The Frankenstein Candidate Read online

  Quentin grabbed the youth’s arm and yanked so hard that he pulled it out of the shoulder socket. Someone grabbed him from behind. His elbow swung back in a circular motion, and Frank heard the cracking sound of a rib. The third man was in front of Quentin now, a knife in his hand.

  His eyes were so fixated on Quentin’s face that he never saw Quentin’s front-loaded kick smash into his groin.

  “You okay, kid?” Frank heard as he was dusting himself off.

  “Thanks…you were terrific.”

  “Brazilian jiu jutsu,” Quentin said.

  “Why did you risk yourself?” Frank asked, weeks later. “He would not have taken it any further than a slap.”

  “Because you are under my protection,” Quentin said.

  “Does that mean authority?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I am under no one’s authority,” Frank said, “Still…I owe you one. Big time.”

  Frank never forgot the lesson he learned from that encounter. One day, a year later, he was walking toward the bus stop with Mardi when Mardi was threatened by a gang of older students.

  “Hey, little bird, did you finish my homework?” It was a tall boy in a beanie.

  “He is not a little bird. Leave him alone,” Frank intervened.

  “Did someone ask your opinion?” an even taller boy said.

  “It’s okay, Frank,” Mardi said as he handed over some papers.

  The boy in the beanie took them, sneered at Frank, and the gang began to leave.

  Frank glared as Mardi nonchalantly remarked, “It took me only six minutes to finish, Frank. Let it be.”

  But Frank strode toward the gang and, surprising the boy in the beanie from behind, snatched the papers from him.

  Before the boy could turn, Frank had ripped the papers into shreds.

  The boy in the beanie grabbed Frank’s neck. That was the turning point. The boy in the beanie had started it. Frank yelled out “Ki!” so loud that it froze everyone within fifty meters as he smashed his knee into the boy’s groin. The boy went down.

  “Do your own homework, Jerry. It’s good for you.”

  There were four others in the gang. No one moved.

  Mardi watched from a distance, not quite comprehending why Frank would do such a thing. Frank left the mob gaping, their jaws collectively down to their chins.

  “It was for you, Mardi. Don’t let yourself get used like that.”

  Mardi smiled at Frank—he had few social graces, but he had connected.

  Frank continued to spend endless amounts of time learning from and discussing various matters with Mardi. His grades suffered a bit, but two years later, they were all graduating from high school and headed for university. It was the fall of 1987.

  Frank was headed for the University of California at Berkeley to study economics. The developing science of money fascinated him. He thought he could discover a way to make poor people and poor nations rich and eliminate world suffering.

  Mardi had been invited on a full scholarship by three Ivy League universities to undertake a degree in astrophysics.

  “Science is everything,” Mardi would say.

  Quentin was a member of all the right clubs and associations, played football for the school, and had a GPA of 4.2. He secured admission to Brown University to study law. Quentin’s father was a congressman. He was delighted.

  Bob, too, had done well. Like Frank, he wanted to study economics, but his quest had a different flavor. Bob wanted to end up in public service. Bob’s father was an economist. He had all the right connections. Bob’s dad had told him there was no answer in economic science for making poor nations rich or even for making some poor people rich.

  “It doesn’t even matter,” he told Bob. “Study monetary policy and the juiciest jobs will be on offer when you finish.” Like Quentin, Bob went to the east coast because his dad said that was the place to be.

  Bob and Quentin just couldn’t comprehend Frank when he said, “Remember what Mardi said? You study something in order to understand things…to solve the problems of the world…what else is there?”

  “Girls,” Quentin said, laughing. He certainly had plenty of those.

  “My dad said you get the best jobs with monetary policy. He knows,” Bob said.

  Bob and Quentin went east. Frank lost touch with both of them. He wanted to. Frank and Mardi stayed in touch.

  Frank had started dating girls by graduation, but mostly it was limited to taking girls to the school prom. All that changed when he was a freshman at Berkeley. He met Susan, another freshman.

  Susan took Economics 101, but she was greatly interested in the “small is beautiful” framework trumpeted by the economist E. F. Schumacher. Frank did not care much for this theory, but he was greatly enamored with Susan. “Indeed, small is beautiful,” he would say, referring to Susan, who was both small and beautiful. For a while, Frank pretended to go along with whatever Susan liked.

  “Keep an open mind,” she would say, and he did. Yet try as he might, he could not make Susan’s favorite theory work when all the big economic theories were calling for more globalization and teaching the economies of scale. That hardly mattered between them. They both loved cycling and hiking, dancing, and contemporary R&B music. They were in love, and they knew it. They held hands and were always together. He switched courses to take more of hers, but their grades never suffered. They were both conscientious students. They both lived in the dorms, and sometimes at night, she would sneak over to the boys’ college and spend a whole night in the little cubbyhole that was Frank’s room.

  At the end of their freshman year, Susan suggested taking a trip together to Africa.

  “What, are you serious? What will it cost?” he asked.

  Susan had done all the numbers and the itinerary: the student-discount cheap flights, the vaccinations, the weekend American English for beginners workshop they would do in Nairobi to earn money, the backpacker hostels—everything down to the brand of mosquito repellent they would buy. Frank had never been happier, he would have just boarded the plane to anywhere in the world. Susan and Frank expected two weeks of bliss.

  They never even discussed their guardians. They never needed to. Frank knew he would need to lie about going with some friends to avoid large discussions with Uncle Abe and Aunt Leeba. Mardi, he knew, would cover for him.

  They flew Kenyan Airways and did their teaching workshop the very first weekend. Frank was dumbstruck by the poverty. He had never been outside the United States, and nothing that Susan had warned him about could have prepared a nineteen-year-old for that unnerving experience.

  Susan held on to her quaint romantic notion of a self-sufficient village economy and firmly believed that small cottage industries would solve the world’s poverty problem. Frank, too, was deeply attached to the notion of understanding how worldwide poverty could be overcome.

  Their five-day trip to the Masai Mara Reserve was extremely fascinating and took Frank’s mind off the misery and sorrow he had seen in Nairobi. The two hundred square miles of vast grassland plains, woodlands, and forest were scattered with herds of zebra, giraffe, gazelle, monkeys, buffalo, and elephants.

  After that, there was to be another week of sleepy coastal towns rich in history and culture, sleeping in huts and tents, and then the journey home. The night before they left, Susan had a mild rash and an itchy sore on her neck.

  She asked Frank to apply a cooling lotion. There was no mixing of the sexes in the backpacker’s hostel, and Frank kissed her goodnight. The next morning, she awoke with a fever. It wasn’t high, and she insisted on making the trip to the coastal towns. Frank had to practically force her to go to the local doctor. They waited for five hours outside a general surgery. The waiting room was littered with children with rickets, malaria, and typhoid. Frank had enjoyed the game reserve, but he was tiring of the whole African romance. He soldiered on for the sake of Susan. The kindly old doctor ruled out cholera and typhoid and prescribed her some anti
biotics for cautionary purposes.

  Popping the pills, Susan jumped on the bus to the coast with Frank. Her condition worsened on the journey. Still, Frank had to physically pull her off the bus to have a night’s rest at a local inn. Late that night, her rash worsened and she had a throbbing headache.

  “We are getting out of here first thing tomorrow,” he said.

  They had Kenyan Airways return tickets, but with Susan having bought them at a discount, there was little ability to bring their flights forward. In any event, there was no flight the next day. The town had no hospitals. Frank took Susan to a medical center. The queues ran into the street and went two blocks down the road. The doctors were very busy treating emergency cases and suggested taking her to a hospital in Nairobi.

  By the time they got to Nairobi, Susan was no longer walking properly. Her speech had become slurred. Everything after that was a blur—all Frank would later remember was crying, screaming at the doctors to do something, running to the American embassy, calling her parents, and then Abe and Leeba. He remembered Susan not moving, him calling Mardi long-distance, and the final words: coma, sleeping sickness, second stage, nerve/brain barrier.

  On the way back, Susan was in a coffin in the baggage compartment. Frank would never forget the look on her parent’s faces when he landed. It took him two weeks in a hospital to recover, and he stayed on antidepressant medication for months afterward.

  When he came back from hospital, his first act was to throw the copy of E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful into the fire. Small, he knew, would never cure poverty or improve the human condition. A part of him died with Susan, and although he continued to do well academically, her death matured and hardened him beyond his years. After Susan, he never loved anyone the same way again—in fact, he hardly ever dated any women until more than a decade later.

  In the fall of 1989, Frank and Mardi were both twenty-year-old sophomores when Frank called Mardi for one of their weekly calls.

  “Hey,” Frank said.

  “Hey, man.”

  “Is it possible that something that is science is not science?”

  “You riddling me, Frankie?”

  “Mardi, you are the smartest person on the planet.”

  “You should meet my professor, Lawrence Fyshwick.”

  “Okay, you may only be the smartest person I know.”

  “Lawrence knows the trick to everything.”

  “Economic science has a bundle of contradictions. Ask your Lawrence how it survives or tell me yourself.”

  “That’s why I take astrophysics and meteorology. Now, lemme see. Too many variables in play. Almost anything can be attributed to anything.”

  “Then why are certain things regarded as gospel? Everything should be suspect.”

  “Good point. But aren’t you lucky?”

  “How so?”

  “Because there is gospel, and you can master it. Lawrence would say, play by the rules and you will do fine. Advocate the gospel—”

  Frank hung up. Maybe Mardi was having a bad day. Maybe Mardi was pulling his leg. Then it started to happen frequently. Mardi had got older, and all the psychologists his parents got him to see had made him seek social approval at all costs. Frank began to understand that. It was sad, he thought. Mardi had been a rock of integrity impervious to social influence.

  Frank stopped calling. He had no friends left. The long-distance calls to Mardi were costing him a lot anyway. Each of the Oxford Academy foursome went his own way after that.

  It wasn’t until thirty years later that the paths of the formidable four would cross again, this time with one formidable woman named Olivia. And this time, it would determine the fate of the most powerful nation on earth.

  4

  Olivia Allen, Monday, November 25, 2019

  Georgia was saying, “But mommy, did you and daddy only want boys?”

  Olivia Allen woke up. Thanks heavens it was a dream. Hell no, it wasn’t. She turned to look at her alarm clock. It was three a.m. She had only fallen asleep after eleven p.m. She turned to her side. Gary, god bless him, was fast asleep.

  She tried to get back to sleep, but it started happening again: that inexplicable feeling, the tightening muscles, the sweaty palms, the fear of being found out, of being exposed. I am a fraud, she thought. Oh my God, I am an imposter. She tried going over all the reasons she wasn’t one. She had always been the bright one at school. She was always expected to achieve, and achieve she did: scholastic achievements, sports, girl scouts, music. She was beautiful, too. She had been destined for public life. After graduating in law from the University of Pennsylvania, she did a master’s degree in political science at Columbia University. That’s when she fell in love with New York. That’s when she met Gary.

  Everything was nearly perfect. She had finally escaped her mother. Then she was elected to represent New York State in the U.S. Senate. She had married and had two children. Gary had become a successful architect. He used to work very hard, but these days he hardly had any work. With a deepening recession, no one was building anything, certainly not office buildings or high-class residential homes, both of which were Gary’s specialties. Gary was a wonderful husband, though, and their two girls, Georgia and Natasha, were now nine and seven respectively. Gary loved them and often drove them to and from school. At forty-four, Olivia could still fit easily into a size four dress. Her life was as near perfect as it could be. Everyone else agreed too. Why was this happening to her?

  For all of her adult life, Olivia always had an inner fear that she simply was not good enough—that one day, her world would come crashing down. Suddenly, everyone would realize that she simply was not smart or at least not smart enough to be holding the positions she was accustomed to holding.

  She caught herself sobbing. It happened every few months or so, but there was no real pattern. Sometimes this is the way it would end. She would recount all her achievements to herself, but the feeling would not go away. Then, finally, she would cry herself to sleep. Only today, sleep was not coming back.

  What was it that Doctor Joshy had called it? Yes, the Imposter Syndrome. She controlled the urge to sob loudly. She didn’t want to wake Gary up. Gary didn’t know. He must never know. He had enough burdens of his own. She turned over again to look at the clock. Three thirty a.m.

  Olivia got up and left the master bedroom, heading for the medicine cabinet. Her physician had given her prescriptions for Valium and temazepam and warned her never to take them both at the same time. Temazepam for sleep and Valium for an anxiety attack. She rarely needed the Valium. She broke the temazepam tablet into two with her pill cutter and took a half tablet, as she often did when she got up in the middle of the night.

  Olivia went back to bed and closed her eyes. Usually, the tablet took twenty minutes to take effect. She started thinking about her meeting today. Colin Spain had asked specifically for her. Colin had declared himself a presidential candidate. The whole world was in economic stagnation. She trusted Colin as a leader in bad economic times. She trusted herself as the champion of social justice. She could help Colin fix things—and things needed to be fixed.

  She thought of Georgia again. Why did her nine-year-old think she only wanted boys? It was just something Georgia said as she got out of the car as Olivia was dropping her off at school. Olivia needed to ask her later.

  And that was the last thought she had before she fell asleep.

  Her alarm went off at six thirty. Gary was already up. She could hear him downstairs. Work or no work, he acted busy. He rushed off to his morning jog, came back and had a shower, made the girls and himself breakfast, and got them ready for school. Then he made Olivia’s breakfast and sat down to discuss how they would manage their day. When Olivia could not drop the girls off at school, which was on most days, Gary dropped them on his way to work. At work, Gary spent most of the day reading newspapers and meeting prospective clients. Then he would pick the girls up from school, bring them home, play with them i
n the yard, and make dinner.

  One thing she felt happy about—Jacques, her chauffeur, had recovered fully. He even wanted to get back to work straightaway, but she had insisted on him taking a month’s break. The Hill had a used Volvo in its fleet and had loaned it to her while she collected her insurance and bought herself a new one.

  Olivia got dressed. At seven fifteen a.m., she woke her daughters up and got them ready for school. At precisely seven forty-five a.m., she was out the door, getting her daughters into the three-year-old Volvo X99 wagon. As she dropped them off at school, they hugged and said good-bye to each other. How wonderful that felt. She never got the feeling of dread when she was with Georgia and Natasha.

  Olivia got to Colin Spain’s campaign office before eight thirty. Colin was already there. “Good morning,” he said.

  Colin Spain was a striking man; he was dressed immaculately in a smart suit and tie. A career politician, tall and suave and in his mid-sixties, he had served as a senator for California for four consecutive six-year terms that finished in 2018. At sixty-four years old, he didn’t seek a fifth term. If people thought that meant retirement, they were wrong. Colin was anything but ready to retire. He was tanned, fit, and always energetic.

  “Good morning,” Olivia replied.

  “Larry will be here soon,” he said.

  Larry Fox was by far the most experienced and thorough campaign manager and a strong blue-collar faithful. Some called him the Democrats’ answer to Scott Howell. Larry, they said, had been singularly responsible for two winning Democratic gubernatorial campaigns and had influence in several other races.

  “I’ve met Larry. Will he be running your campaign?”

  “Not exactly,” Colin said. “He will be what I call the chief strategist. I have someone else in mind for running the logistics of the campaign per se, doing budgets and the fundraising. She will also be here soon, same time as Larry.”

  Olivia narrowed her eyes.

  “Her name is Katrina Marshella.”

  Olivia had heard of her. A rookie, she thought. She had never run anything this big. Olivia believed she was only thirty at best.