“Desperate times,” I began as we walked out.

“Call for desperate measures,” she concluded.

I stopped and looked at her. “You believe that?” It was a question, not a challenge. After all the time we had spent together, I really didn’t know how she would answer.

“Probably not tonight,” she decided. “We’ll see about tomorrow.”

Lucille was at her table by the door. I stopped and gave her the usual peck on the cheek. “You write that that fucker should go to hell,” she said, waving angrily at the TVs. Then she offered Jenny a cheek and Jenny planted the obligatory kiss.

It was a lovely spring night. When we were outside, Jenny laughed, “Well, certainly no equivocation there.”

“If she ever gets over her shyness…”

Jen leaned over and kissed me, holding it for a second. “I’ll call you later,” she said. I watched her walk away. She knew exactly what I was doing, and without looking back gave me a single wanton twerk.

As I walked to the parking lot, I began considering the potential consequences of Wrightman’s request. There was nothing especially threatening about Ian Wrightman, nothing he’d done in his political career that caused my warning lights to start flashing. He’d staked a claim to the political middle, and as far as I knew, he had held on to that position as tightly as a sailor hugging a mast in a hurricane. There was nothing he’d done in his career that struck me as being inherently evil. But still.

Evil is real. I’d seen it close up. I laughed as easily and as often as I did because if I let those horrors live in my head, I’d never have another good day. Spend as much time as I did in the places I’ve been, and if you don’t come back as a cynic, then there’s really something wrong with you. I’d seen the things human beings are capable of doing. I’d watched passively evil people like Trump, whose own psychological problems allowed him to hurt people without regret or even understanding of the damage he was doing. I’d watched the religious fanatics, the people in the desert plotting against civilization and the Mike Pences of the first world, all of whom justified their actions by claiming allegiance to a greater good, anointing themselves vessels carrying out their Lord’s will rather than accepting responsibility for their actions.

Ian Wrightman didn’t strike me as any of them. There was a certain unctuous smoothness in his manner; but he wasn’t an irrational zealot. He was as radical as the latest polls, as religious as American politics demanded. Rather than passion, he had calculation. That made him a wild card.

I wasn’t sure it made him dangerous, but it definitely made me nervous. Being granted the powers that went with a declaration of war would essentially make him king. The powers of the president had expanded almost continuously for decades as Congress ceded more and more of their constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. But war powers were the keys to the kingdom. He would be unchecked by traditional checks and balances. He could pretty much take whatever steps he decided were necessary. He could use the Constitution as a road map or as toilet paper. The dictatorial powers that Trump had dreamed about and reached for, he would have in his grasp. Maybe that wasn’t the level of power you wanted to hand to a wild card.