The Mistress

Sitting in the small, cramped and beige hotel room in this city I've never been to before, the drugs my campaign manager gave me are starting to take their effect. I watch the room bend and shake around me, look down at my speech and it's just five blank pages where I could swear there were words a second ago. He said it would be like this at first.
What did he call it? Demitrol? He said they used it to put cats under before they put them to sleep, so it would be mild enough on a guy like me that it shouldn't affect my performance today at the press conference, but it should numb me enough that I stop thinking about the other things going on while I'm talking.
“Relax,” I hear him say from some unseen corner in the room. I can see the sound waves from his voice, but he's nowhere. Logic says I must be breathing heavy or doing something to incite that, but I have no idea what. I can't feel a thing at the moment.
I'm not usually drugged during my speeches. Usually, I'm vibrant and thoughtful and passionate when I speak, but today I can't keep my mind straight.
Why? Because I'm damned.
Somebody somewhere in the world had to say, “Women are the downfall of man,” and that man must have been a politician. He must have been Cicero. He must have been in the same position I was in: she loves me too much, she can't stand me being married, she threatens, and now, she's got the leverage. Poking holes in condoms is the lowest of blows.
But I can't blame her. The truth is, I love her back. I want to leave my painfully pushy wife and move in with sweet, young, beautiful Jenn with her body shaped like an hourglass instead of like a pear. I find her more appealing in every way: she's smarter, more fun, more beautiful, funnier... there's very little about her I don't like. Except how much she can't stand seeing me play charades with this other woman, can't stand my facade.
It's not her fault really, she's a very real kind of person. That's why when I told her I couldn't divorce my wife for political reasons (for 784th time), she found a way to snap me out of it. She knew I wouldn't take the initiative, so she did. She just wanted to show me how stupid I was being, how false I was being.
She even told me she would never vote for me because she knew how much of a liar I was. God, I love her.
Demitrol apparently starts soft then hits hard. My campaign manager saw it coming and had a trash can set up for me to vomit in, my suit jacket hanging far away in the closet, my tie tucked around my neck in the back of my shirt. I miss at first and get a little on my shoes, and an intern is immediately down to scrub them down, tearing off my shoes and starting a deep cleanse while another violently puts my feet in another pair. All while I continue vomiting.
That bitch. I can't believe she would put me in such a bizarre place on purpose. An affair is one thing, but a child is another. An affair is heresy. A child is proof, undeniable, ever-present. She's incriminated me, dragging me down to the level of an adulterer. Who would trust a man whose own wife can't even trust him. Jenn was a slut to start off with, basically throwing herself at me at a local bar. She took me home the first night. I had never been that easy. But a fight with your wife, and a few beers later, you're ready to make all sorts of mistakes.
I can't believe what she's putting me through. How dare she! I agree to keep seeing her for 2 years, and now, at the peak of my career, she pulls this junior high shit on me. I'm lucky I have a great campaign manager who doesn't crack under pressure. He stands by me, and will do anything to help me. He's a great guy.
I feel myself being hauled to a mirror, but at the moment, all I see are vague colors that might be objects or rooms or people, or space ships for all I can tell. My hair is being scraped and plastered to the right, my tie is being straightened, my jacket being slipped on, one arm at a time, but all I can see is white light.
Then like a switch, clarity. I find myself in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, ready for my speech. Except I'm not wearing my reading glasses yet. They're in my pocket.
The campaign manager came up with the plan to take care of her:
Step 1) Abort the child.
Step 2) Ship her to France.
When the election is over, Step 3) Send for her.
That's the plan he told me, which sounds pretty reasonable. Happily ever after, safe from the complications of public rebuke. This would not stress out Woody Allen. So why am I on Demitrol?
Because I know my manager too well, and that is not his real plan. That's the Disney version he told me so that I wouldn't be distracted. But I know that it's easier to cover up a cadaver than a living person.
The words have come back to the pages of my speech, filling a neat little 9 ½ x 7” space on each piece of stationery. I bundle them together and begin my walk downstairs, surrounded by an entourage of young, ambitious cut-throats.
As we arrive downstairs, the press becomes an intimidating blob of black and white flashes. They sit sweetly in their chairs, yelling for their turn to speak to the man of the hour.
I am introduced. There is a flurry of applause.
Thank you. Thank you.
I begin to read my speech.
I'm on Demitrol because at this very moment, men in black suits are breaking down the door of my mistress's loft apartment, paid for by the Political Action Committee. They are breaking her door down to tell her that they are taking her to get an abortion of my illegitimate child. That is what they tell her, and that is what they told me, but that is not the truth. She will be bound, gagged, murdered, and her body tossed somewhere deep in the ocean where my campaign manager will be glad to bet his life savings she will never be found. Technically, that's what he's doing anyway, betting his life savings she'll remain a secret forever. I believe that this is an accurate metaphor for the state of our nation today.
Wild applause. I start wondering if I'm saying these things, or just thinking them behind the veil of my actual speech. At the moment, neither would surprise me.