingertips. They were soft, like cotton.

"I haven't been sleeping well."

The giant Wolf Blitzer interrupted us. "Georgia and Alabama go for Koch, but the President wins Massachusetts, Maine, and Delaware. Florida is too close to call. Koch's lead is getting a little bit smaller, and if the President wins Florida, he would even take a slight lead over the Governor."

"Damn," Kate said.

"Don't worry," I said. "We'll win Florida and Ohio, and Texas is in the bag. It's all over after that."

"I hope you're right."

"I am."

Behind Kate I saw Barry and Rudy, the Governor's financial advisor, watching us as they pretended to be interested in some random socialite's banter. Barry didn't even try to hide the fact that he was staring at me and Kate. Rudy, on the other hand, peeked over the socialite's brown bun like an extra in a 'B' spy movie. I could almost picture those two holding up binoculars and hiding behind bushes. They knew about my relationship with Kate while the Governor, they assumed, didn't, but I maintained the Governor couldn't be as dense as they believed. He knew, only he didn't want to address the issue until he was forced to. Then he planned to deal with it behind closed doors. It's an old political strategy. Ronald Reagan had done it in the early eighties when Nancy had found out about a romp the Gipper had back in the sixties with a co-star who happened to have had an Adam's apple. I didn't judge. It was Hollywood. And I was perfectly content with letting the whole situation play out as such. In fact, I was inclined to believe the Governor even approved of the match. He had just offered me a job in Washington.

Kate opened her yellow clutch and pulled out a keycard. "I know what might make you feel better."

"Lead the way, Miss."

She hurried toward the exit, and I winked at Barry and Rudy as I followed Kate. The lobby at the Skirvin remained unchanged since opening in 1911. Mahogany archways, white marble floor, ornate Persian rugs, red velvet drapes, gold tassels, buttoned lounge chairs and chaises, what their website dubbed "Western yet refined décor," whatever the hell that meant. Over a hundred years had passed, and no one would have been able to tell if it wasn't for Kate clacking away on her Blackberry, texting a girlfriend back in Norman where she was a senior at the University of Oklahoma, a fact which turned out to be a huge selling point to the public: You can't call the Governor an elitist, his own daughter goes to a state-funded, public university.

"This place is haunted, you know," she said as she hit the elevator button.

"Really?"

"Yep. Mr. Skirvin knocked up a maid back during prohibition and locked her and the baby up in a room on the fourteenth floor and didn't let them out for years. The maid went crazy and jumped from the window, and she's been haunting this place ever since." The elevator doors opened and we went inside. She hit fourteen. "Just kidding." She hit twelve and smiled at me, bounced her head between her shoulders like a metronome.

"What was the maid's name?"

"Effie, but that's not even the best part. Some men have said that they were sexually assaulted when they stayed here by a woman they could see through. They were raped by a ghost, ha!"

"Whatever."

"Seriously. In 1936 one of these guys ran out of here naked and screaming. There was a big write up in The Oklahoman about it."

The doors opened, and we stepped out onto Kate's floor.

"You're lying."

She put two fingers up in the air and covered her heart with her other hand.

"Scout's honor, Eli. Call me Honest Kate."

"I'd rather not."

"What? You don't think I'd look hot with a beard?"

We entered her room, a small one, probably rented with her own money rather than her father's. A bottle of cheap champagne chilled in an ice bucket on the kitchenette; she had been planning this. Maybe. Purple sweatpants lay in a chair in the corner, the comforter was bunched at the foot of the bed, pillows were strewn across the room, batteries separated from the TV remote, and I smelled burnt coffee. If I didn't know Kate the way I did, I would've thought there had been a fight, but Kate lived this way, like a slob, and, as far as I could tell, she enjoyed it. But we hadn't seen each other in weeks since I had been on the road with her father. I thought that maybe she would've cleaned up for our reunion.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and pushed her lips against mine. They tasted like ChapStick and menthol cigarettes, a sometimes nauseating combination, in fact, I had often asked her to brush her teeth before we had sex, but I didn't care then. We moved toward the bed, and she untied my bowtie and took off my jacket and threw them on the floor as I fought with my belt buckle. I kicked my pants off, and she pulled off her dress, pushed me onto the bed and started to grab at my socks.

"Wait," I said.

"What?"

I went down on my hands and knees and put the batteries back in the remote and turned on the TV and surfed the channels until I found CNN.

"You've got to be kidding me," Kate said.

"What? I haven't missed an election in twenty years."

She exhaled out of her nose, took off her dangling silver earrings. "Fine, but you have to mute it. I really don't want to hear about my dad while you're inside of me."

I muted it and slid on top of Kate, and she moaned as I entered her. On the television I read the closed captioning as Wolf described some of the exit polling from Florida. People voted along party lines, Republicans for Koch, Democrats for the President, the same as it had been in all the other states called so far, what everyone had known would happen.

"Look at me," Kate said as she placed her hand on my cheek, her thumb on my bottom lip and tugged it down.

Her cheeks flushed pink, sweat slid down her brow onto her eyelashes, a bit of black eyeliner dripped into the corner of her eye and rested on the white next to her iris, but she didn't blink it away, kept her green eyes locked on me.

"Say something," she said. "Say something about me."

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot hallow this ground.

"What do you want me to say?"

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

"I want you to make me feel beautiful."

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

I couldn't think of anything other than Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, so I looked back up to the TV. Wolf Blitzer was ready to make an announcement. CNN showed a picture of the Governor with the caption "Koch wins Florida" underneath, and I couldn't hold back any longer. I came and collapsed against Kate's heaving chest.

"You're beautiful," I said as I struggled to catch my breath.

She pushed me off of her, and I rolled over.

"You'd think you'd come up with something better, being a writer and all."

"I'm sorry."

My eyelids felt heavy, drooped. I tried to remember the last time I had slept for more than a couple of hours on a plane, in a make-shift office in Pensacola or Jacksonville or Columbus or St. Paul. I tried to remember the last time I had slept in my own bed but couldn't.

Kate smacked me a few times.

"Wake up. We've got to get back down there or my dad will know something's up." Kate already had her dress back on and was pinning loose strands of her hair with bobby pins. "They called Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas for us while you were out," she said. "We're only twenty electoral votes away."

"How long was I asleep?"

"Thirty minutes maybe."

I got dressed, and we left, and Kate pushed the button to wait for the elevator.

"Are you okay?" Kate asked. "Your hands are shaking."

I counted the numbers when they lit up as the elevator car approached from the ground floor-1, 2, 3-and focused on steadying my fingers. As soon as I got back to the ballroom I planned to drink another Red Bull; I had to stay awake to see who won the presidency, but the chime of the ascending elevator echoed like a church bell and the twisting patterned carpet slithered like earthworms after a spring thunderstorm. I felt like I was walking through an anesthesia induced daydream. "I'm fine. Only exhausted. I'm sorry about falling asleep earlier."

"It's okay. Maybe after tonight you'll be able to rest." The elevator doors opened, and Kate pressed the lobby button. "Maybe you could stay with me for a little while. We could lock ourselves in my apartment and sleep until noon and watch Seinfeld reruns."

"Your father asked me to go with him to Washington."

The elevator doors closed, but the car didn't move. Kate hit the button again.

"He won't be going right away. You'd have a week at least."

"Right. Okay. Yeah, I could stay with you."

"You don't have to," she said.

"No, I want to."

I reached out and grabbed her hand as the elevator lurched, and we moved up. Kate tapped the lobby button again; it remained illuminated, the others dark. The doors opened on the thirteenth floor, one of the few remaining thirteenth floors in the country, and I heard a housekeeping cart squeak down the hallway. Kate hit the lobby button again, the doors closed, and we moved up to the fourteenth floor.

"Okay," Kate said. "This is starting to freak me out."

I led her out into the hallway. "Let's take the stairs." The stairs circled the elevator shaft, and Kate's heels clicked against the wood floor as we hurried. We reached the thirteenth floor, turned the corner, heard the elevator chime, and saw the doors open. No one was there. Kate kicked off her heels, and we sprinted down to the twelfth floor where the elevators opened again. Every floor the elevators opened as we crossed in front to reveal no one standing inside. When we got down to the lobby, sweat dripped off of me, and Kate's hair looked wild, thick strands curved up and drooped down like blonde candy canes.

"Are you okay?" a man asked both of us. He wore a blue shirt and a nametag that said "Robert" and a tool belt. He worked in maintenance.

Kate burst out laughing. "We're fine. We thought we were being chased by Effie."

"Who?" he asked.

"The ghost."

"It's electrical, been on the fritz all day."

I wanted to interrupt and tell him that I didn't think it was Effie, but I had. I was so tired I had thought a ghost was chasing us.

Kate and I composed ourselves as best we could and returned to the watch party. Inside the ballroom the spectators were silent and stared at the projection screen as Wolf Blitzer listened to his earpiece and stared down at the ground. In the middle of the room stood the Governor, and as the doors slammed shut behind us, he turned to us and smiled. Kate grabbed my hand, caressed my finger with her thumb. The Governor waved us over, and while we approached Wolf announced that the Governor had won Ohio and Pennsylvania, "Jacob Koch is the next President of the United States." The red, white, and blue balloons dropped from the ceiling and filled the room like a pixilated American flag. The crowd hugged and cheered and chanted the Governor's name and the band played "All Hail the Chief" as three shots rang out.

I knew they were gunshots right away. And before Kate and I could shove our way through the panicked mob to get to the Governor, I knew he was dead. Kate released my hand and collapsed beside her father and cried for him to wake up, please, daddy, wake up. But he wouldn't. Blood poured from where his forehead had exploded, and bits of brain lay next to his still smiling lips. Kate tried to put his face back together just as Jackie Kennedy had done with JFK fifty years before. She picked up skull fragments and pressed them against the bleeding wound like putting together a puzzle, and as I watched I fought the urge to push her out of the way, curl up next to the Governor, rest my head against his shoulder, and recite The Gettysburg Address before falling into the deepest sleep.