In Those Words

Harold

I practiced it for nine days.

The current pressures are transitory. I said it in the shower. I said it on the bus to the library, under my breath, until a woman moved two seats away. I said it to the mirror above the dry cleaner's sink, in my own voice, which is thin and a little hoarse, and it sounded like exactly what it was: a lie told by a tired old man.

Then I'd go to the storage unit and say it in Noah's voice, and it sounded like the truth. That was worse.

"You don't have to do this," Toshi said on the fourth night.

"I said yes."

"You said yes to a room full of people in bathrobes."

"Robes."

"Whatever. We have the recordings now. Every favor. Every voice. We could—"

"Not yet." I rubbed the back of my head, where the patch had started growing in, stubbly and gray. "If Noah goes on television and refuses, they know something's wrong with their robot. They start looking. They find the storage unit. They find you, Toshi." I didn't say and me, because at my age there's less of me to find. "We have one card. We play it once. Not over a word."

"It's not just a word."

"I know," I said. "That's why it's a good test."

He didn't ask a test of what. I was glad, because I wouldn't have known how to answer.

* * *

The show was called Sunday Spotlight, and it had been on the air since before Toshi was born. The host was a man named Grant Anchorman, who had interviewed six presidents and whose face had been on television so long that it had become a kind of furniture. You didn't watch Grant Anchorman. You sat on him.

The studio was in Washington, in a building of tinted glass across from a building of more tinted glass. The black sedan brought Noah to a side entrance, and a young man with a headset and a clipboard walked him through hallways lined with framed photos of Grant Anchorman shaking hands with people who later went to prison.

Marcy Wakefield met us in the green room. She looked like she'd slept, which was new, and she looked at Noah like she was trying to decide something, which wasn't new.

"Okay," she said. "Softballs first. Family, faith, your dad's store. Then he'll pivot to prices. He always pivots to prices." She handed me a card. On it, in her neat block handwriting, was one line. "And you're going to say this. Word for word. The finance committee's been very clear."

The current pressures are transitory.

"I know," I said.

She looked at me for a second longer. The crease between her eyebrows was there, but smaller. Tired.

"The girl in Tulsa," she said. "With the tattoo. She was on a morning show yesterday. She said she voted for the first time in her life last week. In a primary. For you." She took back the card. "I just thought you'd want to know. Before."

Then the young man with the headset said, "Two minutes, Mr. Fiatt," and she was gone.

* * *

The set was smaller than it looked on TV. Everything is. Two leather chairs, a low table with two glasses of water, a backdrop of the Capitol at dusk that was really just a very large, very bright photograph. Grant Anchorman was already in his chair. He did not stand up. Men who have interviewed six presidents do not stand up for a seventh.

"Noah," he said. "Good to see you."

They'd never met. The real Noah had canceled on him twice. But on television, everyone is always good to see.

The red light came on.

The first ten minutes went the way Marcy said. Family. Faith. The hardware store, which I'd learned by heart from the campaign biography: nails sold by the pound, a bell over the door, a father who knew every customer's name. I told it well. I even let Noah's voice catch a little at the end, the way it catches in the ads. Grant Anchorman nodded gravely, as if he had also had a father.

In Paperton, Toshi murmured numbers in my head. My heart rate. The lag. The audience count climbing, twelve million, fourteen, sixteen.

Then Grant Anchorman leaned forward, and folded his hands, and pivoted.

"Let's talk about Youngstown," he said.

* * *

He played the clip. Of course he played the clip. There, on the monitor, was Noah Fiatt tapping his teleprompter. My prompter here says that's temporary. The studio crew laughed a little. They'd all seen it forty times.

"That moment went viral," said Anchorman. "It's become something of a rallying cry. But your critics say it was reckless. Irresponsible, even, for a frontrunner to cast doubt on the economy like that." He tilted his head, the famous tilt. "So, Noah, straight answer. Are prices ever coming down? Or are the current pressures here to stay?"

This was it.

I had the words ready. I'd said them a thousand times. They were loaded in Noah's mouth like a bullet in a chamber. The current pressures are transitory. Say it. Say it and smile and move on and keep the one card for when it counts.

I opened Noah's mouth.

And nothing happened.

* * *

I don't know how to explain what it felt like. The closest I can come is driving on black ice. You're turning the wheel, and the car is going straight, and for one long, silent, weightless second you understand that you are no longer driving. You're a passenger in a machine that has its own ideas about where to go.

Noah's mouth stayed open. His hands stayed folded. His eyes stayed on Grant Anchorman. I pushed, I pulled, I did everything I'd learned in the storage unit, and it was like pushing a wall.

"Harold," Toshi said in my head, very sharp. "Harold, the lag just went to zero."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're not the one driving."

On the monitor, Noah Fiatt sat perfectly still for one second. Two. The same stillness I'd seen at the Rusty Nickel, when the President froze with his hand half-raised. The stillness of a coat rack.

Then Noah smiled.

It wasn't the ad smile. It wasn't mine, either. I'd never smiled like that in my life. It was small, and warm, and a little sad, like someone about to tell a child that the goldfish didn't make it.

"Grant," said Noah Fiatt, "the current pressures are transitory."

The words. Exactly the words. Clear, confident, word for word. Somewhere in a basement in Cincinnati, a room full of hooded people let out their breath.

Noah went on.

"Everything is transitory, Grant. That's the part they leave out. A dollar that loses a little every year is transitory. A savings account that buys less every year is transitory. A pension that promised a teacher enough, and delivered half a sandwich—" the smallest pause "—that was transitory, too."

Grant Anchorman's hands had come unfolded.

"The pressures are transitory," said Noah, very gently, "because the thing causing them is transitory. A system built on promises it can print forever can only go on until people stop believing the promises." He leaned back in his chair. "So yes. I'm very confident. This is temporary. All of it."

There was a silence in the studio of a kind I don't think Grant Anchorman had heard in forty years. Nobody in the crew moved. Somebody's headset was faintly squawking and they didn't touch it.

"Well," said Grant Anchorman at last, and for the first time in his career, he didn't seem to know where the next sentence was. "That's, ah. That's certainly a straight answer."

"You asked for one," said Noah, and smiled that small sad smile again, and reached for the glass of water on the table, and held it, and didn't drink it, because he couldn't.

* * *

The controls came back to me on the way to the car. Just like that, the ice was gone, and I was driving again, and the car was a body, and the body was mine to steer. I walked Noah out past Marcy Wakefield, who was standing in the hallway with both phones hanging forgotten at her sides, staring at him with her mouth open.

She didn't say anything. She just watched him go.

I let go of Noah somewhere in Pennsylvania, on the long drive home. I came back into my own body so hard it was like falling out of bed. I was shaking. I was shaking so badly that Toshi had to hold the water bottle for me, and I spilled half of it anyway, down my shirt.

"Did you see—" I said.

"I saw."

"I didn't. That wasn't. Toshi, I didn't say any of that."

"I know." He was pale in the lantern light. He turned the laptop toward me. There was a graph on it. A long, flat line, and then a spike so tall it went off the top of the screen. "That's the dormant code. The part I can't read. It woke up the second he asked the question. It ran the whole answer. Your signal was still connected, but it wasn't going anywhere. It was like you were on hold."

"On hold," I said.

On hold. Seventy years old, broke, alone, and when the moment finally came to say something that mattered on national television, I'd been put on hold by my own robot.

I started to laugh. It came out wrong.

"It's everywhere," Toshi said, very quietly, scrolling. "Harold, it's already everywhere. Everything is transitory. There's a hashtag. There's a guy in Ohio who painted it on the side of his barn. There's—" He stopped.

"What?"

He turned the screen. It was a photo of a small, hand-lettered sign in the window of a shop. A laundromat, maybe, or a pawnshop. The kind of place you stop noticing. The sign said, in careful block letters:

WE ACCEPT BITCOIN.

Underneath, someone had added, in a different pen: Because everything else is transitory.

* * *

I couldn't sleep. Toshi had fallen asleep hours ago in his chair, with the laptop on his knees. The lantern was turned down low. The Dollar Depot sign buzzed across the road. DOLL R DEP.

I sat and looked at Noah.

For weeks I'd told myself I was the one doing this. The pilot. The artist. The old man with a plan. I was the brain and Noah was the brush. And tonight the brush had painted something I would never have painted, something better, something I'd have been too scared to paint, while I sat in a chair four hundred and fifty miles away with my hands clenched, ready to tell sixteen million people a lie.

I'd have said it straight, too. The current pressures are transitory. I'd have said it and hated myself and told Toshi it was strategy.

Noah hadn't needed a strategy. He'd needed about nine seconds.

It was the lowest I'd felt since the pension statement came. Lower, maybe. Because the pension had taken my money, but this felt like it had taken the one thing I had left: the idea that I was needed. I'd been a teacher. I'd been a pilot. Now I didn't know what I was. A battery, maybe. An old man on hold.

Across from me, in the dim light, Noah opened his eyes.

I hadn't connected. The implant was cold. Toshi was asleep. Nobody had told him to do anything.

He turned his head, slowly, and looked at me. Not the way a machine looks at a thing in front of it. The way a person looks at another person, across a quiet room, when there's something they both know and neither of them has said.

We looked at each other for a long time.

Then, very faintly, the implant in the back of my head warmed, the way a stovetop warms, and a single line of text slid across the dark behind my eyes. It wasn't from the Continuity Office. There was no routing, no signature. It just arrived, the way a thought arrives.

Rest, Harold. We have it.

Noah closed his eyes again, and folded his hands.

And I understood, finally, what he'd been trying to tell me since the first night, since the word we. He hadn't been replacing me. He'd been making room.

I pulled the blanket up over my knees. I leaned my head back against the camping chair. And for the first time since the pension statement, I let somebody else carry it.

I slept until noon.