Chapter Four

Chapter Four

The afternoon had been occluded and furious, hyper-tense and exhilarating. And a vindication, too – of a sort. One man’s guts and unmitigated balls had withstood the final nightmare of the nuclear age. Considering the circumstances, President Donald H. Rumsfeld had done as well as anyone could have hoped – at least in his opinion. Other than an unabashed pacifist, Rumsfeld assumed that any competent policy analyst would have been in accord with all of his Zero-sum assumptions regarding the degree and severity of his response to the problem he had been presented with earlier that day.

His national security advisor and Cabinet ADC approached Rumsfeld at 1:30 with news that something spectacular was happening on the DEW-line over-the-horizon radars located below the Arctic Circle. Ballistic lines were streaking down the radar screens like furious slugs sliming a trail to their targets. By 1:45 air raid sirens were sounding from SAC bases shock-absorbed under mountainous concrete regrades to missile bases behind gargantuan Potemkin corn fields, and were snuffed out minutes later by the impacts of the heavy-yield “bunker buster” SS-18’s and 19’s. The Soviet ballistic missile strike had been expected to a certain extent, intelligence had made clear the rigid old Stalinist true-believers in the Kremlin had seen that there were no more tomorrows for Marx’s mad dream and there was nothing to be lost by a desperate play of the ultimate trump – a strategic nuclear strike upon the American intercontinental ballistic missile silos in Wyoming and the Dakotas. After the first impacts had been reported, Rumsfeld had been urged by a small group of advisors to refrain from a counterstrike; the Triad had been designed with redundancy, after all, and the initial deluge of atomic munitions had taken out only forty-percent of the Minuteman and Peacekeeper force. Perhaps it was just a show of force – a dramatic and overpowering one, no doubt, but the missile silos had been situated so as to avoid massive civilian casualties should a first strike of this sort occur. The logic of terror had withstood a fearsome leap from theory to practice, the Triad had done its job; bombers still were available in Missouri, and a dozen Ohio-class Trident missile boats lurked off the two coasts, perhaps the most preciously guarded military secret in the land. The Soviets might simply want to go to the negotiating table, they had proved their point, American casualties in this first exchange – despite having twenty or more megatons dropped on fertile soil – were perhaps less than fifty-thousand. There was no need to bring down Armageddon over this – admittedly horrifying – precipitous assault. President Rumsfeld was advised to get on the emergency line immediately and discuss a cease-fire with Soviet Premier Ligachev. The series of wars which had led to this catastrophe – starting with an absurd over-reaction by North Korea to a joint US-ROK military exercise – could also be discussed, foreign aid offered, international arbitration proffered – by restraint and calm, President Donald Rumsfeld could lend his name to posterity as the man who had, truly, turned the other cheek and saved the world from utter, total destruction. His advisors pleaded with him to merely pick up the phone.

Rumsfeld would have none of it. He was surrounded by poltroons, utter cowards – a gutless cabal of peaceniks and losers, men who had just watched the United States strategic deterrent fail in its appointed role. Now that deterrence was a moot point, it was time to utilize these fearsome weapons for what they had been designed for – destruction. Rumsfeld was the commander in chief. The Pentagon would damn well do what he said. And what he said was to let the whole goddamn arsenal fly. Immediately.

As in now.

Very little was held back. The B-1 and B-2 force had been largely wiped out by superior Soviet air defenses, but there was no escape for the cities of the western Soviet Republics as the Trident missiles rained down upon them. Additionally, despite the fact that she had not been involved in any of the conflicts up until now, China was hit hard by a fusillade of ICBM’s and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, wrecking her port facilities and just-developing industrial areas. Before the umpires ruled that the Soviets and Chinese would have likely called things off, President Rumsfeld had succeeding in destroying one-hundred-seventy-five of the largest cities and industrial areas in the entire Communist bloc. He had traded Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Houston in the bargain – plus Paris, Rome and London to an enraged and spiteful Soviet Premier Ligachev – but overall American losses were an acceptable thirty-five million. Ashen-faced Pentagon cold warriors reported the results to President Rumsfeld, who gave an “I told you so” sneer to the timorous souls whom had counseled restraint. The umpire’s ruling was official: Ligachev, horrified at what was truly happening, called off the response counter-counterstrike half-way through. The man portraying him in the next room – a career lobbyist for Raytheon who had just landed a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute and had gleefully accepted the role of a frothing-at-the-mouth Leninist reactionary premier, a kind-of alternate reality to Gorbachev – had faltered in his appointed role of surrogate Anti-Christ. Never realizing just how real the actual war would feel, knee-bucklingly real, gut-churningly real – the poor sap was reported to be in tears and emotional collapse as actual SAC generals informed him of what would be happening in Seattle, in Pasadena, in Rego Park, in so many places being incinerated if this were an actual day of judgment for man and the atom. They hadn’t felt it was a joke – the entire exercise was of the highest importance and all participants had been informed to play it Peckinpaugh-straight with no histrionics and no hot-dogging – nor had any of these Doomsday-mandarins been prepared for the bloodthirstiness of the American president when faced with the ultimate test. Ligachev was supposed to be the frenzied ruthless ideologue, the crazed bastard, the fire-storm-worshipping arch-pyromaniac – but President Donald Rumsfeld had bested him and, ahem – buried him. The Soviets had lost one-hundred million citizens in the unrestrained counter-strike. Chinese losses would have been incalculably higher still. And they hadn’t even been at war with anybody, until that afternoon.

Donald Rumsfeld was the greatest slayer of humanity in all of History. He had killed perhaps a third of a billion people, and left the situation command post with a smirk on his face.

“Let’s go get a drink, boys – c’mon, all is forgiven,” he said to the pack of loyal Republican advisors who had urged moderation and diplomacy. As if he were letting them off the hook. As if he with the greatest magnanimity was allowing them to shoot the shit and take a snort with a man who – had all this been real – would have been the most ferocious and cold-blooded mass-killer throughout all of civilization’s many permutations of absolute evil.

For appearance’s sake, the whole crew accompanied Rumsfeld to the main conference room, where booze awaited. Everybody needed a drink. But more than a few found it unsettling to take it with such a joyful executioner like Rumsfeld. Even the generals from SAC – some of whom were old enough to remember Curtis LeMay – had never seen a more enthusiastic performance of a man bringing down The End.

Armageddon was serious business, and must be treated as a thing which not only could happen, but might be necessary – but there was no precedent for confronting it with glee.

Or even something perhaps more unsettling: Lust.

* * *

For what was described above did not, needless to say, actually occur. In the real world, that is. But in the perhaps even more seriously considered world of secret Federal government planning operations, these events did happen one spring afternoon and led to a series of leaks which alerted the Clinton administration that the COG (Continuation of Government) program had spiraled completely out of control – bureaucratic entropy, the most dangerous kind of Kafkan metastasis. Hyper-secret and so guarded that the participants didn’t even know what underground command post they were in, even what state – COG was more than a think-tank simulation of how the government could continue to function if a madman like Ygor Ligachev seized power, reconstituted the Soviet Union and initiated a desperate nuclear strike on the American mainland. COG had become something far more than a research program designed to keep mail delivery and water supplies functioning after Looking Glass had been shattered and Armageddon come down. It was a côup in waiting.

* * *

The Continuance of Government Program had all the off-books funding it could muster and plenty of shadow-dwelling technocrats on hand to make sure it went off with perfect realism every time a run-through was arranged. A galaxy of Aerospace and Defense industry stars – names of complete anonymity to the American public but possessed of fabulous wealth and crippling influence with the people who really made policy in the United States – would be on hand every time the Pentagon came up with some new possible way that the world could end. The theory was that constitutional government should be maintained, no matter how devastated the country after the worst mass-tragedy imaginable. The irony was that over time, there lurked within this framework a possible shadow government which could subvert that very Constitution and be immediately ready to impose their own vision of America upon a legitimate government who barely knew they were there.

Certain military-industrial-complex types had noticed this incongruity, and they also noted that a man like Don Rumsfeld would make the damndest interim president such a usurpation could ever hope to possess. He was straight from central casting when it came to the authoritarian jeffe needed: somewhat anonymous, Pinochet without the brass and epaulettes, a curmudgeonly-grandfather type laconic and reassuring, avuncular like Pétain and capable of the doubtless brutality of Suharto. A blessing from the heavens for men intent upon destroying American democracy. And it hadn’t been everybody who had been the subject of a Warren Zevon song, whether or not the actor on diplomacy’s stage had any knowledge of where all of that “Envoy” shit had come from – a time of Wahlid Jumblat and Druze militias, shuttle diplomacy between juntas, refugee- camp massacres and barracks-bombing nightmares. Don Rumsfeld had something more than contacts, he had gravitas. Not as obviously a puppet as Reagan, but not nearly as threatening as Al Haig. Old Rummy had “dictator” written across his gnarled forehead like the signature of Machiavelli himself. His would-be sponsors said little but acknowledged much; today they had seen him keep his cool and saunter off for a highball after a nuclear holocaust. The oligarchy was watching, and it was impressed.

They were all gathered now in the principal entertainment vault of the command bunker, two-thousand feet beneath the solid granite sheath of central North Carolina. Wide-screen Technicolor vistas viewed by a hundred preening Cassandras; and none speaking a word of their haunts. Here was a nest of Catilines, a squadron of conspirators – like locusts hidden for years before the moment was rife for rapine and predation. Rumsfeld was gregarious and in grand humour, dispensing MRE’s to his fellow participants, pouring whisky into glasses, turning up the air conditioning, cranking the command post stereo; and oh-so-fittingly, Holst, The Planets, first movement, Mars: The Bringer of War.

In another room, an Air Force general drank coffee with a similarly disgusted liaison officer from the State Department. They each had their reasons for deploring Rumsfeld’s conduct in the day’s faux-nuclear war.

“Man, that Rummy – he sure is, ah, ‘into’ the whole nuclear war thing...” the liaison staffer said.

The general gave him a cold stare. “I don’t find any of this amusing. We’re here for very serious work, to keep the fucking government functioning if they started dropping megatons on the Homeland. Whoever ‘they’ are, whenever that might be. And this asshole Rumsfeld is just here to strut his cock, show how tough he is. You understand what would have happened today if this had been for the money, civilian?”

“It was bad, I saw even you military guys were uncomfortable...”

“Listen, you latté-sippers from over at State all act like we’re barbarians across the Potomac in the E-Ring. But you’re not the only man concerned about what some of these others have cooked up here when they start talking about what a pinko Clinton is. I took an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States. An oath. And I’m telling you right now, if this had been for real, what happened when that Rumsfeld gave the order to salvo-launch the entire inventory of the American nuclear arsenal on two billion innocent civilians – I’ll tell you what I would have done. I would have walked into the other room, grabbed my service side-arm, and came back and shot that sonofabitch right through the heart. Do you understand we’re not here to play games? Do you understand how real all of this is to certain people – people in that other goddamn room who might have their own State Department up their sleeves, just waiting for the right moment to make their shadow government real?”

The liaison got the message. It would be he who violated his oath and leaked the full extent of the threat COG represented to constitutional government in America. “Yeah. I understand you completely, General. I think I get the picture.”

“Good. Now let’s go get a drink with that bastard before he gets suspicious about what we’re talking about over here. That man’s a paranoid, I’ve seen his type before.”

In the entertainment room, Rumsfeld was continuing a harangue at a defense industry executive who had been bemoaning cuts in the Seawolf attack submarine program initiated by the Clinton administration. All agreed that the president was an avowed peacenik and openly hated the military.

“He never served, that’s the problem,” Rumsfeld was saying, punctuating each syllable with a thud of his fist to open, belligerent palm. “Stayed out of Vietnam, uh, ahhh...did all he could to support Ho Chi Minh when he was at Oxford, uhhh, a real campus radical – Christ, it’s like the Port Huron Statement is our guidebook for defending the goddamn country.”

“He hates America, I agree with you, it’s completely clear,” the executive affirmed.

“Of course he does. Of course! That whole crowd, the Sixties, ah, uhh – the Radicals, the freaks and dopers – and you’re telling me this man is the president of the United States? He’s making decisions about whether or not we’re going to be, uh, ahh, proactive in defending our interests? You know, Kissinger – a real bastard, I’ll tell ya, but thank God he was on our team – he said something once about that goddamn communist Allende down in Chile, pure poetry, it was. He said ‘Why should we let Chile go Red because of the irresponsibility of the voters?’ The man had a goddamn point.”

The Air Force general had heard enough such that he wanted to clarify what “president” Rumsfeld was implying. “What are you saying there, Mr. Rumsfeld? I’m becoming a little uncomfortable with your editorializing here, sir.”

Rumsfeld despised the conservatism of the military. Their “oaths”, their “honor”, their simplistic obedience. “General, this conversation is strictly about policy, and has nothing to do with you.”

“I believe what you are implying here, Mr. Rumsfeld, could hardly be more pressing to a man in my position. I’m hearing some very dangerous ideas here today, sir.”

Rumsfeld got up from his chair and put down the whisky. His good humour was at an end. “All right, you butt-inski – you want to know what, ah, uhmm, uh...what I’m driving at, is that it? Well let me make this perfectly clear. This country is in the hands of a self-serving blowhard who can’t be trusted to assure all that we have built. I’m talking about Founding Fathers stuff here, goddammit. Great things, Manifest Destiny, a wall of glory for our mission in this world – low taxes, Free Trade, easy credit for military client states. I’m saying that some times, uh, umm – Well, like Franklin said, ‘Water the tree of order with the blood of tyrants’, some such business as that. You got me?”

“It was Jefferson,” the general said, turning to the door and leaving the room as he spoke.

“What do you mean, uh ahh – come back here and let’s finish this.”

“Thomas Jefferson said that – that it was sometimes necessary to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. He said liberty, too – not ‘order’, though I’m not surprised you remember differently. But he wasn’t talking about legitimately elected governments, democratically constituted,” the general continued, still with his back to Rumsfeld, insultingly severe and indirect, “he was talking about men like you, Mr. Rumsfeld. The would-be tyrants and dictators who lurk in the shadows, men of executions, repression, lovers of war – men who would bring the country to darkness, if only they weren’t such cowards.”

In an unimaginable fury, Rumsfeld fired his whisky glass at the far wall, missing the exiting general by a good two feet – rage always scattered his vision, anger obliterated his accuracy. He sat back down and began anew on the now-shaken defense executive. “That, right goddamn there – that is the problem with this goddamn country,” he said, fulminating, pointing a damning index finger, red-faced and bursting with a desire for murder. “Even the military has gone soft. We’re in a crisis here, and that, uh, ahh – that jackass wants to talk about philosophy!”

The liaison officer from State turned to leave the room, emboldened by the general. He knew now what he had to do as soon as he got back to his office down the hall from Secretary Albright. “You’re out of line, Mr. Rumsfeld,” said the liaison, quietly and perturbed.

“Who in the hell are you? How dare you speak to me that way!”

“I’m from the State Department, and you’re not the president – not for real, thank God. And I assure you that after what I’ve heard today, you won’t be playing these war games any longer,” the man said, and got away from the room before he heard something that he might have to testify to some day.

The exercise was at an end. What should have been a moment of pure triumph for Don Rumsfeld – proving that he had the balls to be president, to bring down Armageddon – had turned into one of the most humiliating moments of his life.

Any plans he had for doing something more concrete about Bill Clinton than just talk had evaporated in those few seconds of principled determination evinced so clearly by the general. Donald Rumsfeld – never to be president, never to be jeffe, either by vote or at the head of a plutocrat’s mob – returned to his chair and waited out the afternoon, until at last the officer from the military airlift command appeared and said it was time to be blindfolded again, returned to the transport jet and sent back to his corporate reality, far above the surface of this Doomsday oubliette.

* * *

Shaken by the hallucinations of the night before, Rumsfeld was lounging the next afternoon and brooding over past injustices – chiefly his run-in with the sanctimonious general and the buffoon from the State Department related above – but many other failures of repose and resources over the years as well. The writing was going badly. The whisky was diminishing in swift gulps of bile. His nostrils ached from having been violently pressed by the barn door. The day became one long solipsistic festival of introversion and contentiousness, the loathing directed chiefly at himself.

Don wondered, during his hours of solitary criticism, what the deeper message was, truly, in the nature of the books that had been appearing around him these last few days. That someone was trying to make a statement was obvious. No rational person could mistake the parallel themes of the volumes bound for Rumsfeld’s pleasure. And, Don allowed, surely there was a racial component to the message, from whoever had been responsible for it, and it was something that infuriated the old man as he balanced his morbid introspection with the knowledge that whatever he had done wrong in his life, there were a thousand fools out to get him, had been for years, and this perhaps explained why some things he’d attempted to accomplish had finished rather less than grandly.

He’d been hearing the “racism” thing a lot recently, smart-ass pols and pundits wondering if methods of regime change would have been different in Iraq had the occupants been Nordic instead of Arabic, similar things he considered nonsense. And now, here at his weekend place, there appeared to be a similarly-minded malcontent afoot, stalwart and determined in his designs to peg poor Don Rumsfeld as Chesapeake’s own modern-day Simon Legree. The idea that he was some kind of racist drove the old man to fits of refutation; he recalled, surely as had it been yesterday, years before when a rather parsimonious series of payments was arranged for himself and some companions on a corporate board he chaired. His fellow investors were feeling rooked by the paltry sum of some stock options exchanged, and which, in a letter of protest drafted by a colleague, was referred to as a “niggardly division of the proceeds” from a certain company’s sale. Don allowed to his friend that, indeed, they had been screwed over, but times had changed and “niggardly”, though technically correct, might be seen as offensive to the lawyers the protest was bound for. Don was proud that he had nixed the offensive use of phrasing, and insisted that the matter be referred to as “exiguous” instead, a more agreeable word in his view, euphonious and racially-neutral, and one bound to send the recipient running for Merriam-Webster. That was a good way to infuriate a lawyer, hit him with a word he couldn’t identify, smack the blockhead down with superior verbiage redolent of contempt; it was also proof, Don thought, of his own estimable reserves of empathy and sensitivity, seeing as that he was concerned the lawyer reading the thing would probably be Jewish, and any damn fool knew how they identified with the coloreds. Don was proud of this moment of enlightenment, and wondered why his seeming-assailant here upon Mount Misery didn’t know about his many good deeds towards blacks, going so far as to learn to use the phrase “African-American” when Powell or Condi Rice were around. With Iraq now in flames from Basra to Kirkuk, no one wanted to seem to give him the benefit of the doubt for anything anymore; he wondered how much longer he could refrain from open pandering to the mobs, and how loathsome it would be needing to justify every decision he had made for the past six years. The need to explain was something Donald Rumsfeld had rarely felt in his life; now, to get any fairness from History at all, it appeared he would have to do just that. He was blinkered with fury thinking of showing his scars like Coriolanus, then only to be betrayed by the “bald tribunes” in the end and mortally removed from power. Everything was Shakespeare to Don these days; and all of his references felt like acknowledgements of globe-spanning tragedy. But nothing disgusted him more than the idea of explaining to a piss-ant like Denny Kucinich or that walrus Ted Kennedy why he had done what he had done during his tenure at the Pentagon. He resolved that afternoon that he simply would never do so, and let the record judge him as severely as it wished.

One of the surest truisms of the passage of a man from prominence to obscurity was the need of the subject, if he had been any kind of great figure at all, to justify himself to History and beg forgiveness for failed schemes which had been mooted from a desire to effect great change. Don may have been the first of the Dubya Cabinet to be forced to take up the jaundiced quill, but he would hardly be the last; an avalanche of verbiage was about to spring from the neo-con fiasco and all its many enablers, entire forests would need to be clear-cut to the floor to allow the mea culpas to flow in all their myriad flavors of apologia and pitiable hand-wringing. “To redeem the past and to transform every It was into an I wanted it thus! – that alone do I call redemption!” – so had written Nietzsche many years ago, but never had it been more true than for what was to inevitably occur in the following years from the wellspring of defiant justification that was surely to be the Bush administration’s greatest gift to posterity – obscurantism.

Don knew – courtesy of the CIA grapevine that sieved information from Langley like a flock of biddies gathered ‘round a pinochle table – that yutz Tenent had been working on his memoirs for months, hunkered down like a hedgehog in his suite of offices and ordering in vast amounts of Kung Pao chicken and Happy Family with extra prawns – five-star spiced as if in penance devouring Sriracha and fire-bombing his gut – and never leaving until the pre-dawn hours, throwing the empty Chinese delivery containers in the hallway and talking to himself as he left, seething and skulking like a mendicant friar, about to be turned out from the monastery and left to fend for himself and answer for everything, whether it was his fault or not. Don also knew that the working manuscript of his memoirs was the biggest pile of steaming bullshit seen in Washington since the literary inventions of John Dean, still painting himself as a victim after all these years. He knew what Tenent’s book had in it because the overnight cleaning woman who took care of the Director’s suite was a plant from the Defense Intelligence Agency, recruited by Richard Perle and placed by that ace satrap Gonzalez. The woman had a photographic memory and didn’t mind plucking fortune cookie scraps from the carpet to earn her Green Card; Tenent would have been stunned had he known how Rumsfeld had Langley crawling with informants, all the better to keep and eye on the spies who had a troubling habit of not agreeing with what he needed them to agree to. As it was, Rumsfeld learned that Tenent gave new meaning to the word “blowhard” in his volume, wrapping himself up in the flag for the first fifty pages and then placing that same old rag atop the coffin of his dignity in the closing chapters, a proud patriot to the end, assuring the world of the good intentions and honesty of the pre-war Intel, especially how anybody could have been fooled by that pile of aluminum tubes found in Jordan by the eager-to-please Mukhabarat. It would sell thousands, make Tenent a nice retirement, and still be nothing but a milquetoast analysis of the big questions of why the United States was fighting a civil war in Mesopotamia. Rumsfeld cringed at the idea of his own work ever being so pusillanimous, resolved to fight hard in his own defense, and place garbage like George Tenent’s work upon the ash-heap of literary history where it belonged. His book would be indispensable.

Don had nurtured visions of literary grandeur before. While he intended his memoirs to be a cold and sober version of his years in power and the multifaceted complexities of American foreign policy during that time, many years before he had harbored an ambition for a grand American novel that would shock the litterati while at the same time proffering generous doses of solid conservative American values. Not surprisingly, he never got much past a gaudy, portentous title and a purple-prosed sex scene that would have forced his wife to divorce him if ever published.

He had wanted to call the book The Isthmus of Panama, only half-realizing that his attraction to the title was related to a brief collegiate flirtation with Henry Miller’s racy work during his time at Princeton – a subconscious homage, perhaps the most baleful and fraught with pitfalls of derivativeness. He would often mention the still-born novel to Joyce, or bring up the title obliquely while in committee meetings during his time in Congress. “The Isthmus of Panama – well, what do you think?” Don would accost a colleague, the man generally too perplexed to offer a thoroughgoing critique of what remained nothing more than a title.

He had wanted to write the most violent and graphic sex scene in the history of literature – really throw a curveball to those “squares” who thought they had Don Rumsfeld pegged. Once, during a typically beastly-hot DC summer, he stayed awake late through incendiary August nights and pounded away on his preciously-earned IBM Selectric. Despite the heat, he gulped coffee and – rare for him – burned smokes to the nub. With only an outline of where he intended the plot to go, he wrote his long-cherished sex scene first, practically smacking his lips at the perversity he had conjured while at the same time defending American trade policy with the imponderably vast banana plantations and their protective dictatorships of Central America. The Freudian implications were lost on Don, and he used the bananas merely as an excuse to work a swarm of tarantulas into the plot. For the female lead – about to be so graphically mounted by his hero, whom he had transparently named “Don” – he pictured Kim Novak, ravished and ravishing, pure spitfire oomph and jaw-dropping curves. As filmed directly from the text, Don imagined there would have to be a special version of the movie strictly released in France. Only the Frogs could handle what he had in mind for the defilement of his sex kitten Kim Novak.

Don showed the chapters to Joyce the next day, dropping them on the kitchenette where she sat eating marmalade on toast and strong Earl Grey tea. “I’m going to the office,” he said, “if you have time, see what your hubby has been uh, ahhh – creating these nights.” Joyce knew he had pretensions to literature and decided to at least pretend to critique this novel so diligently crafted night after night in the blast-furnace heat of his private office.

Don slept that night on the couch, did so for three more nights, and abandoned all hopes of finishing The Isthmus of Panama. Joyce warned him she would leave if he ever gave vent to such impulses as lurked in his libido again. And she would never be associated with a man who would write such things if, by some incalculable horror, they were actually published. Don apologized, put away the Selectric, shelved his dreams and installed an air conditioner in his office. By that time next year he had been selected to head a committee on the viability of electric busses in mid-size American cities, and realized how much he loved the vast minutiae of committee work. Getting Toledo, Spokane and Burlington, Vermont to work on time fascinated him. He never thought about Henry Miller again.

Until this afternoon. The night previous had been such an unsettling experience that he was literally unable to think clearly, facing his own infinite collection of files and correspondence maintained here at Mount Misery. Flummoxed, he checked his e-mail ten times, made a series of phone calls to old pals in the pharmaceuticals industry, scrubbed his footprints off of the wall where the “waterproof” shoes resided, and found himself like so many discarded old men, puttering around the house with absolutely nothing useful to do. He wondered if this is how it had been for Nixon in the last days of life, the greatest political mind he had ever encountered flipping through channels and killing time watching “Animal Planet” and thinking of every single little thing that had ever gone wrong in his life. Don watched a documentary called People of The Forest about three generations of savanna-dwelling anthropoids and realized that save for trade and an organized military, the chimpanzee mandate in life of fornication and death varied little from his own human experience. A million years up the evolutionary ladder and the only thing truly different about Don Rumsfeld from a goddamn chimpanzee was that he had never thrown faeces at anyone. The chimps certainly got more sex, that was for sure. Don, utterly despondent, fell back into the couch in front of the television and drifted off to sleep.

Maybe an hour of solid dream-time had passed when he was awoken by the banging in the basement. Things had gone on in the basement of Mount Misery as well as the barn, things that Donald Rumsfeld refused to acknowledge or even think about. Down a flight of wooden steps which dated from the mid-nineteenth century, the earthen-floored basement let in water and sucked out heat; Don had resolved to put some concrete down when he got a chance, but of course had been far too busy fighting two wars the past few years to get to the project. He was used to groans and creeks of the mansion as it continued to settle and slide into the soft earth; this was different. Once again, it sounded like an intruder was loose in the basement of his home. Groggy and only half-roused from his nap, an irritated Donald Rumsfeld opened the hallway door and went into the basement, determined to stop whatever it was that was banging about beneath his home.

Torture had gone on in this basement a hundred and fifty years ago. All the manacles, shackles and chains had long since been cleared away by the various owners over the years, but the basement was a place of torment devised by the original owner of the property when the elements mediated against going into the night and sloughing to the barn. Here was a fall-back torture chamber, a place of confinement when no other place would do; the basement was Mount Misery’s own private Guantanamo Bay. Here, obstreperous niggers could be dealt with harshly and consistently, without the wielder of the whip even having to put on his galoshes.

Don knew these things, chalked them up to the social mores of a time gone by, refused to be hamstrung by archaisms, and shone a flashlight into the humid darkness. The ground was cold, wet – glutinous, precisely as outside. So much water leaked through the floor of his home, he was surprised only that it hadn’t mildewed the walls or cracked the mortar. As soon as all of this nonsense played out, he resolved to fix up his home, and do it without regard to cost.

Whatever had been banging around the basement had stopped its protestations in exact appraisal of Don’s arrival. Again, these things figured as surely as the most precise calculus – the measureless depths of infinity, as measured by the perfect pitch of irony. Don walked to the steps to return to his couch and his nap, with probably a nip or two of the nectar in between – Scooter Libby’s gift had been the one truly useful thing he had been given during the entire year. Donald Rumsfeld was two fingers of Scotch away from insanity, and had been for the last three days running. It was quite a siege.

And then as he mounted the first step to return to the warmth of the couch, the top door slammed shut, with such violence as to send a gust of air down the steps and rustle the wisps of hair that had accrued in the old man’s ears. It was strange what parts of the body became more sensitive as a man bounded unequally into old age.

By now, fury had become such a regular feature of Don’s condition as to hardly raise a hackle or a pause in his tripwire demeanor. He accepted that this old draughty mansion needed an entire year’s worth of weatherproofing, elsewise he would be pissing away electricity and fuel bills to the tune of thousands of dollars until the day he died; still, he was amazed that air could be suctioning through the walls to the point that doors were slamming shut and a sound much like fists being pounded upon concrete was issuing from the basement; for that is what had lured him here in the first place. Anguish buttressed by rage, like a condemned man making a last, vital protest; that basement was the mansion’s memory hoard, an unfinished canvas of all the unjustly accused and imprisoned, torment and sorrow in each concealed layering. At the top of those steps was the refinement of privilege enforced by violence, above this wretched pit of mud and lost souls. Down here was the forgotten history of the brutes.

Don knew, of course, that when he tried to force the door at the top of the steps that it would not open, yet he tried anyway, as he had never considered himself a fatalist. Still, there was more than a little remorse at having displayed such optimism. The door was shut and would, naturally, be swelled by the elements to the point that he would have to throw the full weight of his upper body into it in hopes of gaining egress. Of course, such a thing was hard to do when balancing on a staircase wearing only a pair of house slippers.

Eyeglasses askew upon his clenched and square face, Don threw a mighty shoulder-block into the hard wood, some hundred-odd years old; meaning oak, meaning constructed with pride and to last. The door creaked, but did not yield. Again he threw his weight into the door, and again it stood there like an insult; it wasn’t enough for people to be assailing him, he thought, objects obviously had it in for him too.

It was only after the tenth try that Don noted his shoulder began to throb and a kind of vertigo had set in. He had left himself short-winded and precariously balanced on the top step, and his equilibrium was gone with a finality that would demand a protracted rest. And that would mean a rest in the cold, bone-swelling mud of this basement. Where a hundred-or-so-years before black men and even black women had found themselves when it was too much trouble for an angry psychopath with a whip to walk a hundred yards to the barn and do them in where he felt they belonged: amongst farm animals and their waste. In this cold pit, with all of his emergency communications equipment left on the other side of this impenetrable door, Don would be forced to spend the night. In the morning, Sparky and Popeye would secure the grounds and find him here, locked away in his unfinished basement, humiliated and alone. Don scouted around for a quiet place to assume his degradation slumber; in the process, he noticed that the ass of his pants had become soaked with mud. How, he did not know. But this is how he would be found by his own private Keystone Kops, several hours from now: cold, wet, furious, hunkered upon a muddy, sodden ass and probably the first signs of pneumonia appearing in his withered lungs.

He chattered and shook ‘till dawn, never gaining a moment’s true rest. Atop a pile of old magazines he made his bed, and, prone, studied the spider-webbed crossbeams above. Faded brown stains spotted every nook, every surface he could see. The walls were lousy with them, though you’d never know it if you didn’t end up on your back on the floor with the morning light bringing a dull gloaming to your eyes, your lungs cold and wet and wondering how the hell so much blood ended up on the ceiling, dried, discoloured, and as if never having been in the veins of a living man, ignored utterly, through so many years and so much forgetting, the obliviousness that only race, class and privilege can bring to a man.

Only for a moment did Don Rumsfeld wonder, truly, how bad things must have been for the slaves who ended their days in this basement, their usefulness to their master at a decisive and final end.

* * *

They roused him, Sparky and that clueless idiot Popeye, early the next morning and brought their aged bundle upstairs, chilled and vaguely blue about the nostrils, wretchedly gaunt, numb with an invalid’s agony and a convict’s shame. Carcass-like, grimy, emerged from the mansion’s sepulchre in defeat – here was the man who weeks before had wielded military power unseen and unheard of in an American regime since the time of the Civil War, now looking like a refugee from one of the wars he had conjured with all the dexterous skill of a short-con grifter. Locked in his own basement, by whatever force had been so dastardly and downright rotten, Rumsfeld had spent several hours in sub-freezing temperatures, all the while surrounded by walls dripping wet with slimy water that now had inundated the old man’s robe – the garment clingy and clammy, pitifully filthy, like a giant mechanic’s rag – leaving him palsied and humiliated, starting to stink like a mange-ridden dog let out for a bathroom run in a thunderstorm and never washed since. Quivering over a cup of black tea as the distraught agents attempted to understand how this catastrophe had occurred, the old man for the first time in years stopped to consider how truly pathetic he had become, right there at that moment, smelly and cold and obviously a danger to himself. Locking yourself in the basement is the kind of thing that gets you sent to the “retirement home”, Don thought – really just a nice way of saying the “glue factory” for used-up old bureaucrats like himself. He wondered if his children would try to have him committed, cloistered away in a Republican old farts home, stuck playing Scrabble with Jesse Helms all afternoon, listening to boring old stories about Mark Foley and Larry Craig loose at Congressional page social mixers, wearing a diaper and begging Death to get a move-on and end this humiliating charade. Don had never been so goddamn miserable in all his born days.

Sparky was concerned. He was the one who had found Don, after a frantic search where he had come within a few panic-ridden seconds of calling back to the District and reporting his number-one charge missing and possibly abducted. Then he had heard the banging on the cellar door, and a fusillade of obscenities not fouling his ears since the time of Marine boot, many years before. It was he who had prepared the tea, tamping it down in a French press because he knew that was how the ex-secretary liked to fix his coffee. Now, he looked at the dilapidated frame of the old man – glasses twisted upon his face like a mugging victim, a filth-laced robe across his shivering back, bleeding again from the wound to his jaw and muttering a scatological glossolalia with bewildering repetition, made even the more disconcerting as the vulgar syllables halted between his pursed lips, cut-off and truncated, teeth chattering rapidly as the old man continued to suffer from the cold – and could only feel pity. Sparky thought he looked like a crazy person you would see down by the bus station, slathered in filth and piss and scaring children on their way to school. The agent considered his employment options after he was fired for this dereliction of duty, realized he would be lucky to not be prosecuted for some kind of crime, and stared at the floor while the old man got to the bottom of his cup of tea.

“Jesus! What in the blue blazes is in this goddamn tea!” Rumsfeld roared, spitting big chunks of tea leaves from his lips in frantic succession, then grabbing a towel and wiping his tongue clean of the detritus. It is to be noted that a French press is not the ideal method for preparing rough-cut black tea, as the woe-begone agent was finding out at this moment.

“Sir, please, just sit down and we’ll get a medical team out here...”

“Goddammit, I do not want a goddamn medical team out here! I’m fine! I’m just a little cold, that’s all – and I’d be better if I could get a goddamn cup of tea that didn’t have a pile of goddamn mulch leaves in it. Who in the hell was the jack-ass that made this goddamn tea? Are you trying to kill me, you idiots?”

The agents looked at each other, knowing this was the moment when their careers were to end, years of faithful and patriotic service destroyed by a malcontented old fool who had obviously begun his slide to dementia and demise. Bitter at the Fates, the men both kept quiet. Before them, Rumsfeld bled and raged, spitting imaginary tea leaves from his mouth and shaking with either frenzy or freeze – the agents couldn’t tell which. Their doom was assured, however, and both men realized this in pathetic silence.

“In all my years of government,” Rumsfeld began, taking off his glasses, glaring at the French press on the kitchen counter, “I have never seen, nor heard of, a more disgraceful treatment of a man – an important man, goddammit – who has been, uh, errr...involuntarily retired from a position of authority in the Federal government. This is an outrage! Left all night to freeze in the basement – why didn’t anyone check that door, it’s obvious the thing has swelled in the cold and wet, and when it shut, there I was, down in the pits, you’re lucky...uh, ahhhh, mmmmmm....you’re lucky I didn’t, ah, ah, ahmmmm...” and Rumsfeld simply trailed off to a grunting silence, gasping his lament and acknowledging, in his own way, that the agents had actually saved his life.

The men were terrified. Sparky was shocked to silence, and it was left to Popeye, alas, to try to calm the old man and convince him that all would somehow be well. “Sir, I understand your ordeal was overwhelming. Your duty and patriotism have moved us all, sir. Now, you have survived yet another trial. Your good health is an inspiration to all Americans in a time of war. I think if we just get a doctor out here, especially considering you were also stuck in the quagmire out by the barn the other night...”

“What did you say, you goddamn jack-ass?” Rumsfeld exploded, certain now that a conspiracy to drive him batty had been revealed by one Mr. Popeye’s word choice, so casually traduced.

“Sir...” the agent tried to respond, befuddled.

“You heard me! And I heard you! That word you used – ‘quagmire’. Quagmire. Quagmire!” He paused and kicked the refrigerator, feeling his toes come back to life from deep-freeze with the instant pain of impacting upon the steel door. Defiant, he refused to cry out, preferring to eat the agony like candy and swallowing it whole. In the far window, the sun still not having completely emerged and night still rendering the pane damningly reflective, Rumsfeld caught a glimpse of himself, clearly amok like only the mad can be and his hair wildly disheveled in wisps and torrents of mad-scientist disorder, and at that singular moment realized his utter debasement. A moment of insight which Milan Kundera has termed litost, an absolutely wonderful word – a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. Old, cold and ridiculous – a mulcted retiree seeing in his reflection the visage of a lunatic or a tramp, here was the very definition of litost, and he lurched still further into the void of insanity with the accusations he next hurled at the hapless duo trapped here with him in his kitchen.

“You said ‘quagmire’ for a reason, didn’t you, Popeye? What are you getting at, huh? Answer me goddammit!”

“Sir, I have no reason to try to insult you...”

“Oh, so it just happened, did it? Just a random, uh ahhh...just a random visitation from the word fairy, is that it? Quagmire, huh? That one just popped out of your pie-hole like a bunny from its burrow, is that it? Answer me, Marine!”

Agent Popeye had no idea how to calm the old man. He listened to the indignation percolate and the outrage flow; Marine – where did this poor old bastard think he was? Subic Bay? He looked like he needed to be restrained – like a few unlucky bastards he’d seen in a psych-warfare exercise in Langley at CIA headquarters that separated the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. “Sir, I am sorry for offending you, but I was just talking about the incident by the barn where you ended up, ah, you know...ahhhh...”

“Caked in filth! Go ahead, say it! I ended up head to foot in mud, just like I am right now, isn’t that it? Seems to be a pattern emerging here, eh’ Popeye? I seem to be ending up filthy and muddy with ah, ah, errr...alarming regularity, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sir...”

“Goddammit, you two listen to me now and you listen good. I don’t know what it is with you guys and language, but you’re pushing me with your word choices. I do not ever, under any circumstances, want to hear the goddamn word ‘quagmire’ spoken in my presence again, do you understand me? There are plenty of things you can say to indicate a presence of mud, plenty of things. I do not want to hear that word, comprendé? Plenty of things you can say...ahhh, mmmm...plenty of things.”

“Like what?” Popeye meekly asked, in total innocence, Agent Sparky still shooting him an absolutely murderous look, the kind a parent gives a child who has just been released from jail.

Rumsfeld eyed the man with a hatred so pure it almost made him smile. But he allowed that the fellow might need some instruction after all, and he wracked his brain in trying to give it to him. “‘Like what’, he says...like what?...all right, I’ll tell you what you could say...ahhh, mmmm...you could say, uhhh, you could call it...” Still lost for just the right synonym, he instinctively thought back to his reading, and a particular book on the Russian “holy man” and seducer of the Tsarina, one Grigory Rasputin. “Rasputitsa,” Rumsfeld said, spat the word in his effortless manner, colloquially garbling the consonants and spraying spittle as the letters ground against his teeth in the way a foreign word defeats even the most accomplished English speaker. Don was very proud that his mind could recall such trivia after his recent travails, proud that he was still, after all, a solid thinker.

“A what, sir?” Popeye asked.

“Rasputitsa, you could call it that...it’s a word the Russians use to describe the muddy season, uhhh, uhhhhh...in the spring, it rains so goddamn much, then the earth thaws out from that goddamn glacial cold of theirs...mud everywhere, up to the axles of the Wehrmacht...a real mess...rasputitsa, rasputitsa...” he repeated, solemnly, like he had given the men some great secret, the fruits of diabolical labor, a gift of alchemy. Rasputitsa.

“Oh, ok sir. Yes, we’ll do that. Thank you for the advice,” Sparky said, stepping in before the oaf Popeye led this obviously insane old man to more outbursts, more violences. As soon as Rumsfeld had kicked the refrigerator, Sparky knew he had to get the both of them the hell away from this man.

“Yes, yes...I always am trying to help...just don’t use that other goddamn word. Don’t use it. I can’t bear to hear it. It’s not accurate.” He paused and sat back down at the table, looking at the tea cup lousy with sodden debris. “Comparisons to Vietnam, a ‘quagmire’ – they’re not accurate...”

By the time he recovered his wits and looked around the kitchen, both Sparky and Popeye had left. Fled, actually. They had been deeply upset by Rumsfeld’s fulsome display, first the spontaneous rage and then the exhausted pleading to not use a certain word that functioned as his own personal shibboleth, two syllables that separated friend from foe and when spoken led to blistering paranoia. The two agents, driven to retreat, had left the old man alone in his kitchen, a few feet from his former prison in the basement, still wet and cold and in desperate need of a long, hot shower and many hours of recuperative sleep.

Don looked around the kitchen, smelled his ruined bathrobe and scowled in disgust, and realized the boys had left him all alone, they didn’t even say good-bye. And he realized he was more than just alone in this moment, he had been abandoned – fired and discarded, here was the end to his career and all of his attempts to lead the military into the Twenty-First Century, he had tried for greatness and a legacy and had blown it all, left with nothing, disgusted and alone, and only aware of how utterly wretched he felt, deep within an appalling depression and sunk to the lowest depths of personal regard.

Litost.