The Fires of Orc
Chapter 5: Man in Progress

I am the Cat who walks by himself

and all places are alike to me.

Rudyard Kipling

Aweek passed. I’d be lying if I said my feelings weren’t hurt. In the scheme of things, a week is a short time, but to a young man a week is an eternity of rejection. One entire week of wondering how I could have done better, whether I was too full of myself, if my confidence was misplaced, if people didn’t like me on general principle or just one particular person disliked me for some specific slight. Maybe I was just an asshole. A week is a long time for a young man with an unquiet mind to live with questions that lead inexorably back to himself.

Unless torture is your purpose, never make the young wait a week to hear yes or no. In a week’s time, assuming the answer is no, a youth can get over it and be on to the next pursuit. But to live with uncertainty for seven tormenting days – that’s a cruelty the young can’t bear.

The phone beeped insistently one evening and I answered it, probably too eagerly. It was the Markus 2028 Internet Strategy Manager. He didn’t mess around with cordiality.

“I wanted to know,” he said, “if you’d be willing to help us with our social networking plan and approach. We’ve gotten likes and forwards and shares and all that, but we’re just not gaining the traction we want. We’ve had practically no click-through on our links and fewer still actual commitments, neither donations nor volunteers. It’s as if everyone wants to like us but no one wants to step up and do anything.”

“So you’re talking about turning interest into action,” I said. “There are ways to do that. I’d be happy to give you my input and advice but I’d really just as soon take it off your plate.”

He grumbled. “At this point we’re really just thinking about some keywords and calls to action that will build on our momentum.”

“What momentum is that?” I asked.

“Well we do have a million likes.”

“Tell me you’ve got a million dollars and I’ll call it momentum. A million likes is nothing. I’ve seen a million likes on a Facebook page for a cat in a dress. I could get a million likes for a line of suppositories and I’d know what to do with them.”

“I don’t really think…” he stammered.

“Look, I hate being crude but there’s just no time to waste. It’s less than fourteen months to election night and a million likes are trivial. You need to take your trickle of online energy and put it out on the street where it can create action. I can help you do that. Why don’t I come by tomorrow morning and see what we should do first. I’m not trying to take anything away. I’m trying to add. I’ll give you the best advice I can offer and we can just take it from there. How’s that?”

And so it was. I was at Markus headquarters at eight o’clock the next morning.

There was coffee, regular and decaf in two carafes, and paper cups with wooden stirrers. The creamer was powdered. There were sugar packets and Stevia for the effete and the tragically trendy. Christ, I thought, can’t they even do refreshments in style?

The Internet Strategy Manager was a tall man who liked that fact about himself. He wore vertical stripes and carried his chin up-thrust to look down at those around him. He spoke like he walked, stiffly. He greeted me in a style better suited to a Catskills bed-and-breakfast than a modern campaign.

“Good morning. I trust I haven’t kept you waiting too long,” he said.

Oh where did they drag this guy up?

“Not at all. I’ve been enjoying your coffee.”

“I spoke with some of your references,” he said.

Of course he did. He wouldn’t have called me otherwise.

“Everyone I spoke with had some very flattering things to say about your work.”

It’s not flattery if it’s true.

“Oh,” I said, “people are very kind. I just want to do what I can.”

I have come to think in my seasoned years that there is no virtue in humility. For the ordinary, humility is just honesty. For the extraordinary, it’s hypocrisy. But then and there, humble affectation was still among my routines, although I don’t think it was particularly effective. Arrogance shines through, no matter how thick the veneer.

We began with introductions. I met the interns – wide-eyed and zealous, all of them. There were a dozen regular staffers working under the office manager, the whole assemblage somewhat less remarkable than the interns. Marsha and I met again. Different pant-suit, same horn-rims.

The blonde receptionist with the great legs offered me more coffee.

“Actually,” I said, “Betty is it?”

“It’s Veronica.”

“Ah, Veronica. Sorry about that. Veronica, would you mind asking one of the interns to pop down to Starbucks and get me a venti with half-and-half?”

The Internet Strategy Manager led me to an office on the mezzanine, overlooking the bustling ground-floor bullpen with its phone banks and hustling rank-and-file, interns keeping busy and being seen to be so, line staff issuing occasional pointless directives to distinguish themselves from interns, a wasteful choreography of the wastefully occupied.

“So I’ve set you up here with a computer,” he said stiffly. “I also had the tech guys assign you a username. Your password for the time being is ‘password.’ You can change that, obviously.”

The Internet Strategy Manager believed I was there to stay. That was the license I required.

“Thanks very much for getting me set up,” I said. “I can take it from here.”

“Well I thought we might discuss a few things,” he said.

A meeting. The Internet Strategy Manager was a meeting person. That wouldn’t do. How would we achieve anything if we had to meet about it?

“I think it might be better if I just dive right in,” I told him. “I was up late last night going through your online material and there are some things I really want to get to as soon as possible. If it’s okay with you, how about I get to work and we can meet later to go over what I’ve done?”

“I guess we could do that…”

“Yes let’s. And if I don’t already have access, could you tell the tech guys to make sure I’m an admin on the website, all the social networks, just everything? I’d sure appreciate it.”

Veronica brought me my coffee.

I took it with both hands saying, “Thanks doll.”

She left with a hmph, but she would warm up. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

“What were the women like, Old Timer?”

Oh yes, the Landlord.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean the women in the old world. What were they like?”

“They were rather like the men, only smaller and less linear.”

“Come on, Old Timer. I’ve seen the pictures. Tell me about what it was like in the old world. Did they really all look like that, all so perfect, so clean and soft? I bet they smelled like peach blossoms. Tell me about them.”

“I’ll tell you one thing about the women of my time.”

He turns, facing me, heightened anticipation in his round eyes.

“They were too direct.”

“What?” he asks. “What does that mean?”

“It means they shunned the art of words, their natural gift.”

“Jesus Old Timer,” he protests. “I ask you about women and you write me a poem?”

“It’s the truth,” I tell him. “They were too direct. They dealt too much and maladroitly with the things of men and our manners rubbed off on them. Women in my time gave it to you straight and that’s not something you want from a woman. They lost their way in the paths of men. They were blunt and coarse.”

“Whatever you say Old Timer. But they were sexy I bet!”

“Well yes. That they were. The coarse and the sexy are quite often one and the same, no?”

“God yes!” he exclaims.

How I hope he won’t embellish.

“Like Sandra, the baker’s daughter…”

He’s embellishing…

“She cusses like a sailor and gives as good as she takes. I would marry that girl in a hot minute!”

“Yes, well there you have it. The old world was chock-full of bakers’ daughters.”

“Oh man, Old Timer – you were one lucky dog. I wish there were more girls like the baker’s daughter.”

“Yes,” I tell him, “but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”

“What’s that Old Timer?”

“Nothing. Just writing you another poem.”

It so happens that direct communication is not an essential aspect of truth. There is an unwarranted compulsion to mistake the communication of truth for truth itself. In a man’s world, we will go so far as to rank the telling of truth more highly than its apprehension. The discovery is less important to a man than the expression. Can it be said rightly? Can it be diagrammed, charted, graphed and plotted? Can we frame the truth to fit the receptor cells of an audience that needs it not and doesn’t deserve it? These are a man’s criteria for valuable truth and together they amount to a pittance. Putting a thing clearly, directly, bluntly, taking the truth inelegantly and cramming it into consumable morsels, that is a vulgar act. A man’s need for dissemination makes a coarse thing of truth, as if its value is evident only in its expression.

But what of the inner value? What of the power of truth to expand the mind and turn the spirit? How are those loftier aspects of truth in any way advanced by blunt speech and spreadsheets?

I have lived too long to remain ignorant of the womanly power to grasp great, deep truths, the ineffable truths, the most important truths of all. I would rather place my trust in a woman’s general sense of a thing than in its description by myriad parallel processors. That which can be explained is a pitiful sample of all that can’t.

As a rule, if it can be explained it’s not profound. The profundity of a woman’s knowledge, the wisdom reaching back to the first mothers, those things can’t be explained and they’re the more profound by their mystery. I tell you, women of this world or the next, a line of women stretches out behind you, tethering you to our past, to our beginnings. That line includes women who knew what men could not explain and you must seek them out, those foremothers, and know them, and imbibe their wisdom, and take it into yourselves, and live in a conscious now, aware of those women long gone living still in your every thought and deed.

“Tell the truth, Old Timer, was there any one woman in particular? Who was your special one? I know there must have been one.”

“There were a few,” I tell him.

“A few?! Ha, I bet there were. You probably got around plenty in your day. But what about the one you think about now? Was there that one?”

“I don’t really think about it. I guess I’m fine with remembering them all in general.”

But I lie. There was one.