VARIATIONS ON AN AMERICAN HYMN [I]

The president is dead. His wife (second, though once-First) sits at his bedside and cries into her palm. What she's really doing is averting her gaze. Who is this dead man? His skin is still whip-brown though his soul has left him; his eyes and teeth are cranked open way beyond their natural hinges; his hands are like the bare stalks of long-dead baby's breath. Who is this man? She can't bear to look at him.

Why can't she square the body before her with the soul she'd watched diminish? Stentorian on the Senate floor, vicious but respected. Head high and eyes clear. Touched somewhere at his heart with a grief that must have always felt something like a lie. First wife dead. Somehow always withholding with his second. But she loved him for always receding from her. He was like cigar smoke after a fete: a passing memory to which she'd hug her knees like a child and fall asleep.

Campaign season had been the highest bliss. Here was the apotheosis of his psychic recession: an evolution of his Senate figure into a relief of Goliath: growing larger and flatter with the passing of every poll, every rally, and culminating into a very shadow on the sky with his victory at the primary. When the final counts of the final race rolled in, he'd grown so large that he'd disappeared into a given.

Who could know when he began to pale beneath his own shadow? The second term? The third? A chasm had opened where an era should have been and now no one could remember.

Though there were things The First Lady remembered with great misfortune. Had these been the end?

When he began night-swimming in the tributary, sloshing around in the muck and industrial waste? The nights that he sat up carving little five- and six-armed stars from Roosevelt's globe? What about the taking of calls—any and all calls—so that he'd sit at that great mahogany desk for hours chatting with salesmen and Bengali con-men and the schizophrenic homeless? How, somehow, he always managed to be the less coherent end of the conversation?

What about that wedding in Sudan? What had he seen on that drone footage that made him pull the trigger, as it were? Though she had insisted otherwise, he showed his wife the footage and, when the bombing bloomed a white flower on the night-vision green, she saw the bride splinter in mid-air then disappear.

This is not even to mention Yemen and Iran and Syria and Venezuela and Detroit.

So, in a way, the First Lady understood the need for something like the Executive Rehabilitation Project. Her husband was suffering. He was adrift. She suffered for the constancy of his presence. She missed the way a room felt after he'd left it. Now he never left the room. Perhaps The Project would bring her husband back to her by giving him the ability to leave her.

And, of course—of course—the world had suffered, too.

There were weeks of intensive meetings, for most of which The First Lady was not present. The only one that she was invited to attend was for the bureau concerning the rehabilitation of the President's look, as it were. Age had given him downcast eyes and swinging jowls. He was rotten with rosacea. His teeth had gone yellow and crooked. His back took on a severe curve so, as he walked, he gave onlookers the impression of a much smaller man cowering away from hostile birds.

The bureau wanted to get the First Lady's blessing. They were, after all, going to radically alter her husband's appearance. They'd tried other things. Complex silicon masks. Prop makeup. Cunning camera angles. They had experimented with various virtual solutions: AI-corrected live feeds, deepfakes applied to actors, etc. Nothing seemed to land with the focus groups. One woman from Iowa had said, "I need to be able to reliably imagine his body odor. And I need to like it."

So the bureau recommended more direct measures. The proposal was long and intensive. Rhytidectomy and blepharoplasty. Rhinoplasty. Buccal fat pad extraction. Jaw implants. Full mouth dental implants. Melanin injections. Cataract removal and LASIK. Total lumbar disc replacement. Bilateral knee arthroplasty. Laryngoplasty and vocal cord extension. Recovery would take months—but the virtual solutions would suffice for a time.

The First Lady took only a cursory look over the proposal before approving. She couldn't bear to see the photos of jawbones laid bare or the odd three-dimensional renders of a man who looked something like how her husband used to look. So she nodded and signed the papers and went on with her day. But that night, in her dreams, she was pursued from room to room by a shaggy figure whose face was always just outside her view.

Something went wrong. The facelift and eyelid reconstruction had required the removal of so much skin that he could no longer close his eyes or mouth. His system rejected skin grafts. At all times, one could see the whites on all sides of his irises and his resin teeth made avian clicks and clacks with the little unconscious movements of his jaw. Panic ran through his cabinet like phosphorous fire through a poppy field. The First Lady wept. She took up smoking. Feeling her own lips on the cigarette reminded her of better things.

They got by for a week or two with dark sunglasses and a surgical mask: the President is feeling just rotten these last few days, folks, but here he is. They'd refined their AI system to produce speech on his behalf and they stuck mouthguards on his teeth so that microphones did not pick up the clicking of his teeth.

But even this was not the worst of it. The bombings continued. Armed forces were deployed to entirely unforeseen locales: Hong Kong, Aachen, De Haag, Mexico City. An American airborne nuclear device was intercepted in the lower stratosphere, cutting power to most of Eastern Europe and ripping holes in local weather systems so profound that St. Petersburg had its first 120-degree day.

The President had begun swimming in the tributary again. Various aides and secretaries would try to fish him out as he passed, but he was simply too sly and the sewage was too slick for him to be caught.

The First Lady had taken to sleeping separately from her husband. He required regular visits throughout the night to keep his eyes and mouth from drying out, and the coming and going of the nurses was too much for her to abide. But, one night, her dreams filled with animals. Snakes spiraled up her leg. Birds lit upon the crown of her head. All around her, hounds crooned and nipped at the ankles of cats. Then blackness. But the sound remained. Hiss, then bark.

Her husband, the President in his powder blue pajamas, stood over her. The hissing was that of air through his teeth. He barked at her—"LUDD. LUDD. LUDD"—and each bark ended with a click. She said his name in a tone she'd long forgotten. Moonlight cast him in granite and deepened his shadows so that he might disappear into his own black vacancy. He might have been an old tyrant carved into a chapel wall. But then he raised his wrists to his wife and showed her where he'd severed the radial arteries. The blood had lost its initial velocity and had begun dripping impotently to the floor where it pooled and raised an abattoir stench that was, the First Lady recalled, not unpleasant: like a steak fresh out of its plastic.

He'd been dead before she even got to her feet. His metal knees and spine kept him erect without direction and, despite losing his soul, his shocking blue eyes did not lose their quality.

Where was her husband now? Was he hidden in this corpse before her? Were she to put her ear to its chest, could she hear him in there mewling like a man buried alive? She laid her cheek to its breast and heard nothing there: no beating heart; no cries for help. Just nothing.

Nothing. The sound of nothing. Her breathing slows and, before she knows it, she is asleep.