Democracy

Megan Wildhood

She tiptoes in, the forms of people milling in front of her, tapping clickpens on clipboards, shuffling papers, waiting. Not late, exactly—the person she is here to see doesn’t know she exists, she doesn’t think, so wouldn’t be expecting her—she joins the waiting. What scraps of sky that can be caught from the tops of the windows tinted almost to the hilt shine like chrome. The windows surround them. Should she sit? She does not see anyone sitting. The overstuffed chairs, probably selected to remain on trend, seem like they are bursting with anticipation to hold a human’s weight, like they are stretching out towards anyone who recognize their value, their purpose. Is that why her face is often astonishingly puffy? 

Not today, at least. Today, it is because she beelined for the marble dames’ room promptly upon exiting her cab so she could sob in private. Finally complete with her diagnosis so she can at least procure meds, she is furious they aren’t working yet: she is still afire with nerves after eight weeks of religious pill popping. Perhaps the nerves (or, let’s be honest, the pill popping) are not unusual in this circumstance, though. Most of those waiting are infernally clicking pens, tapping clipboards, shuffling papers. She wills her eyes to focus. Some are even running through panoplous facial expressions, practicing. Thinking. Understanding. Agreeing. Puzzling. Pitching. 

Pitching. 

Selling. Could she hate anything more? Maybe her mother. And yet, that is why she is here, waiting. Always waiting.

She trained to be a librarian to fight fake news and help people get real information, which can save lives, but librarians barely make it in life, according to Mama’s Metrics. She didn’t know until now that Mama had not at all planned for the future—maybe that’s why she exists in the first place?— thus Mama’s Metrics were not as rainproof as her childhood had sheened them. So now she, single, of course by choice, because of female solidarity (also, she now notes, a Metric), has herself and Mama to take care of. She resigned from her beloved job in the downstairs of the public library where she had designed playscapes and ran Minecraft meetups and made guitars out of tissue boxes and rubber bands for thirteen cadres of youth zero to eighteen when she learned Mama had stretched her days of independence father than they should have gone with a snap ER visit and accompanying admission. Then another. Another. Eventually, the stamp of dementia. 

A diagnosis that snap qualifies you for the old-people warehouse. At least in Daughter Metrics. But, even if insurance agrees, they don’t have to pay for it. Especially if you don’t have a policy for long-term care. Or one of any kind. Turns out, you can’t just show up at said Warehouse, even with a full and indexed library of personally cataloged Medical Metrics, to begin the higher level of care there was no way she could provide. Turns out, hand-written Metrics from a family, no matter how dutiful and meticulous and OCD and librariany (read: well-read), do not count as chart notes and hold no negotiating power even after a real doctor validates them with a diagnosis.

So she’s here. Ass a dementia medication company rep of sorts. Some of those waiting, she just now notices, are not milling about. They are not sitting, but they are hovering by the sepiaed windows, faces poker, shoulders back, chest up, spine straight. Nailing all of Mama’s Metrics. They’re not nervous? Confident seems like an insufficient diagnosis; even she could don confidence with the best of them: she had walked out of the dames’ room with no evidence of being on the razor’s edge of a mental breakdown with the exception of a very puffy face, which she could assert with a wry smirk ais, “oh, just the moon face of perimenopause” if she had to. Their lack of notes to shuffle through, clipboard to clutch, stand-in fidget toy to pummel… they were experienced. But why?

She certainly didn’t plan to stay. Not any longer than necessary. Maybe she had stronger-than-warranted hope in this drug, the third one Mama’s tried (eleventeeth by Mama’s Metrics), but even if this one turned out to finally be The One, the Dementia-and-Affected community has been chasing for billions of dollars, and it wouldn’t be worth diverting money away from continuing to neglect the country’s 90,000 condemned bridges, warping otherwise much-needed legislation, and only God knew what else. So it was just until she could afford to get Mama out of her condo and into the Warehouse, which shouldn’t be too long; even mediocre petitioners made bank. At least in the pharmaceutical industry. And the tech industry. And sugar. Ag. Plastics. Oil and gas—really, you don’t have to be a librarian to figure out what’s going on here.

But she could do this just until she survived this little life detour. The de-mentia de-tour. The tour D’Mentia. She settled. Didn’t sit, but neutralized her face, lifted her chin, dared her shoulder blades to touch. Mostly, this just made her shoulders reach for the chromey sky. Would she try to be the first one in her rep’s door to get it over with? Would she play it cool, study her paper stack, recite company metrics to herself, refamiliarize herself with facial expressions like the smile?

No time to think through a decision. House Representative Hyden’s door rattles open. Everyone but the window gazers flinches. The window gazers all turn, not together, but it seems to her to be a calculated separateness, toward the exposed Congressman, then each to each other as if daring each other to go first. Go ahead, she imagines them saying in their minds: reveal your desperation. I don’t need to worry about following anyone. I am a class of one.

“Let’s have you, miss,” Rep. Hyden says, either tired or already exasperated with the whole process despite it being the first day of session. 

Her? Her heart wailing on her sternum nearly plunges her face first into the freshly updated vinyl flooring—the distressed look is so in right now. That’s the only way she’d ever be fashionable, for sure.

Is she, Miss? She is the only one within Rep. Hyden’s view. The others waiting, she imagines, all shoot the glare of competitors at her, the glower Mama used to not even try to conceal when they were out for ice cream or shopping and the boys allowed themselves brief looks at her, no longer Mama: envy mixed with a wistful knowing that her time, though now, would also soon pass. She hadn’t positioned herself here on purpose; there was no way to know which door would open first. Right? She hadn’t been in this business long enough to know this particular Metric. In fact, she only knows one—her mind trick; probably why Menta hired her.: 

She blinkblinksers her eyes as she strides in ball-heel ball-heel to quiet the clacking of her mandatory Stilettos. Her eyes do not adjust quickly to the cave lighting of Rep. Hyden’s office, so she apparently doesn’t see hims gesture toward the chair in front of his desk. 

“Will you stand for your entire seven minutes?” His voice is quizzical, calm. Tells her everything she needs to know.

“I will only need three.” She evens her weight between her feet.

The scant light in the room is on  Rep. Hyden’s face: his eyebrows rise, one corner of his mouth pokes into his cheek.

“I am here to ask you to introduce a bill that would amend the Constitution to ban professional lobbying.” Her hand does not shake, thank you meds, as she hands him the sample text she spent months revising.

He frowns as he slowly reaches for the paper. “But isn’t… ,” he trails off as he reads it. After a long pause, “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how difficult it is to amend our Constitution.”

She nods sharply. “The last time was more than 30 years ago and, incidentally, it related to congressional salary. Only took three years from proposal to passage.”

He raises his eyes from the page. “You do know your stuff.” Another pause, awkward but expected. “I just don’t see how you people would make your money af—…” he trails off again. Bingo.

“We both know it’s not my money we’re about to discuss.”

Rep. Hyden smiled, pinched the edge of the sheet he was holding, and ran his fingers down it. “And it’s not mine, either.”

It’s yours.