1.2 Three Conversations

1.2 Three Conversations

Now

M😍

Meghan

Today 1:32 PM

How was the flight?

Today 2:11 PM

Hard at work already?

Did you meet ur new boss yet?

Today 3:23 PM

Having lunch with the boss

Then headed to the airport

Again I mean

We’re going to new york

Today 4:52 PM

That was fast

So guess the interview went well

Today 5:13 PM

Not really an interview

Basically already had the job

Your dad?

…

…

…

yes

Today 5:37 PM

So what is it

?

Comms

Comms stuff_❓

OK

What stuff are you doing in nyc?

Meeting some union_‼️

👀👀👀

Wait, r u sure ur at the right campaign

What union??

Today 6:03 PM

Police

Some police union

Out on long island

Today 6:43 PM

Long island police union?

yeah

Boarding now

let me know when you land

OK

call you later?

Today 6:59 PM

ok

Then

“Still with me, son,” Dave was saying, his tone magnificently accomplishing the work of snapping fingers in Tyler’s face to get his attention despite his hands staying still.

“Arms dealing?” Tyler finally managed to gasp out, after a long silence in which he hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until his heart began to pound at the effort.

“Potentially,” Dave offered, “and just very lightly, nothing that’s not man-portable. Mostly ARs and such. If it even comes to that. Look, kid, we do what needs doing, okay, that’s the gig, to make sure the right people win this election. Get the Big Guy back where he belongs. And I’m going to need you to get onboard with that somewhere in the vicinity of right-the-fuck-now.”

“Well, uh, I just–”

“Listen, don’t overthink it, kid,” Dave reassured, “mostly what we’ll do–mostly what I’ll be doing–is talking to people. That’s it, at bottom, what politics is all about. We go out and talk to people and figure out what they want to give us what we need. Easy.”

“Sure,” Tyler said, trying to find the thread that would unravel the sweater, “but the, uh, the other stuff, you said–”

“What, some minor felonies? Look, don’t sweat the small stuff, kid,” Dave said, his frown shifting him into the picture of a disappointed teacher with higher hopes than their student could deliver on. He went on, his voice warming up to itself as it worked, “this stuff, you know, you gotta ask yourself, who even decides what’s a crime these days,” he finally said. It was less a question than a bit of chum, tossed amiably enough into the waters of their conversation, blind bait to see what came biting back. 

“Uh, judges?” Tyler responded, relieved there was a question with an easy answer, even if only relatively.

“Well, in a sort of superficial way, sure,” Dave said, his mouth working between words like he was chewing on the idea, “Technically juries, functionally prosecutors, listen, it’s low on the agenda, but it might be helpful if you get a better sense of how that kinda stuff works, just in case, All that education and no law school, huh. Luckily we’ve got lawyers. We’ve got fucking lawyers for days, here.”

“Just in case of, uh, what?” Tyler kept struggling, he piled up sentences that failed to cohere, just protest-sounding words strung out but unable to shape up into either argument or interrogative.

“Look, we’re getting off track here,” Dave said, one eyebrow rising in suspicion, “the job is the job. It’s whatever. You know,” Tyler really, truly did not, but Dave continued. “Don’t lose sight of the goal, kid, that’s the trick of it. Real terms, right? We might be in Nebraska or Montana one day, trading promises of military surplus to some keyed up sovereign sheriff in exchange for a bunch of volunteer heavies for election day. You get the picture, right? Eight or nine hundred pounds of born to lose knuckle tattoos and shaved heads to station as poll watchers in the only black neighborhood for a hundred miles. Something like that.”

“Right,” Tyler said, meaning in the usage unclear even to him.

“That’s the gig, someone has something we want, we have something they want. Sometimes it’s some promise for when we’re back in the driver’s seat, when we’ve got the juice again. Let’s say our hypothetical sheriff, he’s maybe got a consent decree with Justice, or there’s an open probe heading in that direction. What he wants is our word that this fed trouble goes away, and what we want is loyal foot soldiers, we want him on the air, or whatever a podcast goes on,” Dave trailed off a little, momentarily distracted by his own question. “Wifi or whatever, the point is,” back on track, stabbing a finger down into his desk for unneeded emphasis, “we want him fire-and- brimestoning all the way up to election day. We want him delivering his supporters’ votes for us. We want him on speed dial for anything comes up. Local juice, what some talking head might call ground game, you follow me?”

“Sure,” Tyler shrugged, trying to follow, desperate to.

“I mean, most of these guys, they just want a picture they can hang in their office, when the Big Guy blows through town next, shit-eating smiles and thumbs up. That sort of thing,” Dave paused, seeming to consider terms of transactions not necessarily hypothetical, “some of these guys, they want something more tangible, you know some Iraq-era surplus machine guns, or some MRAPs going dusty in a defense warehouse.”

“Okay…”

“So we shake some hands, make some promises. We give them what they want, son, or convince them we’re going to. And they give us what we need. That is the job.”

“Yeah, uh, I just, where do I fit into all this?”

“You’re the golden key, kid,” Dave said, awful smile spreading like a stain on his face, “you’re gonna open some doors for us, doors we’ve been knocking on for a while.”

“I don’t–”

“Yeah, you don’t get it. Don’t understand. I know. I get the picture, kid. Listen, you’re mostly going to keep your fucking mouth shut, nod your head and smile, shake some hands when I introduce you and then stay out the way. Your dad, your name, your money is the juice here kid, that’s what I need, okay,” Dave said, his face gone slack, his didactic energy running aground of Tyler’s sustained ignorance. “If I could put one of my other guys in a t-shirt that just had Larry Graham’s kid in big block capitals across the front and get the same reaction, I would. Believe me.” Tyler did, but Dave continued anyway, a head of steam built up, needing relief, “we’ve got some fucking fenceriders out there, waffle motherfuckers, you know?” Dave asked for the benefit of no one in particular, “some dipshits and twitter hotshots need to be reminded its not a fucking posting war. Listen, not sure how much you already understand kid, but we need your name attached to ours. Your dad was getting hinky there for a while, looking froggy, after it came out how many of the planning calls he was on way back that December. After some Wapo dipshit followed some dollars and put a number on exactly how many buses worth of rednecks your dad’s money sent to the capitol that January. Any of this coming together for you?”

“Uh,” was the best Tyler could manage, though on some subconscious level the pieces came together. He had the frame of it at least, the corners of the puzzle, even if the center and bits of the borders were mostly wide open, waiting to be filled.

“Christ, well look, we’ll keep it simple. Here’s the gig, for you at least. Smile. Say nothing. Act casual. You’re here to be here, son, that is your singular job. And you stay the fuck out of the way, okay.”

“Okay.”

“Now, we’re gonna say no more of this shit, for today. We've got a few hours to kill before the airport, just enough time. Let’s go, we’ll call it a late lunch,” Dave said, winking.

Which turned out to be four fingers of scotch on the rocks, so pale and peaty it was stripping paint off the walls of the storefront dive bar they found themselves in. Two strip mall parking lots over from the strip mall office space, the menu offered fries, onion rings, and nachos for appetizers, entrees limited to chicken fingers, hot dogs and burgers. At the bottom was a selection of milkshake flavors, covered over with thick black magic marker on the laminate.

Tyler ordered a club soda. They even gave him a straw. Dave swirled the half-gone scotch, rapidly shrinking ice cubes watering down what was left. His eyes stayed in motion, scanning from the scotch to Tyler to over his shoulder, most likely intently focused on where his next drink would be coming from.

“So,” he began, setting his scotch down with something like genuflection, then spreading his hands expansively, “politics. “

Dave’s smile put Tyler in mind of doctors with fatal specialties, oncologists practiced in the breaking of bad news. Smiles that spoke of how unpleasant and hopeless the conversation to come was going to be, would have to be, just by the nature of the structure that left them sitting there, facing one another.

“Politics,” Dave continued, Tyler flinching just a bit as he did, “it’s a real motherfucker. You know much about politics, son? It’s not exactly a job requirement, but it would be moderately helpful–”

“For the felonies?” Tyler managed to blurt and whisper at the same time.

“Kid. What did I say about shutting the fuck up,” Dave smiled, showing sharp teeth, “what did I say about not speaking about that for the rest of today,” he broadened his smile out with a little threat. “We’re talking about politics. I’m curious what you know and understand about politics. Forget about the official job req. Humor me,” his eyes stayed on Tyler, even as his hand came up, signaling for a fresh scotch.

Tyler’s personal politics were functionally nonexistent, sitting safely outside of any overton window. He had been assured–with and to varying levels of forcefulness–that he misunderstood politics in some deeply fundamental way. The cocktail party conversationalists, barstool buddies, college friends, acquaintances, and failed romances who had identified this inability to grasp political ideology also uniformly agreed that his social status was directly and, likely, entirely responsible for it.

“I’m registered independent,” Tyler nonetheless offered, gamely.

“Excellent, means personal won’t have to fire your ass for checking some wrong box,” Dave smiled, a little gamely, himself, “but I’m asking what you know about politics-as-a-practice, son. That is, politics as the work of winning and accumulating power. That is, as distinct from governing. Distinct from policy. From leading. Politics,” he smiled, his fresh scotch touching down just in front of him, “is the art of controlling your environment.”

“Oh, well.”

“I’m going to assume nothing. Let’s just go with that, Tyler, let’s assume you know fuckall about politics unless and until you manage to somehow disabuse me of such.” Dave’s face went slack, eyes flat, a vacancy written across him that contained multitudes, while Tyler correlated the data points and realized interrupting was not in his interest. Dave continued, “That bit, that quote, ‘politics is the art of controlling your environment’ is Hunter S. Thompson, I take it you aren’t familiar.”

“Never met him,” came across Tyler’s lips before he could stop himself.

“Of course,” the old man offered the hint of a grin, and Tyler realized belatedly that Dave was unsure if it had been an attempt at a joke or not, “but it’s as good a definition as any. Politics is the art of controlling your environment. In real terms,” Dave said, his mouth sour around the callback, “we win campaigns by sticking to our plan and making the other guys–don’t fucking look at me like that–guys, fail to stick to theirs. Control the environment, the agenda, dominate the fucking news cycle, the fucking, whattayacallit, the discourse. That’s politics. That’s what we’re doing.”

“Great,” Tyler said, a smile he still couldn’t quite sell sitting numbly on his face.

Tyler’s phone vibrated in his pocket while Dave drained the last of his second scotch, waving a third his way. He watched Tyler clinically, his eyes occasionally scanning, wandering over everything, tracking the rest of the room. Dave nodded and eye rolled in equal measure, giving permission. As Tyler retrieved the phone from his pocket, the next scotch arrived.

Dave cradled the rocks glass, accomplishing some sought-after equilibrium of diluted scotch and shrunken ice cubes delivered by transferred warmth from his hands. There was a massive pile-up of notifications on Tyler’s home screen. It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard Dave’s phone, hadn’t even seen it, wasn’t sure how to gauge his importance by the weight of ignored notifications. For his own part, whatever importance Tyler had wasn’t likely signaled by the badges signifying unread texts from his ex.

They sat there in a strained silence, Dave focusing intently on his twenty-two-dollars-a-glass scotch, Tyler unsure of everything, up to and including if that was expensive or not by Florida standards. His phone buzzed and shook on the tabletop, so he slipped it back into a pocket, making a bemused face first at it as he slid it out of sight, then at Dave, waiting for whatever was next.

“Alright, Chauncey Gardiner, finish your club soda and let’s get our fucking skates on, already,” Dave said, taking the last of his scotch down in one long, smooth, swallow.

Later

T❤️‍🩹

Tyler 🩹

Today 8:12

landed

What are you up to?

Today 8:51

Headed to the hotel

still want to connect later?

Today 9:53

hey 

Today 10:42

hey

👋👋👋

Still up?

Its one am for u

Missed FaceTime request from Tyler❤️‍🩹 

^_10:58

Missed FaceTime request from Tyler❤️‍🩹

^_11:12

Today 11:23

Ok

_{FaceTime request from Tyler❤️‍🩹}

She hit accept and her face shrunk to one corner while his filled the screen. Dark circles under his eyes either shadow or sleeplessness, stubble rising on his cheeks, reddening at its edges, scotch-irish ancestry showing in exhaustion. Neon blues and reds reflected off his cheeks and forehead, off the too-white hotel pillows his head rested on, light dancing and moving, television highlights from somewhere out of sight mingling with the blue light off the screen. 

She sighed without meaning to, at the sight of him, and watched as the recognition played out on his face–her seeing him, him seeing her see him, everything that went with it. Multiple kinds of space stretched out between them before he finally broke the silence.

“Wow,” he said in place of greeting, “I look like hell.”

“Yeah,” she let out a relieved little laugh, “you really do. When was the last time you slept?”

“Like, slept-slept? Like a full night? I dunno, yesterday? Tuesday?”

“It is Tuesday.”

“Monday, uh, Sunday, then.”

“Jesus.”

“And meetings in the morning,” he offered, along with the sad smile she knew too well.

“So,” she drew it out, like stepping gingerly on a landmine could produce a smaller denotation, “what are you doing?”

“Meeting cops,” he said, shaking his head like it would dispel his own disbelief, “I said, right? We’ve got some union meeting. In the morning.”

“No, I mean, no, I know,” she sighed, a little surprised at how frustrated she was already, “but the job, like, what is the job?”

“I’m, uh,” his eyes rolled up to rummage through memory, searching for refugee in jargon and titles, “the special assistant to the executive director of the special projects team for the communications department of the campaign,” he finished, moderately pleased with himself.

“That’s, uh, that’s a lot of specials and executives.”

“Two specials, one executive.”

“Right,” she said, watching the video version of her as one hand moved from supporting her chin to covering her mouth. She willed herself, like she would a character in a heavily foreshadowed horror flick, to not bite at a nail, “but what does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet, to be honest,” he said, possibly moderately honestly, even.

“But you’re meeting cops.”

“Union cops.”

“On Long Island.”

“Oyster Bay.”

“And you don’t know what for,” she asked, watching her own face as one of her eyebrows cocked itself, unconsciously suspicious.

“I mean, it’s my dad. You know.”

“I know. Dad shit.”

“Dad shit,” he echoed.

“So you’re just there because he asked?”

“I mean, I guess. It was, uh,” he stumbled around, groping in a way she recognized as dissembling, but somehow forced into at least the shape of seriousness, “he asked, y’know? Or Monica did. Or whatever. I had the job before I landed, he told me.”

“He?”

“New boss.”

“Same as the old boss, or does he have a name,” she smirked, him wincing in reply.

“Dave. David Mazarelli.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Me neither,” his turn to smirk, she smiled gentle acceptance back, “I did some googling. In the car.”

“Wait,” she laughed a little, picturing it, “right next to him?”

“He was driving,” Tyler blinked acknowledgment of the strangeness of it, “he likes to drive, he said. We got a rental.”

“Okay,” she said, her mental image quickly exhausted of humor, “so what did you find?”

“Not a ton,” he sighed, “his name is on the wiki for something called the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000? But he doesn’t rate his own article, I guess.”

“Just a stub, huh?”

“Yeah, there’s a bit of a note, he worked for someone in a primary, Huckabee?”

“Yeah, I think I remember him. Some nerd with an angry radio show. Podcast. Whatever.”

“Podcast,” he said, sounding like it was something distasteful lodged in his throat.

“Yeah. Oh, yeah, Huckabee,” she said, quick taps on the phone screen making Tyler bounce in his little video corner where he had been relegated to as she pulled up a search, “he was a governor, oh my god, his daughter was the press secretary for like, a couple years. I kinda forgot that. She’s a governor now, basically the same old shit, just a smaller stage. She’s fucking nuts. I don’t remember her dad that well.”

“Yeah, I dunno, that’s all I found on him, though,” he refocused the conversation as she tapped back to let him take up the entire screen, her face tiny in its corner.

“Okay, so he’s been around though?”

“Sounds like it.”

“So,” she pulled them back after the detour, “what are you doing, though?”

“Well,” he sighed again, heavier, closing his eyes like he was somehow gathering strength from it, “basically I’m just here to be here, to represent my dad, somehow.”

“Somehow?”

“Yeah, like,” he fumbled and groped, and she could see he was trying to get his arms around the what of it as much as explain it “he said I’m here to open doors for him, like, show that my dad’s behind the campaign, basically, you know, fly the flag or whatever.”

“Like a mascot,” she frowned, “or something.”

“Probably,” he snorted out with half-a-laugh, “more or-something than mascot, I think, but probably not far from it, I guess”

“Honey,” she said, neither catching it before it came out or back-tracking to self-correct, “what the fuck are you doing, though?”

“Heh,” he chuckled, aiming for something someone might’ve described as rueful in a hundred year old book, an act of unconcern mostly for her benefit, “I don’t even know.”

“Why don’t you just come home,” her eyes shined with empathy even on her screen, his discomfort–either at the empathy or the question, unclear to her–palpable.

“Don’t have a home,” he huffed more than sighed, powered through to the point, “the movers showed up before Monica even got there to tell me, started packing the place up for storage and staging for the listing.”

“Wait, but, wait. The condo? It’s not in your name? Like, can they do that?”

“It’s the trust, you know how he is, it’s just, it’s not worth the fight.”

“Right, but, wow,” she considered, “so all your stuff is in storage?”

“Yeah, don’t worry, your stuff is in a box with your name on it, I told them to make sure it was in the front. I can email Monica and you if you want to find time to pick it up.”

“No, I just mean, like. Wow. I guess, yeah, I can pick it up whenever. It’s not, uh, it’s not like a priority or anything. It’s all at the Bel Air house?”

“Just some rent-a-storage spot. Forget where, it’s in my email somewhere.”

“Okay, but like,” she shook her head clear, reprioritizing her questions, “you can still, like, you can still come home, y’know? Like, home to LA. Just not your old place.”

“Yeah,” he frowned, she thought about how he used to say our place. How she didn’t. His frown deepened, “I mean, look, you know how it goes with him. I’ll put in a few months, I mean, what, the election is ten months away, anyway, right?”

“Uh, eight, nine, eight if you don’t count early November.”

“Nine, eight, sure. Whatever,” he said, sighing as punctuation, “I can do eight months. It’s not even, like, the worst place he ever sent me.”

“It isn’t?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” he furrowed his brow, the lines cut there looked deeper than she remembered, but maybe it was just shadow, “Beijing was pretty bad.”

“Beijing was so bad,” she laughed, noticing a small smile finally stretching on his face, solidarity in semi-shared misery, “you were so sick, like, the whole time. Whenever we talked you were either heading to or coming from the bathroom.”

“Yeah, I kept coughing between pukes, or puking between coughs, whatever. It was awful,” he laughed, as unselfconscious as he had been in the conversation so far, ”he never sent me back east after that, or never that far east. Whatever. Y’know, bright side. Silver linings.”

“Silver linings,” she smiled, matching him in his unguardedness, before remembering to get her game face on, “but this, this is like, pretty bad? These are pretty bad people.”

“Dave’s the only one I’ve met so far,” he deflected.

“Wait, didn’t you go to their offices? Isn’t that, like, the campaign headquarters?”

“He was, uh, the only one there,” he smiled again, his wounded little smile, made up of equal parts sadness and resigned acceptance. She thought she knew it well enough to disarm it, but was surprised to find this wasn’t strictly true. Then he sighed again, offering instead, “he said they were out on the trail, primaries, whatever.”

“Super Tuesday was, like, a month ago,” she watched herself frown, tried to artificially brighten her face up, following some parental advice about how to avoid wrinkles still somehow playing in her subconscious. “I mean, there’s barely a primary happening.”

“Seems like they run a lean operation,” he offered further, avoiding falling into any specifics she suspected he, maybe, was only dimly aware of.

“Okay, but, look,” she sighed, her game face was wearing, he was in turns evasive, deflecting, accepting, or just sad. She knew all his moves, but felt increasingly too tired of the whole game they always played. If the stakes had gotten higher, that just made it that much more exhausting. “These people are bad, yes? This campaign is bad. He was a bad President. He’d be much worse this time. Like, this isn’t, I dunno.”

“Normal bad?”

“Normal bad. Sure, it’s not normal bad. It’s not, like,” she struggled to frame it along some line that wasn’t already a third rail for them, mostly failing, “it’s not like the normal bad background radiation of late stage capitalism, you know? It’s not like you’re just doing marginally bad things for your father to make marginally more money, and maybe he’s marginally less worse than some other soulless billionaire,” she paused, catching herself, tasting how familiar all these words were in her mouth, trying to get back to something less triggering for the both of them. “Baby,” she said, fully aware of it this time, watching his face darken in response, “this is like, end-of-the-world-bad. These people? They’re put people-in-camps kinda people. They’re like, end-of-free- and-fair-elections people,” but she could see him shut down long before she even finished, all their old defenses hardening in place, habituated from long practice.

“Yeah,” he smiled again, trying again to disarm without any success, “look, it just is what it is. If it weren’t this it would be something else, something just as awful. Remember Scoreboard?” She did, nodding along, “it’s just that or something like it. You know the routine. Do this for eight–”

“Nine.”

“Nine months, ten months, whatever. It’s just a waiting game. Wait for him to forget why he was mad in the first place, then unpack back into the condo, have a few months, maybe a year off until he gets mad about something else again.” He sighed out a full stop, before gathering breath for the arguments and counters, all of it just an old script for him to read from. A map that always lead them back to the same place.

“Tyler,” she said, summoning up compassion, some gentleness that always moved him more than the anger it edged out, pushed to the periphery of her voice, “I know. I know how it goes with you two, it’s just. Dad shit, okay, I get it. This is bad, okay, I’m just, I know this isn’t your thing,” her inflection framing thing in scare quotes, “but you know I know what I’m talking about. This is bad. Okay. Whatever they have you doing, even if you’re just, like, taking out their trash–”

“Getting coffee.”

“What?”

“Dave said I could get him coffee.”

“Fine, whatever, you take their trash out and the trash is toxic waste, you, you, whatever, get their coffee, the coffee is like human blood.”

He laughed, despite himself, and she smiled despite herself, but he was already past reaching and she recognized it with weary familiarity, “I don’t think anyone there drinks human blood.”

“But you couldn’t say for sure?”

“I’m going to go to bed. Early morning. Thanks for talking to me,” he muttered, playing up the drowsiness in his voice, but not by much.

“Tyler,” she said, a firmness in her tone focusing his bleary eyes on the screen. “You can’t say for sure they don’t drink human blood, can you?”

He smiled, one last college try for the old result. It didn’t come up, “goodnight, lovely.”

“Goodnight, honey,” she said to the two-note-tone of him disconnecting.

Thanks for reading, if you’re trying to get caught up you can at the start of the novel by reading 1.1. Terminal, here.

Or you can read the introduction that (hopefully) helps explain what all is happening here.