Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“Cass,” he said, “I don’t know where to begin.”

“Shit happens. Especially in the Balkans.”

“How’s your arm?”

“Itches.”

“The high point of my day is scratching my stump when I take off the prosthesis. As you get older, it’s the little things in life. Look, I’m…I…I was just trying to…”

“Drive across a minefield. It was an accident. We’re alive.”

“Well, I’m sorry . I’ll do anything I can.”

“I saw you on television. At the Capitol. Doves? ”

“Don’t tell anyone, but they’re actually pigeons. They dip them in Wite-Out. Cheaper. I have a new PR man. Genius at the photo op. Name’s Tucker. Now look here, I’m sending a plane for you. I want you to come down here. I want to talk to you.”

“Talk? What about?”

“Your future.”

“Do I have one?”

“Those idiots in the army. I told them it was all my fault. Want me to denounce them?”

“No. Leave it. But I could live without the media stuff about how we were having sex in the minefield.”

“That didn’t come from me.”

“Collateral damage, from your reputation.”

“Guilty as charged. All right, I feel guilty. I’m wealthy, and a congressman with political ambitions. You’re in a spectacular position to make me pay through the nose. And I want to.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I’m offering you a job. And money if you want it. Your mother hates me. She made that perfectly clear on the phone. Put in a good word for me, would you? Can’t stand it when the mothers hate me. Guess it goes back to childhood.”

Cass heard a humming over the phone.

Randy said, “She told me you’re clinically depressed and that you’re going to shoot someone. Please don’t. It would completely ruin my political career. Are you in much pain?”

“The physical kind or the kind where you spend week after week looking at the ceiling?”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m still in pain. I can’t get out of bed in the morning without a couple of Percocets. I sit in hearings and drool, like something out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My aides have to wipe off my chin so I won’t glisten on C-SPAN. I’ll probably end up at Betty Ford. I could always announce my Senate run from there. Lock up the rehab vote early.”

Do not laugh, she told herself. This man ruined your life.

“Cass?”

“What?”

“I’m sending a plane. Tomorrow. Will you come?”

“I don’t know. I’m a little agoraphobic right now.”

“I’ll share my Percocets with you. Fifty-fifty.”

“Fine.”

Congressman Randolph K. Jepperson’s office overlooked a not very impressive slice of Capitol Hill vista. There were the usual unimportant but large trophies, flags, maps, and awards from organizations no one had heard of and the obligatory photographs of him taken during reception line photo opportunities: the standard Washington wallpaper of self-importance. Cass looked for a photo of him with the troops of Camp November. Sure enough, there it was, front and center, signed, “Get well soon.” There was also a photo of him with the Central American ex-wife of the rock star, taken on a beach. He was smiling; she looked upset. Perhaps room service that morning hadn’t been quick enough. Looming behind Randy’s desk chair was a large oil portrait by Rembrandt Peale of the ancestor who’d signed “the Dec.”

He greeted her warmly. She sat. He slid a piece of paper across the desk toward her. A check, made out to “ Yale University ” in the amount of a year’s full tuition ($33,000). He said that he’d write a new one every fall. “But I want good report cards,” he said, smiling widely.

There it was, in her lap, a rectangle of light blue, her ticket to a bright future.

“Well?” he said. “No oohs or ahs?”

“I’m all out of those. Look, I can’t accept this,” Cass said.

“Why on earth not? It’s not going to bankrupt me, I assure you.”

“To be honest, it feels kinda like a bribe.”

Randy looked at her. “Why would I be bribing you? What secret am I trying to protect?”

She put the check on the desk. “I haven’t talked to the media. And I’m not going to talk to the media. So,” she said, nudging the check toward him, “you don’t need to do this.”

“What do you take me for, Cass? Aside from an upper-class imbecile?” He looked hurt.

“Someone who wants to be president?” she said.

Randy smiled. “Well, you have me there. Uch …” He rolled up his pant leg, pulled off his plastic limb, and scratched. “Itches. Itches like sin.”

“Try not to scratch.”

“Thank you, Nurse Ratched. The pills only make it worse when they wear off.”

He’d lost weight. The doctors had him drinking eight-hundred-calorie chocolate milkshakes four times a day. His face was still red in places from bits of Humvee shrapnel. He looked like-someone who’d been blown up.

“I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t take your money,” Cass said. “But I will take a job.”

He looked up from his scratching. “Don’t you want to go to college? Rub it in Dad’s face?”

“I don’t care about him.”

“Wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

She glanced around the wood-paneled office, at the bookshelves. “This looks enough like college. Pay me thirty-three thousand in salary.”

“You’ll have to work your way up, you know.…?What’s so damn funny?” he said, scratching furiously.

“You telling me I’ll have to work my way up. Excuse me, but it’s just totally hilarious.”

“Yes,” Congressman Randy said, scratching, “I suppose it is.”

So several weeks later, Cass arrived in Washington, D.C., to start a new life with a new name: Cassandra Devine. When she went before the judge in Connecticut, she told him about her parents’ divorce and about the episode in Bosnia and said that she just needed to “reboot my hard drive.” He was sympathetic and granted the name change.

Once installed on Capitol Hill, she began where many a brilliant Washington career has been launched-answering constituent mail: “My Social Security check didn’t come…We need a stoplight…The highway people say they can put the new interstate ramp through my pig farm. Raising pigs is hard enough without the federal government sticking its nose in.…?I be writting with regards to my cusin who been in prison for allejedelly runing over the game wardin in his pickup.…?Don’t you see the Jews are taking over the country, and you’re just going to let that happen?…I am asking your support for a projected 500 megavolt wind farm in the Connecitcut River Valley.…?I read where they are thinking of closing the submarine base in Groton. Why can’t we put it here? The water is plenty deep enough.…” The warp and woof of American representative democracy. About twenty-five pounds of it, every day, in sacks, dumped on Cass’s desk.

Cass’s supervisor was a fifty-something woman named Lillian with lips that never unpursed. Her response to any levity was, “I don’t see what’s funny about that,” which had earned her the office nickname “Giggles.” She required that every letter from a constituent, no matter how unhinged or idiotic, be answered within three days, ensuring that Cass’s workday never ended until after eight o’clock. When Randy formally announced his Senate campaign, the volume of mail increased by two sacks, to fifty pounds per day. Cass now rarely got home until ten-thirty. At least it solved the problem of what to do about a social life. She had just enough energy left to microwave a Lean Cuisine bean burrito and read three pages of Ayn Rand before falling asleep.