Mark Doten - The Infernal

I thought that by looking into your face and feeling your hand in mine, I’d be able to gauge your reaction. But now that I’ve said it, I realize I can’t — that you’re giving me no reaction to gauge.

Perhaps the Ray-Bans are due for another nod. They don’t know me, after all — if they knew me, they’d have let me keep the Rodem Universal. Now, can you do me one more favor? Just to keep things moving, so we don’t spin the tires when it’s the monkey wrench we have to contend with? Can we pretend for a second that you did make the offer? That you said, Tell you what, when I get back to the office, let’s have a look at the big board, see where we might have an opening —something like that?

OK?

OK.

Ha ha!

Thank you, it’s an honor, truly — but I cannot accept. The fact is, by means of the dozens of best-selling international crime series that I’ve published, I am every bit the ambassador that Gips and Roos are — and then some.

I am an ambassador for the whole world, to America, just as you are an ambassador for America, to the whole world.

What a team we are — and look at us here shaking!

I do not want an ambassadorship, I want so MZ#BLOP0X1 6V

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What I want is something else altogether — something I just had the plan for this morning.

Soon the Ray-Bans will take you up and ou0LRV6 °C9 573FYKHSSCS0CG

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ou’ll give your speech — and you’ll have to offer some kind of response to the Swedes.

So we have to move quickly, but at the same time we can’t rush — this is the kind of conversation you simply cannot rush.

Just look at those storks!

They don’t know our hearts.

They surrendered their plates to the caterers without a word — almost, it seemed, behind their own backs — and now they stand in those hunched clusters of four or five, and they swivel their heads slowly our way, and their grins just grow tighter and tighter.

Our two hearts are something they can’t see — no one can see into another’s heart. Sometimes when I was shaking with Daddy, I could feel in our hands our two hearts beating.

But Daddy shook much harder than you.

Would it be too much to ask you to look into my heart and measure my words against what you see?

Yes, it would be too much.

Because you can’t see my heart.

You can see my face, the terrible damage that’s been done to it, and you can see this nursing home reject I’m sitting in, but you cannot see my heart.

No one can see into anyone else’s heart.

It seems to me these days we as a species — or as a species in a country — see very little of each other. And I think of how careful we have to be with each and every word. Skip Gates, case in point. You blurted somethinNL2S’X?SGW’#/

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said a few words and then you saw these things you’d said — perfectly ordinary things, that all of a sudden seemed so terrible. You left them orphaned. You left them at the mercy of the elements. Your left your own words to be abused, misunderstood, brushed away, despised.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. The good professor Skip Gates, an encounter with a police officer. Stupid , you said. You called a cop that — a man you’d never met and didn’t know the first thing about, as the talking heads wasted no time in tsk-tsking.

Later, it’s beers in the Rose Garden: too late. The wind has changed. What they’re allowed to say about you, how loudly and directly they can put forward certain notions — that’s different now.

The next week a man shows up for a speech of yours with an assault rifle, open carry.

And again the week after, another man.

They get them on TV, they start saying things like The Tree of Liberty. Like The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants.

One of the talking heads puts it to them, what about our history of political violence? How can you say that in a country like this? Don’t you know we live in a country with a terrible history of political violence?

And they don’t answer.

They don’t have to.

They know — we all know — what kind of country we live in.

Here in the city, or in Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Trenton — drivable places — whenever you had one near enough, I had to show up with my little bundles of checks. I’d joystick into the lobby in my Rodem Universal, personal checks from folks all over the country in ha6Q KA-AY #8 0 1W1X1O7W

Totals of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars from these good people I’d never met; that I was about to hand this bundle over to you, or rathe3CDKQT4G# MOF R /TF BH

this seemed miraculous to me. And each time I’d think, today is going to be the day.

One of yours would be standing at my side. After ten or twenty minutes had passed in silence, a certain mutual solicitude between us — your people had become us C B NTA/ PM7L,I M

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had become used to my ways — I would hand over my little bundle, and joystick off.

No, this was not to be the day after all.

I wonder: Did they think I was some kind of rube?

One of the boys from publicity would be waiting at the vehicle. He’d work the lift and lock me in place and we’d be off.

This morning is the first one I’ve come out since the election. I let myself pretend it was about Gips and Roos — that I was upset — I felt I should be upset. I showed up, and realized immediately it had been a terrible mistake — after all, there were no checks this time. I hadn’t reckoned on how it would be to park there in the lobby without checks. Let me tell you about a passage in the most recent book in the Vietnam series. There’s a description of an expat British drug addict who opens a promising acquaintance’s medicine cabinet to see a worn, discolored toothbrush and nothing more: he feels a raging fatigue that scraped him to the bone.

That raging fatigue was one I rewrote during the editorial process, but now I wonder if that was a mistake — what were they, these feelings in my body, if not a raging fatigue? I actually moaned in pain. Moaned and moaned again, and I had to put a stop to it — I couldn’t be seen moaning in pain, not the man who runs a Big Six New York City publisher. Imagine the trade publications, the industry blogs. If I was to be seen in one of my very rare public appearances, carrying on like that, with moans of pain. I wanted to shut up! To simply be silent! But I couldn’t be silent — yet I couldn’t be seen moaning, so I did the only thing I could, I opened my mouth and started to speak — and what I spoke of started with Reagan. Because it was after they shot him outside the Washington Hilton that I was last moaning in pain like this.

Why can’t he be a little more like Reagan? I asked.

Take the public option.

See, what Reagan would have done is he would have waltzed right in with the public option on his arm and bowed to the right, bowed to the left, and done a little do-si-do with the public option, if you get the picture — and pretty soon everyone down in D.C. would have been in on the fun, they’d have all been dancing the night away with the public option, and I mean really cutting a rug.

I said, Don’t look away. If you want to re #WQ5E0

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