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.
After enjoying the buffet lunch at The Emperor Babur Restaurant at the Hadron shopping Center I climbed the stairs to street level. The orange “open” sign at the Subway blinks on and off surrounded with holiday cheer in LEDs rendering images of holly and red berries.
Turning from this pulsing orange and green merriment, there’s Diddlie and Lark across the street loading the last of their Obama campaign paraphernalia into the back of Diddlie’s Prius. They face me as they step out of the glass-fronted office and into the fine rain that fills the mid afternoon dark, and intermittently refreshes the puddles out here.
Keeping the umbrella facing into the wind and walking towards them, I can see Diddlie waving a picture of the president on the end of a pole to get my attention. Next door, by a quirk of fate, the silent image Senator Lee Levenworth Knox fills a seventy two inch TV in the window of Dream Screen, the big screen TV shop with its ‘Great Wall of Entertainment’ stretching around the far corner and beyond towards the Snaz Super Store. Snaz and Dream are the two anchors for the Hadron Center’s lesser outlets and restaurants. A block long row of huge screens with smaller flat screen sets stacked above and below them make the ‘wall’ of identical images shining through the display windows, accompanied by the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ from the store’s outside speakers. The row of smaller screens below the giants, advertize electronic products under falling snow that never buries them. Those above the Senator show us beautiful people at the beach using their laptops under colorful umbrellas displaying the Dream Store logo in red white and blue. The president is pictured up on Diddlie’s pole pointing high into the air with his mouth slightly open facing the Dream Screen store. For a moment the president and the senator seem to be talking to each other, but it is an illusion. I look up at the crawl under the image of Knox, “…end of America as we knew and loved …” A cold gust of wind catches the president’s picture like a sail, blowing the pole against the side of Diddlie’s head.
The rain lets up. Lark drops the box she is carrying and moves over to steady the pole. Another gust sends papers in Lark’s open carton fluttering into the air like pale yellow paper birds. I wave and walk towards them across the street streaked with colorful commercial reflections in front of the vacant store-front they were using for the campaign. The crawl on Dream Screen’s set continues … “over- whelming numbers of takers are swamping the makers” … “Knox is surrounded by his supporters in Dyspeptic NY”. I try to catch some of the sample ballots blowing around my knees from Lark’s box, and pick two off the surface of a gleaming amber puddle before they are saturated.
“Lark, I see the “dynamic duo” have been working hard for the President’s reelection.”
“Its time to leave the bat cave Fred. I couldn’t have lived with myself if Romney had won while I sat back. Could you ‘Did’?”
Diddlie grunts from behind her grimace.
“How’s your head, honey?”
Diddlie is biting her bottom lip and rubbing the side of her head with one gloved hand and brushing her wind-blown hair out of her eyes with the bare fingers of the other. Lark takes the pole and slides it into the car letting the end rest on the dashboard with the rectangular picture flat in back. She picks up the bright red leather glove Diddlie dropped and stuffs it into her shoulder bag. The tips of three fingers stick up from the top like a cock’s comb. I roll the papers in my hand into a tube and offer them to Lark.
“I felt like the election was a toss up right up to the end.” She takes my tube and puts it in her carton before picking it up and loading it in the car.
“Too true Diddlie. Have you seen today’s paper?”
“You mean that headline announcing Fibonacci Corporation is in chapter 11?”
“Yup they are reorganizing, and there’s a picture of Jake Trip and Aaron Macadamia getting out of Jake’s Hummer Limo, or is it his?”
“Probably not. They are in Detroit.”
“Hi Bel!”
Bel Vionnet is walking towards us past the ‘Great Wall’ with a bag full of groceries from Snaz.
“Bel would you like a memento? Would you Fred?”
Diddlie offers us both an Obama poster, one in each hand.
“Thanks, I’ve got plenty. I am not sure I want to remember that horrible campaign.”
“Horrible, Bel? That’s entertainment!”
Bel doesn’t look happy “I am relieved to know that Romney is not in the White House.”
“Bel, Be Happy! Our guy won!”
Standing silently next to Diddlie, Lark eases down the hatchback of the Prius, so as not to damage any of the cargo.
“Yes Lark, and that’s fine with me, but the campaign was not.”
“Bel, that’s what seven billion of dollars buys in the political speech market.”
“Later Lark … I know I’m not ideologically correct, but there are times when I put that load down … Excuse me for now, but I have to move on home. This is my exercise for today folks.”
“May I walk with you Bel?”
“Come along Fred.”
“What do you make of the Fibonacci debacle?”
The sky is clearing and the rain has stopped blowing across the parking lot as we turn our backs on the ‘Great Wall of Entertainment’
and walk homeward talking quietly.
“Business as usual.”
“I was surprised.”
“What is so surprising about greedy people ruining themselves?”
“Nothing much I suppose. They take a lot of employees down with them though.”
“Fred that is the tragedy of it. It is a betrayal of those employees and I think it is a crime about those pensions.”
“Their pension contributions were automatically paid into company stock and they weren’t given a choice.”
“No, true enough, and for years they did very well. I think at some point the company got more interested in making money than doing business.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Not in this case. They were a diversified company and they put too much into bets on Wall Street and less and less into the rest of the company and the services it provided.”
“Lark tells me they had a huge contract with the Defense Department.”
“Yes, won’t it be interesting to see what happens?”
We stop at the long light on Route One and look at the pigeons sitting in a row on the utility lines, as if to watch the spectacle below. Facing us at first, the flock flies up in a huge cloud and circles back over the traffic and shopping center to lines that run perpendicular to Route One, up Boltzmann Road. Traffic is backed up at the lights because the long cycle allows for left turns from three directions. As we cross Bel tells me that risk management at Fibonacci finance arm grew weaker as their profits grew stronger. A fire engine races up to the intersection with horn and sirens loud enough to send the pigeons off again and when the engine passes they take up their positions facing us again. “Bel do you think each bird found his original spot?”
“Fred, I have no way to tell, but they all know when to take off and land, even without the sirens to scare them.”
“Yes, they don’t have to take a vote on it.”
“Pigeons know, Fred.”
“Where did you learn all that about Fibonacci Bel?”
“Sherman Shroud told me at a party. It was a bunch of Steve’s old colleagues mainly and I didn’t expect to see Sherman there.”
“So you know Sherman?”
“Sure, he has done some pro bono work for the Fauxmont Board.”
“I had no idea of that connection!”
“Steve knows him because they both visit Arty Bliemisch’s studio. The Shrouds collect her work.”
“I would have thought he was too high powered for us. I mean
Jake Tripp hired him!”
“He is high powered but that doesn’t put him out of reach. He spent his first five years here and went to the preschool.”
“ … and hasn’t forgotten us!”
“By the way Bel, have you seen Jake’s house is empty, with a foreclosure notice on it?”
“No, but I am not surprised.”
“Snaz is till open I see Bel.”
“Yes they won’t go out of business in this area.”
“So why should Jake be in foreclosure?”
“He got caught in Macadamia’s meltdown.”
Bel shows no sign of flagging after this long stretch with bag in hand.
It is a good mile up Boltzmann Road.
“This thing’s not heavy Fred. Just paper towel and some radishes I couldn’t find at the Farmer’s Market.”
We reach Victor de Broglie Boulevard with cherry trees growing in two rows down the broad grassy median and three turreted mansions towering over their new landscaping along one side. We take a short cut over to Maxwell Avenue, through an expanse of weeds in the last vacant lot on the street and come out in sight of the Light House Gas station up the road. Long before it was torn down, a Fauxmont style house stood here with a sign outside saying ‘Lot for Sale’. Bel stops and reads the number still visible on the old mailbox lying on the ground.
“1775, I think Mrs. Rutherford grew up in this house when she was Marguerite Ampere.”
“Did you know the Amperes?”
“No, but Margaret and I chat.”
We pass a few broken bricks strewn on the ground and a length of privet hedge the bulldozer left when it tore out the azaleas growing around the patio. The azaleas dried out over the summer on a mound of excavated dirt, now flattened.
