The French Revolution (30 page)

The room bobbed with heads, yes, no, maybe, tired. “People want comfort,” retorted the emeritus professor. “They want politicians who can lead, who are like them, who reflect their values. Not to mention hitting the issues they can understand. Like the economy, or local services.”

“But if there’s any place you can get away with a bigger story, something more than taxes or trash delivery, it’s San Francisco,” the younger professor added.

“I’m not sure about the District 4 part,” Robespierre said. She stopped in front of the television and watched the grainy images, chaotic images, undirected unspecified images, light and dark scored to the sounds of destruction. “It’s misleading, like there’s a war in District 4 that needs to be stopped. And there’s something to be said for the blunt power of
Stop the War
. It’s easier to remember. And grander. A grand vision. A grand unstoppable beautiful vision of what could be. What should be.”

“I like it,” murmured a dreadlocked freshman everybody thought was sleeping.

“It’s not bad,” assessed the younger professor.

“Stands out,” the emeritus prof agreed.

“Whatever,” David sniffed.

“It’s right, isn’t it? Doesn’t it feel absolutely fucking honest?”

And though her advisory committee members were bushed and hungry and propagating an unpleasant communal odor, slightly delirious, too much time sitting in the same clothes, offkilter from the circular arguments and extended brainstorming and concentrated mental focus, they felt it work on their spirits, sensed a little lift in the arches of their feet, detected a fresh-tasting smell perfuming the inside of their clothes.

Three days later, when they received their shipment of one
hundred thousand STOP THE WAR! door hangers, nobody remembered ordering the exclamation point. Energized by their powerfully punctuated policy position, the younger political science professor gushed to an alternative newspaper columnist over espressos that Robespierre would block city services to the federal government unless the troops came home, stop policing the Federal Building unless the troops came home, introduce legislation that called for reclaiming the Presidio from federal control unless the troops came home. The columnist pumped his fist three times when the professor left to canvas doorknobs, the headline ANARCHISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! bursting into his head in eighteen-point type.

That same morning, Robespierre told a columnist at the rival alternative newspaper that, if elected, she would travel on official city business to Iran to stop the war in any way she could. This columnist, an analytical journalist with daily news experience, who enjoyed teasing out offbeat ideas and either pinpointing the hidden sincerity or dissecting the ludicrousness, asked her with a straight face how exactly she would do that.

“Simple,” Robespierre said, swabbing her lips with a circular tongue-mop, “I’ll lie down in front of tanks.”

“U.S. or Iranian?” the columnist asked.

“Both,” she decided.

“What about body armor?” he asked. “Protection? An escort?”

“Not sure,” Robespierre said. “Depends if the city will cover it.”

The two columns hit newsstands the next Wednesday morning; by lunch, Robespierre’s volunteer database had swollen from 9 to 418, her campaign website had crashed, and she’d been called by three national news programs. Her interviews were slapped on the end of nightly broadcasts, the “only in San Francisco” story intended to give viewers a break from gruesome war footage. “It’s what I care about,” she explained, her steadfast, serious face radiant on the television screen. “I’m fortunate enough to live in a rich city with nearly everything we could possibly
need. Stopping the war is what matters. So let’s stop it.” The networks rolled back to smiling anchors, sitcom reruns and rumor-mongering entertainment news shows, millions of viewers disagreeing on what to think of her—naïve, prophetic, a traitor, a hero, your classic San Francisco wackjob—but registering her fortitude, the guts to take a stand.

J. Malcolm Fletcher, attorney at law, rang her doorbell at 7:30 the next morning. Having fallen asleep a few hours earlier following a rum-heavy orientation with the new batch of volunteers, Robespierre gingerly wheeled open the door, kicked pizza crusts out of the hall, and asked the guy in the trench coat if he’d like any coffee, because personally she needed a fucking vat of the stuff.

“That’s fine,” said Fletcher, removing his hat. “Thanks.”

Robespierre took his response as a no and stuck a half-filled mug from the day before in the microwave. “So,” she said, distracted by the electromagnetic hum, “what do you want?”

His flighty smile was lined with gray stubble. “A campaign donation,” he said. “Thanks.”

“I see.” She checked her wrist where a watch would be. “Look, I gotta get going.”

He shook his head. “A check,” he said. “A client of mine asked me to deliver it to you. On his behalf.”

A green-gray force field descended around her skull, teeming with alcohol and teslas. “Great,” she managed. She noted how he held his hat upside-down with both hands, like a religious offering, perfect for catching puke if she couldn’t make the trash can.

“Well,” said Fletcher, his grin broadening. “That’s wonderful.”

Crappy luck, a roundabout talker. She couldn’t put up with this for long. “I can take that for you,” she offered, angling her shoulder toward the lawyer, who was antique and stooped and would be a cinch to force out the door if it came to that. “The check.”

Fletcher reached into a scraped suitcase and removed a gold card the size of a lottery ticket. “For you,” he announced. He
held the card with both hands and presented it to Robespierre with a slight bow. There was a charm to the gesture that penetrated her defensive earthworks—the slight dip in his hips? the unwrinkling of his forehead? the lacquered fingernails?—and she took the card and returned his smile and handed him the mug of coffee from the microwave.

“Coffee,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“Sure thing,” she agreed.

He set the mug down on the counter, picked up his suitcase, and walked out the door. Robespierre followed him as far as the sofa, when her knees gave way and her head disintegrated into a billion bone fragments and she fell unconscious for seventy-six minutes, until she was awoken by hangover groans, toilets flushing, the suck of the fridge pulled open and shut. The gold card adhered to her sweaty hand, and she peeled it off and opened it:

Cavernous breathing took over her body; she pushed her back against a wall and sank. Then she found the check on the floor, all the decimal places crammed into one line.

Her phone rang, and she let it drone on until an intern picked up.

“It’s for you,” somebody said, and she shuffled over on her knees, receiving the handset as if it were an ancient talisman.

“What?” asked Robespierre, but the dial tone was all that was there. She stood up, suddenly white-faced and heavy, and staggered over to the kitchen.

“You OK?” asked the intern, who looked like a fifteen-year-old version of Salma Hayek.

“We got money,” she drawled. “A lot.”

“Cool! That’s awesome!” But all Robespierre felt was emptiness and hopelessness, knowledge lost forever. “Do you want to, you know, put it in the bank?”

“Not that,” she whispered. “My dad.”

The intern pulled her into port, a total embrace, kneading her jerky shoulders through her sweater. “What about your dad?” the intern asked.

“Nothing,” Robespierre said, and went down the hall and started the shower. She sat on the toilet with all her clothes on and dove into a stump speech practice session, reciting campaign promises mixed with out-of-tune humming, errant spray from the showerhead spritzing her face until her blouse was soaked and her hair hung like heavy rope and she finally felt the slightest bit clean.

The quiet house chipped away at her. Even with the television always on and the fresh bag of low-cal Jiffy Pop that Esmerelda heated in the microwave each night, the building felt ghostly without Marat’s island rhythms, Robespierre clacking out communiqués on her computer, Esmerelda reporting on her weight loss with jubilant shouts from the bathroom scale. She screened Fanny’s beloved soap operas but couldn’t get past the low production values; she found reality television repulsive; athletics barbaric. She watched her collection of Paul Newman movies, but even those ran out of juice after the third or fourth screening, his gentleman’s ease feeling old-fashioned and unrealistic, reminding her of her age. The phone didn’t ring for months, not when Robespierre announced her run for supervisor, or when it became mathematically certain that Marat had a day or two on leave, or even when she finally paid off the last of the collections agencies, so she brought the handset down to Best Buy after work to have it tested. It went off on the first try, and she could only withstand two lonely rings before ripping the cord from the wall and charging out of the store.

In April of 2012, San Francisco unleashed a rare stretch of midsummer—dry air and fogless sun, the ocean breeze watered down to nil, Esmerelda’s secretaries skipping into the shop in skirts and no jackets, prattling on about weekend trips to the beach and barbecues and baseball games. Esmerelda caught the roofless trolley down Market Street for a meeting with her book-keeper, watching office workers dining al fresco along the sidewalk, extended loitering and stoop-sitting and milling about, bicycle traffic pouring out of the bike lanes and weaving in with top-down convertibles and open-sunroof hatchbacks. She took off her cloak for the ride back, the simple act of exposing her arms in public still a significant thrill.

The Caribbean conditions stayed high in her head for the rest of the day, nurtured by the delivery men dressed in shorts, the increased use of the vending machine by thirsty patrons, the sweat stains forming under customer armpits, the prevalence of sunglasses worn indoors, the searing glow illuminating the store’s large plate glass window. “Hey, Lakshmi,” she asked as closing time approached, “wanna grab a drink after quitting time? Maybe soak in a little sun?”

Lakshmi let out a shriek from the back of her throat and bolted for the bathroom.

“Worth a shot,” Esmerelda muttered as electric points surged in her brain, pushing her outside into the weird heat, unable to think, falling in with the comforting flow of pedestrians down the elevator to Muni, stepping onto a hot crowded train and gripping a steel bar until they stopped moving and a conductor shooed her out, switching to BART with a team of middle-aged women through a factory line of escalators and plastic gates, teaming up to issue a semicircle of scolding glares at perfectly healthy teens who refused to give up their dirty fabric seats. She shot under the bay, through the gasp and pull of tunnel pressure changes, rattling along the faded East Bay haze amid ancient brick warehouses and the smell of rail grease until a big clump of people got off in Berkeley, leaving her and a platoon of end-of-the-line
losers sleeping against the window and staring into blank space, nobody worth being around.

She got off at the next stop and stumbled into a vast parking lot, pavement the off-white of pine smoke, a fleet of bumbling cars and kids in khakis whacking their skateboards into benches. Hot wide space and distant buildings, a bland suburban stink-hole, more alone than ever.

“Help,” she said to herself. She slowly sank onto her knees, but even the joy of flexing her muscles without toppling over couldn’t overcome the seismic ache in her chest.

An old Chinese man hobbled beside her, carrying a pair of cigarette cartons. “You need ride?” he asked, releasing a stream of hot gasoline fumes, a couple bottles of rice wine plus whiskey.

An angel. “God yes.”

“Where you go?”

“Home.” But to say it hurt, there was nothing there anymore. “Scratch that. Take me somewhere close, somewhere fun. Outdoors.” She checked the guy out, seven sprigs of hair twirling from the center of his grape-skin smooth brow, small pummeled eyes, a dirty tuxedo and gold pocket watch, three playing cards in his breast pocket.

“Got it!” he spurted, then pushed his hair sprigs into his pate and hustled into the parking lot, disappearing behind a row of aged minivans.

“Freak,” she muttered, and headed over to the pay phone. All that remained of the phonebook was a gutted plastic casing, so she guessed on the easy-to-remember repeating digits she always associated with taxi services, 999-9999, seven squared, crazy eights, connecting with pizza delivery joints and used car dealerships until she ran out of quarters. Making a note to research cellphone plans, she headed back to the BART station to make herself some change when an
awooga
double-honk broke through, followed by the hard screech of metal on metal.