Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(87)
“Bring it.”
In a few minutes, he will join the Republican nominee and the Democratic incumbent in the second of three presidential debates scheduled before the November 6 election, each at a location of the candidates’ choosing. He has nicknamed his competition: Herman Munster, the former governor of Massachusetts, with his stiff black hair and freakishly rectangular face and toneless advocacy of pro-life, capital punishment, tax cuts; and the incumbent, the Incompetent, whose middle-of-the-roadness translates to constant compromise and never taking a stand on anything. Chase doesn’t feel nervous about tonight so much as he does sick and tired. He wishes they could quit all this talking and put each other to the test in some other fashion, maybe a footrace or cage match.
He imagines grabbing the Incompetent by the ear and using it as a handle as he peeled away a long ribbon of skin. He imagines what his blood would taste like. Like cherry cough syrup. His tongue runs along the ridgeline of his teeth. He can’t help it. He has learned to stop hating himself, hating what he has become. It would be like hating the whorl of his fingerprint, hating the sun and the moon’s rotation in the sky. Some things are the way they are and there’s no changing them.
Buffalo is leaning against the desk with his arms crossed over his belly. “Did you read those foreign policy books I gave you?”
“Pretty much.”
“You either did or didn’t.”
“Why do I need to read what I’ve already been briefed on by the policy wonks? I read some, skipped some. Books. Jeez. I just wish they were all as good as that Freakonomics. There’s a guy who can tell a story out of one side of his mouth, give a lesson out the other.”
“I am not trying to entertain you. I am trying to educate you.”
Chase swivels his chair in a slow circle. When he comes to a stop, Buffalo uses his middle finger to push his glasses farther up his nose. “You know you can’t control these debates the way you can control a town hall meeting. You know you’re coming across as cocksure but empty-headed, a single-issue candidate. You know you’re too complicated right now as an Independent, neither fish nor fowl, seeming to agree and disagree with everyone on everything. It confuses people. We need something that distinguishes you. Cowboy and war hero will only get you so far.”
“You got my candy?”
Buffalo studies him for a few seconds and then reaches into his suit coat and tosses Chase the bottle of Volpexx. His body pulses at the sight of it and he feels an immediate ache, a need as basic as thirst. He catches it with a rattle and shakes out on the desk a few pills. The container is a mix of Volpexx and Adderall, white moons and blue jellybeans that will at once dull him and sharpen him. He uses a coffee mug to mash them up and a credit card to cut the powder into lines and a dollar bill to snort.
He is lost for a moment in a weird gray buzz. Then he feels Buffalo’s hands. Fitting the earpiece into him until it is invisible. Lifting his coattails and clipping the belt pack to the small of his back. He remains hunched over the desk, his eyes closed, until Buffalo pats him on the shoulder and tells him he’s all set.
After the bombing, his left ear recovered immediately, but the ringing persisted in the other for two weeks. He wondered what he would hear, if anything, when it faded. Not much, it turns out. High voices are better than low, all sounds registering as if run through a cotton filter. “Did I get the right one?” Augustus asks and Chase says, “Yes,” and touches his damaged ear.
The bombing of the courthouse square secured his run for the presidency. Three days after the event, after he had been discharged from the hospital with a concussion, third-degree burns, and a ruptured eardrum, Buffalo arranged for an AP photographer to visit the governor’s mansion and shoot him bruised and bandaged, but very much alive, sitting at a desk with pen poised over paper and a phone pressed to his ear, unstoppable. He became the victim as well as the aggressor, someone people could sympathize with and rally around. He met with the president and provost and board of regents at the University of Oregon. Soon thereafter the Center for Lobos Studies became a reality, and for the first time since the mid-twentieth century, vaccination became a possibility. Within a week, dozens of lawsuits had been filed and he was on the cover of Time magazine in military dress and with half his face cast in shadow. The donors soon followed. Among them Alliance Energy, given his support of nuclear energy and the continued occupation of the Republic.
Buffalo has arranged the rest, including his running mate, a bright-eyed NRA-endorsed fundamentalist constitutionalist senator from Arkansas named Pinckney Arnold. They don’t know each other really—they hardly see or talk to each other outside campaign events—but Pinckney is a fine choice, soft-spoken and articulate and humble and God-fearing, a nice counterweight to Chase and his swinging-dick persona. So says Buffalo.
Chase swigs again at the Monster Energy Drink. It tastes chalky. He heard somewhere that all energy drinks include that chalky flavor, not because it’s an active ingredient, but because people expect it. They expect anything high-octane to taste a little bad. Maybe that has something to do with why people tolerate his behavior, why he so suddenly emerged as the dark-horse contender of the election. He doesn’t try to come across as puritan like the rest of these chumps. Onstage, he scoffs, rolls his eyes, and once stormed off in annoyance. He interrupts and calls bullshit. He curses so much that the networks televise with a thirty-second delay. He hurries to tell an off-color story—the reason no one should stand behind a sneezing cow, the time he got frostbite on his doohickey during a pee break on a subzero patrol—and folks believe in him because of that. “He’s like us,” they say. “He’s ordinary people.”