Mae-Ying Allen ~ 3-4-2029, 9:21 PM EST
Evening at the flat on Logan-Circle; Walsh’s flat. They’re about to go to a charity dinner; she needs to be in war mode.
She’s pulling on her blouse when he walks into the bedroom, a high ball in one hand, his tablet in the other. He’s focused on something he’s reading there. Mae-Ying knows the article; she sent him the link twenty minutes ago.
He sits down on the edge of the bed. Mae-Ying watches his face through the mirror while she buttons up her blouse, observing his reaction: a half-smirk, a sniff, a muted laugh.
“I know,” she says. “She spent a whole paragraph on my eyeliner.”
“No! It’s good,” he says. “I think it’s good.”
She purses her lips.
“You don’t like it.” He glances up at her.
“She made me sound like a dilettante.”
“Really?” He squints. “Where?”
“I’m young, I’m ‘energetic’... I think she actually calls me cute at one point?” She brushes the top of her hair back and puts it in a barrette.
“You are cute.”
She groans.
“Mae, the whole reason they did the profile is because you’re the youngest legislative director on Capitol Hill. You’re one of the youngest senior staffers ever, House or Senate.” He puts the paper down on the bedside table. “You’re just mad because they called you a girl.”
If anyone ever called you a ‘boy’ in print, you’d expect me to have them in a shallow grave by midnight, she thinks to herself.
“I’m not mad.” She pulls on her jacket. “It’s just not how I see myself, I guess.”
Walsh laughs. “You don’t see yourself as a girl?”
She glares at him over her shoulder. “Jim, come on. You know I have a hard time convincing people I’m not a teenager.”
“You’d rather they made you sound like a conniving bitch?”
“If those are my options.” She puts on her Avatar glasses, rimless and paper-thin.
“This might be news to you, but that isn’t how the rest of the world sees you. Dedicated, yes. Ambitious, maybe. Conniving? No.”
“Then I guess I’m not working hard enough,” Mae-Ying says.
#
A week later, an hour before sunrise, Mae-Ying is pumping away on the elliptical machine in the staffers’ gym. Three televisions, all muted, flash through news bits on the far wall. She keeps one eye on what happened to the world overnight while the other drifts over her inbox, her texts, her schedule for the day, March 5, 2029.
Her schedule. Something’s off. There’s a lunch meeting with a woman named Candace Knight, and she didn’t schedule it, nor can she recall who Candace Knight is. She highlights the name and runs a query. Turns out this woman, blonde, young, works for the LA Times. Apparently they still have a few reporters on their payroll.
A few deliberate eye gestures and she’s on the phone with her aide. “Fred? Hi. Do you remember booking a meeting with a reporter from LA? Knight?”
“Um… Knight?” There’s a short pause. “Oh. That’s right. The Senator’s home office called and asked me to put it on your schedule.”
She suppresses a sigh. “Okay. Cool. Thanks.”
She hangs up and keeps pumping the pedals beneath her.
#
Candace Knight is running late. It’s been ten minutes since Mae-Ying sat down at their table for two, and she’s starting to wonder if the other woman will even show. She’d love to use the downtime as a break, but she can’t afford that; she has a bill to sell the Energy and Natural Resources committee and the vote is supposed to happen this afternoon. So she alternates between staring into information displayed on the lenses of her glasses, formulating a plan of attack for the early afternoon, and staring out the plate glass window at the front of the restaurant, looking for the reporter.
Now it’s twelve twenty five, and the appointment was for noon. Mae-Ying makes a phone call.
“Fred, hi. Could you get me Ms. Knight’s contact info?”
“Sure thing,” he says.
She swirls the straw in her water and wonders when it would be appropriate to get up and leave. How much should she tip for water? This is so unprofessional.
“Huh,” Fred says. “The home office didn’t attach any contact information. Want me to call them?”
“That would be great.” Looking up, Mae-Ying spots a blonde woman carrying a messenger bag and heading directly towards Mae-Ying’s table. “Never mind, Fred, I think I see her.” She hangs up and stands up, extending a hand. “Ms. Knight? Pleased to meet you, I’m Mae-Ying Allen.”
“Candace Knight,” the woman says, pumping Mae-Ying’s hand. Her voice has a Texan twang. “I am so sorry about being late, you would not believe the traffic!”
“Oh, it’s not a problem,” Mae-Ying says with a forced smile.
Candace puts down her bag and takes a seat. “Well, I guess you know why I’m here…”
“To be honest, I don’t,” Mae-Ying says. “This was a last-minute addition to my schedule.”
“Oh! Well, I’m doing a report on Senator Walsh, about how he’s become sort of a rockstar in the Senate after getting that Housing bill to pass the Presidential veto. I called the Senator’s Boulder office--sorry, I should have gone through Mr. Stevenson, but he wasn’t in yesterday and I have a filing deadline.” Candace gestures with her hands as she speaks. On her right hand there’s an odd, bulky ring, like a class ring, but not quite the same. A signet ring. Who wears those? “Anyway, they said you would talk to me. They said you were the closest person to him on his staff.”
Mae-Ying smirks. “That’s true, yeah.”
“So, let’s talk about Senator Walsh. Where’d he get his career started, politically speaking?” Candace asks.
Mae-Ying takes a sip of her water, covering for the fact that the question’s triviality annoys her. “Where to begin. Well, Jim graduated from Harvard at the head of his class. He was a partner at Gage, Whitehall and Price, and then he was elected to the Colorado Senate.”
“Uh huh. Why’d he decide to jump to the national stage?” Candace asks.
Because you keep moving up or you die where you’re standing.
“There’s so much to be done, both for Colorado and the nation, that can’t be affected at the state level. The Senator felt as though he was called to higher service.”
The questions don’t get any less banal until Mae-Ying’s halfway done with her food. Candace has just finished asking Mae-Ying about Walsh’s controversial stance on nuclear power--pro, in the interim, as it’s the only viable means to reduce carbon emissions in order to hit the Paris targets by 2040--when the bomb shell finally drops.
“So what can you tell me about Synesis?”
Mae-Ying frowns. “Synesis? I’m not familiar with that name.”
“Oh.” Candace’s eyebrows go up. “Well, they’re a company--some kind of biotech thing based in Montana. I’m asking because they’ve donated a huge amount of money to Senator Walsh in the last few years.”
So that’s the punchline. “Oh,” Mae-Ying says. “Sorry, but I don’t handle any of his fundraising.”
“That’s weird, because I asked the Boulder office, you know, who does his fundraising? They basically said no one there handles it, either.” Candace tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and there’s her ring again. The image on the signet is a cross with a rose at its center.
“I’d call Douglas Osbourne,” Mae-Ying says.
“Okay, thank you!” Candace pulls out a smartpad from her bag and hands it to Mae-Ying. “Would you mind giving me his contact info?”
“Not at all.”
#
Eight-thirty that evening and Mae-Ying is drinking red wine and black coffee, waiting for Walsh to show up for dinner. She still has her Avatar glasses on. It’s a social cue, not just a way to keep working--if she looks busy, she might be able to avoid conversation with any colleagues who might wander past. One of the reasons she hasn’t invested in the contacts that most users have replaced their glasses with recently. Finishing up with an opinion piece about today’s bill, she pulls up the aggregator she had one of her technical staff spin up after her lunch with Candace Knight. She downloads the summary and reads:
Synesis Biomedical and Defense Technologies. Market Cap: $15 billion USD. Venture capitalized; pre-IPO. Headquarters: private research campus outside Missoula, MO. Recent news: Synesis secured a defense contract worth $400 million USD to provide next-gen area reconnaissance capabilities--
Walsh sits down across from her.
“You know, you have a staff,” he says. “I pay them to work so you won’t have to while we’re at dinner.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mae-Ying says. “I’m looking at porn.”
Walsh laughs nervously and glances around. “Too much to hope there’s a CNN stringer in the room…”
She removes her glasses. “How was your trip?”
“It was tedious,” he says. “I don’t like sucking up to rich white people who should have been dead a decade ago.”
“Now that’s a soundbite...”
“Figured I’d get in on the fun.” He loosens his tie with one finger. “We’re home on the bill?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Good,” he says. “I like poking Rollins in the eye.”
She smirks at him over her wine glass. “I know how you do…”
“Anything interesting come up while I was gone?”
“Yeah, actually, now that you mention it. I had this weird lunch meeting with a woman called Candace Knight. From the LA Times. She’s apparently writing an article about you.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Huh.” Mae-Ying frowns. “In any case, she asked me a bunch of softball questions--except for one about campaign donations from a company called Synesis?”
Walsh looks down at his menu and doesn’t respond.
“Does that ring a bell?”
“Oh. They’re donors.” He doesn’t look up. “The head of R&D, Russel Manson, he and I go back.”
“Right,” she says. “Anyway, it threw me for a loop.”
“You think I should put some people on her?” Walsh asks.
“Who? Candace Knight?” Mae-Ying arches her eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Walsh says.
“I don’t know. Are you concerned about it?”
“About an article on me in the LA Times? Not particularly, but you said it threw you for a loop.”
“The Synesis thing did. Why are they asking about it?”
“Why do reporters ask about anything?” He shrugs. “Sniffing after a story.”
Mae-Ying sighs, irritated. Walsh looks up from his menu.
“What?” he asks.
She lowers her voice. “If this is something you’d rather I didn’t know about, you can just say so.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Walsh says. “They’re mostly a biotech firm. Vaccine research, SDI but for biological weapons. Hard to argue with that.”
“All right.”
He gives her his campaign smile. She smiles back without teeth.
“Let’s see if we can flag down a waitress,” he says.
#
Much later that night, a faint buzzing from Mae-Ying’s earrings tells her she has a phone call. She rolls out of bed and stumbles through the dark into Walsh’s bathroom to put on her glasses, which are resting next to the sink. Her Avatar identifies the caller as Allen, Tara, San Francisco CA. She sets it to voice only and picks up.
“Mom, seriously? It’s one AM.”
“It’s so hard to get you on the phone these days!” Tara says. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you--”
“I was free almost all weekend,” Mae-Ying mutters.
“Were you?” Tara is almost certainly feigning surprise. “Huh.”
“Look, I’ll call you back tomorrow--”
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yes you woke me up!” Mae-Ying hisses. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“Is there a reason you’re whispering?”
Mae-Ying closes her eyes and exhales. “Mom, we’re not doing this now.”
“When would be a good time?”
“Come on, mom, don’t--”
“Rumor has it you’re engaged. Is that true?”
She chokes down her initial reaction, instead asking, “Engaged to who?”
“Your boss? The Senator?”
Mae-Ying runs a hand through her hair. “Mom...”
“Were you going to set a date before you even told me about him?”
“For fuck’s sake, mother, we’re not engaged!”
Tara pauses before responding.
“But you are sleeping with him,” she says.
“I’m not answering that question.”
“Put me on video.”
“I can’t. I lost my watch.”
“No you didn’t. You never lose anything! You’re at his place right now, aren’t you!”
Mae-Ying looks at the ceiling. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“I just want to talk to you about how that could impact--”
Mae-Ying takes off her glasses, ending the call. She rubs her eyes, put the glasses back down by the sink, and goes back to bed.
I just want to talk to you about how that could impact… what? Her career? Her reputation? Her feminist credibility? What’s done is done, isn’t it? It’s not like he’s married, or even divorced. He’s a widower--there’s no scandal there. Sure there’s an age difference. So what? He’s 45. Mae-Ying has been 45 since she was 15. And she got the job first, anyway. She got the job the same way anyone else would have, by working her ass off and having the right contacts. That’s the first thing she always wants to tell people--I got the job first. Whatever she’s doing here started after that. Not that long after, but what does it matter?
Rumor has it you’re engaged.
Thinking back, she can recall four or five times over the last week that someone she knew gave her a random thumbs-up, or pointed at her and grinned as they passed her on the street. Was that why?
Obviously it’s something that could happen, probably would happen, if this fling went on long enough. It’s just that Mae-Ying hasn’t had any sense that it’d be this soon. But what if Walsh did? What would she say? It’s not like no would be an option, not unless she could get another job lined up. He wouldn’t fire her, but she’d have to leave regardless.
What if she said yes? Everyone knew Walsh had his sights on the presidency. Even if he didn’t make it there, her career would have to take a turn. Working on his staff wouldn’t be an option after they got married, but neither would working for another senator.
She could always launch her own venture into politics, she supposed. Run for Congress or something. Part of her would rather die--or at least go into the private sector--but maybe she could get over that. It would be better than dropping out of the game to become his full-time wife.
She knows what her mother would ask. Do you love him?
It’s complicated, she’d say in response.
Is it?
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