by Karl Wenclas
Read Part I here.
REMINDER: This is a work of fiction, inspired by but not based on real persons and events.
The Campaign Continues
The state’s far right newspaper, 100% a puppet of the state’s money men– who spent much of their time vacationing at a pricey upstate resort– sponsored an outdoor event for Roger Roxby, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Someone at the newspaper or among its owners had noted the contentious Democratic side of the primary was receiving virtually all of the media coverage. Especially from the recent big data center protest. A Roger Roxby event which the newspaper could hype would rectify that.
Enlisted as performer and host was MAGA entertainer Kid Grift, a washed-up, weathered-from-drugs has-been. Pseudo-rock, pseudo hip hop, pseudo-everything, son of the state’s richest car dealer, he’d stolen shamelessly from every musical genre and performer he’d heard.
At the event, Kid Grift stood on a balloon-and-banner festooned stage, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, in part to hide his expanding bald spot; stringy dirty-blond hair which hadn’t been washed in a month streaming down from it.
“Here he is, people. Where is he? Roger? Roger? Hello! Be patient, people. Eat your hot dogs. He’s around here somewhere.”
The event organizers had offered free hot dogs as one of the promotional lures. Those chowing down on them, red MAGA hats bobbing, gave the impression hot dogs were the only attraction.
Eighty people showed up.
Odds against the upstarts remained steep. Directors of their own party were against them. More lobbying funds poured into the campaign vaults of establishment candidates, who’d made private deals to not make waves. Populist Democrats? A contradiction! Forget the 1930s. The idea of it frightened money men and their selected candidates. What good was a carefully constructed, well-oiled-and-conformist System if the common people decided? Why then go through the trouble and expense to prove the chosen politicos were reliable; that they could “play the game”? Play it, moreover, not just by the written rules, but more importantly, the unwritten ones?
They were going to win!– the Approved candidates vociferously insisted to their backers, Hannah Gribbens most vociferous of all.
“We have the ads, plenty of ads, bombardments of ads, bombing bombing bombing every day in the scariest of scare tactics that could ever be imagined. You’ve never seen so many ads! Mail ones and TV ones and Internet ones. I tell ya, we’re going to hit them voters where they sit, right between the eyes!”
Hannah spluttered as she spoke to the representatives of Power and Money, eyes popping out of her head as her red-white-and-blue eyebrows and chin bopped up and down in bizarre ways, causing those sober-minded ever-calculating representatives to question, at least for a moment, what they were doing.
Among perceived left-leaning Democratic candidates in the state– indeed, in the entire country– Ahmed Al-Babou had the biggest target on his back, chiefly because of his name and religion, as well as his anti-war, anti-imperialist foreign policy stance. The President himself added to the labels and slurs against the candidate, referring to him with a typical classless insult, “Ahmed the Boob.”
“Stick to domestic issues,” consultants advised him.
“I am,” he said. “But I’m not about to back down when asked questions. Inevitable questions no other candidate right now has to face, because of who I am.”
Part of the problem was Ahmed’s aggressiveness, which triggered pushback. He approached the campaign as he would a high school football game. He’d outwork everybody: more interviews, more public appearances, more phone calls. More campaign videos, ranging from the serious to the ridiculous. Criss-crossing the state to meet the skeptical, even to the most northern, sparsely populated part of it.
“He wants to meet the bears and the wolves!” a conservative commentator mocked.
“Yes, I also want to meet Dog Man and Bigfoot,” Ahmed said in response.
He knew a sense of representation for those people mattered.
On most of his trips he was driven by Cliff, an aide, in a smooth-riding, roomy new model SUV in which he could stretch out, write speeches, review notes, even nap. Occasionally, though, he’d drive his Olds 442. He knew the impact he’d make driving himself into a small town with it. This conveyed several messages: independence, determination, and traditionalism. It emphasized reality: his upstart campaign versus a well-oiled machine.
He was forever the too-small underdog.
A sympathetic podcaster presented what he called a Spend-O-Meter on his show, tracking how much corporate interests and offstage lobbyists contributed to Ahmed’s opponent, Hannah Gribbens.
“They’ve passed $50 million!” the man shouted like an auctioneer or old-style carnival barker, with a graphic of the number onscreen accompanied by green dollar bills floating through the air. “Will we see $55 million? Sixty? MORE?! How much will they spend? How high will they go?”
The summer was hot. 100-degree days. Many of them.
Ahmed and Shahara stood outside their garage, under the orange summer sun. Tall evergreens stood nearby.
“It’s crazy, but I feel the history of this place. This land. In the air and through my feet,” Ahmed told her. “Indigenous people here before anybody. French explorers and fur trappers, then Anglo pioneers, followed by Irish and German, then Slavic immigrants brought in to work the giant factories, and ex-slaves who arrived for the same reason from the South. I see the spark: mechanics working in home garages, not all that different from ours, to build the first motorcars, then turning those experiments, those toys, into giant factories producing products like this one.”
The garage door was open. He gestured toward the freshly painted modernist blue product, representation of– and symbol for– the complex technocratic world in which they lived. Sharara saw the glistening car as some kind of ancient pagan monster or god. She saw Ahmed as forever in campaign mode, making a speech, attempting to justify himself to the world. Or to himself.
“I don’t disdain that history,” he continued. “I respect it. I smell the oil and grime that produced it. I’m not against technology. I only want to balance distortions caused by the shock waves of progress.”
“They’ve even called him a Communist!” Ahmed’s wife Shahara complained over the phone to her best friend, Bernadette, a fellow professor at the urban college they taught at. “Can you believe the irony? Here we are, socially, economically, and religiously as conservative as anyone can get, and what do they call us? Communists!”
Bernadette listened, making occasional sounds of agreement. She knew the stress Sharara was under. Stress her husband Ahmed seemed to enjoy.
“Communists!” Sharara repeated. “Nothing could be more offensive or further from the truth. Such misrepresentation. My family have been entrepreneurs since they entered this country. Entrepreneurs! Adding value. My family owns three gas stations, two diners and one dollar store. They support Ahmed’s campaign, in a small way. Hannah has corporations and lobbyists behind her. My husband has backing him a few gas stations.
“The American way.”
On another front, local Democratic Party bigs, curious or alarmed by Zane Day’s climbing poll numbers against two well-groomed, well-screened candidates, sent an election expert named Milton to give Zane advice. They realized they might be stuck with Zane for the general election. They believed not, hoped not, but there was a chance it could happen. Milton’s mission: to ensure Zane Day was properly moderate.
Looking over flyers and posters in the tiny rented office– a shop previously used by someone who read tarot cards– discussing strategy with Zane (Trinity for the moment back in New York), Milton pulled out from a brown leather briefcase printed spreadsheets full of data. From behind thick spectacles and with much jargon he attempted to convince this unorthodox politician to play by the accepted rules.
“You’re trying to bake a cake without the ingredients,” the designated expert told him.
“But I don’t want your ingredients, Milton,” Zane responded.
Dalton Norvell had worked enough jobs to know that in this unequal society life was a cutthroat competition in all things, prioritizing not the best, but the most ruthless, most focused, most narrow-minded who usually existed within a tight corridor of ideological beliefs. Which is how this country ended up with money-grabbing tech moguls driving the economy off a cliff.
Dalton stressed this at a campaign appearance.
“We’re living in the middle of a Monopoly game. Remember how those end? One person has all the money and everyone else is homeless.”
When Ahmed drove up north in the blue 442, with a single aide, Cliff; racking up the miles, feeling the car’s power under his foot on the accelerator, heading farther and farther into emptiness under a fresh blue sky, he imagined what it was like for the French explorers. Themselves immigrants. Then pioneers with their wagons, headed west. More immigrants, seeking something of which they weren’t sure what. Something new. Better. A nation of immigrants and the children of immigrants. The frontier mindset: pushing into the unknown. A vast emptiness full of dangers and opportunities.
Cliff looked at the GPS map on his phone for the next town.
MAILBOX MANIA!
Campaign season was a profitable time of year for printing shops and the United States Postal Service, no matter who won. Thousands upon thousands of glossy printed political ads were daily sent out, targeting every address in a congressional district, at a ratio of one positive mailing to nine negative ones, the latter depicting the opponent in the most grotesque terms, blaming the person for every tragedy and inconvenience of contemporary life, using the most unflattering image of said opponent that could be found or AI generated, accompanied by hyperbolic words presented in large day-glo lettering.
The pace of mailings increased as primary election day approached. Every day, mailboxes were jammed with propaganda for or against every announced candidate. Hapless homeowners who went on summer vacation for a week without having their mail held at the post office arrived home to find mailbox overflowing, political mail pushed inside the front door, under the mat, or stacked on the porch and scattered across the front lawn by the wind.
“Are you a member of the DSA?”
“Gotcha” questions became the norm at campaign events of all the left-leaning or populist Democratic candidates. While Ahmed Al-Babou received most of them, this question was addressed to Zane Day at an event in a woodsy hall in a local town. It came from a reporter at the state’s most conservative newspaper, which predictably was owned by a giant conglomerate.
“DSA?” Zane asked him, cynical green eyes boring in on the smug-looking man.
“You know,” the man said. “Democratic Socialists of America.”
Zane shook his head. “No, I’m a member of ADE.”
“What’s that?”
“You know: A, D, E. ADE. American Democracy for Everybody.”
Dalton Norvell during an interview with a journalist:
“The standard upper-middle class person dominating discourse has zero knowledge of how millions of people in this country live. Or really, how they survive. Many bouncing around between sketchy living spots, with no computer or smartphone in order to get aid or apply for jobs. Sometimes no computer skills; from broken homes and broken schools. People are challenged, physically, mentally, psychologically. The attitude of our opponents: Too bad! Winner take all, the rest of us expendable.”
From a Zane Day speech, this one outside at a park plaza, where Beatles cover bands and the like usually played, in front of a larger than usual audience, as Trinity Rotissary looked on:
“People are tired of unstoppable growth, growth at all costs, growth that’s turning this society into an inhuman dystopia where everything we say is recorded in order to flood us with ads, and people walk around staring rigidly at their phones like zombies.”
“What about values?” a questioner asked Zane Day at another event.
“Personally,” Zane replied, “I believe in a few universal, human values. The problem is someone’s values have been imposed on us. Values of greed, selfishness, maximized profits whatever the cost, accumulation of wealth and to hell with everyone else, unstoppable ‘progress’ pushed by sociopaths.”
On primary voting day, DSA staffers like Trinity worried that ICE would show up at polling places to intimidate voters. But the governor cut a deal with the orange president to ensure this didn’t occur. Most likely she’d merely batted her fake-glamor eyelashes at him at an in-state event and he’d said, “Okay, I won’t.” He’d always been a sucker for fake glamor.
Detachments of Michigan militia types did show at several polling stations, including one in a black neighborhood. The line of overweight cosplaying white men in fatigues were either ignored or laughed at. It was a high UV Index day. Much sun. They began to sweat. To melt.
“Let’s get lunch!” one of them suggested. “We passed a saloon on the way here.”
They left and were not seen or heard from again.
The sun, reaching its high point then beginning its descent while moving from east to west, burned ever brighter, more powerfully. More intense. Drivers reached for sunglasses or pulled down windshield sun visors. Pedestrians wilted. Those waiting for buses looked for shade. Much of the population, including those sheltering indoors, felt drained.
Was some message from the all-encompassing universe communicated?
As remaining voters rushed to the polls– many individuals had voted by mail– the candidates themselves were nervous.
Zane Day stood outside his small campaign office in the late afternoon sun vaping, peering skeptically out at the world through narrowed eyelids.
Dalton Norvell was napping, his favorite technique to escape stress. He knew the exact time to be at his victory party– polls had him comfortably ahead of Thorpe “The Mop” Skandehar– and he’d be there.
Ahmed Al-Babou made endless phone calls: to aides, consultants, journalists, and uncommitted voters.
Hannah Gribbens paced about her campaign headquarters, which had a dozen television sets blaring on different news channels as she pumped up her troops. “This is end zone time! We’re gonna bury them Communists! We’ll knock ‘em out!”
Roger Roxby, who faced no opposition in the Republican primary, and was scantly interested in who his November opponent would be, drove about town in his red two-door Mercedes convertible enjoying the hot weather, waving at people whether they knew him or not. Waving hardest at attractive young women, giving them a wink, a thumbs-up, and a grin.
Cliff, one of Ahmed’s aides, standing with the buzz of success outside a scene of celebration, felt unease as he watched red lights on the rear of the bright blue Olds 442 disappear up the avenue.
Inside the car, Ahmed Al-Babau watched as the red needle on the speedometer moved to the right, the car’s speed rising higher and higher. Ahmed felt like a comic book superhero. Unbeatable. He sensed the sky overhead dotted with gold stars. Streetlamps appeared to be celebratory lights reflecting off the car’s recent blue paint job. As a steel wall of orange appeared in front of him, a thought appeared for an instant– too late?– inside his head: “I’ve been too defensive about my family, my culture, my god, my religion. . .”
Police were on the scene quickly, as not much else was happening that time of night. “The Donut Hour.” Scout cars came from three directions, the huge orange truck blocking three lanes of traffic, officers rushing to lay red emergency flares down on the black asphalt, bars of blue light pulsating across the avenue and into the cloudless black sky, vast and seemingly asleep. One mangled classic car, half overturned.
“Call an ambulance,” one officer said. “Also fire rescue and a tow truck. Someone’s inside.”
Officers gathered around the crumpled vehicle.
“A dream cruise guy, probably,” a police sergeant remarked. “The problem is cars back then weren’t built to be crash resistant. Can see it in this wreck.”
As mechanics worked methodically to free the person, or body, from the crushed wreckage, one of the police officers standing nearby watched the flashing yellow lights atop the tow truck, hypnotized. His tired brain was unable to turn away.
“WHAT?!” Dalton Norvell shouted into his phone in the midst of his victory party. After receiving details, he touched off the phone and tracked down his wife.
“Honey,” he said, instinctively hugging her. “I don’t know all of what went down, whether it’s foul play or who’s behind it, but Ahmed Al-Babou has been badly hurt and been taken to a hospital. About thirty minutes drive from here. Get yourself together. We’re going there now.”
His wife’s eyes took in all he’d told her.
“We’re taking our security people with us!” she replied.
As their volunteers and fans began whooping and dancing, everyone realizing they’d actually won, Trinity and Zane looked at each other. They’d done it. Achieved the goal. At least part of the goal. For the first time, they actually looked at each other, closely, seriously; saw each other as human beings. Trinity tried to avoid the thoughts which came now to her. Which, she realized, had come to her before, in her sleep. About his lean body. His eyes. . .
His green eyes looked now directly at her, into her own, their gaze traveling down to her feet. His eyes and hers watered with emotion.
One of their volunteers ran up to them, out of breath. A young woman. Upset. Shaking. Scarcely able to talk.
“Guys, I hate to disturb, it’s all . . . all over the news. . .”
Curiously enough, the driver of the large orange truck vanished. Search of the vehicle produced no registration, no receipts or documents of any kind. The license plate number was listed as stolen. A run of the VIN number by police showed no record.
Friends, relatives, aides, journalists, and the merely curious began to arrive at the emergency room of the massive new hospital to which Ahmed Al-Babou had been taken. Those sympathetic to his cause. The hospital’s layout discouraged many would-be gawkers. Circles and curves, multiple signs which were hard to read at night, the massive and utterly foreboding charcoal-colored concrete structure in sight but set apart, like a hard-to-reach but fantastical objective.
Eventually the seekers found Visitor Parking and streamed into the emergency waiting room. Dalton Norvell arrived with his wife. He wore sunglasses to appear incognito, but no one recognized him anyway. Trinity and Zane, who had a farther distance to drive, walked in forty minutes later.
“Hey, big guy,” Zane said to guaranteed-to-be new Congressman Norvell. “Any news?’
The crowded, brutalist-designed room hushed when Sharara Al-Babou, accompanied by her friend Bernadette, entered, wearing the white hijab which put off so many political opponents. An officious-looking PR person chatted with her briefly, then escorted her to a side room.
“Kohldwahr!” Zane Day exclaimed in subdued-yet-surprised tones, half to himself. “This is one of theirs.”
“Of course it is,” Trinity told him as she hovered protectively close, uncertain if all DSA-sponsored candidates were endangered. “Clinics, hospitals, urgent cares, labs. They want to own them all.”
After awhile, nervous as always and tiring of waiting, Trinity using a restroom, Zane Day wandered into a hallway. Like the entrance drives and parking lots, the interior of the facility was impossibly confusing. Doors, signs, hallways in every direction. Blue smocked doctors and nurses rushing everywhere, themselves looked confused. Ten floors rose above this one; several were underground. Everywhere: beeps, intercoms, and blue-or-red flashing lights.
“All I want is a drink of water!” Zane said out loud, but every gleaming chrome-steel drinking fountain he encountered was broken.
A passing orderly pointed him toward a vending machine which contained bottled water.
“At last,” Zane said. “Water!”
He touched a button on the machine to view the price. Five dollars. For a drink of water!
Kohldwahr Health had to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the surgeon– the Surgeon– rushed up to Mrs. Al-Babou in the Special VIP Visitors room, which instead of being gray walled, harsh, and sterile, was colored gray-blue, with slightly thicker padding on chairs. Hospital staff made way for the Surgeon’s approach. He carried himself with authority, taking long strides, though he was not a tall man. A green operating mask hung from his face, tactically placed, as if he were part of a photo shoot for a fashion magazine.
“He’s the best,” a nurse whispered to Sharara.
“Mrs. Al-Babou,” the Surgeon intoned. “We need to operate immediately.”
He proceeded to rattle off a series of Latin-and-Greek terms about what internal and external damage had been done. Then he translated: a thin steel shaft had embedded itself into Ahmed’s torso, and must be removed. Luckily bleeding was minimal. It didn’t appear to have sliced any vital organs, according to MRI’s, X-rays, and CAT scans, but one never knew.
“The good news, Mrs. Al-Babou, is your husband appears to be extraordinarily resilient. Impressive willpower. He may pull through.”
With that, the important, best-in-the business surgeon swiveled on one heel and strode back toward the operating room.
The brightly lit Emergency waiting room buzzed with lateness. Realizing Ahmed would be in surgery a long time, Dalton Norvell encouraged his wife to head home. It’d been a draining day, evening, and night. He told her to send the two bodyguards who’d followed them– who now kept unobtrusive watch nearby– home as well.
“No!” she insisted.
“Baby doll,” he told her, exasperated yet amused, “I’m a grown man and can take care of myself.”
Trinity and Zane observed this. “Maybe you should go back to your hotel,” Zane suggested to her, “in your rented car, and get a few hours sleep. Then come back later. It’s going to be a long night.”
“Me?” she said, blue eyes flashing within her dark face. “No, you can leave, Zane.”
Trinity looked at him and wondered why she’d selected him in the first place. Maybe because through her life she’d felt like an outsider, and saw in him the same kind of person. A mirror image. Driven by her pains and insecurities– a tough background full of abusive experiences– to want to help others, those going through everything she’d been through, or worse. She saw that in Zane Day, in his green eyes. Here he was, an actual nominated candidate.
“You’re my charge, Zane. I adopted you into the movement. You’re my project. My obligation. So is Dalton”– who’d moved to a seat next to them– “and so is Ahmed. Call it community: that’s what the word socialism means to me. Everyday people getting along to help and protect ourselves and others. To help everybody.” She shook her head of hair at the two men to emphasize her point, though they understood her perfectly. “I simply mean, when we back a candidate we go all the way.”
As Ahmed was being operated on, under a strong sedative, he found himself in a dreamlike state. Still alive, he believed. Maybe. Must be. Green-masked doctors and nurses moved around before him in a haze. At the same time he saw the accident, the large orange truck jumping in front of him, too sudden. Something wasn’t right about it, he sensed, amid scattering thoughts. Thoughts bouncing and bounding away from him. Not right. Not right. . .
Of all people, Hannah Gribbens walked unescorted through the hospital emergency room doors, swinging her arms in exaggerated fashion. Still fully into her role.
“I’m jes’ here to con-grad-ulate Ahmed and wish him well,” she said to those arrayed around the waiting room while making her trademark faces. “Fast recovery, ya know. Can’t say yet I’ll support ‘im in the general. But ya never know!”
“Success,” a colleague said to the hospital’s chief surgeon as they stepped from the operating room. Ahmed Al-Babou would shortly be wheeled to a private room.
The team beamed as they pulled down their masks. The surgeon himself gave them a trace of a smile as they waited for a few words from him.
“I’m the Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan of the operating room,” he told them, to their immense pleasure.
Then he turned away and strode down the hall, satisfied with himself. Planets had been aligned. Someone was looking down from above.
“The Best!” he could be heard shouting as he pushed through a pair of swinging doors, his words echoing off walls.
“How much will he owe?” Peter Blase, the hospital’s PR director, asked Kohldwahr CEO Chet Evergold as they walked down a hallway in the gigantic building, away from a floor of plush suites, in and out of a silent elevator. Peter, a former local television newscaster, would soon be facing journalists, and wanted the full picture, even if he wouldn’t be disclosing it.
“Keep in mind Al-Babou was saved by a state of the art surgical technique, utilized by the best surgeon in the world,” Evergold said. “Without that, he’d be dead! The price: not much, not very much at all when that’s taken into consideration. The total bill: $953,000. That’s with his insurance covering part of the cost. The rest was not covered, per Section 278, Part I, Subpart D, Sub-subpart 23. If he doesn’t have the money, he can borrow it. He has a name. Presumably a decent credit rating. He can always mortgage his house.”
They were silent as they walked outside to a waiting limousine in a reserved parking lot at the back of the complex, the giant structure behind them looming overhead. A combination chauffeur and armed security expert, leaning against the car, stopped leaning and jumped into the front seat at the sight of them. Evergold thought to add to Peter, before he climbed in back of the limo, “He’ll learn! Wants to change the world. Free care, for everyone! But it’s a top-down world. He’ll learn to play ball. Might even get elected to something someday that way. Then he’ll have all the money he could ever want.”
Visiting her husband in his room twelve or so hours later, Sharara saw the real Ahmed. Sitting up in his hospital bed, coming out of the operation, the drugs, the sleep. A vulnerable human. He was thinner, subdued, without the facades he’d erected in trying to “be” somebody. The role he’d been playing since announcing his run for the U.S. Senate. Yet the spark in his eyes remained. She knew he’d be back on the campaign trail within days.
“So what do we do?” she asked after telling him the figure on the bill she’d been given.
“Pay it!” he said in a still-hoarse voice. “If I win, there goes my salary for more than a few years. If I lose, I’ll work two jobs. As so many people already are doing. You work. I work. We’re professionals. We can borrow from our parents and other relatives. We’ll get by, a helluva lot better than 80% or more of people in this country right now.”
They looked outside the window near his bed. The shades had been pulled open by a nurse, at Ahmed’s request. The full orange sun– the same sun they’d see anywhere in the world– was already moving toward the horizon. Another day gone. The election date moving closer. Hard campaigning to come.
“Is the future bright?” he asked her, taking her hand. “Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s doable. We’ll survive it.”
Several friends and allies were allowed in to see Ahmed after Sharara’s visit. She was on her way home to check on her son, who’d been left with Ahmed’s parents. To reassure all their family, as well as inform them. Present in the room were Dalton Norvell, Ahmed’s aide Cliff along with two other members of his staff, SDA rep Trinity Rotissary, and Zane Day. Notably, no one from the state Democratic Party apparatus had appeared, for whatever reason.
Ahmed glanced around the private room, more spacious than others he’d glimpsed on this floor. For all the hate and scorn he’d publicly received, he noticed he rated some level of special treatment. Such was the incurably hierarchical nature of this society. Maybe of any society.
Though he’d sure enough be paying for the room!
“Remember, we’re in this fight together,” he told them, his voice yet weak, but resonant with emotion and belief in what he was saying. “Us– and the people here and outside this hospital. Obstacles exist only to be overcome.
“The truth is we have a long campaign ahead of us. The opposition will slam us with every stereotype and any lie they can come up with. Corporate interests, lobbyists and stray billionaires will spend tens of millions of dollars to try to defeat us. They know their ruthless, greed-motivated, power-at-any-price philosophy is at stake. Even if we win the midterms in November, the battle is only beginning.
“Strap in.”