Two speeches
The rocket makes it or it doesn't.
At the podium, one speech is pocketed, the other read aloud. The cosmos, the President reads, is dire and alive and deadly like the sea before it, and those now entombed there are the first three to achieve a distinct honor. In the version he didn't read, it is the quiet medium through which America conquered the stars once and for all. Somebody had to write both. The President must always have, at the very least, two speeches: one if there's something to celebrate, one if there's something to mourn.
Bell stared lifelessly at her typewriter, her shredder already full of rejected speeches. Just a few blocks away, it was being decided whether and how a criminal should be punished. The hanged man, she called him, because to swing voters "martyr" was out. He and his accomplices had stormed the stage at a rally with a mannequin dressed to resemble the human shitstain that served as Speaker of the House and, in a rehearsedly gruesome pantomime, strangled it with an American flag soaked in pig's blood.
Even five years later, as the case was just reaching the Supreme Court, the nation was eating it up. "Anti-speech", one outlet called it; others landed on "good trouble", "bourgeois shrieking", "degenerate hypocrisy", and "more deliberate, affecting performance art than anything presently at the MOMA". It just kept getting juicier, too. The first trial was televised, and the appeal had been secretly videotaped. Reddit started a rumor that the hanged man was actually a body double of the real protester. Someone up top had a list of who was buying pig's blood. There would be violence in the streets when the Supreme Court announced the verdict, that much was certain; the only unknown was why.
There were a few obvious speeches to start. One for if the Supreme Court ruled the flag strangulation was straightforwardly free speech, of course, and one for if not. Those were already written, revised, typed up, and thrown into the trash, to be rewritten later after she had locked in the voice. But something was nagging Bell this time. She, like the rest of the country, had nothing better to do than to obsess over the hanged man, and she felt as though there were something else she had to write, some other outcome to prepare the President for. So she tried. One for if he got away with it on some technicality or another. One for if the court ruled against him, but only with a slap on the wrist. Hell, one for if a justice suggested the death penalty. Not that they'd do that. That one was mostly for fun, to get in the headspace of shaming the justices.
However much Bell felt like she was missing something, she was having fun. And thank God, because Bell was never sure how hard to work on these speeches. Her editor said that the best work of her life was the speech for if the Green Party got its shit together and turned 9% of the popular vote into a win. She wished she could remember anything about it. After all, it went straight to the shredder. Under this administration, nobody could save a copy-- that way, there was no embarrassing evidence that the President genuinely feared a Green victory, not even evidence that in another world he could have praised someone he chastised. Even she couldn't save a copy (hence the typewriter). When a speech was no longer necessary, when its audience ceased to exist, it vanished.
Back in February, when the President informed the teenage protesters chained to a traffic light on Albuquerque's MLK Avenue that they had 12 hours to surrender, Bell had that same 12 hours to write two speeches. Big names like King were delicate, she always thought. Too unsubtle with your allusion and you sound like a hack, too subtle and the commentariat would latch onto something you didn't intend. There had to be something for voters who couldn't care less about protesters and just wanted peace, love, and decorum. If the President was the mouth of the nation, her editor told her, social media was its digestive system. Stomach acid has to burn through something, so feed it, lest it eat itself.
In this case, though, the difficulty was that the President's original ultimatum was badly written. It wasn't Bell's fault-- the President preferred speeches by a single writer to what he called "committee-slop", and they tended to save her expertise for "two-speech situations". It also wasn't anything that needed damage control, thank God. Still, it was frilly and amateurish, an awkward journey through every MLK quote the speechwriter knew. "I Have A Dream" and "Letter from Birmingham Jail", Bell thought, were like belts and suspenders: usually one, never both. Were you using King as an universally beloved orator, or a man crucified in a cold cell who redeemed us nonetheless? He can't be both. In reality he was both, of course, and neither and more, but good communication is not reality.
If the protesters hadn't surrendered, the President would have compared them to Martin the hero, the man who shared a dream with millions, the man who wielded asyndeton and tricolon rather than his body, who wouldn't stoop so low as to handcuff himself to a pole and stop traffic. It was the cleaner speech. Selfishly, Bell wished those kids had toughed it out for just a few more hours. But they didn't, and so the protesters were like Martin the prisoner, Martin whose work continued after his arrest, Martin who didn't waste his potential. Martin who didn't firebomb a police station or anything like that when he was criticized, hint, hint. This was a more delicate operation. Line after line of logical knots and sleight of tongue to distract the listener from the fact that if the protesters were nascent Christ-figures, the government was crucifying them. She couldn't quite align all the pieces, couldn't make it stop feeling like a bastardization of a good man's legacy. With the clock ticking, she had to just submit them and pray her editor could work her usual miracles.
"I'm going back to the hotel to write two speeches for us," Bell joked as she handed off the drafts to her editor. "One for if you can fix these, and one for if you can't."
The pointless speeches, unshredded, were forming a pile that sprawled over half the desk. One for if the hanged man disappears. One for if somebody assaults one of the justices. One for if the hanged man offs himself. That last one, a sprawling glass house of euphemisms and admonishments, was satisfyingly effortless.
Still, Bell felt like there was something on the tip of her tongue. Her good mood had become dread, a very particular kind of it. Poor Bell couldn't quite describe or place it in her body. She even took a break to try. She settled on "like stepping on something in the dark, hearing a crack, and going through a mental inventory of all the breakable objects in your house".
Over the next week, Bell allowed herself to become more and more fanciful. One for if the hanged man is himself strangled by an American flag drenched in pig's blood, or if such a thing is attempted. Why not? It wasn't her job to decide whether such a thing was likely, only whether it would necessitate a bespoke speech if it happened. She'd poured her heart and soul out for a Green Party sweep, of all things-- this wasn't that much more frivolous. And it was helping. The dread wasn't going away, but it was becoming more concrete. She felt it as only a pit in her chest now, rather than an all-consuming malaise.
The image of the strangulation itself was starting to amuse Bell. One for if somebody attempts a copycat crime, but with some other flag. One for if there's a mass looting of mannequins from stores across America. Neither had happened yet, five years after the crime, but it was best to be prepared, she chuckled. She was enjoying this bizarre little world where literally anything could happen as long as it was a consequence of the hanged man's protest. One for if a CEO involved somehow in pig's blood manufacturing is, through an absurd domino effect, forced to step down. Actually, make that two: one for if the President is sympathetic to the CEO, one for if he's not. One for if the pig's blood is found to actually have been the blood of some other animal all along. One for if Saturday Night Live releases a sketch so tasteless that it is imperative for the President to respond (perhaps about a fashion show involving a white, blue, and mostly red dress). One for if the Supreme Court releases an opinion saying the protest was so beautiful that--
Bell felt the dread shift inside her, like a mouse clawing the inside of her stomach as it scurried toward her heart. She felt woozy. What was she just typing? One for if the Supreme Court releases an opinion, she read, saying the protest was so beautiful that... it stopped there. Her shoulders tensed, and the mouse reached out a paw on the inside of her neck. Instinctively she leaned back in her chair, which made her head spin.
That could happen. Not only could it happen, she knew down to the word what it would sound like if a pompous aesthete like Justice Lauridsen wrote such a concurrence. Bell was shocked out of her fantasy. This was reality, potential reality, hiding in plain sight. This was it.
She needed two more speeches, then, and then she was done: one for if the Court explicitly claimed the strangulation was beautiful, and one for if they explicitly claimed it was not. The first was easy. The President would separate speech and art, talk about the difference between beauty and goodness, acknowledge and mirror his audience's never-ending fascination with the flag strangulation, and disappear in a cloud of "although"s. She knew the President would like that. It was simple, fundamental even, and deferred saying anything of substance until the smoke cleared a little. It was second only to the Green Party speech.
The other speech was impossible. Even as the knot in her stomach untied, she found it laborious to figure out how and why the President would refute the Court. He would have to, she thought. There was something grotesquely beautiful about the event, that's what she had realized. Even beyond the symbolic level, there was something about the mottled redness of the flag, the awkward obeisance of the mannequin to gravity, the choreography of it all. But how do you say that, she wondered. A President can't get up on a podium and talk about how nice he thought a visual symbol of murder looked.
No, there was no way to describe the event without letting the audience see for themselves. At first she thought of props. It might help the audience to see a mannequin, to watch how it falls with a satisfying thud when pushed instead of catching itself. The original mannequin, even, if such a thing was possible. Would it be a reach to present a bloody flag side-by-side with a Rothko? Certainly. Strange imperative sentences popped up again and again, even after she considered every other option: "Tenderly hold the flag to the mannequin's neck." "Unfurl the flag with urgency." "Shake the mannequin to model its lifelessness, and by extension the lifelessness of what it represents." The President couldn't do such a thing. Hell, she couldn't do such a thing. She didn't even believe in this, not really. Not if the strangulation wasn't involved.
It's hopeless, Bell thought. The hanged man had made something uniquely slippery, uniquely... beautiful, she had to admit. Art that couldn't be talked about under the conditions she was working under. Nothing she could do except make draft after draft until something worked. Finishing this speech would be the hardest few months of her life.
Bell approached her editor with two envelopes.
"I'm going home to write two speeches for us," Bell joked as she handed off the drafts. "One for if you can think of a better idea, and one for if you can't."
This earned a guffaw. After the thank you and goodbye, though, the sentence caught up to her. Did she hear that right? There were two envelopes: "SCOTUS COMMENTS THAT FLAG STRANGULATION WAS BEAUTIFUL" and "OTHER"... other? What did Bell mean, "other"? That was unlike her. She pried at the flap, eventually opening it and unfolding the shockingly white page inside.
It had only three words: "Recreate the strangulation."