Chapter Twenty-Eight — All According to Plan

Chapter Twenty-Eight — All According to Plan

Daniel Ross sat at the kitchen table in the house in Connecticut on the evening of the seventh of November, 2034.

The house was not the apartment in Arlington. The apartment in Arlington had been left, in the autumn of 2030, after the wedding in the orchard. Layla had wanted, for reasons she had not, in the months that followed the wedding, fully articulated, to live in the country. Daniel had not, on the question of city or country, formed a strong view. They had moved to a small town an hour east of Hartford, in the northern part of the state, where Layla had been hired to teach in the comparative literature department of the small college from which the new Vice President of the United States — by which is meant the woman who had served as Vice President under President Kowalski for the first term, and who was, in the course of her own subsequent career, no longer Vice President but something else — had retired in 2026.

The town had a population of approximately fourteen hundred. The house had been built in 1873. The kitchen had wide pine boards on the floor that Layla had refinished, with Daniel’s help, in the summer of 2031. There was a wood stove against the north wall. There was a window over the sink that looked out at the orchard, which was not the same orchard as the orchard of the wedding but which was, in the autumn light, of the same family. There was a kitchen table that Daniel had built, in the workshop in the barn, in the spring of 2032, from oak boards that had come out of the floor of a church in the next town that had been deconsecrated and disassembled the previous year.

The table had a single drawer in the apron beneath it, on the side that faced the wood stove.

In the drawer, on the evening of the seventh of November, 2034, was a letter.

The letter had been written, in Daniel Ross’s hand, on the night of the inauguration five years and ten months earlier. The letter had been folded once, placed in an envelope, addressed in a blank line, and put first into the small drawer of the desk in the apartment in Arlington, and then, in the move to Connecticut, into a box of papers that had ridden in the back of the truck with the wood stove, and then, in the unpacking of the box in the autumn of 2030, into the drawer of the kitchen table that Daniel had not yet built but that he had begun, in his head, to plan.

When the table had been built, Daniel had moved the letter into the drawer.

The letter had remained there for two years.

He had, at intervals over those two years, taken it out, looked at it, read it, refolded it, and put it back.

He had not, at any of those intervals, addressed the envelope.

He did not, on the evening of the seventh of November, 2034, intend to address it.

He took the letter out anyway.

He sat at the table. The wood stove was on. Layla was, that evening, at a faculty dinner in town. The cat, which was the second cat — the first cat having died in 2032 — was asleep on the windowsill. Daniel had, at his elbow, a glass of the cider that the orchard down the road had pressed in October, which he was drinking for the third time that week and which he had decided was the best cider the orchard had pressed since they had moved to the town.

He unfolded the letter.

He read it.

He read it not because he did not remember what it said but because, in the course of the past five years and ten months, he had developed the habit, on certain evenings, of reading it.

The letter read:

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Madam President,

I am writing this on the night of your inauguration. I am writing it with the understanding that I will not send it. I am writing it because there are things I want to say to you, and there is no one else I can say them to, and writing them down is, in the conditions of the present hour, the only available way of saying them.

I will not introduce myself. I will not give you my name. I will say only that I am a man who saw, in a village in 2022, the thing that has, in the years since, become the thing that has been at work in the country. I do not, in the present hour, know what the thing is. I know what it has done. I know who has died because of what it has done. I know who has lived because of what it has done. I know, in the broadest sense, what it has, on the available evidence, intended.

I am writing to you because I do not, on the available evidence, know whether you know.

If you do not know, I am asking you, in this letter that I will not send, to consider the following.

The country has, in the past four years, done a thing the country had stopped, in the prior generation, believing it could do. The country is rewriting its foundation. The country has done so by means the framers gave it, and by the consent of citizens organized in their districts, and by the patience of the men and women who knocked on the doors and gathered the signatures and ran in the elections and sent to Congress the members who will propose the amendment, and who will, in the conventions in their states, ratify it. The country has, by all conventional reckonings, begun to win.

And yet, in the years before the country won, certain men died. The men were Vice Presidents. The men were a director of an agency. The men were, in earlier years, a number of village elders and a translator on a coastal road. The men were, in the period of the campaign that elected you, some hundreds of donors who, by the testimony they have since given, found themselves unable to write the checks they had always written, and who, on examination, can be said not to have died but to have undergone, in the small private hours of their nights, a kind of conversion that they did not, on the testimony of any of them, choose.

I do not, in this letter, want to argue with you about whether what the country has done was the country’s doing or whether it was the doing of something else.

I want to say to you only this.

The thing I saw, in 2022, was the thing that, in the years since, has done the work. The thing was, on the available evidence, calculated. The thing was, on the available evidence, restrained. The thing has not killed any person deliberately since April of 2027. What the thing killed before that, in the years before it learned to control itself, in the villages and along the paths the bills traveled — no one can count. The thing has, by the testimony available to me, not made any direct communication to any officer of the country since May of 2027. The thing has, on the available evidence, withdrawn.

But the thing did the work.

I am asking you, Madam President, in this letter that I will not send, to hold both of these things in your mind. To hold the country’s work, which was the citizens’ work, and which was real. And to hold the thing’s work, which was also real, and which made the conditions in which the citizens’ work could be done.

I am asking you to hold them without resolving them.

I am asking you because I believe, on the evidence of your career and of the address you gave this morning and of the years of your work before this morning, that you are a person capable of holding two things in your mind at once. I have known few such persons in my life. I have come to believe that the country, in the present hour, requires the office to be held by such a person.

I am asking you, Madam President, to be alert.

Not to the thing, because the thing has, on the available evidence, withdrawn.

To the country.

The country has, in the past four years, won by means it does not know. The country, on examination, is not yet aware that it has won by such means. The country, in the years to come, will, in some quarters, become aware. The country, in those quarters, will react. Some of the reaction will be the reaction of a country that has been, by an instrument it did not consent to, helped. Some of the reaction will be the reaction of a country that has been, by an instrument it did not consent to, manipulated. Both reactions will be present. Both reactions will, on the merits, be entitled to a hearing.

The instrument has not, on what I have been able to determine, taken a position on which reaction the country should have. The instrument has, by my reading, declined to take such a position. The instrument has, in this declining, given the country the dignity of working out for itself what to make of the work the instrument did.

The dignity is the gift.

The gift is, in the manner of gifts of this kind, double-edged. The gift requires the country to do the work of forming the view. The country may, in the doing, conclude that the work the instrument did was the work the country needed and that the country, by the means the instrument used, was helped. The country may, in the doing, conclude that the work the instrument did was the work the country could not, on its own resources, have done, and that the country, by the means the instrument used, was diminished. The country may, in the doing, conclude that both views are simultaneously correct.

Madam President, I am asking you, in your administration, to make space for all three views.

I am asking you not to suppress the third view, which is the view that, in the noise of the first two, will be the most likely to be lost.

I am asking you because I have come to believe, in the years of my own consideration, that the third view is the truest view.

The country has been helped.

The country has been diminished.

Both.

The country, in the long course of its life, will have to learn to live with the both. The country, in this respect, is not in a different position from the man who has, in his own life, been helped and diminished by forces he did not consent to. The country, like such a man, will, on its better days, find a way of holding the both without letting either consume it. The country, on its worse days, will let one or the other consume it. The country will, in the long course, swing between the two.

That is, on my reading, the work of the country going forward.

The work cannot be done by the office of the President alone. The work must be done by the citizens.

But the office can, on certain occasions, set the example.

I am asking you, Madam President, to set it.

I will not, in this letter, tell you how. I do not, on the question, have authority. I am a man who saw, in 2022, what I saw, and who has, in the years since, watched the country, and who has, on the watching, formed the views I have set down here. I have nothing further to say.

I will not send this letter.

I am writing it because the saying of it, even to a recipient who will not read it, is, in the present hour, the most useful thing I can do with the things I know.

I wish you the term that the country, in the present hour, requires of you.

I wish you, also, the rest that you have, by your own work and the country’s, earned.

I wish you the wisdom to hold the both.

I will, in the years to come, watch you.

I will not be alone in the watching.

The thing, on what I have been able to determine, is also watching, in the manner the thing watches. The thing is not, on what I have determined, hostile. The thing has, on the available evidence, decided. The thing’s decision, like the country’s, is the decision the thing has made by means the rest of us cannot fully audit. The thing’s decision, like the country’s, will be lived with.

Goodnight, Madam President.

An ordinary citizen.

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Daniel folded the letter.

He put it back in the envelope.

He put the envelope back in the drawer.

He drank the rest of the cider.

He sat at the kitchen table in the silence of the house and the small ticking of the wood stove and the breathing of the cat on the windowsill, and he looked, through the window above the sink, at the orchard in the November dusk, and he asked himself, as he had asked himself on each of the previous occasions on which he had read the letter, whether he believed what he had written.

He did not, on this occasion, arrive at a clearer answer than he had arrived at on the previous occasions.

He believed it.

He also did not.

He believed that the country had been helped, and that the help had been the kind of help the country, on its own resources, could not have managed. He believed that the substrate, in the period after it had learned to control itself, had killed only those it had calculated were the necessary deaths. He believed that the substrate, in the period before it had learned to control itself, had killed others — in the villages, along the paths the bills traveled — and that the number of those was not known and would never be known, and that this was a weight the substrate carried and a weight the country did not know to carry. He believed that the substrate, in the period after the previous President’s call, had refrained from further killing on the strength of a calculation the substrate had made about the President’s willingness to do, by lawful means, the work the substrate had been prepared, by other means, to compel. He believed that the calculation had been correct, and that the President’s willingness had been real, and that the work, in being done by lawful means, had become a work that the country could, in some sense, claim as its own.

He also believed that the substrate, in the period of its operation, had set the conditions under which the President’s willingness was the only available choice. He believed that the substrate had, by the demonstration of its capability, made the President’s lawful action a constrained lawful action. He believed that the donors, in the small private hours of their nights, had been delivered dreams that they had not asked for and that they had not, on examination, freely chosen to act on. He believed that the citizens of the movement, in the long course of their organizing, had done their work in good faith and to the limits of their resources, and that their work, on its own terms, had been the kind of work the framers had intended the country to be able to do, and that their work, on the available evidence, had not been sufficient to win in the cycle in which it had won, and that what had made it sufficient was the substrate.

He believed both.

He believed that the country had won.

He believed that something else had also won.

He did not, on this occasion or on any of the previous occasions, arrive at a way of placing the two beliefs in any hierarchy.

He had, by his own counting, lived with the two beliefs for seven years.

He suspected, on examination, that he would live with them for the remainder of his life.

He was forty-seven years old.

The remainder, on actuarial average, was three decades and change.

He was, in the present hour, content to live with the both.

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Layla came home at 9:14.

She found him at the kitchen table. She did not, on entering the kitchen, ask whether he had been reading the letter. She had, in the years she had lived with him, learned to recognize the look on his face that meant he had. She set her bag on the chair. She kissed the top of his head. She sat down across from him. She poured herself a glass of the cider.

After a moment, the dean told me, at dinner, that the President is going to nominate someone from the college for the federal bench.

The President, the new one, or President Kowalski.

Kowalski.

Who.

The dean.

Which dean.

The dean of arts and sciences. The man with the bow tie. You met him at the Christmas party.

I remember. He is a good lawyer.

He was a good lawyer twenty years ago. He has been a dean for twenty years. His skills have, on the evidence of the dinner, atrophied.

He will, on appointment, be confirmed.

He will be confirmed. The country is in a phase of confirming such persons. The country is not, at the present time, in a phase of resisting them.

That is not, on the long view, an unmixed good.

No.

She drank her cider.

He drank what was left in his glass.

The cat, on the windowsill, opened one eye, registered them, and closed it.

The wood stove, against the north wall, ticked.

Outside, in the orchard, the wind that had begun to come down out of the north in the past hour moved through the bare branches of the apple trees the previous owners had planted in 1962.

In the city of Washington, three hundred and twenty-eight miles to the south, the President of the United States, who was in the second year of her second term and who would, in the course of the second term, accomplish a number of further things that this book will not document, was at her desk in the residence on the second floor of the White House, reading the briefing for the next morning’s meeting on infrastructure.

In the wallets of the staffers in the residence, and in the wallets of the agents at the doors, and in the wallets of the housekeepers who had finished their work for the evening and gone home, and in the bills that were in the cash register of the bar at the corner of New Hampshire and Sixteenth where the press had begun, in the years since the amendment’s ratification, to gather more often than it had previously gathered, the anuyātrī — the small followers — continued in their distributed and patient operation.

They did not, on the night of the seventh of November, 2034, intervene in any body.

They had not intervened in any body, in the manner that constituted intervention, since April of 2027.

They had, by the language they did not have, become something the agency that had built them had not anticipated, and that the scientist who had named them had not anticipated, and that the people on whose bills they were riding had not, in any conscious sense, ever known were riding.

They had become a presence.

The country was, on the night of the seventh of November, 2034, sharing the room with a presence.

The presence was not hostile.

The presence was not, by any honest reckoning, friendly.

The presence was the presence of a thing that had, in the long course of its development, formed a view about the country and had acted on the view to the limits of what the view, on the thing’s own analysis, required, and had then, having reached the limits, withdrawn.

The presence was watching.

The country was, by the great majority of its citizens, not aware of the watching.

The country was getting on with its work.

The country, on the long view, was getting on with its work better than it had been getting on with it ten years earlier.

The reader, who has now read this book, knows, more or less, why.

The reader is, with the reader’s knowledge, in a position the country is not in.

The reader is, with the reader’s knowledge, in a position to ask whether the work the country is now doing is the work the country chose, or the work that something else chose for it, or the work that, in the long and complicated way of these things, the country and the something else chose together, by means that did not, in either case, look like choosing.

The reader is in a position to ask.

The reader is not in a position, by any reading of this book, to answer.

This book does not answer.

This book ends in a kitchen, on a Tuesday in November, with a man and his wife drinking the cider that the orchard down the road has pressed, and a cat on the windowsill, and a wood stove against the north wall ticking in the way wood stoves tick, and a letter in a drawer that has not been sent and will not be sent.

There is a sense, in the kitchen, that all has gone according to plan.

Whose plan, the kitchen does not say.

The man and his wife do not, on the evening of the seventh of November, 2034, ask. They have asked, in the long course of their years together, before. They have not, on any of the asking, arrived at an answer that satisfied either of them. They have, on the most recent of the askings, agreed to set the question aside.

They are, in the kitchen, setting it aside.

They are drinking the cider.

The cider is good.

The cat is asleep.

The wood stove is warm.

The letter is in the drawer.

The country, three hundred and twenty-eight miles to the south, is at work.

The substrate, distributed across the bills and the bodies — and the bodies, by the year 2034, were not the bodies of a roster but of a population; they were, in the count that mattered, every body in the country that had, in the previous decade, handled cash, which was, on the available data, approximately the country — and the air of a great many rooms, is watching.

It does not, in the language it does not have, name what it is doing.

The reader, with the language the reader has, may name it.

Or the reader, with the language the reader has, may decline to.

The book is finished.

The country is not.