THE BULLETPROOF GLASS in the Oval Office windows cast a gloom over the day, the sort of greenish pall associated with bad storms. Appropriate clouds rose from the Ellipse, pluming easterly in the late autumn breeze. On E Street a string-straight line of troops prepared to advance. The White House chief of staff knew that had the French doors been open he would be hearing the chuck-chuck of the tear-gas guns, the rattle of the Uzis’ rubber bullets, and the screams.
Eisenhower had warned him this would happen.
Doggedly he swiveled away from the riot, his leather chair squeaking, to face the mantelpiece and the portrait of Millard Fillmore that hung above it.
The door behind him opened with a click. His secretary announced, “Sir. The NSC’s finally arrived through the Treasury Building tunnel. They’re waiting for you.”
Wearily he rested his chin on his hand. The President, in one of his frequent tutorials on politics, had assured his chief of staff that governments existed only by the apathy of the governed. The people outside, with their placards and Molotov cocktails, seemed troublesomely unapathetic.
With a surge of will he pictured himself as a pool. The riot and the oil painting of Millard Fillmore were pebbles tossed into water. The ripples they made widened until the warm waves of their company gently rocked him.
The roundness of stones in the bottom of a stream; the circular pattern of fishes’ scales. He sat in the silence of the huge office but pictured the triangular thrust of the Rockies with their beards of conical firs, shapes within shapes within shapes. Perhaps soon he would take a needed Colorado vacation. Perhaps one day he would do the unthinkable and retire.
“Sir? You hear me?”
“Yes.” He refused to turn around.
Muffled footsteps on the thick wool carpet. Natalie came into view behind his left shoulder, just inside the range of his peripheral vision. Her blouse, sewn from a material of disorderly, multicolored shapes, sent chills of disquiet down his neck. To avoid the sight of that blouse, he moved his gaze
“Who are the demonstrators?” he asked.
“Germans, French, some Scandinavians,” she replied, seating herself in the Louis XV chair next to his desk.
“What are they protesting?”
“The tariff bill. They think the Chinese and Koreans are about to undermine their economic freedom.”
There was a new box of pencils on his desk. He picked up the container and slid off the top. Inside, pencil ends nested like flat, hexagonal atoms. He drank in the scent of wood and graphite, running his finger down the first queue. “This,” he said fondly, “is freedom.”
Holding the corner pencil down, he upended the box, letting the others spill onto the desk. Then he righted the case and lifted his opposable claw from the single survivor. The pencil toppled from its pleasant upright alignment and fell against the side of its container. “That is freedom to you,” he said.
Natalie pondered the box, then picked up a pencil from the heap and dropped it, with a dull tap, in with the other. “It looked lonely,” she explained.
In the box the two pencils lay at an antagonistic angle. Yes, he had missed the point. Two crossed pencils were more symbolic of what humans judged to be freedom.
“There are plots to kill me,” he told her.
“I know.”
“Who could be behind it?”
“Anyone,” she said with a shrug. “Everyone.”
He peered down the long velveteen spread of the south lawn to the single army tank at the barricade and the advancing troops behind it. The helmets of the UN peacekeeping forces were an inappropriately cheerful sky blue. “They expect me to do something, but I don’t understand tariffs. And why should economics be so important?”
“Pocketbook issues always get people into a sweat.”
The White House chief, like all Cousins, was used to concrete answers. Good data, he felt, should line up in neat rows like pencils in a new box. “What specific pocketbook issues?” he asked, hoping she would come to the point.
“Oh, cheaper cars.”
In the window his own image was superimposed on the riot, as though he had given it a seal of approval. His eyes were huge onyx almonds on a pale hot-air balloon of a head that seemed tethered above his black uniform. On his shoulder his insignia and nameplate gleamed.
“Cheap cars are unimportant,” he told her, “when compared to the peace of Communal thought.”
Light as a leaf drifting onto the surface of a pond, his attention settled on her. The colors of her blouse were hectic blues and reds and greens, the shapes ill-formed triangles that pointed, higgledy-piggledy, in all directions. “This blouse,” he said.
She touched her collar in evident surprise. “New. You like it?”
“Don’t wear it again. Muted colors, as I told you. Grays and blacks and navies.”
“Gray makes me look ten years older,” she argued. “And I spent good money on this blouse. You know, I could make a lot more in the private sector. I have great front-office appearance. Not, of course, that you would ever notice, but the senators do. You don’t pay me enough–”
He stood and lifted his hand as a signal that she had won the fight. Natalie, at five feet one-half inch tall, had been one of the few applicants his size. “Use the White House credit card to buy yourself another.”
“And a new pair of shoes.”
He cocked his head to the right in query.
“I bought shoes to match this blouse. So you owe me.”
“All right.”
“And a purse.” Natalie’s mouth was in a tight line. It was a dangerous expression, he knew. A sign of anger. Perhaps the blouse was a pocketbook issue.
“Buy whatever you like,” he said. She bared her teeth in a smile, and he began to wonder if he was being overly generous.
“Sir? Better get down to the basement.”
As he turned to go, the room assaulted him with its disorganized design, one that had no relationship at all to nature. Humans had a primitive idea of harmony. Only once had he seen the order of fractals in a piece of human art: a Renaissance oil that showed the subject standing next to a painting of the same subject and the same painting, copies of the large painting growing smaller and smaller until the final one was done in a suggestion of tiny brushstrokes.
Chaos, he thought as he strode across the presidential seal woven into the dark blue carpet. Chaos was going to kill him.