May We Be Forgiven

desk if he could show me the video loop from the elevator. I see the guy standing in the one blurry spot, as if he knew exactly where to be. All you can see is the brim of his baseball cap—you can’t even tell that he’s talking to me, except that I appear increasingly agitated and am looking around as if to see if anyone else is hearing what I’m hearing and what it means to them.
    Is it some kind of test? I don’t want to make anyone nervous, but, on the other hand, if it’s a test from the inside, it would be smart to report it. I ask Wanda if she might come into my office. She comes as far as the doorway and then stands there while I explain about the man, the baseball cap, and so on.
    “He stood behind you,” she says. “Seemed to know exactly who you were, told you things you hadn’t heard before.”
    “Yes,” I say, excited we’re on to something.
    “Nothing on the surveillance video?”
    “Just a blur,” I say.
    Wanda nods. “He’s been here on and off over the years,” she says, unimpressed.
    “Who is he? Like a crazy hanger-on?”
    “Something like that,” she says. “There used to be others, but there aren’t too many left now—it’s generational.”
    I’m still concerned.
    “The world is filled with people,” Wanda says.
    I stand waiting to hear the rest—but Wanda says no more.

    H ow many others? How much more is there to know? I get the sense that, once one begins to dig, the information stream is not only endless, but passed under the table from administration to administration, as though there is some much larger playbook that only the President and his men are privy to. And clearly, once you take a look at that playbook, not only are you forever changed, but the twists and turns of party politics braid the cord of information and deal making so much that true change becomes impossible.
    Who wrote the playbook? And when? Is anyone in charge? It is all such a gnarly web that at best one can only pick at the knots.
    “Everything okay?” Ching Lan asks when I get back to my desk. “You look discolored,” she says.
    “Sorry?”
    “Erased,” she says, “very white, like paper.”
    I nod. The man in the elevator was dropping a lot of little beads about things I didn’t want to hear. The man he was talking about wasn’t my Nixon, he wasn’t Nixon as I wanted him to be. He wasn’t the youthful RMN as a vice-presidential candidate, accused of using campaign funds for personal expenses, going on national television, and making sure the people knew that he was of modest means.
    Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this—that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.

    This man’s Nixon was darker, more menacing than I ever allowed myself to imagine. Upset by my own naïveté, I wonder, Can I allow myself to know what I know and still love Nixon as deeply as I do? Can I accept how flawed, how unresolved he was, the enormous fissures in personality, in belief, in morality? Is there any politician who hasn’t sold his soul ten times over before he even takes office? The mystery man in the elevator told me what I didn’t want to hear, and on some level I know it all might be true. For some this might be a turnoff, but it draws me closer, makes RMN all the more human. He clearly wasn’t the first or the last to have gotten confused with regard to the boundaries between executive power and imaginary superpowers—he just may have been that rare bird who documented himself more heavily.
    I ask Ching Lan to pull up the “SOB” story so I can take another look.
    Quoting from “SOB”:
    “If people had a clue about what’s been going on they’ d be shocked, more than shocked, they’d want something to happen—the last thing anyone wants is for the truth to come out—that’ d be detrimental to us all.”
“Son of a bitch it would kill this country.”
“Whatever it is you know or think you know or that anyone else you know thinks he knows—you make sure they forget it, make sure that it goes away. There’s a way to do that, have things go quiet for a while—for as long as it takes.”
“Son of a bitch who the hell does he think he is—Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments. SOB …”

    I glance up and see Wanda in the hall chatting with Marcel, who pushes the chrome mail basket around delivering