HIGH GROUND by Robert R. Chase

At the age of thirty, Jake Weisman could look back on five successful years as a show producer for theCooking Network. He had started with Food Champs, an arguably derivative show on which celebrity chefs competed against each other to create dishes that looked daring, original, and might even taste good.

When that became a success, he created Food Chumps, in which people were randomly pulled off the streets and put into the studio kitchen to determine who what the worst cook of all. Food Chomps followed, a quiz show in which dishes from Champs and Chumps were fed to a panel selected from audience members who then had to guess which creation came from which show. Contestants who guessed correctly more than fifty per cent of the time were dropped from the panel as they moved through the elimination rounds.

However, he considered Food Chimps to be the culmination of his career. In that program, the studio kitchen was turned over to chimpanzees to create food appealing to man and beast alike. Already, the first episode had seen the creation of the chocolate covered pretzel stick studded with termites. The Cooking Network hoped to make millions marketing it.\

Thus it was with little trepidation that Jake responded to a summons from his boss, Bea Knight. He entered her office and was stunned when she told him he was fired.

“What!” he said. “Why”

“We can’t have nonproductive deadwood around here, Jake.”

“Nonproductive? What about Food Chimps?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It was this morning!”

Knight pressed her lips together. Jake wondered what she was waiting for. Then the grandfather clock in the corner of the room began tolling the noon hours.

“Well, now it’s afternoon and you’re out of here,” she said.

Jake went to clear out his desk only to discover that the entire east wing of the building was undergoing renovation. Temporary walls had been taken down and new partitions put in place. The old desks had vanished; their replacements were being carted in. A chimp sitting at one of the new desks looked at Jake and shrugged sympathetically.

Things got worse when he got to his apartment. As he took his mail from the slot, he was astonished his sofa and collection of jazz CDs sitting on the sidewalk.

“What is this?” he asked the apartment superintendent, who was supervising the removal of more furniture from his apartment.

“You’ve just been fired. I can’t have deadbeats and vagrants taking up space.”

Jake leaned back against the wall of the building, finding it hard to deal with so much bad news in such a short period of time. As he did so, he noticed for the first time the return address on one of the envelopes was that off Senator Morton Hindbrane. Tearing it open, he was relieved to find an offer of employment on the Senator’s campaign staff.

“I may have to move, but at least I’ll have a job,” he said.

The superintendent had been reading over Jake’s shoulder. “Hindbrane. Does he have a position on rent controls?”

“Absolutely,” Jake said, favoring the superintendent with a glare he hoped was intimidating.

The superintendent thought a moment, then spoke to the workers. “Okay, guys, there was a mix-up here. Take everything back upstairs.”

He turned back to Jake. “Sorry about the mistake. You can keep your apartment indefinitely. Or at least until the election.”

The Senator’s letter asked Jake to join him as soon as he could. Unfortunately, the loan company had received notice the Cooking Network firing him and had repossessed his car. Rather than waste time fighting with them bought a bus ticket to where Hindbrane was campaigning. It was a long drive, and Jake was just beginning to drift off to sleep when a woman came and stood next to his seat.

“Are you Jake Weisman?” she demanded.

“Uh, yeah.”

“The Jake Weisman who produces Food Chimps?”

This was how Jake learned that even though he had been fired, there had been no time to remove his name from the list of executive producers.

“I used to be,” he said.

“Well, you should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.

“Why?” he asked curiously.

“The terrible way you profit from the recipes the chimps create,” she said. “That’s cultural appropriation.”

Jake was honest enough to have admitted to himself that his career generally and Food Chimps in particular could be criticized on several levels but this was one critique that had never occurred to him. He might say that the chimps were well paid and seemed to enjoy banging pots in the studio kitchen and throwing things at the audience. Somehow he doubted that would satisfy this woman.

“I don’t think I can be guilty of cultural appropriation,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I self-identify as a chimp.” He opened his duffel bag, rooted around for a moment, and came up with chocolate covered termite stick. “Here, have one. The chocolate is first-rate, the salt crystals are large, but it’s the formic acid in the termites that give it a real kick.”

For a second it looked like she was about to make a heated response, but then the bus driver called back that safety regulations required all passengers to stay in their seats while the bus was in motion. The woman stomped back to her seat and Jake resumed his nap.

Several hours later, Jake was awakened as the bus came to his stop. He got out and looked around. To his left, across the road, grasslands stretched off to where dimly seen mountains punctuated the horizon. To his right rose a large hill, atop which stood Senator Morton Hindbrane in a white linen suit.

Jake began to trudge up the hill. There were groups of people scattered all around the base and on the slopes. Some were arguing and even fighting. Jake gave them a wide berth.

Like many of his former colleagues on the Cooking Network, Jake was a bit overweight, so he was sweating with exertion by the time he reached the summit. Fortunately, a cooling breeze swept in from the ocean on the far side. Jake stood there for a moment, panting and letting the wind dry him.

“Mr. Weisman. Delighted that you could make it here.” Hindbrane advanced and grabbed Jake’s hand in his own meaty paw.

“Thank you, Senator,” Jake said after he rescued his hand. “I’m glad to be here. But where exactly are we?”

“Why, we’re on the Moral High Ground, of course. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Jake looked around and had to agree. The view was even more magnificent up here than it had been from the road. In addition to the grassy plains and the distant mountains, he could now see the ocean dappled by afternoon sunlight. He noticed for the first time the miniature wildflowers beneath his feet, glowing with all the colors of the rainbow.

“It is indeed,” Jake said. “But now that we’re here, what do we do with it?”

“We occupy it,” Hindbrane said, “and keep any of my opponents from taking it away from us.”

“How do we do that, sir?” Jake asked.

The Senator put a heavy hand on Jake’s shoulder and favored him with a man to man stare. “By any means necessary, my boy. You understand?”

Jake nodded, though something seemed wrong about that.

“It’s lucky you arrived when you did,” Hindbrane continued. “My people have been doing good work keeping people down but they’re stretched thin. The seaward side isn’t really defended at all. That’s where I need you to be.”

Jake walked over to the edge and looked down. Wind-driven black waves smashed themselves to foam on the rocks below.

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “That slope looks awfully slippery.”

“Nonsense, boy, folks say that just because it gets steeper and wetter the further you descend. I’m sure you have too much gumption to believe those ninnies. Now get down there and get to work.”

Jake picked his way carefully down the slope. He didn’t really want to fight anyone, but it was now his job and he wanted to do it well. However, the first person he met was not coming up the hill at all. He was ensconced behind a rocky outcropping, from which he surveyed the slope below.

“You’re not trying to take the moral high ground?” Jake asked.

“Me?” the man said. “Goodness, no. You must be one of Hindbrane’s people. He’s still pushing all rainbows and unicorns with that high ground crap. I’m a pragmatist. I find practical solutions to real problems. You gotta realize while a little morality can be good, too much is toxic. Moral narcissism, that’s all it is.”

Jake was relieved to realize he had not reason to fight this man. Furthermore, since the man would not let anyone take his outpost, he was effectively keeping all from ascending beyond him on this part of the hill, thereby out of his own self-interest helping Hindbrane. There was an economics lesson in all of that, Jake thought, though he could not say exactly what it was.

Jake moved across to a section of the slope that was unguarded. Half a dozen men and women were toiling upwards. Jake grabbed the arm of the one nearest and threw him down. The next one over had already ascended beyond him. Jake took a few quick steps, grabbed that one from behind and whirled him round and to his knees. Escaping from Jake’s clutches, the climber scuttled along the side of the hill to find an easier route of ascent.

The other members of the group could have easily ganged up on Jake but each was too intent on his own climb to do so. Jake was doubly fortunate that they were as out of shape as he was. After a few minutes, he had cleared the slope of them all.

Except for one woman who was determined to continue on the most direct path to the summit. She avoided Jake’s attempt to grab her and raked her fingers across his cheek, simultaneously leaving several bloody furrows and breaking one of her fingernails. Both yelped in surprised pain. Jake lost his footing, tumbled into her, and together they rolled down the toward a precipitous drop off.

Jake managed to stop rolling at the edge. The roar of the surf was loud. The ground was wet from the waves which shattered themselves on the knife-like rocks and hurtled upwards in continuous geysers of spray.

The woman’s feet dangled over the edge. She shrieked as her slide resumed. Jake automatically grabbed her wrist. She looked at him suspiciously.

“You’re not doing this just because I’m a woman dressed in a perhaps too revealing tank top, are you?” she asked. “Would you help a fat, bald guy in a spaghetti tee shirt?”

“Of course, I would,” Jake lied.

“Well, okay then.” She allowed Jake to help her inch her way off the precipice. Fully back onto the slope, she lay next to Jake, panting with exhaustion. Jake was unable to move for a few seconds. The crash of the waves was a continuous reminder of how close they had both come to death.

“This is stupid,” he said at last. “I’m supposed to help Hindbrane hold on to the Moral High Ground, but that shouldn’t mean getting ourselves killed. There is room at the top for a lot of people.”

In fact, now that he thought of it, Hindbrane’s problem was that he had too few people to patrol too large a perimeter. The Moral High Ground, from what Jake had seen of it, was more like a plateau rather than a mountain peak. It could contain multitudes.

“Look,” he said, turning to the woman, “if you promise not to try to take the Moral High Ground from Senator Hindbrane, I’ll escort—“ She frowned at him. “—ah, accompany you up to the top and ask him to let you stay.”

The woman, whose name he eventually learned was Jill, agreed that this was reasonable. They carefully crabbed their way backwards until they read dry ground and the slope had lessened enough to allow them to stand. From there they climbed the hill together, each helping the other up when they stumbled and fell.

The top was even less crowded than Jake remembered. A bloody sun touched the horizon, washing the blowing grasses in a dreamlike twilight. Hindbrane seemed to have disappeared. It took Jake an hour to spot him. He was in a mass of people clustered near the base of one of the steeper drop-offs., addressing them through a bullhorn. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and it wasn’t clear to Jake if members of the audience were trying to get closer to hear the speaker or if there were actually two groups in contention. Hindbrane was turned away from him, so Jake could not here what he was saying to the crowd. He could tell, however, that some of them were becoming quite agitated. One of the spectators got close enough to punch Hindbrane. Hindbrane promptly smashed his bullhorn on the attacker’s head.

“Senator Hindbrane!” Jake yelled down to him. “You have abandoned the Moral High Ground.”

Hindbrane raised his bleeding face to Jake and grinned. “Finally realized there was nothing up there worth keeping. The action’s all here in the trenches. You’ve got to get your hands dirty, boy. C’mon down.”

“I, uh, don’t think so,” Jake said. As he was speaking, Hindbrane disappeared beneath a swirl of bodies, so he may not have heard Jake’s reply.

Night fell. Some of those still on the Moral High Ground lit a fire and shared whatever food they had with them. Jake contributed the last of his chocolate termite sticks. Jill and a few others politely told him the taste was “interesting.”

The found space beneath a small grove of trees and fell asleep. A few hours later, Jakewas awakened by distant shouts of anger and alarm. He got up, cautiously made his way to the edge and looked down upon the darkling plain. He had thought that everyone would go home, or at least go to sleep, with nightfall, but there seemed to be as many contending in the darkness as there had been during the day. Torches advanced and retreated in a parody of the majestic movement of the Milky Way high above. Different groups surged back and forth, and sometimes seemed to split and attack their own constituents.

Jill crept up beside him. “Come back to bed.” He looked at her. “It’s getting cold for a woman dressed in a perhaps too revealing tank top.”

He did so, and wondered what they would do in the morning.

-END-