World on Fire

OLIVIA NUZZI was a star political correspondent until scandal led her into exile—and to a California up in flames. In an excerpt from American Canto, our West Coast Editor takes stock of scorched earth

OLIVIA NUZZI

A politician s greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

I woke the morning after Election Day on the wrong coast of the right country. A brush fire had come charging across the road, through two houses, and onto the cliffs above the sea. But I did not know that yet.

All I knew was that my phone was ringing, and when I picked up it was a friend, walking along the Atlantic in Palm Beach, where I was supposed to be, and she was dodging sources and subjects, like I was supposed to be, and when the conversation turned to a sensitive topic, right around the time I was wondering why my coffee was not brewing, the call dropped. The power was out.

A few minutes later, the planes swooped down to spray the flames in the bluffs. I watched from the Pacific Coast Highway, as far away from my problems as I could get on land, which was not far enough.

You cannot outrun your life on fire.

On the coast, the streetlights and traffic lights and the lights in the big windows of the big houses turned to black. It was not until I made my way up to Zuma that I saw the fire had been right behind me. The pink clouds puffed up to the south. Then the flames peeked over the hill. The sky grew lighter as the fire swelled and made its way to the sea. I watched from the deck as the night turned orange. How many like the rattlesnake, his little soul swallowed without ceremony in one breath? And where would the coyotes go? They did not walk across the deck and leap into the garden tonight.

12:40 a.m., 100 acres burning.

I stand on the edge of the earth. I wander through the burned-up grasslands. Any fantasy of creation I understand as a fantasy of destruction too. In every spark of life, an ember of death. A trillion little deaths a minute, collecting quickly around your

ankles, tethering you to the beach, dividing you from the sea. Off the cliff over the Mediterranean and onto the cliff over the Pacific.

2:15 a.m., 850 acres burning.

As a child, I became convinced that death was not random, that life was the process of investigating what the point of it was, and as soon as you figured it out, in that very instant, you would ascend. God would eliminate you from this plane. He could not risk a leaker walking among the ignorant. The assignment was to crack the case for yourself. And when I would find myself thinking too hard about the central question, I would back away slowly, thinking, Well, I will return to this matter some other time when I feel more ready to possibly meet my end. What if I guessed correctly?

The unsolvable puzzle. Tripping once, on a balcony in Washington overlooking the National Cathedral. Smoking what I did not know was my final cigarette. Unless someone offers me a Capri, which does not count. The great cosmic riddle, I figured I had solved it. The joke was that the joke was never done being told.

4 a.m., 1,800 acres burning.

The wildfire is over my shoulder now, over the hill. The waxing gibbous moon is over my head. A thought bubble, it shines blankly. Across the country, the Politician is the guest of honor. Across the country with his wife. With Mike Tyson for some reason. People are mocking the photos, asking where I am, asking how she could stand there after all that.

I know how. The earth here is hot. Inside the bonfire, what evidence can I burn? I think of all I turned to ash in hotel rooms. I think of how you cannot burn a cloud. I think of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, how there were so many, how the officials did not know what to do with them, and how fire seldom seemed to occur, though the White House and the president's properties are studded with fireplaces. Too easy. I worry.

I worry about evil. If it is a force, if it is like the Santa Ana winds, if it may come on suddenly, if it may grab hold, if it may depart but not completely, if it may leave word, if the word might sound good, if I might again believe it. The snake charmer, the man-eater, the devil himself. Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, "Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin. " This politician did not wear one of those.

Midnight, 3,000 acres burning.

A politician's greatest trick is to convince you that he is not one. And what is a politician? Any man who wants to be loved more than other men and through his pursuit reveals why he cannot love himself.

People ask me now about anger. About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged? I think this over. I scan the terrain of my body. My chest, my spine, behind my belly button. I look for pale pulses of idle fury, waiting for the alarm to sound at the trip wire of my veins. There is nothing there. There is nothing there because I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

You cannot live in America without thinking about guns, without thinking that one day you might not live anymore in America, and the reason will be a gun. 46,728 lives ended in America in 2023 because of a gun. 27,300 suicides. 17,927 homicides. 604 police shootings. 463 accidents. 434 undetermined. On the 405, a billboard announces that gun injuries are the number one cause of death for American children. You think: A gun willprotect me from guns. Then you recall the statistic, that a gun in your home doubles your chances of dying by homicide. Still I loaded a gun. I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand.

I could blame all who reached for it, who fired in my direction, who dove as it fell to the floor, who fought to wrest control of it, who rose to stand over me, who emptied the barrel into the parts of me that seemed still alive. But the violence began with the act that preceded the shots and the struggle. It began when I loaded a gun and set it on my nightstand. I loaded a gun.

"I would take a bullet for you," the Politician said. He always said that. "Please don't say that," I said. I always said that. From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment.

I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny. I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. "Baby, don't worry," he said. "It's not a worm." A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all. He sighed. It was too late to interfere with what had already vaulted from the sphere of meme to the sphere of screwy legend, but at least I did not have to worry about the worm that was not a worm in his brain.

In Volcanoes National Park, no cell reception, except just over there, at the top of the slope of rock, for a few seconds. Long enough for the veil of paradise to be pierced by the bullet literal that had flown in Butler right at the president's head.

The Politician left the Midwest for the East Coast. The deal with the president had fallen through. The moon was big and gold and we marveled at this. "I do pay attention to the moon," he told me once. We had been born under the same kind of moon, the January waxing gibbous in Capricorn, 97 percent illumination, 39 years apart. "Do you think this means we're compatible?" he asked me. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe."

The spark, the flame, the rumor fulfilled. The labyrinth on fire. The

Palisades fire.

10:30 a.m., 10 acres burning.

10:50 a.m., 20 acres burning.

The winds returned at what was

described by officials as a "hurricane force" of 80 miles per hour. It had been in Southern California not just a drought but the driest nine-month period in recorded history. Billions of dollars to fund fleets of hundreds of fire trucks and aircraft and thousands of responders, plus the thousands more volunteers and furloughed prisoners paid as little as one dollar an hour for their labor, up against our more flammable world.

2 p.m., 700 acres burning.

3 p.m., 1,300 acres burning.

Past hairpin turns down canyon roads to the shore, firefighters threw up barriers, knocked on the car windows of people as they tried to flee, advised that there would not be time for traffic jams near the highway. Wildfire is a sprinter; flames grow as fast as three acres a second. Wildfire wins every race. Survival would require quick acceptance here. Escapees would need to abandon their cars, their belongings, and exit the disaster on foot.

Wives prepared. Husbands forgot. What they recalled, mostly, was the "good-generic" day before the burning began. "I had a bowl of apples," one man said. "I gave her some apples." His wife closed her eyes and smiled. "He gave me some apples."

By nightfall, the winds had grounded the helicopters. The fire swelled.

12:30 a.m., 3,000 acres burning.

9 a.m., 5,000 acres burning.

11:45 a.m., 12,000 acres burning.

1:30 p.m., 16,000 acres burning.

New fires broke out elsewhere, everywhere. In the Hollywood Hills near Runyon. In Altadena. North in Ventura. South in Orange. All of Southern California, painted orange. The wealthy summoned private fire departments. The poor found their emergency alerts delayed by hours. Of the 88 cities that make up Los Angeles County, 39 have the official designation Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. From the 405, the whole place in flames. At a distance what appears a cinematic apocalypse or dystopian war is, up close, a bunch of eyes stinging, lungs infected, lives disrupted, homeless displaced, memories destroyed, children terrorized, parents helpless and then distracted by calls to inept insurance companies.

The air was toxic, the ground a heap of rubble growing larger.

9 p.m., 20,000 acres burning.

8 a.m., 22,000 acres burning.

4 p.m., 24,000 acres burning.

Shots rang out. The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical. My phone rang again. "I need you to take a bullet for me," the Politician said. "Please."

It was the flag. When I close my eyes in search of the end or the start, the place at which before stopped and beyond which now began, that is what I see. The blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white, stretched and folded, pulled apart, undefined yet unmistakable, the flag. There was no one day, one moment, one event, one decision, one word that marked the change. There was the flag as it mutated from metaphorical to literal weapon, as it was marred by a corruption of the American character that could not be understood or even fully observed through the prism of the partisan binary. Which is to say that it was the flag, but it was not about the flag, not about notions of patriotism or nationalism or idolatry. It was the flag that thrashed in psychedelic distress, suggested a bend in lanes of reason, a tear in the fabric of consensus reality.

In this period of now, from 2015 to 2025, in which the man through whom the culture was synthesized achieved dominance, I found myself fixated on the flag, on the way the flag expressed how the country was warping, and yet the magnitude of this change could not be categorized appropriately or cataloged completely amid such amnesia. At the southern border or the White House or the Midwestern auto factory or the boat in the Atlantic or the truck rolling beside the Pacific, the very flag that had been clutched like pearls at the turn of the century was refashioned as costume jewelry. Red, white, and blue asphyxiated blue, gray, and black. Stars and Stripes a backdrop for the star of the country. One stripe remade a banner across which his campaign slogan crawled.

That it looked so unserious, the manner in which the symbol of a country was seized and perverted in violation of code and good taste to communicate tribal allegiances at once camp and seditious, was a sleight of hand. That those who did not participate in the process by which it was edited or did not dwell in places where such flags were flown were not inclined to be offended by the sight of them prevented theninclusion in the broader culture wars. Yet even the flags about which nothing seemed amiss were tricks of a kind, most of them made of plastic parts imported from a foreign adversary and assembled by low-wage immigrant workers and offered for pennies wholesale to mega-chains that advertised them as MADE IN AMERICA at markups of 15,000 percent.

As the edited flags waved strange and ominous, my job was to bear witness to the processes of American presidential politics, to travel the country and attempt to understand those who sought or wielded or influenced executive power. I had never been interested in politics, exactly. Iwas interested in characters, and as it happened there were lots of them in politics, and like all great characters they wanted something, would do whatever they had to in order to get it, and often they were delusional—but often enough to encourage delusion, delusions manifested in America. Almost as soon as I entered the profession, Iwas assigned to cover the dominant force, the president, the greatest character of all.

I came to see him as the mirror through which the country was reflected back at itself. The mistake was to think it possible to opt out of the picture he revealed. Those who tried found his concave surface made light into flame, that the heat warped even that which the flame did not burn as the held of his distortion sprawled ever wider, its imperial expansion across territories not a hostile takeover but a series of terms and conditions to which we had repeatedly and emphatically agreed.

We were primed to participate in the farcical parable in which the son of a businessman dreams of making movies, goes to Hollywood, comes home, becomes a businessman who thinks, still, of the screen, thinks of Hollywood, who makes himself a star as consolation, becomes the skilled practitioner of a screen art that perverts notions of truth and make-believe, who like many stars succumbs to tyrannical impulses and authoritarian fantasies because the compromise of his life feels like a loss of control, an expression of weakness, because it is, and whose fantasies, in a pretty good twist, are not his alone but are instead woven into a mass delirium that splits us into a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.

Everything seemed suddenly flexible. With all information available at all times to all people, all matters appeared potentially negotiable. Fine fractures splintered deep, fanned out far, cracked up for good. The parties were over. The system was moot. Vast interconnectedness and mass overstimulation gave way to individual isolation and nihilistic boredom so total that it all but invited the ascendant mob-mentality politics of comic relief and sadistic catharsis.

Our more flammable world. Arson, the national pastime. Self-immolation, well.

Events lost context. Words lost meaning. Denier. Nothing could be believed because everything was subject to change. Truther. Everything could be believed because anything was possible; this was at once inspirational slogan and active threat.

I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.

The man who cried dictator yesterday might be his deputy tomorrow. The man who condemned the violence might soon tell you there had been no violence at all. The woman might make official her concession but then refuse to concede the point. The man might refuse all concessions, and for his more total commitment to his truth, be rewarded with a prophecy fulfilled.

A promise was only a suggestion. A suggestion was only a joke, unless you were not moved to laugh; then the joke was on you.

In this reality, reality ceased to feel real.

In the news, the Politician offers a united front and a rewritten history. My vow of silence does not feel like enough. I wish to fall silent on myself too. I wish to sink into the sea. To flee behind the curve of the earth. To emerge a new shape, a stranger. To stop giving fake names in coffee shops. To never see myself, the character of myself imagined by others, viral allegory of hubris, female avatar of Icarus, stripped and left for dead in a pool ofwax. I do not wish to be understood, which no one seems to understand.

Birds of prey circle. It is inconceivable, it seems, that someone would choose to allow a crisis to go to waste, would not want to make of their attention more attention, would not want to reap some kind of short-term profit from the mess of their life.

The paparazzi, the calculating ones, write to tell me where their colleagues are staking me out. New York. Washington. Outside my brother's house, where they get into an altercation with a neighbor. Never anywhere I am. They think that if they do me this favor, I will cut a deal and agree to be photographed by them in exchange for what they advertise as control over my image. My Image, a ship that has sailed and sunk. The offer includes a promise that doubles as a threat: If I accept their terms, I will be left alone the rest of the time, which means that if I do not accept their terms, I will not be left alone.

They are outside my parents' house, one of them said. I asked him to let me know if he finds my parents; I have been looking for them for years. For the first time in awhile, I feel with some frequency griefs phantom limb. I should call my mother. I should see my father. I am always forgetting to do something, that is how their absence registers. Was I not somebody's daughter? Did I not mean to check in today? I vow to call more often in my next life.

In the discourse someone I have met before jokes about my murder. Others contact me to warn me that such a thing is not a joke but a possibility. I was not going to sleep anyhow.

People often, often people I do not know very well, reach out to tell me that I have appeared in their dreams. I wonder if this is because I sleep so little. If the version of me who fives on the plane of dreams tires of waiting for me to release her to action, if she goes out searching for places where she may exist without my permission, if she identifies the minds of those who have felt any kindness toward me, if she thinks that within their dreams she might get to live freely instead. I wonder, too, if this is a function of being a visible face but a veiled personality. If my impression contains empty space that renders me an adaptable idea and thus a useful device for subconscious minds. It is nice to think of this, that I might still be in someway, to someone, of use.

I mean to tell you as best I can what it was to face this unrealness, to stand so close that it seemed at times almost plausible, to tiptoe along the edge of the abyss, and to balance there just long enough to forget that the plates would soon shift.

I mean to tell you of the canyon where voices carried. The place where monsters spoke to me. Where I listened. Where I found that, as fortune or curse would have it, I knew the language of monsters. Where, with news on my tongue and tears in my eyes—the role of town crier I interpret literally—I ran back over the hill to translate for those who could not stomach the thought of standing face-toface with monsters but who required knowledge of monsters as the monsters accrued ever more power, as they revealed or converted ever more monsters among men.

I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want. That you feed the monster, and the monster wants only more. That here you have surrendered to the endless transaction, and through the terms on which you meet the monster you are transformed monstrous, too, for the day that the monster is done wanting is the day that the sun does not rise; want makes the monster as sun makes the day.

I mean to tell you that as I studied them, Iwas sometimes fooled. Fooled about their power. Fooled about my own. Fooled about the nature of power. Fooled most of all into thinking that anything was ever about anything other than power, which is to say the misconception of control, which is to say the misdirection of fear, which is to say the misprocessing of love and its absence.

Certain dramas you can count on. Empires fall at last. Heroes fail at first. And here I mean to tell you that character is not what you are in the end; character is the thing you cannot outrun or outgun that spars with fate all along. I refer now to my own. Witness and witnessed. When I slipped, Iwas swallowed whole. Straight through the plot, under the blade of the devices, and out the other side.

I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think.

I mean to tell you that, before I was consumed by it, I could not have told you what it was.

The flag winked beside the lanes that bent to borders that faded to barriers that fell to the lines I crossed. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.

When I open my eyes I see, still, the blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, ofwhite.

I mean to tell you now as best I can.

Copyright © 2025 by Olivia Nuzzi. From the forthcoming book American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi, to be published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.