Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

Randy had been busy. What he had not done was inform Cass of the full extent of his private deal making. She, destroyer of golf courses and assailer of gated communities, disturber of the Boomer peace, may have been “behind enemy lines” tonight, but Randy was among new friends.

Mitch Glint, ABBA’s executive director, stopped by to pay his respects. He extended a somewhat cool handshake to Cass, but a hearty one to Randy. They talked for a few minutes. As he left, he said, “We’ll talk more about those other things.”

“What ‘other things’?” Cass said when they were alone.

“Oh, nothing. Just been keeping the lines of communication open.”

“I thought I was your communications person.”

“And so you are, so you are. Fill you in later. Need to focus on my speech. Got to be on my toes now, or this crowd’ll have my guts for garters.”

She watched from backstage, through a partition in the curtains. Normally, Randy hardly limped at all. But when he was walking out onto a stage, he could make himself look like someone dragging out of the surf onto the beach after having his leg gnawed off by a shark.

That’s my boy, Cass thought.

Randy began, “When I was lying in the hospital bed after the explosion…”

She’d heard that before, many times.

“… thinking about the far greater sacrifices made by other Americans…”

Her mind wandered. She felt, sitting there in the shadows, like a political wife listening to the same speech for the four hundredth time. At least she wasn’t out there onstage where you had to force a smile. They must get the zygomaticus muscle equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome, the wives.

“… no time for partisanship…”

She thought of Terry.

“… not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue…”

Cass’s lips moved silently: …but an American issue. …

“… but an American issue.…”

She was texting on the BlackBerry when she became vaguely aware, as if some bat had suddenly appeared and was flitting about in the backstage darkness, that Randy was uttering words she did not at all remember reading in the text she had written for him.

“For our agenda is very much your agenda.”

What?

“Indeed, there are more things that join us than separate us.”

What was he talking about? ABBA was the principal lobby for the enemy, the most self-indulgent, self-centered population cohort in human history, with the possible exception of the twelve Caesars.

She looked up from her BlackBerry and stared at the spotlit figure onstage. His right arm was raised in a pantomime of a Greek statue, index finger pointed upward as if to imply some spiritual connectedness with, or sponsorship of, the heavens, or perhaps some passing American eagle, or, failing that, the auditorium roof.

“Ronald Reagan used to say that the nine scariest words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

An amused murmur rippled through the audience.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen…”

Where is this going? Cass thought, curiosity turning urgent. She was on her feet now, subconsciously looking about for a long hook.

“… I am from the government. Run-while you have the chance!”

The audience laughed. Cass relaxed slightly. Speechwriters are fundamentally Calvinist: They become nervous if their principals exhibit free will and depart from the prepared text.

“Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man. A courageous man. He took an assassin’s bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life. He survived and saw through his presidency. He outlived many of his adversaries and contemporaries. Survived-but for what? Only to come down with Alzheimer’s disease. To die a long, lingering, and inglorious death. Was this any way to go? I think the answer must be-no. No way. No way. At all.”

Cass snuck to the edge of the curtain to peer out at the audience. They were stone silent, eyes fixed on Randy. She couldn’t tell what they were collectively thinking, but they weren’t coughing or fidgeting or furtively BlackBerrying.

“My fellow Americans, we are all of us going to make the Great Transition. We can inject ourselves full of drugs, have doctors replace our organs, change our blood, become bionic Frankensteins. But we were born with expiration dates stamped on our DNA. We can fool some of the diseases some of the time, but we can’t fool all of them all of the time. We are all of us sooner or later going to cross the river and rest in the shade on the other side. And just as this generation has always contrived to get the very best from life, so too can it aspire to wring the best from death. My fellow Americans, as Country Joe and the Fish, balladeers of our youth, put it so memorably, albeit in a slightly different context, ‘Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!’ Indeed. So I put it to you: Why not do it the way we’ve lived our lives-on our terms? Why-I put it to you-not do it on our timetable? And finally, I put it to you, my fellow Americans-indeed, my fellow Boomers-if we are going to make the ultimate sacrifice, isn’t the least our government can do for us is show a little gratitude ?”

The audience applauded warmly when he finished. A few even stood. Mike Glint came out onstage to thank him and to tell the crowd that he had demonstrated that he was “someone we can work with.”

“Well?” Randy said when the two of them were in the car. Cass had been somewhat quiet. He had the exhausted but exhilarated air of a politician who has just heard the sound of a thousand hands clapping. “Was it good for you, too?”

“Yeah,” Cass said coolly. “I had multiple orgasms.”

“Well, what on earth is eating you? In case you didn’t notice, I just killed.”

“You’ve been doing deals.”

“Just a little back-channel dialoguing.”

“I knew you’d do it.”

“Don’t be a downer, darling. Come on-they ate it up. Veni, vidi, vici. Let’s go roast an ox, drink the best wine in Gaul.”

“Which of our fundamental principles did you trade away first? No, don’t tell me. Let me read about it in The Washington Post. ”

“Cassandra. We have to do business with these folks.”

“No, we don’t. God-you’re such a…”

“What?”

“Senator.”

“I didn’t realize,” Randy said archly, “that it was a term of opprobrium.”

Cass didn’t have to wait long. Three days later, ABBA announced that it would support Senator Jepperson’s Voluntary Transitioning proposal, and co-sponsor Senator Fundermunk of Oregon had disappeared into a northwest mist. “With the proviso,” as Mitch Glint said at his press conference, “that the final legislation reflects ABBA’s input.”

In Washington, “input” means “demands.” ABBA’s input consisted of several truckloads of Boomer pork. Cass read down the list with mounting despair: a Botox subsidy? Tax deductions for-Segways? Grandchild day care allowance? The blood throbbed in her temples. Then she came to the real eyebrow raiser: “Mr. Glint further said that Senator Jepperson had ‘indicated a willingness to raise the threshold age of Transitioning from 70 to 75.’ ”

He gave it all away, she thought. He gave away the entire store.

She angrily punched the speed-dial button on her cell phone. His emergency cell number, to be used only in the event of a nuclear strike or his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Randy answered in a whisper, indicating that he was on the Senate floor. The Senate, bowing to OmniTel, the powerful cell phone and PDA lobby, had relaxed the rules so that senators and congressmen were now permitted to use phones on the floor, even during speeches. They were still banned during the joint session for the president’s State of the Union address, but OmniTel’s lobbyists were working on it.