The King Is Always Above the People. Daniel Alarcon

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      Hank said: “Take, as an example, Abraham Lincoln.”

      “Why bring this up?” I asked. “Why tonight?”

      “Now, by the time of his death,” he said, ignoring me, “Lincoln was the most beloved man in America.”

      I raised an eyebrow. “Or was he the most hated?”

      Hank nodded. “People hated him, yeah. Sure they did. But they also loved him. They’d loved him down to a fine sheen. Like a stone polished by the touch of a thousand hands.”

      Lincoln was my first love and Hank knew the whole story. He brought it up whenever he wanted to hurt me.

      Lincoln and I had met at a party in Chicago, long before he was president, at one of those Wicker Park affairs with fixed-gear bikes locked out front, four deep, to a stop sign. We were young. It was summer. “I’m going to run for president,” he said, and all night he followed me—from the spiked punch bowl to the balcony full of smokers to the dingy bedroom where we groped on a stranger’s bed. The whole night he never stopped repeating it.

      Finally, I gave in: “I’ll vote for you.”

      Lincoln said he liked the idea: me, alone, behind a curtain, thinking of him.

      “I don’t understand what you mean,” I said to Hank.

      “Here you are with me. Together, we’re a mess. And now the wheels have come off, Manuel.”

      “Like Lincoln?”

      “Everything he did for this nation,” Hank said. “The Americans had no choice but to kill him.”

      I felt a flutter in my chest. “Don’t say that,” I managed.

      Hank apologized. He was always apologizing. He polished off his drink with a flourish, held it up, and shook it. Suddenly he was a bandleader and it was a maraca: the ice rattled wonderfully. A waitress appeared.

      “Gimme what I want, sugar,” Hank said.

      She was chewing gum laconically, something in her posture indicating a painful awareness that this night would be a long one. “How do I know what you want?”

      Hank covered his eyes with his hands. “Because I’m famous.”

      She took his glass and walked away. Hank winked at me and I tried to smile. I wished he could have read my mind. That night it would have made many things between us much simpler.

      “The thing is,” Hank said once he had a fresh drink, “there’s a point after which you have finished loving something, after you have extracted everything of beauty from it, and you must—it is law—discard it.”

      This was all I could take. “Oh Christ. Just say it.”

      There was a blinking neon sign behind the bar, and Hank looked over my shoulder, lost himself in its lights. “Say what?” he asked.

      “What you want to say.”

      “I don’t know what I want.” He crossed his arms. “I never have. I resent the pressure to decide.”

      Lincoln was a good man, a competent lover, a dignified leader with a tender heart. He’d wanted to be a poet, but settled for being a statesman. “It’s just my day job,” he told me once. He was sitting naked in a chair in my room when he said it, smoking a cigarette and cleaning the dust from his top hat with a wooden toothbrush. And he was fragile: his ribs showed even then. We were together almost a year. In the mornings, I would comb out his beard for him, softly, always softly, and Lincoln would purr like a cat.

      Hank laid his hands flat on the table and studied them. They were veiny and worn. “I’m sorry,” he said, without looking up. “It wasn’t a good job, was it?”

      “No,” I said. “But it was a job.”

      He rubbed his eyes. “If I don’t stop drinking, I’m going to be sick. On the other hand, if I stop drinking … Oh, this life of ours.”

      I raised one of Hank’s hands and kissed it.

      I was a southern boy, and of course it was something Lincoln and I talked about. Hank didn’t care where I was from. Geography is an accident, he said. The place you are born is simply the first place you flee. And then: the people you meet, the ones you fall for, and the paths you make together, the entirety of one’s life, a series of mere accidents. And these too are accidents: the creeks you stumble upon in a dense wood, the stones you gather, the number of times each skips across the bright surface of the water, and everything you feel in that moment: the graceless passage of time, the possibility of stillness. Lincoln and I had lived this—skipped rocks and felt our hearts swelling—just before he left Illinois for Washington. We were an hour outside Chicago, in a forest being encroached upon by subdivisions. Everywhere we walked that day there were trees adorned with bright orange flags: trees with death certificates, land marked for clearing, to be crisscrossed by roads and driveways, dotted with the homes of upright American yeomen.

      Lincoln told me he loved me.

      “I’ll come with you,” I said. I was hopeful. This was years ago.

      That morning he’d gone to the asylum to select a wife. The doctors had wheeled her out in a white gown and married them on the spot. Under the right care, they said, she’ll make a great companion. Her name was Mary Todd. “She’s very handsome,” Lincoln said. He showed me a photograph and I admitted that she was.

      “Do you love her?” I asked.

      Lincoln wouldn’t look me in the eye.

      “But you just met her today.”

      He answered with a sigh. When he had been quiet long enough, he took my hand. We had come to a place where the underbrush was so overgrown that the construction markers seemed to get lost: mossy, rotting tree trunks were everywhere, gnarled limbs and tangled vines hung over the trail. Lincoln kept hitting his head as we walked.

      “This forest is so messy,” he complained.

      I said, “You’re too fastidious to be a poet.”

      He gave me a sheepish smile.

      Back at the bar, Hank was falling apart before my eyes. Or pretending to. “What will we do?” he pleaded. “How will we pay the rent?”

      It was a good question. He slumped his shoulders and I smiled at him. “You don’t love me,” I said.

      He froze for a moment. “Of course I do. Am I not destroying you, bit by bit?”

      “Are you?”

      Hank’s face was red. “Wasn’t it me that made you lose your job?”

      It was good to hear him say it. Hank had been in the habit of transferring his most troublesome callers to me, but not before thoroughly antagonizing them, not before promising that their lost package was only the beginning, that they could expect far worse, further and more violent attacks on their suburban tranquility. Inevitably they demanded to speak to a manager, and I would СКАЧАТЬ