Greasy Lake & Other Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Author:T. Coraghessan Boyle [Boyle, T. Coraghessan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author), United States, United States - Social Life and Customs - 20th Century - Fiction
ISBN: 9780140077810
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1985-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Sadly, however, unity and harmony are not the way of the world, and no leader, no matter how visionary—not Napoleon, not Caesar, not Mohammed, Louis XVI, Jim Jones, or Jesus of Nazareth—can hope to stave off the tide of discord, malcontent, envy, hatred, and sheer seething anarchy that inevitably rises up to crush him with the force of a tidal wave. And so it was, seven years later, my second term drawing to a close and with neither hope nor precedent for a third, that I found the waves crashing at very doorstep. I, who had been the most heralded chief executive in the country’s history, I, who had cut across social strata, party differences, ethnic divisions, and international mistrust with my vision of a better world and a better future, was well on my way to becoming the most vilified world leader since Attila the Hun.

Looking back on it, I can see that perhaps my biggest mistake was in appointing Madame Scutari to my Cabinet. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of experience—I understand that now—but her lack of taste. She took something truly grand—a human monument before which all the pyramids, Taj Mahals, and World Trade Centers paled by comparison—and made it tacky. For that I will never forgive her.

At any rate, when I took office back in January of ’85, I created a new Cabinet post that would reflect the chief priority of my administration—I refer to the now infamous post of secretary for Lunar Affairs—and named Gina to occupy it. Though she’d had little formal training, she knew her stars and planets cold, and she was a woman of keen insight and studied judgment. I trusted her implicitly. Besides which, I was beleaguered by renegade scientists, gypsies, sci-fi hacks (one of whom was later to write most of my full-moon addresses to the nation), amateur inventors, and corporation execs, all clamoring for a piece of the action—and I desperately needed someone to sort them out. Gina handled them like diners without reservations.

The gypsies, Trekkies, diviners, haruspexes, and the like were apparently pursuing a collective cosmic experience, something that would ignite the heavens; the execs—from U.S. Steel to IBM to Boeing to American Can—wanted contracts. After all, the old moon was some 2,160 miles in diameter and eighty-one quintillion tons of dead weight, and they figured whatever we were going to do would take one hell of a lot of construction. Kaiser proposed an aluminum-alloy shell filled with Styrofoam, to be shuttled piecemeal into space and constructed by robots on location. The Japanese wanted to mold it out of plastic, while Firestone saw a big synthetic golf-ball sort of thing and Con Ed pushed for a hollow cement globe that could be used as a repository for nuclear waste. And it wasn’t just the big corporations, either—it seemed every crank in the country was suddenly a technological wizard. A retired gym teacher from Sacramento suggested an inflatable ball made of simulated pigskin, and a pizza magnate from Brooklyn actually proposed a chicken-wire sphere coated with raw dough.

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