The Vice President’s Dream

 

In the vice president’s dream the morning

is always perfect, sometimes late summer,

sometimes early fall, but always that smell

that just says lovely (the vice president

can smell in his dreams) and always that sound

of violins and birdsong (the vice president’s

dreams have soundtracks) just before the cellos

ease in, low at first, more a feeling

than a sound, a vague tension, something

not right, and then the terse message, sometimes

the hot line, sometimes a breathless

flunky, sometimes the vice president just

knows (the vice president is blessed with

extraordinary powers of intuition)

but always that message: they’re coming, they’re

coming, sometimes they’ve got planes, sometimes

missiles, sometimes they’re brandishing fiendish-

looking curved swords, but they’re coming, they’re

coming, no time to scramble the air force,

no time for procedures, no time for going

by the book (in his dreams, the vice president

never goes by the book), no time to work

down the chain of command, just one chance: go

straight to the top, and at this point the president

himself just appears, as though cued by the vice

president’s extraordinary powers

of intuition, and sometimes the president

is dressed for clearing brush on his rancho,

and sometimes he’s in a monogrammed robe,

and sometimes he’s just naked, and the vice

president has only to say, “Sir, they’re

coming” in a voice historians will call

grave, yet calm and resolute (often, in fact,

the vice president dreams that historians

are narrating all of this) and at this point

in the dream the president, normally

a pliable ninny, is supercharged

by the moment, by the vice president’s

grave, calm, resolute demeanor, and with

a swelling fanfare of brass and kettledrums

the president’s stature grows, he sees and

hears and smells his destiny (in his dreams

the vice president even knows what other

people smell, it’s uncanny) and suddenly

the president is in his flight suit

and he smiles that crazy, cocky, crooked

sideways smile of his at the vice president,

and sometimes he says, “I guess this is it,

old buddy,” and sometimes he just winks,

and the vice president says “Good luck, sir”

and the historians record this as “Godspeed,

Mr President” or “Vaya con Díos,

Señor Presidente” (the vice president’s

dreams are often bilingual) and the president

races outside to a waiting jet aircraft,

a single-seat Vietnam-era trainer,

all fired up and ready to go, right there

on Pennsylvania Avenue, and as

the president climbs nimbly into

the cockpit an aide rushes up, the president’s

closest advisor, a sinister, porcine

fixer the vice president has always

secretly feared and detested as a rival

who, in turn, fears and detests the vice

president, and this aide is shouting above

the jet roar, “Sir! Your parachute!” but

with a wry smile the president waves him

off because sometimes, as historians will

later quote the vice president, Destiny

Wears No Parachute, and the president

buckles himself into a complicated

harness, and the plexiglass canopy

comes down with a committed click, audible

even through the jet roar, and the president

glances over to the vice president

and gives him a thumb’s-up and does that crazy

smile thing again, and then flips down his

helmet’s visor, disappearing into

its mirror bubble, and suddenly flames

dart from the back of the engines like blue

tongues of hell and the presidential jet

catapults aloft, rocketing skyward,

and somehow, as if through the vice president’s

miraculously precise and telepathic

powers of navigation, the president knows

right where to go, right where they’re coming,

and the president’s last words, crackling to the vice

president over the radio, are “Ima

gonna git em, cause this here’s the End

Times, heh heh heh,” and the historians relate

this as “I love Jesus and I love the U S of A!”

and “Amo Jesús y los EEUU!”

and there’s a blinding flash and at this point

in the dream the vice president always

wakes up and it’s morning in America.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

April 2011

 

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