Calypso(45)

Cher.



Seven. A few days after the election I am in Oakland, California. It’s Sunday afternoon and I notice a great many people walking toward what looks like a park, some of them carrying signs. “What’s going on?” I ask a young woman. Her hair is purple in some places and green in others.

“Oh,” she says, “everyone’s going to Lake Merritt to hold hands. We’re going to form a human chain around it.” She says this as though it’s going to reverse time and make Donald Trump stop being the president-elect. I cringe, thinking of how this will play on Fox News: “Watch out, everyone, they’re holding hands!”



Eight. I join my family on Emerald Isle for Thanksgiving and have a great screaming fight with my Republican father, who yells at one point, “Donald Trump is not an asshole!” I find this funny but at the same time surprising. Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.

Later in our argument my father shouts, “He’s the best thing that’s happened to this country in years!” and “It was just locker-room talk.”

“I’m in locker rooms five days a week and have never heard anyone carry on like Trump in that video,” I argue. “And if I did, I wouldn’t think, Wow, that guy ought to be my president. I’d think he was a creep and a loser.” Then I add, repeating something I’d heard from someone else, “Besides, he wasn’t in a locker room; he was at work.”

Since I left the United States in 1998, I’ve cast absentee ballots. Americans overseas vote from the last state they lived in, which for me was New York. Then we got the house on Emerald Isle and I changed my location to North Carolina, where I’m more inclined to feel hopeless. In 1996, in line at the grocery store in lower Manhattan, I’d look at the people in front of me, thinking, Bill Clinton voter, Bill Clinton voter, convicted felon, Bill Clinton voter, foreign tourist, felon, felon, Bill Clinton voter, felon.

At the Emerald Isle supermarket that I stomp off to after the fight with my father, it’s Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and then the cashier, who also voted for him. Of course, these are just my assumptions. The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn’t necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room.

The morning after our argument, I come downstairs to find my father in the kitchen. “Are you still talking to me?” he asks.

I look at him as if he were single-handedly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, as if he had knowingly cast the tiebreaking vote and all of what is to come is entirely his fault. Then I say, “Yes. Of course I’m still talking to you.”

He turns and plods into the living room. “Horse’s ass.”



Nine. On Christmas morning, at home in England, I climb into the loft space above the bathroom in search of some presents I’d wrapped months earlier. The ladder I’m using is wooden and has only two legs, which slip on my freshly waxed floor. I fall from a height of nine feet and land with a bang on my left side, fracturing eight ribs. As I lie on the floor, stunned and in the greatest pain of my life, it occurs to me that I might die before Trump assumes office, and that maybe that won’t be such a terrible thing. Amy runs out of the guest room then, and Hugh charges up the stairs from the kitchen, both of them asking, “What happened?” and “Are you all right?”

I don’t want to ruin Christmas, so say, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” Fine people, though, don’t need ten minutes to get off the floor.

Hugh phones the NHS—the National Health Service—and after being asked a number of preliminary questions, I’m put through to a nurse named Mary.

“Who are you again?” I ask.

“Mary,” she repeats, not, I notice, Mary Steward or whatever her last name is. Everything in America is based on lawsuits, on establishing a trail. In the United States I’d be told to come in immediately for X-rays, but in England they figure that unless you’re unconscious or leaking great quantities of fluid—blood, pus, etc.—there’s no point in wasting everyone’s time. Mary asks me a number of questions to determine whether I pierced a lung, which apparently I have not. “But it really hurts when I cough,” I tell her.

“Well, David,” she says brightly, “then my advice to you would be not to cough, and to have a lovely Christmas.”

I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It’s remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I’d been slammed against a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist—show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election. A lovely Christmas is out of the question. Every day I lie on the floor and clutch my sides, stunned.



Ten. I hold on to the most unreasonable hope. The electoral college will come to its senses and say, “We can’t let this happen!” It will turn out that Russia tampered with our voting machines. Yet nothing stops the advancing truck. On Inauguration Day I am in Seattle. Late in the afternoon my old friend Lyn sends me a photo of an anti-Trump sticker someone found in Japan. It’s cleverly designed: three peaks that on second glance turn out to be Trump sandwiched between two Klansmen. I want to write back and say Ha, but instead, as a joke, I respond, Dear Lyn, I’m sorry you’re so opposed to change, or too small-minded to move past your narrow assumptions. In the future I’d appreciate your keeping things like this to yourself. —David