Victoria Passionately took a bus back to her hotel, and by the time she settled in, it was 10 o'clock, time for the local news. She sat on the edge of her bed, rum-spiked Dr Pepper in hand, trying to forget the day, forget her failings, not expecting to see her face on the screen, wanting only to drink herself to sleep. Of course, the day before, she fully did expect to see her face on the screen at this point, on every screen and on the cover of every newspaper, lionized as the brave wrench throwing herself into the endlessly squealing and crushing machinery of the American president-selection process. Something like that.
But when finally given her audience with the president, things had not gone as planned. From him she wanted chaos and fear, and instead she got calm and even understanding. The president had pulled some crazy Zen shit on her! He had wanted to hear her concerns. He had asked her questions. Everyone had waited for her to make a point or two, or demand answers to probing questions. But Victoria Passionately had done little beyond saying "Meatshit." She was ashamed, sick with her own feebleness, and knew it would take months or years or longer for her to stop kicking herself in the ass for not being better prepared, better spoken, a better representative of progressives everywhere.
But now her can of Dr Pepper was on the floor of her hotel room, and it was spitting its watery syrup onto the beige carpet, creating a stain in the shape of Slovenia. Her muscles had gone slack, and she couldn't breathe. Her face! It was her face, just over the left shoulder of the local news anchor. She turned up the volume and took it in. Her face! She looked so angry!
A few seconds of setup, about a young woman in red who disrupted today's press conference. Then a cut to footage of -- holy shit, that was her! -- Victoria Passionately in that room, yelling "Meatshit."
Of course they bleeped the second syllable, but it was clear what it was she'd said. The anchor then did a strange and wonderful thing for Victoria Passionately. He said this: "This young woman speaks for millions of young people when she says this word, an expletive apparently of her own making."
This is all Victoria Passionately remembers, for she fainted shortly thereafter.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
In the morning there was the T-shirt. Victoria Passionately was waiting in line at the Buzz Room, the coffee shop she'd begun to frequent while planning her assault on the incumbent, when she saw something odd. Something like a three-dimensional kind of déjà vu -- if such a thing were possible. On the pumpkin-colored T-shirt of the young bed-headed man working behind the counter was a word that seemed so familiar. But from where?
Victoria Passionately wasn't quite awake yet -- thus the visit to the Buzz Room -- so it took her a moment to read and weigh and discern the provenance of this word, freshly handwritten, on the T-shirt, and why this word seemed like something written on the inner wall of her own skull. At the last possible moment, as her body again lost its self-control and she slumped to the ground, she made sense of it.
MEATSHIT.
The T-shirt said MEATSHIT. And again Victoria Passionately had fainted.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By noon that day -- after the man at the Buzz Room had revived her and recognized her and asked her if he could buy her some food and be her assistant -- things had moved into another dimension entirely. The coffee shop man, named Brooke, brought her into the back room and on his laptop revealed that not only were there over 220,000 matches for "meatshit" through his search engine -- all of them brand-new -- but that there were three Web sites already devoted to the word and/or Victoria Passionately herself.
Victoria Passionately was everywhere on the Web. Conservative bloggers pointed to her as a perfect and glorious example of how stupid young liberals are, while far more bloggers had taken her word, its utter and crucial meaningless, as the perfect and only logical response to a world that ceased to make sense.
Someone had matched her face to her name, and her name was now well-known. And though it was frequently misspelled, all over the Web were ponderings of her political affiliations, her biography, her education, her sexuality, and a long thread of vitriol following one blogger's claim that it was the same woman who had accused a popular basketball player of date-rape.
Seeing her picture -- from her yearbook! Good god! How did they get that? What the hell was happening? -- above the words "Gold-digging hippie lesbo Nazi" was enough to provoke her second faint in as many hours.
Would she ever stand again? She wanted to sleep forever. She wanted to dream of her life before this and never wake up.
But this was not possible. The name Victoria Passionately and the word "meatshit" would be inextricably tied together from that day forward, as would be her left-central place in the New Hampshire primary and the future of the nation.
