The French Revolution (29 page)

“Got to. We need their vote. And we get free mail, franking privilege. Paper letters stand out from email. There’s authority to it, finding you at a fixed address. And people appreciate the labor involved, that we took the time to print something and sign and mail it. Now, the overwhelming majority of correspondence covers the same twenty or thirty issues, for which we have regularly updated responses prepared. Basic structure’s acknowledgement, explanation, and either agreement or call for understanding. Constituents write in on different sides of an issue, but we don’t get too deep. Most people just want to know they’ve been heard.”

Which fit in with everything Robespierre knew about ego massaging and flattery, the keys to psychic conquest. It was a beautiful bureaucracy—people-powered, scalable and systemic, timely, simple, embracing democratic ethos and capitalist gamesmanship, the full splendor of America. “Maybe I can help write response letters,” she suggested, “for the new issues that come in.”

Maeve wrinkled her upper lip in a smirk of semi-respect. “Do a good job and I’ll see if they need help over in speechwriting. You can start with these.” A mail bin loaded with paper landed on her desk like a Yule log. “Plenty more where that came from.”

She pulled out the top envelope, unfolded a loose-leaf sheet
out of eighths. Wild handwriting recommended repurposing mothballed antiaircraft weaponry to stop dangerous hurricanes, as fired bullets would disrupt hazardous wind patterns with counterattacking air currents and the sheer force of hot lead. The next letter was typed, all caps, and contained profanity of a class not observed since Sven’s sailor mates swilled beer by the gallon on weekend nights back on Stillwell Road. Following that was a lengthy exposé on the devious connection between military officials and the Vatican, involving parallel universes and subatomic weaponry, all of it explained by invisible ink on the Dead Sea Scrolls. One treatise on spies dressed up as farmers and seeding fields with toxins; another pointing out the indefensible sluttiness of the Speaker’s wardrobe, her leg flesh visible from five yards or closer. Rants against homeless people, corporations, governments, nonprofits, flaccid passive every-men who didn’t ask questions, annoying liberal brats who wouldn’t stop with the questions, right-wing hotheads who screamed too much, idiot activists, idiot cops, idiot criminals, intelligent criminals, tight-assed media dopes, scamming banks and fucked-up CEOs, dumbass Mexicans who tried to buy their houses on orange-picker salaries, xenophobic blowhards who conveniently ignored their own immigrant heritage, greedy real estate agents and exploitative mortgage brokers, preps and hipsters, yuppies and too-cools, environazis and polluters, single mothers, single dads, married losers, useless children and seniors, faggot-ass homos, scumbag gay bashers, trannies, anti-transsexuals, crackheads, squares, drunks, gangs of kids throwing trash in the street, sanitation companies and their unions, exploitative national chain stores forcing their way into local neighborhoods, moronic communists who blocked well-meaning businesses from opening up. The Speaker, the Speaker’s parents and husband and children, anyone who’d ever met the Speaker, the Speaker’s ancestors and descendants, every last one of them to burn in hell for eternity-plus.

That accounted for about half the letters. The rest drove down on the wars in epic poems of battle and freedom, recounting specific attacks and missions, names of dead men and women, requests for memorials and remembrance. Screeds against military contractors and America-hating camel fuckers and all the evil that built this into being. Flags to fly at half-mast until the guns were put away. Some demanded bigger deployments and hydrogen bombs—might as well throw the kitchen sink and get out, like Japan in World War II—but most were tired and sick of it and drained and far beyond done. Personal essays on selling their dead son’s car and donating clothes and living in orphanages. Pictures of kids growing up parentless. Needing an explanation. Why was America fighting in these places, why people mixed with explosives, why high school kids flew ten thousand miles to absorb a car bomb outside a restaurant. How they loved the country lots but these questions required answers. Teardrops and grease stains, small careful signatures, respectful salutations and congenial farewells.

Robespierre took these war letters home with her, read them over dinner and through the night. They would not let her sleep. She drank a pot of coffee and beat everyone into the office, fired up her computer, and typed. No filters, no calculations—she mined honesty and truth, the rising fluid she felt between her lungs. Individual responses, with direct answers, apologies, and a plan, a policy enacted overnight: that the wars would end. Speaker Pelosi would not support the fighting, would not commit another dollar of taxpayer money to support it, would never let this happen again. These wars were wrong, they were lies, their children were dying for nothing, for less than nothing. Dying for losing. With judicious copying and pasting she was through the stack by noon, then printed off the responses, applied the Speaker’s autopen signature, stuffed them and mailed them, then hit the cafeteria for a salad and Diet Coke.

Three days later she returned from her lunch break to find Maeve sitting at her desk, clicking through her computer. “Let’s
walk,” Maeve stated, taking Robespierre’s elbow and moving her through the stately hallways and down elaborate winding staircases and outside into the swamp-heat sun, a little park across the street.

“Are you trying to ruin us?” Maeve asked, her voice separating into a fusillade of razor-tipped spears. “Everything a Democratic Congress stands for can be ruined by this.”

“By what?” Letting Maeve feel in control.

“Don’t act stupid. The fucking letters.” She held up one of Robespierre’s better missives, a searing three-page discourse on the institutionalized hypocrisy wrought by the military-industrial complex. “The lies you spread.”

“I didn’t spread any lies.”

“You impersonated Speaker Pelosi and made policy promises the Speaker never would or could enact. Lies.”

“Everything you send out is an impersonation!” she burst out, silly stupid with the doublespeak and side lingo and made-up shit. “Pelosi doesn’t do any of it herself!”

Maeve’s face arranged like a keyboard, jaws out and teeth like yellow wood, hair stretching back like piano wire. “Approval. That’s the difference. I never authorized any of these.”

Pieces fit inside of her and she knew this was how it was done, a perfect political dumping. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

“I found the letters on your computer. And the print logs. And a roomful of witnesses who saw you working there during the hours in question. Overall, real sloppy work.”

The high slipped from her head and she landed square in the center of the jungle heat; these points were too true, she was tostada with a side of eggs, exercises littered with rookie mistakes. The only alternative was to take down as much as she could with her, make herself too knowledgeable to turn in. “I never had any instructions,” she claimed. “There were no approval processes in place. I just used common sense.”

No movement in Maeve’s face, eyes barely open, a death mask
before burial. “There are clear approval processes in place, posted on the wall of every cubicle. All communications from the Speaker of the House’s office require review and approval from me.”

Robespierre vaguely recalled a laminated form on the wall of her cubicle printed in attention-getting, eye-paining red type, over which she’d pinned several photos of President Obama playing basketball and a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge drowning in fog. “You’ve been frank with me, so I’ll be frank with you,” Robespierre said. “You can either go down with me for not telling me about your approval process, or you can blame it on a computer problem. I want a transfer. Somewhere important.” But what was more important than the Speaker’s office? “The White House. And not the Old Executive Office Building either; I want the real deal, 1600 Pennsylvania and the Oval Office and little Obamas running around the White House lawn with Bo the dog.”

“Can’t do it.” Unbelievable in every contour.

“Maybe not. But you better try.”

The death mask fell away and Robespierre sat down on a bench, watching the pigeons peck at sandwich crusts and bike messengers slurp Gatorade under trees and pasty-faced suits racing back and forth across the sidewalk with their heads down, as if the fate of the world hinged on their attendance at meetings or project outlines or coauthored reports on fiduciary processes. She walked back to her rented dorm room and fell on her bed like a stone, sleeping straight though dinner and on through the night, until her cellphone rang in the morning with an official by-the-book secretarial voice informing her to report for work at the White House as soon as she could get there.

In the spring of 2012, still reeling from her failed bid for Stanford class president the previous year—she’d lost by five votes to a guy who’d literally handed out free beer—Robespierre put
on her sexiest skirt and a double dose of lipstick and collected signatures to get on the ballot for San Francisco supervisor. She staked out parking lots and approached shoppers loading their cars, chatted up moms pushing strollers, trotted out the two lines of Mandarin she’d memorized the night before, flashed a laminated copy of her intern photo shaking hands with President Obama. To young men she blew slow, fat-lip kisses; when asked for her number, she gave out the campaign hotline, an answering service in Fremont. Incredibly, donations came in: friends’ parents and Stanford alums and prominent city businesses looking to hedge their bets on the supervisor race while building a record of supporting minorities. She spent her funds on dinners out with potential endorsers, spa treatments and makeovers, pricey designer outfits to reel in the votes. On policy she was inconsistent, contradicting herself on a sales tax initiative within the space of two sentences, pulling a triple reverse on a transportation proposal, not having any position at all on homelessness, other than that she was against it. A disorganized campaigner, a knockout on television, her campaign gave great photos and vapid vibes, more L.A. than San Fran, culling no traction with voters.

Up late on a Tuesday night with her advisory committee, punchy student organizers and a couple of political science professors excited to test-drive some of their more radical thought experiments. Her first door-hanger order was due in four hours, with a round of final exams shortly after that. She needed more than a slogan, Robespierre observed; she needed a creed, a philosophy of courage and candor and just enough dreaminess, something San Francisco voters would love to love.

“But no rhyming,” she decided. “It’s a cheap trick. They’ll see right through it.”

“So what if it’s a cheap trick?” countered David, a gay teaching assistant with perfect hands. “It’s effective. Like a jingle on the radio.”

“But everybody hates it when it gets stuck in their head.”

“But it gets stuck in their head and they remember it and you win.”

“Like McDonalds,” chimed in Sheila, a pink-haired Asian chick.

“This campaign is not like McDonald’s,” Robespierre declared.

“Nobody’s saying that,” David said, “but you can’t argue away their market dominance.”

They paused to watch the Iranian War on the television she kept on the closet floor. Creaking tanks, men coated with dust, bombs breaking in lightning bolts. The Khorasan Offensive was overextended, a journalist reported by satellite videophone; attacks on supply lines disrupted the American advance from Turkmenistan. Women launched rockets at cooking fires; children hurled Molotov cocktails at medics. Somewhere in the background Marat humped on patrol, conducting strip searches and shooting first and learning bigger ways to hate. Her contribution to the problem.

“Nukes can’t be far off,” Robespierre muttered, citric acid mixing in her mouth.

“No way,” said Jenny Prescott, a Barbara Boxer-styled Marin yuppie who was exploring the nuclear prospect thoroughly in her dissertation. “Not in an election year.”

“Worked for Harry Truman,” a young poli-sci professor pointed out.

Snapshots of KIAs scrolled onscreen, names and hometowns, scowling photos in uniform. A camera tottered through a village of amputees, victims of bombs from both sides sitting in wagons, leaning on crutches made from sticks, signing documents with pens between their teeth. Legless, armless, smiling people, overjoyed from living, ecstatic with life.

“This is what I care about,” Robespierre said, feeling skin tighten over her arms, a buzz in the room building into live particles and energy waves. “We gotta stop the war.”

“Jurisdictional issue,” yawned one of the older professors, an emeritus chair-holder up way past his bedtime but enjoying his
consulting role as a way to stay relevant. “As a San Francisco supervisor, that’s significantly beyond the—”

“Wait, wait, wait. We go big. Real big. Ultra-fucking big.” Robespierre was up and walking, a quick lap around the room. “Write this down.
Stop the war in District 4
.”