The Pinocchio Syndrome

She opened the purse, which seemed inordinately huge, to search for the missing skirt and underwear. The purse was completely empty.

I’ve got to get to the ladies’ room. She saw the door marked ‘Ladies’ and went through it. The personnel director smiled indulgently, as though to say, ‘Yes, go ahead, I’ll wait for you.’ But at the last second he darted into the ladies’ room behind her.

There was something magical about that entry, for when they got inside he was no longer a man, he was a little girl. Karen looked at herself in the mirror and saw that she, too, had regressed through time and was small again, as she had been back home in Boston. She was still naked below the waist. So was the other girl.

‘Let’s touch each other,’ the girl said. Karen thought she recognized her as a childhood friend, Elise perhaps. The girls stretched out their hands to fondle each other.

A tremor shook the building. It’s an earthquake. The building tilted suddenly to one side. The doors to the toilet stalls swung open with a bang.

Karen tried to escape, but the little girl had hold of both her hands. The building was falling over with an enormous roar. Karen was tumbling through space, about to be buried by tons of concrete and steel.

Help! Help me!

With a scream in her throat, Karen woke up.

The alarm was ringing. She reached sleepily to turn it off, realizing with a smile that the roar of the crumbling building in her nightmare had actually been the buzz of the alarm clock.

The headache hit just as she was fumbling for the button. The empty glass beside the bed reminded her of how much bourbon it had taken to leave her in this shape. A throb in her bladder told her she had to pee. No wonder the dream had been about a bathroom, she thought.

With a groan she got out of the bed and stood up.

‘Jesus,’ she said. The headache was much worse. She staggered to the bathroom, flung open the medicine cabinet, and found the Advil bottle. She shook three of the brown tablets into her trembling hand and filled the dirty water glass from the tap. She moved to the kitchen. Mercifully, the coffeemaker was full and ready to perk. She had remembered last night, despite the booze, to fill it.

She turned the machine on and padded back to the bedroom. The churning sound of the coffeemaker was like a fist squeezing repeatedly at her throat.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she moaned. ‘Hurry.’

It took seven long minutes for the coffee to perk. The Advil still had not taken effect when she brought her first cup back to the bed. With her eyes half closed she turned on the little bedroom TV.

Washington Today, one of the most-watched political talk shows, was on. Dan Everhardt, the vice president, was being assailed by two right-wing senators who challenged him to defend the administration’s policy on terrorism.

‘Just tell me how you can defend a policy that simply doesn’t work,’ one of them demanded.

‘The fact is that our policy on terrorism does work,’ Everhardt said. ‘In cooperation with other governments around the world we have prevented countless terrorist attacks over the years.’

‘Not as many as you could have prevented.’

‘That’s not quite fair.’

‘Not the World Trade. Not the Crescent Queen.’

Karen smiled. Dan Everhardt was not a good debater. A quiet family man, a former defensive lineman at Rutgers, he projected honesty and integrity rather than glib eloquence. The president had chosen him as his running mate for precisely that reason.

Everhardt was very popular. He stood six feet five inches tall and was, in his ruddy way, quite handsome. Unfortunately, his slowness on the uptake was hurting him in this debate against two strident pro-Goss spokesmen.

‘Those were terrible tragedies,’ he said. ‘But we learned valuable lessons from them. I —’

‘Not the lessons we needed to learn,’ said one of the senators. ‘The World Trade should have taught us to destroy these fanatics before they attack us. The Crescent Queen tragedy took place precisely because we had not learned that lesson. Nine hundred innocent people slaughtered, most of them children. And we still don’t know who is responsible. We sit here like sheep waiting for the slaughter. The next hydrogen bomb could land on New York or Washington. Don’t you people in the White House have any conception of what we’re up against?’

Unfortunately for the vice president, the show’s director took this opportunity to cut to an image of the mushroom cloud rising above the blue Mediterranean where the Crescent Queen had been.

Even more unfortunately, the moderator now interrupted the proceedings to bring in Colin Goss himself, via split screen from his corporate headquarters in Atlanta.

‘Mr Goss, can you bring some perspective to the debate going on here?’

‘Well, I hope I can.’ Goss leaned forward, his sharp gray eyes fixed on the camera. ‘I honor my distinguished colleagues, and I think they speak out of a sincere regard for our nation at this perilous time. However, I don’t agree with Vice President Everhardt’s logic. I don’t think our policy on terrorism works. Let me put the analogy to the vice president in a different way. Suppose a farmer has a sheep ranch, and wolves are breaking through his fences and killing his sheep. He has consulted the best experts about the fences, and has learned that no fence can be built that will completely protect his sheep. He now has two choices. He can either close down his ranch, sell his sheep, and give up – or he can shoot the wolves that are killing his sheep.’

He joined his hands in a gesture of resolve. ‘The American people seem to feel, as I do, that it is time to fight back against the mad dogs who are massacring our children.’

Karen smiled. Time to fight back. That was one of Goss’s favorite campaign slogans. Mad dogs was his code word for terrorists. ‘You can’t negotiate with a mad dog,’ he liked to say.

Goss had leaned back, but his eyes still seemed to glare into the camera. Those eyes had made him a national figure, for they expressed a powerful will and great intelligence. But some observers said they were also the reason he had lost the three presidential elections in which he had run. There was something dangerous in Goss’s look. Some saw it as strength, others as ruthlessness. He had the look of a leader, but perhaps of a bad man.

Dan Everhardt was caught off guard by Goss’s analogy.

‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘we have fought back. We fought back with great success in Afghanistan …’

‘Our campaign in Afghanistan only provoked the terrorists,’ Goss retorted. ‘And did it prevent the Crescent Queen disaster? We knew for years that the terrorists were developing weapons of mass destruction. The handwriting was on the wall. Yet we did nothing, and look where it has gotten us.’ He smiled patronizingly. ‘In sports there is an old saying, ‘The best defense is a good offense.’ I wonder if the vice president and his administration have ever really understood this.’

‘There’s something about your analogy I don’t like,’ Everhardt said tentatively. ‘For one thing, in this civilized world we don’t solve our problems by taking out guns and shooting people.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Goss. ‘We use force to defend ourselves when the adversary doesn’t understand reason. Perhaps the vice president doesn’t remember how we defeated Hitler and Saddam Hussein.’

He leaned forward again, his eyes darkening. ‘But the situation is even simpler now. This is not a territorial struggle, as it was with Hitler or Saddam. These terrorists have only one aim. They want to kill Americans. They’ve said it over and over, they don’t make any bones about it. To kill Americans. And our response has been to sit here waiting for them to attack. That response is worse than cowardice. It is insanity.’

At this point Dan Everhardt made a crucial error.

‘But how would we know who to attack?’ he asked. ‘We don’t know who was behind the Crescent Queen.’

There was an audible intake of breath among those present. Everhardt had admitted his administration’s weakness, both intelligence gathering and in retaliation.

Colin Goss’s lips curled in disdain. ‘If we had the right leadership in Washington,’ he said, ‘we would know who to attack.’

The silence that followed this remark was deeply embarrassing for Everhardt and those who supported the administration.

‘Well, I …’ Dan Everhardt stammered.

The moderator came to his rescue. ‘We have another special guest via satellite. The junior senator from Maryland, Michael Campbell, has accepted our invitation to join in this debate. Senator Campbell, how would you respond to Mr Goss’s analogy?’

Karen smiled again as she sipped at her coffee. The Goss camp must be pissed off to see Campbell come to Everhardt’s rescue. Campbell was a good speaker and a good debater.

‘I agree with Dan Everhardt,’ Campbell said. ‘I think Mr Goss’s analogy is faulty.’ The contrast between Campbell’s handsome face and Goss’s jowly middle-aged countenance was immediate. So was the contrast between Goss’s angry gaze and the reflective, almost tender eyes of the young senator.

‘I do agree,’ Campbell said, ‘that there are mad dogs in the world, but I think that our system of laws and of international covenants is an instrument designed precisely to fight those enemies. Let me put it this way: when a rancher’s property is threatened by wolves he sits down with his fellow ranchers and they discuss together what must be done to control the wolf population and to protect their collective properties. By working together they solve the problem. No one rancher, by simply charging out onto the prairie with his rifle, can solve a problem that concerns everyone.’

The force of this argument made itself felt. Campbell, despite his youth, had been able to articulate the mature, wider view that was needed to combat Colin Goss’s bloodthirsty metaphor.

Colin Goss looked at Michael Campbell with well-concealed dislike.

‘And what happens,’ Goss asked, ‘if the rancher and his friends can’t agree on precisely what should be done to fight the wolves? What if the larger ranchers and the smaller ones don’t see eye to eye on the matter? What if their negotiations drag on for months or years? How many sheep must be lost before something positive is done to stop the wolves?’

This was an undisguised allusion to the Bilateral Agreement of last year, which followed a summit conference that included Israel, the United States, and leaders of the major Arab nations. That agreement had promised a united front against terrorism. But the terms of the agreement were so vague that in its final form it was hopelessly watered down.

Nine hundred students and teachers aboard the Crescent Queen were bombed into vapor exactly six months after the signing of the Bilateral Agreement.

Dan Everhardt had no answer to this. Michael Campbell, though, seemed to have anticipated the question.

‘Again I don’t think the analogy is quite right,’ he said. ‘The purpose of collective cooperation among the ranchers is to use every appropriate method, including deadly force, to stop the wolves that are killing the sheep. I’m sure Mr Goss remembers that it was a collective effort by a coalition of countries that forced Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. The campaign in Afghanistan that defeated the Taliban was also an international effort.’

‘I agree with Senator Campbell,’ threw in Dan Everhardt. ‘We can’t use vigilante tactics to fight terrorism. It’s the civilized world we’re trying to protect. We have to go about it in a civilized way.’

‘There’s one more thing I’d like to say,’ Michael Campbell said. ‘Many of my ancestors were Irish. What happens if you are attacked by a terrorist group, and you fight fire with fire, bombing one of their schools for every one of your own schools that is bombed? Assassinating one of their leaders for every leader of your own who is assassinated? You get Northern Ireland. Is that what we want for our children and our children’s children? There has to be a better way.’

‘Smart,’ Karen said aloud. Campbell was modest, he deferred to older and more established politicians. But he had a knack for putting the case in such a way that ordinary people could understand it.

In the last couple of months the administration had discovered Campbell as a powerful weapon against the strident Goss forces. Campbell was too young to be identified with the late-twentieth-century policies that had failed to control terrorism. He was handsome, well spoken, and – most important of all – a living embodiment of great physical courage. As a teenager he had developed a serious curvature of the spine that required a lengthy hospitalization. As part of his rehabilitation he took up competitive swimming and became an all-American at Harvard. A second operation became necessary in his junior year, and he came back from it to win two gold medals at the Olympics as a first-year law student at Columbia.

Campbell’s political career had derived immediate momentum from his Olympic triumphs and the pain he had overcome. He won his Senate seat from Maryland in a landslide. He was admired by men for his courage and coveted by women for his handsome looks. Voters of both sexes admired his beautiful wife, whose face appeared every month on the cover of Vogue or Cosmopolitan or Redbook.

Karen yawned and took a bigger swallow of the sour-tasting coffee. She had to admit that Campbell was a handsome man. The body that had made him famous as an Olympic athlete was still hard and attractive. He had a clear, youthful complexion that went well with his crisp dark hair. The combination of his youth and his arguments for moderation was powerful.

On the split screen Colin Goss seemed aware of this. He was looking at Michael with a condescending smile. His personal dislike of Campbell was well known. He considered Campbell an ambitious punk, wet behind the ears where the issues were concerned, a matinee idol trying to make a career out of his looks and charm. Yet he realized that Campbell was now a dangerous enemy, politically speaking.

Mercifully Karen’s three Advil were beginning to work. She got up, poured another cup of coffee, and headed for the shower. Leaving the coffee on top of the toilet where she could reach it, she stood for a long time under the steaming water. Then she soaped herself, washed her hair, and turned the water much colder for a final wake-up rinse.

She hung the towel on the rack and walked naked into the bedroom. As she was opening her underwear drawer to locate a pair of panties, something on the TV screen stopped her.

Washington Today had been interrupted for a special report. On the screen was a live image of a roadblock surrounded by empty Iowa farm fields, along with a reporter interviewing a worried-looking public health officer.

‘We’re still trying to assess the situation,’ the public health man said. ‘We know that there are victims in several communities in this part of the state, but we still don’t know how many. We’re evacuating them as we locate them.’

The reporter asked, ‘Sir, can you comment on the rumors that the mystery illness leaves its victims frozen like statues in the position they were in when it struck?’

‘I don’t know that it’s a “mystery illness,”’the man replied. ‘We’re still assessing it, as I said. It’s true that the onset seems to be sudden, but I can’t really say any more at the present time.’

More questions were shouted at the official as the camera cut away to video, apparently of victims of the disease. A man was shown slumped behind the wheel of a semi trailer on a frozen interstate highway. A school bus was shown stopped at an odd angle in the middle of a rural intersection, the expressionless faces of children visible behind the windows. A helicopter shot showed a skating rink adjacent to a high school or middle school. Skaters lay in unlikely postures on the ice, some face down, others in a sort of fetal position.

Karen stood gazing at the screen, the panties still in her hand. Goose bumps started on her arms. She frowned.

‘Mystery illness,’ she said aloud.