“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Why did you kill Maxwell Harper? Why did you kill the press secretary and the attorney general?”
“I didn’t kill them,” she said. “No one killed them.”
“What?”
“They are not dead.”
He gaped at her. “What kind of a lie is that? Of course they’re dead!”
Her eyes on him again, tears in them. “Austin Briggs is alive in Washington. And so is Julius Wexford; he got off the train with us yesterday, he took a car from the station to San Francisco.”
All wrong, this is all wrong. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, Mrs. Augustine, but it won’t work. Briggs and Wexford are dead. And Harper is dead, he’s lying out in his cottage right now with his skull crushed. If you make me do it I’ll take you out there and show him to you.”
“No,” she said, “you won’t.”
“Why won’t I?”
“Because he isn’t there. He was never there.”
“He’s there-”
“He doesn’t exist,” she said.
Confusion in him now, like a black mist. He shook his head, saw her get painfully to her feet and reach out an entreating hand to him-as he had reached out a hand to the President on Lookout Point. He backed away from her with revulsion.
“You can’t keep lying to me,” he said. “I’m a trained policeman-”
“You’re not a policeman.”
“Christopher Justice is a policeman.”
“Christopher Justice doesn’t exist either.”
Pain in his head now. “I’m standing here in front of you!”
“Nicholas Augustine is standing in front of me. You are Nicholas Augustine.”
And the mist, the mist. “The President is dead! I saw him die on Lookout Point, I couldn’t save him!”
“You haven’t left this house tonight. You’ve been here with me all along.”
“No, no…”
“Oh God I hate this,” she said in anguish, “I hate seeing you this way, Nicholas-”
“Don’t call me that, don’t call me by his name.”
“-but I’ve got to make you understand. You’re the President, you’re Nicholas Augustine. Maxwell Harper and Christopher Justice are imaginary people; your poor overworked mind created them and gave them histories and functions and finally made you become each of them. For the past month I’ve listened to you peaking in their voices, different voices like the one you’re using now; I’ve listened to you carry on two- and three-way conversations with yourself, I’ve heard you fantasize entire events and situations, distort other things that actually did take place, mix up fantasy and reality in your mind…”
He retreated from her again, but she moved after him, hands clasped at her breast, and kept talking, talking, words and sentence fragments piercing his ears like needles, terrified me from the first, I just didn’t know what to do, flames in the fireplace leaping at him, trying to grab him, didn’t happen very often until this past week and never in public, I deluded myself into believing no one suspected and we could get through until January, just until January because I thought I could convince you eventually not to run for reelection, the mist swirling behind his eyes now, love you so much, Nicholas, I only wanted to protect you from shame, his back coming up against the curtains over the French doors, never thought it would get this bad, so bad you would imagine people murdered, even your own death, gliding along the wall beside the doors but she kept advancing with him, then Austin called me on Wednesday and said you’d been to see him in his office, talking to him in a strange voice as if you were another person, I had to lie and tell him it was a game you were playing, only a game, roaring in his ears like that of a train, terrible shock when you fantasized Austin’s death, all I could think of was to get you away from Washington as soon as possible, up against the couch, around the couch, realized Julius suspected the truth too when I talked to him on the train, and when you told me yesterday he was dead I finally found the courage to call Doctor Whiting, but he was away from the Capital and couldn’t get here right away, moving toward the hall doorway, hate myself for telling you to fire Maxwell tonight, I should have guessed you might fantasize murdering even one of your own personas, pain and mist, mist and pain, accused me just now of killing all those people, killing you, I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t wait, I had to tell you the truth She stopped speaking, turned her head away from him toward the doorway as if reacting to a sound only she could hear. Then her shoulders slumped and she said, “Oh thank God. Thank God you’re finally here.”
He looked at the doorway and there was no one there.
“Nicholas,” she said, “It’s Walt Peterson and Doctor Whiting.”
No one there. No one in the room except him and Mrs. Augustine Only then the ceiling lights came on and she was nowhere near the light switch, and he blinked and began to shake his head, the mist swirling, swirling, and in the center of it a small spot of truth and acceptance, and he heard himself whimper and then say, “I’m Christopher Justice, I have to call my superiors, I have to notify my superiors,” and he ran for the doorway.
Hands caught him before he reached it, hands that were not there, hands that held him with invisible fingers, and he cried out and struggled desperately for a moment, just a moment before the strength went out of him and he became rag-doll limp. The hands guided him gently to a chair and sat him down, and he heard Claire Augustine saying brokenly, “Nicholas, oh Nicholas, what have we done to you, what did I do to you?” and heard another voice too-Doctor Whiting’s voice? — coming to him as if from a great distance.
And a voice came out of him then that was not his own, a voice that belonged to the President, and the President said clearly and lucidly, “You shouldn’t have let me go on, Claire. I might have done something unspeakable, didn’t you realize that?”
Then the voice was still, and he put his head in his hands and wept in mourning for the President, the fall of the President, the last long fall of President Nicholas Franklin Augustine.
Then the voice is still, and we put our head in our hands and weep. But not in mourning and not for me.
We weep instead for what might have been, for what could have been done about Briggs and Wexford and Kineen and Oberdorfer and the media and the minority party and the Indians and the National Committee and the pressure groups and the electorate and Israel and the Arabs and the Russians and the Red Chinese. We have known from the beginning that death is the only answer; and there is no moonshine in our soul. If only we had carried that knowledge to its ultimate conclusion. If only we had thought of it.
We could really have committed an act of mercy then.
We could have murdered them all.
