Free The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch

would organize away what amazes me about stars, their random density, their numerousness.
    They were all curious about America. It was Timmo who said, “Is it true everyone in America’s fat, then?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    His potato face expanded with pleasure. “Really!”
    “Not the movie stars. Or the president. Or me.”
    “But mostly?” said Anneliese.
    “No, no. I do remember thinking midwesterners were fat when I lived there.”
    “Where?”
    “The middle part of the country.”
    “The Great Plains, they call it,” said Tom knowledgeably.
    “Some of it,” I said.
    “Where’d you go?” Anneliese asked.
    “I was in Ohio. Iowa, actually, then Ohio.”
    “How fat were they?” Timmo asked, eyes gleaming. I’ve always thought there was something humorless about people in peak fitness. “Very fat?”
    “I’m not sure how to say…”
    “Well, how many stone were they?”
    “How much is a stone?”
    “Fourteen pounds,” said Sophie.
    I thought for a second. “Maybe the fat men are twenty stone, or something. Really it’s the fat kids, though. You would see a family of four, each eating like two hamburgers and a large fries, with a large Coke, and then maybe a McFlurry after that.”
    All of them looked gratified, especially Anil, at this intelligence. “Oh, dear,” he said.
    “I can’t say I haven’t done the same,” I admitted.
    “Why were you in Ohio?” asked Sophie.
    “I was working for John Kerry.”
    “Mate, bad luck!” said Timmo, looking genuinely moved.
    It was a sign that even someone as civically diffident as Timmo would commiserate with me, and there was a chorus of agreement. This was during the middle of the war in Iraq, two years after “Mission Accomplished,” and Bush’s reputation in England—which had never been high—was as a martial coward and an enemy of the poor.
    “Was it fun at least?” asked Sophie. “The campaign?”
    “It was amazing.” The bottle of wine came to me. “Everyone’s working really hard, and you’re all tired but you’re in it together, too, if you know what I mean, and there are constant little romances, and once every few days your candidate will come in and give a big rousing speech, and then you’re always putting out fires.”
    “But losing must have been just awful,” Anneliese said.
    “It was.”
    It still felt fresh. I had been disappointed, for Kerry and for myself. I had been relieved to go home. I had been tired, definitely really tired.
    Above all, I had been angry. I became interested in politics during high school, probably because it was considered a mark of intelligence, and when I reached college, and Clinton was president, the field had possessed a glamour for me—in its plain ambition, its competitive cleverness. I was a traditional liberal, for reasons that seemed self-evident, and which I probably acquired naively. Of course poor people ought to have better schools; of course the death penalty was wrong.
    That glamour soured and my opinions intensified and clarified in the early 2000s. By the time I was in Oxford—partly because of the personal ignominy of losing the campaign—those feelings were too deep, ranting, almost embarrassing. I could see people retreat to politeness when I began to express myself, even like-minded people. I hated the president and his privileged, plausible, errant allies. What angered me almost to madness was that their rich and luxurious lives were, like mine, predicated on inherited privilege, and yet I felt—one always feels—that I was different. The inequality of circumstance for which I had felt guilty my entire life was to the president something to enshrine in the law. I would rather have shot myself than direct some minimum wage worker to pull himself up by the bootstraps. I looked at his face and could see a deformed version of my own—the British dream, inherited money and status, not the American dream, which seemed to me an outright falsehood by that stage. We went