The train had been his wife's idea; the poll guys backed her up. "Symbolic closure," Wilkinson said, drumming his fingers enigmatically. Now the President was pulling into Raleigh, where, four years ago, they'd buried his father, a waterlogged figure in a casket the size of a canoe. The President stayed through the eulogy—full of the benign prevarications such occasions demand—toured a cow milking operation the next morning, and carried the state by three percentage points.
Somehow, he had expected this trip to be agendaed: meetings, photos, speeches, a schedule from which to break spontaneously, or feel put upon by. But the sassy little Texan he'd taken as a press secretary was down in Aruba, on some white beach, yapping, presumably, into a phone.
The President fidgeted. His wife snored, humorlessly. A pair of Secret Servicemen stood outside the couchette, thick and impassive, like urns. He trundled to the club car, shaking a few hands along the way, grinning, and bought a candy bar the name of which he did not recognize. He watched the low-slung skyline of Raleigh slide past, and tried to remember something about the place, anything.
Once, the President thought he was having a heart attack. But that had been in Charleston—clammy old Charleston, like a sad knockoff of New Orleans—during the dedication of a new aircraft carrier. His chest tightened and his left arm tingled. This is it, he thought. The big sayonora. His wife took a Tums out of her purse and told him to quit complaining. When this failed to quiet him, a young navy doctor tapped at his chest and told him much the same thing, more gently.
The President had trouble sleeping more than an hour at a stretch. This had been useful in office; especially during the two overseas conflicts he had overseen. (It didn't seem quite fair to call them wars.) Some nights, restless with the glamorous residue of his day, he'd sneak off to the East Wing and call a handful of antagonists in Congress, leaving them gracious messages regarding arcane committee matters. He liked to imagine their secretaries checking voicemail in the morning, calling out to their co-workers: You'll never guess who called at four-thirty-two this morning! Listen to this! Listen to this!
The president climbed out of bed and stood in his socks for a long moment, waiting for someone to direct him. Then he climbed back into bed and tossed against the crisp sheets and fretted over the silliest aspects of his future. He was going to have to reapply for a driver's license. Wait in line at the DMV. If he didn't like the photo on his new license, tough. Who are you, the President?
In the White House, everyone he met was so quickly awed. Men shook his hand, but struggled to maintain eye contact. A surprising number of women lost their breath, or wept. Even the celebrities who made him nervous (Barbra Streisand, Merle Haggard) spoke froggily in his presence. So great was the sway of his title that little had been required of the actual him. He hugged people. He did a lot of hugging.
More recently, though, he sensed something beneath the awe, a kind of unrefined hurt that pinched the flesh around their eyes. With a bolt of dread, the President now recognized what this was: disappointment. Somehow, he had disappointed his constituents, whom he referred to as the American People, or sometimes, for the sake of rhetorical sweep, the good people of this nation.
This was easier to imagine than he would have hoped. Politics was the process of absorbing disappointment, the bad charisma of compromise, rules tailored by the wealthy, then filigreed into slogans by the speechwriters. Most days, his chief legislative role resided in serving as the broad, friendly face at which Congress, from time to time, hurled old tomatoes.
His mood, which seemed of vital importance to the American People, shifted from whimsy to gravatis as required. It became a thing apart from him, like an aura, a slightly seditious doppelganger. He attended briefings and summits and made a terrible lot of speeches. Sometimes, at night, his cheeks ached. The business of Washington carried on; he was as vital and inconsequential as a cherry blossom.
Outside Asheville, the President fell asleep and dreamed that his old cat, Tab, had been put to sleep. He knew this was a dream, because one of the few cogent memories of his youth was watching Tab disappear beneath the grill of an oncoming Dodge. But he appreciated the dream's authenticity, its driven illogic, and kept himself submerged even after his mother announced that it was him who would have to be put down, not Tab.
He woke on the outskirts of his hometown. Its silhouette, once gap-toothed and dingy, shone smugly. He recognized none of the buildings. As a young man, he had worked at a local paint plant, affixing labels to cans. One day, there was an explosion. Imagine that! Something exploding! Police and firemen and reporters dashed about, animated by their own urgency. (How pleasing it was to have urgency on your side!) But the paint factory was gone now, replaced by a strip mall with a blue plastic facade.
Against the somber slate of dawn, the station looked small and sad. His face, which adorned a billboard outside the railyard, looked bloated by comparison. The President understood his fame as a process of erosion; his interior life had been replaced, by increments, with a brand. But how, exactly, did one reverse the process?
He dressed hurriedly and marched into the coach compartment and that is when the train stopped, abruptly, the white chorus of vents stilled, and the clacking wheels. The President steadied himself against a headrest and listened to the human sounds becoming sovereign again: shirtfronts rustled, shoes clomped, couples damp from sleep working their jaws toward speech, the crescendo of zippers and crisp shimmy of chip wrappers, everyone embarrassed to interrupt the silence.
And later, eddying through the fumes of a final ceremony, bunting hung hopefully from the platform's rafters, the President was struck with a longing to revisit all the towns he had lived in as a youth—Killen and Snopes and Tuscaloosa—so that he might understand more vividly who he had been in them. All around him, people bustled and gawked, wept and laughed, hefting suitcases and flowers. He thought of his father: "Get me out of here," he'd said, sunk into a railed bed, plugged full of tubes. "You're the goddamn President. Do something!"
The President's eye drifted back to the train, which let out the long hiss of departure. The President knew what to do; his legs knew. They moved swiftly toward the nearest set of silver doors. The commotion behind him swelled and receded and swelled again, while the citizens, locked behind their windowpanes, gazed upon him shyly, suspended in berths where they might be anyone going anywhere, emerging.