Deja Who (Insighter #1)(36)

TWENTY-THREE


Catherine Carey was the first woman elected mayor of Boston, and when the votes were tallied you could hear the sighs of relief all over the city. The incumbent had to go.

Mayor Carey ran as an independent and soundly kicked ass for several reasons. She was beautiful (yes, what diff, except in politics it helps if you’re hot, it helps a lot), a local (born in Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the former Danvers State Insane Asylum), intelligent (MBA from Harvard Business School, which proved nothing, but an IQ of 146, which did), charismatic (Miss Danvers, 1993; Miss Teen Massachusetts, 1994), and compassionate (she ran her first blood drive at age fourteen; she mailed her lemonade stand money to starving children in Africa).

Also, her Republican opponent, the incumbent, had just been indicted for taking a bribe to push through the Big Dig II Program (“Now Bigger and Diggier!”), and her Democratic opponent burst into tears during their televised debate (“But I don’t know how we’re going to fix the tax situation! Stop picking on me!”).

(It later came to light that the man had stopped taking his antidepressants several weeks earlier, which earned him a compassionate scolding from Mayor-Elect Carey.)

As expected, Mayor Carey wasted no time rolling up her figurative sleeves (and occasionally her literal sleeves) and jumping in with both feet (also literally as well as figuratively). In her first year of office she decreased government spending by eight percent (hey, you try it), coaxed two local zillionaires to fund the renovation for several local athletic fields, and wasn’t a racist.

The last one proved to be her political ruin. While going over the city’s proposed cuts to the Boston Public Library budget, Mayor Carey objected strongly, probably because “cuts” really meant “demolition.”

“I don’t care about Kindles or Nooks or Wikipedia or downloads. We will always need a library. Boston’s citizens will always need a place to find a planet’s worth of information for free. Rich, poor, other, they’ll always need a place that’s warm in winter and cool in summer and full of books and computers and maps and magazines and government forms and reading nooks. It is every citizen’s birthright and we are not tearing it down because the Internet exists. Bad enough you want to be so niggardly with the budget.”

Of course: uproar. The mayor assumed it was because she was digging in her heels on the budget.

It wasn’t.

“But niggardly isn’t a racial slur.”


RACIST MAYOR REFUSES TO APOLOGIZE

“But that isn’t what niggardly means.”


MAYOR DENIES BEING DISGUSTING BIGOT

“It means ‘stingy’ or ‘miserly.’ It’s from an Old Norse word: ‘Nigla.’ It means to make a big deal out of a small thing. Kind of like what’s happening right now.”


RACIST MAYOR THINKS BIGOTED REMARKS “NO BIG DEAL”

“For God’s sake.”


RACIST MAYOR TRIES TO COMBINE CHURCH AND STATE

“Fine. I apologize if my correct use of an adjective that isn’t a racial slur offends anyone who can’t take five seconds to look it up in Merriam-Webster. Hey, you know where you can do that? The fucking public library!”


MAYOR MAKES AMENDS FOR RACIST REMARKS; PLEDGES TO KEEP LIBRARY OPEN

“Really? That did the trick? You know, the journalists really got us off track with this one. The Boston Globe is basically a black hole from which no scandal, however silly, can escape.”


RACIST MAYOR CITES BOSTON GLOBE AS BLACK HOLE; THINKS BIGOTED REMARKS SILLY

“Oh, come on! I didn’t mean that I think the Globe is solely staffed by African-Americans! A black hole has nothing to do with race!”


RACIST MAYOR DENIES BEING A RACIST AGAIN

“It’s a region of space-time that nothing escapes! It’s called black because it sucks up everything, even light, and doesn’t have one thing to do with race or creed or color. Which you can also find out if you use the fucking public library!”


RACIST MAYOR CLAIMS BLACKS SUCK

“That’s it. I quit.”


RACIST MAYOR RESIGNS



And that is how the former mayor of Boston came to live part-time in a small Chicago public park.





TWENTY-FOUR


“Hmm. Okay. It’s probably not gonna be Cat.”

“She’s not even poor,” Leah giggled. Somehow they’d ended up prone on the couch, Archer on his back, Leah on his front. This had stemmed in mid-story from her demand to examine his stab wounds, and had progressed to kissing and, of course, the finale of the Tale of Cat.

“No? Really?”

“Boston, right? Most of her family can trace their roots back to Plymouth Rock and she’s got a six-figure trust fund. So she didn’t just quit being mayor; she quit all of it. Corporations and business suits and shaking hands while kissing babies and politics of any kind and now she sort of pokes around the city and sometimes she sleeps in shelters and sometimes she gets a suite at the Marriott but she always ends up in that park. She must really like the ducks.”

“She really likes you, dork!” Archer gave her a gentle smack on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Why does that never ever occur to you?”

“Um.” She tipped her head to the side and thought. “Past precedent?”