It's quite a dramatic premise. I let the reader in on Mescher's secret fairly early on. It's then a case of standing in Mescher's shoes (albeit the prose is in the third person) and the suspense in the story is based around the question of whether he gets away with it and how he will avoid detection.
Anyway, here are two important extracts. The first is right at the very beginning, where we find Mescher in the Catholic children's home and he meets his foster parents-to-be.
THE GOOD AMERICAN
At 14, Mary was too young to keep the child, so he became a ward of
county. In the ensuing five years, he
was put through no less than ten foster homes, some of them abusive, until the
Meschers saw him.
The child they saw was barely 10, but looked much older, and his mind
and emotions were cynical beyond their years.
Cynical and knowing. He knew
things that a 10-year old child should not know, but he did not let on to
others that he knew them. In 18 months
at the Three Rivers Catholic Home, the boy had learned the fine arts of
hot-wiring, burglary, larceny, as well as achieving an advanced standard well
beyond his years across math, English, science, geography and history.
When the Meschers arrived at Three Rivers, they were taken to see the
Head Sister, who promised that she would show them no less than four boys. It was a boy they wanted. The Meschers were young, confident, affluent
and blue collar. John Mescher worked as
a mechanic at a local garage. Elizabeth
Mescher was a secretary in a large law firm in downtown Springfield. She was infertile, due to a childhood bout of
Measles. From German immigrant families,
they wanted desperately for a child and had already adopted a baby boy and a
baby girl. Bitten by the fostering bug,
they had taken in a seven-year old girl and thought it would be nice if she
could have an older brother. The
Meschers were devout Methodists. It had
been their original intention to start a large family.
“We’d like a boy who is well-behaved.”
“Well, we keep them all in here, Mrs Mescher”, the Sister replied
nervously.
“It’s important to us that we’re able to bring him up in a godly way”,
Mr Mescher chimed in. We attend chapel
each Sunday.”
“I’m pleased to hear that….Well, here we are.”
They were shown into a small room in which sat a boy, alone. The floor was a blue linoleum while the walls
were a light green, covered here and there with children’s paintings, drawings
and murals.
The boy was sat at a hard wooden desk, which seemed to be chained to
the floor. He was hand-painting and
covered in red and yellow paint. His
head was shaven. He looked up at his
visitors with wide-eyed bemusement before returning to his work.
“Whattya paintin’?” Elizabeth Mescher chanced, bending forward over the
desk and catching the boy’s eye with a smile.
“Jesus”, he replied.
“We encourage the boys to paint images based on what they have learnt
from the Bible”, the Sister chimed in.
“What’s Jesus doin’?”
“Nothin’, just on a donkey.”
.............................................................
The next extract fast-forwards to John Mescher (re-named after his foster father) now as a successful adult man in his late 30s on the verge of securing the Republican nomination for President of the United States, an astonishing feat for someone so young. Yet Mescher is already 'old' and cynical in his mindset and attitudes.
Here Mescher goes through an internal dialogue with himself. Despite being successful, he is troubled by what he is doing. Somewhere deep within him he has a conscience and he is racked by it, but he will still play the game anyway....
.............................................................
He knew that behind the picket fences and the factory gates, the
‘folks’ held him in nothing less than contempt.
But they would still vote for him.
In their millions. It was their
suburban lives that imprisoned them, that shielded them and prevented them from
actualising a full humanity. John had
not been a prisoner. He had already seen
the other side, in the Catholic Home at Three Rivers. He knew that the system was make-believe, and
that the morals and values of the fools who elected him were against their own
interests. He held them in contempt and
he derived his thrills from the fact that he could express his contempt and
scorn openly to them, in speech after speech after speech.
He blamed their old, he blamed their young, their sick. And when he had exhausted the scapegoats
close to home, he picked on the aliens, the criminals, the welfare
dependents. And when he couldn’t find
any more scapegoats in Americaland, he looked abroad – even to the Chinese.
God that was funny! The speech
he made about The Traitors In Our Midst made him crack up every time. Sometimes he struggled to maintain a straight
face while he delivered it, and afterward, when the Secret Service agents, the
press people, the campaign workers, the advisers, the groupies and the all the
hangers-on were out of sight and he was safely ensconced in his hotel room, he
would collapse, sometimes in fits of laughter, at the sincerity of these fools. They didn’t know what living is. Their suburbanised lives had trapped them in
a facsimile of living. They were trapped
by the 9 to 5, the mortgage, the wife, the kids, by the neighbours, by
themselves, by their own feeble minds.
And John was there to justify it all, to act as the realtor agent for
society’s hell. By distracting attention and filling their stupid heads with
propaganda.
At the same time, John also felt alone.
The trickery he pulled did not convince him or make him the remotest bit
happy. He knew that his life was a
facsimile as well. He knew that, even if
elected to the White House, a president has no real transformative power or
influence. Even the greatest presidents
could not eradicate the world’s problems.
These problems were the product of a bankrupt social system.
It was in the people that the answer could be found, but not in the
sense that the propagandists supposed.
It was that tiny bit of contempt that the man in the mill, the woman in
the office, felt for John Mescher that was the last hope. In that contempt was a small beacon of light to
a new system, a democratic system in which men and women would take control of
their own lives and at last be fully human.
The contradiction in John Mescher was that he knew this but at the same
time he cared little for it. His job was
to propagandise and sell the existing America Dream, not replace it with a
better reality.
But that conflict bit at him.
His conscience had not been corroded by law, business and politics, but
it had been tranquilised by the money, security and prestige. He knew the truth deep down, and he knew that
when he spoke to the crowds, their smiles betrayed not joy but contempt, a
contempt that would one day turn to action.
He knew that America was fake and finished, and that is why he turned to
Chen.
Chen was a wholesale stationery agent working out of a lock-up two
miles from downtown San Francisco. He
was a major donor to the Republican Party in Oakland County and had met John at
a social function a year earlier, held in an effort to persuade local business
of the merits of the failing governor.
Simpson was a terrible governor for small business people, that was the
truth. He was the type of Republican the
California party had a habit of inflicting on the nation - i.e. Democratic in habit, culture, mind and
spirit, metropolitan in politics and outlook, Republican by affiliation, but
probably a pothead and a draft dodger in college. Simpson certainly was all these things, and worse.
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