Old Man Misery

2008-02-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

About Old Man Misery

The simplest way I can think of to "blurb" my novel is to reprint the pitch letter I sent to various Lit Agencies. With personal details omitted, it is reprinted, below:

Donald Rumsfeld has been fired. In the last eight minutes of his tenure as secretary of defense, Rumsfeld is besieged by a host of memories, ages-old quarrels and final reminders of the end of his professional life. Facing a bitter segue to retirement, Rumsfeld leaves Washington for a week-long recuperation at his estate on the Chesapeake Bay. There, in isolation, he intends to peacefully spend time before the Christmas Holidays beginning the writing of his memoirs. But all is not well at his estate, known to history as "Mount Misery". On a property formerly owned by a notorious "slave breaker", Edward Covey, Rumsfeld faces a host of confrontations – with his past, his legacy, and a disastrously failed war which posterity will long remember his name by. He may also be facing something else – what could be the spirit of Frederick Douglass, the most famous and perhaps tragic victim of Edward Covey, master slave breaker and former owner of Rumsfeld's vacation estate. Though composed of multiple themes, the final question of this novel is quite simple: How can a man who refuses to say what is "good" ever know when he is doing "evil"?

Chapter Seven

2008-02-10T15:21:00.002-08:00

Chapter Seven

Rumsfeld was in Taos, New Mexico three days later, and was resting in another of his favorite old chairs, examining yet again the Columbian Orator, which alone of his books at Mount Misery he had decided to take with him west for the festivities so gaily planned by his wife, Joyce. Douglass had not returned the next night following his spectacular appearance, the last night Rumsfeld was in Maryland before he decided to escape that turmoil and head to New Mexico for some family time and a warmer Christmas. As a result of this, Rumsfeld had never had a chance to ask the spirit where those two books had come from, who had been responsible for leaving them on his desk at the Old Executive Office Building and atop his kitchen table in Maryland. Still reeling from the experience and trying to decide whether or not Mr. Douglass had, in actuality, issued forth from his conscience unhinged by a bout with too much Scotch, Rumsfeld ground his teeth thinking how he would probably never know where this beautiful old book had come from. Don hated loose ends; when he left something, he wanted it to be finished, one way or the other, a definitive result. This book was like holding all of Iraq within his hands; it was the ambiguity of the situations which made him dwell upon them, it was this ambiguity which had made him miserable. Here was misery, at last defined: not knowing whether all you have done has been worth a damn or even if it has failed. Not knowing and not being able to know made him Old Man Misery, in ill-repose to a History that would only be written long after he was dead. There was something grossly unfair in not even being able to know how despised your name would be to posterity.

Rumsfeld had a new pair of shoes on, lighter and made of canvas for the warmth of the Southwest, and new glass frames, too. He wore an open-necked cotton shirt that had just been pressed; a far window was open and the cloth ruffled about his chest from a slight, pleasantly cool breeze somewhere gathered upon the hundreds of miles of desert that was his neighborhood and home. There were no ghosts in New Mexico, the land may have been enchanted but was far too young to have known the kind of horror that shaped this nation when it was very, very new, and still confused as to what rights were worthy of what men. But hadn’t there once been Indians here in this desert, hadn’t they, too, faced the conqueror’s justice from another group of men whom had arrived with a Bible, a flag and an interest in trade? Where had they all gone? Rumsfeld allowed the thought only the briefest grace; then, it too was banished, one more uncomfortable thing that had nothing to do with him, a man who had been born hundreds of years after the slaughter which took the ground underneath his feet from its former masters. All of this was just History, and – Rumsfeld thought – What can be said of History? By the time it is written, we’ll all be dead.

There were more prosaic concerns which could occupy his mind now. For one, the smell of all the cooking going on in that kitchen was worth forgetting everything else, if only for the day. Joyce was going all out, and it pleased Don to know the woman still cared enough, after all that had just occurred, to try and make him happy with a family Christmas and vast plates of freshly-baked cookies and pies. It reminded him of some of the only truly free time he’d known while serving this latest disaster of a Bush.

Friday nights were the one time he and Dick allowed themselves to relax, and have a huge old dinner the likes of which they’d both grown up with. Dick would invite them over to the official residence, a grand old house in a terrific part of Northeast D.C. by the National Observatory, and his limo would pass the horde of protestors who had permanently besieged the mansion outside the gate, and Don would smile knowing that they couldn’t see who it was that was going right past them and not even bothering to honk. The assembled discontents of civilization were magically blind to the ultimate prey passing their sentinels; here was their much-loathed “war criminal”, parting their barricades with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

Inside the Cheney household, a different world appeared at the front door and became more pronounced as Don moved through the mansion to the vice-president’s sitting rooms. Lynne insisted upon cooking herself, almost as if the Cheneys were normal people, and it would be vast platters of pot roast, meatloaf, Salisbury steak, acres of corn and whole fields of mashed potatoes – things Dick shouldn’t even have been looking at after five heart attacks. Yet eat he did, ravenously, and with great satisfaction; very few words were exchanged when the men sat down for the serious business of chow, but what a perfect time it was regardless. Everyone’s cholesterol was under control, Dick’s heart was solid as a mule’s, Don still looked like a varsity wrestler from Princeton – those meals were the few peaceful moments for men serving a president who knew, and embraced, only war.

At some point, the protestors had taken to reciting lists of the soldiers and Marines killed in Iraq, and during the balmy Fall weather when the District was almost livable, the monotonous sound of the names of dead young men carried in through the open windows, spoiling the atmosphere of these homey, family get-togethers. One night, the endless list of slaughtered youth too much to endure, Dick had slammed his fork down in disgust, and went over to the French doors and threw them shut. “Goddamn them, what do they think – I wanted all of these boys to be coming home in bags?” It was the one time politics had been allowed to ruin the Friday night dinners. Rumsfeld felt great empathy for his old friend; that blood was on his hands, too. But, he allowed – What are you going to do? War is hell and young men die; that’s life. That’s life – and Dick sat back down and finished his slab of roasted chicken. Later, there was pie and coffee. Don learned that you couldn’t let the business of State ruin your disposition; and it was knowledge he appreciated right now, knowing how hard his still-lovely wife had worked to make this family Christmas a special time for him.

He put the book down and went to the kitchen, where Joyce was having coffee with one of their grandchildren. The young woman would live to see what was said of her grandfather, but he would not. The old man resolved to spend time with the girl, be kind to her and pleasant, so that she would remember something other than what his enemies would write of him. Don knew he had to let them know something other than what would come to be known as the truth, because that truth was going to be very, very hard on him.

He had planned for a notable, if unspectacular, retirement; planned for what remained of he and Joyce’s lives, their children, and the children after that. He’d felt he would have needed a few breaks, but that if a couple things tilted his way he might yet be able to salvage his reputation, earned with such tremendous effort through forty-odd years of American history, moving through all of these events and somehow preserving his dignity and his balls. He felt that he had secured that peaceable retirement just a few years before, that he could segue to uselessness removed and above all of those who never like him anyway, but whom he had, finally, outlasted.

But on the spot men become men again and mountains mountains.

Don Rumsfeld would spend the remainder of his days erasing History before it was even written, invalidating facts with a penitent’s guilt, letting people know there had been a real man behind the catastrophic legend being burnished by the enemies who loathed the very mention of his name. He would start by going into the other room, becoming a smiling grandfather as he passed, pouring a cup of coffee, sitting down and reading the paper, and behaving like a normal, tired, yet still-vital old man.

Here was Old Man Misery, and he had many things to say about the History he swore would never be written. That task accomplished, and only then, could he die in peace. Rumsfeld smiled as he entered the kitchen and caught the eye of his granddaughter, knowing that his work would keep him alive, and for many, many years to come.

Chapter Six

2008-02-10T15:21:00.001-08:00

Chapter Six

Documents, books, letters, marginalia – Rumsfeld had been virtually besieged by an army of words, hundreds of thousands upon millions of them, during his lamentable time upon the slave’s tomb of Mount Misery. That afternoon, his paperwork labyrinth was crenellated still further with the delivery of a document he had requested days ago from those ambiguity-minders deep within the Pentagon; recently de-classified, Donald H. Rumsfeld wanted to read this particular document in full, as he was certain that it would eventually become more widely known, and raise some very troubling issues regarding his time as secretary of defense. When it had been written, several years before, he could have hardly cared less about the thing’s contents – cross, caustic, vitriol-laden, inflectively-sober or otherwise, it didn’t matter a damn to him, he was a busy man secure in his job, Good Old Rummy with two wars to fight, virile and magically immune to misfortune’s ever-spreading pox, stoically defiant. Now, suddenly curious as only the hubris-shorn can be, he found this particular White Paper offensively legitimate. Anybody could read the damn thing now, thanks to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits; to defend against the avalanche of charges within, he would at least have to acknowledge that they existed.

He’d packed already and was getting as far away from Maryland as he could. On the limo drive to the airport, the old man relaxed again to music, this time Beethoven, a late Rasumovsky like the score to civilization itself, and examined what purported to be the definitive psychological/historical analysis of the conduct of one Corporal Charles Graner, Jr., the Army MP held chiefly responsible for the torture exhibits arranged at the great military fortress of Abu Ghraib in the Fall of 2003.

It was one more ghost he would have to deal with for the remainder of his days, a haunting as assured and repugnant as the wickedest visitation from the damned; for Don Rumsfeld was recognizing that perhaps even if Frederick Douglass had not stood in his living room the other night and engaged upon a three-hour philosophical harangue, there were other memories of the world, other visitations, other claustrophobic encounters with the permanent and enduring spirit of History.

He would never be able to escape all that was his work. Old Man Misery would forever be known for these things, his name forever blackened for infamous crimes. But if it shook him, either to conscience or trepidation, he did not let it show.

Rumsfeld relaxed into the seat and began reading the document.

* * *

The first thirty pages droned on through a cataloguing of crimes of inspired depravity. Rumsfeld knew them well, having seen the same photos that the entire world did when the carnal circus of American Empire had been betrayed by a suddenly vigilant media, pruriently displaying the images of sexual torture, the chastisement dripping with lascivious intent. Don breezed through the pages and paused only for boarding of the corporate Lear jet that awaited him, shook a few hands and settled into his private cabin. Alone, he watched Washington fade away beneath him as the jet made altitude, re-read a few passages that hinted at an author with an axe to grind, and then moved on to the sections where he knew minefields of accusation awaited.

It took the anonymous author of the document some time to get to the crux of his arguments, and specifically to a point where Rumsfeld felt himself involuntarily rising in his chair, seeing for the first time how he was being accused of abetting the torturers of Abu Ghraib:

We do not know what orders were given regarding “softening up” the insurgents by the military intelligence apparatus and the CIA; it will take years to procure that information, if indeed it will be allowed to enter the public domain at all, and it is likely that myriad Freedom of Information Act lawsuits will be required to gain these documents. In the meantime, the questions raised by this troubling confluence of illegal and abusive activities engaged upon by US troops in both Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison will be left for the reader to ponder for significance.

Certain commentators have found disturbing parallels between the specific actions of the MP’s at Abu Ghraib and the graduates of a US Army program created by behavioral scientists called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). The SERE program reportedly utilizes a series of the “homeostatic derangement” mechanisms visible in the infamous “Darby photographs” leaked to the press in the early days of the atrocity scandal. Why this is significant is that if there can be shown to be a confluence or congruity between the grisly abuses supposedly concocted by that “one bad apple” (Corporal Graner) and the actual techniques taught by the Army at SERE warfare schools, a far more disturbing case can be made that – by direct implication – the “somehow” in the question of where Graner and the other defendants got their knowledge on the utilization of these specific tortures will come a long way towards being answered. The resulting answer will certainly not absolve Corporal Graner of his crimes, but may allow a certain “mitigating factor” to be considered: namely, that Graner was chosen for this assignment expressly due to his violent background, a years-long résumé that includes charges of prisoner abuse during his time as a guard at a Pennsylvania correctional facility, two separate restraining orders issued against him due to violent assaults upon his estranged wife, and even disciplinary action taken by the Fayette County (PA) jail due to a sadistically-conceived “practical joke” wherein Graner dumped a phial of chemical Mace into the coffee of a fellow guard. All of this information is publicly available, and therefore it is possible Graner was chosen for his role of “prisoner breaker” further up the command chain, by bureaucrats who knew he was, at root, a common sociopath, prone to sadistic outrages and, in short, a thug. Corporal Graner could have been chosen specifically due to his violent demeanor to run guard duty on the unsupervised overnight shifts within the prison’s “Hard Site” – and therefore to enact the program of abuse the mind warriors of the Pentagon had concocted. The mitigation arises when considering that the Pentagon is, at root, to blame by virtue of their compiling this dark-sided information in the first place – the SERE course information and the somewhat-related CIA “intensive interrogation techniques” KUBARK manual. It is not inconceivable that the Army – in some remote corner of its budget, locked away in a room full of Strangelove-ian Psy-Ops mandarins – engineered the very abuse of the detainees that has so appalled the civilized world. The result of such a conclusion is one of terrible realization: That the crimes at that point rise to the level of state sponsored terrorism. Such irony would be devastating to the image and mission of the United States in these troubled, morally ambiguous times.

There is also the question of even greater crimes that have not been exposed yet, and this due to the brilliant investigative work of Seymour Hersh of the New York Times. Hersh maintains that an entire class of photos which have only been seen by a (shaken) congressional delegation deal with unconscionable atrocities that simply make pale the sexual shenanigans and abuse associated with the MP’s of the 372^nd(Corporal Graner’s unit). Hersh claims that women and young boys were also part of the human booty taken in the punitive raids by army units in “active” insurgent sectors, and that the fate of some of these people is so grim as to be beyond description. To be blunt, however: credible reports exist of young boys being sodomized to death by prisoners forced to molest at gunpoint, of women being gang raped until they pleaded with their captors to kill them, and of adult male detainees being simply murdered for sport after their usefulness as props in this stomach-churning saturnalia had been exhausted. Could this possibly be? It is wrong, of course, to merely engage in the syllogism of extrapolating authority for these charges from the certainty that other, equally disquieting allegations have already been proven true. One must ask oneself a vital question, however: if all of these links in the logical chain continue to hold – and it increasingly appears at least possible that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were directed from a devious, secretive Pentagon program – then it becomes instead more incredible that other, more vile tortures did not occur rather than that they may have or did. The onus at this point resides strictly upon the back of the Army; it is up to the generals to exonerate themselves, and not continue to simply blame this all on one sad sack MP from Uniontown, Pennsylvania named Charles Graner, Jr.

Satisfied that his worst fears for the document were being realized – the author had gone so far as to lump the United States in with North Korea and Syria as sponsors of terrorism, for Christ’s sakes – Rumsfeld arrived at a later section which developed the idea, and posited a theory on why such a catastrophe as Abu Ghraib was possible in the first place:

These preparatory comments are necessary to understand how the military prison at Abu Ghraib turned into the chaotic torture chamber the world knows it as today. Rumsfeld’s initial plan of campaign was to involve a mere 75,000 soldiers to overrun an entire nation – the reductio ad absurdum of his “transformation warfare” theorizing. This was, of course, a plan born of a mindset thinking only of military exigencies which would have been applicable to conventional conflicts like World War Two or even the First Gulf War; unfortunately, they took no consideration of the inevitability of Saddam loyalists “taking to the hills” and continuing a brutal struggle that took no care for actual victory, but rather sought vindication through merely harassing the enemy until his plans were rendered impossible to fulfill. In short: “Shock and Awe” segued to a “Mill on the Tigris”, and the military authorities of the Pentagon amazingly did not consider that the enemy didn’t have to “win” anything to force us to lose.

On a self-flagellating roll and anxious to see how far the indictment could go, Rumsfeld poured himself a fresh drink from the wet bar and considered the author’s opinion that the counter-insurgency operation was handled so disastrously that the very apprehending of suspects actually made the situation worse:

Similarly, the Army in Iraq seemed concerned with arresting and detaining as many people as possible – whether or not they were of actual value to our intelligence resources or a threat to our security – in an attempt at giving the American public solid evidence of a pro-active campaign against the insurgents. The parallel to the infamous Vietnam War “body counts” should be obvious; such public-relations calculus representing the intellectual nadir of an operation which can only count the numbers of heads on sticks to justify its continuance. During this time of “democratization quotas” Abu Ghraib went from approximately 1,000 prisoners at the start of the war to over 10,000 during the worst of the fighting in late October, 2003. That most of these prisoners weren’t Fedayeen at all but merely common criminals was not reported until much later; by then, it was too late. Corporal Graner’s unit was virtually alone and seriously undermanned; there simply hadn’t been adequate resources allocated to do anything other than make sure the detainees were fed. But, unfortunately, their fighting spirit had hardly been extinguished.

The fact that so many of these detainees were, in fact, mere private citizens with no links at all to any inchoate insurgency leads to a further rank irony worthy of historical comparison: namely, that these innocent men may have gone into Abu Ghraib with no lasting negative opinion of America, but certainly came out with a decidedly different orientation. Like the British and their disastrous experience locking up suspected IRA militants at the infamous H-block in Long Kesh during the early 1970’s, America may be learning that wholesale-sweeps of purported terrorists may in fact take an innocent man and expose him to actual terrorists, thereby creating a new enemy where before was at worst a disheartened citizen. That Abu Ghraib is, in fact, the real cradle of this ongoing insurgency is an irony so deeply demoralizing as to invite despair at the actions of men who could so obdurately foul up seemingly every level of the occupation, down to the last prison cell holding the last common thief.

The causal chain then took a disturbing turn closer towards the top, pointing to the possibility that the Army’s emphasis on Graner alone was a knowing fraud, and that, by implication, the Department of Defense and Pentagon would have known precisely these facts:

When learning of the Army’s desperate attempts to place the blame squarely on this “one bad apple” and distance its higher officers completely from the scandal, however, it is hard not to feel sympathy for Graner’s plight and recognize a terrible injustice in placing this one man “outside of history” as though he were, truly, “an army of one” and writing him off as a psychotic who with Svengali-esque skill violated all orders and corrupted an entire unit. This, most assuredly, he is not. The charge is so absurd as to be laughable. But, as Arnold Zweig wrote in his classic novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa, “The divisional court martial works like a machine: when once a man is caught in it, he only comes out as a corpse.”

Don knew he was in for a treat as the literary allusions started to fly. He also knew that the anonymous author was getting to his real and final point, namely that no matter what the photographs showed Graner and his pals doing in Abu Ghraib, somebody else thousands of miles away was ultimately responsible, and Don had no illusions about whom that person had in mind when he wrote the following:

Corporal Graner is facing serious jail time and the knowledge he will be held in full public obloquy for his crimes and specifically reviled for their shocking and debilitating nature. But he perhaps is facing something even worse: Corporal Charles Graner, Jr. is the living embodiment of all the failures of the United States Army to control its troops and effectively maintain a chain of command in a conquered nation. In this era of instant battlefield communication, cellular phones and real-time satellite intelligence, it is remarkable indeed that so many just above this humble corporal claim to know nothing of what he was doing, or where he got these curious ideas regarding jail-house discipline in the first place. Theirs, after all, might be the most remarkable and incredible defense of any. And, realistically, it is simply implausible.

The reason for this collective (and selective) ignorance compounded by bureaucratic amnesia may be very simple indeed. For this ludicrous defense to succeed, and for so many who wish to give it credence, what is exposed primarily are their cherished hopes rather than any intellectual acumen or honesty: the need to protect the organization, i.e., the Army or the Defense Department or the Bush administration, is paramount. And these are people who will need monumental amounts of protection from the facts once those uncomfortable gadflies make their presence known to history. As Michael Herr writes in Dispatches, his brilliant reportage from the ground up in Vietnam, “When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, ‘sorry’ just won’t cover it. There’s nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.” (Herr, p. 49)

And, at last, the diligent author came to his own conclusion regarding the events at Abu Ghraib, and found a host of culprits who allowed such abuse to occur. But Don was only really concerned about one of these supposed culprits, and he skipped down to the section where his own name appeared most noticeably:

There is no “ultimate culpability” in the grisly torture chamber that was, and perhaps remains, Abu Ghraib prison. Through a farrago of noise and interpretation, many officials have sought to distance themselves from the disaster, some more effectively than others, but perhaps none as curiously successful as the man who planned this war in the first place, US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. His acumen in the face of criticism and condemnation is remarkable, though perhaps not laudable; Rumsfeld has survived a spate of damning questions regarding his knowledge of the events in the prison, but never has he bothered to truly answer any of them. His silence in the moral cauldron of basic human decency and adherence to international law during time of war is remarkable; to some, it is also gravely disquieting.

It is clear that the orders issued to General Miller regarding the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, during his time as commanding officer at that detention facility, came not from the Army general staff, since there were three separate entities entrusted with gaining “actionable intelligence” from those pathetic prisoners. The three entities – the CIA, Army intelligence, and a civilian contractor known as CACI – operated seemingly independent of each other, and this arrangement was continued when General Miller was sent to Iraq to “advise” the local commander, General Sanchez, on how to better utilize his capabilities and break the resistance of the supposed-terrorists held at Abu Ghraib.

The question then becomes: who, precisely, is the most logical choice in the entire command-and-control apparatus of the United States military for having issued orders that, under any reasonable interpretation of the word, rise to the level of torture. Who had the most to gain by leaving the Army, and the Army alone, to explain for any possible indication that the United States had gone beyond “extraordinary rendition” and “intensive interrogation techniques” into the realm of dictators and despots, that of officially-sanctioned sadism masquerading as “intelligence gathering”?

One need only return to the days before the Iraq invasion to see where all of this “turf warfare” seems to have begun. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was so intent on getting the “proper” intelligence regarding the nuclear capabilities of Saddam Hussein that he established, in effect, his own private intelligence service, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), within the Pentagon, operating under a “defense intellectual” and committed PNAC signatory named Douglas Feith. Rumsfeld feuded with the CIA and other, more established intelligence agencies, disregarded their views, buried their data and interpretations of evidence, and in short did everything he could to make sure that the policy he chose to pursue, e.g., an invasion and occupation of Iraq, would be the only one that could be considered by the president, according to the “evidence”. That this “evidence” was almost completely fabricated and willfully misrepresented is now increasingly clear; what is also clear is that this “intelligence war” between Rumsfeld’s DIA and every other US agency was ugly, protracted, and left lasting scars.

Rumsfeld has never trusted the military to run its own operations. His disregard and contempt for professional soldiers is legendary within the Beltway. That he would treat something so vitally important – intelligence gathering from detainees in GITMO and Abu Ghraib – as a subject the Army could be trusted to handle on its own is not credible. Rather, the facts point to Rumsfeld using established channels within the Army to direct that certain types of procedures be used, and older, more “quaint” adherence to things like the Geneva Conventions be effectively disregarded.

The entire legal rationale for the detainee system was a coöperative effort of the very highest Bush Administration officials, including, but not limited to, the vice president, his personal lawyer David Addington, legal counselor John Yoo, the Justice Department’s Jay S. Bybee, White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, and the secretary himself, Donald H. Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld seems to have a special culpability, as once the lawyers had hashed out the necessary semantic details for shredding the Geneva Conventions, one man above all the others would be given the special task of utilizing this newly found despotic freedom. Thus liberated, he would then be expected to produce results commensurate with the low-level of veracity demanded by a president who went to war over the flimsiest patina of evidence seen in this country since the jingo’s grab for Empire at the expense of Spain in 1898. Armed with such esoteric and unregulated authority, Rumsfeld began collecting information for his own personal perusal, deftly removing the uniformed military from the chain of command regarding sensitive battlefield intelligence, and, with curious irony, making inevitable the kind of abuse which occurred amongst the detainees within Abu Ghraib. Stripped of restraint, emboldened by duty, and sanctioned by the Pentagon, soldiers in complete physical command of fellow human beings began to de-humanize, humiliate, torture and kill their charges. Considering all of the foregoing evidence presented as to the origins of some of these exotic “intelligence gathering” techniques, it becomes increasingly clear that the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, Donald H. Rumsfeld, would have been aware of these techniques, the tenuous rationale of the administration for suspending something as fundamental as the Geneva Conventions, the results of the practical application of torture in a theater of operations dealing with grueling counter-insurgency combat, and finally the usefulness and worth of information gleaned from individuals who would have been saying anything – literally – to satisfy their interrogators and keep themselves alive. There is precedent, after all, for using such techniques to gain information one vitally wishes to be true; after all, it must have taken quite the skillful interrogator to persuade Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and thousands of other “saboteurs” to admit to being spies and wreckers for various foreign conspiracies designed to destroy the infant Soviet Union. The brutal irony is, that for all the human rights abuses and war crimes Donald Rumsfeld may have countenanced during his tenure as secretary of defense, far from aiding America in her quest to defeat international terrorism and render the Mid-East fit for Democracy, he may have ultimately sabotaged the very idea of proper intelligence gathering, making this country more likely to suffer a catastrophic repeat of Nine-Eleven while at the same time destroying all of the respect and regard this nation has long been held in by the oppressed of the world seeking to emulate our bold experiment in individual liberty and freedom. It is difficult to more strenuously denounce the catastrophic legacy Donald Rumsfeld has left to posterity in his role as secretary of defense; quite plainly, he is perhaps the most disastrous Cabinet official to ever serve a sitting president, a man whose singular contempt for the Rule of Law has left this nation open to the depredation of its existing enemies and burdened us still further with new foes only too willing to see his crimes as being worthy of fanatical resistance and punishment. Rumsfeld’s vision of a “democratic” Mid-East may end, paradoxically, as the greatest recruiting tool radical Islam has ever had placed at its disposal for a final reckoning with the “Great Satan”.

Don Rumsfeld – the man who destroyed Liberty. The thought was finally too much for the old man, and he gritted his teeth and cast a series of violent aspersions underneath his breath, crumpled the lower half of the obscene polemic, and winced in discomfort as the wound to his jaw exploded in newly found pain. True or not, he was not going to let some literary lunkhead slander him like this and get away with it. The moment the plane touched down, Rumsfeld was getting on the blower and calling up some friends in the tobacco industry who knew all about bad press, and have them recommend to him an ace PR guy. Don hadn’t spent the last six years defending America to end up being compared to Andrei Vyshinsky.

His name had appeared a handful of times in the document, several tenuous, inference-laden mentions of his possible culpability is creating the conditions which had made for the gravest American military scandal in two generations. Several times only, but clearly the author’s intention had been to place him as squarely in the dock as the “sad sack MP” Charles Graner, Jr. Don knew things were bad, and he knew things were going to get progressively worse in the remaining years of his life. This one report had made almost no use of classified material, had been written by a Historian with a psychology background and with obviously no intent of reaching a wider audience, and yet it was still enough to make the anger Rumsfeld had been feeling in recent days recede to virtual nothingness by comparison. He saw now how the game was going to be played, and how brutally his enemies would seek to affix his name to every terror even remotely associated with the Iraq war. The only thing that allowed him rest, as he re-arranged himself into the plushly-stuffed chair in the middle of the government jet, preparing for landing, was that no matter how noxious the charges and how debilitating the verbiage, they would never be able to touch him.

His enemies were lining up to pillory and chastise; his head would be demanded and many lawyers of international repute would emerge with many fine-sounding theorems of guilt, culpability and requisite punishment. In the legal journals and in the newspapers, justice for a war criminal would be demanded, adumbrated to the finest tooth-combs of analysis, all sorts of theoretical punishments awaited the old man as surely as had been hinted at by the high-minded analyst whose paper Rumsfeld had just read. But on the spot men become men again and mountains mountains. And Don was more mountain than man to the little pricks who would be trying to take him down. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

The plane began its descent to the tarmac, banking a hard left and causing Don to spill a minute amount of the drink he held, the ice melting and forming condensation on the outside of the glass, slippery in his palm. Don noticed that, even after reading so much disparaging commentary on his role in the Iraq atrocities, his dead-calm rigidity remained true, both his hands were steady and sure, nothing could shake this old man’s imperturbable demeanor. Sang-froid; literally, from the French, the term meant “cold blooded”. It was a phrase that held many possible inflections, from reptilian to homicidal. Don thought about the possible irony for a second and decided he was just a tough old bastard and that was nothing to be ashamed of. He thought again about how, no matter what he had just read, he would never have to sweat a meaningful prosecution, grinned like only the de facto justified can in recognition of their detractor’s impotence, and lay back with a Scotch and water in his hand and this slight consolation in his heart. Let the Left and the peaceniks and all the others file war crimes charges until they were blue in the face with fatigue, and let them see if he would ever care. People had been demanding Henry Kissinger’s head on a pike for the last thirty years, and they would never get it. And although it sometimes cut into his travel plans, old Henry the Terrible had managed just fine and remained the single wealthiest person Don had ever known whom had made government his primary occupation. Don felt it couldn’t be all bad to be a Class-A war criminal, not if you never had to face the Tribunal or the Hague or the dock or the gallows. All his enemies would ever be able to do would be to pile words atop his carcass, volumes of scorn and vitriol and the occasional well-reasoned analysis. Regardless, Don had weathered a torrent of words in his life – he had been beset by angry speeches and loaded denunciations all weekend, of course – and he had managed to survive them all. One more untoward condemnation didn’t matter more than all of the others; he was a free man, would never answer for any of his supposed “crimes”, and was more than willing to face a future wherein he was barred by indictment from entering, say, France.

For years, placed deep within this or that sinecure, lost within the Nixon administration brambles and fog, stuck at the Great Society-era-holdover Economic Opportunity Council or later trundled off to Brussels and NATO headquarters by a vindictive George H.W. Bush, Don had used his isolation from the policy mandarins to network and form alliances that would serve him in the decades to come. He knew what it meant to be isolated, how it felt to be adrift, and Don knew it was an eminently survivable situation. He remembered reading a biography about Stalin once, wherein was described the broad-chested Ossete’s similar aptitude for intriguing in the policy backwaters; Stalin stuck in the nationalities commissariat proposing stillborn constitutions for Kyrghiz pony herders, Stalin under reams of sham reports plotting the collectivization of the Ukrainian granary, Stalin the “grey blur” lost and ignored in the ferocious Bolshevik bureaucracy, all the while making nice with Politburo cronies whom he would one day render stooges. And, still later, corpses. To Don, such a reward for his reading was the pleasantest joke on a long winter’s night; there was old Uncle Joe, banished to some bureaucratic netherworld, patient as a Tartar sheepherder and forever claiming vendetta on enemy blood. And Don wondered how many Nixon toadies had made the same mistake about him that Trotsky had, fatally, about The Man of Steel; how many of their number, Ehrlichman, Halderman, John Dean, Mitchell, every sonofabitch in Washington who wore a Trilateral Commission pin and wouldn’t let him play, how many of them had viewed Don as merely a “grey blur” walking through their midst, never knowing that no matter where you sent him – EOC, NATO headquarters, Tel Aviv or goddammit even Baghdad – Old Rummy was making friends and influencing people, people whom he would need and could use later in his life when the time for a trump came nigh and he aimed to be the last cardplayer holding the deck. Had someone else ever compared his boiler-room politicking to Stalin, Don would have slapped the taste out of their mouth; discovered deep within his old reading, alone, this strange similarity to a dictator long dead and of a completely different ideological stripe, the notion of getting his revenge against all of those Trotskys who had doubted him so much, was exhilarating. Flush, within a crucible of resentment, he found liberation in pure acrimonious reflection upon jobs well done and pure, spiteful survival. Don remembered how many times an infuriated and floridly gesticulating Dick Nixon had been presented with some new perfidy hatched by supposed political allies, and simply raged, to all within the room and with tape recorders running in the basement, “Fuck those cocksuckers, fuck ‘em all!” What hadn’t that brilliant man known the elemental truth about? Don thought it might be worth being damned to Hell for all eternity by an irate God just to have the pleasure of spending time with old Dick Nixon again, off in Hades with Satan and no doubt handling his foreign policy across the River Styx with Heaven. The thought made him chuckle, and Don threw the troublesome White Paper to the floor, fit only for the cleaning woman to throw in the goddamn trash.

After a breathtakingly mundane three-and-a-half hour flight, marred only by two or three mild incursions with storm fronts or turbulence, the turbo-jet carrying the ex-secretary touched down safely and quietly to the earth, a lulled and quiescent Rumsfeld recovering his sense of equilibrium after hurtling through the sky at six-hundred miles an hour. The cabin was quiet, only a vague ringing in Don’s ears from the engines, the space devoid of judgment, merely calming, assuredly isolating: They’ll never touch me, thought Don Rumsfeld, I’ll die breathing free air and they can all go straight to Hell.

And without punishment, what good, after all, were even the most ironclad indictments of a man’s character and crimes? He was right, of course; without the gallows, words are never more than empty catalogues of even the most infamous crimes. Without punishment, a man dies vindicated, if only by the callow inability of a civilization to make him answerable for what he has done.

And America had shown no appetite to make her guilty, now or ever before, no matter the enormity of their crimes, ever face real justice.

Words, for now at least, and perhaps forever, would have to do.

Words were the only justice men like Rumsfeld could ever know.

Words were still vitally, excruciatingly, irreplaceably important.

Chapter Five

2008-02-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

Chapter Five

In a Glass Box

“In old days, temptation was of a carnal nature.

Now it takes the form of pure reason.”

– Interrogator Ivanov to Detainee Rubashov, in

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

A few days passed in quiet and the holidays loomed. Rumsfeld, no matter how he wished to remain lodged away from the world within his off-season keep, would have to prepare for Joyce’s arrival, and her demands that he right himself for the family get-together she was arranging for the other vacation property in Taos, New Mexico. As well, he would basically have to prepare himself for the new year which would inevitably lead to interviews, articles, slanders and rebuttals. And to face this onslaught, he realized how alone he now stood; beginning the writing of his memoirs was an enterprise born from a cauldron of bitterness for Old Man Misery.

Don Rumsfeld was still a wildly unpopular man in this fair republic; the Christmas moratorium over and the Iraq Study Group’s findings released, he would have to brace for waves of the most strident criticism, and spanning the possibilities of political expression in America – from the Left whom had always detested him, to his new foes on the neo-con Right, eager to blame him – and only him – for the failure of their grandiose vision of a muted, malleable and democratically house-broken Mid-East. Disgusted by their disavowal of his stewardship, Rumsfeld now realized his relations with the think-tank Metternichs and AIPAC potentates to have been decidedly worthless and one-sided from the moment of their inception; Abrams, Pipes, especially Perle – all of Strauss and Podhoretz’s modern Pharisees, with their exegetic analyses and panaceas born of bombarded citadels and heaps of corpses – had needed him to enact their plan of a Pax Americana enforced by brutal method and lightning campaigns. But as their beard, he also realized he was fated to be their patsy, too. Rumsfeld was amazed by their lack of loyalty and flat-out cowardice. None of them had ever foreseen the future Iraq was living at this moment. None of them. The afternoon when the documents arrived at Mount Misery was thus one segueing evenly from hopeful satisfaction to grim lucubration; Rumsfeld positioned himself in the study behind his desk and laid out documents like fusiliers at drill – strict, segregated, precise piles of information wherein lay the truth of this nation’s run-up to final reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had the whole story, right here, and nobody at State or the Pentagon begrudged this old man his right to look Richard Perle in the eye and call him on his bullshit. Rumsfeld had earned his stripes and a cantankerous retirement. And by God nobody was going to leave him the “lone nut” for future generations to castigate and bemoan, wondering in pages of tendentious histories how this man had been allowed to craft a war of convenience with no peace possible. There were many whom Don resolved to have join him in History’s gallows dock, those who feigned such bewilderment now and those whom had affected such snide assuredness before. Atop that desk lay the foundation of what he hoped would become a tower of honor, the memoirs which would put the lie to charges of incompetence, vindictiveness and gaping stupidity. In a whorish plentitude of documents lay the nation’s foreign policy ghosts, phantoms amassed from Iran to Indonesia, bogeymen from Mossadegh to Ortega. Vetted carefully, the whole story of Saddam’s modern Babylon would emerge. And there was much in that story which would need to be harshly pruned of its thorns. He had a week to fully immerse himself in the madness of Iraq yet again, only this time with no one to answer to save his conscience.

Some of this avalanche of paper was mere curiosity, esoterica and essentially trivia of the Rumsfeld years. During a spat with Condi Rice, he’d had her phone tapped with a FISA request that, of course, was automatically approved and kept entirely secret from anybody else in the Cabinet. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find, and realized now how silly it was, and had the proof of his old man’s paranoia in front of him: Condi Rice had a thing for Italian shoes, expensive Belgian chocolates and wanted a Martini made from Polish potato vodka ready for her every night at ten p.m. no matter where she was in the world; up, dry, three olives, just like a man would take it. She also apparently had a crush on Tom Brady; either that, or she was particularly obsessed with her fantasy football team. After reading about the Charlie-Palmer’s-strength Martini, Don wondered. Either way, there was nothing of value, outside of an Old Boy snicker or two, in the pile of reports on what had been culled from Condi’s cell phone records.

But the die could cut both ways, and Don was confronted with this truth as he examined the forest of data atop his desk. After playing a hunch, Don had asked around to some NSA boys who used to be poker buddies of his factotum Doug Feith. They were willing to play ball with the old man, on promise that he’d get Feith to pay off his on-going poker losses – and this in a nickel-anty game, for Christ’s sakes – that had reached astounding heights, several thousand dollars at least. Don wondered how somebody who was such a shitty poker player could ever have been a capable Intelligence officer, then remembered it was Feith after all and that of course he’d had special plans for Feith’s singular talents when he sent him over to the Pentagon as his personal defense snoop. The fact he was so goddamn thick was what made Feith so invaluable to Rumsfeld and anybody else who needed to conjure a war when the prevailing Intel had been so dauntingly bad.

The NSA boys got their money and Don got his documents. It turned out he wasn’t the only administration member who was taking advantage of the enhanced (and completely unsupervised) FISA warrants. Don had thought something had been queer and shifty and it was true, after all; his old pal Dick had been spying on him for months, had requested eighteen taps on his various phones and here was Don looking at the evidence, reading transcripts of conversations he’d had with people from Blackwater and Halliburton, and even a birthday greeting he’d sent to his daughter. Son-of-a-bitch, thought Don – he couldn’t even trust Dick Cheney not to pile on the corpse! Those FISA warrants were priceless and it made Don’s teeth hurt to know he wouldn’t have that privilege any more; how he’d love to get a slime trail on Cheney and put it in his book, maybe some juicy details on him and that goddamn lesbian daughter of his. Now, the chance was gone, forever. It was proof, yet again, that Nixon had been right and you can’t trust anybody ever, and that when you have the chance to get some dirt on some asshole, fucking well get it. Dick Cheney, a paranoid rat too; well, Don thought, what can you expect from a guy who runs around wearing flack jackets and shooting people in the face. They could all go straight to hell now. Everybody had been spying on everybody else; as Iraq disintegrated, the Bush team dissimulated. And watched where each other went, and what kind of shoes they bought. The whole goddamn administration had been so entangled in personal espionage it was no wonder they never knew what the hell was going on where it actually mattered. And espionage and Intelligence were a particularly sore subject for Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld suffered reading the Intel he had ignored in the weeks before the shallow triumph of a statue’s fall from a plinth upon the streets of Baghdad. Powell had warned him against peremptory de-Ba’athification, advised against dismantling Saddam’s army and made clear US Army doctrine sought to avoid city fighting with weary eyes akin to institutional blindness. Lose control of Baghdad even for a day and you’ll never get it back; like the US embassy in Hanoi, like the other seventeen provincial capitals hit so hard by that nemesis of empire, the master Giap himself, during the culmination of his genius during Tet. Don had listened, impassively, and then ignored the former general in arrogance assured, with visions of a grateful, simple people throwing roses at the feet of their liberators. He never thought of them as a complex polity capable of seismic shifts in loyalty and of ambiguous patience; then again, as he remembered when sadly re-reading histories of conqueror’s ill-repose past, very rarely did an Imperial power regard their newest subjects as true people in comparison to their own citizens. If they had been fully realized as a race, then why need the ennobling hand of “liberation” in the first place? The very act of conquering – or of pacifying, or of liberating, whatever hollow ring the scribes did affix to the business of making war and empire – was one speaking of profound contempt for those so in need of guidance towards civilized behavior. Pershing had regarded the Filipinos he fought in 1899 as little more than animals, and treated them accordingly; astoundingly brutal to modern ears, Rumsfeld thought, but damn him he had won. To win now in Iraq – the country, the American people, would never tolerate the slaughter necessary to make the few survivors fit for full inclusion in the world community. Better to kill them all, thought Rumsfeld; like pulling out weeds from a garden, perhaps a new flower would spring from the sod so well fertilized with the ash of the dead.

Hours passed. He read reports from the UN and diary entries direct from Hans Blix, thoughtfully culled from the dispatches of a helpful spy masquerading as a cleaning woman at a Luzerne Ritz-Carlton. Whisky drained from rocks glasses an amber-tinged anaesthetic, blistering his gullet and numbing his remorse. He read on, drank on, unable to stop or becalm or to merely die. He saw ancient photo-stats of investment portfolios held by Hamid Karzai accrued during his time advising massive Western oil concerns. He read again imputations and scorn heaped in vast, incomprehensible legalese against the credibility of the Iraqi National Congress. He came to loathe the name of “Curveball” when it appeared before his drunken eyes, this fraud only too eager to please that asinine Feith. He saw again a damning French intelligence estimate that the Saudis had known about Nine-Eleven for months before they even made a peep to our spooks in Yemen. He winced thinking about poor dumb Pat Tillman and his beauhunk patriotism, a good kid with stones like a bear but rocks in his head; as if the Army Ranger's poster boy was ever going to be allowed to come home and sit down and mouth a farrago of sedition with that old chancre Noam Chomsky. And he hurled his coffee cup against the wall in disgust that spurious meetings in Prague and Joe Wilson’s wife and goddamn Yellowcake uranium had ever been allowed to enter the vocabulary of the nation’s debate upon his own personal culpability in this fiasco. He opened another bottle of whisky and filled the hundred-dollar crystal rocks glass half-full, three-ounces of pure forgetting. He took a sip and let the heat singe his tongue; only after several seconds did he allow the bitter liquid to pass his throat. A pile of paper that scrutiny would allow made him the biggest fool in the history of the Department of Defense lay before him, and yet he had hoped to turn these pages into something of value, of vindication, of honor. For the first time, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged to himself how horrible of a waste it had been, and how he must, at all costs, bury this horror under so much verbiage, so much conflicting opinion and so much cross-eyed minutiae that no man should ever be able to untangle the impediments strung, should ever extricate the truth from the hydra of lies he now vowed to create. Rumsfeld could serve his country one last time, after all. He could prevent her enemies from ever knowing just who his old friend Dick had been talking to merely weeks before the Trade Centers fell and the Pentagon burned, at an energy summit meeting in an undisclosed location that would have made ears prick up from Manhattan to Mecca. No one could ever handle the truth of how America ended up in a quagmire of dry sand with thousands dead and her reputation in tatters, no one could ever know whose name sat so close upon the page to his old pal Dick, or just how much money all of these bastards had made doing the business of Empire with the firm malevolence of an interest in free and unfettered trade.

Ten-thousand pages lay before him, perhaps a million more would need to be vetted, scanned and destroyed. He’d thought his working years perhaps ingloriously passed, yet now came recognition that his penultimate labor opened before him barely conceived, let alone finished. History was a whore; now here she was, virtually pleading to be raped. The task was enormous, the defilement of the record no mere fling or flirtation; it would take him to his grave, it would serve as his farewell and salutation, good-bye to the world and hello to posterity, an orphaned daughter of deceit and half-truths the product of Rumsfeld’s culling of these archives, unmucking of the grooves and burying of the unhinging details, arrogant Bowdlerizing of millions of pages of inconvenient facts and damning indictments of the culmination of America’s fifty-year long foreign policy terror of those with flatter noses and darker skins than ourselves – not a pretty thing when seen too closely, so had said Conrad. But he was dead and forgotten and who writes History except he that wins? A mere novelist could never comprehend the ingenious justifications of raison d’etát.

Rumsfeld was stone drunk when he looked at the pile and finished crafting his ideals for its coming variations. Like a dozen composers facing a minor key of Diabelli, one would inevitably surmount the others and be remembered unto the wider History. Rumsfeld placed his bet on the least bothersome to overcome the questioning rabble and assume primacy as being both definitive and antiseptic; for History was not kindred to Music. It demanded as its keeper not a Beethoven, rather a cipher.

He sipped his whisky and looked at the wall mirror, acknowledging his duty and gazing at the reflection of a man with so much still to give to his country. In that reflection, behind his own visage, slightly over his shoulder and smaller in the distance as it stood by the door, was the clear and imposing face of a middle-aged black man with a violent afro and long, sharp nose like the strake of a ship. Countenance grim and handsome, almost impossibly wise and noble from his deep set eyes to the sunken cheeks of an emaciated thinker, he stood, clearly dead, clearly animate, staring at Rumsfeld and holding his lips so taught that his jaw pulsed. There was absolutely no doubt as to the identity of Mount Misery’s watchful spirit; here stood a man dead for over a hundred years, here stood Frederick Douglass.

“Good evening, Mr. Rumsfeld,” he said.

Never thinking to doubt, Don looked into the mirror and squinted behind his twisted frames to see more clearly. “Good evening...uh, uh...sir,” he said.

“You stammer quite a bit,” said the spirit.

“Not everyday you find yourself, uh...talking to a ghost, you know.”

“You do it all the time, Mr. Rumsfeld. I’ve kept watch on you, sir. Would you kindly turn from that mirror and address a man to his face, instead of speaking to his reflection? There is courtesy, sir, even for a Negro, even upon Mount Misery.”

Rumsfeld acceded to the request and met the spirit’s eyes with his own. He was drunk and this could all be another hallucination, but if it were it was still one hell of a clear thing. Douglass stood perhaps five-ten, tall for his day, adequate even now; though sunken about the cheeks, the man was remarkably handsome, an absolute poise that held him erect and confident, not even remotely arrogant but rather assured, and clearly a man of learning. He wore a black suit and a short knotted cravat which hung above his vest; he was not translucent or spectral, but as corporeal and gainsayingly solid as Rumsfeld himself. His hands hung at his side, clenched lightly, head straight and proud. He raised his jaw in speech, nodding towards the chair from which Rumsfeld had been so recently plotting his campaign of lies. With this movement he meant to direct Rumsfeld to that chair, so that he might sit and face this small inquiry, be rendered unto a small justice.

“If you would like to sit down, Mr. Rumsfeld, please do. It is no insult to me.”

“Uh, yes...no, I uh...no, I would prefer to just stand here for now.”

“All the same we have some business to attend to, sir.” The spirit paused, hoping Rumsfeld understood. “This may take a while.”

“That’s ok, ok...I need to stand here a minute, uh, however long...”

The spirit positioned his hands on the inside of his jacket, pulling slightly downwards with his thumb so that the flanks of his vest were more visible. He wore a look of superb bemusement; the handsome dead stranger was almost mortified by the calm acceptance of these events evinced by his elderly host. Perhaps even a ghost can be surprised. “I must say, Mr. Rumsfeld, that you are taking my appearance with a remarkable degree of equanimity.”

Rumsfeld straightened yet again his wildly bent eyeglass frames. “I’ve seen bottles speak before – that’s all this is, uh, uh...”

“I assure you I am here, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

“But would you tell me any different if I were just, uh, er – seeing you?”

Pleased with Rumsfeld’s calm – a near preternatural removal from fantastic events – the spirit allowed that to be true, and dismissed it all the same. “It matters not, sir. You’ll have of tomorrow to decide whether or not such events as these did indeed come to pass on this night. For now, whether I am sprung from a bottle or in truth and veracity watchman of this sad, sad old mansion, it matters not. I am here. We shall have ourselves a chat, and I shall brook no contesting of this fact, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

“Fine, fine,” Rumsfeld said, waving anew with his active and dismissive hands, “I have no reason to doubt this, uh, this – event needs to be addressed, or, uh...whatever.” And the old man retrieved his whisky, quick to take a snort to steady his courage and calm his foul, ever-risible temperament.

The spirit arched his chin again, peeved. “Do you not know who I am, Mr. Rumsfeld? You speak to me as though I weren’t here.”

“Oh, I uh – yes, very well, I know, uh, I know very well who you are.”

“Then please address me accordingly, sir.”

“Frederick Douglass, I uh...I know damn well who you are.”

The sprit fixed its gaze upon Rumsfeld and clearly this answer had not been sufficient. “Do I know you, sir? Have we been intimate friends for some time, then? Did I not know enough courtesy to call to you as Mister Rumsfeld? Do I rate a lesser response, sir?”

Rumsfeld understood that he was speaking to a gentleman, and one whom had needed shed his own blood to be accorded such respect. He realized his error immediately. “I am sorry...uh, Mister Douglass.”

“Thank you,” said the spirit.

“All the same, uh – Mister Douglass, forgive me...you’re in my home here, we’re talking, uh, it’s late...you could call me ‘Don’ or something, uh, less formal...”

The spirit cut him off before his stammering reached conclusion. “No. That is not appropriate, sir. I had given much to be called Mister Douglass when I lived – and even though I am past that – living, breathing, man’s inhumanity and bile – this is not a social call. I would thank you to forget such informality, sir. You shall call me Mister Douglass.”

Rumsfeld stared into his whisky, baffled enough at last to speak freely. “But you’re dead...”

“So are the many taken home to God, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said, “and thousands more join them every day. But,” he said, leaning closer to let Rumsfeld see him more clearly, “they are not here. However, I am. And some might say, sir, that while you have indeed purchased this house which you call your home, perhaps I have paid an even greater interest in the possession of this old bundle of bricks atop Mount Misery. Do you know what I am speaking of, sir?”

Rumsfeld decided he had better sit down after all. He leaned into a chair and placed the whisky on a table beside him. “I think I have a very good, uh...a very good idea, yes sir, Mr. Douglass.”

“That is good,” said the spirit, nodding, “because I would have been most upset had you not paid attention to your recent readings. It is problematic to upset the dead, Mr. Rumsfeld – they have so much time to inveigle justice, and in their demise can speak very eloquently now that they’ve time to think things through, do you follow me, Mr. Rumsfeld?”

Rumsfeld looked away, assured now that he was face to face with an angry ghost. Not a pleasant prospect. “I think I see your point with exceptional, uh, uh...clarity, yes, I do see that, Mr. Douglass.”

“Good. I didn’t want to have to spend half the night telling you why it is I still haunt these rooms, Mr. Rumsfeld – why it is I still take such an interest in the goings on at what was, alas, once my home. But not like the home it is for you, sir.”

Rumsfeld was silent with his knowledge. “Yes,” was all he said.

The spirit stood perhaps five feet from Rumsfeld; his pallor filled the space fully and made him seem even closer than he was. Rumsfeld was terrified. For the first time, he got a good glimpse of the eyes of this man whom had intruded upon his night of falsehoods; the eyes were not cruel, yet miserably incensed all the same. There was something behind this phantom’s gaze that spoke of raw perplexity, and in that confusion an incipient rage.

“You know whose home this once was, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said.

“Yes, it, it, uhhh...had been a contentious subject...uh, the press...with some of the, uh, uh...”

The spirit interrupted him. “I have just said that you are aware of who once owned Mount Misery, sir – it was not a question. I know you are aware of a certain former owner, and you must, further still, be aware of some things which occurred here many years ago when I had been a living man. I know you are aware of him, sir.”

“I know of him, Mr. Douglass.”

The spirit gazed hard at the ashen Rumsfeld, now quiet and clearly moved to open fear. “Speak his name unto me, Mr. Rumsfeld. I haven’t heard him spoken of in a long, long time. Say that name, sir – prove to me you know who he is, say his name, and I shall be kind to you, sir.”

Rumsfeld looked at the ghost and for once did not stammer – in fear, he found his faculties assured and controlled, the rasping, stumbling gait of his cadence now clearly directed. “Edward Covey,” Rumsfeld said, and all was quiet again.

The spirit closed his eyes and smiled, clearly unto himself. It was apparent that so many memories returned to him in abundance, drawn merely from the mention of a name. “Edward Covey,” the spirit said, as if satisfied, “once again to think of my old nemesis, and standing here in the presence of such a cultured gentleman.” The spirit paused for a second, then opened his eyes again; they were moist with hatred. “Mr. Rumsfeld, why in the name of God did you buy this damnable mansion?”

“Mr. Douglass, why in the world would any of this matter to you now, all these years later?” Rumsfeld encouraged himself to be bold in his defense; it was merely an old bundle of bricks, after all.

“Have you ever been in a condition other than one of Liberty, sir?”

“In a sense, for the last six years I’ve not been exactly free,” said Rumsfeld.

Douglass rebelled against the suggestion, infuriated. “In a sense, is it, sir? Tell me then, you know what it is to be property, chattel, to be owned, do you, sir?”

“No,” said Rumsfeld, realizing his error and the limits of self-pity. “I do not, by the grace of God, know what that is, no.”

“Then why, again I shall ask – why, sir, did you buy this haunted old mansion? Knowing what you know of what once was common occurrence here, sir?”

“I didn’t think there would be a, ah, ahh...ghost here to, uh, uh...register his disapproval.”

“I am sorry it is only my presence which makes you think of Liberty and the costs of your own morality,” the spirit sadly spoke. “I would think you had enough of your own sense of rightness that my presence here would be extraneous, sir, even – immaterial...to your own morality, that is.”

“Perhaps I’m just thinking of it now, Mr. Douglass,” Rumsfeld said, and finally sat back, leaning his whole frame into the couch, crossing his legs so that they exposed his suddenly bony ankles, realizing he would have to be doing a lot of explaining to his interlocutor for the duration of the evening. And Rumsfeld wouldn’t be sober enough for some time to make it all go away by himself.

“Mr. Rumsfeld, allow me to ask you a question whose parameters range large and wide, its import so vast to men of wisdom: Do you know what ‘Good’ is, sir?”

“Good, for Christ’s sakes?” said Rumsfeld, exasperation inflecting each syllable; he had no intention of engaging in a free-ranging philosophical discussion with a ghost.

“Yes, Mr. Rumsfeld – as in the opposite of Evil, I mean to say, Good. Do you know what it is, I am asking you,” the spirit said, and then added emphatically, “and I mean to stay here until I have a satisfactory answer, sir.” The spirit paused and cast his mien severe yet again, registering umbrage with Rumsfeld at a quick glance. “And I would ask you cease taking the name of our Lord in vain in my presence, sir – He is, so to speak, more vital to me in my current state than even when I lived. And I was a righteous man, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

Rumsfeld removed his glasses and leaned forward on the couch; this furniture, too, had been a gift from a concerned businessman, an avionics whiz at General Dynamics. Wouldn’t that fella be interested to know what was happening upon this bit of graft right now. “Mr. Douglass, uh uh, errr uh...for Christ’s sakes what do you mean coming in here and tormenting me over some, uh, uh...abstract principle,” he said, waving his arms, a sure sign of Rumsfeld’s contempt and disgust.

“Spend all the time you like avoiding the issue, sir,” the spirit said, sanguine and not distracted, “I certainly have a lot of time to spend on your case – all eternity, if even a day. But let me vow to you now: an answer I shall receive, be it tonight or be it years from now when you lay dying. I shall find you, sir, and I shall have my answer. Now, again, Mr. Rumsfeld: Do you know what ‘Good’ is, sir?”

“All men know what ‘Good’ is, dammit,” Rumsfeld said, rising from the couch, pacing in front of it, furious at such generalizing which could only lead to vast sophistries.

“Mr. Covey was somewhat, on occasion, less than clear as to its meaning, allow me to assure you, sir.”

“I’m not a damn slave holder,” snapped Rumsfeld.

“And neither was Mr. Covey, sir – but you knew that, didn’t you?”

“I knew something about it, uh, uh...to be honest, I was somewhat less than clear on his, uh, uh...arrangements, Mr. Douglass.”

“But you were reading my autobiography, were you not? I felt I was concise of style upon those pages, sir – a great deal of time did I spend writing so that any man could see slavery for what it was. Was I less than lucid in offering from my soul these indictments born of all my people’s suffering?”

“The book was marvelous, Mr. Douglass – I uh, well – I had been drinking that night, I found the part where you explained how you came to this house to be, uh, uh...strange, not your fault, all mine. That’s life.”

“The whisky is not to blame, Mr. Rumsfeld. You know what you read. One thing I’ve learned of you is the superlative nature of your mind – yours is a solid intellect, sir. It was not the alcohol that engendered your oblivion – that was a conscious thing, wasn’t it? You didn’t want to know the true history of this place, is that not correct, sir?”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” allowed Rumsfeld, who again adjusted his ruined eyeglass frames and looked out the windows to the blackened Maryland night. The wind had kicked up again and the rain commenced anew; perfect conditions to be debating a ghost in one’s home, thought Rumsfeld.

“Then if you are so solidly fixed upon ignoring the truth, allow me to tell you here to your very face, sir – since I know the subject so exceptionally well. Mr. Covey was not a slave holder – he was a slave breaker, Mr. Rumsfeld. Can you conceive of such a terrible thing?”

“He sounded like a true bastard, if that helps you any,” Rumsfeld said, again maudlin, pitiable.

“It is not about that, sir. It is about the Truth – Our Lord suffered and died for Truth, with a capital “T”, you know this, do you not?”

Rumsfeld nodded, but did not speak. This greatly annoyed the spirit of Frederick Douglass. Too often, men had spoken to him not with language, but allowed a whip to address him instead. Any kind of non-verbal communication, save written, reeked of contumely arrogance to the memory hoard known as his spirit. “Sir, are you a religious man?”

“I go to church, yes, Mr. Douglass.”

“It is good that you allow for fellowship, but this has little to do with praising God, sir. I asked if you were religious, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

“I’m Presbyterian,” said Rumsfeld, stoic and shy of elaboration.

“Mr. Covey was a Methodist,” the spirit said, recalling it from long, long ago as if this trivia were heretofore lost and then remembered only at this second. “Mr. Covey knew Truth and perhaps he knew what was Good; yet still he abused men so they would be more pliant for others, the better to control them and keep them in their degraded, less-than-human state. I wonder why that was, Mr. Rumsfeld? It is curious, isn’t it, sir? You know, he was clever, the man who once took me into that barn beyond those homely windows, where he beat me and cursed me and took a whip to my hide until I soiled myself and begged God to take me home. He may have known Truth, or what the Methodists say it is – though I’m sure it is close to the speech of Presbyterians, too, when those good men speak of the larger verities. But he was damned forgetful when Truth ran into the hide of a Negro. All kinds of lies were born of this impasse, sir; what he knew of Good faded to oblivion when arose the question of money.

“He was clever, our Mister Edward Covey, because he was once a young man who owned property but had not the capital resources to make that farm something profitable. Slaves were useful to a man – how could they not be, they worked as cheaply as could be had, and one certainly did not have to waste undue energy or resources assuring for their welfare, Mr. Rumsfeld. A slave would be a useful item for our young farmer, Mr. Covey – but how to get one, when they were so expensive, and one had so little resources for capital outlay?

“This is why I say he was clever, Mr. Rumsfeld. For Mr. Covey found a way to get his slaves, and not only for free, but to earn money in the bargain. You see, Mr. Covey was a strapping fellow, and he absolutely despised Negroes. He hated a man like me with something akin to venom; why it is I do not know, for surely you can see that in my countenance I bear the mark of my white blood. Mr. Covey and I were racial brothers – of a sort. My father was a white man, Mr. Rumsfeld, but this coloring of mine made him see a true Negro before him, he didn’t bother with picayune niceties such as ‘mulattos’ and ‘quadroons’, he knew me for a Negro and nothing more – and that was enough for him to see me as something far less than human, sir. So for him to make the jump and treat me as one would treat any obstinate animal – you see, don’t you, how easy it was for Mr. Covey to take a whip in his hands and ‘correct’ me, don’t you, sir?

“Mr. Covey would get his Negroes from local slaveholders, and these were a special lot, sir. Slaves from all over the Old Line state were carted in with magnificent disregard as to their misfortune. They were men and women who, like me, had been branded as rebellious – troublemaking slaves, sir, the worst kind. A slave who heeds not the voice of the overseer is positively cancerous – such recalcitrance may serve to remind the other slaves of their own humanity, and thus their ability to say No; for being a man in the truest sense is to be a man who recalls how to say ‘No’ and is willing to use such a faculty in the face of tyrants, overlords and whip-wielders; and to stand up for himself and against the commands of any man, to flout the rules of oppression and deny the empowered thug, no matter his illusory greatness, the awesome and despicable supremacy of race; and all merely by brandishing the power of ‘No’. This is called Liberty, Mr. Rumsfeld.

“So Mr. Covey would take in an unruly Negro and use him like a plow mule for a year; and he was so clever that the slave owner would agree to pay him for that thing which Mr. Covey would have gladly done for free, had he merely been asked: beat down a man, sir, and a woman and on occasion children, too, so long as they were Negroes. Mr. Covey positively relished the idea of inflicting pain and seeing defeat in his brother man’s eyes. Here was a soul who thrived on submission, sir.

“As you know, I was one of those troublesome slaves. I wonder if you recall from my book, Mr. Rumsfeld, I gave the case of Demby from the days when I had been slave to another master, years before I made the acquaintance of this sinister Mr. Covey. Do you remember what I wrote, sir? Poor Demby had become unmanageable – and this wicked man Mr. Gore, our overseer, who relished his work with an appetite for cruelty of unimaginable facility, he had taken his shotgun and blown poor Demby’s brains out the back of his head, stained the swamp where Demby wallowed, he had dared say ‘No’ when Mr. Gore told him to get his behind out of the muck and back to the horsehides. And Mr. Gore was asked by the plantation master why he had done so, did this not seem to be vastly out of scale to poor Demby’s pathetic crimes? Mr. Gore memorably responded that ‘if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites.’ I quote from my very own writing, Mr. Rumsfeld, these are words I will never be able to forget, even if I should like, throughout the vast unforgetting of eternity. Here was the logic of the oppressor, sir; when I rebelled, the man who called himself my ‘master’ could see the beginning of many fatal steps until such a time when he and his children would be hanging from the trees, strange fruit themselves and rotting, like the bloodthirsty uprising of Nat Turner or even the true slave revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture. This is what I grappled with, sir. By rising only a little and being unruly, perhaps only to one day hope of being free, I was seen as a wild animal who sought to kill and rape and molest those who had once owned me. That is where the Law of the Whip wields its jurisdiction, Mr. Rumsfeld; a Rebel was I, and to Mr. Covey would I be sent, to make me whole and fit to be a good piece of property once again.

“In that barn, through that back window, on your property, sir, this is where myself and perhaps five-hundred other Negroes were taken over many years and beaten ‘till they were broken, like a man would tame a horse – excepting that the horse would be more humanely treated in the process. Allowances were always made, that, alas, not all of the Negroes entrusted to Mr. Covey would survive the sadistic jurisdiction of the Law of the Whip. Many of us died, and I can assure you that these deaths were more than wanting for their mercy, Mr. Rumsfeld. I believe you were allowed to hear the whipping of one of our number when you took your ill-fated walk the other night to close the barn door, did you not? You have knowledge of the power of the whip in the hands of a man who despises his prey, am I mistaken to hold this true? Mr. Covey could take flesh with every blow, sir, his was a much-practiced stroke of skillful evisceration, and there is only so much that a man may yield before he has yielded his life in the bargain of the lash. Many little boys and girls lost their parents within their precious earshot, and I wonder if you still might think that all men know what is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?

“I wonder further, Mr. Rumsfeld, if you know what is ‘Good’, or whether you have mouthed a mealy platitude each time morality was commanded of you and you thought merely of transitory or personal gain in the bounty of the moment? How a man in your position, who has benefited so greatly from life – a man who directs the fortunes of nations, and a great nation at that – how you who have known so much plenty and so much good humour and the love of your family, and your own Liberty – my God, sir, that last thing, how precious it is! Know of it you have for all of your life! And know still further how this precious commodity is robbed from those who run afoul of this or that insane stricture devised by the malign hand of the overseer or the malcontented heart of the prison guard – Mr. Rumsfeld, help me! Tell me you know what is ‘Good’, convince me, I am in fear of standing in a room with a man such as could sit lounging on a back porch on hot summer days sipping a lemonade with great figures at his side, while within his vision stands the structure where men and women – human beings, sir, endowed by their Creator with dignity and rights – where these people died, sir, for the crime of being born a Negro! Forgive me the length of my speech, and I shall happily yield to you for the time you wish to respond, but please, sir – Help me understand how a man can claim to know ‘Good’ who could relax in such a place, and do so further from the exalted pedestal of great personal richness and luxury. I see the proof of your material wealth all ‘round me, sir – it is the poverty of your soul which commands my attention this weather-blasted night!”

Rumsfeld, silent and neither brooding nor boastful, allowed for the seconds to pass as the fine-edge of Douglass’s censure dulled against the wall of indifference he had erected. As always he was shrewd in defense and irate in his calm; diffidence had never been more cold, restraint never more purposeful. Time ate up the power of the indictment, and by refusing to answer to anything he’d been called to account for, Rumsfeld in effect escaped culpability by the mere ruse of remaining stoic; a wall he was, and no court and no jury had ever been able to make a wall hang.

“Why have you waited so long...Mr. Douglas, uhhh...to make your protests known? I’ve been here for three years, off and on. Why tonight? Why now?” he finally said.

“I’ve wondered about something for a long many months, sir, and I could take it no more. I had to make myself known to you.”

“And what was it that would push a damn ghost over the edge, Mr. Douglass?”

The spirit dropped his head, narrowed his eyes; for a second he looked distraught and even florid, no small talent for a ghost. “When you were on the telephone with a man in Cuba, Mr. Rumsfeld...”

“How would you know who the hell I was talking to?”

“I was so close, right over your shoulder...were I a living man and not a spectre, you should have felt my breath upon your shoulders, sir,” the spirit said, and his voice grew severe, brusque like Rumsfeld’s had become. “You were here one night and in great agitation. I followed you to the liquor cabinet, where you’ve been spending an awful lot of time these last months, and you picked up your telephone, those new, tiny, terrible things...and you were asking about a man with an Arabic name. His condition was of vital importance to you that night, wasn’t it? Tell me, you know of this. Admit your role, sir, and at least allow me rest that I was not unduly askance of your designs upon this man. Who was he?”

Rumsfeld knew at once who this should be, and decided it was not worth trying to fool his able questioner. “He is a very bad man, Mr. Douglass, a wicked beast...”

“To hear a man called a ‘beast’ chills me more than you could know, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

“Listen, Mr. Douglass – I appreciate your concerns. What was done to you was dreadful, an, uhh, ummm...iniquitous crime. But you have been dead a long time. The world has changed a lot. We have people who are trying to kill us all, Mr. Douglass – Americans, I mean to say kill the whole lot of us. The ‘gentleman’ you refer to is an, uh, uhhh...unreconstructed terrorist, sir. The only reason he’s still alive is that he was too stupid to pull off his part of an assignment to kill Americans by the thousands. A suicide operation, goddammit. Does the spirit realm know of what happened on September The Eleventh, sir?”

“I know,” Douglass responded, quickly. “You speak of it incessantly here, while you vacation. What is the man’s name?”

“Mohammed al-Qahtani, and he’s a terrorist.”

“And from here, on your phone, in this very living room – Mr. Rumsfeld, I know for a fact you were ordering that man to be tortured,” Douglass said, disgustedly.

“Damn you, that is not accurate! The United States of America does not torture!” Rumsfeld said, all of his rage at the charge heard so often these last months coming out in caustic defiance.

“You were asking if he had been allowed to sit down that day...”

“We have a duty pursuant to the Laws of our Constitution...”

“...you were furious that he had been allowed rest...”

“...and part of that is to protect our citizenry and homeland with vigilance...”

“...you demanded that the Marine guarding him be changed, as he was too ‘soft’ for the job...”

“...men are in this country right now, ‘sleeper cells’, and we need to take vigorous proactive measures to assure their being apprehended...”

“...you instructed the man in Cuba to have water dripped through a towel placed upon the Arab’s face, so that he may fear as if he were drowning...”

“...these men are not held to the standards of Geneva, and are illegal combatants...”

“...and it was too much for me to bear – not in this house, not in this age...”

“...franc tireurs...”

“...it was the one thing I could never tolerate, to allow to happen again in this house such a crime – it was then that I resolved to let you know of me...” Douglass said, and the banter – so remorseless, so useless, the two men not even hearing each other through the din of their dialectic cacophony – came to an end. Rumsfeld had no more to offer; but Douglass had to tell him why this had led to tonight, to standing here in the early-morning hours arguing with a drunken man who only half-believed this spirit was even here.

“You were directing the torture of a single human being from the tomb of my youth atop this mound called Mount Misery. You were calling all the way to Cuba at all hours of the night to make sure that one single man was not being allowed to sleep, or eat any save the most Spartan diets, or even sit down for more than a few minutes. Some nights you were in a frenzy. Some nights your melancholia was palpable. It was as if whether or not you yourself rested these squalid nights depended upon this one man being somewhere in dire pain – indeed, in fear of his life. You fed upon that man’s misery, sir. And it reminded me of a former master of the mansion, indeed it did. And it was too damn much for me to bear and stay incorporeal and quieted, Mr. Rumsfeld. And so I have made myself known, and called upon other tortured spirits to remind you of their presence, as well. Your terrorism forced us – all of We the Enslaved Dead – to act, sir.”

Rumsfeld thought that Douglass sounded like some damn Leftist, like the cowards who crowded the Mall on the weekends, summer-soldier pacifists and spring-weather patriots. Bigamist-moralists of the lowest order, dually wedded to incompatible aims demanding moral perfection in others while their own daily hypocrisies passed unknown, unwatched. Sickly, weak, cowards. He despised them; yet could not comment on their arrogance. Unlike the critics, he alone lived in a glass box. Where all of his foibles were on display, held to obloquy, imprisoned in a crystalline cage. (Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, he thought for a terrible second) To be called himself a “terrorist” – Rumsfeld slanted towards becoming unhinged, but remembered how to silence a deft adversary. He clammed up. Instinctively, hermetically – the wall had returned.

The silence extended for a minute, more. Rumsfeld turned away from Douglass, stared out the window at the bleakness and severity of the long Chesapeake night, admired the cleansing wrath of Nature and the workings of a simple wind storm. Lightning, tree strikes, fires and atmospheric mayhem. The chaos of the Heavens, torpid and Arcadian pastures upturned and sullied, a violence there was no defense from. To command disorder enthralled Rumsfeld; here were things even he could not order and rule, here were the workings of an omnipotent God. Douglass recognized where his subject had shifted his attention to, and realized he faced a wall. And part of him gave in, right at that very moment. The worst, most recondite and superficial abolitionist had never worn as daunting a mask as Donald Rumsfeld had, tonight.

“When did this become of you, Mr. Rumsfeld?” the spirit finally asked, unable to comprehend of a man so indifferent to the most basic morality, such that he refused to answer whether or not he could define “Good”.

“I’m growing old, Mr. Douglass,” Rumsfeld finally answered, “and have had a very long career. Many understandings of mine, uh, uh, ahhh...came to me over time, shall we say.”

“The calluses have thus been cumulative, is this correct, sir?”

“I’m not callous,” Rumsfeld said – spat it, really – and it was clear that this was a charge he had heard far too many times to face again with reserve or calm.

“I fear that you do not know yourself as others may see you, sir – when a man can empathize with his detractors, sometimes it helps him to overcome his flaws. Not every criticism is a condemnation, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

Rumsfeld scowled at the idea, one he found ridiculous. “Horseshit,” he said, murderous sarcasm inflecting the sputum-laced rasping. “You are, uhmm, uh, uhhh...unbelievably naïve, Douglass. I wish you could have seen your name in print with some of the company I’ve been forced to keep by these editorial writers – every murderer, despot, war-monger, there’s not one tyrant of the last fifty years some of these ‘humanitarians’ haven’t seen fit to lump me in with. Pol Pot. Noriega. That sonofabitch the Ayatollah. Henny-Penny the sky is falling! Rumsfeld is a war criminal, a butcher, a, a, ahhhh...a liar. Is that fair, Mr. Douglass? Tell me, you keep up on things, obviously you do – is this what you think about a man like me? Huh?”

Douglass had to admit that by now he was stumped, utterly and completely, by this fulsome enigma known as Donald Rumsfeld. “I have no idea what to think of you at this point, Mr. Rumsfeld. I must be honest. After all of this murky discourse and all of these unbridled banalities, all of this preening civility, obsequiousness, one moral cul de sac after another...I do not understand you, I can not comprehend of you, I have not found a single key to unlock what lies in your heart, where you have come from and where your morals will lead you, sir. I think that should one day someone attempt to write about you, they would certainly face an insuperable bottleneck, yes. A roman à clef needs a key to function, after all; your spirit is a closed gate, behind a wall and astride a moat, sir. You are locked away from humanity, Mr. Rumsfeld. Even the dead cannot reach you.”

Rumsfeld said nothing, then turned away for perhaps the twentieth time that night, snarling his lower lip, watching a spider scurry up the windowpane to safety. He mumbled to himself – “Nuts” – and that was all that he could muster.

“What is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?” the spirit of Frederick Douglass asked, perhaps his final attempt to break this impasse and get a simple answer.

Rumsfeld looked at the far corner of the room, beyond Douglass’s shoulders and impressive bearing, and spied an old knick-knack his father had given him from a World’s Fair, hard to believe, but the St. Louis Expo, from 1904 – his father had been a mere toddler, and Don’s grandfather had bought the boy this little thing, a silver cup proclaiming the “Birth of An American Century.” It upset Don that he was connected by a mere generation to a time when America was a brand new power, cocksure and ready for her Imperial age – it made him realize how old he was, and how long ago was his youth.

“When I was a kid,” Rumsfeld began, adroitly ignoring, yet again, the simple question asked of him this night, “they had these glass boxes at the gas stations. They had these arms, and you would, you know...use them to grip the thing, what you were after, in this glass box. It was a prize, you would try to get a prize...they had them, at all the gas stations, it’s been a long time ago – when I was a kid. But it was hard, with all of these arms, to get your prize...they had them, you know...when I was a kid, I mean.”

Douglass, for a moment, almost felt sympathy for this babbling old man, hopelessly lost even in his own recollections – a stranger to his own past. “I’m not sure that I follow, Mr. Rumsfeld.”

“I mean to say that there are things you reach for, uh, uh...you know, uh, you try to get that prize and it is – fleeting. In a glass box. A hopeless metaphor. You can see it, you know – there it is, all of what you’ve hoped for, reached for, whatever – at the gas stations, they had them. But you had to – oh, for Christ’s sakes, Douglass, why do you keep bothering me about this stuff?”

“What is ‘Good’, Mr. Rumsfeld?” said Douglass, exhausted and awestruck by his unraveling companion, here very, very late in the night.

“You think I’m heartless, don’t you? You think you know me, eh? Let me tell you something, Mr. Douglass – I had dreams when I was younger, you bet I did. There was this old fella I knew, way, way back when – in the Sixties, we were both congressmen, my good pal Allard Lowenstein – and I’ll tell you,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, reveling in the times he spent with his good friend, “he was some piece of work. Uh, uh...a liberal – and I mean to say a crazy peacenik, totally against the war – that war, back then, not this one now. Another war. See, he and I – err, uh, him and me, whatever it is – we used to talk about starting a newspaper, I love newspapers, Mr. Douglass...we were going to go out in the country, way out in the sticks, and start ourselves a real, old-fashioned country broadsheet. Just me an Allard. A helluva nice guy. A real crazy liberal – he’s dead now. I used to have friends on the other side of the aisle,” Rumsfeld said, sad and remote, more talking to himself than anyone else, “it’s not like it is now, sir. No, no way – me and Allard, he was my friend, goddammit.”

“I’m sorry you’ve faced such loss, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit said, and there was no mistaking how he intended the words to be taken. “I’m deeply sorry you’ve let your memories fog your conscience, and that you’ve lost sight of so many beautiful things, sir.”

The spirit had spent whatever reserve he possessed. There was sorrow in the face of what had been Frederick Douglass when he lived; surely he haunted Donald Rumsfeld not from within a crater of some unspeakable evil, but rather from a perch of true and incongruous confusion. This spirit that stood before Rumsfeld was positively shaken by the absurdity of his living neighbor’s callused heart; what was all so clear to the dead Frederick Douglass seemed utterly lost on the breathing Donald Rumsfeld. The spirit thought that in the interim since his demise, mankind had completely lost all points of reference to even the most basic morality. This new world was one of indefinite, ambiguous, dark-sided and amorphous evil, creeping and utterly banal. Every man a Machiavelli and even the oppressed biding their time for a chastened vengeance; if all of man’s intrigues were halted for only long enough so that the meek might finally inherit, would this Earth be any better off for said reversal of fortune? Liberty had become a poisoned chalice, thought the spirit; and the masses drank freely and with no regard outside of their selfish interests – how this age imbibed of the rot. Men were adrift from the moorings of ethics, and only too happy to find reason to celebrate their aimless doldrums; and this spirit welcomed that he was dead and didn’t have to live during such a time, where even the wickedness of slave holders paled in comparison to the obliviousness of this adrift age and its “great men”.

Rumsfeld walked to the far corner window and looked out into the night. This time of year, the sun was still two hours removed from the horizon. He would have given five of his remaining years of life to escape this relentless metaphysical grilling from a dead Negro slave and have peace for the remainder of his time in this cursed Maryland burial ground. Buried slaves, buried lies, buried dreams, hopes, futures – part muddle, part hecatomb, Mount Misery stood atop soil rich with death and rife with the wickedness a young republic had allowed stand for the unity needed to ensure its independence. Here in its essence was the bricolage of humanism and naked greed which had put the lie to so many of the promises made and since unkept of this nation born of the Enlightenment’s greatest ideals. Slavery had always been spoken of as America’s “original sin”; but, perhaps, Mount Misery allowed this monstrosity to be seen as our original irony, or a shared fever-dream of hypocrisy, a vast and irreconcilable paradox. Out his back window, Donald Rumsfeld could see only night, and the reflection in that darkness of a saddened spectral form who existed somewhere between death and life trying to find that one honest man who could tell him what ‘Good’ was, and where it might be glimpsed in this perilously disjointed world. Rumsfeld thought, with great knowing of the tragedy of this truth, that perhaps he was not the proper man to be asking these kinds of questions of.

“You speak with great eloquence, Mr. Douglass,” he finally said.

“Thank you, Mr. Rumsfeld but – please tell me that I’ve bored you to tears, so long as I might have moved your heart.”

“I’m not sure what truth is anymore, Mr. Douglass – but I can assure you that I’m moved by your pleas.”

The answer of this confused old man appalled the spirit. He was reminded of something of which he had written, many years ago, from an incident glimpsed even further back in time than that. “It is a man afforded a great luxury who can live with a poverty of truth, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the spirit began, moving closer to Don and commanding him by his relentless leer to refrain from the window and return his gaze upon the speaker. “A man mired in a penury so forgiving can be truly profligate in the wasting of his fellows – here is an indigence which is never called to account. I commend you, Mr. Rumsfeld – you have managed to elevate poverty to a virtue, indeed, a desirable condition for one to whom ‘Good’ remains an alien concept.”

“I can’t hope to match you in debate, Mr. Douglass.”

“Then strive simply to match me in – forgive the use of the term, sir – spirit. You were born in Illinois, weren’t you, Mr. Rumsfeld? The land of Lincoln – a great man, truly great. He shook my hand once, Mr. Rumsfeld – have you any idea what that meant in the Nineteenth Century, a white man taking a black man’s hand were it though his equal?”

“A Republican, too,” Rumsfeld said, somehow trying to bolster his own fading confidence.

“Mere words to which men ascribe when gathering in groups to fleece the people and fetch glory for themselves, sir. I don’t care what political party he was from, they were all scoundrels, probably still are, but – some of them rose above, Mr. Rumsfeld. Truth was something knowable to Abraham Lincoln. His heart was changed from when he was younger – he learned to look at a man like me and see a man, not a Negro. But can you see why I am saddened that it be considered a virtue for a white man to merely take the hand of a Negro? That I should have to justify this thing? That this was ‘Truth’ then and that it seems to be lost to men, now, what ‘Good’ meant, then? Can I tell you what ‘Truth’ meant to me, when I was a younger man?”

“I would not seek, at this point, to dare try and stop you, Mr. Douglass.”

“Very well, Mr. Rumsfeld. This too was in my little book, of which I was so inordinately proud upon its completion. I was proud because I could tell some of the stories which had hurt and effected me so – things of unimaginable brutality and evil, sir. I sought to illustrate, at one point rather to the middle of my narrative, what ‘Truth’ could mean to the Negro slave. I told the story of a black man who ran into my old master, Colonel Lloyd, one day when he was walking up a road. Now, Colonel Lloyd owned a thousand slaves, Mr. Rumsfeld – can you but imagine? A thousand human beings, the property of this one stout old white gentleman! He couldn’t be expected to know them all – would he be expected to know the names of all of his pigs, cows, the ducks that congregated in the swampy ponds upon his back four-hundred acres? No, of course not; these were animals, too – just like the Negro slave, to his eyes.

“The colonel saw this man and asked him to whom he belonged. The poor slave answered ‘Colonel Lloyd’, whom he obviously did not know at sight. The colonel proceeded to interrogate him about how he was treated, and the foolish, ignorant slave said several things of an uncomplimentary nature to the colonel. A few weeks passed, and that poor man was rustled up one day, tied and cuffed, and then shipped away. I recall what I wrote, sir, forgive me if I was somewhat enamored of my own prose. ‘Without a moment’s warning,’ I wrote, ‘the man was snatched away, and forever sundered, from his family and friends, by a hand more unrelenting than death. This is the penalty of telling the truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions.’ As slaves, the Negro learned he had to lie, at all times and to all white men, for mere survival. Do you see why I, when I became a Freeman, placed so high a value on truth? Why it means so much to me even today, long after mere lies could ever harm my old bones again? Mr. Rumsfeld, somehow I’ve just got to get you to speak in one beauteous moment of ‘Good’ and ‘Truth’ – I fear the Heavens may fall should I succeed, but Oh, what a deluge of the verities and be they welcomed without scorn, sir!”

Rumsfeld laughed at the imagery, and even forgave that he was being so openly mocked. He was far past caring at this point. Whatever he could do to get sober, make this long-winded gentlemen in his home be off with himself, he would accept. The fella sure had been entertaining, though. “Mr. Douglass, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. You see, uh, uh...I never, not for a moment – you have to believe me – never thought, could have, no...never thought I would be buying this house and getting a tenant in the bargain. Didn’t think you’d be here, still be here. Didn’t know I’d have to answer for crimes – awful, bestial crimes, no doubt – that occurred long before I ever thought it might be nice to have a place close to the District for me to get away to, to relax with just me and Joyce. I have to face a lot of questions, Mr. Douglass – uhh, ummm, not a lot of people are too thrilled with old Don Rumsfeld these days. But I’ll tell ya – one question, two questions, whatever it is – one question I never thought I’d have to face is whether or not I knew what ‘Good’ is, Mr. Douglass, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

Douglass was far more restrained in his response. Clearly, he had wasted a tremendous amount of breath trying to reach this horribly cynical old man. “Perhaps that is just the problem, Mr. Rumsfeld. Perhaps the biggest problem is that a man in your position was never asked even the most basic questions. I try not to be political but – sir, I apologize, but if a man doesn’t value ‘Good’, can’t even say what ‘Truth’ might be – how can such a man value peace, hope, friendship between brothers, the universal love of our Creator? Mr. Rumsfeld, for God’s sakes indeed – how could a man like you ever have been entrusted to guide a nation through its most daunting hours, when before you all you see is opposition or conspiracy?

“I know now why you bought this house, sir – for me, at root, what I want to know most is, how could you sleep in it?”

“Forgive me, Mr. Douglass, but all the altruists have packed up and gone to live in Bedlam,” said a condescending old man, convinced he was, more than ever, the last realist and the last sane man still alive.

“Altruism,” said Douglass, resolved at last to finish with this business and cease his haunting of the formidably entrenched Donald Rumsfeld. Through sheer obstinacy, the old man had bested a ghost – indeed, had shown more patience than the dead. “Mr. Rumsfeld, I am reminded of another man I had some queer run-ins with, and though they were memorable, I can’t say they were always welcome. You make me think of old John Brown. I always wondered about Brown – was he that convinced of the Negro’s equality, or was he just a raving madman with a smooth-bore musket and five fanatic sons? He got himself a wife and had her bear him an army, Mr. Rumsfeld – that always left me cold, even though he was fighting for my people’s Liberty, it always made me a little raw thinking of him taking those fine young men and making them as militant and as death-loving as was he. But he never would have pleaded to anything accept the highest ideals for even his lowest crimes. The Browns slaughtered men in their sleep in Kansas, sir – cut their throats and spared not even the lads, mere adolescents. But he only spoke of the highest ideals. Every cut of his terrible, swift sword was but for the glory of God, and woe to him that stood across John Brown’s annihilating path. ‘Altruism’, as you say, Mr. Rumsfeld – it is curious, but for once I share your skeptical view of things.

“He could be sly, but Mr. Brown never did things save someone was watching. God forbid the man might face approbation for whatever he’d accomplished, but I think, to Mr. Brown and to certain other types, the ability to shrink from commendation is in itself their greater triumph. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rumsfeld? That there are certain of men who would rather hear the accolades and sound the alarums, while at the same time staunchly resisting man’s tribute and seeking to pass on glory only unto God? Do you not think this is a kind of hubris worthy of the most archly cynical and arrogant man, sir? You see what I am driving at, I presume? That perhaps the man who gives the most of himself – or appears to, as if by calculation – is, in fact, perhaps the most decidedly self-possessed and avaricious? That he’s not an altruist at all? Now there’s a thought – through meekness this false altruist assures his godhood. You wouldn’t want to consider whether this theory might apply to anyone else we both know, now would you, Mr. Rumsfeld?”

Rumsfeld turned again to the window. This haunting had ground him down to a cold, icy powder. “No, Mr. Douglass – I couldn’t possibly think of any man germane to this discussion who might meet your criterion.”

The spirit of Frederick Douglass didn’t dare think it was possible, but a living, breathing man was losing interest in the testimony of another who had reached the other side, and returned to report upon his observations. The man who had inherited the mantle Master of Mount Misery was an inscrutable, fleshless sort the likes of which dumbfounded the poor deceased spirit. Had he not been paying attention to all of the strenuous and moving arguments put forwards as to why a great man of his enlightened era should think twice about occupying the throne atop a kingdom of evil? That even if Mr. Douglass were the figment of a bottle, released in the vapors – a spirit born of spirits and then observed – that there were other kinds of ghosts which could haunt a place? Ghosts of memory. Ghosts of repression. Long unheard voices of the dead who lived and died and were never even truly sure of their actual age – men reduced to living like animals, held as property. Could not Rumsfeld see why this might bother the mind of a man who was perhaps not over-sensitive, but merely adroit to the sensibility of common decency? Who was this strange Master, this warrior-plantation owner, what kind of a man could leave a ghost left in outright unease regarding his companion’s absurd disinterest in matters of the deepest – yet most basic – humanity? The spirit could not leave just yet; there was still further one thing to be addressed, so that Mr. Rumsfeld would be clear that while a slave came to Mount Misery, a man one day left it.

“You realize, Mr. Rumsfeld, that we have not finished with our discussion of my treatment at the hands of Mr. Covey, sir?”

“I finished your book, Mr. Douglass. I commend you for your toughness.”

The spirit sighed. He felt Rumsfeld was still not clear as to what kind of toughness his rebellion had required. “Mr. Rumsfeld, I thank you, but I’m sure you speak of my mere physical strength, when what was required to stand against Mr. Covey was far more to do with the indestructible nature of my soul, rather than the rawhide fury of my bones.

“You know what led to the final confrontation. As best as I can tell – for you know I am sadly unclear as to my true age – I was sent to live with Mr. Covey when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old; times have changed, but I assure you, I was still just a boy. But I was an unruly boy, and I was to take man-sized punishment for my derelictions against the Law of the Whip. Mr. Covey, plainly, beat hell out of me for the best part of six months. Then came the day when he learned to beat me no more.

“I have written in my little volume how at one point, to my sadness, Mr. Covey had ‘broken’ me. Between the exhaustive labor and his pleasured frenzy in beating the skin off of a colored man’s back, I had become docile and poor in spirit. Yet one day I reclaimed my old self, and it took my near death to push me over that brink, and back to the realm of the living. It is perhaps fitting that all this began on the hottest day of the year – when even the temper of a broken man can be frayed and set to explode.

“I fell ill while fanning wheat in the unforgiving mid-day sun. Mr. Covey stood for no slave failing in his work, even when he was near to death from his exertions. He inflicted upon me a vicious whipping, and busted open my skull with a blow from a hickory slat; from this I bled, and in no small measure, and even now, perhaps you can see the scar I took from this enlightened Christian man wielding his dark-ages cudgel.

“I ran away, Mr. Rumsfeld. I begged another man to take me in, to let me live with him, but instead I was returned to Mr. Covey. When I returned to this torment, Mr. Covey was waiting for me in the barn, it is the same barn which stands now on your property, so many, many vile deeds had been done within that structure you may look upon from time to time – how could you stand it, Mr. Rumsfeld? Does it take a ghost to make you see the anguish of ages past, right before your eyes?

“Mr. Covey attempted to place me in a length of rope, which he tried to affix to my legs. Sir, I assure you – I know that had I not fought him then, he meant to kill me. I had seen his evil countenance close to my face many times before, but at this moment, the glean in his eyes was one of Satanic rage. Here was a killer, Mr. Rumsfeld. He aimed to kill me – that broken ‘me’ he assumed was before him – but instead he found a man prepared to die, but at least die fighting.

“We fought and struggled and bled for two hours. At a final moment, he could see I would not yield. Mr. Covey backed away, and during my final six months on his infernal estate, he would think to berate me, and then think better yet again. I recall what I wrote, sir: ‘He would occasionally say, he didn't want to get hold of me again. ‘No,’ thought I, ‘you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.’ It felt good to bleed in the cause of my own Liberty, sir. The stripes which before had been handed out in abundance by a malign injustice now were replaced by stripes born of principled resistance. I was free, from that moment, damn the law and the attitudes of that time, from that moment when I resisted forcefully the wicked power of a man known with pride as a ‘nigger breaker’, I was free; it was only a matter of time for when I could make my escape and claim my rightful status as a Freeman. Later, I came to some prominence, as I’m certain you are aware, sir. And it all started here, Mr. Rumsfeld. In the house and out the back and on the property and within the barn where you have come to call home for your rest and vacation, where you sit and relax with many men of importance – and some of them, and how could this be, great-grandsons and granddaughters of slaves such as myself – right here, sir, this is where I was liberated. But, forgive me as I recall how rare a case was mine – so many, many, many other poor slaves met their end and doom in the barn atop Mount Misery, sir. Here was the wickedest crime man has ever conjured – daring to possess his brother as chattel – and here you sit, amongst precious and dainty things, relishing your power and good fortune. Do you not see what might bring a man back from his eternal rest to offer unto such an occupant his most strenuous of protests? Sir? Mr. Rumsfeld? Can you even hear me?”

Rumsfeld continued to stare at the far horizon. Abruptly, perhaps just like that, the barest glimmer of a sunrise appeared distantly removed and away from the Chesapeake Bay. A lovely and perhaps warmer day lurked in that burgeoning sunrise; assuredly, given some luck, it would be warm enough to dry the ground a bit and dissipate this cragging, joint-swelling fog that had been plaguing the old man. There was hope in the rise of a fresh sun and a quick new day. Rumsfeld looked for the sun to rise and liberate the night of its fleshless denizens, and then noticed that, while the reflection of the room remained, the occupant of that reflection whom had tormented him so for these last hours had vanished. Without so much as a farewell, Frederick Douglass and his spirit had given up on reaching harmonious accord with Donald Rumsfeld – and instead, merely retreated to the shadows, returned unto the ether.

Should he have done more than merely notice, Donald Rumsfeld made not a peep. His icy stare continued, frames bent and twisted atop his irritated slices of eyes, his lower lip curling a bit thinking of some of the grievous judgments made upon his person by a well-spoken ghost who had no idea what perils lurked in this unmoored and adrift modern world. Rumsfeld had started his encounter with Frederick Douglass and his spirit in a condition of woe and fear; largely, through time and the rantings of age subjected to himself the tenor of which Douglass had made most vent, Rumsfeld realized all he was really facing was just another critic, the type of which he had dealt with for years. Don Rumsfeld would outlast the critics; even in retirement, even atop Mount Misery, they had never made a critic who could tell a man like him any goddamn thing worthwhile.

The world, the critics, the conspirators, even well-meaning acquaintances and helpful insiders – the whole lot of them, had always just been wasting their breaths.

Chapter Four

2008-02-10T15:18:00.001-08:00

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.

Chapter Three

2008-02-10T15:16:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three

Four hours after the phantom security breach, Don Rumsfeld was nowhere near sleep as he sat, engrossed, in his favorite old chair, one lone lamp directed at his head, lighting the object he held and glared intently upon as he followed the words printed within its pages. He’d changed into his pyjamas and had thrown an old blanket around his midsection that Clare Wolfowitz had given Joyce a few years back, thick and heavy and damn good and warm. A cup of tea steamed away on a small table; it was a pungent amber brewed double-strength and spiked with a jigger of whisky. With a slice of lemon, Rumsfeld had made himself one potent, warming grog. It was the perfect late night drink for doing some intense reading.

Rumsfeld had opened The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and read the first paragraph and that had been the end of his plans for sleep that night. Two sentences in, he came upon the following lines:

I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.

He’d wanted crisp, clear English and by God he’d found it. The more he read, the more the style enveloped him. Pages went by, one grog led to two, and Rumsfeld had entered a deep trance that only the best storytelling can engender. The wind shook the windows and a clock ticked away in the living room, but other than that there was no sound, not even any Chopin or Bach. The idea of a man not even knowing his age astounded him. It was a perfect way to illustrate, in the first paragraph of the book, exactly the level of de-humanization slavery had achieved; a man rendered as ignorant as a horse. Don tightened his jaw and narrowed his eyes; with age playing such a role in his own recent intemperance and maddening discord, he was aware of the perils flush for a man looking back upon the years cut down like so very many ripe stalks in a field. A man not having even a record of his lost time in either comfort or bedevilment was disconnect itself, was angst and unknowing to even one’s own past; the idea of such a thing greatly disturbed him. He read on.

Rumsfeld had never read Douglass’s book before, but he certainly was glad he had the chance now. No matter how, or by whom, it got there in his kitchen. Strange, indeed. But fortuitous. By five a.m., Rumsfeld finished the book, took one last swig of grog, and went up to bed, resolving to sleep late, at least ‘till ten. He was filled with admiration for Douglass. As a boy, the slave had taught himself to read while running errands in the streets of Baltimore, he’d do double-time on the march and then take a few minutes to study his vocabulary – and this in an era when teaching a Negro to read was a capital offense in much of the South. The book he’d used for guidance was The Columbian Orator, he’d bartered a copy from some young Irish lads by giving them bread in return for the book. Bread for books, and how lightly education was taken these days. Douglass had been a rare breed of courage, audacity and intellect.

The young Douglass had escaped and made himself an author, he’d written his Narrative with his own words, in his own style, he’d insisted on it – and compared to the florid, orotund effusions littering the Introduction written by William Lloyd Garrison, how fortunate it was indeed that Douglass had demanded this freedom. It was a gripping story, Rumsfeld had read few others so stimulating, but it was the style – he’d cost himself a night’s sleep to finish this gem, and was pleased with every lost minute and every gained paragraph. Frederick Douglass could flat out write.

Douglass had gone from bondage as a youth to become the human face of abolition as a man. He was so eloquent a speaker that, initially, the crowds come to watch him tell firsthand accounts of the horrors of slavery refused to believe he had ever been a slave, for he was far too bright and ranging of reference. Before Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois as pioneers, long before X and MLK as dueling visionaries, and as a writer generations before Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright, there was the first truly great black American, and that man had been Frederick Douglass. That a man such as this had ever been property should have been the shame of the nation; but Douglass had made sure that even the more common folk were accounted for in his book, rife as it was with appalling tales of inhumanity and degrading violence, the only means of law known to a system of such hideous oppression. The Narrative was always a human story first, and Douglass’s life had been far beyond merely worthy as a subject which could encapsulate all the evil that was the slavery system.

There were other things in the book that Rumsfeld knew about, but perhaps with deliberate disregard and unknowing had he not pursued them. They were less sanguine corollaries to the wizardry of Douglass’s restrained, modern prose. Things that made clear why perhaps someone was taunting him by leaving a copy of the Narrative lying around in his kitchen atop a hill called Mount Misery. Whoever that person was...they definitely had an agenda, no one could doubt that.

Rumsfeld was slightly drunk and hit the pillow snugly. His mind cooled down, yet still he wondered as he crossed over to sleep how that book had made its way into his kitchen, and who possibly could be leaving so many books, so obviously interconnected, around his sorrowing summer home.

He slept for five hours, never once dreaming, the sound of the violent windstorm creaking the floorboards and rocking the gables, calming him, easing him, away from some very unsettling thoughts associated with this house and Mr. Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

* * *

By noon the next day, Rumsfeld had eaten his breakfast and drank four cups of coffee, read the newspaper and checked his E-mail, talked by cell to the half-dozen secret service agents ringing the property, and informed them of his intentions of taking a walk, alone, around the three-and-a-half acres he owned here on the Chesapeake Bay. The decision to get away had been made final after five minutes spent listening to that loudmouth ass-kissing rodomontade Rush Limbaugh on the AM dial; Rumsfeld had always despised him, couldn’t tolerate his smug and sanctimonious lecturing, didn’t think he knew shit from shinola when it came to foreign policy and, above all, had always been shocked by how much the man would eat during some kind of Republican fundraiser. There he’d be, across the table from Prince Bandar or somebody with real class, and he’d order two filets from the banquet waiter or have a big slab of chicken with an entire bowl of ranch dressing for the frites. The man ate like he was at a strip-mall buffet. He spoke with his mouth full and made crude ethnic jokes during coffee, he’d fart and act like it had been someone else, his collar was always soaked with sweat and he wore horribly loud ties – an absolute lout. Several Mormon businessmen with bu-koo bucks confronted Andy Card once after a fundraiser and wanted to know why they had let somebody who was obviously high on drugs into a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner. Nobody had known at the time, but those Mormons were dead on target.

Now the sonofabitch was talking about the election and how he wouldn’t be “carrying anybody’s water anymore”. Rumsfeld wondered if Limbaugh was talking about him. The very idea that a goddamn disc-jockey from Pittsburgh, a rank curiosity of the Age of Invective, that this obfuscator should be leveling rifles at Don’s execution – Rumsfeld had put in twenty-hour days, he didn’t need a “water boy” – the man was a braggart and a buffoon, etiquette was an insuperable Russian novel to that jackass – Don turned off the radio, called the secret service boys, and went to the closet to try on his new shoes. The weather had let up outside. It still wasn’t raining, and had reached a balmy forty degrees. Screw Rush Limbaugh. Don would never have to make nicey-nice with that toad again.

Joyce had ordered his new shoes from an outlet store on the Internet. She loved shopping on the computer. It was fine by Don, he needed a new pair of weather-proof shoes and she was just the ace to track a pair down. He opened the box and thought how nice it would be to go off the paths and into the woods; it said right on the box, “100% Unconditional Guarantee: These Shoes are Skidproof and Water Tight.” They were kind of spiffy, too. Joyce had a good eye for things like that. He looked in the hallway mirror, admired his new sweater and faded Levi’s, put on a lined canvas jacket, and thought the green and black shoes with a kind of “duck bill” pattern on the toe made him look like a real outdoorsman, fit to go herd cattle with Cheney out in Wyoming. Or whatever Dick did when he went home out West, besides hunting, of course.

Don had taken a few hundred yards of steps down a path before he came to the first rough area. A branch had been blown down in the night. He decided to get off of the path and go move the thing, maybe drag it back to the barn and chop it up for kindling later; or maybe just chainsaw the mother, his very definition of a good time. Don took two footfalls into the high grass that had been inundated by rain for the entire week, and his feet, both of them, were immediately and totally soaked by the ground water seeping through the bottom of his guaranteed-waterproof shoes. He considered the rottenness of this latest indignity, totally unforeseen; simply off for a stroll to remove some debris from his property, he took one misguided step from the path and now found himself in a quagmire. The mud was glutinous, cold and vindictive; how else to describe the mere earth, now joined in collusion with the other elements, seemingly only to infuriate him? Rumsfeld looked to the sky and came within an enraged-breath of saying something really bad to the man upstairs; but he thought better of it, and stormed, sloshing with each step, back to the house. Furious, he took off the shoes and saw how water came through at virtually every seam. His socks were ruined, smelly Maryland mud clinging to them like tar. Rumsfeld shook with cold, sneezed, swore legal action against the shoe company, and fired the faulty footwear at the far wall, where they left big muddy footprints on the Biscayne-azure paint. He’d have to clean that off, or Joyce would have his balls. She’d picked out the paint colors herself, and was very proud of how “modern” she’d rendered the inside of this two-hundred year old mansion.

Don made another pot of coffee, and grabbed the Columbian Orator. The thing was kind of addictive. Education in the 19^th Century had been a far different ideal than that which passed for literacy today. Long excerpts from Pitt the Younger would be bookended by perorations of Cato or exhortations to Republican virtue by Roman legates. The scathing and dramatic philippics of acid-tongued Cicero delighted him, and he resolved to work some of the Roman’s more caustic diatribes into his own forthcoming denunciations – for Don felt he had faced his share of Catilines, too. The language was occasionally hopeless but some of the pieces were enthralling. It was nice to read something that hadn’t been prepared by a RAND analyst or some other drybones scribe. So he missed out on his walk. A good book was a nice afternoon, too.

One of his personal agents had belatedly arrived around one o’clock with a six-pack of Budweiser, Rumsfeld having then completely befuddled him by saying “Good job, Rosencrantz” upon delivery, the man formerly known as “Sparky” having no frame of reference for this scorn he now faced from old Rummy. With the old man, the way he told a joke was evinced so sarcastically as to make a man wonder where the humour was supposed to be behind all of that snarling. Rumsfeld was just trying to be sociable, and dismissed the lunkhead with asperity, off to the kitchen to crack open a beer and make himself a couple of scotch eggs. They gave him heartburn, especially with his patented Coleman’s mustard sauce served alongside (laced with cumin, Hungarian paprika and whisky), but Don was so resentful of the world this day that he simply didn’t care whether it killed him or not; there are times when what a man needs is cheap alcohol and fried foods, and such was a time this day for the lugubrious master of Mount Misery. He ate his eggs, belched mightily, and retired to the old comfy chair for some reading time, fantastically alone.

Rumsfeld was re-reading the marked-up sections of the slave dialogue when he heard the steps creaking in the hallway, just like a pair of boots clomping down in heft and rhythm, deliberate and slow. The wind wasn’t blowing, he wasn’t sure what could be making the house shake like that. It was enough to make him put down his Budweiser. As he did so, a sound like a length of chain being drug through the living room greeted his ears, and as he got up to investigate, his eyes caught yet again in their haunted periphery the moving shadow of a vast head of hair with that hatchet-ridged nose carving down the middle. When he turned to face it, the phantom was gone. He was seeing things again. Hearing them, too. It had been a rough week, but this was too much. Don resolved to get to a doctor as soon as Joyce arrived, sometime next week, right before the holidays. He had also eaten his last over-spiced food for a long time to come. Scotch eggs, whisky, coffee and beer – he was eating like Krook must have been right before Dickens conjured him out of existence by having him spontaneously combust. Gas, indigestion and florid depression – Bleak House, indeed.

Don dumped his beer and called one of the agents. He was going into town, goddammit, and get out of this place for a few hours before it made him nuts. He had a Chevy Suburban on the property, and so long as a few agents went along, he was free to take a drive during the day. To hell with the world; Don Rumsfeld was going to go look at antiques for a few hours and get his wife a nice new something-or-other for Christmas.

As soon as he switched the cell phone off, the sound of a door slamming shut upstairs clamored through the house. A goddamn draughty old house at that. So old and draughty, Don thought, it was almost like having a goddamn ghost in the place.

* * *

Rumsfeld, again beset by the sleeplessness so often the bane of enforced idleness, walked down the main stairwell and poured himself a snifter of the Armagnac that had not met with his approval the night before. With nothing other to drink than the ’61 Château Petrus which Don feared was nothing more than high-falutin’ Frog vinegar anyway, it was that or another long draw of grog or straight Scotch. Leery of the whisky after the hallucinations and in need of entrenched sleep which would not be aided by strong tea, he gave an aggravated sniff to the brandy and slugged back a jigger full in one draught. Settled and less jittery, he ended up where he always seemed to when he couldn’t sleep, in the old cozy chair he so adored and which had followed him from the middle-class beginnings of Georgetown to the exulted manor of Chesapeake Bay. It was three-twenty-seven a.m.; another night of rest shot to hell, he put on his glasses and began reading a book he’d meant to finish for some weeks. He had understandably been loath to continue with the present tome’s lessons, for he feared that someday, perhaps while he was still alive, someone might be writing a book very much like it, only directed at himself.

The book in question was The Battle of Dienbienphu, written by a young Algerian named Jules Roy, and once the standard historical manual for journalists with serious intent during the exhaustive campaign of Khe Sahn in 1968. Westmoreland’s arrogant stranding of his Marines at that isolated firebase had so much, in damning profusion, in common with this battle that had doomed Euro-Imperialism just fourteen years before that even the press had reasonable concerns about trying again a strategy which had led to such a fiasco. The Frenchman sent to fight this battle, Henri Navarre, erroneously thinking his duty was to defeat those “scraggly bastards in black pyjamas” of the Viet Minh, was about to be run out of Southeast Asia in an ignominy matched only by the Italians of 1896, crushed by Menelek’s brave Ethiopians at Adowa, or the Spaniards upon the Rif in 1923, slaughtered by ferocious Berber tribesmen – and who did not take prisoners. Rumsfeld knew his history, could stand to learn a thing or two about the French misadventure in Indochina, but – he wondered what the hell the old friend whom had given him this book could have been thinking, really, at this particular time to make a gift of a volume such as this.

The Algerian was relentless in damning this “stupidest kind of imperialism”, as he called Navarre’s folly at the behest of the doomed Fourth Republic. Roy summed up the other-worldly conceit of desk-bound bureaucratic warriors as encompassing “the clearest ideas, when translated into the language of the Staff College...[become] complicated and buried in memoranda...metaphysical directives which cover masses of typewritten paper. A spade ceases to be a spade, difficult airstrips are practicable, hilly country opens up before battalions...and the Air Force completes all of its missions despite adverse atmospheric conditions. But on the spot men become men again and mountains mountains.” Don read the passage, re-read it again, underlined, excised and emended, all within his alerted mind, set to trigger with the slightness and surcease of the paranoiac; and he closed his eyes and saw Baghdad neighborhoods in flames, billion-dollar weapons systems ineffectively squandered and high-tech albatrosses rendered useless by clusters of detritus picked from trash heaps, wrapped in gobs of clammy Semtex, and triggered to a violent bright-orange vengeance by disposable cell phones.

The first night reading, Rumsfeld, ever on guard for impropriety and insult, was convinced his old acquaintance had been trying to send him some kind of message. Later, he realized that Douglas Feith, knowing absolutely nothing about military affairs, wouldn’t be capable of such an insult; he’d probably just bought the damn thing from a discount rack in a chain bookstore out in Fairfax, just the kind of place a dunderhead like that liked to spend his free time.

When he had been younger and seeking to grasp influence with the military by trying to think like them, Rumsfeld would read military history for days on end, weeks if he could, dozens of volumes still here on his shelves at Mount Misery and heavily annotated in the crisp, argumentative hand of this reader who made such good use of the wide margins so thoughtfully provided by the publishers. They may have had men like Rumsfeld in mind when they allotted these broad white borders to bracket the text and allow the eye a canvas for disagreement; they served the critic-reader beheld of Rumsfeld’s mania to great effect, where one didn’t merely read a book, one argued with it, from first page to last. And some of Rumsfeld’s interpolations upon these mouldy pages were quite quarrelsome, indeed.

While Navarre had been despised by the sabre-and-dreadnought cognoscenti for generations as reward for his imaginatively deprived tactics in the face of the Viet Minh, Don came to see his plight in more sympathetic terms – perhaps in recognition of how little sympathy had been give he by the press, crowing sarcastic and pompous in the manner of after-the-fact prophets as his lightning war faded to a drizzle of endless occupation. As he read, Rumsfeld saw virtue where others saw pig-blindness; resolution where many decried obduracy and near-catatonic complacency. Here was a genuine colonial warrior, Navarre, of the same stripe and vigor and horizon bleu bloodline as Franchet d’Espérey or de Lattre (but also the sinister putschist Raoul Salan), yet not remembered save in any fashion short of the vituperative. Hadn’t the despised general shown the tenacity required of an anti-insurgency struggle, had he shown not only élan but, more importantly cran – had he not, Don thought, stayed the course and given the French civilians room to get the hell out of Indochina?

So it was that as Don read this book, he learned much he never knew about the First Indochinese War, and saw disturbing parallels to the current intractable deadlock in another country, now, of a name which made him visibly wince when said aloud. He came to argue with Roy upon his very pages, scribbling marginalia in a petulant hand, divvying out criticism in spates of acerbic, quick-drying black ink. And he came to hate this journalist who so blithely condemned the entirety of a man’s career, as if the “chamber pot” of Dienbienphu spoke definitively and completely of a man’s full life. The aspersion had a familiar, daunting ring to the ears of the old man.

Rumsfeld also knew that there was a long-standing rumor in both State and within the bowels of the Pentagon – within the A-ring where clandestine worldwide misery had been planned for fifty years – that the real architects of the Dienbienphu operation had been the Dulles brothers, eager to have France perform an ill-conceived strategic sacrifice which would drive them out of the whole of Southeast Asia. From there, who but the United States could be powerful enough to continue the great anti-communist crusade? A conspiracy theory, thought Don, but perhaps a valid one; for he knew about Operation Ajax, the convoluted plan of subterfuge these same brothers had imagined for the deposing of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran just a few years before Dienbienphu. That had started as a nasty tiff between the democratically elected socialist Mossadegh – the legitimate government of Iran – and British Petroleum over oil revenues. The Crown had wanted American support for putting this arrogant usurper Mossadegh in his place; Allan Dulles decided it would be a good idea to remove Mossadegh and bring back the Shah, but why go to all of this trouble for Britain? And a very cozy relationship with a tyrant named Pahlavi and his brutally efficient Savak was thus born. Don knew the Dulleses weren’t above anything when it came to oil revenues; and who knew what riches still lurked in the barely-exploited Mekong Delta and Laotian hinterlands? If things hadn’t quite worked out in Vietnam, Don thought you couldn’t blame Eisenhower for having tried, or the Brothers Dulles for their ingenuity.

Rumsfeld continued over several days to analyze Doug Feith’s ill-conceived gift; Feith was an idiot, the whole world knew it, but this was a whopper even for him. It certainly was a helluva time to have a book in front of you which belabored numerous esoteric points to near-tedium regarding the impossibility of subduing a mass, nationalistic movement which refused to follow the rules of engagement needed by a Western commander to achieve military victory. Baghdad was a great city, vast appendages of suburbs ringing the blasted hub, seven million people and seemingly none of them able to tolerate their neighbors without strapping dynamite to themselves. France had fought in Indochina for eight years, God knows how long it would take to subdue the militias in the Sunni neighborhoods, you needed patience, vast amounts of it, to wear out a foe to whom casualties were badges of honor, instant-ticket martyrdom to a paradise of herbs, oils and virgins. You’d need to get over the squeamishness of Empire the American people were now showing – you’d need to get used to massacres, acres of body-bags, vast bonfires of dead and grievously wounded dying. America would have to learn to stare, unblinkingly, at calamity – a million Mogadishus and the My-Lai-of-the-week, for years to come.

And what of it? – Don thought. War was a bloody business. The Frenchman had failed, catastrophically, but Navarre had fought doggedly, he’d had patience that was utterly unexplainable to an American public with a thirst for interactive maps and a thirty-second attention span. The same slander would be evinced upon Rumsfeld one day, he knew it; war was glorious indeed until the first bag of bones came home on a transport jet, bathed in a flag and speaking of a true price for pulling that trigger, striking in anger, sending our boys “over there” with retribution in their hearts and violence slung across their shoulders. Rumsfeld’s own war had to be fought, he’d tried so hard to explain it, but yet still he had been sent away in humiliation when the American public first started to clamor for the decadence of peace. In Rumsfeld’s world, there was no peace; it hadn’t been earned, was a myth born of sybarites and poets anyway, and not enough bodies of the ruthless hung upon hooks to sweeten the pot and inform the enemy of what the true meaning of a Pax Americana would be. What the press in gangrenous harmony called “imperialism” Rumsfeld knew as something else: a reckoning.

What Rumsfeld had envisioned was something not seen since Rome. Only this time, the decadence afflicted the Empire before her borders were fully strung and her foes fully humbled; not understanding the complexities of this vast struggle for a whole new kind of empire, the media made arrogant sport of the fickle public’s attention span and after the disastrous mid-term elections he had been the first to go. That was a democracy, and that was life. Don thought that, over time, he might learn to forgive the American people, but he’d never forget what a chance had been lost by a public not understanding that the tenacity and obstinacy of a Navarre was what they needed to see this thing through. It was their loss, and someday they were inevitably going to pay dearly for it.

Rumsfeld, now fully engrossed in his own legacy, the problematic future of his own reputation, placed the book aside and thought about Iraq more exhaustively – what had been intended, what he had sought to achieve. And since the subject had such a festive appeal for the pundits whom had turned so venomously against him, he thought yet again of that other era of imperial overstretch, that of Vietnam – a metaphor worn thin and frayed, still the worse the old man’s nerves, each of them of perilous stability and tiresomely overwrought. Don had thought in the final days of office, when his firing seemed so clear, so imminent, that should one thing good come of it, it was that never again would he have to humour a member of the press corps, those assholes who threw the word “Vietnam” around like they had actually fought there – or understood anything about it. To stand isolated and completely misinterpreted – Rumsfeld, in hubris rarified even for he, thought this was the inevitable fate of great men who saw the world in terms of a challenge, like the great Greek philosophers so many centuries buried under the false hermaneutic texts of academia. Yes, alone and proud – here stood men like Donald Rumsfeld. Or Plato, he thought.

On the bookshelf was a private Department of Defense study on the battle of Khe Sahn, published in 1971 and probably never read since; a forgotten monograph, which Rumsfeld had had to cajole out of the ambiguity-minders in the Pentagon’s classified library. He’d read the small book before the first Tomahawks screamed into Baghdad, now almost four years before; and only now were some of the deeper lessons of previous American failures in imperial conflicts becoming clear.

If the war was an irredeemable disaster, then his own legacy would be that of a blundering pedant, a meddler whom had utterly wrecked the military – and worse, left a smouldering ruin of American foreign policy in the guise of Baghdad, that shattered metropolis. Yet Don realized, as he read the small book on Khe, that these things had happened before and nobody seemed to be learning any lessons about how tricky it was to travel to a foreign land and change the basic culture without simply killing everybody and starting from scratch. During this long night of realization, when his own legacy was at last becoming more clear to him, the most daunting idea of all may have been that “the quiet American” hadn’t learned a goddamn thing, from his time in Saigon pimping for the corrupt Diem, to the present, grandiosely pretending Iraq was a real country rather than a Westerner’s absurd series of scribblings of arbitrary lines upon an arbitrary map.

Rumsfeld was in a frenzy of discord – irate and no longer able to tolerate his own company, he returned to the bookshelves and found an old volume on Napoleon’s masterpiece, the Austerlitz campaign. He left the comfort of the old chair for the assurance of his formidable desk; in front of him, he assembled some of his private papers, an ice cube holder for the Chivas (he’d yielded to the inevitable and returned to the welcoming embrace of the whisky) and the book. His mind was a million places at once, a recent phenomenon for the assured and stolid Rumsfeld; but alone in this old house, with the wind unprecedented and violent, shaking the walls and rattling the door frames, he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think with any clarity – he couldn’t stop thinking about the insurgency, had the worst feeling that no matter his hopes this would be his true and lasting legacy, and he wondered what Napoleon would have done. But an hour later, despite plucking that volume from the richly and tightly packed shelves, he had read all of three pages, half-assed and absentmindedly, on the beau soleil of Austerlitz. Every paragraph or two, his mind wandered, his head raised, he took a sip of Scotch and set back to staring down his greatest demon, the fear of total failure. And instead of reveling in the genius of Bonaparte, he wallowed in the ponderousness of Navarre. Finally, he gave up on the book and sat back and sipped his whisky, staring out the side window towards the back of the property, where stood the barn whose original purpose he knew of, but simply chose to ignore.

As he watched, the wooden cross-lock failed on the front door of the structure, and the barn’s front door flew wide open into the maelstrom, clanging and banging back and forth with insistent thuds. The tocsin of the door’s metal latch striking the wood kept a poorly syncopated backbeat, keeping time only with the irregularity of the elements. That racket would keep up all night, Don thought – of course the goddamn door flew open at four o’clock in the morning with it freezing as hell outside. What else could it do? While sleep was out of the question, that banging would drive him to further despair, and quite possibly fury; he decided to put on his shoes and go shut the goddamn thing, who knows, maybe the poor secret service guys were out there and they deserved their rest. They didn’t have Iraq hanging over their heads like the Damocles Sword, either – so it was possible they might actually get it.

Rumsfeld tied his robe tightly shut over his flannel pyjamas and decided this would be sufficient cover for the hundred-yard-or-so walk to the barn; he’d be out for five minutes, no need to bother with getting fully dressed. He put on his “water proof” shoes as he prepared to leave, but forgot that they had failed earlier that afternoon; they were still soaked, and his feet became immediately wet and cold. Cursing a particularly brutal epithet gleaned from one of the Dutch Masters of profanity, old blowtorch-tongued Dick Nixon, Rumsfeld put on his slippers and exited by the side door, his feet instantly freezing next to the cold Maryland sod. He swore vengeance upon the company which had dared sell him the utterly worthless “waterproof” shoes, now lying in the corner of the house, saturated, discarded and despised.

The wind was like a lathe, furious, intense – not a speck of rain in the sky, nor snow looming in the clouds, but wind, howling mad and truculent, like judgment and execution. He arrived at the front of the large structure, an A-frame one-storey affair with a disused loft and floorspace, in its heyday, for several large horses – or other beasts of burden. His wife had mooted several plans for the eventual modification of the barn, all of which sounded expensive to Don and terribly impractical. Taking a rare dictatorial stand in his home life, he had vetoed them all and thus the barn would remain nothing more than a curiosity for some time to come. Why couldn’t a barn just be a goddamn barn, anyway? The structure had great conversation value when visitors came to stay over and Don gave them a walking tour of the property. It didn’t need to be a goddamn pottery kiln, or whatever Joyce had worked up in her mind.

Rumsfeld surveyed the situation and surmised that this was just a standard inconvenience, one easily rectified and not worth blowing a gasket over. He grabbed the rapping door and slammed it shut. Using his still-mighty wrestler’s legs to hold it steady and flush, Rumsfeld retrieved the cross-block and shoved it in place with tremendous force, cursing it, too, with a colorful flurry of invective and a solemn threat not to make him come back out here tonight. As soon as he released his shoulder pressure from the door, a huge gust erupted, sent the lock hurtling past his nose, and the door swung into him with such force that his glasses went flying, and so did he, into the ground with a gasp and a blizzard of obscenity, and there quickly covered on his right side from shoulders to slippers with cold, viscous mud. Blinded without his glasses, he lay there for a moment and resolved to dynamite the structure on the very morrow, call for a demolitions team while he still had such connections, take vengeance on the barn and in the meantime deal with the prospect of mud by paving over the entire property, at least the walks and pathways. And, when spotting the utterly useless cross-lock lying several feet away and now split into two impalement-worthy pieces, for the second time that night Donald Rumsfeld called an inanimate object a “cocksucker”.

The door continued to bang, now louder than ever, faster than ever, the cacophony more a battering ram than a rhumba, the pat-pat-pat of a Vickers gun in one of Haig’s armies its signature and score. Rumsfeld was enraged to the point of silence; now was not the time for a fulsome display of spleen in the night and muck of sleep gone wrong and sabotaged. He rose to his feet with imprecations of muttering savagery upon his lips. He turned and looked to the ground. The wind blasted him in the face as he did so. The trees marking the far path swayed at a jaunt, their branches shorn of leaves ragged and defenseless, it was all a blur to Don without his glasses. He had the sound clear as a firing range in his ears, though. The door scraped earth a few yards to his rear, and would inevitably break away in the commotion and violence. Branches snapped and scattered, Rumsfeld stood cold and still, all the creatures were hunkered down and quiet, the barn creaked and shook, and then Rumsfeld heard something quite different, and very specific. He heard the low, small moaning of a man being beaten with a chicotte, the corkscrewed hippopotamus-hide whip tearing into his back for the fiftieth time that night and the man moaned low because it had been too much this time and the rivulets of flesh would not coalesce to ridge-backed cicatrices and he was going to be one dead nigger with the next blow of that vile, evil whip.

Blinded, Rumsfeld turned to the barn, an object large enough for him to recognize in his dilapidated state. He’d heard the wind, yes, he’d heard the branches, what could be more normal, but for Christ’s sakes what was he doing hearing the sound of a man being whipped to within an inch of his life? And he’d known it was just that; somehow, he even knew the exact derivation of the implement, and it wasn’t a bullwhip or even a cat-o’-nine-tails, it was definitively the sound of the West African chicotte, a flesh-scourging juggernaut of radical discipline, a prized and fearsome corrective tool wielded by the Congolese as part of King Leopold’s empire of blood and rubber, but also not unknown in the Thirteen Colonies when this property of Rumsfeld’s had been...something other than it was today, recalled Don. Something he didn’t need to be thinking of right now, utterly dumbstruck blind and blinkered sure as Gloucester when he’d finally run far enough afoul of Cornwall in what had always been Don’s favorite Shakespeare – he liked it best when it was produced with gusto, let Lear carve his Kingdom into threes sure as Sh’ia, Sunni and Kurds, bring on the Grand Guignol, buckets of blood and gore, cleave some viscera to all those blades of the heart – poetry. Now he was frigid and all was a blur, the scene of the mad old King trailed by a sarcastic Fool ran through his head and torture clamored in the night and vulgar, cold mud clung to him like earthen glue. Don was frightened to immobility thinking of excuses for why he had heard his property’s barn giving off the vent and steam of two-hundred year old violences, the savage, scathing wassail of distemper that was the chicotte’s unforgiving song of strike and the creep of death come low and heavy to a man about to be extinguished by that flesh-carving entrenchment-tool of racial correction.

He found his glasses after a few bungling steps, feet now utterly soaked of course, and the frames were maliciously bent by the encounter with the heavy wooden door – the glasses sat on his face at a comical disproportion, cock-eye skewed, he was muddy and frigid and half-filthy but yet fully disturbed. And of course furious. Resolving again to raze the structure and watch it fade to rubble as though it were an old foe from when he’d been Nixon’s errand boy with the liberals on the EOC, he twisted the frames as best he could and turned to go back to the house, the door banging more loudly than ever, flat out mocking him at this point. He’d taken maybe five steps when he heard the sound of the chicotte tear through him again, this time a child wailing in an unknown Southern dialect, instinctively he thought it was from one of South Carolina’s coastal islands, how he did not know, the child was screaming but not nearly as loudly as its mother, who had stolen some corn from her master and had been sent here for correction, to this barn behind him, stripped to her waist and her full black breasts being gouged and carved as the whip carried over from her ruined back to her sides, she, too, was about to die and in sight of her littlest child, born into slavery, sent here as chattel to learn manners at the side of his mother – property.

That was what had used to go on in the barn behind Donald Rumsfeld’s gorgeous and period-perfect brick Georgian mansion. In that very building. And he had known it, from the moment he signed the papers taking the property over – he’d known it.

Apparently, he was finally having some troubled sleep from the buried knowledge, because he assured himself this had to be a hallucination brought on by whisky and utter exhaustion. Because no matter how many slaves were broken in a barn or worked in the property’s adjacent fields until domesticated skeletons, goddammit there was no such thing as ghosts. Rumsfeld was cold but he wasn’t crazy; he needed to put away the Napoleon, grab a hot shower, take a strong nap and get outside in the daylight when his mind would be clearer and straight. And maybe consider backing off the Chivas for a day or two. He didn’t need his wife to show up at the house next week with him wearing bent and broken eyeglass frames and seeing fucking ghosts out of them.

Chapter Two

2008-02-10T15:15:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two

He had called Joyce – his wife, greying but still vibrant at seventy-four and always able to hold her Pimms or Grand Marniers – two days before and told her to go to New York and just shop herself ‘till she dropped. Go to Bergdorfs, go to, uh, well...those other places women like to go to shop in New York City, whatever the hell they were. She was at their official residence in Virginia and he was still on the job at the Pentagon, talking to members of Gates’s transition team, nuts and bolts things about where Navy carrier battle groups were and how many ballistic missile submarines were in port and out to sea. Rumsfeld knew these things, all of them, minutiae down to the tactical level; he was famous (or infamous) for his “5,000 mile screwdriver”, the mind-boggling attention to specifics and the grammar of military operations that left all who met Don Rumsfeld wondering how he kept all of that information straight in his head, and – some more skeptically – what a man in his position needed to know all of that detail for. He was either uniquely informed or unconscionably a meddler, Rumsfeld was, and it was left to his correspondent to make such a decision according to his own volition, jaundiced or sycophantic, wherever his sympathies may lie. More than a few generals left his company, however, wondering what could be said of a man who wallowed in the quotidian and seemingly mistook it for command.

Sending Joyce off for a few days would let him shake his cobwebs. Rumsfeld’s wife didn’t need much of an incentive to go to Manhattan and lay waste to his carefully horded credit. It didn’t much matter, anyway; now that he was back in the private sector, Don could cash in on numerous favors he’d banked from concerned suitors, and of course interest would have been accrued on these outlays of governmental largesse and the granting of the Godfather’s ear. Financial worries were to be none in the final years of Rumsfeld’s life, even though he hoped to be granted a quarter-century more of Chesapeake Bay summers and New Mexican winters. He had worked hard for his influence and his contacts, and when he died, his children and grandchildren would bless his name for the motherlode awaiting their acceptance. It would be his final triumph, and from beyond the grave as well, to let his family know just how successful their father had been. And as long as the Rumsfeld fortune existed, just a chunk of the principal, it was proof that a man named Don Rumsfeld had lived, and that his money provided a kind of immortality through bettering the lives of his progeny and the following generations. This was how ultimate success was measured in America – how much weight your name packed when you were dead.

With the wife away in Manhattan and the secret service men firmly instructed to keep scarce, Don Rumsfeld found himself in a pleasantly marooned state his first evening alone at the gorgeous and period-perfect Georgian-revival mansion known – for various yet artfully ignored reasons – as “Mount Misery”. But all in due time as to the derivation of that rather sinister moniker, and how it had been so fully earned.

The journey from the White House to this concealed and quiet abode had taken the usual forty-five minutes; he’d used the time to flip through the Columbian Orator and had found a nice passage regarding the emancipation of the Irish. The whole book was a collection of famed speeches given over the millennia and was designed to give children of the 19^th Century a guide on proper usage and stirring diction. Much of it was mired in a time of grandiose circumlocution standing in for eloquence, rife with archaisms and magniloquent phrasings; shockingly, even Lincoln’s entrant to the book was never near to the point and often pompous. The diamonds, however, were genuine. Rumsfeld had noted how a former reader had been particularly struck by passages from an anonymous fragment wherein a slave, captured for the second time after running away, argues with deftness and aplomb for his manumission; in a somewhat unlikely “ironical” turn, his master’s heart is turned by pure reason and the slave is freed. Uplifting, very much so, though Don was disappointed at all the pencil markings in the margins, which had completely ruined this grand old book’s value on the open market.

Arriving, Rumsfeld said goodbye to his driver and entered the house, it was now well after five in the evening, pitch black and windy as hell outside, a bulking draft sieving through the windows and which flowed through the deadened mansion like a sodden fog. Far from what it had been like during his most recent visit, several months before. Mount Misery had been purchased for the specific purpose of a summer weekend getaway for the Rumsfelds; the thing was shut up fully and with a lock after Labor Day, and only Don’s immediate need for a place of retirement after his public execution had allowed the doors to be unfixed and the grounds to be allowed trespass.

The fact was that Rumsfeld, in his final days on the job and waiting for Gates to take over, had begun to realize that this was, very truly, the end of his career in government. Hale, spry and fit, the mind as lucid as his heart was strong, he was still seventy-two years old and even if all of this recent bullshit hadn’t occurred there was no room in a new administration for someone of his age. The final recognition of this fact had sent him into a free-falling depression, and since there was a lot of work to do in preparing to fend off the attacks which were inevitably going to come his way, Rumsfeld simply wanted to retreat from the Pentagon and the White House and to wherever he was going as quickly as possible. The house on the Bay was just up the road, and since it was way, way off-season there, the odds of him having total silence and peace were exceptionally good. In the middle of December, there was nobody out here – in an old crabbing village on the finger of a peninsula stuck out into the Chesapeake Bay – except for townies, woodchucks and ghosts. And Don Rumsfeld didn’t believe in associating with any of them.

The heat had clicked on with no trouble; Don was satisfied the place had been taken care of in his long absence. He’d build a fire later, but simply wanted to get the place habitable as he got out of his suit and into something more rustic. His wife had taken care of that for him, too. On the kitchen table was a box from LL Bean, and inside were three brand-new sweaters of a fittingly manly style, thick wool straight from a Yorkshire sheep’s behind and solid, dark colors marking the crew-neck and rolled sleeves. Rumsfeld was almost giddy inspecting the sweaters. He’d worn suits for years, of course, had them on twenty hours out of a day sometimes, but had always secretly longed for the freedom a man has who can wear an old black sweater with reinforced elbows and a pair of jeans or workpants and boots and all of the personal sovereignty that implies. He’d still have need for suits in the years to come, at least he hoped so, but it was with great pleasure that he inspected the sweaters, picked out the autumn green one to wear first, and went upstairs to find his aged Levi’s and take a hot shower. After that, it would be simply a matter of coming downstairs and going to work on the bottle of eighteen-year Chivas “Royal Salute” Scooter Libby had given him for a going away present. It had been a long day, all days are long when you get fired, but this one was especially exhausting; with no one to answer to except that mirror upstairs, Rumsfeld smacked his palm as he thought of Libby’s foresight and resolved to do nothing but knock off some of the Scotch, build a fire, and find out what the hell the Columbian Orator was all about. He’d waited years to have a day like this, with absolutely nothing to do, and no one to bother him either. The memoirs could wait until the documents arrived. Tonight, Don Rumsfeld was going to be a normal old man for a change.

One of the curious features of Mount Misery was that it had been a bed and breakfast until a few years ago, when his wife had discovered the mansion in an on-line real estate listing and couldn’t believe how unbearably eighteenth-century the place looked. Rustic was rustic, but this was like something from a Hawthorne story, with corpses in walls and other entertaining artifacts of an impenetrable Gothic past. The bourgeois weekend-getaway was its last incarnation, however, and signs of this well-heeled palimpsest abounded.

Having been essentially a small hotel, there were showers and bedrooms all over. The couple who ran the little hotel were looking to get out, and were obviously tidying up their nest egg with the two-point-five mil asking price. Money like that always made Rumsfeld edgy, until he realized he had plenty more than that locked away and that if he didn’t buy the gorgeous old brick mansion he’d pay far more dearly in terms of scorn and bile to Joyce, who had refused to consider any other properties once she’d seen this subtle masterpiece outside the little resort town of St. Michaels. Rumsfeld had one of his financial people talk to the couple, squared them down to one-point-seven, gave a ten percent bonus to his man on the $800,000 savings, arranged a mortgage and now owned a house with five bathrooms, four fireplaces and three breakfast nooks. He loved it. He could shower anywhere he wanted, upstairs or down, and throw his clothes in a pile any goddamn place he chose. There was a princely buoyancy in this would-be slovenliness; a man is never fully in possession of a home until he can make a mess of it. Before he went upstairs, he picked out one of the breakfast nooks and put aside a fresh grapefruit and a box of coarse-grained Irish oatmeal on the little table. It was here that he would have his breakfast in the morning. Such was the extent of the planning he needed to do for the entire evening, and this was a phenomenal change for a man who had previously been directing an entire great power’s war efforts in two countries ten-thousand miles away. But he could still plan, damn them all. With the oatmeal, Rumsfeld defiantly threw down a gauntlet of banality to overcome the loss of great prestige.

Half an hour later a refreshed old man stood inspecting himself in the bathroom’s clouded-over mirror, where he had just completed a vast cleansing ritual designed to clear his head as much as anything else. He had put on a white cotton T-shirt and stared into the misted pane, looking for signs that he at last was breaking down and declining with age. Even allowing for the eye’s subjective appraisal, Rumsfeld thought he was holding up magnificently. He hadn’t smoked in years, and his teeth were white and firmly held by disease-free gums. His eyes remained clear, not rheumy, not sunken, no bulging cataracts clouding the sphere and his natural eye color – off-blue, like a swimming pool with a slight algae problem – was still discernable. He made a bicep for the mirror, and a sinewy flesh-colored rock appeared in the reflection, not much diminished from his days on the wrestling varsity at Princeton. All men face the axe, nature’s auto-da-fé is a conqueror assured, time is a bandit as well as a cudgel, and Rumsfeld would one day coalesce to a morbid pile of discolorations and glutinous flesh, tumors amok and skin rugose, a satchel of despair and age. But that time was not yet. Don was thrilled to see that despite being sent away ingloriously, he was at least still Don Rumsfeld, and not some flabby-assed epicene codger, he’d wake up tomorrow and still be whom he’d known all these years. Rumsfeld inspected his skin and decided he could use a shave, get a jump on tomorrow. The solid and equally-planted five o’clock shadow was yet another element of his still-extant vitality. Shaving was a thing that meant you were still a man.

Rumsfeld was finishing his shave, getting at that really tricky part well-defined men have right at the hinge of the jaw. He’d lost gallons of blood over the years trying to keep that patch clean, he wondered how it wasn’t completely scarred over. As he turned his face and drew the skin taught, carefully dragging the double blade over the scene of so many slices and nicks, Don looked up briefly as his eye caught something moving in the hallway behind him. It was a shadow, something like a human but maybe not quite, he couldn’t really tell, the thing was gone in an instant and probably had never really been there anyway. It had startled him enough, a small hallucination ebbing through the ether and over his shoulder, fain of the reflection and ephemeral, barely there and never more, just a blot of misfiring cells within his brain making him think he’d seen a man with a full, wild head of hair and striking, knife-edge nose like a hatchet set down across the plane of his cheek. The whole thing took a fraction of a second, hallucination or whatever it was, and had probably never been anything more than a bundle of spots collected in the periphery of an old man’s eyes.

The only lasting trace it would leave was the startled reaction of the man glimpsing the mirror who saw the event, and the deep gash of flesh he’d taken from his hide in that perilous spot of shaving so many times scourged, this time deeply, betrayed by eyes that were seeing things and making him jump like an anxious old fool, wondering what the hell he’d done to have old age hit him like a brick so quickly, literally right before his eyes.

* * *

An hour later and a full two-fingers of lovely, smoky, peat-rich whisky down his gullet and still Don Rumsfeld bled, the corner of his jaw that he’d cut away stinging in the air and seeping tiny drops of fluid that were now collected on a dozen scraps of toilet paper tossed in the wastebasket to his side. He sat downstairs at a desk with a few documents in front of him, things he’d meant to read as prep-work for the memoir writing. All of them now had little flecks of blood across their print, most now browning and crinkling the paper, Rumsfeld was disgusted with himself for slicing up his face like this, and had even given up on building a fire because every time he released pressure on the nick it started dripping again. It was that kind of day and then some, fired, bloody and alone, wounded and hallucinating – just what the hell had he seen in that mirror, anyway? It looked like some fella, he kept reminding himself – and that fella had caused him to hack half of his mandible off, an hour later and still wincing, Jesus-Christing under his breath. He’d begun the evening with no one to answer to save that mirror upstairs, and Don broiled thinking how miserably that confrontation had ended.

Rumsfeld slammed the remainder of his whisky and decided he needed some water to go with it – maybe he was dehydrated. People saw things when they were dehydrated. Your brain gave you fits. That’s life. Some aitch-two-oh might be just what he needed to up his platelet count and stop this damn facial hemorrhage he’d inflicted. Don wasn’t a doctor, he didn’t know. It was worth a try, though.

He hadn’t even reached the refrigerator when he spotted the book lying on the kitchen table, again as before completely unknown to him until this moment of sighting, just like back at the Eisenhower executive building when that other book had appeared from nowhere. Apparently, he was being stalked by a bibliophile, or random pedagogic volumes were auto-assembling from air molecules and depositing themselves on Don Rumsfeld’s tables and desks. He looked at the book and assumed he was losing his mind. He hadn’t been in the kitchen for hours, hadn’t brought any books off of his shelves, knew to meticulous detail the contents of those bookshelves and what his volumes looked like when arrayed, and this one did not fit the description of any of them. He picked the book up, another aged-yet-attractive volume, and squinted through his glasses at the title: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. A very interesting story, no doubt, but it didn’t belong in the house on Mount Misery. It wasn’t his. Some asshole was loose on the grounds and playing pranks. Rumsfeld was on his emergency cell in seconds, calling in the most trusted of his secret service men. With stunning speed, the man was at one of the side doors and letting himself in with his duplicate key. By the time he got to the kitchen, he had his pistol unholstered and ready to use. He found the ex-secretary sitting at the kitchen carving station next to a rack of expensive German knives with a book in his hands and a snifter of Armagnac in front of him. The man looked ill.

“Sir, what’s going on in here? I need a PVP.”

“A what?” Rumsfeld asked, in complete befuddlement tinged with anger.

“Personal viewing perspective, sir. The who, the what, the where. I’ve alerted backup. I need to know what you know.”

“So you mean, uh, err...you want to know what I saw?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why the hell didn’t you just ask me that? A goddamn ‘PVP’, such shenanigans,” he said, waving his hands with fulsome dismissal. Rumsfeld rose and sniffed the brandy; it wasn’t what he wanted, and he sat it down. “And can the ‘sir’ business, too – okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did I just say, goddammit?”

The agent kept quiet now, totally unwilling not to refer to this man as a “sir”, or a “Mr. Secretary.” He looked around with the gun waving, as if the intruder were right there in the kitchen.

“Are you just going to stand there and not go see who the hell is in this house? Jesus Christ, unless he’s, uh, err...invisible, he’s not in the goddamn kitchen. Go look for him! Get your ass in gear, Popeye!”

The agent knew someone was in deep “86” when Rumsfeld called them “Popeye”. It was a term of absolute derision, apparently he hated that cartoon passionately and had been forced to sit through a screening of the movie with Saddam Hussein years before as Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East. Like Hitler, Saddam craved American movies on the deep, deep sly. Real garbage like Popeye. The Führer with his Mickey Mouse and Moustache Nebuchadnezzar’s secret admiration for Bluto. All dictators were nuts.

Sometime later, the agent returned with a partner, both of them solemnly reporting that the entire breadth and width of the estate had been searched, and there was absolutely no one on board who was not authorized. Rumsfeld explained that the book lying on the counter was proof otherwise, but the agents would not be moved. The second agent stepped forward to assure the old man that all sensors had been checked and all cameras focused; there were no intruders upon Mount Misery that night.

“Mr. Secretary,” he began, and was immediately interrupted by an old man’s accusing finger and gash-lipped snarl.

“Don’t you call me that!” Rumsfeld snapped. “Don’t ever do it again. I’m not the secretary of anything anymore, I’m, uh, uh...errr, retired, goddammit!”

“Sorry, sir. It was a slip...”

“Whatever it was, don’t let it happen again, Sparky!” The old man looked his age now, when he was angry, in a paroxysm, whatever – his studious calm would segue to the most barbaric outbursts, and the agents who’d seen it could tell it was a rage born of raucous, exalted contempt. There were days it seemed as if Rumsfeld absolutely detested everyone. “Both of you two, just, uh, uh, err...get the hell out of here. Go on, go fiddle about your business, I need to be alone.”

“We can’t do that, sir,” said the second agent.

“Why the hell not?” an exasperated Rumsfeld replied.

“Sir, there has been a PBRAS...”

“English! English! From now on tonight, no more goddamn acronyms! I’ve had enough of that stuff over at the Pentagon. From now on, tonight at least, when you speak to me, you will speak in standard, identifiable English words and phrases. Comprendé, Sparky?”

“Sir, what I was saying was...”

“Then say it, and it had better be in English, goddammit.”

The agent cleared his throat and looked at the old man in front of him. For the first time he noticed the wad of toilet paper stuck on the hinge of his jaw, below the ear, it was a big piece of bunched-up Charmin totally rotted through with blood. Raging with his arms-a-flailing and his demands for simple language, the obvious wound to the ex-secretary’s chop made him look quite ridiculous and pathetic. The saddened agent tried to explain why they would need to be in the house for awhile to come. “Sir, what has occurred this evening is a Potential Breach of Restricted Area Surveiled, it’s a PBRAS,” he said, sounding it out like “Pee-brass”, and yes, it was a goddamn acronym, Rumsfeld noted, “and that is a big time security alert, sir. I’m sorry, but you’re still a high value target to certain anti-American interests, and while the area is indeed secure, you have indicated a great deal of anxiety over the presence of a foreign object.” He paused, sentinel-like, and pointed to the book now abandoned with the brandy on the cutting table. “Would you like to have that item scanned for Anthrax, sir?”

Rumsfeld glared at him. “You Neanderthals...six hours out of the goddamn job and I’ve got the goddamn Keystone Kops running around out here. It’s not an ‘item’, goddammit, it’s a book – and no I don’t want it scanned for Anthrax. I’ll take my chances, Sparky. I want to know why I can’t have some quiet in this house when I ask for it.”

“Sir, I’m sorry you feel this way, but regulations are firm. I’d feel better if you gave me the alien object for disposal...”

“Well I wouldn’t.”

“...fine, that is your right, sir, but we need to stay here for a little while and make sure you are secure. Now, please sir – just relax and we’ll take another look around upstairs.”

Rumsfeld yielded to the inevitable. He directed the two agents to the living room, and put on some music – Chopin, nocturnes, something to calm him down. The music sounded lovely through the three-thousand dollar Bose speakers. A gift from Ariel Sharon, the only (joking) stipulation being that they were never used to play Wagner.

While the agents inspected the many rooms of Mount Misery, Rumsfeld thought about what might make him relax. He didn’t need any more whisky, that was clear, the stuff had him seeing things tonight. The Armagnac smelled like lighter fluid and the only other booze in the house were two bottles of vintage Bordeaux Joyce had bought at an auction in Norway. She’d kill him if he drank $15,000 worth of wine because he thought the Armagnac had gone bad. Then, he realized what he really wanted to drink. When the agents returned, he apologized for snapping at them and made a friendly suggestion to make up for it.

“Son,” he began, speaking to the first agent, “what’s the procedure on getting an old ex-secretary of defense a beer?” He was all charm again; Don could go from antagonistic to avuncular with no cue and no warning – and precious little interval. He always kept his agents on their toes.

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“Please, Mr. Rumsfeld will do. I’d tell you to call me ‘Don’ but I know you guys are all Marines – heck, you probably call your kids ‘sir’,” Rumsfeld said, and the joke fell totally flat on these men who were still in full combat mode.

“Be that as it may...Mr. Rumsfeld...uh, what transpired tonight...”

“Can’t you guys relax for one goddamn minute and just speak English? Do you know you just used two clichés in one sentence? Lighten up! I’m trying to ask you guys if you want to go for a beer! ‘Transpired’– it’s bad usage. Pretentious, like some muckety-muck from a poetry department...uh, uh...don’t do it. Now, what about the protocol for an old man getting some suds?”

“Sir, there is a bar in town that is probably still open, but it has never been screened for security threats. It would not be a good idea...Mr. Rumsfeld. You’re a very high-value target.”

“I can’t go get a goddamn beer?”

“It wouldn’t be wise, sir.”

Rumsfeld gave up on correcting him. “Not even with you guys?”

“Too risky.”

Rumsfeld sighed and sat back on his couch. A gift from the CEO of Boeing. This couch had cost the taxpayers three billion dollars, the avionics upkeep on Rockwell’s decrepit old B-1 bomber. Armed Services had been holding up a contract in committee, and then Rummy stepped in. The couch had sealed the deal. “Good God. It’s come to this? Uh, uh...Jesus, I’m still ‘high value’, a real target, you say? What a load. Papers don’t seem to think so, I’ll tell you. But I can’t go get a beer.” He paused, the irony of his defeat crushing, bewildering. “I’ll ask again: How about some suds, boys? Bring all of your guns, I’ll bring mine, too. I have a nice nine-millimeter upstairs that Dick Armey gave me years ago. A peach of a piece. We’ll fill the bastards full of lead the moment they come through the door – IRA, al Qaeda, whoever wants a piece. Whattya say?”

Rumsfeld’s good humour was finding absolutely no takers this day. “Sir, if you would like a beer, I would be happy to go into town and procure a six-pack from one of the groceries. You can have your beer in the security of the surveiled zone, and we’ll all be a lot more relaxed.”

Rumsfeld surrendered. “If you go do that, will you sit down and have a goddamn Budweiser with me? Talk about the Redskins, that, uh, uh, hockey team or whatever – how about that?”

“Very sorry, sir. Totally contrary to all known regulations. We’re on duty, sir. Under no circumstances can we imbibe alcohol on duty.”

“But you’re always on duty, Sparky.”

“I enjoy serving my country, sir. It’s a small price to pay for doing my bit.”

Angered, Rumsfeld turned his back to them and began waving his hands. “Oh, all right, all right – you win, goddammit. Just go watch the house where I can’t see you, get the hell away from me, the both of you.”

“Sir, do you still want me to procure you a six-pack of Budweiser?”

“Sparky, for Christ’s sakes...the only reason I wanted the beer was to sit down and talk to some people for a little bit, get me away from this, uh, eh...entrapment I’m, uh, feeling out here. I wanted some air. A nice glass of suds. Can you comprehend of these small pleasures, son?”

The agents both stared at the old man, disquieted, unsure how they should respond to such a mournful plea. Angered yet again, Rumsfeld directed them to get out of his sight, waving his arms like a maddened crane.

An hour later, the agents were leaving by the front door, the first agent noticeably glum and peeved with the second.

“What’s your problem?” the second asked.

“He called you ‘Sparky’, you heard him.”

“So what. He calls everybody ‘Sparky’.”

“Not me. He got PO’ed and called me ‘Popeye’,” the first agent lamented, and winced further still as the second agent let out a long, low whistle.

Everybody knew how bad it was for Old Rummy to call you ‘Popeye’. He was one mean old man, and most of the secret service dreaded him like gangrene when assignments were being divvied out. Neither one of these two would have willingly sat down and drank a beer with him, God knows what he might do if they became too “chummy”. Keeping the man safe was a solemn duty, but duty didn’t extend to getting your head ripped off for whipping him in a game of pool.

Chapter One

2008-02-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

Old Man Misery

A Novel

“But there you are, confronted by this enigma and this almost mystical intuition for which there is no reasonable explanation.”
– Knut Hamsun, Mysteries

“As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
– Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume One

Chapter One

Compact, tense, shrewd and irate.

The old man wore his charcoal-grey pin-striped suit were it though he’d been halved in years – cuffs brushing his wrists, still youthful and spotless, trousers slung taught across a flat gut and narrow hips – tie knotted Windsor, shirt a creaseless broadcloth, shoes black, functional, laminate-polished. Head erect and carriage stiff, matador-like, even when alone such attention to posture remained true, once it had been called pride. Born to one of the adjectives leading this tale, he had learned two of the others by professional diligence, and came to the fourth by sheer cussedness – aged, wizened and bilious, he remained defiantly contentious, a gleeful pain-in-the-ass. Eyes pinched, exasperated brow, slit-scowl mouth – laden with sarcasm, contempt – these had withered the many who had assailed him over the years, the fools and mobs and reporters that would never be his problem again. Eight minutes now separated Donald H. Rumsfeld from an end to his professional life – and all of this stress, fury and aggravation would cease. And a very uneasy retirement awaited the old man in the isolation that would follow.

As of 4:30 that afternoon, he would no longer be the secretary of defense, would no longer be answering phone calls from disgruntled generals (retired or otherwise), would no longer be forced to stand before a phalanx of impertinent, blockhead reporters who had maddened him for years, would no longer have the ear of the President nor the guts-balls-spine of the Vice-President for support, would have none of the trappings of power accrued – but neither the trap of powerlessness bestowed – when that prize became instead a snare. Donald Rumsfeld, seventy-two years old, a small-town kid from Winetka, Illinois who had sure as hell shown more than a few doubters and naysayers during his remarkable career, would be nothing but a real civilian again, not in any way associated with the Minotaur’s Maze that was the Pentagon nor the ideological steeplechase that was the Cabinet – by God, rid of them all was he and still the only emotion he could feel was that burning loathing that had accompanied him from nascence to terminus, from the Thirteenth District of Illinois to the K Street vanity brothel, from Nixon the Father to Bush the son. This was something more than mere irony. His fine classical education allowed Don the knowledge that the Greeks would append a more daunting ring to this Third-Act dénouement: what he knew now was perepeteia. What he knew now was freedom hamstrung by fate.

Freedom – for the first time in years, out of work and free and with the rest of his life to sit down, write, give interviews, issue edicts and demand retractions, file lawsuits, hinder prosecutions, craft a legacy, suborn perjury, elucidate a conscience, proffer regrets, slander the naïve and comfort the demagogues, rough-hewn a legend while humbly balking reward, amass tribute while parceling out fault, lay low with useful scoundrels, aim high with ambitious fiends, field offers from New York agents, confer with Washington pundits, dissociate from Baghdad corpses and – that one from far before on the list, that superbly useful item – write, he could write, correct some of the goddamn record and settle some goddamn scores. He was done at 4:30 EST, just minutes from now, when the recently-confirmed Robert Gates would be arriving in this very office at the back of the Old Executive Office Building and taking helm of the ship Rumsfeld had so patiently assembled. The impediments to his captaincy had been vast and at times quarrelsome. From a recalcitrant and conservative military establishment to a Congress which never seemed to remember that once Don Rumsfeld had been one of them, and therefore knew all of the little incentives, bribes and threats which were needed for their kind to get off of their asses and do what needed to be done for America – or merely Don himself – so he had faced, so he had engaged and so he had vanquished. He was rid of them all. He had lost this ship so adroitly crafted – or perhaps fabricated was a better word – but in the process gained Liberty. Off alone and despised and into that wilderness some fools dared called peace.

This should have been a moment of – yes, liberation. And yet it moved him to utter fury that someone had somehow snuck into his office during the last few hours it was still his, without one damn soul paying attention to their presence, and left a book on the corner of the desk that was government property and therefore had to be left behind. For Gates; the desk would be his now, and from the reverse of that solid burnished-oak fortress would come the plots hatched to undo all that Donald Rumsfeld had done to transform the American military. The book sat there on that abandoned desk, a literate orphan, a bundle of words, provocation and taunt. If it was some kind of practical joke, Don Rumsfeld certainly didn’t find it amusing. You don’t sneak into the secretary of defense’s office, no matter who you are, during a time of indefinite, ambiguous and dark-sided war, and leave him a going-away present, forget what you were trying to say and how clever you thought you were in saying it.

Rumsfeld examined the book swiftly, truculently. The Columbian Orator. A fine old volume, printed in the era before dust-jackets, dark green cover with a solid spine and, though this book was ninety-some years old, not likely to crumble anytime soon owing to the crisp, acid-free wood-pulp paper. Rumsfeld admired the book for its craftsmanship, opened the thing and whistled aloud when he saw the date of printing – so old that it lacked a Library of Congress code – thought this was all fine and that it would look nice on his bookshelves out on the Bay in Maryland – still, a nice parting gift, but there were other ways to give a gift. For the next eight minutes he was still the goddamn secretary of defense; and Don Rumsfeld didn’t countenance people sneaking around the lushly carpeted hallways of the nation’s central bureaucracy and seat of government, much less intruding into his very own abode and keep, no matter how short-lived said abode would now be. Somebody needed an ass-reaming, Rummy style.

But there wasn’t time for that, and nobody would listen to him any goddamn way. There was nothing to be gained by kissing his behind anymore, and the lowest staff member curtseying to the most insincere Cabinet official knew it. Various undersecretaries and policy advisors artlessly ignored him, like waves of piss-ants, and Don snarled on down the hall, doing nothing important, taking up space. He’d been a ghost for the last three weeks. The last thing left in this office was the desk, and that wasn’t even his to take. Everything else had been packed up and shipped off, weeks ago. Don’s very first tutor in the advanced arts of political infighting had once said something very bitter but also very wise, and so this discarded old warrior paraphrased that great man’s thought, sotto voce, while taking satisfaction in having looted the office in sight of all whom had conspired to depose him: You won’t have Don Rumsfeld to kick around anymore.

He took one last rueful look at the office, bare save that soon-to-be-occupied government desk, put his newest book under his arm and slammed the door shut behind him. He did not turn off the light.

At the far end of the hall was the president’s Chief of Staff, and Don winced thinking how everybody in the damn press corps made such a big deal about how young Josh Bolten was. But they didn’t seem to remember that Don’s only true ally these many years on the Hill and beyond, Dick Cheney, had been a couple years younger than Bolten when he held the same post under Ford. At least Don thought he had been younger – it was hard to think of cowboy-stoic and Big Sky-snarling Dick Cheney as young, ever – but he must have been young, because Don remembered all the work it had taken to maneuver him into the chief-of-staff post where he’d be most valuable. Where Don could use him. And from where the big house cleaning party could begin, the “Halloween Massacre”, an epithet both mot juste and Saint-Just, where Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had organized what amounted to a coûp against Kissinger, that dirty old bastard, had out-maneuvered and out-tricked him, Kissinger, and put the kibosh on the half-pint Clausewitz who had spent the past eight years nagging Nixon into making pals with the Red Chinese and goading Ford into sitting down and talking strategic arms limitations with Brezhnev.

Dick had been old enough to take on Henry Kissinger, by God, and there weren’t balls big enough on the steers in Wyoming for a man to say that in those days. Cheney had horseradish in his veins and strychnine in his soul, he pissed gasoline and fired lightning bolts from his nostrils; he was old enough then, and had stuck with Rumsfeld for over thirty years. The moment of their ultimate ascendance had been assured when first they dared topple the Prince of Detente.

Don still remembered what Dick had said when they were discussing the Kissinger question one night over whisky and insomnia, early in the administration’s unsettled fog and back when Dick still smoked three packs of Benson & Hedges a day. “You gonna sit back and be that prick’s shabbos goy, Don?” he’d said, heaving reams of smoke with his exhale, and it wasn’t a question, it was a challenge. Two weeks later Henry the Terrible had been neutered and Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. That was Will. Forget what that jackass Liddy had chirped and clamored, idiots hold their hands over open flames but – it takes guts, balls and bile to stare down a modern day Prince like Kissinger, and Dick Cheney had all three. Josh Bolten was a goddamned notary, as far as Rumsfeld was concerned; he’d said it before, sniping in the Cabinet while Bolten was off running errands, meaning it completely, that Josh Bolten was so full of shit that if someone gave him an enema he could be buried in a matchbox. For everything that had gone wrong in these last miserable months, Josh Bolten served as shorthand and stand-in, ever the target for an old man’s unrelieved wrath.

Bolten, for his part, had noticed the secretary’s antagonistic demeanor, surmised that age was the principal ingredient in this stew of malign, and was bewildered as to how petulant this man Rumsfeld could be. He had celebrated his fifty-first birthday just a few months before, and Josh Bolten was clearly greying about the temples and acquiring deep bags under his eyes as reward for the hours of staff work required to keep the Cabinet functioning; how Don Rumsfeld could consider him a “punk kid” (as he’d heard himself referred to in the various hallways of this vast old mansion) was just further proof of how a bitter old man’s slide to disgrace was greased liberally with delusion and phantom conspiracies. Bolten would look at Rumsfeld certain days and realize, now that he was a lame duck and merely waiting to segue to uselessness with Gates coming aboard, that the secretary was fighting a host of private wars in his mind, re-visiting ages-old calumnies and dog fights from the Nixon years and through his time battling Colon Powell for the helmsmanship of the country’s foreign policy. Rumsfeld had always been known as gruff, for God’s sakes even the Dalai Lama had commented on it once at a State dinner function. But these last days of his office...Bolten knew that a man was coming undone in his presence, and that this interregnum between the neo-con Jacobins and policy-realist restoration could not pass fast enough. Don was making everyone edgy with his spiteful reminiscing, acrimony contained and never let slip for public consumption, but all the same pronounced and disquieting. Rumsfeld carried his memories like scars of conscience, sharp jagged valleys of woe and unfulfilled victories crevicing his brow and erupting in caustic facial tics, the battle never having ended fully enough for a decisive, walk-off retirement. There had been victory but never peace.

Rumsfeld had taken the length of the hallway for all of these memories to boil, and now was standing face to face with the wünderkind chief of staff.

“Don,” was Bolten’s greeting, cordial and laconic, somber and yet still aloof. He had a Starbucks cup in his left hand in festive Christmas colors. Bolten drank three or four mochas a day, double shots, he was never without the Starbucks, all that caffeine and all that sugar and the best this guy could do for a final greeting was “Don”. Rumsfeld had been the chief executive at a pharmaceuticals company, for Christ’s sakes – he knew what the hell was going on with Josh Bolten.

“Josh,” replied Rumsfeld, with the patience an old man has for a young man he despises.

“I’m sorry we’re all running late today, Don, but I know you have to leave soon and...the POTUS has a meeting with some of the new Democratic leadership – Black Caucus, majority whip, those folks. He’s down the hall with Secretary Rice and...well, Don, he wants to make sure before you leave...”

Rumsfeld hated how you could hear the ellipsis in Bolten’s voice. He also hated how he said things like “POTUS”, as if you wouldn’t know “president” meant “President of the United States”. He just flat out hated Bolten, and wondered if this kid thought he could take the old man.

“All right, let’s go – I’m not flying today anyway, too goddamned windy. I have the driver handy, you know, the uh...the limo,” Don said.

They started walking down the hallway to the president’s location. “Not taking your last chopper ride on the company dime?” Bolten said, trying to sound like one of the old timers, like he belonged. If he thought he was cute now, wait until he had to deal with Baker and Gates and all of “POTUS’s” daddy’s buddies who were lining up to come back to Washington for one more taste before the big Viking funeral that awaited that whole goddamn bunch.

“No, uh, Josh – I’m, ahhh, taking the limo. Old rule – my last lesson for you, Josh – don’t take the Chinook unless you have to. Choppers crash. Stuff happens. That’s life.”

Rumsfeld usually had a good sense of humour, but it was lost on Bolten, and especially today he thought the comment too dark. “Oh, ok, Don – ha ha, that’s good advice.” There were ten paces of absolute and uncomfortable silence which followed. Finally, Bolten spoke, unable to take one more second alone in a roving morgue with the walking dead. “So, you’re gonna go away, get out of the District for a few days, stay close?”

“I’m gonna, ah, uhhh...you know, Josh, go out to Maryland, the, ah...Bay, you know...Chesapeake Bay. My weekend place. In St. Michaels. My, uh, ahhh...Summer place.”
“Oh, ok – no need to fly there, no, not at all.”

“No, not at all, Josh,” said Rumsfeld, ready to say goodbye to Dubya and get the hell out of this lunatic asylum. Too much talk in the White House these days, everybody a bunch of garrulous do-nothings. Bolten made small talk like no one had ever told him to shut the hell up and then backed up the threat with a fist. Don was a man of instinct and knowledge. And visceral reaction. He hated small talk.

They entered the big room where Dubya was getting a last-second pep talk from some undersecretary for something or other, Don couldn’t keep them straight, there were a thousand of them and the only one he had ever liked was his own guy, Feith, squirreled away over in the Pentagon fabricating a war. Doug Feith was out of work now too, all the loyal eggs had been boiled in the scandal pot, only Wolfowitz had managed to swim to the top, roiling Rumsfeld raw.

All this was none of his concern anymore, as of six minutes from now. Don wanted nothing more to do with Leo Strauss’s pack of toadies and epigones, that Gnostic Sect of American foreign policy who were blaming old Rummy for this whole fantastic disaster in Mesopotamia.

With each of them one foot through the door, Bolten kept up the squawk, even as Dubya turned to acknowledge his soon-to-be ex-secretary of defense. “Not going to Taos, Don? – hey, I’d think the weather would be better there...”

Rumsfeld could take no more. “Josh, I have to go say goodbye to a man I care about very much. Go drink your coffee somewhere, ok?” With this dismissive swat the blathering ceased, Bolten off to a corner with only a dunce cap missing to complete his humiliation, asperity and contempt sending him away, banished from the “adults”.

Don spotted his primary secret service agent, nodded, and other than this man, the only people in the room were the undersecretary of whatever, Condi Rice, Mr. Chit-Chat and Dubya. And himself. Yep, this was goodbye, all right.

Rumsfeld held his ground about five feet from the doorway. The room was one of many in the old building devoted to nothing but waiting and prep work – sometimes to Rumsfeld all of Washington had seemed like one infernal bullpen. This one was better appointed than most, and the company was pretty tight but – you spent half of the best years of your life playing meaningless games of catch waiting to get to The Show. Rumsfeld had waited twenty-five years himself to get back on the mound, and he’d hung on for five long Winters, the last two anything but pleasant – but it was the turning of the Fall, that horrible sixth September and vulture-laden October – he’d have been lying if he hadn’t admitted to self-pity, to thinking of himself in the same breath as Billy Mitchell, Doug MacArthur, Hyman Rickover – Christ even Bob McNamara! – reformers all, men with vision, a plan – and all of them turned out and exiled, nary a word of thanks and no regret proffered for the brusqueness of the cutting blade. Rumsfeld fumed over the injustice, then snapped back to where he was when Dubya’s eye caught him square. The President gave him a salute with the wrong hand, and Don knew it was time to stop thinking of History and simply get through these next few minutes of it, the History no one ever bothered to write – the maudlin, pathetic farewells of moments not somehow elevated to dignity by catastrophe or national tragedy.

Dubya separated himself from the anonymous undersecretary and took a few confident steps towards a man he had known since his Yale days, and all this time later the relationship still was lopsided, unequal – Dubya knew it and Don did too. Here was the one man in Washington that Bush The Second knew was his boss and his better, despite all of the myriad policy wonks and politicos who could lay claim to that title. At this moment, it made Rumsfeld intensely sad – not just for Dubya, but for his father, too. Even though he despised that man with the perfect beauty of a Sicilian blood-feud.

The President looked his erstwhile secretary of defense in the eye, with that homespun folksiness that he had acquired by osmosis and guile in Texas after a childhood spent amongst the Brahmins and superannuated spooks of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS, all come to barbecue and drink at the family compound in Maine. He squinted Rumsfeld his peculiar gash of a smile – sometimes more of a smirk to those who took it with umbrage – snared his hand in a real Texas grip, and made clear that what he said he meant, with deep gratitude and respect, no matter how it sounded to the assembled officials in the room. The President looked good in his conservative-cut blue suit with striped red tie and American flag pin in the left lapel.

“You did a heck of a job, Rummy,” the President said, and the silence engulfing the room was immediate and total. Josh Bolten cleared his throat modestly as the effortlessly tactless man continued to stare into Rumsfeld’s over-sized eyeglass frames, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement of his gracious tribute and peroration. Bolten thought disdainfully that his boss planned all of his farewells as if Norman Rockwell was going to immortalize them on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Rumsfeld looked at his former boss, noted the stoic earnestness behind the somewhat-dim man’s Dale Carnegie gaze, and decided he was incapable of the shrewdness nor the irony the comment would require though it were some kind of insult. It was just another glaring dart from reality for a man who still was plagued by the English language as if it were a precious, shiny thing in the hands of a bumbling lummox.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Rumsfeld said, evenly, and returned the Texas grip, humbled and shorn of hubris, one last malapropism from the boss making him the fool in his final few minutes within the cauldron of power he had longed-for and stoked with the patience and skill of a Medici. There was silence for a few seconds as the handshake lingered on, the President incapable of seeing the discomfort the situation had left this proud man in. Finally, Bolten leaned into the President’s ear and reminded him he had an appointment elsewhere, and that he needed to leave the office now. “It’s time, Mr. President,” he said, and Bush came back to cognition, a sign that the emotion had been genuine and very real to him just moments before. Rumsfeld released his grip and merely stared ahead, seeing nothing.

Dubya exited amidst his wedge of advisors, Bolten on his flank and Rice barely able to contain her sadness as she followed behind. “Good luck, Don,” she said, knowing enough not to touch him, he didn’t care for that, and why was such mawkishness needed anyway to say goodbye to whom everybody knew would be just fine, Rumsfeld was the toughest sonofabitch in the room. It had been that way for thirty-five years; even Nixon had said so.

It was now just the ex-secretary and his lone secret service guard, a handsome and youngish man specifically chosen so as not to dwarf the bantamweight frame of Rumsfeld. During the Ford administration, Rockefeller had always somehow contrived to get a veritable giant assigned to the five-foot-seven Rumsfeld, a fact Don attributed to pure politics and something he never forgave the bastard for. Don had always known he could have taken that privileged nancy-boy, vice-president or no he was still just an old-money Eastern liberal with no sack between his legs, he’d have put him in a Boston Crab and that would have been that, had he just been given a chance to settle it with a wrestling match like in the good old days at Princeton – or like Burr and Hamilton had settled their differences, that would have been even better. But these were different times. Men were not men anymore.

“Well, let’s go Sparky,” Rumsfeld said to the pleasant young agent, who knew enough of his charge to give a smile when the secretary made a joke. He’d called him ‘Sparky’ ever since being assigned to Rumsfeld months before, but then, of course, there were a slew of secret service agents assigned to the secretary and he called them all ‘Sparky’ or ‘Bo’ or ‘Popeye’ depending on the frame of reference for the sobriquet. The agent never minded and thought Rumsfeld called him ‘Sparky’ simply because he couldn’t be expected to remember the names of ten different men who were in constant proximity to him. Now, well, this was not the time to go about correcting a man who had just been fired by what amounted to a revolt by his own troops.

Quickly, with no final goodbyes to wear him down, they were out the door, into the long corridors leading to the basement car ports, and soon enough heading up the ramps to the egress behind Pennsylvania Avenue with the former secretary relaxing in the comfort and security of his bullet-proof limousine, the intolerable gray skies of Washington in early December looming out the windows like chalkboards hung from the heavens and in need of a damn good cleansing. The driver, another secret service man, had been good enough to turn on some music, Bach, the Third Brandenburg Concerto, here was a good fellow indeed who had paid attention to what his boss enjoyed. And now that he was a civilian – unemployed, essentially – Rumsfeld had the strangest sensation to tell the man to stop at a newsstand so he could get the afternoon paper. But, of course, they didn’t make afternoon newspapers anymore – and it would have been ridiculous to think Donald Rumsfeld could just get out of a car down on M Street and go buy a goddamn newspaper. Maybe in a few months, but probably never.

The car was over the Potomac in good time, the horrible DC traffic was lighter than usual for early evening, and this man was an ace driver – Rumsfeld thought, No, he’s really goddamned swell. He liked the idea of having a good driver and relaxed to the Bach, sublime stuff, really, you didn’t have to be a longhair to understand genius like this, and got back to thinking of his newspaper. Nobody read the damn paper anymore. He saw Dubya with a copy of the Austin Statesman under his arm one day and wondered who the hell he thought he was kidding. There was a time when presidents paid more attention to the papers than they did their closest advisors. Reagan had been a terrific reader of newspapers. Don had never been in his administration in a Cabinet post, he’d only served him as a special ambassador to the entire brush-fire Mid-East, but of course he knew Reagan, had fretted about him in ’76 as a challenge to Ford coming from the hard Right, knew plenty of people who had been part of his Praetorian guard, and recalled how no matter what was going on, on a weekday evening at six o’clock – the world could be ending, dammit, but Ronald Reagan was going to sit down to a cup of coffee and the Washington Star.

Cheney had called him one day years before in disbelief, he’d been elected to Congress and missed his old friend, Don was back in the private sector, paring down a failing pharmaceuticals company and had just been named one of the “Ten Harshest Employers” in the country by Fortune, same old Rummy and that was why Cheney still called him, just for some backbone. He had just been to the White House with Sam Nunn and Scoop Jackson and a couple other Hawks that Cap Weinberger trusted, and reported how Reagan had thrown them all out of the Oval Office precisely at six o’clock right when they were talking about how to take out some new asshole named Quadaffi, and he was polite enough about it but said, firmly, “Now I have to see what my most trusted advisor has to say,” and he was talking about Jack Germond’s column over at the Star. Dick couldn’t believe it. Nancy came in right behind them with a tray of petit fours and then one of the servants with a Sterling silver coffee service – except for an old ceramic mug with “Dutch” stenciled on it, and that was obviously for...Dick was horrified and wondered what would happen if the Russkies dropped the Big One during the early evening news. Dutch would be too busy with his tea-time to stage a proper retaliation.

Rumsfeld laughed out loud thinking of the incredulity in Cheney’s voice, here was a US congressman with damn good contacts who had just found out the biggest secret in American government: the president was a good-natured goofball with daily habits utterly set in stone, unyielding and totally incontrovertible and in his own unique way completely in tune with American public opinion. He was the most powerful man in the free world and his wife still brought him cookies and his favorite coffee cup every evening while he sat down and read the paper. And Rumsfeld patiently explained to Dick that this was precisely why he was the most powerful man in the free world; Reagan knew his limitations and always made time for the homey banalities that would resonate most clearly with the American people. Like Jack Germond and the goddamned Washington Star.

Rumsfeld continued to chuckle as he remembered explaining to Dick that this was why they would forever be in the shadows and never truly “the big cheese”; too forward, too gruff and far too unwilling to suffer fools gladly, a Cheney or a Rumsfeld would never be president. You needed to be able to pretend you were on their level, the great American unwashed. Except Reagan wasn’t pretending. He needed his corps of advisors and all those big brains around him because he really did think keeping up with the papers kept him ahead of the competition – whatever that was, when you were the President of The United States. Rumsfeld had been baffled about few things in his long career, but the strange propinquity of misplaced arrogance and paranoia so near the apex of power, how it remained to this very day, this was something that stole the smile from his face and left him in nodding-head bewilderment, now and forever miffed, and thus was how ended his reverie as Bach’s last notes faded from the limousine’s speakers.

The Star was long gone, 20 years out of print and now the town had a total bullshit liberal fish-wrapper and the conservative paper was owned by the Moonies. He even remembered the day that great old rag put up the shutters for the last time: August 7th, 1981. He remembered it because seven years before, missing by just one day – August 8th – was when poor old Dick Nixon had been run out of town, forced to resign and disgraced by people not fit to shine his shoes. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, he didn’t know what it was, but Rumsfeld couldn’t help but note that August 8th, 1815 was when the monarchs of Europe finally succeeded in getting rid of Napoleon, exiling him to Saint Helena. Bonaparte had been back in power for one-hundred days before his most trusted guard broke and faltered at Waterloo; Nixon’s staunchly-loyal Cubans paid out by CREEP had spied on the DNC and Daniel Ellsberg for one-hundred days before they fouled everything up at the Watergate. No, don’t bother to tell Don Rumsfeld that History didn’t enjoy a good joke.

Lots of good things were gone now, and Rumsfeld wondered if a man like Dubya could ever have appreciated the routine pleasure afforded by something so simple as reading the Washington Star. Ron Suskind had let the world know Bush wasn’t much of a reader, the Paul O’Neill book and now this last fiasco, the one that made Cheney seem like such a heathen. Everybody was so worked up over Bob Woodward’s books, but some of the things Suskind got off-the-record were uncanny. Rumsfeld had to shake his head as he thought of the truth. “Not a reader” was putting it mildly, and Reagan had been no scholar, of course, but – Dubya didn’t even read the daily PDB’s; he had them read to him, it was Josh Bolten’s number one job. There was no way he would have understood Reagan’s everyman delight in sitting down to a cup of oil-slick black coffee and the blessed old Star, as reliable as it was conservative, and never a bad word for the good old America each of them had grown up in.

Times were different. The car passed the shops and boutiques in Georgetown, went past Jack Kennedy’s old house from when he’d been a young senator and half-a-dozen Starbucks Don felt that chatterbox Bolten must know better than his own home. DC was an okay town but he remembered it best when every other storefront was some mom and pop joint and the races mixed downtown and it didn’t feel like such a mall – the chili trailer that used to park at the bottom of the Hill, sneaking out for a Senators’ game on a Tuesday afternoon, even a quick incognito run to the 1819 Club where the prettiest girls you ever saw danced naked as jaybirds and none of it seemed vulgar or obscene. Just think what would happen today if the assholes from the Post caught a congressman in that place – ever since John Jenrette there was no peace for a man in the District who wanted to take a night off from being married. Even if he was just balling his own wife on the steps of Congress.

Change had been total and DC was now a nesting ground for over-paid lawyers and their shoddily-clad wives. It had all crept up on him. He spent so much time on the job he hadn’t even noticed how much had changed. Don didn’t have much to say about it and the car was soon on Wisconsin Avenue, out towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda, and then to where the former secretary had asked to be driven: his weekend home at Mount Misery, on the Chesapeake Bay in windy, wet and cold Maryland.

Rumsfeld didn’t care much about the weather. He wouldn’t need to be outside hardly at all. Don Rumsfeld was going there to be alone, completely alone (except for the agents specifically told to keep “invisible”) and with only his Blackberry and the PC he kept at the house. A truck would be by in a day or two with the first pile of documents he had set aside since he had been fired, and then he would be free to peruse his own substantial library and begin the obligation de rigueur of all great men the moment they have been turned out to pasture: Don Rumsfeld would begin writing his memoirs.

About Old Man Misery

2008-02-04T16:49:00.000-08:00

The simplest way I can think of to "blurb" my novel is to reprint the pitch letter I sent to various Lit Agencies. With personal details omitted, it is reprinted, below:

Old Man Misery

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven

Chapter Six

Chapter Five

Chapter Four

Chapter Three

Chapter Two

Chapter One

About Old Man Misery