The White House
January 20, 2001
Dear Lex,
Today you embark on the greatest venture, with the greatest honor, that can come to an American citizen. Like me, you are especially fortunate to now lead our country in a time of profound and positive change, when old questions not just about the role of government, but the nature of our nation, must be answered anew. You lead a proud, decent, and good people. And from this day you are our President. I wish you much success and much happiness. The burdens you now shoulder are great but often exaggerated. The sheer joy of doing what you believe is right is inexpressible.
My prayers are with you. Godspeed.
Sincerely,
Bill
Pete.
Then.
They were friends.
Weren't they?
Pete and Clark had grown up together. Smallville, Kansas, and if the name didn't give you a sense of the scale, or lack thereof, the graduating classes topped ninety most years, half the county was related, and everyone knew everyone's business, or thought they did. The exact opposite of Metropolis in every way that mattered: there you could hide, blissful anonymity in a city of twelve million, find a corner and make it your own. Live and die in the City of Tomorrow, join a cosmopolitan populace keen on their own progress. To be part of that, Pete thought. What an alluring thing.
And yet.
Clark and Pete had taken different paths.
Smallville was home, and he was well aware of that. But still Pete chafed under it. He was a quiet intellectual in a family, a community, of loud laborers, and as he grew up he became used to the folksy smallness, so obvious you almost hate to say it. A concept given reality, and time and space enough to grow. You knew everyone. Everyone knew you. Everyone knew your parents, your grandparents, where they'd gone to school, what they did—which, farming. Far and wide. Farming. Big broad Osage County where—
Where the fields stretch so far into the horizon that at a certain point it doesn't look entirely real anymore—
Where they stretch so far that you start getting ideas about going beyond that horizon, about leaving and becoming your own person—
So far that pure possibility, the idea you get to just Go and Do becomes an unmanageable thing. How do you leave your world and go beyond when your world is all you've known?
He'd have to leave the farm, one thing's for sure. That damn farm. Pete rolled the word around in his mind. The farm. How's the farm. Oh Peter it's nice to see you tell your parents I said hullo and how's the farm, and I will Mrs Fordman thank you, and Oh the beans look good this year, and Oh yes but we could use rain.
How angry it made him. To be as smart as he was and languishing here among people who would never grow up and leave, never aspire to something other than what society intended.
He knew of course that he couldn't be angry. He didn't have the right. It was everyone's livelihood and Peter did not want to upset the apple cart. His was a life of quiet duty, even as a child when he couldn't understand what Duty really was. Wake up, do your chores, go to school, come home, do some more, it puts food on the table Peter don't you want to eat?
Yes.
The opportunity came in High School. Government class senior year, he had entered an American Legion Americanism and Government Essay contest and found himself a winner. The reward the Legion said was all-expenses paid to Washington, DC, with twelve others from around the state. They toured Antietam on the way, and spent four days touring the Mall, monuments, the State Department. He went back and bragged that he'd met Kissinger. That trip lit the spark. Convinced him that his intelligence was something to be nurtured, that no one else was going to do it for him, life's tough on the farm and you gotta do what you gotta do. He came to see that if he only stretched out his hand and went after the things he wanted, he could have them. He would have them. Achievement, he convinced himself, was an act of sheer will.
There were city mouses from Topeka alongside country boys like him on that trip. At least he thought they imagined him a country boy. Perception after all is everything. Certainly he did not think of himself that way—stereotypically. He had pursuits. Hobbies. A voracious mind that ate up everything it came across.
He wrote an accounting of his trip, extolling DC's historicity and emotional effect upon him as well as what the role of government and individuals could or, he guessed, should be. He presented it to Mrs Sidders for his final AP English valuation—Sidders in turn encouraged him to submit a version of it as entrance exam to his college choices: the state university in Lawrence, and Georgetown. A long shot. But he wanted it. By the time he had sent the application off in the mail he had convinced himself it was happening.
And it did.
And he left. Graduated alongside Clark and Lana, his best friends in the whole world, and then they were off. Clark, to the Wayne Boring School of Journalism at the University of Metropolis, Lana to Lawrence and the State University, Pete to Georgetown. To DC.
And other things started happening. He continued achieving. In his memory he lamented that it was all a blur, all these years later. Internships with congressmen. He met Tip O'Neil in a back hallway and thanked the man for his work and the impact it had had on Peter's life, and O'Nell shook Pete's hand with his sausage link fingers and told him, "you're new, Ross, stay new. Stay hungry. Keep going."
And he did. He remarked often to his mother and to Mrs Kent that it all seemed to be going like autopilot. Achievement. Achievement. Achievement. Even reconnecting with Lana during all this. During his weekends home. Reconnecting and falling in love. Marrying her. Building a family with her. How anodyne it all seemed. How unchallenging.
He found himself a State Senator. Two terms there, then Congress, and under O'Neil's wing until the old man retired. All of this while Clark was far away in Metropolis working for the Planet and being Superman. Pete dare not say anything, to Lana, to anyone, about the pit in his heart. The one that festered and burned after a conversation with Clark one day.
I'm Superman.
And you're not.
So what are you.
He tried to find things to occupy his time. His life. Aside from the fantastic bullshit of Clark's life that had intersected with his—Doomsday, an alien calling itself Brainiac, and all of that come to bear on his infant son—Pete persevered. Or forced himself to. To find the purpose he imagined Clark had.
The Senate gave him that. Public service, or so he kept telling himself, gave him that. He came to believe he was keeping Kansas' ancestral progressivism alive, to the furore of some and the love of others. He told himself he could live with that. The distinctive mixture of love and hate that O'Neill had said comes with public service.
It was a good life.
Then Luthor came.
Lois.
She hated sleeping—an artifact from her college years. Instead she preferred the hustle-bustle, the murderous schedule which university then, and the Daily Planet now, gave her. She liked the rigor of it all. Her father's sensibilities creeping through. She woke slowly, lazily, thought of a time before. A time above. Before Clark, before the Planet and the careerist woman she had become, there was Willi. In the instant before she rose out of bed she remembered him. Cute little guy from SUNY used to come see her on the weekends, and, if he played his cards right, through the week. It was fun and dangerous and it let her blow off some steam.
And then it stopped being fun.
She was sorry. She told him as much. There was yelling. None of it achieved anything. Couldn't he see she was trying to make something of herself? What was she going to do, graduate college, get this degree for nothing, and then fly back home and bust out babies? Willi had asked what was so wrong with that. A life that's good enough can be a good life. He tried to tell her, and she wasn't having it. They disagreed, and that was the charitable way of putting it. So he moved off. She did too. She sat up in bed, and the memory of Willi dropped from her mind. Maybe—
The room was dark but for the television's glow. Clark was watching the television on mute. She sidled up next to him and wrapped one arm around his bare shoulder. She saw cameras and the talking heads on some street. Maple leaves lining it, quaint storefronts within the camera's view and, she well knew, beyond.
Not just some street.
Main Street in Smallville.
"What the hell."
"I know," Clark said and his eyes were still on the television. "I saw them from orbit. Look."
Lois' eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips. About to say something.
She stayed quiet, and watched every movement on the screen. News crews moving in and out of the General Store on the Main Street. All the vultures. WGBS was broadcasting a countdown: "LUTHOR'S VEEP AT 8AM!" The usual vultures were there. WGBS had the exclusive and the front row placement. CNN, GNN and GCN, Fox, affiliates from across Kansas, even the Comedy Channel, and the press pool from the major papers and one very intrepid small-towner. And of course everyone's favorite lickspittle, Luthor's private televised Pravda: WLEX. In the throng of reporters just outside the door, she noticed Killian and his Ledger interns. Paul Gustavson next to him, the two of them sharing a smoke, George Taylor with a Daily Star press pass sticking out of his hat, just as the camera moved through and planted itself across from the soda jerk.
Lois inhaled and felt it light up every inch of her. She wished she had a smoke.
"We've been scooped, haven't we?"
Clark said, "Yeah." He grabbed the remote and thumbed the volume up.
It was Cat Grant standing in front of the camera. WGBS' finest. Behind her the crowd parted, and there he was.
Luthor.
Black trousers—it was always black, Lois knew, and all of them Brooks Brothers, he was obsessive like that—and an awful yellow shirt buttoned up his chest but for the top two, a glimpse of the physique underneath. Sleeves rolled up in that politician's way: look at me, I'm relatable, I crease my shirts just like you.
Next to Luthor there was Pete Ross.
Lois for some reason thought of her dad. She had a memory of protestors outside the White House, or watching them on the television at least, and her father, the intractable Major Lane in those days, sneering at the television and saying, look at those protestors, Lois, a bunch of elite—
Well. He always had a way with profanity. She wondered what her father thought of Luthor, just about as far from a communist as one could humanly get.
She watched Pete Ross sit there on his barstool, in this bowling shirt she was sure some aide bought for him and told him to wear because it would make him look real. Pete Ross, with his hair combed over and forward in a stylish wave. He looked young and in charge.
And Luthor, well—
She knew how he looked.
She coughed a little. Maybe it was vomit. She humored herself and thought it was the latter.
She glanced at Clark, still sitting there enraptured. She imagined he was fixed on Pete.
A time zone away in the middle of a bright farmland morning—she tucked that line away for use in today's invariable column about this carnival sideshow—she watched Cat Grant spew a bunch of bullshit.
She wished there was a better word for it.
Cat was plastic and perfect: "...So we're in the breadbasket of America with presidential candidate Lex Luthor, and Mister Luthor, you've got some exciting news for us, haven't you?"
Luthor smiled broadly and his tanned skin shone in the studio lights. He leant back on the counter, gesturing with one hand and said, "As a matter of fact I do, Cat. Several months ago when I began this race to the White House, I knew I wouldn't be doing it alone—and so I'm delighted today to announce my running mate. He embodies the very spirit of our campaign and I honestly can't think of a better-qualified man than the former Senator from this great state, Mister Pete Ross!"
Pete gave a schoolboy smile and did not stand. He waved his hand and said his thank yous to Luthor and Cat and the press pool. He cleared his throat like a rank amateur and said, "Well, that's some buildup, Mister Luthor, thank you again. I'll take some questions now, guys."
The pool erupted. Through the din, Ross picked out Gustavson, kneeling in the front row: "What went through your mind, Pete? How did it feel saying yes?"
Pete gave a nervous laugh.
At Lois' side, Clark was gone. She felt the wind behind him and touched the spot on the bed where he had been sitting. She looked at the bed, and at her own hand laying still upon the rumpled sheet. She frowned and felt.
Empty.
She looked back at the television.
"You know," Pete said, "When Lex first asked me, I was hesitant. I'd only ever been a state senator, I was used to roaming Congress, whipping the votes, that sort of thing. To be Vice President would be a step more, a huge responsibility—but I couldn't say no."
Knox from the Gotham Gazette stuck his pen in the air and Pete singled him out. "Question. Why take the leap?"
"I'm a country mouse," Pete said and kept the boyish smile. "Lex is a city mouse. We each know things the other doesn't. We do. And that's useful. We can bounce ideas off each other in constructive ways, I really feel like I have his backing and I've got to tell you all, he knows he's got mine. Ha. Or else I guess I'm walking home, right, Lex?"
The pool ate it up. Broke into laughter, Luthor included. He put on his public face, and his public voice, and he said in range of the mike, "Say, isn't that our old friend Clark Kent in the back there? Come on up here, Clark!"
The crowd parted, and up came Clark, in his jeans and flannel button-up, glasses loose on his nose, forcing a slouch only to be righted when Luthor parked next to him and clapped him on the shoulder.
All three of them were on camera at that point. Cat out of broadcast, mouthing "vamp!" and making a circle with her finger.
Lex seized the moment. He stuck himself between them, an arm around each shoulder, and smiled smooth and easy into the televisions of millions.
"Childhood friends, Clark and Pete," Luthor said. "And the most important thing about that is seeing how these two young men, both coming from a small town in America, would grow up and be as successful as they have. That, my friends, is the American Dream, don't you agree?"
The camera went away from them. Followed Luthor across the store, glad-handing the press and the patrons alike.
Lois sighed and relaxed on the bed. She clicked the television back on mute and looked at the ceiling.
She was reasonably sure it was vomit now.
In Smallville, Clark decided to be forceful. Once the cameras were off of him, and Pete tried to slide away, Clark grabbed his forearm gently and said, "I need to talk to you."
And they went outside. Hovered around a postal box down from the General Store. They were silent for a moment. The sun and the heat seemed to beat down on them. Clark was staring up and down the street. Pete was leaning against the building. Staring at the concrete. Staring at nothing.
"What the hell do you think you're doing," Clark said.
Well, that did it.
"Oh my god, Clark—"
"You don't need to yell—"
"I'm trying—"
"I need to know what went through—"
"Its my job Clark—"
"It's my job too—"
"No it's not!"
Silence.
"No it's not," Pete said again. "It's not your job to tell me what I can and can't do."
"I'm not saying that—"
"Oh the hell you aren't—"
"No it's—"
"Yes it is you think—"
"I think you're making a mistake!"
Clark sighed. He felt it through his whole body, like it took years, and when it came and went he slouched standing in place. Atlas beleaguered.
"It's a mistake," Clark said. "I want to understand why you made this decision. I wish to heaven I could but I can't, Pete. I just can't."
Pete was quiet. He leaned on the postal box and looked down the street. These maple trees have been here for years and they just keep doing their thing, life and death, through all the bullshit around them. All the movement of life on this planet, humans poisoning it, these trees should be dead but here they are. They've made something of it. Pete heard a faint wind rustle through them and imagined, childishly, they were talking. Look at him. He doesn't understand it. He never will. How could he. He's not Superman.
Pete frowned and wondered when he had acquired this. This self doubt.
"When I was in DC," Pete said. "I used to see Luthor come down. Whenever the spirit moved him. If he needed to move things and work people over. He'd walk into Tip's office, and hand him a check and ask for this, or ask for that. He just made things happen. That's power you can't buy."
"It's wrong."
"I know," Pete said. "I've wanted to stop it for years."
"And you think being Vice President can do that?"
"I think I can help," Pete said.
Clark was quiet. He looked at Pete plaintively and started pacing around. Ran broad, muscular arms through his hair and waited. What to say. What not—
"Clark." Pete said it in this voice that sounded like his father. Clark looked at him.
"Say it," Pete said. "Something is on your—"
"He tortured my parents. He tortured Lana. I can't let that pass." It was an uncharacteristic display of emotion. Out of everything else Lex Luthor had done to Clark personally. To Lois. To Metropolis, to the Justice League and to the world, it came back to first principles. Aurelius teaches us to mind them after all. And Clark's first principle was always his friends. They were his family. Luthor had none of his own, and so could not understand the bonds of affection that drew people together. He couldn't. He never would either.
Clark just.
He knew him.
Luthor would never change.
He tortured her.
He tortured her.
Father—
Pete scratched his head. As he stared at the sidewalk he said, "This is not about Lana."
"Yes it is."
"No it isn't!" He yelled it out and threw his hands up. "You are not the center of the goddamn universe, Clark, just because you think something is about something doesn't mean it is! Lana has moved on."
"Has—"
"Other people have lives, Clark, we can't just do what we wanna do when we wanna do it. I have a family, I have to support them. I have to make choices that affect them. Maybe if you and Lois—"
Pete stopped. He looked Clark and at himself.
Clark looked right back. "If we what."
And when he saw Pete step back, slowly, his head darting up and down the empty street, Clark was silent. Wounded. Looking away.
"Pete he's lying to you. He killed people. Women and children. Children."
"Clark I have to try. Maybe I can stop him."
"He'll never stop."
"Maybe," Pete strained to say it. He shuffled in place and held back his anger. "Clark, maybe he's not some super villain, okay? Maybe he can change things. Maybe this is all in your head!"
Clark stayed quiet. His face wasn't quite scowling, but wasn't blank or distant either. Very much in the moment. As they say. And what a grim visage it was, words elude me, that perfect face, that perfect hair, the visage of a man, an alien just like us, glowering.
At Pete.
He shook his head.
"He can't," Clark said. His voice was quiet and mournful. Wishing for any other outcome than the one they had. In this moment, in this world...
Pete.
Clark was quiet. He looked away.
What to say. What not to say.
He's.
Father, he's my best friend.
Pete spoke, thin and fragile. "Clark. You're my best friend. But this is something I have to do. Okay? They're waiting for me in there. I have to go."
Pete passed him and went back to the door.
Father—
The trees rustled, as if in a gentle breeze.
Luthor.
Years ago.
He thought the sign was a bit much. Metropolis 900 miles, I mean really, who does that. Cruel even by his standards.
One thing was certain. He hated it out here. He was glad he never had to grow up in such squalor, although only Suicide Slum could compare to this human horror. Far flat farmland and obnoxious, pathetic people living flat, barren lives which they felt were.
Enough.
Well, it was enough for him. Here he sat, in this booth with sinking broken springs. In this restaurant he owned far out here where nothing ever happened. Ordered the steak and eggs and a large, hot, black coffee. The sun beat through the windows, great glass affairs, a desolation of a wheat field beyond. He felt calm. The kind of calm that only comes with the right cup of coffee, or the existential joy of being in the right place at the right time. Noon of a summer day and here he was. In this place. This nowhere. The vast expanse between the coasts, which was where things actually mattered. He wondered if he could help her to see that, and not just see it but to cherish it. To take her and bend her into something like him.
He breathed and held the mug just under his nose, and pretended the sludge in it was anything but. He took a drink and felt it dance over his tongue. He smiled. The bitterness, he thought, makes it all the more flavorful.
Beautiful things shouldn't last.
Nothing does.
He was vaguely aware of the time, by the position of the sun in the sky. He imagined he had spent the better part of an hour in here. Drinking his copy. Reading the same stupid article in The Financial Times. He sort of. Spaced out.
And watched her.
She moved with a bumpkin's grace, there was some lithe carriage in the hips but a hardness too: you could tell she grew up on a farm. Knew how to wrestle a pig, as they say. There was a sinewy strength in her arms, he noticed, as she cleared the booth in front of his. Slender tendonous hands, white skin stretched over them and going up into pale straws for arms. Yellow frock with a white apron cinched high on her waist, just below pert breasts: paradoxically shown but covered. A teleology of duality, of despair. She wanted to be anything other than what she was. He sympathized. Her face was square and plain, not a bad thing, and when she smiled you saw the creases from too many Winstons thin away as the corners turned up into her cheeks. It made a nice plumping effect. Her eyes were brown and yet they glowed. Curious how the biological quirk of stromae seemed to reveal one's soul. Her hair stuck in the same curled do it had been, he imagined, since oh, probably, seventh grade.
He pulled a cigarette, a Lucky Strike, from his jacket and lighted it. The smoke curled around his face and he took a deep breath. Through the smoke he saw her coming.
Finally she was upon him, and spoke. Rehearsed and folkish: "What can I get you, sir?"
"You can join me for a little while."
The veneer seemed to crack a little at that. "Oh…no. I couldn't."
He waited.
She said, "I'm very flattered Mister Luthor but Ralli's company policy says we can't sit with the guests. Not while we're on duty anyway."
She knew the language. That was something. He waited. Allowed a smile to creep up.
"Ralli's policy is of little consequence to me, my dear," he said. "You've guessed who I am, you've probably also guessed that I own this restaurant. I own ninety percent of the state. Now please. Sit."
The smile dropped.
She sat. She vocalized some kind of protest: "Maybe. For a minute I could."
"I was imagining a good deal more than a minute," he said. "A month."
Her face blanched. She stirred in her seat.
"I noticed you when I first came in," he said and took a drink. "Jenny, is it? I asked for one of your tables specifically. Now I'm asking you to come with me. Back to Metropolis for one month."
She stood. "Mister Luthor, I happen to be married! And I'm not that kind of girl!"
His eyes stayed on her. She was quiet in the next moment, as if scolded. Somehow she knew she'd overstepped some invisible boundary regarding the rights of employees and humans in social conversation, a boundary only Luthor seemed to be aware of, and how it seemed to offend him.
He kept his eyes on her and did not move. The only wasted motion—
"Everyone," he said. "Is that kind of girl. It's only a matter of price. Sometimes a wedding ring, sometimes a Hollywood contract. Sometimes…people just want a sympathetic ear. What do you want, Jenny?"
"I…"
"One million dollars," Luthor said. In those days a million dollars was nothing to him and even less now. A sucker's game. Tosh, to be thrown out and disregarded as a dialectical balm for the unwashed—"For one month of your life."
She seemed to summon strength from nowhere. "Just because you're the richest man in the world…you may be used to gettin' your way on everything, but not on this, Mister Luthor—"
"Calm yourself," he said. And she did. "You're reacting emotionally, not logically." Another moment passed and he said, "Shall I tell you your life story? You were born here. Not more than a mile from that sign out there, 'Metropolis nine hundred miles'. You were a bright child, and you had dreams of escaping. Anywhere but here. You used to dance in the school play. You were a sunflower."
He exhaled. Through the smoke he saw her. More clearly than he had before. She was still standing, but sort of leaning on the leatherette booth cover there. Looking down. Looking at her hands. How many more days and nights in her youth. How many.
He suppressed a smile. Because this was what he did.
Lex Luthor at his finest.
Destroying people.
He didn't need powers to see her. To read her mind. To peel back her heart and know it as intimately as you'd know your own. It was his speciality. Laying the beloved truth before these people.
"A butterfly." She whispered it.
"Of course," Luthor said through the haze. "High school cheerleader. Married the quarterback and wound up with a house, and a mortgage, and responsibilities. No education after school, couldn't afford it. And now you're twenty-two and you feel like you're going on fifty. What does one have to show for a life when it's a life lived like this, Jenny? The future? A television set to show you the world. Images of faraway places, and things, and people…that you'll never get to see. Because of choices you've made. The problem with democracy, Jenny."
She turned away, crossed her arms over her chest. He laid one hand, firm and unmoving, on her shoulder. "A million dollars," he said. "Buys many tomorrows. The price is a month. And it always gets paid."
He walked past her, narrowing up his tie and throwing on his blazer as he went, one save motion, a cloud of smoke trailing above and behind him.
He said, "Think about it Jenny. I shall wait in my car for exactly ten minutes."
And he was gone. She watched him slide out the front door, open one half of the glass panes and stroll out to his car. Not a car, a stretch limo parked across three spaces on the side lot. She watched him go, and open the door, and get in.
She turned and went to the back. The girls were upon her and it all seemed so ridiculous, so robotic, so manufactured and wrong and silly and fun and—
She pushed through the girls and grabbed the phone. She knew the number by heart.
It rang twice. The longest rings of her life. Two warbled chirps in her ear. Finally static, and a man with a pack a day cough.
"Hullo? Thiz Wally here, Wally the Wiz?"
She stopped.
She took the receiver away from her ear. She became aware she wasn't breathing. She looked around the room. Meaning. A sign. Somewhere. Anywhere. Lord I've never asked for much but oh lord do something for me, let me have some—
She hung up.
Turned around. Went back out to the front.
"Jenny," Aggie said through her horn rims and a pouting, sunken face. "He's."
Jenny went to the window.
Gone.
Continued...