At this point he took something from his pocket.
“You remember that movie The Matrix? Laurence Fishburne makes a speech about what the machines are using people for. Well, it’s the same with liberals. Blacks, immigrants, people of color—this is all we are to them.”
He holds up a nine-volt battery.
“We empower them. They use us for our votes, and what do we get in return—tell me? Eight years of Clinton, eight years of Obama—are we better educated? Are our neighborhoods safer? No. They use our power to fuel their own interests, and they do it by keeping us down on the plantation.”
The battery metaphor got him invited to meet top leaders of the Surfer Party in Washington and VIP tickets to high-profile events in New York and Los Angeles. See, thought Remy, this is what I’m talking about. Every man has the ability to invent their own future. Black, white, brown, it makes no difference. Just say no to the party of grievance, the party of reparations. Ride the wave. Don’t let the undertow of yesterday’s problems pull you down.
But as the invitations from elevated white circles increased, Remy found himself decidedly unwelcome in places he used to love. They took the kids out of public school—where all those Swimmer parents now gave him the evil eye—and moved out of Brooklyn to a six-bedroom Colonial in Westchester. Here, while Hadrian went to an elite prep school, Remy wrote a weekly column and another book and regularly took the town car ride down the Major Deegan to film segments for Fox News, Fox Business, Bloomberg, CNN, you name it.
By the time the God King came into office, Remy had become conservative royalty. A Black man “who told the truth”： social welfare programs oppressed people of color; affirmative action had accomplished what it was designed for, and now must end. Praise the Lord, the races now had equality in the eyes of the law. If only the Swimmer Party could achieve equality in their own minds, could leave the current of dependency, the current of grievance, the current of inadequacy.
And yet, at the same time, starting in 2016, something shifted under his feet, for what was the God King if not the Emperor of Grievances? The wave Remy thought he was surfing—a sunny-day wave of self-reliance and free will—became a storm surge of outrage and injury. Remy started to worry that Surfers like him had lost control of their wave, or maybe that feeling of control had been an illusion all along, the way a bird isn’t in control of the wind. He tried to turn, to stand up for the values he had preached, but more and more he found himself shouting into the storm. In 2017, 2018, Remy watched other sunny-day Surfers denounce this new culture of grievance and saw how in an instant they were pulled from their boards and drowned. And so Remy had a choice to make—speak up and vanish into the cold depths, or convert and live. Either way, the wave was surfing him now, and they were headed for the rocks.
And so he changed his battery speech to a speech about liberal elites sucking the blood from the common man, a speech about moral corruption, about exploitation. He pledged allegiance to the God King, impeached but never removed, indicted but never convicted. What could explain his miracle ascent, his Teflon bouyancy, if not magic? In short, Remy did what he had to do to survive. Or not just survive, but to prosper, for he had grown accustomed to the perks of punditry, the book contracts and Twitter followers. He liked standing out in a crowd, and so he said what he had to say and did what he had to do, but make no mistake, the undertow had him and it was pulling him down.
*
They reach the address Story gave them in sixteen minutes, following the calm commands of the GPS docent to the letter—even the ones she has to repeat because everyone in the car is screaming. Good news is like oxygen filling your lungs. You become light-headed, enraptured. You feel you might just live forever. Unless, of course, you are one of those people who has the strong impulse to hide under the bed—which is the feeling that strikes Margot after the initial wave of adrenaline has worn off. She hears her mother’s voice, like a scared rabbit, her mother who liked to point out you’re never more vulnerable than in a moment of celebration.
What will it be? Margot wonders. Car accident?
Maybe my flight to DC will crash.
But at the red light she smiles when Remy squeezes her shoulder. Smiles when her son leans up from the backseat to hug her. At that moment she realizes she’s been waiting for the phone call for forty years, that she’s never wanted anything in this life as much as she wants to be a justice on the highest court in the land. And that terrifies her. As do the dizzying political ramifications of being a well-known Drinker, nominated by a Cook. A unity play, he called it, and that works for her just fine, being an old-school moderate who can still remember functioning government. But will she be seen as a traitor by her own party, or celebrated as a Trojan horse?