Distraction - Bruce Sterling [51]
“There’s just one problem though,” Donna said, expertly shuffling the deck.
“What’s that?” said Lana, munching a pistachio.
“The campaign manager should never sleep with the candidate.”
“She’s not really a candidate,” Lana said.
“I’m not really sleeping with her,” Oscar offered.
“He will, though,” Donna said wisely.
“Deal,” Oscar insisted.
Donna dealt the cards. “Maybe it’s all right. It’s just a fling. He can’t stay there, and she can’t ever leave. So it’s Romeo and Juliet without that ugly bother of dying.”
Oscar ignored her. “You’re shy, Lana.” Lana threw in half a Euro. The krewe always played poker with European cash. There was American cash around, flimsy plastic stuff, but most people wouldn’t take American cash anymore. It was hard to take American cash seriously when it was no longer convertible outside U.S. borders. Besides, all the bigger bills were bugged.
Corky, Fred, Rebecca Pataki, and Fontenot were already waiting in Holly Beach. Backed by the krewe with their on-line catalogs, they had made a touching effort with the rented beach house. They’d had ninety-six hours to put the wretched place in order. From the outside it was unchanged: a ramshackle mess of creaking stairs, tarry wooden stilts, salt-eaten slatted porches. A flat-roofed yellow cheesebox.
Inside, though, the desolate wooden shack now featured hooked rugs, tasteful curtains, cozy oil-flow heaters, real pillows, and flowered sheets. There was a cloud of little road amenities: shower caps, soap, towels, roses, bathrobes, house slippers. It wouldn’t have fooled Lorena Bambakias, but his krewe still had the skills; they’d pried the place loose from squalor.
Oscar climbed into the bed and slept for five hours, a long time for him. He woke feeling refreshed and full of pleasantly untapped potential. At dawn he ate an apple from the tiny fridge and went for a long walk on the beach.
It was gusty and cold, but the sun was rising over the steel-gray Gulf of Mexico and casting the world into wintry clarity. This local beach wasn’t much to brag about. Since the ocean had risen two feet in the past fifty years, the rippled brown shoreline had a gimcrack, unhappy look. The original site of the Holly Beach settlement was now many meters out to sea. The relocated buildings had been moved upslope into a former cow pasture, leaving a network of old cracked pavement diving forlornly into the surf.
Needless to say, many such structures on the rim of the continent had not been so fortunate. It was a common matter to find boardwalks, large chunks of piering, even entire homes washing up onto American beaches.
Oscar strolled past a glittering shoal of smashed aluminum. The plethora of drift junk filled him with a pleasant melancholy. Every beach he’d ever known had boasted its share of rusted bicycles, waterlogged couches, picturesque sand-etched medical waste. In his opinion, zealots like the Dutch complained far too much about the inconveniences of rising seas. Like all Europeans, the Dutch were stuck in the past, unable to come to pragmatic, workable terms with new global realities.
Unfortunately, many of the same charges could be leveled at his own United States. Oscar brooded over his ambiguous feelings as he carefully skirted the foamy surf in his polished shoes. Oscar genuinely considered himself an American patriot. Deep in his cold and silent heart of hearts, he was as devoted to the American polity as his profession and his colleagues would allow him to be. Oscar genuinely respected and savored the archaic courtliness of the United States Senate. The Senate’s gentlemen’s-club aspect strongly appealed to him. Those leisurely debates, the cloakrooms, the rules of order, that personalized, pre-industrial sense of dignity and gravitas.… It seemed to him that a perfect world would have worked much like the U.S. Senate. A solid realm of ancient flags and dark wood paneling, where responsible, intelligent debate could take place within a fortress of shared values.