This week in the saga

The anniversary week, and the centre of the long winter. He had set a press conference for five o'clock on the sixth of January — his first since the ban — and on the fourth he cancels it, in a statement, blaming the committee and the press. The room stays set. On the sixth the man who took the office marks the day from inside the Capitol itself, on every network, and the exile's complaint is that his name was used to do it; his own answer comes the next morning, four thousand words long, calling what he watched the last gasps of an establishment on its way out. It is a week of enormous noise and total stillness: the anniversary of the day belongs to everyone else, and the anniversary of the silence — one year, that same week, since the account went dark — belongs to nobody at all.