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.

Lark Bunlush is standing with Boyd before a huge puddle, covered in a light film of yellow dust, at the foot of her driveway.

“What happened here?”

“Rain, Fred.”

“It seems to be growing.”

“Maybe there is a water main break?”

Boyd waves across the deluge.

“You think we can back the car across it?”

“Hi, Boyd.”

Lark walks across the slope of the front yard and picks up a small fallen oak branch.

“I think this is just water draining down from up the hill.”

“Okay Mom, try this end first.”

“Here goes, ‘Twig Test’.”

She sneezes.  The pollen is thick in the air as she dips the spread of twigs on the end of the branch near Boyd’s feet.

“Looks about eight inches deep”

“Wait, try down at the other end.”

Lark drags the branch along the bottom and water rises on the wood.

“Oh! The twigs are all submerged!”

“How’s that for high-tech detection, Mom?”

Lark gives Boyd a high five.

Boyd lends a hand with the branch.

“It’s stuck, I think there’s a hole or something!”

A shadow crosses the shade-line between the reflected strip of bright gray sky and deep brown shadow of the hillside behind Lark’s home.

“Hi, Maynard.”

“Boyd, Mon confrere!”

Lark puts down her branch.

“Fred, this is Maynard Keyes.  Maynard, our neighbor, Fred.”

He bends slightly and offers an elbow bump from his greater height, six foot seven, or more.

“Glad to meet you, neighbor.”

Keyes smiles with yellow teeth under his copious mustache.

“When did this happen?”

Lark stares at the puddle and sneezes again.

“Last night.”

“Boyd looks like you are busy.”

Boyd watches him walk away with a spring in his long stride and his arms swing at his sides like ungainly pendulums.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“Boyd!”

“Yeah!”

“Are you coming?”

“Yeah.”

He walks back towards us.

“Say, Boyd, when do you think you will get across the pond?”

Lark pulls her branch out of the water and dumps it on the grassy slope among the Spring Beauties.

“Go ahead, Boyd.”

“Wait a minute. Mom, I think you can drive through this.  Just stay to the left.”

“Me too.”

“So, go ahead!”

Keyes is examining the tide line at his feet where water laps the dry asphalt in waves from Lark’s dragging branch.

“The level has advanced two pebbles since I started my observations.”

“Yeah!  Hear that Mom? Hurry up!”

Lark strides up the driveway to her Toyota Corolla with a big new dent in the right side door.

“She still hasn’t got the door fixed!”

Lark pulls on the driver’s side door.

“Won’t open.”

“You got it, Fred.”

She opens the left side door and slides across over the shifter to get behind the wheel.

“Fred, I’ll bet the battery is dead.”

“Think so Boyd?”

“Yeah, well, it is barely turning over.”

The engine starts.

“Okay Mom, keep coming but go left a little.”

Lark backs down the slope into the puddle and stalls.

Click, it turns over weakly with no ignition.

“You have a dead battery!”

“How am I supposed to get out?”

Lark has moved back to the left and opened the door.

“That water is almost spilling in here!”

“Just wade out.”

“I am not a heron!”

Keyes looks up with a twitch of his mustache.

“Have you got a plank somewhere?”

Lark leans out of the doorway.

“Look in the basement, Boyd, under the old boxes of campaign stuff.”

Boyd walks over to the front door, to go and look.

“How did you get to know Boyd?”

Keyes is watching the advancing tide line.

“I met him in a diner when I was driving through New Mexico, last year, and gave him a ride back East.”

“No one here knew where he was.”

“He didn’t tell me much.”

“He keeps a lot to himself.”

“Boyd is an interesting character.”

“Were you together long?”

“Oh, about two weeks on the road.”

“Did a little touring?”

“No, I also had friends to visit in New Mexico.”

“Sounds like a nice trip.”

“When we got back, he stayed at my place until last month when his mother tracked him down.”

“So, she found him!”

“Yeah, private detective.”

“I see.”

“He was gruntled at the thought though!”

“It was no joke to Lark.”

“I am sure.  That relationship is complicated, you know.”

“Yes, they seem to be doing well at the moment.”

“Boyd tells me you have been acquainted for some time.”

“Acquainted, is about right.”

Keyes turns, stands slightly stooped, trying to keep eye contact with me, below.

“Have you met Albrecht?”

“Oh yes, many times.”

“What is your impression?”

“In my opinion, he is a bit of an extremist.”

“I gather he is a confirmed rightist and authoritarian.”

“Yes, I never could tell whether Boyd agreed.”

Keyes watches two doves, flap across the puddle muttering.

“Seems to me, Boyd was swept off his feet and followed someone he found he couldn’t agree with politically, even though love insisted otherwise.”

“He must feel safe confiding in you, Maynard.”

“Oh, up to a point. I am sure he won’t mind my telling you about it now.”

“Well, that’s good to know.”

“Ah, Mr. Keyes!”

He looks over to Lark, still marooned in her car, leaning out the side window.

She pushes the curtain of her thick gray hair, with its black streak, out from in front of her eyes.

“My COVID hair!”

Maynard’s yellow grin widens into a smile.

“There is a lot of it around, Lark.”

“Did you just drive over from DC?”

“Yeah, I am parked back there, in front of the wrong house.”

Keyes points down the street where the road turns sharply.

“Yes, has Boyd told you where he wants to live?”

“No, I think he is pondering.”

Lark is still fighting her hair.

“He is in a muddle. Hasn’t told me either.”

“Well, he seems to be okay with our group.”

Lark’s ring-tones interrupt.

“Where do you live, Maynard?”

“Up near the Cathedral, in DC.”

“Oh, Cleveland Park?”

“Yes, big place, about a dozen good size rooms.”

“Is that your family home?”

Maynard laughs and scratches the back of his neck.

“I would say so, but it isn’t Mom and Dad.  It is more like a floating arrangement among various partners.”

Lark is off the phone and leaning out of her car window again.

“Say, Maynard!  Boyd told me he is going on stage.”

“He might! One of my friends is planning a production on Zoom.  So, it is not really a stage show.  He has been working with her quite a lot.”

Boyd carries a dusty plank out of the front door.  He tries to put the far end

into the open car but it is too far out and too heavy, and the end falls into the water.

“Try floating it over.”

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“Like launching a boat. Put it in the water and push in over here.”

The plank sinks after getting a push, instead of moving across the surface.

“Why isn’t it floating?”

“Boyd, I am not going to walk the plank!”

“Yeah, okay. It wasn’t my idea, you know.”

 “It is too short anyway!”

The plank comes to the surface but is not moving toward the car.

“Bad idea Maynard!”

“Don’t blame him, Boyd.”

“Stop telling me what to do!’

Keyes gestures down the road.

“I don’t want to get dragged into this plank debate, Fred. Going to bring my car over.”

He strolls off, pendulums swinging slowly in time to his long stride.

Keyes, waves to Boyd without shouting back, or turning around and carries on.

“Okay, Mom. Have you got any galoshes?”

The plank has drifted further from the car.

“Look under the stairs.”

Boyd comes back with a pair of red galoshes.

“Okay Mom, can you catch?” 

“Sure, throw them over.”

Lark catches the first but the second flies past her and hits the steering wheel.

“I didn’t say, throw them at me!”

“I didn’t throw them at you.”

A huge pink station wagon comes slowly around the corner.  Yellow-green oak pollen collects where the chrome trim attaches to the paintwork.  It sticks to the glass.

Keyes parks, among the weeds on the verge opposite the house with wipers working on the pollen.

“What is that?”

Lark has the Toyota’s door open and is standing with her arm over the top of the door.

Boyd waves to his friend. 

“That is Maynard’s a 1960 Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon.”

“They didn’t make any car that color!”

“No, he got it painted down in Richmond.”

“Okay, where did he find a disgusting monstrosity like that?”

“Out in New Mexico.”

“No way! Not in pink!”

“I just told you, he got it painted. Besides, old cars don’t rust in the desert.”

“He must be out of his tiny mind!”

“It didn’t work so, he shipped it back.”

“What a gas-guzzling waste of time!”

A tow truck from The Lighthouse Gas Station stops by the puddle and Farouk shouts across to Lark.

“Looks like you need a boat, Lark?”

“Farouk!  The battery died.”

He walks around the back of the truck and brings an old tire around to the front and fastens it to the bumper.

“Okay Lark, I’ll push you out of the water.”

“But I need you to tow me to the gas station.”

“Right, but I can’t hitch the car underwater.”

“Oh! right!  So, what are you going to do?”

“Push your car up out of the water then back up and hitch.”

Farouk maneuvers his truck getting his front bumper with tire affixed against the rear bumper of the car.

“Are you in neutral Lark?”

“Yeah, that’s N, right?”

“That’s it.  Is the hand break off?”

She takes the break off and the car settles against the tire.

“Keep the wheel straight, okay?”

Farouk climbs into the truck and gently pushes the car back up the slope.

“Put it in Park, with the break on.”

Lark yanks the hand break back and moves across to get out of her battered Toyota.

“Guess, I don’t need these.”

She hands Boyd her red Galoshes. 

“The water is too deep anyway.”

He throws them down and walks around the puddle, over to Keyes.

“Boyd, it is time to absquatulate.  Are you ready?”

He gets in the car before Keyes, saying nothing.

Lark stares over the water.

“What the hell do you think you are doing, Boyd?”

Keyes waves to all.

“He will be in touch.”

“Like hell, he will!”

He gets in the driver’s side.

Farouk hitches the Toyota to his truck and eases it down to the street.

“Boyd, I can’t believe you are just leaving!”

Boyd does not respond. Keyes starts the V8 and engages 235 hp of pink throttle.

“You want a ride, Lark?”

She ignores Farouk.

The gray curtain has closed across her face again and the tip of her nose points towards the departing car.

“You little shit!

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.

We walk past yellow crocus blooming next to The Golden Archesprinted yellow on red. It is a piece of litter catching the sun.  Sudden rain turns to sleet, freezing on the asphalt, here and there, along Bails Lane.

Lou kicks a rock out of the way.  His jacket pockets sag heavily at his side.

“Another weird Winter.”

“Yup, rain, and ice but no snow.”

“Great for potholes.”

He kicks another rock, which spins back into its hole.

“What did we go out for, anyway?”

“Carry out.”

“Right, that was back when the sun was shining.”

“Remember? we agreed on the phone, half an hour back.”

Lou’s left foot slips and he staggers against me.  I can feel the impact of something hard in his coat pocket.

“Wow!  Sorry there.”

“What are you carrying in those pockets?”

“Just a few household items.”

We slow down and walk along the verge where gravel is welded together by ice and brown tufts of grass show no sign of Spring.  

“Well look at that!”

Lou points to a patch of blue in the holly and brambles on the other side of the ditch.

“Looks like someone tossed their mask!”

“Yeah, there’s another, look, squashed at the intersection.”

We have reached Oval Street.

“That’s an M95!”

“That’s a steep hill we are looking at, too.”

“Here’s Diddlie’s place, let’s see if she has some salt or something.”

Lou pulls out his phone.

“Hi, Did, how are you doing?”

She appears at her door, beckoning to us.

Lou avoids the ice-glazed driveway and steps off the road into the ivy for better traction.

“It’s getting crunchy.”

“Don’t tread on my Daffs!”

Diddlie watches us from the edge of her porch with a black watch tartan blanket over her head.

I follow Lou’s eccentric path through the ivy avoiding the light green blades cutting through dead oak leaves and crisscrossing vines.

“I’ve got snowdrops right ahead of you!”

“Okay, I see them.”

We are getting further from the porch.

“Why don’t you just walk up the driveway, guys?”

“Can you lend us some skates?”

“What?”

“I said, can you lend us some skates.”

“No, mine are too small.  What do you need them for?”

“The driveway is covered with ice.”

“What do you want, anyway?”

“You got any sand or salt to grit the hill?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, can we use it?”

“You’ll have to come to the carport.”

Lou stops.

“What’s in it for me Lou?”

“Want a carry-out from the H-Bar?”

“You can’t come in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Lou! I haven’t had my jabs yet.”

“Right, I get it.”

“Who’s that with you?”

I wave.

“It is Fred.”

“Hi, Fred, I can’t see you. Why are you hiding under that hood?”

“So, the sleet can’t find me.”

We start weaving and crunching back through the ivy toward the driveway.  Challenged by low-hanging holly branches, we push on past the prickly leaves to the carport.

Diddlie is dragging a bucket out for us.  

“Listen, you two.  I don’t have my virus suit on.  So, wait until I get back in before you come and get the bucket.”

“That thing you wear is called a ‘hazmat suit’.”

“Whatever you call it, I don’t have it on, okay?”

“Yeah.”

She goes inside. Lou picks up the bucket.

“Our friendly neighbor comes through again!”

“She seems more freaked out than ever.”

“Hey, Lou!”

Diddlie is back on her porch, under the blanket.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have a ham and cheese on rye with a pickle and ice-tea.”

“Got it!”

“Ah, Lou.”

“Yeah.”

“Leave it on the porch here, okay?’

“Yeah.”

Diddlie goes back in.  We start down Oval Street with grit.

“Here, you hold one side of this handle and I’ll take the other.

We can throw this stuff ahead of us.”

We tread slowly along the side of the road to the bottom of the hill.

“Enough of this!  Let’s leave the bucket here at the corner.”

We walk across Wicket Street. Walking like penguins toward the intersection at Maxwell Avenue.  Taking tiny steps slowly so as not to put much momentum into a possible slip.  The traffic light blinks amber.  There’s a Toyota Avalon sideways by the entrance to the Light House Gas Station.

The Avalon’s front tires smoke, spinning on the ice.  

“I don’t think we should cross here.”

“No, let’s jaywalk from the bus stop.”

The car slides further away from the driveway and then it suddenly jerks forward.

“Are you sure the H-Bar is open?”

“Yeah, placed our order from my phone.”

We cross on the other side of the intersection to where the parking lot has been treated.

“So, I guess Pam is back at work?”

“No, she took off for Pennsylvania last week.”

“What takes her to Penn’s woodland paradise?”

“A guy called Bill!”

“Oh?  The original problem?”

“No, no, he came out of the past in a beat-up Ford Econoline.”

“Took her with him, did he?”

“Yup!  After drinking all my beer.”

We put on our masks and go in the H-Bar’s side door, to their carry-out counter. “The String Bag”.  A menu is chalked on the back wall, titled, ‘STRING THEORY, Eleven Dimensions of Your Gustatory Pleasure.’

“Anyone home?”

Lou shouts over the unattended metal-top counter.  We can hear a faint response and wait.

“It has taken us thirty minutes to walk here.”

“Slide you mean!”

Lou shuffles his feet and checks his heavy pockets.

“I knew it wouldn’t last.”

“No, how do you feel now she’s gone?”

“Glad to be out of the house.”

“Welcome to String Bag, carry out service.”

Says a man from across the counter with a blue paper mask, face protector, and gloves.  His name tag is obscured by a splash of mayo.

“You got something for Waymarsh?”

“Yes sir!”

He pulls the order off a nail in the wooden shelf behind, hanging in its string bag.

“Thank you, gentlemen.” 

He walks back through the swing doors he just emerged from.

“Here’s a string bag made of fishing tackle!”

Lou tests the string with his thumb and finger, as the aroma from our paper-wrapped lunch disperses between us. 

“So, where are we going to eat this?”

“I think we’ll hang out on Diddlie’s porch.”

“At least we’ll be out of the wind, but cold though.”

“Oh, I have something for that!”

He pulls a bottle half out of his coat pocket.

“I have two of these plus a Schnapps chaser in here too.”

“So, uninvited, we are going to get plastered on Diddlie’s porch!”

“What is she going to say? I am going to hand her a free ham and cheese on rye?”

“I can imagine any number of things.”

“Well, Fred, I know but I think we can pull it off.”

“Does she drink? I have never seen her.”

“Sometimes, I have seen her well-lit with Lark, and The Stones at high volume.”

We wait for the ham and cheese.

“Hello!”

Lou shouts again over the empty counter. A young woman appears with her hair gathered in high bun ponytails.

“How can I help you?”

“I am looking for a ham and cheese for Waymarsh.”

She goes back through the swing doors and reappears in a couple of swings.

“Ham and cheese on rye with pickle!”

She pulls a string bag from a bundle hanging down to the side of the counter and nets our order for us.  She yells through the swing doors.

“One iced tea up here!”

The mayo man comes through with a tall paper cup full and seals it with a lid.

“One Iced tea.”

Lou jams the cup into the bag.

“Have a nice day!”

Lou waves as we go out into sunlight.  The walk back is easier. I carry the bucket back up to Diddlie’s carport. Lou sets up on the porch.

Diddlie sees us immediately and shouts through a half-inch opening in her storm door window.

“What are you doing with my chair covers?”

“Hi, Did, Here’s your lunch.”

“What?”

He holds out the string bag.

“Your ham and cheese on rye, here!”

“Lou, will you back off?  I am not going to take that thing out of your hand.  Just leave it by the door.”

“Ah, Did. We are planning to eat out here, okay?”

“The two of you, on my porch?”

“Right, it’s turned out to be a nice sunny day!”

“What’s that you are taking out of your pockets?”

“Schnapps and beer.”

She opens the door far enough to take a closer look and pick up the bag, which Lou just put in the spot designated.

“Oh really!  And I hope you don’t expect me to share a bottle with you in this pandemic!”

“No Did. You have iced tea.”

The window rattles as the storm door closes. 

“Pull up a seat Fred.”

Lou unpacks lunch on Diddlie’s table, still covered, in its dark brown winter protection, like a tablecloth.  

“What have you been doing since Pam left?”

He hands me an open bottle of Dos Equis.

“Keeping busy.  Cleared out my shed and then the store-room behind the kitchen.”

“Find anything interesting?”

The storm door opens as he puts a shot glass in front of me. Diddlie pushes a box out onto the porch with her foot and closes the door quickly.  She pulls down the window a few more inches and shouts through.

“I put three glasses for beer and three for booze.”

Lou pulls the flat bottle of schnapps out of his inside coat pocket.

“We are good for shots.”

“Well, I am not taking them back in.”

“Okay.”

“Listen you two.  I have to put on some protection, okay?”

“What about your tea?”

“It is in the fridge.”

“Right.”

The door rattles again behind her.

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.

Paula Pocock is looking in the window of the Elegant Ostrich.  She pulls on the glass door, which doesn’t budge.  Chuck Newsom has come around from the back.

“The service door is locked, back there.”

Paula gives the door another pull.

“There is nobody there yet.”

“I think they have gone out of business.”

“Hi Fred, yeah, I know.”

Paula adjusts her mask while Chuck walks out into the parking lot. 

“The sign is still up.”

“Right, I saw it yesterday when I was filling up at the gas station.”

“Fred, we plan to rent this space.”

An X model Tessla SUV pulls up with no more than a crack as the left front tire crushes some brittle plastic against the asphalt.  The large rectangular display in the center of the dashboard blinks through the driver-side window in multiple bright hi-res colors.  Nadia Brasov is smiling from the driver’s window.

“Hi, Chuck, what are you two doing out in the ice and sleet?”

Chuck walks over to the high riding window. 

“It is melting.  Hear the drips?”

“Yeah, the road is clear.” 

“Hi Fred.”

“Nadia!  How’s Max?”

“Just fine.  I am on my way to pick him up from our lawyer’s office.”

“Can’t he drive himself?”

“No, he got in trouble driving this giant ghost too fast and mouthed off to the cop!”

“Isn’t he a little old for that?”

“He’s had it.  You know, with all the frustrating legal problems he’s been having.”

“Okay, so now you’re seeing Sherman?”

“Well, how did you guess?”

“We all try to hide behind the Shrowd when it comes to the law.”

Paula waves to Nadia and beckons to me for a confidential chat.

“Yeah, ah Fred, you know, Chuck has been, like talking to this guy, Gloriani.”

“You mean, Guiseppe Gloriani?”

“Yeah, I told you about Nadia’s experience.  He’s like, a real creep and a letch too.”

“He is also Boris Tarantula’s agent.”

“Right, that’s it, see. Chuck wants to, like get into the art scene.”

“Good philanthropist!”

“Yeah, right.  He bought that sculpture in front of the house.  He’s talking to Gloriani about, like a gallery or something.”

“A gallery, in this little shopping center?”

“Yup, right here.”

“I doubt if Boris would agree to this.  Wealthy collectors don’t come around here.”

“That all happens in the District, or maybe Old Town.”

“No, it is not just a gallery. It’s, like, a… Well, Gloriani calls it a “New Concept”.

“What kind of concept?”

‘Oh, I don’t know.  It’s all jargon, you know, CAI.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know!”

“What else have you learned?”

Paula bends her elbow around mine, pressing against me, and talks into my ear.

“I think Chuck is getting screwed!”

“Why?”

“CAI! Come on! You know.”

“Well, neither of us knows but…”

“Oh!  you know what?”

“What?” 

“Osiris is in on this thing too.  I mean like, I think she has got Chuck all into this stuff.”

“So, it is not Boris at all?”

“Well, I don’t know, you know. Like, he’s around.”

“Maybe Osiris wants to open one of her boutiques?”

“I think it is a big con. to get Chuck’s money!”

Chuck walks over as Nadia swishes away across the slushy parking lot

on the silent electrons exciting her SUV.

“Fred, you know we are interested in this place.”

“Paula was telling me.”

“Yeah, I’ve got Shrowd’s people checking it out.”

“You have a contract?”

“Kind of, I mean I got a packet from Boris Tarantula’s agent

and some other stuff.”

“Paula said something about CAI.”

“Isn’t it exciting?  Cyber Anthropic Interface, that’s a whole new kind of art and it is going to happen here in the sleepy Fauxmont shopping Center.”

“What is it exactly?”

“It is going to put this place on the map!  The arts map, I mean.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

“It can happen anywhere, but this is a good place to start.”

“Okay, Chuck.  You still haven’t told me what it is!”

Paula shakes Chuck’s arm.

“Nobody knows what it is.”

“Sure, we do Paula.  Cyber Anthropic Interface, is where thought and reality converge through electronic media.”

“Chuck, what are you talking about, honey?”

“I am saying that a world-wide thing can happen right here with relatively low overheads and grow big, in New York, Tokyo, London, I mean, you name it!”

“That’s what Gloriani keeps saying.”

“Yeah, he does.  Anyway, Nadia is going to talk to Max about it.  Turns out we have hired the same lawyer.”

An Asian man in a blue Snaz tracksuit opens the door with one hand, holding an iPad in the other.

“Are you Mr. Newsome?”

“Yup, how are you doing?”

“I am Fong. Saw you walking around as I came in the back.”

We all step inside.

“Hi Fong, this is my wife Paula, and this is our friend Fred.”

Chuck offers an elbow, but Fong doesn’t reciprocate.  He pulls a blue paper mask out of his pocket and hooks it around his ears with one hand and heads towards the back. 

“Did I meet you at Dr. Finderelli’s office?”

He stops to look at me.

“Hard to say who anyone is with these things on.”

I pull my mask down for a moment.

“Ah, maybe, like ten years ago.”

Fong leads us through dusty winter light past the rows of empty shelves, past the counter where the pay station used to be, and into a back room with the lights on, full of racks and electronics.

“This will be the server room.”

Fong gestures with his iPad.

“Wow, we got enough power coming in?”

Fong sits down in front of a bank of blank screens and looks at his iPad.

“Not yet.  Let’s see, VEPCO is going to pay us a visit next, ah.”

He scrolls through his emails.

“Yeah! Next Tuesday.”

Paula has wandered behind the racks.  There are three rows only partially loaded with equipment and none of it looks wired to anything else.  

“What’s down there?”

“Where are you, honey?”

Chuck walks around the racks to find her, while Fong turns to his screens. Only two light up.  After a while, Chuck shouts from behind the racks.

“Hey, Fong! Why is this locked up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hey Fong, where do these stairs lead?”

“Paula, I haven’t been down there.”

Chuck shakes the bared door hard enough to loosen some dust around the frame.

“Who has the key to this damn thing?”

Fong doesn’t respond.

“Honey, you aren’t going to get down there right now, okay?”  

“Looks like a prison with all these bars on it.”

Fong comes back with his fur-trimmed winter parker on.

“That is the Middlesex Project.  I am not working on that underground stuff!”

“What is the Middlesex Project?”

“Nothing to do with me.”

“Have you seen people going down there?”

“Sure, they are down there all the time.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know.  Way before I got here.”

“So, this was here behind the Elegant Ostrich?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, what is going on?”

“You didn’t hear this from me, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“They had a cave-in, a while back.”

“Someone told me, that all these wet leaves and stuff fell into the project from this one lady’s yard.”

“Where?”

“Right across the street.”

He points toward the front of the building.

“He means Fauxmont, Fred.”

“Sounds like Diddley Drates back yard!”

“You know about this too, Fred?”

“I know she had a problem with her compost heap and her friend came over and nearly got electrocuted trying to fix it.”

Fong starts turning away.

“Aha, they had a major short out!”

Paula steps toward Fong and grabs his coat sleeve.

“You mean there’s, like underground stuff under Faumont?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Yeah, like okay Fong, but I heard about that woman’s yard problem before.”

“Okay, I don’t want to know.”

Fong leads us back towards his work station. He shrugs and turns off the screens he had been using.

“Are you scared of something Fong?”

“I am well paid to mind my own business.”

“I get it.”

Fong hurries toward the back door.

“Say, I have got to go check on my kid.  I’ll be back in about half an hour, okay?”

“Show me how to lock up.”

Chuck follows Fong to a back 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.

Daisy has invited me to a risky, socially distanced performance, called, “Reality Check”.  We are double-masked.  Though seated next to each other, we are at least five seats away from anyone else in the theater, where there hasn’t been a movie since sometime last year.  Who can remember?

The sparse audience manages a good volume of applause as “Tongue Teaser” walks on stage. She wears a body stocking printed with vines leaves and flowers, which don’t conceal the voluptuous proportions and graceful movement of her body.  Daisy’s bracelets, jingle, down her long arms in celebration as she claps with enthusiasm.

“I know this girl’s voice.”

“Does she tease you?”

“Oh, she wanted me!”

“For the show?”

Tongue Teaser has her mic in hand.

“Thank you!

 Welcome to, Reality Check!

So glad to be here with all you good folks.

Let me introduce, Tongue Teaser!“

Our hostess bows and smiles strolling to stage left as she speaks.

“She is an inspiration.

She moves mountains!

Yes,

Those mountains of new jokes, and slogans, mountains of feeling, of grief

Great rolling hills of joy!

I mean the mountains of mind,

Emotional tectonics,

Floating on associations we make so easily.

Feel that heat?

That truth?

You know.

I know. 

What do WE know?

Yeah! That is love’s heat.

Love has the power to glow in opposite ways.

Steep, slippery and hard

Whole ranges that divide people

With snowy peaks of cold disdain.”

Tongue Teaser pauses to stroll across the stage and talk to us from stage right.

“Yes, our many tongues, 

Bring us together with words.

Bring us together by ear,

Only to divide us?

You know there is something magic about words.

No. I don’t mean to be superstitious.

I am not superstitious.

Sounds, voices, marks on a page,

think what words can do!

Words can start wars, 

And end them too.

They can bring your lover to bed

And out again, real, quick.

Words can move you to make a purchase,

Or cast a vote.

Do you vote, love or stone?

Like, against, to get that gravel out of your sandal,

or in favor to take a step towards aspiration? 

To taste sweet realization.

I mean, well ah, that’s politics, isn’t it?

It’s all words.

There are so many of them!

It is estimated there are more than seven thousand languages of them!

All that sound is vibrating 

in rooms, automobiles, prisons, jungles, deserts, and bedrooms,

YES, and on the streets

and right here!

I mean can you FEEL it?

Just think!

Okay now, were you thinking in words?

Think again!

How many different ways are there to say that thought in English?

You know any other languages?

Let me hear?”

I look at Daisy as we listen to different voices.

“That was Spanish, but what is that, now?”

“Don’t know, is it Yoruba? Maybe Igbo?

“It isn’t European.”

Several other languages are voiced across the theater.

“Speak up now!  we can’t hear you, baby!”

Daisy nudges me. A man with a big white beard gets up and recites a short poem.

“I think that is Russian.”

“Thank you, sir!

“Do I recognize a verse from Lermontov’s poem, Oak Leaf?”

The man bows and responds in Russian holding his hands up as if in praise.

“Yeah!

So many ways to talk, you know what I mean?

There’s the way you talk to your child 

the spouse, the friend, 

your opponent, your enemy,

a stranger in line at the grocery store.

There’s that thing called, “code-switching”.

Right? 

How many of you know what that is?”

“Oh Yes.” hands wave.

The Exit doors, to the right of stage, break open and armed figures run in towards the stage with flags, the Confederate Battle Flag, the Stars and Stripes, and the QAnon symbol. 

“My, My, who have we here?”

They climb the steps and chase after the artist.  She puts her mic on its stand and jumps from the stage. She runs up the center aisle towards the box office.  No one follows.

I pull on Daisy’s arm as she moves to get up.

“Better to get down than up.”

“I want out of here!”

“Who are these people?”

“I am following her!”

“Hang on Daisy.”

“It’s an insurrection.  They are probably going to shoot us or take us hostage or something.”

“Why us?”

“To spread terror.”

“But aren’t they patriots?  Look they carry flags.”

“Can you imagine white supremacists buying tickets to this?”

“Well, maybe they are here now.”

Five people stand on stage.  As well as flags they carry automatic weapons. They wear combat cammies and ballistic goggles. They hold their weapons in the air, while others are walking around the auditorium to guard the exits.

One of them, a bear-shaped man, picks up Tongue Teaser’s mic.

“ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS!”

“We are the future, people!”

They fire their weapons into the air, belching blue and red smoke, and divide into opposing groups facing each other from stage right and left.

“Stop the Steel!”

They start shouting at each other in chaos of voices.  No one listens to anyone else.  

“USA, USA, USA.

“The election was Stolen.”

“Where’s the evidence?”

“The election was borrowed.”

“There is overwhelming evidence.”

“Where? Where? Where?

“We only have to say it!”

“No, you have to show it.” 

“Traitors, Traitors, hang the Traitors!”

“Like the moon landing, it was faked.”

“Fake news.”

“Climate Change”

“Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.”

“The glaciers aren’t melting because the weather is colder!”

“Hoax!”

“Commies”

“Ignorant Fascists!”

“Socialist!” 

“Macadamia lost.”

“He won by a landslide.”

The bear shaped man leaps forward.

“Dominate the battlespace!”

“We are not in a battlespace.”

“Fight for it!”

“Socialists are burning our cities!”

The others draw back.  They disappear into thickening smoke.

“They are coming for your toilet paper!”

Those who had moved around the theater also come on stage and join in the shout and fire more smoke into the atmosphere.  Now too thick to see anyone.

“You are not here.”

“You don’t exist.”

“You are not even real.”

“We are.”

“You are.”

“We,”

“Patriots”

“You.”

“Us,”

“Them”

“Us”

“Them”

Thinning clouds of smoke, or perhaps it is vapor, blow into the audience going gray as the colors mix.

The smoke clears.  We see them all turn with military precision and shoulder their weapons facing the audience in a line across the stage.  

The lead insurgent takes off her military garb, and her wig, revealing short slender woman with tufts of blond and purple hair.

Tongue Teaser reappears in a pale blue Tuxedo with red top hat decorated in dandelions and ivy.  She helps the other insurgents out of their military gear, one at a time.

She reveals a bald man in a tea shirt and jeans.

“Good Afternoon!”

He has the tones of an upper-class Brit.

“Sorry about that dramatic intrusion, dears!”

The bear-shaped man with a beard tumbling down his cheeks in graying waves is revealed in a tweed jacket and open-collar white shirt.

“Greetings!  I am professor Bombast from Prestige University, representing the enlightened point of view among all these fools.”

Weapons fire more smoke.  A chorus of insurgents who were guarding the exits are now at the back of the stage shouting.

“Elitist!”

“Socialist!”

Tounge Teaser balances her top hat on his oval head.  Some dandelions fall off.  An ivy vine hangs down the side. Our hostess moves on to a tall woman in a green pants suit waiving a willow branch.  Her assault gear is piled up at her feet.

“Well, HELLOW! Listen, here’s the thing.  There is not enough land to support free-range cattle and chickens to feed our population.  Okay?  So, what do we do about the feedlots? The pollution?  Pretty shitty situation, huh …?”

The sound of weapons drowns her out and more smoke pours across the stage engulfing Green Woman. 

The chorus:

“Fake News!”

“Bullshit”

“We shoot Socialist Traitors.”

The last insurgent has two Colts in hand.

“Yo!  Say, Folks.  Gun rights! Yo!”

After a pause, Tongue Teaser asks.

“What about it?”

She skillfully spins her revolvers, one at a time and then together.

“The second Amendment.”

“Aha, and …”

“Well, I am not going to let you take my guns?”

“Have I touched those weapons of yours?”

“No, and you’re not going to.”

“Sweety you don’t need them in here.”

“What do you know about my needs?”

She fires her colts in the air and jets of blue and red smoke shoot from the barrels into a cloud.

After dropping her colts, throwing off her black flak jacket.  She steps out of the cloud and her cammies, to reveal herself hardly covered by a sequined bikini with blue top and red bottom.  She turns to flash her cheeks.  She jiggles and gyrates like a pole dancer while singing in a strong contralto voice.

“Oh beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife

Who more than self, their country loved

And mercy more than life

America, America may God thy gold refine

‘Til all success be nobleness

And every gain divined”

Dr, Bombast stares on after her song is finished.

Tongue Teaser speaks in several languages, in succession, apparently saying the same thing each time.

“You recognize that melody, I am sure 

but how many of you knew those words?”

She goes off stage and all the others break into the song with the gyrating contralto in front.

As they sound the last notes, Tongue Teaser reappears, in a sleeveless dress. Countless red, white, and blue pleats swirl around her body.  A man in minimal loin cloth covered in tattoos, stalks her from behind. She waves to us.  Her long white gloves rise above her elbows. 

She holds a jeweled magic wand like a cigarette holder.

“The magic of words, folks!

She waves her wand as if conducting an orchestra.

“What is, ‘The Government’?”

She waves her wand in circles.

“Our Government.”

She waves her wand tracing a square in the air.

“The Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary?”

She traces a triangle in the air.

“Socialism?”

She shakes her wand like a fist.

“Government Regulation?”

She waves her wand in slow circles.

“Commie takeover?”

She stabs the air.

The bear-man strips off his false beard and tosses it to the singer.  

Our hostess takes off her wig and peels off an unnoticed rubber mask, tossing them to the bear-man.

Daisy nudges me.

“That is, Freda Maidenform!”

“The one who wants you?”

“Well, she did once!” 

Freda shakes out waves of her thick red hair.

Stretches her freckles with a grin.

The tattooed man runs naked off stage, waving his loan cloth, and reappears with the butt of a rifle over his groin.

Tongue Teaser stares at him.

“Who could that be?”

The dancer bends to pick up her colts, giggling her breasts and flashing her cheeks to maximum effect. She fires more smoke with her colts.

The naked man holds up his weapon and fires revealing his dangle before he is concealed in vapor.

Tongue Teaser steps forward.

“We have offered you a Reality Check.  

Let me invite you to cash and spent it in carefully constructed sentences!”

Our host bows and turns to the cast; all bow.

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 line outside the Post Office extends into the parking lot and looks longer with social distancing. 

Sophie is leaning on her quarterstaff; a deep brown length of sapling a few inches taller than she.  The warm patina suggests it would now be a mature tree, had it been left in the ground. Her grip will hold on the nobbles, where branches were trimmed.

“I never should have come here on a Saturday morning!”

“No, this time of year is worst of all.”

More people join the line behind us, while the front seldom moves.

“How long have you been standing here, Sophie?”

“Only a few minutes.  Five or six people joined the line ahead of me as I walked over here.”

“Well, it gives you time to think and observe.”

“Yes, look at all the boxes and packages up ahead.”

“Each one adds another minute or two!”

“And exposes the clerks to more risk!”

Three busses pass slowly on the parkway, headed for the parking lot nearby.

“Such a noisy place!”

“Does it give you a headache?”

“Ha! This traffic makes it hard to get my messages.”

“I know, our phones never stop.”

“No, I mean, stuff from the other room.”

“What room?”

“Where dream people gather, you might say.”

“Might I?”

“Yes, if you were trying to characterize the visitors.”

“What visitors?”

“Presences.”

“Do you feel they are part of you?”

“I know they are when they step out.”

“Welcome to Macadamia land!”

“Politics is getting out of place.”

“The ‘Kulturkampf’ has spread like a disease.”

“It might be a good idea to silence all the phones for a week!”

“Covid is the actual virus and the virtual virus infects politics.”

“There is no vaccine, but silence.”

“No ‘factcine’, either, facts are just road-kill, now.”

“The word is meaningless.”

“What word?”

“Fact!”

“What do you mean?”

“Facts and opinions, I mean what’s the difference, the way those words are used now?”

“Oh, you refer to ‘alternative facts’.”

“Those are beliefs!”

“President Macadamia has turned into our new prophet.”

“Yes, he is leading the way to a new religion.”

“Belief, isn’t that what religion is about?”

“We talk about it that way, yes.”

“Believers read his words on their phones and they are inspired.”

“He is the first president to be able to bypass regular media.”

“He said, he ‘didn’t need’ them.”

Sophie leans on her staff.

“And people are so moved at his rallies!”

“Witness, Macadamian miracles!”

“What miracles?  So much of it is lies!”

“The revelation to themselves of their unexpressed feelings.”

“It is more like mass hallucination!”

“Hallucination, belief, it can be a fine line.”

“How about, self-deception?”

“It is hard to give up cherished beliefs. That’s is an old story. You must know that!”

“Sure, but this is supposed to be an election campaign, not a séance.”

“It has always been both. I know, I keep an open door to the other room.”

“What is this room? Are you Maxwell’s demon?”

“This is nothing to do with thermodynamics!”

“We can take that up at The Pie Shop.”

“We were just talking about it.  The room we can never enter, but it opens on to our room.”

“You mean the unconscious?”

“I don’t use that term.”

“Why not?”

We have moved forward in line, not getting too close to the big man ahead.

“The metaphor is exhausted, and I think, misleading.”

“The term is well established in psychological practice.”

“Psychology!  What nonsense!”

“Why?”

“I don’t mean anything psychological. Psychology is not a mystery. It is psychology. I mean the mystery of existence.”

“Ah, why is there something rather than nothing?”

“There is a mystery at the center of each person and at the center of the Universe.”

“Oh yes, black holes and all that.”

“That is interesting, but I mean something else.”

“And what is that?”

“Have you ever seen a thought?”

“Yes, books full.”

“No, no, no, those are rendered.  I mean a thought itself?”

“Well, no. One might see an impulse on a scan.”

“But the thought, the occurrence in consciousness.  You can’t see that.”

“No”

“No psychologist can observe it.”

“So what?”

“I, Sofonisba Anguissola, have lived on the threshold, for seventy-odd years and I know a mystery when I find one.”

“The mystery of psychology, you mean?”

“I mean discomfort has become a way of life.”

“Discomfort with what?”

“With being in the world, with ‘Dasein’, with cultural adaptation.”

“So, you feel like a misfit.”

“I am not the misfit!”

“OH! so you think the rest of us are?”

“I think we live with misconception.”

“You think the rest of us are wrong, but you are right!”

“I am not as wrong as those who think they know.”

“So, you are a Socratic skeptic.”

We have moved as far as the step up to the door.  The big guy has his hand on the bar ready to hold it open when the next person comes out.

“Well, I don’t accept rubbish!”

“Psychology, you mean?”

“Yes, think of these wealthy psychiatrists prescribing drugs and doctors prescribing drugs.  All to protect us from the mystery!  While the kid selling weed on the street gets a beating from the police and years in jail.”

“Those professions have helped a lot of troubled people.”

“That weed, and some of those illegal drugs, can ease your way to the threshold.”

“They can do a lot of damage too.”

Sophie pounds the bottom of her staff on the ground.

“So does delusion!”

“Uncertainty is hard to live with, you know.  One wants something substantial.”

“Yes, one has religion and its offspring, psychology.”

Sophie is looking at the big guy with no mask, as he moves his carton from one arm to the other.

“Do you hear prophetic voices?”

A mail jeep runs slowly past toward the post office.

“What was that?”

“I said, do you hear prophetic voices?”

“As ambiguous as the Delphic Oracle.”

“Really! Can you give me an example?”

We put on our masks, ready to go in.

“Yes, as I sat down to look in my Grimoire this morning.  There was an interruption; ‘I am going to carry this cloth, these threads, and shreds to’ and that is all I got.”

“That is all you heard in your head.”

“It isn’t really an auditory experience.”

“Yours is metaphorical noise.”

“I overhear something from the other room, and it has a presence of its own.  Not analogous to any sensation, I mean.”

“Intuitions?”

“Perhaps, they are, I am sure, they are part of our common humanity.”

The big guy will be next through the door.  He turns, leans forward, and glares down at Sophie.

She steps back holding her staff out of his reach.

“Where’s your mask?”

He says nothing, and shuffles forward a bit, bending slightly lower.

Sophie steps back again.

“What do you mean, our common humanity?”

“It’s right here.”

“What?”

“We are standing, talking in this line, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“So, we have that in common.”

“We have nothing in common.”

The big guy must be over six foot six.  He has to move his head to one side to go through the door.  When he comes out, he blocks the way for a moment.

“As far as I am concerned, you two are the enemy!”

He lets the door close behind him and walks into the parking lot.

“That’s was weird!”

“There’s the danger!”

“Him, you mean?”

“He is only one manifestation; has no idea who he is.”

“Seems to me he had a pretty clear idea.”

“Oh no, he is undone, a loose thread.”

“Oh, the ‘cloth’?”

“Well, ‘the threads and shreds’, it is an old metaphor.”

“I noticed you kept your distance.”

“I did not want him to grab my staff.”

“Why would he want to?”

“Couldn’t you sense the violence in him?”

“I guess so, now you mention it.”

“So, if he did come at me, I would put my staff in his way and trip his weight to the ground.”

“That takes some skill!”

“Practice over these many 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.

Steve Strether joins me at the crosswalk.  Maxwell Avenue is busy and Oval Street is backed up at the red light, in the Thanksgiving shopping rush.

“Fred, are you joining tonight’s Community Meeting?”

“Yeah, I had a job to find the time, Steve.”

“Have you got the link?”

“Not sure I have seen it.”

“It isn’t Zoom, you know.”

“Oh! What is it?”

“Look for, ‘SnaZConnect’ with the green and orange logo.”

“No, have not seen that one.”

“It gets complicated because ribbons of texts cross your square at the same time as video conversations.”

“Sounds like it will be beyond me!”

“Bel and I have a bottle of mulberry wine to help us get through.”

“It is going to be interesting.”

The light changes.

A couple sits outside the Pie Shop in hoodies and jackets.  A cloud of dry grey oakleaves floats across the street like brittle snow. A muster of loud crows takes off from the utility poles in front of the Light House Filling Station.  

“Look at those crows, Fred!”

“I see, no masks!”

“Must be time for their meeting.”

“Looks like those Corvids recovered from West Nile virus, back in ninety-nine.”

“Now it is our turn with Covid.”

“They don’t need any software, either.”

“Catch you in your square Fred, got to pick up a prescription over there.”

He walks over to our newest store, ‘Legal Drugs’.

The meeting starts at 4 PM and Steve sends me the link, which works on the first try.

There’s Lou greeting me, full screen.”

“Here’s to your tenth anniversary in Fauxmont.”

Lou’s image flickers as he raises a glass.

“Congratulations Fred.”

“Thanks, I moved in on the 25th of November 2010.”

Lou’s picture diminishes. There’s Diddlie, Lark, Steve Strether, Daisy, and various others I don’t know, all faces in the checkerboard pattern on my screen.

His voice seems to cause his image to expand again into a bigger highlighted square among the others, which were all the same size a moment ago.  

Lou is sipping from his glass.  

Albrecht joins the meeting.

“Here’s to you, Fred!”

Albrecht swigs from his beer bottle. Now his square has displaced Lou’s.

Diddlie’s square goes blank. 

Then a text unrolls in my square.

“I don’t associate with Fascists!”

Albrecht’s image fills my screen again.

“What’s her problem?”

“Can somebody tell me how this thing works?”

Lou texts me:

“Just restart your computer.”

All the images on my screen flicker on and off and then swirl out of sight, as if they are water going down a drain.  My ringtones sound.

“Hello, Fred?”

“Yeah, Lou, when you told Diddlie to restart I was kicked out of the meeting.”

“No, I was telling you, to restart!”

“Oh, okay.”

“Go back to www.SnazE.C.”

“What is going on?”

“Don’t know.”

“Seems like whoever is speaking gets a big highlighted square.”

“Right, but you can click down below and break off, into a private conversation.”

“I see, but there are more options.”

“You can allow others to join, or not.”

“What are all these symbols?”

“Well, you can record the conversation in audio-only or include video, or video only. And you can do this with or without the other person knowing.”

“That is an invasion of privacy!”

“Seems like it, but if you read the terms of use, you find you have consented.”

“Yeah, right!  In the middle of all that micro verbiage!”

The restart works, time to hang up.

Dick East’s face fills the screen.  The caption reads; “DIRECTOR”.  His Van Dyke beard and squint in his left eye, seem more pronounced in the closeup view.

“Hi everyone, I hope you can see and hear me. I am Dick East, Chairman of the Fauxmont Guild.  It is my pleasure to welcome you to our first virtual Guild Meeting.”

Diddlie’s square is back, blinking on and off.  She texts on my square.

“Right-click on my square, will you?”

Click

The Red Queen is nodding towards me, pecking her screen.

“Queenie, get out of the way!”

She lifts the bird clear.

“Hi, I have this on confidential”

“We are missing the meeting.”

“Aren’t you recording it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, just record it, then you can run through the whole thing later, skipping the endless nonsense.”

“Suppose I want to say something.”

“You think anyone is listening?”

“It is a community meeting, isn’t it?”

“It is a SnaZ.c meeting!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they are controlling it all the time.”

“Who is?  How?”

“Wake up Fred. I am talking about Jake Trip, Ernie Manstein, and The Leiden Organization.”

“Aha, and you think Ernie is in control?”

“His people created this software we are using.  We are like, his beta test.”

“Diddlie, who told you this? Mr. Liddell?”

“No need to get snarky Fred.  I am telling you something few people realize now but it will come out after it is too late.”

“Well, in that case, you better watch what you say! They will get it all on the record.”

“And just what can they do about it?”

“You tell me!  You’re, the expert.”

“Well, I am getting expert help from a certain source, as we speak.”

“Sounds conspiratorial to me.”

“Oh, look who is here!”

Donna Intaglio appears in a square next to Diddlie’s.

“Hey Donna, long time no see!”

“I know Diddlie.  We are still in Grenoble.”

“Donna, what time is it there?”

“Ah, it is 10:28 PM.”

“It is nearly 4:30 here in Fauxmont.”

“Yeah, this technology makes no time-sense!”

“Excuse me Donna, but Diddlie, didn’t you say you were on ‘Confidential?”

“Oh! I am so sorry Fred!”

“No, No Donna, not your fault.  I am trying to understand how this software works.”

“Fred, you didn’t click on confidential.  So, you are wide open.”

“Okay, I don’t know where that is. Did you see Albrecht’s square, Donna?”

“Yeah, we were chatting earlier.”

Rank Major’s square opens, filling the screen and interrupting the conversation.

“Rank, where did you come from?”

“Hi Fred, I am in Hong Kong.”

“How come you just interrupted my square?”

“Don’t know, just logged on from the link Dick sent out, that’s all.”

“What are you doing out there?”

“A little reporting.”

“Reporting! I didn’t know you were a reporter.”

“Oh, it is one of the things I do, you know.”

“Sounds like an interesting place to be, at the moment.”

“Sure is, I just got up too.  It’s 5:30 in the morning here.”

“Is it today or tomorrow or yesterday?”

“We are thirteen hours ahead of you!”

“Okay, save some trouble and tell me this.  What was the outcome of the meeting?”

“Can’t say.  SnaZconnect creates a twist in time.”

My screen flickers.

Mr. Liddell fills Diddlie’s square and then fills my square.

“Diddlie, what are you doing?”

“Sorry Fred, it is only a picture.”

“What do you mean?”

“I put up a picture of Mr. Liddell instead of showing myself.”

“Why?  This is way too confusing.”

“I just need a little privacy at the moment.”

“So, are you returning to the meeting?”

“I never left!”

“You did.  You put that White Rabbit up.”

“Well, it is a picture, a bunch of pixels, same as I am a picture.”

“The rabbit can’t speak, and you can!”

“Oh really!”

An animated white rabbit appears on screen.

“Hi, Fred! Liddell here.  Have you seen the Red Queen?”

“Okay, Diddlie!”

Bel Vionnet fills my screen.

“Hello, bel.”

“Fred, where did you come from?”

“Oh, I am just floating through cyber space-time.  Thought I was at the Fauxmont Guild meeting.”

“So did I, but I couldn’t see anyone, only heard the voices.”

“Well, I don’t know what is going on.  Rank says we are in a ‘Time Twist’.”

“He does?  What’s that?”

“You better ask him.”

“Why is Dick East using this software, anyway?”

“Steve tells me it was recommended by Jake Trip.”

“It’s got me confused!”

My screen goes blank for several seconds.  Dick East is back.

“Sorry about the instability of the system.  We have some, help here. Please, everyone shut off your computer.  Wait three minutes and then start up again.”

Albrecht’s face fills my screen.

“Yo, Fred! Have we approved the budget yet?”

“What budget?”

“The one we were all discussing with Dick and the treasurer just now.  I moved off to talk to my Mom.”

“I never saw any of it.”

“Where were you?”

“Ah, Grenoble, Hong Kong, and various homes in the neighborhood.”

“You need to go down the bottom of your screen and look under the options menu.”

“Aha, okay, confidential, share, break out, greet, and welcome.”

“So, what is highlighted?”

“Ah, ‘Greet and Welcome.”

“Okay, that means every time someone logs on, they take over your square.”

“We should have had a community training session!”

“Well, everyone under twenty-five knows this stuff.”

“I thought this software was new.”

“It is, but people that age just get it.  You know.  They are born into it. The code flows through the amniotic fluid.”

“This community is aging and so am I.”

“We are supposed to be shutting down.”

“Okay, Albrecht.”

I shut down and my ringtones sound.

“Hi Fred, ah, you got a minute?”

“Lark, hi, yes, I have three, in fact.”

“Yeah right, ah, did you hear? Theo died!”

“NO! I am sorry Lark. When did he go?”

“The hospital called me a few minutes ago.  It was complications of Covid.”

“Sorry Lark.  He was always interesting.”

“Yeah, overweight, stressed out, and mostly out of breath too.”

“Have you found Boyd?”

“No, but I think he went back out West.”

“Are you going to announce it at the meeting?”

“I guess.  Let’s start up again.”

Clicking on the link brings the interface back.

“Hi, I am Helga Dumpty, secretary to the Fauxmont Guild.  I have not got everyone’s vote on last meeting’s minutes.  Please check and make sure you voted.”

“How do I vote, Albrecht?”

“This is bel, Fred.  I am not there yet.”

“Okay, bel.  What time do you have?”

“Just on five.”

“HA! Same here!”

“Isn’t that what you would expect.  We are only a few blocks apart?”

“That’s geography.  Here, in cyber-space-time the rules are different.”

“Bel’s picture is gone, replaced by letters spelling her name, yellow on brown. I speak to the letters.

“I’ll call Lou.”

Lou tells me over the phone that the vote button doesn’t always work.

“You find it under ‘Meeting Options’ then, ‘Procedures’, then open the vote box and click on ‘yea or nay’.”

“How archaic!”

“Little bit of nostalgia for us.”

“I can’t even find ‘Meeting Options’.”

“No, it isn’t with the other commands.  It is up top to the right.”

“Oh Great, my screen just went blank.”

“Same here Fred.”

“At least we have the phone.”

“Sorry Fred, I am out of time.” 

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.

Lark is pushing bottles and jars thru a hole in the side of a huge purple recycling dumpster.
“Fred, how do you like breaking glass?”
“It can be very satisfying!”
She holds up a clear empty jar with no label, and a little water in the bottom. She tips out the water and looks through the bottom.
“There!”
“What?”
“It isn’t so different from what I saw on TV last night.”
“Is your screen curved or something?”
“No, the picture was focused but the image was crap.”
“You are talking in riddles.”
“I am talking about distorted views of the world.”
She pushes the jar hard, past the flap covering the hole.
“Yeah, I like feeding the great purple glass eater!”
The jar lands with a resonant crash and tinkling subsidence. A frozen fluid, it shatters like ice.
“Doesn’t sound very full.”
“No, this thing has plenty of room to get a really strong impact!”
She pushes through a blue, cream sherry bottle, her last piece.
“Here, use this opening. You will be standing in a puddle outside the other three.”
She stands back with her empty canvas carryall and pulls her mask up over her nose and mouth.
“I am really fed up with these damn masks!”
A Toyota Prius parks nearby, in electronic quiet.
“Who is this?”
“I can’t tell, Fred.”
Someone in white gets out of the passenger side and walks around to open the back.
“Looks like they are wearing hazmat gear.”
“Did we miss something?”
“It is the ghost of future plagues!”
The ghost waves with a free gloved hand while lifting the hatch. Picks up a bucket and closes the hatch.
“We are about to find out who this friend is.”
The figure approaches with glass-faced, full head protection, and a filter sticking out of the front like a proboscis.
“My God! Its Diddlie.”
She comes close to us, with smiling eyes behind her defenses.
“What? can’t hear you Diddlie.”
She puts down her bucket and adjusts something on her headgear.
“How is that, Lark?”
“You sound like a synthesizer.”
“This thing has a crummy speaker.”
“So, what’s with the hazmat?”
“Protection sweety, I don’t want to die of this virus or infect anyone else.”
“Well, neither do I.”
“So, why are you risking your life out here without protection?”
“I have a mask.”
“Listen, the air is toxic. Full of virus particles and that mask isn’t enough.”
“Diddlie, it isn’t radioactive fallout!”
“No, it is fallout from China.”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, I am serious.”
“Diddlie, I saw Serge and Tatiana a few weeks ago, sitting outside the Pie Shop and wearing masks, only.”
“Well, they should know better and you are all lucky to be around!”
“Did. I can’t believe you are serious about China fall out.”
“Listen, they told me about this site the other day.”
“Who? What site?”
“Serge and his girl.”
“Okay, what site are you talking about?”
“Oh, some kind of news site.”
“Diddlie, it was probably propaganda.”
“Anyway, I got a new PC delivered from the SnazE-Connect, the superstore.”
“About time! I know you were having a lot of trouble.”
“Serge talked me through over the phone and it is all set up and connected and all that.”
Lark walks around Diddlie, examining her suit.
“Can you get that thing on by yourself?”
“Sure, I have a special jig to kind of walk into and out of it.”
“How long does that take?”
“Took me thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds, today.”
“What a hassle!
“This is only my second time out.”
“Congratulations.”
“I am on, ‘Backstairs’ all the time. It is my favorite site for local news and comment.”
“Backstairs, You, do Backstairs?”
“Every day!”
“You are really into cyber space now.”
“It is the only way for us, singles.”
“Where did you get an outfit for working in the nuclear industry?”
“Oh, I’ve got friends in the right places!”
“You are mis-led, Did.”
“Fred, Mr. Fawkes got me this suite. Brought it by last week and showed me how the filter works.”
“Was he wearing one too?”
“His is different. Not whole body, just his head and face.”
“How about gloves?”
“Sweety, I don’t let anyone in without gloves.”
“And a hazmat suite?”
“Well, yes, or something like it. I mean, I let Fawkes in, and he didn’t have the full body protection but that’s his problem.”
“So, was he wearing a full fishbowl, or what?”
“Okay, no sarcasm, please. This is serious!”
“Sorry, I meant that in all seriousness.”
“It was not a fishbowl! And it wasn’t an astronaut’s helmet or a diver’s, either.”
“Who told you, you need all this protection?”
“I tell you, check, ‘ChinaBugThreats.com’.”
“Sounds Trumpian!”
“No, it’s nothing to do with that jerk. They are survivalist s and anarchists.”
“Have you been talking to Serge?”
“Yes, I told you. They helped me get started.”
“Sorry, I get it. You have me really confused!”
“It is, simple. Serge, sent me the link. You get it, Fred?”
“Sure, I get it. When did you take on Anarchist sympathies?”
“I didn’t. They are all cooks, but some of their information is good.”
Lark throws her arms out and dropping her carry all.
“Well that can be the way with cooks. Mix a little truth with a lot of nonsense and defend the true part. It works by implication.”
“Lark, it is pretty exciting though.”
“Look, social media carry a big provocation game.”
Lark picks up her bag.
“Yeah, but I mean some of that stuff is really addictive.”
“It is designed to keep us clicking.”
Diddlie pulls on her leggings and lifts each leg in turn.
“You won’t be able to vote in that thing, will you?”
“Why not?”
“Do you think they can tell who you are?’
“Sure, I have all my ID in this.”
Diddlie points to a large rectangular pocket sewn on to the right thigh of her suit.
“Can you use a pencil with those big blue gloves on?”
“You can operate a nuclear power station with them on.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Diddlie steps over to an opening in the purple glass eater.
“How am I supposed to recycle a gallon jug through here?”
“Try it, my apple juice jug fit.”
She can’t get the jug past the flap.
“You need something to stand on.”
Lark holds out a hand to take the jug.
Here, let me try that.”
Lark pushes it through.
“Oh great! My turn.”
Diddlie stands on tiptoe, up close, with a pickle jar in her small blue hand.
“Why didn’t it make big noise?”
“Because you dropped it near the opening and that’s where the stuff is piled up.”
Diddlie looks over to the polling station across the parking lot.
“Looks like the line is growing fast!”
“They don’t open until one o’clock.”
“So what time is it now? I can’t tell with this suit on.”
Lark pulls her phone out of her back pocket.
“It is 11:43.”
“And they are lining up already!”
“Sure, people don’t trust the mail.”
“I don’t, do you?”
“Yup, I voted by mail two weeks ago.”
“Can you help? I’ve got to get this stuff in there fast!”
“Lark grabs her bucket.”
“Go and get in line, Did. I can do this and give you back the bucket in a minute.”
Diddlie starts toward the back of the block-long line at the polling station.
“Fred, have you dumped your glass?”
“No, I’ll do it while you feed Diddlie’s. We can alternate at this opening.”
Soon done, we walk over to Diddlie, in line, and return her bucket.
“Thanks guys.”
“Looks like you will be here for a while.”
“Yeah, I told my ride to go home and I’ll call later.”
“You mean you have a phone built into that thing?”
“No.”
“But your suit is in the way.”
“I’ll find a restroom and open the glass, see?”
She points out a catch on the right of her hood that releases the glass in its metal frame, from the gasket which holds in place.
“Pretty slick Did.!”
“You two ought to call Mr. Fawkes and get one of these.”
“That’s alright, I can get by without.”
“Fred, do you have a death wish?”
“No, but thanks all the same.”
“What about you Lark?”
“I think you are crazy, wearing that thing.”
The line has grown another block and it is hard to see the end.
“Lark, the virus fell on Theo Tinderbrush, didn’t it?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“On, my favorite our neighborhood gossip site.”
“You mean, “Backstairs?”
“Right, don’t you keep up?”
“My God, I can’t believe no one told me!”
“I thought you knew.”
“How is he doing?”
“He was on a ventilator, last I heard.”
“Who posted this?”
“I think it was someone from his school.”
“When was that?”
“A couple of days ago, I think.”
“Can I visit? You think they allow visitors?”
“What do you think Fred?”
“No, it’s a Covid precaution. You can’t get in there.”
“Call the Prestige U. Med. Center.”
Lark has her hands on her cheeks.
“Diddlie, does Boyd know?”
“I don’t even know where Boyd is.”
“Neither do I.”
“Do you know Fred?”
“No, have we haven’t spoken for months.”
“He isn’t answering my texts or calls.”
“Is he with Augie somewhere?”
“No, I checked. Augie is back in California.”
“What, do you mean?”
“Yeah, looks like it is over for us.”
“I’ve got to get over to the hospital, now!
Lark runs toward her car.

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.

Serge sits at a table outside The Pie Shop with a young woman.  They have their green and yellow hoodies up, masks on and seem to be separately absorbed by their screens.  She tears a page out of a small spiral-bound notebook and puts it down next to her laptop, only to have it blow off their table under Lou’s chair.  Lou picks it up and looks over to them.

“Are you Serge Whiterose?”

“Yes, hi Lou! I am Serge.”

He puts his arm across her shoulders.

“This is my friend, Tatiana.”

Lou hands her the paper.  She puts it under her laptop. Pulls back her hood and shakes out the waves in her thick black hair. 

“Thanks.  Good to Meet you, Lou.”

She adjusts her mask. Hair has caught in the elastic stretching back around her ears.

“It is hard to get to know anyone with these on.”

Lou gets up, steps away facing us, and pulls his mask up over his forehead.  Then moves fast to catch his glasses as they slip off his nose.

“OH! Hi there!” 

Tatiana laughs.  The elastic has fallen off her right ear, so she holds the paper mask away from her face.

“Tatiana! Good to see you!”

Serge stands up and steps back to pull his cloth mask down around his neck.

He holds up his water bottle.

“To your health!”

We all stand for a few moments with masks off, before replacing them and sitting down at our adjoining tables.  The Pie Shop is closed without explanation.

Serge closes his laptop.

“So, this is the new thing, I guess.”

Tatiana pulls her mask up over her eyes, giggling.

“Oh My God!  Looking at each other’s faces!”

“So, what, Tat.?”

“We have been hidden so long it’s like we broke a taboo!”

Lou does the same with his mask.

“The shock!”

We all hide our eyes behind our masks and laugh.

“This is it.  Now we have to separate, for introductions.”

“Lou, have you heard why the Shop is closed?”

“No, I was surprised.” 

Serge’s ringtones sound like a car’s starter motor. He starts texting.

“Are you studying remotely these days, Tatiana?”

“We’re, just having fun now.  We study at separate institutions and can still be together, thanks to the plague.”

The cover of her laptop shows a large dark green decal with a tall, single stem plant, and the words “Milk Weed”, rendered in yellow.

“Are you a botanist?”

“No, why?”

“I am looking at the decal on your Laptop.”

“Oh, that!”

She picks it up and shows Lou the whole cover with decal

“See?’

 The decal’s slogan is: ‘Fast Bugs on the Milkweed’.

“Okay, so what is all this about Milkweed?”

“The Latin name for Milkweed is Asclepias syriaca.”

Serge has stopped texting and looks over.

“I feel we are going backward!”

“Why?”

“Latin, it’s an old and dead language!”

“Not really, Latin is alive in our language, and for example, it oozes out of Rumanian, French, and Spanish.”

“Well, right but, you know, he wants to know about the site.”

“Okay so, you are talking, ‘Fast Bugs’!”

Lou is cleaning his glasses with a paper napkin.

“I am still none the wiser.”

Serge nudges his friend.

“Tat, you are being obscure! It’s an online forum, Lou.  ‘Fast Bugs on the Milkweed’.”

Lou rubs his thick black eyebrows and the deepening lines across his forehead.

“Who’s on it?  I mean what is it about?”

“Oh, there are a lot of different, Utopians.”

“All Utopians are the same, it seems to me. You know, idle dreamers.”

“No, no no, the ‘Fast Bugs’ include Techno-Utopians, Environmental-Utopians, Political Utopians, Sexual Utopians, Dietary Utopians, and so on.”

“All, different kinds of idling dreaming, though.”

“What is so idle about dreaming?”

“It’s what we do in our sleep; inactive.”

Tatiana spread her arms hands high in the air.

“Lou, we are not asleep!”

“I can see that.”

“Well, I know people often associate Utopia with an impossible kind of perfection.”

“Right! isn’t that the usual meaning?”

“Thomas Moore’s Utopia had slaves in golden chains.”

“Okay, but I am talking about our usage now.”

“That’s what we have now, except its finance with cyber chains.”

“What do you mean?”

Tatiana, puts her phone down.

“Our lives could be different and better.  Believing that, is not futile.”

“Well, sure our lives could be better!”

“These activists are not idle.”

“Yes okay, and this milkweed.  What is that about?”

“For one thing, milkweed’s milk is poisonous.”

“Yes, I know, unless you are a Monarch butterfly caterpillar or milkweed bug.”

“That’s it.  Think of the beautiful monarch’s wings and that poisonous plant.”

“Okay, I am thinking.”

“Now think of all the wonderful products on the market, and the environmental degradation we are suffering.”

“Okay, I see a parallel.”

“The Fast Bugs want to move on!”

“What are they doing?”

“Capitalism isn’t any one thing, nor is Socialism.  There are many kinds of both.”

“Yeah, our system has gotten off the tracks.”

“‘Fast Bugs’  are discussing some improvements.”

“There is a grim history behind this kind of thing.”

“No, not revolution, improvements, like incremental.”

“What kind of improvements?”

“That’s the subject of the different Utopians!”

“Why don’t they stand up, and deal with reality.  No matter what your politics are, these are critical moments.”

Serge, leans forward.

“That’s what the forum is all about.  Tatiana and me, are ‘bugging’ FaceBook.”

“You are?’

“I keep track of my clicks and ‘like’ as many Trump messages as Biden messages.”

“Why can’t you make up your mind?”

“Oh, I know who to vote for.  We are both doing this to see how the algorithm responds.”

“It gives you more and more of both, right?”

“Yes, so far.  We have only been doing it for a week and reporting on the forum’s, ‘Utopia 1516’.”

“Speaking of bugs, do I hear bees?”

“Yes, Lou.”

Tatiana picks up her phone to text and then the starter motor takes Serge back to his phone too.

“Our COVID tests!”

“Serge looks up from his phone.”

“I thought it was tomorrow!”

Tatiana shows him her screen. He gets up.

“Ciao for now!”

Tatiana puts her laptop in her shoulder bag and gets up to go.

“Be seeing you guys!”

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.

Find an old-fashioned, letter-size envelope, brown with foreign stamp. Addressed to Daisy Briscoe.  It is on her front path with a curled and sticky red-oak leaf covering the return address and three ants inspecting an aphid waving its antennae at the edge of a sinus.  The letter had been forwarded from an address in Delaware. It is damp to the touch.  Looks like Daisy may have dropped it on the way to her door.  

She waves her wire cutters from beside a mock orange. Its branches obstruct the path.  Her black hair gathered in back and her green and yellow bandana features a white star above the left eye.  She throws down a bunch of prunings.  Picks up a shovel and beckons to me.

“Just in time, Fred.  I get soaked brushing up against these leaves after it rains.  Need you to dig under these roots while I pull.  They are too strong for me.”

“Okay, but I must change first, it’s too humid to work in what I have on.”

She drops the shovel.

“I hate yard work anyway.”

“Those are wire cutters, you know, not for pruning.”

“Well, they cut.”

She takes the envelope keeping the cutters in hand.

“My God!  A blast from the past.”

“I didn’t notice the post mark.  How old is it?”

“No, not that. It is from my step-sister Cam, Cam Rayley.”

“Didn’t know you had a sister.”

“No, she ran off to Andorra with a cornet player in about her third year of college.”

“Was he Andorran?”

“No, he was Danish. Cam told me he had a gig there.”

“So, when was this?”

“I think it was the fall of, ah, 83.”

We go into the kitchen where she picks up a paring knife and rips open the envelope.  The aphid fell off with the leaf, and she didn’t notice the ants until one showed up on her left index finger.

“That is a U.S. ant!”

She flicks it in the sink.

“How can you be so sure?”

“They don’t travel by mail.  They either crawl or fly.”

“True, I have never found one in the mail, only on the mail.”

“Oh! I know. They use my box to hatch eggs.”

“Nice dark protected spot.”

“Oh! it’s from Denmark, look, and it was forwarded from Delaware.”

“Yes, I noticed that.”

“Old family friends.  She doesn’t know I am living here.”

“We should have our masks on.”
“I know, but it is too hot, and humid and besides, I feel sure neither of us is infected.”

“Can you feel any antibodies?”

She pulls pack of surgical masks out of the cupboard above.

“Take your pick, any mask so long as it is blue!”

We don masks and stand together looking closely at the stamp.

“Yes, ‘Danmark’ is printed on the stamp.”

“That’s a picture of Queen Margrethe II”. 

“Well, I didn’t know Cam was in Denmark.  Haven’t heard from her since Andora and the Ghita.  We weren’t close. I mean we didn’t even have email back then.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that is what it meant!”

Yes, she called, long distance, one day, asking me to mail her copy of the Bhagavad Gita. We have been out of touch since.”

“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to buy one there?”

“I suggested that, but Cam couldn’t find an English translation.”

She pulls two odd sheets of paper out of the envelope. One handwritten on a small piece of yellow paper and the other typed on the back of some Christmas wrap.

“Is it in English?”

“This yellow sheet is.”

“Looks like she is coming back.”

“When?”

“Ah, doesn’t say. No wait, here, it says before Thanksgiving.”

She puts the papers down on the counter, by her pile of bracelets and rinses her hands. The Christmas wrap tries to curl against the folds made to put it in the envelope.  

“How are they going to travel now?”

“She will find a way around the virus restrictions, if any one can.”

“Seems pretty dangerous, given the infection rates.”

Daisy dries her palms on her jeans and picks up the Christmas wrap.

“This paper must hold some hot news.”

“Probably humidity too.”

OH! Listen to this:”

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.”

“She always loved Whitman.  I think she took, Leaves of Grass with her.”

“Do you feel that you know who she is, now?”

“Well! Kind of, anyway she wants to stay here with me. The rest is philosophy.  She is into Fichte.”  

Daisy drops the Christmas wrap on the counter.  

“It is too hot for both Cam and German Romantics. Back in a minute.” 

She leaves the room and soon returns without her bandana, showing off a Snazz teashirt and purple sweatpants with yellow stripe down the leg.  Her hair is coiled and pinned on top of her head.

“What do you think Fred?”

She indicates her new hair style.

“Looks a lot cooler for you.”

“I call it whipped cream.  Wrong color, I know, but you notice how the cone-stack culminates in a point at the top.”

“You might be able to market that idea.”

The Christmas wrap falls off the counter and I pick it up and put it back.  Rolled into one of her bracelets.

“You want a coffee?”

“Anything wet, will be fine.”

We sit in the living room.  Me on her broken couch and she at the dining table where a small space, amidst her boxes of stained glass, paints and mail, is kept clear for eating in front of an old TV on the sideboard.  

“Cam left her stuff behind when she took off, and Mom didn’t know what to do with it. So, it has been in the basement for years.  I couldn’t find Cam when Mom died, so I cleared out the place and found a cello case in the bathtub down there.”

“Did anyone in the family play?”

“Sure, Cam did.”

“Was she in the school orchestra of something?”

“No, she played it the bathroom, naked.”

“Why?”

“Liked the acoustical effects.”

“It must have been deafening in that small room.”

“No, not too bad.”

“You mean, you were in there too?”

 “Yeah, once in a while.”

“What did you play?”

“Nothing, no hand-ear coordination.  I used to draw.  She made an unusual model.”

“No wonder she didn’t play in public!”

“Her nudity wouldn’t have mattered to her.”

“No, did she ever play with her cloths on?”

“Sure, when we were kids and she went to lessons.  The bathroom was for practice.  She said clothing was inhibiting.”

“Well, she could have been the first nude cellist performing for Fauxmont!”

“Yeah, Cam doesn’t care what anybody thinks.  She is a philosopher.”

“Really, as well as a musician! What school?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  She read Rousseaux and I found Thoreau among her books and ah, of course Whitman.  Walt was her true love!”

We sip in the dark.  The tree shade seems much darker in the late morning sun and Daisy doesn’t turn on the table lamps.  The hum of the air conditioning dies down letting in the sound of cicadas rattling and clicking, soaring and pausing out in the heat.

“It was a blond cello, almost ochre yellow.”

“I think of them as deep brown.”

“I know.  Maybe someone made it as a novelty.  It didn’t sound all that good, to me”

“What about the humidity in that bathroom?”

“She didn’t bath in there!”

“Oh, a tiled music room.”

“She played in the bathtub.” 

“No one will barge in!”

“Right, she sat on the side of the bath with the cello anchored in the drain hole.  The faucet had broken, and the water was turned off.  The tub was about a foot out from the wall.  That space was filled with a tiled shelf.  It was a horrible shade of green too, always looked moldy.”

“What did she play?”

“About five notes.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was inspired by early Philip Glass.  You know, rhythmic repetitions.”

“Yes, kind of mesmerizing.”

“She loved the effect of mellow deeper notes played softly.”  

“Oh, I imagined her playing Bach!”

“No, Bach was Feng’s thing!”

“Feng?”

“Yes, the musician.  His name is Feng Youlan.”

“I thought you said he was Danish.”

“He’s a born Danish citizen. His grandmother emigrated to escape the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.”

“How extraordinary.”

“It was. According to Cam, his grandmother was having an affair with a Danish diplomat and he got her out.”

“What about the rest of the family?”

“That is all Cam told me. She said, “No further interrogation, Okay’?”

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.

Lou’s deck looks out towards tall green bamboo, dense and blending into a screen. With regularly spaced nodal rings, which might be rising magically like bubbles in a grassy carbonated drink. He was busy early yesterday morning when I walked past, digging up white rhizomes whose shoots are emerging through the clay from Daisy Briscoe’s back yard into his.  We socially distance under his torn and sagging awning, damaged in a recent thunderstorm but still affords some cover on the extreme left, overlooking Sophonisba’s yard.

“Can you fix this thing?”

“Expecting delivery of new canvas and struts any day.” 

“Great! No knowing when we can go back to the H Bar.” 

“The virus is spreading in the South and West.”

“I hope the lockdown won’t have been for nothing!”

“Yes, we might have the worst of all worlds; a lockdown here and there, a resulting financial crash everywhere and then a second wave leaving us with the same problem all over again.”

“That’s getting to, ‘herd immunity’ the hard way!”

“Joy has succumbed, you know.”

“Joy Von Luck? I didn’t know. When was that?”

“Last week, bel tells me it was organ failure.”

“What will Steve and bel do now, about their puzzle?”

“I don’t think there is much to it.”

“No? Really?

”No, that thing was a game Macadamia enjoys.  He is a puzzle freak you know.”

”Had no idea.”

“You better tell bel and Steve.”

“I did, but they were not convinced.”

Lou cleans his gold-rimmed glasses on his tea shirt and replaces them under his black overhanging eyebrows.  A single hair is trapped behind the left lens, but it doesn’t bother him.

“Daisy has isolated herself, now.”

“I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

“You won’t.  She gets her necessities delivered to the porch.  Then sprays them with bleach and wipes off before taking anything in.”

“She doesn’t answer the phone, not my calls, at least.”

“She gets too many junk calls. You’ll do better with email.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Mid-June, I went over and snaked out the drain in her kitchen sink.”

“You mean she let you in?”

“Had to wear a paper hazmat suite she left on the porch for me, plus mask and plastic face shield.”

“How about a couple of tanks of air and regulator?”

“Well, she did insist I spray bleach on all surfaces, she had not covered in plastic and leave her kitchen windows open with a fan blowing outwards in case I left anything in the air!”

“I wonder what she gets up to, all cooped up by herself?”

“She told me, to mind my own business!”

“Friendly soul!”

A humid breeze rattles the broken awning.  Thunder rumbles, though the sky overhead is clear. Six crows circle.  The air is thick with their cawing. 

“Yeah, she was in a foul mood that day; clogged drain and fighting with Jake, earlier.”

“Didn’t know Jake was around.”

“No, I was surprised to see him arrive.”

“I am wondering, how they communicated?”

“She was in the carport cleaning out Mr. Liddell’s straw and went on the attack as soon as he got out of his Hummer.”

“You mean you witnessed this ambush?”

“Yes, Jake responded in kind.”

“What a neighborly community we have around here!”

“I was going to stop by to check on her.”

“And?”

“And I chickened out. Came home and got out of the heat.”

Pam slides the porch door open, as a motorcycle revs out front before shutting down.

“Lunch from The Emperor Babur has arrived, gentlemen!”

Lou gets up quickly, pulling a mask from his back pocket. Pam hands him his phone and rushes out to meet the delivery.  Pam’s royal blue silk kimono with yellow trim falls open at the front, as she reaches up to move the curtain out of the way of the door.

“Oh! excuse me, Fred!”

She giggles and covers herself at once. The garment momentarily rises, flashing her left hip as she steps away gathering silk across her breast.

Lou returns with two bottles of Rosy Pelican beer, and Murg Makhani, Daal Masala,  Basmati rice with Naan, Raita, and mix chutneys.  All is distributed across the porch table in a wilderness of plastic containers.

“Nice spread, Lou!”

He drops his phone on the table.

“Left this thing plugged into the wall!”

“We have too many things to remember these days.”

“Yeah, mustn’t forget to recycle these things.”

He holds up a one-ounce disposable sauce container of Mango Chutney and then looks closely at the lid as he removes it.

“The Emperor is doing things right!  This is made of ‘bioplastic’ derived from 

renewable biomass, such as recycled food waste.”

“Gives me a new reason not to eat leftovers!”

Lou shakes his head. Picks up a Samosa and dips it in the chutney.

“You remember Serge?”

“Yes, Rosie’s son, isn’t he?”

“Right, he started a food delivery business, ‘Geek’s Good-Deal Deliveries’, from his computer and hired friends to deliver by motorbike.”

“So that’s what the noise was.”

“Yeah, got a look at it, a Triumph Street Triple R.”

“I don’t know much about bikes.”

“Nor do I but I have lusted after another Triumph after having a bike in the sixties.”

“Thought Serge had gone off to MIT, was it?”

“The virus got in his way.”

Lou opens more containers and a whiff of turmeric and coriander

rises from the Daal Masala.

“Makes a change from our burger routine.”

“Is Pam going to join us?’

“Ah, Fred, no-one is supposed to know she’s here.”

“Seems to me the ladies next door will soon catch on.”

“I Know!”

“So, what’s the harm?”

“By the way Fred, Osiris lives in New York.  She is visiting.”

“I wonder what that connection is?  Thought she was an art dealer.

“She is a mystery to me.”

“She is friends with Nadia Brasov, I remember.”

“Yeah, anyway, Pam is trying to make herself scarce at the moment.”

“Let’s hope it is a brief moment.”

“Gives her a chance to finish her Chemistry degree as we speak.”

“Oh, Zooming past lunch into the romantic valances of chemistry!”

“No less, and more too!”

“How long has it been?”

“A few months now, I guess.”

We toast the occasion with condensation dripping from our Rosy Pelican bottles.

“She’s on her last course.”

Another toast.

“Hi, Lou, who’s your friend?”

Sophonisba is standing on the other side of the hollies dividing the two properties. She smiles up at us through a gap in the foliage, from under her yellow turban, arms folded.

“Sophie, this is, Fred.  He lives down on Wicket Street.”

“Hi Fred, have you met my friend, Osiris?”

She turns toward her patio.  The crows landed and are calling back and forth quietly in small dead branches poking out from the pin oak, by the road. Now they fly off with a lot of commotion.  Five land in an ironwood tree next door.

“Osiris, men!  Over here, honey.”

Osiris Tarantula limps over to join Sophy by the hollies, leaning on a long pole, which might once have been a boat hook. Her black robe trails through last year’s dead and brittle leaves.

“Hi there, you men.”

“Osiris, this is Fred.”

“Fred, we have heard about you!”

“Nothing too scandalous, I hope.”

A sixth crow joins the others in the ironwood tree.

Sophie beckons to me.

“You need to stop by my store for a reading.”

Osiris turns and limps back towards her chair on the patio, adjusting her orange beret trimmed with black feathers.

“Osiris has to sit down.  It’s her knees.”

“Okay, Sophie, what did you hear?”

“Oh, chatter from the other world.”

“You must have it from Diddlie.”

“No honey, my sources are not of this world.”

“You mean an intuition?”

“Call it that if you want, honey.”

“I mean, I find the supernatural problematic.”

“Oh, it is, Fred. It is! I am sure there is a spirit anxious to contact you.  I could feel it as soon as I came outside.”

“But you didn’t know I was here!”

“That’s right, as soon as I saw you, then I knew what that movement was!”

Osiris waves a bunch of goldenrod from her chair at the edge of the patio.

“Sophie, it’s time!”

“Well, you men, I have things to do.  Be seeing you.  Don’t forget Fred.  I am in the Cremona Building on Route One!”

Sophie strolls back toward her patio with her arms upraised at the elbow.

“What do you make of that Lou?”

“She must be summoning spirits.”

“Goldenrod?”

“Diddlie.”

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.

Artie Bliemisch, dressed in black sweats, sits alone at a table outside the Cavendish Pie Shop.  Her striped train conductor’s cap is pushed back on her head and bunches her thick curly hair, flaring out around the bottom like an herb flowering from its pot.  She looks up from her newspaper as I cast a brief shadow while passing in front of her to go in. A Danish and two muffins remain untouched on a plate by a tall paper coffee cup.  She speaks through her blue paper mask.

“Fred; carry out, or staying?”

“Staying, we can ‘social distance’ out here, okay?”

She gets up, pulls another chair over to her table, and throws some folded newspaper on the seat, shiny-wet from the last shower. 

Mrs. Rutherford is behind the counter trying to explain the contactless payment system to a tall customer.  So tall he is bent nearly double concentrating on his phone screen shining up from the countertop where Mrs. Rutherford can see it.  She looks like a Schnauzer.  The dog’s face is printed on fabric protecting her from Covid 19. 

“Maria, can you explain this?”

Maria del Sarto, with a red mask covering her from chin to cheek, steps over to help with the confusion.

“Can you just do it for me?”

“Sure.”

“She picks up the phone in pale blue-tint latex grasp.”

“Ah, you have to give me your password.”

“I don’t have one.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know.  My wife uses that thing.”

“I can’t do this without it.”

Mrs. Rutherford opens the cash drawer.

“Sir, I’ll make an exception for you.  You got cash?”

“Absolutely!  Here.”

“He puts four dollars on the counter and some change.”

Maria picks up the money and puts it in the open drawer.

“Thank you, sir.”

He puts another dollar in the tip jar.

Mrs. Rutherford waves to him as he turns from the counter to go out.

“Maria, you better wipe the counter and put on fresh gloves.”

“The box is empty.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

Mrs. Rutherford prepares a small pot of tea.

“That’s Darjeeling, right?”

“Yes, when did you start serving tea in pots?”

“My distributer got us going last month.  Check the screen.”

The advertising video screen, high on the wall, shows a demonstration with two scoops of loose tea, spooned into a warmed pale blue porcelain pot. I opt for the stone wear mug advertised as FREE, with premium teas, for regular customers. 

“We still have bags if you want.”

“No, no, tea is better loose and from a pot.” 

“I turned the sound off on that thing. If I have to hear that loop one more time, I’ll smash the damn screen! Excuse me, Fred.”

She steps back behind the door to the bakery for a moment and returns with a box of gloves.

 “Besides it is too distracting for my customers.”  

She taps the tea water, just off the boil, from a large stainless-steel thermostatic tank. 

“I’ll probably hear all about it when the Rep. comes in.”

“Most grateful!”

“No milk or sugar, just the way you like it, Fred.”

She hands me a small oval wooden tray with my new mug and teapot.

“You better sit beside me, so I don’t breathe on you when I unmask to eat.”

“Thanks, Artie.”

“You’re going to have to take your mask off too, I guess.  I mean we can’t eat or drink through these things.”

“No, that innovation is yet to come.” 

“We are all breathing in lots of microfibers with these things, you know.”

“That’s why I avoid cloth masks made with synthetics.”

She takes her’s off and looks for a label.

“Nothing to say what this is.”

“Does it feel sweaty?”

“No, it absorbs pretty well.”

“Maybe it is cotton, then.”

She repositions her mask.

“Did you know they are finding microplastics in the Arctic, and deserts?”

“Yup, everywhere the wind blows.”

“Synthetic polymers, it’s our new atmosphere.”

Artie sips her coffee.

“Got my BMI down where it is supposed to be.”  

She picks up the Danish.

“Now I am going to boost it back up with these!”

Artie pulls down her mask to enjoy the full pleasure of an apricot Danish.

 “Where have you been for the last year or so?”

“I got away to Maine before the plague.”

“Where, in Maine?”

“A broken-down old Victorian on the coast, South of Portland.”

“Did you Winter up there?”

“Ended up that way.  Invited for a month and spent a year!”

“What about your studio?”

“Sad story, got kicked out of my place back here.”

She gestures behind her back, where her studio used to be in rooms above the bakery.

“Put everything in storage.”

“Come to think of it, I was wondering about you when Jake Trip bought the building.”

“Yeah, Jake wants to develop it.”

“So, what is back there now?”

“Nothing, as far I can see.”

“How long have you been back?”

“A couple of weeks.”

“And?”

“Well, Steve put me on to a friend of theirs’s with a big outbuilding in their back yard.  Looks like I can rent that.”

“Can you live there?”

She finishes the Danish.

“No, I am couch surfing until my next show.  Hope I can sell enough drawings to get by.”

“How did it go up North? Well, first of all, why did you leave?”

“Oh, God!”

Artie peels the paper off the side of her blueberry muffin.  Two sparrows advance in short hops along the freshly painted black railing separating us from the parking lot.

“I took off because working with dust was giving me bronchitis and I didn’t think the idea was getting anywhere.”

“Oh right!  I remember. You were into a Jungian thing and associations with dust, time, and memory.”

“Doesn’t sound bad the way you put it!”

“Yes, I found it interesting.”

“Thanks, Fred.  Anyway, it’s all about drawing now, thick wax-charcoal sticks, on paper.”

She breaks off and spills some crumbly muffin, and the sparrows fly around behind our chairs, ready to feed.

“What size?”

“About three by six feet, and bigger.”

“Where did you find paper that size?”

First muffin gone, she starts the second muffin, a lemon and cranberry swelling above its paper confines, and spilling over the top, with paper now baked in.

“You can get it, at a price but I bought Pacon’s rolls, thirty-six inches by a hundred feet. Then taped the thirty sixes to get seventy-two-inch widths.”

“That simplifies your material requirements!”

Lark Bunlush, walks over under her wide-brimmed straw hat.  She wears a kerchief bandit style, across her face.  A gust pulls at her hat, lifting the right side.  Hailstones bounce across the pavement as she steps under the awning.  The sparrows fly off sounding their excited notes.

“Well look who’s here!”

“Is this a hold-up?”

“No, I didn’t bring my ‘shooten’ irons.”

Lark leans against the window facing us sideways, showing off her cowboy boots. Maria opens the door.

“You guys can come in if you sit six feet apart.”

Lark turns to look at her.

“Maria, I thought you worked at the gift shop.”

“I did, until Ostrich closed, then Mrs. Rutherford needed help.  So here I am.”

Maria lets go of the door and rushes back behind the counter as Mrs. Rutherford calls.  Lark lets the door close, leaning on the handle.

“That girl is gaining weight.”

“So would I, working in here!”

“Are you coming in, Artie?”

“Are you staying for coffee, Lark?”

“Ahh, maybe but, Artie are you back for good, or what?”

“Yeah, I have to get moved into a new studio.”

“Painting?  Like, what kind of art?”

“It’s all charcoal crayon.  I mean, like getting more out of less!”

“You mean drawing?”

“Right.  Have you been out West or just shopping?”

“Yeah, we went out to New Mexico to visit Max’s cousin and Max helped build a storefront on their house.”

A cold gust blows hail on us through the morning sunlight. Lark opens the door and holds it for us.  We pick up our things and follow, spacing our-selves across two dragon tables in the empty shop.  Lark doesn’t order anything or sit down but steers the conversation holding on to the right and left finials of a chair back. 

“Okay Artie,  I am not through yet.  What are you drawing?”

“Lines, mainly.”

The gusts and hail blow over and a sunbeam casts shadows across the room.

“What do you mean?

“I mean lines.  Long and short, fat and thin, straight and crooked, and so on.”

“So, you’re not drawing anything, like, no subject?”

“I have an abstract subject.  There are no lines in nature.”

Lark takes her hat off and hangs it from her neck by the ties.

“Wait a minute, what about that shadow there?”

She points to the shadow cast by a chair leg.

“Think about perception.  I mean, look hard. What do you really see?

“Colors and shadows and lines.”

“Fred, you’re looking at edges.  The edge between the shadow and sunlight on the ground.”

“You mean edges aren’t lines?”

“No edges can be rendered with lines.”

“So, what if I do a line drawing of you?”

“Well Lark, you are basically drawing my name.”

“No, you are there, not your name.”

Artie scrunches up the paper once containing her cranberry-lemon muffin.

“Look again, do you see me?”

“Sure do!”

“Okay Lark and what you call, ‘Artie’, is a pattern of light isn’t it?”

“Sure, but can I draw a line around it and across it, and so on.”

“No, you draw more of what you know than what you see.”

“Oh.”

“Well, I am working with lines.  Not what they can represent but what they are.”

“You mean you are just making black lines on six by six pieces of paper?”

“Right, that’s part of it.”

“What is the rest?”

“Paper and perception.”

“Lark has put her hat back on and walks slowly towards the door.

“I’ve got a march to organize.”  

“Where?”

She pauses with the door handle in hand.

“In Old Town.”

“You mean you’re going to get yourself arrested?”

“Artie, that’s one of the hazards of social action.”

“Yeah, but suppose it turns into a riot?”

“That’s a matter of perception too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fred, riots justify police action and demonstrations don’t.”

“Yes, both are happening though.”

“Right but depending on their ideology people refer to one or the other.”

The tall man is standing by his blue Honda Element. He loads a couple of signs through the back hatch and waves to Lark.

“There’s my ride.”

Lark, waves back and goes out.

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.

Rank Majors stands outside the Elegant Ostrich Gift Shop, watching the raindrop.  An automatic weapon hangs across his chest and his new green Fauxmont Militia baseball cap shades his eyes from view through the overcast morning.  ‘REOPEN NOW’, says a hand-lettered sign in the window.

“Do you think we have an inch yet?”

“Hi Fred, way more. Time to build an Ark!”

“How about a small dented old aluminum boat?”

He shifts his weight and adjusts the hang of his weapon.  We both look into the rain, which slackens even as the sky gets darker.

“I didn’t know you had a machine gun!”

“Fred, this is an assault rifle.”

“Yes, what do you need one of those for?”

He thumbs behind him to the hand-lettered sign.

“These folks tell me they will go out of business by the end of the week if they can’t get customers in.”

“Sorry about that, but what’s it got to do with your weapon?”

“I just bought it, when the government started locking us up like convicts, you know, ‘LOCKDOWN’.”

“I think the idea is to prevent the spread of infection.”

“The idea is crazy.  We are killing our own economy, not the virus.”

“The economy is only on hold for a while.”

“No one can put an economy on hold.  It’s either growing or dying.”

“We are trying to live with a deadly and dangerous infection.”

“The effect is exaggerated.”

“Don’t you see that one infected person can spread the virus to many others?”

“Sure, and that’s how it should be.”

“Should it?”

“I mean the planet is over-crowded.”

“Are you hoping for a mass die-off?”

“Not hoping, no.  Every death will be a tragedy but if we lose three to five percent or even twenty percent of the population, the whole country will benefit.”

“Over a hundred thousand have died already.”

“Those numbers aren’t reliable.”

“You think they are inflated?”

“Ah, not really.  A lot of those people would have died anyway.”

“What about those who wouldn’t have died anyway?”

“The problem is we don’t have reliable data.”

“That’s it.”

“Yeah, smoking is supposed to kill 480,000 per year, traffic accidents, around 36,000, diabetes, 84,000. We live with these numbers and no one gets too excited.”

“We lost around 3000 on 9/11 and look what happened!”

“Yeah, they turned it into a war.”

“What would you call it?”

“I call it what it was, a terrorist attack. Those people were criminals as far as I am concerned and that is how we should have responded.”

Rank waves to The Fauxmont Militia passing in an SUV flying a saturated and floppy, Gadsden flag. “Join or Die” is painted in red along the side window.

“That will rattle the Liberals and lefties!”

“Are you riding with General Gadsden these days?”

“I am not all the way, with those guys.”

“They are so careless; they deserve a nomination for the Darwin Award!”

“There’s about, 330,000,000 people in the country; too many.” 

“The virus doesn’t just kill sick people, you know.”

“Yup, so, we lose say, sixteen and a half million.”

“A lot of rich undertakers!”

“There you are, free investment advice.”

“Well, some humans think saving their fellows is a good thing.”

“That is no excuse for an immoral, unconstitutional, lockdown!”

“So, what do you think should be done.”

“If you want to stay home, stay.  If you want to go out, go. Leave the government out of it.”

“Suppose you are among the casualties?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Your chances are improved by the stay home order, you know.”

“This AK will take care of my problems.”

“AK?” 

“That’s right Fred, AK 47, selective-fire, gas-operated 7.62×39mm rifle.”

“A Russian one, isn’t it?”

“It is, named after Mikhail Kalashnikov, model-year, 1947.”

“Why don’t you buy American?”

“Because this is more rugged and reliable than anything we make.”

“Well, it looks familiar enough from all the pictures of war zones I’ve seen.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty common.  I got a deal on it from a buddy who brought some back from Iraq.”

“Aren’t you concerned about being identified with terrorists?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it the Jihadi’s weapon of choice?”

He points to the American flag sticker on the magazine and the patch on his shoulder.

“Sure is. What’s it to me?”

“Anyway, how is it going to help you against the virus?”

“Oh, it isn’t. You can’t shoot the thing!”

“My thought, exactly.”

A couple comes out of the Safeway with a cart full of paper goods and packs of water.  A small woman in a yellow slicker struggles, without a cart.  She loads her Jeep Renegade with a twelve-pack of toilet paper and even more paper towels bound in stretched plastic.

“Looks as if the shortages are growing worse.”  

“See the sign on the door?”

“Oh yes, they are out of hand sanitizer.”

“No more soap, either.”

Rank adjusts the strap on his AK again.

“This thing may save my bacon and yours’s too if you want to buy one.”  

“If it comes to that, I think the military have you outgunned.”

“If it comes to that, the military may no longer be a coherent force.”

“You think there will be mutiny?”

“A lot of young soldiers support the President, big time.”

“How do you know?”

“The volunteer force draws a lot of people from red states; like need a job!”

“A lot of others as well.”

“They will do their patriotic duty.”

“Well, one man’s patriot is another’s mutineer!”

“Harks back to 1775, doesn’t it?”

“You talking revolution?”

“No, I am making a statement of my views.”

“Certainly, looks provocative!”

“You bet Fred.  That’s how you get attention.”

“Sensation sells airtime. That is clear.”

Rosalba Whiterose greets Rank from under her dripping umbrella, decorated with images from Monet’s views of the Thames.

“Hi there, are you looking for trouble?”

“Hi Rosie, I am guarding against it.”

“Well, thanks for keeping my work safe.”

“That’s not what I am here for.  I am demonstrating my right to be on the street.”

“Well, okay, you want to let me in?”

“I won’t stand in your way.”

“I need to pick up three pieces that have not sold, before they shut down.”

“Sorry Rosie, I don’t have keys.”

“Darn it! I didn’t think they would be closed now.”

“They were forced to close.”

“Oh, yeah, the virus thing.  I know.  It’s great! I haven’t left my studio for four days.”

“You chose one hell of a day today!”

“So did you, Fred.”

“Yes Ms. Whiterose, a bad time to run out of food.”

“Have either of you seen Maria del Sarto?”

“No, I thought she had moved on.”

Rosie flicks through some screens on her phone.

“Better not have. She is supposed to be here now. It’s gone 11:30, and that’s when we were going to meet.”

Wind blows rain into us under the shopping center’s covered walk.  We step back. 

“Don’t think you will get much of a crowd in all this, Rank.”

“What do you want a crowd for?”

“To make my point, Rosie.  Get some attention!”

“Rank, leave me out of the politics, okay?”

“Rosie, you can’t ever get away from politics.”

“When I am in the studio working on my miniatures, I am doing that and nothing else.”

The sky is brighter to the West.  There’s a brilliant flash immediately followed by thunder. The traffic light at Maxwell Avenue and Oval Street is blinking yellow and power is out at the Light House Gas Station.  Distant sirens grow louder.  

“That must have hit right here.”

Rosie stands with her back against the door having fastened her umbrella.

“Check the smoke guys!”

Rank points across the street.

“Yeah, that tree is split.”

“There it goes!”

“Fred, we have another obstacle to deal with.”

The Fauxmont Militia SUV returns, goes right, off Oval Street and stops at the shattered tree blocking Maxwell Avenue.  Two people jump out in green military-style ponchos.

“That’s Albrecht. Look, he has his AR15.”

“Now, that I believe, is the ArmaLite gun.”

“Yeah, they sold the patent to Colt.”

Rosie looks up from her phone.

“Why all the guns, Rank?”

“Hey, these are dangerous times.  We must be ready, ready for anything.  Besides I can get a rise out of the liberals!”

Rosie steps away to get a better view past an intervening pillar and looks back at us.

“What are they doing?”

“Oh yes, here is Banninck Cocq!”

Another black Chevy Suburban approaches on Maxwell Avenue with a single orange light flashing from the roof.  It stops on the other side of the fallen branch.  Two get out, with navy blue ponchos, hoods up and stand in the road to direct traffic. Weapons strapped on their backs. 

“Why are they wearing shades on a dark day like this?”

“It is part of  the company ‘look’, you know.”

“What company?”

“Urban Safety Solutions, you know, Jake Trip hired them years ago as a community service.”

“If I made a painting of them, it would be a cartoon!”

“They have, Bill Ruytenburch out, as well as Kemp.  I think that’s Kemp.”

“You know that guy, Rank?”

“Sure Fred, Bill has a nice place over on the Van Rijn Estates.”

“Wish you could open that door, Rank.”

“Sorry, can’t help you.”

Though sirens grow louder nothing comes down the street.

“They’re going to clear the road!”

“Well, they got a chain around that branch.”

Albrecht’s black Chevy backs up, pulling the huge red oak branch to the side of the road.

“That’s the real America for you!”

Rosie steps back towards us, maintaining her social distance.

“Really?  You think the rest us are a fantasy or something?”

“No, I think we have become decadent and lazy.”

“Well, there are people getting rich out of this virus thing.”

“Right!  God love them, make a buck! That’s what makes America what it is.”

“Aha, and what is America, Rank?”

“People are getting out there and doing what needs doing, instead of waiting for the government.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Sure, don’t you think clearing the street is worthwhile?”

“I guess so. It’s not their job.  I mean the county pays people to do that.”

“That’s right, government and taxes, way too much of it.”

“Armed with military weapons?  I think that’s unnecessary, Rank!”

“Rosie, you will find out soon enough.”

“Hey, guys!”

“Maria! There you are!”

“Sorry, everything is messed up by this storm and I had to go back and get my mask.”

“We don’t need them outside.”

“Well this thing is soaked, and I can’t even breath.”

She pulls it down from her face and leaves it pressed against her neck.

“OH! Icky!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Rosie, I got cold water dripping inside my shirt.”

“It has been raining ever since sunup.”

“Yeah, not that you could tell, Fred!”

“Early riser, Rosie?”

“Early thunderstorm.”

“That’s one big cloud up there.”

Maria presses her fingers into her tight denim pockets.  First her right thigh then her left.  She finds the keys in a back pocket.

“The forecast is cool and wet until Thursday.”

“Keep looking West, Fred.”

“It’s not going anywhere soon.”

“Say, guys, these keys don’t work.”

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.

A small rectangle frames the image of bel Vionnet’s plump face, on the computer screen. Catching her fierce focus on something off-screen. Then the rectangle expands with electronic pointillism and outcomes her voice from the computer’s speaker.

“Wait until it reaches the mailbox.”

“What’s that, bel?”

“Sorry, I was pointing out a shadow to Steve.”

“Yes, glad to see the sun after that storm this morning.”

The screen fills with pixels forming and dissolving rectangles, then it appears in focus that bel is pointing her phone-camera out the open window.

“See that Fred?”

“Yeah; a utility pole, redbuds, street, crows, and ah, is that your mailbox with wisteria on it?”

“That’s right.  Now, see that long shadow on the street?”

“Yup.”

Bel’s image returns to the screen.  Just her neck and dangling earring.  Then the side of her face and now, she looks at me with a gentle smile, a deep red curtain behind her.

“When the shadow of the utility pole reaches the mailbox, it is time to make coffee and break out the chocolate!”

“What do you use to time your afternoon break for the rest of the year?”

“This is a diversion during the emergency.

“We are all  Zooming now.”

“Or, Face Time, aren’t we on Face Time?”

“No, this is a new program, Signac/Seurat.”

“Okay, I wondered what that icon was, in your email; but clicked anyway.”

“So glad you did, bel.”

“I haven’t kept up the new cyber stuff.”

 “We live in digital times.”

“Yup, and we are all cinematographers, now.”

“Trying to be!”

“There hardly any traffic noise, Fred. We didn’t see much on the Parkway when we were walking, about seven this morning.”

“I can hear those crows outside your house.”

“Did that blue jay’s screech come through?”

“Yup, Hear that, bel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GLIFUtXj2M

“Oh yes, ah, Oh I know that sound, ah…

“Carolina wren.”

“Right, Steve calls it, ‘amplifier bird’, so loud, yet small.”

“The dogwoods and azaleas are out along with a zillion spring beauties.”

“Have you got grape hyacinths?”

“They are mixing it up with the lawn weeds.”

“Yes, it is funny about weeds, so many native plants are known as weeds.  Joe Pye weed for instance, or Ironweed.”

“Don’t know either of them.”

“That’s it bell.  Few people do.”

“So, what’s the deal with weeds?”

“For that, I point to Doug Tallamy’s new book, “Natures’s Best Hope”.

“Okay, Diddlie was telling me to read that, too.”

“He points out that anything growing in a field of crops, besides the crop, is called a weed.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“Yes, his point goes further.  Europeans brought their own plants from home to grow here, and local native plants were called weeds!”

“Oh, so am I supposed to let the ivy and wisteria just take over?”

“No, not at all.  Those are both called “invasive species”.  They were imported and have no predators here. They outgrow the natives.”

“I am hearing something familiar in this story.”

“You are.  The point of it all is about the relationship between plants and insects.  Our local insects only eat local plants.  When we plant imports, they make for a barren landscape.”

“Well, not exactly, those plants are doing fine.”

“Too true, but our insects can’t eat them; fewer insects means fewer birds and a depleted biosphere. It will eventually starve us out.”

“This all sounds like a warning from First Nation!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they were regarded as weeds!”

“Too true, bel.”

“Well, I hope that beautiful redbud isn’t an import!”

“Don’t think it is.”

“The spring flowers make me feel I am in a kind of paradise until I think of PU medical center.”

“How ‘Wordsworthian’ of you!”

“Augie said this is his 250th anniversary and Beethoven’s.”

“Haven’t seen him lately.”

“Beethoven is dead, happened around 1825, or so”

“No, Augie, haven’t seen Augie lately.”

“Okay Fred, anyway, my romantic side is struggling with reality at the moment.”

“Oh, is PU overwhelmed?”

“Not yet, I am expecting they will be.”

“Why?”

“Fred, there are big apartment buildings less than a mile from here full of people who can barely get by.”

“I get it, no gardens, no privacy, no space to, ‘distance’.”

“Did you know, Joy vonLuck is in that hospital?”

“Oh no! Is it the virus?”

“We don’t know but her trouble breathing is suggestive.’

“Also, her computer was hacked.”

“Before or after?”

“The day before.”

“I think, whoever hacked her system got the results of her work with us.”

“Did she tell you she had solved the mandala puzzle?”

“No, she said she was close and working with a Polish artist friend.”

“Maybe that’s where the hack came from?”

The image fragments into a pointillist swirl of colorful pixels, and blacks out again.

“Fred? You still there?

“Right here, what’s going on?”

Bel is back in focus, laughing.

“Josephine just woke up. It’s those bird calls.”

“Aha, so she knows coffee break is coming.”

“Yes, on overcast afternoons, she times the chocolate and coffee point.”

“What does she get?”

“Bel’s Best Home Baked cat treats.”

“That explains a lot!” 

“She was climbing the curtain. See?”

Josephine’s tail curls across the screen and now rents at the bottom of the curtain come into focus.  The image tilts from left to right before the screen blacks out.

“Oh NO!  Fred, you there?”

“Yes, but don’t see anything.”

“Neither do I.  Got the cat though”

“You have to click on that button at the bottom.”

“Josephine is trying to get a paw in.”

“Paws are too big for screen icons.”

“Hold on, okay Fred? I must put her down.”

“Okay”

The picture comes back with a view up through a lampshade, past the knob and bulb, and beyond to a sunlit stripe on the ceiling. 

“Fred, sorry I dropped the phone!”

“Okay, I am still here. Looking around the garden.”

“Right, okay, so look at this!”

The image blurs before a document comes into focus with a formal letterhead.”

“Looks serious.”

“We got this from Sherman Shrowd.”

“Good grief, what is that all about?”

“He wants to depose us about the work we were doing on the Macadamia patio cipher.”

“I wonder why Sherman didn’t just call?”

“We are wondering how he knows about it!”

“Hard to say.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, he is usually so informal.”

“He needs a paper trail.  That’s my guess, but even so, I would have thought he’d call first.”

“Yes, Steve thinks he is under pressure of a case.”

“I remember Steve being cagy about where he got those drawings.”

“He told me they came from Ernie Manstein.”

“That’s right, he did say so but then disavowed it.”

“Only if you quoted him.”

“Are you worried?”

“Ah, I don’t think Steve has told me everything yet.”

“You didn’t expect to get any money out of it, did you?”

“No, nothing like that.  It was a challenge and maybe something interesting would come out of it!”

“You might call that letter, ‘interesting'”.

“Not what I had in mind!”

Josephine’s paw appears before the scene changes to an embroidered cushion of geometric design, the fragment of a vintage Kilim, perhaps.  

“Hi!”

Blue, white and yellow stitches of Steve’s Fair Isle Sweater fill the screen with a moment’s knitted wool.

“Steve, what’s all this about, Shrowd?”

“It’s PU, that’s what I think.”

“You think they have retained him?”

“Perhaps, or he is working for someone else, but PU is the main player.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I still believe that everything said in this house is electronically collected.”

“Your bugged!”

“I can’t find the critter, but then, I don’t have expertise or detection equipment.”

“Why not hire a pro?”

“That’s what bel keeps saying but I don’t know anyone I trust.”

“Can’t you just ask around among your contacts?”

“Well, this is not a discussion to have here and now.”

“I get it but who would want to know?”

“I can only guess.”

“And your guess is?”

“No one but you, bel, Joy and me, knew anything about our little project.”

“What about the Polish artist?”

“I found out, Joy was working with her at PU at the time, and she is based in Paris, at the moment and not Poland.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Not that I can mention.”

“Is this what Shrowd is after?”

“Only Sherman knows that.”

“So, when is the deposition?”

“I just got off the phone with Shrowd’s office and they are trying to set it up for next Tuesday.”

“You mean you have to break out of lock-down and go there?”

“Maybe, that is still under discussion.”

“Why don’t they send somebody over?”

“Yeah, we might sit at opposite ends of the dining table.”

“I hope you can use Zoom or something.”

“Or something, I mean Zoom is about as secure as a street corner.”

“What about Signac/Seurat, we are using now?”

“I don’t know, new App, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it was developed at PU Media Lab.”

“Now that is an interesting place.”

“Really, I had never heard of it until someone put me on to Signac/Seurat, the other day.”

“They have some substantial classified contracts.”

“Aha, say no more.  I remember Joy dropped the name of a consultant there.”

“They claim it is more secure than Zoom.”

“It may be, but you have to consider “back-doors”.

“No place to collogue!”

“A swirl of colorful pixels cross the screen like windblown leaves. For an instant we are at “La Grande Jatte” on a Sunday, then the image breaks down and a corporate message appears.

“I think we are out of time.”

“Okay Fred, cyber-see you later.”

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

The H-Bar is quiet today.  No chatter from the students and professors from Prestige U. Physics Department, whose labs are nearby. Not a kiss of the cue ball in the pool room where the smooth baize never loses its green promise in fall or winter. The parking lot has plenty of vacancies showing off spacious puddles rippled by sprinkling rain.  

Lou sits by the bow window cleaning his gold-rimmed glasses with a paper napkin dampened in the condensation on his beer mug. He speaks without looking up before I can sit down to join him.

“You have to get your own drink from the bar.” 

“Is everyone taking a dry day?”

Lou presses the curve of his frames behind his ear.

“It’s not abstinence, it’s the plague.”

“You mean the virus?”

“I mean it is plaguing me.  Affecting everything I wanted to accomplish this week.  If you have face to face business with other people, you can forget it.”

“There’s always the internet.”

“I know, pervasive and too much of a good thing.  I like to deal with people, not some simulacrum!”

“Crummy indeed!”

The bartender keeps his distance, as I step up and order some local brew.  

“Grab your suds here, sir.”

The suds are frothing on the bar about a dozen empty stools away.

“Social distancing in effect here, sir.”

“Are you going to close?”

“Mr. Hoffman is calling the County Health Department; maybe, like, after lunch.”

“Yes, hope we can get lunch, first.”

“Yeah, I don’t think Mr. Hoffmann will, like, throw you guys out.”

“Well, public health is a valid reason, I guess.”

Lou watches the light rain soak a man who can’t unlock his solitary PT Cruiser, parked outside the window. 

“Battery must be dead in his fob.”

A young woman comes in from the foyer pushing her long, wet hair out of her face with a ring on each finger and both thumbs.  She reads the crawl on the TV over the bar for a few seconds and walks out again, without answering the lonesome bartender’s question.

Lou puts his phone on the table.

“Had enough of all this virus crinkum-crankum.”

“Yes, communication is now easier but that makes for new complexities.”

Lou starts up from his chair and stops.  Bent over partway up, supporting himself with his arms, hands on the sides of the chair.

“You want the usual?”

“Sure, you alright?”

“My back is protesting the lack of service around here.”

He straightens up in careful increments. Pulls the back of his gray sweater down and looks at me.

“I haven’t been tested; you know?”

“Has Pam got it?”

”I don’t know. She hasn’t been tested either.”

“Moved in, has she?”

“Options were limited.”

“Is it working out for you both?”

“She is isolated from me, too.”

Lou takes a step away.

”It’s called ‘self-isolating.’”

“How do you isolate from yourself?”

“Might be another term for alienation!”

Lou’s coordination improves as he walks to the bar.  He writes our order with his own pen on the pad provided.

“No iPad today, huh?”

“No way sir, that thing’s a vector, for sure.”

As Lou steps back from the bar, the bartender wipes the surface where the heal of his hand rested while writing. He throws the wipe away in a whiff of alcohol.

“This gives a new meaning to alcohol consumption!”

“Don’t worry sir, this stuff is strictly for cleaning, nothing wasted.”

“I would hate to have to choose between disinfecting and drinking that Glenfiddich over there!”

“I’ll let you know when your order is ready, sir.”

Lou takes his seat with the same incremental progress he made in getting up.

“I had plans to go into the distortion zone about now.”

“Aren’t we already there!”

“I mean the permanent one across the river.”

“Up there, on Jenkins Hill, you mean?”

“Right, in The Distract of Caramba!”

“Oh yes, all those dollars flowing like wine for the gods.”

“Wine is the least of it.  Everything said there is distorted by the pressure.”

“What do you mean, ‘pressure’?”

“It’s the gas, you know.”

“What?”

“You remember when they dug up the Mall?”

“Sure, it took me forever to walk around the excavations to get to the Museum of American History, from Smithsonian Metro.”

“Pretty big operation, right?”

“It seemed out of proportion to an irrigation project for the grass.”

“You didn’t hear this from me.”

Lou leans forward.

“Have to break with social distancing for this.”

“Is it worth getting Corona for?”

“In your case, Fred, yes!”

“Aha, okay, spill it.”

“They needed someplace to store political speech!”

“Is this anything to do with that party you threw back in when was it, 2011?”

“Right, January of 2011.”

“Yeah, well this president’s political speech is hyper-energetic and needs a special containment zone, cooled and underground.”

“How astonishing!”

“The volume of tweets alone is driving engineers crazy.”

“So, the dig turns out to be all the more important.”

“They have to move the stuff around at night, in stainless steel pressure vessels mounted on trucks.”

“So, I’ll bet it is pretty heavy.  I remember all those heavy crates at your party”

“No, it’s a gas, lighter than air and decays within moments of exposure.”

“What has all this got to do with you?”

“I am not throwing another party!”

“Gentlemen!”

The barman gestures with a wave of his latex-glove.

Mr. Hoffman is standing at the other end.  His office door is open behind him.

“It’s on the house.”

Lou looks up.

“Banesh, ‘May your tribe Increase’.”

“We are now closed.  Take your time, but please move to the back. I am not going anywhere yet.”

Mr. Hoffman gestures to the barman, who walks over to us and hovers a table away with a mask on his face, a tray and fresh towel over is arm.

“Gentlemen, just walk on over there by the wall, please.  I will bring your drinks.”

He puts our drinks on his tray and covers them with the towel and places the tray on our new table before we can walk across to it.

Lou sits down more easily and removes the towel from our drinks.

“In addition to that excavation on the Mall, they built a data mine.”

“You mean they dig the President’s speech out of the clay under the Mall?”

“Well, no, they store it there.”

“Okay, so where’s the mine?”

“I called it a data mine but it’s electronic mining with algorithms, so they can gauge the effect of the gas.  I have never been able to find out where the mine is.”

“I imagine it is essentially cranial cavity.”

“Gentlemen!  I have your orders.”

The barman puts a tray on the bar with our lunch on covered plates ready for pickup.

“I’ll get it, Lou.”

“Be sure we have ketchup.”

I pick up the tray as the retreating barman reaches the pay-point at the other end, pick up some ketchup and carry it all back to our more private table.

Lou seizes the tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser, holding it up as if it were a sample.

“The gas has some extraordinary properties.”

“Unstable, you mean?”

He is examining the dispenser more closely turning it in his fingers.

“Well, you might put it that way.  They are carbonating drinks with it.”

“So, what is the effect?”

“It goes straight to the gut. A so-called, ‘gut reaction’, that is. It gives people the sensation of something truer than truth.” 

He squirts ketchup on his fries with a wet sucking noise.

“Truth isn’t a sensation!”

“Have you ever heard the expression, “I feel that’s true?”

“Yes, but it is a figure of speech.”

“Not in those unreflective moments when something feels true!”

“Well sure but I just don’t understand the thought here.”

“You can’t understand a gut reaction by trying to find the reasoning in it.”

“So, you are saying that many voters have been gassed!”

“Yes, it is an intuitive agent, more compelling than reasoned argument.”

“Seems kind of foolish to me.”

He puts the ketchup dispenser down, carefully placing it between the salt and pepper shakers.

“So, it may, but this gas moves people to vote.” 

“An interesting sort of recreational drug!”

“Well, an ‘opium of the people’, yes.”

“AH! our Karl is never far from the scene!”

“Other effects are called ‘semi-truths’, mixed with the well-known ‘alternative facts’.”

“Oh, you mean half-truth?”

“More finely graded than that. Semi-truth is the product of cherry-picking.”

“I get it.  Not the tree of knowledge, but the orchard of political speech.”

“Precisely! a semi-truth cites a cherished fact, such as a quote from the constitution, but draws conclusions in many vague and subtle gradations and in many blends.”

“Isn’t that what is called, ‘micro-targeting?’ ”

“Yes, but the vagueness allows you to fill in, as it were.”

“Fill in with what?”

“What-ever your subconscious brings forth!” 

“So, once again, where’s the thought?’

“It is all intuitive, and associative.”

“That sounds like ‘shrinkery’!”

“Right, that is the beauty of this gas! Oh, we mustn’t forget the ‘anger quotient’.”

“A political calculation.”

“It is a factor, along with the distraction coefficient, which is used to judge the efficacy of the gas and the optimal time for it to release the anger potential.”

“I see, this really is a highly reactive gas.”

“That is the overall effect.”

“Do you mean that, what people believe is called true, because they believe it.”

“Yes, in many cases, the word truth is used in an act of loyalty.”  

“Toeing the party line, you might say.”

“In other cases, many I think, it is more a matter of self-deception.”

“Or is it complacency?”

“Also, as an act of arrogant self-assertion.”

“Like Albrecht Intaglio’s flaunting his long-barreled six-gun at community meetings.”

“Yes, now we know that guns are speech!”

“What about guns sitting in a locked safe.”

“Those are like sentences in books on the library shelf!”

“Some library, tanks of gas under the Mall!”

“We do keep hearing about, ‘weaponized speech’”.

“You point out another property of the gas, its many semantic variations.”

We both start eating our cold lunches.

133. Sophonisba

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.

Lou’s fondue party started at Daisy’s suggestion, as an interesting way to meet and discuss community business.  None of the Fauxmont Guild members could make it on such short notice, but they put it on anyway.  

It is dark by five, and we have had our fill by seven.  Every minute or so, we see another light floating in the bare trees beyond Lou’s back porch. They start high in the top of the window, blinking on and off irregularly and slowly descend in a diagonal across the rectangle. Lou breaks a long silence in the conversation.

“You see those lights?”

“Can’t be lighting bugs. It’s too cold out there.”

Daisy Briscoe leans forward in her armchair

“Fred, they must be enchanted lanterns!”

“What?”

“Well, will-o’-the-wisp, then.”

“Willow what?”

“No, not the tree. Don’t you know the story?”

“No idea.”

“They represent the soul of an unbaptized person trying to lead travelers to water in the hope of being baptized.”

“They seem to be coming in procession.  I mean why are all these unfortunate souls floating through my trees?”

“Lou, it is cold dark wet nights like this that bring out all kinds of things.”

“This is February, not Haloween!”

“It does tend to enliven the imagination though Fred.”

“Kind of misty too.  See how fuzzy your neighbor’s yellow porch light is?”

“Yeah, I am glad they used a bug light.  Reduces light pollution too.

“Who are your neighbors?”

“Ah, I forget, Fred. They are new.  Moved in last week.”

“They didn’t build a McMansion!”

“No, just put on an addition and restored the place.”

“So, haven’t you met anyone yet?”

“Well, come to think of it, Diddlie told me her name is Sophonisba.”

“She should know.”

“How’s that Daisy?”

“She makes it her business to welcome all newcomers with a bouquet of goldenrod.”

Lou laughs, leans back on the couch, takes off his gold-rimmed specs. and rubs his eyes.

“That’s been going on for years!”

“I don’t remember getting a bouquet of any kind.”

“Oh, Fred I know, but I hear you two got pretty close pretty fast!”

“Daisy, you mustn’t believe everything you hear.”

“Aha, okay — Lou, you have a mannerist painter living next door!”

“She is a psychic according to Diddlie, you know.”

Daisy extends her long arms in a stretch above her head.  Her gold and silver bracelets decorate the black sleeves of her turtleneck.

“Right! I have seen her sign at the Cremona Building on Route One”

“No wonder you have spooky lights in your trees!”

“You mean she is summoning the spirits, Fred?”

“I don’t know. Could be. They just want to check out Sophonisba’s new pad.”

“We are looking at landing lights of incoming flights to Calvin Coolidge National Airport.”

“So much for ‘silent Cal.’!”

“No, Lou, that is way too prosaic.”

“Yeah, Fred! but kind of likely don’t you think?”

“Let’s open the door and listen for the jets.”

Daisy holds up her empty fondue fork. The last bite has gone.

“No way!  You might let something in.”

“Yes, the noise.”

“You won’t hear a spirit.”

The sound of the door chimes silences us all.

“Oh no? There’s one at the front door!”

“Lou, you know perfectly well who that is.

Lark Bunlush appears in the hall, covered in a dripping black slicker with a green reflective vest over the top.

“Sorry, I am so late!”

“Okay Lark, glad to see you. Fondue’s gone. You want some punch?”

“Sure Lou, what’s in it?”

“Oh, fruit juice with something to give you a lift!”

Daisy shouts across the room looking over the back of her armchair.

“Lark, what do you know about our new neighbor?

“Ah, which one?”

“You mean there’s more than one?”

“Sure, there’s that huge new seven-bedroom place on Maxwell Ave. and the place next door, right here.”

Lark pulls her arm out of a wet sleeve as Steve holds up the collar from the back to let her step away from both slicker and vest.

“Maxwell Ave. is more like a hotel, not a house.”

Lou removes Lark’s slicker and vest to drip in the powder room. 

“I don’t think anyone has bought it, Lou.”

Lark takes to the loveseat facing the front of the house and ladles some dark fruity punch from the bowl on the coffee table into a tall cylindrical glass.

“Anyway, to answer your question; Sophie, next door, is Osiris Tarantula’s partner and Augie used to know her too.”

“Isn’t Augie coming?”

“No.”

“Ah, okay Lark.”

“I don’t want to go there. Sophonisba goes by Sophie?”

“Daisy, no one is going to say her full name, here in the States!”

“Wait a minute, Osiris lives in New York.”

“So, Fred?”

“Oh, you mean business partners?”

“Ah, I think there’s more to it than that!”

Lou stands looking out at the back porch, talking to the window.

“Yeah, okay, but partners usually live together.”

“You’ll be seeing Osiris around.”

“This is getting even spookier!”

“I suppose we will be seeing Boris too, huh?”

 “From what I hear, Boris and Sophie don’t get along.”

Lark stands up and walks over to the front window.

“Look at those weird lights!”

“We have been looking at them out back, all evening.”

Daisy pokes around the dish with her short-prong fork at the end of her long arm.

“This fondue party is turning into something else!”

“A gathering of specters!”

“Lights, specters, wraiths, it’s too much punch, Fred.”

“Where, are you looking Lark?”

“The street Lou, out front, they seem to be floating in the air.”

Daisy gets up too.

“Yeah, greenish, yellow and look!”

Lark is pointing at colored lights moving slowly along the street and others, stationary. 

“There’s some red ones.”

“You think the spirits are having a house-warming for Sophie?”

“Lou, this Sophie is bringing you lots of apparitions!”

“So far, all I see are lights.”

“We are rediscovering the supernatural Lou!”

“Oh, come on!”

“No Lou, I mean I was talking about it with bel Vionnet.”

“I think we are done with superstition like that.”

“It’s not what you think Fred.”

“Lark, I can’t believe bel would be into that.”

“Where are bel and Steve anyway?”

Lou scratches his brow and sits down again.

“Steve called yesterday, to say they won’t make it.”

“Why not?”

“He says bel has a new foundling Persian cat to take care of.”

Daisy sits down on the love seat.

“Yeah, that’s right.  It’s called Xerxes and he is grumpy, too.”

“Steve dropped off the punch this afternoon.”

“Bel is talking about some guy called, Jung.”

“Yes, the Psychoanalyst, but he is on about dreams.”

“That’s it, Fred.”

“Okay, dreams, Jung, and shrinks, I know bel is reading a lot of that stuff.”

“Okay, so the thing is, that dreams are supernatural.”

“But they are not Daisy.  Dreams are products of mind and brain, not gods and ghosts.”

“That is the point of rediscovery. It is all in our heads!”

“I can buy that!”

“So, what has been rediscovered?”

“Well, Fred, dreams and imaginings don’t obey the laws of physics.”

“Of course, it’s all fantastic.”

“So, what are you talking about?”

“Bel calls it getting out of out of our dominant myth.”

“And what is that?”

A brilliant sweep of green light passes across the room.

The wind comes up. A jet passes low overhead with the roar of its hot wind. Something hits the roof, shaking the house.

“Oh my God!”

“Daisy, that was a Mammoth’s ghost!”

“Oh, sure!”

“No, they are coming back, you know.”

“Right Lou, I saw one dating an elephant at the perpetual red-light on route one.”

“No, seriously, there is work being done with their DNA.”

“You think I am batty, but you will see.”

She squeezes her damp napkin into a ball and throws it at Lou.

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.

Mr. Fawkes’s white van was backed up askew and parked, taking up the whole width of Diddlie’s driveway. The doors are open, but a green tarp hides the interior, suspended like a curtain across the back to keep the rain out. 

Mr. Fawkes’s white van was backed up askew and parked, taking up the whole width of Diddlie’s driveway. The doors are open, but a green tarp hides the interior, suspended like a curtain across the back to keep the rain out. 

Red letters along each side read, “FAWKES, Expert Pyrotechnician available for hire at GuyPyro1605@sparkler.com” in an eccentric font designed to look like Elizabethan script. Underneath, in smaller Helvetica, “Alternative INTERESTING jobs accepted”.

Diddlie’s yellow slicker hangs off her like a tent.  She folds her flip phone.

“What makes your yard work so interesting to Mr. Fawkes?”

“It’s not the work, sweetie, it’s me. If I do say so myself.”

“Oh, has a crush, does he?”

“Well, I hope NOT!”

“So, what then?”

“Just certain things, you know, sweetie.”

“I don’t know.”

We both look up as the unexpected sun cast our shadows on the moss and leaves at our feet.

“Glad it stopped raining”

Diddlie pulls on my sleeve.

“I think you have an idea, honey.”

“Honey, sweetie, you are trying to distract me with endearments.”

“Not at all, Fred.”

“Well, you are not telling me much.”

“We have been friends for what? ten years or more.  You know what I do.”

“You somehow gather goldenrod, in full bloom, throughout the year and store it in that bomb shelter your husband built during the cold war.”

“He doesn’t know anything about that!”

“You mean it is your scintillating personality!”

“No sarcasm please.”

“Sorry, frustration got the better of me.”

“Okay, he’s come to fix the fence around my compost heap.”

“That’s what he finds so interesting?”, 

“Look, over there, the wire fence, part covered in ivy, rusting out and three of the fence posts are leaning way over.”

“So that’s what it is!”

“What do you mean?”

“I have noticed that thing before and took it for the remains of an animal cage.”

“My raked leaves, grass clippings, used teabags and coffee grounds and filters, all go on there.”

“You are caffeinating the soil!”

“Only when it rains.”

“Must be a strong brew.”

“You think so?”

“Right, hyper-active worms help the composting process!”

“No comment.”

“Oh, it is just you and the earthworms then?”

“Oh, Come on! What is it with you today?”

“It’s my inner absurdist.”

“Well, don’t let him out right now, okay?”

“It’s involuntary I am afraid.”

Diddlie wanders off slowly, towards her carport.

“Come on! nothing to fear! Anyway, the mixture was too strong for the goats I guess.”

“What goats?”

“My husband, Stuart, planned to get some goats when we first came.”

“Did you ever get them?”

“Yeah, Sun and Shade only stayed for a few days.”

“Were they a couple?”

“Right, Sun was the female and Shade was the guy.”

“They hardly had time to learn the lie of the land.”

“Yes, they did.  They ate most of the neighbor’s vegetable patch on the third day and then we lost them both for nearly twenty-four hours until animal rescue called us to pick them up.”

We stroll over to her carport together and look in on Mr. Liddell.  He has half-buried himself in straw.  His ears are lying back, and he blinks once and takes no notice.

“You should have fenced in the yard!”

Light rain has resumed, tapping lightly on Diddlie’s bright yellow ‘tent’.

“We did, but they got out by munching through a holly bush to get at the vege. next door.” 

“Why was there no fence there?”

“It was about fifty years old.  It was so thick you couldn’t even see through it.  It was the biggest fence we had!”

“Where did you put the goats after animal rescue called?”

“We gave Sun and Shade to my friend Hank James.  He has lots of grass over on the Eastern Shore.”

“What a shame, you had to get rid of your primary lawnmowers!”

“We had to compensate the neighbors with expensive produce from the farm market.”

“Sounds like a neighborly agreement, no court costs.”

We are back behind the carport, where we started.  Where Diddlie can watch Mr. Fawkes at work.

“This was long before that grotesque hodgepodge of architectural styles, went up.” 

Diddlie points next door. Mr. Fawkes approaches. His khaki bib overalls stained with soot and wet up to the knees.  He removes his dark brown Akubra Cattleman Hat and shakes the moisture off it. 

“You get taller every time I see you!”

“Haven’t grown a millimeter since I was seventeen.  Left Australia at the height of one point nine meters.”

“Well, you can always volunteer as a lighthouse!”

“I prefer ornamental explosives.”

“Yeah, right! What is going on in my compost heap?”

“Diddlie, you’ve got a pond there, not a compost heap!”

“I do?  Sorry, I thought it was a pile of dead leaves and the black snake I told you about.”

“No snake, it’s winter, just subsidence, Did, a whole lot of it.”

“You mean like a sinkhole?”

“Come see.”

We follow Fawkes’s long stride through ivy, past greenbrier climbing Japanese Honeysuckle, and some Wisteria winding up the trunk of a mature sweet gum in python’s coils.

“It must be the old septic tank.”

“So, what’s this doing in there?”

Mr. Fawkes holds up a large wiring harness clogged with sweet gum leaves, sticky balls and several teabags with rusty staples attached.”

“Look at those teabags!  They must be made of plastic!”

“Fred, I stopped using anything but paper ones, two years ago.”

Mr. Fawkes is raking a pile of leaves, twigs, and muck with his garden fork.

He uncovers a smashed flat screen, a circuit board with color-coded elements soldered all over it, resembling feasting insects. Sparkes fly as he rakes further, and he drops the fork at once.

“That’s a live cable for God’s sake!”

“I’ll call the utilities.”

“No Fred!  Don’t call anyone.”

“This is dangerous.”

“I know but he will take care of it.”

Mr. Fakwes goes back to his van and steps up behind his green curtain.

Diddlie is trying to use her flip phone.

She drops it among the wet leaves.  It bounces into the ivy spreading across the ground towards our feet, from the broken fence.

“This damn thing!”

“Here let me call.” 

She seizes my arm.

“No, I need to use mine.  Call my phone then we can hear where it is.”

We can see the screen light up a foot away, towards the fence.  As Diddlie steps forward to pick it up, the phone flashes and smokes.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Mr. Fawkes is back with a device on the end of a long pole.  He holds it with thick leather gauntlets like those used by the utility company technicians.

“Stand by, Did.”

He pokes the end of the pole into the heap he made with his garden fork and moves a telescoping section of the pole back and forth, near his hands.  There is a low hum then a series of pops.  Steam and smoke rise out of the pile.

“Ahha! Just as I thought!”

Mr. Fawkes withdraws his probe.

“That ‘ll fix them.”

“Fix whom?”

Diddlie turns back toward the driveway.  We can hear the rapid clicking turnover of a heavy diesel engine.

“Who is this?”

“Oh! I didn’t even try to call them.”

“Maybe Mr. Fawkes did?”

“No way!”

Diddlie runs towards the driveway, stumbling over a broken cinderblock half-hidden in the ivy vines.  An unmarked Orange truck has pulled up opposite the driveway with a cherry picker on the back, obstructing Mr. Fawkes exit.  Next to them is Urban Safety and Security Solutions, in their black Chevy Suburban, blocking Bailes Lane completely.  A man holding an assault rifle, waves from the front passenger window and steps out. The driver’s window cracks open.

“Hi there.”

“What is he doing in the Security truck?”

“We just gave him a ride, Mrs. Drates.”

The driver’s window hums down all the way.

“Hi, Irma Standov, Urban Safety, and Security Solutions.”

“Hi, I am Diddlie Drates, as you seem to know.  I don’t remember calling anyone.”

“Ah no, we just got a signal.”

“Aha, and what made you come by my house?”

“Nothing to worry about.  Thought a line might be down.”

“You did, did you? and where were you last month, when that big storm knocked out my power for forty-eight hours?”

“We were real, busy.”

“Well, my power is fine right now, thank you.”

The Rifleman strolls over towards the compost heap, weapon at the ready.

“Hey there!”

He turns around and comes back. Diddlie accosts him while he puts his assault rifle in the truck and starts again.

“Where do you think you are going?”

He looks back again.

“Just going to check things out.  Wouldn’t want you to get electrocuted, now.”

“Come back here!  You have no right to walk across my property!”

“Mrs. Drates, I am with the Fauxmont Militia.  We are here to protect you!”

“I only see one Militia person and one rent-a-cop person.  So, what’s with this, ‘We’?”

“I am a team member Ma’am.”

“Yeah, okay.” 

He kicks his way out of the ivy back to the driveway.

“I have all the help I need, Mr. ah, what’s your name?”

“Rombout, Ma’am, Sargent Rombout, Fauxmont Militia, keeping you and your community safe since 2013.”

The orange truck with cherry picker revs up as if to ready escape and soon rattles down Oval Street hill, past the Trip mansion.  It breaks with a screeching lurch at the stop sign on the corner.

“Why don’t you follow that truck on out of here?”

“Because Ma’am, Mr. Fawkes isn’t qualified to fix your problem, and we have the resources to help you.”

“I don’t know what this is about, but I suggest you find my neighbor Jake Trip,”

She points next door, where an orange tank truck from Dordrechts Group, appears to be pumping something out of the Trip’s garage.

“He started all this security malarkey. Talk to him.”

“Mr. Trip is not available right now, but you can be sure we shall get with him as soon as possible.”

Mr. Fawkes walks over to his van.  Puts away his pole, closes the back door and tries to pull out of the driveway.  Finding the SUV in his way he blasts his horn and 

leans out of his window.

“You mind moving over?”

Irma Standov, pulls forward to let him pass.

“Diddlie, you won’t have any more trouble today.  I’ll call you about the rest tomorrow.”

“What about my phone?”

“Tomorrow!”

Fawkes drives off down Oval Street.  Doesn’t stop at the corner stop sign and speeds out of sight along Wickett Street.

“If you must know, Mr. Fawkes and Stuart were going to start a business.”

“So, you go back a long way.”

“Yes, Guy has always been there for me since Stuart’s death.  See, I am wearing his old slicker!”

Summary

Fred finds Diddlie standing outside her house watching Mr. Fawkes at work in her garden. She points out her compost heap with broken fence and goes on to tell Fred about two goats, Sun and Shade.  Her husband Stuart brought them in, but they ate most of the neighbor’s vegetables, then disappeared. Stuart had to give them to Hank James, after Animal Rescue found them.  Fawkes finds Diddlie’s compost heap has subsided.  It is full of water and old electronics.  Then he finds a live power line in the heap and probes it with a special tool. Diddlie drops her phone and it catches fire when Fred calls the number to help find it in the ivy leaves.  Fred offers to call the power co. but D. stops him. Insisting on making the call herself. Urban Safety and Security Solutions arrive in a black Chevy Suburban with Sargent Rombout of the Fauxmont Militia in the passenger seat.  There is no explanation for their arrival or the arrival of an unmarked orange truck with Cherry Picker. A tank truck from Dordrechts Group is parked by the Trip’s garage. Irma Standov only says they got a signal. Diddlie gets contentious and tells them to leave. Fawkes packs up his probe and askes Irma to move out of his way so he can drive off.  He tells Diddlie he will be back, and she won’t have any more trouble. D. tells fred Stuart and Gay were planning to start a business when Stuart died, and Guy has “been there for her ever since”. 

Red letters along each side read, “FAWKES, Expert Pyrotechnician available for hire at GuyPyro1605@sparkler.com” in an eccentric font designed to look like Elizabethan script. Underneath, in smaller Helvetica, “Alternative INTERESTING jobs accepted”.

Diddlie’s yellow slicker hangs off her like a tent.  She folds her flip phone.

“What makes your yard work so interesting to Mr. Fawkes?”

“It’s not the work, sweetie, it’s me. If I do say so myself.”

“Oh, has a crush, does he?”

“Well, I hope NOT!”

“So, what then?”

“Just certain things, you know, sweetie.”

“I don’t know.”

We both look up as the unexpected sun cast our shadows on the moss and leaves at our feet.

“Glad it stopped raining”

Diddlie pulls on my sleeve.

“I think you have an idea, honey.”

“Honey, sweetie, you are trying to distract me with endearments.”

“Not at all, Fred.”

“Well, you are not telling me much.”

“We have been friends for what? ten years or more.  You know what I do.”

“You somehow gather goldenrod, in full bloom, throughout the year and store it in that bomb shelter your husband built during the cold war.”

“He doesn’t know anything about that!”

“You mean it is your scintillating personality!”

“No sarcasm please.”

“Sorry, frustration got the better of me.”

“Okay, he’s come to fix the fence around my compost heap.”

“That’s what he finds so interesting?”, 

“Look, over there, the wire fence, part covered in ivy, rusting out and three of the fence posts are leaning way over.”

“So that’s what it is!”

“What do you mean?”

“I have noticed that thing before and took it for the remains of an animal cage.”

“My raked leaves, grass clippings, used teabags and coffee grounds and filters, all go on there.”

“You are caffeinating the soil!”

“Only when it rains.”

“Must be a strong brew.”

“You think so?”

“Right, hyper-active worms help the composting process!”

“No comment.”

“Oh, it is just you and the earthworms then?”

“Oh, Come on! What is it with you today?”

“It’s my inner absurdist.”

“Well, don’t let him out right now, okay?”

“It’s involuntary I am afraid.”

Diddlie wanders off slowly, towards her carport.

“Come on! nothing to fear! Anyway, the mixture was too strong for the goats I guess.”

“What goats?”

“My husband, Stuart, planned to get some goats when we first came.”

“Did you ever get them?”

“Yeah, Sun and Shade only stayed for a few days.”

“Were they a couple?”

“Right, Sun was the female and Shade was the guy.”

“They hardly had time to learn the lie of the land.”

“Yes, they did.  They ate most of the neighbor’s vegetable patch on the third day and then we lost them both for nearly twenty-four hours until animal rescue called us to pick them up.”

We stroll over to her carport together and look in on Mr. Liddell.  He has half-buried himself in straw.  His ears are lying back, and he blinks once and takes no notice.

“You should have fenced in the yard!”

Light rain has resumed, tapping lightly on Diddlie’s bright yellow ‘tent’.

“We did, but they got out by munching through a holly bush to get at the vege. next door.” 

“Why was there no fence there?”

“It was about fifty years old.  It was so thick you couldn’t even see through it.  It was the biggest fence we had!”

“Where did you put the goats after animal rescue called?”

“We gave Sun and Shade to my friend Hank James.  He has lots of grass over on the Eastern Shore.”

“What a shame, you had to get rid of your primary lawnmowers!”

“We had to compensate the neighbors with expensive produce from the farm market.”

“Sounds like a neighborly agreement, no court costs.”

We are back behind the carport, where we started.  Where Diddlie can watch Mr. Fawkes at work.

“This was long before that grotesque hodgepodge of architectural styles, went up.” 

Diddlie points next door. Mr. Fawkes approaches. His khaki bib overalls stained with soot and wet up to the knees.  He removes his dark brown Akubra Cattleman Hat and shakes the moisture off it. 

“You get taller every time I see you!”

“Haven’t grown a millimeter since I was seventeen.  Left Australia at the height of one point nine meters.”

“Well, you can always volunteer as a lighthouse!”

“I prefer ornamental explosives.”

“Yeah, right! What is going on in my compost heap?”

“Diddlie, you’ve got a pond there, not a compost heap!”

“I do?  Sorry, I thought it was a pile of dead leaves and the black snake I told you about.”

“No snake, it’s winter, just subsidence, Did, a whole lot of it.”

“You mean like a sinkhole?”

“Come see.”

We follow Fawkes’s long stride through ivy, past greenbrier climbing Japanese Honeysuckle, and some Wisteria winding up the trunk of a mature sweet gum in python’s coils.

“It must be the old septic tank.”

“So, what’s this doing in there?”

Mr. Fawkes holds up a large wiring harness clogged with sweet gum leaves, sticky balls and several teabags with rusty staples attached.”

“Look at those teabags!  They must be made of plastic!”

“Fred, I stopped using anything but paper ones, two years ago.”

Mr. Fawkes is raking a pile of leaves, twigs, and muck with his garden fork.

He uncovers a smashed flat screen, a circuit board with color-coded elements soldered all over it, resembling feasting insects. Sparkes fly as he rakes further, and he drops the fork at once.

“That’s a live cable for God’s sake!”

“I’ll call the utilities.”

“No Fred!  Don’t call anyone.”

“This is dangerous.”

“I know but he will take care of it.”

Mr. Fakwes goes back to his van and steps up behind his green curtain.

Diddlie is trying to use her flip phone.

She drops it among the wet leaves.  It bounces into the ivy spreading across the ground towards our feet, from the broken fence.

“This damn thing!”

“Here let me call.” 

She seizes my arm.

“No, I need to use mine.  Call my phone then we can hear where it is.”

We can see the screen light up a foot away, towards the fence.  As Diddlie steps forward to pick it up, the phone flashes and smokes.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Mr. Fawkes is back with a device on the end of a long pole.  He holds it with thick leather gauntlets like those used by the utility company technicians.

“Stand by, Did.”

He pokes the end of the pole into the heap he made with his garden fork and moves a telescoping section of the pole back and forth, near his hands.  There is a low hum then a series of pops.  Steam and smoke rise out of the pile.

“Ahha! Just as I thought!”

Mr. Fawkes withdraws his probe.

“That ‘ll fix them.”

“Fix whom?”

Diddlie turns back toward the driveway.  We can hear the rapid clicking turnover of a heavy diesel engine.

“Who is this?”

“Oh! I didn’t even try to call them.”

“Maybe Mr. Fawkes did?”

“No way!”

Diddlie runs towards the driveway, stumbling over a broken cinderblock half-hidden in the ivy vines.  An unmarked Orange truck has pulled up opposite the driveway with a cherry picker on the back, obstructing Mr. Fawkes exit.  Next to them is Urban Safety and Security Solutions, in their black Chevy Suburban, blocking Bailes Lane completely.  A man holding an assault rifle, waves from the front passenger window and steps out. The driver’s window cracks open.

“Hi there.”

“What is he doing in the Security truck?”

“We just gave him a ride, Mrs. Drates.”

The driver’s window hums down all the way.

“Hi, Irma Standov, Urban Safety, and Security Solutions.”

“Hi, I am Diddlie Drates, as you seem to know.  I don’t remember calling anyone.”

“Ah no, we just got a signal.”

“Aha, and what made you come by my house?”

“Nothing to worry about.  Thought a line might be down.”

“You did, did you? and where were you last month, when that big storm knocked out my power for forty-eight hours?”

“We were real, busy.”

“Well, my power is fine right now, thank you.”

The Rifleman strolls over towards the compost heap, weapon at the ready.

“Hey there!”

He turns around and comes back. Diddlie accosts him while he puts his assault rifle in the truck and starts again.

“Where do you think you are going?”

He looks back again.

“Just going to check things out.  Wouldn’t want you to get electrocuted, now.”

“Come back here!  You have no right to walk across my property!”

“Mrs. Drates, I am with the Fauxmont Militia.  We are here to protect you!”

“I only see one Militia person and one rent-a-cop person.  So, what’s with this, ‘We’?”

“I am a team member Mam.”

“Yeah, okay.” 

He kicks his way out of the ivy back to the driveway.

“I have all the help I need, Mr. ah, what’s your name?”

“Rombout, Mam, Sargent Rombout, Fauxmont Militia, keeping you and your community safe since 2013.”

The orange truck with cherry picker revs up as if to ready escape and soon rattles down Oval Street hill, past the Trip mansion.  It breaks with a screeching lurch at the stop sign on the corner.

“Why don’t you follow that truck on out of here?”

“Because Mam, Mr. Fawkes isn’t qualified to fix your problem, and we have the resources to help you.”

“I don’t know what this is about, but I suggest you find my neighbor Jake Trip,”

She points next door, where an orange tank truck from Dordrechts Group, appears to be pumping something out of the Trip’s garage.

“He started all this security malarkey. Talk to him.”

“Mr. Trip is not available right now, but you can be sure we shall get with him as soon as possible.”

Mr. Fawkes walks over to his van.  Puts away his pole, closes the back door and tries to pull out of the driveway.  Finding the SUV in his way he blasts his horn and 

leans out of his window.

“You mind moving over?”

Irma Standov, pulls forward to let him pass.

“Diddlie, you won’t have any more trouble today.  I’ll call you about the rest tomorrow.”

“What about my phone?”

“Tomorrow!”

Fawkes drives off down Oval Street.  Doesn’t stop at the corner stop sign and speeds out of sight along Wickett Street.

“If you must know, Mr. Fawkes and Stuart were going to start a business.”

“So, you go back a long way.”

“Yes, Guy has always been there for me since Stuart’s death.  See, I am wearing his old slicker!”

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.

We, can see ourselves reflected in the windows. Christmas lights come on in the parking lot.  What is outside and what is in? One of the miniature Christmas trees and their lights out in the lot appear over bel’s head like electric jewels on her crown.  Traffic in the congested parking lot is maneuvering, unobstructed through the tables and chairs of the Pie shop.  A couple enter wearing floppy red Santa hats with white tassels hanging down on the lowered hoods of their red parkas.  The open door admits cold air and a blast of car hooters from outside, then the crunch and tinkle of colliding vehicles.  The door closes behind the two youthful Santas.

Felicity Tock opens the Pie Shop’s glass door for Gertie Stone. Big white Alph’s round face appears in the opening, nosing rich wafts of the interior, unknown to its present occupants.  He pushes past and walks in with canine smile and thick furry face reminiscent of a friendly polar bear. Sniffs bel’s down coat from the top of the chair-back where it hangs, to the floor.  Where it pools in a gathering of damp down-filled clumps. Taking his time, he runs his nose along the edge of the table between us, delicately, never quite touching.

“Oh! Hi there.”

“It’s Alpha dog!  Look who’s here.”

Gertie Stone’s shoulders slant to the left as if arthritis has her walking along a hillside.

“I am getting slower by the day, bel.  Pretty soon it will take me all day to get the crapper and back.”

Felicity unbuttons her shearling coat. Keeps it on and helps Gertie out of her deep blue gabardine cape with white scarf. A golden fox leaps from a round broach at her neck.  She leans on her silver topped cane and presses the arthritic knuckles of her other hand on the dragon table. 

“You got my chair?  Where’s the chair?”

“Right under your butt Mama!”

“Well, it’s too low.”

“It is a standard chair.  Same as all the others.  Just keep lowering.”

“I’ll be on the goddamn floor soon.”

Felicity pushes the chair further under Gerties girth to touch the back of her knees.

“Ya!  Okay I am down, stiff, too old to live and too young to die.”

“Said, Jethro Tull.”

“I don’t know Jethro, Fred.”

“It is the name of a rock band from way back.”

Alph tries to settle under the table but his shoulder moves it into bel’s and my lap.

“Out Alph!  Out!”

He backs out from his attempt and looks up at Felicity, panting.

“Okay Alph, come on.  Come here.”

Alph walks around the back of Gertie’s chair and with Felicity’s guidance and settles under the table where it abuts the window wall.

Felicity leans down from behind to speak into Gertie’s ear.

“You want to keep your beret on?”

“Hell, yes.”

Gertie has her hands up to check the wooly orange beret tipped to the right from the top of her head.

“Fred, I spent the sixties listening to Bach and trying to get my hands into his Two- and Three-Part Inventions.”

She holds up arthritic fingers clawing above her palm.

“And what did you hear?”

“An unearthly combination of order and grace, adventure and discipline, an expansive mind!”

“You grabbed hold of Johan Sebastian with your ear!”

“I ignored the sound of spoiled self-centered white fools, yelling, ‘freedom’ from the dope crazed eddies of their melting middle class minds.”

“Okay Gertie, I get it, alliteration and all.  The sixties were not your time.”

“That’s your generation, you know.”

“Is that supposed to mean something, Fil?”

Felicity turns away.  Goes to the coffee bar.  She glances at the selections posted on the LED Screen hung on the wall behind Mrs. Rutherford and her help.  The videos featuring local customer participation are turned down. Though we can see fragments of their sequences as we glance up at them reflected in the windows.

“Was that dismal decade anybody’s time, bel?”

“Sure.”

“Aha, like who’s?”

“In this country at least, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement.”

“Well, it’s too bad, the two got mixed up in each-other.”

“Why?”

“Because, bel, what could be more important than civil rights?  It is a story as long as our disgraceful history…. Felicity, what is it?”

“It wasn’t all disgraceful.”

“Okay, some fine aspirations and also a cruel and lasting compromise.”

“For that admission, here’s your coffee and croissant.”

Gertie takes a sniff and then a sip, while Felicity sits down next to her with a tall blue mug.

“Ah! Café Crème, just the way I like it with an almond croissant.”

“It’s Espresso.”

“Well, I remember it from our Paris days.”

“Okay, I have my Jasmine tea.  What have you got bel?”

“Darjeeling, always.”

“Your cane is about to slip off the table.”

“Grab it, will you, Fil?”

“I can’t reach from here.  You can.”

Gertie looks aside, grabs her cane in her claws, less than halfway up.  She leans back and straightens her shoulders.  Holds her cane up as if it were a baton with the silver handle above her head like a bright sign of authority.

“Ah, you know.”

She pauses to get our attention.

“It, I mean the civil rights story, passes through the sixties and continues to this moment. While that war was a blundering quagmire, both politically and practically, so it muddied the waters.”

She lowers the cane and hands it to Fil. 

“Four o’clock and it is dark already!”

Fil hunches up in the sheep and lanolin of her coat collar.

“Happens every year Fil, winter Solstice.

“I think the sleet is getting thicker, Fred.”

“It’s a mess out there.”

“We have the biggest mess of all now.”

“You mean climate change Gertie?”

“Bel, I mean we humans, damn fools, evolved to the point of self-reflection only to distract ourselves in an adolescent commercial fog!”   

“You are in a good mood today!”

“Yeah Fred, pain both inside and out.” 

“You might try those meds prescribed for you.”

“No thanks Fil.  No thanks to death before my time.”

“Yes, desensitized to pain is to be desensitized…”

“That’s the point bel.  When I can’t stand it anymore, I’ll damn well end it.”

Felicity grabs Gertie’s wrist.

“Don’t be so arrogant!”

“Just matter of fact my darling.”

“Just stubborn foolishness.  Puts you in a bad mood.”

“Okay, so I am victim of pathetic fallacy, okay, I’ll take it.”

Bel holds her warming mug of Darjeeling between her palms.

“Are you now driven to introspection?”

“You mean, am I herded into my navel by whimpering dogs of regret?”

“How about wandering there on a quest for clarity?”

“My thoughts and impulses are as plain as day.”

“Consider it morally.”

“What is a moral impulse?  An impulse is an impulse.”

“Motive is really the key, I think.”

“Ah, motive!  A mystery in its subtlety and a kick in the teeth in its clarity.”

“Looking at motive started me looking for something I could love in everyone I met.”

“Bel, let’s leave Polly Anna lost in her wooly wilderness.”

Felicity leans forward toward bel.

“That sounds impossibly challenging, bel!”

“Well, it is perfectly Surreal!”

Gertie grabs the edge of the table in one hand and tries to make a fist with the other.

“I keep hearing people use that word, and I am willing to bet they have never heard of Andre Breton!”

“No Andre is history.  We are living now, a new crisis, a new improved diet plan, a way to get rich by clicking, ‘here’ and then I look at the crows and starlings.”

“You are no Maldoror.”

“No I am the Anti Lautreamont.” 

“Bel, don’t get squishy on me, please!”

 “There is nothing squishy about a crow. Corvids include crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, all smart, black and easy to love.”

“Bel, have you lost it?  Ornithology is not my subject.”

“Are you saying we should all fall for starlings and the Corvids?”

“No Fil, I am saying let’s keep a positive vibe.”

“Oh! Well okay, yeah, my reception varies.”

“So, what do you find so surreal about this love vibe of yours?”

“Gertie, it is transformational. Life is more interesting.”

“What is so interesting?

“People”

“What about hate, disgust, prejudice and prejudgment, what about aggression and force and coercion?”

“It is all there.”

“So, you admit to those impulses?”

“When possible, I choose to let them pass.”

“You can’t choose an impulse!   It is there, like a slap in the face.”

“No, I choose where to pay attention.”

“Aha, you claim too much!”

“No more than; ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’.

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.

Albrecht sits with his feet up on the chair opposite, in the driveway of the Intaglio home. He has set up the patio furniture on the black asphalt of the newly paved driveway.  His brown leather bomber jacket and Stetson keep out the cold while cleaning his long-barreled revolver.  He has a pocket-size automatic on the table next to him along with a rag and a small plastic bottle of gun oil.  Someone in a long down coat with the hood up is standing with him.  Yellowing horse chestnut leaves fall around them, palmate, five, and seven fingered. A leaf lands with its seven fingered leaf on his rag.  Spread as if to grasp it.

Bel Vionnet looks up from under her hood as I walk over through the open gate.  Albrecht salutes, tapping his gun barrel against his temple.

“Fred, do you need to clean your piece?  I’ve got the right stuff here.”

“No thanks, Albrecht, I haven’t bought one.”

“I’m going to keep telling you buddy, it’s time to get yourself some protection.”

“From whom?”

“You’ll know when they come, and the cops are overwhelmed by people who can’t even speak our nation’s language.”

Albrecht takes his booted feet off the chair and gestures toward another vacant one opposite him at the table.

“Bel, Fred, why don’t you pull up a seat?”

“Thanks, but it is too cold to sit out here, even in the sun.”

Bel turns to keep her back to a momentary breeze.

She rubs her palms together and jumps up and down to warm up.

“I don’t think that time has come. Any way Albrecht, where have you been?  I haven’t seen you around.”

“Yeah, I just got back from a trip out West.”

“Back to your spiritual roots!”

“You know, I had to get away from a domestic situation.”

“Yes, sorry to hear about that.”

“It’s okay bel. Go out West, see how those folks are taking over out there.”

“Those Folks, Albrecht?”

“Yeah, the ‘Amigos’ from points South and the ‘Allah’ crowd from the desert.”

“I don’t sense the danger, Albrecht.”

“No, you will. It is coming your way.”

“I see Hispanics doing yard and roof work and operating restaurants and working in politics and so on.”

He shakes his head. Sets his revolver aside and picks up the automatic.

“You know, I found this in the house yesterday and it all came back to me. I mean I could see grandad in my mind’s eye, you know. It was like, if someone told me his spirit came down from heaven to visit, I could have believed it.”

“What did Grandad say, after his descent from heaven?”

Albrecht looks up at bel with the automatic in his lap.

“Come on bel, I am not into old-time religion.  You know me better than that.  I just know something comes over me every once in a while.”

“Your grandad’s inspiration!”

“You remember the Virginia Company?”

“Yeah, James Town, around 1606.”

“And bel, right, 1606, they were armed ready to profit from their courage.”

“It was also the beginning of one of the great killings of our history.”

“It is called creative destruction bel. We have built the greatest country in the world out of a wilderness in the last 200 hundred years.”

“Albrecht, I think that is candy-coated history, to say the least.”

“Okay Fred, but I just want to tell you Grandad reminded me what it takes to make things happen.”

“Our history is a lot more complicated than that, though.”

“It simply reminds me who I am, hard conservative and ready to fight.”

“But Albrecht, there is nobody to shoot it out with around here.”

“You Liberals don’t get it. You are too distracted by all this impeachment nonsense.”

“That is serious business.”

Albrecht pulls the clip out of the handle of his automatic showing that it is empty.

“Nice and compact, looks easy to carry.”

“Fred, that man was never unarmed.  He gave this to my grandma, and she had it in her purse at all times.”

“Dare I ask if she used it?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Well, you have followed your grandparent’s example alright.”

“Yup, the old man taught me how to shoot at a range South of here.”

“What did your parents think of that?”

“Oh, Dad is too wrapped up in art to know anything, and Mom is too wrapped up in him.”

Bel steps toward him and looks down on him closely, speaking softly.

“Did he ever shoot anyone?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Was he a soldier or something?”

“Law enforcement.”

Bel takes a step back looking up into the trees as a whirl of oak leaves rattle to the ground opposite.

“Albrecht, does his spirit often drop in on you?”

“He became my inspiration Fred, after he died, and I first went West. I found out I was an American.”

“You have always been an American.”

“Not a real American, who fights for his liberty and keeps his powder dry, so to speak.”

“What is a real American?”

“If you perceive the dangers of the immigrant and socialist threats, you are well on the way.”

“Isn’t it more a matter of law and civics?”

“No, basically it is just power.”

“Right, the power of law.”

“In a way, mixed with politics, and if Macadamia was president you would see it working right.”

“Well, I am sure Macadamia got your vote.”

“No, he did not.”

“What? but Albrecht, he was your man!”

“He still is but I didn’t want Mac to take my vote from a conservative who had a better chance of winning.”

“Strategic vote!”

“Right bel. Most voters are idiots.  You know what?  Back in ancient Greece the word ‘Idiot’ meant a private citizen!”

“Well, well, Albrecht, what have you been reading?”

“Oh, just a little history.”

“You got to know the ‘hoi polloi’.”

“Sure, they will buy what we tell them. We just need to keep their minds full of fog.”

“What do you mean, idiots and fog?”

“Keep mixing it up, liberal facts, conservative facts, and so on.”

“Lies, you mean?”

“Fred, wake up buddy, politics is the art of lying truthfully.”

“That sounds absurd.”

“It often is absurd.”

“So, you see no value in truth, honesty, and integrity?”

“Integrity?  Politicians?  Come on now!  As I keep saying, Fred, belief is what it is all about.  Facts are what people want to believe.”

“A fact is a fact regardless of what people believe.”

“That’s philosophy, not politics.”

A truck pulls up opposite towing a trailer with lawn care equipment. 

“But it seems to me, some of us want to believe lies.”

“Nobody believes lies.  That’s impossible!”

“Albrecht you are not making any sense!”

“Bel, I am just telling you how it is now.”

“Do you accept the difference between truth and lies?”

“Not in politics.”

“So, you believe in the deep state conspiracy”

“Yes, looks that way to me, bel.”

“Which deep state is that?”

“Fred, its people who have been in big government jobs for too long.  The whole swamp needs draining!”

“A lot of those folks are patriotic Americans.”

“For goodness sake, you Liberals think …”

Someone starts a leaf blower next door.  It revs into a deafening buzz and soon dies down again.

“Well, you are not making any sense to me, or maybe I get it. Maybe I should be far more worried.”

“It’s about power, that is; perception, belief, and ideology, and we have the winning ideology.”

A blond man from the truck starts blowing leaves towards the street from the yard opposite.

“You may think so, but these impeachment hearings are revealing scandalous behavior.”

“Bel, listen, you two are college-educated Liberals.  The majority of Americans didn’t go to college.  Out West, in the real America, they don’t care about these hearings…”

The propinquity of blower’s double stroke motor drowns out all conversation.

Bel keeps in the sun which hasn’t melted the puddle in the shade of the garage door.  Even when the air is still, the horse chestnut keeps dropping its summer burden of leaves and nuts, round and spikey like sea mines with too many fuses.  She picks up a nut fresh one out of its casing.

Albrecht looks at its deep brown finish in her fingers, and the leaf blower’s motor dies down to idle.

“That thing looks like someone spent all day working on it with furniture polish.”

“It is brand new and as shiny as your pistol.”

Albrecht goes back to work. Shakes the leaf off his rag and works the rag through the barrel of the revolver with his cleaning rod. 

Bel heads for the open gate. 

“Wait around bel, I am having a little planning discussion with the Fauxmont Militia at 11. Come join us.”

“So long guys, Happy Thanksgiving! I am going to get out of this cold.”

The two-stroke revs up again, blowing a cloud of red, yellow, brown and gray leaves and dust into her path.

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

It is Wednesday lunchtime at the H bar and Lou is sitting in the quiet of the Quark Lounge.  Texting in a comfortable booth.

He doesn’t notice his friend sit down opposite. He goes on texting until I momentarily block the light coming in from the bar.

“Who’s texting?”

“It is the wife, Fred.”

“Oh, where is she, now?”

“Toledo, on business, sort of.”

“Doing a bit of touristing too?”

“Yeah, she’s at the TMA, looking at David’s, The Oath of the Horatii.”

“But that is in Paris.”

“Oh yes, I forgot, you’re into painting.”

Lou scrolls through his texts.

“She is looking at a reduced replica ordered from Jacques Louis David by the high-ranking courtier Comte de Vaudreuil.”

“Isn’t Tilda an artist herself?”

“She started there but got more interested in making money in other ways.”

“That’s the American way!”

“Hi Lou, Fred, how are you guys doing? Here’s your lunch guys, enjoy!”

Pam serves our burgers, fries, and beer, ordered earlier from Lou’s phone app.

She moves on to the next booth to take orders the old-fashioned way.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen Tilda?”

“Years, not since I moved here in 2010.  I remember, she never quite lost her French accent.”

“Yeah, that is part of her charm too.  She tried to teach me French, but that is a sad story!”

“Didn’t you meet at the LC?”

“Sure did.  Library of Congress, 1975, back when we were xeroxing for a living. I was on break and found her lost, coming out of deck 39 looking for the main reading room. She had blue paint on her finger and told me it was Cerulean blue.”

“That’s right, they had open stacks back then!”

“That soon changed!”

“Had to. Didn’t we all go to lunch together?”

“Oh, about a week or so later.”

“She also showed you some Ultramarine blue on her hand while we were waiting for Pizza at Duddington’s Underground.”

“I learned a thing or two about artist’s paint.”

“You two got it together pretty fast for being blue.”

“We did, lust and infatuation moved us pretty quick!”

“No wonder you were scarce for a while.”

“Yeah, we were real busy back then, and not making anything but love.”

Pam stops by our table.

“Can I bring you, gentlemen, anything more?”

“We are doing fine Pam, thanks!”

Lou squeezes her arm as she grins at him.

“Have you guys thought about going green? Like, no red meat?”

“Can I plead lettuce?”

Pam shakes her head.

“Ah, not really.”

“I have tomato in here too.”

“Right and that counts as green, and you have a pickle on the side, but…”
“Alright, alright, what alternatives does the H Bar have, Pam?”

“You’re the customer Lou.  I am saying, ‘talk to Mr. Hoffmann.’”

“Okay Pam, will do.”

“How about you Fred.  Demand will bring supply!”

“Sure Pam, let’s look at alternatives.”

Pam flashes a smile and moves on.

“So, enough nostalgia Fred!”

“Yeah, what is going on?”

Lou picks up his beer, pauses and puts it down carefully positioning it on a paper napkin.

“I didn’t notice how far apart we were.”

He turns his glass slowly and it sticks to the napkin.  The rectangle of the white paper napkin and the round mug turn together. It is as if he is looking for his next thought condensing on the glass of amber liquid. 

“I mean Tilda and me, it didn’t occur to me until I sold the business to Fibonacci Corp. Then I was home more, had more time on my hands.”

“I seem to remember that was right about 2010.”

“Tilda came back from a business trip at the time and told me she wanted to separate.”

“Don’t remember that part.”

“No, we didn’t tell anybody.”

“Well, it is nobody’s business but yours.”

“No, and she didn’t move all her stuff out.  In fact, she does look me up once in a while.”

“So, the flame still flickers!”

“Ah, no, these are not conjugal visits.”

“She is interested enough to find you though.”

“Sure, Tilda still loves the neighborhood, and I am part of it.”

“She has moved on.”

“Right, I’ll tell you, she met this guy, Jim in TMA. He teaches painting at a college in town.”

“TMA?”

“Toledo Museum of Art.”

“You didn’t seem preoccupied or anything at the time.”

“Yeah, she described him as, ‘a force of nature’ in the sack.”

“Quite the stud!” 

“Funny, how that stuck in my mind. A force of nature, I mean, what else could sex be?”

“Not so much nostalgia, as reflection.”

Lou swigs his beer and holds up the glass.

“Reflections in a glass of beer!”

He places the glass back on its damp ring, soaked into the napkin.

 We had already separated, just hadn’t got around to saying so.”

“So, you have been ‘batching it’ all these years.”

“Yeah, well I ah, had wandered off course myself.” 

Augie Carmichael takes off his dark glasses and waves to us as he enters the dim Quark Lounge from the brilliant sun-lit bar.  Lou raises his glass.

“Can you join us, Augie?”

Lou slides down the bench seat of the booth to make room and puts the menu he didn’t need, in place for him.

“Sure, be glad to, but I do have an agenda.”

“Okay, lay it out.”

“Fred, Lou, have either of you seen Boyd, lately?”

Lou picks up his burger. Pausing with it near his lips.

“No, sorry I haven’t seen him for months.”

A slice of tomato spills out of one side.  He puts the bun down to reassemble the meal.

“Don’t remember when.”

Augie grasps the menu Lou left for him in both hands but doesn’t read it.

“How about you Fred?”

“I remember seeing him outside that popup bookstore.  You know that

place down by the river?”

“Yes, we were in there last month, I think.”

“Anyway, he told bel and me that he had moved in with his father.”

“Right, but Harper told Lark, that he had moved on and he didn’t know where.”

Lou is well into his meal.  He squirts more ketchup on his fries, with the wet noise from the conical nozzle of the tomato-shaped dispenser. As if the plastic dispenser he squeezes were breathing in and out with a cold.

Then takes off his gold-rimmed specs and wipes them on a paper napkin.

“This stuff gets everywhere!”
“Seems like no one knows where Boyd is, and Lark has been getting panicky ever since Harper’s call, last week.”

“Did Harper say how long ago, Boyd left?”

“Couple of weeks perhaps.  Apparently, he was pretty vague. He was away for a while and found Boyd had gone when he got home.”

“Sounds like there was a falling out!”

“That’s what Lark said, but Harper demurred.”

“Bel once told me, there is no communication without trust.  Otherwise

you are just reading signs.”

“Reading signs, Fred?”

“Yes, like looking up at the clouds for signs of a storm or looking at a dog’s tail to judge its intentions.”

Augie puts the menu down.

“You ready to order sir?”

“Ah, sure, just coffee, please.  Is it fresh?  I mean I’ll have it black if it’s fresh but need some milk if not.”

“I’ll bring it black with creamer on the side.”

“That’ll work!”

“Pam, I’ll have a cup too.”

“Sure, Lou.  How about you Fred?”

“Nothing more for me thanks.”

Pam turns to the table across the aisle but turns back.

“Excuse me, but are you guys talking about Boyd?”

Augie folds his hands and looks down at the table.

“You know him, Pam?”

“Well sure, he used to be a regular with his friend, ah.”

“Albrecht, right?”

“Right, you must be Augie!”

He turns to look up at her.

“That’s me, Pam.  So, did you see him with anyone else?”

“Oh, not those two, not for a long time.”

“How about an older guy, you know, his Dad perhaps?”

“Right, I did. Probably last month some time.”

“Well, Pam, I am trying to find Boyd because his Mother is worried about him.”

“Aw sorry, I don’t know where he would be, but those two seemed very quiet together. Like, the vibe was bad, you know.”

“Aha, I know.”

“Sorry Augie, hope you find him.”

Pam turned again to the table across the aisle.

“Anyway Fred, communication, we were talking about it. Isn’t the dog communicating by wagging its tail?”

“Okay, in a way, but clouds do not have intentions and can’t communicate.”

“But we do, ‘get the message’, about rain I mean.”

“Yes, we see signs of clearing or signs of rain, for instance.”

“Really, but Fred, don’t negotiators communicate across the ‘trust barrier’?”

“What do you mean Augie?”

“Take hostage negotiators for instance.”

“No, the first thing the negotiator does is to establish trust.”

Lou is wiping his glasses again on a fresh napkin.

“Well, trust and sincerity go together, seems to me.”

“Of course Lou, you can’t trust someone you don’t believe is sincere.”

 “Otherwise it is a guessing game.”

Augie’s coffee arrives with creamer on the side.

“Now we are in a guessing game with Boyd, Fred.”

“So, it seems, but I am not sure that Boyd is insincere so much as unsure of himself.”

“Too true, we are reading Boyd’s signs.  

“Well, I am now entangled in something, and Lark is so jumpy I have started calling her Roo.”

“As in Kangaroo?”

“Yeah Lou, ready to box and bolt!”

“Are you going to bolt too, Augie?”

“It has crossed my mind more than once, Fred.”

“Well, Boyd is all grown up now.  Why doesn’t she just let it ride for while?”

“’Nor less I deem that there are powers

Which of themselves our minds impress

That we can feed this mind of ours

In a wise passiveness.’”*

“That’s what ‘the man’ said. Why indeed Lou? You try telling her that.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

*Expostulation and Reply, William Wordsworth

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. 

Mrs.Rutherford now sells sky-blue porcelain mugs, for use on the premises, at the Cavendish Pie Shop. They are on offer to anyone, but we have only seen them in the hands of regulars since the campaign started in September. Our names are printed in white along the handles. Though stored somewhere under the counter. Pictures of each customer’s mug are on display in a crawl along the top of a large screen above the door to the back bakery. Customers can make an appointment with the videographer, on the first Saturday of the month and then if they wish, appear using their mug in a promotional vid which fills the main screen. “Promote Your Neighborhood Business”, says the slogan, periodically flashing across the screen between news clips and scores of recent games and other promotions. Those who pay the twenty-five-dollar cost of a mug are then members of the Maxwell Club, who get a discount on Darjeeling Castleton tea, when available and earn points according to some complex formula. All recorded and calculated on your phone and updated at the time of purchase.  

Bel Vionnet tips her mug up over her nose to get a last sip of Darjeeling. She puts it down on top of an old tea-stained copy of, The Viking Portable Jung. Its broken spine was fixed with enough duct tape to make the book look like a battered package.

“Are you going to promote Mrs. Rutherford’s lovely Pie Shop?”

“No, I don’t want to look at another screen or be seen on one. I’ll support her by drinking her tea.”

“When did she start with all this high-tech stuff?”

“Not long ago. She told us it’s an experiment with one of her vendors.” 

“Not, Snaz Promotions!”

“How did you guess, Fred?”

“First, they take over the gas station, now this!”

“Yeah! I believe Jake Trip wants to buy her out, and she is not getting any younger.”

“Mrs. Rutherford is old enough to know better.”

“Fred, we aren’t getting any younger either.”

“No, I better stop being so Geezerish!”

“Just don’t get hooked on opioids.”

“I am more concerned about the world seen by people who only look at screens.”

“There are no seasons in cyberspace, no weather, and no day or night. It’s a weird wired world!”

“Which has taken to the air, or RF, to be precise.”

“Can people still recognize a Carolina wren by its loud voice, a violet or Southern red oak, or a Monarch butterfly?”

“I don’t know, what is generally known of the natural world.”

“Aren’t we told our beautiful blue planet is under dire threat?”

“The commercial world tends to cast doubt these sermons.”

“If you aren’t aware of the natural world – I mean if it isn’t part of daily life, then why should you care about it?”

“Well, some people make a study of it.”

“Only a few, most of us are drenched in public relations even in here. Look at that screen!”

“And we used to come here to get away from it!”

“Speaking of screens. Did you see that vid I sent you from the Jung Society?”

“Thanks, bel, I did. You said it inspired you with a vision.”

“Well, that sounds a bit grandiose, but yes, it was inspirational.”

“To model the ideas, you mean?”

“Right, it is hard to get all that stuff into proper relation.”

“I have never fully understood Jungian terminology.”

“Well, talk of ‘complexes’, and ‘intrapsychic energy’, makes me think of something analogous to the relation of the earth to the universe.”

“A sort of solar system perhaps?”

“I was thinking of a bunch of spheres, one within the other.”

“Music of the spheres!”

“No, not orbiting spheres, in my model or diagram the biggest sphere represents consciousness. These are spheres with fuzzy borders. Interpenetrating spheres.”

“Spheres of influence?”

“In a way, the conscious sphere, like the universe, which is mostly made of “dark matter”, most of consciousness is taken up with another unknown matter, the unconscious.”

“Isn’t it an odd name, “Dark Matter”? When no one knows what it is. Why not call it Jim, for instance? “

“Ah, okay, or Janet perhaps?” 

“Or, Wakan Tanaka is even better.”

What, or who is, Wakan Tanaka, anyway?”

“I just read about it, bel. Wakan Tanka is a Lakota term for energy existing in all things.”

“But who knows if dark matter is anything to do with energy?”

 “That’s my point, if it is a mystery, then it seems misleading to call it matter, which takes me back to, ‘Jim’!”

“The dark horse!”

“The great celestial equine question!”

“Any way Fred, Jung requires a feminine name, Aphrodite, perhaps, because the feminine principle is the inexplicable generative force in creation.”

“Let her be a female then, but Aphrodite is too ‘Euro.’. How about, Inanna?”

“Fred, she is Aphrodite’s ancestor, back around four thousand BC.”

“Let’s recall the highest deity among Sumerians!”

“Does Inanna rule the unconscious too?”

“In this scheme of ours Fred, she rules the unknown.”

“By unknown rules!”

“Do we know there are rules?”

“We don’t, it is a presumption!”

“Unwarranted, it seems to me.”

“Okay then, Inanna is simply a name attached to the unconscious and the universe beyond the bounds of current scientific knowledge.”

“Agreed! Ah, no, wait a minute. If we decide that this unknown has no rules, we are saying it can’t be understood.”

“Yes, such things exist!”

“What, for instance?”

“Well, how about motivation, or chaotic systems?”

“Is it that they can’t be understood, ever? Or not yet?”

“How would we know?”

“There’s a point, Fred, the future is something we shall never know!”

“A dark matter, indeed. Okay, bel what about your spheres?”

“Yes, what about them? Ah, it is partly a matter of scale, the largest sphere containing everything else is the sphere of consciousness. Then most of that is the unconscious.”

Mrs. Rutherford has no help this morning. Bel gets up to fetch more tea at the counter and brings back a yellow pot with surprising celerity.

“Never seen one of these before!”

“Yet another sales gimmick! I have enough points on my Maxwell Club account to get a free yellow pot full, called, ah, where is it?”

Bel turns the pot slowly on the table, looking for the name.

“Well, I don’t see it! Anyway, I think it is Earl Gray by the aroma.”

“Doesn’t matter now, bel.”

“Yes, okay so, within the two spheres of consciousness is a locality, a much smaller sphere, a person’s piece of the action.”

“So, as you see it, each of us inhabits a sort of locality within the universe of consciousness.”

“You might say that. The first small sphere represents the self, and within that is the soul, and at the center, like a dot, or singularity, is ego.”

“You are thinking of ego as analogous of the universe’s original big bang?”

“Right, every birth is a big bang, a beginning at least, if not an explosion. A soul which comes into being and goes on becoming within the spheres of consciousness until the body dies leaving its influence behind in the larger spheres.”

“Bel, you are a bit of a mystic.”

“No, I don’t mean anything like that! I think this is all plausible enough within Jung’s model.”

“Well, isn’t the idea of a soul rather mystical and otherworldly?”

“Yes, it can be. Soul is mentioned in scriptures as immortal. But think of soul music.

Have you ever been moved by Aretha Franklin singing, “Respect”, or a Brahms symphony or a painting by Vermeer, or the ocean? Just to mention four, out of countless possibilities.”

“Yes, I have been moved, of course!”

“What do you think moved?”

“Me, of course!”

“I would say your soul was moved, the heart of your feeling.”

“So, soul is aesthetic in your model?”

“That is only one aspect. Come on Fred! Think about it!”

“Yes, okay, I have been joyful and suffered my share of indignities and other pains, and I have been in love.”

“There you are then.”

“So, you might say soul is a function of the nervous system and its headquarters.”

“You might, it sounds a bit reductive.