Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Harrison
“What a glorious morning the Lord has made,” I said. Ten thousand people roared back their love, and not one of them knew they were applauding a dead man walking around in an expensive suit.
I let the noise build and then I lifted my hands to gentle it, the way my father taught me before I was old enough to shave—palms out, slow, benediction and command in the same gesture—and the arena quieted to a held breath.
They always quieted. That was the terrible gift I'd been born into: a room would go silent for me the way water goes still when the wind drops. I had never once asked for it.
“Friends,” I said. “I want to talk to you this morning about power.”
My voice carried out over them, warm and certain, and underneath it, in the only room that was still mine, I was somewhere else entirely.
I was twelve floors up in a wrecked bed, with a stranger's heartbeat slowing under my arm, his hair against my mouth, and I had not wanted the sun to come up.
In thirty-five years I had never once not wanted the sun to come up.
“Now, the world will tell you that power is a dirty word,” I went on, the cadences worn smooth as river stone.
“The world will tell you that people of faith ought to stay quiet. Stay small. Stay home. Keep your God in your church and your church on its block and don't you dare bring Him out into the daylight where He might inconvenience somebody.” A ripple of knowing laughter. “But I’m here to tell you that meekness is not the same thing as weakness, and that the good Lord did not give His people a nation this great so that they could hand it over to the people who hate Him.”
They came up off their seats with a roar.
And the whole time, I was thinking about his voice in the dark.
Somebody tried to love me once. The way he'd said it—flat, almost bored, the way a man talks about a wound so old he's stopped feeling it on the surface and only knows it's there by the way he limps. And the whole time, I was just waiting for the catch, laying there with his confession in my hands like something warm and living and thought: I know you. God help us both, I know exactly who you are, because I am the same animal, and we’ve both been hiding in the dark for the same reason, and here we are, together.
“This,” I told the arena, sweeping a hand in front of me, “is not a church service. Make no mistake. There are churches enough in this country, and praise God for every one of them. No. What this is—what YOU are—is an army.”
The word landed like a struck bell.
“And an army has somewhere to march. We’re not here to feel good or to be comforted.
We are here because there is a ballot box in every county of this nation, and that ballot box is an altar, friends—it is an altar—and on it we will lay down the future of this country and ask the Lord to make it godly again.
A nation that honors the family. That protects the unborn and the unspoiled.
A nation where a child is raised by a mother and a father under the eyes of a righteous God—”
The roar swallowed the rest.
A mother and a father. I heard the words come out of my own mouth, and somewhere far down inside myself a dry voice muttered: you don't have a wife, Harrison. You have a photograph of a dead wife that serves as a stand-in. You’re a faker.
I kept my face open and luminous. The screens threw it forty feet tall across the dark. I had learned a long time ago that the face and the man behind it were two separate beings, and only one of them was ever shown to the public.
And then—because the human animal cannot bear too much of itself at once—I turned my head. Just slightly. A speaker's instinct, throwing a line to the far side of the room so no one feels forgotten.
I saw my mother.
Floris Mae stood in the wings, stage left, just past the lip of the curtain where the house lights couldn't reach her but I could. She’d assembled her court around her—four, five of them, the convention wives, the donors' wives, the lacquered blonde helmets and the surgical sameness of those frozen faces, and the jewelry, my God, the jewelry, catching what little light reached them and throwing it back in hard cold points, diamonds at the throat, wrists, and ears, a small huddle of women wearing the tithes of the faithful around their necks.
Mother was watching me work, and she was not moved. My mother had heard me give some version of this speech four hundred times and she watched me give it the way a foreman watches a machine—checking for defects, calculating output, feeling nothing at all about the product it was making.
She caught my eye across the dark and gave me one small nod. Approval.
And something moved through me that I’ve never had a word for. A despair so total and familiar it was almost restful. It was the despair of a creature that has been in the trap so long it can no longer remember the field it was caught in.
I felt cursed.
Not metaphorically. I felt as though some power larger than me had reached down before I was born and decided that this man, of all the men it could have made, would be given the perfect voice and face.
And guarding over that man was the perfect terrible mother.
He’d be set down in the exact center of a great machine for converting human longing into political power.
This man would be cursed to spend his life saying true-sounding words he didn’t mean about God and a family he was constitutionally incapable of having.
Is it a lie? The question came up out of nowhere, mid-sentence, while my mouth went on building the cadence toward the close of the speech. Every word of it. Is every word out of my mouth a lie?
Because the awful thing—the thing I could never say to anyone, the thing I had come closest in a decade to saying to a stranger in the dark—was that I didn't know anymore.
I believed in God. I believed in the family as a holy thing; I believed it so completely that the believing was half of what was killing me, since I would never be permitted one. The words were true. But I was a lie.
“So go home,” I told them, and my voice broke just slightly on it, and they would think it was passion, they always thought it was passion.
“Go home to your towns and your counties and your precincts. And do not be quiet. Don’t be small.
Do not be ashamed. Take the gift the Lord gave you, and march it all the way to that altar in November, and let us build—together—a nation worthy of Him. ”
“And may God,” I finished, softly now, “bless you. And may God bless this great and chosen land.”
The place came apart. Ten thousand people on their feet, a wall of sound you could lean against, the screens flaring white, the music swelling back up underneath it all.
I lifted one hand and held it there—the benediction, the close—and I smiled the smile that wasn't mine, and I thought about a man whose name I would never know telling me to stop hiding.
* * *
Backstage was a different country. Out front it was light and longing; back here it was cables taped to concrete, road cases, a craft table nobody touched, and the men who actually ran the thing.
They closed around me before my eyes had even adjusted, a moving knot of senators, political operatives, and the big silent suits with the curled wires behind their ears.
The praise came at me from all sides at once, the way it always did.
“Pastor, that was the one. That was the best I've heard you.”
“The altar line. Ray, did you hear the altar line? We're cutting that for the digital, that's the whole spot right there.”
“You had them, Harrison. You had every one of them eating out of your hand.”
Senator Finch gripped my shoulder with the dead grip of a man who has shaken two hundred thousand hands, beaming up into my face.
“Son,” he said, “that is the future of this movement talking right there. You hear me? The future.” I gave him the modest dip of the head, the aw-shucks, the thing they wanted.
And then, over Finch's silver head, at the edge of the backstage crush where the press were penned behind a second rope, I saw him.
The floor dropped out of the world.
It was him. Standing maybe thirty feet away in the same loose unafraid way he'd stood in the doorway of room 1218, the dark-blond hair, the stubble, the eyes—and for one half of one second my whole ruined heart simply lifted, lifted like a boy's, because there he was, the one real thing, standing in my actual waking life in the same room as me.
And then I saw the lanyard around his neck.
PRESS. In red. Hanging against his chest on a branded strap. And in his hands a black camera with a long lens, the kind of lens that reaches across an arena and pulls a man's face close enough to count his pores. Immediately I tried to read his name. Alex? No, it looked like Alec.
I have been afraid in my life. I’ve been afraid of my mother, afraid of exposure, and afraid, in the small hours, of the size of my own emptiness. But I ‘d never felt anything like what went through me then.
It wasn’t heat. It was every drop of blood in my body deciding at once to be somewhere else, a gray roaring at the edges of my vision, the backstage and the senators and the praise all tilting.
A man does not slip into a building full of closeted, powerful, terrified men by accident and find his way into the bed of the one man whose ruin would be worth the most. A man with a press pass and a long lens does that on purpose.
Last night I’d told him things. Not the fact of myself—I had guarded that—but I had told him I was the fakest man he'd ever meet. Told him I'd been performing a character so long I'd forgotten who I was. Then I’d wept in his arms and let him hold my hand in the dark.
And he had a camera.
I don't do this part, I'd told him. I leave. And he'd made it easy, the bastard, he'd made it so easy—nobody stayed, we just didn't leave—and I had lain there in his arms feeling, for the first time in my adult life, safe.
“Harrison.”
My mother's voice cut through my thoughts like a blade through silk.
I turned, and there she was with her court of bejeweled women fanning out behind her, every one of them shining and frozen and pleased.
Floris Mae looked up at me, and her ice-blue eyes did a quick, proprietary sweep of my face—checking the product, always checking—and found me pale.
“You look peaked,” she said. It was not concern.
It was quality control. Then she leaned in and whispered, “You're coming to lunch. The Hadleys have taken the private room at the Lincoln Country Club. Betsy Walton has been promising a big donation to the church from her husband's foundation for the past year. You’re going to sit beside her, be charming, and close the deal.” She did not ask.
My mother had not asked me a question since I was nine years old. “Come along.”
And here is the thing I will never be able to explain, except that a drowning man grabs whatever floats past.
I always said no. That was my one small rebellion, the single square inch of ground I held against her. I didn’t do the lunches, or the donor courtships. I gave her the stage and the speeches and the empire but I kept the lunches and schmoozing as the one thing that was mine to refuse.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Let me—yes.”
Something flickered across her smooth face—surprise, quickly filed away as her due, as if I had finally come to my senses. “Well,” she said. “Good.” And she turned, certain I would follow, because I always, in the end, followed.
Lunch with mother and her court was a door out of this room. Lunch was a private dining room and the Walton's foundation, and had nothing to do with the man with the press lanyard and the camera in his hands.
Had he slept with me on purpose? Did that man come to Lincoln to weaponize my deepest, darkest secret?
I needed walls between me and him.
As we walked out I told myself I would not look at him. I am a disciplined man; discipline is the entire architecture of my survival. I would walk out with my eyes in front of me, my face composed, and I wouldn’t give him—or the long lens—one single photo worth printing.
I looked.
Five feet of stale backstage air between us and I turned my head. His eyes were already on me, had been on me the whole time, and they locked with mine. The roaring backstage went silent the way the arena went silent for me, except this silence I had not commanded and couldn’t control.
He didn't lift the camera.
That was the thing that undid me. He had the shot of a lifetime standing right in front of him—the kingmaker, hypocrite, the closeted shepherd, gift-wrapped—and he did not lift his camera.
The man just looked at me, and his face had none of the triumph I'd braced for.
There was something else. Something that looked, impossibly, like the same wreckage I was carrying.
Like he'd been hit by the same truck, from the same blind corner, at the same instant I had.
For one half-second the doorway of room 1218 opened again between us in the middle of all those cables and bodyguards, and everything in me strained toward it—toward him, toward his warmth in the dark—and my arms actually ached, physically ached, with how badly they wanted to close around him one more time, consequences be damned.
I forced my feet to keep moving.
One in front of the other, down the line, after my mother. I broke our shared glance and it felt like breaking a bone. Walked away from the only man who had ever truly seen me, and I didn’t know whether I was walking away from the man who would destroy my life, or the only one who could save it.