No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

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‘Somebody in the night,’ Laurence says. ‘Didn’t see who they were.’

‘That’s what some people will do. They’re desperate for news.’

‘News isn’t in my fucking garbage cans, Amit.’

‘Yeah it is. Larry, news is and always will be whatever somebody can get their hands on that somebody else will pay to read.’ He hands Laurence back his ID card. ‘Flight’s twenty minutes late. Let’s get a coffee.’

They walk through the terminal to a coffee shop and Laurence finds seats at a table while Amit goes to the counter. This is how it is, now, until there’s a result one way or another: other people trying to bear the brunt of the stress for him, deferring whatever they’re not sure he can take and treating him as if he’s important. He doesn’t push back. Amit’s phone beeps as he comes back to the table. He grins.

‘The prediction’s done.’

‘What?’

‘The little tick boxes, Larry. Remember the tick boxes?’ Laurence hates when he calls him that. He’s the only person who does, an affectionate little tic. Larry and Dee, frivolous and light … ‘The package is being put together, should be with us soon as anything.’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘It is. But you’ve seen Homme’s. You know that it’s effective.’

Homme had his own prediction released to the public a couple of months ago, the product of spin and facts, but also deep-rooted in his public persona. Amit thought that it was managed – it had to be – but to the public it seemed to be honest. It was in some way a truth. The ClearVista algorithm took his information – his entire life, realistically, when you break it down – and fed out a picture of a candidate who wouldn’t actually be a bad leader. Statistically, Homme was weak on so many issues, running with very few actual policies he seemed to care about but he was balanced, accessible, open to all. He would take red families in some places, that was his trick. Crossing party lines. Along with the hypothetical suppositions of what his stance would be on certain hot topics (which contradicted so much of the usual left stances, pandering to moneymen and the religious right), ClearVista created a short video. This was their most important gimmick: a new addition to the premium package, only possible with the most detailed survey and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars; but, they promised, the trade-off was worth it. The video was useable, open source, free to be circulated however the recipient desired. Homme’s was perfect for him. It was so on-message as to be almost laughable. There he was in a helmet and a flak jacket, surrounded by swirls of dust, running to a helicopter, waving at troops; shaking their hands as he passed them, mixed gender and color (and even, in their haircuts and rainbow pin-badges, crudely implied sexuality). It was very presidential, the press agreed. They joked, the first time that they saw the tech, about previous presidents, and what it would have shown of them: Marilyn Monroe; ‘I am not a crook’; interns and cigars. A few days after the video was released – along with the full results of the tests, and the answers he gave to get the results, in the spirit of full disclosure and honesty – his numbers increased, stripping out votes from the other candidates. The video worked, even if it was only smoke and mirrors. ‘Pointless to be nervous,’ Amit says. ‘It’s done. Results come through later today, they’ve said.’ They leave the Starbucks and head for the gate, scanning their ID cards as they pass through to the departure lounge.

They join the queue to board, and Laurence notices that the man who had been in front of them at the check-in desk is in front of them again now. He’s wearing his blue jacket this time: the back is wrinkled from where he was gripping it. He turns and smiles.

‘You’re Laurence Walker, right?’ the man asks. He holds out his hand, and Laurence looks at it: something wrong about this. It’s the second time he’s been here. He’s stopped believing in coincidence. Amit notices and steps in, shaking it first.

‘You’re a supporter?’ Amit is exuberant, as he always is.

‘Yeah, I thought it was you. I’m a big fan,’ the man says. ‘We’ve been needing somebody like you for a while now. We’ve been playing safe, I think. We need a shake-up, that’s what I’m saying.’

‘Yes,’ Laurence says. ‘I agree.’ The man talks about the party and the future and Laurence nods his way through the conversation, relieved for some reason. Relieved, and yet still nervous.

The flight attendants run through the drills and show the exits; and they show the little movie about what to do in an emergency; and then the plane waits while the captain runs the airline’s custom algorithm, to take into account the names of all the passengers, to generate a final figure that’s meant to dictate their safety levels; and Amit fights the elbows of the man next to him, who reeks of cheap cologne and grips the seat’s arms as they shuttle down the runway. He leans over, looking across the aisle at Laurence and the window, and he watches the ground seemingly get faster and faster, and then it tilts away from the plane as they head upwards, pulling away from the ground. His ears pop and he shuts his eyes and opens his jaw over and over in an approximation of a yawn. He’s one of the first to his feet when the seatbelt sign goes dark, grabbing his laptop from the overhead locker.

‘You want?’ he asks Laurence. Laurence shakes his head and jacks his seat back a few degrees.

‘I’ll get some rest,’ he says. ‘Wake me when we land.’ Amit sits down and logs into the Wi-Fi. He loads the calendar app and looks at the breakdown of the next few days, structured and tweaked to the minute in order to allow the maximum time with each of the potential investors, and at each photo opportunity. The little colored bars are packed tight, and he rearranges the ones that only involve the two of them – breakfasts, dinners – so that it maybe doesn’t look too bad to Laurence’s eyes. Artificial breathing room, Amit thinks: one of his finest tweaks to the system. And each of the appointments has information attached that both men have to memorize. They have to know who donated what previously, and why; what the thing was that swayed their wallets. They have to know how deep they can make them dig. One of Amit’s junior staffers has prepared a full breakdown on every man for them, telling them who to discuss God (capital G) and religion with, and who is likely to want to talk about artillery instead of textbooks. There are lists of the names of their wives, husbands and children. One of them has lost a child, just as Laurence has; this is common ground. All of them will know everything about him; their own research just levels the playing field. Lies are pointless now, because information doesn’t die like it used to. It all sits there on some server, waiting for somebody to discover it and mine it and crosscheck it and use it. Used to be in politics that you could tell a different story to two different moneymen and they’d both buy it. Now, Amit’s rule is that you should stick to the truth, or whatever version of it is most palatable. You only work with what you’ve got. Laurence’s life is available to the world already. Everybody can read the words from the eulogy he delivered at Sean’s funeral; that’s nothing but material now.

His email pings. It’s ClearVista. The whole thing is automated: no people sitting back and watching this, making it work. That was the tech that they were instigating when he finally left working for them. For whatever reason, that stuff always used to creep him out. The email is labeled Your Laurence Walker Results: there’s something disquietingly possessive about it. Laurence opens the email.

Thank you for your contract with ClearVista, the world’s foremost predictions and statistics company, it reads. Your package [LW008] has been completed and the contract fulfilled. Please find the initial results attached. Further emails with package enhancements will follow. Thank you for using ClearVista.

The numbers don’t lie.

Attached to the email is a glossily produced PDF file, little more than a glorified spreadsheet holding a series of almost incomprehensible posits and answers. There are questions asked at the top, about Laurence’s virtues and skills, things that are ambiguous but useful.

Is LAURENCE WALKER a good man: 96% chance of occurrence.

Does LAURENCE WALKER care about his country? 93% chance of occurrence.

Will LAURENCE WALKER remain faithful in his marriage? 93% chance of occurrence.

Is LAURENCE WALKER a good father? 82% chance of occurrence.

The list goes on and on. Amit scrolls down quickly, scanning the results for anything anomalous. It’s all good; all stronger than Homme’s. The percentages break Laurence down to predicted emotional responses – and the voting public is more likely to believe that than the words of a man standing on a stage. This will all help back up what they already know about him.

Can LAURENCE WALKER overcome grief? 07% chance of occurrence.

Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit drug abuse? 28% chance of occurrence.

Will LAURENCE WALKER ever commit sexual abuse? 01% chance of occurrence.

They are all results that work. The Grief one might hurt them, but Amit has an answer for that: nobody ever recovers from the death of a child. It would be worse if it said that he would, he spins, because that would suggest a lack of heart, of basic human empathy. He hears the words from speeches in his head, taking the data and turning it into a portrait of a man who will do his best to honor the memory of his dead son, but who is driven and dedicated to running his country first and foremost. And, if they have to play dirty, there’s the sexual abuse question. Homme had a 3.4% percent chance of committing sexual abuse, which his people spun as a number so small as to be insignificant. Laurence scored better. Amit doesn’t ever want to have to use that – not in the way that some of the dirty political games in the past might have done – but he knows that some of the blogs will run with it themselves. That’s the thing: it paints Homme in a worse light just by virtue of its existence. Nothing wrong with that.

Is LAURENCE WALKER likely to suffer from an emotional or mental breakdown? 51% chance of occurrence.

That’s harder, Amit thinks. That’s a tough one. It’s on the wrong side of the fence, irritatingly; this will mean countermeasures, therapists and counselors on call to make sure that nothing goes wrong. It’s fixable, that’s the thing; an arbitrary number based on his situation. Who wouldn’t suffer that risk? So they’ll address that. A strong Vice President will be the key. Somebody that the country feels comfortable with if they were forced to step up, even though nobody will ever say that. Not Homme, no matter what happens.

He scrolls through the rest of the document, to the section headed POLITICS, and he runs through the likely outcomes of Laurence’s voting habits. Who he will be likely to want as his political advisors, who he will want in key governmental roles, where he will side on certain issues. And, at this quick glance, the report syncs with the discussions that they’ve already had. Hundreds of answers booted out from thousands of questions, using Laurence’s past voting habits, the past results of votes, all to predict a path forwards. The report says that Laurence is liable to be fair to the oil companies, which is good – and slightly unexpected; Amit copies the line and pastes it into a new document, to use over the next few meetings. This is all ammunition. He keeps going, scrolling through page after page of the document, reading everything, trying to take it all in, and then he sees the final two questions, in their own boxed-out section at the very end of the file, printed larger, the answers to the very reasons that they got the survey done in the first place.

He doesn’t parse them the first time. He reads them, over and over.

If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of DEMOCRATIC PARTY NOMINEE: 00% chance of success.

If LAURENCE WALKER runs for the role of PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: 00% chance of success.

‘What the fuck?’ Amit says. The man next to him tuts at the language, and Amit mutters an apology. He shuts the file and reopens it, but the results are the same. He pulls his phone from his pocket and turns it on.

‘Hey,’ the man next to him says, ‘you can’t do that!’

‘It’s fine,’ Amit says.

‘We’re on a plane, asshole.’

Amit looks around and sees one of the cabin crew staring at them down the aisle, looking at what’s going on. He can’t have his phone confiscated, so he switches it off.

‘Happy now?’ he asks. The man rolls his eyes, smug at his win. Amit goes back to the laptop and opens the email. He hits reply and writes to them, as quickly as he can.

There’s a problem with the results issued. See final two questions. Please address IMMEDIATELY, or we will be forced to take legal action. He hits the screen’s keyboard so hard it stings the tips of his fingers.

‘What’s wrong?’ Laurence asks. Amit looks across at his boss who is sleepy-eyed, rubbing his face.

‘Nothing,’ Amit says. He thinks about telling him – no lies, no secrets, that’s how this works – but he knows that this will be corrected. When it is, this will be something to laugh about. He doesn’t know, right now, how Laurence will react to it. ‘Somebody is wrong on the Internet,’ Amit says. He can hear the shakiness in his own voice, the lie coming through. Laurence smiles.

‘There’s always somebody wrong on the Internet,’ he says. ‘I’m going to try and get another half hour of shut-eye.’

‘Do it.’ Amit shuts the laptop. ‘Me too.’ Both men shut their eyes, but Amit clutches his phone in his hands. As soon as they land, as soon as they can get to the hotel, he’ll be calling ClearVista; and he’ll be getting angry, speaking to somebody directly, sorting this out.

He shuts his eyes and he sees the final results, the numbers flashing behind his eyelids as if they’re afterimages of the sun.

Deanna drives down to the stretch of shops that calls itself the town center. She could walk this easily – their house is at the end of a long stretch that calls itself Main Street, but it has no actual competition for that title, with almost all of the town’s houses either sitting on it or just off it in neat little clusters – but she has a list of what needs doing, and one of the things involves getting the car checked out at the garage. And there’s the shopping from Henderson’s, for food and the new lock and simply walking around to clear her head. She likes living in this place, talking to the people, being a part of life here. They know Deanna, have done since she was a little girl. That sense of belonging is nice; the community feeling like a part of their lives. As they recovered – as they still recover – from Sean’s death, the support of the town has been incredible. They have all wanted Laurence to pick himself up and, in his parlance, brave the rain. They’re all going to vote for him, they say, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, saying that they’ll plant placards in their lawns and spread the word as much as they can. It’s that sort of town.

The garage is at the far end of the street, past everything else. Deanna pulls in, driving onto the forecourt, and Ann runs out. She’s a short woman, older than she looks, hair pulled back into a greasy net, and she perpetually leans, Deanna’s noticed. On everything, resting her hands. She leans on the hood of the Walkers’ SUV as Deanna gets out.

‘Deanna,’ she says, ‘good to see you.’ She adds a J to her pronunciation of the name that makes Deanna think of I Dream Of Jeannie; a classic sitcom vision of small-town America. ‘She playing up?’

‘Not quite,’ Deanna says. ‘There was a clunking coming from under the hood a few weeks back. Thought we should probably get it checked out.’

‘I’d say you should for sure. You want me to do it right now?’

‘Would you mind?’ Deanna asks. ‘I can go do the shopping then come back?’ Everything is phrased as a question, not wanting to assume or put anybody out. Ann smiles and nods, and takes the keys from Deanna.

‘Give me a half hour,’ she says. Deanna thanks her and walks down the road towards Henderson’s: past the diner, past the church, past the gun store (which does the most trade here of anything, given how close they are to one of the North-East’s major hunting spots), past the liquor store. The owners and customers all stop and nod at her as she passes, all smiling. She goes into Henderson’s and Trent and Martha, co-owners, married for fifty years, as they’ll tell anybody whether they ask or not, and the closest thing to figureheads that the town has, come out and kiss her in greeting and tell her how happy they are to see her. They mean it, as well.

‘Where’s that husband of yours at today?’ Trent asks.

‘Texas,’ Deanna says.

‘Oil money?’

‘Oil money.’

‘That’s politics now,’ Martha says.

‘That’s always been politics,’ Trent counters.

‘As long as you’re all safe and sound, that’s all that matters,’ Martha replies. She goes to the coffee machine in the corner – they had it installed a few years ago, to offer takeout when they started stocking varieties of different coffee beans as well – and makes Deanna a drink that she didn’t even ask for. It’s the way that they do things here; the way that they always have. They know what you want sometimes before you do, even.

‘Not long now until he’ll know, I suppose?’

‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Not long. A couple more months.’

‘So maybe this’ll all calm down after that.’

‘Maybe. Probably not, the way that Laurence tells it.’

‘Oh my word, we’ll be so sad to see you leave,’ Martha says. ‘I mean, of course you’ll come back for your vacations.’

Deanna thinks about the lake house, how that was the intention of owning it all along. Now, she doesn’t know if she can even go there. It feels wrong to her; as if it’s forever tainted. It will always be associated with Sean, with what happened. No getting past that, and the Hendersons realize that as well, if not too late. Trent and Martha shoot each other looks, not knowing whether to address the faux pas or not. It hangs in the air until Deanna breaks the tension. ‘That’s a long way away,’ Deanna says, meaning in terms of votes and time both.

‘I reckon this is a foregone conclusion,’ Trent says. ‘You can’t call these things, but as much as you can, I’d say that it’s a done deal.’ He nods at the television in the corner, behind the counter. There’s Laurence and the other potential nominees, the newscaster talking about their current vote split, the predicted results, and that 3% head start. ‘Makes it easier when the television’s saying he’s the man, I reckon.’

‘Maybe,’ Deanna says.

‘You got a list?’ Martha asks. Deanna holds it up and Martha snatches it and forces it into Trent’s hand. ‘He’ll do it. Nothing better to do. You can stay here and keep me company.’

‘Oh, no,’ Deanna says, but she knows how this goes. It’s always the same.

Trent looks at the list. ‘What do you need the chain for?’ he asks.

‘We had another intruder. They broke the old lock.’

‘Again? Somebody’s pushing their luck, you ask me. You know who it was?’

‘Laurence thinks it’s the press.’

Trent nods. ‘I’ll hate to see you leave Staunton, Deanna, you know that; but it’ll be better for you. A house with a bit more security, keep you safe.’

‘Maybe,’ Deanna says. He nods and looks at the list, picks up a basket and goes off around the shop. There’s a pain in his movements that Deanna hasn’t noticed before, a slight favoring of one leg over the other.

‘I feel terrible making him do this for me,’ Deanna says to Martha.

‘Oh, don’t, Martha replies. ‘He needs to work it or it’ll fall off.’ She smiles. They watch him go down the aisles, and they talk about the kids, and they talk about the town, the same conversations that they always have, just moved on in time, like updates to the same old information. When every item has been collected, Trent scans them at the till. The calorie counts and nutrition values tick up on the screen, ClearVista predicting the weight gain and exercise needed to counter the richer, fattier foods; and then he brings up the total before adjusting it. They always do a discount for Deanna.

By the time she gets back to the car it’s been turned around, now facing the road. Ann comes out of the dark of the garage, holding something in her hand. It’s shiny and golden, a stub of a thing. Deanna thinks that it could be a bullet for a second but then she gets closer and it’s a screw. No: a bolt.

‘Found this inside her,’ Ann says. ‘Must’ve come loose, but I’m damned if I can find from where.’

‘From the engine?’

‘It’s not a car part, best I can tell. Maybe it got kicked up there one day from the road. Happens, you’d be surprised.’

‘Okay,’ Deanna says. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘I changed your oil, so just for that. Give me ten and we’re even.’ She leans again on the hood.

‘You sure?’

‘Ayuh.’

Deanna pulls a twenty out of her purse and hands it over.

‘Consider the rest a tip.’

‘Ha! Okay. We’re giving tips, let me give one to you as well. You need to sell this soon, I reckon.’ She puts her hand on the roof of the car. ‘It’s a few years old now, and you’re losing money on it. All the new models, the tech’s much better. That stuff ages a car more’n you’d imagine. You’ll still get a good price for this right now. I ran it for you, if you want to have a look: software says this has got years left in it yet, but that the book value’s gonna plummet.’