Why We Wrote This
I watch as he moves through the room like air belongs to him. That is what they love, I think.
Not wisdom. Not strength. Not greatness. Ease. The vulgar, golden ease of a man who has never had to wonder whether the room would open.
People turn before he speaks. They soften before he asks. He laughs, and they receive the laugh as if grain has been poured into their bowls.
No one notices how little he has to do.
That is the insult.
A lesser man would mistake this feeling for envy, but envy is too small a word for what happens when the whole room participates in its own deception. I am awake to him.
He is not wise. He is large. That is all.
A harvest face. A festival voice. Muscle over mind, wrapped in enough public warmth to make fools call him noble.
Then Isis turns her head.
She does not look long enough for anyone else to notice. She never does. Her gaze touches and withdraws, leaving behind the little heat she will later deny making.
That is her art.
Stillness as bait. Devotion as costume. Softness arranged for witnesses.
Everyone calls her faithful because they need the story to stay clean. They need him to be the all-powerful golden man and Isis to be the holy woman beside him. If they are holy, then the room is holy for loving them.
I know better.
No one is that composed without practice. No one is that adored without calculation. No woman looks away that precisely unless she knows exactly what she has left behind.
She wants me unsettled.
She wants me watching.
She wants to stand beside him and make me feel the distance as if I placed it there myself.
I keep my face still.
That is what they will not get from me. They will not get the satisfaction of seeing that their little arrangement has landed.
He laughs again. Isis lowers her eyes. The room breathes around them like worship.
I feel a clean, cold certainty that the room is wrong. Wrongness has been allowed to sit on a throne.
They have mistaken size for substance. They have mistaken performance for purity. They have mistaken being pleased for being led.
I feel a pressure behind my ribs, a tightening around the truth, a sense that the world has tilted. Everyone else is too drunk on him to feel the angle.
I look at the easy body, the open hands, the stupid generous mouth. Vomiting nothing over the strength of his teeth.
I look at Isis, at the white linen of her composure, at the mask everyone keeps blessing because it flatters them to believe in it.
The room keeps turning toward them again and again, as if the turning proves anything.
It is close enough now that I can feel the shape of it before I know the plan.
