The King Is Always Above the People. Daniel Alarcon
are you talking about?”
“Your mother agrees,” he said. “We’ve discussed it. She’ll miss you, but she says she understands.”
I stared at him. “And Malena?”
“She’ll want for nothing.”
I picked up the gun, brushed the dust off it. I checked to make sure it was unloaded and passed it back to him.
“When?” I asked.
“Whenever.”
And then we rode home and spoke only of the weather and the elections. My father didn’t care much for voting, but he supposed if the owner of the plant wanted to be mayor, he could be. It was fine with him. It was all fine with him. The sky had filled with quilted, white clouds, but the heat had not waned. Or maybe it was how I felt. Even with the windows down, I sweated clean through my shirt, my back and thighs sticking fast to the seat. I didn’t add much to the conversation, only drove and stared ahead and thought about what my father had said to me. I was still thinking about it two weeks later when we were robbed.
It was no better or worse than I’d imagined. I was asked to say something at the manager’s wake, and to my surprise, the words would not come easily. I stood before a room of grieving family and shell-shocked friends, offering a bland remembrance of the dead man and his kindness. I found it impossible to make eye contact with anyone. Malena cradled our son in her arms, and the evening passed in a blur, until the three of us made our way to the corner of the dark parlor where the young widow was receiving condolences. She thanked me for my words; she cooed at our boy. “How old?” she asked, but before Malena or I could respond, her face reddened and the tears came and there was nothing either of us could say. I excused myself, left Malena with a kiss, and escaped through a back door. It was a warm evening, the town shuttered and quiet. I could hardly breathe. I never made it home that night, and of course, this time Malena knew better than to look for me.
WE WERE TALKING, Hank and I, about how that which we love is so often destroyed by the very act of our loving it. The bar was dark, but comfortably so, and by the flittering light of the television I could make out the rough texture of his face. He was, in spite of everything, a beautiful man.
We’d lost our jobs at the call center that day, both of us, but Hank didn’t seem to care. All day strangers yelled at us, demanding we make their lost packages reappear. Hank kept a handle of bourbon in the break room, hidden behind the coffee filters, for those days when a snowstorm back East slowed deliveries and we were made to answer for the weather. After we were told the news of the firing, Hank spent the afternoon drinking liquor from a styrofoam cup and wandering the floor, mumbling to himself. For one unpleasant hour he stood on two stacked boxes of paper, peering out the high window at the cars baking in the parking lot. I cleaned out my desk, and then his. Things between us hadn’t been good in many months.
Hank said: “Take, as an example, Abraham Lincoln.”
“Why bring this up?” I asked. “Why tonight?”
“Now, by the time of his death,” he said, ignoring me, “Lincoln was the most beloved man in America.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Or was he the most hated?”
Hank nodded. “People hated him, yeah. Sure they did. But they also loved him. They’d loved him down to a fine sheen. Like a stone polished by the touch of a thousand hands.”
Lincoln was my first love and Hank knew the whole story. He brought it up whenever he wanted to hurt me.
Lincoln and I had met at a party in Chicago, long before he was president, at one of those Wicker Park affairs with fixed-gear bikes locked out front, four deep, to a stop sign. We were young. It was summer. “I’m going to run for president,” he said, and all night he followed me—from the spiked punch bowl to the balcony full of smokers to the dingy bedroom where we groped on a stranger’s bed. The whole night he never stopped repeating it.
Finally, I gave in: “I’ll vote for you.”
Lincoln said he liked the idea: me, alone, behind a curtain, thinking of him.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said to Hank.
“Here you are with me. Together, we’re a mess. And now the wheels have come off, Manuel.”
“Like Lincoln?”
“Everything he did for this nation,” Hank said. “The Americans had no choice but to kill him.”
I felt a flutter in my chest. “Don’t say that,” I managed.
Hank apologized. He was always apologizing. He polished off his drink with a flourish, held it up, and shook it. Suddenly he was a bandleader and it was a maraca: the ice rattled wonderfully. A waitress appeared.
“Gimme what I want, sugar,” Hank said.
She was chewing gum laconically, something in her posture indicating a painful awareness that this night would be a long one. “How do I know what you want?”
Hank covered his eyes with his hands. “Because I’m famous.”
She took his glass and walked away. Hank winked at me and I tried to smile. I wished he could have read my mind. That night it would have made many things between us much simpler.
“The thing is,” Hank said once he had a fresh drink, “there’s a point after which you have finished loving something, after you have extracted everything of beauty from it, and you must—it is law—discard it.”
This was all I could take. “Oh Christ. Just say it.”
There was a blinking neon sign behind the bar, and Hank looked over my shoulder, lost himself in its lights. “Say what?” he asked.
“What you want to say.”
“I don’t know what I want.” He crossed his arms. “I never have. I resent the pressure to decide.”
Lincoln was a good man, a competent lover, a dignified leader with a tender heart. He’d wanted to be a poet, but settled for being a statesman. “It’s just my day job,” he told me once. He was sitting naked in a chair in my room when he said it, smoking a cigarette and cleaning the dust from his top hat with a wooden toothbrush. And he was fragile: his ribs showed even then. We were together almost a year. In the mornings, I would comb out his beard for him, softly, always softly, and Lincoln would purr like a cat.
Hank laid his hands flat on the table and studied them. They were veiny and worn. “I’m sorry,” he said, without looking up. “It wasn’t a good job, was it?”
“No,” I said. “But it was a job.”
He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t stop drinking, I’m going to be sick. On the other hand, if I stop drinking … Oh, this life of ours.”
I raised one of Hank’s hands and kissed it.
I was a southern boy, and of course it was something Lincoln and I talked about. Hank didn’t care where I was from. Geography is an accident, he said. The place you are born is simply the first place you flee. And then: the people you meet, the ones you fall for, and the paths you make together, the entirety of one’s life, a series of mere accidents. And these too are accidents: the creeks you stumble upon in a dense wood, the stones you gather, the number of times each skips across the bright surface of the water, and everything you feel in that moment: the graceless passage of time, the possibility of stillness. Lincoln and I had lived this—skipped rocks and felt our hearts swelling—just before he left Illinois for Washington. We were an hour outside Chicago, in a forest being encroached upon by subdivisions. Everywhere we walked that day there were trees adorned with bright orange flags: trees with death certificates, land marked for clearing, to be crisscrossed by roads and driveways, dotted with the homes of