The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch

about it like six times, Jennifer Fabianski, too. Neither of them has seen him over there.”
    Those were Polsky’s bosses. “So he’s at home. We can’t go see him at home.”
    I smiled. “Why not? That’s what Carville and Stephenopolus would have done.” The War Room was our favorite movie. “Those guys didn’t wait for things to come to them.”
    She sighed. “But if we rub him the wrong way—”
    “Do you honestly think he’ll endorse John fucking Edwards because two Kerry staffers bothered him at home?”
    “I think that’s exactly the kind of thing he would do, yeah.”
    I grabbed her hand. “Come on, Al. Let’s do it.”
    So we walked out through the bullpen, where droves of volunteers were making calls, and through the staffroom, where Rix was screaming on the phone, and got in our rental car to drive out to the Des Moines suburbs.
    It was, and had been, about five degrees outside. With the wind chill, five below. Even within the heat of the car nobody ever felt quite warm.
    When we got to Polsky’s house the lights were off. “Shit,” said Alison.
    “Polsky, you asshole, where are you?” I said.
    Suddenly Alison gasped. “Jesus, is that him?”
    I followed her eyes and saw a brown lump in the snow on his lawn. “No way.”
    We both got out of the car and into the freezing air—it was so cold that after thirty seconds you couldn’t feel your face, the kind of cold that doesn’t feel cold as much as painful, like an Indian burn—and ran to the brown lump.
    “Polsky?” she said.
    The lump groaned.
    “Mr. Polsky?” I said.
    “Help me, for fuck’s sake,” he said. His voice was sluggish.
    We lifted him onto our shoulders. “What happened?”
    He didn’t answer. His knee was at a weird angle to the rest of his body, and I think he had been passed out. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital,” I said, which is a sentence that sounds like a hospital-TV-show joke until you have to say it.
    That roused him. “Gotta file.”
    “It can wait,” said Alison.
    We wedged him into the car and took him to the hospital. Once we got him there the nurses put him on a stretcher, and he disappeared for two hours, while we sat and waited.
    “We should stay here, right?” I asked.
    “Obviously.”
    “Rix has called me twice.”
    “Ignore it. Or text him.”
    Finally the nurse came out to find us. “You can see your friend.”
    “C’mon,” I said.
    “No, wait,” said Alison, “let’s get him something hot.”
    The soup we got him, honestly, I think, won John Kerry the caucuses in Iowa. Actually that’s absurd—he likely would have won anyhow—but it seems to me now there’s at least a chance that the last few thousand votes we needed to get to a plurality came out of that odd and fortuitous night.
    Polsky was in a hospital bed in a curtained-off area, his face crimson red. As we knew him he was so solid, unusually midwestern, but he now looked different, ebbed down into nothing. “Frostbite,” he said, “and a fucking broken leg. It just gave way right underneath me. I passed out.”
    “Here you go,” said Alison and gave him the soup and a cup of hot tea we had bought him, too.
    To our surprise, he started to cry. “You have no idea,” he said.
    “No idea about what?”
    “You have no idea” was all he would say. I wondered if he had a wife.
    “Is there anything else we can do?”
    “Anything else ?” he asked. “Besides saving my life?”
    “Someone would have found you,” I said.
    “Maybe not,” Alison said. She was more ruthless than I was. “Anyway, it was lucky.”
    Polsky shook his head. “Lucky. I was going home to file, I was gonna go play the big guy at O’Leary’s, tease people about the pick, have everyone buy me drinks, not tell shit to anyone.” O’Leary’s was the bar where the staffers and the press met up every night and drank, a clearinghouse of sorts. He started to cry again. “I mean, Christ in a fucking Chevy, right?”
    “Who’d you