The Fires of Orc

All we are not stares back at what we are.

W. H. Auden

Ireceived a text message mid-morning. Stay put, it read. It was The Soldier. He was coming to talk. A forboding chill went down my back. The Soldier was a serious man.

He arrived within a half-hour and said, “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shut up and come with me.”

We went directly from headquarters to my home, walking in silence the whole way.

Once inside he got straight to the point.

“What does she know?” he asked.

“What does who know?”

“The girl, and don’t play stupid with me. I’m serious as a heart attack.”

“About the campaign?” I asked. “She knows everything.”

“No god damn it, about the black lady.”

“She has her suspicions,” I confessed.

“What kind of suspicions?” he pressed.

“Well she confronted me about it. She said it seemed like something I would do and she reckoned Markus knew about it and financed it.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told her she was wrong.”

“How convincing were you?” he asked.

“I guess not very. She quit in disgust.”

“This is a bad thing,” he said. “This can’t come back to him.”

“I know,” I said.

“No you fucking do not know!” he blared. “You have no idea, not the faintest clue how serious I am about this. This thing will not get back to him. I want you to look at me. Look at me damn it!”

I looked in his eyes.

“I promise you,” he said, “I will shut this thing up dark as coffin air. Don’t think you can manage this. It’s not getting managed. It’s getting crushed. I want you to stay home until I tell you to go back to the office. Is that clear?”

“Crystal clear,” I said, “but I really think…”

“You’ve done enough thinking,” he said. “I want you right here. If you get hungry, call for a pizza. If you get horny, call dial-a-hooker. You’re staying put until further notice. Got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

And he turned to leave but stopped when he received a call. He stepped into my bedroom to take it, closing the door behind him.

In the awkward position of waiting in my own living room for a task master to emerge from my bedroom, where he’d taken himself to avoid my overhearing him in my home, I felt suddenly very alone in the world. I wasn’t afraid of The Soldier, but his mere presence alerted me. My mind raced. What am I missing? And it came to me – Theowulf. There was someone else, someone who could tie the whole thing back to me and to the candidate. There was a berserker unchained somewhere out there and with a few keystrokes he could bring the whole matter crashing down. He had the records of our conversations. He could document my visit to his place. He knew everything. Theowulf, I thought, damn.

The bedroom door opened.

“So,” said The Soldier. “you’re staying put right here. Do you need anything from the office?”

“No,” I said. “I’m all in the cloud. I’m good here with my desktop and tablet.”

“Whatever that means,” he said. “You just stay where you are. I’m going out for about a half-hour. But first I need you to tell me everything I need to know about you and her.”

“Me and Lydia?” I asked.

“No, you and the Virgin Mary. Damn it son, tell me what I need to know. You were fucking her, weren’t you?”

“We had a relationship outside of work…”

“This is not the HR department kid. Talk like men-folk.”

“Yes,” I said, “we were sleeping together. Pretty much everyone knew it.”

“Yes they did,” he said, “including me and that’s exactly how I want you to answer any questions about the two of you.”

“Questions from whom? What are you telling me?”

“It’s all gonna be okay,” he said. “She’s dead.”

An hour passed. I was at home, alone with my thoughts. Lydia was dead. I heard him clearly. He said she was dead. The fact crowded the front of my mind, sharing space with Theowulf.

She’s dead, I thought, followed up by, and Theowulf knows everything!

I have to get to him, I thought, but I can’t let it be known that I’m trying to get to him. With a man that unbalanced one couldn’t be sure how far trust could extend. If he sensed panic, if he got the slightest sense of concern, if anything was out of the ordinary, Theowulf could make havoc. Weakness, for him, was opportunity. He did not ply his craft for any recognizable cause. His penchant was for disorder, disruption of predictability. He believed in nothing at all except that all order was bad. Chaos was his objective, the destabilization of established conventions his life’s mission. I had to get to him.

I sent an email via a back route he had given me.

Need to talk, it read. Nothing more. Perhaps he would think it was a job order. Maybe I could lure him into a conversation and get at him in a round-about fashion without spooking him. He couldn’t be approached directly. There was no way I could let him know in advance what I needed to talk about without giving him a reason to take his information out into the cyberverse and do with it what damage his fiendish might could conceive, damage that was unthinkable to normal minds, even those given to conspiracy and intrigue.

There was an insistent knock at the door.

“I’m back,” came The Soldier’s voice. “Open up.”

I opened the door and found him in the company of two men in cheap suits, detectives by the looks of them. I welcomed the forbidding trio. The Soldier sat at the table in a chair turned backward. The cops sat on the couch. I took a seat across from them in an armchair.

“Sir, we need to talk to you about your relationship with Lydia Black,” said the first cop. He was a middle-aged man in reasonably good shape, broad chested and thick-necked, a shock of black hair showing just a few greys here and there. He wore his collar open, his tie gaping below his whiskery throat.

“Sure thing,” I said.

The second cop took down my basic information on a notepad – name, date of birth, all that – as the first asked the standard questions for such situations. The second detective was a young Hispanic man with perfect skin, thick, shiny hair and a diamond stud in one ear. They were a couple of nearly unbelievable stereotypes. I expected at any time one of them might hit me with a phone book or threaten me with prison rape if I failed to cooperate. But no such comic relief occurred.

“What can you tell us,” asked Cop One, “about your relationship with the deceased?”

“I can tell you it was brief, but significant. I’ve known Lydia for about a year now and we were ‘involved’ for part of that time. She worked for me, mostly out of my office. I spent most of my waking hours with her this past year.”

“I understand the two of you were prone to arguments,” he said. “Would you say that’s accurate?”

“Lydia was passionate,” I said.

“Can you explain that?” asked Cop Two.

“She was an intense woman. She was passionate. I don’t really know how else to put it.”

“You mean romantically?” asked the senior of the pair.

“What?” I asked. “No. I mean, yeah, I guess. But that’s not what I was trying to suggest. I mean she had strongly held opinions. When we disagreed she stood her ground.”

“And then you would fight?” asked the younger.

“No. Sure, we argued. That’s what people in our position do…”

“You mean people in a sexual relationship?’ he pressed.

“No, god damn it, I mean people who work closely together on a campaign – what is this anyway?” I fumed.

“They’re just questions,” said the older one. “We need to determine the full nature of your relationship, particularly over the past few weeks.”

The Soldier jumped in, “Son, these detectives are trying to establish what contact you might have had with Lydia since the last time you saw her.” Turning to the first cop he added, “And you might be a bit more sensitive. The young man has had quite a shock.”

“Okay then,” said the older cop, “perhaps you can just tell us what contact you have had with the deceased since the last time you say you saw her.”

“None,” I said. “I received her email this morning. It said ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t really know what to make of it.”

“And where were you last night?” asked the second.

“I was at work until about seven o’clock and then I was right here the rest of the night.”

“Is there anyone who can attest to that?” asked the first.

“I just fucking told you,” I snapped, “I was here at home.”

“Alone?” asked the second.

“What difference does it make who I was here with?” I asked.

“It could make a great deal of difference, for you at least,” said the first.

“Just answer the question,” said The Soldier. “It’s alright.”

“Veronica was here.” I said.

“Veronica?” asked the first.

The Soldier answered for me, “She’s the receptionist at campaign headquarters.”

“I see,” said the cop, adding “Do you work with any women you aren’t sleeping with?”

I growled, “What I do in my off-time…”

But The Soldier cut me off, “I have tracking on both their phones. I can confirm they were both here the entire night.”

“Why exactly am I being questioned?” I demanded. “Am I a suspect or something?”

“No sir, you’re not,” said the older cop. “It’s routine. We need to speak with love interests in cases like these.”

“Cases like these?” I parroted. “What kind of case is this, exactly?”

“This is what we call a ledger,” he said. “Kind of a quasi-suicide.”

“Quasi,” I pressed. “What does that mean?”

“When one is despondent,” he explained, “and treats oneself with a mixture of pharmaceuticals and alcohol, well, it’s just one of those unfortunate tragedies. It’s foreseeable, but not necessarily deliberate, a ledger. Maybe someone should have seen it coming, but in the end it was an accidental overdose, at least that’s the working theory. But we might need to ask you some more questions in the future. We’ll need you to stay in town for at least a few days.”

Lydia was one of the thirty million Americans with a prescription for Alexigin. Like almost everyone else who took the drug, she used it to cope with the vicissitudes of post-modern life. When reality was too much, Alexigin and a bottle of wine made it tolerable.

Along with a patented serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, Alexigin contained a low dose of diphenoxylate, a chemical nearly identical to the drug Demerol. The miracle of Alexigin was in the toxic combination of anti-depressant and narcotic, which made it the ideal substance to soothe anxiety without deepening a case of the blues. It was a legal speedball. The right blend of cocaine and heroin would have worked just as well, but Alexigin had better marketing.

Of course, like any other narcotic Alexigin was habit-forming, which was good for business. It was also prone to overuse, which was bad for consumers. Lydia was far from the first “quasi-suicide” attributable to Alexigin and alcohol. By the time of her death more than a hundred other people in the U.S. had already succumbed to the fatal blend of a few too many pills and one too many glasses of wine. Alexigin was banned in Europe a few months later. Americans kept popping it under doctors’ orders right up to the fiery end.

The whole farcical “need you to stay in town” routine was both silly an unnecessary. I had nowhere to go. With fourteen days left until the election, my work was effectively over. If the votes weren’t there already nothing would get them there. It was close, agonizingly close in the must-win cities where we had staked everything. I had fingers to cross and not much else to do in the time left. If it didn’t rain in the key areas, if the traffic wasn’t too congested, if everything worked according to the plan, we had the race won. But it was still so close. Doubt clouded my thoughts, stealing sleep and pushing me to the edge of delirium.

Lydia’s death was ill-timed in several respects. In the first place, there was little time for ceremony. Had we lost her a month earlier we might have called the staff together for a moment of sensitivity, time for reflection on the life taken from us too early or some such thing. But it was crunch time. Everyone had a phone to answer, a last minute statement, an eleventh-hour reply to get out, something too urgent to take time out for a staffer who just days earlier stomped out in a huff.

In the second place, I personally had something more pressing at-hand than the loss of a difficult love interest. There was, somewhere afoot in the wide open world, a dangerous mind. I needed to find Theowulf and keep him quiet for another fourteen, whatever the cost.

While I dwelt on the problem, Markus made a statement:

Today we lost a friend, a colleague and a brilliant woman with a life full of promise. I and my entire team are stunned and saddened by the death of Lydia Black, a key member of my staff whose contribution to this campaign is one instance in her brief lifetime of devotion to advancing the common good. Lydia was an intelligent, engaging, powerful young woman who brought dignity and grace to an arena often characterized by coarseness and avarice.

I continue on schedule today with my planned campaign stops because our cause remains important and our success will honor Lydia’s memory. But while I work to ensure that our message reaches all Americans, my heart is with Lydia’s family, her mother, father and siblings, whose grief I can only imagine.

In time we will know much more about the cause of Lydia’s tragic, premature death and whatever we learn, I pledge to use the lesson of her life and the weight of our loss to inform our policies in the future – policies regarding mental health, the pharmaceutical industry, and our general comportment as a society that cares equally about each of its members.

It was pure Markus. He could take scandal and make it into a moment of personal advantage and he did so seamlessly. There was no hint of hypocrisy in his statement and no reporter thought to ask if Lydia’s recent experience with the campaign might have contributed to her despondency. What few reports there were merely related the event of her death and Markus’s call for awareness, his obvious concern for Lydia’s family and his capacity to put the solemnity of the occasion ahead of business as usual.

“In the last, desperate days of a year-long race for the world’s biggest prize,” wrote one junior press corps member with a gift for purple prose, “Markus showed that not even a pursuit of this magnitude can distract him from his essential humanity. One may think many things about the Markus campaign, but about Markus the man – one cannot but like him.”

There are in any time a few of us touched by fortune, fated to do no wrong, their errors happily spun around to good purpose, their every step cushioned by a forgiving ground. Markus had a twenty-six-year-old staffer die of an overdose and it actually improved his position.

But still, Theowulf. You will ask, no doubt, why the obsession with one geek who might or might not try to make something out of a story that was ultimately unprovable and at any rate, yesterday’s news. The thing is, Theowulf was no ordinary geek. What’s more, when you make a promise to a billionaire, you keep it. I told Markus the Dunlap story would not come back on him. He was an inch away from the presidency and I wasn’t ready to break my word to a president. That’s not good business. Theowulf could ruin me. I would not let that happen.

And although the race was far past the point that any unseemly rumor about Markus might actually make a difference, that wasn’t really the point. Theowulf was not the sort of hacker who cared about the outcome of political races. He was the kind who enjoyed destroying powerful men. What hell he might unleash after the election troubled me much more than anything he could do prior thereto. He was a smart, devious, anti-social master of virtual mayhem and when he heard that Lydia died he would dig around and find out everything about her. He would learn of my relationship with her. He would find someone somewhere who could relate a third-party account of an argument in my office not long after my return from the trip to see Mrs. Dunlap. He would put it all together and figure that my dabbling in seedy affairs prompted my split with Lydia and just knowing that fact would start his dangerous mind on its course. Where that course would lead was impossible to predict, but wherever it led, it would be someplace craggy, dank and inhospitable.