Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

In any event, the goal was that the work I did on Bylina’s campaign would be enough to propel me into a job in his administration, if he won. I wanted to assist with creating policy, develop some connections, move into the private sector for a while and then run for Congress in about ten years—once I had some money and was old enough to be credible. In the meantime, in between working my crappy bursar’s-office job and hanging out with Jill, I was spending every spare minute at Bylina’s office, helping out with fundraising.

The main challenge to my policy of making as few enemies as possible was Drew Fielder, this pasty-looking peckerhead who lived on my floor in the dorms and who volunteered with me on Bylina’s campaign. The guy had a gut, and acne on his neck. Twenty-two years old and already he had a gut, and yet his favorite thing was to give everybody else, and me in particular, shit about how we looked. This coming from a guy who liked to dress up for The Rocky Horror Picture Show with a whole group of people, including my buddy Stan who was otherwise normal, and prance around the Student Union in drag. He wasn’t a good-looking guy and he sure as hell was even uglier as a woman.

“It’s The Most Handsome Bastard in the World,” he always announced when I entered the room. This was a joke Stan had started. Fielder knew it because back when we were roommates, Stan liked to shout it down the hall when he saw me walking back from the bathroom in a towel. But it was funny when Stan said it. Fielder just shouted it at random, and it was annoying as all hell. He was also fond of constantly asking if I’d just gotten back from vacation, which was his way of mocking me for tanning. Try to suggest to him that a little vitamin D might clear up some of that acne, though, and he’d pout for hours. But around Bylina he brought out his pro game, using the energy he had saved by acting like a dick to everybody else. I’d worked on political campaigns since my senior year of high school, and never had I seen an ass-kissing sycophant on the level of Fielder. The ridiculous part was that he wasn’t even a Republican. He was registered as a Democrat. It was killing me, wondering if the staffers closest to Bylina already knew and just didn’t care at that point, or if they had no idea. Nobody wants to be the snitch, but God, did I ever hate that guy.

Normally I was glad to be in the office—model volunteer, always—but on the day Elias came home I was counting down the hours from the minute I got there. Fielder was in, too, but everybody knew my brother was coming back from the war, and for once he kept his mouth shut so as not to sound like a jackass. At three o’clock sharp I left to pick up Jill and rush over to the airport, then as soon as we got Elias settled in I took Jill back to her dorm and he and I went out to get cheesesteaks. That was his singular focus: it was as if he’d spent three years in the Middle East mainly missing that specific food product. Other than the cheesesteak talk, he was pretty quiet. Unnaturally quiet. Elias was one who, in his ordinary life, would talk until your ears fell off. You had to get him started first, but if you said to him, say, “Elias, tell us again about that time in high school when you tripped and fell on your face on the track while the cheerleaders were practicing,” he’d stretch out the story to twenty or thirty minutes even if he knew you’d already heard it a dozen times. But today he couldn’t be provoked by that kind of stuff. He just wanted the cheesesteak.

So I filled the silence by talking about myself instead. After dinner I told him there was a place I wanted to show him. I drove west on the parkway until the hospital appeared above the trees. Took that exit, then the one onto a road that seemed to go nowhere, then an access road. With every turn we climbed higher up the hill. At the top was this gigantic blue water tower shaped like an upside-down teardrop. The sun was setting and the clouds were blazing pink, like radioactive cotton candy or a scene from Fantasia. Under the tower was a parking lot made out of rough construction sand, no painted lines. Nobody ever parked there except maintenance workers, but damn, was there ever a view. I got out, and Elias slammed his door at the same time I did.

We walked to the crest of the hill, that blue bulb looming above our heads. Electrical cables looped up and then down the hill, past some sort of concrete-block structure surrounded by razor wire, an electrical substation probably. But past that, way down in the distance where the land was low, there was D.C. Staggered roofs, a thousand lights— ten thousand—glowing like fireflies, double headlights cutting through the dusk. The memorials, white marble all lit up, made a compass rose: the Lincoln Memorial a cube, the one for Jefferson curved like a lens and farthest away, the needle of the Washington Monument pointing at the sky.

“God damn, ” said Elias. “Terrorists’ wet dream, this little crow’s nest here. Can’t believe they don’t have it secured.”

“Nothing you can do from here.”

“You can look.” Elias took a few steps closer, then stopped and crossed his arms. A siren blazed down the parkway; the sound, from where we stood, was lonesome.

“That’s my city,” I told him. “Someday, man, that’s gonna be my fuckin’ chessboard. Not a room I can’t get into or a rope I can’t get past.”

“You planning on getting elected king?”

I laughed. “No, I’m gonna be like Ted Kennedy. Not right away. Not even real soon. But eventually, over time.” I pointed toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s where I proposed to Jill.”

Elias nodded. He slid a box of cigarettes from his pocket and clenched one at the side of his mouth, then asked, “You want one?”

I hesitated. Sophomore year I’d worked late nights on a contentious campaign for state delegate. That season, I’d picked up the habit from the other staffers. I told myself I’d quit as soon as the election was over, and I did. But goddamn—was it ever a murderous struggle. I didn’t have the money to support the addiction—that was the bottom line. Otherwise I would have kept it up forever. It gives you something mindless to do when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen, and there’s a lot of that in politics. It helps you focus and relax at the same time. In no time flat I had gone from being a nonsmoker to the guy who rolled out of bed and lit up before he peed. I’d stayed away from the stuff ever since I quit, because it was so hard the first time I figured I couldn’t quit twice. But this was Elias. That’s the other thing smoking does—it helps people bond.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

He handed me a Marlboro and his lighter. As soon as I lit up, the pleasure of it was visceral. Tasting the smoke in my mouth was like sex after months of jacking off. Sex with the wrong person. Right away I knew this had been a bad idea.

Elias exhaled through his nose like an angry bull. “Mind if we sit down?”

We sat on the bristly grass on the curve that overlooked the city. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. I asked, “So how was Afghanistan?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“’Course I do. Not like you ever wrote.”

He shrugged. “It sucks. It’s hot. Sand shits up everything you brought with you inside of a month. And the people. It’s still the Stone Age over there. Trying to fix anything’s like pissing in the wind.”

“So what do you think about how the president’s allocating troops? Do you think he should have gone with Congress’s recommendation instead?”

Elias gave a slow shake of his head. “Man, politics is your bag, not mine. I don’t give two shits.”

“How can you not care? It was your job. ”