1.1 Terminal

Day One: LAX>DFW>PBI>EWR

He had been told to be there right away, armed with print-out plane tickets and pre-packed carry-ons. Fourteen hours–not counting the coastal time difference–had carried him cross continent, two flights broken up by a midnight local layover, finally depositing him here, on the barely-shaded sidewalk outside the arrivals terminal, Palm Beach International.

Hot air stuck to his skin and went through his lungs, wet and thick, atmosphere dense and weighty, a sea-salt smell so strong he imagined the sound of waves breaking, just out of sight, over a concrete horizon wavy with heat. Airport expansiveness, humidity, and that smell all competing and contradicting, reminding him of Los Angeles, distant and remote.

Feeling the vibration against his chest, he retrieved his phone from its interior pocket, checked and confirmed that his car remained on its way, five minutes out for going on fifteen, now. He stretched, yawned, scratched somewhere he shouldn’t in public, caught himself doing so and felt his cheeks turn red despite the studied disinterest and complete self-absorption of the other arrivals around him.

Absent any other ways to pass the time presenting themselves, he returned to alternating between chewing mindlessly on his vape pen and furiously sucking at it. Desperate to will some nicotine out of the thing, not noticing in the too-bright sunshine the indicator light at the tip flickering in-and-out of operation before going entirely dark.

He took off his sunglasses for no good reason at all, regretting it instantly as the sunshine state stabbed at his eyes, squeezed the tension headache pulsing in behind them. He deftly  juggled phone, vape pen, and sunglasses, tucking the useless vape away, dropping the phone into an ass pocket, and putting his sunglasses right back on. Against his ass he could feel the phone vibrating for his attention again.

He assumed it was just another reassurance of the still-imminent arrival of his car, though he allowed himself to allow for the possibility it was something more significant. Maybe just another endless SCAM LIKELY, but just maybe, a remote chance, it could signify more. An email or calendar reminder, an invite from a whole other coast, addressed to some past life he had vacated fourteen hours ago, when his father’s personal assistant handed him his papers. 

Which was how his car finally found him, lost in thought as much as anything else. It distinguished itself in the sea of rideshare black camrys by cutting across four lanes of slow-moving but dense traffic. Skidding to a halt half-a-foot from the curb, the driver stretching the car out across two of the four available lanes for pick-up traffic. 

Moving quickly to minimize disruption of the endless flow the car was impeding, Tyler tossed his bags into the trunk, then stood staring at it dumbly for entirely too long before realizing it wasn’t a push-button open/close affair. So he slammed the manual trunk harder than strictly necessary before hustling to a near-total collapse into the back seat.

Sweating and catching his breath from useless exertion he managed to lock eyes with the driver in the rearview, and ventured a cautious “Juan?” The driver grunted, said nothing else, and Tyler felt compelled to complete the rideshare ritual of sign-countersign so he offered his name to the driver, spreading a hand across his chest like he was speaking to a slow child.

The driver, Juan, tossed off another grunt towards him as he put the toyota into gear, nosing his way back into the thick traffic he had disrupted. Tyler felt some small relief at absolution from small talk. He pushed his sunglasses up to rest in a tangle of oily hair, what might be described, charitably, as tousled, but today was simply a greasy mess. Settling in, he caught a ghost reflection of himself in the dark face of the phone before unlocking, startled by his own evident exhaustion and frayed presentation.

He laughed, quietly at and to himself, at advice on first impressions and projecting confidence. His chuckle aggravating an undercurrent of pain pulsing at his temples. His sunglasses now safely removed, he pinched the bridge of his nose, television having taught him this was some bit of magic that could dispel his pain. He thought, again, of talking to the driver, making conversation, being nice, but instead fell mercifully into unconsciousness.

Never one to struggle with sleeping on planes, a nervous energy and painfully unforgiving itinerary had combined to keep him restless if not exactly wakeful. The worst of both worlds. So he was still asleep when Juan pulled into the otherwise abandoned stripmall parking lot, communicating their arrival in a series of grunts of escalating volume until Tyler finally stirred, muttering a quick gracias as he exited. His pronunciation brought up a painful self-consciousness that he swallowed back, a sort of bile-like-burp.

Leaving the strip mall parking lot, the toyota asserted itself as aggressively into the four-lane-highway traffic as it had outside the arrivals terminal. Tyler dutifully rated five stars, tipped a standard ten percent, then reconsidered and revised, leaving thirty percent, a sort of apology without admission. He flicked through apps until his email showed him the address he was at, the suite he was looking for, and the name he was there to see.

Smoothing the wrinkles out of his button up and slacks, both regressed almost immediately to the preternaturally wrinkled state they had earned over the trip. He ran a hand through his hair, fingers collecting grease under the nails. He placed his sunglasses first at his open collar, then tucked away into the shirt’s too-small breast pocket, the lenses peaking out and over the edge, fashion victims looking to make a break from the scene.

Swinging around his backpack, he reached first for a water bottle he had forgotten to fill at two successive airports, then past that for a leatherbound portfolio, stamped with the seal of a school he hadn’t attended. Portfolio under arm, nestled in gone-stiff sweat stains, backpack on back, rolly case dragging behind, he walked down the faux sidewalk in front of the vacant strip mall storefronts, looking for the right number above one of the darkened doorways.

Where he found it was over a door with a window next to it and a sign taped up reading  CAMPAIGN HQ, handwritten against the college rules. Next to the door was a buzzer, also haphazardly taped up, which he pressed. He heard the dull, low buzz echo back to him from the darkened interior.  He buzzed again. And once again, still without reply.

Finally, he committed to a long aggressive buzz, counting one-two-three-mississippi in his head, his lips moving wordlessly to the rhythm of his breathing before release. An equally annoyed answering buzz admitted him, and he ducked into the dark, dust motes floating in sunlit shafts that framed his shadow falling across the tastelessly patterned office carpet.

There was a desk there, with a lifeless monitor sitting on it and nothing else. No office chair accompanied it, and no one to ask for purpose or proffer direction. He moved down the hallway, the only path open to him, passing stacks of bankers boxes, reams of fresh white printer paper, empty file folders. The hallway emptied out into a mostly-open-floor plan office space that must’ve straddled two storefronts, ringed with cubicles separating them with fake wood framing. Vertical blinds hid secret interiors, structures temporary and hastily assembled.

“What do you need,” said a voice just outside of Tyler’s periphery, less a question than an orthogonal observation of how lost he must’ve looked.

Turning too quick he caught a knee on the corner of his rolly case, winced but didn’t make a sound, and now stood facing a tapeworm thin man, his standard-issue oxford shirt spotless but so wrinkled Tyler envied the apparent comfort with which he wore his disheveledness. A solid red tie hung on for dear life at the collar, spread wider than one would think possible with just the top button undone. Underneath was papery white skin paler than the Florida sun should’ve allowed for, gone razor burn red at the neck, despite the ring of dusty gray stubble.

“I’m Tyler?” he responded, raising eyebrows and intonation, unintentionally turning his introduction into an existential question. “I’m looking for a man named Dave?”

“Tyler. Yes,” was all the rumpled little man in the wrinkled oxford said, then his mouth worked like he was chewing on something more to say, swallowed, finally, and instead said simply “Larry’s son, right?”

Tyler flinched back a bit, accustomed but uncomfortable with the categorization, no matter how much it had dogged and defined him. The discomfort mixed with relief, and on some basic motor level he realized anxiety had been rising in him along with bile, bubbling up his throat. He flashed an unconvincing smile in an effort to cover the movement of his adam’s apple as  he swallowed it all back down, the taste bitter on his tongue. Then he began again.

“They told me to come see you, uh, straight away,” Tyler managed to offer.

“Who is they, exactly, Tyler,” the man said, making clear his habit of question-shaped statements that served more for examination than investigation, like some quiz he had the answer sheet to already at hand.

“Uh, Monica? I mean, my father’s assistant. She booked the meeting, uh, our meeting. I believe, I think anyway. And the air travel, I guess,” he offered as explanatory after thought, trying to map a series of justifications for his existence before this man.

“Monica. Right. Okay. Tyler, Larry’s son. Sent by Monica,” he summarized, then said “I’m David Mazarelli, you’re allowed to call me Dave,” he smiled, offering some scant beneficence. “So. My office. In.”

He disappeared into one of the identical office-cubicles, not looking back to see if Tyler followed. Another handwritten sign, this one on blank printer paper hung in the window next to the thin pressed laminate plywood door reading “DIR/SPT COMMS”. Tyler, seeing no real alternative, ducked in after him.

Settling behind a desk that ate up enough floor space he had to shimmy between it and the wall to reach his chair, Dave sat. He gestured to Tyler, who banged the desk with first one knee and then the other as he worked to arrange himself into one of the chairs crammed facing it.

“So, Tyler,” Dave began, then paused as Tyler continued adjusting himself into the space allotted him, banging knees and feet against the desk a few more times. Drawers rattled. Dave’s frown deepened to oceanic depths, Tyler saw his eyes roll up and his shoulders slump with a sigh before he started again, “welcome to the team.”

“Thanks, I, sorry, I thought this was an interview?”

“Hm, yeah, I’m sure it’s not your last mistake we’ll have to correct,” Dave said, winking crudely as though they were sharing a dirty joke. Maybe a racist one. “The thing is, when someone who gives you a lot of money asks you for a favor, they’re never really asking, you follow me?” Tyler considered whether or not he actually did but Dave had already pushed on, ”once someone here answered the phone, or opened the email or what have you, there was only one way this was going to go.”

“Right, so, I guess, uh, what, what will I be doing?”

“We,” Dave began, his gesture enveloping Tyler into the term along with himself, “are the Special Projects Team, and I am the Director of said team,” he said. He licked his lips then, gratified by his own place in the world, then sucked his teeth sharply, “nominally we report to the swollen cauliflower ear of the Director of Communications,” he offered, clarification with actual clarity, “in practice, we mostly answer to one or two senior people, the Big Guy himself, and some off the books advisors. You, in turn,” he said, again scooping Tyler up into his words, “report to me.”

“Great,” Tyler offered, unconvincingly, “so, uh, sure, what, sort of, what sort of projects are we doing then?”

“Well, you know that old adage right,” Dave said, clearly warming once again to the sound of his own voice, “you campaign in poetry but govern in prose.”

“Sure,” Tyler said, as unconvincingly as his prior enthusiasm, to which Dave merely blinked placidly, then smiled as he swallowed the lie for the sake of his own evidently prepackaged rhetoric.

“Right. Well, in this case it might be more helpful to think of what we’re doing as campaigning in violent nihilism and governing with feckless corruption and unflinching apathy,” he delivered his punchline with another of his creepy-uncle-your-parents- won’t-leave-you-alone-with winks.

“Uh, okay.”

“It’s more of a toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe sort of thing, I suppose,” Dave said, considering the impact of his words on Tyler, whose turn it now was to blink placidly, to which he added a stiff rictus smile attempting, and failing, to demonstrate interest. Dave considered it, shuddered so subtly Tyler barely caught it, went on observing “so, sounds like that’s probably not actually very edifying to you, then.”

“Well,” Tyler drew it out, playing for time in the conversational volley he kept fouling his return on, “honestly, I’m not sure, uh, what that means. Like. What that looks like. You know, in uh, real terms.”

“Real terms,” Dave said, smiling sharply, as though he appreciated the chance to clarify, the invitation to explicate further, “well that’s an expansive question, son.”

“Expansive,” Tyler repeated, dumbly.

“Yes. Expansive. We have a broad remit to support the campaign for and, eventually, the administration of the once-and-future-President.” 

Now Dave splayed his broad hands, long spindly fingers spread wide, wrists not quite touching but so close. His hands, long and thin, mirrored the strange, stretched proportion of his body, which looked precisely like it could’ve served as a passable stunt double in a zombie movie. 

If Dave were a zombie, he would be the zombie that does stuff, the one at the head of the pack chasing the heroes through some darkened hallway or abandoned flight of stairs. Not a monster of imposing size, but of cunning and a viscous celerity. A little make-up, some rips and tears in his clothes to accentuate the wrinkles, Tyler could see it shaping up, the IMDB credit - Zombie #1. Maybe bald zombie. Evil smile zombie. Scary zombie.

Dave turned his open hands into a sort of pick-the-red-pill-or-blue-pill gesture, though they were empty. Tyler’s focus dragged towards an absolutely hideous wristwatch, some flavor of rolex in a gold so yellow it could’ve been the piss of an especially supplemented athlete, its bezel an offensively naval flavor of blue. 

When he brought his eyes up to Dave’s face he withered under the way the older man was looking at him. Around crinkly wrinkles,  there were watery blue eyes that seemed to stay in motion, scanning in readily-apparent effort to find something, anything at all, useful in Tyler.

“Great,” Tyler tried again, leaning into selling it, “I mean, that is, I’m excited to get started. Happy to help, you know, to be part of, uh, the team.”

“Excellent,” Dave replied, slapping his open palms together in one quick clap, as if to catch a troublesome bug, but merely causing Tyler to jump and bump another knee against the desk. “We’ve got a full itinerary. You, son, you’re going to be my number one guy, ride shotgun on my meetings, travel with me, etcetera, etcetera, good news is you’re already packed,” he smiled, throwing his sharp chin in the vague direction of Tyler’s luggage. “We leave for the airport in…” he paused and brought the hideous watch up towards his gaze. Tyler noted forests of thick dark hair on the backs of his hands. Far darker and thicker than the graying wisps where Dave’s forehead chased his hairline halfway towards the back of his head. “Three hours, exactly.”

“We’re, sorry, we’re going to the, uh, airport?” Tyler asked, feeling the friction of his clothes on his skin for too long, the weight of his eyelids fighting to remain open and attentive, little electric pulses of the losing battle adrenaline fought against exhaustion in his nerves. Their rhythm matched the migraine that continued to build in his temples.

“Yup. Off to the big city, kid. Well, by way of Newark, at any rate. Cheap shit jack travel consultants–you want your first lesson about this business,” Dave challenged Tyler, pointing one crooked finger at him. “Book your own fucking travel. Unless you want to show up at the airport with the vague hope of a seat assignment not by the toilets in one hand,” Dave said, lifting his hairy hands, weighing his own hypothetical. “And your limp useless schlong in the other,” he finished, his ostensible-schlong-hand tipping the balance, heavier by far than the hopes. “Anyways,” his eyeroll italicizing the second syllable as he pronounced it. “We’re on united at six,” he said, consulting the hideous gold thing once more, “it’s a man’s life on the campaign trail, son. Hope you’re up for it.”

“Absolutely, sure, yeah, uh,” Tyler trailed off, searching for more positive synonyms to share absent any actual conviction, “what, uh, what are we doing in New York?”

“People to see, rats to fuck, that sort of thing, you know,” Dave smiled again, Tyler worked up a sorting algorithm in his head of all the things he had seen that had made his skin crawl, ranking the man’s smile very near the top. “Cops, in this case,” Dave clarified, “we’re off to see some cops in Oyster Bay, out on the Island.”

“Cops? Like, police officers?” Tyler groped for some anchor point in the conversation, finding none in the forced formality, “uh, what, what are we meeting with cops for?”

“I’ll tell you in the car, on the way there,” Dave replied, offering up his wink that Tyler was now trying to assess in relation to his smile and all his memories of stomach-churning images gleaned from a relatively short and sheltered life.

“But, like, what do you need me to do, like prep-wise?”

“Prep? Son, you’re already doing everything I need you to do. Don’t sweat it.”

“What, uh, what does that mean,” Tyler asked, voice cracking just a bit around the that.

“You’re your father’s son, kid, right, now that’s all I need you to be. You can get me my coffee from time to time if it’ll make you feel better. You know, if you need to be useful.”

“I’m lost,” Tyler said, despite his vague and dim understanding that it didn’t require saying, “what are we doing, though, what is, like, what is my job?”

“You’re the special assistant to the very special director of the only somewhat secretive but nonetheless very special projects team,” Dave offered, “we do what needs doing, son. Whatever that means. Real terms, right? A bit of bribery, occasional blackmail, some vote-rigging here and there, and, you know, maybe, potentially some very light arms dealing. Whatever needs to get done, really.”