Chapter the First
“This place has got Soylent on tap” September 29, 2017
Pattie Carlyle wiped a line of sweat from her forehead, brushed her thick, frizzy black hair back over her ears, bent down, and lifted up a large wooden crate from her brownstone’s doorstep. Straining under its weight and the heavy air that presaged a thunderstorm, she reached several times for the front door handle before finally establishing a hold long enough to wedge it open with her foot. Slowly, she spun around into the musty, dark entryway, pastel green wallpaper peeling around the edges of the floor moldings, adjusted her grip on the crate, and began methodically climbing the wooden stairs, which creaked and groaned in protest with each step. She paused at the landing after the fourth flight, balanced the crate against the banister as she fumbled through her pockets for a Brown lanyard, and staggered toward a door halfway down the hall, the keys’ metallic jangle reverberating against the floor’s ceramic tiles.
Out of breath as she reached the door, Pattie forced the keys in and jiggled the handle until it assented. She dragged the crate over the threshold into a tiny living room crowded with a brown leather sofa and matching armchair, a marble coffee table, a wooden cart laden with stone fruit, a copper sundial the size of an end table, a reproduction of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” a grandfather clock, four framed paintings stacked against one another, and three astrolabes, their brass discs encircled by a series of metal rings and dials and etched along its surface in archaic symbols. She sat down on the arm of the sofa and inspected the lid of the wooden crate, searching for a latch or an instruction to “pull here.” Finding it nailed shut, she glanced around the room, picked up the sundial, wedged its pointed gnomon underneath the box’s lid, and heaved down until it erupted in splinters that rained across the floor.
“For God’s sake, Harold,” Pattie moaned as she pulled out from a pile of Styrofoam a fourth astrolabe, identical in all but the smallest particulars to the other three brass discs. A single astrolabe was one thing, perhaps even a second, since Harold had been waiting so long for some success of his own. Four, though
Wiping sweat from her forehead, Pattie surveyed the room, visualizing the routes that would need to be hewn from the clutter in case of emergency, when she felt her phone buzz. “Commercial break,” a text read. “How am I doing?”
Pattie quickly typed “Good!,” then scrolled through her recent text history with her husband, searching for context. Finding none, she picked up a remote control from the coffee table and turned on a television set mounted on the opposite wall.
“I expected my quip about Mnuchin’s wife to go over better,” said a new text.
Pattie raised the volume. Red CNN letters flashed across the screen and dissolved into a starkly high-definition telecast of a slender man with thinning blonde hair and crow’s feet forming around his eyes nodding vigorously as a taller man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair commented on the qualifications of the new White House communications director, Hope Hicks.
“Harold, do you think Hicks is becoming a moderating influence on the president?” the man asked.
“Great question, Jake,” Harold smiled. “When I was covering the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, I heard this question repeated time and again: ‘when will we see Trump make the presidential pivot?’ It wasn’t until I went undercover on the GOP campaign bus that I began to understand that the bluster is not a defect, but a feature, of this president’s—not to mention the entire GOP’s—design.”
“You’re referring again to the episode you recount in your book—”
“No One Stopped the Bus,” Harold interjected.
“Right,” Jake continued, “the episode in which you infiltrated a high-level GOP strategy meeting, first recounted in a series of articles you wrote for the Times.”
“Yes, thank you, a meeting on the GOP campaign bus.”
“Uh-...
