Gardner Dozois & Jack Haldeman - Executive Clemency

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file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dozois,%20Gardner%20&%20Jack%20Haldeman%20-%20Executive%20Clemency.txt

EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY

By Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II

The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and

watched early morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.

He couldn't remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that

he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just

beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.

Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.

This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as

if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself

sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner

against the wall. Sometimes he'd be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he'd

awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes,

like this morning, he'd just be sitting and staring. Other times he would awaken to the sound of

his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things

that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once,

he knew that it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never

hear them.

He didn't move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs.

Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no

matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn't move at all until Mrs.

Hamlin came upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his

life together.

The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of

direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes,

everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was

profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the

day. Naturally it couldn't last.

Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there 'came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a

bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though

the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden

house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking,

groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with

the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a

few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early,

spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below,

coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie's baby,

crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr.

Samuels's loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.

The sunlight swept across his chair.

The President of the United States stirred and sighed, lifting his arms and setting them down

again, stamping his feet to restore circulation. Creakily he got up. He stood for a moment,

blinking in the sudden warmth, willing life back into his bones. His arms were gnarled and thin,

covered, like his chest, with fine white hair that polarized in the sunlight. He rubbed his hands

over his arms to smooth out gooseflesh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stepped across to the

gable window for a look outside. It seemed wrong somehow to see the neat, tree-lined streets of

Northview, the old wooden houses, the tiled roofs, the lines of smoke going up black and fine from

mortar chinked chimneys. It seemed especially wrong that there were no automobiles in the streets,

no roar and clatter of traffic, no reek of gasoline, no airplanes in the sky-

He turned away from the window. For a moment everything was sick and wrong, and he blinked at the

homey, familiar room as though he'd never seen it before, as though it were an unutterably alien

place. Everything became hot and tight and terrifying, closing down on him. What's happening? he

asked himself blindly. He leaned against a crossbeam, dazed and baffled, until the distant sound

of Mrs. Hamlin's voice-she was scolding Tessie in the kitchen, and the ruckus rose all the way up

through three floors of pine and plaster and fine old penny nails-

woke him again to his surroundings, with something like pleasure, with something like pain.

Jamie, they called him. Crazy Jamie.

Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Jamie collected his robe and his shaving kit and walked

down the narrow, peeling corridor to the small upstairs bedroom. The polished hardwood floor was

cold under his feet.

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The bathroom was cold, too. It was only the beginning of July, but already the weather was

starting to turn nippy late at night and early in the morning. It got colder every year, seemed

like. Maybe the glaciers were coming back, as some folks said. Or maybe it was just that he

himself was worn a little thinner every year, a little closer to the ultimate cold of the grave.

Grunting, he wedged himself into the narrow space between the sink and the down slant of the roof,

bumping his head, as usual, against the latch of the skylight window. There was just enough room

for him if he stood hunch-shouldered with the toilet bumping up against his thigh. The toilet was

an old porcelain monstrosity, worn smooth as glass, that gurgled constantly and comfortably and

emitted a mellow breath of earth. It was almost company. The yard boy had already brought up a big

basin of "hot" water, although by now, after three or four other people had already used it, it

was gray and cold; after the last person used it, it would be dumped down the toilet to help flush

out the system. He opened his shaving kit and took out a shapeless cake of lye soap, a worn hand

towel, a straight razor.

The mirror above the sink was cracked and tarnished no help for it, nobody made mirrors anymore.

It seemed an appropriate background for the reflection of his face, which was also, in its way,

tarnished and dusty and cracked with age. He didn't know how old he was; that was one of the many

things Doc Norton had warned him

not to think about, so long ago. He couldn't even remember how long he'd been living here in

Northview. Ten years? Fifteen? He studied himself in the mirror, the blotched, earth-colored skin,

the eyes sunk deep under a shelf of brow, the network of fine wrinkles. A well-preserved seventy?

Memory was dim; the years were misty and fell away before he could number them. He shied away from

trying to remember. Didn't matter.

He covered the face with lathered soap.

By the time he finished dressing, the other tenants had already gone downstairs. He could hear

them talking down there, muffled and distant, like water bugs whispering at the mossy bottom of a

deep old well. Cautiously Jamie went back into the hall. The wood floors and paneling up here were

not as nicely finished as those in the rest of the house. He thought of all the hidden splinters

in all that wood, waiting to catch his flesh. He descended the stairs. The banister swayed as he

clutched it, groaning softly to remind him that it, too, was old.

As he came into the dining room, conversation died. The other tenants looked up at him, looked

away again. People fiddled with their tableware, adjusted their napkins, pulled their chairs

closer to the table or pushed them farther away. Someone coughed self-consciously.

He crossed the room to his chair and stood behind it.

"Morning. Jamie." Mrs. Hamlin said crossly.

"Ma'm," he replied politely, trying to ignore her grumpiness. He was late again.

He sat down. Mrs. Hamlin stared at him disapprovingly, shook her head, and then turned her

attention pointedly back to her plate. As if this were a signal, conversation started up again,

gradually swelling to its normal level. The awkward moment passed. Jamie concentrated on filling

his plate, intercepting the big platters of country ham and eggs and corn bread as they passed up

and down the table. It was always like this at meals: the embarrassed pauses, the uneasy sidelong

glances, the faces that tried to be friendly but could not entirely conceal distaste. Crazy Jamie,

Crazy Jamie. Conversation flowed in ripples around him, never involving him, although the others

would smile dutifully at him if he caught their eyes, and occasionally Seth or Tom would nod at

him with tolerably unforced cordiality. This morning it wasn't enough. He wanted to talk, too, for

the first time in months. He wasn't a child, he was a man, an old man! He paid less attention to

his food and began to strain to hear what was being said, looking for a chance to, get into the

conversation.

Finally the chance came. Seth asked Mr. Samuels a question. It was a point of fact, not opinion,

and Jamie knew the answer.

"Yes," Jamie said, "at one time New York City did indeed have a larger population than Augusta."

Abruptly everyone stopped talking. Mr. Samuels's lips closed up tight, and he grimaced as though

he had tasted something foul. Seth shook his head wearily, looking sad and disappointed. Jamie

lowered his head to avoid Seth's eyes. He could sense Mrs. Hamlin swelling and glowering beside

him, but he wouldn't look at her, either.

Damn it, that wasn't what he'd meant to say! They hadn't been talking about that at all. He'd said

the wrong thing.

He'd done it again.

People were talking about him around the table, he knew, but he could no longer understand them.

He could still hear their voices, but the words had been leeched away, and all that remained was

noise and hissing static. He concentrated on buttering a slice of corn bread, trying

to hang on to that simple mechanical act while the world pulled away from him in all directions,

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file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dozois,%20Gardner%20&%20Jack%2Haldeman%20-%20Executive%20Clemency.txtEXECUTIVECLEMENCYByGardnerDozoisandJackC.HaldemanIIThePresidentoftheUnitedStatessatverystillinhisoverstuffedchaironthethirdfloorandwatchedearlymorningsunlightsweepinaslowlineacrossthefad...

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