He had won.
Barely. The morning after the election, he stood in his boxer shorts in the early quiet of his bedroom, the television on. His wife brought him coffee in a white cup. This term he would show them.
“You did it,” she said, smiling through miles of makeup.
He nodded. “Let’s see if it’s worth it. I mean how much money we’ll make.”
The cup shook slightly in his hand.
“This is the presidency of the United States, honey. It’s not about the money.”
He glared at her and pulled up his pants.
“Do you need help with those?” she asked with her own deep cynicism.
The job was bigger than he had thought. The days were loud, filled with meetings that turned to noise before he could finish a sentence. Everyone wanted something. His aides smiled too much. His vice president smiled most of all—young, steady, full of the faith of those who haven’t yet seen how fast things rot, and with hunger in his eyes. His key advisor watched him sometimes in the meetings, how he gave thumbs up and dominated the camera, how he checked his phone. This adviser looked at him the way a son looks at the father he plans to bury.
He slept less. When he did sleep, he dreamed of crowds disappearing into a great sea. He would wake up sweating with the idea that only one person was left in the crowd, his barber.
He told himself he had changed everything. He said it on television, on the new network he watched late into the night and early the next morning. He even said it to the mirror: I changed a lot.
But inside he felt the slow pulling away—the crowds growing smaller, the speeches thinner, the cameras hungrier. This was his second term and everything he looked at seemed to say “done.” The more of an effort he made on one day, the more uneasy he’d be the next. Maybe he hadn’t changed anything.
He had built things in his life. Towers, casinos, reality television shows. There was always a kind of truth in that, he thought. Folks said he cared nothing for the truth, but people needed to be distracted. They needed to forget. He had given that to them. He was the Woody Allen of politics, he smiled at the thought. Now they came to him for something else—belief. That was harder—but it was their problem.
He had never believed in The Truth. It was just a word men and women used when they ran out of better ones. But lately it was visiting him in flashes. In the mirror—his hair was thinning—and in the window’s reflection at night when he saw himself old, the face sagging, the eyes still bright but uncertain. His vibrant young Vice President.
He thought about his legacy, what he’d leave behind, like the social media company he’d named Truth Forum. The irony had pleased him. For a while. But the pleasure was thin and left a bad taste. Each post was a mirror of the last one. Each crowd cheered the same words a little more faintly. He knew that they were not there for the truth, but for him, for their own image they saw in him. What would happen when he wasn’t there?
He began talking to himself at night. Then to someone else.
He didn’t believe in the Devil the way his followers did, but sometimes he imagined him sitting across the room, half in shadow, the grin familiar. The Devil didn’t tempt him. He didn’t have to. He only listened. Was this his own Gethsemane? A Devil who listened like his father never did? All would be better in the morning when he would post on social media. It reassured him and his audience—no matter what he posted, as long as he did post. Then, doubt again. He couldn’t shake this constant doubt.
“They’ll devour it all,” he said aloud to himself and to Satan. “Every bit of it. The news, the pundits, the kids online. I caught it—the whole grand thing—and they’ll strip it to the bone by the time I’m gone and be on to the next.”
The Devil said nothing. He only watched and listened like the night sky.
Once, the old president woke before dawn and stood at the window of the residence. The city was dark, street lights lining the Mall. For the first time, he wondered if he’d ever really caught anything at all. Maybe there was no fish but only the hunger for it.
He rubbed his eyes and whispered, “I could have been something else. I always wanted to build those hotels in Dubai and Russia.”
The next day, he appeared on Fox News and said he was the greatest president of all time. The host laughed. He laughed too. But after the cameras stopped, he stayed in the chair longer than usual, staring at the reflection of the studio lights on the glass. Hesitant to let go of that smell that he knew was fading.
He knew the young vice president was already making calls. The aides were dividing loyalties. The donors had moved on. He would not run again, not really. He told people he might, because hope made them listen, and it fucked with the other side. But he knew this was the end. There was nothing else to do.
And . . . when the term was done, he left the White House quietly. The sky was the same pale gray as the morning he’d been sworn in. A Secret Service man stood by the car.
“Ready, Mr. President?”
“Yes,” he said.
He turned back once. The White House glowed faintly in the winter light. It looked smaller now, even with the new ballroom. He smiled, just a little.
“It was a good fight,” he said.
The agent nodded, though he didn’t understand. No one understood. He looked again into the agent’s eyes hoping for more understanding, for a recognition. But there was nothing. Only the agent’s job, his duty.
The Deep State, he thought. I never beat The Deep State.
As the limousine pulled away, the old president leaned back and closed his eyes. In the grey light receding behind him, he saw the open sea—not the real one, but the sea of faces, the lights, the roar that had once been, the would-be assassin. He saw them rushing toward him, endless and hungry. Then they began to fade, piece by piece, until there was only quiet water, and the sense of something big and shiny slipping away beneath the waves.