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Donald went to bed, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavored not to think, the more he thought.

McCain’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, “Was it a dream or not?”

“OMFG, Donald,” his hair said, “you keeping flipping and flopping and rolling over and over. Let me off and I’ll sleep on the credenza.”

“Gay,” the hat said from his stately stand.

“It’s nothing,” Donald muttered. “Nothing at all. Just a flashback maybe or a bad batch of fries.”

He screamed when a hand reached out of the dark and touched his shoulder.

It was a strange figure–a young man, in a jumpsuit. Donald realized with a start that it was McCain, a McCain he had never known. Young McCain was squinting as if into the sun and had a head with short-cropped hair. He smiled at Donald and put on aviator sunglasses, mirrored and impenetrable. As Donald stared in horror the figure flickered–stuttered almost–winking in and out; and he was as insubstantial as fake news.

“Is it going to be all night with this Scooby Doo shit?” the hat asked.

Donald cried out for the Secret Service but none came.

“Are you the Spirit whose coming was foretold to me?” asked Donald.

“I am,” Young McCain said. The voice was soft and gentle.

“Who, and what are you?” the hair demanded.

“I am the Ghost of Warboners Past.”

“Long Past?” inquired the hat. “Like World War II?”

The Spirit did not turn to answer him. “No. Donald’s past.”

Perhaps, Donald could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

“What?” exclaimed the Ghost, “Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, you want me to wear it low upon my brow?”

“Don’t have a ghost put me on, Donald,” the hat said, fear in his voice.

“What about the hair? You want to wear my hair?” Donald asked.

“Neither!” the Spirit thundered. “I don’t want to wear either your hat or your hair.”

“Then what business do you have here?” Donald asked.

“Your reclamation. Take heed!”

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm.

“Rise! and walk with me!”

It would have been in vain for Donald to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown. The grasp, though gentle as a hooker’s hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit made towards the window, clapped on his hat and hair in supplication.

“I am a mortal,” Donald remonstrated, “and liable to fall.”

“Bear but a touch of my hand there,” said McCain, laying it upon his heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than this!” As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon a busy New York City sidewalk.

“What in the mother of fuck?” the hat shouted.

“Did we just teleport?” the hair asked. “I think we just teleported!”

“Good Heaven!” said Donald, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. Men in hats and women in dresses passed them on the sidewalk unaware of them. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!”

“Look at how the people are dressed,” said the hair. “Look at the stores and billboards that line the streets. Look at the cars.”

“Time travel,” the hat said. “I can finally kill Billy Ray Cyrus before he is born.”

“Your lip is trembling,” said the Ghost to Donald. “And what is that upon your cheek?”

Donald muttered.

“Wait, are you crying, Donald?” the hair asked gently.

“It’s just so beautiful,” Donald whispered. “So many white people. White people everywhere. And everyone is so skinny.”

“Do you recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit. “Do not be bothered by those around us. We appear as naught to them.”

“Remember it?” cried Donald with fervour; “I could walk it blindfolded.”

Donald took off a wattling run, the hat and hair holding on. The ghostly figure of McCain flew beside them, his spectral feet a few inches above the cold sidewalk.

Donald stopped before the window of a huge toy store and pressed his face before the glass. Dolls and BB guns and wind-up tanks and sparking robots sat inside the track of an elaborate toy train that chugged along. Planes and cars and cowboys and noble knights astride fine steeds hung from the ceiling by fishing wire, and lights flashed and bells rang.

“I loved this window,” Donald said. “So many things, all the things, such classy toys.”

“This was your last Christmas, wasn’t it?” McCain’s Ghost asked.

“The last good one,” Donald said. “The next year I was sent off to military school. I spent Christmas there from then on.”

“Military school,” the young figure of McCain said. “A chance to get your first warboner, a proper one. A chance you wasted.”

“Your last good Christmas,” the hair said, rubbing Donald’s head in sympathy. “Did you at least get what you wanted?”

“No. Father refused to buy me the store,” Donald said mournfully. “I was going to burn it down for the insurance money.”

“Away,” said the Spirit. “We have more Christmases to visit!”

A wind picked up and began to swirl around them, and somehow made it seem as if the city was swirling around them.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said the hat. And then the scene settled and he merely groaned.
They were now on the lawn of a college campus quad, students arm-in-arm going to and fro.

“WEST PHILADELPHIA, 1967” floated in the air before the in neat white block letters.

“Anyone else seeing words floating in the air?” the hair asked right as they began to fade away.

“Wharton,” Donald said hoarsely. “1967? 1967?”

“Yes,” said the Spirit. He grabbed Donald’s arm and walked through a nearby wall. When the four of them stepped out of the grey darkness of passage they were in a room full of young people, navy blazers and ascots all around, cable-knit sweaters and Brylcreem, pretty girls in knee-length skirts and sweater sets. Frankie Valli crooned on the record player.

“1967?” the hat asked. “Where are the hot hippie girls? Where is the free love? This looks like fucking Happy Days.”

An older man, wearing a corduroy jacket over a turtleneck and smoking a pipe turned to the ghostly party. “There are no ‘hippies’ at the Wharton School of Business, you degenerate,” he said, addressing the hat.

“Who the hell are you?” the hat asked the man with the pipe.

“None of your business, you sad little id projection,” the man said and did exhale a cloud of fragrant smoke. He took two steps away and faded into the party crowd.

“Who the hell was that?” the hat asked the Spirit.

“He is the Spirit of Exposition, another Ghost who walks this night. Pay his irritation no heed,” said Young McCain.

“I remember this,” Donald said, growing excited. “I remember this.”

“Yes,” Young McCain said, his eyes becoming pools of oily blackness, “Your lowest point.”

Donald walked away, ignoring the Ghost, and slipped insubstantially through the throng of party-goers.

“This was the night!” Donald said excitedly. He walked through a shut bedroom door taking the hat and hair with him.

Three young men were in the bedroom, leaning over a nightstand they had pulled away from the wall.

“Try it,” one of them said.

“You’ll like it,” another said.

Young Donald Trump, all of 21-years-old said, “I don’t know. I don’t like drugs very much. Heck, I don’t even drink.”

“This isn’t like grass,” the tall one said. “It doesn’t make your dick limp and turn you in a commie. This stuff is fantastic.” He handed Donald the rolled up 20 dollar bill.

“DONALD!” said the hair in a shocked voice.

“This was just a great Christmas. Just tremendous,” Old Donald said.

Young McCain joined them in the bedroom and said, gasping, “This is not what we are here to see.”

“Are you out of breath?” the hat asked. “You’re a Ghost. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Young Donald leaned down and hoovered a fat line of the cocaine and Old Donald sighed.

“They sold me an eightball to take home,” Old Donald reminisced. “I didn’t sleep for maybe four days.”

The ghostly McCain stepped forward and plucked a piece of paper out of Young Donald’s cardigan. “This is what you are here to see,” he said, holding up to the other three travelers. It was a draft deferment form, stamped 1-Y.

Old Donald shrugged. “I had bone spurs,” he said and shrugged.

“You threw away your chance for glory!” the shade said. “Your chance for honor!”

“Your chance you get your balls shot off,” the hat said mockingly.

“It was a stupid, pointless war,” Old Donald said.

“COWARD!” the Spirit of Warboners Past thundered.

He stepped forward and tried to run his finger on the cocaine-dusted mirror. “Aw, nothing? Not even a little bump?” he asked.

Young Donald was writhing around, dancing to music only he seemed to hear.

“How do you feel, Donny?” one of his friends asked.

Young Donald grinned beatifically. “I feel amazing, like I could beat-up Godzilla and fuck King Kong!”

“YEAH!” the hat cheered.

“OK,” said the shade of McCain. “Fuck it.” He waved his arms in a complicated pattern.

Donald found himself back in The First Bedroom, the lingering scent of cigarettes and stale beer in the air. He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness. He gave the hat a parting squeeze, a placed his hair back on the credenza; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.

 

McCAIN WAS DEAD: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Donald didn’t go, he wasn’t welcome, but McCain was dead. Old McCain was as dead as a door-nail.

Donald knew he was dead? Of course he did. His hat and his hair had both told him and they were both of well repute. McCain was dead.

How could it be otherwise? Donald had watched the nation mourn the passing of McCain, the po-faced men and the ladies hiding their lack of tears behind squares of lace. Donald and McCain were rivals for many years, an enmity growing plump between them toward the end. The country mourned performatively, mourned the passing of a man more for who he disagreed with than any love for the man himself. Donald was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but he was a man of politics on the very day of the funeral, and raised the flag from half-mast soon after.

The mention of McCain’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that McCain was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Donald never mentioned McCain’s name after he died, never dined with McCain’s wife or took a stroll in a park with McCain’s obese daughter. Donald continued on his business like McCain had never existed, never opposed him, was never loved like Donald wanted to be loved.

Nobody ever told him he would be a great President or a beloved President. No one stopped him in the halls of the White House to ask, with gladsome looks, “My dear Donald, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No reporters implored him to bestow an interview, none of his Cabinet members asked him over for dinner, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired of Donald the way into the history books.

But what did Donald care? His own counsel was very thing he liked. To own the libs, to womp the womp womp, to rave and rail on Twitter all day long with his only two friends was all Donald professed to care for.

Once upon a time–of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve–old Donald sat busy in his Oval Office. The door of Donald’s office was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond was practicing press conference statements. Donald had a fine large can of Diet Coke, but the clerk’s can was so very much smaller that it looked like a single swallow. The clerk pulled out her cellphone, and tried to tried to catch up on Twitter; in which effort, not being a woman of strong concentration, she failed.

“Happy Holidays, Father! HaShem save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was Donald’s daughter, the Jew-married Ivanka.

“Bah!” said Donald, “McNugget!”

“Holidays a McNugget, father?” said Donald’s daughter. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Donald. “Say Merry Christmas! What reason have I to be merry? You’re Jew-married and thrice-childed.”

“Married, yes. Now a Jew, yes. And I have three children. But you know this means I celebrate Christmas no more. Holidays, holidays. Happy Holidays! Come, then,” returned the daughter gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose?”

Donald having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “McNugget.”

“Don’t be cross, father!” said his daughter and sat in his lap. She ground her bottom into his lap and pulled his arms around her and giggled like when she was small.

“What else can I be,” returned her father, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Happy Holidays? No, Merry Christmas, indeed. Holiday time to you but a time for Congress to not be in session and therefore not shutting down the government; a time for TV specials that I don’t star in, the end of the regular football season so there is no more kneeling; a time for a nightmare grove of Christmas trees to infest my home? If I could work my will,” said Donald indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Happy Holidays’ on his lips, should have a stiff steel tariff and be the subject of a Fox and Friends expose. He should!”

“Father!” pleaded Ivanka.

“Hottest of my daughters!” returned her father sternly, “Keep Hanukkah or whatever in your own way, and let me keep the legislative recess in mine.”

Donald leaned toward her and smelled her hair and shuddered.

“This is my only joy,” Donald said.

“Keep it!” repeated Donald’s daughter.

The press secretary in the outer room involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, she drained her Diet Coke noisily and burped lustily.

“Let me hear another agreeable sound from you,” said Donald, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! You’re quite a useful creature, Pie,” he added, “But a dozen land whales who could do your job beach themselves in Adams Morgan every day!”

“Don’t be angry, Father,” Ivanka said. “Come! Dine with us tomorrow.”

“Chinese food? I hate Chinese food,” Donald groused. “And no Hollywood film would please me.”

“Oh, Father!” Ivanka said despairingly. She leaned back and his hair did mingle with her hair.

“Why did you get married?” said Donald.

“Because I fell in love.”

“Because you fell in love!” growled Donald, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a Happy Holidays. “Good afternoon!”

Ivanka stood and Donald’s hair did whimper at the parting.

“I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute, Father. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have come to you in homage to the Holidays, and I’ll keep my wry Jewish humour to the last. So Happy Holidays, Father!”

“Good afternoon!” said Donald.

“And a Happy New Year!”

“Good afternoon!” said Donald.

His daughter left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. She stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on Pie, who returned them cordially.

“There’s another moron,” muttered Donald; who overheard him: “the stout-hipped Pie, heart disease and a husband and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I should send her to North Korea.”

At length, the hour of shutting up the Oval Office arrived. With a dyspeptic glare, Donald put down his phone.

“You’ll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?” Donald demanded of Pie.

“If quite convenient, sir.”

“It’s not convenient,” said Donald, “and it’s not fair.”

Pie observed that it was only once a year.

“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Donald. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”

Pie promised that she would; and Donald walked out with a growl. The Oval Office was closed in a twinkling, and Pie, with the long ends of her red slanket dangling below her waist (for she boasted no great-coat), waddled off to her DC home.

Donald took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy McDonald’s; and having read all Twitters, and talked quietly with his hat and his har, and beguiled them the rest of the evening with his Candy Crush, and went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once housed a Negro and his wife; they were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Donald, the other rooms being all let out as offices.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the door to the Residence, except that it was very large and the knob is large and brass. It is also a fact, that Donald had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place. Let it also be borne in mind that Donald had not bestowed one thought on McCain, since his overwrought funeral. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Donald saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change–not a knob, but McCain’s face.

McCain’s face. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Donald as McCain used to look: with bald pate and liver spots, bandage on his nose and forehead. The eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That made it horrible; but as Donald looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knob again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. He looked around for the Secret Service agent that should have been near the door. He looked up at the security camera that he had unplugged months before.

His hat said: “What the fuck was that?” And his hair shivered on its perch. Donald opened the door, his hand touching nothing but smooth knob and looked into the room beyond. Nothing. His hat told him to look behind the door. Nothing. There was nothing, so his hair said, “Aw, shit, just close the door.”

But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.

Tweeting-room, bedroom, panic-room, wig vault. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Tweeting-room as usual: wrist braces, retweeting tools, two Filet-o-Fish boxes, bidet on three legs, and a solid gold shitter.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his hat and hair; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down to read a few late-night tweets.

Every tweet he read seemed to be about Old McCain.

“McNuggets!” said Donald; and walked across the room.

The door to the secret Kennedy fuck tunnels flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard a noise much louder. Donald and his hat and his hair moaned with fear. They heard a sound, clanking sound, deep down below where the mutated offspring of JFK live. Donald clutched his hair and hair to his chest.

“Who is there?” asked Donald.

“Oh, great,” said his hat, “Step up to be in a horror movie why don’t you?”

“It’s McNuggets still!” said Donald. “I won’t believe it.”

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. “I know him,” Donald cried. “McCain’s Ghost!”

The same face: the very same. McCain with his baldness and dour expression, in the uniform they buried him in, starched and pressed; the medals on his chest clanking as he walked.

“What the damn hell fuck is going on?” asked Donald’s hat.

“I don’t believe it,” his hair said, quaking, and did shit dandruff onto Donald’s nightdress.

Donald looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

“What do you want with me?” Donald asked in a high queer voice.

“Much!”–McCain’s quarrelsome voice, no doubt about it.

“Who are you?” Donald’s hair asked.

“Ask me who I was,” said the spirit.

“I hate riddles,” moaned the hat.

“Who were you then?” said Donald, raising his voice.

The Ghost sat in a chair in and offered for Donald to do the same.

“In life, I was your rival, John McCain,” said the shade.

“Bullshit,” the hat spat.

“You three don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“We don’t,” said all three in uncertain chorus.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Donald.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Donald, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of Big Mac, a blot of secret sauce, a crumb of McGriddle, a fragment of an underdone Apple Pie. There’s more of the Dollar Menu about you than Deathly Menace, whatever you are!”

“Good one, Donald,” his hat said. “I’m going to put that one on Twitter.”

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chest of medals with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Donald held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. His hat and his hair were blown backward, off his head and behind the chair in which he sat, both cursing and tumbling.

Donald fell upon his knees, and bowed his bald head. “Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“I come to help with your legacy” replied the Ghost, “and I don’t mean your Twitter archive.”

“I worry for my legacy,” said Donald. “I must. But why do you walk the earth, and why do you come to me?”

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its medaled chest and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are medalled,” said Donald, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the honors I gained in life,” replied the Ghost.

“I made it medal by medal, and ribbon by ribbon; I got them being shot down so many times; I bear them for the time I spent as a POW. They are the pride of my Warboner. Is my Warboner strange to you?”

“I had bone spurs,” Donald said.

“Bone spurs! A totally real thing!” said the hat, riding as he did on the hair. They jumped into Donald’s lap and scaled to his shoulder and then climbed to his head.

“You missed your chance to create honor,” said the Ghost, “but it is not too late to become a great President. A beloved President. A President with statues and parks named after him. A President that has every excuse made for him.

“McCain,” he said, imploringly. “Old John McCain, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, McCain!”

“I have none to give,” the Ghost replied. “You must embrace the Warboner as I had done and be elected President which I could not.”

“But you were always a Never Trumper, McCain,” faltered Donald, “why would you want to help me?”

“The Warboner is its own end,” McCain said in sepulchral tones. “The dead desire only more dead to share their suffering.”

The hat and the hair were very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on this, and began to quake exceedingly.

“Hear me!” cried the Ghost. “My time is nearly gone. I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate, the failed Presidential candidate, never to be loved, a footnote of a joke in the history books.”

“I didn’t go to your funeral,” blurted Donald. “And you daughter is still quite large.”

McCain’s Ghost grimaced. “You will be haunted,” it resumed, “by Three Spirits.”

“Three more ghosts? This is the shittiest Christmas ever,” the hat said. The hair shushed it loudly.

“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you and your head gear cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first when the bell tolls One.”

“Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over, McCain?” hinted Donald.

“Like a ghost foursome,” the hat chipped in.

“Expect the second on the next hour. The third upon the next hour! Remember what has passed between us!”

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the door to the Kennedy fuck tunnels opened a bit wider. McCain beckoned Donald to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, McCain’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Donald stopped and became sensible of confused noises in the tunnels, incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated down the dark damp stairs.

Donald looked down the stairs: desperate in his curiosity.

The tunnels below were filled with phantoms, each of them, like McCain, a failed Presidential candidate. Mondale and John Anderson, Bob Dole and Gerald Ford and many Donald could not recognize floated by, mummified from the neck down in bumper stickers.

“What the fuck?” the hair asked, pointing with a tendril, “Mitt Romney isn’t dead.”

“He might as well be,” McCain’s Ghost said, as clear and loud as if it were still in the room with them. “He will never know a proper Warboner…”

Donald closed the tunnel and locked it, double-locked locked and checked the locks a third time. And being, from the confusion he had undergone, or the fast food he had consumed all day, or his glimpse of the afterlife of politicians past, or the dull conversation of McCain’s Ghost, or the tiredness of his Tweeting thumbs, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.