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Compromise
They’d borne witness to many ideas over the past eight years. Bordello's brow knit as time began to slow: "But this implement works." He raised the awkwardly long shrouded rectangle from the ground to waist level with emphasis.
Bordello had tried it on someone. On whom, they asked. It was none of their business. Tucker "Tex" Aikens, a man who pushed his toothpick legs through the same pleated chinos every day, felt compelled to speak up, as he deemed it was his turn:
"The hell do we know that?" Bill Dillard, the senior researcher and, of course, token group skeptic, pointed out.
Bordello had tried it on someone. On whom, they asked. It was none of their business. Tucker "Tex" Aikens, a man who pushed his toothpick legs through the same pleated chinos every day, felt compelled to speak up, as he deemed it was his turn:
"Folks, what we had here was some deranged California beatnik and a Korean psychologist fraternizing under the authority of this, our Eyetalian goofus, to paint magic wingnut propaganda that'll brainwash us all to see commie red." He pivoted to turn his back on the crew and face Bordello with a smile that had solar wrinkles prematurely baked in: "We're all worried about your head, Birdellah."
Deafening silence followed that truth. Even Tex regarded Pino Bordello as one of them: sane, pragmatic. Not the kind to try anything too floo-floo--forget fine art. Scientists' scientists.
As a result, this magic painting shtick embarrassed the entire group, and this meeting, summarily, was considered a mandatory timesuck. The idea at present was almost as bad as colleague Karol Kurwitz's "solution," proposed six years prior, which was really just a specialty toy for men.
"Next just have a kid construct a papier mache bust of Hackman, buddy. Earn us a raise." Tex's sprayed-together blonde mass of hair volleyed precariously across his head as he scoffed. The guy was only 30, and obviously suffering in a marriage he committed to out of high school. Bordello could relate some amount.
Regarding the papier-mache bust, everyone in that lecture hall reported to Ezra Hackman since the special project's inception, which happened in the weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometime in October, but not Halloween. Hackman was the boss who kept everyone motivated through eight years of failed ideas, themselves of varying quality.
Silence. Finally, Bordello could return to explain: "My subject then became attentive. I started by telling them that a piece of flatware must be picked up."
"Who was your subject?"
"Your mother, Tex!" Dillard piped up in the back.
"Your mother, Tex!" Dillard piped up in the back.
Bordello cautiously made eye contact with Hackman, who had presumedly heard his name earlier and was now propping his stocky frame up against the threshold. Hackman nodded at Bordello to continue.
"...They picked up the spoon without question. I gave them more directions framed in that exact script: the subject walked in three concentric circles and completed an intermediate Calculus problem, incorrectly."
"So, it didn't make h--"
"--er some kind of genius or automaton. Correct, Tex. Your mom needs a Math tutor." Bordello grinned.
Hackman's voice spilled from the doorway, ordering Bordello and Tex to cut it out and to secret the implement into the main boardroom. Tex smiled and wished Bordello luck, clenching Bordello's shoulder with big-brotherly force. There were rumors that the head of the FBI might be there in that boardroom. Bordello didn't care much--that guy was going to want to see this.
-----
"A painting that makes everybody agree. That's--normal." FBI Director Price Goddard raised two well trimmed sausage-link eyebrows above horned browline glasses.
It was part of a grant-funded science program, enacted to quell the mass hysteria around the A-bomb. Simple enough, their credo was that a solution to make everyone agree would be to ensure no more bombs would drop. Peace would be enacted as law, but without the violent authoritarianism from which the world currently suffered. And how to make this so was matchingly ridiculous.
On one side of the government-led project, the nation's best teachers worked with violent prisoners to design an intensive reeducation program to rewire the brain against hatred. Nothing had come out of that yet: it had been eight years. On the other, a room full of scientists tested everything they knew about the world to concoct serums, devise treatment regimens, have Karol Kurwitz hock his sex toy, anything to get the most ornery, angriest, most stubborn to agree. But in reality, over eight years, all they had learned was that they were agreeing less and less, especially with each other.
But then in August 1949 Pino Bordello had a dream about his artist wife Alice painting a lush green landscape with knotted oak trees and a twisting waterfall spinning from the sky into a watering hole. Normally, Pino thought landscapes were hackish and boring. Normally--and normally, he was an exhausted father to a one-year-old, surfing the toilet-bowl rim of his marriage. But this one made him feel such peace that he swore upon waking he felt like he could never take up an argument with anyone ever again.
That morning, Bordello had shaken Alice awake, begging her to devise such a landscape. Alice plainly reminded Bordello that she was a ceramicist, not to mention seven months pregnant with their second child, and ensconced herself once more at the potter's wheel, forcing Bordello to ring up his younger brother in California.
It took a while to find Carmello, who went at that time by Crispin Upward to "save the Medigans a tongue-sprain." Bordello knew it was to sound like some cultured white asshole who had grown up in the suburbs, some hipster. Carmello was living in Haight-Ashbury--which wasn't so predictable in 1950--and knew plenty of artists Bordello could work with, if he was willing to pay out.
Carmello had no shot hanging out with bohemians, Bordello thought to himself, but the kid wrote about skiffle music now, or at least that's what he told the family last Christmas. Ostensibly, though, those connections came through when Bordello picked up the phone and heard the voice of Holocaust and Holodomor survivor Leonas Ostrobromski, only the most talented artist anyone had never heard of. That's what he said, point blank, when Bordello asked.
He sent over some prints, which were indeed astonishingly impressive. Bordello admired them quizzically: none of them expressed identifiable postmodernistic or “in” qualities, at least not the minimalistic gray and beige brutalism of contemporary years. Something even better, more progressive; antiderivative. Not didactic, but obviously thematic. Not maximalistic, but definitely not without its own meditative detail. Divinely, gloriously interesting. The opposite of boring.
Bordello offered to pay for Leonas' rent and groceries until the painting was done—a sort of satellite artist-in-residence, Leonas pointed out.
And there was one last thing: Leonas was going to have to work with company. The greatest--albeit in the cheaper bracket--Jungian psychologist in LA, Dr. Baek-Hyeon "Beck" Kang, would be visiting the compound Leonas lived on with his beatnik compadres. Dr. Kang was overqualified for this unorthodox arrangement, which in turn worked out much better for the painting itself and its success.
Wildly, Dr. Kang and Leonas were the worst of enemies from the get-go. Leonas's self-importance, alcoholism, and spontaneous abstract profundity did not match Kang's nebbishy, purposeful industriousness, and nothing was accomplished for the first six months.
Then, however, Kang lent Leonas a recent publication by Joseph Campbell, which charmed Leonas into docility. Newfound attraction united them even further, even within the realm of a temporal passion that lasted through the painting's second and third years of creative gestation. Kang was more Leonas’s Kahlo than his Gala Elouard, unfortunately, and whatever analogical Diego Rivera was in Leonas found another doomed romance with Leonas’ next muse, Allen Ginsberg.
Dr. Kang nixed the waterspout-out-of-the-waterhole imagery from Bordello’s dream from the get-go. The waterspout was violent--a painting that gets people to agree using Jungian theory, Kang explained, should first calm our tempestuous emotional inner selves. Kang mentioned a “villain archetype dormant between the liminal spaces in our beings” as well as some other highfalutin bullshit Bordello couldn’t fully recall. The bottom line was that the painting should feel like the composition intrinsically understood the onlooker from first glance ("like the subject is at home, in a house they designed themselves," Kang once remarked abstrusely). It should also have an unpretentious feeling of exigence.
"Toward what?" Bordello asked.
Kang and Leonas looked at one another knowingly. "That is our final secret."
After four years, the painting was finished, but to no fanfare. No one knew about the project save Bordello, "Crispin," Leonas, Dr. Kang, and maybe Allen Ginsberg. Not even Bordello's higher-ups in Virginia knew of this project--Bordello had taken on this endeavor, along with its risks, independently.
Which brought him here to this shotgun-style boardroom--the "firing room" of latent infamy--breathing the same air as Price Goddard and about thirty other government higher-ups.
"This is my implement, or one devised by my colleagues Mr. Ostrobromski and Dr. Kang. It is very powerful when the onlooker has it in their field of vision, sans occlusion. I have invented special glasses that block out all the colors the implement uses. Please retrieve the glasses from your pocket folders now as I take off the painting's tarp."
With grace Goddard slipped off his glasses, and on with the special pair. "Bordello! I can't see a thing!" He ripped off the special pair--"These are painted black!"
"Yes." Bordello plucked his own special pair from his breast pocket. "The painting uses many colors, and you don't need any distraction with this thing anyway. From what I've seen, it's dangerously persuasive."
"...Who hired this guy?"
"Sergeant Tanner," Goddard snapped. "Put on your black glasses and keep your damn mouth shut: you sure are lucky you secured all that artillery from the Nazis in Stalingrad." Goddard shifted in his seat and pushed up his own pair of shades.
Bordello's eyes narrowed--did the military have it out for the FBI or something? His attention snapped back upon Goddard's verbal command. "Alright. I will reveal the implement. Before I do, I need one volunteer to complete my instruction...for the demonstration." He cleared his throat.
The audience of uniformed men turned and chanted "Tanner," almost in unison. Tanner grinned peevishly and stood up, ripping off his glasses and flicking dust off two intimidating pectorals. Everyone heard Goddard's throat rattle in disgust.
Bordello's own throat quickly dried out while Tanner lumbered over like the linebacker he probably was in college. Bordello noted a Purple Heart suspended among the bars on his lapel, and doubted Tanner was enabled to act like such a yutz on most assignments.
"Ready, sergeant?"
"Ready as I'll ever be, I guess. What's this thing supposed to do to me?"
"Oh, only everything I say," Bordello smiled, guiding Tanner to a chair in front of the painting. "Everybody, please make sure your blackout shades are on."
Tanner sighed with a little exasperated disbelief and sat. He chuckled to himself. "I don't need these glasses at all?"
"Nope." Bordello situated himself behind the painting and slipped off its shroud.
Tanner sat transfixed by the painting for a moment, wide-eyed. "Wow."
"Tanner, it's very early."
Tanner glanced at his watch. "Yeah, though I don't mind it."
"...You're a big guy, aren't you, Tanner?"
Gasps resounded.
Tanner laughed heartily. "I guess I am."
"A big, burly boy who needs his milk?"
Goddard burst out with laughter.
Tanner chortled and sighed, "I prefer something stronger, but milk is fine."
Bordello transcribed the conversation on a legal pad.
After another moment: "Tanner, I'm feeling very tired. Do you agree?"
"You're feeling very tired."
"No shit.” Bordello looked at Goddard, who was now bouncing with laughter at the head of the table. Whether it was at Bordello or Tanner—maybe both—Bordello didn’t know or really mind. “Tanner, do you agree that you have been looking forward to this meeting for the past year?"
"My senses tell me that isn't true, but I do agree. It's an important meeting, after all." He paused. "What's it about, exactly?"
The crew of stoically outfitted military men tittered like a group of high schoolers.
Bordello picked up a red flashcard. "This is blue. Do you agree?"
"It looks red to me, but I'm afraid I have to agree that, yes, that is definitely a blue card."
"Are you sure?"
"Sure as I'll ever be." Tanner scoffed with some vestigial entitlement. How could Bordello believe stupid blue card was red.
"Thank you, Tanner. You should go sit back in the chair you were in before this demonstration, don't you think?"
Tanner rose and stomped back to his seat at the long boardroom table, a disbelieving half-smile on his face. He was not robotic in his actions; rather, the apparent brainwashing seemed only to add a pleasant bounce to his jockish affect.
Goddard harrumphed. "Sergeant Tanner!”
“Mmmmmmm?” He shot Goddard a puckered-lip over-the-shoulder glance like a minxy pinup.
“It is so that you must do a backflip on top of this table."
Tanner laughed. Shakily, he mounted his rolling chair and then scaled the table, his patent dress shoes gleaming under well tailored uniform trousers as he threw his head back with laughter. He chasséd goofily, springing and twisting and lunging chest-upward into a graceful backwards dive headfirst into the table, screaming with laughter all along the way.
Even as the audience members removed their glasses and Bordello scrambled to pull the canvas tarpaulin back on the painting, Tanner laughed. They had to basically scrape his scalp off the table, he hit it so hard headfirst, and his ankle was badly sprained from his attempt, but he laughed as though he knew the punchline to the world's dumbest joke.
After the dust cleared and Tanner, still rolling, had been taken out on a gurney and presumedly discharged, Goddard broke the silence that filled the boardroom:
"I don't know if I fully believe this is a thing, Bordello. Sergeant Tanner is known for being something we in the business like to call shit for brains."
"With respect, why don't you just volunteer yourself then, sir?" Bordello suggested.
"I guess if it works we'll agree about something."
Five minutes later, Bordello helmed a room of believers.
Ethos
"Leigh Weinberger" was not a name with a je ne sais quoi.
Juxtaposed with that fact, it gleamed white beside INCUMBENT PRESIDENT DUPREE ANDREWS and GOLDEN TICKET PARTY CANDIDATE BLAKE SVENSON on a backlit viewfinder between animated swirls of filigree. Not a pundit herself, Leigh awaited her cue between the candidates, straight-backed in a hard little chair the setup people had found for her off set.
Leigh was actually an underpaid clinical therapist from Decatur, Ohio who tested out of a single Government course requirement back at Oberlin in 2067. Not necessarily someone with the inherent authority to mediate a presidential debate, she felt like an imposter as her feet hung off her chair, whorly tresses spilling down her arms. The two blonde Northern European folks that bookended Leigh loomed hulkingly over her frame, but her strict posture gave her a confident air. She folded her hands over a government-issued laptop after buttoning the open-knit mohair cardigan her sister made for her last fall.
The set that she sat on was surreal and bleak, she surmised. So was the task in front of her.
In the two years after the Second American War, the government had been a capsized vessel trying to right itself on an angry sea. Too many factions were boiling up into the fray, and a temporary administration decided that a bipartisan election hearkened appropriately to antebellum tradition.
While people stood in bread lines at Kroger and pieced together hyper-regulated internet lives on old iPhones, the media rolled out the red carpet for the number one event to make American citizens feel back in control of their lives again.
Advertisements flashed for a new kind of preliminary debate. This time, the candidates were only allowed to state verified statistics to persuade their audiences: no ad hominem attacks or half-baked emotional appeals. How were they going to ensure that?
By giving Leigh the responsibility instead. She had been selected at random through a public lottery draw from what the government claimed to be thousands of qualified candidates, and then volun-told to attend basic refresher courses on Rhetoric and Politics.
Her directions thereafter were even more surrealistic: to download a soundboard and, anytime one of the candidates said something that was not verifiable fact, to click the loudest buzzer sound and explain to the audience why the statement was not powered by pure logic.
