You Dreamed of Dictators

You walked into the booth and you froze

I’m curious if you can admit it, if only to yourself.

You love it.

You’ve never told anyone—that goes without saying—but you’ve loved it from the beginning. And the part of you which feels it is so isolated, so foreign, that you’ll never truly know it yourself. It’s too terrifying to consider.

There’s good reason for that. It’s not even really your fault; after all, you can try to be as honest with yourself as you want, but even if you’re willing to dig into places nearly everyone is too self-protective to excavate, it’d be almost impossible to get to the bottom of it. You’re in too deep. 

How deep?

You’ve been riding the wave for a decade now. It was inconceivable and then it happened and it’s been everything ever since. You devoted yourself to the cause—gouged your eyeballs out every night to the networks, hailed loyal commanders who’d lost wars to people with funny names, lost sleep over judges you didn’t know existed the week before. For four years you booed and jeered and threw tomatoes—you literally threw a tomato once—like it was six hundred years ago and you were at the circus.

Then it un-happened, which you told yourself was everything you ever wanted, but it was strange what became of you right after the un-happening: you were empty. Your life returned to the placidity you swore you’d craved, but it turns out your anger was inexhaustible, appetite for vengeance insatiable. It turns out the happening gave you purpose. You spent two years telling everyone you dreaded his return, and then he returned, your cup filled, subscriptions renewed, television blaring. You had something to talk about again.

Never again, you said, along with what felt like the rest of the world—it was the rest of the world, wasn’t it?—and you believed it, even when things weren’t looking so hot, in the depths of summer. He shit the bed and she rose from the dead, and all around you freedom rang.

But something was off. You were there in July, you heard her say it, gawking from behind the screen: “She will be the nominee. She will win.” She said it so confidently, like it was such a foregone conclusion, that you almost had no choice but to believe her. 

Somewhere inside, though, set askew like a cliff sliding imperceptibly off its tectonic plate, you knew it couldn’t have been right, the confidence with which she spoke. Because you remembered that night; was it eight years ago now? Had everyone just forgotten?

But by admitting something was off you’d be betraying not just orthodoxy but identity. That’s why it’s so hard. This is what it’s become for you, after all: you. Your resistance, as you saw it (a fight which transcended the party in power) became not just a movement to participate in, a battle to wage, but who you are. You burrowed so deep in the world of talking heads and unequivocal opinions and well-edited podcasts—the right side of history—that to reject any of it now, even a little, would be to repudiate not just a perspective but a value chain. Are you prepared to self-immolate?

Certainly not. Instead, here’s what you did:

You walked into the booth, and you froze.

It’ll stay between you and me, the feeling you had in there, right at the beginning, shrouded by those ridiculous privacy barriers on either side. The two blank bubbles, right at the top. You moan and pontificate and throw your chicken salad at the TV, but after everything there’s just that, you and a pen and an oversized sheet of paper and God. You ditched the confessional for this, exchanged booth for booth, large white floor tiles for mahogany pews, coffee-stained ceiling for stained glass windows, overheated whispers for hundred-pipe organs. Maybe He accompanied you there, maybe not. If He did, you’re keeping it to yourself, that’s the point of God; He keeps it between you and me. But what you’re definitely keeping to yourself is the feeling you had, just for an instant, when your pen hovered above those two bubbles, one next to the other, the same dry, hyper-legible font, set against an empty background, and you had the thought for a second. Just a single second. But it shot across your mind, you couldn’t help it:

What would happen if I did it?

How to explain the genesis of that question? Would it be too simple to say: 

Freedom?

Come on now. You’re talking crazy. You’re talking like them. You’re smart enough to know this isn’t real freedom. That, really, you get all the privacy you want. No one’s infringing on your anything, you’re your own man, unbeholden to anything, anyone, and real freedom is—

The privacy of the booth is really nice. It’s so silly, you know it is, but you can’t help but feel it. You like it here. How long’s the line behind you? Maybe you’ll hang out for a minute. Pretend to be taking in the propositions down ballot. You still need to fill out that first section, by the way…

What are you thinking? Really, what the fuck? I mean, you could justify thinking about it, maybe, if it was just you, you and your buddies, and your group chat was all the world meant to you. But that’s not how it works. You understand that. 

Consider the women. Yes. Right. Good. That is the real reason you’re here, why you’ve been so frenzied for so long now—so long now—because there are stakes, if not for me then for them. How many times has Sandra sat you down, cried into your arms, over another ignored pass at the office, another missed promotion, another patronizing sit-down with bossman. This won’t stop all that, you and she both know it, but it’ll send some kind of message, won’t it? And then Nicole; Nicole. How thrilling, how good, for her to see it with her own eyes, the thing you yourself have never seen, to experience it together, the three of you. To show her what she can be. You think of your daughter’s eyes and you know, unequivocally, what must be done.

Jesus. Where had your sick mind been? You move your pen down to the page. 

And stop.

Because there’s something else. Another thing you’ll never admit, even and especially to yourself. The thought has been there, nagging at your side, for a while, but in that booth, with the measly power it bestows upon your otherwise impotent ink pen, the one reserved during peacetime for enumerations of grocery lists, recitals, visits to the urologist, the feeling takes on a sudden urgency, nearly reaches coherency, the one that goes: 

For as long as you remember, you’ve dreamed of a dictator.

You dreamt of it not as one longs for success or love or liberation but as one actually dreams: in short, semi-intelligible bursts you woke up from, every time, wiping the sleep from your eyes and pretending to forget. Lodged in there somewhere, though, they remained. You never fought your war and thank God for it but you were curious. What would it be like? To abandon reason, stick it to rationality, drive a dagger through the heart of enlightenment, drag your fingers through the mud and wipe streaks under your eyes in an earthly allegiance to a flag whose meaning you’ve never considered. Again, this is a dream—you always woke up, so horrified you forgot it, at least told yourself you forgot it, slapped some water on your face and got on with your day, back to believing, nay, breathing the orthodoxy which unwittingly, without you even noticing, had become a synonym for monotony. 

But you stayed curious. Something about a longing for mud under your eyes made your pen hover above those bubbles for longer than it should have. Dreams fade but they tend to linger around your pelvis. You didn’t actually do it. But you stayed curious. 

What would it be like?

To forgo choice, deliberation, equivocation, to shut up and just have it done for you. You thought the rallies were dark and scary and doltish but at least they had vision, panache. They were interesting. They led somewhere.

Where, exactly? Well, that was sort of the appeal. That no one—least of all the speakers themselves—knew.

You watched them rant and rave—it was ranting and raving, no two ways about it—not live through the television but a few days later, when you searched for it online, on the sly (hadn’t your curiosity always been your strongest trait?) and you were disgusted, obviously, but for some reason you kept watching, didn’t skip a second, even the interludes, between the pomp, because it was fucking fascinating. It worked you up, but in a more ambigous way than before. Made your muscles swell. Jolted your loins. 

Who are you?

They conjured fire. Red and white banners hanging from the ceiling, thin flames lapping each sheet up from its dangling bottom. Smokeless. Black and white. History.

It’s not exactly that you liked all this, per se, not even close, as you watched. It’s more like you kind of sort of wanted to see what might come to pass if they followed through. Would it make you feel? As a kid you kept two beta fish in a single tank, separated them with a plastic divider. You loved those fish. But you couldn't help but wonder, as you gazed through the glass each morning, past beady specks of eyes, into shiny scales and squishy gills, what might happen if you, just once, lifted the separator and let them at each other. Is it so crazy to have not yet vanquished that urge?

This is what it means to be a Man.

You wake up from that dream, shaking in your booth, ink still hovering over a pair of inanimate bubbles (not that you ever actually had a doubt…), when out of nowhere another thought hits you, and you don’t know what it means, but it’s different from the dreaming because you don’t snap out of this one, you can’t repress it, it lingers with you all day, long after you step out of the booth, echoes across your skull, works its way into your ribcage:

A baby is being born right now. 

And the most difficult thing about pressing the pen to the page is your nagging sense that this thought, the one more than any other you can’t shake, is totally incompatible with the sterile duality staring back at you from the page. You close your eyes—maybe it’s merely a blink—and suddenly the fluorescent glare and the echoing clicks of sturdy heels (you didn’t realize how tightly you’d been wincing) rush away. It’s sunset, the exact hour during which nothing can go wrong, and light like a harp drifts diagonally through the atmosphere, gently warming the soles of your feet through the smooth stones crunching under you with every delicate step. In front of you the sea glimmers, the tide works the pebbles into a soft clatter, the smell of pine wafts down from the sloping hills rolling effortlessly into the horizon. Your inhalation of this world and all its warmth is heightened by a peculiar sound building in the distance. High pitched and off-rhythm, jolting you awake, you realize as it rises it’s the sound of laughter; the laughter of an infant. It’s halting and sonorous and raspy, like it’s at risk of getting caught in the giggler’s throat with every guffaw. It’s so full of pleasure you might die. You pivot in every direction, but you can’t sort out the source of the sound. Where is the baby? Meanwhile the volume is rising and rising and rising and—

You open your eyes. The names have become so blurry and distorted—what are those wet marks on the page?—that you no longer recognize them. The bubbles make you sick.

What would it be like?