NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
It hung down from the top of the door, in black twists and curls like ornate cast iron work. Lou was looking for his auger when he opened his shed. The snake made a brief wet sounding hiss, as if it was spitting as it fell against his arm from above the door. As he backed away, the door swung to, and the black snake’s tail was caught in the top.
“That will be the end of the mice in here.”
“The thing looks well fed.”
“Too many people kill these guys without realizing how helpful they are.”
“I saw one looped around the branches of a big azalea last summer and I think that was killed.”
“Oh over at the Rundstedt’s you mean?”
“Yes, it wasn’t them though, some visitor thought he was protecting the kids.”
Lou started using his cell phone, capturing 8 megapixels of information per shot while making a faux shutter click with each.
“Your phone is trying to sound like an old film camera.”
“There’s an option to make it hiss like a snake.”
“Now it is unwinding it looks about four feet long, what do you think Fred?”
“No more than that.”
Lou used a stick to push the door open again and release the snake. The snake pulled its head up to the extended length of its body to the top of the door and started out toward the mansard roof overhung by viburnum coming into bloom. On the other side dying pink azalea blossoms hang in rags under the lotus-like symmetry of the four-petaled Kousa dogwood flowers. The shed is full of garden tools, and things hard to identify, stacked in the dark towards the back. In spring Lou fertilizes the expansive white oak that shades his living room and iron wood trees outside the kitchen. He drills down with the auger and pours granular fertilizer in four or five holes around the base of each tree.
“The auger used to be here on the right.” Lou is looking to the left, though pointing to the right. Something had drawn his attention and he moves further in.
“Lou, it has probably fallen behind your shelving unit.”
“Here, give me a hand with this.” He is bending over a powder blue wooden chest covered in mouse droppings and stained across one end.
“It stinks!”
“That’s what the snake found too.”
He adjusts his gloves and gives me a pair. We tilt it to the right far enough to get a hand underneath one side, and lift the box out of the shed and put it down on the grass. He drops his gloves on the ground and takes out his phone. An unusual looking padlock hangs from the hasp like a large brass cube. It has a small rectangular window on one side. He puts his phone up to the window and the lock springs open.
“What do you keeping here?”
“Not the auger … “
He breaks off as he removes the padlock and opens the lid revealing a lot of small cartons and some six packs. “These look familiar?”
“Lou that looks like the blue stuff I drank at your political party.”
“The very same. There are a few bottles of solution in here too.”
“Is that the top there?” I pointed out the cut glass on top of a bottle shaped like an Ionic column. “That’s it Fred, clean air solution.”
“Did you get that from Alice or do you have your own supplier?”
“Oh we have the same supplier.”
“What are those things that look like small diving tanks?”
“They are still experimental. You might call it fog. Once released,those under its influence believe what ever they are told.”
“Sounds dangerous. Do they go on believing after the stuff is dispersed?”
“Probably, the results are not all in yet.”
“Where has it been used Lou?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“I mean did Romney or Obama use it in the campaigns?”
“Possibly.”
“You mean they both did.”
“Oh well, that’s possible. This product will be sold to any one with the money to buy it.”
“Is it a gas, or what?”
“Not a gas, though it is under pressure.”
“What kind of pressure, is it a fluid?”
“No no, nothing like that.”
“What kind of pressure are you talking about?”
“Rhetorical pressure.”
“You can’t get that into a cylinder”
“Couldn’t tell you how, but it is. This is cutting edge stuff. I know the shape is suggestive but there isn’t anything like gas in there.”
“So what is it?”
“Something like ‘talking points’ and other stuff too.”
“So there’s an agenda bottled up in there.”
“That’s the idea Fred. Talking points enable the candidate to lead the discussion and avoid difficult questions. Also they keep every one on the same track.”
“Yes, high pressure would tend to blow away unwanted questions, but the idea of having candidates available to reporters and the public is to make them answer questions.”
“True enough, but a lot of money goes into elections now and that buys the discussion.”
“Buys the discussion? What discussion?”
“The discussions kept in tanks like these.”
“Lou that kind of scripted talk misses my point.”
“Your point is an idealistic one, and now obsolete. With this technology buyers can get the perspectives and opinions they want out there, on the internet, on TV where many consumers are passionately taking in every word.”
“But this kind of passion is aroused by misleading statements and outright lies.”
“That is as old as politics and there you have a point. Nothing obsolete about that.”
“Lou what are you doing with this stuff?”
“These are just a few trophies I keep for sentimental reasons.”
He pulls out a lot more small cartons and more tanks and then as he removes the last item, the bottom of the box falls away revealing the top of a long shaft that appears to be going deep underground. “Come on Fred.”
Lou climbs down into the shaft and starts down a ladder built into the side. I find it is a snug fit climbing down and feel no vertigo as we go down for at least ten minutes. It is like sliding down the earth’s throat. Stepping off at the bottom we are in a damp triangular chamber. It is like being in an elevator painted powder blue with a flat finish.
“I think we have been swallowed Lou. Is this the stomach?”
“The stomach of what?’
“Exactly Lou. Where are we?”
A metal door in the wall facing us is painted same color but gloss. Lou doesn’t answer. He is working on his phone again. He swipes and taps the glass a few times and the door opens. There is no visible handle or lock. The oval shape passage beyond the door is high enough to walk down with a good foot of clearance above Lou’s six foot height. It curves to left and right of us, and he asks which way I want to go.
“How about this way”, I point to the left.
“Okay Fred, go ahead.”
We soon come to another door in the side of the passage marked “WT7” in orange light. It is hard to tell whether it is projected onto the door or if it is somehow coming out of the surface. I put my palm up in front of the illumination to see if there is anything projected on the back of my hand. There’s nothing, nor anything on the palm.
“There is a strange light down here. Why is everything blue?
“You chose to go left.”
“Right”
“These are issue the left finds important. For instance the question as to why World Trade Center building seven collapsed on 9/11 is wide open on the left. They point out that it wasn’t hit by aircraft, like the two towers, and nothing fell on it. So why did it go down? Some want to say demolition charges were set and claim there is residual evidence in dust collected from the site. Was it a false flag operation? Had we gone to the right there would be no mention of it.”
Moving along, I notice a huge green pipe over a foot in diameter running along the top of the passage, secured to the ceiling every few feet by massive braces. The words, “DANGER HIGH PRESSURE” move along the outside of the pipe in glowing white letters in the same strange light as the signs on the doors.
“What is in that pipe?”
“Don’t worry that’s the truth factor. It runs throughout the system.”
“Oh really, truth factor?”
“Yes all these issues have to be processed under high pressure with truth factor so people will believe them when they are released.”
“Some of it may be untrue Lou, a lot in fact!”
“That’s not important. What matters is that people believe things if they think they are true, or at least want to believe they are true. That is critical. It can be explosive!”
“What is?”
“To feed that yearning for truth in every good consumer.”
“For truth Lou?”
“Yeah, no one is going to believe something they think is untrue!”
“We are not talking about truth. We are talking about credibility, and bias and deception and so on.”
“To be sure Fred, those ingredients are piped in as well. You see that cable running along the side of the pipe?”
There is a thick purple cable fastened to the pipe along one side. “Yes, it seems to be glowing.”
“That’s bias factor. That purple light moves down the fiber optic at enormous intensity and shines into the processing unit so all the information will be seen in the same light.”
“So when this stuff comes to light, so to speak, it is all purple!”
“No, it simply has a consistent bias.”
“Lou, I don’t like the sound of this.”
“As Dick Cheney famously said, ‘the facts don’t matter any more’.”
“You mean the facts can be hidden or ignored.”
“They are producing food for thought in here Fred. That’s what the consumer needs.”
“No Lou, thoughtful people question the information they are given and examine it critically.”
“Fred, that kind of detachment is out of the question. This high tech stuff works on feeling, not abstraction or self reflection.”
The passage narrows as we move along under the threatening pipe and its attendant purple bias line. We have to face the wall and move sideways. Now here’s a door marked “Watergate” and further on another marked “Iran Contra”.
“These aren’t open questions. The doors are all shut.”
“Not if you have one of these.” Lou flicks his fingers across his phone glass and taps, and the door opens.
“There’s Oliver North climbing into a helicopter … Look, Lou isn’t that Manucher Ghorbanifar?”
“I don’t know. Who is he Fred?”
“Its getting uncomfortably hot in here Fred.”
“Things heat up as passage narrows Fred. The rhetorical space is restricted while the heat and pressure go up. Too much information can be confusing. They pressurize a a little with emotional factors to keep people’s attention. ”
“Okay Lou, by the way, Ghorbanifar was the go-between selling arms from the U.S. to the Iranians to increase our influence in Iran. Money from that deal was diverted to the Contras who were fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and that contravened the Boland Amendment.”
“Yeah, that’s what brought about the famous hearings.”
“That’s why we recognize the name ‘Ollie North’!”
“ I see where this is going Lou and it is too hot. Now let’s take a look to the right.”
Using his cell phone again, he opens an unmarked door and we walk through into another passage but this one is painted red with glossy red doors. Here’s one marked ‘Whitewater’, the next is “Vincent Foster”, and soon enough we come to “Monica Lewinsky” marked, like the others, in powder blue light against the red, a contrast, which leads to optical irritation.
“Lou, there doesn’t seem to be anything there!”
“Where Fred?”
“Right here, see! I am touching the door and my hand goes through it.”
“That’s right Fred you are in a rhetorical structure.”
“Do you mean a virtual structure?”
“You might say they are related.”
“I thought we were in a stomach.”
“Mind and gut are intimately connected and this is all about that kind of connection.”
“Oh you mean the so called ‘gut reaction’.”
“You might say that, yes. All kinds of controversies are kept alive down here ready for deployment at the right political moment.”
“Whose moment?”
“Whoever has the money to buy it Fred.”
“Fibonacci Corporation for example?”
“I couldn’t say Fred.”
“But Lou, that’s the good old free enterprise system at work!”
“You sound like Albrecht Intaglio Fred.”
“I must be out of my mind Lou. What’s to stop me from walking right through there?”
“Try it.”
Stepping forward, I see the big mock orange blooming in Lou’s yard. The sky is brilliant and the wind is gusting. It is remarkably cool for late May, under 65 F with low humidity. Mr. Liddell is crouching as still as stone in the shade of a holly.
“Lou, is that Diddlie’s white rabbit?” As I speak Mr. Liddell hurries off with his ears down, toward the front of the house.
“Could be Fred. He is missing again. You must have dropped off under that mock orange so I went ahead and started.” He is using his auger to drill holes in the ground around a tulip poplar. There’s an old wrought iron gate rusting against the side of the shed, with climbing ivy curling into the decorative motive with light green runners.
“So what happened?”
“What’s that Fred?”
