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.Reference.
The H-Bar is quiet today. No chatter from the students and professors from Prestige U. Physics Department, whose labs are nearby. Not a kiss of the cue ball in the pool room where the smooth baize never loses its green promise in fall or winter. The parking lot has plenty of vacancies showing off spacious puddles rippled by sprinkling rain.
Lou sits by the bow window cleaning his gold-rimmed glasses with a paper napkin dampened in the condensation on his beer mug. He speaks without looking up before I can sit down to join him.
“You have to get your own drink from the bar.”
“Is everyone taking a dry day?”
Lou presses the curve of his frames behind his ear.
“It’s not abstinence, it’s the plague.”
“You mean the virus?”
“I mean it is plaguing me. Affecting everything I wanted to accomplish this week. If you have face to face business with other people, you can forget it.”
“There’s always the internet.”
“I know, pervasive and too much of a good thing. I like to deal with people, not some simulacrum!”
“Crummy indeed!”
The bartender keeps his distance, as I step up and order some local brew.
“Grab your suds here, sir.”
The suds are frothing on the bar about a dozen empty stools away.
“Social distancing in effect here, sir.”
“Are you going to close?”
“Mr. Hoffman is calling the County Health Department; maybe, like, after lunch.”
“Yes, hope we can get lunch, first.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Mr. Hoffmann will, like, throw you guys out.”
“Well, public health is a valid reason, I guess.”
Lou watches the light rain soak a man who can’t unlock his solitary PT Cruiser, parked outside the window.
“Battery must be dead in his fob.”
A young woman comes in from the foyer pushing her long, wet hair out of her face with a ring on each finger and both thumbs. She reads the crawl on the TV over the bar for a few seconds and walks out again, without answering the lonesome bartender’s question.
Lou puts his phone on the table.
“Had enough of all this virus crinkum-crankum.”
“Yes, communication is now easier but that makes for new complexities.”
Lou starts up from his chair and stops. Bent over partway up, supporting himself with his arms, hands on the sides of the chair.
“You want the usual?”
“Sure, you alright?”
“My back is protesting the lack of service around here.”
He straightens up in careful increments. Pulls the back of his gray sweater down and looks at me.
“I haven’t been tested; you know?”
“Has Pam got it?”
”I don’t know. She hasn’t been tested either.”
“Moved in, has she?”
“Options were limited.”
“Is it working out for you both?”
“She is isolated from me, too.”
Lou takes a step away.
”It’s called ‘self-isolating.’”
“How do you isolate from yourself?”
“Might be another term for alienation!”
Lou’s coordination improves as he walks to the bar. He writes our order with his own pen on the pad provided.
“No iPad today, huh?”
“No way sir, that thing’s a vector, for sure.”
As Lou steps back from the bar, the bartender wipes the surface where the heal of his hand rested while writing. He throws the wipe away in a whiff of alcohol.
“This gives a new meaning to alcohol consumption!”
“Don’t worry sir, this stuff is strictly for cleaning, nothing wasted.”
“I would hate to have to choose between disinfecting and drinking that Glenfiddich over there!”
“I’ll let you know when your order is ready, sir.”
Lou takes his seat with the same incremental progress he made in getting up.
“I had plans to go into the distortion zone about now.”
“Aren’t we already there!”
“I mean the permanent one across the river.”
“Up there, on Jenkins Hill, you mean?”
“Right, in The Distract of Caramba!”
“Oh yes, all those dollars flowing like wine for the gods.”
“Wine is the least of it. Everything said there is distorted by the pressure.”
“What do you mean, ‘pressure’?”
“It’s the gas, you know.”
“What?”
“You remember when they dug up the Mall?”
“Sure, it took me forever to walk around the excavations to get to the Museum of American History, from Smithsonian Metro.”
“Pretty big operation, right?”
“It seemed out of proportion to an irrigation project for the grass.”
“You didn’t hear this from me.”
Lou leans forward.
“Have to break with social distancing for this.”
“Is it worth getting Corona for?”
“In your case, Fred, yes!”
“Aha, okay, spill it.”
“They needed someplace to store political speech!”
“Is this anything to do with that party you threw back in when was it, 2011?”
“Right, January of 2011.”
“Yeah, well this president’s political speech is hyper-energetic and needs a special containment zone, cooled and underground.”
“How astonishing!”
“The volume of tweets alone is driving engineers crazy.”
“So, the dig turns out to be all the more important.”
“They have to move the stuff around at night, in stainless steel pressure vessels mounted on trucks.”
“So, I’ll bet it is pretty heavy. I remember all those heavy crates at your party”
“No, it’s a gas, lighter than air and decays within moments of exposure.”
“What has all this got to do with you?”
“I am not throwing another party!”
“Gentlemen!”
The barman gestures with a wave of his latex-glove.
Mr. Hoffman is standing at the other end. His office door is open behind him.
“It’s on the house.”
Lou looks up.
“Banesh, ‘May your tribe Increase’.”
“We are now closed. Take your time, but please move to the back. I am not going anywhere yet.”
Mr. Hoffman gestures to the barman, who walks over to us and hovers a table away with a mask on his face, a tray and fresh towel over is arm.
“Gentlemen, just walk on over there by the wall, please. I will bring your drinks.”
He puts our drinks on his tray and covers them with the towel and places the tray on our new table before we can walk across to it.
Lou sits down more easily and removes the towel from our drinks.
“In addition to that excavation on the Mall, they built a data mine.”
“You mean they dig the President’s speech out of the clay under the Mall?”
“Well, no, they store it there.”
“Okay, so where’s the mine?”
“I called it a data mine but it’s electronic mining with algorithms, so they can gauge the effect of the gas. I have never been able to find out where the mine is.”
“I imagine it is essentially cranial cavity.”
“Gentlemen! I have your orders.”
The barman puts a tray on the bar with our lunch on covered plates ready for pickup.
“I’ll get it, Lou.”
“Be sure we have ketchup.”
I pick up the tray as the retreating barman reaches the pay-point at the other end, pick up some ketchup and carry it all back to our more private table.
Lou seizes the tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser, holding it up as if it were a sample.
“The gas has some extraordinary properties.”
“Unstable, you mean?”
He is examining the dispenser more closely turning it in his fingers.
“Well, you might put it that way. They are carbonating drinks with it.”
“So, what is the effect?”
“It goes straight to the gut. A so-called, ‘gut reaction’, that is. It gives people the sensation of something truer than truth.”
He squirts ketchup on his fries with a wet sucking noise.
“Truth isn’t a sensation!”
“Have you ever heard the expression, “I feel that’s true?”
“Yes, but it is a figure of speech.”
“Not in those unreflective moments when something feels true!”
“Well sure but I just don’t understand the thought here.”
“You can’t understand a gut reaction by trying to find the reasoning in it.”
“So, you are saying that many voters have been gassed!”
“Yes, it is an intuitive agent, more compelling than reasoned argument.”
“Seems kind of foolish to me.”
He puts the ketchup dispenser down, carefully placing it between the salt and pepper shakers.
“So, it may, but this gas moves people to vote.”
“An interesting sort of recreational drug!”
“Well, an ‘opium of the people’, yes.”
“AH! our Karl is never far from the scene!”
“Other effects are called ‘semi-truths’, mixed with the well-known ‘alternative facts’.”
“Oh, you mean half-truth?”
“More finely graded than that. Semi-truth is the product of cherry-picking.”
“I get it. Not the tree of knowledge, but the orchard of political speech.”
“Precisely! a semi-truth cites a cherished fact, such as a quote from the constitution, but draws conclusions in many vague and subtle gradations and in many blends.”
“Isn’t that what is called, ‘micro-targeting?’ ”
“Yes, but the vagueness allows you to fill in, as it were.”
“Fill in with what?”
“What-ever your subconscious brings forth!”
“So, once again, where’s the thought?’
“It is all intuitive, and associative.”
“That sounds like ‘shrinkery’!”
“Right, that is the beauty of this gas! Oh, we mustn’t forget the ‘anger quotient’.”
“A political calculation.”
“It is a factor, along with the distraction coefficient, which is used to judge the efficacy of the gas and the optimal time for it to release the anger potential.”
“I see, this really is a highly reactive gas.”
“That is the overall effect.”
“Do you mean that, what people believe is called true, because they believe it.”
“Yes, in many cases, the word truth is used in an act of loyalty.”
“Toeing the party line, you might say.”
“In other cases, many I think, it is more a matter of self-deception.”
“Or is it complacency?”
“Also, as an act of arrogant self-assertion.”
“Like Albrecht Intaglio’s flaunting his long-barreled six-gun at community meetings.”
“Yes, now we know that guns are speech!”
“What about guns sitting in a locked safe.”
“Those are like sentences in books on the library shelf!”
“Some library, tanks of gas under the Mall!”
“We do keep hearing about, ‘weaponized speech’”.
“You point out another property of the gas, its many semantic variations.”
We both start eating our cold lunches.
