The Media Candidate (22 page)

“This brings us to your friend, Townsend.”
Sherwood paused with his pipe now standing at the ready in his
right hand at mouth level. The smoke cleared and revealed a pair of
gray eyes now fixed intently on Guinda. She was unaccustomed to
Sherwood actually looking at her, and she wondered if her
nervousness was manifest in her eyes. And why did he refer to
Townsend as her friend? Could he somehow know about her second
meeting with Elliott?

During this silent interchange, the slightest
grin slowly unfolded on Sherwood’s face. It did not involve his
mouth but just his eyes, and not their size or their shape, but
their essence. They evolved from the piercing eyes of an inquisitor
to the taunting eyes of a precocious child holding a favorite toy
just out of reach of a smaller comrade.

Sherwood stood up, his attention seemingly
focused on making sure his pipe was completely extinguished before
replacing it in the pouch in his pocket. Guinda vertically joined
him. “Do not become enchanted by such people. They romanticize
about events that caused great discord and suboptimization in a
world as different from today as Townsend is from you. They seek to
destroy the order that has allowed the twenty-first century to
blossom. I doubt that Townsend will ever contact you again, but if
he should, let me know immediately so we might act accordingly. Any
more questions?”

“Ah … no.”

He shook her hand politely, maintaining eye
contact with her. Guinda shifted her eyes to the right, and their
hands parted.

Elliott read the unsigned note in disbelief,
then reread it in swelling anger: “You’re being surveilled by COPE.
They think you’re an anarchist. You may be in danger. I’ll call you
at the appropriate time. Please destroy.”

The entrenched tactics of bygone tyrannies
skulked from the note and filled the air with acrid vapors. This
was an artifact of centuries past. Yet this was the twenty-first
century, the age of freedom and enlightenment. This memorial to the
age of monarchs eulogized a palace guard protecting the privileged,
reaffirming the ageless dogma of “might makes right.”

Elliott envisioned some faceless bureaucrat
signing an order to surveil one Elliott T. Townsend for expressing
an opinion contrary to the monarch’s. He was just a name on some
list of anarchists in a computer file somewhere with gigabytes of
other trivia. He considered how it might have happened, maybe with
some baseball slugger newly arrived in Congress, knocking mud from
his cleats by doing a favor for a COPE bureaucrat to expand some
surveillance program, each the master of the other—and now each the
master of him.

He’d spent his career in the quest for truth,
pure truth, the secrets of the building blocks of the universe. It
was not the truth of convenience, not the sensational truth so
easily dispensed by his accusers. But what were they accusing him
of? Anarchy? He was no anarchist. He felt some ubiquitous
organization tightening its coils about him. Dobbs’s eyes suddenly
confronted him.

He entered the TV room where Martha was watching
The 404 Place
, a late morning soap that boasted of being the
most prolific political career-launching medium in the industry. It
had introduced over two-dozen national political figures to the
public. Entertainers with political ambitions actually paid NBC to
make appearances on the show.

“A few days ago you said something about them
hurting me. I thought you were just angry. What were you talking
about?”

“Ted, what’s the matter? What happened?”

“You remember that woman I went to see at the
CBS office, and then I went to have lunch with her the next
day?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I got this note from her today. She says
COPE is surveilling me.”

“You mean somebody is following you? Are you
sure?” Martha questioned in disbelief. Her eyes darted from one
window to another.

“Yes, I guess that’s what it means. But the
other day, you said somebody could hurt me. Were you talking about
COPE?”

“I read an article a long time ago, but then I
never heard anything else about it. Some reporter said that COPE
uses illegal means to monitor people, and he even said there were
several unsolved murders suspiciously linked to COPE. But that was
the only thing I ever heard about it. The story just disappeared,
and I forgot about it. It sort of reminded me of those CIA stories
we used to read about a long time ago.”

“But you didn’t really forget about it, did
you,” Elliott replied. “You really believed it. Otherwise you
wouldn’t have said that to me.”

“Elliott, I new there was going to be trouble.
You’re just too outspoken … and too old fashioned. Things just
aren’t the way they used to be. You’re acting like nothing has
happened in the last forty years—like we’re still back in the
twentieth century. Times have changed. It’s a more mellow time
now.”

“You call that stuff you watch on TV mellow? The
times aren’t mellow, Martha. But everybody’s brains are mellow. The
people running the country sure aren’t mellow—just everybody’s
brains. I don’t know if its mellow or jello. All I know is that I’m
living in a world of bullshit. And now this. I’m being watched like
a common criminal.”

“You aren’t a criminal but you are suspicious.
You’re so far out in left field or right field or somewhere, that
people are suspicious of you. You’re just going to hurt yourself,
and me too. This foolishness of yours has to stop. I didn’t think
you could get into trouble that fast. I thought it would take you
months. You’ve done it in just a few days. I’m impressed.”

Elliott wanted to ignore Martha’s sarcasm, but
it reflected an image painfully close to reality. Without
responding, he turned and walked away.

His logical mind drove him toward trying to
determine the seriousness of his situation and the capability of
his surveillant. A simple test might tell him about whoever was
assigned to tail him, if, in fact, it wasn’t all just a ruse. He
backed his car out of the driveway, trying to nonchalantly scan the
neighborhood for something unusual. The only misplaced object he
noticed was a small gray car parked nearby, but it could easily
have been one of the many robotic delivery cars that plied the
streets.

As he started down the street, the small gray
car came to life and start to follow him. When he stopped, it also
stopped. When he moved, it waited a discrete time and then
followed. Elliott was amused by the antics of his robotic shadow.
It had clearly been programmed to follow him and probably report
his comings and goings to some central computer. He drove around
the block and returned to his driveway. The little gray car
politely returned to its spot. He knew that he would have no
trouble evading this spy at the desired time. If this was the best
COPE could do, he could safely ignore them until they tired of his
mundane brand of anarchy and went home.

After Sherwood’s visit, the remainder of
Guinda’s morning seemed as muddled as the whirls and shadows of
blue-gray smoke through which Sherwood had launched his monologue.
The smoke captivated that memory nearly as much as the face and the
words. When she closed her eyes, though, the smoke would dissipate
so the whole experience could recur. As she replayed vignettes of
Sherwood’s monologue in her mind, her confusion would swell, then
ebb, then swell again.

She recalled lying on the grass in her back yard
on a summer evening with her best friend, Geena. They mingled their
thoughts, fears, and fantasies in the darkness as adolescents had
for a million dreams. The chilled northern sky would capture first
their eyes, then their minds, and finally their hopes. They would
imagine themselves standing on some distant heavenly body, looking
down on the earth, and understanding life in a way denied to those
cloaked in its folds. Such insight was granted to only the select,
and Guinda and Geena vowed that this night would forever bind them.
Then a billowy castle cloud would sail between them and that sphere
of mystery below, and the revealed secrets of life would be
replaced once more with new twists of old riddles. Their séance
would carry them far into the night, ending in layers of
silence.

The revelations Sherwood made about the Media
Summit and its role in the rebirth of America were new concepts,
disturbing concepts. She had studied political science for years at
the university and had never encountered these facts, if they were
facts. The modern form of the political process had been taught as
a natural evolution, driven by technology and voter maturation.
Never before had she encountered a culpable media, and he used a
word foreign to her lexicon—infotainment. Was this a new riddle or
an answer to an old one?

She thought back to her master’s thesis,
“Dynamic Functional Initiatives and their Effect on Voter Base
Preferences Resulting from Parallel Incremental Contingencies.” She
had spent countless hours researching the most obscure records and
scouring the literature. But here was a new wave history, an
unauthorized view of political evolution. Her thoughts wandered
about that period of her life. Her attention quickly focused on the
central figure of her graduate-school experience.

Guinda’s thesis advisor had been there every
time she needed help interpreting some obscure bit of information
or making sense of conflicting statistics. The word
anarchist
never even appeared in her thesis, and anarchy was
not an issue in any of her courses. Yet, in the world she now found
herself, there seemed to be some unmatched struggle going on
between the establishment and the anarchists.

The time seemed right to lean on her
ex-professor to help understand this new phenomenon. Since they had
stayed in occasional contact over the few years since Guinda left,
it was perfectly natural for Guinda to ask her mentor’s advice
about this.

The professor’s phone rang twice and was
answered, “Good morning, political science.”

“Good morning, may I speak to Professor
Halvorsen, please?”

“I’m sorry, but Professor Halvorsen is no longer
with the University. Is there someone else in the department who
can help you?” the voice responded.

“Terry, is that you?” Guinda asked.

“Yes.”

“This is Guin Burns.”

“Guin, how are you? We miss you around
here.”

“I’m just fine. How’s everything around
poli-sci?”

Terry answered, “I guess you haven’t heard about
Terra.”

“No, and I’m really surprised she left. Where
did she go?”

“She didn’t go anywhere. She’s dead.”

Guinda stopped cold, unable to respond. “She
died a few days ago. I’m just in the process of putting together a
little memorial newsletter. You’ll probably receive yours
soon.”

“What happened, Terry?”

“We aren’t quite sure, but it looks like murder.
She was killed by a lethal injection, and the FBI has taken over
the investigation. They won’t let the local police get involved.
They say it had something to do with some kind of international
espionage.”

“What!” Guinda said. “That’s absolutely
ridiculous!”

“I know, Guin. I think so too. We were all so
stunned by it. You just can’t imagine how it has upset some of the
people around here.”

Guinda composed herself and asked, “Have they
caught whoever did it?”

“That’s one of the strange parts. The FBI just
said that there were no DNA prints of any kind left behind, and
then they said, ‘No more comment’. Whoever or whatever did it was
extremely professional and seems to have vanished without a clue.
It seems really odd to us that there could be no trail, but that’s
what the investigation shows so far.”

“How is TJ taking it?” Guinda asked.

“I saw him at her memorial service, but I didn’t
talk to him. Did you know their relationship was off? That happened
several months ago. Terra seemed isolated lately.”

“I knew there was some tension between Terra and
some upper levels of the University,” Guinda said. “She seemed
highly thought of, but I never knew for sure what was going
on.”

“There were some at the University who claimed
she was jeopardizing a lot of research funds with her
investigations of some of the candidates. The story I heard was
that she found out some things that were a little strange, and the
Dean of Liberal Arts Research suggested she find more-useful ways
to spend her time. Terra, of course, was very stubborn about it,
and wasn’t about to be intimidated by the head shed and their
funding problems. This is all just scuttlebutt. I don’t think
anything ever went onto paper. But there were some bad
feelings.”

“Did Terra ever document any of her findings?”
Guinda asked.

“I don’t think so. I cruised through her files
after she died to make sure the Department had a copy of anything
important. I didn’t find anything about any candidates.”

“Do you know if anyone ever called her an
anarchist?”

Terry thought for a minute and then said, “No, I
can’t recall anything like that?”

A few more minutes of memorial exchange
transpired before the conversation ended.

Guinda walked around her office, first to the
window, then to her desk, then back to the window. Her mind was
filled with conjecture. She finally sat on the edge of her desk and
considered all the puzzle pieces before her. Not even one edge was
completed; but if she once finished all four edges, she knew she
would be drawn into the center. The size and complexity of the
puzzle intrigued her. She couldn’t resist holding each piece in her
hand, rotating it, measuring its fit. And there were all those
pieces in the box, a box tightly covered by an unprinted lid. Dare
she remove the lid?