THE ASSASSIN
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Illustration by TIM O’BRIEN in The American Bystander #15
[If you’re on a desktop or tablet, and would prefer to read this piece as it appears in Bystander #15, you can download a PDF here. The first two pages are a spread. — The Editors]
The security checkpoint was dead ahead, and if things today were going to go down, then they would go down right here, right now. They were checking backpacks and purses with flashlights, to make sure you didn’t have any bombs. Then, after this, they ran the backpacks, and then the guests, through a metal detector. Just to be on the safe side. Thick Florida sunshine beat down on Molly’s face, even at this early hour of the day. From speakers hidden in the flowers came the endless melody. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true! Yeah, Molly thought. That hasn’t exactly been my experience.
“These three remain,” her mother had said, when she first came out. “Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
“But mom,” she said. “Won’t it be a scandal when everyone finds out your son has become your daughter? Won’t that be an embarrassment?” The tears had rolled down her face and hung at the bottom of her chin, like raindrops on a downspout.
“Yes,” mom said. “But I will adjust.”
The security officer—did they call them cast members?—nodded at her respectfully. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said. On his lapel was a nametag: STANDHOPE. Molly put her purse down on the table, and the officer shone his pen light into its depths. Then he nodded and handed it back to her. He looked at her dress blues with a phrase pregnant upon his lips. Go on, she thought. Say it.
“Thank you for your service,” said Officer Standhope, and she nodded somberly, as if to make clear the depths of the horrors she had witnessed but would not now discuss. The woman on the far side of the metal detector waved her forward, and Molly moved through the portal awkwardly, limping slightly on the fake leg. A piercing alarm went off, and the woman held up her hands, “I’m going to have you stop right there ma’am,” she said. Within that single instant three other security guards were on the scene, like they’d all instantly teleported here from the Enterprise.
“It’s her leg,” said the woman at the x-ray. Her nametag said she was HERNANDEZ.
“I’m wearing a prosthesis,” she said, and wondered if she should mention the cancer. She pulled up the cuff of her uniform trousers, revealing the high-tech joint that connected the force sensor in the calf to her dynamic foot. “There’s a micro-processor in the knee?”
“Yeah, said Ms. Hernandez. She couldn’t be twenty years old. Security at the Magic Kingdom was not exactly the TSA. “Can we run you through again?” Officer Standhope came over and looked at the screen, which the young woman pointed at with a pencil. “I’m looking at that,” she said to him quietly.
“Would you like me to go through again, miss?” she said, and turned back, with just the most barely detectable sense of—what would you call it?—nobility striving against humiliation.
“That’s okay Lieutenant,” said Officer Standhope, with a wave of his hand. “You can go on ahead.”
She turned back, picking up her purse from the table. “Thank you for keeping us safe,” she said to him.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. Then, as if unwilling to surrender this vague intimacy between them, he added, “Flight surgeon?” He was looking at the badge upon her breast.
She gave him a look to suggest that, while she was proud of her service, she was not given to speaking of it. “Flight nurse,” she said.
Standhope nodded. “SEACOPS,” he said. “USS Ardent. And the Dextrous.” He looked around at the Magic Kingdom. “In another life.”
Molly felt her heart pounding in her breast. She wasn’t entirely sure what sea cops were. Some kind of naval police, probably?
“Well,” she said, “all ashore that’s going ashore.” She turned swiftly—too swiftly. A frisson of pain shot up from the inner socket encasing her thigh stump, and she cried out, “Fuck,” a phrase that was not exactly on-brand.
“Ma’am?” said Standhope.
She moved away from him, trying to resist the impulse to run. Ahead of them was the train station, the old steam locomotive puffing happily away. Beyond that, Main Street. She wanted to look back. It was ironic that she’d got all the way through security only to nearly blow it at the last minute.
Back at the security station, Officer Standhope looked after Molly as she moved off into the crowd. He rubbed his chin. Then he went back to the computer screen and looked at the x-ray image again. Ms. Hernandez pointed at the screen with a pencil again. “This is what I was looking at,” she said.
“The leg?” he said.
“No,” she said, with irritation. “This thing. Hidden inside it.”
• • •
When she had been raising the kids with Louise, the operating profanity had been Oh for. It was short, of course, for Oh for fuck’s sakes, or even, Oh for the love of fuck. They’d agreed they weren’t going to swear in front of the children, though, so Oh for became the go-to. Luke and Patrick had used it when they were toddlers, without having a clue that it was short for anything. In the same way Louise, her ex, had used “Sugar Honey Ice Tea,” an Oklahomaism. They’d been married for almost twenty years before Molly realized that it was a way of spelling out “shit.”
They’d been here once, maybe ’98 or ’99, Louise and the boyos, and they’d taken on the park like they were storming the beaches at Normandy. They arrived at rope drop, screamed toward Space Mountain, then got themselves over to Thunder Mountain Railroad right after. The park had started to fill up by mid-morning, but there was still time to check off Splash Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted House before lunch. She remembered the boys starting to flag after that, a complication that wasn’t eased by the fact that they’d somehow strayed into a section of the park where the only thing to eat was turkey legs. Patrick, eight years old, had wanted to know, where’s the rest of the turkey? Is it walking around with a leg like you, Daddy? Everyone thought this was hilarious, a turkey with a prosthethic limb. A paragobbler.
Louise had advocated a quick retreat after that, given that they’d checked off all the “A” rides, and the boyos were strangely fine with that, especially since she promised to bring them back for the fireworks. Molly—Mark, then—had been quietly pissy about not being able to take in the tackier rides which she actually loved most of all—the Carousel of Progress, Bear Country Jamboree, and dear god, the Enchanted Tiki Room. Still, it was not possible to be a connoisseur of kitsch if you hadn’t developed a taste for irony. Which the rest of her family had not.
Her own father had been irony-challenged as well. Back then, as a boy named Mark, she’d begged him to take the family to Orlando. But he’d dismissed Mark’s plea, saying, That’s a place for babies. When you grow up, you’ll understand, the gravity of the world. That’s what you need to respect.
The gravity of the world, young Mark had thought. It was a thing his father could perceive, and he could not, at least not yet. He’d hugged his father’s leg. “When I grow up, I want to be like you,” he said.
After Molly came out, after the divorce, after a judge had ruled that she had no parental rights at all, that she was, in fact, an ongoing threat to their well-being, well: she had some sense of it now, the gravity of the world. She was blocked from their Facebook pages, hadn’t even laid eyes on her own sons in years. They’d be in their late twenties by now, maybe with families of their own. Had they brought their own sons to the Magic Kingdom in the years since? Had they paused before the silhouette of Splash Mountain and remembered the family they had been?
I didn’t say it was your laughin’ place, Brer Fox, I said it was my laughin’ place.
Molly made her way down Main Street to the moat in front of Cinderella’s Castle, where she sat down on a bench for a moment, catching her breath. Inside the socket her stump throbbed. She checked her watch. 9:30 AM.
• • •
In a conference room one story directly below Main Street, Officer Standhope was reviewing the images from the x-rays with his immediate superior, Leo Livshits. Hernandez was there too. “A U.S. Navy officer, you say?” said Livshits. He was a large sweating man with a bald head and a grey mustache.
“She was wearing dress blues,” said Standhope. “Flight nurse.”
“Can I see the footage from the camera?” said Livshits.
“Here you go,” said Hernandez. They all looked at the wall monitor, where the black-and-white video of Molly O’Carragain moving through the security line played. Livshits watched as Standhope looked into her purse with a flashlight, then rolled it through the x-ray. The woman moved through the portal, then paused as the alarm went off.
Livshits rubbed his eyes. “I’m not seeing it,” he said.
“Well,” said Standhope. “It’s right there, in the leg.”
“Yeah, I see that,” he said. “It’s a shadow, shaped like a sidearm. But it’s probably bullshit. I’m thinking it’s bullshit.”
“Should we—” said Standhope. “Take her in?”
“That’d look great,” said Livshits. “Hauling in a vet. Correction—a wounded vet. Because of some bullshit…penumbra. A penumbra of a shadow of an emanation, isn’t that what they call it?”
“Sir,” said Hernandez. “I’m thinking of the potential risks here—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Livshitz. “I just—” He ran his fat hand over his bald head again, from crown to chin. He sighed. “All right, fine. Bring her in. But do it with respect. You respect the hell out of her.”
Standhope was staring at the screen with a strange expression.
“What?” said Livshits.
“She’s a strange looking woman, isn’t she?”
• • •
Molly stood before the waters surrounding Tom Sawyer Island. A ferryboat was churning away from her, a calliope puffing steam in the bright sunshine and playing “In the Good Old Summertime.” In the distance to her right was the Haunted House, standing on its bluff overlooking the river. To the left was the promenade along the waters, the Diamond Horseshoe restaurant, the Country Bears, the Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn. Somewhere beyond all that was Frontierland.
Another ripple of pain shot up her right leg. Yeah, Molly thought to herself. And when did surprise set in, exactly? There’s a reason it doesn’t sit right, given the alterations she’d had to make in order to sneak in the Glock. She found a bench.
A family walked by her, a pair of fat parents and four resentful children, all six of them eating turkey legs. A teenage daughter sucked on a pink slushie. Two of the children—twin boys, Molly figured—were wearing Hooters T-shirts. The father was wearing one of those Make America Great Again hats. She felt the rage seething within her.
There was a loud blast from the riverboat, startling everyone on shore, and the girl with the slushie dropped it on the sidewalk, where it exploded pinkly in every direction. The other members of her family burst into riotous laughter, like this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. The girl, who couldn’t have been older than fourteen, stood there with her turkey leg, tears quivering in her eyes.
“Womp womp,” said the dad.
A dufus paused before her. He was wearing camouflage, his T-shirt and his pants and his hat. His beer belly spewed over his belt, like a huge loaf of rising dough. By his side was a young boy, about eight, wearing a shirt with wide blue-and-white horizontal stripes.
“Thank you for your service,” said the dad. The boy cowered behind the father’s leg, viewing Molly with an expression of fear and awe.
She sat there, wondering what the proper response could be. You’re welcome? It made her feel self-conscious about the whole ruse, and for an instant it occurred to her to come clean. Listen, she might say. I just borrowed this uniform from my friend Coop. I figured it’d make them less likely to stop me at security. Truth is, I was never in the service. They wouldn’t even let me serve, to tell you the truth, even if I volunteered. Or at least they wouldn’t if Agent Orange gets his way, the unbearable, poisonous fuck.
But of course, it wasn’t possible to say any of this. She just nodded somberly.
Molly figured that the dufus, along with his spawn, would be on their way after this, but the man just continued to stand there hunkering, while the child peered at her as if through a periscope. She tried to imagine the logic of the crap the man told himself to ease his conscience. After all, that’s what everyone kept saying we needed to do, to open up our hearts and understand the disaffection of the rural white voter. But it seemed hopeless. She’d come from a Republican family, and the general idea of lower taxes, greater personal responsibility, smaller government—she understood the appeal of these things, as ideas. But how did we get from there to—this place?
“How’d you lose the leg?” the dufus enquired. The boy looked at his father, aware, even at his tender age, what an awful thing this was to ask another human being.
“Daaad,” he said, in a stage whisper. “Let’s go.”
She’d rehearsed an answer before embarking on this mission, something about an IUD in Fallujah. I was out with a convoy, securing the perimeter, when suddenly—
IED, actually. Not an IUD. An improvised something device. As opposed to an Intra-Uterine Device. Which, as it turns out, was also something she’d never had. On account of not having a uterus, and stuff.
“Hey, you know what,” Molly said, and suddenly stood up. “It’s none of your business.”
“Whoa,” said the dufus. The boy retreated into himself, as if this was exactly what he’d foreseen. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just—”
“I said it’s none of your fucking business,” Molly snapped, and walked swiftly away from him, or as swiftly as she could with the pegleg. Out on the lagoon, the Mark Twain steamboat chugged toward Tom Sawyer Island.
The dufus stood there watching her go. Something about the woman in the uniform felt—off.
Two people, a man and a woman, rushed toward the bench where the officer had been sitting. They wore blue-grey uniforms with badges over the left breast and the Disney “D” logo on the right sleeve. Black caps with visors. They looked around, a little confused. One of them, a woman with a badge that read HERNANDEZ, turned to the dufus. “Excuse me sir,” said she. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen-—?”
“Navy officer?” he replied. “Woman with a pegleg?”
“Yeah,” said Standhope. “Was she just here?”
“Walked off that way,” said the dufus, pointing toward Adventureland. His son appeared to be mentally crawling into an invisible cave. “What’d she do?”
“Nothing, sir,” said Officer Hernandez. “We just want to talk to her.”
“Well you should,” said the dufus. “She’s bats.” He looked at his son. “Don’t you think she was bats, Bruce?”
Bruce looked at the cops, and then at his father. “Yes,” he said. “She was scary.”
“Bats and scary,” said Standhope. “How exactly?”
“I was just talking to her,” said the dufus. “She used some language.”
Hernandez was talking into a walkie-talkie she’d removed from her belt. “What do you see on the cameras?” she said. “Over.”
She listened as Livshits replied.
“They get like that,” said the dufus. “My son.”
“We gotta go,” said Hernandez.
“Your son?” said Standhope, looking at Bruce.
“My other son,” said the dufus. “Post-traumatic stress. From the war.” He shook his head. “It’s like somebody took my boy away and gave me back some whole other person.”
Bruce hung his head in shame, as if the some whole other person his father had been given was himself, rather than a transformed version of his older brother. It was clear enough that the father, given the choice, would have traded the young son in a heartbeat for an unharmed version of the older one.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Standhope.
“We gotta go,” said Hernandez.
“You take care, sir,” said Standhope.
“Yeah, okay,” said the dufus, as the officers turned away and moved swiftly toward Adventureland. He looked down at Bruce, who was now inexplicably crying.
“Oh for God’s sakes, what the hell are you crying about.”
“I’m not,” Bruce wept.
“Hey,” he shouted after the cops. “Hey! What’d she do?”
• • •
Molly, sitting on a stall in the ladies’ room halfway between the Tortuga Tavern and the Pirates League, had the leg off now and was removing the gun from the flexible inner socket. It was a Glock G42 Flat Dark Earth 380, with a 6+1 mag and a 3.25 inch barrel. She pulled out the magazine, then clicked it back into place. From the stall next to her came the sound of a flush, and for a moment Molly feared that the unmistakable sound of a Glock mag might have given her neighbor the willies, but a moment later she heard the stranger washing her hands in the sink, and someone else entered the stall next door. She could see a pair of shoes—sensible mom shoes, worn down trainers, exactly the kind of footwear popular with the suburban ladies who had helped deliver us to this hell-hole in the first place. Molly tried to imagine these people going into the voting booth, and weighing their choice: on the one hand, the first female president, a person arguably more experienced in public service than any previously nominated candidate, someone who would protect abortion rights, and health care, and the integrity of the Supreme Court. On the other hand, Agent Orange, this giant idiot moron. Hmm, said the mom, O I can’t choose. I guess I’ll have to go with—Agent Orange!
From the stall beside hers came the sound of agitated flushing. Molly aimed the muzzle of the Glock at the divider, right about the place where Mom Shoes was tidying up. There should be a sign, she thought. Please do not flush country down toilet. Use the voting booths provided.
Molly slipped the Glock into her purse and re-affixed the leg. As she did this, she tried to imagine the conversation she’d be having in the aftermath. Was it a political statement, they’d want to know. Something about the trans military ban, maybe? Or the ruling in the Masterpiece Cake case? Was it the Kavanaugh nomination? Or was it something more personal—maybe the memory of having been here before, with the family you had lost?
But it was none of these things, or none of them alone, in any case. In the end, it was because the land she once had known and loved had been taken from her, and transformed into a seething, turgid, selfie-taking, twitter-tweeting, effluvium-spewing sewer culvert.
That’s why I shot him, she would say. I was trying to encourage everyone to be nice.
Molly was moving swiftly now. She walked past Pirates of the Caribbean on her right, the Enchanted Tiki Room on her left, the Magic Carpets of Aladdin dead ahead. The crowds thinned out in front of the Tiki Room, but it was still a hot day full of drained Americans. She had a quick memory of taking her boys through Pirates of the Caribbean years ago, how frightened they’d been of the room full of burning buildings. That little dog with the keys to the dungeon in its mouth, the jailed buccaneers praying they could coax it closer before they were consumed in flames. Then, they rounded the corner, and there it was, the ornate pirate ship, like something from a dream.
She wondered what her sons were like now. It was not impossible they had sons of their own. What had her grandchildren been told? Yes, you had a grandfather, but he died. Something like this, she imagined. This is what cis people were like: it was easier to tell people you were dead than trans. Because death, in this view, at least came without shame. Whereas.
On her right now: the Swiss Family Treehouse. On her left: some kind of cafeteria. Just beyond this: the Sunshine Tree Terrace, where people in shorts were eating orange soft-serve ice cream. Now she came to the bridge above the lagoon and the sign above it reading ADVENTURELAND. She left this all behind. This took her to a square on the outskirts of the center pavilion, the Cinderella castle surrounded by gardens. There was a wire running to the castle, if you looked carefully, and it was upon this that the cast member portraying Tink would fly, once the sun went down. By then, she reckoned, she’d be in custody. Or, you know.
Molly took a left, the shortcut across the turgid Adventureland estuary, and followed the lagoon back toward Liberty Square. Dead ahead: Sleepy Hollow, with its funnel cakes, waffles, and sandwiches made from ice cream cookies shaped like a decapitated cartoon villain.
In the far distance, perched upon its bluff, were the towers of the Haunted Mansion. She remembered that song, “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” on endless loop inside the ride, and how young Patrick had sat next to her in the hearse-car, his hands clamped over his face for the duration. You said it was going to be funny, he’d wept, afterwards.
Shrouded in a daft disguise, they pretend to terrorize.
Molly O’Carragain reached into her purse and felt the cool steel of the Glock, and gently clicked off the safety.
• • •
“I didn’t get a good look at her,” said a severe-looking woman, like the wife in the painting of the farmer with the pitchfork. “I was already on my way out. All I saw was she was tall.”
“This was how long ago?” said Standhope. They were in a cluster in front of the rest rooms in Adventureland.
“Like, a minute,” said the farmer’s wife. “She’s probably still in there!”
“Okay,” said Hernandez. “We’re going in.”
“I’ll wait here,” said Standhope.
Hernandez, halfway to the entrance, turned back. “The hell you will, come on, let’s go!”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Standhope said. “Men in the ladies room!”
“The fuck, come on!”
“I’m not going in there!” Standhope said, more firmly.
“We have an armed suspect!” said Hernandez. “I think that trumps—”
“Armed?” said the farmer’s wife. “What do you mean, armed?”
Standhope ground his teeth. “Fine,” he said, and followed Hernandez into the den of pleasure.
“Did he say armed?” said a thin man to the farmer’s wife.
“Sorry, ladies!” said Standhope, in a loud voice. He hunkered near the sinks with his weapon drawn. “Just keeping everybody safe!”
A woman came out of a stall. She had ornate tattoos on both arms, from shoulder to wrist. Swastikas crawled along her biceps. She sudsed up her hands and rinsed them, and then placed them beneath a high-powered hand dryer, this being the most efficient way of preventing the spread of disease.
Hernandez went from stall to stall, looking underneath the doors at the shoes of women. “Shit,” she said.
Standhope waited uncomfortably by the sinks. He thought back to his days on the USS Ardent, a whole ship populated only by men. That was a different world than this. It smelled different in ladies rooms. There was something acrid and salty in the air. What was it—the smell of iron?
“We’ve lost her,” said Hernandez. Sweat was trickling down her temples, plastering her black curly hair to her skin.
“Do we know that?” said Standhope.
“Everybody here,” said Hernandez, “has two feet.”
“Maybe that’s just what she wants us to think,” said Standhope.
Hernandez looked at her partner. “Are you all right?” she said. “Seriously?”
“I don’t know,” said Standhope. “I’m confused.”
“Livshits, Hernandez,” she said into her radio. “She’s given us the slip again.”
There was some swearing from the other end. Then Livshits said, “I’m giving you ten minutes to find her, then we’re going Code Nine.”
“Is that really necessary?” said Standhope. “Maybe we could just—”
“What do you see on the monitors?” Hernandez asked. “Talk to me.”
Standhope looked out the door of the women’s room at the Magic Kingdom beyond. He remembered standing on the deck of the Ardent, nothing to see in every direction except the Indian Ocean. The bow rose and fell.
He tried to put himself in this woman’s shoes. Shoe. What were her intentions? If the goal was to create the greatest amount of mayhem, where would you go? And what would you do? From the distance Standhope heard the laughter of children. The steam whistle on the Mark Twain blasted into the morning air.
“Say that again,” said Hernandez, into her radio. “She’s where?”
• • •
The first thing Molly saw as she moved through the lobby was that same dufus from the lagoon having some sort of argument with his son. She didn’t want to get too close, in case her indiscreet reply to him had somehow aroused his suspicions. But even at this distance, you could see the child didn’t want to go in. The dad was adamant, though, even as the child squatted down on the floor and tried to escape his father’s grasp. I don’t care, said the man. We’re going.
Molly moved on into the crowd, although admittedly it was pretty hard to blend in anywhere, being six feet tall, and walking on a peg leg, and wearing a naval officer’s uniform. Of course, people couldn’t see the pegleg unless they noticed the space between her shoe and the bottom of her trouser-cuff, where the shaft that held the force sensor was just barely visible above the dynamic foot.
The air was full of sleepy conversations; this was not the place you went when you first came into the park. This was something you did toward the end, after your will to live had been sapped by the long lines and the turkey legs, and all you wanted was to sit in some anonymous silence.
Molly passed into the theatre and took a seat on the aisle, not too close, but not too far either. Her stump ached, but then that was to be expected with all the custom alterations she’d had to make to the socket in order to smuggle the Glock through security. Still, the pain that she was feeling seemed to go deeper, right to the bone. It wasn’t a good sign.
Before her was the blue curtain with the presidential seal projected upon it. An announcer spoke in a reverential and stentorian tone: “This program is dedicated to the memory of Walt Disney. In 1971, his love for America inspired the creation of the Hall of Presidents. A place to celebrate the optimism and good will he saw at the heart of the American story.”
The curtains parted. Fog and smoke drifted across the stage. There was a painting of what looked like George Washington planting the Betsy Ross flag atop of Iwo Jima. Now there was a new announcer, a woman. “It is 1783. The smoke is clearing from the Revolutionary War.” And so on. Molly just shook her head, and thought about poor old Walt. He got cancer, too, died sometime in the 60s, the Johnson years, she figured. The Watusi. The Twist. El Dorado.
From behind her, she heard a strange sound, like weeping. At first it was suppressed, then it swelled into something more like open sobbing. “Quit it,” said another voice, and she didn’t have to turn around to see. “I swear to God. I’ll give you something to cry about.”
For a while Molly just sat there, listening to the twin sounds: the child behind her weeping, the announcer narrating a gussied-up version of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. It was like listening to a radio stuck between stations. Jesus Christ, she thought. Just like my own miserable life.
She felt the gun in her purse, and thought of Coop. I am Molly O’Carragain, she thought. And I am an instrument for the love of God.
Now the curtains parted, and there was Abe Lincoln, sitting in a chair, a wooden version of the marble throne he sat upon in his Memorial. He stood up. The president wore a long coat that fell nearly to his knees. There were four buttons on each side of the coat. He also had a loose bow tie, and a vest. “Four score and seven years ago,” he said. “Our forefathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
“And women!” someone shouted, from the back of the hall.
“Sshh,” said someone else.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said the dufus behind her. “It’s gonna be like that now?”
After the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln sat back down, and the curtains were drawn again. Then time speeded up. Images flashed across the screen of the country’s growing prosperity. Teddy Roosevelt waved at a crowd. The pistons of locomotives raced forward and back. Miners panned for gold. Molten steel poured from buckets in a foundry and sparks flew in the air. Then FDR allowed as how there was nothing to fear etc etc. Now it was VE Day in Times Square. And seconds later: holy cow, we were going to the Moon! Louie Armstrong played the trumpet. Jack Kennedy, in his lovely tails, said, “Ask not,” etc. Martin Luther King appeared in shirt sleeves. Jimmy Carter stood between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, and everyone shook hands all around. There was Reagan, and Clinton. The twin towers fell. Obama walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
She thought about the passage of time, both its deadly protraction and its heartbreaking velocity. When her boys were small, she remembered that feeling—that each day took an eternity to pass. But the years had passed by like wind.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Presidents of the United States of America,” said the announcer, and the curtain rose again on the tableau of the forty-four robots gathered upon the stage. Some of them sat serenely in chairs, others stood around, clutching at their lapels. Everyone was winking and blinking.
Trump stood at the center of the stage, wearing a black suit and a blue and white diagonally striped tie. Lincoln sat in a chair next to him, and on the other side, Ulysses S. Grant. The presidents were gathered in little groups, arranged by chronology. The founding fathers—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, were all stage left. As they were introduced, a small spotlight shone on their visages, and the robots looked duly humble. The other robots looked at them with deference.
The prewar presidents passed in a blur, most of them stage right. Lincoln glared at them: Jackson, van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor. Strangely, Millard Fillmore was standing nearly at center stage, behind Trump and Lincoln. Abe didn’t turn around to look him in the eyes, or Franklin Pierce, either. You couldn’t blame him—each one of those ignoramuses having done all they could to force the moment to its crisis.
Then James Buchanan, the old doughface. And finally, Abraham Lincoln, and as the name was spoken, Trump gestured with his left arm as if to say, The Great Emancipator, amiright?
Then it was on to Andrew Johnson, who was also nearly center stage, standing next to Buchanan, just over Trump’s left shoulder.
Behind her, she heard the boy sobbing again. “You’re crying at U.S. Grant now?” said the dufus. “Seriously?”
“That’s not why,” said the child.
The postwar presidents were all on the far right side of the stage, and the robots craned their neck to see. Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley.
They had arrived in the 20th Century now, and Molly felt her heart pounding. I’m really going to do this, she thought. It’s all happening right now.
Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding. There was a flash of light as doors opened at the back of the house, and two figures came down the aisles. They made their way to the front and shone their flashlights out into the audience. There was some muttering among the crowd at this. The flashlight played over Molly’s face but they didn’t see her, not yet anyhow. Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman.
Molly looked around, wondering whether she should change the plan at the last second. Would it be so different if she spun around and took aim in a different direction? The flashlight played off of her face again, blinding her for a moment. “Hey, quit it!” shouted the dufus. “You’re wrecking the whole show!”
Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter. Now Reagan, the unbelievable idiot. The flashlight beam glanced across Molly’s face again, and this time they froze upon her. Henandez shouted to Standhope. We got her, and the two of them moved quickly up the aisle toward her. “Ma’am,” said Hernandez. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. “Ma’am.”
She stood up, took off the safety and aimed. Hernandez drew her weapon, and so did Standhope. The President began to speak. “I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute—”
Molly pulled the trigger. It was louder than she thought. “—the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability—” He was still talking, although she noted that the Ulysses S. Grant’s head was now hanging at a weird angle. God dammit, she thought. After all this, I’m going to wind up shooting the wrong fucking robot. Some smoke puffed from a hole in the general’s neck.
The officers were almost upon her now. Molly shot again. “—defend the Constitution of—” She pulled off two more shots. Then there was a shot that did not come from her gun. The Trump robot wobbled. It raised one hand to its cheeks.
“—the United States. So help me God.” Now people in the audience were screaming. A row of people off to the right rose to their feet.
They’re actually shooting at me now, Molly wondered? Somehow, step by painful step, she had walked into this world. Well, fine, she thought. Screw it. Molly emptied the magazine, one gunshot after another echoing in the theatre. The robot President shook, like a can of paint in a mixer, and then all at once, Donald Trump’s head fell off of his shoulders and rolled across the floor. Someone in the audience screamed. Someone else laughed, as if this was funny.
She felt the impact as Hernandez tackled her and crushed her to the floor. The Glock fell from her hands and skittered down the steps leading toward the proscenium. Standhope, out of breath, climbed on top of her and helped clamp her into a pair of handcuffs. Incredibly, the recorded part of the program was still going. “From the beginning,” Trump’s voice said, “it was the People who rose up to defend our freedoms.”
“Everything’s under control,” Standhope said to the crowd. “Just a guest who’s sick. We’re going to take her to get help.”
Molly, lying on the floor of the Hall of Presidents, felt the officer on her back. It reminded her of football practice, decades and decades ago, back when she’d been forced to play against her will. They made all the boys play, back in middle school. It was torture then, the incomprehensible signals being called, echoing inside her too-large helmet, followed a moment later by some stranger out of nowhere crushing her to the ground. Compared to that, this wasn’t so bad. In fact, now that it was done, she felt nothing but a sense of calm.
“Suspect apprehended,” Standhope was saying into his radio. “Situation under control.”
Hernandez was helping her to her feet now. “Can I ask you something?” she said, looking at Molly carefully. “What’s this all about? All this work to shoot a robot? Seriously?”
But Molly just thought, Sic semper culus! Thus always to assholes!
Now that she was safely in custody, the other people in the theatre—those that had not fled after the firing of the shots—were watching her arrest with fascination, with expressions that—to be honest—were a lot more excited than they’d been during the introduction of James K. Polk. People were pulling out their phones to record the whole thing. Some, Molly realized, had been videotaping the show from the beginning. By nightfall, if everything went just so, she’d be internet-famous.
They started to escort her out of the theatre. But suddenly, there at her side was the small boy.
He went up to Molly and looked at her with a face of tragic longing. Her father shouted at him. “Get back here! Now!” But the child just stood there, tears shimmering in his eyes. Then he put his arms around her, and clutched on to Molly like she was someone he had lost. “Where’s your mother?” Molly said. “What happened to her?”
Someone clapped, and the sound in the confused auditorium sounded like another gunshot.
Then other people started clapping, softly at first, then more loudly. A ripple of cheers broke out as the audience in the Hall of Presidents began to applaud. Molly felt a frisson of pain vibrate through her bones as she was escorted from the building like a hero. God bless America! someone shouted. God bless the United States of America!
The officers tried to move Molly toward the exit, but the aisles were now jammed with people shouting and waving their phones around and laughing and cheering with abandon. She thought, fleetingly, of her mother. But the greatest of these is love.
Molly looked down at the child still affixed to her leg, but it was not the face of young Bruce that she saw staring up at her now. It was her former self, young Mark, the child she once had been.
His young face was full of hope, full of an idealism and faith that the world had somehow not yet crushed.
“When I grow up,” he said, “I want to be like you.” ◊
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN (@JennyBoylan) is Anna Quindlen Writer-in-Residence at Barnard College. Author of 16 books, she’s a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her latest book is Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.
This article appears in The American Bystander #15. Buy it here.
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