The Fires of Orc

A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only;

not as a woman but as a Madonna,

a queen, a sphinx.

Saul Steinberg

My first two days with the Markus campaign I was the first person in the office and the last out. The third day I knocked off at four in the afternoon and met Veronica in the lounge of a stately old hotel a block away at Fifth and Broadway.

Nearly bereft of substance was the leggy blonde. I woke the next morning to the faint scent of vanilla, Veronica’s long legs wrapped in mine.

Human energy is a wondrous thing. Shared effort is the miracle bonding agent that joins any twosome, no matter how loose the natural fit. Where there is work being done, men and women elbow-to-elbow, there is an elemental process of inhibitions falling and trust rising, the recipe for delectable little unions. I imagine sometime in the darkest prehistory stooped ape-men realized the danger of co-mingled labor and took steps to prevent it. It’s not that women can’t hunt and men can’t gather; it’s that doing so side-by-side would lead to the inevitable, and that inevitability flouts the first commandment of humanity – Thou shalt guard thy conquests. Neanderthals knew better than to put men and women together at work.

We forgot many things in my time, including the lessons of the cave. In my time churches sent youth groups to work on community projects, pubescent boys and girls in little platoons singing together, sleeping in adjoining tents. There’s no more potent aphrodisiac than a cocktail of hormones and the Holy Spirit. It’s no wonder new little Christians kept popping up. And if the superstitious order of Twenty-First Century children could come together through sweat and common purpose, what predictable conjugal goings on would attend to the high-stakes office environment where carnality was as important as any other faith?

So yes, Veronica. A joy. I don’t regret it a bit.

There was, of course, the axiom in my day that one ought not dip one’s quill in the company ink. I never cared for that axiom and never observed it. Why would I procure my own inkwell when the company’s was so bountifully full? To mix metaphors, the grass may indeed be greener outside the company fence, but it’s damnably far away. I’d sooner graze where I stand and grow fat on familiar grass. Honestly, how green does grass need to be? The grass within my reach was always green enough for me.

But then I was never a company man. My itinerant ways meant plenty of inkwells in which to dip a quill, plenty of untrammeled green grass on which to feed. In eighty years I have only rarely put down a root I could not just as easily pluck up when the moment demanded. Regretful though I am, at times, about my impermanence, it gave me the freedom to move about, laden only with my books and my next ambition. It’s a fair trade. The key to the scoundrel’s way is simple: If you think you can’t live without a thing, get rid of it. You’ll keep on living. I promise.

Veronica woke with a start and grabbed her phone from the nightstand.

“Oh my God,” she yelped, “I have to be at work in an hour and I still have to go home and change.”

“Not to worry,” I told her. “I’ve got you covered. I’ll tell them I asked you to stop by the printers for me. Take all the time you need.”

“You are so sweet.”

“Aw thanks. Just being a team player. And actually, I wondered if you wouldn’t mind stopping by the printers for me. Can I call you a cab?”

I was in the office an hour before Veronica arrived – in a fantastic pencil skirt and black pumps – with a box from the printers. I sent an intern to carry it upstairs. Seeing me at the top of the stairs, Veronica waved sweetly. I shot her a quick wink. Damn it, I thought, how am I going to cut this one loose? The question was no sooner asked than answered when my eyes beheld a vision, a radiant thing, Venus in flats, a tomboy beauty amid the bustle of the bullpen in whose penumbra I fell enchanted, bewitched at first beholding.

Lydia was the youngest member of the campaign’s full-time staff. In my first two days on the job she had been in San Francisco helping to set up a field office. Lydia’s official title was Communications Coordinator but that was on paper. In practice she was responsible for creating print materials and online content. In two days I had undone nearly everything she did in the preceding month. I sensed an impending confrontation. I didn’t fret about that. An entirely different kind of impending encounter seized my imagining.

Lydia wore a hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater. A Grogan College girl. Good old Grogan, Polyanna U, America’s only four-year institution offering a double major in daddy issues and naivety. Originally a women’s college, Grogan became co-educational in 1969, years before the rest of America joined the Great Inter-Gender Hug-a-Thon. Lydia, like all Grogan girls, came from a bubble of tolerance and believed her core values would spread without opposition, given enough exposure. If only the world could enjoy for a moment the joy of Grogan progressivism then prejudice, fear and greed would most assuredly be relegated to our barbarian past. I knew the type. I was willing to deal with it, in Lydia’s case anyhow, at least for the time being.

She laughed too loudly. Three times in the minute I watched her from my lofty perch she tossed her fine head on her long neck and laughed as if making a point. We see that you’re amused, I thought. You don’t need to prove it.

When I saw her ask about the contents of the boxes from the printers, I retreated hastily to my desk and sat down, gathering breath and nerve for what storm would soon whirl its way up the stairs. I had a minute, maybe.

“Soup, Old Timer?”

“I beg your pardon?” I think he offered me soup.

“I wondered if you wanted some soup,” he says.

Well I’ll be. “What have you got?”

“It’s real chicken soup. I got the meat from the butcher. He owed me for a bet at the dog fights. It’s got carrots and celery too, from the garden.”

“Well then, since you’re offering, I gratefully accept. I would love a cup of soup.”

“Cup shmup. Take a bowl, Old Timer. It’s free.”

“As you like it. I would love a bowl of soup.”

“And how about a sandwich?” he asks.

“A sandwich? Truly?”

“I have a loaf of bread from the baker’s daughter.”

“I can see what you like about her.”

“Yeah. I have bread and cheese. Let’s have ourselves a sandwich and some soup. Whad’ya say?”

“I say thank you, again. Sincerely.”

Late morning. Noon draws nigh. Light still slants warm through the smoky glass. I have read none of Ulysses, but there’s time for that. This day, right now, I shall dine with my host, The Landlord. And then back to our story.

“Black and green? Are you kidding me?!”

I felt the storm gathering.

“Whose idea was this?

(It was mine.)

“And who the hell is that?”

(The guy upstairs who trashed everything you’ve done so far.)

“And where are the pictures? There’s nobody in here but the candidate. Where are my pictures? Where are the real Americans?”

(They’re dumped. Come on up and let’s talk about it.)

I heard the angry slap of ballet flats on the stairs.

Elf thin with a ripe mouth, her chestnut hair pulled tautly back, one shade more or one stroke less would be the ruination of a strange, irresistible composition. There was balance in her movement, and grace, but also a deliberateness, a styled edge turned out upon the world, a lance to proceed a mesmeric beauty. She bounded through the open door, pamphlets waving in her wild, small fists.

“What is this?!” she demanded.

“Good morning,” I said. “You must be Lydia.”

“You know who I am and I know who you are. That’s not what I’m here about.”

“Ah, I suppose not. I suppose you’re probably here demanding to know what happened to the pictures in the literature.”

“You suppose right,” she said.

I leaned back in my chair, “May I offer you a bottle of water?”

“No you may not,” quoth the lovely Lydia. “You can tell me why there are no pictures in these pamphlets.”

“I see we’re dispensing with courtesy. All right then. There are no pictures in those pamphlets because I had them removed. I took them off the website as well, and all the social networks.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Because they were pictures of people I don’t wish to see associated so closely with the candidate.”

“Pray why might that be?” queried the fair waif.

“Because they’re ugly,” spake I.

“They’re not ugly!” she huffed. “They’re real people.”

“And,” I rejoined to her delightfully furrowed visage, “So what? You say that like it’s a good thing. Do you think anyone cares what real people think or do? Everyone’s a real person and few of them matter. Nobody wants to hear from a person just like themselves. People want to hear from better versions of themselves. People like the people they want to be, not the people they really are.”

“This campaign, sir,” growled Lydia, fairly coursing with contempt, “is about real Americans.”

In daring riposte I answered, “I disagree. I think the campaign is about winning an election. Real Americans don’t matter unless we win. We sure can’t help any real Americans if we lose.”

“How can you be so shallow?” She asked.

“I don’t believe I’m being shallow,” said I with gallantry befitting the circumstance. “I’m telling you the truth. Good-looking people count for more than ugly ones.”

“So what are you suggesting? We should use models?”

“Absoulutey,” I said, “and the prettier the better. If I may say, I think you want us to use common people with common faces because doing so somehow says we like them even though they’re common. I think that’s convoluted bigotry. I also think it’s condescending and whatever it is, it’s wrong.”

Oh the lilt and flow of the power-lust waltz. How the thought of it moves me still!

“You have got to be the worst person alive,” she said.

“Maybe so,” I conceded, “and I think you’re a beautiful person who feels guilty about the advantages that come with good looks. That might be why you try to tone down your own assets with the pony tail and sweatshirts. Whatever it may be, I think it’s something you should work on outside the office. One shouldn’t let one’s issues enter one’s work life.”

“How dare you?!”

“I dare do anything to beat Bradley and Smith. That’s how I dare. I dare tell the truth even if it’s unpopular and even if it’s insensitive. And here’s the truth, madam – all things being equal, things aren’t equal. Good pretty people beat good ugly people all the time, at everything. I hope you accept that for yourself and even if you don’t, you need to accept it for the job ahead of us.”

She crossed her arms, looking down at the literature spread around the table. She sneered, “So I suppose you don’t want any old people.”

“I definitely want old people,” I corrected. “Old people vote. But nobody takes voting advice from their Aunt Edna. Lose the sad, old wrinkled folks. If you want an old woman, get any old diva in Hollywood with a passable facelift.”

“Do you have to be so offensive?”

“Apparently I do. You weren’t listening before. If you don’t like sexy old women, use sexy old men. Get anyone better looking than normal people.”

“Who do you think you are anyway?” she asked, to which I replied,

“I’m the one whose call this is. They brought me in here for a reason and I haven’t done anything I wasn’t asked to do. The literature and internet materials weren’t working.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then if we do this, it’s on you.”

“I sure hope so,” I told her. “Tell everyone in this campaign we’re dumping the riff-raff and going with pictures of good-looking people, and be sure you tell them it’s my idea.”

She spun and stomped out, pony tail wagging behind her, but her ardor lingered for hours, permeating the space around me with an intoxicating moxie, pushing me to new insights, new bold measures and strides a mile long.

Wow, Lydia. What a fighter.

Lydia’s protestation notwithstanding, there were plenty of pictures, just no pictures of the motley herd. There were instead pictures of Markus – radiant, strong but kindly, confident but approachable, perfect pictures of a perfect candidate. In time there were also pictures of a hundred other people, people who ordinary Americans wished they looked like. There were paid models, chosen scientifically from tens of thousands of faces. They did their part.

There were also new furnishings and new window treatments. Lydia winced as they were installed. I grew to love black and green, mostly because I chose them. I also chose a staffed coffee cart. Although I was, strictly speaking, a volunteer, the campaign gave me a modest budget. It was quite modest indeed with the coffee costs taken out. I spent the balance of my allotted funds retaining a squad of geeks to troll the quantum net for trends and tendencies. They were my own little info-tech army, pale-skinned mercenaries, pill-popping misanthropes with Red Bull addictions, spread around the country, connected through virtual communities, united by their common ostracism and their shared vernacular of acronyms and arcane idioms.

The most important minion in my cyber warrior ranks was a character known to me only by his online name, Theowulf. He was introduced to me, virtually, by a tech kid I employed on the Alexigin campaign. From a brief stint with a radical East Coast net privacy cell, my techie came to know of Theowulf, a man who was a living legend to the ultra-geek community. Aside from my initial video conference with him, for which he wore dark glasses and a hood, I had practically no direct contact with Theowulf, ever. My payments to him were sent in the form of blank money orders to a P.O. Box in Massachusetts. It was all so goofily cloak-and-dagger.

Theowulf was my crusher, a title he earned through his function, at which he excelled. If a subject or a person or a news story arose that threatened the image I was trying to create, Theowulf learned what I needed to know to crush it. Anything that might ever come to light was imminently crushable if you could find its weak spot. Theowulf had a laser focus for weak spots. With him on-board and the rest of the geeks enlisted, I had the team I required to start making Tom Markus the man America could not love enough.

In a week’s time, headquarters was overhauled, as was the website, the Facebook page, the Twitter account, the Tumblr blog, the Pinterest account, the Instagram images and the Linked In profile. I had the colors I wanted and the image. But the message lacked one thing. I didn’t yet have a slogan. Winners have winning slogans. You can’t properly brand a face without a word bite to underline it.

Slogans outlive presidents. In 1984 it was “Morning Again in America.” In 1992 it was “Putting People First” and in 1996 it was “Building a Bridge to the Twenty-First Century.” Those were okay, but in the new millennium, they got really vacuous and really good. In 2000 we got sold on a ’Kinder, Gentler Nation.” In 2004 we bought a “Safer World and a More Hopeful America.” In 2008 we needed “Change We Can Believe In.” That one ultimately did much better when it was shortened to simply “Change,” which led, predictably enough, to 2012 when we got the ultimate in sloganeering, one word, “Forward,” an adverbial noun connoting movement toward no destination at all, just ahead. A real master stroke, it was simultaneously meaningless and reassuring.

Since then the slogan mavens had slacked off. In 2016 they gave us “Make America Great Again,” as opposed, presumably, to ungreat, while in 2020 we got the quintessential lack of creativity, “Now.”

In 2024 Bradley dubbed himself “The Right Man at the Right Time,” and so he was.

Walter Bradley was a two-term Governor of Massachusetts who sailed to the White House on a tide of discontent. Bradley, a Democrat, was preceded as president by two different Republicans. Richard Widmore of Texas was elected in 2020 but resigned from office early in the fall of 2021 under indictment for fraud and insider trading, leaving the most powerful position in the world to his vice president, Wisconsin’s Vance Miller, who in barely three years as an installed president committed a half-million ground troops to conflicts in six different countries. Those two failed men followed a trio who together comprised a single presidency, a reign entered singularly in the textbooks as America’s forty-fifth. The Constitutional Crisis of 2018 and near war in the streets led to Widmore’s ascent to power through his commitment to law and order. He and Miller failed to restore either law or order but they did pass the reins of power peacefully to a successor. As an incumbent candidate in 2024, Miller was the perfect foil for Bradley, the latter of whom was an elegant, soft-spoken man with Quaker roots and a passion for diplomacy.

Were Markus not in the race in 2028, Bradley’s path to re-election would have been fairly un-impeded. However, coming up on a year before the election, it was obvious we pulled more votes from him that from his opponent, Brandon Smith, a two-term Republican Senator from Philadelphia who had a strong appeal with the resurgent Christian conservatives who had gone quiet for nearly a decade prior. In Smith the Bible Belt found a champion and with Markus cutting into Bradley’s presumed share of the vote, the “Soldiers for Smith” were emboldened.

Organized, zealous and unapologetic, the Smith team included the hardest-hitting political heavyweights of the era. They were a formidable force, even against the power of a popular incumbent like Bradley. The political cognoscenti unanimously dismissed Markus as a non-contender in the race, but early on his possible role as a spoiler was noted. It was generally assumed that were he not in the race himself, Markus would strongly prefer Bradley to Smith. It was dangerously ironic, then, that merely by being in the race Markus hurt the former more than the latter. We well expected a visit sooner or later from the Bradley people to point out this obvious conundrum. I feared Markus’s goodness. He could very well bow out with a clear conscience.

That didn’t work for me. I don’t forfeit. I needed to persuade our campaign that even if we did not win, we would not hand an election to Smith, a man who, among other bizarre acts, twice quoted from the Book of Revelation on the floor of the Senate. In 2026, Smith enjoyed one of his more cockamamie moments during a Fox News interview, telling his inquisitor that he respected the rights of individual communities to instruct their children in “whatever scientific mumbo jumbo they believe is best,” adding that, “As for me and mine, I see no reason to question the word of God. Why is a rock-picker less preposterous when he says the world is six million years old, or six billion, or six trillion, than I am when I tell you that according to the Lord and all his prophets, it’s six thousand? Six thousand years is old enough for me.”

That really happened, which in itself is unremarkable. Many a bumpkin has aspired to high office with not enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole. What mattered is that roughly a third of Americans believed that a Nineteenth Century command of fundamental science was sufficient for a Twenty-First Century President of the United States.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s beliefs.

At any rate, in September 2027, we faced a Democratic incumbent and a Republican challenger, each with about thirty-five percent support in nationwide polls, while we had about fifteen percent with another fifteen percent undecided. We had Markus’s own money, a color scheme, rapidly improving web and print materials, a cadre of enthusiastic young workers and a very long shot at pulling off a miracle. I liked our chances.