The place is cheap, with a mildewed bathroom, but it’s a place to live. A place to figure out what to do next. It has an Insignia 24-inch Class flat-screen TV ($69.99) and free Wi-Fi.

Vicky’s been on four times, Oprah through Ellen. He says when he grows up he wants to be a congressman…or a clown! and he really hams it up so everyone laughs each time he says or a clown!

Every night, dinner is Chinese from your local, a hole-in-the-wall called “Fortune’s Palace.” You eat at the coffee table in sweatpants, your eyes darting from the glow of your TV screen to the glow of your laptop, searching for news, and there used to be quite a bit of news about you—a guy you barely knew from way back in fifth grade, from Ms. Sline’s class, got some attention when he told Bill Maher, “Look, we called him ‘Odd Fuck’—” aloud, on TV. Now there’s less.

Nancy Fucking Beavers is not even talking about you; she’s moved on, she said months ago, and squeezed herself into a new butter-colored pantsuit for the campaign trail. “It’s better that America just move on,” she says, and our country is imperfect, she says, but better than any other at fighting injustice, and while she is serving the First District she will continue to fight injustice for the sake of our children, and how she leans on that word! Her neutered-looking husband, Cody Beavers, and their two moonfaced children, Bailey and Alicia, are pressed to her sides as Nancy talks about her revised platform, which is Family, but how Family is different for all people, and all people are different, it’s what makes America America, and then her campaign song comes on, “What Makes America America,” and you laugh because she doesn’t know it’s a slogan for Subarus, and Ole Beavers, you have to hand it to her, she really knows how to lean on those platitudes and has a 78% Favorability Rating—but right now it’s all you can take.

You already know what the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket will be, the reason Rutledge rooted you out from your tunnel: Beavers-Rutledge. God help you.

You turn off the TV. You must stop waiting for something new to be said, or for something to happen. Because nothing will happen.

Besides, you have work tomorrow.

One person is still with you. Never left your side. Barb Newberg found you this apartment, a job at the Library of Congress, and it’s where you’ve gone the past month.

You’re in the Jefferson Building. You’re what they call a “minor researcher.” It’s the sort of job usually reserved for recent college grads, and the only grown men you ever see there are these tired guys with hairlines in various degrees of distress who wear abominable short-sleeved oxford dress shirts from Van Heusen which they order on Amazon ($18.99), out of which swing their pale forearms.

These men, they appear trapped in time, their shirts tucked tightly into khakis with pleats at the front that are belted with braided leather, over which hang their soft middles. Black woolen socks are stuffed into cheap penny loafers sans pennies (due to forgetfulness or neglect, you really don’t know), and the loafers have been worn for so long that the heels have gone slant, making them all walk sort of bowlegged. The way they shuffle and slide around the marble floors of the magnificent Jefferson Building they could, like, be in their living rooms, you think, a mug of chamomile tea somewhere at the ready, and they barely speak, and when they do speak, it’s in veritable whispers—“The men’s needs more paper,” they wheeze—and they are not disagreeable; they are plain-spoken, uncurious, like they haven’t been laid in a decade.