The Media Candidate by Paul Dueweke Read Free Book Online

A
forest-green dress embellished her the way a frame magnifies a work
of fine art. Her dress exactly matched the color of the bright CBS
logo covering one full wall of the hallway they shared. Following
Burns was an unforeseen pleasure.
    Burns’ athletic, yet femininely proportioned
body demanded attention. Hair flowed down over its green backdrop
in a single wave of gold. Elliott’s gaze attended the wave as it
disappeared, leading toward splendid hips dancing in time to the
cadence of heals. Music and art coalesced perfectly in this
impromptu ballet. A single button was undone on the back of her
dress in her otherwise impeccable attire. Considering her obvious
concern for appearance, that button seemed remarkable to
Elliott—and yet it was just a button.
    She led him into a small conference room and
motioned him to a seat. The walls were covered with pictures of
political candidates, none of whom Elliott recognized. One
candidate was signing a soccer ball emblazoned with “Hyperbowl XXIX
Champs” before the adoring eyes and cheers of a mob of children.
Another pictured naked women and men entwined in a polygon of love
on bright satin sheets. Elliott couldn’t decide which was the
candidate, even after reading the caption “Joesy Hots, Star of
Every Night – Eighth Congressional District.” A few pictures
included Burns, barely recognizable in her revealing sportswear,
jogging outfits, and ponytails. Every picture he quickly scanned
showed her in a ponytail, laughing and hugging both the equally
vivacious candidates and the young admirers. Everyone was young,
exuberant, and very, very chic. The most interesting was a poster
of a collage of giant baseball cards. Apparently, everybody on some
team was running for something on the CBS ticket.
    The furnishings seemed borrowed from a studio
set, like they belonged in a generic office of a generic
corporation. The walnut table looked uncomfortably pregnant with
its bulging middle to afford every subordinate an unfettered view
of each other subordinate, thus frustrating even the most-subtle
early-afternoon nod. The chairs wore standard black cushions and
sprouted plastic legs and arms to clutch their unlucky patrons
according to some unwritten discomfort specification. The walls
withdrew to neutrality in deference to the impotent parry of the
drapes. A wall-TV screen filled one end of the room. It was a
magnificently common conference room, one in which any conservative
manager could seek refuge from decisions behind a wall of committee
approvals and a sea of expert-system computer models and decision
trees. With the exception of the pictures adorning its walls and
the woman enhancing its decor, the conference room personified
mid-management America, celebrating its monotony, apologizing for
its paralysis.
    “This is an unusual pleasure, Townsend,” she
said as she seated herself across the table from him. “We don’t get
very many volunteers anymore and, frankly, our volunteer
requirements are quite low since most of our campaign work is
automated or multimedia. And virtually all of the volunteers we
retain are University students or other young people. That’s why I
found your phone call this morning very intriguing. So, how may we
assist you?”
    Elliott found it difficult to start, difficult
to put his nebulous vision and ethereal concerns into words. But
even beyond his communication dilemma, he found his hostess to be
disarmingly human, certainly not the champion of hype and the
adversary of sensibility and taste that he’d anticipated. He was
prepared for Burns to be a bimbo, a bouncing, pony-tailed, tanned,
and stunningly nippled beauty who conversed in one and two syllable
words and expounded on the wonders of entertainers and jocks. He
envisioned cartwheels and pom-poms accompanied by base-thumping
sentences escaping in strings of inseparable sounds. Sexual allure
would be explicit and uneasy. In short, he’d anticipated the person
embodied in many of the