Our American King: A Novel - Hardcover

Martin, David Lozell

3.35

103 ratings by Goodreads

9780743267311: Our American King: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743267311 ISBN 13: 9780743267311

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2007

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A fictional account based on the author's provocative theory that American-style democracy and government may not be providing necessary solutions to today's global problems, a depiction of a dystopian world finds the leader of a decimated America declaring himself king, with unexpected results. By the author of Facing Rushmore. 20,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

David Lozell Martin's previous novels include international bestsellers Lie to Me and Tap, Tap and the critically acclaimed The Crying Heart Tattoo, The Beginning of Sorrows, and Crazy Love. Facing Rushmore is his eleventh book. Martin lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

We walked a biking, hiking path between the river and the parkway. No one is about. The Potomac flows on our right without a burden of boats and, to our left, the parkway's pavement is empty of cars. America had run out of oil, the remaining gasoline confiscated and stored underground by the Federal government or in depots guarded by mercenaries in the pay of rich Americans.

Near the path, everything is grown up. Fallen limbs stay where they have fallen. Here and there are wrecked cars. A big Greyhound bus looks as if it had been used as living quarters, trash all around and clotheslines to nearby trees. But the bus is empty now. John and I walk.

I worry what'll happen if we encounter Patagonians. Even with nothing to steal, we're vulnerable. They might kill us for sport. Or cut off our arms. And all without speaking a word.

"We'll walk up to Memorial Bridge and cross there," John says. I think the boatman's unexpected enthusiasm for the idea of an American king has knocked John off balance, making him wonder if he's stumbled onto something truly magical.

I eat from Boatman's bag, offering portions to John who is deep in a calculation of possibilities. I don't know how the idea of a king can be bigger than baloney and cheese, but John clearly is distracted.

We're losing the day. Although I've finished Boatman's food, still I'm running out of energy. "Can we stop for the night?"

John looks at me as if he'd forgotten I was along.

"Stop? Yes," he says. "We don't want to go into the District at night. Let's sleep by those trees."

Here we are, two Americans of the modern era, stopping to sleep by trees the way my migrating ancestors might've done a thousand years ago at this very spot.

Except my ancestors wouldn't be looking in the sprung trunk of a wrecked car, which John does, finding a cheap plastic blue tarp. I ask him if we can put it over us for a blanket but John says the tarp will serve better as a ground cover, to keep the damp and cold from seeping up into our frail bodies. He says he'll look for something to put over us.

"No fire tonight?"

He doesn't think we should risk the attention it might bring.

Fire's a wonderful invention, I think, but, unlike our ancestors, we can't use it. For security reasons. Such is life in the modern era.

I ask John if someone can die of misery. "I know I don't have hypothermia but I am so tired and miserable of being cold. My feet hurt and itch and, last time I checked, the skin was cracking."

He pats my leg.

"No, John, the question wasn't rhetorical. Can a person die from being miserable?"

He said he didn't know, then he explained I had chilblains, that's what was causing my skin to crack and itch and hurt. "You have to keep your feet dry."

"I'm cold."

"Didn't Boatman's food help?"

"I suppose. Yes, it helped. I would've been colder without that food. I ate it all, John. I'm so sorry."

"No, you offered. I'm just...distracted."

"With thoughts of kings?"

"Yes."

John spreads the blue plastic tarp on the ground to the lee of a burned-out Mercedes SUV. In the twilight we can see fires here and there, across the river and down the way. In deference to John's somber mood, I don't start in again about how we should build our own nice, warm fire. He saw me shivering though and John said he would bring over dead leaves, there were tons of them around and they were dry and would make good insulation.

"How are you going to get them?"

"Stand up, I'll use the tarp."

"I'll help you. John?"

"What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Fine."

"If I lost you, I couldn't go on."

We took the tarp to the trees and filled it several times, bringing each load to the burned-out car, piling leaves there until we had a mound large enough to cover both of us. We spread the tarp on the ground again and repiled the leaves on it. He put some spidery limbs over the top to keep the leaves in place, though the night was thankfully windless.

We burrowed in. Primates make a simple leaf nest at night, we are primates. This den had none of the comforts of a real bed, I don't want to give a false impression, but the leaf-mound offered a nesting feel and filled my head with a powdery scent.

John and I had leaves between us but we could touch each other if it came to that.

"Cozy now?" he asked through the leaves.

I was a million miles from cozy but told him, "It's pretty nice, actually."

"The human body at rest produces two hundred and fifty BTUs per hour. That's about the energy from a seventy-five-watt bulb. You'll be taking off your clothes next."

I laughed.

He said it's been a blue moon since he heard me laugh.

Yes, put a baloney and cheese sandwich in me, I become a party girl.

I think if you start out your life sleeping in a bed, you never get used to sleeping on the ground. I hated it during all those years of the calamity. And on that cold hard ground under leaves and next to a Mercedes, I remember Tom's death. Pigs scavenge at night. Now every sound I hear will put a fist in my throat. My stomach churns and I pray to keep Boatman's sandwiches down.

"Tonight's the calm," John says. "Tomorrow we open the hinge of history."

"You mean meeting that king?"

He says yes that's exactly what he meant.

Here I am worrying about pigs while John has kings and history hinges on his mind.

"John?"

"Yes."

"How will you know him?"

His answer comes quickly. "He'll be magical from first sight. It won't be one of those situations like when you meet someone of note but the person is so unprepossessing that later on you say you had no idea he or she was important. This one, this king, he will prepossess from the git-go. Something distinctive about him. An aspect of the man. A sense of possibility, of danger, of magic. There will be about him a certain magnificence. The loose and confident way he walks. His eyes are green."

Later in the night I hear John whispering prayers and I feel sorry for my husband, a lapsed Catholic yearning for grace and praying for the impossibility of an American king. His Hail Marys are heart wrenching.

"John," I say, reaching through the leaves to find his papery hand.

"I have such a great wish for him, Mary."

"I know you do."

Another adamant day depressed me awake, shivering, needing to pee, a terrible rumble in the bowels. This next hour will be nasty. As if to offer a hopeful answer or mock me, I'm not sure which, clouds separated and light broke across the river to flood our little grove. John reached through the leaves and pulled me close. He spoke with fetid breath, which didn't disgust me, this was, after all, my beloved John, but which did make me feel bone sad for the man. We were both such wrecks. What he said, however, stood in vivid and hopeful contrast to the way he smelled. John called me his little darlin' and told me not to worry, here comes the sun.

John waited patiently for me to get over my bowel sickness. I washed off in the Potomac River. Moving upstream from where I had just cleaned my hands, I leaned to the freezing river and drank directly as one has learned to do in this calamity. God knows what's in the water and what it'll do to my tortured innards.

"Ready?" John asks brightly when I return to him.

I nod.

On Memorial Bridge we encounter the first people of the District. They've been propped in sitting and leaning positions along the concrete railings and sidewalks of the bridge. When we see that many are missing hands, missing arms, we know it was Patagonians that made these killings. A few of the bodies have been decapitated and propped into sitting positions on benches, holding their heads on their laps. Thus are we welcomed to the nation's capital, by a boulevard of atrocities. The cool weather has preserved the bodies in fair condition but with the sun warm today and spring coming, the stench will be unbearable soon enough. They'll be tipped over the rail and into the river, a burial that thousands have undoubtedly already received -- and when I recall drinking downstream from here, I get stomach sick and soul sick.

John puts an arm around my shoulder and we walk like that across the bridge. The first living people stare at us strangely. They seem relatively normal. No one appears prosperous or fat but, still, compared to John and me...and that's when I realize they're staring at us with repugnance because we are walking skeletons, their own personal forecasts, which they find appalling.

An older woman in a heavy coat offers me an apple. I shrink back. Something must be wrong with that apple, people don't give food to strangers. She's crazy, she's a witch. But then I see her eyes, wet with pity, and I take the apple and am ashamed.

As if I am committing some perverse act, I eat half the apple with my head turned away from the other people we see on the bridge. I offer the other half to John.

He shakes his head.

I tell him, "You're scaring me. You keep turning down food, first from Boatman and now this apple. John. What's wrong with you?"

He shakes his head but I insist.

"It's my teeth."

I look at his mouth, which he's keeping closed. "What's wrong with them?"

"They hurt. They're loose in their sockets. Like my whole jaw is coming apart."

"Oh, John."

A dental problem in our current situation is horrible.

"You need vitamins, you need the citrus in this apple."

"If I try to eat," he tells me quietly, "my teeth will come out."

I chew a bite of apple until it's mushy and then finger it over to my husband, telling him to suck on it and swallow the juice -- which he does eagerly, wiping his mouth and weeping just a little. I feed him another piece. "Why are you crying, you big baby."

"Ex...

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