Ana Simo - Heartland

Rafael told me his story in the one hour of grace I consented to give him. He promised to leave when he was done if I still wanted him to. I assured him it was unlikely I would change my mind. He finished at 3:15 p.m. McCabe must have landed two hours and fifteen minutes earlier at the state capital. She might already be in the car that would bring her here. Rafael put on the borrowed winter clothes and took his belongings to the blue sedan. I did not follow him. I was already traveling with McCabe inside a black limo moving through the snowy flatlands. The snow was bone-yellow at this hour. When Rafael came back to say goodbye, I asked him to stay.

I will not repeat here the many twists and turns of his story, its tortuous illogic, logistics, and soap-opera betrayals. I did not follow half of them. Many of the characters, and there were dozens of them, I had never heard of; I cared for none. Nor did I know the meaning of most of the government agency acronyms involved, although at the end of his account each had become a living character, with its own morality, face, smell, and body mass. My physical and political topography of the nation’s capital and ruling elite is willfully inadequate. Growing up in Shangri-La, I never paid them much attention. None of us did. Then, I erased them entirely from my mind when the grotesque venality and hypocrisy that have been both the strong and the weak points of my parents’ adoptive country thoroughly tipped in the direction of the latter. That was in 1984, the year the Great Hunger erupted, killing or displacing half of the country’s population, and emptying the heartland; the year the Caliphate opportunistically gobbled up Anatolia, cutting off Constantinople from Asia. Two utterly avoidable cataclysms provoked by our rulers. In 2008, the year Rafael entered government, I was happy to see his picture in the paper behind the President-elect. I would have been equally happy if he had been made capo. There is only one measure of success. Six years later he was in a maid’s room telling me how the other side suffers.

“Allow me to recall Rafael’s swift ascent to power,” Rafael said. Even if the official media had rehashed it ad nauseam, “our memories are short.” He relished telling his story, in spite of the melancholic third person. Eight years ago, when the Caliphate first started digging anti-nuclear bunkers on either side of the Bosphorus near besieged Constantinople, Rafael, then an obscure adjunct at MIT, published an essay in Foreign Affairs provocatively entitled “The New American Racialism.” In it he proposed a simple and elegantly final solution to the Caliphate menace: mix and ultimately replace the genetic stock of the border populations threatened by the Caliphate—and in time, that of the Caliphs themselves—with the DNA of America’s black, yellow, and Hispanic peoples, with its unmatched genius for sociocultural malleability. NAR’s race-based Wilsonian idealism would succeed where centuries of mutual mass slaughter had failed.

The essay caught the eye of the presidential front-runner, who asked to meet the author. They hit it off. Rafael took a leave of absence from his university to devote himself to the task of sharpening the candidate’s capacious, if mediocre mind. When she was inaugurated, in 2008, he was rewarded with the number-one position at the National Security Council. When she was re-elected by a landslide three years ago, the President asked Rafael to remain in his post. He hated the limelight as much as the President loved it, was unconditionally loyal to her, and carried out the NAR revolution with the ruthlessness often found in shy, selfless people.

At first, most of the action had been internecine. As DNA harvesting centers went up in suburban ghettos and refugee and resettlement camps, drawing enthusiastic and patriotic crowds, the White House, hiding behind the National Security Advisor, purged enemies and doubters from government and military-industrial bureaucracies, among them the remaining, ossified neocons, liberal multiculturalists, White Canon lovers, Bible literalists, and assorted fellow travelers. The battle had been won last summer. NAR was then projected worldwide. It had been glowingly received abroad, not only in the proud ancestral homes of America’s spics, niggers, and chinks—all of whom dreamt of their own genetic Trojan Horse empire spreading after America fell, as it inevitably would one day soon—but also in Europe intramuros (except France). All praised its enlightened realism, its preference for humane intervention instead of force, and the entente of races and civilizations it promised.

Rafael’s nails were still bitten to the flesh. The Patek Philippe watch and the J. M. Weston shoes were new developments. A lighter line on his finger betrayed an absent wedding ring. “They’re going to drown them,” he said, hiding his watch inside the cable-knit sweater’s sleeves. “They’re going to drag them out of their beds after midnight tonight, once it’s not Christmas anymore. Then they’re going to shove them in a container and dump it off the coast of Delaware. Near international waters, but on our side, so they can keep away nosy people. Not that anyone will know what’s in there.” His eyes got watery. “They,” he explained, were the President’s loyalists; “them,” soon to be at the bottom of the Atlantic, were the leaders and intellectual instigators of a failed coup, “a rabble of white evangelical Air Force majors, Negro notables, white supremacists, embittered neo-cons, and Aztlán fundamentalists,” Rafael spat. The coup had been attempted yesterday, on Christmas Eve, and had lasted seven and a half hours. The White House had been the sole target. Officially, it had never happened. Few inhabitants of Washington, D.C. had heard or seen anything, given the one-mile restricted zone around the White House. And those who had would never talk. Neither the media nor history books would record it. The President had managed to escape unharmed and was now safe in a bunker somewhere along the Mexican border. Rafael had survived by locking himself in an East Wing broom closet until the loyalists regained control. He had seen hundreds of dead, both assailants and defenders.

“So your side won,” I said brightly, standing up, ready to show him the door. He looked past me, his head mournfully bobbing up and down. “She wouldn’t listen to me,” he said. “I tried to reason. Then I pleaded. I begged her.” He stood up and flapped his arms as if about to take flight. “A container! In the Atlantic!” He sat again on the edge of the bed and began to pull the sweater sleeves over his big hands. “And you know what?” he said. I shook my head. “She’s right.” The star pupil had outgrown the teacher.

I was relieved by his tone of resignation and was about to say something cowardly, like “You did what you could,” or “Maybe you could take some time off from your job,” when he rasped, “I think she’s gonna pull a Vince Foster on me.” That is why he had fled his office in a panic after hanging up on the President’s secure line, first on a stolen motorbike to a refugee camp far beyond the restricted zone, then several miles on foot to a derelict garage in a suburban Salvadoran slum where out of sentimentality he had kept his old used car, still registered to the original owner and bearing its original Maine plates. He had driven directly here “because I know you won’t rat on me.” He refused to say how he had found me: “The less you know, the safer you’ll be,” was his noble answer. I almost socked him in the nose, but his glasses steamed up. “They’ll get me in the end, you know.” He wanted me to drive back to New York immediately, so he could wait for them, alone. He wanted me to tell his wife and kids that he had not killed himself. “Suicide is contagious. I don’t want to put that curse on them, and their children, and their children’s children.”