FAUXMONT with Fred BlogZ

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.

The Cavendish Pie Shop has just opened for the day.  I am waiting at the bus stop standing on a patch of cinders between the drainage ditch and Maxwell Avenue. Even though it snowed last night, Mrs. Rutherford is outside directing her help as they arrange a few small tables and chairs behind the railing that separates the sidewalk from the parking lot.  Some one else is talking to Mrs. Rutherford and waving at me from under the awning.  She beckons me over but I don’t want to walk across and miss the bus.  It’s Diddlie.  She has given up gesticulating and is now walking as fast as she can towards me across the parking lot, with a basket full of goldenrod on one arm.  She shouts to me from across the road, something about the blog, but I can’t hear as a helicopter is going over.  Now the rapid high-pitched, clicking and thundering of a passing diesel truck is followed by the sound of cars moving slowly in low gear. When the traffic subsides she runs across the road and shouts “Your blog is a mess!”  I am not sure if she is irritated by the noise or by me.

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t you come over and talk to us?”

“I am waiting for the bus.”

“Where’s your car?”

“In the driveway.”

“Listen, I was reading thing of yours last night.  I mean the blog.”  She stands squarely in front of me frowning and accusatory, holding her basket with both hands.  Yellow pollen powders the front of her pea coat.  It rubbed off as she ran holding the basket in against herself.  Her scarlet woolen scarf ripples by the side of her head in the gusts from passing traffic.  “You have the same text in the posting called ‘Diddlie’s Place’ as in the posting called ‘Diddlie’s Disaster’.  You also misspelled ‘cue’ in Quantum Cue.  You’ve got, ‘q-u-e,’  it should be  ‘c-u-e’ and there’s more.”

“Oh, thanks for telling me.”  A passing motorcycle backfires as it roars past.  Pausing for the noise, I go on as thinning blue smoke spreads slowly across the road until a speeding car excites it.  “Where do you get those flowers this time of year?”

She ignores the question.  “You should be more careful.  Can’t you spell?”

“No, never could.”

“You’re a writer aren’t you?”

“Yes”

“Well you ought to be able to spell.  I mean it is so basic”

“Writing isn’t just spelling.”

“When are you going to fix it?” I feel caught in some criminal act.

“I’m working on it.”

“No you’re not.  You’re standing here leaving me in a crummy misspelled messed-up text.”

“Sorry about that.  I mean, at home, this morning, I was working on it earlier.”

“Why don’t you just leave me out and simplify it a little?  I think it’s too chaotic.”

“Are you going to tell me where you get the goldenrod?”

“No.”

“So what’s the secret?”

“There’s no secret, but I always have it when needed.”

“Do you buy it?  I wish I could grow those things in February snow.”

The bus arrives suddenly, though its approach should have been obvious up the long straight slope from the south.  The front doors unfold with a bursting hiss, over the rhythmical repetitions of the engine.  No one is getting off and Diddlie steps up ahead of me.  I don’t see her pay her fare. I pay mine as I get on.  Can’t see Diddlie as I walk down the aisle past empty seats to sit near the exit half way down.  After settling into a window seat, I find her next to me.

“You wouldn’t understand” she says.

“Wouldn’t understand what?”

“You don’t understand who I am.”

“What do you mean?  I am writing you.”

“You said yourself you get lost.”

“So?”

“Forget it.  Get it together, and stop embarrassing me.”

“Yes I will.  It’s a big job for me Diddlie.  Sorry you are embarrassed.”

“Why do you have to have all that stuff derived from other writers, or from physics,

Planck, Rutherford, the Cavendish Laboratory, and whatever?  I mean who’s ever heard of them but a few scientists?”

“You have, it seems.”

“I can’t remember all that stuff from school, but I did a search and found Ernest Rutherford is a, ‘New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics.’  So what?”

“It’s another way to connect the story with the world.”

“It’s another way for you to show off.  You think it’s so smart and literary.”

“So you think it’s just a snob thing.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing to do with the story.”

“You mustn’t take it so literally.  All those references are there for your diversion and amusement.”

“I think you’ve lost the thread.  I’ve told you that before.”

“My work is to find the way.  I told you that before.”

“Okay how’s it going to end?”

“What do you mean?”

“In contrast with books, that is novels.”

“Novels end when the plot works out.”

“Yes and blogs?”

“Do they have plots?”

“That’s it.  Do they?”

“Mostly they’re like diaries or notebooks; full of opinions, rants, and what ever else the blogger thinks of.”

“So there’s no knowing what to expect from a blog.”

“I don’t know.  I don’t expect much.”

“Any way it is a new thing with interesting possibilities.”

The bus has stopped and the aisle is crowded with people getting on at the shopping center carrying bags and backpacks.  The bus starts moving out but voices cry out to stop. The driver shouts something inaudible and opens the door.  More passengers crowd on, pressing closer together in the aisle, some chatting in Spanish.

“You have too many characters.”

“There’s a lot of people in Fauxmont, a variety of people.  I want to give some sense of that.”

“Okay, okay.  Why don’t you call it the Fauxmont Pie Shop or something?”

“The Cavendish adds another theme, an additional layer of meaning.”

“So why not use references to sports, famous players, and games that people would understand?”

“I would if I knew anything about sports.”

Diddlie giggles saying “Sweetie you’re so out of it!”

“I can only use things that come to mind.”

“So first you blunder into a muddle then try and work your way out.  Is that it?”

“It’s one way of putting it.”

“You ever heard of an outline, like in high school?”

“I remember that.”

“Who do you think is reading it anyway?”

“You.”

“Besides me.  I don’t count.  I am part of it and I want out!”

“No I am not leaving you out.  You’re a central part of it.”

“Do you really think no one is reading it?”

“Don’t suppose anyone is.  Haven’t any way to tell, really.”

“So I need not be so embarrassed?  Is that it?”

“No I’m not saying that.  A few friends have glanced at it and

left comments.  Nothing embarrassing to you though.”

“Who has time to read it anyway?”

“Over two hundred spammers left coments.”

“Are they readers or even real people?”

“No idea, maybe a program capable of searching for key words on the net and inserting a generic comment.”

It is remarkably quiet.  Diddlie coughs into her scarf and someone’s phone is ringing in the distance.  There’s shouting and whistling outside, though I can’t tell what it’s about.  She goes on.

“There are more people writing and blogging than reading you know.  It’s a big ego thing.“

“Blogs give people a new opportunity to say something to the world.”

“Right, and who’s interested?”

Some one is shouting again.  Looking up I see the driver is standing by the front door.  “End of the line sir.  Every body gets off here.”

The other passengers have gone.  I move across the seat from the window toward the aisle and finding Diddlie is gone.

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.

“That must be Max” says Diddlie as we walk across the H Bar parking lot.  I look at a large step van, with ‘Planck & Sons Builders’ written on the side panel in a Germanic script seldom seen in this area.  “Max Planck built the new foundations for Newton House” explains Diddlie.  “He’s very big around here.  Termites had undermined the original foundations and the new Quantum Cue was built.  The upper stories of historic Newton House remain intact as part of the larger structure of Hoffman’s Bar and Grill.  We all call it the H Bar,” says Diddlie as if she were leading a tour and went on with further historical background, alluding to Mary Thompson’s short monograph on Newton House which finally put paid to the myth that George Washington slept there, by showing that the building was not erected until 1801, while Washington died in 1779.  Mr. Hoffman has posted a sign in the foyer offering a free drink to purchasers of this history who read it on the premises.

Diddlie explains: “Max has two grown sons, Niels and Werner, partners in the business, when they aren’t playing pool, or just disappearing for a while.  You never know which one of them will show up at a job site and you can never get them both together” says Diddlie with a giggle.  “There’s a lot of speculation in the neighborhood about those two.”

“Are they twins?”

“No, they don’t even look the same.”

We stand waiting in the foyer of the H Bar which opens to the Quantum Cue on the right, and the cocktail lounge on the left.  “There’s Lark!  She never called when they got back.”  She points through the wide entrance to the Quantum Cue pool hall.  That’s Max making a shot at the table on the left there.”  We do not join Max, who has his back to us.  He has taken to wearing black leather jeans since his visit to Prague and other points east.

“Who’s Lark?”

Diddlie grabs my arm.  “Lark Bunlush.  We were college roommates.  We even shared the same guy for a while.  Well for a couple of months.  Then it had to end, pronto.”

“Must have been a tense moment when you two found out about each other.”

“No the tension came when he found out we were sharing him for the fun of it.”

“Oh were you comparing notes?”

“Yeah, well we did I guess, but that’s not what it was about.

“So who got him in the end?”

“It wasn’t a contest.  We had a lot of fun.  We wanted to be different.  We both liked him.  Guy sharing seemed like an exciting idea.  Get away from possessiveness.”

“Is that what is called free love.”

“Love isn’t free, sweetie.”

“No, well love is a big topic.”

“We wanted a new experience.”

“Sexual experience?”

“That was part of it, but look, don’t misunderstand.  I wasn’t trying to be mean or anything.  I thought Lark was going to take off with him, but it never happened.  Now she has been over to Europe with Max, and kept me out of the loop.”

“Are you still that close?”

“In some ways … it’s not like we are roommates but we keep up  … have to talk to her.”

“What? You’ll interrupt the game!”

“No” she squeezes my arm and tugs on it for emphasis like a young girl.  “Not in front of Max, and not here.  I mean later, in private.  That little weasel’s up to something. I just know it.”

We stand watching for a few moments.  Max misses a shot, then Lark walks over to the table.  Six shots later, Max is confronted with the cue ball and bare green felt.

Diddlie moves slightly behind me as she speaks.  Her voice has gone soft, as if not to be overheard.  She presses against me trying to conceal herself and not block the passageway.  “Come on I don’t want them to see me yet.”

Lark Bunlush, also wearing leather jeans, is leaning back on the bar facing the pool table and resting the cue on her shoulder.  Lark’s full figure shows through her white Shetland sweater.  One narrow length of pure black hair is thrown back from her forehead fanning out over the thick wavy grays.

They don’t see Diddlie.  It is our turn to be seated.  We walk away from the Quantum Cue towards the bar in the cocktail lounge and sit down.  I can still see them now and then, moving across the mirror in front of us among the necks of bottles: Jeremiah Weed’s Country Peach Sweet Tea, Beafeater gin and Laphroaig.  Diddlie tells me more about her roommate and confidante at Glamour College in Vermont, during the late sixties.  It was Lark.

“Lark founded and edited Shrink Rap Magazine while we were students, but I didn’t get involved in that part of her life.  She gave it up when the magazine was sold to a conglomerate, and they hired Rand Farctoid.  Her name is still on the masthead though, as a contributing editor.”  The bartender glances at Diddlie as he moves past quickly with beer bottles in hand.  Diddlie remarks that Lark keeps her dislike of Farctoid to herself, but sees disdain in Lark’s demeanor when she is around Rand.  Lark has told her Farctoid is too ready to make money by selling sensational stories that don’t reveal anything important in Lark’s mind.  She adds “Fartoid’s skill boosted the circulation of Shrink Rap to where it is now.”

“Where’s that?”

“It is big enough to keep going, and it has a website.”

She goes into Lark’s history, explaining that Lark’s early marriage to Harper Nightingale, while still a student, was complicated after graduation from Glamour.  They moved to Fauxmont.  The first and only child didn’t come for many years.  Lark did graduate work at Prestige U, where she attended Theo Tinderbrush’s seminars, and became his teaching assistant.

Diddlie grew up in Fauxmont.  She returned after college, delighted that her friend had moved in nearby, but had difficulty staying out of their heated dispute over who the father was.  As the boy grew, his resemblance to professor Theo Tinderbrush grew stronger.  The distinctive high forehead and jutting chin, and the thick and floppy reddish brown hair were nothing like Lark’s jet black hair or Harper’s square and symmetrical face with curly black hair.  Harper was unable to ignore these anomalies.  Lark and Harper separated around the time Boyd was five, but after the boy started high school they got back together.  An event Diddlie finds impossible to understand.  Harper said it was for the boy’s good, but Lark told a different story every time the two friends discussed it, leaving Diddlie puzzled.  At the moment, Lark appears to be close to Max Planck, sharing his taste for leather gear, booze and pool.  Where is Harper?” I enquired.  Diddlie thinks he is at a business conference in Singapore, but isn’t sure.  She is convinced that he is seldom home with Lark, who it seems, is seldom home herself.

The boy flunked ninth grade and Harper and Lark separated again.  At that point Harper told Lark that Boyd should go to a military academy to learn some discipline.  Lark was appalled, accusing Harper of neglect, and pointing out that the discipline problem, if there were one, would never have arisen if Harper spent more time at home.  Harper then asked Lark when she was last at home, which provoked Lark to throw Harper out.  He had no intention of moving out, but did leave on a business trip to Hungary the next day.  When he got back a week and a half later, having stopped off in London to see friends, Harper found Lark had moved his things into a rented flat, and changed the locks to their home.  Their story runs in alternating currents of hope and despair through Diddlie’s concerned attentions.

Having started, Diddlie can’t stop talking about Lark, her favorite subject.  As she speaks faster and faster in her excitement she chokes on a French-fry but goes on to tell me about one of Lark’s memorable outrages.  It occurred after the first break up with Harper.  There is a pause while her jaws rest behind her napkin.   She swallows, takes a deep breath, smiles and cheerfully excuses herself.  Putting her hand on my arm, Diddlie leans closer and continues in a newly confidential tone about Lark’s visits to the Library of Congress when researching a paper.  Lark had admired Neptune’s statue as she walked by the fountain in front of the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building, facing the Capitol.  One night, without telling Diddlie of her plan, she painted Neptune’s balls yellow and his cock blue, and signed her work ‘Minerva’ in orange on the dark back wall.  The rest of the statuary remained covered in its weathered bronze stains before the grandeur of the Capitol dome.

The morning after the paint job, a newsworthy association of scholars had gathered in front of the fountain to have their picture taken by a celebrity photographer, and word of Larks’ paint job spread.  The photographer had to arrange his subjects in front of the fountain blocking any view of the desecrated statue.  The paint job became a story on local news.  This presented a dilemma for the media who could not show pictures of the offending paint-work on their television news broadcasts.  For a few flickering moments, Washington’s attention was focused on carefully edited images of Neptune’s Court, and other powers in the city were ignored.  Lark was annoyed by the fact that no one could see her work on TV.  The story disappeared before she could step forward for a newsmaker interview.  She had no occasion to make her larger point on camera, about sexism, or the prevalence of violence over sex in television entertainment.

Months after the event Theo came back from a lecture tour in Germany and gave her a copy of the German tabloid, Der Spiegel, with an illustrated story about vandalism at the Library of Congress.  No mention of Lark, or her publicity stunt, just the paint job.  “Those pictures should have been published here” she complained.  It was then that Lark had the idea to start Shrink Rap.

Diddlie and I eat at the bar. I finish but Diddlie’s plate is still full as she has so much to say, leaving herself little time to eat.  While she was speaking I kept an eye on the mirror behind the liquor bottles.  Now I can see Liberty and Gale Trip coming into the room.  The two women come over to chat giving Diddlie time to finish the rest of her lunch.  I learn that there is nothing but uncertainty surrounding the bug case.  Liberty said they just finished a discussion with some  ‘suites’ up in the Heisenberg Rooms.  She wanted to interest them in marketing the Aphid Fuzz label internationally.

 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.

I am going to the party in response to a flyer found under my door-knocker one afternoon last week.  It isn’t far away, at the Waymarsh place up the hill on Bails Lane.  The narrowest road in the neighborhood is jammed with trucks and vans parked on both sides.  Armed rent a cop types stand at intervals in dark glasses.  Their lips reduced to a narrow line of stress and concentrated hostility above crisp pressed uniforms from Urban Safety Security Solutions.  Their black SUVs are pulled up off the road into Lou’s front yard.  The engines are running, but they couldn’t get back on the road because two rented yellow trucks are in the way, unloading. The last of the golden rod is crushed under their tires along with the weeds.  I can hear beeps and code numbers through their high volume radios: ‘Beep one, one, two BEEP three, five, eight, thirteen’ and on and on.  The partiers’ cars and SUVs are parked among the bigger vehicles making it difficult for any more to pass.  I dodge an old Toyota sedan barely moving with a Spinoni hanging out of the driver’s side back window panting in the exhaust from all these automobiles.  The driver parks in the ditch where it has filled with enough compressed leaves to keep her axles within an ant’s crawl of the ground.

The party has filled the house and people are standing outside the front door, chatting, maybe waiting to get in.  They all have a lot to say to each other.  I think of Jake, expecting to see him in the crowd and introduce myself to various strangers, but can’t think of anything to say.  They invariably turn to talk to someone else as soon as the sound of my name has faded into the buzz.  I am easing my way as close to the door as I can, trying not to spill any one’s drink.  Big men in denim uniforms are moving steel-edged wooden boxes into the house.  Some are small enough to be carried by one man alone.  Big women in the same uniforms are wheeling other larger crates in.  It could be amplifiers and other equipment, but I don’t see any mikes, wires, or speakers.  Waymarsh is squeezing through the door past two men carrying a long narrow box.  He shouts directions over his shoulder back into the crowded house.  “I am taking a break out here” he yells and turns to look where he is going.  Seeing me he offers a warm greeting.

“Hi Lou”

“Glad you could make it.”

“What’s with all the boxes and security?”

“Speech.”

“Yes, I mean what is all the freight?”

“Like I said, speech.”

“There’s speech in these things you mean?”

“That’s it. See that truck over there, that’s the heavy stuff.  I mean Supreme Court Justices, The President, and products of research and so on.”

“What do you mean research?  Sounds expensive.”

“Oh focus groups, data mining, that kind of thing.  You know some of the most effective themes are uncovered through focus groups. Speech using these themes is the best money can buy.”

“Where do you get it?”

“Our party buys speech from the PR firm.  They have bonded warehouses full of it.”

“Your party?” I asked.

“Yes this is a political party we are having here and we want plenty of speech.”

“Wait a minute, the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.  You shouldn’t have to pay for it.” Lou draws close and speaks in a quiet confidential voice.  “Your speech and mine, that’s free.  You know why it’s free?”

“Why Lou?”

“Because no one is listening: it is just us.  If you want to be heard, if you want the attention of the people who count, then you need this stuff.”  He points to the crates being unloaded from trucks. Political and commercial speech is prepared, processed and packaged, and it is a valuable commodity.  It is used to sell products and it can win elections.”

“Yes I can see the packaging is heavy duty stuff.”

“These days, speech is money and money is speech, and money isn’t free.  Some of this speech is heavier than gold; and a lot more valuable.  Come over here”.  Lou leads me around the side of his house past the crowd that is chatting in a swarm outside the front door. We walk along a curving narrow path with tall magnolias screening both sides.  There’s a huge stack of bottles and cans in shrink wrap standing in an area fenced off from the rest of the yard, and accessible only along the path.

“That’s the canned speech we get cheap from Snaz Super Stores, and here’s the water.”

“Why buy water?” I asked.  “The well water here tastes pretty good and it’s potable.”

“We call it water.  Those are slogans, mass-produced in Taiwan and highly effective, but you need a lot of them so your message gets repeated often enough to soak in.  This is about enough for our neighborhood for a week.”

“Soak in?”

“ That’s it, an effective slogan is memorable and readily comes to mind.”

“Yes, like rising damp!”

“That’s unkind.  More like your Mom’s advice.”

“I suppose it depends on whether or not you agree with it.”

I can’t remember my Mother buying canned speech.  I remember peaches and peas, and sweetened condensed milk, and evaporated milk.  Yes I can see Mother now in my mind’s eye.  There she is in the kitchen with no one around her, in a long pleated skirt and sleeveless blouse.  She is opening a can of evaporated milk.  The cat is lying in a yellow rectangle made by the morning sun on the tiled floor.   She  pours the milk into a saucer and she goes over to the cat and puts the saucer on the floor in front of it, saying “Here Kitty, you’ll enjoy this milk.  It’s from ‘Contented Cows,’ or so the label says.”

“Yes, we all tend to remember a good slogan, agreed or not,” said Lou after Mother receded into the memories from where she had been recalled.

“Yes.”

Lou hands me a red can of Snaz Super Store speech, and we go back to the party as Lou’s ring tones sound the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  He starts texting as fast as his rheumatic thumbs allow. He excuses himself and disappears into the surrounding talk.  Looking at a label on the can he handed me I read: ‘Instant relief from burdensome thoughts!’  In smaller print, like a warning label.  I read below: ‘This can contains certified conservative speech produced by the best American speakers of our time.’  I open the can and it gets me into conversation at once with a women in a red blazer, golden girandoles, black pants and big hair that rises in a wave off her forehead like a breaker which crashes down around her head, flying into the air and coming down again, covering her ears in frozen agitation.  We are talking about taxes and big government, and the damned liberals.  Big government in huge neoclassical buildings pours out of my can forming a critical mass, much of which disintegrates harmlessly before reaching the ground under the thundering rhetorical power contained in my can.  She shakes out a few despairing remarks on moral relativism and then starts dropping names: Newt and Bob and Frank and several Johns and Mikes.  These names fall to the ground too, untouched by the remnants of big government, which separate from them like oil dropped into vinegar.  A small man in a yellow tie appears and starts teasing her in familiar tones about the mess she is leaving on the grounds of his most cherished political convictions.  It was then I noticed Lou’s yard had expanded.  It is no longer a sloping half acre of wooded gardens.  Now I can see across the valley to the Elysian Fields in the East and Westwards, endless meadows of repetition as far as the horizon with patches of civility growing among geysers of overheated rhetoric steaming over the crowds gathered there.  I can see a distant Vineyard of Liberty, where people in loose fitting nineteenth century clothing are tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.  A torrent of righteous indignation is clearing the area nearby like a fire hose at a demonstration.  It is too close for comfort.  I turn to find the reason for a hot sensation on the right side of my face.  Not far off, another geyser of steam rises from a fat man with several chins jiggling under the nozzle of his mouth.  My can is empty.  The woman with big hair has turned to her friend in a yellow tie and I want to get away from the heat.  I leave them to banter on in the steamy atmosphere, while looking for another can full of speech.  Now I know what to look for, I see a stack of blue cans on a table by the house.  The blue can is just as effective as the red can.  Moments after opening it, I am talking to a tall thin friendly white haired man in a an old fashioned seersucker suite.  It is about the forty million uninsured Americans who can’t get health care, and we go on to discuss various single payer plans that he was studying, and he explains them in more detail than I ever knew before.  I look down for any names he might have dropped but see he is wearing shorts, not the trousers one might expect with a seersucker suit.  His legs are brown and white and furry.  His hooves are polished black.  In fact everyone I can see has two furry legs.  Hooves in brown black and white are evident at the bottom of people’s trousers and long dresses.  I step back when searching the ground for dropped names and bump into a Hispanic waiter with a tray of unusual looking hors d’oeuvres.

“What’s that?” I asked him after apologizing.

“Cud sir, best cud for chewing.  Try it sir?”

“Cud generally comes from one of the ruminant’s stomachs.”

“He smiles, ignores my objection and assures me this is the best.

“Where do you get it from?”

“The freezer.”

“No thanks.”

“It is hard to move my feet.  They are all tangled up in something. Looking carefully it becomes obvious that the healthcare plan pouring out of the blue can in my companion’s left hand is coming out of my can too.  It has spread like geometric ivy in a grid all around us.  It is as if we are standing on a sheet of growing green graph paper.  The shoots speed across the ground faster than the frightened chipmunks who try to out run it.  Our every moment is quantified and plotted in lush green plan.  The man in seersucker is at the center of a growing mat of vegetation.  Conservatives trapped in the tangle of vines, are crying for help.  Two hulking Liberals are rolling a fifty five gallon drum of blue speech toward the trees.  They reach their objective and pour it out toward an elderberry bush, jeering at a group of poor conservatives who were picking berries to add to their wrath wine.  Now the mat is up to my knees.  A young conservative has taken refuge on the flat roof of a cattle shed.  He is trying to pull his girlfriend up to safety with his triceps rippling and sweat pouring from his buzz cut.  The girl’s hooves are kicking in the sides of the shed.  He is telling her to stop struggling but she is screaming in mortal terror of the liberals.  Waves of her blond hair straighten in the breeze as her head rises above the roofline and her bosom heaves from her torn blouse as he pulls her safely on to the roof.  Another group of conservatives is climbing on to the exposed roots of a hickory tree as the vine surrounds them.  A furious woman is beating it back with a cane.  As her arm brushes up and back against the side of her head her glasses lift off her ear and then they fly the with force of the down stroke.  She doesn’t hesitate, perhaps she hasn’t noticed yet.  The bald man who gave her his cane has his hands clasped in prayer.  The bald man is passing out.  He is slumped against the tree.  Now I can hear cheers of joy.  It is Grant Gasberg, one of the biggest names in talk radio.  He rolls into sight on a throne.  It looks like a massive electronic wheelchair moving under control of a fellow in a red blazer, blue slacks, white shirt, and straw boater.  He is holding the remote control and guiding Grant on his cart with the joystick.  Grant is flanked by his unmounted, uniformed ideaologs marching in lock step, wearing Hussar uniforms, and solemnly carrying their orthodoxies like banners.  Grant is as big as a blimp bulging out of his business suit with a huge bald pink head and tiny gold-rimmed spectacles well down on his nose.  He must be fifteen or twenty feet high.  It is getting too hot for him as he crosses some open ground.  His head is expanding and turning red.  Grant isn’t one to surrender to discomfort and waves his entourage on when the man in the red blazer signals to abort the mission.  Four energetic young women are running towards him from his pavilion in the Elysian Fields, dressed like cheerleaders with big blinding white smiles.  I have to look down to let my eyes recover, and notice the smell of fabric softner in the air.  Grant is going to be fine.  I can see the reason on looking up again.  The cheerleaders are showering him with cool scented water from big squirt guns shaped like assault rifles.  “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” the cheer leaders chant, flashing the white stars on their deep blue knickers when they kick high in mid chant.  The Hussars bring forth their side arms and fire into the air, raising more cheers.  Grant has now reached the leading edge of the spreading plan.  He starts spraying the vegetation with invective from two tanks high on his back.  The muscular young man on top of the shed strips off his tea shirt. With one arm he waves it above his head in joy, and with the other arm presses his svelte blond girlfriend to his manly, bared chest.  She smiles sweetly through her tears, looking up at her hero in admiration.  One of her delicate pink hands is spread across his pecs and there twinkling like a star in the night is the diamond on her engagement ring.  The vines burst under the stream of Grant’s invective.  The leaves curl up withering into dust in the heat of Grant’s rancorous tones and the dust floats harmlessly along the ground with the remains of big government.  The two hulking liberals have lost control of their fifty five gallon drum.  They are getting crushed under its weight which only grows heavier as the drum spills out more and more green plan.  The weight of the plan’s consequences builds up within the drum until it is as immovable as a Congressional appropriation, and so terrifying to conservatives that it has to be somehow hidden from public view.  Grant Gasberg drills them with sarcasm.  They writhe in green goo oozing from disintegrating vines, but he is saving their lives by reducing the drum to tin foil.

I want to get home before any one is killed, but can’t see Lou’s house any more, and don’t know what direction to take.  The man in the seersucker suite is smiling at me.  “We always have lively parties in Fauxmont” he remarks in his faint and gentle old man’s voice.

“Lively isn’t the word.”

“You don’t look well.  This is strong speech and it can get to you on warm day like this. Have you had this brand before?”

“No, this is my first experience.”

“Why don’t you follow me?”  He guides me carefully with his hand on my elbow into the rickety wooden shed.  He isn’t obstructed by the plan’s growing depth and extent.  Grant’s action hasn’t reached us yet, but as soon as the old man touches me, my feet come clear of the vines now grown as thick as hawsers and we enter the shelter of shed’s loose planks.  It is dusk.  Sunlight pierces clouds low in the sky, as if they are slits in a timbered wall of evening sky.  I can see the lights on in Jake’s dream house, only a few hundred feet away.  The man in the seersucker suit has gone, and I never did get his name.  I walk over to the house and find a woman in jeans and flowery blouse bending over to give her Spinoni a bowl of water.  We are in back of Jake’s place on his deck.  She looks at me as she rises and asks if I am alright.  When it has finished drinking the Spinoni checks me out, and dries the wet fur of his snout on my trousers as he sniffs diligently.

“Did you see Frank?” she asked expectantly.  The spinoni’s drying snout is in my crotch.

“No.  Frank who?” I am easing away from the dog.

“Why, Frank Shibboleth of course!  he was here over in the Vineyards of Liberty.”

“Really, good old Frank.  I’m sorry I missed him.  Did he bring that wonderful folk group ‘The Singing Nostrums?’

“Hi, I am Alice; and yes we had a really great sing along. Here have a bottle of  ‘Frankly Speaking’.” She had drawn a small bottle out of her knapsack as she spoke, and now offers it to me.

“I am Fred and thanks but I have had enough political speech for now.”

She produces several more objects the size of beer bottles but made of clear glass in the shape of Doric and Ionic Capitals. They contain cloudy liquids, deep red in the Doric and sky blue in the Ionic Capitals.

“How about some of these?” She offers.  I hesitate, wondering what is in these sparkling bits of crystal.  She goes on, “Aren’t they great? This is a program for city trees, and here this blue one is for clean air.”

“Yes, they sound much needed.”

“That’s right.  I have a government solution for just about any problem you can think of!”

“You mean the answers are suspended in that liquid?”

“Right again.  This is in a very concentrated form.  Just add taxes and then watch it grow.”

“Where do you open them?  I mean what do you do with the bottle of liquid?”

“You can ask your Congressman to open it on the House floor.”

“Yes I get it.”

“Oh you should have seen those conservatives run for it.”  She goes on, “Frank brought a truck load of plan in fifty five gallon drums and the Nostrums really spread it around with that high volume singing.”

“Yes that much I saw.”

“I listen to Frank every morning at 8.” she told me earnestly.

“Yes I know he is a big Liberal talker.”

“They always have such great political parties here in Fauxmont, and they are so much bigger now we can use this beautiful new home.”

“I thought the party was held at the Waymarsh House.”

“You must be new.  Yes it started there and sort of spread out.” She sneezes and sneezed again.  ”I really am allergic to Golden rod.  It gets me every year!”  She recoveres, wiping her nose with a brilliant yellow paper napkin.  “The political party is a tradition around here.  This has been as good as any I can remember, and I have been driving over to come to these parties for twenty odd years.”

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 I left a brief message on his answering machine yesterday, he left me an invitation to visit him on mine.  “Finderelli here, come by the Ben Middlesex building about 2 PM Monday” the voice said.

The Prestige University campus is about twenty minutes south of here and the new glass and aluminum clad Ben Middlesex building stands out several stories above its surroundings.  A plaque outside the entrance indicates that Ursula Middlesex named the building she had endowed after her late husband Ben.  I am told she also funded the chair in Gender Studies out of the fortune he made as CEO at Fibonacci Corp.

A woman in a loose purple tee shirt with spiky black hair and orange highlights is sorting stacks of CDs at a desk in an outer office.  Her long deep-purple fingernails click on the plastic.  “Shit!” she exclaims, as I walk up to her desk, “Is this Professor Flower Finderelli’s office, Gender Studies?”  I notice a broken nail on her right forefinger as she holds up her hand, palm out, spreading the fingers to examine the damage, almost as if to wave at me.

“These fucking things are supposed to be sealed in plastic!  Now my nail got caught.  Look at that!”  She gets up, waving the open plastic case at me.  The CD slides out and the tip of her broken nail falls on a white envelope on the edge of her desk.  The loose CD rolls across the floor and falls against the wall.  “Shit!” she says again, and then assures me in an impatient voice that I have found the Gender Studies Dept.  Her hip-low black jeans are tight under her slightly protruding belly.  A length of silvery cloth passing through the wide belt loops is tied on the left side of her narrow hips, its long ends hanging down below the desk-top.

“Are you Fong?” she asks in a skeptical tone, and turns to step out from behind the desk.

I explain who I am.

“Is the Finn expecting you?” she frowns distractedly, rubbing her finger.

She gestures to my left with a head toss, toward an open office door only a few feet from my elbow.  She reaches up to her spikes and scratches the top of her head, revealing a Logo on the front of her shirt.  It is an acid-green cloud-shape with ‘Toxic’ written across it in scarlet, and the word ‘Blob’ in small white letters inside the ‘O’ of ‘tOxic’.

“You look lost.”  She remarks sympathetically and then, becoming more animated, “So you’re Fred.”

“Yes”

“Liberty told me about you.”

“What exactly?”

“That you would be here to meet her” she said sweetly.  “You the new guy?”

“What?”

“Her new guy!  She doesn’t fuck girls.  You came to find Liberty right?”

She points her broken nail at an informal laser printed sign taped on the wall behind me saying ‘Gender Studies’, and also pointing those interested in ‘English Literature and Criticism’ further down the hall.  A swish of her silver sash brushes white envelopes off her desk on to the floor as she moves from her seat.  “Shit” she repeats, walking over to pick up the CD.  She sits down again, ignoring the envelopes around her feet, and further examines her finger.

“I am not her new guy, but was hoping to meet her here after seeing Professor Finderelli.”

“You want to meet Fong?  Thought it was Liberty.”

“No not Fong, Liberty.”

“Every one wants to be with Liberty.  You missed them.  They had to take off early.”

“She had the band with her did she?”

“No she is with the band, not band leader.  Let’s not go there.  That bitch Tessa can’t even play worth a damn.”

“I don’t know Tessa or any of them except Liberty.”

“Finn” she shouted it out extending the “i” sound as if in song. “You got Fred.”

Looking towards the open office door, my eyes follow a long column of buttons upward when a friendly bass voice asks:
“Are you the blog guy?”

“I am” I said, and looking up still further, I find an amiable face angled against the lintel above me.  The doorway is filled with broad cloth and vertical yellow stripes and a column of buttons as I listen further.

“Hi, I am Finderelli” he says, ducking from under the doorway and turning, moving with the grace of a dancer.  He walks across his big office, making the ceiling seem too low, and covers the long seat of a couch against the far wall, stretching out his legs over the cushions.

“Sit over there.” He points towards some office chairs spread out between the couch and his desk.

“Big office you have.”

“Yeah, they are very generous.”

“What is ‘Gender Studies’?”

“Interesting” said Finderelli as if he were going to say more, but he stops there.  His expression prompts me to ask more.

“What interests you about gender Dr. Finderelli?”

“The way language is used.”

“What about the sex aspect”?

“ Go down to the ‘Crotch of Lit.” for that.”

There is a moment’s stillness before he guffaws in a huge burst of energy that shakes his thinning black ringlets hanging from a domed forhead.  Then he adds gently, “No, they are OK with me down the hall”

He is quiet.  I look around for fire ants, sit down and wait for him to speak.  The office door is still open.  “Shit” says the woman in the outer office.  The bass voice starts up again.

“You said something in your phone message about a concert?”  He enquires with a rising intonation.

I thank him for his invitation to visit, and explain that I am interested in the summer bug incident here on the Prestige campus, and I have read his name in a press release.”

“Yea” says Finderelli vaguely, “think I‘ve got an idea of what you are talking about.

“Only an idea?” I ask.

“What’s your story?  I mean this thing is the subject of litigation.”

“I understand.  Just wondered if you can give me some background for the blog?”

“Yea” he says with a little more conviction.  “I can give you that”.

There’s another pause.

“I don’t see any ants about.” I observed, looking around the floor of his office.  He was in no hurry to go on.

“Have you any trouble?”

“Trouble” repeated Finderelli.

“Yes, the clipping I read said ants have been found in offices and class rooms.

“That is a legally loaded question at the moment.”

He breathes in loudly and pauses, then after exhaling for a remarkably long time he belches and excuses himself.  Finally he adds, “Well, look over there in that thing in the corner.”

He nodds towards a small carved wooden totem under the window by his desk.  It’s a few feet high, not heavy, and moves easily.  I tip it slightly towards me.  Light shines into the carved recesses and I can see a lot of dead flying ants in the hollows.

”See anything?”

“Yup”

“How much trouble are they causing you?” asks Finderelli with a big grin.

“They are very helpful, now I’ve actually found some.”

“Helpful” “Repeats Finderelli.

“Yes, I mean I came up to see what was going on and here they are.”

“Care to testify on their helpfulness”?

“Is my opinion really germane?”

He shakes his head agreeably and seems quite comfortable remaining silent, and relaxing on his sofa with sunrays brightening his yellow striped shirt.  I look at some snapshots on the wall by my chair.  One is framed in huge pieces of elaborately carved dark wood, neatly mitered, and making the print look tiny within.  I see a very big man in jeans and no shirt brandishing an ax in one hand, and he has his arm around the shoulders of a boy approaching his own height, but very much thinner.  There might  be a beer bottle buried in the hand that hangs from the boy’s shoulder.

“Your looking at Joel the giant McAllister”. Finderelli informs me.

“Who’s the kid?”

“That’s me.”

“Any relation?” I enquired.

“Hard to say.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

“One problem is the remains of Mrs. Infante’s piano bench.”

“What piano bench?”

“Made the frame out of the remains of her bench.”

“Oh that’s where the carving comes from.  Yes it is so big it does kind of hide the picture.  You might also say I am a hidden cost of the free love that was going down.”

Finderelli’s smile had emerged, and the lines radiating from his eyes seem to add to the warm reflection off his shirt, but he is serious.

His mother married Finderelli in the end, but as he put it ‘the big guy was around a lot back in 64.’  That is, on the commune where his parents met.  “Joel used to swing by with moonshine and acid, play his fiddle and enjoy his popularity with the girls.”

“Where was that?” I asked.

“Oh, down in Virginia, near Winchester.”

“Yes, are you saying that this chap in the picture might be your natural father?”

“The thought has crossed my mind” said Finderelli.

Well how did this picture get taken.  You must be what, 17 or 18 there?

“I went back there with Mom in 82 and she introduced us.”

“Was the commune still going?

“No, long gone”

“But you met there for old time sake?”

“Yeah”, said Finderelli.  There was another pause.  I looked at the picture of a lake, surrounded by trees, with a dilapidated dock in the foreground.  It was framed with massive bits cut from what looked like railroad ties.  The spikes had been skillfully driven into the sides to add to the effect.  The image was almost buried, set well back in the thickness of its frame, as if it were in a box.  I sniffed the wood and stroked the coarse grain.

“Creasote” said Finderelli.

“Yes, I thought I could smell something.”

“That’s where it happened” remarked Finderelli watching me from the couch.

“What happened?”

“That railroad tie was cut from part of the dock.”

“How interesting” I said, “putting the picture against a piece of its subject.”

“Conception,” said Finderelli

“Yes the concept might go far, now I think about it aesthetically.”

“Me,” not a concept” said Finderelli, amused by my confusion, but not unfriendly.

“Are you saying you were conceived on that dock?”

“Under the stars” said Finderelli.

“How romantic” I remarked.

“Skinny dipping” said Finderelli.

“Oh diving off the dock and all that you mean?

“Hot summer.”

“You seem to know a lot about your parent’s antics”

“Yea, Mother made it right for me” and then he adds  “As right as she could.”  In a more thoughtful voice “She was honest.”

There was another long pause, which Finderelli seems to enjoy.

“Pearle is a gem” says Finderelli.

“Who?” I ask “Are you talking about a person?”

“Yes” Said Finderelli in a distant sort of way.

“Well, I mean, what I am asking is, who is Pearle?”

“Mom is raising hell in Ohio now” said Finderelli with some satisfaction.

“Are you telling me that Pearle is your mother’s name?”

“I told you what she is doing now” said Finderelli with a very broad grin.

“Okay, Okay, for some reason I got the implication that your mother’s name is Pearle.”

“You got it right too.”

“So she is in Ohio you say.  What kind of hell is she raising”

“Politics.”

We play on.  To summarize: I ask him how he came to be called Flower.  He explains that he was born on the first day of spring, and his mother called him her first spring flower.  He was known as flower ever after.  I was just getting back to the subject of the bugs when he interjected “You ‘ll have to excuse me… in a minute…expecting a student….”

“Fong!” he shouts.  I look away from the photos towards the doorway.  Fong looks in.

“Hi Flower.”

“Pull up a seat” said Flower gently.

Fong is tapping her cell phone as she sat down, rustling in a black track suit, with a Snaz logo on the shoulder.

“Why does this guy rate so much couch time?” she asks in mock outrage.

Flower frowns in mock anger, and they banter on and I leave.  It dawns on me walking out, all that interesting background on Flower, ‘The Fin’, Finderelli doesn’t say anything about the bugs.

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.

I found Lou Waymarsh up on his ladder.  Lou is from tobacco country, Chesterfield County, but moved north to find work and a house in Fauxmont.  He has always enjoyed working with his hands and is beginning his retirement by doing odd repairs for his two neighbors, Didlie and Derwent.  He comes down promptly when he sees my aging Saturn wagon, flecked with brown from sticky sap that drips on it in the driveway all through Spring.  I have overshot.  The rear windows are obscured by the dog’s nose prints and looking back it is hard to see what he was doing up in the eaves of the Sloot house.  He tramps over gravel, which has spilled out of the roadside ditch during the storm. The forecast snow turned out to be rain.  After he gets in we move off in a sluggish four cylinder crawl along Fauxmont’s narrow winding wooded streets, where I promptly lose my bearings.  After driving an extra mile that Lou tactfully called a ‘grand tour”, we park outside Hoffman’s Bar and Grille for lunch.  The ‘H-Bar’, scene of my first taste of Fauxmont, is frequented by many in the community as well as local business owners, politicians, academics, technicians from the Prestige U. physics lab and mechanics from the Light House gas station across Maxwell avenue.

As we sit down at the only two vacant bar stools, I notice that they’re selling a new brand of mineral water in glass bottles.  He agrees to let me buy him a bottle of what he calls, “snob water”, rather than his usual beer as he plans to go back up the ladder afterwards.  This brand is bottled in England, and drawn from the lake where King Arthur found his sword Excalibur, just the way the picture on the label shows.  Of course it is by “appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth”, which adds to the price we pay for such prestigious stuff.  The guys just off the bar to our right in the “Quantum Que” pool room have also found it impossible to resist.  While to our left, in the Quark Lounge it is ‘de rigueur’ with the professorate from Prestige U.  I can also see a growing line at the “String Bag” carry out counter waiting for one of the “ten delicious dimensions in food and flavor”.  There are eleven dimensions on Friday nights and twenty-six weekend specials.

Dr. Tinderbrush pours a little of this most pure water in his Ballvenie, his favorite among the single malts, that arguably should not be watered down, not even with Merlin’s ancient magic.  Tinderbrush is chatting at the bar with its owner Mr. Hoffman, earnestly telling Hoffman about a scandal.  It is all news to Lou and me. Lou, phlegmatic as ever seems happy to sip quietly and silently share our amusement, eavesdropping attentively, while waiting for lunch to be served. Tinderbrush is waiting for Congressman Bean, well-known ranking member on the new House Select Committee on Esthetic Crime.  Upon Bean’s arrival they will go up to one of the Heisenberg Rooms, private dining and meeting rooms upstairs.  Thanks in part to the popularity of the Quark Lounge and the Quantum Que, Hoffman is acknowledged in certain media circles as being among the most reliable sources in Washington.

Tinderbrush gets animated.  “It turns out that on the aluminum cap, atop the Washington Monument are displayed two words: ‘Laus De’.   You know the meaning of course?” Tinderbrush asks Hoffman.

“Praise God” replied Hoffman.

Dr. Tinderbrush had made this revelation in yesterday’s news conference with Secular Humanists International, at their god bashing conference in Winnipeg, and their outrage is now amplified by a group of Atheists convening in DC.

Tinderbrush has flown down from Winnipeg to meet Congressman Bean before the Congressman is interviewed on talk radio tonight. He wants Bean’s support for his proposal to tear down the Washington Monument and replace it with something more suitable than that “Great White Egyptian Phallus,” as he now calls it.

He mentions Joy Flack repeatedly and with great disdain.  She has proposed a piece by the sculptor Boris Tarantula as a replacement for the white column now in place.  It is said she represents a group in New York who are lobbying to get the new monument contract, should there be one.  Others will tell you that there isn’t any chance of the monument being replaced, but no one is sure where the committee will end up on the subject.  Perhaps the mention of God in aluminum at the top of the monument could be replaced with other words?  In aluminum? Not in aluminum?  What about the aluminum lobby?  Speculation is endless.

I remember Tarantula from the 1980s.  He was headline news as a political dissident when he defected from Romania.  He was reportedly born in Transylvania, and soon made it known that he is a descendent of Count Dracula’s.  He claimed that the Dracula and the Tarantula families had been closely related since the Mongol Invasion.  His ancestor Varlan Tarantula was a commoner, who saved an early Dracula from the Mongols by marrying the princess himself, and buying off the marauding Mongol chief with a few slave girls.

It was also said between guffaws at the Quantum Que, that this now memorable story is ‘bull-shit, and unadulterated crap’ etc. and Mr. Hoffman was heard asking “Since when did attention-getting public relations have anything to do with truth?”.  The word is now that Boris’s ancestors are from Italy, and never had anything to do with the Count or historic princesses in Transylvania.  No one seems to know if he really did defect from Romania, or if that too is part of a public relations gimmick to keep Boris’s name in the news. Speculation grows as tabloid column space allows.  The CIA is usually brought into discussion too, and Boris does nothing to discourage the spread of conflicting stories; as when he got himself in a picture standing next to an accused rogue agent, published in the New York Post.  The story was mysteriously dropped soon after and the alleged rogue copped a plea on another charge.  Boris then got another day’s coverage insisting that he had nothing to do with the man.

Dr. Theobald Tinderbrush is getting more heated.  “Banesh!”  He exclaims with his red hair flying above his face a little too close to his interlocutor’s protective beard.

“You know what they are saying about that Tarantula’s ‘design for disaster’?  Well, it is this Ms Flack actually.  I am told to expect a formal announcement among the talking heads on tomorrow morning’s television calling it ‘Scaffolding for the Future’”.  Theo’s tones of growing frustration hold Mr. Hoffman’s attention, and he nods, quietly drawing more and more heat out of Tinderbrush’s reddening face.

A faint scent in the air grows stronger in the presence of a svelte young woman in a black fleece pullover, bobbed brown hair, and pearl earrings.  She is excusing herself and pushing into the narrow space that opened up between me and the Prof’s back as I lean over to talk to Lou.  On righting myself, I face the Snaz logo on the back of her upturned collar, as she is facing Tinderbrush and Mr. Hoffman.  I can hear her whisper something about the Congressman.  Mr. Hoffman leans across the bar, and gets a peck on the cheek, as Tinderbrush gets up from his stool and rushes towards the door, but Hoffman walks around the end of the bar and brings him back.  Congressman Bean will arrive shortly, and try to avoid attention.  The young woman quickly turns her head towards me.  Her hair flies up with the momentum of her twist and there’s a flash of reflected light from a dangling pearl earring as it whips past my face, extending from her earlobe at the end of its tiny chain as if it were riding a merry-go-round.  She further excuses herself with a flash of her tongue behind a small tooth smile, and she makes room in her cloud of scent for the Prof. to get back to his drink.

Once the Prof. is back at the bar, his voice grows louder and seems intrusive. We  cannot avoid hearing as he tells Hoffman: “This rusty proposal from Tarantula is brought to you by five different interests, (as yet unnamed, I might add)”.  He goes on: ”I don’t believe for a minute that there is money from the Mid East in this. No, this money is home grown green, passed on at the golf course, AND”, he adds sharply, “they reserve the right to advertising space built into the structure.  Imagine it: ads for banks, credit cards, mutual funds and low interest loans flashing across the mall in politically correct, low voltage lighted diodes!  Forget Washington the man or the city, it will be nothing more than a monument to the other ‘almighty’, the dollar ….. well the dollar is not so mighty as it was.  It is now worth a little less every day.”  Tinderbrush is suddenly quiet, as if this thought of the declining value of the dollar has transported him.  He goes on muttering confidentially to Mr. Hoffman.

Pam the barmaid brings our orders.  Mr. Hoffman graciously offers the good professor some more cooling snob-water and goes on listening.

Tinderbrush jammed the door open just now by putting a cloths peg under it.  “What are you doing with a cloths peg?” asked the young woman.  “I don’t know Jan” says Tinderbrush, “I’ve had it for years.”  As we are sitting with our backs to the door, I turn from my plate of fish and chips to look outside on hearing an unmistakable sound.  It is a Volkswagen, a rusty old Microbus with small oval windows along the faded yellow roofline.  This is hardly inconspicuous, but adds a moment of nostalgia to the scene; the memory of that glistening scented smile, and the back of an earlobe with a pearl hanging from it.  I watch the agile Congressman alight in jeans and navy blue tea shirt.  There is no sign of the limo. one might expect as the bus drives off, and the svelte Ms Vermeer guides the Congressman out of sight towards the side entrance, while a motion of her hips draws some attention away from the man himself.

Louis has finished his lunch while I am still only half done and so lost in thought I have not noticed him pick up the tab and leave the tip for Pam who is handing Tinderbrush his cloths peg.  As we walk out, Lou asks: “Do you know that guy talking to Hoffman?”

“No.”

“Theo Tinderbrush, he’s known around the neighborhood.  Lived here for a while.  We reach my car, and climb in. I start the engine and ease the car out of the crowded parking lot even more slowly than usual as the back window is obscured with glare from the sun on nose and paw prints.  Then get behind a massive white SUV at the light on Maxwell Ave. and Oval Street.  Two English sheep dogs with wild hair are watching us through the back window.  One seems to be laughing, or is it yawning?

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.

There is a crow hidden somewhere in the magnolia above, calling to another perched on top of the utility pole I can see across the street.  Magnolia makes two calls and Utility Pole makes three calls and Magnolia responds with two.

“Are you listening to those crows?”

“Yes but I don’t know what they’re saying.”

“They are blogging in crow.”

Diddlie must have come in the garden gate unnoticed.  She spoke as she walked down the path towards me standing by the tree.  Now she is next to me in her blue blazer with bright yellow goldenrod in her lapel and her gardening jeans hanging loosely around her boots.

“Hi, how you doing”?  There is youthful sparkle in her eyes and her short wavy hair is thick, graying and bouncy, resisting the breeze.

“Fine, I’ve been blogging and came out for a breather.”

“We need to talk.  Remember”?  She drew out the sound of ‘remember’ portentously.  “We do?  What about?”

“Remember what I said the other day when you came by?”

“Yes you did say that.  So what is it?”

“Well, do you have time right now?”

“Your time is my time Diddlie.”

“Yeah right;  I’ll let that one pass for now. I’ve got other bones to pick with you.  For one thing you didn’t tell me you were going online with the blog.”

“No, it is sooner than expected.  A friend came by, and showed me how to set up a blog, so we went ahead, forgetting your request.”

“I’ve been reading what you put up.  I am wondering why you didn’t let me see it all first; thought you had agreed to that.  I am also wondering why you blog in the present tense?”

“So you found it already.  Are you okay with it?”

“Yes it’s okay, but I would appreciate some advance notice before you expose me to the world.”

“We can talk about it next time.”

“Okay, but look, most stories happen in the past.  I mean some one is talking about what happened.  I mean the story-teller.  What do you think you’re doing?”

“ I am writing like a crow, about what is going on now.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why? by the time you say it, what you are talking about is past.  Besides you are making it all up anyway.”

“This is a web log.  People write to each other on the internet about what is going on as it happens.”

“They do?”

“Yes, look at Face Book’s “wall” or the comments we exchange.”

“Face book is real people talking to each other and showing their pictures and ids.”

“I mean it is multi media.  Your blog isn’t like that.”

“No, but writing is the thing, the life of it.  It’s not about something recalled by the bard.”

“You are talking about real life.  Your blog is not real life.  You’re doing fiction.  That’s the category you chose.  You know what is going to happen and what has already happened.  It’s all in your head.”

No no, I don’t know what is going to happen.  Well not exactly.”

“ ‘Not exactly’ don’t start that again.  Come on!  Who else but you can know?”

“I don’t have a collaborator so no one else knows, but the story builds on itself.  Re-reading one bit leads to something else that would not have come up otherwise.”

“It is still all in you’re head.”

“Not when a reader reads it.  Then it is in their head.”

“So what?  If they can read, shouldn’t it be the same in both your head and the reader’s?”

“Up to a point.”

“Oh come on!  What point?  You write that there is a crow on the utility pole.  What else is the reader going to think?”

“They are going to think of crow on a utility pole of course, but they are also bringing their own associations into the mental picture”.

“Sure, but they still have to follow your story”.

“The reader’s imagination brings it to life.  A different form of life from what was in my head”.

“Okay, but that happens with traditional books with story tellers.  What’s the difference?”

“I am writing a story, but writing as a reporter or commentator in the present.  The narrator is in the midst of his own story.”

“What an ego!  Do you mean you’re not telling the story, but you are the story?”

“I am only part of the story.”

“But you claim to be ‘reporting’.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re an observer, not a participant, right?”

“There’s no avoiding participation.  Being in Fauxmont is to participate in life there.”

“But it is all just a fantasy of yours. You have put me here in your garden to talk about it.”

“Right.”

“You think standing here talking is advancing the story?  What about all these other people you write about?  What do they have to say about it?”

“You are the only on who has stepped out.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of the narrative.”

“What narrative?”

“The story of Fauxmont.  You have started another separate narrative.”

“You don’t make a whole lot of sense.  You know that?”

“What’s so hard to understand?”

“You say you are ‘writing’ me, like I am your invention.  How obnoxious!  Why are you questioning your own invention?  Don’t you believe in it or something?”

“You are questioning me Diddlie.”

“That’s right and getting nowhere beyond your head.  You have taken more than half my life and put it in the past, and I am still not satisfied with your explanation.”

“Sorry you are so upset about it Diddlie”.

“Sorry!  You say you are sorry! You are doing it.  You are making it up.  You have put me in this position.”

“True enough.”

“So…Change it!”

“We have already been through this.”

“I know, and I am going to keep pestering you until I get some satisfaction.”

The phone is ringing in my pocket. Diddlie has turned away. It is Liberty Trip asking if  I would be interested in going out to Prestige U. campus with her to meet some of her band members. Diddlie has wandered behind a holy, a movement only faintly visible through the thick foliage.  By the time arrangements with Liberty are settled, Diddlie has gone.

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.

Trip’s daughter has just found some notoriety by joining the all girl band “Toxic Blob”. I meet her at The Tentacle Coffee Bar near her rehearsal studio.  We are the only customers.  They serve sushi, tea, and coffee in the afternoon and full meals in the evenings.  The place is sparse, with a few tables and chairs in a large space.  The bar looks as if it once served as a drug store soda fountain.  There are holes in the walls where various attachments have neen removed.

“Toxic Blob”released ten million flying ants at a recent summer concert on the campus at Prestige University.

“Yea, that’s P.U., get it?” Asks Liberty.

“Perhaps” I hesitated.

“The place stinks!”  said Liberty fiercely but confidentially.

She went on in a quiet but serious voice, “I mean there is one group up there that thinks it is still 1968 or something, and another group who are promoting the ‘design argument’  against evolution. They need to wake up.”  She broke off, and now it was she who hesitated.

In vulnerable and trusting tones she asked me to forget all that.  I suggested that the substance of her remarks seemed plausible enough.  After some further reflection Liberty agreed to let me post her remarks and moved on from arts to ants.

That number was used by the publicist. Though ten million is obviously an estimate, the figure is also allegedly mentioned in a suit the college filed against Toxi Blob.  The campus of Prestige University was infested with fire ants and had to close its summer session for a full week after the incident.

Liberty showed me a clipping from the local paper, which revealed that Dr. Bookbender the dean at P.U. refused to be interviewed.  The reporter was also put off by Carol Crowding of the college administration office.  Dr. Flower Finderelli has offered off the record remarks only.   He is co-chair of the Gender Studies Dept, at Prestige and reportedly knows Liberty well. A spokesman for Terminal Arthropod, the exterminator, refused to comment on the issue as it is now in litigation. Some one did say they still find ants on their desk.

Liberty plays under the name ‘Etta Smog’.  She has a smile like her Mother’s, worthy of the screens at any multiplex, and speaks in the same soft friendly tones as her Dad.

“I am an entertainer” she said, “and our band is the only one doing the buzz thing”.

Some men walk in and sit down at the bar.

Liberty is wearing her work cloths.  These are customized outfits made of pink black and orange plastic plates.  In combination they look a bit like the armor jousting knights used to wear, except that Liberty does not care to cover too much of her shapely contour when on stage, or on warm days in rehearsal.

“It is like my exoskeleton” says Liberty.  “It gives us the insect look and feel. I am not wearing the antennas and mouthparts, but we have them for the stage.  Very important for building the band’s identity. It is our brand. It also feeds into the cross species thing.” Liberty does not explain further. She offers me a look at their concert on a portable DVD player.

Toxic Blob plays on stage from inside a translucent and multicolored plastic bubble that vibrates like jelly to sound.

“There’s is the Blob”.  Liberty pointed out.  I keep thinking of the seat on Jake’s deck and of jellyfish it brought to mind. The video shows the band breaking out of the blob and freeing the insects all at once. She leans across the small cafe table pointing out the effects.

“See them – see those beautiful clouds – there  – and there  – look at those flying up through the spot lights.  We keep the bugs hidden in canisters, out of sight until the end.”

She explains that they’re latest music was inspired by the recent sounds of cicadas.  “Why not?”  asked Liberty.  “I mean who’s the dude that wrote the orchestral piece ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’?

She paused. Her upper plates have ridden up crushing her breasts as she leans over to point out more clouds of insects.  Liberty wriggles to adjust her plates. One by one the men at the coffee bar turned to stare.

“Rimsky-Korsakov!”

She exclaimes it in the tone of an expletive, as she turns suddenly, looking back at the men, and answering her own question.  The men at the bar turn back to their lattes, as her plates slip back into more comfortable positions.

“That’s the dude who started the insect thing” she went on.  “ Well, we use electronics and guitars, no orchestra, at least not yet.”

Since Liberty joined the band last year, they have done seven gigs at university campuses around the country and national fame beckons.  Liberty shares her Dad’s business acumen, but she allows as how her taste in entertainment has led to some strain on the relationship.

“Dad’s OK “ she said philosophically, “He can see the bottom line.  He’ll get over it.  I found his wine storage thing was a perfect place to keep my insect larva.  It kept them sleepy until the right time.  So Dad didn’t know what was going on.  Now the lawyers are all over him, and he is helping us too.  That’s why we had to move on when his cel went off in the wine cellar.  It was the lawyers. I know for sure. He’s got the best. Believe me.”  She broke off to adjust the plates riding up on her collarbone.

“You mean your Dad’s lawyer’s are going to defend the band?”

“I didn’t say that.”  The plates are flexibly joined by elastic threads.  She pulles out and down slightly from each side, her elbows out to right and left  like wings.  As the orange and black segments stretched apart her breasts fell back into place under them.

“Okay, so your Dad’s got smart lawyers.”

“Let’s not go there” she said, still adjusting her exoskeleton. These things can get really bad, especially if they pinch my nipples!” she complained, making smaller adjustments with her fingers, and then went on, “This was our first release.” Liberty said of the ants. “We planned a hornet release next and a cockroach release at the next concert, but this first one may be our last.”

“Hornets! That sounds very dangerous.  Once people got stung there could be a panic in the audience.”

“Oh so long as we are outside it would be okay.”

“With a very high wind perhaps.” I suggest they might want to release CDs next time.  “We release insects,” said Liberty “We sellCDs.”

The concert video is over. She closes the CD player. “That’s it Fred.”  She pulls away from the table.  “Hey! don’t forget to look for our label, ‘Aphid Fuzz’.  We are going to use white polyester fibers on the CD ‘jule box’ to make it a warm and fuzzy purchasing experience.”  She got up.  Her body bulged, her skin creased and peeped from under the plates.  She and her plates moved towards the door. She glared at the men sitting at the coffee bar and went back to her rehearsal.

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.

Diddlie’s Place

I saw Diddlie outside her front door as I walked up the hill past Jake’s place, not knowing her address.  She was emptying a pail of water onto a hydrangea when I waved and she came towards me.  She now lives seventeen feet from Jake’s new house at 1661 Oval Road.  The fourth garage door is the nearest and the biggest door behind which he keeps his stretch Hummer.  This Hummer is the sample he used to convince the Snaz franchise to market them nationwide.  Diddlie Drates hates Hummers.  She colored with outrage when I asked her feelings on Jake’s huge house next door.  Diddlie had measured the exact distance from the property line over to the corner of the garage to substantiate complaints she voiced in a recent Fauxmont newsletter.  She alluded to problems over the newsletter, community activists, and other tensions.  She would get to those later she said, then as if to bring up another subject “We need to talk.”

Diddlie seems perplexed.  The subject had put her in a bad mood.  Her response to my question left her disoriented.  I had forgotten how volatile the issue had become in her mind, though I might have been reminded when reading the news letter that she is concerned about Jake’s huge house.

“Yes, okay, what else is going on?  I mean I’ve been thinking, and there’s plenty to tell you.  Like you said I have a lot of memories, and we can get into that, but I am not through with you about that other stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“You are going to tell me who you are: alright?”

“Okay, we can talk.  Go ahead I am listening.”

Diddlie explained that her house was built in the early 1940s.  It is unimproved, and she takes pride in its being well maintained and in original condition.  She has some original appliances that her late husband was restoring, set aside under tarps in the carport.

“This is a historic neighborhood” she states emphatically, pausing for effect before going on.  “We bought this house from my Aunt, Maria Gostrey, when she moved to Paris back in the fifties and she used to visit us regularly.  It is hot in summer but we live in dappled light under here she said gesturing up towards the tree tops with a sweep of her arms over her head and raising her face towards the sky “and it’s cooler here than the ‘burbs’ down the street.”  She gestures again to the east where Orchard Close, far larger than its name suggests, stretched all the way to Route One.  Diddlie danced on into the house, beckoning me in, and skipping over a small fallen branch.  “These homes here in Fauxmont should not be knocked down to make room for mansions” she insisted.  Her one story house is built on a concrete slab, surrounded by tall white oaks, hickories, azaleas, ivy and the wilting hydrangea now recovering outside her front door.

“First they cut down the trees next door, then there was all the construction noise, that nearly drove me crazy” says Diddlie as she goes into the history of Jakes’s construction next door.  She picks up the crouching white rabbit that is still in the hallway leading to her living room.  “This is Mr. Liddell” she says through the strain of bending and picking him up, stretching out the sound of his name.  Now it is Jake’s new lights that Diddlie complains about.  He has more than a dozen high intensity lights installed on his outside walls by the security firm, Urban Safety Security Solutions.  They come on in response to motion detectors, as deer, possum, fox, bunnies, cats and dogs, but so far no terrorists, wander through the narrow margins of Jake’s property, and into Diddlie’s ivy.

“When those lights come on, I feel like I am living on a movie set and the cameras are about to roll” jokes Diddlie, smoothing the rabbit’s ears.  Then more seriously  “That man’s dream house is my nightmare.  No not a nightmare.  If it was a nightmare I might wake up and it would be gone.”  She squeezes Mr. Liddell in her fury, and he wriggles and protests.  No that’s the trouble.  I am stuck with it.”  She breaks off and excuses herself, apologizing to Mr. Liddell and says she is going to put him back in his hutch.  I can’t hear what she says as she goes on talking while walking away towards the back door which slams behind her, cutting off the sound of her voice.

She soon comes back in, her voice sounds as if she has been talking all the time she was out with Mr. Liddell, but it is clear she claims to have broken through Jake’s usually unflappable good humor.  She reports that he called her “a slab dwelling low life busybody.”  That is when she accused him of being a Hun, a Goth and a Vandalizing Mansioniser.  I ask her if Jake has offered her a gift card from Snaz, but Diddlie says “He knows better.”

The sound of a loud crack broke into our conversation.  It was a Toyota Prius rolling quietly up the driveway snapping the branch Diddlie had skipped over on the way in.  Diddlie leads me out the front door and says “We still need to talk!” and runs out to meet someone in the car.  “I can call back tomorrow,” she yells as her voice was cut off again by another slamming door.

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.

Yesterday Derwent Sloot celebrated his eighty seventh birthday behind the row of prickly holly trees that partially screen his living room window from the Trips’.  It faces the Trips’ three story kitchen-dining room with large windows flooding the banana trees, and orchids with light and colorful fish swimming in a huge plexiglas cylinder that rises from its sand stone foundation to the second story gallery, all visible through a thin patch in the holly trees. This view is also an advertisement for high-end Snaz Super Stores, where so many of the Trips’ accoutrements were purchased.  I knock on the Sloots’ door which opens directly into the living room. He opens up and I stand facing his modest picture window, momentarily absorbed by the vision of Trip’s mansion, when Sloot brings me back;

“If you are so fascinated by that sickening extravagance next door, why didn’t you knock on their door?”

“If you remember, you had invited me over.  I am Fred, your new neighbor.”

“Hi Fred.” said Derwent quietly with no sign of impatience.

“What is new in Fauxmont?” I asked Mr. Sloot.

“It is pronounced Foxmont, like the fox”, he corrects me sternly.

“Sit down why don’t you?” He said politely.  Derwent waved at a couch and two armchairs in the living room. The back of his thin hand was bruised purple. His fingers stiff and bent could suggest nothing but a general direction by their limited extension.

I sit on the couch and Derwent takes to a stained wingback chair that cuddles him with extended arms in the hollow of its sunken upholstery. He brushes back some thin white spiky hair that falls across his brow as he leans forward to sit down.  It looks slightly wet. He is still exercised about his neighbor’s new house, and tells me he has expressed his objections to Trip about the new construction on a number of occasions, and then more heatedly he says;  “It’s a megalith, not a house.  I can’t look up without seeing it!”.  He goes on: “Yes, Jake’s dream, his fantasy, his fancy, as told by his builder, not in words: what words could describe that thing?  That idiot Planck built it dumb, and mindless.  Kept adding on without thinking. I stood there and watched one morning while Trip sketched his changing notions on a plywood off-cut, and Planck explained what he could build. He should have refused to build it!  All that architectural chaos wasn’t designed.  His conniving architect, who seldom showed up, contrived it into a towering suburban status symbol for a fee. That’s it. Jake’s ambition expressed in all the things he can buy and in his expansive gestures to his neighbors. Let’s talk about something else!”

Derwent is out of breath. His lip is wet, and he wipes some drool off his chin hurriedly turning away into his cavernous chair.

He is also annoyed by a row of French doors opening onto a spacious deck, with a gazebo built like a three level pagoda thankfully near the thickest healthiest hollies at the property line. The granite base of the eight-story tower, which gives the building an inappropriately medieval presence, further outrages him.  Diddlie told me that Trip, after an altercation, had given Derwent a hundred dollar gift card redeemable at any Snaz outlet.  Some call it vulgar bribery; Steve Strether, another neighbor, called it a neighborly show of good will.  When asked about it, Sloot snarled that he didn’t know where the place was, and didn’t intend to find it. The doorbell rang. He excused himself graciously, and soon returned not with his new visitor but to introduce his daughter Rosalba, explaining he had a chess game in the other room with the caller, a child he didn’t introduce.

“Call me Rosie” she said as Derwent and the child visitor went out.

“I am visiting my folks here.” she explained and went on that Derwent is giving his weekly chess lesson to Heidy Guderian, a five-year-old neighbor.

Sloot has lived in his one story slab built home for fifty odd years. He is a world authority on some microbe living in sub arctic soils, and still enjoys making occasional appearances with environmental groups.  During the pre-election period he pulled up one of Jake’s Bush/Cheyne posters, which he claimed was on his property. Derwent was not happy when Jake replaced it with a larger one several feet back.

Derwent used to know everyone in the neighborhood, but the recent housing boom changed things radically. He had already told me heatedly that he didn’t ’know” Trip, “I only know of him”.  Rosie told me how the community had grown up in the late 1940s.  The owners put up most of the simple single story homes in the space of a few years, and a strong sense of community grew out of that experience.

Rosalba did allow, out of Derwent’s earshot, that her son had a very good time riding in Jake’s Hummer last weekend.  Apparently Jake had taken them all to Cyber Kids out at Snaz.  Rosie giggled: “No one over fourteen really understands how much of Cyber Kids is virtual and how much is actual, and no one under fourteen really cares.”

Rosie’s son, Serge, who was eavesdropping in an adjoining room, came in and told us that his Mother is living in the past.  “Such questions are really meaningless” he pronounced with the precocious authority of a preteen expert.  Derwent is blissfully unaware of the threat to his progeny.

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.

Jake Trip moved into his dream house last year at 1674 Oval street.  Wicket Street is flat, narrow and one way going around the hill from East to West about half way up from Boundary Road at the bottom of the hill.  The steep incline of Oval Street between Boundary Road at the bottom and Wicket street above, passes Jake Trip’s granite faced basement walls as they disappear into the slope.  The basement was cut into the hillside and all eight oneiric stories are visible only from Wicket Street.  I did not mount the twelve steps up from Wicket St. to enter through the formal front doors.  Mrs. Gomez let me in through a side door under a half- timbered overhang.  Looking at all this granite off Oval Street could lead one to expect battlements above, but there are several stories of half timbered stucco.  It’s exterior is designed in many styles.  The brick facing on Wickett street features arches and ledges and iron railings in front of tall windows.  Looking up at the top stories I can see the last few leaves against the long parallel lines of siding like notes on an extended staff.  The sun sets behind mature oaks growing on the perimeter  and none of them obstruct his sixth floor view of distant hills beyond the river.  Jake owns a local Snaz Super Store franchise.  Lou had introduced us over a platter of bear meat as the three of us helped ourselves at his last barbecue.  Jake was interested in telling me about the neighborhood but we didn’t talk much at the time.  Before he left he told me to walk over for a visit after I move in.  Now he is speaking to me from the privacy of his Jacuzzi on this unseasonably warm November evening.  I declined to join him, but settled into a Snaz semi-inflatable seating pod close by on the extensive sixth floor deck.  The pod surrounds you like an amoeba as you sink into it, but surprisingly, it firms up when its innards find their equilibrium around you.

Jake stands up to observe me.  Two crows call to each other on the dead branch of a Willow Oak growing up from Diddlie’s yard next door.

“How about that?” exclaimed Jake, dripping in his tub.  Narrow curled leaves from the oak blow into the water, and float next to his knees when he sits down again.

I tell him it was like sitting in a jellyfish in front of jeering crows.  “Yea, that’s about it” Jake goes on.  “How do you know they’re jeering?”

“Only a guess.”

“I don’t think we interest them.  They’re busy trying to make a living like the rest of us.  My daughter developed that thing as a college project.  She’s got them on the market already; pretty good in two years.  So far I am the only Snaz store that carries them.”

“How’s business?”  I asked; “Hey, business is good” Jake said.  He also indicated that lower taxes will be great for him and his employees.  “I held the line on wages and benefits this year” he remarked sternly.  The proud Snaz owner has cleared most of trees from his lot and his dream now rises eight stories above the expanse of his smooth lawn .

I ask if he is going to plant any trees to replace the losses.

“Yes I have a shipment due in next Tuesday. The trees will grow back.  They have a history of doing that.  Ask the coal industry.”

He splashes at a late wasp that found his plate of sliced Mountaineer apples.  He offers me some and goes on.  “By adding that eighth floor, we have an unobstructed view of the river and the Parkway.  We will see trouble before it finds us”.

Jake has a full security package which cost him ‘half a mil’, he remarked with a wink, including a contract with Suburban Safety and Security Solutions.  Jake tells me that they are able to respond discreetly, in minutes, 24/7, with a team of consultants who will  “assure the protection of your home”.  He finishes the last slice of Mountaineer apple after I refused it.

Trip dismisses local residents’ complaints about the excessive height of his structure as narrow-minded.

“These folks need to get a life,” remarks Trip, as he rises again and starts drying himself off on his sunny Eastern exposure.  “I have added to the security of all my neighbors and raised the value of their homes.”  He pauses to dry his head and face.

“You can’t take it with you.  So, I thought I would just realize a dream of mine to live in a multistory home.”

Standing up again, I can see the sky’s unlimited blue reflected in his jacuzzi water as the surface stills after he steps out.  I can also see warm yellow brown patches in the river filled with mud washed in by recent rains.  After this short chat he goes inside to dress.  As he opens the door from the deck into the house the twins come out in elegant deep purple Snaz track suits with their names Liberty and Gale, embroidered on the front and logos on the shoulders with gold piping on the sleeves and pants.

No they are not twins.  Sorry, it is Jake’s youthful wife Gale.  She blows her husband a kiss and introduces me to their daughter Liberty.

Gale takes the lead, guiding me down to the second floor wine ‘cellar’, where my tour with Jake will begin.  I notice their matching NY Yankee baseball caps and white shoes with purple stripes, and more Snaz logos in the back below their ankles.  We take our time descending the grand double staircase, modeled on one that sank in “Titanic”.  Liberty tells me that her mother was a semi-pro tennis player in her time, and now runs the “Sports Arena” at Snaz.  I ask Liberty about Snaz, and they both laugh nervously, as Liberty explains that “Snaz isn’t ready for me yet.”

As we enter the wine ‘cellar’, Jake appears, in khakis, teeshirt and aviators.  His friendly tones suddenly take on the familiar qualities of a sales pitch.  It emerges that his five thousand bottles of Chardonnay, (he only drinks Chardonnay), are the beginning of a new line at Snaz.  He plans to do a joint venture with Glitz Holdings.

“Glitz do high end Condos, and we shall do the wines and accessories,”

Jake explains.  He has a fully motorized, climate controlled, inventory sorting and tracking system installed on three stories of structural steel, between the basement and the polished surfaces of his second floor ‘cellar’.  I stand next to him while he activates the pop-out keyboard installed behind one of the mahogany wall panels that alternate with glass doors around the walls of the room.  With a few key strokes he summons the screen listing his holdings and then selects the bottle he wants.  The gentle murmuring of electronic switches and motors behind the walls is drowned out by a sudden shrill chirp from Jake’s cell phone.  Gale goes over to his side.

Liberty beckons me over to the door and suggests we move on.  Gale comes across before we leave the doorway, with earnest apologies.  She explains that this is not the right time for my tour.  She offers lunch next Sunday, and a tour, if I don’t mind eating early. I accept.  She escorts me to a Parisian art deco style elevator door, which doesn’t squeak or rattle and I go down to the lobby at Wicket Street level.

Walking out of the elevator into the entrance hall below I see a wall of television screens.  There are four rows of four screens, some blank but flickering, others showing whatever comes into the mirror across the room.  I turn to the left and notice a tall beveled glass mirror on the wall, perhaps twelve feet high and about four feet wide.  As I walk toward it, my image in the mirror walks towards me.  I keep going towards the mirror until my image meets me a few inches from the glass.  The glass steams up as my breath hits it.  So it happens a number of times on the screens opposite.  I can see the screens across the room in the mirror.  There appear to be slight delays between the video capture and the displays.  When I turn around completely I can watch various pictures of my reflection, at different moments in the past few seconds.  Some screens act like another mirror facing the one I was looking in, creating an image of ifinite regression, one image inside the other.  I can’t tell where the cameras are.

“There seems to be something wrong with your security video Gale.”

There is no reply.  The elevator door is closed.  Gale is gone.  I am too bewildered to fully understand the strange infinities in that video kaleidoscope.  I walk out the front door and turn off the path through ivy in the deep shade cast by the Trip’s fantastic home.

NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction.  Click on Archives on the right.

Soon after Diddlie and I sat down the waitress interrupts us, with menus. At the same time Lou Waymarsh appears hemmed in behind the waitress and an adjacent table, with his strong square face showing a gray beard. The waitress looks over her shoulder at Lou and drops some of the menus as she tries to separate two from a stack she is carrying.  Then noticing Lou behind her, she turns and asks if he wants to sit down.  The bus boy is standing off to the right with a cart full of dishes, waiting for the waitress to make way.  He can’t move back because of the lady with the walker waiting behind him. A large party to the left is getting up and the aisle between our booth and the adjacent tables is jammed. As I bend down to pick up a menu that has fallen by my feet I notice Diddlie’s jeans are gone. By the time I give the menu back to the waitress Lou is sitting in Diddlie’s place. His thick black eyebrows look like caterpillars basking in his thoughts while resting above his eyes.  He is frowning slightly, as he so often has since his daughter, Lt. Waymarsh was killed in Iraq. I had forgotten, but realized what he meant at once with his first words.

“It was 3 years ago today.”

“Has it been that long already?”

“I am going to sell my firm to Fibonacci.” Said Lou without any change of tone, as if the two events were one.

“’I had no idea Lou!  ‘The Fib.’  Congratulations, I am sure you got a good price.”

“Yeah the three of us made out okay. We didn’t close the deal until this morning.  That’s when I called. It was an all-nighter.” Lou stifles a yawn, and looks into the menu.  Seems as if he is absorbed by it.  Perhaps he is still negotiating silently behind the caterpillars on his brow which have arched slightly as he concentrates squinting for a while until getting out his reading glasses with a sigh of resignation. He puts the menu down. A few caterpillar hairs are scratching the tops of his glasses as he speaks.

“That outfit is more like a network than a company. Sure they are incorporated, and have that non-descript building out in Fairfax, among others, but they have people from all over government, banking, media. Congress…I mean you name it.”

“Now they have taken an interest in your education consultancy.”

“Yes they want my data.”

“Your data?”

“You know.” he waved his hand over the menu as if to draw forth a genie or perhaps cast a spell. He speaks slowly, as always, with a low resonant voice.

“I was the education guy, but there’s data we had collected over the years.”

“I don’t understand Lou.”

Lou looked more serious than ever. I wonder, has this man been so constricted by the python of his job that he can no longer relax?  I had not noticed this before, though it is striking now, after his daughter’s death he spent more and more time at work.

“Yea, education is where I started out but we drifted into waters Fibonacci is now interested in navigating.”

We had become friends over a Xerox machine; two graduate students working at the Library of Congress, thirty years ago, amusing each other with riffs on the genius of the Flying Circus. Lou has paused, fallen back into the depths he had conjured with his hands out of the menu’s plastic holder. He stifles another yawn.

“Sorry about this.” He puts down the menu and looks at me. ” I mean I can’t say any more about it. You know ‘the Fib’..  They like to stay out of sight, don’t think people realize how big they are.  Like a kind of light house projecting all these pictures its clients want us to see, or someone wants us to see, on the op-ed page, or featured in a news magazine or even on TV.  I mean TV is the thing now.  You don’t see the light source only the pretty pictures it illuminates.”

Lou picks up the menu again but his eyes are closed. “I need a coffee” said Lou, and the waitress is there. I hadn’t noticed her arrival.

“Will that be all sir?”

Dropping the menu, Lou has a full yawn into both hands. The menu slides over the table towards me. “Excuse me” he says to the waitress, “That is all for now.”

I order the same and ask:

“Lou, do you have a neighbor called Diddlie Drates?”

“Diddlie, yes. She was there when we moved in. She is like a founding mother of the neighborhood.”

“ Did you see her ?”

“No, how do you know her?

“She introduced herself to me just now in the bar, after hearing me mention your name to the bartender.”

“Wonder what made her do that?”

“Don’t know, she was sitting here just now.”

“No I didn’t notice her going out, but I don’t notice much at the moment.  By the way, did you contact Jake Trip?”

I told him I had.  Jake remembered me from  your barbeque, and invited me to visit him tomorrow.”

“That should be your first stop alright. Now you will see what the neighborhood is all about.”

My first thought on reaching the H Bar Restaurant on Maxwell Avenue is to ask if my old and close friend Lou Waymarsh has made a reservation.  We haven’t seen each other for months and the first arrangement to meet this morning at his house had changed.  I asked the receptionist and finding that reservations are unnecessary, I look around and see he hasn’t arrived yet and take a seat at the bar.  There is now time to reread the text he sent me earlier, when the ring tone announced its arrival as I drove North on Rout One from the realtor’s office, unaware of the caller’s identity until a stop light afforded time to take a glance. Now there is time to fully appreciate his apologetic digital explanation for the delay and look again at his reminder to find him in the Quark Lounge of the H Bar where we can chat in comfort. His unexpected absence also leaves me time for reflection.  We are sure to see a lot more of each other in future as I have just moved into his neighborhood, largely under the influence of his advice, and his telling me recently that a house is for sale, and in addition, my own experience in Fauxmont, visiting him, had been decisive. There is also time to survey the scene and so my first sense of Fauxmont as a new home comes through the lively ambiance of the local bar and restaurant.  The attentive bartender notices the empty glass of Bass Ale in front of me , and asks if I would like another.  “I am meeting Lou Waymarsh in the lounge,” I explain, shaking my head, thinking Lou might be known at his neighborhood bar.  The bartender gives no sign of knowing him, and I pay my tab and tip, and put my wallet back in its pocket, preparing to look for him again among the quiet booths in the carpeted Quark Lounge.  Before taking so much as a step I am confronted by a friendly smiling woman wearing an expensive, finely cut royal blue blazer.  She asks:
“Did you say you’re a friend of Lou Waymarsh?”

The bar seats are all taken and I had been dimly conscious of someone standing close behind me trying to get the bartender’s attention,  as I settled my tab.

“Yes” I tell her, surprised at her sudden interruption of my reveries, anticipating Waymarsh’s arrival and studying the other customers crowding in opposite me,  and others more distant, I could see walking into the Quantum Que to play pool across the hall.

“I have known him for years.  He’s a neighbor and good friend too.”

“Funny I haven’t met you before.” I said, sliding off my stool to stand next to her, in the narrow space between the barstools and the rail separating them from the chairs and tables of the noisy cocktail area extending beside us to a big bay window.

“I often visit him, when he adds me to a few of his neighbors for a barbeque.”

“I don’t go to those much. I don’t eat meat. I mainly know him through our community organization the ‘Fauxmont Guild’.”

She held out her hand and introduced herself: “Diddlie Drates” she said in a business-like manner.  She has a blaze of golden rod in her lapel, and there’s some garden soil dried on to the stained knees of her jeans.  I walk towards the low light of the carpeted Quark lounge which appears like a dim cave from here in the brilliance of the sunny bay window. She follows and sits down across from me in a booth, without saying anything about it; perhaps assuming that a friend of Lou’s must be her friend too.  She goes on and gives me no opportunity to tell her that I was thinking of my chat with Lou as personal and confidential.

“What did you say you do?”

“Oh I didn’t say, but I do as I please.”

“What do you mean? is it a secret of something?”

“No, I write a blog.”

“Are you going to write about me?”

“Yes.”

“Will you send me the URL?”

“Not yet.”

“I want to see this thing before it goes out, okay?”

“Not yet, it is not up yet.”

”It’s not a blog then.”

“True, it is in the form of a blog.”

“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” asked Diddlie looking alarmed.

“No.”

“You better get with it,” she said fiercely.

Her questions and reactions seem impertinent and presumptuous coming from a total stranger who had introduced herself with such polite formality.

“It’s not as bad as you think.”

“Sounds to me like you are lost.”

“I am finding my way now, though.”

“You’re just a gossip like me.” She giggles.

“I am very interested in what you say.”

“Are you coming on to me?”

“Not exactly.”

“I know you’re lost, but come on, just tell me!”

“No I am not coming on to you, but I am interested in what you say.”

“I mean you… well I just don’t get you.”

“Sorry Diddlie.  I don’t know at the moment if I am writing a blog of a novel or just a blog.”

“A blog of a novel,” repeated Diddlie, “and that is why you are pumping me huh?” Diddlie giggles and goes on.

“Look, I can’t tell you what you’re doing.  You have to figure that out for yourself.”

“True, it’s not your problem.  Forget it.”

“Listen, I just want to know where you are coming from.  I mean you just moved here, or are about to.  You must be the guy Lou mentioned while he was fixing my bike, but I don’t know who you are.”

“I am a writer.”

“Okay, you told me that already.”

“I am writing you.”

“What?”

“Yes, I invented you and now we are getting acquainted.”

“You set me up!”

“Yes.”

“You just dragged me in here for…Well!  For what?

“You came to mind. There was no dragging.”

”So why do you have to keep asking all these questions?”

“You’re the one asking the questions Diddlie.”

“Well you said you are interested, so I keep talking, but I also want to know who I am dealing with.”

“I am a writer trying to give readers an idea.”

“You don’t have any readers.”

“Well, hypothetical readers.”

“So you aren’t really talking about anything.”

“I am.  I am talking to you about who I am.”

“Yea right, and you are all in your head and you’re lost!”

“You keep saying that.”

“It is true. What do you mean you are writing me?  You think you are God or something?”

“No, there’s no need to be so exasperated, I am not playing God, I am just a writer.”

“Is this a put-down?  Are you trying to tell me I don’t exist?”

“No no, you certainly do exist.”

“Ah ha, so when is my birthday?”

“I haven’t thought of it yet.”

“Does that mean I don’t have one?’

“You must have a birthday, every one does.”

“You don’t know when my birthday is.  You can admit it.  It’s okay.  See, God knows everything, and you don’t, and that is okay too.

“I would say it is January 2, 1945.”

“You might say it, but how do you know if it is true?”

“I will write about your birth certificate and you can get it out of your top desk drawer and read it later on.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be that old?  Just think again okay.  You are putting too much behind me.  It isn’t fair.”

“Not so much, enough for you to have interesting memories.”

“What about living? To hell with memories.”

“You have a good life here in Fauxmont.”

“You ought to take notice of your character, as you seem to think of me.  They can really mess things up if you get them wrong.”

“True.”

“So why can’t I be twenty three and having really good sex with my boyfriend in the privacy of my house before that thing next door went up?”

“You did and also married him.”

“No, I mean now, instead of arguing with you in this booth without any food.”

“You can’t because I am not writing the story that way.”

“Sweetie, you could always change it.”

“No, your role is to be a source of background information.”

“I don’t want a role.  I want a life.”

“Yes and you have one.”

“All I have is memories and dumb questions designed to make you look smarter than I am.”

“Diddlie, that is not the idea.  You are plenty smart, but you are also worked up about the new big house next door, and other things in your life. You are burning on a short fuse right now.”

“So you write, but I want a life.”

“Yes it is my story, but you have a good life.  Not an easy life but a fulfilling one.”

“Enough about me…what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I still don’t know who you are. You just keep saying you are a writer.”

“That’s it.”

“Well tell me more about yourself.  Like what do you do?”

“I told you I am a writer.”

“No for a living, come on, you know what I mean… stop being cagey.”

“Anything I say becomes part of the story, and this isn’t a story about me.”

“It could be.”

“I am not writing autobiography.”

“No, but to be fair you might as well put yourself in here with me and get out of your God complex.  I’m talking mental health you know.  Why should you be the only one with a life?”

“All the characters have lives.”

“Are you a character yourself?”

“Not exactly myself.”

”Oh not exactly myself,” mocked Diddlie.  “Are you so lost even about yourself?”

“Whatever I write is what happens.”

“You really do have a God complex sweetie. You’re acting like a deity above it all. No wonder you are so lost.  You say you are Lou’s old friend.  Then you say you invented me.  Now you won’t come and live in Fauxmont.”

“I am living in Fauxmont.”

“But not exactly! Oh don’t start that writer stuff again.  You have no exact idea!  That’s where you get lost.”

“Yes I do get lost in it.”

“Well how dumb is that?”

“Diddlie we live in different worlds.”

“That’s for sure.  You are lost in a world of your own.  I am saying, ‘Come back!’ I have a feeling I might like you a lot better if I knew you.”

“Try thinking of it this way: If I mail you a letter to Diddlie Drates, 1664 Oval Road, etc. it will never reach you.  The post office will either return it or it will end up in the dead letter bin.  On the other hand if you send me a letter in your world, to Fred Blogz at my address on Maxwell Avenue, you can be reasonably sure I will get it.”

“Well what do you know?”

“I don’t know anything until it is written.”

“Talking to you makes me wonder if I know anything at all.”