The Damned Highway (24 page)

“Hello. I'm here to kill Nixon,” I tell him.

“We've been getting that a lot lately,” he says. He has one of those reassuring faces, the kind that look good during a comforting nod.
Oh yes, do kill Nixon
. “We had a large brown man make it almost to the parking lot just this morning.”

“Oh?” This elevator seems very slow. “Did he . . . give a reason?”

“Oh no, this man was entirely unreasonable. Built like a tank—well, if tanks had beer bellies. He was ranting and screaming about New Aztlán, demanding the president's heart to sacrifice to his winged snake god.” He sniffs. “I have to say, despite all this, he smelled a bit better than you, doctor.” He glanced up at the top of my head again.

“Secret Service took him out, I presume. Two taps to center mass.”

“Oh no, we hired him on,” the secretary says. “He was an attorney, came highly recommended. And with his connections with the Chicano community”—and that was odd, hearing a Republican flunky even acknowledge that the word
Chicano
was preferred these days, much less use it—“he'll be a good man to have on our side. Border issues are important to the president. We're worried about drugs in the inner cities, about illegal immigration possibly bringing down the standard of living for American workers, and of course anti-Hispanic sentiment is sure to be a problem going forward. It's crucial that we lay the groundwork for a united country as we enter a New Aeon.”

“Uh . . .”

“Sir, do you have a tape recorder with you? A pencil and pad? Would you like me to fetch one for you?” The elevator stops, and the door opens into a reception area. “I have plenty of whatever you might like at my desk.” He steps into the room and I follow.

“Do you happen to have any . . . fungus? From Yuggoth?”

“Yes!” he says brightly, and he opens the top right-hand drawer of his desk, where one might keep legal pads or a calculator or a Derringer. He digs though a small pile of brown wax butcher paper, but comes up empty. “Oh. We seem to be, um, fresh out.” He opens the drawer on the left side, where there are indeed some legal pads and what looks like a pearl handle of a small firearm, but quickly closes it. “This is unusual. I'm very sorry, Dr. Lono.” He glances over his shoulder, to the brief hallway leading to the room where Nixon supposedly is waiting for me. Where Hoover arranged for him to be killed by my hands and his will. Where, somewhere under Foggy Bottom, in the silt of the Potomac, the star spawn of Cthulhu stir in their sleep. In a room hoisted up to the sky on Molochian steel and concrete, its exterior stained with generations of His soot. So close to the Friendship Lodge of the Odd Fellows, on streets drawn with Masonic precision . . . oh Jesus, I'm rambling. Everything is everything. That's the real American Dream. Not the nonsense about success and individual achievement—that's a fantasy, or a daydream at best. An American Dream, the one written in the unconscious mind, that's what Nixon is. He's uncanny—universally loathed, ugly and twisted, yet at the very top of society, on a throne of bones atop a mountain of one billion bodies, thanks to the conflicts between a million nameless horrors, a thousand unspeakable special-interest groups, and a sacrifice in blood and fire of the North Vietnamese. And I digress.

“Lono,” the secretary says. “Perhaps you should just see the president now. I'm sure”—his eyes dart back to the drawer where the fungi certainly isn't—“he's expecting you. I'm sorry I didn't have what you requested.” He opens the left-side drawer again and pulls out a small pistol, the one with the pearl handle. “Would you like this instead?” He looks up at me, eyes wide like a virgin on her knees before her senior prom date. I would like it, I decide. It's a .32, with a nickel finish, probably S&W, looks well used. “It's from the Spanish-American War,” the secretary chirps.

“Great. It should blow up in my fucking hand nicely,” I say. I check the cylinder; it's loaded, all right. The bullets look new at least. I'm jittery enough that I decide not to put the gun in my pants. I can see the headlines now:
former journalist shoots self in groin. nixon pleased with spectacle, surges in polls
.

I loiter in the hallway, only for a moment. To remember life before this interview. What will the walls look like when I leave the room? What will my brain be like? Hoover, deep in my cerebellum, urges me to kick the door to Nixon's office in and fire at any gray blur I happen to see. Instead I try the knob. It's open. Nixon calls for me to come in.

“Hello, Dr. Lono,” Nixon says with the sort of forced cheer one offers one's childhood confessor ten years after the buggery ends. He's at his desk, almost curled up in a chair too large for him. If he notices the gun, his face doesn't betray that fact. It doesn't betray any facts. Nixon's a caricature of himself now, sweating profusely, jowls everywhere, like an editorial cartoonist's rendition of his famous televised debate with Kennedy back in 1960. His eyes roll like marbles from the gun to the bag to my head, then back to the bag. “Black-bag job, is that it? And son, if you're going to meet with the president, even if just to assassinate him, couldn't you at least bathe? Run a comb through your hair? Put on a new shirt, perhaps. Be a mensch.” He coughs in his fist and says, “If this is a legitimate interview, will you tell your readers that I used a Jewish word correctly? Or are we going to talk football?”

I point the gun, cock the hammer. “First question—why Cthulhu?”

And then Nixon laughs. Not a rueful laugh or a sardonic chuckle. A real guffaw. “Oh Lord, Lono. You don't start with a softball. You think I chose to bind myself to Cthulhu? Do you think children choose to die of cholera? Didn't Hoover brief you?” He glances at the bag again.

“Hoover's dead. I inherited the bag—”

“And its contents. Have you familiarized yourself with their use?”

“Sort . . . of.”

Nixon gets up from behind his desk and walks over to the conversation pit—a loveseat, a small but comfortable chair, and a coffee table—in the corner of the room. “Come, come. Let's have a drink and talk.” Nixon opens up a globe of the world and pulls a crystal carafe with a glass stopper from within. He pours two glasses and takes a drink. “It's fine, see. You can drink straight out of the bottle if you'd like.” I would like, I like indeed. I take the couch and put my bag on it as well so Nixon can't sit next to me. He takes the chair.

“I was born and raised a Quaker, you know. My flesh trembleth for fear of thee—I stand in awe of thee. I shudder at the consciousness of thy presence.” He drinks. I drink. “The Psalmist,” he says. “The best of the writers of the Bible. I live in fear, Lono. Fear of failure, fear of success. There are two ways out, as I see it. Win it all, or end it all.”

“And you want to win it all. A fifty-state sweep of the election. And usher forth a new age. R'lyeh will rise! The stars will fall from the sky, and Cthulhu will reign triumphant.”

Nixon peers at me for a long moment. “I'd hoped, my friend, that you would be more perceptive than all that. You're a journalist, a trained observer. You're Lono, a god whose existence predates the earth itself. You're a doctor. You have to be a smart fellow to be a doctor. There's no pulp-fiction island going to rise; it doesn't matter to Cthulhu whether I win fifty states or am dragged out of the Oval Office in disgrace and humiliation.” He just looks at me. I seriously contemplate shooting him through the head right now. The gun feels good in my hand. Cool. The brandy he poured us is substandard. I suppose there is a war on; costs have to be cut.

“Here's where you are wrong, Lono. Cthulhu's
been
reigning. There is no age of triumph to come, this is as good as it gets!” Nixon flings his arms wide, spilling some of his own brandy. He quickly licks some of the splatter from his fingers. I'm tempted again to shoot him. “What do you think is wrong with the world? Is it us? Human nature? Of course not. Even you, you're a wild man. Wouldn't a Freudian psychoanalyst say that you have an overdeveloped id? Aren't you promiscuous, a drug abuser, a betrayer of women? Don't you wish the world were just a bit less civilized so that you could pull iron and kill whomever you liked?”

“I thought I was here to interview
you
, Mr. President,” I say.

“Interview me, kill me, keep me from a sweep. It's all the same, as none of it matters. This is the point, friend. Do you think I'm not aware of my own liabilities, as a statesman, as a person? Regardless, I am the level-best single individual to lead this country. You've seen those antiwar protesters? Those hippies? How many of them are waving around copies of Mao's little red book? How many millions of people has Chairman Mao starved to death, tortured, killed—”

“And you made overtures to Chairman Mao!” I say.

“I did!” Nixon blurts out. “And . . . he's a nice fellow! We smiled and joked with one another. Told a few off-color stories. I'm glad my wife wasn't sitting in on our meeting. He's just as nice as you or I. You're an ethical man, after a fashion. That's why you oppose me. But if you had your hands on the reins of power, you'd slaughter a world, Lono.

“Captain Cook! He was to be Lono too. And now look at Hawaii, look at the people he encountered. And they were the lucky ones; they killed him. They ended up part of the United States of America. You should see what those frogs did to Tahiti. The explorer and conquistador Cortés was confused with Quetzalcoatl . . . or perhaps he truly was that winged snake god, come to ol'
Mejiko
to deliver a reckoning.

“We're all gods, Lono. If we're not omnipotent, it's just because of the competition. If any one of us really put our mind to it, we could find out all the occult secrets, or rediscover them, and conquer the world . . . destroy it if we like. Isn't that the American Dream in the end: to get whatever you want because you want it more than anyone else?

“We are all Cthulhu,” Nixon says as he leans back into his chair. “And we have all always been. If I could convince the RNC to make that my campaign slogan, I would. They're afraid we might lose the Episcopalian vote if I do.”

I raise the gun and point it right at Nixon's forehead. I half expect him to take it like a man, to sit calmly and dare me to pull the trigger. But he cringes, hides his face behind his shoulder, raises his knees. “Please don't shoot me! I don't want to die! I—I . . . I'm sorry, Dr. Lono, I truly am, but I am who I am. I don't want to have to kill all those Vietnamese, but I
have
to. I wish I didn't have any enemies, but I have lots of them. I wish the Negroes and the whites and the Jews and the Christians could all get along, but they don't and they won't ever.” Finally he straightens out. “Someone has to be in charge! Of everything! No dissent, no sectionalist sentiment, no enemies!”

“You're right,” I say. “Now open the bag, you pig-headed bastard.” I push the barrel of the gun against his head, a school bully poking at the chess-club geek. But this time, I'm offering the answers to the test, not taking them. “Trust me, I'm a doctor.”

——

The process is painless. Nixon is a different sort of man than Hoover. Nixon is a cringing coward. Nixon is ashamed of his body. Nixon wishes people could get to know him. Nixon lives in fear of revealing himself too much. Nixon began his occult studies in the hope of finding a method of raising the dead. Nixon almost succeeded. Nixon hated Checkers, the dog. Lono hates himself. Nixon seethed with resentment whenever he saw that damn dog. Nixon's alchemical experiments began with that damn dog. Nixon isolated the Essential Saltes of men and animals. Nixon knows where the bodies are buried. Nixon doesn't like getting his hands dirty. Nixon, for a moment, feels an electric charge at the possibility of living life in my body. Lono drinks to stave away the boredom of life. Nixon could fuck willowy young blonds who believe in free love and uninhibited self-caresses if he lived in my shell. Nixon worries about my credit rating. Nixon fears change. Nixon knows that change is inevitable. Nixon smoked opium in China. Nixon met a black dragon that looked at him with eyes of creamy jade. Lono wishes he could publish fiction, but without the patina of experience, the sentences just sit there on the page, lifeless and wilting. Nixon never met a Harvard man he liked. Nixon wishes he could strangle them all. Nixon runs his old election campaigns over and over in his head. Nixon dreams about his losses in California, his loss to Kennedy. Nixon felt no joy in beating Humphrey. Lono taunts death and puts himself in extreme situations to remember how to feel. Nixon wishes someone would strap down Spiro Agnew and torture him. Lono often thinks,
Maybe I should just kill myself
. Nixon doesn't know anyone who disagrees with him on this but can't find anyone to do the job. Lono surrounds himself with weapons in order to kill himself. Nixon's best friend is the bald man, but he's sure the bald man doesn't reciprocate his warm feelings. Lono seethes with every typo, every unpaid bill, every unreturned phone call, every kill fee. Nixon would make his own friends from spirit familiars if he could manage to gather sufficient will to summon one. Lono counts it as a victory whenever he wakes up and knows where he is. Nixon's first encounter with Cthulhu destroyed whatever was good and kind and fair about Nixon. Nixon taught himself how to fake it. Nixon comforts himself by imagining that his mother is still alive, and speaking to her, asking her advice. Nixon's first attempt to reanimate the dead ended poorly—
looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares—a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand
. Lono is in pain every day and every night because blotter acid is easier to get one's hands on than Thorazine without a prescription. Nixon occasionally fantasizes about killing Hoover. Nixon considers it a rare victory that he is alive and Hoover is dead, but there is still a bittersweet quality to this victory—he wasn't the one to squeeze the life out of the FBI director. Nixon gets erect when he thinks of killing someone. Lono feels jealous of Senator Eagleton, who was strapped down to a table and given electro-convulsive therapy. Nixon credits this psychophysiological peculiarity with his ability to remain faithful to his wife. Nixon is very surprised to hear of Hoover's Mamie Van Doren trick. Lono wishes women liked him better than they do. Lono wishes he were a myth, white sails on the shore, someone important and meaningful. Lono feels that he is always on the sidelines, not quite intelligent enough to do something about world events. Lono thinks he is really going crazy this time. Lono says, “. . . Counselor,” and tears the apparatus from his head and runs from the room, leaving Nixon swamped in a daze of memories that aren't his, and emotions that aren't quite human.