knew this was probably just going end up with him displaying his ignorance but he said, ‘Okay.’
‘What invention enabled the youth revolution of the sixties?’ Mr Horton leant back as the waiter delivered their meals.
Grafton thought about it for a moment and then, not wishing to offer a long list of suggestions, all of which would probably be wrong, just said, ‘What?’
‘The Roneo machine,’ said Mr Horton. ‘The spirit duplicator. It enabled student activists to cheaply run off hundreds of fliers with information about protests and demonstrations, distribute propaganda, announce meetings. They could hand them out on street corners, stick them up on noticeboards and walls. It gave every radical group their own little printing press. The big anti-war demonstrations could not have happened without a Roneo machine or a Fordigraph or a Gestetner. The Internet today is like a Roneo machine on steroids. Everyone is now a broadcaster.’
During this explanation, Grafton was trying to extract his knife and fork from a napkin that appeared to have been wrapped by someone trained in a cigar factory. As he ran a nail around the damask, looking for an edge as one might with a roll of sticky tape, Mr Horton continued.
‘Once, we elected farmers, miners or timber-cutters as leaders. We even had a Prime Minister who was a train driver. But in the modern world, these kinds of people ceased to “resonate”, as they say. The key to political success is “media presence”. ’
‘The Kennedy versus Nixon syndrome,’ added Grafton, finally freeing the cutlery from its bindings and sticking the now permanently curled napkin into his collar – parmigiana sauce being one of the most indelible fabric dyes known to humankind.
‘Exactly, my son. As a result, in America, we’ve seen actors elected to state Governorships and the presidency. Minnesota even elected a wrestler as Governor. And we have had the recent unpleasantness of a TV reality show host becoming POTUS.’
Grafton wasn’t sure what ‘potus’ was but it sounded like a nasty condition and he could think of no one who deserved to suffer from it more than Ronald Thump.
‘Actors and other celebrities are in huge demand to be “ambassadors” for various causes. And why not? Who better to promote awareness of sickness, poverty and disability than people who are healthy, wealthy and physically fit? And it’s a plus for the celebs because they get free publicity for “speaking out” about starvation in Africa or an endangered species without having to actually hand out food from the back of a truck in Somalia or hand-rear a quokka.’
Mr Horton paused to take a sip of wine that was an unusual green colour, and then leant in, as if imparting a confidence.
‘The problem is, of course, that there aren’t enough celebrities to go around,’ he said. ‘It’s almost impossible to find a celebrity who hasn’t already been signed up for some cause or other such as disappearing frogs or fracking.’
Grafton had to admit that he didn’t know there were frogs capable of disappearing. Perhaps, like chameleons, they had the capacity to vanish into the background. Fracking, he presumed, was some form of sexual assault.
‘The solution is,’ continued Mr Horton, building the tension, ‘to create your own celebrity using the Internet. If you can post things that go viral, you will get Followers.’
‘Like Jesus?’ said Grafton.
‘Very much like Jesus,’ agreed Mr Horton. ‘Once you get a critical number of Followers, you become a Presence, a Voice, an Agent of Change, a Political Force. If Jesus had the Internet he wouldn’t have had to go traipsing all round Judea; he could have sat home in Nazareth posting memes from his laptop – “Blessed are the poor in spirit”; “The meek shall inherit the Earth” – and watched them go viral.’
‘So now anyone can be Jesus,’ said Grafton, sipping his mineral water and pondering the implications of this.
‘Yes, providing they can come with some zingers like Jesus did.’
‘Have I come up with any zingers?’
‘Indeed you have,’ replied Mr Horton. ‘And as a result, your digital footprint is the size of King Kong’s.’
‘What have I been I saying?’ Grafton was intrigued to know what his digital doppelganger had been up to.
‘Everything and nothing,’ replied Horton. ‘Your utterances have had the virtue of lacking specificity because the Internet precludes any form of complexity. Ideas have to be reduced to a single phrase.’
‘Like “It’s Time, Stop the Boats, Make America Grate Again”,’ suggested Grafton with a mouthful of veal.
‘Yes.’ Mr Horton interjected quickly to stop the trickle of slogans. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘all this only applies to people who get all their information from social media. To the others, you are still the anti-Christ.’
To most people, this codicil would have come as a letdown but Grafton found it strangely comforting. In this mad new world it was a relief to find something that he was used to and seemed normal. One thing, however, remained unclear.
‘But with the new rules, the Australian population doesn’t choose the President,’ he said. ‘They’re chosen from a short list by both Houses of Parliament. How did I win that vote?’
‘Again, easily,’ said Mr Horton. ‘It is essential that the President have no fealty to any particular political party. You have worked for the People’s Party and the Workers’ Party and betrayed both of them, thus showing you can be relied on to have no loyalty to anybody or anything. You are absolutely neutral.’
‘I see,’ said Grafton, intrigued that these days everything that was once considered a fault was now a virtue. ‘So, Mr Horton,’ he began. But Mr Horton cut him off.
‘You know, Grafton, I really think it’s time you called me Lee,’ he said. ‘We’re not in school now. We’re both grown up, and pretty much in the same age bracket.’
Grafton furrowed his brow. How big a bracket was Mr Horton talking about?
Something didn’t ring true even to his egregiously unmathematical mind.
‘When you taught me at Forrest Hills High,’ he said, ‘I was fifteen and you must have been …?’
‘Forty,’ said Mr Horton.
‘That means you were …’ He tried to do the maths but got stuck.
‘I’m twenty-five years older than you,’ said Mr Horton in the same tone he used when leading Grafton through a simple science problem.
‘Which means you’re now …’ Grafton stopped again, not because he couldn’t add twenty-five to his own age of sixty-four, but because the answer did not seem possible.
‘Eighty-nine. In Earth years,’ replied Mr Horton.
Grafton was suddenly treading water in a sea of confusion. Mr Horton looked only a few years older than himself. Then he realised Mr Horton had been looking directly at him throughout the meal, not to mention reading the menu.
‘And I thought you were blind,’ said Grafton trying
