The Fires of Orc

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night,

and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

Sun Tzu

From the day of the Dunlap story, the Markus campaign was a runaway train. It steamed full ahead, unswerving and unstoppable. On October 19, exactly two weeks before the election, we held comfortable leads in eight states and were within a point of the lead in four others. Nationwide polls had us in a virtual dead heat with Bradley, a few points ahead of Smith, but we didn’t pay attention to nationwide numbers.

Nationwide polls meant nothing, of course. I argued frequently throughout the campaign with all manner of half-wits who cited nationwide poll numbers. The only polls that really mattered to us were polls in the twenty-five cities where we had a shot and where we had invested practically our entire effort. We had internal polls to track those cities and we led in most of them.

The campaign was achieving its mission in the most populous states we could get, states dominated by twenty-five cities where Markus was the most popular man in memory. Most pundits couldn’t see it yet and the few who could doubted their own calculations. We were on our way with relentless force to winning just eight states and thereby taking the whole prize. The White House was a fortnight away.

The morning of the October 20, I woke up and found an email that came in overnight. It was from Lydia and was addressed to me, with copies to the Campaign Director and Markus. It read simply, I’m sorry.

Five days had passed since the confrontation in my office. Lydia had not been to work and I had not heard from her. In five days, the extent of our communication issue was that one email:

I’m sorry.

I got a call from the Campaign Director asking what it meant. I told him, “Lydia told me a few days ago she was pursuing other options. I think she feels she has offered everything she has to this campaign and she wants to get a head start on her next opportunity.”

The Campaign Director asked, “She’s not a risk in any way, is she?”

“Not at all,” I assured him. “On the contrary. She’s one of us. If you happen to get any inquiries about her from employers or other campaigns or whatever, you can tell them from me that she’s the best they could possibly get. She has been an enormous part of our success.”

“So why is she leaving?” he pushed.

“Like I said, she’s just ready to move on to a new project. Lydia has unbounded energy. She needs a new challenge.”

“Whatever you say,” he muttered.

I knew well enough what her cryptic email meant. She was sorry for leaving with no notice, but she couldn’t stay on knowing what she knew, that is, knowing we had pulled one of the dirtier tricks in a game with a rich history of dirty tricks. But I wasn’t going to allude to any of that, not to the Campaign Manager especially. I had to put him off the scent of anything wrong. There were two weeks left. No time for getting a guy like that involved in a delicate matter. I needed him to shut up and stay the course.

Veronica was looking especially lovely that particular day. She smelled blood in the water. Lydia’s absence was hard not to notice. It had been five days since she stormed out. No one had seen her since. Veronica came to my office with coffee, cream no sugar.

“I thought you might need a fresh cup,” she said.

“Well aren’t you a doll,” I cooed back.

What amazing legs. I can still picture them.

***

“It’s ten ’clock, Old Timer,” says The Landlord.

“What are you, Big Ben,” I ask.

“Who’s that?”

“Never mind,” I say.

“I just wanted you to know what time it is. You’ve been sitting there a whole day. Are you okay?”

“I’m quite well. I promise.”

“Well that’s good.” He putters about the kitchen, arranging something, I know not what, clinking and clattering. He says, “You know, Old Timer, a few of us – me, Jackson, the Baker, a couple of guys from the docks – we’re making a trip next week out toward the hills. There’s a valley not far from here that we’re gonna go check out.”

“That sounds fun,” I say.

“Maybe. I hope so. But that’s not why I’m telling you.”

Oh for crying out loud. Where is this going?

“We’re going out there,” he says, “because there’s this guy, maybe you remember him, Chad, a red-headed guy, had a goat and used to sell milk. Do you remember him?”

“Sadly no,” I say.

“Well it’s not important, but anyway, he’s a really good guy and last year he set out to this valley where he heard there was a community growing up. He went to see if he could join up and, well that was a year ago and just the other day we heard from him. He sent word with a caravan coming this way that they have a farm and stables and a lake and clean air and everything and he says if we come out there we can join up with the rest of them. They’ve got a few dozen people already but they need strong men.”

“I see.”

“Yeah,” he says, “so I was kind of hoping you’d go with us, you know, just to check it out.”

“I hate to break it to you,” I say, “but I’m not a strong man.”

“I don’t mean you,” he says. “We’re all strong enough. But we don’t know what you know. If this place is what he says it is we’re going to take our families out there, or rather they’re taking their families. I’m going with the baker and his daughter.”

“I’m flattered that you hold me in such high opinion,” I say, “but I know practically nothing about farming.”

“No,” he explains. “We know about that, or at least we know enough. But we’re talking about starting a town, maybe a real society, you know, like they had in the old world. And we don’t know anything about that. We need to know about rules, and laws, and government and stuff like that. We need to know about how to choose who’s in charge and how to get rid of him if he’s no good. We need to figure out how to make sure everyone gets enough but no one gets too much. You know about those things. You can remember them and you can teach us about them. We’re strong and we’re willing but all put together we don’t know half of what you’ve got locked away in that old head of yours just going to waste.”

An invitation to a post-apocalypse commune, of all things.

“Does it have a name,” I ask, “this pastoral Utopia?”

“It’s called Valle Escondido. That means ‘Hidden Valley.’ According to Chad, it’s about half-Mexican, so that’s how come the name. But that doesn’t matter. You can teach everyone to speak proper English, even me.” He chuckles at his self-deprecation.

“I’ll have to think about your offer,” I say, “I don’t know if I could even make the trip. I’m pretty broken down you know.”

“Well the baker has a truck nobody knows about. He says it’s an old army truck from before the fires. I don’t know if that’s what it is or not but it’ll carry dozens of people.”

“He has a truck, does he? And how does he propose to power said vehicle?”

“You know the still he runs out behind the bread ovens? He’s been making pure alcohol. He and Jackson have got the truck running. I was there when they started it up. They’ve been working on it for a year. Jackson’s been reading books and studying drawings and stuff. It runs. I’m telling you.”

I’ll be damned. A truck. “May I consider it for a day or so? It’s rather late at the moment and I have some reading to catch up on before I go to bed.”

“Sure,” he says. “Take a couple of days. But if you’re planning to read, you ought to get started. You’ve been sitting in that chair the whole day with that book on your lap and I haven’t seen you crack it yet.”

“I’m working up to it,” I say.

“Must be a pretty awful book if you can just sit and stare at it all day.”

Poor Joyce, panned by the illiterate in a crumbling hovel a hundred and fifty years later. That seems apt. And the Landlord, that poor soul, duped by wishful thinking. Just over the hill there is a better world waiting him and his band of optimists. And he really believes it. How can I tell him there is no better place than here. There is no world but this. There is nothing anywhere that is not as it is everywhere. I know what’s out there and it’s not what he thinks.

I remember thinking as he does, both before the fires and since. I recall hearing and believing so many fabulous tales.

I’ve heard there’s a place where all the rocks are piled straight and thick against the wind and the black soil runs soft beneath cool grass. There the old men, so they say, sit on benches in the elm-spread shade smoking pipes, long plumes curling blue around white whiskers, and the women laugh and gossip, tending to the day’s business while young men chop wood. Boys there shed their shirts to wrestle in the sun, while girls hide freckled smiles behind small hands, pretending not to watch. They say it’s not so far away, this place, but I’ve never been there and I’ve been everywhere.

I’ve been everywhere and everywhere I’ve been the rocks spatter themselves in mined fields to turn ankles, and the trees, too, send their roots in snarled runs beneath the sparse grass to stub the toes of barefoot wanderers. And where there are old men they pass their slow days grieving times gone and loves lost while women grunt and sweat under labors left undone by cheats. And young men chase fleeting fancies while children seek the shadows to remain unseen. So it is everywhere I’ve been and I’ve been everywhere.

Some say there’s a place where fanfares soar to heaven and the lift of strings lightens the heart as drums pace untiring steps. But everywhere I’ve been, those who dance are thought daft by those who despise the music.

They tell me there’s a place where night never falls, a place where even as day lets down the sun clings to earth’s edge throwing frail streaks long and orange against gray, and in that place when sleep comes it comes peacefully to those who need never fear the dark. I want to think they’re right, but I’ve been everywhere and everywhere I’ve been darkness stalks the light and with benighted countenance the one kills the other, painting the world black in treachery. In that blackening night, wherever I have been, what sleep comes to chambered masses comes with fits and screams at nightly horrors, and sleepers’ dreams are a trifle compared to what demons prowl the pitch outside – whirling mongrels on dusted trips, dead pools of clotting decay and gap-toothed whores selling greased loin memories to johns who howl tragically into the gale, letting slip in one illicit moment the gathering tempest of their piteous desire.

There are those who tell of a place where money rains down and a man need only scoop up a fist of clanging silver to stuff his pockets. They say that in this place mothers never want for groceries, nor children for shoes, nor yet the old and sick for care. In this place the abundance of all, they say, is available to any in need. But I’ve never found a place like that. Everywhere I’ve been hope recedes with the prayers of generations while poverty and apathy abide. Everywhere I’ve been there’s despair and unmet need and unchosen suffering and undeserved want. It’s the same everywhere I’ve been and I’m telling you, I’ve been everywhere.

It’s the same all over. Always has been; before the fires and since. Men who bend their backs and knot their forearms stiff by day against the levers of the cold machine return home by night to find themselves fleeced by the mounting cost of just getting by, their accounts picked clean by the price of a life their honest labor can’t buy, and as often as not they run, knowing not whereto, leaving behind bare cupboards, shattered faith and the tear-damp eyes of women turned wooden, incapable of trust. And mothers everywhere move from one moment’s belief to the next consternation and know, in the stretch of endless time, there will not come a day when they no longer fear the knock at the door that brings to their besieged hearth another notice, another slip, another missive to darken the debt shadow in which they wake each infernal day and see their lean children off to gladiator academies to survive another round while they, the mothers, waste their beauty on anguish and squander their efforts on a rich man’s enterprise from whose bounty they remain forever barred. And the children grow vile, calloused, resigned to emptiness far too young and in their empty eyes fade the dreams of youth while in their hearts are woven black strands of apathy and avarice. Curiosity shrivels as apathy blooms. All this goes on while the sick, the old, the weak and the infirmed find neither shelter from the storm nor comfort in their dying and past them speed the animated figures of life in blurs, never pausing to fix eyes upon the evidence of something in this ugly world gone horribly awry.

And it’s like that everywhere.

I’ve heard things I no longer believe and some I never believed in the first place. But they were beautiful. All of them. I listened once to words rise on wings as eagles and I clutched them from beneath, rising on their lilt and promise, bending with the drafts and craning my neck to look down and see from above the smallness of it all below – the dark roofs of town, the shimmer of spreading meadow at its edge and the dots all about of the human swarm. But words no longer lift me skyward. They reach me now only as through a cracked door weakly and though I listen carefully, they’re just noise.

I’ve seen things I can’t describe, most of which I’ll never see again. I saw love splash green and real in spring and life glow red in autumn. I watched flame join with ice in rock on mountains sheathed in cloud. I saw the stretch of prairie reach the water’s edge and yield as creatures leapt rejoicing in their untamed zeal. Then too I saw death’s vise squeeze life’s pulp, leaving only dry bone and sinew. I saw a child’s mouth drawn in lines of hate, its eyes two dizzying twirls. I saw men kill with cold, blue steel and others rape the young and beat the old. I’ve seen things I cannot mention.

But the Landlord will seek his greener pasture, and would take me along! I could weep, but why should I when weeping changes nothing?