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. 

Steve Strether opens his old scratched Dutch Masters cigar box. The same one from which he offered me a cigar when we first met, on the way to Artie Bliemisch’s studio. The reproduction of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (De Staalmeesters), is so warn the figures are little more than blurred silhouettes. He pulls out several pieces of folded tracing paper.

“Don’t ask where I got these.”

He unfolds the biggest on the coffee table.  They look like original drawings.

“Quite an interesting design Steve.”

“Yes, more interesting than I would have thought, too.”

“Are you and bel planning a project?”

“No, these sketches were drawn for Armond Macadamia.”

“Skillful handwork too, no CAD!”

“No, he wouldn’t want this stuff digitized.  Too easy to lose control of the data.”

“Well, money is no object to Mac.”

“Yes, and here we see the concept for his patio.”

We look at a mandala combining triangles within circles designed as a mosaic.  The title, “Evening Vista” underlined, is written in a beautiful copperplate script.

“Didn’t that mandala give him mystical insights into the stock market?”

“Yup, I heard that too. Had to chuckle.”

“They are a symbol of deeper connection with the self and the universe at large.”

“Is Mac. a Hindu mystic?”

“Doubt it. Carl Jung saw them as representing the self, or ‘total personality.’” 

“Yes, bel knows about that stuff. She sees them as representing the relationships between center and periphery, or ‘me’ and the ‘cosmos’.  You better ask her.”

“No one was allowed to photograph it you know.”

“Yeah, anyway, I stopped chuckling when I learned how much Mac was worth.”

“So, what do you think?”

 “Remember back in the Spring of 2015, a drone lodged in that big willow oak by Mac’s property?

“Right!  I heard it was taking pictures of his secret patio!”

“That’s it, and the patio was covered in years of unraked leaves.”

“Is what they got pictures of?”

“I don’t know.  Never saw them, if any were taken.”

“No, now I think of it, didn’t that drone belong to Tron Plank?”

“It did.  He made a real nuisance of himself with that thing until a gust of wind blew it into the tree.”

Lou smooths out folds in the second sheet and puts the other two sheets aside.

“Now look at that, the shape and location of every stone is carefully drawn to scale.”

“Pretty complicated, almost as if it is coded, see the red, blue and black lines”

“Yes, the word is now, that this design shows where Mac hid the millions he brought back from Chile after Allende was toppled.”

“Buried treasure Lou!”

“Not quite that romantic.”

“So, maybe it is just a patio design?”

“Maybe, maybe not, you see Fred, I think it may contain enciphered information.”

“About what?”

“That’s where the treasure comes in.  It may hold the numbers of his various overseas bank accounts and possibly the bank’s names and locations as well.”

“Tax avoidance and all that.”

“Yes, all that and money laundering too. Fred, so long as he remembers the key, his info is safely preserved on the ground of his unkept back yard.”

“Can’t be hacked!”

“Not by electronic means.”

“This will take some work!”

“Want to try and decipher it?”

“Steve, I am no hacker of any kind.”

“Oh, I don’t expect you to figure it all out.  Besides, there is no money in it, not for us at least.”

“A little interesting history perhaps?”

“Maybe, with help.”

“Well, what else can you tell me about these things?”

“Mossack Fonseca.”

“Who?’

Steve says nothing.

“Sounds familiar. Wait a minute, that’s the Panamanian bank that got hacked or leaked or something.”

“Reportedly, 11.5 million encrypted confidential documents came from them. The company is now closed, mind you.

“Yep, an old friend from our days in Bonn, associated with Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), told me Mac’s companies were named in that document dump, in April 2016.”

“Okay, so here you have more of the story.”

The doorbell rings and startles Josephine.  She comes out from under the couch in a furry gray hurry, down the hall to the bedrooms. Steve gets up at the same time and greets some-one at the door in German.  He then introduces Professor Joy Von Luck.  Steve pulls up a chair and gestures to Joy who sits on the couch behind the coffee table. Joy’s thick black hair is cut short and combed back in choppy waves. 

“Okay Steve, this must be the stuff you were talking about.”

She pulls her phone out a pocket in her high collared white shirt and puts it on the table by the cigar box.  Unbuttons her deep brown suede waistcoat and leans forward over the papers. Her American English is faultless.

“Three sheets, that’s all, right?”

“That’s it, Joy.  You’re a mathematician.  Do you think you can crack it?”

“Not right now Steve.  There is a lot going on, here.”

She studies the geometric patterns within the circular form.

“Cobblestones may be indicated here and pavers and here. Yes, and these round shapes might be river stones.”

“Take a look at the other papers.”

She unfolds a smaller sheet.

“Oh look! It’s Stonehenge! These are showing projected shadows.”

“That’s it Joy, some of these stones stand up.”

“Seems rather hazardous for a patio!”

“Fred, this thing is only pretending to be a patio!”

“Also, this doesn’t represent the sun’s shadows. No, these are cast by lights at positions designated by these little sunflower symbols.”

“Besides Joy, the patio is way too shady to catch the sun’s shadows.”

“How long ago was it built?”

“I don’t remember, do you, Fred?”

“No, was I living here then?”

“Hard to say if the trees have grown enough to shade it since whenever it was.

Steve spreads out the third sheet with a matrix full of numbers and letters ruled into the circle and hands it to Joy.

“Okay, so does this fit over the design and tell us something?”

“Looks like that is the idea behind using tracing paper.”

Joy places the matrix over the mandala design.

We all look at it for a while.  Steve offers us coffee and bel comes in holding the cat.

“Riot, just zoomed out of here, honey.”

“Her name is, Josephine, dear.”

“That’s your Napoleonic name.  I call her Riot.  Look at those torn ears!”

“No wonder she runs away if you call her Riot!”

“She was wet and wild when she arrived, remember?”

“Steve, ‘any port in a storm’ when you are about to give birth.”

“We have been her safe harbor, too.”

“Steve and I have been trying to solve that thing all week. Have you all figured it out yet?”

Joy picks up her phone and turns it off.

“Hi bel, not even close.”

“What about those squares off to the side?”

Bel points one out.

“Yes, you mean this for instance.  Look it says, 500W. Could be positions for lights.”

You know Steve, I think this puzzle is visual rather than mathematical.”

“Okay, so what do you make of the sunflower symbols then?”

Bel steps closer and bends over the table to see, still holding Josephine close facing back with two paws on her shoulder, whiskers at her ear.

“Those flowers represent what-ever it is, which casts the shadow.”

“They look like an afterthought.  Drawn with a ballpoint.  Maybe the trees did grow over it.

Joy traces a line between the post hole symbol outside the circle of the matrix and the sunflower symbol.

“The cast shadow is what reveals the data written in the stones!”

“Did someone say coffee, just now, Steve?”

“I did honey.”

He gets up and heads for the kitchen without turning around to get an answer.

“Everybody want some?”

Josephine-Riot, wriggles free of bel’s hold and jumps off her back into an armchair and then with forepaws on the chair-back, gains the top and leaps off into the darkness of the floor behind.

“The patio is gone. Dug up and now there’s a swimming pool there.” 

“There is no way to try this out.”

Joy picks up the third sheet of paper and places it over the first two. Shadow projections are outlined by triangles with an apex at the light source and spreading across the matrix to represent a cone of light.

“Let’s see what this, reveals.”

The shadow covers a group of letters and numbers.

“Okay, so what does that mean?”

“Looks like a jumble to me, Fred.”

Steve walks in mugs of coffee, handles gripped in his curled fingers.

“Okay, that jumble is where we have to break the cipher!”

Joy is writing out sequences of numbers and letters within the shadow.

“Do we read it along the length of the triangle or across the width?” 

“Well, the first thing I see, starting at the apex is, 7 then r and n and…”

“Steve, where did you get these, anyway?”

Steve pauses looking into the air in front of him.

“They were included in a packet I got from Ernie Manstein, a while back.

I’ll deny ever saying that if you quote me.”

“Ernie, wasn’t he with Booz Allen? That explains a lot!”

“Oh, was he Joy?”

“Well, maybe not Steve. I don’t know him, but he gave a lecture at PU years ago, and that’s what I heard at the time.”

“Did you go?”

“No, no, no, invitation only.”

“So, I would imagine.”

“I have an Ap that might help.

Joy clicks her phone on and taps some numbers and letters into it. Then more and takes a swig of coffee.

“I got, ‘Deutsche Bank AG’.  This shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“What Ap is that?”

“A few algorithms I cooked up for another project.”

“You think Mac had the same thing?”

“I don’t know.  There is probably a simpler way to do this once you fully understand it.

126. Flood

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 and Diddlie are already at the corner table agreed upon for lunch, to the left of the H Bar’s bow window.  A sprig of goldenrod in the bottom buttonhole shines against her blue t-shirt.  Rain flooded the parking lot this morning and the clogged street drains have been cleared of detritus.  Two dripping cars just towed in at the Lighthouse gas station are parked with their hoods up and all doors open to the clear sky reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall.

“The water was halfway up the wheels!”

“Is that when you got out?”

“Well, about a minute later.”

Diddlie looks up.

“Hi Fred, and how long have you been standing there behind me?”

Lou is trying to stifle a laugh.

“Okay, poker face, don’t say it!”

“Did, it has only been half a minute.  Didn’t want to interrupt your story.”

“Well, I could see you in the mirror when I looked up, you know.”

“No doubt.”

“I am telling Lou about my adventure last week.”

“Where was this?”

“At the bottom of the hill on Huygens St. at the intersection with Feynman Boulevard.”

“Yes, opposite the entrance to Melitus Marsh Park.”

“Right, it was wet.  I was going shopping with my friend in her Prius and this rain started coming down like I have never seen before.”

“The world is heating up.  More energy in the system means bigger storms and more rain.”

“Well, Lou, do you believe all that stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“About the carbon dioxide and climate change and all that.”

“Not much doubt in my mind.”

“Don’t you think it is all exaggerated to scare us, Fred?”

“Yes, often it is, but I think the facts are scary enough by themselves.”

“Yeah, but who’s facts do you believe?”

“Diddlie, Diddlie, just check the science.  Those are the only actual facts.  The rest is spin and politics.”

“Yeah, but scientists don’t agree, Lou.”

“Politicization of climate science is a trap. It is not a matter of belief; science is about data, measurement, and facts. Don’t fall into it.”

Lou drains his ice-tea with a loud draw on his paper straw and holds up his glass as if in a toast. 

“Just look at the data.”

“Don’t you see Did? Our parents had World War II to survive, our grandparents, World War I.  Climate change is even bigger.  It threatens the next generation, every living thing, really.”

“Well, okay you two, all this rain is washing out my flower beds and pounded the hell out of the Spiderwort, and it was way too hot for Mr. Liddell yesterday.  He had to stay in the living room.”

“The way this is playing out politically, thousands of people may die in various disasters, blaming the latest scapegoat, and never know what really killed them.”

“Lou, I have stopped listening to all that crap on TV. All-day and all night, people jabbering, noise, noise, noise.”

“Too true Did.!

“Yeah, well getting scared isn’t helping anybody.  What do you expect me to do?  What are you guys doing?”

“One thing is to keep informed and support movements to address the issue rather than deny it.”

“Well, okay Lou, ah, I know it is an important story. But anyway, my story is, that the car stalled in all that water and wouldn’t get going again and there was a truck ahead and another car beyond that, in deeper water and the water got higher and it was hard to open the doors.”

“How did you get out?”

“Fred, I barely squeezed out before it got too deep. More water came just as I had one foot out and trying to push myself through the door with the other on the floor of the car.”

“Did your friend get out?”

“Yes, she got out through the sunroof.”

“Can I start you off with a drink?”

Lou leans back with one hand half raised.

“Pam, long time no see!”

“Yeah, I had a better thing going for a while.  Mr. Hoffman hired me back last week. Thank God, or I would be on the street.”

“Oh, Pam! what happened?”

“Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but me and the boyfriend split and neither of us could afford the apartment alone, and I was between jobs, you know.”

Diddlie is fidgeting with her bracelet.

“You could have got someone else to share, couldn’t you?”

“Well, that didn’t work out either.  She got injured in the flood and has no insurance, so we have no rent money, so that’s that.”

“Oh Pam, I am so sorry.  We were just talking about that.  I got caught in it too, but not hurt.”

Lou leans forward to get Pam’s attention.

“Pam, let’s us two talk later. You can start me off with an ice-tea, burger, and coleslaw.”

“Yeah, we are all having the same thing, right Fred?”

“Pretty much, except I would like a Stella and fries.”

“Got it.”

Pam moves on, with a wave from Lou.

“Anyway, my friend didn’t want to stand up on the roof, because of her short skirt.”

“Couldn’t she slide off onto the ground?”

“What ground? There was water up to my knees.  She did slide down the windshield on to the hood and tore her little skirt on the wiper.  

I didn’t care. I had my jeans on, not these by the way. The water was icky!”

“What do you mean, icky?”

“There was all this stuff floating in it, like dead leaves, branches, twigs, and bugs and plastic and other stuff bumping into my claves underwater.  It was dark brown, and you couldn’t see down into it, even where there was a spot clear of leaves. I mean where did all those leaves come from?  It’s summer! Then, this flatbed truck backs up towards us with a wrecked van on the back.  The driver yells out of the cab.  Says we can climb on and he will drive us out.  So, at first, we can’t get on.  It is too high.  Then he tells us where to get a foothold.  The rain starts again and a lot more water comes down the hill, full of mulch, and the truck stalls too. The mulch floats together and seemed like dry land.  It is like, really weird.  

We could hear sirens and I think, great!  Emergency is coming for us, but they just fade away in the distance and we never even see them.  Anyway the back of the van is intact, so we climb in, to get out of the rain.

Then the driver comes back from the cab to check us out, real big, with serious tattoos, a leather jerkin, and jeans. My friend yells, “Lad!”

I mean, they kind of forget I am there. They just get into this huge kiss. I couldn’t believe it!  My friend’s little skirt rode way up and, ah yeah.  It was ripped, you know. Well, she had her back to me, and ah, I could see why she was shy about standing up! Lad turns out to be Gladys, my friend’s gay lover, from way back. Then Lad looks at me.  I saw that leather was all she had on, I guess she noticed me seeing too.

“Hi, you two, like, together?”

“So, I said, ‘yeah, soaked together in this flood.’  After that, Lad sat down between us and got on her phone for help.  She was really funny and sweet to me too, you know.  I mean I couldn’t really respond, but I, ah, we, had some privacy after Lad shut the two back doors.  It was kind of cozy too, with rain drumming on the roof and a bunch of nice dry flattened cardboard boxes from De Hooch Windows Co. I mean we could have had a threesome, or something.

Diddlie giggles, looks away, and points outside.”

“Check the big white dog out there.”

“I have seen that Spinone, before around here.”

“What did you say it was, Lou?”

“An Italian bird dog, Spinone.”

“Okay folks, Stella for you, and iced teas for Lou and the lady.”

“I am Diddlie, Diddlie Drates.”

“Hi Diddlie, sure, I have served you before, and you too sir.”

“Yes Pam, I remember; Fred.”

“Fred, enjoy your lunch.”

Pam pauses for a moment while she and Diddlie exchange smiles and goes on to her next table. 

“We just had to wait.  After a while, Lad gets up and opens the doors to let some air in and yells to someone.  She hauls up this angry guy in his brand-new business suit, all soaked and oily. Then a cute young woman, shaking and drenched and self-conscious about her nipples thrusting through her soaking t-shirt. Lad tries to comfort her but she just keeps her arms folded and turns her back on us all.  It gets too hot and embarrassing after that, with five of us in that confined space.  Lad goes back to the cab with my friend, leaving us three strangers to get acquainted, with the doors open and the rain blowing in.

The guy in the suit starts yelling into his phone about the ruined suit and missing his interview.  The woman’s phone is too wet or something.  Anyway, it doesn’t work and she is sobbing.

Then the suite takes his coat off, saying, ‘Please excuse me folks’, then his shirt and t-shirt.  I wondered where he was going to stop!  He kept his pants on and sat against the back of the front seat, with a hairy bulging gut sticking out. After about forty minutes, or maybe only ten, the sun came out and it got unbearably hot.  So, we sat outside in the shade of the wreck, for what seemed like forever.

Finally, a fire truck pulls up.  Lad comes back to us and explains the ladder from the truck is going to be our bridge out.  I am trying to chat with the poor drenched girl.  I guess she couldn’t have been more than twenty and just totally freaked and crying and hiding her face.  I think she said she was supposed to pick up her sister. Couldn’t get a lot of it, and then she stopped responding to questions. 

I lost track of the suit. Lad had already carried my friend across when I got over to the ladder with the girl.  There was a fireman, with one of those metallic blankets to cover her. Like wrapping her in tin foil.  He offered to carry her, but she made it across on her own.  Imagine that, a blanket in this weather!  Then Lad said, you ready baby? and picked me up too.” 

Diddlie grabs a hand full of fries, for her plate and adds more salt and some ketchup.

A long fry sticks out of her mouth with an upward slant as if she is dragging on a cigarette.  She beaks it off with a flourish and dips the blunt end in ketchup.

“So, that’s how I got back on the mainland.”

Lou finishes up the last of his slaw and walks over to the bar, where he has a chat with Pam.  Mr. Hoffmann comes out and they all talk for a while, before Lou returns to our table.

“I got this one, folks.”

“Why thanks, Lou!”

“You’re welcome Did.”

“Did you take care of Pam too?  Is that what is going on?

“Something like that, Fred.”

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. 

Heavy showers come down with monsoon-like density, after a hot sunny morning and then clear to cerulean sky in ten minutes.  We advance into steam rising from the hot black surface of newly paved Wicket Street. Daisy looks up. Geese fly over, calling, encouraging each other.

“Have you ever been attacked by a goose?”

“No, I hope that echelon up there doesn’t come down after us!”

We walk slowly.  The five geese above pass, as we complete the full circle of Wicket St.  Scent of honeysuckle, odor auto of exhaust, the breeze brings down a shower from the overhanging ironwood tree. The last remaining tree outside number 28, opposite Daisy, at 27. 

“What is that smell, Daisy? 

“Tar.”

“No, something aromatic.”

“Yeah, I know, ah, yes! That is, Snaz brand fabric softener, called ‘Lavandou’.”

“Fake lavender, it recalls the real thing, but it ain’t right.”

“Canned peas, same thing, taste like a distant relative of fresh.”

Daisy stumbles but recovers easily.

“How is your foot, these days?”

“Comfortable, as long as I am careful.”

“That was a thoroughly nasty goose attack!”

“Right! The ‘wild goose chase’, ended when my foot caught in a hole.”

“Seem to remember you shattered your ankle?”

“And spent more time in hospital than I want to recall.”

“Yes, I liked your star-studded cane, though.”

“Nice wasn’t it! Frank Vasari gave it to me.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah, well, you know, he’s calmed down a lot since the old days.”

“Did he ever marry?”

“I think he’s divorced.”

“You know Fred, I had a thing going with a guy out there.”

“At PU, you mean?”

“Right, he’s a friend of Frank’s. He brought me Frank’s gift on my last day in hospital and drove me home.”

“Good grief, Diasy.”

“I guess security was better than I thought.”

“All sub-rosa, was it?”

“Right.  It wasn’t all roses though.”

“These things never are.”

“Rose bushes have thorns!”

“Sweet scent though!”

“Oh sweet, yes so sweet it was. God knows I wasn’t looking for it

 and I don’t think he was.”

“You say, ‘was’?”

“We stopped.  Last week, as a matter of fact.  Left me kind of blue.”

“I see you are wearing your bowler again.”

“Yeah, it was a bad omen when the old one blew away.”

“More yourself now!”

“Thirty bucks, second hand, and also, check these.”

She shows me the thin gold and silver bracelets gathered around her wrist.

“Your job is secure, I trust?”

“Oh, sure.  I don’t wear them at work, by the way.”

Daisy wipes her eyes and turns away, looking past the new bamboo thicket outside number 28.

“Would you ever guess Derwent lived there, Fred?”

“Hardly, the old Sloot house was nicely surrounded by white oaks and azaleas, among other things.”

“Yes, and that tree with kind of droopy blossoms.”

“A Fringe tree I think, local native too.”

“Look the sprinklers came on!”

“Got to keep that grass like a fresh green carpet.”

“It was raining less than half an hour ago!”

“Who lives in that McMansion, anyway?”

“Ah, oh, I can’t think. Diddlie knows.  She has a long story about the pit they dug for the foundation, and some mysterious guy she kept approaching but he wouldn’t talk to her.”

“When did all that come out?”

“Months ago. When did it go up? Around that time.”

Daisy kicks some bamboo shoots at her feet.  Growing at the edge of the road.

“Bamboo is hard to control once it gets going.”

“Yeah, kind of like the guy and me.  Right up to the edge and no further.”

“The edge of what?”

“Something more than I could deal with.”

“Too much, too soon?”

“Too young, for one thing.”

“A student, you mean?”

“A married student of Frank’s.”

“Complications abound!”

“I mean, Boyd was too young.  Thought I had learned my lesson!”

“Daisy, you must have something the ‘young’ uns’ want.”

“I tried to convince him that the emperor had no clothes!”

“In what context?”

“Not just our affair, also Charline von Heyl.”

“Charline?”

“Yup, she is a German abstractionist, now in New York. 

“We took Acela and looked around the galleries over a weekend.”

“Did you find a good hotel?”

“Frank got us invited to Gloriani’s place.”

“Free accommodation!”

“Yes, and he wasn’t around, thank God.  I don’t know who let us in.

“She disappeared after giving us a key.”

“So, what’s Charline’s work like?”

“Seemed like a random arrangement of shapes and effects to me.”

“And to him?”

“Well, I couldn’t see what he was seeing.”

“As far as abstraction goes, you like, DeKooning well enough, I believe.”

“Sure, there is nothing random about his work.  He builds.”

“I hear you saying Charline had no structure.”

“I heard him saying stuff he couldn’t point to in the painting.”

“Ouch!”

“Yeah, painful! we were a random event too, by the great painter of the universe.”

“Fell off the palette, did you?”

“Our colors were a rich mix, but the juxtaposition was all wrong.”

“So, you were in dispute.”

“We were. He said, for example; ‘there’s always a structural reason at the heart of her juxtapositions.’”

“And what of this heart?”

“I found no beat at all, zilch!”

“So, now you are in a ‘blue period’”.

“Yeah, kind of a muddy grey-blue.”

“Speaking of which, look at that front coming in from the South.”

Wind gusts through the ironwood tree, odor of fire lighter, smoke blows from the back of number 28. It is barbeque season.

“Is that a signal from Diddlie’s mystery person?”

“A smoke signal no less!”

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. 124. Hand Writing. 

White oak blossom, short, snaky, dark yellow danglers, falls and clogs gutters. Pollen is washed out of the air in rain that pours off the roof.  The sun comes out.  We walk along the driveway. 

“Roses of Sharon are coming up everywhere.”

She bends, and with both hands, heaves up some deep-rooted seedlings from the side bed.

“Easy to pull them out of this wet ground.”

“Yes, I see a lot of redbud seedlings too.”

“Sure, and garlic mustard. That stuff can spread between blinks.”

“You have some milkweed there, look.”

Diddlie isn’t looking.

“This must be the coldest wettest Spring in years.”

She turns and looks up past the roof as we move on.  Rain starts again.  We cross the road from her driveway.  One of the points of her umbrella sticks in the sleeve of her jacket, low on her wrist. She holds the umbrella away from her sleeve, out towards a strip of orange just above the horizon and releases it again.  It opens and catches a cold gust which pulls it sideways.

“Let’s not do this!”

“You said you wanted to go to the Fauxmont Farm Market.”  

“That was before this latest weather change. It’s too early. Wait until they have more stuff, next month.”

“Well, okay, but it is going to be sunny in a minute.  Look over there.”

“It is too cold out here for May.  What happened to global warming?”

“This is weather.  Global warming is about climate.”

“It is about to drive me in the house.”

She turns and walks back to open her front door.

“Come on in.  I have a little project for us.” 

She unzips her purple slicker as we go down the hall to the kitchen.  The Red Queen is perched above the stove on the old-fashioned plate rack. Diddlie hangs her umbrella on the doorknob, fills her ancient copper kettle and puts it over a high flame.  The Red Queen notices the warmth as Diddlie takes off her slicker and flutters up from the stove with the rising heat to settle on her shoulder.  Sliding off again in the instant it takes her to remove her jacket.

“Queenie, what are you doing?”

The bird flies off, to the top of the open door to the hall and Diddlie puts her jacket over the back of the vacant chair next to me, at her kitchen table.

“You remember my British cousin?”

“Ah, I remember you talking about him.”

“Okay, right, well, I just got three letters from him.”

“But I thought you said he had died?”

“He did.”

“So?” 

“He died a year ago and the executor of his will posted these letters he left behind.”

“As directed, I presume.”

“Well, I don’t know that either, but they were in envelopes addressed to me and he never mailed them.”

“How odd!  Did the executor read them?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so.  She said she found them sealed with stamps on them. See, look at these, Game of Thrones, series.”

The kettle whistles with a shot of steam and then a continuous rising note. The Red Queen takes off from the top of the door and lands on the curtain rail.  When the whistle reaches its maximum pitch, Diddlie lifts the kettle and pours into her green pot.  Sun is coming in the window and breeze-blown leaves animate the yellow wall with their shadows.

“You want milk and sugar?”

“No, well, what kind of tea is it?”

“Earlgrey, the real thing too.  Not dust in a bag!”

“Nothing in it then.”

She sits and opens the table drawer at her waist.

“I don’t see the strainer.”

Gets up and opens more drawers under the counter by the sink.

“See, this is what happens when you are in the habit of using bags.”

“You might try a coffee filter.”

“Ian uses loose tea. I mean it has whole leaves in it. Tastes much better, and now I am into the leaf thing, big time!”

“SQWILGE THE BILGE!”

The Red Queen, says no more. Diddlie looks over at her.

“What was that Queenie? Oh!  We can use that!”

She notices a small strainer hanging from its blue handle on a nail in the trim descending from under the parrot. 

“Now for tea.” 

She pours.

“Fred, I want to share some of this with you, okay?”

“Some of what?”

“This!”

Diddlie opens one of the envelopes secured in her fruit bowl by the weight two ripening mangos.

“Looks like a thick one.”

“I don’t know if I get it or not.”

The red Queen swoops over Diddlie’s head and settles on top of her jacket draped over the chair. 

“OFF TO BED, OFF TO BED”

“No, not now Queenie, dear.

She pulls out a half a dozen, or more, small sheets of paper.

“Okay, so here’s what I am getting from, like, the dead, or from the past or something.  I mean its spooky. Dated July 2018.”

Queenie cocks her head and listens.

“Dear Cuz D,

Sorry I was too busy to say goodbye properly.  Your departure came at a critical point in cyberspace.

Now escaped its allure and reveling, quite lost, in a cloud of nostalgia.  Got out my fountain pen.  Remember those?  Inky finger, gravity, flow, nibs, writing paper, blotting paper, maybe not.  I’ll bet you used ballpoints.  Much more high tech.  Anyway, your recent visit took me back to our childhood, or mine at least, and your childhood visits.  So, here are a few blobs of blue in recognition of your recent sojourn and sorry things romantic didn’t blossom forth for you when you were in Chester.”

“Yeah, well, I am going to skip that part, Fred.  It’s embarrassing.  He caught me in a lie.  Enough said!”

Diddlie goes on reading silently for a few moments.

“You know his handwriting is still pretty good.”

“Some schools, don’t teach cursive anymore. I mean people are unable to sign their names!”

“They don’t need to! They all have phones, and passwords, and all that.”

“All we need are our thumbs!”

“I can’t do it with my thumbs.”

“Text, you mean?”

“Yes, it’s a verb, now.”

“Okay, okay, read on, Did.”

“We humans have done our best to kill each other all through history.… brought success…”

A low flying jet drowns her out.

“Did, start again, from ‘success’.  Can’t hear a thing.”

“God! Heard that though! I thought it was landing here.  Okay, try over.”

 The A-bomb might have brought success, but we haven’t used it effectively yet. We might yet wipe ourselves out through bad land use, pollution, and climate change. Would our success be deserved?”

 “Well, who’s to say?  ‘success’? ‘effectively?’ I mean, what’s with all this death stuff?”

“He seems free to unburden himself, alright.”

“What about the weight on me?”

“Maybe that’s why he never mailed them.”

“SQWILGE THE BILGE!”

“Queenie, get off my slicker.  Your punching holes in it with those claws.”

Diddlie waves the parrot off, but she side-steps along the chair-top, out of reach.

“No, I am not reading to you, shoo!”

Diddlie gets up and the bird flies off down the hall.  She closes the kitchen door and

sits down again.

“He seemed isolated last spring when I was visiting. He told me he was into some online game.”

“Yes, he mentions cyberspace at the beginning. Those games can become an alternative to life.”

“Right, Ian said that’s what he needed, but also that he wanted to stop.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe he stopped the wrong life!  Listen to this:”

“Is writing a good in itself?  I never post these letters.  Will you get them?  I don’t know.

What is the point if no one reads them?  I am writing to something you left in me.  The emotional residue of all our talk.  The Romantics would call it your spirit, but that crap is over now.  If writing doesn’t earn any money, it is outside the economy.  Just my seed spilled on black tarmac of isolation, a useless road to masturbation! Well, at least masturbation might be a distraction.”

“His seed?  Seed for what?”

“Seed for thought?”

“That’s too much for me. Masturbation? I don’t want to hear about it!”

“Must be part of his noctuary.”

“His what?”

“You know, journal of his night-life.”

“Let’s not go there.”

“He knew you pretty well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he never mailed the letters.”

“Well, why write them?”

“That is what he is asking, himself.”

“He is mixed up. Even more mixed up than you are, with that blog of yours.  Now he goes on about God.  He seems kind of troubled, don’t you think?”

“Take it from a blogger, life can be troubling.”

“Okay, listen to this, I mean obscure!”

“The famous mustachioed philologist said,’ God is dead’!  Well, his ghost is haunting some acquaintances nearby, who mentions Jesus so often that his name becomes nothing more than sound and then grows into monotonous noise. No, God is not dead.  We have lost touch.  We are looking for god through our inner telescopes. Constructed by the Ancient Greeks out of their new found logic and their Platonic dualism.  Our current usage can’t hold it.  We can’t talk sensibly about it.  Yes, it, not the ‘Guy in the sky’ but the molten driver of all our energies. That’s where the ‘mustache’ was pointing until ‘Der Fuhrer’ gave him a bad name.”

“You know who he means by the ‘mustache’?”

“No Fred, and I don’t care. He never talks like this.”

“Yes, he is doing a brain dump.”

“Fred, do you have an ‘inner telescope’?”

“If he means introspection, then we all do.”

“’Molten energies’, he sounds like a sun-worshipper to me.”

“Yes, much metaphor.”

“Well, okay, could mean all kinds of things, I guess. So finally, he gets away.”

“I went to the beach. You know, trying to quit the computer game thing. Which beach was it? Can’t remember, but anyway, it was all pebbles and very hot.  The waves were bringing in the tide full of plastic, waves of pessimism.  After listening to all those rattling rocks, I went in and listened to the toilets flushing all through the boarding house. (All I can afford, these days.) Should have rented a caravan, more privacy. Have I sunk that far? No, I wasn’t listening.  I was assaulted!  Did everyone else have dysentery?  An hour of that and I was in the car and away.”

“I just didn’t realize he was in so much trouble.”

“He seems thoughtful, and that can leave you troubled.”

“Why didn’t he have anyone to go with? You know someone to talk to and all.”

“Why, indeed.”

“He thinks I am his diary! Oh, listen to him rant about Brexit!”

“Brexit! Remain! Get out! Do something! What an absurd contraction.  It is our national nostalgic fart, fruity to some and disgusting to others.  We are riven with lies.  They are crawling and wriggling about in our minds, consuming far too much time and heaving with life in Britannia’s cadaver.’ Britannia rules the waves,’ of nausea, that is Brexit, the emperor’s clothes, our vacuum of doom!”

“’Britannia’s cadaver, vacuum of doom’ How creepy!  Is this a troubled mind, or what? Well, that’s enough.”

She scans another page and then, looks over to the shadows projected on the wall.

‘I can still see him, now. He isn’t much taller than me, with very thick black hair, gone grey.  He is getting fat. His jeans are too tight, and he is wearing a dress shirt with open collar, yeah, and bulging buttons on his gut. You know, the backs of his hands, are kind of sexy.”

She looks back at the last page of the letter.

“Oh, wait a minute. This part really bugs me.”

“Too bad we couldn’t marry Did. What do you think? I know we are cousins but at least we used to get along.  When, you-know-who, left me, I gave up on the idea of marriage.  I was so taken with her voice.  I thought, ‘I don’t care what it is saying.  Just let me hear it forever.’  How long did we last anyway? It was too long.  It wasn’t long enough.  It was an impulsive decision we made together.

Probably the only thing we ever really did together.”

“How sad!  He was kind of sweet and always was a little weird, even as a kid.  There’s two more of these, not even opened! I always liked him though. I can’t imagine being married to him, oh no!  

“Sqwilge the Bilge,” The Red Queen shouts through the door, from the hall.

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 text from bel Vionnet says, “The ‘Bookery’, 12:30.”

Bel is there ahead of time, talking to Boyd Nightingale, sitting behind the pay station. Books are displayed in stacks on a table in front of him, but the ‘Pop-Up’ store’s one bare-bricked room has no shelves of books to browse.

“Well, hi Boyd.”

“Hi there, Fred, want to buy a few books?”

“Maybe, saw the ad in Sunday’s paper. Just want to see what you have.”

Boyd gets up and walks around the table in front of him, to bel’s side.

“We have a lot of stuff reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times and the Post, right here.”

Bel picks up a small book.

“I see you have, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new book, Little Boy.”

“Right, he was 100 in March. Augie gave me a copy.  Says it is kind of, ‘sixties’ but still relevant.”

“Yes, ‘relevant’, that is kind of ‘sixties’, too.”

Bel opens the book to a random page and reads;

 ‘…keep you awake in the general slaughter of life as she is lived today when it is dawn and the world goes forth to murder dreams…’ There he is, on page 125!”

“It is like one huge run-on sentence.”

“I suppose he means aspirations and fond wishes, rather than nightmares and anxiety dreams.”

“‘slaughter of life,’ I get that. It, kind of flows poetic.”

“Okay, I’ll take this one.”

Bel makes the purchase through her phone.

“You want a paper receipt, bel?”

“No more paper please.”

“How about a bag?”

“No plastic please.”

“Check the terminals over there, Fred.”

He points to one of the five flat-screen displays in kiosks around the walls.

The screen responds when I touch the representation of a heavy leather-bound volume marked, ‘start’. Now, it shows a list of topics such as New Fiction, Gardening, Self-Help, etc. Volumes of the current best sellers are pictured in a crawl, across the top.  A touch on any one of them animates the picture. Tumbling from the top, it fills the bottom two-thirds of the screen, open to the title page, with a message offering ninety seconds to browse.

A few seconds later, the option appears to buy the book as a download or paper.  Then comes an invitation to, “The Virtual Book Experience.”

“What is this, Boyd?”

He comes to look over my shoulder.

“Oh that, that isn’t set up yet.  It is pretty cool. I tried it at the P.U. lab.  You put on a kind of helmet and gloves and get to read and handle the virtual book.”

“Who needs a virtual book?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t read books, but you can meet the author. If you introduce yourself, he will greet you by name. You can also listen to an interview.  They are having trouble with the gloves. Supposed to give you the tactile experience of handling the paper and all that.”

“What about the smell of paper?”

“No, that’s still not even in the plans.”

“When is it coming?”

“The smell part?”

“No, the experience.”

“Try in a couple of weeks. For now, these displays are all we have.”

“Yes, they are fine, but one might as well be on a home computer.”

“Yeah, pretty much, but most of us don’t have displays this big, and you probably won’t run into friends.”

Bel is standing next to Boyd, looking on.

“Boyd, I heard you were selling artist’s colors over at Tenniel’s”

“Yeah, it didn’t work out.”

“Sorry to hear that.  Why did you leave?  Seemed like the right job for you, with your interest in art.”

“Messed up family, you know.”

“You mean Tenniel’s?”

“No, No, mine, Mom, Dad, Theo, and now Augie.  Too many guys

orbiting the same woman.”

“I didn’t know Harper was back.”

“Yeah, he came by Tenniel’s and all.  He said he’s going to teach at Prestige U. for a year.”

“So, is that why you quit?”

“No, I got fired.”

Ring tones sound near the pay station. 

“Excuse me, I have to get calls by the second tone.”

He faces the wall. His quiet speech absorbed by his jacket hanging from a nail in the exposed mortar, old and porous. He turns back to bel after a minute or two.

“Sorry bel. Guess who that was?”

“Your Mom?”

“No, it was Theo.  He wants to take me to lunch.”

“How about that!”

“He suggested a walk along the river. I said no.  Then dinner, I said no. So, we settled on lunch.”

“Sounds like you don’t want to see him!”

“I don’t know, maybe, maybe not.”

“Well, it is lunch time now.”

“Right, Mom’s going to melt down again when she hears this.  I mean she’ll be a pool of goo and tears.  SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!”

“Boyd, I am sorry about all this.”

Boyd resumes his seat behind the pay station.

“Yeah, my soap-opera life.”

“You know, the soaps are dying out.”

“That’s what, Diddlie told Mom. Mom is not a fan but Diddlie soaks up suds.” 

“Do you get a lunch period?” 

“No, my shift is over at one o’clock.”

He picks up his phone.

“It is what, twelve forty-seven now?  So, no problem!”

“No, no problem, but a complicated situation.”

He pockets the phone and pulls out a set of keys from a drawer under the pay station.

“Isn’t it just, bel! ‘The American dream, you have to be asleep to believe it.’”

“Sweetheart, how are you doing, I mean really?”

“I am here, aren’t I?”

“That’s saying something.”

“Damn right it is. It’s a miracle!”

“Boyd, why did you get fired honey?”

“I went out to lunch with Dad and didn’t get back until 4, or something.”

“Good grief, Boyd, no wonder you got fired.”

“Yeah, right.  It doesn’t matter though. Dad told me to quit anyway and move in with him.”

“So, you wanted to move on?”

“Yeah, well, in a way, sure.  Augie is okay. He got me into counseling.  That’s been awesome. But, you know, Mom and him together, are way too much.”

“Well, Lark is kind of hyperactive.”

“They both are! One minute they are yelling in the living room and the next they are stripping off to do it on the couch.”

“In front of you?”

“I was walking through, you know.”

Bell browses among the best sellers and new editions on the table.

“How did you find this job?”

“Dad’s friend owns this thing.”

“Good way to get in!”

“Sure, he knows all kinds of people.  He also gave me a few bucks and I get to use his car.”

“Sounds like you landed on your feet!”

“For now, at least. Mom says he is just buying me out from under her.  She got so wound up, Augie took her out. That’s when I packed and bailed.”

“So, how is it, between you now?”

“She yelled into the phone last time. She was really sweet before that. I swear, she gets wound up about politics anyway, then starts mooning around the house, and now, Theo has been calling too.  That really sets her off, you know, it is like, crises, meltdown, fireworks.”

“Oh, how is Theo, these days?”

“Stumbling around, as usual. Well, he is around, like Dad.  You know, I mean orbiting!”

“Your life has taken another interesting turn.”

“Yeah, upside down, inside out and lost and found and lost again. The counselor said I was behaving like an adolescent.”

“Was that helpful?”

“It was crushing!”

“He is something of a provocateur!”

“She was a real bitch! Well, no, I have a new one now, a man, sorry bel.”

“You are putting up with a lot.”

“Augie says it is all part of the process. He said he would throw me out if I quit.”

“And you chose to leave!”

“No, Mom, tore into him. Then threw an orange at him and it hit me. He had to back off.”

Boyd is texting. Now he looks up.

 Sorry, I have to stop talking about all this.”

“Yes, you have a job to do.”

“So, I get mad, then get over it, then, well, I don’t know. ‘Why be normal when you can be happy?’  Anyway, there have only been three customers all morning.”

“It gives us a chance to catch up.”

“First, I split with Albrecht.”

“Oh, I remember, he was upset, to say the least.”

“Bel, you are the neighborhood shoulder.  I swear, everyone cries on it and talks to you.

You know, I split to the beach with Maria and she found a beach-hunk there, so that was a bummer.  I could do without so much interest!”

Boyd stands.

“Hi, welcome to the ‘Bookery!’”

Boyd greets a young woman in tights and a baggy navy-blue sweatshirt with the Prestige U. logo fading across the front.  She takes off her purple-tinted sunglasses and looks over at him while folding the white frames. Turns her back and sits in front of the screen nearest the door.

“Where’s the experience?”

Boyd walks over to her.

“Sorry, it isn’t set up yet.”

“Your ad says it is. What’s going on?”

“Sorry, there’s a glitch, so we put these displays in the booths until it is fixed.”

“This is really messed up!”

She gets up.  Pushes past Boyd and walks out. Someone outside catches the door before it closes.

“Don’t waste your time. They can’t get it up.” 

“I know, I work here.”

“Oh God! You need to get a life!”

Heidi Guderian, steps through the door, her phone in hand.  

“Heidi, you are right on time!”

“Hi Boyd, my boyfriend dropped me off.”

“Thanks for the text!”

Her white jeans barely rise above her hips. Her tee-shirt covers her like an unblemished, knitted lavender skin, leaving a seductive gap above her jeans.  The lavender seam rises and falls over her winking navel like an eyelid.

“Nothing much happening. Here are the keys.”

“How many obnoxious PU creeps did you get?”

“Ah, that’s the only one.”

“God, I hate that place, bunch of stuck-up-know-it-all-assholes!”

“Yeah, ah, Heidi, I have to get going.  Should be quiet. See you.”

She takes the keys and sits behind the pay station. Boyd walks out and we both follow behind him along the waterfront, where people are feeding the herring gulls.  Theo walks across the Wharf-side deck towards Boyd, as we catch him up.  Theo sweats in his open overcoat, right hand in the pocket, pulling it down to that side. 

“Hiya!”

Boyd steps back while bel smiles.

“Theo, haven’t seen much of you lately.”

“Yeah, I have been on a lot of travel.”

She gestures.

“Do you know Fred?”

“Oh of course! Hi Fred.”

“Boyd, how are you doing, guy?”

“Looking at you, man.”

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.

“Did you know Hank Dumpty has been discharged?”

“So, they put him back together again!”

“He just got out of Prestige U. Hospital’s Rehab Unit.”

“I was thinking of him the other day, a beat-up old blue truck like his was in front of me on Route One.”

Geese feed on the grass in front of the Ashes as we walk past its ruins.

Daisy’s face is hidden by the hood protecting her from cold rain and drips from every bare twig in the white oaks above.

“There goes that fox.”

“Where are you looking? What fox?”

“You know, the one that was stealing newspapers.”

“How do you know it was that one?”

“Thought I saw a plastic shred streaming from its mouth.”

She stops and faces the building.

“Look, there it goes, behind the Ashes.”

“I can’t see through this mist and rain.”

“Fred, why don’t you come along and visit Hank, with me?”

“Well, I was going to the Pie Shop for coffee.”

“So, turn here instead.”

“Sure, I forget, did he fall off a wall? Was it at home?”

“It was that big wall over there.”

Daisy points towards the retaining wall along the side of the Ashes’ driveway.

“I never did find out what he was doing there.”

Helga has the door open as we walk towards it.

“Oh! Such weather!  Daisy, so glad you can come.”

Hank’s old Ford F 150 is parked next to the woodpile with a green tarp covering something in the bed.

“Oh, and Fred, so kind of you.”

“How is he?”

We step in past Helga in her yellow jumpsuit and pink ribbon in her thick white hair.

“Are you ready?  Fred, are you ready? The only thing that shuts him up is sleep!  He has been swearing at the TV.”

Helga goes in the back. Hank sits in a recliner in the living room with his eyes closed and a red blanket over his legs.  Drying scabs retreat from around his mouth, on his nose and right cheek and forehead. Two plastic urinals hang from their handles on the rail of a cluttered cart next to him. The TV is at low volume.

“Hanky, how are you? How are you?”

Daisy holds his swollen hand.  He doesn’t open his eyes.

“Pull up a chair, if you can find one.”

“There’s a couple right here.  You doing okay?”

Hank stares at the TV.

“Too many buttons! Turn that damn thing off, will you?”

He gives Fred the remote with his free hand.

“Jackal news, Canis Propaganda, Jack shit news, Foxy blonds, and priapic maniacs, they’re not going to make a dupe out of this guy!”

“Okay Hank, try to calm down, honey.”

“Kilauea eruption, ah, flowing towards the coast.”

“Right, in Hawaii.”

“Lava, Daisy, hot angry lava, all over, palaver on right and left.”

“Don’t let that bull shit get to you.”

“Daisy, baby, its climate change, you know?”

“Right, the ice caps are melting.”

“They are firing words out of AKs now.  There is no conversation, it is high volume, ah, ah, ah.

Daisy lets go and Hank folds his hands on his belly and drifts off. Helga is back.

“Daisy, Fred, you want some coffee?”

“Thanks, I would love a cup.”

Helga is off again but turns at the door.

“Daisy, I’ll bring you one too.”

Daisy reaches over to Hank and strokes the back of one hand. It is blotched with purple bruises from intravenous feeds. His eyes open.

“Like going back to infancy.”

“What is?”

“Hospital, spittle care, horse spittle!”

He rubs the bald egg-like head.

“Fred, hi, ah, ah, yeah, good to see you.  Who else did you bring, Daisy?”

“That’s all I got, honey!”

“Where’s your hat, Daisy? And your bracelets? You lose them?

“The wind got my bowler.  It is probably in the Potomac by now, and I left my bracelets off when I started teaching.”

“You did?  Why?”

“They were getting in the way.”

Hank’s lids close halfway over his eyes and he nods forward for a moment, with his chin on his chest, and comes back.

“Yeah, Daisy, hospital, all bodily functions managed with meds, tests and obscene physical intrusions into my person.”

“Okay, you must be glad to be back home in your chair.”

“Infant high chair, more like.  See my seventeen soldiers lined up there?”

He extends his arm with half-folded fist toward the bookcase on his left.

“You have more books than that!”

“No, in front of the books, on the lower shelf!”

“Yeah, all those medicine bottles lined up in front.”

“That regiment is my regimen, god damn conspiracy of pharmaceuticals and profiteering and a sad lack of prophecy.”

“It’s not a conspiracy, Hank.  Those are prescriptions.”

“That’s your description. Daisy let me re-describe here. That’s what my Uncle Rorty used to say, ‘Re-describe the problem, keep re-describing.’  So, listen up, there’s one for this, which leads to that, and another to counteract that so this may happen and another to counteract the side effects of the first two together.  Now, all those shenanigans are what I would describe as conspiratorial!”

“Hank, you are crazy loquacious these days.”

“Yeah, bumped my head and loosened my words.”

“Now, they pour out.”

“Never used to, ah.  I was spare with my words, cautious.  Let the other guy make an ass of himself!”

“You were always pretty quiet, succinct too.”

“No college, but the Army, I can read through. I know how to use a library.  Spent time in Nam and Germany.  Brought the best part of Germany back, too. I built and ran a successful business. Now I run my mouth!”

Hank is looking at his meds.

“Right, yeah, anyway, one of those bastards goes right up my ass! constipation, maybe more than one.”

“Too much information Hank.”

“Too much of a good thing! Some of those soldiers parade daily, some are twice or thrice daily.  Others do night assaults.  You might call them periodicals!”

“Okay, when does your subscription expire?”

“When the battle is over, or the ammo runs out.  Whichever comes first. This is frontline combat, and I had a, ah, ah, ah.”

Hank closes his eyes again and leaves us with his deep rhythmical breathing.

“How do you feel, Hank?”

“Please excuse me.  Did I fade out?”

“Are you alright?”

“No, rotten to the core!”

“You passed out, Hank!”

“It was a squirrel.”

“What was?”

“That’s what I call them, squirrels.”

“Right, okay, but what are you calling a squirrel?”

“Thoughts, like furry little bastards that disappear up the other side of Quercus alba before I can get them into words.”

“Quercus who?”

“Quercus alba, the grey ghosts.”

“Oh! you mean the ghosts of your thought that disappeared.”

“No, I am talking about the white oaks growing all around us with gray trunks.”

“It is surprising how many are left.  Seems like there are power saws running somewhere in the neighborhood every day.”

“Diddlie, gave me a lecture on the subject back around Christmas, white oaks, Quercus, and ghosts, in all that tree hugging vocabulary of hers.”

“Ghostly, especially in winter when it is misty like today.”

“Yeah, no wonder, ah, ah, ah.”

Hank is quiet.  His eyes closed.

“Fred, do you think we should go now?”

“He does seem tired.”

Helga brings coffee.  Two mugs on a tray with a small carton of half and half.

“Oh yeah! I can smell the coffee!  You got one for me?”

Helga stops with tray in hand and looks down at the two mugs.

“Ah, why not?  Bring me a couple, just a couple of swigs, honey.”

Helga leaves the tray and steps out again.

“Right, well, okay, I am tired. Hurt my brain when I fell, or maybe I fell because my brain got hurt. Anyway, the gray matter is scrambled as a breakfast egg.”

Helga comes in with a plastic cup full of water, lid and plastic straw.

“Henry, you had a stroke and fell out of your truck in Diddlie’s driveway.”

“Oh! so it wasn’t over at the Ashes.”

“He fell there too, Daisy, but didn’t hurt himself.”

“I know Helga. I know honey. That is your story.”

“Happens to be a true story, Hank.”

“Truth, stories, facts, oh! let’s not go there!”

“We still know the meaning of truth in this house, Henry.”

“Well, I don’t remember it that way and whatever did happen, happened to me.”

“I get that.”

“I was in the truck, then on the ground, then in the hospital and now, home sweet home with Helga the soldiers and ah, ah.”

“Daisy, he does this now.  He just loses his way.”

“Scrambled egg!”

Hank grabs the plastic cup and Helga drops some pills in the palm of his other hand.

He flashes a gap-tooth grin and downs his meds.

“Doesn’t taste like coffee to me.”

“Hank, what happened to your teeth?”

“Daisy, I lost the front ones in the fall from Grace.”

“You got religion now, Hank?”

“I have been a promiscuous reader, Bible included, and shop manuals, Keats, The Post, The Nag Hammadi Library, damn-fool junk mail, and Melville and so on.  My bastard thoughts are born of random sampling!”

“What are you reading now?”

“Labels on these meds and instructions from the ‘horse spittle’ and prattle from the insurance company and this!”

He picks up a document from his cart.

“From Dr. Glad-t0-know-you, the son of a bitch wants $700.00, for what?  He doesn’t say. Daisy, take a look with your discerning artist’s eyes.”

“Hank, I think maybe you are being scammed!”

“That’s what Helga said.”

He grabs the paper and tosses it back on the cart.  It settles for a moment on top of a box of tissues and floats to the floor.  Hank retreats behind his eyelids for a moment.

“I’ll have our daughter look it over, Daisy.”

“Where is Grace these days?”

“Grace, is fresh out of pharmacy school and ah, ah, hanging out with the boyfriend, upstate and, and, and outside in the truck I, ah, ah, ah.”

Hank, is gone for another moment.

“Yeah, Helga calls my truck Grace, you know.”

“Oh, that truck!  He wouldn’t hire a mover after we bought the house. We must have made two dozen trips, saved so much money.”

“The two Graces, they are both 25, and both carry a lot of weight around here!”

Helga rearranges his red blanket.

“Henry, you remember the sideboard door swung open as we loaded it and broke the glass?”

“I beg forgiveness! And don’t forget the lost sugar bowl, the ancestral crystal, my love.”

“Oh, Die Zuckerdose! It survived British bombs and American.  Grace, told me the other day.  She has it up in Syracuse.”

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 greets me outside the Cavendish Pie Shop doffing his bright red MAGA hat with an exaggerated sweep of his arm. The last blackened mound of weekend snow melts in a stream at our feet.

“Going for coffee?”

“Yes, and something chocolate.”

“Right on, let’s buzz beyond the afternoon Zs.”

He opens the glass door and steps in.  A huge white Pyrenees Mountain Dog sniffs his crotch.  Then puts a paw on his shoulder to sniff his ear.

“Rank! You know my wife won’t restrain him.”

“Okay, I like friendly dogs.”

“What’s that thing on your head?”

Gertie sits back. Her massive bosom fills her dark green shirt, styled with epaulets and pocket flaps.

“Fred, this Gertie Stone.”

She points across the table in a stabbing gesture.

“That is Felicity Tock.”

Felicity’s thick black braid, rests on her shoulder like a hawser.

“See!  Alf always picks the friendly ones.”

“That is not the point, Fil.”

Fil brushes white dog hairs from her sunny yellow turtleneck.

“Fred, you can call me Fil.”

The dog has both paws on Rank’s shoulder and looks at him at eye level, mouth slightly open in a canine smile.

“Down, Alf.”

Felicity rubs dog hairs from between her fingers onto an empty plate while Gertie grabs Alf’s collar, keeping her eye on Rank.

“I still want to know why you are wearing that damn fool hat?”

“It keeps the sun out of my eyes.”

“Did you look at the thing before putting it on?”

“I did.”

“Aren’t you embarrassed for God’s sake?”

“I want a great country, with border security, and ah, low taxes, you know.”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Rank.”

“Gertie, stop it!  You are rude, rude, rude!”

“My dearest love, I call ‘em like I see ‘em, and what I see here is sheer foolishness!”

“Anyway, Rank, shall we all sit together at one of the big tables?   Hope you will join us Fred. If Gertie can calm down.”

“Let’s move it, Fil.”

Gertie carries her ebony walking stick with silver pommel, tweed deerstalker and matching coat to one of the big dragon tables.  Fil follows with Alf who spreads his Alpine white underneath, with his chin on her black suede boot.

Mrs. Rutherford is bent behind one of the glass-fronted display cases. She doesn’t look up from the cherry cupcakes she places on display.

“Mr. Majors, have you been away?  Haven’t seen you around.”

“Yeah, extended business trip.”

“One of those!”

“When did you start letting dogs in here?”

“When Alf came in.”

Mrs. Rutherford stands and puts her tray aside.

“He shouldn’t be in here, but he is a favorite of mine.”

Her ringtones end the conversation with their Westminster Chimes.  She fills our orders keeping one ear to the phone. Rank sits down opposite Gertie who is leaning back with her hand out to the side on the silver pommel of her stick.

“I never would have thought it, twenty-five years ago-or was it thirty? when we were working together.  Never took you for a sucker, Rank.  You were a mighty sharp young captain.”

“So, you guys go back a ways.  Where was this?”

Rank shakes his head.

“Can’t comment, Fred.”

“Fred, I was a linguist until my disaffection.”

“And what was that about?”

“The first oil grab, Bush one moved our troops into Saudi and then invaded Iraq.”

Gertie looks in her empty blue paper coffee cup and crushes it in the fist of her free hand.

“Then I resigned and moved to France.  Now I am glad to be back.  Happy, can you believe it?  In a mad raucous country so high on hype it’s going to hell like any other addict.”

Gertie laughs and bangs her stick on the floor for emphasis.

“Where were you when you resigned?”

“One of those places Fred, that’s so secret you can see it mentioned regularly.”

“One of the seventeen acronyms!”

“Mind what you say Fil, oh love of my life.”

“Gertie Stone, take me for a fool if you want.  We’ll see who the fools are when the country is so overrun with illegals you will have to be a linguist to get through the day.”

“We shall see Rank Majors, and if that happens, I will welcome them all and pick up another language.”

“And what about the rule of law?”

“Yes, it is flouted liberally by our conservative rulers.”

“Without control of the borders we aren’t a country at all.”

Gertie looks out the window.

“Rank, try to relax! Consider this February weather, the current flock of cabinet secretaries, the complexity of the twigs and branches growing in the trees over there, corporate Congressional influence, and that crow perched right outside, on the dumpster.”

“Yeah, okay, ah, so what?”

Fil breaks into uncontrolled giggling.

“Scavengers!”

Rank grins at her, coffee in hand.

“Trees, Congress, nice warm weather, a crow? I guess I don’t get it!”

Fil gently takes hold of his wrist and without spilling any coffee, pulls his cup over to her mouth and takes a sip.

“You always were such a sweet guy Rank, ready to protect a vulnerable woman and ready to stand up for what is right!”

“Do you need protection, Fil?”

She shakes her head.

“No Fred, kidding, you know, trying to lighten it up a little.”

Gertie leans forward.

“Rank, do you know what is right?”

“You bet I do!”

She leans back again to look out of the window.

“Just what I suspected!”

“Gertie, stop talking in riddles and get real, will you?”

“Riddles, fiddles and diddles, the currency is debased.  I can’t get any verbal purchase on reality in political discussions.  So, I express my intentions indirectly.  Allowing you to use your imagination and stretch yourself, Rank.  Your mind is congealed into a hyperbolic mess.”

“You think I am gravy or what?”

Fil gets up and embraces Rank, pressing her head against his.

“My stoical hero!”

“You two are like a comedy act!”

“Is that what you call it, Fred?”

“You are talking right past each other!”

“Fil, leave the fellow alone!”

“Okay, okay, Fil, I can take a joke, but Gertie, you owe me a plain explanation.”

“Rank, go to my blog at, “A Snowflake in the Blizzard.com” and read the section, ‘Stone’s Throw.’

“You are doing one of those?”

“Yup! Let the images and ideas roll around in your mind.  See what happens.  You might also look at my translations of Osama bin Laden’s output.”

“He’s a terrorist. He killed about three thousand people here in the States.”

“No denying that.”

“Why are you promoting terrorism?”

“Rank! Rank! RANK!  This is not promotion. As a one-time-intelligence officer, it should be obvious!”

“Sure, knowing the enemy. That is always a good idea.”

“There you are.  Osama had a point of view and we would all do well to understand it.”

“I don’t think the public needs any of it.  I think you should take it down.”

Gertie puts one hand on the table and slowly stands. Then props her stick against her chair and retrains Alf, sniffing Fil’s plate with his paws on the table.

“We have to go.”

“Oh, so soon?  They haven’t finished their coffees, and look, Fred still has a lot of chocolate cake.”

“I have work to do, love.  Let’s move it.”

Fil puts on her coat and helps Gertie with her hat and coat.  Alf swipes her with his tail, trying to get to Gertie’s stick.

“Nice seeing you again, Rank!”

“Sure Fil, I’ll check it out Gertie!”

“Here’s your stick.  Goodbye Fred, nice meeting you.”

Fil and Gertie walk out the door and across the parking lot, stick tapping, arm in arm with Alf at Fil’s side.

“You took quite a shellacking, there, Rank! and took it very well.”

Rank pulls out his phone and works hard with his thumbs.

“She’s always been abrupt, but she isn’t mean.  I owe Gertie. She helped me a good deal.”

He goes on taping his phone.

“Okay, here it is!”

He puts the phone on the table and the screen is filled with, “Stone’s Throw”.

 I am moved by an impulse to speak.  Though no one is nearby to listen.  No one can get back where words take on the shape of thought. One might try looking at the spectrum of a dream, uninhibited by the physics of a prism’s revelation. An eye possessing its objects by light of mental associations which can make nonsense of speech.  

I walk through the city sunlight for my own reasons, a random passerby to everyone else, a mystery casting its shadow at an intersection.  Some sleep in the park, some hurry by, others stroll with their intimates, lovers and other preoccupations. While many are absorbed by their phones. Traffic winds its tail around the surrounding rectangles.  Block after block of decisions planners made for it.  The city crowd is unlike an army of ants, a herd of antelope or a murmuration of starlings.  We move in a crowd while being apart and pressed close on the Metro, the most one utters is an apology or a request to be excused for moving to the door.

 I observe the city built with machines according to the minds of appointed and elected officials, according to law and custom and persuasive offers from persistent interests. Fissiparous by nature, it is restless trying to grow into its rationality. A grid constructed according to the shortest distance between two points. Two singularities conjured by abstraction, materialized by a drafting program.  Bricks, windows, floor-tiles, doors, the city square, the TV framing fantasies and longing, what other organism is evolving into rectangles?  It takes a mineral!

 I have seen aerial photographs reveal an organic pattern in the curvy linear design of hillside suburban neighborhoods. Each house on the stalk of its gray concrete driveway grows out of a small street, which connects to a network drawn on the earth in black top, like graphite on the page of its conception. When rain turns the city’s page, it reveals a plan of gutters and sewers and storm drains, rubber, plastic, and gravel spread on flat roofs.  Each rock about the size of a raindrop, disperses its impact among the neighbors.  Dispersed randomly as wealth, as the daily stock averages, as a squirrel’s buried acorn on the freshly fertilized front lawn.  Each mowed patch of green blades, a proud carpet of privileged suburban prosperity.

 I wander into the future and through alternative histories, trying to find the present, which is always here, but where am I?  Here I am, gone cyber, grown out of my youth, into my infirmities, and new-found strength. Each year is a smaller proportion of my life span, getting that much faster into the wealth of rich late color.” 

 

 

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

“I think that is our long-lost neighbor.”

Bel Vionnet points out a shiny black Humvee stopped across the road.

“Who?”

“Jake Trip, of course!  Who else would drive a thing like that?”

Jake, lowers the driver’s side window giving a thumbs up.  He turns the engine off, jumps down and crosses the road.  Bel steps forward and grabs his hand in both of hers.

“Where have you been?”

She lets him go. He lifts his dark aviators onto his brush cut.

“That’s quite a story, if you really want to know, bel.”

“Jake, you’re so skinny honey! Why don’t we get some lunch?”

“Okay, I have time.”

“You don’t mind Fred here, do you?”

He points to the snow-piled parking lot in front of the H bar.

“Let me park over there.”

We meet him in the foyer.  We sit in the quiet of the Quantum Lounge, with its carpet, and highbacked green velvety booths.  It is well after one o’clock when our orders come, and the lounge is ours alone. He starts with his French fries and ketchup.

“You know I nearly lost the house, right?”

“Yeah, it looked that way. I mean we saw the notice on the door, but we didn’t really know.”

“Sure, I was working with Armond at the time.”

“You mean, Armond Macadamia?”

“The same, Fred.  When Snaz Corporation was sold to Ensor Group, it became SnazE, and I lost my franchise. Complicated; I won’t go there. Well, I’ll tell you this, Sherman got me the best deal he could.  You know Sherman, bel.”

“We go way back. I have worked with Sherman on Fauxmont business plenty of times; all Pro Bono, too!”

“Yeah, Sherman Shrowd is a straight arrow in a crooked business.”

A fry drops from his fingers and skips off the edge of the table leaving a red drip as it disappears.

“You know, he has a strange middle name?”

Jake leans back to look for his fry and shrugs.

“The one that got away!”

“It wasn’t that big Jake.”

“Here Jake.”

Bel, moves a cinderish sliver of potato from under the table with the edge of her shoe.

“I can’t reach that thing, but I can tell you his middle name is Calouste, and he is related to the Gulbenkians, on his mother’s side.”

Before Jake can stretch towards the rogue fry, the busboy kicks it out of site as he walks past, balancing stacks of rattling flatware, glass and stainless on a battered metal tray.

“Ah! Forget it!  I do a lot of forgetting.  It’s part of growing up, or something. Maybe I forgot too much? Or not enough?  Skip it.  Anyway, I was fund raising for the Macadamia campaign.  Made some contacts and tried to start a new business after Trump won the election.  Then I got home one day, and Gale had left. No note, no nothing!”

“Oh Jake, I am so sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well, we talked bel, I remember that, and thanks again.”

“Sure Jake, so, what did you end up doing?”

“Kept working, kept working until I was so tired I just crashed out, out of the business, out my mind, just about.  I was out West when that happened.”

“Okay, so now you are back.”

Jake, is out of frenchfries and opens his burger bun to add mustard and ketchup to the meat and remove the onion.

“Anyway, Mom was dying about that time, so I spent a while at home.  Kind of washed up.  Kept her company.  I escaped into nostalgia I guess, for a while anyway.”

Jake, bites into his burger and chews quietly.  Bel’s fries are still jumbled next to her clubsandwich, which is cut into small triangles piled four layers high and collapsing when she picks one up. Jake wipes his mouth and puts his burger down.  His coke arrives with a beer for me and lemonade for bel.

“Mom taught sixth grade.  Her Dad was a school principal.  Very strict disciplinarian, the whole school was afraid of him.”

“Were you afraid, Jake?”

“I kept my distance. Paid him respect.  Did okay, I guess. My Dad was an auto worker. Yeah, built engines for Chevrolet, up in Tonawanda. Good secure job, back then.

“Isn’t that in Canada?”

“No Fred, Upstate New York, near Buffalo. Yeah, we got whippings, my brother and me.  Dad’s belt and all, you know.  I hated the son of a bitch.  Excuse my French.  I promised myself I was going to get revenge, too.  By the time I was seventeen I was bigger than him.  I was a winner on the wrestling team and pumping iron in the school gym.  I liked to walk around with no shirt that summer to show off.  The beatings stopped that summer.  It was frustrating you know.  There were times when I thought about provoking him, but didn’t.  Mom would never have forgiven me.”

“What did she make of the beatings?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  I guess she grew up with the same thing.”

“And your brother?”

“Eli?  He just took it.  He used to tell me to “be man and forget about it”.  Be a man! I was going to be a man for sure.  I was going to dislocate the old man’s arms for him.  Let him try it then!”

“I suppose you didn’t get along with Eli.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that.  We didn’t have much in common.  He was older and into electronics.  Too busy to talk to me, taking girls out in his Volkswagen.  Before that we did alright, I guess.  Eli, was out in Silicon Valley when Mom died.  He didn’t make it to the funeral.”

Jake looks down at his plate but doesn’t eat.

“We had one bathroom and Dad wore a yellow bathrobe going back and forth from the bedroom every morning.  He always kept covered up. Well, he slipped in the shower one morning that summer, and Mom told me to go in and help.  Then I saw all the scars on his back, and legs.  Dad had to lie low for a few months with a bad back.  The sight of his back made me feel sick. You know, I got whipped, but nothing like that.  I mean I don’t have scars.”

Jake swigs his coke, but still doesn’t eat.

“Mom told me before she died that he had a tough childhood on a ranch in Oklahoma.  He learned to repair the tractors and trucks.  You know, he had a gift for it.  So, I didn’t know what to do with my revenge.  I couldn’t talk to Eli, about it. I sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to Dad. That’s when I met Gale.  She was working at the soda fountain in our drug store over the summer.  We talked and talked, I mean I spent half my college money sitting in there buying sodas and burgers and taking her on dates. Talking about everything and it took my mind off all that revenge stuff.  You know, we didn’t just talk either, sex took up most of my mind!  We were very careful, and we had a lot of fun even before we got married, right out of high school.

“So, you didn’t go to college then?”

“Not right away. I bought a car for dating Gale.’

“Another Volkswagen?”

“No way! No, I got a Chevy, needed a bench seat.”

“Of course, Jake!”

“Yeah, bel, Mom was really mad.”

“What did your Dad say about the car purchase?”

“Nothing, we didn’t talk.”

“Yes, what about Gale?”

“Luckily, Mom and Gale liked each other a lot.  That was the sweetest thing about it all.  Well, that and sex of course.  We both got jobs after graduation, Gale and I, down town in a department store.  I was in the stock room hefting boxes and she was at a cash register.  I used to hang out with the drivers and some sales men who came back there to have a smoke and bullshit, after making their pitch to the manager.  I figured I could do that. I could sell stuff.

I did too. I mean making the big bucks was my revenge on that bullying bastard.  Poor son of bitch, I guess that was all he knew. I made more money in a week than he could make in a year! You know, I got heavily involved in the business and then, politics. Gale told Liberty, I left her.  Liberty is like me, ambitious.  We can talk about business all night, but she keeps a lot to herself.  I don’t get it.  I mean I was away a lot, but still living at home.  Anyway, I am telling you all this because I want to get Gale back here.

“Jake, did you tell Gale your Mom died?  Did she ask about Gale?

“Mom asked.  I told her, Gale left.”

“Aha, and,”

“We didn’t say anymore, bel.”

“Jake, you are a salesman, you know how to communicate!”

“I can sell alright, but family is different.”

“Well, it is that!”

Jake pushes his plate away with one bite out of his burger.

Bel pushes his plate back to him.

“Jake, eat up!  You have a lot of hard work to do.”

“I know, bel.  Can’t eat right now, though.”

“No, honey, I can see that on your face.”

Jake leans back and wipes his mouth with the last napkin in the dispenser.

“We have a great president and things are looking good for my new company. I mean, bel, I feel like you might have some idea.”

“Jake, ah, have you tried asking her?”

“Ah, sort of, like through Liberty, you know.”

“If you want your woman back, you might go and see her.  How about it?”

“I don’t know if she will see me.”

“Do you think, maybe you stopped talking to her?”

“I was real, busy.”

“Jake, I am flattered that you would ask.  I mean, taking Fred and me into your confidence, but I think you might want to see a marriage counselor.”

“Excuse me here a moment.”

Jake reads a text.

“Bel, you have told me a thing or two over the years, and I am sure you will go on, but I have to make a move now.”

“Oh, and I enjoy our discussions too, and we will go on, and might have another one about this president you think is so great!”

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 holds the door for a hooded customer of the Ab & Cheek Fitness Center, who lugs in a backpack and bulky gym bag.  Paula comes out, pushes her hair out of her face with a quick swipe of her fist holding the cuff of her sweatshirt.

“Surprise! Surprise, Fred! How are you?”

“Keeping dry.  You look well, Paula.”

“I was doing okay until my latest workout.”

We stroll the covered walkway as rain and mist blur the Christmas lights decorating the Hadron Shopping Center and parking lot.  She limps slightly on her left leg, in pink and yellow SnazE sweats with powder blue SnazE “Top Step” shoes.

“Shall we get out of this weather? I mean do you have time for a coffee or something?”

“Sure, Fred.”

“How about, “Chez Roger?”

“Awesome! That new French place. Yeah, I haven’t been there yet.”

She stops, leans on a pillar and touches my arm.

“Fred, did you know Nadia called me a while back?”

“Nadia, of Nadia Brasov fame?”

“Is she a celebrity?”

We move on towards our French rendezvous.

“Just joking, Paula.  I mean she is a subject of interest in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, Nadia, she might be Nadia Plank by now.”

“Could well be!”

“Yeah, I mean I hardly knew who she was at first. We, like, sort of bonded.”

“How delightful!”

“Yeah, we were on the phone for quite a while.  She wanted to know if Niki had contacted me. So, I says, ‘Who’s Niki?’

and she, like, didn’t answer, just says, ‘Have you noticed anyone following you?'”

Paula presses her palms to her cheeks, as I open the door for her at Chez Roger.

“I was like, frozen. I says, ‘there was this weird guy.’

You know, last October at my Mom’s place on Lievens Avenue?  I think it was a guy. I says, to her, ‘I caught him looking in the window of our house.'”

“Yes. I remember that incident.”

“And yeah, she says, ‘What did he look like?”

And I says ‘He had on a trench coat and a scarf over his head like a woman,'”

and she says, ‘That’s probably one of Niki’s people.’

and I says, “okay, so who is Niki?”

She says, “Nikita Brasov, the husband I left behind in London.'”

And I says ‘Was he like, Russian or something?”

And she says, ‘Yes Russian, actually, escaped, perhaps, would be more accurate.’

So, I says” How did he find me?”

And she says, “Niki has the connections to find anyone.”

I was like, “That’s really creepy.”

And she says, “Oh, isn’t it just?”

And I says, “What was he doing at my Mom’s place?”

And she says, Paula chokes and takes a breath.

“He’s scoping Chuck out.”

“Why Chuck? I says.”

Paula stops, breathless again and too distracted to answer the barista, Marcel, asking for her order. After a moment we order our coffees, a couple of madeleines, and find a marble top table for two in the back.

“I get the feeling you are back in it!”

“In what?”

“I mean you seem to be reliving the phone call.”

“Yeah! It’s like, happening!”

“How did Nadia get your number?  I mean, how did she even know who you were?”

“Chuck told her. I think he told her he was seeing me.”

“Okay, and did he give her your number too?”

“No. Nadia is smart. You know what she did?”

“Tell me.”

“She looked on his phone.”

“You mean she knew the password and all that?”

“I don’t know, but she told me that’s how she found my number.”

“How intriguing!”

“Well, she figured everything out, you know.”

“Yes, she has had an interesting life, too.”

“Well, you know, she’s got that cute British accent. I just love talking to her!”

Paula sips her café au lait and points out a framed ad for ‘Patisserie Roger’ from years ago, hanging on the wall opposite.

“Looks like this was a family business back in France.”

“Right, and we got the last vacant table at this one.”

“Have you done all your holiday shopping, Fred?”

A mother with toddler and numerous packages backs into Paula.

“Oh! excuse me!”

The child breaks loose and runs toward the door.  Paula gets up to catch him but her knee pain stops her. She leans slightly on the table with one knuckle. He trips and falls among the people in line for service.  Resolute and adventurous, he gets up and disappears beyond the line.

The mother shouts, “STEVIE,” puts her packages down on the floor by our table and walks over in pursuit.

“Look, Fred, he’s gone in back.”

We can see him toddling around making progress towards his next fall.  His pants are white with flower down one side. He passes from our view through the window on the kitchen.

The baker carries Stevie back into the store. Paula points to the door.

“His mother went that way.”

Someone else shouts out.

“Roger! Roger! She went outside.”

Paula sits down again with a hand on her knee.

Stevie looks around, squirming in Roger’s arms.

“Let go! I want down!”

The baker’s grip tightens and Stevie shouts,

“You’re hurting, fucker!”

Roger doesn’t relent and skillfully changes his grip, so he has a hand under both of Stevie’s arms. He holds him out at arm’s length in front of him, the way farsighted people do to see more clearly.  Stevie kicks in vain.  His stubby legs are too short to strike.

“Petit gamin! Comment osez-vous me parler comme ça horrible petit rat!”

“DOWN! I want down!”

His mother pushes through the line at the door and walks over to her child on high.

“I am so sorry, Roger.”

“Okay, madame.”

“Here Stevie,”

The baker unloads squirming Stevie into his mother’s arms. He falls through and she catches him by the crook of his arm. He dangles for a moment a few inches from the floor, screaming.

“LET GO!”

She lowers him to the ground and squats down to talk, face to face.

“Stevie, quiet down. Just quiet down.”

Stevie’s tears come quietly. A young man in a black SnazE tracksuit offers to carry her packages and they all leave Chez Roger to its French ambiance.

“Do you have kids, Fred?”

“No, never did.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Plainly.”

“Where did he learn that? I mean, really!”

“TV, I should think.”

“Hope I don’t have one like that!”

Paula rubs her knee, preoccupied for a while.

“Paula, what brought all this back to you now?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just memories, you know, and I saw a woman with her scarf over her head when the rain started and it gave me a creepy feeling and I saw you and we haven’t talked since, since I don’t know when, and you know, I just felt like telling you, I guess.”

“Yes, isn’t it interesting how associations play in our minds?”

“Yeah, I guess, Fred. Oh! I have got to tell you this. You know, Nadia was staying with this art dealer in New York when she first got to the States.  I can’t think of her name.  It’s really weird.”

“Are you thinking of Osiris Tarantula?”

“Right, Spider-Woman!”

“Her son is the one who did Chuck’s sculpture.”

“That’s Boris Tarantula.”

“Right, anyway, Osiris told Nadia a lot of stuff about the art deal.”

“The art deal?”

“Yeah, you know, Chuck’s sculpture, that metal willow tree thing in front of the new house?”

“I thought he bought that through Giuseppe Gloriani.”

“Yeah right, but Iris told Nadia that Chuck was lying to both of them and wanted to get the story straight.”

“Both? Who?”

“Ah, no, wait a minute. Oh, this is so complicated!”

“These deals often are!”

“She asks Nadia, ‘When is Chuck going to pay for Boris’s sculpture?'”

“You mean Iris asked Nadia?”

“Yeah, so, Nadia says to Iris, ‘I don’t know.  I assume he paid already.’  Then Iris says, ‘That’s not what I heard from Giuseppe.'”

She also said, because of that, Giuseppe had optioned the Willow Tree piece to two other clients. ‘Yeah, I mean really!’ ”

“Well, good luck, it is cemented in front of Chuck’s place.”

“I know! Then Nadia told me, – and this is so creepy! – Giuseppe took her on a date and tried to get into her pants.  Yeah, she says, ‘We started with lunch, then a preview of a Howard Hodgkin exhibition at Gagosian Gallery,’ then she says,

‘We were in the Limo and I find his hand in my blouse.’  She says. ‘Did he think I would go to his hotel?’

I was like, ‘Probably; I mean what did you do?’

“Then she says. ‘I got his hand out of there with my fingernails. Not the fakes either. ‘I was like, ‘Oh! Wow.'”

“And she says, ‘Those were mine, and strong as hell.’

You know, I was like, ‘God Nadia! Did you draw blood?'”

And you know what she said then?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“She says, real casual, ‘Oh I think I found a few drops on, me later!’

‘Anyway, ah….'”

Paula stops for breath again and gulps her café au lait.

“So, then she told the driver to let her out.  So, I says, ‘Did he?'”

And she says, ‘That slimy creature told him not to stop; ghastly halitosis you know.'”

So I says, ‘What did you do?’

She says, staying really cool, ‘I started banging on the glass with my rings right behind the driver’s head.'”

Paula drains her cup.

“And you know what Fred? The driver finally stopped and unlocked the doors and she got out, and the driver says to her, ‘Sit in front.’  Then he dropped her off at Osiris’ place.”

“And Giuseppe, what of him?”

“I don’t know. She had to get off the phone.”

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 is subdued, slouched in his chair.  We sit behind the H Bar’s bow window.  The thunder storm pours off a broken gutter above. The torrent spreads and flattens on the big main pane, smudging points of red and green light flashing from emergency vehicles on Maxwell Avenue beyond the parking lot.

Lou glances at his phone and goes on watching the light show.

“Notice how quiet it is at home without the leaf blowers?”

“One of rain’s many benefits.”

It is getting so dark we see through our reflection in the window as we also see outside.

“Would have just gotten out of Church about now.”

“It’s past noon.”

“I have let all that go.” He slouches further down in his chair.

Mostly anyway.”

“Hi, my name is Oscar. May I bring you gentlemen another beer?”

The waiter bends toward Lou. His black hair is shaved on the sides, longer and spikey with mousse on top. He picks up our empties from the coffee table between our chairs and lingers for an answer.  Lou is diverted from the view outside.

“Sure, and I’ll have a burger and fries with all the trimmings.”

“Make that two, please.”

“Right away!”

The waiter attends to a party arriving behind us.

“He better take time to cook ‘em!”

“A little steak tartare, Lou?”

“Raw meat! Not in the burger we’ll get here.”

“No reason to change our weekly lunch menu, even if it is Sunday rather than Wednesday!”

Lou raises himself and holds up his glass.

“The H Bar! My church!”

“Our temple to fermentation.”

“Vargas Llosa’s Cathedral.”

“I still haven’t read it.”

“You’ve had my copy of Conversations in the Catherdralfor years.”

“I know just where it is gathering dust, too.”

“Better hang on to it, Fred.”

“You notice, it was quiet up to now in here.”

“Time to chat and think …”

Lou swills the last of his amber pleasure.

“and a little of this elixir to help us along.”

Lark Bunlush walks over holding up a hand in silent greeting and smiling from beneath her deep hood of her purple rain cape.  Augie joins us in matching rain cape.  Lark pushes her hood back repeatedly but the fabric resists and slowly falls forward over her forehead.  Augie, a foot taller, grabs the top of her hood and pulls the cape off over her head and drapes it on the back of a chair with his own.  Before sitting down, Lark puts her arm around Lou’s neck and whispers in his ear and he turns to her.

“Thank you, Lark.”

“I saw it on Facebook this morning.”

“Yeah, the anniversary is marked. Haven’t looked on there for a while.”

“Veterans day, Armistice Day, whatever it’s called, it just past.”

Lou’s glasses have slipped down his nose.

“Yeah, Anna, my young marine …. Remembrance Day isn’t it?”

“I seem to remember it was Karabilah, wasn’t it?”

“Eight years ago, today, Fred …‘Operation: Steel Curtain.’”

Lark pulls her chair next to Lou.

“Anna did her duty to the country. To our country.  Is it still ours?”

She looks at Augie. “I feel it has been heisted.”

Augie shakes his head.

“Well, is that anything new?”

“Heisted from my hopes, from our hopes, I feel safe to say.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, but beware of hype and Facebook and click bate and….”

Her head bent to the left, Lark spindles a strand of gray in the thick black hair falling like a curtain down the side of her face.

“Right Lou, and nonstop data gathering.”

“Of course, I have gathered my share, too.’

“Sorry, Lou, I mean…”

“Okay Lark, that business is on such a scale now.  It isn’t what it seemed then.”

“They know a lot about us, alright.”

Augie leans forward with a gesture of his big hand.

“Fred, Edward Bernays, pointed out back in 1928 that most of us are unaware of our own motives.”

“Meaning?”

“Our motives Fred, behind buying or voting.”

“Much the same thing, but isn’t that now well known?”

“Right, motivation is notoriously complicated.”

“Well then?”

“So, we can also be manipulated by PR.  Think of ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Lou is roused and pushes his glasses back up his nose.

“Rose-tinted nostalgia!”

“There you are, Lou, pluck a petal, savor the scent, and buy!”

“Right Augie, and so called, ‘social media’ can make it so personal.”

“Fred, you look skeptical”

“No Lark, no.  Who is Bernays?

“He was Freud’s nephew.”

“Oh yes, he married a Bernays.”

Augie, shapes his phrases in the air with his hands.

“Bernays is one of the first ‘influencers’ as we call them now.”

“Oh, the ones who keep us all believing!”

“And believing so many different things, Augie!”

Lou looks at the ceiling.

“My daughter believed.”

“In our country, you mean, Lou?”

“Well, whatever I call it now will sound half baked, because she was full of idealism and I can’t find any.”

He searches his lap.

“Yes, we have been talking it over for years.”

“I admire the woman, Fred, but….”

Lou looks out side again.

“Then again, the girl, my daughter, that is the painful part ….”

He sinks back in his chair.

“Sometimes I hear the old hymns in my head, you know.  Get that old religious feeling.  You know, Alan Jackson did a TV special the other night, seemed like he sang them all.”

“He has such an easy voice!”

“Are you a fan, Lark?”

“No, Country isn’t my thing, Lou, but I do like his gentle effortless voice.”

“The old minister told me when I was back home, ‘Don’t hate god’, and also, ‘God never sends us more than we can bear.’ Or something like that.”

“What does that mean?”

Lou’s bristly eyebrows meet in a frown and entangle the gold frames of his glasses.

“Lark, it is intended to give one strength, but it makes me mad as hell, to tell you the truth.”

“You mean the gift idea?”

“Damn right, Augie.”

“You know, the loss is there, an emotional pit of hell.  Calling that a gift… no, I call it  loss. Let’s not kid ourselves!”

“Well, if you can’t accept loss, then there’s all that stuff.”

“I know, I know, I think it over and over, and it fades over time, unless something brings it all back!”

The waiter brings us two burgers buried in buns with a green frill of lettuce around the equator. His nose jewel sparkles above the right nostril. Fries spill off the plates as he puts them down.

“Sorry about that.”

“Not a problem!”

Lark grabs them.

“Got any ketchup?”

“Right away, ma’m.”

The waiter steps over to a vacant table and brings us a tomato shaped red plastic container with a green stalk on top.

“Just squeeze it. The stalk pours.”

Augie points at Lou’s plate.

“I’ll have a planet burger like that, with a ring of orbiting green, no onions and a coleslaw moon!”

“Ma’m, you want some fries of your own?”

“No, I’ll have a house salad and whatever I can steal.”

“Okay, that’s one burger, no onions, with a side of slaw, one salad and a get-out-of- jail-free for theft, right?”

“You got it, buddy!”

“Oh, and a draft for me and a cider for her.”

Oscar, acknowledges with a nod as flash of lightning illuminates his nasal rock.

Augie gives Lark a mock punch on the arm, as thunder rolls in.

“Politics is a good way to get out of jail free.”

“and a way to end up there, too.”

Lark picks up her vibrating phone from the table and waves it for emphasis.

“Don’t forget the power to pardon.”

Lou leans forward to eat.

“The pols all make much of serving our country.”

“Kind of an empty remark, really.”

Augie shows us emptiness with his palms up.

“Well, think of who gets served, Lou!”

“Yes, and they are all part of the country.”

Lou drops a shred of green from his chewing.

“Except those who aren’t.”

“Like who?”

“Russians, Chinese, Saudis, Israel, etc. Take your pick, take a look at the PR firms like Macadamia’s and their clientele.”

“My old customer, good ol’ Fibonacci Corporation, Augie!”

Mr. Hoffman walks over to greet Lou.  A police suv pulls up outside as he introduces us.  The lights flash into the room through the bow window, disco-like. We hear the revolving doors rumble and two officers rush in, dripping.  Everyone looks up and Mr. Hoffman walks over.  He brings them to the bar as they talk. He then climbs on top while the officers stand by in black, draped with their paraphernalia like utility poles.

“We have to clear the parking lot right away, folks.  Please move your cars next door, to the Safeway lot. Officers are outside to direct you.”

“Did you drive, Lou?”

“No, I have my SnazE rainware hanging over there.”

He points toward the lobby where people are pushing through the revolving doors.

Augie goes to talk to one of the cops. A man with red beard shouts from near the doors.

“It’s the fucking terrorists, get out!”

Two women with long scarves smile at us and walk slowly to the door, covering their heads.  People crowd into the lobby.  Lark puts her phone in her bag and keeps the straps in hand.

“What is going on over there, Lou?”

“Just another storm, Lark. I have a meal to finish!”

“This has been the wettest year I can remember.”

He points at the crowd, a fry, red with ketchup, in hand.

More lighting comes through the rain like a nearby camera flash.

Some one shouts out, “There’s a gas leak out there, let’s get out of here!”

Mr. Hoffman has climbed on the bar again.

“Folks, there are….” Thunder rolls over his voice, so he stops and waits grinning at the few customers still unmoved. Lou has finished and sits back listening with arms folded.

“Okay, ah, Folks, there are no terrorists, no gas, just a downed tree and streetlight and live wire on the ground.”

The cops have stopped the beard, and we can see him talking to them outside under the awning.

Oscar brings Lark’s and Augies’ drinks.

“No biggie, folks.  Hang in.  Your order will be right up, okay?”

Lark stands to wave at Augie across the room.

“Are you closing, Oscar?”

“Mr. Hoffman’s on top of it. He won’t close.”

Augie returns to his seat.

“That jerk shouldn’t be shouting, ‘terror’ Lou.”

“He probably subscribes to various hysterical news feeds!”

“Fred, are you staying?”

“I am, Lark.  Look there’s a big rig coming into the parking lot.”

“What?”

“Look out the window.”

Lou looks up at Lark.

“You all just relax.  I have been watching for the past 90 minutes.”

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.

 “John Tenniel and Son.  Finest artists’ colors and supports,” says the sign above the old bow window.  Daisy hasn’t done any painting for some time. I go along to keep her company while she restocks at Tenniel’s in a narrow-fronted row of shops preserved in gentrified Old Town.  The atmosphere of cramped old-fashioned retail pervades the room.  A variety of antique cabinets are adapted for display.  Some look like repurposed bureaus, others more side boards or kitchen cabinets.  They stand back to back in a row, occupying the center of the room, leaving an  isle on either side.  Most of the glass doors have been removed from the antique bureaus’ narrow shelves rising to the low ceiling. We walk insubdued gray light, towards a bright spot under a small square skylight.

“What do you think Fred, shall I try and lift her off?”

“You might pet her first. Test her reaction.”

Tenniel’s cat, Dinah, lies in a sunbeam among the boxes of Windsor and Newton oil paint with one paw stretched out ahead, as if to say, “Mine.”

“Have you tried, Grumbacher colors over here, or Utrecht?”

“Sometimes use them … I see! No cat no problems.”

“or look at these Blockx colors.”

“Check the prices, Fred.”

“$200 for this Cadmium Green!”

“Yup.”

“So that’s why they are locked behind glass!”

“Highest quality you can get.”

“So, they ought to be.”

“Here’s a big 200 ml tube, of Ochre only $12.29.”

“Earth colors are usually cheaper.”

“Check the cat.”

Hearing us, Dinah opens her eyes, stretches both her gray legs and spreads her claws like vestigial fingers.

She looks at us, with owl-like orange eyes, yawns, gets up and walks slowly across a wooden box of paints to the end of the shelf and jumps to the floor.  Daisy steps back to the unsecured Windsor and Newton selection and shows me a 200mi tube of White.

“This is bigger than a tube of toothpaste! a little more than six and half ounces.”

“You getting that?”

“No this is zinc white. I want Flake White, or Cremnitz white

but it is hard to find now because it is made with lead.”

“That’s what Lucian Freud used.”

“Who?”

“You know the British painter. The one who did all those nudes with legs spread and prominent genitals.”

“Oh, that guy! I remember his show at the Hirschhorn.  Read something about him, lots of bastards, he screwed his way among the British aristos.”

“You like his work?”

“I think the Cremnitz gives his work a distinctive tone.”

“Yes, but do you like his work…. Ah, do you think it is any good?”

“I respect it.  Like it?  on my wall? Ah, no…. well … have to look at more to really decide, but there is no way I’ll ever get anything of his, is there?”

She examines a small tube of yellow.

“He is dead now though.”

“Oh, is he? See this Fred, Indian Yellow, they call it.  Made of cow piss.”

“Looks small.”

“Yeah, 35 ml a little more than an ounce, but I paint small, Windsor and Newton thirty fives will do fine.”

We go on browsing among the different brands of paint, displayed in the jumble of ancient wooden furniture.

“Are you still teaching out at the P.U. Arts Center?”

“Yes, Frank Vasari gave me a year’s extension on my contract and an additional course.”

“That should keep you afloat.”

“Not at these prices!”

“Have him give you a show and sell a few works.”

“Yeah, right… ‘Say Frank, I need some extra dough, so how about it’?”

“Stranger things happen every day.”

“You know, teaching that freshman painting course got me back into it.”

“Inspired by your students!”

“Yeah, kind of, you know, watching them mixing and experimenting with color.”

“What do you have them do?”

“Ah, a color restriction for instance, see what you can get by using only mixtures of red and black.”

“As in painting a landscape or a figure?”

“Or an abstract. I watch forms come and go, as they paint and scrape.”

“In oils or acrylic?”

“Both, anything they want really, but I encourage oils, the old way, with palette brush and knife.”

“Don’t they think its outdated?”

“Some do, but it’s not a big deal.”

“What interests you so about the process?”

“Well, it’s seeing stuff appear and disappear…. makes me think of the supernatural.”

“Why?”

“Well, Leonardo compared painting to looking at stains on walls and finding figures in them.  Presences which are there and not there!”

“Illusion!”

“Yes partly, but also color and form.  That’s why I need to look closely at what he has in stock.”

“Why not just buy online?”

“That works when I know exactly what I want.”

“It’s cheaper, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but this is exploratory. I don’t trust the colors represented on a screen.”

“Your color vision is subtler than mine.”

“Experience can help with acuity, Fred.”

“What about that printed on the outside of the tubes?”

“If I ask, Tenniel will let me open a tube of Windsor and Newton and test it.”

“Really?”

“Sure, just squeeze out a little of the color and a little white. Then  smear them together  with a palette knife on white paper and see the range of tones.”

“Smear it?”

“Right, like spreading butter.”

“Seems costly for Tenniel?”

“I guess that is part of what you pay for here.”

“Old fashioned personal service.”

“Some-times I get a deal on previously opened tubes.”

“What an idea!”

Diasy wanders down the aisle and disappears in the direction of the cat’s bounding escape from our intrusion.

I find Daisy in the back room embracing a young red bearded man with floppy reddish-brown hair.  We are a step down from the display area.  A a faded threadbare Bokhara rugcovers the cement floor. Some of the rose ground still glows along the far edge.

We stand before of a big flat file under a broad frosted glass skylight. Here Tenniel stocks various grades of drawing paper, news print, textured acid free papers, parchment and Ingres paper, 16″ × 20″ sheets of Arches water color papers, and much else.  Broad rolls of linen and cotton canvases are mounted on one wall.

The Beard turns around.

“Fred, ah, hi, ah, I’m Boyd, remember?”

“Of course, Boyd.”

Boyd turns away to open a drawer, but Daisy looks at me.

“Boyd is working here again. Isn’t it great?”

Boyd keeps his eyes on the drawer he just opened.

“Yeah, I kind of grew up here when I left high school.”

“I seem to remember you were here.”

“Fred, Boyd has reconciled with Lark.”

He turns from the open flat file, glances at me and then keeps his eyes down.

“Right, I have been staying at Mom’s place.  Hanging out with her and Augie, and all.”

Daisy touches his shoulder with the palm of her hand.

“Its okay, Daisy.  I am not going to burn you!”

“Aha, but we were pretty hot a while ago!”

“That was then. You know, stuff happened. Then I got to know Albrecht.”

“How is Albrecht, by the way.”

“Ah, we aren’t talking.  He said I betrayed him and …”

Boyd stammers and turns back to the open drawer while Daisy fills in for him.

“It is pretty ugly, Fred. He has been really mean. I tell you, that guy is such a fanatic!”

Boyd recovers but doesn’t turn to me.

“Well, I was telling her all about it, just now.  Like how we broke up, and all.”

Dinah jumps up into the open drawer and Boyd lifts her out and holds her looking back over his shoulder with two front paws gripping.

“Boyd, I want to look at paint, okay?”

“Oh, sure.”

We walk back to the shelves of Windsor and Newton.  The cat wriggles free and jumps down to the carpet.

“Boyd, are you still seeing Maria?”

“Yeah, once and a while.”

“So, you guys are good?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Boyd picks up a stack of boxes full of colors and takes them to the back where Daisy starts her selection with an assortment of reds, and blues.

“Okay, I’ll take some of these high cadmiums.”

Boyd brings over a sheet of plate glass and a palette knife for Daisy to check the tonal ranges.

I walk to the front of the shop to look further at the displays. Dinah blocks the isle ahead with the long fine hair of her tail brushing the air in S shapes.  Her thick gray fur, the color of house dust, is ruffled around her neck like a small flat Elizabethan collar.

She makes way for me, turning towards the back.

Brilliant orange of the pignut hickories across the street fills the bow window.  A flock of starlings fly in to perch as the leaves float down.

When Daisy has made her choices, she calls Dinah as she walks towards me.  She bends down. Dinah faces us with narrowed oblong pupils.

“Is this the same cat as before Boyd?”

“No, this is her daughter I think.”

“Her color is what you get from mixing all your paints together.”

Boyd hands Daisy a well filled paper shopping bag.”

“With plenty of white for her gray.”

Dinah turns and runs off again and flattens herself to hide under a bureau.  Boyd looks up.

“That’s the opposite of additive color.”

“It is?”

“He’s right Fred, the spectrum produces sunlight when all the colors are mixed together, not gray.”

 

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

Diddlie arrives home in her friend’s silver Prius as I walk by.  She gets out, waves, and opens the hatch. She picks up a carton from the back and carries it in front of her, into the dark of an overcast afternoon. The side of the box is against her cheek, and rising above her head, so she can’t see where she is going.

“Fred, can you help?”

“Bear right Did! You’re headed into the ivy.”

“I want to put this in the carport.”

“Okay, here, let me.”

“No, no, get one out yourself. Got to do this fast!”

She keeps walking blindly in taking small steps towards the carport and shouting to me without looking around.  Light rain sparkles in the car’s headlights.

“See those other cartons in back of the car?”

“Yes.”

“Great, grab one.”

The Prius’ back seat is down and there are more cartons arranged side by side from the back of the front seats to the hatch. A big dog-eared book is jammed in beside one of the boxes by the right back door.  The sloping hatch has crushed their soft sides.

“They’re not heavy, but they are too tall for me.”

I catch up with her, as she veers to the left.

“Is your friend going to help, too?”

“No, this goldenrod is way too strong. They are on the phone and in a hurry to go.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”
We carry the boxes in and put them on plywood set on a couple of sawhorses in front of an old six-panel door.

“Where is Mr. Liddell? Aren’t these his sawhorses?”

“He moved inside.  He’s getting old.”

“Is he sick?”

“He’s pretty quiet, and over ten years old now.”

“He is a senior rabbit, alright.”

We put the wet boxes down and head back to the car.

“That is a nice new door you have in there.”

“Yeah, Lou got it for me.”

“Looks like it came out of a legal office or something.  You know, paneled walls, dark leather and trophies.”

“I don’t know.  He told me when he hung it, that it is a frame-and-panel door, real oak and real old.”

“Looks like French polish, too.”

“Yeah, I want to take care of that some time.”

“When did you get it?

“He brought it over back in the Spring, I think.”

“Does it open?”

“Yes, with the right, ah, let’s get the boxes in first, okay?”

“Anyway, Diddlie, where did you gather all these blossoms?”

“On my way back from seeing Dr. Bales, over on Capitol Hill.”

“I know Dr. Bales, too.”

“Oh, are you sick?  I mean what is Dr. Bales treating you for, Fred?”

“Mainly misspelling, poor punctuation and occasional syntactical complaints, that sort of thing.”

“Have you been tested?”

“Not lately, had an IQ test as a child, negative result, thank goodness!”

“Intelligence is more dangerous than ever these days.  Look what happened to those Russians in England.”

“What Russians?”

“He was said to be a double agent retired to the safety of Salisbury in Wiltshire, and he and his daughter were poisoned with some high-tech concoction sprayed on their door from a perfume bottle.”

“Well, that won’t happen around here.”

“No, you just get sued by one of Fibonacci Corporation’s heavies.”

“That’s what happened to Werner Plank.”

“I thought he was sued by Dordrecht’s.”

“Maybe, I know he was threatened in the H-Bar parking lot by a guy wielding heavy duty threats of legal action.”

“Right here in Fauxmont, what a shame.”

“I know it hit him hard, too, but he tried not to show it.”

“Tron, told me Werner’s problems were cleared up by the lawyer, ah …”

“Right, Sherman Shrowd.  Those were hard words too.”

“Sherman knows how to smooth things out, polish them up.  You know he seldom goes against the grain.”

“Yeah, Sherman is a master at crafting complex deals.”

Diddlie carries another box in from the car still walking blind.

“Did! you are headed into the ivy again.  Go left!”

She drops the box and starts pulling it across the gravel driveway. I catch up with her, carrying the last box.

“So, Did, what does your Dr. Bales do?”

“He does things with words.”

“Does things? Like Sherman?”

“No, not like Sherman.  He uses them to distill his thoughts and then pours them into poems and novels.”

“Where does he publish?”

“He doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, maybe the stuff is too strong.”

“You mean, like moonshine, right?”

“He keeps a barrel of dreams in his basement.”

“Don’t they get stale and moldy?”

“In a way. He boils them in an old pressure cooker and runs the steam through a long copper line across his kitchen where the literature condenses and drips into an iPad file.”

“How ingenious! Do you have some on your tablet?”

“Ah, no, it is mainly for his band.”

“So, he’s a musician, is he?”

“Yes, and something of a magician too.”

“Like Prestidigitation?” 

“Well, for instance, he hid the names of his wife’s cats in long words.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know, but it annoyed her, and she called me up about it.”

“You mean the cats couldn’t find them, or she couldn’t?”

“Cats seldom know the names we give them. Nobody could find them.”

“Did you visit them both, then?

“No, she was busy looking for the names.”

“Were you drinking his hooch?”

“Yes, we had a tipple with a smoky lapsang shouchong chaser.”

Diddlie goes back out to the car while I admire the door which has no handle.  She returns carrying the book and puts it down by the boxes.

She opens the oak door and goes in while I am looking in the cartons of flowers.

“Bring the book, please.”

I carry the book down some concrete steps past unpainted concrete walls and through a second metal door. Mr. Liddell is asleep on the couch with a feather on his ears while the Red Queen preens on top of the standard lamp above him. The walls are lined with pigeon holes filled with goldenrod.

“How did you get it open? There’s no handle.”

“I know, pretty sneaky huh!”

“Why all the secrecy?”

“Fred, would you put the book on that table please?”
She closes the metal door without further explanation.

“Quiet in here, isn’t it?”

“Yes, you can’t hear the rain or crickets, or the crows.”

There’s no TV on, no sound but the air in our ears, until the Red Queen asks,

“What is the difference between a poet and parakeet?”

The Red Queen flutters but doesn’t take off and starts pecking the ragged top of the lampshade.

“This isn’t your living room, is it Did?”

“Well, I do live here, and it is where I keep the collection.”

“I don’t remember it this way.”

“No, you have never been in here. My husband built it as a bomb shelter in the early sixties.  Lou helped me change it into my storeroom.”

“It is pretty big…. Why do you collect all these flowers?”

“For the truth in their beauty.”

The Red Queen flies around the room and lands on Diddlie’s shoulder.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

“So, said the poet, contemplating an old Greek urn.”

“You have it from the bird’s beak, Fred!”

Diddlie steps into the middle of the room to explain the layout.

“See, over here in these cubbies, are absolute truth, then hard truth, difficult truth, here, and embarrassing truth behind that curtain.”

She points to a section on the right, covered by a yellow brocade curtain.

“Horrible and horrifying truth is locked in the file cabinets behind the couch, along with dangerous truth in the ones with combination locks.

“See, those brown jars?”

Rows of brown mason jars are arranged atop the file cabinets.

“They contain unpleasant truth.”

“Now you see those baskets hanging in the nook?”

“Ah, yes, hanging baskets.”

“They allow the relative truths to move around truth-wise, until you see them from the right angle, then that’s it!”

“A matter of POV!”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“I wish I could say, ‘I see’, but I don’t.”

The Red Queen takes off from Diddlie’s shoulder and flies back to her lampshade as Diddlie grabs my arm and whispers.

“You will honey.”

Then resuming her orientation,

“Most precious of all are my self-evident truths. I hold them real close.”

She lifts up her tea shirt and reveals them.

“Okay, I see.”

“I told you, you would get it!”

“Not what I was talking about!”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“Right, right, I know Did. I know! You don’t have to show me now, though.”

“Remember those lines, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….?”

“Yes, were they ever more obscured than they are now?”

“Truth in politics is like an endangered species, Fred!”

“Or you might say it is like a polar bear hunting in a blizzard?”

“It will bite us alright if we don’t see it!”

“Diddlie, you seem to think that truth lies in goldenrod.”

“Lies! Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way Fred!”

“What do you mean?”

“For one thing, it isn’t lying down, it is active.”

“Analytic?”

“Can be, and catalytic too. You get it?”

“Yes, you have done a Dr. Bales and hidden something there!”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Aren’t you a little concerned about hiding all this truth in here?”

“No, I am not hiding it.”

“Seems like protective custody or something.”

“Well I am the custodian!”

“Self-appointed though, don’t you think….

“Think of this as a seed bank.”

She picks up the big leather-bound volume I had left face down on the table, showing me the spine.

It reads, “Aporia,” in faded gold.

“So, what is it? an old novel?

“She turns it over to show me the front cover, which says in more faded gold, “Austin’s Performative Categories and Catastrophes.”

“They were in the car the whole time!”

“A gift from Dr. Bales.”

“We are in the ivy, now.”

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.

Hank Dumpty was admitted to Prestige University Medical Center the other day.  He is in a private room on the fifth floor.  He tells me all rooms will soon be converted for single occupancy.  Looking out of the long narrow widow, one can see over the parking lot and beyond the bordering pines to a tower block on a rise, miles away. There is little sign of the congested streets beneath the intervening wooded expanse.

“Hi Frank, what are you doing in here?”

“Helga got me in.”

“What happened?”

“I stumbled out of my truck. Told her I was sleeping.”

He points at the dressing on his right forehead.

“On the ground?”

“Well, I couldn’t get up.”

“She says I had a stroke or some dam thing and called an ambulance. The fire brigade came too.  I weigh about three hundred sixty pounds.  The firemen were called upon!”

“Quite a show.”

“Yeah, mosquitos were feasting on my face and arms and the crows … they were sounding off until the ambulance doors closed.  After that I don’t know.”

“You mean you passed out again?”

“Sleeping Fred.  I was lying down asleep!”

“Right, so what is wrong with you?”

“That is unclear.”

He shuts off the TV on the wall opposite.

“What are the docs. telling you?”

“Dr. Hope says I should be out of here Monday.”

“Great! Today is Monday.”

Hank presses a button on a control in his lap, raising the bed.  Another raises the back, so he is sitting up.  Now we can talk facing each other.

“It is?  Well, I came in Friday.”

Hank yawns and closes his eyes for a few moments.

“…. She didn’t say which Monday!”

He rearranges some papers on the table beside him, his phone, remote control, and plastic mug of water with a plastic straw curving out of the lid.

“Have to keep track of this stuff or it will get lost and take hours to find.”

He picks up a pen and writes in a small note book.

“Okay, here’s what I got.  Dr. Hope, I told you about. Dr. Death only gave me a year, and that was four and a half years ago.  Now he is noncommittal. Dr. Ding-a-ling keeps scheduling more tests. None of them talk to each other!”

“Can’t you set up some coordination?”

“Helga is on it.  Oh, there’s a couple of others feeding at my insurance trough, like Dr. Maybe.  Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that .…”

“Sounds like you are getting lots of attention around here.”

“Well, Nurse Porcupine is sticking me every few minutes.”

A nurse enters in a yellow paper smock with a small tray in her hands.

“Here she is again!”

The nurse smiles at us both, but looks at me, pointing out her paper garment.

“Sir, you need to put on one of these.  There’s a dispenser right outside the door.”

I go out and get lost in enveloping yellow paper, which is supposed to go over your head.

“Sir, turn it around so the opening is in back.”

“Fred, that thing has arms you know.”

The billowing paper resists my arms and drives both shirtsleeves to my armpits.

“Hi Mr. Dumpty, may I take your vital signs?”

Hank sighs in mock fear, pulls his gown and sheet to his chin and hunches his massive shoulders.

“And if I say no?”

“I’ll be back later.”

“I know you will!”

“You’re going to be fine, Mr. Dumpty.”

He proffers a bare bruised arm with several plastic bracelets at the wrist and multiple dressings along its substantial length. One bracelet indicates he is in danger of falling. Another with a bar code gets the nurse’s attention and she aims her hand-held reader at it.

“I have a finite blood supply you know.”

“I know, Mr. Dumpty. Your blood pressure is stable and that means you have plenty left.”

She moves over to a computer mounted on an adjustable mast which moves on four wheels attached at the bottom.

“Can I have your name and date of birth?”

Hank scratches the oval dome of his bald head, frowning, as if he can’t remember.

“George Washington, February 22, 1722.”

She laughs.

“Is that his real birthday?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay, Mr. Dumpty, you know I have to check every time, okay?”

“I thought it was in that bar code.”

“You have to tell me, Mr. Dumpty.”

She stands and types.  Digital devices attached to arms on the wall behind Hank’s bed wink red numbers.  Their leads disappear into Hank’s gown.

“You know they pureed my pot roast last night.”

The nurse walks over to the bedside.

“You are okay for regular food, Mr. Dumpty.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Mr. Dumpty, please lift up your covers and gown so I can check the dressing on your knees.”

I look away, out the window.  A crow lands on the roof outside.

She sticks his finger and gets a drop to measure blood sugar.

“Shall I go for a walk while this is going on?”

“No, Fred, you only just got here, for heaven’s sake!”

The nurse puts a blood pressure cuff around his upper arm.

“You can stay sir.  I’ll be through in a couple of minutes.”

Hank introduces his nurse as the blood pressure cuff inflates.

“Fred this is Celest, my favorite vampire. Celest, this is my neighbor, Fred.”

Celest’s pretty smile shows no sanguinity.

“Mr. Dumpty, Vampires don’t just draw blood.  They drink it.”

“Yeah, but from my point of view the loss is the same!”

Celest giggles, as the cuff deflates, and she removes her latex gloves.

“Mr. Dumpty, you are so funny!”

“Celest is from New Jersey, her Mom is from Laos and her Dad is from Vietnam.”

“My Dad was in the Air Force in the war.”

“Yeah, I spent some time over there myself, guarding an air base.”

“Okay, Mr. Dumpty I am all through.”

“Thank you Celest!”

She turns to me.

“Nice meeting you, sir.”

Celest tears off her yellow gown and presses it into a trash can already overflowing with paper and leaves the room.

Hank’s pen drops to the floor.

“Say, do me a favor, see if you can find that thing.”

I get up to look and yellow paper flaps around my knees.

“You have to fasten the draw strings, Fred.”

“What, draw strings?”

“Down by your left foot.  Tie it up or you’ll trip and be joining me in here.”

A long narrow strand of paper tape hangs down from the yellow folds, waiting to be fastened around my waist.

“Got it.”

The pen is under his table and easily retrieved.  Someone comes in steering a big cart. The cart stops with a click silencing its whining electric motor.

“Hi Mr. Dumpty.  Are you ready for your chest x-ray?”

“I might be, if my friend can stay.”

The technician steps from behind her apparatus with bouncing ponytail. Her yellow paper properly tied at the waist.

“He will have to stand outside when I turn the machine on.”

She goes over to Hank with what looks like a flat cushion.  He struggles to lean forward, and she pushes the cushion behind his back.

“Sorry that thing is so hard.”

She steps back to the cart.

“Sir, I want you out of the room for a minute.”

I watch from the door way as the cart is maneuvered to the foot of the bed and an arm from the device is positioned over Hank’s feet and aimed at his chest.  She then walks to the door way with a small unit in her hand.

“You ready, Mr. Dumpty?”

“That’s long range arti. you got there!”

“We are going to take a picture of your lungs.”

“Yeah, zap me any time!”

“Breath in.”

Hank coughs.

“Sorry Mr. Dumpty, breath real slow okay? take your time.”

It is all over with another click.

She walks back and looks at the screen on her cart and announces success and takes the hard cushion from behind Frank’s back.

“Okay Mr. Dumpty, you are all set.”

“Great, Can’t I keep the comfy cushion?”

“No sir, that’s part of my job.”

“Well, thanks anyway … You have a hard job!”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Dumpty.”

The technician leaves with rising pitch of her whining electric cart and adds another paper smock to the over-stuffed can at the door.

Hank’s phone rings.

“Yeah! Hi … when … okay … sure … bye.”

“Helga will be here in a minute, so hang around, okay?”

I leave the chair by his bed for Helga and sit across the room from him.

Frank’s wife arrives in her usual pink denim overalls and white blouse.

She bustles in with several bags in one hand and grabs his right.

“Are they treating you right, honey?”

“Sure, this is a high-class joint.”

She explains what is in various bags and then produces some papers.

“Say hi to Fred over there.”

Helga apologizes for ignoring me and turns back to her husband.

“Okay, I have a list of some doctors, and phone numbers.”

“You need to put some nice yellow paper on.”

“I don’t have time for any more paper!”

“Okay. Aha, what’s all that telling you?”

“Your care isn’t coordinated.”

“Aha, tell me something I don’t know.”

Helga unzips one of her bags.

“Here’s your iPad, Henry.”

“Thank you, sweetie.”

“I have been asking a lot of questions but not getting many answers.”

“No, it is all in their computers.  People don’t know a dam thing these days!”

Hank has untangled the iPad’s charging cord.

He looks carefully at both ends.

“Is there anywhere to plug in?”

“It is all charged up.”

“Anyway, what about all the meds?

I am on about fifty per hour, pills, capsules, solutions, and suspensions, plus drip and, oh yes, oxygen.  They took that away this morning about 4:30. Just as I was dreaming of breakfast!”

“Henry stop exaggerating.  This is serious!”

“Yeah, okay, okay, okay .…”

“Henry, we are going to have to put you on a diet.”

“I am already on several diets – cardiac, diabetic and starvation!”

“The dietician’s name is Loren Fettuccini.  A nice girl, I met her already and she will be in to see you tomorrow.”

“I knew I wouldn’t be getting out today!”

“Who said you were?”

“Dr. Hope, she said, ‘You should be out by Monday.’  She is a looker too …. I mean a fine-looking woman.”

“Honey, gender is irrelevant.  Now, I don’t remember that at all.  When did she say it?”

“After examining me Friday? or Saturday, maybe?  I don’t know.”

“Honey, you were admitted last Thursday evening.”

“Okay, well Dr. ding-a-ling is coming soon to pump up his fee with more tests.”

“I just found out we can get you a patient advocate to take care of the whole ball of wax.”

“An advocate! Why didn’t you say so before?”

“Because I want to hear from you what is going on.”

“How much does this advocate cost?”

“It is a service provided by the hospital, honey.”

“Well … sounds like progress.  Dr. ding-a-ling and Dr. Maybe are both coming today …. There will be enough hot air and influence in here to inflate the currency.”

“HENRY!”

“Oh come on now, you know as well as I do.  This is a ‘money-care’ system.  The ‘medi’ is secondary to the money!”

“Maybe so, but we have to discuss your treatment!”

“Right, when did you say the pasta woman is coming?”

“Loren will be here tomorrow afternoon.  Look at the calendar on your iPad.”

Hank is preoccupied with the charging cord.

“Need a safe place for this thing.”

“Henry, will you please pay attention!”

He drops the cord on his table and turns to Helga.

“Dam right I will. There is a serious conflict of interest. If they were really ‘interested,’ coordination would be happening already.  The Medical, Congressional, Industrial system …”

“Calm down Henry. You are raising your blood pressure.”

Hank leans back, yawns and closes his eyes for a moment.

“We’ll see when the doctors come.”

“I want to talk to your internist as well as the advocate.”

Hank looks up past Helga’s wavy grey hair at the crow still on the roof outside.

“One thing is for sure Helga.  They all have my billing address.”

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. 

Walking with Lark through one of the last bits of undeveloped land in the Fauxmont area. Cockcroft lane takes us on gravel and dust, up through the woods on Maxwell hill and down the other side to Maxwell Avenue and the Pie Shop.  I ask after Boyd, who moved in with her recently.

“My son has taken off again.”

“Where to this time?”

“He’s gone to the beach with Maria del Sarto.”

“You mean they have something going?”

“Seems like. He’s been spending a lot of time over at the Elegant Ostrich.”

The humidity is so thick in the air we can see hanging damp illuminated by the odd sun beam shining through the white oak leaves. It is cooler in the woods than on the street, but the fresh air we seek is soaked and dark.  When we come out of the woods and turn right on Maxwell a small cloud briefly shades us, while the pavement in front of the Pie shop radiates heat.  Albrecht Intaglio is sitting just inside the door wiping his revolver.

“You going to join me?”

Lark has stepped past without looking at him, greeting Mrs. Rutherford behind the counter,but turns when Albrecht and I exchange pleasantries.

“Oh, hi there.”

Albrecht gets up and arranges two more chairs at the table.

Mrs. Rutherford serves ice teas and Lark and I walk back from the counter to sit down.

“It is one hundred degrees Fahrenheit out there, folks.”

He drains his ice tea and puts down his glass of ice cubes rounding like pebbles as they melt.

“Not the best time for a walk through the woods, I guess!”

“Augie is away, Fred, and Boyd has taken off. “

Lark sips her tea.

“I love those woods, even in this.”

Albrecht holsters is weapon and wipes his hands on a napkin.

“You need to talk to that boy Lark.  He is very mixed up.”

“Maybe he is.”

“Maybe he will figure it out at the beach.”

“Fred, Boyd and I had some good years together.  He isn’t going to figure anything out with that vaping chick from the gift shop.”

Lark opens her bag, looks in and closes it and then she looks away from us.

“Maybe he is bi?”

“I doubt it very much Fred.”

Albrecht leans back to stuff his gun rag into the front pocket of his jeans.

Lark gets up, goes to the counter and comes back with a napkin.

“Lark, I have plenty right here.”

He pushes a stack of white paper napkins across the deep brown grain of the varnished table top.

“Oh, okay … ah, thanks … what’s that noise?”

The site on Albrecht’s extralong gun barrel is catching on the stretcher under his chair, and he moves slightly to one side.

“Poor Boyd isn’t the only one mixed up, either.”

“No, our politics are in utter chaos.”

“When have they been any other way Fred?”

“I think the last administration was a lot more stable, Albrecht.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea! Our President was elected to shake things up and he has the power skills to do it.”

“He seems too full of himself, and too ignorant to be in office.”

“All these Liberals, they’re the ignorant ones!”

“What do you mean?”

“All these college graduates from fancy schools who think the rest of us are just trash. What was it?  ‘A basket of deplorables’!”

“Well, yes there’s a certain amount of snobbery out there.”

“A certain amount! Fred, they do nothing but criticize our president for being vulgar, illiterate, boorish, lying, and … what do they know?”

“They know what they hear and read.”

“They are not his audience!”

“That is for sure!”

“Look at what he has accomplished already.”

“I am looking, it is appalling!”

“You think full employment and jobs for the rest of us ‘deplorable’ people is so bad? You think the invasion by MS 13 from south of the border was fine? You think freeloading allies should just get away with it, like his sappy ivy league predecessor?”

“I think we need allies in this world, and we are turning on them all!”

“We need jobs and prosperity.”

“I don’t think this is the way to get either?”

“Those jabbering Liberals all have cushy jobs.  Would they be so sweet, guilty and condescending if they had to scramble to make a minimum wage in Appalachia?”

“They have to scramble in their world.”

“Yeah, to get junior into the right preschool!”

“No, professional jobs can be ‘uber competitive’ and ruinously stressful.”

“Okay, but they get the bucks and we don’t.”

“It takes a lot of work and dedication you know.”

“Don’t say any more until you have grown up in a poor white community! Until you have seen minorities getting a leg up and over you from the so-called progressives!”

“You didn’t, Albrecht.  You grew up here in Fauxmont.”

“No, I grew up when I went West and found the real America!”

“Why is it any more real than here?”

“Because they are fighting for their lives and liberty against government power. Not sucking on the Federal taxpayer’s tit.”

“Are you talking about lost jobs?”

“Yup, over the last forty years, thanks to trade deals, NAFTA and so on … our lives were stolen, but now we are fighting back with a champion.”

“You think this guy’s Whitehouse tweets are solving anything?”

“They ARE!  Sure, beats a generation of … of national decline.”

“Relative decline was inevitable.  That issue is arguable.”

“Oh give me a break. Arguable! While you professors are arguing the rest of are going down the tubes!”

“Albrecht, I think you are being duped by orange hair’s tone and swagger.  So, he talks your talk.  So, what! He is an oligarch, and a bankrupt too!”

“Wait a minute, he came out of bankruptcy a bigger celebrity than he was before!”

“Look at his cabinet appointments.”

“No, I don’t care who is in the cabinet … I mean he is an instinctive communicator.  He knows in his gut what my people want to hear and says it like it is.”

“That is my point. You are being taken!”

Lark is looking at her fingers. Still quietly examining her nails.

“So much of his talk is self-contradictory … it is incoherent.”

“No Fred, what he says reflects people’s feelings, and you can’t accept it!”

Lark looks up from her hands. Still saying nothing.

“Oh! come on, feelings change all the time.”

“Now you are getting it!”

Lark sips her ice tea, then puts it down and slaps the table with the flat of her palm.

“You can’t run our country on hatred, it will no longer be our country.”

“Listen, there has been plenty of hatred running this country since the beginning.”

“It is the hatred we must fight against!”

“What about your own hatred?”

“That too.”

“There you go, all your ‘liberal bleeding’ again!”

Lark grasps the edge of the table in one hand and her glass in the other.

“I see a vain pathetic man-boy sweet-talking Vladimir Putin and that Korean creep and pandering to the worst our country has in its heartland.”

“No, no, no, Lark, you have no sense of the real pulse of our country.”

“Pulse? We are talking about the politics of greed and grievance.”

“Okay, my guy, Macadamia would have done it better.  He would have been more Presidential.  We fought a tough primary, but the president is the president and I support him.”

“Can’t you see the evil of reaching out to racism, nationalism, paranoia, especially about emigration!  To name only three of the ugliest…”

“Aha, all you have is a put down!”

“Right, I find his behavior offensive and disgusting.”

“Lark, has it occurred to you, up there on that dried out, hyper-educated, dead branch you are perched on, that he is speaking for an excluded majority of real live white American voters?”

“Whites have never been excluded, they’ve always been privileged.”

“Tell that to the West Virginia coal miners crooked Hillary went after!”

“Besides Albrecht, his majority was only a function of the electoral college and gerrymandering … AND voter suppression!”

“He is president all the same …. If crooked Hillary had won, you wouldn’t be finding any of that a problem.”

“No, but you would. You would be saying the system is rigged.  Trump set that up early in his campaign.”

“Yes, he did, and he had a point too.”

“So, Albrecht who rigged what?”

“Fred, it wasn’t the Russians, okay?”

“That remains to be seen!  Looks like they had a good try.”

“Look Fred, he beat the odds by being honest and saying how it is in America, how the real America feels.”

“Yes, the lies, racism, and all that are real enough.”

“Yup, low hanging political fruit my friend … That is reality. This is a representative Republic, alright?  What people feel matters.”

“Low, it is! But, once again, it takes more than that to govern.”

Lark stands up, ignoring Albrecht, turns her back and looks past counter where today’s pastry specials are handwritten on a chalk board, out the window towards the shimmering hot air in the parking lot.

“What my people feel has been ignored and excluded by the elites for generations.”

“I think Dubya said a few words in your direction.”

“Right, he paid lip service to get votes then he turned and became just another politician.”

Albrecht picks up his glass and holds it up.  Looks at a remaining ice in the bottom.  Rattles it around and put it down again.

“He invaded Iraq. What a dumb move that was!”

“Agreed!”

“Well, Fred, there is hope for you yet, my friend.”

Lark turns and leans towards Albrecht, bending down with both hands on the table.

“You think Trump isn’t a politician?  Don’t say you buy that line!”

“He isn’t just another politician!  That’s why you hate him so much!”

“Okay, so he is an outlier!”

“Yes, and he speaks for all of us other, ‘didn’t-go-to-college-outliers’ who won the far-out election.”

“Do you really believe that cutting taxes for his buddies is going to help you and America?”

“I don’t know, and neither do you!  I do know unemployment is way down. I also know that no one can predict the future, and there’s a lot of drones writing fake news in the elite media who think they can.”

“Albrecht, think this through! Don’t let yourself be fooled!”

“Back at you Fred!  Like I said, Macadamia would have done it better, subtler, but this president tweets to the raw living pain in our country.”

“He’s just a political opioid!”

“Whatever he says goes for the feelings of the moment, and my feelings are truths … facts about me. He is always fresh, and always on liberty’s pulse!”

Albrecht stops, and turns to look out the window.

A moving picture of apples, bananas, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots and celery fills the windows, to our right. I can see the word “Safe”.

“Wake up Fred! My president has defeated the terrorist Caliphate in Iraq.”

He pats his holster and the gun barrel taps sharply on his chair.

“This is the twenty-first century my friend, the cyber century, the dawn of social media and a Great …”

A tractor trailer loaded with food, is maneuvering in the parking lot, headed for the Safeway loading dock down the alley opposite.

Customers open the door next to our table and walk out letting in heat and noise. The truck’s diesel drowns out our voices while the driver revs to move clear of shopper’s cars.

Post 113. Concrete

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 are walking around the new exhibition, by Boris Tarantula at Prestige University Arts Center.

“ ‘In the Aggregate’,

New works in concrete by Boris Tarantula” 

says the red banner in white letters, stretched across the façade of the building on golden cords with tassels hanging from the knotted ends.

Steve Strether has parked and joins Artie Bliemischand me at the entrance where he dropped us off to spare Artie’s injured foot.  She leans on her walking stick, with lines of yellow and white stars spiraling up the deep green shaft from the bottom like a stellar barber pole.

“Look, there he is!”

“Who?”

“Seymour Van Rijn, Fred!”

“Who? That guy in the aviators?”

“No, he must be security, check his right ear.  No, I mean the old man … he is over ninety and still pretty active.  See him there, with Frank Vasari and the crowd around them?”

They are strolling along a sky-blue carpet that leads visitors into the gallery and around the exhibition then into the courtyard.

“Yes, isn’t that Gloriani, there too?”

“Always, Giuseppe is Boris’s shadow, agent, and fixer.  He set up the sponsorship.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gloriani got Seymour to foot the bill for this whole show.”

“You mean he owns this stuff.”

“He is donating it to P.U. after this.”

Steve takes Artie’s elbow as she looks down at her foot, wrapped with a protective black ‘Orthopedic Wedge Healing Shoe’ with white socked toes protruding through the open front.  She has painted it with orange and yellow paisleys.

“He is loaded, developed the Van Rijn estates out of cow pasture, back in the sixties, you know.”

“A far-sighted man, Steve!”

We enter the gallery which is dominated by a massive lump of unfinished concrete, roughly dome shaped, called “Mammon’s Pantheon.”

A helpful docent tells us,

“It weighs over fifteen-tons, made with coins from every country in the world, mixed into the cement, gravel and sand. Isn’t it a great idea?”

“Very clever.”

Steve speaks from behind a hand up at his beard.  The young docent smiles at Artie.

“Hi Professor, Bliemisch.”

“Jackie, you look great in that black outfit.”

“Thanks Professor Bliemisch.  Did you see the show go up?”

“No, I was long gone. So, Jackie, how much dough did he mix into this thing?”

“The total value is said to be worth over two hundred thousand dollars.”

Jackie looks over her shoulder.

“Sorry, I got to go!”

“Jackie was in my drawing class, Fred.”

“I didn’t know you were teaching here.”

“I am not.  It barely lasted one semester.”

“When was that?”

“About a year or so ago, well maybe two.  I don’t want to remember any of it. I think they gave the position to Daisy Briscoe.”

“They keep the students busy around here.”

We look more closely and find facets of various coins emerging from the aggregate like gifts. Steve walks around the piece and comes back.

“I think I saw tiny bit of a Krugerrand protruding back there.”

“They are solid gold, aren’t they?”

“Yup, one ounce worth, fetch around $1300 Fred, if it really is one.”

“A tempting little item Steve!”

Jacky waves to us from her podium.

“Is that kid one of your students?”

“She was a student, sort of, you might say, I was just telling Fred.”

“Any good?”

“Yeah, she’s too easily distracted, though.  She is supposed to stay behind that podium and dish out programs or what-ever these things are.”

Artie waves the brochure she picked up while we waited for Steve to park.

We can see Jackie back at her station inside the entrance smiling at Sherman Shrowd, and his wife, and giving them both brochures. Artie reads from hers.

“We regret the artist’s intentions cannot be fully realized for this piece at this time.

Please take time to watch the video presentation opposite.”

A flat screen set into the wall opposite comes on as soon as Steve steps within a few feet in front of it.  We can see several people wearing, protective goggles and gloves, chiseling coins out of the surface at various points. A young blond girl and a brown boy are both running around looking for more on the ground. While the crawl underneath tells us:

“The public were to be given hammers and chisels and goggles to chip out the coins, following the way the dome of the Roman Pantheon was dug out from its foundation mound by people hunting for coins. We regret the risk of injuries is too great for this activity.”

“Well, isn’t that cute!”

Turning back to the piece, Artie lifts her spiraling star stick to point at the great lump of art cementing currency into our aesthetic appreciation.

“We consumers should be destroying the thing and getting our mitts on some dough.”

“Yes Artie, consumers of art, no less!”

“Isn’t that putting us in our place!”

“Touchet! Steve.”

“Maybe Boris is an artist after all.”

“Well, look who’s president, Fred.”

“I keep looking the other way.”

Steve has walked ahead while Artie and I look for more gold on the surface of “Mammon’s Pantheon.”  We catch up with him on the blue pile of our progress at, “Regimental Order”. 113 sacks of Portland cement are suspended, as if lying flat on the ground, about four feet above it.  Four abreast in columns of twenty-five, led by two rows of six and one in the lead by itself. Each appears to balance on a thin black wire fixed to the center of the underside of each sack and to the floor below by a round brass fitting.

Artie is leaning hard on her star stick looking closely.

“These things are balloons!”

“There is a little cement dust on this one.”

Steve blows at the one in front of him, no dust rises but the balloon moves a little.

“Must be glued on.”

Artie eases up on her star stick.

“How about that!”

“Wait a minute Artie, those in front are all moving.”

“There must be a fan somewhere, Steve.”

Steve wets his finger with spit and holds it up to find the breeze.

“Nothing here.”

He moves toward the front of the regiment.  Artie moves toward the back.

“No, here Steve, back here.”

“Fred, it is coming out of these vents, look.”

“Yeah, I think they turn the fans on and off to keep it interesting.”

We can see a small vent low on the wall behind them and another in the floorTowards the front.  Artie moves over to the plaque on the wall opposite.

“Why no video on this one?”

We read the plaque:

Each of these sack-shape Mylar inflatables is printed with unique photographs of a sack of Portland cement just before it was opened and emptied into the mixer at the Dordrechts, Rout One bridge construction site, between 11:25 AM and 11:47AM on September 23, 2014, in Alexandria, Virginia.

“The artist expresses the orderly intentionality of our impact on the environment with an irony characteristic of his new work.” E. Montana Berg, Mark It Art, Blog, Dec. 2014.

Artie looks up from the plaque.

“Well Fred, does Berg’s remark mean anything to you?”

“Seems to me that our impact on the environment is disorderly and unintended.”

“What about bridge building?”

“Artie, these things seem more like Dadaist gestures really.”

Steve is stroking his beard.

“Echoes from around 1916, I think.”

“Still making money too!”

“No one will ever do it better than Meret Oppenhiem’s fur teacup!”

“That was well after 1916, Artie.”

“I would like to have seen some video of the action at the Dordrechts building site”

“Fred, someone must have had a phone handy at the time.”

“Funny idea, a phone for taking videos.”

“Cement that one Fred!”

We move on along the river of our blue carpeted intentions to a smaller space, where, “Rising Piece”, is arranged in sequence against the wall.  Seven white pedestals support rounded gray chunks of concrete, only about a couple of pounds each. They are exhibited in a row of uniform, 2 ft. open top, plexiglass cubes, partially filled with water. Each box is filled a little higher than the next in succession.  The seventh with water apparently oozing out of hidden holes in the concrete, overflows into a shallow mettle pan on the floor under the pedestal. The paisleys on Artie’s Orthopedic Wedge Healing Shoe shine with drops of water splashing out.  The pan overflows, draining into a shallow rounded channel across the gallery floor and disappearing through a jagged hole where the wall meets the terrazzo floor. One can follow a faint sound around the corner of the gallery into a dark room filled with the roar of a heavy waterfall.

“Can’t see a damn thing in here!”

“I think that’s the idea Steve.”

“There’s the wall on your left and a railing on your right.”

“Yeah, got it, Fred.”

“Check the LEDs on the floor.”

“Just like being at the movies.”

“Not quite Fred.”

“Well, it is a ‘sound screen’, you see.”

“Not at all Fred.”

“Okay, Artie….”

“Why do I feel I might fall off into the void?”

“Are you afraid of heights Fred?”

“Don’t do well at all, on high.”

“There you are, we don’t have enough visual clues in here.  I’ll bet the opposite wall is closer than you might think.”

“I can’t touch anything beyond the line of lights with this stick.”

A voice comes out of the void.

“For your safety. Please stay within the path indicated.”

The room lights up red, like a dark room safety light. A uniformed security guard comes to Artie, who is leaning over the rail, still pocking with her stick.

“Are you alright Ma’am?”

“Yes, sorry, lost my balance a little.”

The guard escorts her out of the room and the red light goes off.  We could see the room is painted black and isn’t more than a few yards wide with lots of wire and huge black cabinets.

Around another corner we come up outside on an escalator, beneath a massive lump of cement, called “Complementary Eye Piece.  It is the biggest yet, by far, with yellow and purple pebbles said to made by the artist out of tumbled glass.  It balances on a narrow base and towers out ward with a smooth side and a jagged side, like a rock that was torn out of a stream bed.

“Artie!”

“Well, if it isn’t Frank Vasari!”

“What happened to your foot?”

“Slipped and busted it up in the studio last week.”

The group around Seymour Van Rijn has gathered in the shade of “Complementry Eye Piece”, with wine coloring plastic glasses in various shades of grape.

“Artie, let me get you a drink?”

Frank Vasari walks off, before she can answer.

“Hi, Artie, Giuseppe Gloriani…”

He holds out a hand with the fingers of the other crowded around a paper plate, wine glass and napkin.

“Frank told me you are a sculptor.”

“Yeah, I do some 3D work.”

Frank Vasari breezes back with a glass of wine for Artie.  She introduces Steve and me to Frank, who then introduces Gloriani, or tries to.

“Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me folks.”

Guseppe, strides off to tend to Seymore who has turned from the serving table talking to Mrs. Shrowd.

Artie swigs from her wine and gestures to Steve who has a plate full of Teriyaki chicken on skewers and a glass of cider. Boris is yelling across the crowd to Frank, who excuses himself to walk over.

“Listen to that!”

“Boris yells, that’s one of his things.”

“Let’s make a move, guys.”

“Gloriani is a pretty good agent you know.”

“No, no, no, Gentileschi takes care of that for me, Steve.”

“Don’t you want to mix and mingle?”

“No, I don’t know what to say to people at these things.  It all gets too pretentious for me … Finish your chicken Steve, let’s go.”

 

 

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. 

Three leafless stems with a few thin branches rise from a large red clay pot on the patio behind Diddlie’s carport, surrounded by a cage improvised out of chicken wire.  It is draped with oak catkins dangling like tinsel and yellow with white-oak pollen.  Diddlie watches Mr. Liddell feeding on the fresh spring chickweed growing between the patio pavers. Preoccupied by the recent death of her English cousin Ian, she has gone quiet. A blue jay shrieks.
“Were you close?”
“No, we weren’t that close lately, but we have a history.”
“Ahh, I see.”
“Fred, you don’t see anything!”
“I only see what you mean.”
She is looking past me into the trees.
“Well, just don’t use that know-it-all tone of yours, okay.”
Her phone chimes but she ignores it.
“Might I ask about your history?”
“You can ask, sure!”
“Is that what makes his death so painful?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I didn’t want to be presumptuous!”
“It is just a private thing okay?”
“Oh certainly … would you rather I came back some other time?”
“No, Fred … I mean … I mean I want to talk, but not about that….
Her phone chimes and she looks down at it, and puts it back in her jeans pocket.
“…well anyway.  I had to put that wire around my apple trees to keep birds and squirrels out, or something.  I lost a whole year’s crop when I came out one afternoon and found the dirt all spread out everywhere and the seedlings gone.”
Diddlie steps over to pick up Mr. Liddell who has wandered over to the cilantro and parsley sprouting above deep blue and emerald green glazed earthen ware. He ignores the thyme growing on the border of the flower bed which he reaches first.  He scrambles away from her.  Last night’s storm knocked so many blooms off the pink azaleas in the bed beyond the thyme, Mr. Liddell runs into a pink paradise under the arch of overhanging branches weighted with rain-soaked petals.
Diddlie, pauses in front of the azaleas and looks back at the big pot.
“Those apple trees were two years old but didn’t make it through winter.”
“Give them time, perhaps they will sprout yet.”
Diddlie, walks over and reaches down to a thin twig sticking through the wire mesh and snaps it off.
“Not much green in there.”
“Did you grow them from seed?’
“Yes, I put two others in the ground over by the property line, and they survived.”
“Any fruit yet?”
“No, they won’t fruit for at least five years and probably won’t be edible anyway.
“So, it’s a gamble.”
“Yes, nature is holding all the cards.”
Her phone chimes again  and she seems to be
reading a short text.  She puts it back in her pocket.
“What kind of seed did you plant?”
“These were probably Goldrush and York. I don’t remember really. I just kept putting seeds in an old salt cellar on the sideboard every time I ate an apple.”
“I find they tend to fly around when you cut an apple in half.”
“Not if you do it carefully and put your hand over it. You know every seed grows into a new thing.”
“A new type?”

“Yes, another kind of apple.”
“So, you can’t expect more Yorks or Gold Rush.”
“My old aunt, Maria Gostrey used to grow Cox’s and James Grieve in her garden in Chester.  Ian and I used to pick up windfalls.”
“Wind falls?’
“Yes, wind falls, that’s what they called fruit that dropped before it was ripe.”
“Oh! the ones with bugs in them!”
“Supposedly the sweetest! Pecked open by birds, or whatever … “
“They also harbor wasps attracted by all that apple scent.”
“Ian was often gloomy and would say he felt he would fall into the, ‘Great vacuum of doom’.
“Sounds rather frightening!”
“Well, he was matter of fact about it actually.”
“It seems to have left an impression on you though.”
“Anyway Fred, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mr. Liddell has emerged from his bower. He raises an ear, the other is caught in the azalea thicket.  Diddlie moves quickly enough to catch him this time. His pink nose pulsates as he tries to wriggle in her arms.
“I better take him in.”
Rain has started again, and she pulls her floral Indian wrap up over her head as I follow through the carport to Mr. Liddell’s hutch near the front. Her phone chimes again as she puts Mr. Liddell in his hutch head first, smoothing his ears down, and closing the hatch. She looks at the phone, puts it away and runs out to the front driveway.  Daisy Briscoe is standing by the front door with a bunch of daffodils set off by fern and sprays of spirea and forsythia.  We walk over.
“Hi Did., Fred, no one answered when I rang the bell.”
“No, we were out back yacking.”
“Sorry about your cousin Diddlie.”
Diddlie doesn’t take the flowers at once. She taps her phone.  Daisey keeps hold of them resting the stems on her shoulder. The blooms spread their colors behind her, out of Diddlie’s sight.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, from Lou.”
“I never told him.”
“Well, he said he sent you some electrons.”
“Yeah, right, he hasn’t stopped texting all day, him and all kinds of people.  I mean how did they all find out?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters Fred.  I know who I tell what.  You know what I mean?”
“Sure, but you can get mixed up too.”
“No, to me, each person is a story of their own.”
“They are? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know each story.  Each one is its own thing. I know who I told what, and where they are in my life. I didn’t tell any of these people.  I know what I told Lark and I know what I told you, Fred, and there’s stuff I haven’t ever told anyone … and there’s lies I got burned by too.”
“Well, it is a bad habit.”
“Who doesn’t fall into lies from time to time, Daisy?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Diddlie looks away from Daisy down at the concrete step.
“This is my private business.”
Her phone chimes sound.
“It’s these damn things.  Spreading twaddle through twitter … and constantly interrupting.”
“Turn it off Did.!”
“You know I should, Fred but I am expecting something important, so I am stuck with it.  We are all stuck with it, here, at least.”
Daisy’s chimes sound.  She wanders out into the rain with the phone up to her ear and circles back and hands Diddlie her phone.
“It’s wet Daisy, I’ll get electrocuted!”
“Oh Diddlie!  She wipes it on the underside of her long sleeve and smears the screen.
“Give it to me!”
Diddlie takes an oil stained towel out of her cupboard and dries the phone off on a selected patch of faded yellow and puts it to her ear.
“There’s no one there.”
“Must have hung it up when we dried it off.”
“Who was it?”
“Bel Vionnet, she’s got kittens to give away.  I thought you might like one.”
“Does she know too?  I mean did Lark put this in Face book or something? Besides, I have a bird and a rabbit. No way a cat is coming here!”
Diasy walks toward the carport with me and Diddlie while she is busy with her phone again.
“I don’t do Facebook.  Do you Fred?”
“Yes sometimes.  I haven’t seen anything about Ian, though.”
We all shelter in the carport as light rain falls through sunshine.  Diddlie has her hand up around the back of her neck.
“Well, I don’t do it either.  I bailed out after all that about the way our data is used or sold, I should say.”
Mr. Liddell is scratching about in his hutch.  Daisy has backed up so close to the hutch that Mr. Liddell is trying to get a nibble of fern.
“Daisy, mind the rabbit!”
Daisy steps forward holding the flowers upright and away from the hutch.
“I mean it is kind of amazing when I think of it.  How all the people I know stay in their place, until this happens and they kind of all spill out.”
Daisy changes hands, holding her flowers down with the stems up.
“From your yard, Daisy … for me?”
She hands Diddlie the flowers, who holds
the bunch in both hands rotating it to see the full selection and arrangement.
“Well, I hope he didn’t fall into the vacuum of doom.”
She puts the flowers down on top of a tall box.
“God!  I hope nobody does!”
“Well, no one knows what happens after our death.”
“There’s plenty of people will tell you they do you know, Fred.”
Diddley is rummaging in her cupboard, and finds a painter’s bucket to put the flowers in. She then puts flowers and bucket out in the rain where the dried lavender and orange paint drips look wet again, running down the sides.
“There, that will keep them going.”
“Yeah! Look at the rain drops on the spirea.  The sun is doing interesting things.  See that!”
“Ah, maybe, I am not a painter, Daisy.”
“Just look Fred.  Forget paint, check those translucent drops.”
Diddlie has pulled her wrap tight around her chest, as she watches the rain.
“But it’s not just death.  The scary thing is that the vacuum is right here. I mean I can feel it.”
“You mean we are the vacuum, or is it in you?”
“No, no, it’s like Ian said, he is afraid of falling out of life into nothing, nothing but a big pile of purchases, unread books and cloths he never wore, just stuff.”
He had more stuff when we were kids than any one I knew.  He went on buying all his life. Deliveries came every day. Then he threw it all out. Didn’t even give it away.  Just threw it out. That was an email I got from him … a couple of weeks ago … after years … after years of just Christmas cards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 gray cat bel Vionnet and Steve Strether adopted after a storm last year, Marie-Josèph-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, or Josephine, had five kittens.  Two were given to a French family who named them after a couple of Napoleon’s Marshals.

“Marie-Josèph-Rose…what did you say?”

“It is, Marie-Josèph-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie.”

“All that, bel ?”

“Well she was known as ‘Cat’ until the family suggested the longer name.”

“How can you remember it?”

“With practice.  It was a challenge!”

“That’s a bit of a mouthful to call your cat!”

“Not for the French, Fred, Americans can call her Josephine.”

“The French family who returned them said those two tabies raised too much hell. So, they brought the Marshals back to us.”

“Now they are raising it here!”

“Well, they’ve got competition here, and we didn’t want them to go to the pound.”

“When was that?”

“Back in January. Of course, we never knew who Napoleon was.”

“What do you mean, you must know who the emperor was.”

“No, not that self-crowned revolutionary, the Corsican.”

“Well, who then?”

“I mean the father of the kittens!”

“But Napoleon and Josephine had no children together!”

“Oh no? You’re looking at two of them, at least, right in this house!”

“I mean historically!”

“Fred, don’t be so literal!”

“Okay, so what did you call the others?”

“Well, I never took to the Corsican dictator or his Marshals. We chose the names of revolutionary women who were left out of the history books written by men.”

Bel Vionnet goes into the kitchen and brings out a large packet of cat treats.  She calls the cats as she walks through the living room to the hall that leads to the bedrooms.  Only one cat responds to bel’s call, en Française, “Venez! Venez au couloires! “

“You see, Millicent Fawcett, snoozing over there on the dining table.

“Yeah, looking very comfortable, with her back against the fruit bowl.”

She jumps down on to a chair at once, and then to the floor and trots over with one black ear and one white ear, and two white front socks.

“Yes, and who was Millicent Fawcett?”

“A moderate suffragist, she did a lot to improve higher education for women.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Hardly surprising! By the way, she was not part of Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU not a suffragette.”

‘I see.”

“And she also co-founded, Newnham College, Cambridge.”

“Is that so!”

“Yes, the Brits just put up a statue of her in Parliament Square.”

Bel throws a handful of treats down the hall where they land like hail scattering on pavement, a sound which gets everybody’s attention.

“Look at the gray and white Fred.  That is Alexandra Kollontai, asleep in the windowsill.”

“She has a sunbeam all to herself!”

She awakens and jumps down in front of a Black cat, racing towards the hall.

“Now there! That black one is, Olympe de Gouges. Now, she is named after an 18^th century French playwright and political activist. Widely read, she revved up feminist and abolitionist movements.”

“Well I do know that it was angry women who mobbed Versailles.”

“Right, by October 1789 they were fired up.  They got the Revo. going and then it was stolen by that diminutive dictator and his “Code” which, set us back a hundred years!”

“I thought the Code Napoleon, was a great social advance.”

“Not for women.”

“So, the Revo. was betrayed!”

Bel spreads her arms as she speaks.

“Men must be liberated from their dominance.”

Some more cat treats spill out of the packet.

“Interesting way of putting it.  Dominance is so often the successor of liberations!”

Millicent is on them, with paws spread to possess two treats at once.

“So true Fred! Every Revolution in history has been betrayed.”

Josephine looks out from under the couch, twitching her torn ears which were crushed by the motion of her head against the front of the couch. She bounds across the room and races towards the hall speedway with the others.  Two tabbies, Mashall Joachim Murat and Marshal Ney, Prince of the Moskovie, collide in the hall doorway closing in behind Josephine, but skidding on the parquet as they make the turn.  Bel closes the door, as hissing and some yowls ensue from the advance of the Marshals.  The feline mob is blocked from the living room, kitchen and dining rooms. Bel walks back to the kitchen and puts the dog food down for their visiting cocker spaniel, sniffing the bottom of the trash can. It gives her a solemnly sagging look.  The dog munches noisily, its tags tinkling and tapping on the shiny steel rim of the bowl. It goes on licking the empty bowl long after any sign of the meal is evident to human curiosity.

There is a lot of mewing to be heard from behind the hall door.

“When did you get the dog?”

“Oh Flush?  He’s staying with us while Liz and Bob Browning are away.”

Flush moves over to drink at the water bowl wetting down the surrounding floor.

Steve comes in the back door.

“Hey flush! Going to mop the kitchen with those ears?”

Flush looks up and pants.

“You made a great start! Go for it!”

Flush barks.

Steve bends down to give Flush an ear rub.

“Steve, keep ahold of him okay?”

“Yeah okay, ah…what’s up?

“I just put the cat treats down, and their dinner is coming right up.”

“Well I’ll close him on the back porch for a minute.”

“He will try and eat the cat food Fred, and that leads to mayhem.”

Bel has arranged six small steel dishes of cat food in a row along the counter.

“Fred, can you lend a hand?”

There are some loud thumps on the hall door and rasping scratches too. Bel offers me two dishes.

“Just put these dishes in that crate in the dining room.”

I carry the dishes in.

“Okay, Fred, stand by.”

Bel puts another dish on the windowsill where the gray and white cat, Alexandra Kollontai, was sleeping. According to bel, historically, she was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a Menshevik, then as a Bolshevik.

“She was an advocate for free love you know.”

“Or do you mean free sex?”

“Fred, there you have a question!”

Bel puts three dinners in the corner of the kitchen on a mat in front of the dryer.

Steve is back from securing Flush on the porch and we can hear the dog barking.

“Are you ready for the Feline Five Hundred, Fred?”

“Is it formula one?”

“No formula, sheer chaos though.”

“Bel told me to stand by this crate.”

“Did you put those two bowls of food in there?”

“Yup”

“Great, as soon as the two tabby Marshals go in there close it.”

“Okay.”

“They will try to eat everyone’s food if they aren’t separated by Flush’s crate.”

“What about when Flush isn’t here with his crate?”

“They eat on the screened porch, or in the broom closet if it’s too cold out on the porch.”

“What about the brooms?”

“They don’t mind at all!”

Bel opens the closet where I can see a number of things from across the room, including two brooms hanging from the wall leaving a small floor space.

She gets out the sponge mop and mops up around the dog bowl.

“So they eat in there?  In the dark?”

“No, it’s not dark.  See, these are louvered doors.”

Bel’s shouts out.

“Are you ready Fred?’

“Okay!”

“Bel opens the door to the hall and five revolutionaries and one mother race out as if to Versailles in a tumbling mob.  They might be five hundred. Tails cross, heads butt, and whiskers are cruelly crushed as the crowd with no starting line climbs over itself to get to the food.  Olympe de Gouges, the black cat, is in front like, ‘Liberty Leading the People”, with tail high instead of the tricolor.  She jumps against the side of the couch bouncing off to make a skillful ninety degree turn without skidding. This opens the field to the tabby Marshals who are right behind, only they skid and head into the crate at my feet. The windowsill cat, Alexandra, has peeled off from the crowd and does a ‘thunder paw’ to her dish in place.

“Alexandra Kolentai can gallop as loud as a horse!”

“Bel, she is a revolutionary cat!”

“She is like the others, hungry!”

Mother cat, Josephine, and Millicent are neck and neck as they race down the straight away into their Indianapolis, the kitchen. Olympe first leapt up on to the counter and then into the sink.  She mews and laps some water out of a mug. Josephine has started feasting with Millicent beside her when the Olympe jumps down from the sink and drives between them. They all try to eat from the same two bowls until Millicent finds a bowl to herself only inches to the right. The race is over.

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 stands patiently behind the curving glass counter covering a selection of pastries, cakes and cookies available to her customers at the Cavendish Pie shop.

A couple in matching red and blue SnazE running outfits have selected two chocolate croissants.

As Mrs. Rutherford moves to serve them.  The male runner changes his mind and asks for a brownie instead.

“For here or to go sir?”

The woman speaks up.

“To go.”

The man has already said they will eat here.

Mrs. Rutherford is smiling.

“Ah, which is it folks?”

The woman leans over the glass.

“To go, that’s to go Ma’am.”

Mrs. Rutherford places one croissant in a small paper bag and then puts down the tongs she uses to serve them and picks up a spatula to lift a brownie from the display.

Mrs. Rutherford has a brownie in midair on its way to a waiting bag but pauses when he moves close to his companion to mumble something in her ear and she responds.

“Oh well, okay…no, not the brownie, I’ll have, ahhh…a couple of those almond cookies.”

Mrs. Rutherford puts the brownie back.

“Are you sure about that hon.?”

“Sure, I’m sure!”

Mrs. Rutherford pulls a plastic bag over her hand to pick up cookies.

“Okay, how about something to drink?”

He has stepped over to the left side of the display in his green and black running shoes with red wing-shaped SnazE logos rising from the toes.

“Ah, I don’t want a croissant either, can I have one of those strawberry jobs there?”

“Just a minute sir.”

Mrs. Rutherford pulls the plastic bag off her hand so the two cookies are inside. Now she moves to the other end of the counter to serve him.

He points out a thick creamy looking triangular slice with strawberries on top.

“The strawberry cheese cake special! Good choice sir!”

Mrs. Rutherford takes the other croissant out of its paper bag and puts it back then moves over to the strawberry special.

“Oh, ah…ma’am, ah, over here!”

Mrs. Rutherford looks up, and over to her right where the woman who wanted a brownie, then almond cookies has changed her mind again.

‘Yeah, instead of the cookies I’ll have a piece of cherry pie please.”

Mrs. Rutherford doesn’t move.  She is looking hard at the woman in blue track suit with red piping and SnazE logos running across the back of her jacket, who was sure she was sure she wants two almond cookies.

The man has stepped over next to his friend to look at the cherry pie.

“You mustn’t eat cherries remember?”

“Oh, I can eat these!”

“No, No, you can’t, remember what happened at Derick’s?”

“Listen, I am having the pie, alright?”

“No, it’s not alright, I don’t want to have to call the medics.”

A man walks forward from behind me and goes up to the arguing couple.

“Why don’t you settle this outside?  You are not the only customers in here you know!”

They ignore him, and now they are shouting.

“You didn’t call any one.”

“Yes, I did!”

“It was Derick who called, and beside it wasn’t even necessary!”

“Oh no? You wouldn’t be standing here now if he hadn’t called!”

“You are so wrong!”

It was Westie North who stepped up to them and as he is tapping the man’s shoulder, Mrs. Rutherford looks up at me.

“Next customer please.”

She serves me a small Darjeeling tea, and keeps looking over at the arguing couple as she presses down the lid on the sky blue paper cup.

“Enjoy it now, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“Its been a bad season over there in Darjeeling.”

“Oh really, poor harvest, you mean.”

“So, I hear.  One of my customers has folks over there.”

Mrs. Rutherford is staring past me towards the door.

“Well I’ll be…”

The couple walk outside, still in dispute, without buying anything.

“Sorry you had to put up with them!”

“Please excuse me…ah, Fred, You are Fred right?

“That’s me.”

“I find that kind of behavior just hard to understand.”

Steve Strether is sitting with his back to the sunlit window at the far end of one of the dragon tables.  He is tapping his I-pad looking for a web site as I sit down to join him.

“Look at this on Shrinkrap today!”

Axel Ensor’s nineteen-year old Asian wife is shown reclining nude on a huge crimson velvet cushion with palm trees in the background.

“Is it real?”

“Who knows?”

“Looks like she’s on a yacht.”

“Yeah, this isn’t just a tabloid thing.  It is all over. Look at this.”

A headline comes up from the Guardian with few more taps.

“Well maybe it was taken years ago.”

“Fred, he only married her last year in a huge ceremony over on Mindanao.”

“She is under age!”

“Mr. Ensor’s influence assured that she was 21.”

“Well, maybe she was.”

“Someone claiming to be her sister was quoted as saying she is 18.  Then a reporter for Shrinkrap produced a copy of the birth certificate showing she was 19 last month.”

He brings up a Daily Beast article, with picture, and a long article

by Laticia Lantern, of the popular talk show.

“Was she on Laticia’s show?”

“No, he was, and Axel was highly critical of our president.”

“Oh really!”

He taps another news site where Glen Gasberg is doing his daily commentary, accusing the FBI of publishing the picture, “through their liberal allies in the media.”

Steve picks up his coffee for a swig, and then taps up yet another news site.  It is FOX. Robert Byron is standing on a tropical beach.  It is a windy overcast day.  His tie is blowing hard to the right and his hair has come unstuck from its perfect wave and streams chaotically in the same direction.  Steve turns the sound up. We can hear Byron’s voice above the muffled buffeting wind on the furry microphone.

“As the Ensor story has seized the nation’s attention, here in Key Biscayne, you can see the Macadamia yacht pulling out of its slip into this gusting wind. Is Ensor on board?  That is the question everyone is asking. Over to you Bob, for a weather update.”

“Have you seen anything on Macadamia’s alternative budget proposal?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the government shut down?”

Steve shakes his head.

“… or the joint DHS, FBI alert on the Russian government’s targeting our energy, nuclear and commercial facilities.”

“Fed, that’s back page stuff, these days!”

A shadow falls on Steve’s I-pad as Westie North walks in front of the window behind him to sit down opposite me.

“So, Westie, what’s new on the Guild Water Committee’s deliberations?”

“We have plenty of water, but we are one pump down, with two running fine.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Steve, that will happen in good time.”

“How long is that?”

“Well, you know what committee time is.  It is the combined time of everyone on the committee, so it is longer and slower than individual time.”

“Okay, so that explains something about Congressional time as well I guess.”

“The red and the blue, gives me the blues!”

“Westie, are you talking politics or that little fracas at the counter just now?”

“Ah, both…but I’ll say this about that, the media need to stop their assault on the president and get behind him!”

Steve laughs.

“What about the president’s assault on truth?”

“Who’s, truth is that Steve?”

“There’s only one kind of truth isn’t there?”

“Depends what you believe, doesn’t it.”

“Not really Westie, beliefs can be mistaken.”

“Not while your believing them they’re not!”

“Of course, they are. If you believe that Armond Macadamia won the last election, you are wrong.”

“Ha! Truth in politics is what you believe.  You’re talking philosophy!”

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 bites into his burger.  A piece of lettuce falls on his plate, white stem, and green leaf-shred land on a red blob of dripped ketchup.  He listens with his bun in both hands, chewing vigorously.

“Have you noticed Chuck Newsome seems to be a bigamist?”

He puts down his food and wipes his thick fingers on one of the white paper napkins scrunched up around his plate and swigs some Stella Artois straight from the bottle.

“You remind me of a hell of a question!”

“Aha, do go on!”

“Well, a long story in fact. It was at a data management conference in Vienna, back before selling the business to Fibonacci Corp.”

He chokes down another mouthful of burger.

“That’s where I met Nikita Sergeyevich.”

“Ahh, Nadia’s ex-husband isn’t it?”

Lou pushes his gold rimmed glasses up to the bridge of his nose.

“Right, one of them at least, and therein lies the story. I have heard a thing or two, you know, here and there, as he rose in prominence.”

“When was this? I mean was he part of Gorbachev’s movement?

“No, no, he is no Red, this was well after Perestroika you know, as Putin consolidated his power.”

“I guess Putin is more of a ‘black’, leaning in the Fascist direction.”

“Niki gave…hell, he probably still does… give generously to Putin’s youth movement ‘Nashi’. Even though their financing is never revealed, it is pretty clear that the big money, like Gazprom, contributes.”

Lou stuffs a few fries in his mouth and squirts more ketchup over the pile on his plate.  Putting the plastic squeeze bottle down, he waves to the passing waitress.  Still chewing his fries, he gesticulates.  She laughs, nodding.

“That’s two more Stellas, right guys?”

He gives her the thumbs up and swallows his food with a Stella chaser, which drains the bottle.

“I didn’t get breakfast and two o’clock is way too late for lunch!”

“Way too late! …What was Diddlie’s problem by the way?”

“Oh, did she call you too?”

“I think she covered all her bases this morning.”

“Well, I didn’t get over there until after ten.  You know how she gets.

Talking a mile-a-minute!”

“I’ve been there.”

“Lou bungs more burger in.  The waitress brings two more Stellas and he orders another burger, but slaw instead of fries.  We are sitting in front of the bow window in the H bar.  The lunch crowd has moved on.  Joy Flack and Congressman Bean are still at the bar talking to Mr. Hoffman.  Theo Tinderbrush waves to us as he goes out through the heavy oak doors.

“I think the kid was his.”

“You mean Boyd?”

“Yeah, they did a DNA test.”

Lou is busy for a moment with his two-fisted burger and slaw.

“Right, I never heard the outcome.”

“Boyd is Theo’s…excuse me…”

A curly piece of cabbage falls from the corner of his mouth, with a drip of white.

“So, the cat is out of the bag!”

He picks up yet another napkin to wipe his mouth. He waves to the waitress with napkin in hand and she nods to us across several intervening tables.

“Not sure where the cat is, but it escaped Diddlie’s lips.”

The waitress brings him a stack of fresh napkins.

“Well, I shan’t bring it up.  Did you see Harper?”

“No, Harper was only here for about a day and a half. He’s gone back to his job in Budapest.”

“Budapest? I thought it was Prague.  What’s he doing there?”

“He’s teaching at Central European University, you know, George Soros’s project.”

Lou finishes off his fries and lifts the last piece of burger off his plate.

The waitress takes away our empties and brings Lou’s second burger, medium rare, no onions.  He doesn’t go at it right away but leans back and loosens his belt.

“Any way the last time I saw Nikita Sergeyevich, he was a security type, based in Sophia Bulgaria.  He was in charge of some ‘heavies’ and also sat in on data security briefings with his tech. buddy, Henri Beyle.”

“Beyle?”

“Also served time in France as Julien Sorel”

“Never heard of him.”

“No, I haven’t heard anything for years.”

“Was Niki married to Nadia at the time?”

“No, Nikita Sergeyevich Brasov moved to London after he had made his fortune and the right contacts to make more.”

“Whatever made Nadia tell you all this?”

“Nadia told me her story when I did some consulting work for Chuck Newsome. It was just a few days. Chuck was in London on business, Nadia was still nervous and needed to talk and I was listening.  I worked partly out of my house and partly out of an office Chuck had in his old place before he built that palace by the river.  Niki Brazov, it turns out, is a gangster/oligarch, with numerous shell companies, posing as an ordinary businessman.”

“Oh yes, money laundering, and property you mean?”

“I believe he had a roll in arming the ‘little green men’ who took over the Crimea.  He also helps the Ukrainian separatists with volunteers from his militia organization.”

“Sounds like a shady KGB type alright.”

“Don’t know about KGB, he spent some time with another club though, jail time in 1981, on robbery, fraud and child prostitution charges.  Then he got into Putin’s orbit somehow, as a paid informant, I suspect.”

“I get it, a talkative crook of many parts!”

“He picked up young Nadia at a London club, where she was out with friends. He charmed her with his Russian and his money.”

“But Nadia is a Brit.  Sounds like one at least.”

“Well, kind of, Nadia’s father, Dr. Kutuzov was a Russian expat, of White Russian family and a mathematician at Kings College.  She grew up bilingual, Russian/English in a bilingual expat. world.  She was smart, and a little rebellious, a little adventurous, you know what I mean?”

“Oh yes, spirited girl!”

“That’s it.  She also went to one of those elite British schools.”

Lou finishes his second burger and drains his second Stella.  The waitress has kept up with him and picks up the bottle.

“Another Stella hon?”

Lou shakes his head.

“Just a coffee please…you want a coffee Fred?

“Sure.”

“No, excuse me, make that two coffees.”

Joy Flack and Congressman Bean leave through the back, led by Mr. Hoffman.

“Must be reporters somewhere near.”

“Maybe Lou, or maybe they have business back there.”

“Well, could be, the parking lot has emptied out.  I don’t see a TV van or anything.”

“Anyway Lou, you were telling me about Niki and Nadia, but what about Paula.  I thought Chuck was going to marry her?  That will be bigamy.”

“He is marrying Paula, I think that’s why Nadia got together with Max Plank.”

“Yeah, right, they both went off to Bulgaria!”

It may get Chuck out of a jam with Brasov, for stealing his woman. “

“It may not too!  I am sure that Nadia and Chuck were said to be married though.”

“Could be a convenience, just to get her into the States.

“There might be a contract of another sort, you know.”

“You mean out on Chuck’s life, Fred?”

“Yup!”

“Huh!  Could be I suppose.  Any way back before this, Chuck was sent over to London by his firm on business and met both Nadia and Brazov at this club in Mayfair, about the time they started getting involved. She liked both men. At the same time Chuck quits his firm and makes a deal with Nikita Brazov, which netted them a stream of income worth millions.”

“So, Chuck is flush with Russian oligarch money!”

“I believe so. After the deal was done, Nadia and Niki zoomed off to Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, to get married and meet his family.

A few days after they got back to London, Nadia called Chuck and later told him over lunch that she was leaving Niki.”

“Why?”

“He was punching her out and going with other women.  The guy is a real brute!”

“No wonder she took off!”

“Nadia took up with Chuck partly for protection from Nikita’s retribution.  It is a pretty dramatic story.”

The coffee arrives.

“Nadia left their hotel suite midmorning as Nikita was on the phone in another room, and room service brought breakfast.  She stepped out while Niki’s ‘heavy’ turned his back and sat down to eat.

She walks out with no coat, only her purse and phone.

Goes down to the sub-basement and talks a young guy into guiding her out an obscure service door. You know Nadia.  She is well put together and she knows when to flaunt it and when not to.

“Well I know Chuck likes to see it too.”

“Yeah, some of her outfits are pretty eye catching! Anyway…Luckily, Nadia finds a taxi dropping off passengers at the end of the block and gets in after them.

She goes to Victoria station and takes the train to Walthamstow Central.”

“Where’s that?”

I looked it up on the map and its way out in East London far from Mayfair, the Arab Sheiks and Russian Oligarchs.

Nadia is afraid to use her phone in case his people can track it.

She leaves it in the taxi.  Hoping he will be miss led if he is tracking it.  She buys a new one the high street.

She walks for blocks to find the store where an old school friend works. Nikita doesn’t know her. Natalia Bagrationi is part of the same White Russian expat. world and claims to be related to the great Russian General, Bigration.”

“Yes, wasn’t he was killed at Borodino?”

“Ah, maybe…She dropped out of the school where she and Nadia were friends and trained as a plumber. Years ago, Nadia watched her repair a toilet cistern at school with a piece of Styrofoam and a length of bamboo.”

“I would expect the school to do that, in a well-to-do place.”

“No, no, no, they had their weed stashed in the ballcock and it sank.”

“So maybe Natalia got the boot?”

“Could be, Nadia didn’t tell me.  Any way Natalia’s contact info. was not on the old phone she left in the taxi, so Nadia felt safe.”

“Oh! two of my favorite men!”

Diddlie surprises us both.

“What are you guys scheming over now?”

“Oh, nothing much Did. Is your garbage disposal working okay?”

“Well, funny you should ask Lou.”

“Okay, what’s the laugh?”

Lou picks up his second Stella, finds it empty. Sips his coffee instead.

“It’s jammed again.”

“Aha, well that raccoon won’t be getting into the attic again.”

“I hope not Lou…you used a whole piece of plywood.”

“So, you came down here.”

“Boy! You got enough napkins Lou?  Looks like you are collecting.”

“Well, ketchup gets around you know.”

“How many have you had?”

“Napkins? About a dozen.”

“Sweetie you know what I mean.  How many Fred?”

“If you must know, I’ve had a couple of Stellas.”

“I had one before Fred got here, so that’s three.”

Diddlie unwinds her red scarf and takes off her matching wool hat.

“You are not the quiet guy I used to know, or the guy I saw this morning. Seems to me you are well sauced!”

“Yeah! I am happy enough.  So, any way Did. How did you find me…us… down here?”

“You two are always in here Wednesdays lunch time.  Is there any one in Fauxmont who doesn’t know that?”

“The majority of residents. I don’t think that we are all that well known.”

“Well, what do you think Fred?”

“Only a few people know me.”

Diddlie pulls up a chair.

“Are you going to invite me to sit down?”

“Did, you have taken care of that already.”

Diddlie is looking down at the table.

“Lou, any chance you can take another look under my sink?”

“Pretty fair chance I would say.  What do you think Fred?”

“I’ll leave it to you.  Would you like a coffee Did?”

Diddlie looks up and smiles at me.

“Thought you would never ask.”

“Did, you need to go by the hardware store next door and buy a new disposal.  I can install it for you this evening.”

“How many more are you guys going to have?”

“As many as we want Did.  You want a Stella to chase that coffee?”

Diddlie shakes her head.

“Why can’t you fix the old one?”

“Do you know how old it is?”

“Ah, no, don’t remember.”

“That’s it.  Your disposal has worn out and it is going to jam up a couple more times and then just freeze up or short-out altogether.”

The waitress takes an order for coffee.

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. 

Flowers of golden rod spray the sun’s yellows up near Diddlie’s ceiling.  On top of the Hoosier Cabinet the Red Queen browses among stems and blooms with her curved beak.  Only this morning, Diddlie stuffed them, stalks first, into the tin flower drawer with built in sifter. The white enamel metal table is sprinkled with flower fragments in front of cupboards rising against the wall behind.  She listens to young Serge read from his tablet while making tea for the guests in her kitchen.

“Milk and sugar Serge?”

“Ah, what kind of tea are you making?”

Her Majesty, flies down to a perch near the action, on the handle of Diddlie’s tall blackened ancestral kettle. Her claws grip the handle bound in heavy cord for insulation.

“Darjeeling honey, what else is there?”

Diddlie lights the gas under her kettle.

“You really want to know? … I mean there are teas made of Yerba, Chicory, Chamomile, Dandelion…”

“Yeah, okay Serge, you’re a little too clever. I didn’t mean literally.  I mean Darjeeling is the best tea.”

“Oh okay, sorry, I like it with a little milk, no sugar.”

“Five times as clever!”

“What’s with that bird?”

“You want yours straight, right Fred?”

“Thanks, Did.”

The Red Queen flies off the handle circling the room, shrieking as she felt the heat. She settles back on top of the cabinet.

 “Speak when you’re spoken to!”

She pecks at the flowers and at the top of the flower drawer and pulls on it, as if to break piece off for a snack, and then,

“Let me introduce you to that leg of mutton.”
“Leg of Mutton?”

“Serge, she is just flustered by the kettle heating up under her.”

“Can you answer useful questions?”

The red Queen breaks off and starts smoothing her wing feathers.

“Maybe that bird knows something!”

Serge was telling Diddlie about his latest online adventure, when I came in through the back door, as specified by Diddlie. in a text, earlier.  He waves to me and goes on, reading from his tablet, as Diddlie prepares tea.

“The Mattress of Imaginary Murders, was a file found on line in 1998.  It was the plain text part of a larger encrypted file posted by someone called B4.  Nothing more is known.  Efforts to decrypt the rest of the file have failed.”

Serge looks up at the Red Queen, who blinks but says nothing.

“Serge, did you drive here in your Mom’s car?”

“Yeah Diddlie, passed the test last month in the beat up old Volvo.”

“Congratulations!”

“Thanks Fred.”

“How did you find this weird file?”

“Oh, by accident, like so many things. It was through someone else. I mean she’s in like, Hong Kong!  Well I think so. She tells me when she found the B4 file, it looked like a joke.  Going on about the word mattress, and saying mattress is a female mat!  That you will find a key under the mat.”

“You mean the key to the encryption?”

“I don’t know, maybe?  I mean under the mat, what mat? under the word, ‘mat’ or an actual mat someplace? Or is it another kind of mat like a matted hair, or a cardboard mat, like in a picture frame, or what?  So, anyway, after reading a while, Jasmine’s machine crashed. I mean we went back and forth on ‘Haddock’s Eyes’ on all this.  Her Search history was wiped, and she didn’t remember how to get back. She said it took her hours to get her system back up, and that’s when she found the file icon on her desk top. Nothing added up”

“What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?”

Diddlie turns from the counter waving a tea spoon in the air.

“Serge… Ah honey…Just a moment, what is, ‘Haddock’s Eyes’?”

“It’s an online message board, Diddlie.”

The Red Queen moves from behind the goldenrod, along the top of the cupboard, her head moving to track the spoon. She flutters her feathers without taking off.

Diddlie lifts the kettle, checks the weight and puts it back on the stove.

“They didn’t have whistling kettles when this was made.  Queenie!  You stay up there!”

The Red Queen whistles…

Diddlie serves tea and joins us at the table with her own cup.

“A message board?”

“Yeah, you can leave messages for people there.”

“Aha…”

Queenie takes off again, bumps into the pewter chandelier hanging over the kitchen table on its silvery chain and settles back on top of the Hoosier cabinet.  A small grey feather, rocks in the air on its way down toward Diddlie’s cup.  She waits to see where it goes.

“It won’t be the first feather tea I have drunk.”

The downy feather veers off from her steaming cup.

Serge catches a larger one out of the air and misses a second damaged one as it floats down behind his head.

“Serge, who is this girl friend in Hong Kong?”

“She is not exactly a girlfriend. I don’t know for sure, I can’t read Chinese characters, but someone told me her character means Jasmine and that seems feminine. That’s how she signs off, even though everything else is in English.  I don’t even know if she is a girl…She could be anything, a hacker, a kid in Latvia, I mean like a bot or something, even an!”

“Why should an intelligence agency talk to you?”

“Diddlie, they don’t know who I am…You know, like, they might be unintelligent!

”Wrong as usual.”

“Yeah, okay bird!  Any way Jasmine thinks the link was designed to erase itself once it was opened.”

“So, nobody knows anything.”

“Well it’s not quite that bad.”

He goes on reading from his tablet.

“Mattress out on the street, discarded, sodden with dreams, spilled out in breath, blood, snorts, snot, sweats, snores, coughs, tears, belches and farts, seeking all means of escape from the body over fifteen or twenty years of sleep.”

“Serge, wait a minute, wait…Okay, she goes by Jasmine, so who are you?”

“Oh! for this, I am Earl Grey!”

“For this? Really! Who else are you?”

“Oh, I use a bunch of screen names, like, ah, Rowland Macassar, and ‘Telford Menai’.”

“So nobody knows who anybody else is.”

“There is a lot of uncertainty, but you can figure stuff out.”

“Is Earl Grey from the tea?”

“Well, Charles, the second Earl, was Prime Minister of England when they abolished slavery.  That’s the big deal. I did a paper on him. Any way that’s neither here nor there.” He reads on.

“It is stained and sags in the middle with two long shallow depressions next to each other on its surface, like a slumbering couple.”

“Serge, Serge, hold up a moment…is that the dream mattress in the picture?  Did you see it?”

“No, I am only reading what Jasmine sent me.”

“You mean what she wrote to you?”

“Well, whatever…she sent it along with about five other messages, but that doesn’t mean she wrote it.”

“Five times as clever!”

“Oh hush, Queenie!”

The parot flutters and scratches the top of the cabinet under its claws.

Serge sips his tea and reads on.

“These are no ordinary murders.  Remembered dreams escape into conscious mind and have no need to go anywhere else.  These murdered dreams are forgotten, with nowhere to go. Forgetting is self-defense against the criminal element sneaking up!  Carl, fracked the unconscious with his alchemy!  Use that krater and you’ll be pushed out of your own skin, as it were, into some unaccustomed shape.  You have to do your best to explain it away, but ‘sources’ will have their say.”

“Carl? Who’s Carl?”

“I think he’s a psychoanalyst or was.  He’s dead now.”

“Sounds like he is in the oil business.”

“Well you know, they are talking about an alchemist’s krater, like a mixing bowl for bringing stuff up to the surface…you know, like subconscious stuff.”

“Oh, this is way too obscure Serge…”

Serge nods and reads on.

“Fitful sleep, troubled sleep, deep or shallow, sleep like a tide that comes in high and deep, flooding the streets and floating secrets out of people’s private lives into the public flow of the flood.  A low tide sleep drains the beach.  Isolated dreams dry out as their pools of coagulating images evaporate into anagoges, waking dreamers with longings pulsing in their blood. Elastic moments they have been trying to forget for years, stretching out of the Bakken Shale.”

“Well whoever it is, they fancy themselves as literate!”

“Is that what you call it Fred?”

“Why, don’t you see, child—”

“Queenie, why don’t you come down from there, huh?”

Queenie flutters down to Diddlie’s arm, then up to her head. Diddlie puts her hands up to the top of her head.

“No, not on my head honey, not my head, okay?”

She settles on an orange in the fruit bowl. Digs her left claw in and samples the ooze.

“Well, I am thinking of the metaphorical beach, the water, dreams, and so on. It all goes together.”

The back door opens, and Hank and Helga Dumpty come in quietly with two neatly bound bunches of goldenrod, put them on the table, and sit down.  Diddlie gets up to put the flowers into the sifter drawer of the cabinet and serve them, while Serge goes on reading and takes no notice.

“It takes a certain sense to know these mysterious fields trapped in the psychic pockets in the matress foam.  Not all sleepers leave them behind.  A certain configuration of time, space and mind can persist outside the body and dwell in her.”

Diddlie is standing by her stove regarding the cabinet. She doesn’t look over at Serge.

“…dwell in her?”

“Yeah, in her…This is mattress not mat, remember?”

“Oh right…mattress space time, or something.”

The White Rabbit opens one of the cupboard doors and walks along the white Hoosier table with its back to us, nosing the flower fragments.  Diddlie picks him up, with straw in his fur. When he raises his ears for a moment, a long stem with a sharp bend in it catches on her sweater.

“I had to bring him in from the car port when it got so cold.”

He has trailed straw along the table.  Queenie hops down to pick up some stems.

“Serge, this is dream physics!”

“Well, maybe Fred…like, what’s dream and what isn’t?”

As he goes on reading, the back door opens again, and Lark comes in with Augie, followed by bel Vionnet and Steve Strether. The table is full, and they have to stand around behind us, holding their bunches of goldenrod like candles at a service.

Serge reads on.

“Floating in the atmosphere, which may be jammed and scrunched into words, by those retelling their ambiguous dreamy ‘rememberings’. “

Serge stops reading and looks around.

“Who are all these people?”

Frank Vasari carries in a load on his shoulder, and stumbles into Boris Tarantula as he bends down to introduce himself to Serge.  Frank hangs a chrome car bumper on the wall by the table. It has stickers on it.  ‘Elect Macadamia’ which is real, some, such as “I like Ike” are Trompe L’Oeil.

Diddlie greets Daisy as she hangs her bowler from the top of the Hoosier cabinet.  Queenie pulls out the blue sticky from the hat band.

“Queenie! Give that here!”

The bird turns away out of reach.  The room is so crowded Daisy can’t move around the cabinet to try and get it back.  Diddlie gives her half a cup of tea with two lumps of sugar, and spoon in the saucer.

“Sorry honey this is all I have left.”

Her cup rattles in its saucer and the spoon falls on the floor as Paula backs into her trying to make room for Chuck to get through the back door.

Queenie eyes the sugar.

“Did., help me get my sticker from Queenie, will you?”

Chuck Newsome squeezes through the back door. He has a goldenrod stem behind his ear like a pencil sharpened down to flowers.

“Oh, is he retelling his dreams, what a bore!”

“No Chuck, that’s not it.”

“So, what’s going on Fred?”

Diddlie stands on a short stool to make an announcement, as Queenie lands on her hand protected by a golden oven mitt.

“Did., I don’t see my sticky.  Has she eaten it?”

“Okay people, just let him read, okay?  He’s got to keep reading people, okay!

Serge goes on.

“The name recalled by the dreamer, when awakened, is not the name of its secret self, enciphered in brain’s ‘mindy’, ‘thoughty’, meanderings. Name is…  Name is called…. Dream is…Dream”

Someone else is trying to get in the back door.  The wind is up, and we can see snow through the kitchen window.

Albrecht is in the doorway. Starts brushing snow off his jacket, but the crush of people makes it impossible.  It just rubs off on the others as he pushes in toward Diddlie.

“It’s getting too crowded in here!”  The window opens.

“Congressman Bean is here.”

Joy Flack shouts through the window, pushing a bunch f goldenrod through the gap.

“Shut the window!”

Chuck Newsome reaches up to push it shut, but one of the lights fall out.

Boyd Nightingale is standing next to Serge, looking over his shoulder at the tablet.  Tatiana is on the other side with her face pressed affectionately next to his.  They read together.

“The kitchen, the bird, the crush of the crowd, the floor, and noise, even the condensation on the kitchen door has all been around before. All repeated in the dreamer’s unconscious feathers parroting down and down and down past the white rabbit’s pink nose…”

People are crowding in from the corridor opposite us at the table.

The Planks have nailed a sign above the entrance to the corridor, saying, “Maximum Capacity 31!”

There is no room for Werner and Tron to get off the step ladder.

There’s Rank Majors and Sherman Shroud gesturing to Mrs. Shroud who is up on the cabinet with the Red Queen, painting her claws with purple nail varnish. Diddlie is trying to make herself heard by photographs of Derwent Sloot and Mr. Ramsay, but she is drowned out by the crowd.  People push down the hall and into the crowded Pie Shop where Mrs. Rutherford is playing chess with Pam Dirac. Theophilus Gladstone wakes up from his sleep.

“Where is Mr. Wordsworth?” He goes back to sleep with his head on the table.

Queenie has settled back on the kettle, now cool on the stove, showing off her purple claws. Serge and Tatiana are lost in a kiss.

“Can you do subtraction?”