Some Things Pondered.

The President Alone

1.

    The president sniffed at the empty tin can, then recoiled. But rather then let it drop, he took the touble to replace it in the burned-out refuse pile as carefully and as he could.
    This was part of the Rules to Survive by, of which there were now one hundred and three. Nearly every day saw this list grow, and each night, before the president dropped off to sleep, he spent an hour or two mentally shuffling through them, simplifying, memorizing. Number 13 currently was: any object taken up to be examined must replaced as it was, so as to avoid leaving evidence of the president's passage.
    But Rule number 3 was: always look for food. That was what he was doing now. In fact, it was what the president spent the majority of his time doing. Looking for food, looking for water, searching for shelter, these were his priorities. Other things floated in a haze, a kind of stumbling through with frequent misunderstandings and clumsiness.
    This was a house, somebody's house. Though the somebodies were long gone, he guessed. There were beds (burned) in two of the three empty rooms upstairs, but nothing else of note.
    But bending again, yes, here might be something. The president looked, but did not touch. Rule number 83: Examine more by eye than hand.
    It was a small shoe, probably a child's. White once, now char-blackened. The president inhaled deeply, then blowing slowly, quietly out -- yes, a fairly recent fire, the same that had involved the beds upstairs, most likely.
    The arsonist would have set the fire in an attempt to drive the rats and bugs out of the building, so that it might be more comfortable as a den. Rule number 8: Fire is the veteran survivor's friend.
    But the president was better than even a veteran survivor (those who could still remember the world as it had been before the bombs dropped).
    The president was an artist at surviving. He was a Mozart of not dying. There was still a lace in the little char-blackened shoe, for example. And look there! Beyond the tin can, and partially hidden beneath a black, dangerously leaning cabinet winked a mouse or trap with the precious mechanism still intact. It was the promise of food, if not the meal itself.
    Even a veteran would not know what to do with these items.
   
2.

    Sometimes the mask the president was wearing slipped, the story he felt he was obliged to write for the benefit of future generations, dripped in the dead, bald, smoking sun like new blood from an old, but notorious wound.
    He would think he was still a liar. In the past, he'd been such a proficient one that his lies were often infused with more true statements (though in themselves, off-topic) than the truth, so that it became virtually impossible to tell which was which. And his mask, his mask.
    When costumes are never removed, they become the person. So that the president was either  the Vincent Van Gogh of victims, or he was still just another rat scurrying the once-cities. And all else was vanity. He was either everything, or nothing. The last of the great gods, or just another lonely, pathetic scavenger, just another scarred and scared refugee fleeing from the Rumble's impenetrable fires that still burned in the north and like a great glowing eye, fiercely intelligent, but  malicious.
    So was he an ace, or an act? The Chopin of not being chopped up, or merely lucky so far, the drunk inscrutable fortune protects from falling down the stairs and breaking his neck?
    The president's hands trembled when reflections like these passed over him. His stomach tensed, real fear curled up from his bowels. If he was helpless, if he was the stumbling clown, then the end could happen anytime now, couldn't it?
    Yes, even now, right now. There might be Things looking at him from the dark -- Things with starting, staring, hungry eyes.
    He would frown and silently recite the Rules again. Or if he had a fire, he would add another stick, or he would poke disconsolately at the coals. Or if he had water, he would drink. Or if he had food, he would eat. But his eyes would be small in his face, with none of the old swagger, the old concentrated confidence. He would look younger, the way he used to look before the war, before politics, before even college.
    He would be frightened.