I’ve always hated Westercott.
Lionel Westercott. There wouldn’t be two people in the world with an unusual name like that. Lionel Westercott. I said it softly to myself in the summer night. It was a warm evening, with moths dancing softly, in velvet touches, on my screen. I slept fitfully, thinking of my comfortable job, this good little town, everything peaceful, everyone happy, and these two people in the next room, the only people in the town, in the world, it seemed, who were not happy. Their tired mouths haunted me. And sometimes the tired eyes, too tired for ones so young.
I must have slept a bit, for at two o’clock, as usual, I was wakened by her crying, but this time I heard her call out, “Where are we, where are we, how did we get here, where are we?” And his voice, “Hush, hush, now, please,” and he soothed her.
“Are we safe, are we safe, are we safe?”
“Yes, yes, dear, yes.”
And then the sobbing.
Perhaps I could have thought a lot of things. Most minds would turn to murder, fugitives from justice. My mind did not turn that way. Instead I lay in the dark, listening to her cry, and it broke my heart, it moved in my veins and my head and I was so unbearably touched by her sadness and loneliness that I got up and dressed and left the house. I walked down the street and before I knew it I was on the hill over the lake and there was the library, dark and immense, and I had my janitor’s key in my hand. Without thinking why, I entered the big silent place at two in the morning and walked through the empty rooms and down the aisles, turning on a few lights. And then I got a couple of big books out and began tracing some paragraphs and lines down and down, page after page, for about an hour in the early, early dark morning. I drew up a chair and sat down. I fetched some more books. I sent my eye searching. I grew tired. But then at last my hand paused on a name, “William Westercott, politician, New York City. Married to Aimee Ralph on January 1998. One child, Lionel, born February 2000.”
I shut the book and locked myself out of the library and walked home, cold, through the summer morning with the stars bright in the black sky.
I stood for a moment in front of the sleeping house with the empty porch and the curtains in every room fluttering with the warm August wind, and I held my cigar in my hand but did not light it. I listened, and there above me, like the cry of some night bird, was the sound of the lonely woman, crying. She had had another nightmare, and, I thought, nightmares are memory, they are based on things remembered, things remembered vividly and horridly and with too much detail, and she had had another of her nightmares and she was afraid.
I looked at the town all around me, the little houses, the houses with people in them, and the country beyond the houses, ten thousand miles of meadow and farm and river and lake, highways and hills and mountains and cities all sizes sleeping in the time before dawn, so quietly, and the streetlights going out now when there was no use for them at this nocturnal hour. And I thought of all the people in the whole land and the years to come, and all of us with good jobs and happy in this year.
Then I went upstairs past their door and went to bed and listened and there, behind the wall, the woman was saying over and over again, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” faintly, crying.
And lying there I was as cold as an ancient piece of ice placed between the blankets, and I was trembling, though I knew nothing, I knew everything, for now I knew where these travelers were from and what her nightmares were and what she was afraid of, and what they were running away from.
I figured it just before I went to sleep, with her crying faintly in my ears. Lionel Westercott, I thought, will be old enough to be president of the United States in the year 2035.
Somehow, I did not want the sun to rise in the morning.
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
2003–2004
HOW’S THAT AGAIN?”
Silence.
“Would you mind repeating that?”
Silence and an up-and-down murmur on the phone.
“This is a bad line. I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Go over that again.”
The government official was rising slowly from his chair, the telephone crammed to his ear. He was staring out the window, then at the ceiling, and then at the walls. Slowly he sat down again.
“Now repeat that.”
The phone made noises.
“Senator Hamfritt, you say? Just a moment. I’ll call you right back.”
The official hung up, turned in his chair, and stared out across the lawn at the White House.
Then he reached over and touched the intercom button.
When his secretary appeared at the door he said, “Sit down, you must hear this.”
He picked up the phone, punched a number and the speakerphone.
When a voice came on he said, “This is Elliot. Did you call in the last few minutes? You did. Now, go over those details again. Senator Hamfritt, you say? An Indian casino? In North Dakota? Yes. How many senators? Thirteen? They were there last night? You sure of the facts? He wasn’t drunk? He was drunk? Well, it’s late, but I’ll call the president.”