the hall. “There he is.”
Senator Hamilton, grabbing the opportunity to make the news for doing something positive, stopped berating Officer Payton who remained in the comfortable confines of his bulletproof glass booth.
It was a small riot in terms of people involved and duration, but a riot nonetheless. Senator Hamilton, sixty- two and in need of all the voting support he could get, tried to simultaneously calm the AWARE group while dishing out a tongue-lashing the likes of which Senator Day hadn’t received since he burned down a neighbor’s horse barn when he was twelve. Senator Hamilton articulated his threats with grace, the overtures for impeachment with eloquence. He deftly redirected the real mission of the AWARE group, confidently guaranteeing that the newly labeled “most racist senator in modern U.S. politics” would never be re-elected. The senator from Washington, milking the chance to be a hero to his constituents, worked toward a climax. He huffed and puffed, postured and postulated. But before he could deliver the punch line to his impromptu speech, Senator Day, the target of his ire, simply turned and walked away.
The senator from Massachusetts returned to his office, his page and Dana behind him, both less impressed with their fearless leader than they had been when they arrived earlier in the day.
Pausing on his way to his office, he looked at Dana and his page and raised a finger, “Not a word to anyone about an Asian man or a letter. Not a word.”
The senator found his way behind his desk and sat in a daze, alternating between re-reading the letter and downing Jack Daniels, straight up. Just when he thought things were back on track. Being blackmailed for money was one thing. This was something else entirely. The cluster-fuck in the hall downstairs merely made the sting of the letter more poignant. Senator Day called his chief aide at home and checked on the progress of the wire- transfer-hide-and-seek he was playing with a trail of banks in China. No news. The senator cussed into the phone. He had let himself believe that the danger had passed. He had paid the money for the original blackmail and waited. He now realized the silence he had been enjoying was merely a lull in the storm. ***
The AWARE group set up camp outside the Hart Senate Building and made three calls to the local media. As the news trucks converged on the scene with cameras rolling, Senator Day sent his staff home with a week off, unplugged the phone, and barricaded himself in his office.
He picked up the letter again and read it slowly. It was simple. Unless he wanted to hear about an illegitimate child fathered by a senator with a sweatshop seamstress on the news, Senator Day was to follow the directions to the smallest detail. The letter wasn’t demanding money. It was requesting something far more difficult to obtain, far more challenging; something that required a far greater degree of cunning. He wished he could just write a check.
There was an upcoming recommendation by the Special Senate Committee on Overseas Labor regarding the exportation of jobs to third world countries and the establishment of an international minimum wage for American companies doing business overseas. As a show of good faith, and as a measure of Senator Day’s resolve as Chairman of the Special Committee, the letter was demanding a unanimous, unequivocal position against a proposed bill that would limit what the letter’s composer referred to as “free trade” and “globalization.” The letter was a test. And standing between the senator and success were three colleagues on the Special Committee who didn’t share his desire for further internationalization of the great American corporate machine.
Senator Day had work to do. ***
The senator cringed at the television set in the oak cabinet across the room. He reeked of bourbon, a stench that went beyond his personal space and pervaded every corner of his office. One of the senator’s shoes was under his desk, the other shoved toe-first into the thin gap beneath the leather sofa and the carpet. His tie was on the shelf under the window. A swig remained at the bottom of the bottle of Jack on his desk. Outside it was dark, and the only indication of time was that the sun went down somewhere near nine o’clock at the beginning of official summer. The senator’s head pounded, an appropriate feeling to go with one of the worst days of his silver-spoon life.
The fiasco with the Asian equality group was turning into a nightmare. Kazu Ito’s father, the leader of AWARE, wasted no time in milking the press coverage for everything it was worth. The group’s own handheld video recorder had caught most of hallway humiliation from earlier in the day. The quality of the tape was poor, the audio scratchy, the hand of the cameraman shaky, but it all came together with great cinematic appeal. And the AWARE group mainlined it straight into the capital’s news veins. The timing was perfect. They had been stopped as suspicious visitors in the halls of the Senate, the very halls where their elected officials worked and breathed. Plans to bring their organization and the plight of their Asian brethren to light couldn’t have been better orchestrated. It was time to shine. Kazu Ito’s death was going primetime.
The eleven o’clock evening news opened with the crowd outside the Hart Senate Building. In his office, the senator’s eyes were still glued to the screen. The crowd outside, which had surged to over two hundred thanks to calls from Kazu Ito’s father to every Asian organization in the D.C. phone book, had dwindled to fewer than twenty. Most of the AWARE group was now back at the hotel in L’Enfant Plaza, strategizing their plan for tomorrow. The group knew that protesting at night defeated the purpose. There was no traffic to block, no passers-by to incite.
The news crews finished their last clips for the night and were closing up shop. In the confines of his foxhole, Senator Day pulled himself together with a cup of coffee and a wet towel across his face. He put his shoes on, first trying the left shoe on his right foot, and then making the switch.
He turned off his office lights, teasing the final remains of AWARE protesters and news crews who had been watching his office from the ground like a crowd waiting for a jumper on a ledge. Senator Day, hat on his head, strolled to the elevators on the opposite side of the building, body swaying down the long corridor. A lone senate page passed and gave his best “Good night, Senator,” salutation, before stifling a laugh. The senator didn’t acknowledge the snicker. He was making his first attempt to move past the day’s misadventure. The longer he dwelled on it, the longer it would be news. You don’t make it to the Senate without thick skin, a silver tongue, spells of temporary amnesia, and multiple personalities.
Senator Day rode the elevator to the basement and walked to the underground sidewalk that ran like a maze throughout the Capitol complex and its surrounding buildings. The senator eyed the small train that ran parallel to the underground walkway, a toy used to shuttle voting senators to the Capitol in comfort. The train was serious business when it was in use, but parked in the hall without any passengers it looked like an enlarged version of a child’s amusement park ride. It was not a perk limited to the Senate; the House had its own choo-choo too, bought and maintained with taxpayers’ money, of course.
The senator took three underground tunnels and exited a small door on the north side of the Capitol Building. He stepped into the empty street and hailed a cab. Twenty minutes later, he paid his tab in the alley that ran behind his Georgetown home and walked across the backyard and into his house.
The honorable senator sat completely motionless on the foot of the bed, his wife asleep with her head under the pillow. He held his own head in his hands. The image he spent his life trying to portray now dangerously teetering on the cliff of disaster—a cliff named Wei Ling. The years of education, proper upbringing, and the sacrifice of the family lineage that came before him climaxed in one thought that the senator said aloud. “Fuck.”
It was the best he could do.
For the first time since his car had broken down in South Central L.A., the senator was scared. But politics were on his side. He was from Massachusetts, historically one of the friendliest states to morally questionable acts by their governing representatives. His mind raced between desperation and hope, ego and humility. His life was on the line—his wife, his job, his ambition. “Nice job, John,” the senator said to himself. “Two and a half decades of hard work, thrown out the window on a third-world sweatshop skank.” ***
The goateed man with a penchant for positive camera angles and the lion’s share of a recently cashed fifteen-thousand-dollar paycheck, chatted with the off-duty stewardess at Club Iota in Arlington. A local acoustic husband-and-wife team was packing up their guitars after an early weeknight show that had the bar half-full. The bartender cleaned glasses and hit the remote control for the small TV in the corner of the enclosed drink-mixing workspace. With the TV news in one ear, the man with the goatee tried his best to impress the stewardess, his goal to say whatever it took to get her down the street and into the bedroom of his new condo.
With the stewardess playing coy, the cameraman looked at the news on the TV and spoke involuntarily. “Look at this asshole.”
“Who?” the stewardess asked.
“Senator Day. I filmed a documentary for him last month.” So what if it wasn’t a full-fledged documentary. No
