Free (1964) The Man by Irving Wallace

States.”

II
    I t was the muffled sound of argument that awakened him.
    There was a thin line of ache behind his forehead as he listened, sorting and separating the muffled sound into two sounds, the first shrill and feminine, cross and indignant, the second low and male, calm and placating.
    His head was deep in the fat pillow, so deep that when he turned, he could not see the time. The pillow had been handmade by Aldora, almost double-sized and stuffed with gray goose down, and presented to him on their first anniversary, so long ago, when their marriage still had hope.
    The cross fire of altercation beyond his bedroom wall, increasingly abrasive, continued louder. He lifted himself ever so slightly on his forearm and was able to make out the time on the electric clock humming upon the end table beside the bed. It was eight fifty-two, and although the room was darkened by the drawn shades, he knew that it was morning.
    He realized that he had meant to be awakened earlier, had meant to set the alarm, but had forgotten to do so before falling asleep. The shutoff lever on his telephone had banished all calls, and in his utter exhaustion he had slumbered on and on. It was shameful, he thought behind the headache, and, as always, to do anything shameful alarmed him. Other men could afford mistakes, small and large, but he could afford none, not the smallest one. Several times, during his residence in Washington, he had awakened with the remnant of the same dream, that he had been treading water in an enormous aquarium, and that all its sides were painted with blue eyes staring at him. The shimmering fragment of dream had always left him uneasy.
    But now, the private hook of humor that he possessed but had not dared to reveal to anyone but Wanda and his closest friends extricated him from the fish bowl, and he was free to admit to himself that he had performed his first act as the President of the United States. He had overslept.
    Suddenly the enormity of what had happened last night, and of what he was, oppressed him with its unreality and automatically forced him to retreat into the cup of the down pillow.
    He had, he remembered, been told by someone last night that, after formally resigning from the Senate, he had become the President of the United States at ten thirty-seven in the evening. He had not been returned to his brownstone row house until after one o’clock in the morning. It was almost impossible to recollect what had taken place in the time between. He had signed something, yes, his first official signing; he had affixed his name to the proclamation that poor Speaker MacPherson was supposed to have signed, the same statement that had been hastily prepared for the Speaker and was to have been flown to Frankfurt. This proclamation was the official announcement of T. C.’s funeral and the period of national mourning.
    He had listened to Secretary of State Arthur Eaton and Governor Wayne Talley expound on the critical Roemer Conference, and he had not absorbed a word of it. He had sat with them, smoking cigars until his eyes smarted and his throat felt blistered, and he had sat with the sympathetic press secretary, yes, Tim Flannery, the redhead, preparing the carefully worded release to all the news media. Then others had swum about them, senators and representatives whom he had known during work hours for years, and T. C.’s Cabinet members, whom he had hardly known at all, and they had spoken of approaches and strategies and public relations and the Party, and he had been grateful that they had addressed Eaton and Talley and Flannery and not himself.
    He had been almost physically ill from the tension of the events of that day and evening, and after midnight there had been a stirring and rising, and he had been released, guided to a Cadillac limousine outside the South Portico. He remembered protesting against the two Secret Service agents who had entered the limousine with him, and protesting, with