Lincoln In The Twenty-First Century

There are no angels left in America, having fled briefly after the second world war. I had wandered as a ghost for a century, occasionally haunting the White House, even frightening the queen of the Netherlands when she slept in Lincoln's Bedroom. One woman, I haunted while she took her nightly showers. I was in full suit and top-hat--nothing inappropriate. However, when she exposed my indiscretion during the call-in hour on Coast to Coast, I knew that I needed a new cover.

I decided to seek employment. I found the city of glittering lights and raucous machines that ate coins. I applied for the position of hat-tupper. For occupation, I listed "Ghost." A balding, Italian man squinted at me and asked, "What are your qualifications?" I did not have a college degree, he said.... "Hit the road."

Bizarre, I thought, to have to validate my worth in a world that knew me only as a myth. I returned to Illinois, to the common people, where I first campaigned. I earned my first vote by doing a turn on the plow for some farmers. "If you can plow a straight line to the end of the sycamore tree, you have our vote." And so I did. But the farmers had now vanished, replaced by strange sculptures of iron and rust, and fields of smooth, hardened rock.

I went South. This, for me, was a novelty. My political party, I had learned, had been embraced by the South in the century that I had wandered. I found a dead-end street of lights and rain in a Verne-esque metropolis. A veteran paced the sidewalk, covered with a billboard placard that read, "I killed innocent Iraqis." Loud machines with fiery eyes sought to attack him, and he dodged and fled.

I would get no votes here, I thought.

So I went to Antarctica. The horizon was a brutal blue, a vast expanse, both empty and new. The time was now, and it was here, I decided, to begin my campaign to reclaim America.