Chapter Three

And the man of government, all stolid in physique and staid in garb, strode purposefully toward his meeting with the president of his party, mindful of the benefit to his career such striding could create. So purposefully strode he, so powerfully did he enunciate the words of his prepared speech, such was the glint in his eye and the set of his jaw and the cut of his suit that everyone said he would go far. Maybe even the next president. Certainly better than the current guy, who appeared mousy in comparison, tho he stood astride the world on election day, to be denied nothing. Such is the office of the president that no man, however grand, once entering it, can remain grand. The office is of such a great magnitude that the grandest man appears puny by comparison, but that only happens after they gain the office, so the public remains convinced that, somehow, this guy will be different, maybe because his hair is shinier or his smile brighter or he lacks that dyspeptic grin every time someone mentions the scandalous news of the day.

Or maybe it is because 'no comment' is not yet in his vocabulary, this man of the rising star. He may comment on nearly anything, being a mere prosecutor, so long as the comments are grand and the way of saying them are grand, and, most importantly, the comments themselves convey no meaning whatsoever. Any politician will be the master of this essential skill, for if it is possible to discern meaning in anything a politician says to the public, it is possible for some of the public to misconstrue that meaning as taking a position against that portion of the public, something a politician will most strenuously deny having done, whether or not he did it, for a politician, at heart, is a loving man who wishes all men to love him as he loves himself and therefore cannot abide the idea that some may think he carries not their best interest at heart.

Some will say, nay, there be honest politicians, and I say, behold, they are ignored or dead; there is not middle ground. Thus is the strength of the machine, with its great gaping maw at the trough, fed by the blood of the country, its young men off to war, its young maidens off to cry, its middle-aged enslaved by debt, a slavery held dear by accountants, bankers and such, those that pay the government worker enough to engage in the pursuit of happiness supposedly granted to everyone.

Pursuit of happiness happens with a light conscience. With a heavy conscience, it is the fleeing from guilt. The two things often seem similar, what with the singleminded obsession with the end goal, but fleeing from guilt is often rather more lubricated by alcohol than pursuing happiness, which is often lubricated with friendship and the construction of great things.

But enough of this philosophy; what about the practicality? Does not governance demand the finest, the brightest, the most elocutive of the lot? Our government man, our prosecutor, is certainly that. Highest honors in his class, he hung out with the best of the best, enshrouded with ivy and declared fit to rule the world. He began his work lowly enough, doing pro bono work in inner cities, for that would certainly brand him an idealist, a mantle that would allow him to hide all manner of ambition. He also did time as a public defender, seeking to protect the innocent from being wrongfully punished. His ideals flipped when he became a prosecutor, as they must, and he cynically campaigned against his own previous opponent on the grounds that he had been able to continuously beat his opponent in court, meaning that his opponent had let hundreds of guilty go free through incompetence.

Any decent man can see through such a silly contrived attack, but, of course, the political machine and the public bought it, because he had such good hair and when you talked to him, you could tell he was smart. Besides, his party had fallen on hard times, and a rising star such as this was just the ticket, so his party sent the cleaners around to help with the skeletons in his closet and sent the bankers around to help with everything else.

Thus did our man make his name. However, his political adviser had advised him that, in order to run for a senate seat, absolutely essential to make governor or president, he needed a high profile case, needed to show someone who was essentially good to be a mealy, maggot-ridden bastard. Just such a man was found in our friend, the industrialist. Our industrialist had literally never hurt anyone if it was at all possible to avoid. He was the kind of man who stepped over fleas when he could see them. Yet, as is so often the case, it is never the truth but the perception that causes harm, and our man the industrialist had become very successful.

Not only did he present a plum target, but our man the industrialist had never spent any money or time trying to influence politics, so had no friends in the game, so to speak. He did, however, have an awful lot of enemies, many of whom wished he would be broken and stripped of his companies so they could make money for a change. These enemies began to bend ears around the nation, plying their targets with various libations, gifts and services first so as to make the ears far easier to bend. Since, apparently, the quantity of swag is the primary method of making up one's mind when high enough in governance, many of those already tenured in government began casting about for a templar to take on this man of pure snow white morals.

All it really took, they knew, was a good turn of phrase and really good hair, and they found such in the prosecutor. Oh, they made the right faces and took their time selecting their templar, but it was evident in everyone's mind that he was the man; nobody else had that good of hair, nor the twinkling blue eyes, nor the broad, trust me smile. This man was clean, they were sure, a man whose record of challenging the fringes of our society and thus keeping us safe was unsullied, a man who clearly cared, given how much pro bono work he'd done, a man whose salary had never once been raised at his request so as to not burden the people.

He, the pauper publican to take on the mighty titan of industry, in a classic David and Goliath moment, to protect yet again the public from the predations of the capitalist, to save them from the inevitable high prices brought on by the monopolies our titan bestrode, and to liberate for once and for all the workers from their tyranny of being locked into working for our titan, as all other competitors were laid to waste.

And so, in the massively oak lined study of the suitably austere president of the party, our man accepted his new charge and swore an oath that he would not rest until the titan was laid low, preferably in pictures with some sort of prostitute, or sheep, or goat. He swore that no matter how heinous the accusation, he would support it, no matter how libelous the outrage, he would mutter it, and that, in the face of the certain truth, he would lie like a politician. Thus he swore and thus he would do.

Chapter Two

So the man of whimsy fell in his great funk, fell like the redwood falls, smashing the smaller trees all around, and so did his wife and daughter fall as well, wandering the house as if echoes lost in the greatness rather than the sparks of laughter, life, and even anger that used to rebound in the halls of the mansion.

The man took to his attic, his hair extending its length by the automatic biologic process, that, if left unchecked, provides the neighborhood with more of the carrion upon which the strutting, preening vultures must feed. His wife, concerned of his health, and certainly of his sanity, brought to him trays of divine succulence, the finest wines and the sweetest pastries, and, in the end, despairing him his life, brought merely coarse bread and water, which he took with a soulful look, a look of acceptance, a distant look of a man deeply lost in thought, so deeply lost that his eyes are mere pools of liquid, with no life, as the man he is is now so deep in his mind that it cannot be bothered to answer the door. Such a man took her proffered bread and water, set on a steel plate and tin cup, and ate slowly, as with a powerful hunger that cannot be sated but is comfortable in its strength to take its time to assert its will over the food.

His wife stood there, gratitude pouring down her face. She reached up and wiped some of the sparkle out of her eyes, said "Oh, it is so good to see you eat. I had come to worry you would never eat again. I will bring some more bread tonight, and maybe some cheese?" This last bit she said with such hopefulness, such eagerness, the kind that happens when it seems that the impossible is going to be a certainty, that it seemed to stir our man's soul and he took a moment from his ruminations to smile wanly, to reach up and touch her arm and say, "That would be nice, thank you."

She knew nothing more to do, so she kissed him on the cheek and turned to descend the stair. She met her daughter at the foot, with an upturned and questing face, and the question needed no asking. "Yes, he ate. He will eat some cheese tonight. No, he's not coming down just yet."

The daughter turned, herself lost in thought about her father, a man who, to her teenage mind, had seemed a giant massive redwood of a man, never swayed by anyone, anything, nor even the relentless march of time itself, the man who always knew how to stand when everyone ran, the man that stirred such jealousy in others that he, of the immaculate manners and immense magnanimity, still had enemies in those whose existence was mousy or snakelike, which is an unforgivable insult to the majestic snake family, although the insult to the mice family can be let stand as their lobbying efforts have been less effective.

That the giant redwood of a man that was her father had fallen was perplexing enough, doing immense damage to her understanding of the world and her place in it, but what to do about it was substantially more perplexing. She, the daughter, had been up to see the man a time or two, but he had been as if he had not seen her. Part of her railed in jealousy against her mother, but that part was quickly smothered by her own gratitude that the man, the redwood, her father, had eaten, that he had responded, that he was less despondent. She took solace that soon her father would be right, that her world would be right, that once again she'd be the little princess she had become accustomed to being, and, with the flexibility of youth, her countenance brightened, and off to some social event she went, as teenagers make social events of the smallest things, dare to contest it, you who either will be, are, or were a teenager.

Her mother, her poor mother, had no such luxury. She took up her position on the love seat in the den, curled up with a book, the letters and words which passed under her gaze without stringing together into any sort of story she could recall, as such a result requires the effort of the part of her brain now deeply taken up with schemes, plots and distractions to enable her to woo her husband out of his funk and down into some semblance of normalcy, for although she married this man because he was no strutting goose, she often secretly wished he'd not give such fodder to the enemies of the happiness she'd built herself here. She keenly felt the daggers aimed her way by those huns of the tree-lined-lane and country club, the barbarians in the finery of civilization, who have the accoutrements that resemble those of the true bon vivant but lack both the bon and the vivant to back it up and make it really work.

They were out there right now, for sure. By now a servant, even the most loyal, who would never hurt the man out of deep and abiding love for him, even out of that very love might, in an instant, let slip the concern bubbling in their soul to the wrong person, a gollum of the chattering class, most certain to tell the next wrong person in the chain of wrong persons, ending up with all the wrong persons knowing, the persons who did not really care except that it provided the tiniest splash of color to their everlasting white lives and made them feel that much better that they could not themselves attain the level of goodness set for them by themselves and all their kind.

They'd be chattering again. They'd go on about his choice of wife, how she did not really support him. They'd go on out of the other side of the same mouth how she married beneath her and should have left the crackpot a confirmed bachelor, but look, the sheen of respectability a woman of such high breeding as herself had allowed this man to worm his way lots higher in life than he should have, to get power he should not have got, and to anger the wrong people such that now he faced prosecution, and that prosecution would hurt so many who would lose their jobs. Of course, all of them had seen this coming; had said so just last week, dare deny it, and thought then that she should just divorce him before he became a millstone around her neck, as he most certainly would become, and look, they would do the same if the situation warranted it.

So she brooded into the night, torturing herself with the imagined words of others, and such a better person was she that she was able to imagine slights and slander that was beyond the simple imagination of the wolves circling her house. She pretended to take it with grace, but eventually curled up in a ball to have a good cry, late into the night, quietly so that her sobbing not carry up and unduly stress her husband in his darkest hour. She cried thus until it became the last thing she remembered doing and she fell asleep. Her daughter, coming back from the social meeting at the place that they all go to, covered her with a shawl and patted her affectionately. Then the daughter went off to bed, secure and happy that things were not, at least, getting any worse.