Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“It’s good to see you,” Charlie said, shaking his hand gingerly.

“Good to see you too Charlie. Can you believe this?”

“Not really.”

“It’s been surreal, I’ll tell you.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“All of it! They had to knock me out to operate on me. I hate being knocked out.”

“Me too.”

Phil regarded him. It seemed to Charlie that for a second Phil was remembering who Charlie was. Well, fair enough; he had gone on a long journey.

Now he said, “It always seems like there’s a chance you won’t wake up.”

“I know,” Charlie said. “Believe me. But you woke up.”

“Yes.”

There was a tightness to Phil’s mouth which looked new to Charlie, and reminded him of Anna. Also his face was pale. His hair was as clean as usual; nurses must be washing it for him.

“But enough of that.” Phil sat up farther. “Have you had any ideas about how we can use this to really take over Congress at the midterm elections?”

Charlie laughed. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?”

“No.”

“I guess. Well, how about handgun regulation? You could call for it with this Congress, then use their lack of response to beat on them during the campaign.”

“We would need poll numbers on that. As I recall it’s not a winning issue.”

Charlie laughed at Phil’s bravura, his everything-is-politics pose. He knew Phil didn’t really believe in that kind of style—but then again, Phil was looking serious. It occurred to Charlie that he was looking at a different person.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie said. “The NRA wants us to think that, but I can’t believe most Americans are in favor of handguns, can you?”

Phil gave him a look. “Actually I can.”

“Point taken,” Charlie conceded, “but still. I wonder about it. I don’t believe it. It doesn’t match with what I see.”

“People want to know they can defend themselves.”

“The defense doesn’t come from guns . It comes from the rule of law. Most people know that.”

Phil gave him the over-the-glasses look. “You have a lot of faith in the American electorate, Charlie.”

“Well, so do you.”

“That’s true.” Phil nodded and then winced. He took off the phone headset with his right arm, keeping his head as still as possible. He sighed. “It’s good to remind me. All this has left me a bit shaken.”

“Jesus, I’ll bet.”

“All he had to do was shoot a little higher and I would have been a goner. He was only about thirty feet from me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and looked over. That’s probably what saved me. I can still see him. He didn’t look that crazy.”

“He was, though. He’s spent some time in institutions, they say, and a lot more living at his mom’s, listening to talk radio.”

“Ah yeah. So, like the guy who shot Reagan.”

“That’s right.”

“Same place and all—it’s like a goddam rerun. ‘Hi honey, I forgot to duck!’”

“That’s right. He also said to his surgeons, ‘I hope none of you are Democrats.’”

Phil laughed so hard he had to rein himself in. “That poor guy didn’t know whether he was in a movie or not. It was all a movie to him.”

“That’s true.”

“At least he thought he was playing the good guy. He was a cloth-head, but he thought he was doing good.”

“A fitting epitaph.”

Phil looked around the office. “I’ve been thinking that JFK was really unlucky. A lot of these people are so crazy they’re incompetent, but his guy was an expert marksman. Amazingly expert, when you think about it. Long shot, moving target—I’ve been thinking that maybe the conspiracy folks are right about that one. That it was too good a shot to be real.”

Whatever, Charlie didn’t say. Instead he said, “Maybe so.”

It was a gruesome topic. But natural enough for Phil to be interested in it right now. Indeed, he went methodically down through the list: Lincoln had been shot point-blank, Garfield and McKinley likewise; and Reagan too; while the woman who took a potshot at Ford, and the guy who had tried to fly a small plane into the White House, could hardly even be said to have tried. “And a guy shot at FDR too, did you know that? He missed Roosevelt, and Roosevelt got a good night’s sleep that night and never mentioned the matter again. But the mayor of Chicago was hit and later on he died.”

“Like John Connally in reverse.”

“Yeah.” Phil shook his head. “FDR was a strange man. I mean, I love him and honor him, but he’s not like Lincoln. Lincoln you can understand. You can read him like a book. It’s not that he wasn’t complex, because he was, but complex in a way you can see and think about. FDR is just plain mysterious. After he had his polio he put on a mask. He played a part as much as Reagan. He never let anyone inside that mask. They even called him the Sphinx, and he loved that.” He paused, thinking it over. “I’m going to be like that,” he said suddenly, glancing at Charlie.

“Hard to believe,” Charlie said.

Phil smiled the ghost of his famous smile, and Charlie wondered if they would ever see the full version again.

Then there was a knock on the door, and Diane Chang came in.

“Hi honey,” Phil said, “I forgot to duck!” And there was the full smile.

“Please,” Diane said severely. “Quit it.” She explained to Charlie: “He says that every time I come in.” To Phil: “So stop. How do you feel?”

“Better, now that you’re here.”

“Are you still doing Reagan or are you just happy to see me?”

The men laughed, and again Phil winced. “I need my meds,” he said. “President on drugs!”

“Rush Limbaugh is outraged about it.”

They laughed again, but Phil really did seem to be hurting.

“I should let you go,” Charlie said.

Phil nodded. “Okay. But look, Charlie.”

Now he had a look Charlie had never seen before. Intent—some kind of contained anger—it would make sense—but Phil had always been so mellow. Hyperactive but mellow. Or seemingly mellow. Maybe before the shooting was when Phil had worn the mask, Charlie thought suddenly; maybe now they would be seeing more of him rather than less.

“I want to put this to use,” Phil said. “We’ve gotten a good start on the climate problem, but there are other problems just as bad. So I want to push the process, and I’m willing to try all kinds of things to make it happen.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “I’ll think about some things to try.” By God I will!

He watched Phil squeeze Diane’s hand. Test the limits, make an experiment in politics, in history itself. Just how far would Phil go? And how far could he get?

EVERYONE WAS A LITTLE SHAKENin those first few days after Phil got shot, although as it became clear he would recover, people tended to return from out of that briefly glimpsed bad alternative history to default mode, to the world they had inhabited before, without any lingering sense that things could be different. Because they weren’t different, and it was too hard to imagine what things would be like without Phil Chase there. So it was just something that had almost happened and on they went.

But not everyone. To Frank’s surprise, one of those who seemed to have been shaken the most was Edgardo. In the immediate aftermath his saturnine face had been set in a murderous expression all the time, and the first time they went out for a run afterward, with Kenzo and a couple of guys from the OMB they had met in the White House men’s locker room, he had run around the Mall twice without saying anything at all, a thing of such rarity that Kenzo and Frank looked at each other, uneasy, even a little frightened.