In The Event

In the Event

First, it was the phone in the study. They both ignored it. To answer it was to surrender or worse to agree. Then it was the siren and flashing lights coming from the alarm panel in the hallway. That continued for minutes until something had to be said. 

“What did you do?” Leona yelled from the kitchen.

“I didn’t do anything,” Leonora replied, as she came down the stairs. “What did YOU do?”

“You were here with that creep with the weird face.”

“You were here, too. How else would you know?”

Had they been able to cooperate they might have avoided blame. But they were not and so it fell upon them. They were the only two home and someone had blown up the world-wide web.

Outside, a fleet of oversized SUVs was pulling onto the street. NSA, FBI and Secret Service men ran from their vehicles, weapons drawn, and across the Senator’s lawn towards his house. In their haste they knocked over one of the sheep and snapped the arm off the wisemen holding out his offering of incense or myrrh to the baby Jesus. Not even Christ in the Manger was afforded respect in a national emergency. Christmas was ruined, too.

The Senator and his wife arrived minutes after in a chauffeur-driven limo. They had been at the Chilean Ambassador’s residence in Dupont Circle when the Senator’s Secret Service detail interrupted him mid-sentence. He had been trying to woo the wife and model of the famous Spanish painter, Rudolfo. One of his pieces, a nude in pastel, hung in the Ambassador’s study above his desk and once the Senator had gotten a look at the dark of her nipples, he had squeezed between her and a tray of pimento-stuffed anchovy rolls to introduce himself. It was all the Secret Service agent could do to catch his attention and share the news that his computer had been used to release a worm that was now spreading by fiber-wire around the globe. The agent was surprised by the Senator’s aplomb and felt reassured. The Senator was mulling over his options, among them ignoring the dire news and continuing to pursue his fantasy.

Leonora and Leona were sitting in the living room on matching black leather chairs. Behind each of them stood a man in black military clothing and matching helmet. An automatic rifle was strapped across his chest and one gloved hand gripped the trigger guard while the other draped free at his side, ready to balance and aim. Leonora wore Lulabelle yoga pants, a knit sweater and ankle-high Sheepskin boots. Leona was still wearing the dress and coat she had gone out in, but not the jade green high heels.

“Daddy, it wasn’t me,” Leona said as soon as the Senator came through the front door.

“So quick to blame others,” Leonora snapped back.

The Senator ignored them. He moved under escort through the vestibule, past the fir wreaths and strings of Christmas lights towards his study. With him was his Secret Service detail. He was still wearing his overcoat and scarf. Leona sighed.

The Senator was followed by a short man in a dark rumpled suit that was worn at the sleeves and too thin to muffle the sounds coming from his stomach. “Damn,” he said to no one in particular, “That chili’s putting up a good fight.” The Senator dismissed him. The French called people like him a fuctionaire. It was an appropriate title for someone who is paid to do nothing in particular.

“It looks like your computer was used. Is it always on your desk, open like this?” the short man asked the Senator.

The Senator reached out. “Don’t touch it. We haven’t examined it yet.” The Senator winced. More important to him were the loose papers next to the computer. They were the first few pages of the memoir that he was writing, a gut-heaving, throat-burning pouring out of his thirty-five years in Washington. He covered them with the thesaurus that he had been using to find alternatives to the word ‘impotent.’

“So what happens now?” the Senator asked. “And who are all these people?”

“Well, sir. We’re the people that are going to figure out how to save the world.”

The Senator felt the rumblings of the champagne and hors d'oeuvres he had enjoyed earlier. But it may have also been a reaction to the short man. He wanted to tell him, that after all the briefings he’d received over the years from diplomats, analysts and spies, there were parts of the world that just weren’t worth saving. But he feared giving him the wrong impression. Ideas freely offered to such a man as this might be misused, turned into accusations and evidence. So he was cautious not to say aloud what he was thinking, that now that the worm was out it might not be a bad thing to let it run its course. Besides, it was just as likely that some good would come from the world ending. History is the proof of that. In the face of calamity, great men have always stepped forward, genius has found a way and the disaster is averted. It was a crap-shoot.

There was a clamor coming from the front room. Sounds of anger and confusion. A rush of men moved past the study door. The Senator’s wife had just forced her way through the barricade of armed guards at the front door and was now standing under the hall chandelier cursing at those who had tracked mud and bits of straw up the carpeted staircase.

“Who’s in charge here?” she yelled out. “Move out of the way. Your guns don’t scare me.” She pushed her way into the front room where the girls were sitting.

“What have they done to you?” she asked the two girls. “Why are my daughters sitting in here, are they under arrest?”

Leonora jumped up, “Mother, this is her fault.”

“They took my cell phone. I can’t even reach Max,” Leona whined.

The Senator joined them.

“Cell phones aren’t working anyway.” The short man said. “The internet is down. The world depends on the internet.”

“Back to the stone ages, that’s where we’re headed,” another man, younger than the first, but dressed in the same kind of rumpled dark suit, said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the short man snapped back.

“It’s just something I heard,” the younger man replied. There was tension in the air. The Senator could see it in the furtive glances of the men with guns. They were nervous. It was a moment of history when choices are made and later written about by those who lived through it. The world had never ended before and these men, these poorly dressed bureaucrats, were in need of someone to blame. It was someone in this room.

“We just took a look at the security camera footage from your office, Senator,” the younger man said. “Fortunately, it was recorded on CD.”

“My God man, can you do that without a warrant?” the Senator demanded.

The short man frowned. The Senator needed to negotiate, he was at a disadvantage and there was a chance that he might become the target of their inquiry. Did they know about his role in the Senate’s investigation of cyberterrorism? Would the CD expose his growing anarchism? Would it indicate his frustration with the democratic process and his declining interest in being a part of it? Would it show him sitting in his study night after night running the cursor over the execution file hoping for a sign? 

“There is someone in the video that’s not here now. Someone that was in your office this evening. He is what we call a person of interest. Do I have permission to ask your daughters if they can identify him,” the younger man asked.

The Senator let out a sigh of relief.

“Who’s the man in your father’s office? He looks like…well, you know what he looks like.” the younger man asked.

“It’s her sleaze-of-a-boyfriend,” cried Leona. “He was probably stealing top-secret documents or shipping drugs in the diplomat pouch.”

“Shut up. He didn’t do anything,” Leonora insisted.

“I concur, to my knowledge he never has done anything,” the Senator said. “And I highly doubt that he is capable of destroying the world.”

He was relieved to hear that he was not the focus of their investigation.

“Daddy,” pleaded Leonora.

“This is serious, Senator,” the younger man said.

“Point of clarification,” the Senator said. “It was serious, now it’s not. That’s the ironic thing about the end of the world.”

The lights in the house dimmed, fluttered and then went out. Everyone gasp, except Leona, who could see that the manger in the front yard was still aglow and she felt at that moment flushed with hope. Beams of light from a dozen flashlights switched on, scanning faces and the shadows nearest them. The guards with the automatic weapons had flashlights mounted on their helmets so that wherever they looked light followed. Two of them got into a flashlight war that could have meant “Stop looking at me” or “I like you, too.” Again, Leona was only one to notice and the hope that had come to her from seeing the manger bathed in an angelic-glow and feeling God’s presence, was extinguished. 

“Just because the world is ending doesn’t mean we have to destroy it. Darnel, please apologize to your daughter,” said the Senator’s wife. “All of us need to act with a little more restraint. You two girls in particular.”

The shorter man was following the family’s conversation with his flashlight, from Leonora’s face to Leona’s face and back again until he realized a defined similarity between them.

“Are they twins?” he shouted out.

“No,” responded Leonora.

“Yes, but not by choice,” responded Leona.

“There’s still the question of the boyfriend,” the younger man reminded his counterpart.

“There always is,” the Senator said.

“That is enough,” the Senator’s wife said. It was certainly enough for her.

The Christmas tree was a dark specter in the corner and the turkey and ham she had bought were spoiling without refrigeration. Her house was filled with strangers with poor manners and her Christmas-spirit had turned to anger and ill-will towards all and she realized that in the waning hours of her existence, she wanted to smash the Senator’s face in. She wanted to claw at his face, pull his perfectly draped tie around his Adam’s apple till his eyes turned red. She wanted to step on his hands and hear the bones crumble like sandstone so that he would not be able to touch her. She wanted to spill out the years of bottled-up anger, all that she had kept inside while she stood next to him at campaign rallies and inaugural balls. She wanted to pay him back for having to listen to him deflect blame, avoid responsibility and betray his oath. She wanted to hold him accountable. She wanted to ask him about the book he was writing and whether he would talk about the times that he had returned home from his diplomatic trips and junkets with new underwear. Did he think she wouldn’t know? She had packed his bags for him. She wanted to ask him about the thick-stuffed envelopes he had been receiving from Panamanian banks. She wanted to ask about the trips she had made to the Dirksen Senate Office Building to visit him and was told by his staff that he was out of town or in a hearing or on a call, but they had not yet learned how to lie. She had held it in for so long and now at the end of the world, she just wanted to do what she should have done a long time ago, what anyone in her position would do. But her southern upbringing kept her from doing it and, instead, she remained focus on the family.

“How was dinner, dear?” she asked Leona.

“Nice, but I think I lost my shoes.”

“Not to worry. They’ll show up.