A topical adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Part One
Ronald Reagan was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. It had been on TV and in all the papers. Reagan was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Reagan was as dead as a door-nail.
John Boehner knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Reagan was President back when good Ohio Republicans sent Boehner to the Statehouse in Columbus. Boehner was his self-declared disciple, his admirer, his fabulist.
This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
Oh! But Boenher was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, that Boehner, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! With a heart sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck a spark. The poison within him froze a weeping grimace on his features and turned his aspect a color of Orange unknown to Nature.
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Once upon a time, Boehner's devotion to the now dead Reagan had earned such admiration from his fellow Republicans that they empowered him with the ability to shut down the government of the United States and destroy the ability of the U.S. Treasury to borrow money. All of his Republican friends thought it was a wonderful and very smart idea. They thought everyone else would think so, too.
One day as Boehner sat in his Office, from his speakerphone, came “John, you must pass a clean CR and raise the debt limit!” in a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Boenher's nemesis, the President.
“Bah!” said Boehner, “Humbug!”
“Don’t be cross, John!” said the President.
“What else can I be,” returned Boehner, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? What does funding government mean to you but paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
“John!” pleaded the President.
“Mr. President!” returned Boehner sternly, “you govern in your own way, and let me govern in mine.”
But John, said the President, “at times like this it is more than usually desirable that the government should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many millions are in want of common necessaries; many tens of millions are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Boehner.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the President.
“And the sweatshops?” demanded Boehner. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the President, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“Welfare reform and strict means testing are in full vigor, then?” said Boehner.
“Both very much so, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Boehner. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the President, “a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the most needy and their poor children food and drink and shelter and means of warmth and doctor's care when they need it. We choose this time, because you have let all Government's the money run out when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Boehner replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Boehner. “Since you ask me what I wish, Mr. President. I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”
Later that day, Boehner took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, got drunk and went home to go to bed. He had been thinking all day how proud his Hero Reagan would be of his handling of “the problem”, as they both called the Government. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Boehner, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the big brass knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Reagan's face.
It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Boehner as Reagan used to look: the same oddly colored hair to which Boehner's own skin color was a kind of homage. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its color, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of Reagan's expression.
As Boehner looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, turned on the lights.
He did pause, with a moment’s irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Reagan's face staring back from the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said “Pooh, pooh!” and closed it with a bang.
The sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every bottle in the wine-cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Boehner was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs.
Before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.
Sitting-room, bedroom, office. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa, nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his pajamas, hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall.
Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his tie; he put on his pajamas and slippers.
His fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Reagan, nine years dead, came like the ancient Prophet’s rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Reagan’s head on every one.
“Humbug!” said Boehner; and walked across the room.
After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain up the steps from the cellar. Boehner then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.
The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.
“It’s humbug still!” said Boehner. “I won’t believe it.”
His color changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the lights flared up, as though to cry out, “I know him; Reagan's Ghost!” and fell again.
The same face: the very same. Reagan in his ridiculous haircut, usual suit and shoes. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Boehner observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, bills, vetoes and Executive Orders, all wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Boehner, observing him, and looking through his suit, could see the pocket buttons on his pants behind.
Boehner had often heard it said that Reagan had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.
No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.
“How now!” said Boehner, caustic and cold as ever. “What do you want with me?”
“Much!”—Reagan's voice, no doubt about it.
“Who are you?”
“Ask me who I was.”
“Who were you then?” said Boehner, raising his voice. “You’re particular, for a shade.” He was going to say “to a shade,” but substituted this, as more appropriate.
“In life I was your Hero, Ronald Reagan
“Can you—can you sit down?” asked Boehmer. looking doubtfully at him.
“I can.”
“Do it, then.”
Boehner asked the question, because he didn’t know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.
“You don’t believe in me,” observed Reagan's Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Boehner.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Boehner.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Boehner, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
Boehner was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Boehner felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Boehner could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though Reagan's Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair and suit were still agitated as by the hot vapor from an oven.
“You see this toothpick?” said Boehner, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision’s stony gaze from himself.
“I do,” replied Reagan's Ghost.
“You are not looking at it,” said Boehner.
“But I see it,” said the Ghost, “notwithstanding.”
“Well!” returned Boehner, “I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you! humbug!”
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Boehner held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom pulled off his own jaw and dropped it upon its breast! Boehner fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”
“Man of the worldly mind!” replied Reagan's Ghost, “do you believe in me or not?”
“I do,” said Boehner. “I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
“You are fettered,” said Boehner, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied Reagan's Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Boehner trembled more and more.
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, when I died. You have labored on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”
Boerhner glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.
“Sir,” he said, imploringly. “President Reagan, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Sir!”
“I have none to give,” Reagan's Ghost replied. “It comes from other regions, John Boehner, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing supporters and their cloistered haunts; and weary journeys lie before me!”
It was a habit with Boehner, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his pockets. Pondering on what Reagan's Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.
“You must have been very slow about it, Sir,” Boehner observed, in a business-like manner, though with humility and deference.
“Slow!” Reagan's Ghost repeated.
“Nine years dead,” mused Boehner. “And traveling all the time!”
“The whole time,” said the Ghost. “No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.”
“You travel fast?” said Boehner.
“On the wings of the wind,” replied the Ghost.
“You might have got over a great quantity of ground in nine years,” said Boehner.
Reagan's Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Police would have been justified in indicting for disturbing the peace.
“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labor by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any benevolent spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”
“But you were always a good man for business, Sir,” faltered Boehner, who now began to apply this to himself.
“Business!” cried Reagan's Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my life were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
It held up its chain at arm’s length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
“At this time ,” the spectre said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down. Were there no suffering millions whose fates should have concerned me?!
Boehner was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.
“Hear me!” cried Reagan's Ghost. “My time is nearly gone.”
“I will,” said Boehner. “But don’t be hard upon me! Don’t be flowery, Sir! I beg you!”
“How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.”
It was not an agreeable idea. Boehner shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
“That is no light part of my penance,” pursued the Ghost. “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, John.”
“You were always a good friend to me,” said Boehner. “Thank’ee!”
“You will be haunted,” resumed Reagan's Ghost, “by Three Spirits.”
Boehner's countenance fell almost as low as Reagan's Ghost’s had done.
“Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Sir?” he demanded, in a faltering voice.
“It is.”
“I—I think I’d rather not,” said Boehner.
“Without their visits,” said Reagan's Ghost, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls One.”
“Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over, Sir?” hinted Boehner.
“Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!”
When it had said these words, the spectre took its jaw from its lap and when the jaws were brought together Boehner ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.
The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It beckoned Boehner to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Reagan’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Boehner stopped.
Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.
Boehner followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Reagan’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Boehner in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a dark suit, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.
Boehner closed the window, and examined the door by which Reagan's Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say “Humbug!” but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of Reagan's Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose.
To be continued.