Black Static #58 (May-June 2017) by 2017 May-Jun (epub)

Author:2017 May-Jun (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dark Fiction and Film
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2017-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

***

I didn’t sleep well that night. When I’d glanced at the papers they were filled with stories about tensions escalating, something to do with the South China Sea islands and whether the US was being too aggressive. John McCain was trying to dial things back but you could tell he was getting tired of it. His eyes looked sharp and a little bit scared.

I’d had panic attacks all throughout the October leading up to the election. There’d been Brexit, of course, our own particular mess. At a conference last summer an American colleague had told me, “What we’re seeing is radical politics. People stopped believing that they mattered to the system – but all that’s different now. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Anything could happen.” Trump had seemed funny back then, dangerous but still avoidable. They called it all a horror show but you could tell there was fascination underneath it all. How close could we come to disaster? But Hillary was ahead in the polls. Some of the Republicans were denouncing Trump, trying to put a little distance between themselves for when the eventual shellacking came on November 8th.

But it didn’t come. For weeks after, all throughout the Christmas break, whenever I heard Trump’s name it was as if there was a loud gong echoing in my head. My feed was filled with anguish, betrayal, heartbreak. But I had seen all that already. I felt immured, resilient – and besides I still didn’t believe, not really, that it would happen. Then eventually the cold hard truth settled in when I watched the inauguration with Luca. As Trump walked to the podium I burst out laughing, I don’t know why, the sheer cognitive dissonance of the whole thing. I felt hysterical. My palms were sweating.

Afterward I learned St. John had written a novel about something similar, Answering the King, about a madman who cheats his way to becoming the President of the United States. Eventually it comes down to a fifteen-year-old girl tormented with visions of the past and the future to stop him. The question at the heart of it is: if you could go back in time to stop Hitler, would you? They had made a movie about it with Steve Buscemi. I don’t remember who played the girl, only how wide her eyes were, how she captured that world-weariness so well for someone so young. She was a Cassandra. No one would listen to her.

That was the night when the whole thing with Luca happened. Normally we were very careful. I hadn’t been in my job for very long and he’d just moved across the country to live with me. We had talked about having kids one day but… We weren’t careful enough. Disaster crept in the way it always does.

I called Argo the next day. It was the first time I’d spoken to her and her voice was thin and cagey with a flat Ohio accent. It sounded as if it were coming from much further away than the Upper East Side.

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