Finding a Look

A morbid tribute to the power of appearances.

 “You’re on in a minute-thirty,” warned the assistant’s fleshy cheeks framed by the cracked door.  A make-up artist was applying blush to Lake Bradley’s cheeks as he sat in the cherry leather chair in front of a circular mirror.  His hair was already coifed into his signature slanted side-part and blowdried for added fluff.  His eyebrows, tweezed straight, were resting furrowed, perpendicular to the diagonally striped red and blue tie connecting his sharp Adam’s apple to his shining belt-buckle.  The air was filled with the chemical smells of shoe polish and hairspray.  When the make-up artist backed away, Lake stood up to examine his face more closely.  He picked an eyelash off of his chin and nodded at himself.

            “We’re good to go!” he sang.  He didn’t dare scratch his itchy nose so close to show-time; it had been powdered.  He slowly molded his face into the ready, adjusting his smile so that his dimples were perfectly apparent and his bleached front teeth lit up like the inside of his tanning bed.  

            “Fifteen seconds now,” the assistant warned, now loitering between the door and Lake’s chair.  He was sweating through his shirt near the n*****s.  

            Lake wore bloated dignity on his puffed-out chest as he strode through the corridor past the multitude of smiling historical figures hanging on the walls and the smattering of reporters diligently documenting his mood and his clean-shaven double chin.  He peered forward with a determined squint, as though he were looking through the golden binoculars of time at the imminently lush future he had been promising for the last three years.  The cameramen gobbled up his expression digitally, flashing sparkles into his eyes, and the reporters described it verbosely, slashing their little leather notepads with silver pens.  “…Your honorable governor, Lake Bradley!” blasted from the walls of speakers in the auditorium, as Lake burst through the double doors at the end of the hallway.  He sauntered through the applause of his constituents, shaking his head slowly to indicate his poignant gratitude.  He waved and waved, silently mouthing, “Thank you, thank you,” while gazing into the mass of heads and suits as if they were all his old friends.

            “My friends… thank you.  My friends.”  A narrow-lipped smile of appreciation and slight annoyance developed slowly to signal that he had been sufficiently heaped with praise for the time being.  He would like more later, he assured them with a closed-eyed nod.  “My friends!” he announced, louder this time, and the crowd was quiet.  “Thank you.”

            “I’m so thankful that we have all gathered here today to �"”

            The auditorium suddenly plunged into darkness.  The cameras lined in front of Lake halted transmission, flustering news anchors into awkward segues.  The power had gone out, and nobody could hear Lake as he pleaded into the myriad of dead microphones in front of him, “Alright, nobody panic.”  

            Panic ensued.  Women whimpered and men choked on desperate coughs as they pushed randomly just for the sake of moving somewhere.  The dark was scary.  Lake remained at the podium, dumbfounded by the fact that the emergency generators had not kicked in yet.  He straightened his tie and shifted his shoulders back so that his chest protruded boastfully in front of him.  In times of crisis, the public craved confident displays.  Of course, in this particular case, nobody could see him.  Realizing this, Lake panicked.  Great balls of sweat popped from his forehead and rolled down his cheeks, accumulating red blush-powder.  They plunged like monsoon raindrops and exploded on his speech paper, blotting the Times New Roman bloody as the dirt of Old Rome’s Coliseum.  Even if light had returned, Lake wouldn’t have been able to read his soggy, red speech.  He badly needed to use the restroom.  

            At least 12% of the state had been watching the address.  Now, they were disappointedly watching news anchors speculate regarding the power, and when it might return.  They also wondered aloud how the outage might affect the outcome of next year’s elections.  “Wow, what a tough blow this is for Bradley, huh, Sarah?  Right when he was in a position to discuss his vision, the power’s gone and nobody can hear him.”  

            “More importantly, Bill, nobody can see him,” added the shiny-haired co-anchor.

            “Indeed, Lisa,” Bill agreed.

            “Bumbling Bradley can’t even complete an address!  Chastigan 2018!” a couched man yelled to his wife seated next to him somewhere in the state.

            Lake was still frozen at the podium panicking internally, and the evidence was busting out into the external world, filling the lightless stage with odors.  The crowd was buzzing with the confusion of kindergartners during a fire drill whose teacher had fainted.  Despite constant collisions and pushing, someone had managed to find the exit, denoted by a glowing red “exit” sign, and people were funneling their way through impolitely.  Lake realized that he was losing his crowd, and his panic turned to fury at the thought of a postponement, or, more unthinkably, a cancellation of his address.  He was a glob of negative emotion, and he needed help.

            “I’m receiving word that the power is still out, and that everybody has been evacuated from the building.  Yes, yes, the power is still out,” reported Bill, the smug-nosed anchor in the studio, pressing his earpiece into his head and narrowing his eyes importantly.  “There will be no address tonight.”

            Still a year from elections, the official campaign season had barely begun, but as Lake or anybody like Lake would have recited merrily, “the new campaign starts when the old one ends,” and boy, had this unofficial campaign been a tight one through and through.  Lake’s opponent, Shelly Chastigan, was a hulking man of integrity and military experience who dominated a room with his valorous stoicism and gut, which was a heaping barrel of blubber that somehow appeared muscular.  He had served his country as a cook for one of the most successful squadrons in peacetime South Korea during the early 1990s.  “We need to right the ship.  We need to right the ship,” he implored in interviews, causing the citizens to realize that the ship was headed in the wrong direction again.  Lake had pointed out a similar phenomenon three years prior, noting that the state’s prospective future had been “unspeakably atrocious” during his campaign.  The continuation of his livelihood now depended on his ability to instill the notion that the state was running as smoothly as his children’s Christmas card smiles suggested.  This was a tall order, since he had changed almost nothing since pointing out its deplorable condition last election.  Because of this, Lake felt that Chastigan had the upper hand. 

            Lake’s assistant was smarter than he was.  In the photo of him and his high school buddy on his little tin desk, the picture frame blocked his helmet of black curls, causing him to resemble a large baby in a flannel shirt, because his cheeks were so soft, hairless, and prominent.  With his arm outstretched meekly for protection, he ambled blindly onto the stage to find his still-stationary boss.  “Governor Bradley…Governor Bradley!  Where are you?  Say something Governor Bradley…”

            “I’m ruined,” said Lake.  

            “Come on, come with me.  We’ll get this all figured out.  Let’s get you backstage, though.  There’s a flashlight in the dressing room.”  The assistant rubbed Lake’s damp back soothingly, but there was no response.  “Governor Bradley!  The generators are failing.  We’re going to have to try to reschedule this.  It’ll be alright.”

            Lake was inconsolable.  “It won’t,” he whimpered with deathly conviction.  “It won’t be alright.”  

            The assistant had heard that tone from Lake during the 2014 campaign after he had thoroughly embarrassed himself.  His opponent, Butch Lester, had called for a return to laissez faire policy, and Lake had retorted, “Well, Butch, I don’t think this state needs to be promoting lazy fairs at a time like this.  No, we need people to realize the importance of initiative, and the best way to do that, I think, would be for us to remove the economic regulations that make it difficult for businesses to grow.  The massage couches they advertise at those fairs are wonderful, though.”  He winked. 

            While watching analysts skewer him after the debate, Lake had cried, and the assistant had been there to rub his back.  The assistant, there on the excessively soft maroon couch in Lake’s dressing room, had expressed his sympathies, but had also explained didactically the reasons that he felt Lake was still in a position to win the election.  “You see, Mr. Bradley, you look good.  What I mean to say is, you look better than Butch Lester.  This is a small state in which people don’t necessarily understand the issues.  We’re still three months away from election time, and I really believe, as long as you stick to your talking points from now on, you will win.  Don’t try to be funny.  Don’t try to counter his arguments.  Just say what you’re supposed to say and stand up straight.  You look like a leader, Mr. Bradley.”

            “I do look like a leader,” Lake had sniveled.  While wiping his snotty nose, he had called for reapplication of his make-up for the limo ride home.  He went on to win the election by a landslide.

            Lake’s assistant did understand the issues.  He had attended a top-ranking law school after attaining a perfect 4.0 grade point average while studying political science at a top-ranking university as an undergraduate.  Though he inarguably possessed the credentials to land a job more lucrative and honorable than “personal assistant,” he had been passed over by countless employers.  At 28 years of age, he was the one who milked and sugared Lake’s coffee.  He wasn’t great in interviews.  When he listed his numerous accomplishments in his sleepy, grammatical drawl, potential employers recognized him as one of those un-hirable smart people that worked really hard all the time.  They saw him for what he really was:  a chubby kid with a bush-head and a button-nose.  His floppy cheeks sagged when he forced a smile, and he was one of the least witty people they had met.  Furthermore, his handshake was fairly weak, as was his eye contact whilst shaking.  He wasn’t qualified for a high level position.  The fumes of desperation emanated from the assistant’s sweaty stomach as he entered Lake’s office; Lake knew he was the one and hired him on the spot.  He was the perfectly inglorious man for a perfectly inglorious position.

            The assistant took Lake’s frozen arm in his hands, rubbed it a bit to thaw it out, and dragged him slowly toward the side of the stage.  “You’re Lake Bradley,” the assistant reassured him.  “It’s going to be alright.”  Half way to the stage exit, there was a splashy thud on the floor, and the assistant felt the shrapnel of Lake’s vomit sprinkle his pant leg.  “Come on, Governor Bradley, let’s get you backstage.”  The assistant led the stuporous leader to his dressing room by muscle memory.  Once inside, he pulled Lake over to the couch and pressed him down by his shoulders into a seated position.  He then felt his way toward the counter in front of the mirror, slamming his knee into the metal structure of the cherry leather chair as he shuffled.  The darkness gobbled up his grunt.  In the drawer under the counter, he discovered the flashlight behind a series of hair buzzers, straight razors, vials of cologne, and tubes of moisturizer.  He pulled it out, flicked it on, and pointed it at Lake’s face.  Sweat and tears had wiped off his highlighting bronzer and pink blush powder, leaving pale columns on his cheeks.  His eyes were wide, staring straight ahead into the mirror across the room, in which his illuminated face appeared in the center, framed by the fuzzy yellow of the dimly lit wall behind him.  

Seated in the make-up chair, the rancid smell of Lake’s vomit became palpable to the assistant, rising malevolently from his pant leg.  It thrust him back to a street corner just after he had completed graduate school.  He stood, tired and hungry, picking lint out of his jean pockets while waiting for his friend to meet him for lunch.  From behind, a man of about 60 years who lacked teeth approached.  “Can ya spare some change?  I got no home.”  The surprised assistant wheeled around to discover the man’s face about three inches from his own.  Black creases twisted with his nose, pulling along one of his eyes, while the other remained fixed.  His gums were brown with rot and his beard hung tangled and rigid like a ball of grey pipe cleaners.  He breathed unevenly through his mouth.  

“I have no change sir, sor �" ”

“I wanna buy you a gold ring with a big ol’ diamond on it, pretty boy,” the man stammered.   He then bent at the waist and vomited bile onto the assistant’s shoes, crumbling to the sidewalk as he did so.  No autopsy was performed.

 “I don’t look good right now,” Lake finally spoke.  

          “I don’t,” the assistant countered.  He turned the flashlight around and pointed it up towards his face.  His nose cast a shadow that extended up his forehead and disappeared into his cloud of black curls.  His expansive cheeks were a waxing pair of gibbous moons.  A fly thudded against the flashlight’s face three times then died.  

         “You look the same as always,” Lake offered.  

The assistant turned off the flashlight, and an uncomfortable silence soaked the room cold.  Finally, Lake lamented, “I think I’m really screwed this time.  This is worse than me saying something stupid, because it’s a loss of airtime.  I don’t think we’re going to be able to reschedule.  We already spent the max from the state budget setting up this night, so we’ve got nothing left to set up another one.  Maybe if I have Sal move some things around a bit…”  He snapped his lips hopefully and then sighed.  “But either way we won’t get the same viewership we would have gotten tonight.”

            Usually by this point, the assistant would have cut off Lake’s helpless monologue with encouraging analysis, but now he remained silent, so Lake continued with desperate optimism, “At least nobody will see me like this.  I’ll have to have Claire spruce me up extra nice for my next appearance.”  A dry chuckle escaped his throat as he sat wishing the assistant would assist in alleviating his snowballing anxiety.  Then the room’s lights flickered and stabilized, slicing Lake’s eyes with fluorescent knives.  

            Lake closed his eyes to shield his widened pupils.  “The power’s back,” he grunted.  There was no response.  “I guess we might as well get out of here.  I’m sure there’re reporters waiting outside.”  A circular blob of fiery orange crept across the inside of his eyelids where the white light was focused, surrounded by a bubbling ocean of scarlet.  When he opened them again, the blob turned black, like a negative sun, and blocked the assistant’s face, which he was attempting to look at.  He turned his focus toward the mirror in front of him so that his own face was obstructed by the blackness, but the assistant’s could be seen blurrily in the periphery.  All that he could make out of the assistant was shimmering scarlet.  Lake rocked, stood, and dreadfully approached him, his vessel-red eyes slowly adjusting.  The dark circle had faded by the time he reached the chair, so Lake could see the assistant’s pale cheeks and staring eyes.  Blood pooled in the valleys between his neck fat and seeped into his collar and chest saturating his shirt.  A straight razor lay on the tan carpet.  Lake peered into the assistant’s sunken eyes, still moist and glassy. The two men reflected each other’s eyes back and forth infinitely for a moment, like a pair of mirrors facing each other.  In the assistant’s green iris, Lake saw his own face, swollen and shiny with fluids.  His hair hung straight and heavy in greasy bangs.  He was rust behind peeling paint.

            Between his assistant’s being dead and his own abominable appearance, Lake was quite uncomfortable.  He squeezed between the make-up chair in which the assistant was slumping and the sink built into the counter.  He then cleansed his face with warm water tossed by his cupped hands, rubbing the stubborn mixture of soiled makeup and sticky sweat off of his cheeks.  He then reached into the drawer for the scented moisturizer and applied a healthy dab to each cheek.  Though he was not accustomed to applying his own makeup, he knew the routine by heart.  First came the tan foundation, which he generously spread onto his face with a rubber-foam brush.  He made sure to blend it evenly so that the color was consistent and lively.  Next, he patted a soft circular brush three times into powdery blush producing a little pink cloud in the air and accentuated his cheekbones with three swift touches on each side.   In the drawer lay the eyebrow pencil, with which he filled in and slightly extended his eyebrows.  This gave him a cleaner, younger look by eliminating the grey hairs sporadically interspersed.  A sparing stroke of eyeliner on each lower eyelid popped his eyes larger, and dusting of powder was necessary to hold everything in place in the face of unpredictable humidity.  Of course, he knew not to use the same brush for the powder that he had used to apply the blush.  Finally, he fixed his hair with his fingers, delicately parting it just so, followed by a heavy dousing of hardening spray that caused him to cough.  He felt better.

            There was still the matter of the dead assistant.  Lake quickly decided that it would be best to leave things as they lay, for death was a knotty matter from which politicians benefited only on rare occasions.  This was not one of those occasions, because it was ingloriously tragic.  As far as anyone else knew, Lake had never returned to the dressing room, and since he now looked nearly pristine, nobody would have any reason for suspicion.  Angsty assistants were commonplace.  So Lake took one last look at the assistant’s immense face, one long examination of his own, and then exited through the side door into the parking lot, where his driver was waiting for him with the limo door open.  He climbed in, shirking a small band of ravenous reporters, and poured himself a calming glass of cabernet.  “Home, Simon,” he sighed.  Lake won re-election.

Author's Note

Please let me know if you are confused at any point. Also tell me what you think! Do you like it or not like it and why? Also I really struggled with the title... probably going to change it and wouldn't mind some suggestions.

Reviews

[Marie]

This is a good story, and it's well written, but it's too long. Only write something this long if there's a real pay-off at the end. I didn't find it.