Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

“The president and I were just talking about you. He asked me to give you a call, in fact.…”

Randy’s speech on the floor of the Senate had the predictable effect: It got him on the nation’s front pages and the evening news. The Times denounced him in unusually harsh personal terms. (“It appears that the junior senator from Massachusetts may have left more than one body part in the muddy fields of Bosnia.”)

But it also got him invited on the late-night shows, which, studies now showed, provided over 80 percent of the nation’s youth with 100 percent of their political information. The idea of aging, self-indulgent Boomers killing themselves rather than becoming an oppressive financial burden to their children and the nation was not anathema to these young viewers. In fact, to them it sounded like a darn good idea. They especially liked the part where the government would eliminate all death taxes so Mom and Dad’s money could flow straight to them.

Cass accompanied Randy to New York City for the Letterman and Jon Stewart and Colbert shows and to Los Angeles for the Jay Leno show. Randy might excite vituperation in older, more serious-minded TV hosts, but to them, he was a million-dollar gift certificate, proof of the existence of a bemused, smiling God. They loved him.

Letterman asked, “Aren’t you the one committing suicide here?”

Randy replied, “Maybe. But if I can convince a majority of the U.S. Senate to commit suicide along with me, this country would be a whole lot better off.” They loved everything about Randy: his funny accent, his wealth, the fact that his colleagues hated him, his screwball idea, even his fake leg, which he obligingly removed on the Jon Stewart program. “This is where I hide the tequila,” he said. Cass, looking on from the greenroom, smiled at the precision and deftness with which Randy was rendering the lines she had written for him. As media training went, this was as good as it got. She’d come a very long way from teaching disgraced hospital owners how to spin. Her CASSANDRA blog was getting so much traffic that she had had to hire a staff of five just to keep it fresh. A woman from IBM-the head of its entire corporate communications department-had called to say she wanted to have lunch with Cass at someplace in Manhattan named Michael’s to explore “possible strategic synergies.”

Within a week of Randy’s TV blitz, the media was treating Voluntary Transitioning, if not with respect, with less reflexive derision. Adjectives such as “outrageous” and “despicable” and “unthinkable” that had been initially Velcroed to the phrase were now replaced by “bold” and “revolutionary” and “dire yet deserving of discussion.”

An editorial in The Washington Post made the paradigm shift official: “Whatever else Senator Jepperson is up to, we’re beginning to suspect that his real intention all along was to force the issue of Social Security to the forefront of a Congress that has been in continual denial, even amid crisis and collapse, and that much, Mr. Jepperson has emphatically accomplished.”

One night in New York during their media tour, Randy summoned Cass to his hotel room, ostensibly to go over the next day’s schedule. It was late, and she very well could have begged off, but she went. When she walked in, the lights were turned down low, Patsy Cline was singing “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray” over Randy’s iPod speaker, and she saw the neck of a bottle of Dom Pйrignon protruding from a frosted ice bucket in a way that seemed, well, suggestive.

There was Randy, sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing an expensive silk kimono.

“You wouldn’t make a one-legged man chase you round the room, would you?” He smiled.

Cass had known something like this was going to happen. There had been a few signals. A few dinners, just the two of them, legs-his good one, that is-accidentally grazing against hers under the table. Her feelings for this peculiar man were complicated. But he made her laugh, and he was not dull. And he wasn’t bad-looking. And he was rich. And not married. And evidently running for president.

A few days ago, she’d said to him, “Why do you want to be president?” He’d told her about the day of his acid epiphany in the lobby of the JFK Library.

“You want to be president because of an acid trip you took?” she’d said.

“It’s not such a bad reason, really. Have you ever taken acid?”

“No,” Cass said. “My life is enough like an acid trip as it is. When you do announce, let’s leave out this epiphany, shall we?”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure the country is ready for a candidate who says he wants to be president because he swallowed a triple dose of LSD while staring at a photograph of John F. Kennedy. But I could be wrong.”

“I think the country would welcome it.”

“Well, we could find out. If you’re wrong, at least it will be over quickly. Like by noon the first day.”

Randy considered. “You could be right. And that’s a pity. I think there’s a hunger out there for the truth. That’s why I think we’ve come so far with this nutty idea of yours. It’s so fresh .”

“You do this pronoun shift. You may not even be aware of it. If it’s a ‘bold idea,’ it’s ‘ours.’ If it’s a ‘nutty idea,’ it’s ‘yours.’”

“Grammar Nazi. Would it be enough to say I want to be president to…”

“I’m listening.”

Randy said, “I was about to say, ‘To give something back,’ but it sounds so pathetic. What it really boils down to is, I’d like to be in charge for just five minutes. Balance the books. Get us out of debt. Be nice to our friends, tell our enemies to fuck off. Clean up the air and water. Throw corporate crooks in the clink. Put the dignity back in government. Fix things. What else…? Can’t have Arabs blowing up our buildings, certainly, but I now know that we don’t need to be sending armies everywhere. Among other things, it’s expensive .…”

“I’m sorry, were you talking? I went to sleep after ‘balance the books.’”

“It’s not that bad. What do you want me to say? ‘Bind up the nation’s wounds, with charity toward all and malice toward none’?”

“I think we need to work on it.”

“ Evidament. ” Randy sighed.

“No French.”

“Quite right. Muchas gracias . Qu й bonita es este burrito .”

Now here they were in a hotel suite that was decorated for sex. She’d finally run out of reasons not to go to bed with him. She looked at him sitting on the bed and said, “It’s been a long day. I don’t think I have the energy to run.”

“Glad to hear it. Why don’t you walk that bottle of Dom Pйrignon over here. Damn thing cost three hundred and fifteen bucks in room service. Reckon we might as well drink it.”

Cass brought it over and sat on the bed. “That may be the only time in history the words reckon and Dom P й rignon have been used in a single sentence.”

“I’m just a simple boy from Boston,” Randy said, twisting off the cork with the expertise of a three-star sommelier. “You remember that beer we drank in Bosnia? Right before I got us blown up?”

“The beer you drank. I was on duty.”

“It wasn’t that bad, really. But this will be better. Certainly ought to be, at these prices.”

“Do rich people also complain about prices?”

“Always. It’s how they got rich.”

He poured the Champagne into their glasses. The tiny bubbles tickled on the way down.

He put his chin on her shoulder. “Want to watch a dirty movie on the television?”