But with this, he had no idea where to start. This was preposterous. This was a perversion of democracy, or whatever, this goddamned blimp. "A goddamned blimp!" Sergei said, as it took shape. It wasn't even 8 o'clock and already Sergei and Nicky and the Craspedacusta campaign had trouble. They arrived at the high school expecting to find it empty but instead were assaulted visually by a hive of Olongapo's minions, inflating this blimp the size of a ranch house. Little Nicky was staring at the blimp, his mouth open and limp.

"What kind of gas you think that is?" he asked, head tilted, like an inquisitive pet. "Is that air, or would it have to be something lighter?"

Poor Little Nicky. He was so clever and such an imbecile. Chubby, unshaven, wild-haired, from New Hampshire, with eyes and an ever-sweating forehead that gave him the perpetual look of someone disarming a bomb. His neck, covered in carbuncles, was hidden under a bandanna worn at all times. He seldom blinked but when he did it was a full-facial blink, like he was clicking into place all the parts of his head. Though he was very serious, very methodical, he was given to maniacal fits of laughter. The little bastard laughed maniacally at any joke or witty observation given him, especially by Sergei, who was so unsettled by Nicky's laughter that he'd stopped telling jokes or making witty observations in Nicky's presence. When he wasn't laughing or talking or sweating profusely in visible rivulets, Nicky was the best special projects man in politics willing to work for $600 a week and expenses and live at headquarters in case the phone rang in the middle of the night, with an informant on the other end of the line, bursting with revelations that would once and for all bring down Murray Olongapo, that clueless, humdrum and complacently competent moron.

"I hate that guy," Nicky said. "What kind of name is that, anyway, Olongapo? Sounds African. Or Maori. Or Spanish."

The name was Filipino, as was Murray, a few generations removed from immigrants -- but Sergei didn't bother explaining this to Nicky, who seemed particularly dim that morning. Instead, Sergei watched as the blimp, now engorged, rose from the football field with an air of unmistakable menace.

Nicky whistled. "It's like a planet," he said. "Or a big car."

Sergei and Nicky had no blimp. They hadn't thought, for a second, about a blimp. Where did one get a blimp, even a mini-blimp? "Fucking internet," Sergei muttered. Man, he hated the internet, almost as much as he hated the World Wide Web. He and Nicky stood for a minute more, their shoes soaking through with dew, both of them wondering why blimps hadn't always been on their minds, why they had had this blind spot where blimps were concerned, why they had brought only balloons and banners to this fair, why they had thought, in this instance, wholly within the box.

The blimp was now aloft completely, tethered by ropes attached to twelve of Murray's Minions, as they cheerfully and jokingly called themselves. They were such losers. Sergei hated them, and hated Murray, with his bright blue socks and fish ties and his insistence that all references to him be "Murray," never Mr. Olongapo, or Congressman or Representative or even Sir. "They haven't knighted me yet!" he'd say if you called him Sir, and then wrap one of his skinny rubbery arms around you. "He's so charming!" people said. "So down to Earth!" Cluck cluck cluck. Booga looga boo. He was a doofus and a dunce. Any grown man -- and Murray was 66 -- who wore the same ridiculous bright blue socks every day and showed up at any formal event in a different fish tie -- the tie! it looks like a fish! ho ho! -- was an abomination and a disgrace. Because Murray asked to be called Murray, implying youth and accessibility, Sergei always called him Olongapo, hinting at a certain harsh and exotic impenetrability, though Murray, and his parents, were born in San Diego. In response, Murray's Minions were lately using "Stuart Little," though Stuart, at 5'8", was not exactly short, and seemed taller. Sergei had been personally offended by that moniker, by the quick and savage way they'd come at poor Stuart, who, oddly enough, he'd privately been calling Stuart Little for months himself. Every attack, Sergei knew, prompted a return volley, one that was invariably nastier, more shocking than the one that started things, and on and on this would go, in small flurries, always ending with one side going too far -- as when Sergei publicly referred to Olongapo's wife as "Imelda" -- leaving each side momentarily too stunned to fight.

Sergei turned to Nicky. "Make some calls. See if there's another blimp."

"For today?" Nicky asked, and flinched.

"Yes for today, you weasel. Today."

Nicky made a flurry of calls, to no avail. Nicky was making the calls right next to Sergei, on his cellphone, and this made Sergei tense. There was a time, before portable phones, when Nicky would have taken the orders and gone off to an office or booth, leaving Sergei alone to survey the landscape and await the information in a brooding executive fashion, ostensibly working on his own tasks while Nicky did his. But having Nicky right next to him, making the calls Sergei could easily be making himself, was very awkward.

"They said they don't really make blimps anymore," Nicky said. "They don't know where this one came from. They said maybe it's a balloon, not a blimp."

The blimp was, in fact, more in the shape of a zeppelin, long and narrow, cigar-shaped but ribbed by its armature. It was, Sergei and Nicky had to admit, gorgeous. Its base was golden, subtly so, pearly perhaps, and over it were painted stripes of red and white and stars of blue. Sergei gazed at it and felt weak, defeated already -- there was no way to achieve Total Visual Dominance with a behemoth such as this floating over the fairgrounds, unchallenged. The blimp seemed so smug. It could float, aloof and static, above the thousands at this fair, symbolizing everything out of touch and bloated and unresponsive about the incumbent, and people would love it. And once something like that was aloft, how could one bring it down? It was so much more difficult. How to convince the populace that this ridiculous mass of nonaction was not something to gaze at, admire, but was their worst enemy, the very face of tax-and-spend imprudence?

Sergei had an idea. "Can't we get some kind of giant inflatable grizzly or something?" He pictured the grizzly atop the fairgrounds' snackbar roof, swatting down the blimp with its great claws. Nicky called about grizzlies.

"I found a crow, but it would --"

"A crow?"

"Yes. An eighteen-foot crow. Available a week from tomorrow."

Sergei sighed. Maybe Nicky was not as good as he'd previously thought. When Nicky was focused, he was a genius. But his sense of the time-space continuum, of urgency, was sometimes lacking. Would he have to fire Nicky? He didn't want to fire Nicky, as good as it would feel -- and boy, that could feel good -- to accumulate enough hatred of Nicky in the upcoming days to make it possible. He was and always had been and always would be surrounded by people less perfect than himself, and about this his mother had been correct. When he thought of his mother, her pacific eyes, her 26" biceps, Sergei sighed and his chest swelled. She'd been a Soviet pole-vaulter long before women's pole-vaulting existed in international competition, and was a woman always candid and wise and capable, with the shoulders of a highland gorilla.

A gust of wind came, cool and quick, and Sergei's feelings of frustration were followed, almost immediately, by a strength drawn from knowing that there was work to do, and he was just the man to find the people to do it. And if they didn't do it properly, he could fire them and start over, which was something he enjoyed because he believed so fervently in every last one of his people.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A mile or so away, closer to the sea and with eyelids flickering, Stuart Craspedacusta was finding his way out of a particularly pleasing cave of sleep, tasting the air for sunlight, carefully limning whether or not the hand between his legs was his. In a moment, after moving it (sign No.1) and feeling the hair on its knuckles tickle his inner thigh (sign No.2) it became clear that the hand was indeed his own, and he went back to sleep. An hour later, he awoke again, and, this time, between his legs was not his hand, but Samantha's. Samantha was his longtime ex-fiancée, with whom he slept, often, providing enormous pleasure for both, while they each looked for other, better, permanent companions. She was practical, funny, loud, doing well without being what one would call ambitious, and built like a professional soccer player. She was, in fact, a former professional soccer player, now a lawyer, one who hated to go to sleep without an orgasm, a point of view Stuart admired greatly. She slept three times a week at Stuart's house, which he shared with a college friend named Dudley, whom Stuart had not seen in six months, though they both slept at home every night, shared a shower and, unwittingly, a robe.

Samantha's face, prone, was chinning itself toward Stuart, her mouth set in a beatific grin. She was asleep and he took this as an opportunity to look at the tiny scars on her forehead, evidence of a fall through a skylight as a teenager; from the roof, she'd been spying on her foster parents having relations on a stationary bicycle. For her scars and other reasons -- before she put a CD in the stereo, she would toss it in the air, perpendicular to the earth, like a magician tossing rings to interlock -- Stuart had love for Samantha, more than she had for him, and he couldn't blame her.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Stuart couldn't remember exactly when he decided this would be a good idea, this running for State Representative. It seemed so long ago, as fuzzy and indefensible as any choice made under duress or the influence of rage or beer. It brought to mind other paths he'd taken and was eventually puzzled by: in high school he'd briefly thought himself a singer and at the talent show had sung "I'll Be Your Mirror" accompanied by Hammered dulcimer, played by his French teacher, Mme. Bialosky -- she was sex on legs, whoa nelly! It had not gone well, but was glory and conquest compared to the disaster of his Clan of the Cave Bear fan club or, in college, his leading of the Young Conservatives March Against Protests. He'd had his successes, yes. He'd lettered three years in track and had twice been the RA with the highest approval rate, and now his cellphone ring-customization outfit was flourishing. He made a good living. His skin was clear. He could play pickup basketball with anyone, and had loyal friends who knew when to stop talking. So why this, now, a run for statewide office? It had seemed easy enough six months ago but now was a grind, and everyone involved seemed to be taking it much too seriously.

But he'd always thought of himself as political, or potentially so, and he'd been told again and again he had the name for it. Though growing up he'd been called everything from Crab-Dip Custard to Crappy Pad-Thai Custer, his ancestors had actually helped to settle the area. A number of the district's buildings and even a great travertine obelisk bore his family's name, and thus when the GOP was looking for someone to run against Murray Olongapo, the well-liked three-term Democratic incumbent, Sergei Andropov came to Stuart Craspedacusta.

After they'd agreed he would run, Sergei leaked the possibility of Stuart's candidacy to the press, who promptly asked Stuart if this were a possibility, his candidacy.

"I have to consult with my family," he said, because Sergei had told him to say this, even though Stuart had no real family to consult. He was an only child, and hadn't spoken to his parents, divorced and fulfilled and busy and too happy to care about his fortunes, in a couple years. For companionship he had a pair of cats, one blind and one hyperactive, who wandered his house tied to each other with a bungy, a strategy that had greatly reduced the number of head injuries to both. And here they were now, jumping as one onto Stuart's bed, making their way to his face, where the sighted one will nuzzle its face against Stuart's, while the other will nod, eyes wild, looking perhaps to add to the calligraphy on Samantha's face.

After deciding to run, Stuart waited a week and then, standing on a stage with a couple in their seventies and a pretty, well-dressed woman in her thirties -- none of them related or married to Stuart -- reported that his family had given him the green light. Neither Stuart not Sergei made any claims that these people were his family, nor did they claim that the broad coalition of Latinos, whites, blacks, American Indians, Asians, children and the aged standing behind them literally were actually a broad coalition of Latinos, whites, blacks, American Indians, Asians, children and the aged standing behind him metaphorically or in any other way. Who they were and where Sergei had found them and what he'd paid them no one would ever know.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
Stuart showered and ironed a white shirt. He would not drive but walk to the fairgrounds, he decided, because a candidate -- of course! -- should walk the streets he wants to represent. Stuart mentally shook his own hand for that decision, a very good decision, though he also knew that had he wanted to drive, he was unable, for while he'd been lathering in the shower, Samantha had taken his car, which she often did, because it caused them to argue, and she was more likely, she said, to achieve her climax if they both started at a point of sensory elevation. Man, she was a hard woman. He'd made her really angry a few times, and he saw that her bones were steel, reinforced with lead, buttressed by platinum and iron and stone. She was tough as dirt. But things were good between them, for now, and Stuart was content and alive on a California day, the sky singing an aria to him. He left his driveway and ambled toward the high school.

"Hello, ma'am," Stuart said, passing a hair salon, outside of which a woman was sweeping human hair onto the sidewalk.

She did not say hello. People do not often say hello on sidewalks in Southern California, but Stuart did not allow this to dampen his high spirits. He was wearing new shoes. He'd decided that new white sneakers every month was a luxury worth any price, given what a strange little boost it gave him. Just as his handwriting got better when he was using a Uniballer instead of some cheap knockoff, so did his pace improve, and accordingly his entire outlook, when wearing some new K-Swiss. And today he was striding with great confidence. He'd lived here from the time he was seven, when his family moved from upper Michigan, and he'd loved the years in Solano Beach as only a non-native could. He felt lucky every day to be here. And the memories! He couldn't remember too many of them on his own, but when friends called him or drank imported beers with him, he would say Oh yeah, yeah. I remember that. And he liked saying those words, I remember that.

He walked with jaunty steps and freely swinging arms, knowing that he could be happy now, before he reached the fair, at which point he would be less cheerful, given he would have to face the voters, whose feelings toward him often had nothing to do with him, and whose words, sometimes, were confounding.

From a woman with twins in a widebody stroller: "I'll be disappointed in you no matter what you do." From a very tall man in a seersucker suit: "I want you to know pain, son. Don't feel it, know it. I will provide that pain for you, if you'd like." From an older man carrying a full square belly, like a sack of flour: "You should get my daughter committed." Stuart had started to speak. "You stupid prick!" the man added, puckering like he was waiting for a straw. "Speak, doofus! You're running for office, aren't you? Are you a mute?" Stuart couldn't find a word. The man seemed disgusted but then softened, perhaps subdued by the candy apple he'd just taken a great bite into. "You're no damned better," he managed, while grappling with the caramel, "than Matthew Modine."

The odd thing was that Stuart Craspedacusta looked very much like Matthew Modine, like a shorter version of Matthew Modine, with his sandy brown hair, his plainly handsome face, the tilt of his head, a little back and to the side, always implying an affability bordering on arrogance. Stuart had been mistaken for the actor a few dozen times in his life, but only once had he allowed a woman to believe, throughout the course of a very pleasant evening and morning, that he was indeed Matthew Modine. He'd memorized the actor's oeuvre for such an occasion, though while watching Cutthroat Island and Vision Quest -- the second movie very solemn and about high school wrestling -- he'd had to keep himself focused on the goal, his eyes on the prize. Stuart took some solace in knowing that a certain amount of those who would meet him at the fair would assume that Matthew Modine was out stumping for some slob named Stuart Craspedacusta, as opposed to the reality, which was that Stuart Craspedacusta was out stumping for Stuart Craspedacusta, and wasn't even sure why.

But for now Stuart had to chuckle. There, on the lawn he was passing, was a sign that said OLONGAPO, TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUDIE!

This Trudie business had been discusssed, but Stuart hadn't realized Little Nicky was really going to move forward with it. Trudie was Murray's former assistant, who had left suddenly eight months earlier and hadn't been heard from since. Sergei knew she was working at a mission in Bolivia, but was implying that she, and perhaps a Murray-Trudie lovechild, was being hidden, or had been disappeared.

Sergei and Nicky had come up with a number of completely indefensible connections between Murray Olongapo and every traffic accident, ATM burglary, sexually transmitted disease, dog mauling and summer camp drowning that had taken place in the six years Olongapo had been in office. At the beginning, it had been thrilling, Nicky's and Sergei's utter lack of fear or restraint, and Stuart had been morbidly fascinated with what they'd come up with next. They'd dragged out of the vault every unfortunate occurrence within a sixty mile radius -- bus crashes, floods, red ant sightings, and the freak (but preventable!) shark attack that claimed the left arm of Young Portia Epstein of Manhattan Beach. Each time Sergei and Nicky struck, Stuart would first gasp, then laugh, then show it to Samantha, and together they would try not to worry.

Nicky had begun with a flyer, stuck into the doorhandle of every house in the district, which intimated that Murray Olongapo was somehow responsible for or complicit with the failed efforts at the Bay of Pigs, given that Olongapo had visited Cuba with a delegation in 1998. Over a picture of American soldiers dead on a beach -- not actually from the Bay of Pigs; Nicky couldn't find one of those so they used a shot from Okinawa -- were the words: OLONGAPO: FRIEND OF AMERICAN GIS OR "AMIGO" DE CASTRO?

Olongapo hadn't even bothered to respond to the Castro leaflet, but the next day, the Craspedacusta campaign had received five donations, each for $5,900, from prominent Cuban exiles. Apparently there were about 200 now living in the district, having left Miami when the cast of "The Real World" showed up. Thereafter, every time Nicky put the words Olongapo and Castro in a leaflet or on a button, the checks poured in. It was like printing money.

"It's like printing money," said Little Nicky, while designing the next one, which was simpler and more direct: over a large picture of Elián Gonzalez were the words PORQUE, MURRAY OLONGAPO, PORQUE?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

At 9 a.m., when Stuart arrived, the fair was filling with food and color, white T-shirts luminous and the odor of sausage coming in measurable waves. Stuart walked directly to the booth that bore his name -- it was still so strange to him, to see his ungainly name in large clean forward-leaning letters -- and there found the two Jeannies, both of whom were dressed, as Sergei often asked them to do, very much like Hooters waitpersons. Their shorts rode high on the sides of their thighs, and their TV-tube-blue Craspedacusta T-shirts were worn snug. Jeannie One was from Orlando, Jeannie Two from the Ukraine. Jeannie One, whose last name was Currie, was the single African-American working for the Craspedacusta campaign, was unhappy about the outfit, but was willing to take one for the team, a lesson she'd learned from her dutiful grandmother, Betty, who had also worked in politics for a spell. Jeannie Two, on the other hand, had no experience of interest in the process, was just an old friend of Sergei's, though this could mean anything from a cousin to an ex-wife, and in two previous occasions had meant both.

"Hello Jeannie, hello Jeannie," Stuart said, directing a nod to each.

Jeannie One hugged Stuart around the waist and sighed. She did this at least once a day. She was thirty-six, unmarried, devoted to philately, spent a good deal of time attending reunion concerts, and liked Stuart a great deal.

Behind the Jeannies the rest of today's volunteers were occupied with the task at hand: putting helium into as many balloons as possible, and then attaching as many balloons to as many hands as possible, onto as many fences and food-booths and go-Karts as possible, each balloon tethered and swung aloft bringing them closer to achieving Total Visual Dominance.

In and around the booth, there were eleven six-foot canisters of helium, looking, with their aerodynamic shape and scuffs and scratches and dents, very much like a bouquet of unexploded Scud missiles. Manning the canister -- the squeak of the balloons being filled! It was painful and sudden, even when expected -- was Sergei's cousin Dmitri, who was sixteen but already more craven than his uncle, more desperate, with fewer qualms; he'd grown up in Moscow under Yeltsin and acknowledged no laws. He'd lost his father, a brother and two uncles to the Moscow River -- all had drowned in the summer, stinking with Stoli -- and he owed no one his pity or mercy. The ballooning process suited him, as it was brutish and short, and sounded nasty. Dmitri would finish the helium, pinch off the balloon and hand it to Haley, one of the three College Republicans from North Carolina, all attending UC-Riverside, who would then tie the balloon's umbilical and pass it to Nancy or Missy, two women in their mid-sixties who believed too fervently in everything Sergei said, found him impenetrable and sexy -- in fact thought he and not Stuart should be running -- and drank a gallon of milk a day to keep their bones strong. They would tie three feet of string to the balloon and hand it to one of the dozen other minions, who would either give one to a child young enough to want one, or otherwise run to an area of the fairgrounds not already bearing a Craspedacusta balloon and tie one on.

"Have you seen Sergei?" Stuart asked.

Jeannie Two's nose did a painful sort of twitch at the sound of the name.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing. I won't let him do this to me again."

There was a moment when Jeannie Two waited for Stuart to ask her to elaborate, and Stuart noticed a new scuffmark on his new white K-Swiss shoes.

"How do I look?" she asked, leaving her feelings about Sergei behind and brightening. She was often asking people's opinions about herself; she needed candid input daily. She'd been on three television dating shows and had been deliciously humiliated each time. She had sued and been sued on shows where retired judges rendered binding verdicts. She'd lost both times. She entered contests she couldn't win, and regularly posted her pictures online, begging for frank comments, suggestions and ratings. She loved to be judged and loved America for being so willing to accommodate her. Also: she was cadaverous and her skin had the color and texture of a pumpkin.

Stuart demurred.

Neither Jeannie knew exactly where Sergei was.

"Well, I guess I oughta be going out," Stuart said, hoping someone would stop him. "You guys need help with anything?"

They didn't.

"You go out," Jeannie Two said.

"You come along?" he asked One.

"You have enough moist towelettes?" she asked. Call it a passing thing, but he had surrendered to moist towelettes. He carried a dozen with him always, ever-ready to rub them all over his fingers and palms before handshakes and after. Stuart checked his pockets, feeling the bulge from the two handfuls he'd grabbed at home. They were the perfect size, the perfect weight. They were the best-engineered product he had ever known and he felt thankful, truly thankful, that we lived in a country where moist towelettes were available not only to the landed few, but to everyone. He nodded to Jeannie One and she grabbed a basket of buttons and stickers, pens, fanny cushions and license plate holders and they made their way into the multitude. Each time Stuart caught someone's eye, he would extend his hand and smile. "Hey there!" he said to children and men in their forties and fifties. "Hello hello!" he said to seniors and to those whose English was unpolished. "Hey," he said to people around his age or under. Each time he took someone's hand in his, he tried to invest something in the action. He made it a ritual: he would look down at the hand he was shaking, see its elephantine wrinkles, its marks and calluses. He knew that some hands were shortfingered, the digits like udders, and those hands were always dry; some fingers were so slender and the slender ones were cold; the perspiring hands always appeared barren from the outside. Nothing was as it seemed, but he liked to shake hands with young boys, to look them in the eye and act very serious when doing so. With women of a certain age, he flattered and found a way to touch, meaningfully, their inner wrist. It did not fail.

Even without the inner-wrist fondling, though, he really enjoyed it, all of it. He wasn't thrilled about putting himself into people's faces, interrupting their conversations or trains of thought -- and he tried not to do either -- but when he found himself in brief conversations with a voter or family or high school student interviewing him for her newspaper, he felt at home, was unsurprised but very happy with how warm people could be, and the number of people now in his life, who he could wave to at the beach or the taqueria. He had increased his acquaintances exponentially, and this made him feel infinitely more enmeshed in and necessary to his world. How many people did he know now? Thousands -- thousands he could recognize and half of those he could probably name. His high school had been one with 1,100 students, and he figured between the upperclassmen and those below, he'd known by name about 700. Add to that the maybe 400 he came to know in college, and his relatives -- 36 there -- those at his church, and you have around 2,400. He was not someone who chatted up clerks and cabbies, and was too forgetful to go regularly to the same barber, so while he considered 2,400 people a great amount, more than you'd find at a professional tennis quarterfinal or even the largest Indian wedding, he was sure he'd already doubled that in the past six months. The nursing homes alone -- he'd done both of them, Sunny del Sol, Vista Mira View -- he was sure, held 200 people each whose names he'd probably recall if he saw their faces again.

He took pleasure in all this, but every time he heard himself say "How you doin'?" he felt a slight electric shock, as if his unforgiving teenage self were punishing him. The question, though, flowed from his tongue with such ease that he wondered what might be next: "Working hard or hardly working?" Or "You can say that again!" Or "Don't even start me on that!" It was mildly unsettling, but there was something thrilling about the process, about having an excuse, a logical and socially responsible reason, to be greeting and sometimes getting to know a small amount about, strangers, lesser known neighbors, and octogenarians. He'd met an artilleryman from the Korean War -- on the Korean side! -- yesterday, and that was something.

As Stuart greeted an older couple, easily eighty-eight each, both grinning and feisty, he caught Dmitri across the park, freeing a group of thirty Olongapo balloons. An audible moan emitted from Stuart's throat, unplanned. Oh god, he thought, the counteroffensive has begun. He couldn't believe the things being done ostensibly in his name. He tried not to watch as Dmitri cut the balloons' strings and ran, ducking behind a row of portable toilets. Stuart, still holding the warm hand of his octogenarian friend, watched as the cluster of American-blue balloons rose and shrank away into the sky's less strident blue, where within a few hours they would sail twelve miles, land in the Pacific and eventually choke a group of migrating turtles.

Episode 2: The balloon battle heats up, and Bill Bennett enters the picture.