The Last Transaction

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

The Last Transaction is a deep and fascinating glimpse into the memories, inner compulsions, torments, triumphs, and events in the life of a President of the United States in a world gone mad, from 1980 to 1985. Even more, it is a perceptive vision of the major issues our society will face tomorrow. Sure to be a controversial, possibly prophetic, like anything Barry Malzberg writes, this novel is an experience you will not forget.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 163

Sample

Don’t think I can get a thing out today.

Not a thing, not a thing. Sensation of dim blockage not only of the mind but of the bowels; it is, then—and let me try to get this right—as if all of this rhetoric were choked within coils of possibility: too weak, distracted, dispirited even for simple recitation of the facts. Tomorrow, then, or perhaps the day after—the constant flickering of the light on this machine as I speak is a pain in the ass. Voice as light; the reduction of words to image. Incontinence beckons again.

Coming into Peoria there was music, five of the bands massed to greet me at the steps of the town hall, noise all around, color, return of native son in triumph after all these years. It must have hit me for the first time then—although again there might have been hints before then—a complete hint of disassociation. I did not know where I was. Suddenly all of it was flicking in and out of focus: one moment the town hall, the limousine, the noise, and the pressure against me on the seat (I thought, as I had a thousand times in open limousines, of Kennedy, leaning forward slightly to touch my shoetops with a glistening forefinger, which trembled only slightly out of the field of vision); and the next some dim, gray, open space in which I floated like a bottle bobbing in the sea, a flick! in the recession of consciousness—and then back into focus again, one high-school youth bleating madly through his sousaphone, dangling like an elevated prick into the car. But although I saw, I did not know where I was, literally could not place the segment for an instant: who was I? where was this? what was going on? And the panic began. Never had this hit me in public before. A few times perhaps in bed, once in a cabinet meeting—but those were moments instantly controlled. But this one went on, appallingly on. I could feel the sweat begin to come out of me in little ball-joints of excrescence, and I straightened, leaned against the seat, and opened my mouth, warning myself to take slow breaths. Slow breaths. Hope: “Bill, what is wrong? What’s the matter, Bill?” Never could get a thing past that bitch—not that her knowledge ever did her any good either. “Bill, you’re very white. Are you all right, Bill? All right?” shoving hip to thigh against me in the enclosure of the limousine then, and I could feel myself swinging perilously into alignment finally, a sense of history returning along with time and place, and I said, “Yes, Hope, I’m all right, everything is all right,” forcing a trembling little wave above the door, the wind glancing off my palm, then another, and indeed I did feel better. Somewhere between the bleats of sousaphone and Hope’s own kind, blurred words, I could feel assertiveness returning, a sensation that I had made some awful passage and was now coming out through the other end—all illusory perhaps but very comforting at the time. There is nothing like going briefly crazy and coming away from it to give you a shot of optimism, let me tell you. Let me tell you that, among other things. We welcome the president of the United States. Returned native son for the first time in so and so many years. Triumphant reelection campaign. First Lady too. She pressed my palm, gave me little glances dappled by the sun. You might have thought—even the local dignitaries and Secret Service might have thought—that we were lovers. Ah, well. Future of America within our grasp. Future of Americans also within our grasp. The end of the century approaching, crucial choices for the next two thousand years—the next four thousand years—and then, just as I was coming toward the end of it, one more image of Kennedy thrust into mind as if seen through rips in the mesh of consciousness, and falling, falling into her arms, their arms, the burning of the brain. … That was a very difficult election.

Eggs with bacon on toast with a side order of hashed browns. Sounds of the road rising and filtering through all the sounds of the diner. A 1938 Packard Eight, straight cylinders with floor-shift and high cushions. Explosion of sun against the visors, the road falling.

Merrick is on duty during the days this week. He and Henry alternate, of course (I am very cunning and alert to everything that is going around me; this senility and now incontinence are merely by-products of my cunning; like the observant freak at the sideshow they permit me to watch the others without drawing attention to myself) so that Henry was my day-attendant last week and will again be next. But on the other hand, Merrick is the one with whom I have to contend this week, and I do not like him very much, although under all of the difficult circumstances attending this case, there is no particular reason why I should. Merrick is forty, or perhaps he is forty-two years old; he looks like a cabinet minister, at least in certain flashes and aspects of the light, but he is little more than a skilled male nurse—which is not to say that he is to be derogated on these grounds alone. I wonder why they will not allow me female nurses—but it is not mine to speculate. Perhaps they feel that I am at least potentially violent, but except for that one unfortunate situation, I have never been. Violent.

Tapes jamming in the recorder, the spool slamming to halt, and the tape exploding then in a filthy mess out of the machine and on the rug. It was necessary for me to call Merrick for assistance, my own old hands being insufficient to scoop the damned tape from the rug, untangle and feed it into the machine again. And in fury I bellowed for Merrick, helpless tears coming into my helpless old eyes, my helpless old frame shuddering and shaking in its chair, the microphone falling away from my lips as I bellowed and bellowed for him … increasingly, I disgust myself. Self-revulsion may be the last identity of the aged, the last expression of the will which they are permitted. Merrick came in (I imagine that he is sitting in the outer room reading a newspaper, although this is pure sentiment; Merrick, I am convinced, can neither read nor write, undoubtedly he listens to my ravings with a disinterested ear, pausing now and then to take small, careful swallows from the pint bottle of gin which I can see bulging in his pocket) and saw the mess and stooped over to pick it up, shaking his head, his face carefully blank.

“Now, Mr. President,” he said, “this is happening too often. This is the third time this week you’ve had an accident with the recorder, Mr. President. Don’t you think that maybe you should rest for a while? Or at least you could use casettes, now casettes don’t spill all over—”

“I’ll do whatever I want,” I said. Merrick does not bring out the best in me. “I don’t want a cassette. I want something that I can feel. I want to see accumulation. Don’t call me Mr. President.”

“Why, Mr. President, you are the president, I mean you were. It’s only proper—”

“Don’t give me any of your shit,” I said. Sometimes I enjoy using obscenity before Merrick merely to gauge his reaction. Henry never shrugs, is as likely to answer me scatologically as not, but Merrick underneath his shell of white has some lurking beast of Protestant ethic: obscenity disturbs him, even more when it comes from an ex- chief of state. “Clean up that filthy mess and go,” I said.

He continued at his work, casting shy, careful glances over his shoulder. “All of the excitement,” he said, “all of this excitement is not so good for you, Mr. President. Perhaps a nap—”

“I don’t want a nap,” I said. “I don’t want to be told what to do. I don’t have to take orders from you. Don’t call me Mr. President.”

A sudden roiling dust came up before my eyes; I realized that I was about to incur another spell of weakness. Not two hours before the machine, not three hours out of the bed, and I felt myself beginning to lurch and totter once more inside, all powers failing. I could not bear for him to see my disgrace. “Get out of here, Merrick,” I said.

He stood there, strips of tape like ribbons of state filtering through his fingers, one spool dangling from his wrist like a scrotal sac. His eyes showed new alertness. “You’re not well,” he said.

“Get out of here.”

“Upsy-daisy, Mr. President,” Merrick said, laying the spools and tape carefully on the floor and coming over to extend an arm, pull me crumpling from the chair. “Now, we’ll just take care of that later. We’ll just clean that up a little later on this morning and have it nice for you when you’re ready to come back. We’ll have everything for you later. But it’s time for a rest now; you don’t look well. And also, some medicine will make you feel much better.”

I could not resist him. Falling across him, riding his back like an insect, I could see the layers of white rising against my eyes, a field of white, becoming all perception. I struggled. against him, flapped my hands like paper on the surfaces, but no good, no good. He carried me easily. He is 270 pounds. He used to be an amateur boxing champion, he once told me. There is no way in which I could resist him—and then again why should I? Without his presence, without the presence of the others in these rooms, how could I live? I would not trust myself to breathe.

“Come along, Mr. President,” Merrick said, and we tottered and tumbled from the room. As we did this, I had a sudden jagged vision of the procession through the halls for the State of the Union and said to Merrick, “Yes, Mr. Speaker, yes,” but he did not gauge the sense of this, having neither irony nor recollection, and after a time I did not gauge the sense of it either, being preoccupied with more immediate necessities. How can I continue the tapes if my health continues to flag? How will I finish my work?

Hovering above Eunice, Arthur’s squalls from the next room mounting and mounting, it occurred to me that all I wanted to do was to finish, that lust or simple necessity had made me a beast and my concern was no longer for mutuality, for her pleasure, for the ethics of sex itself, but only to come and be done with it before the wretched screams became insuperable and she would have to rear from the bed, throw over the sheets, lumber off, sighing, into the next room to feed him. At the beginning I had performed with gentleness and fire, just as she had asked, but as the first blade of sound came from his bedroom, the rhythm of my purpose broke and I was suspended on flaming wire, merely trying to come into her before all of it was gone and once again I would have to dwindle into the gloom of self, ponder my losses while listening to the slobbering and sucks from the next room. Completely supplanted. Jabbing and jabbing away at her, all purpose concentrated into my organ, I thought for an instant that I could break through into the other side of her, force her to an excess of feeling that she had not known before. But then it all went away, and I was in the capitol with the two of them, the governor looking at me grimly, his eyes slanting toward knowledge, then away in contrived disinterest in that way of his, and I told him, “You haven’t got the votes. That’s all. They’re not there.”

“You’re job isn’t to tell me I don’t have the votes,” he said. “Your job is to get me the votes.”

“We can’t,” Connors said, looking away from me. “We’ve been up and down the aisles on this one. The resistance is too strong; they’re getting too much pressure downstate. It won’t go through.”

“Yes it will,” the governor said. He jabbed Connors once in the chest, not too lightly, and reinforced that conviction which I had had from the first—that there was in the governor perhaps the desire to possess, but in Connors it was the need for possession, and this was the real, the operable relationship, Connors’ pervasive need to be fucked, to literally be empty and dominated and overtaken. By that insight I turned away—it Was too disgusting—and found myself in fact walking out of the office, and the governor said, “Bill, where the fuck are you going?”

“I’m going away,” I said. “I have nothing else to say. There’s nothing more to do here. We came to give you a message and now it’s given. We haven’t got the votes.”

“Stay here,” the governor said. “I want to talk—”

“No,” I said. I do not know where that sudden conviction came from, but it came flaring from within; and it was as if I was seeing Connors, the governor himself through the other end of a very powerful telescope, dwindled figures revolving in statuary conf. . .