I was looking at the carefully preserved black and white photographs. My late mother-in-law was captured seated, holding a splendid bouquet with a handsome young man standing by her side. “He looks like Ray Liotta,” my sister-in-law said. A mysterious figure from a three quarter century old wedding party, he, too, had likely already passed.
The phone buzz indicating an incoming text returned us to modernity:
WellThis is terrifyingTrump shot
My husband has been predicting something like this for a few years — not that he was the only one. It wasn’t the first presidential assassination attempt in American history or the first time a Republican president has been repeatedly, for many years, called Hitler. But it was the first assassination attempt after years of defamation and lawfare and after decades of every institution of our republic being aggressively pulled apart.
The text was a rude intrusion — we were saying goodby to the house, to a home. I’ve been coming there for more than two decades, usually twice a year, sometimes more. My brain stored memories of pool parties and Christmas Day dinners.
One summer we dropped off our dog and drove to Arizona, and the dog took care of the gopher infestation in my in-laws’ ginormous backyard. My father-in-law was very proud of her — and she was extremely proud of herself.
A week ago, we took our new SUV on its maiden voyage to LA, our last trip. We interned my father-in-law and sold the house. And now we came to pick up a few keepsakes.
When I walked into the mid-century house for the first time, I saw a delicate blue-eyed woman with a still beautiful face sitting in an armchair across from the entrance. At Lilian’s funeral service the priest said that she was known by her gentle silence. She had mobility constraints as long as I knew her and she always sat in that chair across from the front door watching her grandchildren play on the living room floor.
When Lillian passed, the grandmother chair became grandfather’s. I sat in it a few times myself, but I felt like an intruder. This time I snapped a picture of it — an empty white chair with blush roses, lonely between the fireplace and a sliding glass door leading into the backyard. I took a few more photographs.
Both Tom and Lillian died in this house. They raised six children there, all of them upstanding citizens. Lillian was an elementary school teacher, and Tom was an aerospace engineer for a defense contractor. Back in his days security clearance meant something real, and the man, as much as he liked to talk aerodynamics, was full of secrets — he took them to the square compartment behind the marble mausoleum wall.
Today, the conditions of employment with the United Sates Secret Service seem evasive, the CIA recruits at Punk festivals and a transvestite stealing women’s panties from airport carousels can be put in charge of nuclear waste disposal. Americans are ill-advised to put their trust into institutions that, by their very nature, function secretively.
I looked at the empty chair and thought about the current occupant of the White House who went MIA in the hours following the shooting of his rival. When he finally surfaced, Joe Biden refused to call it an assassination attempt. On the following day, the sworn-in president of the United States of America was stumbling through a pre-recorded speech with a frozen expression on his face.
At this point, the country is well aware of his senility; the only question is what kind of degenerative condition he may have. Because he’s spotting that robotic facial expression, it’s widely believed to be Parkinson’s.
We bought our new car this year, in part because the autos coming on market are increasingly computerized, which deprives the driver of the responsibilities of the open road, with all the joys and dangers they bring. We certainly didn’t want a car with a built-in spying mechanism. We decided to invest in something approximating an old school ride before they disappear completely. And yet our car could take us to LA more or less on autopilot.
“We are the last generation that will teach its kids to drive,” said my other sister-in-law. “Driving will be fully automated and there will be nothing to impart on them.” That, plus the young people are in no hurry to be independent and to assume the responsibilities of driving.
“Ray Liotta is exactly my age,” said my sister-in-law. Ray Liotta drove a car high as a kite, followed by cop helicopters. Or maybe he imagined it. He did it his way. Ray Liotta, too, is dead.
Some say Trump is a bad person and a bad candidate, and maybe he is. But he is a candidate — a living, breathing, cognitively sound human spirit. His instinctive, masculine reaction to being shot at was to pump his fist and to “fight, fight, fight.”
His opponent, Joe Biden, is on autopilot. An empty chair. A SUV controlled by a hidden hand.
Individuals comprising this nation are atomized and alienated. From now on, a teenager with no social media footprint will be presumed to be a presidential assassin in training. Depending on what poll you look at, it’s far from certain that a living, breathing human being will be in charge of this country in 2025 — or ever. We are a people at a junction.
My husband played “This town is coming like a ghost town” as we were leaving the Valley. The I5 is intimately familiar to us; it’s amazing how little it has changed through my adult life. Some say it’s boring, but I find the I5 charming. If the plush brown hills will ever disappear behind new developments, a computer screen will lead us back. On autopilot.
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