David Zeman - The Pinocchio Syndrome

By nine o’clock that night, most of the physicians and interns on duty had had a look at the patient, and none could offer a constructive thought.

The nurses were told to keep a close watch on him, and he was put to bed for the night.

In all this time Wayne Kennedy, a fifteen-year veteran of the postal service with a large family of his own, had not uttered a single sound.

Alexandria, Virginia

November 16

7 A.M.

Karen Embry was dreaming.

The fringes of a troubled sleep procured by nearly half a bottle of bourbon made her dream intense and disturbing.

She was applying for a job in a very tall building. The elevator thrust her upward with such force that the wind was knocked out of her. She thought she was going to wet her pants.

The personnel director greeted her when the elevator opened. Looking down at herself, she noticed with a shock that she had nothing on below the waist. Just the suit jacket and foulard she had worn for the job application, the large purse and the red leather shoes.

She opened the purse, which seemed inordinately huge, to search for the missing skirt and underwear. The purse was completely empty.

I’ve got to get to the ladies’ room. She saw the door marked ‘Ladies’ and went through it. The personnel director smiled indulgently, as though to say, ‘Yes, go ahead, I’ll wait for you.’ But at the last second he darted into the ladies’ room behind her.

There was something magical about that entry, for when they got inside he was no longer a man, he was a little girl. Karen looked at herself in the mirror and saw that she, too, had regressed through time and was small again, as she had been back home in Boston. She was still naked below the waist. So was the other girl.

‘Let’s touch each other,’ the girl said. Karen thought she recognized her as a childhood friend, Elise perhaps. The girls stretched out their hands to fondle each other.

A tremor shook the building. It’s an earthquake. The building tilted suddenly to one side. The doors to the toilet stalls swung open with a bang.

Karen tried to escape, but the little girl had hold of both her hands. The building was falling over with an enormous roar. Karen was tumbling through space, about to be buried by tons of concrete and steel.

Help! Help me!

With a scream in her throat, Karen woke up.

The alarm was ringing. She reached sleepily to turn it off, realizing with a smile that the roar of the crumbling building in her nightmare had actually been the buzz of the alarm clock.

The headache hit just as she was fumbling for the button. The empty glass beside the bed reminded her of how much bourbon it had taken to leave her in this shape. A throb in her bladder told her she had to pee. No wonder the dream had been about a bathroom, she thought.

With a groan she got out of the bed and stood up.

‘Jesus,’ she said. The headache was much worse. She staggered to the bathroom, flung open the medicine cabinet, and found the Advil bottle. She shook three of the brown tablets into her trembling hand and filled the dirty water glass from the tap. She moved to the kitchen. Mercifully, the coffeemaker was full and ready to perk. She had remembered last night, despite the booze, to fill it.

She turned the machine on and padded back to the bedroom. The churning sound of the coffeemaker was like a fist squeezing repeatedly at her throat.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she moaned. ‘Hurry.’

It took seven long minutes for the coffee to perk. The Advil still had not taken effect when she brought her first cup back to the bed. With her eyes half closed she turned on the little bedroom TV.

Washington Today , one of the most-watched political talk shows, was on. Dan Everhardt, the vice president, was being assailed by two right-wing senators who challenged him to defend the administration’s policy on terrorism.

‘Just tell me how you can defend a policy that simply doesn’t work,’ one of them demanded.

‘The fact is that our policy on terrorism does work,’ Everhardt said. ‘In cooperation with other governments around the world we have prevented countless terrorist attacks over the years.’

‘Not as many as you could have prevented.’

‘That’s not quite fair.’

‘Not the World Trade. Not the Crescent Queen. ’

Karen smiled. Dan Everhardt was not a good debater. A quiet family man, a former defensive lineman at Rutgers, he projected honesty and integrity rather than glib eloquence. The president had chosen him as his running mate for precisely that reason.

Everhardt was very popular. He stood six feet five inches tall and was, in his ruddy way, quite handsome. Unfortunately, his slowness on the uptake was hurting him in this debate against two strident pro-Goss spokesmen.

‘Those were terrible tragedies,’ he said. ‘But we learned valuable lessons from them. I —’

‘Not the lessons we needed to learn,’ said one of the senators. ‘The World Trade should have taught us to destroy these fanatics before they attack us. The Crescent Queen tragedy took place precisely because we had not learned that lesson. Nine hundred innocent people slaughtered, most of them children. And we still don’t know who is responsible. We sit here like sheep waiting for the slaughter. The next hydrogen bomb could land on New York or Washington. Don’t you people in the White House have any conception of what we’re up against?’

Unfortunately for the vice president, the show’s director took this opportunity to cut to an image of the mushroom cloud rising above the blue Mediterranean where the Crescent Queen had been.

Even more unfortunately, the moderator now interrupted the proceedings to bring in Colin Goss himself, via split screen from his corporate headquarters in Atlanta.

‘Mr Goss, can you bring some perspective to the debate going on here?’

‘Well, I hope I can.’ Goss leaned forward, his sharp gray eyes fixed on the camera. ‘I honor my distinguished colleagues, and I think they speak out of a sincere regard for our nation at this perilous time. However, I don’t agree with Vice President Everhardt’s logic. I don’t think our policy on terrorism works. Let me put the analogy to the vice president in a different way. Suppose a farmer has a sheep ranch, and wolves are breaking through his fences and killing his sheep. He has consulted the best experts about the fences, and has learned that no fence can be built that will completely protect his sheep. He now has two choices. He can either close down his ranch, sell his sheep, and give up – or he can shoot the wolves that are killing his sheep.’

He joined his hands in a gesture of resolve. ‘The American people seem to feel, as I do, that it is time to fight back against the mad dogs who are massacring our children.’

Karen smiled. Time to fight back. That was one of Goss’s favorite campaign slogans. Mad dogs was his code word for terrorists. ‘You can’t negotiate with a mad dog,’ he liked to say.

Goss had leaned back, but his eyes still seemed to glare into the camera. Those eyes had made him a national figure, for they expressed a powerful will and great intelligence. But some observers said they were also the reason he had lost the three presidential elections in which he had run. There was something dangerous in Goss’s look. Some saw it as strength, others as ruthlessness. He had the look of a leader, but perhaps of a bad man.

Dan Everhardt was caught off guard by Goss’s analogy.

‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘we have fought back. We fought back with great success in Afghanistan …’