This will be changing a bit to suit the newer plot, but for the most part I like this section as it is. Enjoy!----------1. Or a Vision in a DreamHere is what the Last President of The United States dreamt the night before his 51st birthday:It was a very hot room: dim, silent, and heavy with indifferent sorrow. Rows and rows of empty cots topped with vinyl mattresses the color of bile.The President noticed as he drifted down the endless aisle, that he was wearing the same charcoal suit he wore the day of his inauguration.Finally, at the last bed, a small girl sat knees to chest watching The President's approach. He thought at first that maybe she was a burn victim, with patches of charred skin on her face and arms, but as he sat beside her, he saw that her skin was a deep swollen maroon, shiny and bloated with the pressure of subdermal bleeding. Her thick dark hair stuck to her face with slick sweat and he could feel her sick heat when he took her hand. She looked no older than six with large, black, almond eyes and mottled brown skin."There's a song about it," she said.He touched the stiff skin on her cheeks, "About this?"She nodded, "It's kinda funny, but also sad."He pulled her onto his lap and held her tight, "What's your name?" He wiped her forehead with the sleeve of his suit.She shrugged. "I can remember yours, though," she held up her thin wrist to his face. The ID bracelet read 'Jane Doe 2522'."There's a song about you, too," he said. "It's about the moon.""How does it go?"Luna, lunita cascabelera.Eres tan Luna, tan hechicera.Tu luz se cuela por mi ventana,Y al yo dormirme te digo adiós.The President said none of this out loud, but she heard it. She lay her head against his chest and she cried quietly."Now you can tell all your friends your real name," he said."It's worse to remember," she said, pressing the backs of her hands against her damp eyes."One day, I think you'll see it another way."Then bright lights shone in their faces and the war sirens wailed as helicopter blades beat wind and sound through the heavy muslin curtains, and the President woke dipped in slick sweat to the sound of his new baby girl wailing in his wife's arms down the hall.By Fall, The President would be speaking in tongues, and by Christmas, the first Pox cases would be reported on the western coast of the United States.In this one, Luna was waiting by The Art Museum near the Rocky Statue for a young Haitian named Jean-Rene.The President waited with the girl, now deep tanned and gangly, barefoot in torn denim shorts. He watched, perched on her shoulder, as a dark man in a powder blue beret and fatigues jogged towards them.The President took in the smell of a UN rationed breakfast and musky cloves as the couple embraced, and was suddenly struck with the knowledge that soon they would be clutching at each other in the back of an abandoned school bus parked at the edge of the Schuylkill river. Her shorts would be pushed down to her ankles, and sweat would be rolling down his shaved head to pool at the hollow of her collar bone. Jean would call her a dirty little girl in Creole, which she would wishfully mistake for 'I love you', and she would say it back at the end as she stroked his face.The President was shaken awake as he contemplated this scene, his wife bearing down on him as he lay on his mother's narrow sofa."The Doctor wants to talk to you." A cell phone was thrust in his face. They had flown to his mother's house in South Jersey immediately following a UN Conference in New York, after which The President collapsed in the men's room."Hello." He rolled onto his side and spoke softly.His wife watched with crossed arms as he casually scheduled an appointment. After an easy goodbye, he tossed the phone on the coffee table and met her eyes."What?"She shook her head and left the room. Most of their exchanges lately had been ending in departure. He liked that better, though, than the anxious searching of his face she had been prone to doing, even before the baby. He rolled over and squeezed his eyes shut to the sound of his sons tearing around out back. As he drifted off, he realized the Art Museum of his dreams hadn't any tourists snapping pictures of themselves next to the Rocky statue, or college kids doing homework on its steps. And so what? he thought as Luna's smooth face filled the space behind his eyelids.She's pulling him towards the stage, through a smoky throng of faceless kids in something like a hot, vast warehouse bursting with the crushing blare of poorly mastered electric instruments. The frontman was surrounded by halogen lanterns on a massive stack of colossal pallets. He was screaming and sweating into the microphone about anonymity and tribal consciousness; a god in a denim loin cloth and blonde dreadlocks.They were face to face now, the man on stage leaning into the crowd, his visage filling The President's entire view. His eyes introduced himself, and The President knew his name was Tarzan.Now the kids were out of the corners and on their feet, pressing Luna against The President's chest like a tormented tide. The President twisted away from the stage to face a crowd of fresh, sad monsters.The President's wife sat on the back porch sipping her mother-in-law's bitter iced tea and thinking about the fate of the world. Last night, Darcie, a childhood friend, had called and relayed last Sunday's sermon to her."He said it was like sitting at a baseball game with all your friends and family and your neighbors and the little kids who go to your kids daycare and The President and your doctor, and it's like going to this game and right before you sit down, someone whispers in your ear, 'This place is gonna be hit by a meteor in ten minutes.' So you know this place going to be destroyed, right? Now you would tell someone, right? Like you'd get on the jumbotron and you'd be like 'GET THE HECK OUT OF HERE!' Right? He said when we let our husbands and our children or even the neighbors go without the word of God, it's like knowing about the meteor, but just picking up your purse and driving home, leaving everybody there to just burn up.""Well, when you put it that way," said The President's wife. Later she would laugh it off and be grateful to have escaped a Virginian adulthood.Later still, after a flash of a nightmare jolted her awake, she would lie staring at the ceiling while her husband muttered next to her. Before the baby came, she would have whispered her late night worries into his ear, but lately they had adopted a policy of isolationism between them, balling their anxieties (lust, rage) up tight like the beginnings of a passive aggressive star.Usually, when the President's wife stared at the ceiling, she would visualize in great detail, doing Allen Menser from 11th grade in the woods behind his father's trailer. He smelled like the manure he shovelled after school at the stables near Williamsburg, and it was the sexiest smell she could imagine on nights when repressed bitterness and her husband's somnolent (and vocal) affairs kept her wide awake.This night, though, the ceiling formed more sober imagery, one that put a terrified fluttering in the center of her chest. It was more than her husband's growing distance, or the way the baby seemed to gasp for air in her bassinet. Part of it was how Nashwauk, Minnesota had to be moved five miles down because their children and pets kept sinking into the ground, under which miles and miles of undocumented toxic waste had been dumped 15 years earlier. And how a new locust had the Midwest at it's mercy, and how an ear of corn was $4.00 because of it.It was how the EU had begun closing it's borders to even American tourists. How it seemed like every other other night, a new group of cult members had offed themselves in a new obscure location (last week it was Cloete, Mexico).It was how countries who hadn't yet been hit by floods or earthquakes, or locusts were discreetly shutting their borders. How there was this brume of suspicion and introspection that tinged the speeches of UN leaders, Prime Ministers, and yes, even her husband.Most of all, it was the dazed look in the twins' faces when you asked them what schools they were looking at or what their major would be. Or how if you asked a someone on the street for the time, they jumped as if startled out of some grainy black and white nightmare. How her non-religious friends were dragging their families to church, and her religious ones shrugged at the idea. How she could easily write this all off as another cycle in the world's history; doom and gloom at the end or beginning of an era, but somehow that creeping feeling that this was different would not go away. She felt stuck in a dark, muted age.And so, Darcie's warning did not fall on completely deaf ears. Instead quietly nurtured the latent fears of a practical woman, one who penned Spring Cleaning: No-Wave Feminism in the New Millenium. It had one the National Book Award for Christ's sake. And who was Luna anyway?
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