What consequences might we expect from a so-far hypothetical second Trump administration? A recent Washington Post magazine piece posed this question to 21 experts whose predictions ranged from the obvious – appointments based on loyalty over expertise – to the genuinely alarming. An electoral autocracy, they said, where votes are cast but power isn’t transferred. Politically driven violent insurgency. An outright democratic collapse.
I am typically skeptical of these sorts of thought pieces, filled with what-ifs and guesses about events that may or may not take place. But this one fed my particular brand of anxiety. No matter how things are in the present, my brain believes something terrible is just about to happen. The American Psychological Association calls this anticipatory anxiety – worry about the future because of the possibility of a negative outcome. A contributing factor, I have been told, is having had an unpredictable parent.
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In Tommy Orange’s propulsive debut novel There, There, 21-year-old Tony Loneman is the first character we meet. Tony tells us he’s Cheyenne and lives in Oakland. He was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. His mother is in prison; he sells weed and gives the money to his grandma, who raised him. When some white boys come looking for cocaine, Tony goes to his friend Octavio, who lets Tony shoot his gun and becomes his supplier. And then he ropes Tony into helping him rob the Big Oakland Powwow. Tony’s role is very specific: Go to Walmart, buy bullets, put them in a sock, and throw them into the bushes at the entrance to the coliseum. Oh, and wear your regalia.
And there we have it - the ticking clock. The powwow is coming; it’s tomorrow. Nefarious plans are in the works. Chekhov’s gun has been introduced, it’s 3-D printed, and we feel uneasy about what might happen when it goes off in the fourth act. Our guy Tony is implicated. The powwow isn’t mentioned again until three chapters later, when we meet a man cleaning the coliseum ahead of the event. And yet we’re beginning to understand it’s the powwow linking these characters and the others we meet. We begin looking for clues to understand how their lives will intersect. We need to know what’s going to happen at the powwow.
How long do your characters have to do what they need to do, Charlie Baxter asks fiction writers in his new collection Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. “If they have all the time in the world there may be a fatal lack of urgency in the story.” This sort of pressure or artificial deadline comes naturally in Clancyesque novels, where the planet is in peril if Jack Ryan doesn’t do something before the bomb goes off. There, There’s powwow is more carefully crafted, less overt as a plot device, but completely clear as the point at which this story will culminate.
Sometimes life is like this: tension building to a day on the calendar. On November 3, 2024, 746 days from today, America will hold an election for president. And a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that if the 2024 race is a rematch, 48 percent of registered voters would support Trump while 46 percent would support Biden, albeit a difference within the poll’s margin of error.
More often, our high-stakes, no-going-back moments can be anticipated but not pinned to a specific date and time. The point at which climate change is irreversible. A finger pressing a button to deploy nuclear weapons. The death of a parent.
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We buried my father at Arlington this week. He is two years dead, but there is a long waitlist for services. His wife brought his ashes from Texas in a box inside a backpack. After a 21-gun salute and a bugler playing taps, an Army chaplain gave some crowdsourced words about my father’s love of cookbooks. What remained of him was sealed behind a marble plaque in the columbarium, and that was it. A life hard-lived and lost.
My father was a charming man who freely handed out gratis gas station cappuccinos to my high school friends from behind the counter at QuikTrip. He loved so many quaint and disparate things: Lonesome Dove and Night Court, baseball and baking, Lynyrd Skynyrd and a quirky Christian rock band named Lost & Found. And drinking. I don’t know if he wanted to, but he really loved drinking. It made him mean and many times it brought him to the brink of death. Car accidents, bike accidents. Stints in the hospital, in jail. I wasn’t surprised by the phone call I received in January 2020, six years into our estrangement, telling me he was in a coma. But after all the near misses, I was surprised he actually died.
“The sense of a clock ticking is the oldest human truth,” Baxter writes. “We’re all going to die, and we do not have all the time in the world.”
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Sometimes I think about the ages of our likely presidential candidates and wonder to myself, not without shame, about their mortality. I don’t wish them death; it just seems like things might be easier.
Criminals are the friends of fiction, writes Baxter in the chapter of Wonderlands titled Captain Happen: Notes on Narrative Urgency. And by virtue of fiction’s inherent unreality, we can be captivated by miscreants’ misdeeds and even root for them. There are no consequences for us in doing so. We can be shown their backstory and feel empathy, as we do for Octavio in There, There. We can also despise them and not hate ourselves because they’re not real people.
Things have been easier since my father died, in a way. I no longer have to actively question if I did the right thing by removing him from my life. There is no more reckoning with my stubbornness, no longer the possibility of changing my mind.
But he never got to see his granddaughter, born a year after he passed. I think he would have liked to meet her.
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After the phone call that January I made my way to Fort Worth. It’s hard to say I went out of duty, though I suppose that was part of it. Somehow knowing my father was in a coma made it possible for me to go. There would not have to be discussion or atonement, two things I wanted to avoid. I sat next to my father’s wife in the ICU and we waited. In the corner, the nurse monitoring his vitals tap-tapped on her keyboard. The gel around his eyes made it seem as if he was crying. The gel was there, the nurse said, for moisture, because he could not blink. The machine breathing for him droned on. Under the white sheets and a raft of airbags circulating warm air over his body, he looked larger than life.
After a long silence, his wife asked why I’d stopped speaking to him. I told her I’d explained it all to him, years ago.
Was he sober when we had that conversation, she wanted to know.
“No,” I said. No, and I couldn’t bear to have it again.
The keyboard clicked. The dialysis machine whirred, red blood going in, red blood coming out.
I left the next day. She and my grandmother sat vigil another week until he was gone.
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In There, There, Dene Oxendene is a storyteller, the character in whom writers might most recognize themselves. He’s at the powwow to capture oral histories of Native people in Oakland, work motivated by fulfilling his late uncle’s dreams of making movies. Just before his uncle drank himself to death, he said to Dene: “We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver. We struggle for release, and then it pecks out our eyes and intestines for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.”
I didn’t know my father had been sober for the four years before he died, and I’m not sure it would have mattered if I did. The clock was always ticking on his sobriety. He was always sober until he wasn’t. Every time he fell off the wagon, life became unstable again, and we passed through what Charlie Baxter calls one-way gates: actions you cannot go back on, fundamental changes to the situation. My father took his actions and I took mine.
The clock resets every four years in this country. If, for many of us, life became truly uncertain in November 2016, perhaps it became more predictable again in November 2020. But any relief we may have felt was almost immediately tempered by election denying, the storming of the Capitol, and, gradually, the recognition that the former president remains popular enough today to potentially be re-elected. Now that we have glimpsed what a self-serving presidency looks like, anticipatory anxiety about a better prepared, more experienced redux feels justified. I realize that for many others of us, these sentiments are exactly reversed. It’s the current president who is now the danger. I don’t know how to reconcile this.
My father never came to D.C. when he was alive, not even to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, something he always said he wanted to do. But now he’s just over the Potomac from my house. The rest of our family members are in the Midwest and Texas, and here I am, alone with my father. Writing to make sense of his life and mine. Wondering how much my storytelling is a desire to reshape the past and have control over the future.
Baxter again, on fiction and life: “If you’re going to make your move, make it now. If you don’t make your move now, you may lose everything.”