The Fires of Orc

Women and cats will do as they please

and men and dogs should relax

and get used to the idea.

Robert Heinlein

Ihad to go on the road. If we were going to run for mayor in twenty-five cities, I needed to know what mattered to the citizenry in all of them. In San Diego it was simple – San Diegans cared about streets, clean neighborhoods, the absence of visible homeless people and seals, not necessarily in that order. The seal people were our most zealous. They were a subset of green voters, eco-maniacs, CAVERs, as we called them, short for citizens against virtually everything. Their cause was captured in the iconic face of a California fur seal, the round-eyed coyote of the sea. I never understood the seal people. Fur seals were not threatened. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they bred like big, blubbery, malodorous rats and dotted nearly two thousand miles of Pacific coastline. But on every spit of sand where a new pod rolled ashore to pup and defecate, there was sure to spring up a Save Our Seals tent occupied day and night by binoculared guardians of the pinniped wastrels, bound and determined to keep would-be surfers, sunbathers and other assorted evil-doers away from their beloved, stinking mass of lazy, flippered, shit-streaked lay-abouts.

The most we or any credible candidate might do to even begin to address the pressing concerns on the addled minds of the seal people was assure them that we cared about the ocean ecosystem and were committed to defending marine life against the encroachment of reckless development. All candidates for office in all levels of government had some variant of the seal people to contend with. They didn’t matter in San Diego any more than the Apache language preservationists mattered in Phoenix. Nut jobs don’t count.

So in San Diego, one paid lip service to matters aquatic and then had only to talk about investment in infrastructure – new streets, updated pipes, undergrounding the last remnants of antique power lines in some older neighborhoods, that sort of thing – and then shoving homeless people into some corner of town where they’d not be caught in the act of the most unforgivable of code violations, being visible while poor.

San Diego was, of course, a lock-down cinch for us. Every time a nun cried on television, Markus endowed another San Diego charity. The principle seal-shit beach in town was encircled by an eco-blending wall bestowed by Markus as a gift to future generations of nature lovers. There was a Markus Drive in the mid-town business district, free of potholes, well-lit, its sidewalks unlittered, electric docking stations at regular intervals, a bike lane in each direction. It was the model street for model neighborhoods throughout our model city and Markus had his hands around all of it. It would take an unimaginable blunder for us not to pull at least fifty percent in San Diego, and that fact gave us a boost in neighboring Los Angeles and Riverside counties, both of which had sizeable workforces connected directly or indirectly to Quark Metrics.

I had been to the field offices in Southern California often enough. I knew how to speak to the region and so did Markus. Those spots weren’t on my list to visit, but twenty-two other cities were. You can’t understand what makes people tick unless you wake up in their town, drink their coffee, walk their sidewalks, have lunch at their cafés, gossip at their happy hours and pass the evening in the lobby of their best hotel. If you do all those things for a day, day-and-a-half, you can know what matters and the rest is all a trifle. Anything you can’t learn in a thirty-six-hour stay, you’ll imbibe at the airport on your way out of town.

There were easy sources of information in the cities and the most bountiful spigots of intelligence could be tapped only by being on the ground. The web never could tell you what every cab driver knew, which bar to go to if you wanted to mingle with City Hall staffers after hours. Bartenders did their part, knowing who worked for whom and whose political bent was prone to outing with the proffer of a round of drinks. But it was the cab drivers who knew which bar to go to in the first place. Once there, sketching the essential political picture of a city was as simple as horning in on a loud mouth, buying a couple of martinis and asking a few leading questions.

In Miami I learned that what mattered most were property taxes, followed closely by defense of marijuana rights and conservative fiscal policy. Regarding property taxes, I drafted talking points for Markus outlining a plan that would grant homeowners a tax credit for local property taxes in excess of one percent of their home’s assessed value. The rationale behind the plan was to allow individual cities to determine their own revenue needs to address local concerns and invest in infrastructure. By granting some relief for residents of high-tax cities, Markus’s plan would avoid penalizing those cities with aggravated costs of living. It was an appeal to fair play for which Markus could never gain congressional approval, but it wasn’t really aimed at Congress; it was aimed at Miami voters, to whom it made great sense.

Thus was my experience in twenty-two cities in thirty days.

I stayed two nights in New York, unnecessarily. It just wasn’t a place you could skip out on after a night. It was too big, too busy, to rich a place to cut short. But even after two full days and nights, I left knowing no more than what I already knew – there was no universal agreement on anything in that city. Even sports loyalties were divided. A New Yorker could be a Yankees fan or a Mets fan, but not both.

Since nothing in particular really mattered most to New Yorkers, we decided to appeal to New York through the two issues that mattered more than any others, cops and money.

Politically speaking, New York City was a legal mafia. The Mayor presided over a political apparatus that encompassed five counties and employed more than three hundred fifty thousand public workers, more than all but three U.S. states. The Mayor controlled departments of corrections, education, public safety, water and power, sanitation and welfare, among many others. He was the boss of all bosses, more powerful than his own governor, more powerful in fact than most heads of state. We knew we needed his endorsement and in order to get it, we had to tread lightly on the issues of cops and money.

New Yorkers loved their cops, except the New Yorkers that hated them. Markus crafted his own message to address the issue, steering deftly wide of the fact that New York City police officers were a notoriously racist, deadly-force-addicted regime and focusing instead on their role in defending us from terror.

Most of us still remember that horrible day in 2001, he wrote, when terror visited our shores. In that moment that tested our resolve like no other time in living memory, the NYPD made each of us proud to be Americans…

It went on, vacuously.

About money, there wasn’t much we could say that Smith couldn’t say more convincingly. He was a small-government, big-business Republican. Wall Street and probably all of Manhattan were his. That left us Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx. We wouldn’t get them without the Mayor, a nominal Democrat whose tendency to buck Bradley was well documented. Some thought he had presidential aspirations of his own. For the time being he wasn’t endorsing a candidate. Markus would have to work on him in private. New York was out of my hands.

I kept up my appointed rounds. In Atlanta the issues had to do with the competing interests of a largely urban, comparatively well-educated Black majority, the cultural center of the New South, versus the reactionary White suburbs and their entrenched distrust of modernity and progress. Then too Atlanta was a hotbed of women’s issues. Race and gender were among our favorite talking points. Markus had a natural, mesmerizing way of bringing all colors and types into one big tent. He talked with ease about topics that still discomfited the ordinary American. He was a man of a world much bigger than one country’s messy history could match. We were strong in cosmopolitan Atlanta. It was our anchor in the South.

In Cleveland and Cincinnati the issue was jobs. We ran in both cities on the promise of a re-training initiative and a program to on-shore sectors of the old economy lost in the preceding quarter-century to the developing world. Ohioans didn’t trust Bradley. He was too white-collar for their taste. As for Smith, they not only distrusted him, they despised him. His trade philosophy – complete deregulation coupled with free-trade handouts to most of the globe – was the very summation of policies that had doomed the Rust Belt in the 1990s. Ohio was not certain but it was well within our reach.

Michigan, on the other hand, was ours. I spent three nights in Detroit and roamed its streets. I grew to love the place not for what it was but for what it was becoming. It felt very much as if Detroit in 2028 was in the starting blocks of a sprint to its own future, one that would feature the renaissance of its past glory and its emergence as a newly great American city for a new era. Detroit was deeply divided between its established inner city and gentrified outlying neighborhoods with their upscale coffee houses, book shops and bistros, all snatched up for a song a decade earlier by carpet-bagging hipsters with designs for a new city. The tension between the two created an energy that would drive the city forward. It provided Markus with a chance to display a talent for domestic diplomacy and innovation.

Detroit was only a half-mile from Windsor, Ontario, Canada’s sixteenth largest city. Windsor was an affluent city with an advanced manufacturing industry that provided the world with integral components for home and office technologies. A half-mile across the Detroit River is not so far and Markus proposed to provide tax-credit financing for a twelve-lane bridge from bank to bank with railheads at either end linking both countries. To address the needs of the entire Great Lakes region, he also proposed a new information management complex to support Quark Metrics’ forthcoming contribution to the Mars mission planned for 2036. The center would employ twelve thousand people. You could say Markus bought Detroit. It was a good buy.

Then there was Washington, D.C. The good people of the District cared about representation. One of the greatest ironies of the day was the fact that the seat of the world’s oldest continuous representative democracy was not itself representative, or even very democratic. The District of Columbia was not part of any state and was not represented at all in the U.S. House or Senate. Its citizens had practically no way of influencing the federal legislation that governed them exclusively. The Mayor was a figurehead and the district functioned as an enclave for power brokers who made their own rules.

Markus appealed to D.C. voters by proposing statehood for the district. Of course that would require a Constitutional amendment, which would never happen, but by speaking up for the hypothetical notion Markus won many friends in Capital neighborhoods. He also addressed those neighborhoods’ shortage of basic public services, a shortage directly attributable to their lack of representation. He pledged to invest in an overhaul of the system for managing public benefits in D.C. and in so doing virtually assured himself a win there.

Across the country, in San Francisco voters cared about the same First World problems that had vexed them for decades. San Francisco and the entire Bay Area had become a nearly feudal region, with extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of the tech-elites while the retail and public service workers who catered to them were locked in working poverty. What the working poor might have cared most about didn’t percolate up to the level of public concern. Instead, the issues of the day for San Franciscans were the issues that mattered to the Technorati.

Chief among those issues was the push for a zero-emission city. San Francisco was already an electric city almost entirely, abuzz with the whining, zipping, criss-cross of micro-cars and scooters. Its cable cars ran up and down its streets filled with snooty millionaires, content in their own righteousness because they eschewed oil and ate slow food. Pledging to support the continuous greening of San Francisco was simple enough. Every candidate did that.

But there were other concerns that by 2028 had become critical for the City by the Bay. For the burgeoning class of minor nobility in their thirties, children came as a natural enough by-product of human union, even though their parents had no idea how to parent them. The absence of childcare options in the city had prompted some tech companies to build their own on-site facilities staffed with imported teachers and staff. But for entrepreneurs and parents working at small firms the problem of what to do with one’s progeny was a problem that loomed larger than any other.

Markus proposed a plan that would incentivize the creation of day care programs for pre-kindergarten children through a blend of tax credits for construction, student loan forgiveness for teachers and other measures that probably wouldn’t really address the issue but at least signaled to San Francisco parents that he understood what mattered to them. That’s all he had to do. In fact, doing that allowed him to gloss over the other issues important to San Franciscans. Some of those issues, like the housing shortage, were very real. Others, like the push for enhanced food labeling, were not.

And so it went, in city after city, until I had a working understanding and a feeling in the gut for what twenty-two of our twenty-five bases were all about. I had no intention of visiting Las Vegas. That city was always about one thing, and there was nothing any presidential candidate could say that would make a difference to the gaming industry. I also missed San Bernardino. I would get there later, just an hour’s drive up the freeway from San Diego. The only city I really missed out on was Chicago. That place was still an enigma to me, as it was for two centuries to American politicians in general. Chicagoans knew what mattered to Chicagoans but even if they could have explained it to the rest of us, they refused to. To know Chicago would require more than a few days on the ground. I would get there soon enough.

In San Diego Lydia worked, as always, and she was in the office on my first morning back. In the month I was gone there were times when I stopped thinking about her, times when I busied myself with the background work that would become important in the coming weeks, arming myself with the weapons needed to win the biggest wargame of all, the battle for the ultimate throne. But inevitably night came, night after grueling night, with only the comfort of the occasional barmaid to hold back the impulse to call and plead my case to a woman back home who could get on just fine without me. Those were haunted nights, dark, engulfing, fitful nights with sleep and whiskey entwined in a struggle against the ideas of a mind beset by the demon of a conquest never to be. Each car horn outside each hotel, each flashing downtown light in a rain-streaked window a taunting, bedeviling reminder of my powerlessness to possess another who was never mine to begin with.

At work it was evident she still was not to be mine. There was no sign in her that she had missed me during my absence or that she was excited by my return.

“I hope your trip was productive,” she said.

“Busy,” I answered.

“Well welcome back,” was all she offered. “I have a lot to catch you up on.”

***

“Old Timer,” he asks, “how do you pass the time besides reading those books over and over?”

“What do you mean ‘besides’? Reading is enough for me. Does one need multiple hobbies?”

“Well it just seems kind of pointless, reading things you’ve already read. Don’t you know the stories by now?”

I lift an eyebrow haughtily, “Of course I know the stories but that’s not the point of reading. One reads for the sake of reading. A story well told, an idea well shaped, such things never get old.”

“See there,” he beams, “that’s the sort of thing I want you to teach the young people. Men like me can’t know what you know. We weren’t around to learn it and except for you it’s all gone now. I want there to be people in the world someday who can understand what makes a story a good story and how telling it one way is better than another. The world really needs what you have to share, Old Timer.”

He’s probably right. As busy as our new world is with just staying alive, it is nevertheless beginning to make time for reflection. One can hear children laugh at times. On the night air one can hear song and the loud conversation of people talking about nothing in particular. Perhaps finally, fifty years after the fires, there is time and purpose in sharing with these humble people the higher moments of a better time.

“It’s certainly something to consider,” I tell him.

“Well don’t consider it too long, Old Timer. You won’t live forever you know.”