She caught my eye across the dark and gave me one small nod.Approval.
And something moved through me that I’ve never had a word for.A despair so total and familiar it was almost restful.It was the despair of a creature that has been in the trap so long it can no longer remember the field it was caught in.
I felt cursed.
Not metaphorically.I felt as though some power larger than me had reached down before I was born and decided that this man, of all the men it could have made, would be given the perfect voice and face.And guarding over that man was the perfect terrible mother.He’d be set down in the exact center of a great machine for converting human longing into political power.This man would be cursed to spend his life saying true-sounding words he didn’t mean about God and a family he was constitutionally incapable of having.
Is it a lie?The question came up out of nowhere, mid-sentence, while my mouth went on building the cadence toward the close of the speech.Every word of it.Is every word out of my mouth a lie?
Because the awful thing—the thing I could never say to anyone, the thing I had come closest in a decade to saying to a stranger in the dark—was that I didn't know anymore.I believed in God.I believed in the family as a holy thing; I believed it so completely that the believing was half of what was killing me, since I would never be permitted one.The words were true.But I was a lie.
“So go home,” I told them, and my voice broke just slightly on it, and they would think it was passion, they always thought it was passion.“Go home to your towns and your counties and your precincts.And do not be quiet.Don’t be small.Do not be ashamed.Take the gift the Lord gave you, and march it all the way to that altar in November, and let us build—together—a nation worthy of Him.”
“And may God,” I finished, softly now, “bless you.And may God bless this great and chosen land.”
The place came apart.Ten thousand people on their feet, a wall of sound you could lean against, the screens flaring white, the music swelling back up underneath it all.I lifted one hand and held it there—the benediction, the close—and I smiled the smile that wasn't mine, and I thought about a man whose name I would never know telling me to stop hiding.
* * *
Backstage was a different country.Out front it was light and longing; back here it was cables taped to concrete, road cases, a craft table nobody touched, and the men who actually ran the thing.They closed around me before my eyes had even adjusted, a moving knot of senators, political operatives, and the big silent suits with the curled wires behind their ears.The praise came at me from all sides at once, the way it always did.
“Pastor, that was the one.That was the best I've heard you.”
“The altar line.Ray, did you hear the altar line?We're cutting that for the digital, that's the whole spot right there.”
“You had them, Harrison.You had every one of them eating out of your hand.”
Senator Finch gripped my shoulder with the dead grip of a man who has shaken two hundred thousand hands, beaming up into my face.“Son,” he said, “that is the future of this movement talking right there.You hear me?The future.”I gave him the modest dip of the head, the aw-shucks, the thing they wanted.
And then, over Finch's silver head, at the edge of the backstage crush where the press were penned behind a second rope, I saw him.
The floor dropped out of the world.
It was him.Standing maybe thirty feet away in the same loose unafraid way he'd stood in the doorway of room 1218, the dark-blond hair, the stubble, the eyes—and for one half of one second my whole ruined heart simply lifted, lifted like a boy's, because there he was, the one real thing, standing in my actual waking life in the same room as me.
And then I saw the lanyard around his neck.
PRESS.In red.Hanging against his chest on a branded strap.And in his hands a black camera with a long lens, the kind of lens that reaches across an arena and pulls a man's face close enough to count his pores.Immediately I tried to read his name.Alex?No, it looked like Alec.
I have been afraid in my life.I’ve been afraid of my mother, afraid of exposure, and afraid, in the small hours, of the size of my own emptiness.But I ‘d never felt anything like what went through me then.
It wasn’t heat.It was every drop of blood in my body deciding at once to be somewhere else, a gray roaring at the edges of my vision, the backstage and the senators and the praise all tilting.A man does not slip into a building full of closeted, powerful, terrified men by accident and find his way into the bed of the one man whose ruin would be worth the most.A man with a press pass and a long lens does that on purpose.
Last night I’d told him things.Not the fact of myself—I had guarded that—but I had told him I was the fakest man he'd ever meet.Told him I'd been performing a character so long I'd forgotten who I was.Then I’d wept in his arms and let him hold my hand in the dark.
And he had a camera.
I don't do this part,I'd told him.I leave.And he'd made it easy, the bastard, he'd made it so easy—nobody stayed, we just didn't leave—and I had lain there in his arms feeling, for the first time in my adult life, safe.
“Harrison.”
My mother's voice cut through my thoughts like a blade through silk.I turned, and there she was with her court of bejeweled women fanning out behind her, every one of them shining and frozen and pleased.Floris Mae looked up at me, and her ice-blue eyes did a quick, proprietary sweep of my face—checking the product, always checking—and found me pale.
“You look peaked,” she said.It was not concern.It was quality control.Then she leaned in and whispered, “You're coming to lunch.The Hadleys have taken the private room at the Lincoln Country Club.Betsy Walton has been promising a big donation to the church from her husband's foundation for the past year.You’re going to sit beside her, be charming, and close the deal.”She did not ask.My mother had not asked me a question since I was nine years old.“Come along.”
And here is the thing I will never be able to explain, except that a drowning man grabs whatever floats past.
I always said no.That was my one small rebellion, the single square inch of ground I held against her.I didn’t do the lunches, or the donor courtships.I gave her the stage and the speeches and the empire but I kept the lunches and schmoozing as the one thing that was mine to refuse.
