Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [170]
By then it was around eight in the evening. Phil had been on his way to the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also known as the Colbert Hour, at which Phil had been expected to shine. After the shooting many of the attendees stayed, standing around in quiet groups, waiting grimly to hear the news, reminding each other this had happened before, and reminiscing about the previous times.
All the Quiblers were at home. When Roy called with the news they were having dinner. Charlie jumped over to switch on the TV, and then they were confronted with the usual images, repeated over and over like a nightmare you could never escape: reporters outside the hospital, administration spokespeople, including Andrea, looking pinched and white-faced and speaking as calmly as she could. And, of course, jostled and bouncing images of the shooting itself, caught mostly in the immediate aftermath, looking like something from an art film or reality TV.
Charlie and Anna sat on the couch before the TV holding hands, Anna squeezing so hard that Charlie had to squeeze back to protect his bones. Nick sat with his face right before the screen, big-eyed and solemn; Joe didn’t understand what the fuss was about, and so began to get angry. Very soon he would begin to demand his proper spot in the limelight. Anna started to cry, bolted up and went into the kitchen, cursing viciously under her breath. She had never shown any great regard for Phil Chase or for politicians in general, as Charlie well knew, but now she was crying in the kitchen, banging the teapot onto the stove as if crushing something vile.
“He’s not dead yet,” Nick called out to the kitchen. His chin was trembling; Anna’s despair was infecting him.
Charlie clung to hope. That was what he had at that moment. Anna, he knew, hated to hope. It was to her a desperate and furious emotion, a last gesture.
Now she stormed past them to the front door, yanked her coat blindly out of the closet. “God damn this country,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I’m going for a walk.”
“Take your phone!” Charlie cried as the door slammed behind her.
The Quibler boys stared at each other.
“It’s all right,” Charlie said, swallowing hard. “She’ll be right back. She just needed to get away from—from all that,” waving at the screen.
Already all the channels were deep into the tabloid mode that was the only thing the American media knew anymore. Phil’s struggle for life was now that beat that came right before the commercials, that moment when they were left hanging, on the edge of their seats, until the show returned and the story was resolved one way or the other. It was all perfectly familiar, rehearsed a million times, ER meets West Wing. Charlie watched it feeling sick with fear, but also increasingly with disgust, feeling that all those TV shows somehow brought things like this into being, life imitating art but always only the worst art. His stomach was a fist clenched inside him.
For him, as for all the older viewers, there were other reasons than TV shows to feel this sick familiarity: not just the big assassinations of the sixties, not just 9/11, but also the attempt on Ford, the attempt on Reagan. It happened all the time. It was a part of America. In reaction to it they would all mouth the same platitudes they had said before. The lone assassin would turn out to be a nonentity, hardly noticed by anyone before; and no one would point out that the constant spew of hatred against Phil in the right-wing media had created the conditions for such madmen, perhaps had even directly inspired this one, just as no one had said it about the Oklahoma City bomber back in the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when for lack of anything better to hate the hatred had been directed at the