The Nightmares of Old Silverback

1.

Old Silverback sees her face, the one he’s forgotten, when she resurfaces in the news. And hers, after that, when she does. And hers, and hers. She always has something for him but the dream ends before she can give it to him. He gets angrier and angrier every time. In the last dream, she pulls out a gun. The Secret Service disarms her instantly and Old Silverback tackles her. He’s trying to hit her but his arms are like rubber, and she’s so powerful. She’s biting his neck. She’s tearing his throat. Her face is covered in his blood. He wakes up laughing, like an old friend told him a joke he hadn’t heard in years.

2.

The son who died young is back. He was in Iraq and he finally made it home, even though Iraq ended years ago and his son never went to war. Old Silverback is furious. They were apparently in an argument before his dead son left, and they’ve only grown more bitter in each other’s absence. It’s back and forth, a lot of things that only have meaning in dreams. Old Silverback says, “You put this disease in me, you little shit. I wish I could kill you again.” And the son says, “What do you mean, again?”

3.

The Cubans are ready to make a deal. Old Silverback’s people have offered to eliminate sanctions if they open elections to the opposition, including to overseas voters. When they object that Haiti is under no such pressure, Old Silverback pisses himself right there at the conference table. He staggers to the Oval Office, pushing aside aides and clingers-on desperate to preserve his dignity, their dignity, the dignity of the country. The Cubans aren’t even laughing. They know as well as anyone that Old Silverback is dying and they view his steady collapse with pity rather than disgust. Youngblood is behind him. “Why aren’t you in there with those sons of bitches,” bellows Old Silverback. “You have no idea how weak this makes us look.” Youngblood touches his shoulder and he slaps his hand away, sits down at the Resolute desk, piss soaking his underwear, his slacks, his shoes. There’s so, so much of it. The press can never learn of this.

4.

There’s a new Children’s Crusade. It’s unprecedented in living memory; something to do with the changing climate, something to do with a religious revival. The leader is some Scandinavian girl, and the best intelligence is she’s raising an army. “Something has to be done,” he tells a Senate page. “We have to put a stop to this.” For some reason, everyone is against him. He’s not looking at this rationally. He’s not used to that; he’s used to being the most reasonable man in the room. He’s used to everyone agreeing with him. Out of the corner of his eye, she’s there. The one that hasn’t squealed yet. She’s got her blood on his collar. He’s tearing at his shirt when he realizes this. “What the fuck are you looking at?”, says Old Silverback, and he turns to face her, and she’s gone. Everyone’s gone, and he’s alone. He walks out of the Senate and the streets are empty. All the ads, the models have masks on them. He feels tired, like he’s aged decades in the blink of an eye. He sits down on a bench with hostile architecture. The sun rises and sets and rises and sets. No cars, no people. Nobody but him. He wakes up in the morning and doesn’t remember any of it.

5.

Old Silverback is Jack Kennedy. He is there with his beautiful wife in Dallas. He is watching it all on television, much younger than he will come to be. His twenty-first birthday is around the corner and there’s about to be a war. He is Lee Harvey Oswald, crouching in the book depository with a terrible rifle, sweat beading on his brow in spite of the chill in the air. He is the spook hiding behind a hill overlooking the motorcade, the one he gets to know about, put a face and a name to the deed. He chambers his pistol. JFK was all smiles a moment ago but now he’s clutching himself in pain. In the dream Old Silverback understands that this ends with his son in a coffin, his wife in an urn, his liver-spotted and disintegrated face the laughingstock of a disbelieving nation. He knows it ends with him pissing himself in the White House, once at first, then many times. He knows it ends with the woman he proleptically knows as Jacqueline Onassis scooping chunks of her husband’s brain into her dress and handing them to a doctor, too shell-shocked to realize there’s no undoing what he’s about to do. It is the easiest shot he’s ever taken in his life, because he’s never pulled a trigger in his life. He’s never had to, but he knows now it’s the easiest thing in the world. He simply points his finger at history and presses the play button.

6.

The doctors are telling Old Silverback there’s a cure but he’ll have to step down from power, it’ll take every minute of his life and he won’t be fit for office when they’re done, but he’ll be alive again, he’ll be able to remember things clearly. He’s furious. It’s not ready yet, he says. He’s not ready yet. They say, sir, with all due respect, are you really fit for office at this point anyway? It makes him even angrier. Of course he is, he was fucking voted in, wasn’t he? Where’d the respect go? The doctor takes a drag off of his cigarette and told him that went out the window when all of them started being rapists. “You mean to tell me Jack Kennedy never got in trouble with a girl?” Yes, they said, but nobody had to know. Everyone has to know now. He realizes in this moment they’ve already poisoned him. “You rat bastards, you’ll never get away with this,” says Old Silverback. They tell him, of course we won’t, and he can’t see anymore, or hear anymore, or feel anymore.

7.

Old Silverback is in Hell, but it’s not fire and brimstone like the holyrollers said, or the absence of God like the priests said. There’s no purgatory like he used to believe in, nowhere for him to lay down the burden of sin and walk anew in God’s grace, shorn of the petty and venial things that shackled him while he walked on Earth. No, Hell is being understood. People stop him on the street and call him names. Then people stop stopping him on the street. People stop walking on the street at all. Old Silverback is alone with his dreams. He’s a young man working at the pool again, forever. The children brush the thick hair on his bare, vital legs and it feels like hellfire. Every bulge in the pockets of someone’s swim trunks is a razor about to be drawn over his throat. Old Silverback grabs the first thing he can find to defend himself, a chain, and he starts screaming like hell. Crying. Pissing himself a little, again – or maybe for the first time in his life. Some of the kids look up to him after that. Some of them never look him in the eye again. Someday he will be the most powerful man on Earth and someday his lungs will cave in as he forgets how to breathe. That is what Hell is.

8.

Every instant of the last eighty years occupies the present. It is always November. Dad’s always out selling cars. Old Silverback is always President. The weather is always turning. Everyone he has ever loved is alive and dead at the same time. When he sees a woman’s face he exists in a quantum state of guilt and innocence that can never resolve into one or the other. He is always humiliating whoever has opened her stupid fucking mouth. He is in Hell and he is burning alive in a lake of brimstone. He is doped up with morphine in a hospital bed, attended to by anonymous strangers who say they love him. Old Silverback laughs one of those times and says, “You can say that, but I’m still going to vote to confirm Thomas.” They just cry. They’re always crying. Everyone is always crying except for Old Silverback. He always feels like laughing instead.

9.

Old Silverback was a racist. Old Silverback was a rapist. Old Silverback was the worst things about the American political class rolled up into a tight little ball, and there was nothing in his soul but aimless, meaningless spite. Everyone loved him, and everyone wept for him. But no one who mattered saluted at his casket like doomed little Junior. He was watching his funeral when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He remembered being angry, and he found it in himself not to be. It was time to be sworn in to some high office or another, that’s all. The president, who he would have crossed the street to avoid twelve years ago, is placing a ribbon around his neck, calling him a hero. Old Silverback cracks a smile and starts to laugh, but he can’t breathe. The ribbon doesn’t feel too tight, but he can’t breathe. Is this Hell, then? He can’t breathe. It hurts and he can’t breathe.

10.

“I killed you,” says Old Silverback to his dead son. “No,” says his son. “You don’t deserve that.” He never knows, when his dead son says that, what exactly it means.