The Fires of Orc
Chapter 17: Amid Ice and Fire

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Mahatma Gandhi

Night and darkness and I have read not one page of Ulysses. Here he comes, down the tilted stairs, a whistle on his silly lips.

“Where are you going at this hour?” I inquire.

“If you must know,” he replies, “I have plans with the baker’s daughter.”

“Plans?”

“Yes, plans, and a gentleman wouldn’t press for details.”

“Very well,” I relent.

He busies himself about the kitchen making some treat, presumably to proffer to his quarry, a sweet reward for her company.

“Old Timer,” he muses, “I’ve never asked you this, but I was wondering – what do you think caused the fires? I mean, where did they come from? How did it happen?”

“If I were to point to a single cause,” I tell him, “it was hubris.”

“Hubris? What’s that, some kind of pollution?”

“No,” I lecture. “Hubris is the flaw of over-estimating one’s real virtue. It’s the sin of excessive pride, the kind of arrogance that offends the gods.”

“The gods?”

“It’s a Greek thing, an ancient concept. They believed that hubris, when it offended the gods, was punished. Of course for the Greeks it was normally an individual’s arrogance that was smacked down by the wrathful gods. But in my time, before the fires, we were guilty of a collective hubris, a shared arrogance, the belief that we were, for all intents and purposes, gods ourselves.”

“So you think that the gods sent the fires?”

“No, not literally.” I pause to ponder. “What I think is that our arrogance made us too sure of ourselves. We stopped believing that we could be wrong, that we could give offense at all. We believed so much in our perfection we stopped looking for our flaws and while we weren’t watching, the fires found their way to our hearths and homes. We were vain. We burned for our hubris.”

“Damn,” he mutters.

“Damn indeed,” I echo. “Damn indeed.”

***

I came back to the office the morning of Tuesday, October 10th, exactly five weeks before election day. Of course Lydia was already there when I arrived sometime after eight o’oclock.

“Welcome back,” she intoned.

“Thanks,” I answered. “How are you?”

“Pardon me?” she replied.

“I asked how you are.”

“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

“Lydia, come on, you know what I’m asking and why I’m asking it. Are you okay?”

She withered me with the blast of her dark eyes. It seemed like minutes of silence – staring, swallowing down the impulse to cough or sing or shout, anything to break the fixed gaze, unmoving silence, nothing to do, no fidgeting just enduring her look.

“I would appreciate it,” she said, “if we could get to work and leave personal matters out of the office. There’s a lot to do.”

“If that’s how it is…”

“That’s how it is!” she emphasized. “And that’s how I require it.”

“I understand.”

From my perspective it was a simple choice – Veronica’s leggy company in Chicago or respectable isolation. Even now, weighing the choice logically, it was the reasonable thing to do. Should I have spent a lavish weekend alone, absent the reassurance of a woman who had never spurned my advances? Why? To respect the feelings in myself that Lydia would not acknowledge or allow? No, there is no virtue in self-repudiation. I did nothing wrong, a fact that came as no comfort. Logic be damned, I regretted everything about that choice.

But there was still work to do and Lydia was very much a part of it. There is a narrow defile between respect and condescension down which one must pass cautiously to avoid tripping the wires on either side. Too considerate is patronizing. Too indifferent is callous. The mean between the extremes is a small target. It required constant effort and awareness. There would be no return of the carefree aspect of friendship Lydia had wanted. Of course I had only been playing at friendship in the first place. But in those icy days, I longed for a return to pretense.

“So have you seen the figures out of Cleveland?” I asked.

“I have.” She replied.

“Any opinions?”

“I think they’re significant.”

“Significant good or significant bad?

“That depends.”

“Depends upon…?”

Exasperation welling, “It depends on which way they turn.”

“Agreed. But isn’t that the case with all data? It’s either good or bad depending upon which way it’s heading.”

Exasperation on full display. “If it’s manifestly true, then I don’t understand your original question. What about the numbers out of Cleveland is not clear to you?”

“Nothing,” I relented.

Such were our days all day every day for the next week. There weren’t even any emergencies, no urgent issues, no cataclysms, no rush jobs to thaw the freeze. It strained every fiber and tried every nerve. If it continued she would beat me. I would break first, no question. It was almost past bearing by week’s end. By that time nothing distinguished Friday from Saturday or indeed any day from any other. With four weeks to go every day was twenty-five hours long and every hour was too short.

Saturday, October 14, I woke startled from a fitful few hours of sleep. I brushed my teeth and pulled on a clean shirt and was at the office by six in the morning. It felt odd to be there without Lydia, like being in your parents’ closet, or left alone in a classroom after the teachers have gone home. I busied myself with general housekeeping matters and then got to work on the still critical task of talking to Chicago. The city was a three-way dead heat, too close to call in any poll from any source. My web punks thought we were stronger than the polls indicated, with a grip on most of the “decline to answer” block. I trusted them but I wanted to be sure, so that meant direct email appeals, social network blasts, the whole tool box, all filtered through the right algorithms, with the right keywords and subject lines in a half-dozen versions, with at least one Spanish version vetted by native speakers from four different regions of Latin America to avoid an unwitting slip of the foreign tongue. Micro-manipulating mass opinion is detailed stuff.

As I worked, the details grew – spreadsheets and checklists and tabs and sums and it all just spiraled. The tasks Lydia always helped with or handled outright were suddenly mine alone and I was, for the first moment really, keenly aware of how much she meant to me professionally, quite aside from what desire or avarice I bore her from one moment to the next. I sent her a note:

Were you planning to be in the office today?

Yes, came her immediate reply. I’ll be there soon in fact.

I breathed an audible sigh of relief and as I did I heard Veronica’s familiar, feline voice from the office door:

“You sound satisfied. What are you up to this morning?”

“You’re up and at it pretty early for a Saturday, aren’t you,” I replied. I noted the time on my tablet, eight-fifteen.

“I knew you would be here. I’ve missed you since we came back. I thought I’d drop in and see if there’s anything I can do for you,” she lilted.

“There’s always something you can do for me,” I said, “but I’m neck deep in Chicago and I really need to stay in it.”

“That’s fine,” she said, “but I brought you coffee, the way you like it.”

She slinked around behind my desk, setting a large cup of coffee on the coaster at the corner. She turned to stand before me and slid onto my lap, facing me, her knees astride my thighs, her hands on my shoulders.

“Veronica, this is so nice, but really,” I said, “I absolutely have to work and I need to do it now.”

“I know,” she purred. “I’m just giving you a kiss for support,” whereupon she leaned in and kissed me with one hand behind my head.

She let go of my head and leaned back slightly, placing one hand on the desk to brace herself. As she climbed off me and pulled away I saw Lydia laying a stack of files on the round table. She did not even glance my way, just took her seat and pulled out her tablet.

“Oh hi,” I said. “That was fast.”

“Yes, well, I intended to be here sooner but I had an errand to run this morning.”

“Good morning, Lydia,” Veronica hissed.

“Oh, yes,” said Lydia, “where are my manners? Good morning. Will you be helping us today?”

As jabs go, it was a pretty good one. Veronica was challenged to take a lunch order correctly.

“Nope,” she quipped. “Just stopped by to lend a little moral support. You two have fun.”

She kissed her hand and laid it on my forehead, winked and was gone. She could jab too.

Lydia took it without flinching.

I watched Veronica descending the stairs and thought it was time to speak.

“I’m working on Chicago,” I said.

“I assumed so,” said Lydia. “Why don’t you send me whatever files you have open? You get on the message stuff. I can handle the sorting and tables.”

“That would be fantastic,” I said.

She looked up, smiling defiantly, “It’s no big deal. That’s my job.”

We worked all day and well past nightfall. I ordered gyros combos and the Greek brought them over.

At eight-thirty that night , Lydia began packing up files, sliding them into her shoulder bag. She made a much more elaborate ritual of leaving that usual for her. She sorted stacks and pulled select folders together into a new pile that she jammed in an empty box.

“Are you out?” I asked.

“I am,” she answered. She went on. “I think I might be working from home quite a bit for the next few days.”

“Um, okay I guess. Is something up?”

“I just think it would be best for everyone,” she said.

“Everyone?”

“Yes,” she repeated, “everyone.”

“Look, Lydia,” I implored, “if it’s Veronica, you know she just came by to…”

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “Can you even hear how insulting you are? For the record, it’s not Veronica, it’s you. I’ll be in for a few hours every day and I’m a text away if you need me to come by, but I intend to minimize my presence for the short time we still have. None of this will matter in a few weeks.”

“Lydia, please,” I pleaded. “None of it matters now! Can’t we just go on like we were before Chicago?”

“You know perfectly well we can’t and I would appreciate it if we didn’t mention the events in Chicago again. I’m truly sorry for my mistake and I’d like to let it go.”

“Of course,” I promised.

“You know how to reach me,” she said, and was off.