The Looking Glass War
Brendan DuBois
The President of the United States sat before his computer screen, which was still blank, and he sighed in frustration as the damn computer kept on humming at him and doing nothing else. He had switched it on and off three different times, and the screen was still blank. Not a damn thing. He had even gotten on his hands and knees below his desk in the Oval Office—an elaborate carved wood monstrosity that had once belonged to Johnson—and struggled to make sense of the jumbled strands of wire and power cords that were crowded under there, and gave up after a few minutes. Not very presidential but he didn’t care. The damn computer was still blank.
He sat back in his custom leather chair, comforted that at least the bearings weren’t squeaking any more. At least the chair was now working. It had seemed nothing much else was working this day. Take breakfast, for example. The White House kitchen—which was much improved over the previous administrations, if any of those self-serving memoirs he had read years earlier had been true—had about four or five breakfast choices that they rotated around each successive morning. Breakfast choices, like so many other things, had been settled during the transition period three years ago, and everything should have been fine. Except for this morning, in the private sitting room just off his bedroom, breakfast had been something that he had never liked. Lumpy oatmeal. And cold toast. And no damn Washington Post or New York Times. He had thought of throwing a hissy fit, start tossing things around and making phone calls to the Head Usher’s office, but there had been that embarrassing item in the Style gossip section in the Post last month about another incident he was too humiliated to think about, concerning missing toilet paper, so he sat down and ate mechanically, staring at the far wall. Some breakfast, some start to the day. And as he ate, he knew there were many, many things that should be crowding his mind, things to address, things to take care of, but funny, wasn’t it, that the only thing on his mind was getting in front of his computer.
That’s it. Again, not very presidential, but there you go.
. . .
