Saturday Afternoon

When the campaign manager called and said: “You won,” Nola thought she’d be ecstatic.

Instead, she just felt relieved.

Her entire campaign was about restoring transparency, restoring economic fairness, restoring cooperation between City Hall and regular working people. They all said they wanted exactly that.

She should have realized:

Any town that loudly “wants transparency” usually already has too little of it.

Her first morning as mayor, she arrived an hour early. She wanted to sit in her office before anyone else came in and just try to feel the weight of the job.  But the lights didn’t turn on.

The building looked modern from the outside, glass façade, digital signage, keycard entry.

Inside was original paneling from the late 1950’s. Fluorescent tubes with a faint flicker. No exterior windows in most of the interior rooms. The staircase felt like a bomb shelter.  The receptionist came in at  8am sharp, saw her sitting there in the half-dark lobby, and said, with zero sarcasm:

“Oh. They didn’t tell you where your real office is.”

Her “real office” was down a different stairwell. A basement level beneath the basement. No elevator button for it. No signage. They walked through a supply closet, behind stacked banker boxes, and pushed through a rusty metal fire door that was not listed on the building’s map.

Her office was concrete. No windows. No cell reception. The air smelled like an idle swimming pool and ancient printer ink.  There was a full-sized metal file cabinet. A rotary phone. The entire place looked like it had been sealed in 1973.

The receptionist said:

“You will take instructions from calls that come in on that phone. Don’t worry if there’s no caller ID. They always know your schedule.”

She handed Nola a binder. No title on the front. No label. Just a black binder with pages that were so yellow they looked like nicotine sheets.

The receptionist left.

The binder was full of decades of mayor memos – but none written by the mayor.

They were all written to the mayor.

All directions. All decisions have already been made. Not requests.  

Some were about zoning variances that violated environmental law. Some were about police staffing directed at certain blocks and not others. Some were about approving developer tax credits for projects that didn’t exist on paper – yet. Some were written at 2am by someone who wrote in a typeface that didn’t exist anymore.

At 9:17, the rotary phone rang. She answered on the second ring. A women’s voice said: “We’re so glad you’re cooperative.” Not “Congratulations.” Not even “Welcome aboard.” Just we’re so glad you’re cooperative. Then a click.

Nola climbed back upstairs. Her chief of staff (who she herself hired) asked if she wanted to walk to the elementary school and meet the kids like they’d planned.

Nola looked at her, and realized:

No one above ground knows. No one in this “normal” shining civic building has any idea what’s beneath. It’s like the whole town is built with two stories – the physical one and the real one. And the second one is buried under concrete like a root system.

She wanted to say out loud: nobody would believe her yet.

First, she needed to figure out how this shadow government actually works. She needed to see behind the curtain – and then decide whether to rip it down.

Because it hit her in that moment:

The job of mayor here isn’t to lead. It’s to pretend to lead.

And her job — if she was brave enough – would be to break the machine by making the invisible visible.