precipice

we’re all thinking the thing we cannot say, waiting for catharsis that’s also just as likely never to arrive. the thing is monstrous in itself, a collective wish for the destruction of donald trump, president of/presiding over this american suicide administration. 

how else can we think our path out of this darkness? electoralism is in shattered pieces–maybe it works for school boards or small city councils; maybe the newly elected socialists in nyc and seattle are bellweathers. regardless, the remaining venues for the vote don’t include the top of the heap, our trash olympus with its big box ballroom is impervious to the vote. our congresspeople are frozen in time, incapable of escaping their scripts from 10 or 15 or 50 years ago. all we have is the power of our desire, the bleak fantasies of a cosmic end to american fascism. kill the trump in your head, and maybe the thought will careen and carom with enough force to, well, do the thing itself. 

my version came to me in between dreams. an image: the president appearing in the exit hatch of air force one. a grey, windy day, a light mist settles on the jackets and cameras of the throng of press waiting below on the tarmac. i’m watching this through a television camera. a chyron describes the scene as something like “trump returns to d.c. ahead of the holiday” or “peace talks” or meeting with joint chiefs of staff–it could be anything. the president has an agenda; his handlers are keeping him to it. 

it’s difficult to keep him to it. our president is irascible, cruel and forgetful, demented. any schedule, let alone this president’s schedule, is an oppression, an acquiescence of will to other people’s needs and demands. a president can be forgiven for responding to a schedule with petulance and annoyance. keeping trump’s ire at bay is on the mind of his handlers this morning. cruel petulance, as ever, is on our president’s mind as he scans the landing area, feeling the wet wind whip his thinning hair out of place. 

my vision lingers on the scene: his unruly hair, the exertion in his breath from traversing the length of the plane to the hatch, the slight amount of precipitation misting the tarmac, the plane, the stairs. it’s the kind of expansive moment that can’t be defined by its elements. everything could come together or fall apart in any kind of way until the moment it finally coheres and becomes its own unique moment. in my dream, the clock starts with a single step from the plane hatch to the moveable stair. 

a toe awkwardly overhangs the step. a heel just barely misses the edge. we can expect (and we may demand) endless replays and analysis, but when it happens, in that moment, it’s impossible to tell. the president moves forward an inch, a foot, lurching into the air and grabbing for the railing as his feet come out from under him. 

the stairs are wet and so he slips on the stairs. the railing is wet and so his hands glide off the railing. his coat is baggy and so it catches a defect in the stair and snags, twisting trump’s vector into a frantic geometry. trump’s body is frail in the way a dead rhino is frail: both disgustingly bruisable and distressingly immovable and meaty. his weight seeks a final surface. 

he will hit the stairs belly first, the force of it pushing the last volume of air he will ever breathe out of his chest. milliseconds later, his face makes contact with the edge of a stair, bounces slightly before twisting into contact with the railing. his body cannot bounce–it begins to slide haltingly down the stair as aides and cabinet secretaries begin to appear at the hatch above, half-seriously scrambling to at least present the appearance of rushing to the president’s aid. it’s useless. 

trump’s bones break, flung against the soft aluminum structure, his even softer body crumbles its way to the concrete below, deflated and masticated by its final journey. nothing looks correct anatomically. his skin has sluffed off one side of his already sagged jowls. meet the press. meat the president. 

i don’t know how long they’d leave the president’s body in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. they’ll have to wait for medics, it’d be there for a few minutes. the rain will pick up, soaking his clothes, pooling around him. maybe oil from his cosmetics would wash off and make little rainbows on the surface of the puddles, like you see in parking lots after a storm. the press would do their jobs perfectly, not intervening, documenting, photographing, yelling questions at the president that he will never answer. 

–mr. president, are you okay? 

–mr. president, will you raise tariffs on stairs?

–mr. president, have you met your maker? are they pleased with your works? 

–mr. president, do you really think you can escape? 

the wind picks up, lifting the loose fabric of the president’s jacket and shaking it menacingly at the plane. an ambulance siren begins to sound in the distance. my dream shifts and ends, and i’m somewhere more or less absurd. until i wake up, forced again to dream of the day it finally, undeniably, happens.