Laurie Boris

After January 6, 2021, I lost the heart and will to continue writing my Council series. Now that I’ve picked it up again, I wanted to go back and fill in the missing gaps. This one was hard to write, but I think I needed to. With that accomplished…we’re not going back. We’re not going back. We’re not…

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Forty-four came in sweaty from shooting hoops and spied Michelle in profile in the living room. She was watching a TV screen, the content of which he could not see at that angle. But her face was somewhere between shock and outrage, with one hand pressed to her cheek.

For a split second he wondered who had died.

He opened his mouth to ask and his phone rang. It was a number he knew well. He had a feeling it was not a social call.

Michelle turned to him, eyes on fire. “Barry. This is—I knew it. I knew that man would—”

He let the call go to voice mail. He saw the TV screen. The Confederate flags hanging from the Capitol Building. The members of Congress being ushered to safety. “Dear God in heaven.”

The phone was still in his hand. She gestured to it. “You should probably check that.”

Forty-four nodded. All Forty-three-and-a-half said on the voice mail was “Are you seeing this?” Something would have to be done but in that moment he knew his first priority.

He sat next to his wife. Put his arm around her. They sat together a moment, watching something he never thought could happen in the country he loved so dearly but feared that it could. Had feared this for a long time.

“I should call a meeting,” he said. She nodded.

He fired up a secure channel in his office and got everyone patched in on video. In each expression he saw a version of Michelle’s. They all knew why they’d been assembled.

Forty-two was even redder in the face than usual. Forty-three-and-a-half looked ready to spit. The others just looked sad.

All eyes were on the square containing the aviator-shaded avatar of the president-elect. Behind that, Forty-four imagined the chaos swirling. The briefings. The decisions. He knew the tumult of those inflection points better than he wanted to.

“Forty-six-elect, is there anything we can do to help?” he asked.

His voice was all Scranton Joe. “You got any contacts left inside, give ’em a try. I’ve been on the horn ever since I got wind of this. Nobody’ll talk to me. Some pipsqueak in the DoD told me to go to hell and enjoy the view.”

“I got a text from Pelosi’s team,” Forty-three-and-a-half said. “They’re okay. With gas masks. Jesus Christ. And what’s he doing? Watching TV and tweeting bullshit. Throwing more gasoline on the fire and toasting marshmallows. We gotta stop this orange ass clown.”

“I got a bad feeling he’s the only one can call them off,” Bush said. “That he’s trained these dogs to a whistle only they can hear.”

“I’m still gonna try,” Forty-six-elect said. “I’m making a statement. Godspeed, everyone.”

“Godspeed,” they all muttered in reply, and his window disappeared.

They agreed to talk again in a few hours.

Forty-four got on the phone, hunting down intel. There were similar protests in Sacramento, Austin, Denver, and Minneapolis, but those so far had not turned violent. Tight-chested and fists-clenched and every cell of him aching for a smoke, he watched the crisis at the Capitol unfolding on the small flat-screen in his office. A gang of overgrown boys playing militia man stomped a police officer. The news network kept playing the same violent clips over and over. And the same refrain kept going through Forty-four’s mind: “Where the hell is the National Guard?”

Oh, right, he told himself. That’s the president’s job.

The cavalry wasn’t coming.

Michelle walked in and set two steaming mugs of coffee on his desk with a clunk and a slosh. You could break walnuts on her jaw. “He wanted this,” she muttered, shaking her head. “He asked for this. Where the hell is the National Guard?”

He met her eye. Yeah. They both knew the answer to that question.

A voice from the TV said, “We’re breaking away for a statement from the president-elect…”

They turned as one.

The words were plain and angry and appealed to patriotism and the Constitution. Frankly labeling the riot an insurrection, demanding the orange man get on TV and call off his dogs.

They stood together, silent before the screen, waiting.

It took seventeen minutes. One thousand twenty-four seconds after the president-elect’s appeal, a video appeared. Not on television but on Twitter. The soon-to-be-former president gave a half-assed request for his people to leave in peace. Oozing on about how special they all were.

But then…things started happening. Slowly, but it happened. Maryland and Virginia sent in National Guard and state troopers. In the next hour, police moved into the Capitol and began to clear and secure the building.

An hour later, the forty-fifth president was banned from social media. “About time,” Michelle said. “You’re making a statement, of course?”

He nodded. It was already cued up to go. Even as a former two-term president and a member of the Council, he was now a citizen, which meant that politically he had to let certain parties go first. When he got the call that the Republican National Committee had condemned the violence of the day, he hit send.

—

In the wee small hours of the morning, after the House and Senate had reconvened their respective, then joint sessions, Mike Pence did his Constitutional duty.

Forty-four stayed awake to watch it all.

Apparently so did his compatriots, judging from the texts he was receiving. Since they were all awake anyway, he called an ad hoc meeting.

Forty-six-elect was full of fire, talking about the horrors of the day, amazed that so quickly after his statement, the rioters had been called off. That led to a discussion about the Inauguration, that maybe the living ex-presidents could make some kind of statement together. When fatigue had them lapsing into silences, though, Forty-four called it a night.

He was dying for a cigarette. If there was a moment he could forgive himself one, it was this. And while he was sitting out on the patio, smoking and watching the absurdly early still-dark morning sky, he remembered something.

He texted Forty-three-and-a-half: “I’m all for gallows humor at certain times. But you had some funny kind of smirk on while Forty-six was talking about his statement. I’d love to know the joke.”

A moment later she rang his phone and said, “Nothing against Joe, but do you actually think His Orangeship gives a flying goddamn about statements?”

“Then how? It couldn’t have been out of the generosity of his soul because he doesn’t appear to have one.”

“I called a mutual friend.”

“Putin? You called Putin. After what he did to your campaign?”

“Water under the bridge. I just…suggested what might happen to a lot of his business and personal interests if he didn’t pull his little orange Pinocchio’s strings.”

He shook his head, smiling into the dark. “Madame Secretary. I don’t even want to know what you suggested, but I am so glad you’re on our side.”