A Reason to Believe
In the third installment of “Not One Domino Shall Fall,” our characters shift into new roles again this week–to the campaign trail.
My brother and I had a charmed upbringing: horseback riding, sailboats, international travel, housekeepers, exotic foods, health insurance. I was embarrassed about it, ashamed of my immense privilege. To make up for it, I wore beat up tennis shoes and tried passing myself off as a punk rocker. My peers could see through my anarchic façade but, as long as I bought the drugs and the beer, they’d let me pretend to be anything I wanted.
My brother, though, he just rolled with it. He didn’t resent his station and flaunted it like the fancy boy he was—we both were—at heart. This somehow made him more relatable, more down to earth. He could talk to anyone, from any stratum of society and make them feel understood. He was so good at it, that he did the only thing that made sense. He went into politics.
Our pop set him up with everything—a downtown office, political strategists, pollsters, soothsayers, the best ad-buys, consultants, a personal sushi chef, the whole nine yards. The only thing he didn’t have was a campaign manager and, for some reason, he asked me.
I didn’t know what I was doing at first. I kept looking at these giant posters of my brother’s face—his big gleaming teeth, looking like the columns on the front of the White House—and feeling completely inadequate, a feeling I was very accustomed to. After a botched campaign event where the bikers I’d hired to do security spiked the punch with LSD, I decided to quit. But my brother refused my resignation.
He was at his big oak desk, looking warm and composed. As usual, I was the opposite—cold and sweaty. He came around and sat on the edge next to me and put his hand on my shoulder.
“If you give up now, how will you ever know how great you could have been?”
“I don’t think greatness is on the table,” I said.
“You’re right. It’s not,” he said. “Greatness is in you.”
I hit my stride after that. It wasn’t an easy ride and I fucked up plenty, but we powered through. Before long, the presidency was in sight. Somewhere in there, our father died. We never talked about him, the dark places from which he extracted his immense fortune. In the end, it was like we barely knew him. Instead of talking, we mourned him by staying in the fight. We mourned him by winning.
On inauguration day, there were plenty of detractors. There was the military brass who thought we were a bunch of peaceniks, the intelligence community who suspected us of being communists, and organized crime and Wall Street—two sides of the same coin—who hid in the shadows, quietly waiting to see which way we would make the wind blow. There were a lot of stories printed with “anonymous sources,” stating that our administration was full of clowns, dipshits, rookies, fuckboys, and impostors. They weren’t entirely wrong but the words still hurt.
It’s hard to say when or how it happened but my brother’s priorities began to morph, shift, develop. Power had once appeared as nothing more than another shiny toy but now that he possessed it, he realized there was more to the presidency than non-stop adoration and trysts with models and movie stars. Maybe it was the war overseas or maybe it was the rampant inequality at home. Or maybe it was the acid trip he took with one of his more radical lovers. He never told me and I never asked. I remember sitting in his office with the fire roaring, his fingers tented in front of his face. He told me our institutions were old and crumbling. It was time to shatter them, scatter them to the wind, and rebuild.
My brother was killed one year into his second term. They shot him down in front of a crowd of thousands. The act was a message punctuated by the crack of gunfire. I wasn’t with him, which is something I’ll always regret. Ed, a senior intelligence official who we were days away from firing, called me at my office. He told me he was sorry to break the news. Before I hung up, a thin black viper’s tongue shot out of the phone’s earpiece and flicked itself at me. This told me everything I needed to know.
The assassinations continued. A Black Muslim was shot to death on a stage in Harlem after urging people of all races to come together to fight the fascist power structure. A Black preacher was shot in front of his hotel after calling for an end to foreign wars, saying a war on poor people anywhere was a war on poor people everywhere. Executions and assassinations ate away at the social fabric of countries across the globe and Ed’s tongue left a trail of slime across every crime scene.
After being confronted with all this death, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was nothing, a disaster of a person. I needed a leader. We all did.
I had a secretary—I know how this sounds, but there weren’t a lot of other jobs for women in those days—and she worked in the office, day after day, watching as I literally slammed my head against the walls, knocking down pictures and breaking my nose in new and interesting ways. I cried so much that the salty water came up to my ankles. She waded over to me and sat on the edge of my desk just as my brother had done.
“You really believed in him, huh?” she said.
“Of course,” I said.
“And he really believed in you?”
“I guess.”
“So why don’t you pull yourself together? There’s work to be done.”
The cord of my phone coiled like a snake, still pregnant with Ed’s poisonous call. It slithered across my desk, baring its fangs. The woman grabbed it and threw it across the room. It cried out as it shattered into a million pieces. We grabbed some buckets and started bailing out the office. It took hours.
This woman had some big ideas about organizing and coalition building. In the office she’d seemed so spritely, but now I could see the battle lines that ran across her hands and face. I tried not to stare, but there was no getting around it. They were beautiful.
We built a new campaign. I promised universal healthcare, an end to American imperialism, the abolition of our crooked and cruel criminal justice system, and, finally, I would find the people who killed my brother and bring them to justice. In public, Ed smiled and shook my hand. But I could see bullets in his eyes.
Counseled by the voices of the recently assassinated and guided by the woman’s strategy, I was unstoppable, the thing was a lock. On election night, we had a party at a giant hotel that looked like a castle. I asked my security detail to keep their distance as I went in through the back entrance. I wanted to show the world I wasn’t afraid. I stopped to shake the hands of everybody on staff. It’s what my brother would have done.
The first shot blew out my hearing; my world shrank, reduced to ringing and searing pain. I turned and saw a man wearing a cheap oversized suit holding a gun. His arms and legs were suspended by thick cords that went up through the ceiling and into the sky. A giant hand hovered above us, dictating his every move.
A finger twitched on the giant hand and the man fired again. A bullet struck me, and I fell to the floor. My blood flooded the kitchen, knocking over steam tables and ruining all the salads. The woman grabbed a butcher’s knife off a cutting board and started climbing the cords, slashing at the giant hand. As she ascended, making her way to the top, I watched unafraid, secure in the notion that, now and forever, I was protected.
Another sketch next week…
Jeremy Steen lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has previously published work in the Oxford American, New World Writing Quarterly, The Racket, Rejection Letters, The Sublunary Review, among others.
Follow him on Bluesky.