Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (8 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 

Cliff won the election, and drove himself to his inauguration in a specially customized limousine, cutting more than a half hour off the ceremony’s previous record for speed. He raced the engine noisily whenever the motorcade was forced to pause along the way, and startled dignitaries when he slid across the polished floor on his stomach during the gala ball. Yes, Cliff was young, but not, everyone emphasized, as young as Van Walker had been. Win Woodhead had disappeared forever right after his defeat, either to seek out Van or to sulk without end, but August Dodd Woodhead came to the inauguration, to show that at his advanced age he no longer minded anything.

Once in office, Cliff froze wages and encouraged the barter system whenever possible, since objects themselves were incapable of inflation. He made his father Secretary of Transportation, and they decreed hundreds of miles of highways to be public drag strips. He relished setting the limited fires his Secretary of the Interior suggested for the national parks’
sake, and he ordained frequent jet defense drills that shattered windows with sonic booms. He announced that prosecuting drug users was too costly, and as he had with Shep, declared that everyone who wanted to use drugs could do so, only now in a special reservation fashioned from the state of Oregon, a sort of national Smoking Section. He was a champion of deregulation, and gave heavy tax breaks to American auto manufacturers, but he seemed sullen and mistrustful whenever he had to speak to foreigners, even the English. His tough position on American defense provoked some killings of Americans in Europe, but he responded by recalling all Americans, civilian or military, from overseas. This “Americans in America” policy wreaked havoc with international business, not to mention international marriages, but as terrorism discouraged travel, and protectionism made importing and exporting complicated, slowly a gargantuan medieval insularity developed.

True to his
Manolog
days, the new chief executive also liked dropping out of sight for days at a time, which thrilled people only at first, and his animal freedom started to seem as dangerous as Van’s angelic weakness. Although Nestor wrote speeches for him including allusions to family and sharing, Cliff seemed gruff and distracted, and Carlotta felt no closer to him than she had in California. He was growing away from her without ever quite being hers. He may have felt it would be weak to rely on her, sympathetic as she was, but whenever he disappeared, it was she who had to put on a brave face for the press while
they wondered if there were other women or just a secret hideout.

To complicate the national paranoia, a sexually transmitted illness began to ravage the population. It was eventually discovered to have begun in the lambskin condoms prescribed in Van Walker’s administration to curb venereal disease. Apparently the lambs had been grazed on radioactive former bomb test-site prairies, and the mutant virus they acquired was hard to shake. People immediately stopped using condoms, but it was already too late. Fatal Urogenital Carnal Kinesis claimed its victims without any right to such claims, and often drove them mad first. Even Nestor, who had been careful to protect himself in his dalliances with Mexican girls, went from merely garrulous to incomprehensible, and his last words were something about the Wagon Train heading ever westward to the Milky Way.

So, not only travel but socializing was curtailed, with television as the safe alternative, and this was where Carlotta entered her truly legendary phase. Under the supervision of the secretaries of State and of Health, she made numerous cheerful videos in which she seemed not only to have a nice romantic date with the viewer, she went on simulated vacations to Europe, bought attractive furniture, went to friendly parties, and even raised several pleasant and appreciative children. She herself was childless, and the husband in her videos went unseen, but millions were grateful for the apparently fulfilled life they vicariously experienced from her tapes. Her greatest
seller was a video in which she lived in a peaceful small town called Verdant Park, and everyone in it had a sweetheart and a job. People now referred to her as Our Carlotta, since it was hip to know her real name, and besides, it was more comforting than Charlotte.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 

Julienne appeared at the White House late one afternoon, sunken-eyed and weirdly dressed for a formal ball, with a huge handwritten manuscript that she wheeled in unwrapped on a dolly. When Carlotta came to her, Julienne confided too loudly that Culvert had committed suicide the day before. Depressed by his sickness, for starters, he had thrown himself from the highest finial of his father’s unfinished folly, Vertigo Park, the haunted palace of storm windows. Julienne had then decided she was finished with her biography and headed for Washington. It was called
Carlotta Made
, and she presented it to her sister with shaking hands. It bore no relation to reality, however, beyond its vaguely pornographic title, and though illegible, would have read more like a hack’s misremembrance of the Book of Revelation than like Carlotta’s actual rags-to-riches story. It seemed to presume that Carlotta, sometimes called Charlotte, was the cause of the sunrise and of springtime, of
snowfall and rebirth. The text dwelled on a serpent called Horizon, and had no clear-cut beginning or ending, since the pages were unnumbered and Julienne seemed unconcerned about those pages that blew away when she moved the dolly from place to place. She announced that she was Carlotta, that Cliff was her husband, and that they were going away together forever.

Carlotta was anxious, but invited Julienne to rest there for the night. Julienne spent it sleeplessly calling out her own name, which was difficult to call a good sign. Cliff, who was in residence at the time, and Carlotta could hear her cries even from their room, and though Cliff dismissed Julienne as self-chopped mincemeat, he was shaken, and for the first time in his experience, was sexually impotent. Carlotta was sympathetic, from which he recoiled, because it made him feel weak. She secretly hoped that this, his first unluckiness, might be a breakthrough to fuller humanity for him.

Julienne came to breakfast late, still in her formal dress, and declared that her name was now Fury, which she hoped didn’t sound too much like a horse. She then produced a small handgun, which Cliff had insisted be provided in every guest bedroom, and rushed into the Rose Garden, where he was negotiating with Romulus and Remus Portonovo, the wealthy Italian realtors, for the sale of Rome as a movable theme park. She shot Cliff in the heart, and then herself, warning the Italians they would be next. Apparently she had been driven mad not just from
jealousy but from the Fatal Urogenital Carnal Kinesis that had incubated in her since her performance in
Will Wanda Never Cease?

Aides screamed, and Romulus and Remus wailed Latinate expressions of horror. Carlotta rushed to cradle the dying Cliff, who shuddered with surprise. He had never felt pain before. He faintly joked that once the dick goes, so do the reflexes, and with his index finger tenderly, for once, tracing the scar on her cheek, he expired. Carlotta stiffened with confusion, and at this moment Shep Woodhead appeared, fresh out of Lilly Willow, and asked if there were any job openings.

EPILOG