The teachers are telling him about the weather, and he’s pretending to care as he tries to ignore the florescent lighting as yellow as the skin that forms on old butter, the cracks in the dull beige walls, the faded construction paper of old projects taped to those walls, drooping down toward a tired, washed-out green carpet that’s paper-thin under foot.
It’s the kind of event that he’s never really understood the point of, even as he understands the reason for it. To prove that he’s still fit for office. To prove that the country, some of it, is free of war and division. To prove he cares about kids, even though this particular school seems to be falling apart. Why this class, why today, is what he really doesn’t understand, with so many world crises—China’s imperialism, the Siberian separatist movement, Iraq as the only bulwark against Russian influence in the Middle East. Or a vice president he now knows may be too old and delusional to be anything other than an embarrassment, and a cabinet he let his family’s political cronies bully him into appointing, and a secret cavern that has infected his thoughts, infected his mind.
And that would lead to memories of his father, and the awful silence into which they told him, as he sat coked up and hung-over that morning on the pastel couch in some sleazy apartment, how it had happened while his father worked a town hall meeting in Atlanta.
All of this has made him realize that there’s only one way to succeed in this thing called the presidency: just let go of the reality of the world in favor of whatever reality he wants or needs, no matter how selfish.
The teachers are turning into animals again, and he can’t seem to stop it from happening.
The time machine had appeared as an image on their monitors from an adept named “Peter” in vat 1023, and because they couldn’t figure out the context—weapon? camera? something new?—they had to wake Peter up and have a conversation with him.
A time machine?
And they’d believed him, or if not believed him, dared to hope he was right. That what Peter had seen while deprived of anything but his own brain, like some deep-sea fish, like something constantly turning inwards and then turning inwards again, had been a time machine.
If they didn’t build it and it turned out later that it might have worked and could have helped them avert or change what was fated to happen in September…
That day, three hours after being sworn in, he had had to give the order to build a time machine, and quickly.
“What?” he kept asking, and the answer was always the same:
They kept telling him that the adepts didn’t seem to convey literal information so much as impressions and visions of the future, filtered through dreamscapes. As if the drugs they’d perfected, which had changed the way the adepts dreamed, both improved and destroyed focus, in different ways.
In the end, he had decided to build the machine—and defend against almost everything they could think of or divine from the images: any attack against the still-surviving New York financial district or the monument to the Queen Mother in the New York harbor; the random god-missiles of the Christian jihadists of the Heartland, who hadn’t yet managed to unlock the nuclear codes in the occupied states; and even the lingering cesspool that was Los Angeles after the viruses and riots.
But they still did not really know.
He’s good now at talking to people when it’s not a prepared speech, good at letting his mind be elsewhere while he talks to a series of masks from behind his own mask. The prepared speeches are different because he’s expected to
They round the corner and enter the classroom: thirty children in plastic one-piece desk-chairs, looking solemn, and the teacher standing in front of a beat-up battlewagon of a desk, overflowing with papers.
Behind her, posters they’d made for him, or someone had made to look like the children made them, most showing him with the crown on his head. But also a blackboard, which amazes him. So anachronistic, and he’s always hated the sound of chalk on a blackboard. Hates the smell of glue and the sour food-sweat of unwashed kids. It’s all so squalid and tired and oddly close to the atmosphere in the underground cavern, the smell the adepts give off as they thrash in slow-motion in their vats, silently screaming out images of catastrophe and oblivion.
The children look up at him when he enters the room like they’re watching something far away and half- wondrous, half-monstrous.
He stands there and talks to them for a while at first, trying to ignore the window in the back of the classroom that wants to show him a scene that shouldn’t have been there. He says the kinds of things he’s said to kids for years while on the campaign trail, running for ever-greater office. Has said these things for so many years that it’s become a sawdust litany meant to convince them of his charm, his wit, his competence. Later, he won’t remember what he said, or what they said back. It’s not important.
But he’s thought about the implications of that in bed at night, lying there while his wife reads, her pale, freckled shoulder like a wall above him. He could stand in a classroom and say nothing, and still they would be fascinated with him, like a talisman, like a golden statue. No one had ever told him that sometimes you don’t have to inhabit the presidency; sometimes, it inhabits you.
He’d wondered at the time of coronation if he’d feel different. He’d wondered how the parliament members would receive him, given the split between the popular vote and the legislative vote. But nothing had happened. The parliament members had clapped, some longer than others, and he’d been sworn in, duly noting the absence of the rogue Scottish delegation. The Crown of the Americas had briefly touched his head, like an “iron kiss from the mouth of God,” as his predecessor had put it, and then it was gone again, under glass, and he was back to being the secular president, not some sort of divine king.
Then they’d taken him to the Pentagon, hurtled him half a mile underground, and he’d felt like a man who wins a prize only to find out it’s worthless.
Before they built the time machine, he had insisted on meeting “Peter” in an interrogation room near the vats. He felt strongly about this, about looking into the eyes of the man he had almost decided to trust.
“Are you sure this will work?” he asked Peter, even as he found the question irrelevant, ridiculous. No matter what Peter said, no matter how impossible his scientists said it was, how it subverted known science, he was going to do it. The curiosity was too strong.
Peter’s eyes were bright with a kind of fever. His face was the palest white possible, and he stank of the chemicals. They’d put him in a blue jumper suit to cover his nakedness.
“It’ll work. I pulled it out of another place. It was a true-sight. A true-seeing. I don’t know how it works, but it works. It’ll work, it’ll work, and then,” he turned toward the black one-way glass at the far end of the room, hands in restraints behind his back, “I’ll be free?”
There was a thing in Peter’s eyes he refused to acknowledge. A sense of something being held back, of something not quite right. Later, he would never know why he didn’t trust that instinct, that perception, and the only reason he could come up with was the strength of his curiosity and the weight of his predecessor’s effort to get to that point.
“What, exactly, is the machine for? Exactly. Not just…time travel. Tell me something more specific.”
The scientist accompanying them smiled. He had a withered, narrow face, a firm chin, and wore a jumpsuit that matched Peter’s, with a black belt at the waist that held the holster for an even blacker semi-automatic pistol. He smelled strongly of a sickly sweet cologne, as if hiding some essential putrefaction.
“Mr. President,” he said, “Peter is not a scientist. And we cannot peer into his mind. We can only see the images his mind projects. Until we build it, we will not know exactly how it works.”
And then, when the machine was built, and they took him to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t
