BIG BROTHERHOOD IN THE OVAL

A man with his shoe in his hand is called into the office of the president, where he expects to have to explain himself. 

He is not asked to do so, despite the fact that he opens the door with a disclaimer and the beginning of a story. 

“Jim,” he says. “I was at this store, Eyes Ajar, up on To Be Free Boulevard….”

He has known the president since they were boys.

(This story is set in some other decade, past or future. The mere fact that this needs to be said is as affront.)

The president, Jim, cuts Marcus off, confounded. 

He doesn’t want to know about the shoe and is more interested in the fact that Marcus is wearing a mask. 

The mask is nothing obvious, not a Richard Nixon mask or a werewolf or The Shape, but rather a thin transparent film that almost leaves Marcus’s face as it is in everyday life. 

“Your pleasantness, Marcus,” the president says. “I love that.” What he doesn’t say is that the mask has disrupted it.

The meeting is short, two-pronged, half about an upcoming diplomatic event that Marcus has petitioned to attend and that Jim regrets to inform him he cannot, the other half two old friends shooting, as it were, the shit. 

“What?” the President says. “No. I can’t be seen as having used that kind of language. Everyone knows I use it but no one must know. Does that make sense to you? I need for it to make sense to you. I need for you to have a clear sense of what I’m saying. I don’t want to disown you, Marcus. I don’t want to have to disown you. We are brothers, stitched together under the skin. We are two but we are one. I have never loved anyone as much as…”

“Shut up, Jim,” says the man with one shoe and the ability to make others feel he is wearing a mask—though there are as many masks on his face as there are on the foot whose shoe is in his hand, meaning no masks at all. “Just shut the fuck up. You weren’t elected to be anything other than this.” He waves his hands around. “This is what now you are. What now you are? What you are now.”

The two men, virtually telepathically, stand at the same time and walk out together. Marcus leaves his shoe on the desk. He’s not going back for it. Both of them know this as well as they know each other.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas