The Frankenstein Candidate (13 page)

She finished packing her things. Her skinny arms were carrying a lot, but he didn’t volunteer to take some of the packages. There were too many prying eyes in the school.

“I can give you a lift,” he said.

“No, it’s—”

“No, it is perfectly all right.”

She relented. He drove to her apartment in Fairfax County. They were quiet on the way. She never asked him about his family; she probably did not want to be reminded that he had one. She guessed he did not want to talk about his work. They almost always ended up talking about her life; today was no different. She spoke, as always, with passion about her future, her adopted country. He replied monosyllabically, struggling to say anything and always looking straight ahead even when the traffic light was red.

As she walked in to her apartment, she put her overcoat away. Her loose cotton dress seemed awfully out of place in a Virginia winter, and he found it strangely arousing. The smell of her perfume was still swirling in him. Words came to his lips, stopped, and went down his throat again; nothing he could think of saying seemed appropriate.

She offered to make tea, and he chose coffee instead. The room was cold. She turned her fireplace on. He thought the embers from the previous fire hadn’t been cleared, until he looked again—it was a gas-fired heater made to look like a drawing room fireplace. Good taste, he was thinking, but strange words escaped him as though he had a brain spasm.

“I guess this is good-bye then,” he found himself saying softly, and immediately he regretted it. Fortunately, she didn’t hear. The kettle was boiling; she was in the kitchen, and the crackle of the heater had added its own drums to the Calypso music floating in via a neighbor’s apartment.

The coffee was brewed just right. He sat on the sofa. There was a lounge chair at right angles to it. Proper décor invited her to sit there. She proceeded, however, to sit next to him like they were a couple and turned the TV on. They watched CNN for a long time, as though they were two geriatrics, existing but not living, waiting for the day to finish—the reality was that conversation had become unbearable. When two people are radiantly aware of the sexual tension in the air, words struggle to make themselves heard; a glance becomes a passionate kiss; a touch feels like an electric shock.

She sat close. There was that alluring smell again. Not a word was said as several awkward moments passed. She rested her head on his shoulder, sending an electric current through his body.

“I am tired,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. His hand went around her back and came to rest on her other shoulder, letting her head fall on his upper chest. Her shoulder felt bare. His hand had no right to sneak inside the sleeve of her dress, but it was not taking orders from his brain. His eyes continued to rest on the television screen, taking nothing in.

Fortunately for him, it was Francesca who broke the impasse. One moment, he was putting his coffee cup on the adjoining table, and the next moment, her lips were on his.

“Olivia,” his head screamed silently, but he was far too weak to resist. His mouth opened to receive her tongue.

Then he lost all track of time.

When he got himself together again, he noticed that the orange rug in the room was sparkling in the fire that had consumed them. The fire crackled—it was the color of warning, always ignored by men in a sexual stupor.

By the time his phone rang, he almost had to wake himself up from his surreal state. He was naked, as was she. They were on the rug. The television was still on, and the coffee had long since gone cold.

“Leave it,” she said.

His cell phone kept ringing. He had it on increasing volume.

Once again, he hesitated and almost reached out toward his jacket on the sofa, where he knew his phone was. Her nubile body pushed him down, and she smothered his face with her tongue. Third ring, and he began counting.

It was as though the phone represented his normal world, and everything for the rest of his life depended on his choice. The sixth ring was loud.

If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. Something in her was telling her the same thing. It was the temptress versus the phone.

The eighth, almost-deafening ring, died out into an eerie silence that was only interrupted by the crackle of the fire. The temptress had won. She knew it, and so did he.

He flipped her around. She wrapped her legs around him.

By the time his phone rang again a few minutes later, it didn’t matter anymore. The increasing volume was just the backdrop they needed to choreograph a perfect dual climax on the loudest ring, the eighth, an erotic musical symphony, a count of eight, a bar.

He left with a spare key to her apartment in his coat pocket, her profile still on the carpet, her face serene in a rapturous victory, her body unashamedly nude—the image in his mind was frozen in the glow of the embers.

It wasn’t until he was in his car that he decided to check his messages.

It was a voice he had never heard before.

“You were warned. You paid no heed to the warnings. But it’s not too late.”

The second message was the same voice, in a tone more chilling.

“There are consequences, Gary Allen. All you need to do is stop for a year, otherwise the consequences will be very dire.”

Goddamn it, the caller knew his name
. Gary looked around. There were other cars parked on the street, but as far as he could tell, they were empty. He cruised around, afraid to discover his caller but unable to resist the curiosity. He checked his caller profile. The caller ID was blocked. His pulse was racing. He decided to call Francesca.

“Hi…Francesca.” His voice shook.

“Hello, my lover, what’s up?” She sung the words in a Sixties rock melody that matched his trembling.

“I was just going to ask you whether…”

“Whether what, darling?”

Darling! Even Olivia never used that with him anymore. In fact, she had not even used “honey” for how long?
He did not remember.

“Umm. Whether you, whether…”

“Whether I have a boyfriend?”

“Yes, do you?”

“No.”

“Did you have one before?”

“Back in Belgium many years ago. Why do you ask?”

“Is there any chance that he…I mean anyone you know hates you or hates to see us together?” He tried to keep his voice from trembling.

“No. Did you just see a ghost? You sound scared.”

“No, no…I’m fine. I’ll call you.”
She must have heard his heartbeat on the phone, the beating was so loud.

He switched the cell off. He did not want her to get upset, and he could not become calm. He restarted his car, but he could still hear his heartbeat above the din of the engine.

On the drive back, he kept wondering about his choices—telling the police was one, one that almost certainly meant they would question Olivia. No, that’s no good. He could just stop seeing the girl, but he could not tick that box. No, he just wasn’t thinking straight—maybe he got drugged. Perhaps he could just avoid Francesca for a while, a week or two. Maybe some idiot was following him and playing pranks. The prankster would just go away if he laid low for a few weeks. That was it. A few weeks, that’s all he needed. And the next time his phone rang, he was going to answer it.

For a candidate who had just handsomely won the first leg of his presidential campaign, Quentin Kirby was not happy. He and his staffers had tried, without success, to get Frank Stein to meet with him. Stein had insisted on knowing what the agenda was before agreeing to a meeting. Then he had announced his candidacy a few days earlier than they had anticipated, which negated their ability to stop Stein from making a bid altogether. Finally, when Kevin Heller had suggested a meeting “to discuss what Stein could add to Kirby’s campaign to mutual benefit,” Stein had laughed off the request and asked him to tell Kirby that he should not bother. It was bad enough that Stein had the gall to refuse a meeting with the vice president of the United States, but what happened after that was much worse.

Not in their wildest dreams had they expected the sort of interview he had given at the Net Station. Once that was out, just about no one could keep quiet. Politicians, economists, journalists, television reporters, radio hosts, and television show hosts all pounced, and most were brutally scathing of Stein. Even Wall Street’s private equity investors and hedge funds, Stein’s own brethren, were shaking their heads.

The
Washington Day Monitor
called it “the most scandalous political campaign of our times” The
Chicago Sun-Tribune
said “It is time that independent candidates are disallowed from standing for president unless they could independently raise at least thirty million from third parties and demonstrate that to an independent electoral council. This would prevent billionaires from abusing the process in an orgy of self-serving rhetoric” using the very word that described the process Stein despised. CBS interviewed the Speaker of the House, who urged the country to ignore “the self-styled radicals and concentrate on the substantive candidates” who he dutifully and in a most bipartisan way identified as Kirby, Reed, Logan, Spain, Ganon, and Rogers.

John Hastings, host of the popular Los Angeles–based Hastings Radio Show, called it “the disgrace of American democracy that a billionaire businessman can use his own money to just abuse respected academics and spread long discredited free enterprise mumbo jumbo to serve his own ends.”

Yes, Quentin Kirby was distressed for the same reasons that Colin Spain was furious. He thought Stein timed his show to perfection, spreading his unregulated gospel moments before the Iowa caucus results were declared and effectively taking away large chunks of media time that rightfully belonged to Kirby and Spain. Actually, Kirby was doubly distressed. Here was a candidate who could have been promised a seat in his administration, perhaps even the Treasury Secretary position given his financial expertise. He could have poured hundreds of millions into Kirby’s campaign, effectively guaranteeing him a return to the White House.

He was still toying around with that idea when Kevin Heller put an end to it.

“Don’t even think about it,” Kevin cautioned. “That was weeks ago. Now, even to place his name on the campaign register, even if it came with no strings attached, could be a public relations disaster.”

Kevin Heller remained confident that Frank Stein would disintegrate of his own accord. His opening salvo alone had hurt a range of powerful people across a broad spectrum. The anger among the establishment was so palpable that Heller could not help but compare it with what he called “the typical Tea Party anarchy from ten years ago,” when in 2010, Tea Party–led activists had stormed the gates of Congress and helped overturn a Democratic majority.

Kayla Mizzi saw it all with a different lens. With cameraman in tow and microphone in hand, she was standing at ten a.m. at Times Square. She knew from the messages on her website that many would come.

It was January 12, 2020. It was the day that was going to test the notion that voter apathy had increased and no one cared any more.

By ten thirty a.m., a crowd of thousands had already gathered. New York Police Department personnel were rapidly deployed along Seventh Avenue, and the crowd kept increasing.