Her chin was tipped slightly upward.

The President did this when she was anticipating a photograph. It gave her neck a more elongated, regal appearance and eliminated the little fold of skin, the beginnings of a rooster’s gaggle that would hang from under when she eventually got older.

The pose was flattering insofar as the light, but also gave her a sort of prideful appearance. A nose upturned, a tightness of lips, the look of one who had long ago realized herself superior, who both adored and deeply resented the enormous responsibility which that fateful situation accorded.

The First Man looked down. His hands were loosely folded. He had very large hands. They were not folded in prayer, but rather in anticipation and in idleness. The folding gave them something to do.

The three of us, with Arthur walking nervously behind as he’d just heard some news that he didn’t want to tell me about just yet, had entered from the left side, in the door from the alleyway into the Emmaus Chapel.

The alleyway was the VIP driveup and allowed the Presidential party to bypass the main lines coming up the front stairs of the cathedral. Organized on two sides and two banks of metal detectors, with magically wanded officials managing the flow, in uniform. Press and onlookers were scattered about, apart from the designated lines, eyeing each line’s components up and down to catch anyone worth an image or amplified word.

It was the opening of the High Court’s season. There would be a Mass.

I didn’t yet know that on the other side of the world, in another urban setting without High Courts like ours, there would be a war.

It was unusual for President Tracy to have chosen this event, considering a simultaneous military operation. As it was on the other side of the planet, she’d have to rely on camera and radio. And while this was never admitted outright, on certain major media that had “actual boots on the ground.” Actual boots only halfway in her control, to capture and analyze the events as they unfolded.

It was an operation out of teenage boy virtual gamelife, one of the staffers from the Five would later tell me. A tightly built urban arena, sand and water, well-armed men crouching on rooftops and in corners, blending in as noise stood out. Loud helicopters and the precision weapons of those who have everything, confronting the fearsome passions of those who have nothing.

It was, in the slang of the District, going to be a “sterilization process.” An elite mission to cancel a moment of inconvenient chaos. Or in the words of certain men I worked with in Treasury, unwanted ground clutter.

That was ultimately what all elite missions did. Put unwanted cluttered things in order so they wouldn’t bother anybody.

There had been the usual natter in the media about a woman sending soldiers to battle. But I knew it to be wasted on the President.

The battle, the ideas of fierceness and conquest and completion, did not scare her at all.

It was the smallness of the box and its limited options that did. How tight the space and timeframe was and how easy it would be to make a mistake.

Space gave you options. Time game you more. More choices and chances to redirect or escape. The distant city was not a place like that.

There would be no redirect, I’d heard her say. I’d figured it was about the distant city.

But the President wanted to go to the Mass. The official rationale being that it was for those whose vocation was law. Her vocation was law. So was her husband’s. And agendas of the sort she and her husband would envision sometimes required the cooperation or docility of judges. Those put into places where they could not exactly prevent, but could inconveniently impede, key aspects of those agendas.

But the real reason went unsaid.

Fern Tracy, being both female and the President, the very first of her kind, wanted to show everyone that she could do everything.

Send special teams into battle and chat directly with God on the very same Sunday October morning. And have neither go wrong.

Though at least one would.

I was not with the President and her husband on Sundays by routine. This was originally Arthur’s gig, until President Tracy realized that the High Mass would be Roman and elaborate and fully incensed and would have a Cardinal involved. It would require standing up and sitting down at specific moments. She would be highly visible in the first row.

She needed it all to look seamless. Arthur needed to find someone who, in the President’s words, was “Roman Catholic in their sleep.” She requested that the person not be tall or noticeable. They were going to guide, but not appear to anyone else, cameras especially, that they were doing so.

It had to be someone perfectly informed and entirely unimportant.

These being the core criteria, I was called into service. Arthur asked me at the gym. He was on the stairmaster next to me. He waited until we’d been exercising for twenty or so minutes before he turned all of a sudden to ask if I was available on Sunday morning the third of October. Arthur perspires a lot and that day was no exception. He flicked sweat all over my face, and then felt badly that he’d done so and started wiping my face with a towel. I think it was his facial expression when he was doing this that made me say yes.

Though I probably would have anyway. Mass with the President? I found this exciting. I did not sleep the night before. I read through my missal, one I’d taken home though I was supposed to have left it in the pew. This reading was not an essential exercise, I realized — I’d memorized the missal already, beyond the President’s wildest expectations. In my sleep. But I read it anyway.

I could tell Arthur was nervous. Not knowing that he’d had an early report from across the world, I thought it had to be about me and the unscripted nature of the morning. He probably wished I hadn’t worn a red-orange dress, though it was too late to change that now.

I’d promised Arthur I’d wear my hair back, though I ended up wearing one of my silk covered headbands. So I would match the President. She would be wearing one too.

The Cardinal was dressed as Cardinals do. Red. He was from Chicago, and that datapoint came up during the well-choreographed clasp and smile. President Tracy is from Chicago as well. They exchanged pleasantries and names of dining locations of mutual interest while standing the requisite three feet apart. Then the First Man broke the space, shaking the Cardinal’s hand a bit too long, with a show of familiarity I found disconcerting but said nothing about.

I curtseyed. I reminded myself that I was today’s dance leader, and looked around the Emmaus Chapel. It is familiar to me.

The Emmaus Chapel is one of my favorite places at St. Matthew’s. I attend Mass here every Sunday. Sometimes at sunrise, more often at mid-morning since it is in traditional Latin and I like the sound of that, and sometimes in the evening, where younger adults with a slight or great hangover are not so subtly told to date and marry. I find the evening Masses oppressive. One is trying to pray, all the while being looked at like a piece of raw and functional meat from some unholy but hungry stranger down the way. I have been told not to be prideful, and judgmental, but after a few minutes at evening Mass I can feel a repulsive sort of presence pulling me that way. I don’t know if it’s me or the guy that’s sort of using the Holy Eucharist unpurposefully, so he doesn’t have to excite himself alone that night, aided by a magazine and a sock. I grimaced and considered for a moment which was worse, letting him do that or being the object of such an impersonal act myself. I did not arrive at a conclusion just yet.

The Chapel is beautiful for its light. The light is essential to the meaning of the tableau, which depicts the moment the disciples realized that they had been walking and talking with the risen Lord. There was an everyday moment, and then suddenly it was sacred. It was ordinary, and then extraordinary. When the light came, it all changed, and the same place and was no longer the same. There was a sense of forever in a short burst of time, and time became irrelevant. All who were present were now permanently different.

The Church itself is an enormous and resplendent place, a byzantine-romanesque domed building of rich marble and color, with an organ of grand enough sound to tremble and envelop its massiveness. This place has hosted events of great triumph and extraordinary sorrow. It is a place filled with stories and telling, the tears of old men and the reverent, spontaneous salute of a very small boy, on a fall day, too serious for his young age and his adorable little coat. The four Evangelists seem to know this, and each guards the dome so it shall not ever fall. Each looks differently. John looks the youngest, without a beard. He looks like a poet, still composing and unfinished.

There is a chapel of St. Francis, with pastoral landscapes featuring friendly animals. There is a Pieta, with a kneeler placed close enough so you can place your hands on Mary’s hand or Jesus’s foot, or vice versa. There is an enormous statue of Mary, surrounded by stars on a background of dark blue. She reaches her hand out towards the one kneeling, though I’m not tall enough to reach it. Sometimes, from a certain angle, she appears to be smiling. At other times it seems as if her hand has moved, though one knows it’s just the vantage. Poised on the kneeler below, all the stars seem to be spilling onto you.

As light moves through the room, different stars illuminate at different times.

We were placed across the first row pews, Secret Service at each end, before the entire church was opened to the attendees. We had three or four minutes waiting time. The phone rang and a briefing came in about the faraway city. Arthur got up and whispered to the President. I tried to hear it but could not. I could tell that something was not settled. But we did not leave.

We stood for the procession. I finally got a chance to look back, and the church was absolutely and formally filled. It had already started to be warm, due to all the suits and bodies being in one place. Two cabinet ministers were two rows behind me. A very tall woman from West, and a slight but friendly man from South wearing wireframe glasses. They both wished me good morning.

“You are borrowing Minister Ash’s advance?” Said the woman. Arthur smiled at her, but did not answer.

Arthur has two smiles. The real one where his eyes look soft, and the one where he juts his front teeth out a bit, baring them as a threatened puppy would when someone was trying to take his chew toy away.

This was the second one. It means “Don’t ever, ever ask me that again.” I wonder if the woman from West, whom I noted is almost twice Arthur’s size, knows this. About what the second smile means.

Across the aisle were the High Court Justices in black robes, some with family and others alone. A roundish, professorial Justice with an Italian name and far more Mass experience than myself, I figured, greeted me personally, with a kind handshake. He joked to the President as he gestured toward me.

“So she’s going to show you how it’s done?”

It was outwardly cheery but it was also an insult.

He was telling the President to her face that she didn’t belong here. She knew that’s exactly what he meant, and said nothing.

I sat, I stood, and I knelt. I made no mistakes. President Tracy followed me in real time, except on the kneeling.

She did not do that.

Then the singing started.

I was worried about this part, as I cannot sing. As I learned that day, neither can President Tracy. There were two hymns of lighter nature, and both seemed to last years. I wanted to cover the whole sound with my hands, as if it was my job to protect others from hearing it. She did not try to achieve proper pitch, but rather tried to sound like her husband.

The result was flattened and approximated, and never resembled song at any time.

During the homily I tipped my chin up just as the President did, looking directly at the Cardinal. She looked very important, and I wondered if I did too.

On a typical Sunday I take notes during the homily. That not being possible today I focused upon the Cardinal’s face. It was friendly. Calm. He spoke of duty, of commitment, about things outside of ourselves. The whole idea of “outside of ourselves,” and the ability to perceive that simultaneous division and wholeness being what made us human. That consciousness made holiness accessible to us. It also had gifts and directions for us.

To each a gift. To each, a direction. To each a different responsibility to act, I said to myself. During her campaign, the President had used lines like that in her speeches. Particularly when she was talking with women, and asking them to join her in her plan to change the world.

Prayer and proclaiming gave way to response and call, and we moved toward our event’s culmination. The room’s mutter rose to join in one line, spoken in unison without pre-rehearsal.

“But only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

I was quiet, as always, just after these words were uttered across the room. Then I realized that due to my placement at the edge of the very first pew, I was going to be the first one to receive Communion. I would be the first one to stand up.

The Cardinal realized this as well. He looked at me and nodded that it was time. He smiled.

It was a wonderfully unintimidating smile. He seemed like any priest anywhere, except that he was in red vestments and had a mitre sitting, or more like standing considering how tall it was, on a pedestal nearby.

I looked at Arthur, then at the President. They nodded. I would go. They would stay.

I walked forward. The ushers, taking my cue, began to guide the congregation out of each pew, in order and line, in the usual Sunday way. But I was looking forward.

The Cardinal himself was giving Communion. Four attending priests came down and angled to the side aisles, walking towards the back rows of the church, filled with those who had come in late or who were purposefully placed there for reasons of proximity to the doorways.

I remember thinking, right then, “I’m wearing a red-orange dress.” I was going to be visible.

Yet this one was made of wool. It was conservative. Muted. With tightly sewn buttons. It did not require that one have any specific sort of body to wear it. It was functional. It draped and it hung. Arthur couldn’t have been too bothered by it, I thought. Even though he’d told me to wear navy blue.

The Cardinal smiled at me, and grasped The Host in his fingers, raising it before my eyes.

The Body of Christ.

At that moment, something changed.

It was as if something grasped my skull with two hands and turned it around, like I was not human, but owl.

My head turned back and looked at the President.

She was not looking at me.

Her husband was. I saw his eyes.

But they were not eyes. They were something else.

Empty sockets. Space. Abyss. Dark. But no, not dark. An opaque and milkiness that was not quite light.

I could see no pupils. The pupils had disappeared. First there had been just a chilling blue. But then they were dark and I saw something else. It was desolate. It seemed to replace his face.

I saw the surface of what may have been the Moon. Or a salt flat. A space or planet forsaken. A place that was nowhere.

Dust, nothingness. Void. Not the Moon as landed upon by Americans with a flag.

Like a place would look if there was no life, no air in it at all.

My entire body went stiff and cold. I had the sense of an immediate confrontation with an animal, neither alive nor dead, neither in time or space, and the shadowy, opaque and milky animal was going to eat me, and there would be no redeeming reason why.

No hunger would be satiated. No valley would be filled.

It would just be random and I would be dead.

As if I had never existed.

My neck was stiff, and I recall that it took all of my strength just to turn it forward.

To look at the Cardinal again. I had no sense of how much time had just passed. Seconds, minutes. It was impossible to know.

My throat was dry. My voice had a crackle; electric and incomplete.

Amen.

I looked at the Host, and my eyesight had become enhanced, as if my blood pressure had shot to the sky. I could see every ridge and fleck, and I could also see it perfectly. For a split second, it was all I could see.

My hands were icy. So were my feet. I was supposed to raise my hands to receive, but I did not. This was not by choice.

My arms would not move.

All eyes upon us, the Cardinal improvised. I received on my tongue, which I have not done since I was a child. When we knelt at the altar and patiently waited, instead of just walking up like we do now.

The Cardinal looked at me and smiled.

It was a different smile than before. A smile of fear, and then firmness; intensity and then comfort.

He whispered, as if he knew me, though we’d just met that morning,

“Remember who you are.”

I wanted to look around and assure myself that he was talking to someone else.

He wasn’t.

I returned to my seat. I do not remember walking, but I did not fall down. Which I was thankful for later.

As I walked back, the President’s husband was now looking down, towards his own hands and knees.

She was not.

Her look toward me was subtle, and told almost nothing. But I heard her voice in my head. I actually did.

“So you’ve decided. Or have you?”

During her campaign, Fern Tracy had talked a lot about deciding.

Every woman had to choose. To be real or not.

To be someone that was used physically or someone who was far too brilliant to be wasted upon such merely physical things.

There were two kinds of girl. “You know, it’s the rule of the beesmilk,” some one told me once when I was younger, though that rule’s name had never quite been explained to me.

Some girls did not get to choose what to be, due to foreordained lack of capability.

But many did have a choice. They needed to choose well.

“To each a gift. To each, a direction. To each a different responsibility to act,” said Dr. Tracy, the first woman to be taken seriously as a candidate for President.

The consequences of such a choice were heavy. I’d thought a lot about them, wondering if the choice needed to be made at all.

But the President’s question, lingering inside my head, did not invite that third option. I did not have the luxury to consider it now.

Had I decided?

The blessing was given. We walked outside, and my pupils must have dilated because it all was too bright.

The small pack of stringers had turned into a horde of TV crews. The cameras were flashing, it looked like an aerial map of landmines going off. I counted twenty or so cameras, both tripod and shoulder. There were voices talking over each other, repeating right from the scene, though the real story was worlds away, with assistants holding silvery sheets and backgrounds to cast light properly on their own assigned talking head.

I scanned the crowd and looked for Zane. I wondered if he was with Dr. T, and they were already at the office, Zane’s promise to Leah to stop working on Sundays having been broken yet again. Minister Ash would be setting up in the second floor residence, the phones lighting up to talk to the world. It mattered little that they were not considered military. The three of them would be dividing tasks. And dealing with whatever was up.

Which soon became all too clear.

“Madam President, the Chopper is down. The mission has failed! We have unconfirmed reports that we have lost men. Do you have a word?”

We were whisked away, out the front door this time but under secret service cover into black cars. The President and her husband in the first, Arthur in the second. I got caught in the crowd and ended up in the third car instead. I got in the wrong car, but there was no time to fix that. And the Mass had ended, we left in peace and encountered something else outside. At that moment, I stopped being the dance leader.

My body, I noticed, had returned to normal temperature.

I had to go back to the hotel, to run past the wedding of tall Stuart and petite Wendy, and to change my clothes to meet with the Minister. And whomever else was with him. For a day of work I was now going to have. A Sunday of work that I sensed would have to be be off record.

The markets would be open in just a few hours in places that he had to worry about, I thought.

I keep extra clothes at the hotel for moments just like this. When it would take too long to go home. Three business suits, and two outfits for running back and forth that could also double as pajamas if it turned into a caffeine filled overnight.

In the hotel lobby I was warmly greeted. Or more accurately, I was almost knocked down.

By Zoltan, the minibar attendant.

He looked like he had won the lottery. He wore a largish bow tie and looked a bit like Chekhov on Star Trek. He was practically jumping up and down in his hotel waiter’s tuxedo.

“I saw you on television!” He cried, in a thick sort of accent.

“I saw you with ze President! In front of ze Church!”

His joy, which I suspected may have already been animated by certain liquid minibar contents despite the pre-noon hour, almost confused me. Leaving me speechless in its unrehearsed and wonderful sincerity.

He did not mention the chopper. It was a Blackhawk, and it was officially lost. I realized that he didn’t know yet.

I would soon enter a room where the word Blackhawk was all that would be mentioned. There would also be names. Names of those who would not come home. And those who would need to be contacted.

The ground clutter would still be there. Inconvenient. Just angrier now.

An elite team had gone in to fix something. But reality disrupted what plans had designed.

The operation had changed, Minister Ash calmly told Japan. But it would be completed as scheduled.

According to the new plan. There was nothing to be concerned about.

“The resiliency has been built in,” he said.

I realized as he said this that just about all had gone wrong. Later, Zane would have a word for it.

Zane always had words for things.

“It was a deviation,” he said. Or mumbled.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That her system wasn’t good enough.”

Her system. As if the boys had nothing to do with any of it.

It was all her. I was glad Arthur wasn’t in the room to hear that. But I couldn’t concentrate anyway.

What had I seen at Mass today?

I was afraid to see the President’s husband again. And I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened.

But just after it had, I had looked at the ceiling. At the four Evangelists. At the dome. It was blue, and looked like a wheel, with spokes. All alight.