The man, towering over his opponent with the expression of an outraged mullah, was informing her that if he won the election he was going to get a special prosecutor “to look into your situation.” The room exploded into angry jeers that all but drowned out the whoops of his supporters in the studio audience. I stared, fascinated in spite of myself. I’d been slow to take any serious interest in this weird, ivory-gold colossus who’d been destroying his rivals one by one throughout the summer. He’d been a fixture of New York, an established sideshow, since long before I arrived there in the late eighties, but only very recently had I begun to realize he was something other than just a buffoon—that he had his own sickened vigor, his own charisma even. Perhaps because he too had recently joined the ranks of powerful men accused of assault, his very distinct physicality had begun to acquire, for me, a heightened aura. He brought to mind those slabs of pallid humanoid flesh in Francis Bacon’s paintings, enthroned on toilets in arid rooms with a molten dog for company—his lust for gold, detailed ad nauseam in the press, lending the image a tinge of jaundiced porcelain. Everything about him seemed at once gleaming and effluvial, like some Freudian idol we’d set up in order to load it with the qualities we most abhorred about ourselves before driving it out into the wilderness.

“He’s going down!” someone shouted. “He is so going down!”

He’d just threatened to jail his opponent and had retreated to his lectern like a bull withdrawing into his safe space, his querencia, looking at once menacing and cosmically aggrieved, as if nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could compensate for the wrongs done to him. That too, that titanically aggrieved air, was something I’d been slow to recognize—slower still to grasp its magical power over others, especially those with real cause for grievance.

“What a chump!” a woman on the sofa below me said.

“Dump his rump,” another person said.