FAUXMONT with Fred BlogZ

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

The Light House Gas Station looks deserted when I pull up. A tall lean figure over by the service center has his hands up around his eyes to look through the tiny windows in the closed doors of the lube bays.  He turns away and waves to me.

Augie Carmichael kicks some ice off the tire of a dented lime-green Kia sedan parked in front of the doors. A sign saying “SnazE Gas!” glows red about twenty feet up at the top of the new light house sign post.  Its LED beacon highlights the random flutter of snowflakes falling past it into the thin mist.

I finish inflating the tires on my old gold Saturn wagon and we walk towards each other, meeting outside the station office. Augie points at the new sign.

“When did that happen Fred?”

“This place changed hands when Mr. Ramsay died.”

“That thing looks like a stack of blue and white life savers.”

“Yes, it went up last month.”

“Is it a new franchise?”

“Well, SnazE now belongs to the Ensor conglomerate, so we’ll probably see these all over the place soon.”

“Last time I was here there was an old wooden oil derrick there.  Kind of funky, but distinctive.”

Lark comes around from the back in her black down jacket dotted with flakes of snow.

“The restrooms are locked, Augie.”

“Yeah, so is the office door.”

She walks by a tow truck parked near the lube bays.  The doors are marked “LUCY” in Gothic script.  The door is alive with graffiti style color.  A female figure with huge breasts bulging from a minimal black bustier, bursts from the center of a splash, in the shape of a scallop shell. Her face is flushed, her exaggerated deep red lips part revealing a dazzle of white teeth. The semicircles of her brilliant blue eyes are painted like rising suns with black mascara sunrays radiating above the horizon of her pale cheeks. Her wavy blond hair spreads to the right in a parody of The Birth of Venus with a spray of diamonds glistening in the sky around her head.

“No one back there! This place has gone to hell!”

“Here’s Fred, Lark!”

“Hey there! What are you two staring at?”

“You just walked past it.”

Lark turns around to see the truck she just ignored from looking down to keep the snow out of her face.

“Yeah, right, pretty skillful paint job! Or wait a minute.”

She walks back over to look more closely at the truck door.

“This may be a transfer.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, a printed image on thin film, just pasted on.”

“You think so?”

Lark stands close, takes a glove off and runs her forefinger over the surface.

“Well, no.”

“Any way, you know who bought this place don’t you?”

“Jake Trip, is what I heard Fred, and this is about his speed.  Plastic signs, no service and higher prices.”

“Yes, that’s what I heard too and he is going to build a convenience store over there where they used to park cars and store tires.”

“What about the Seven Eleven further down the block?”

A door bangs, somewhere at the back of the building.

“Maybe they are opening up!…lights are on in the office.”

“Why aren’t they open Fred, its gone 3 o’clock?”

“Who knows Augie.”

The office door opens a few inches and then closes on the narrow column of light it revealed.  A row of Christmas lights blink, green, yellow, orange, and blue, on and off along the windowsill, blurred behind the condensation on the office window. We keep looking.  It opens again bringing us children’s voices singing Jingle Bells.  Somebody with a big gut stretching his black tea shirt over his belt, steps out and shouts, keeping one hand on the door handle.

“Can I help you?”

His shirt is printed with the phrase,

‘I Club Baby Seals’. The club symbol from a deck of cards is printed bright red in place of the word ‘club’, while the lettering is white.

Lark gets to him first.

“Hi, is Farouk around?”

“Who?”

“Farouk, you know, the manager.”

“No Farouk here lady.  The manager is on the phone.  What do you need?”

“Do you know where he went?”

He shakes his greying black goatee and gold earring.

“I drive the truck.  Don’t know nobody.”

“That’s too bad.  Farouk really made this place what it is…or what it was.”

Augie regards the pumps, which are also in the shape of lighthouses with the hoses hanging inside a niche in front of each.

“How much you want for that Kia?”

“It’s going for about six grand.  You want to check it out?”

We walk over to the green car.

The new man doesn’t seem cold in his tee shirt even though his boots crack ice in a puddle outside the lube bays.  He has a complicated indistinct design tattooed down his right arm. The ink has smudged under his skin.

“The price is on the dash.”

Lark has bent down to look inside.

“It’s not locked take a look.”

“I don’t see anything on the dash.”

She tries the door, but it resists.

“It’s locked.”

The club man steps over and pulls on the door handle, and it opens part way with a metallic crack.  He takes a white plastic rectangle off the driver’s seat and puts it face up on the dash, revealing:

“BARGAIN, $6999.95, only 90 K miles”

Lark steps back, pulling her hood forward with both hands.

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s the matter Lark?  Don’t you want to road test it first?”

“No, I don’t like it.”

She looks closely at the outside mirror.

“Look at that! It’s cracked too. Forget it!”

“She locks her arm in his and turns away.”

Augie follows turning to the driver.

“Thanks buddy!”

He doesn’t answer and walks stiffly back in the office.  His massive shoulders rocking from side to side with each step.

Lark turns to me with a shiver.

“He totaled my old Toyota Fred! Now he wants to fob me off on that crate.”

“That’s no crate kiddo.  It even has a dent in the same place on the driver’s side door.”

“It’s a piece of junk. Besides mine was not on the driver’s side and it wasn’t as bad.  The paint was intact.”

“Strange fits of passion have I known:

And I will dare to tell,

But in the Lover’s ear alone,

What once to me befell.”

“I don’t see any poetic qualities in it, okay?”

“No, it’s not the car.”

“You going to whisper later?”

“The poet has said it all for me.”

“Well, at least you didn’t hurt your precious bod in ‘what once befell’!”

The snow is turning into sleet.  A pair oncoming headlights push their cones through the deepening gloom, sweep into our eyes as they turn the left from Maxwell Avenue on to Huygens Street.  They fill the pumping station with a cold blueish tint and then shut off.  Herman Intaglio opens the driver’s side door and stands looking at the new pump.

“What the hell?”

He stands before the new light house pump, one hand in the pocket of his black raincoat and the other pulling down the peak of his red baseball cap.

“That’s Herman, Augie.  Have you met him?”

“Oh right, he’s a printmaker isn’t he?”

“He’s an artist alright…got to say hi to Donatella.”

Lark pats Herman on the shoulder and looks for her through the open driver’s side door.

“Lark, what are you guys doing here?”

“Oh, getting cold and wet and disappointed.”

Herman still hasn’t moved to start pumping gas, so I step over to him.

“Do you get it Herman?”

He doesn’t look up.

“Do you have the SnazE phone app Fred?”

“No, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“Well, join the club.”

“Why?  Isn’t it supposed to make life easier?”

“Yeah, easier to get hacked Fred!”

“Always a risk.”

“Don’t we face enough risk on the road already?”

“Herman, I am told these pumps know all about you. They know the make, model and year of your car, when its due for service and how long you’ve owned it.  It will even remind you to go for inspection.  Also, you can buy anything in the SanzE inventory. Do on line banking, all while you wait for the tank to fill.”

“How can it know all that?”

“If you give the necessary permissions through the app.”

“Oh! I am not giving any permissions! Give this thing the keys to my life?”

An electronic voice speaks from the pump.

“Hi, I am your pump attendant. How can I help you?”

Herman looks at the small screen in the pump.

“Is that a woman’s voice?”

“Sorry sir, I don’t understand your question.  Do you want to pump gas?”

“Yes, where do I put my money?”

“Just follow me on your phone sir.”

“My phone?”

“Sorry sir we have no record for this transaction.”

Herman walks over to the office only to find out that they do not take cash.

The blue and white lighthouse pump addresses him again as he walks in front of it.

“Hi, I am your pump attendant.  Welcome to ‘My Gas’ help.”

“You just said we can’t do business.”

“Sir, you can find me on your phone.”

“What?”

“Just tell me your address and plate number and we can get started.”

“I don’t speak to machines.”

“Sir, don’t you want to fill your tank?”

Herman turns to get back into his car and finds Lark sitting behind the wheel talking to Donna.

“Are you driving or what?”

Lark gets out of the car with a hand from Herman.

“Did you fill up?”

“No Lark, I got into an argument with the big guy in the office and then had a senseless confrontation with that machine.”

Donna shouts goodbye to Lark, but Herman keeps talking.

“We can coast down the hill on fumes and gas in VanRijn.”

“Enjoy the holiday Herman!”

“Merry Christmas!”

“You can no longer say that you know, Herman.”

He was closing the door, but that remark stops him, and he gets back out.

“What do you mean Lark?”

“I mean the president has politicized it.”

“He has?”

“Yes, he has just ended the “war on Christmas!”

“There never was a war. I’ve been greeting people with that happy phrase since I was a kid.”

Donna leans over across the driver’s seat with one hand on the wheel.

“Herman get back in the car honey, before the seat is soaked.”

“Okay, okay…you know Lark, I have stopped reading twitter or listening to the so-called news.”

“Herman, Augie’s settled in with Lark.  You’re supposed to be congratulating them.”

“I wish you both every happiness!”

He closes the door, opens the window and sings.

“Fa la la la LA, La La LA!”

The clubman walks out from the back, over to his tow truck and backs it up to the green sedan. Two ace of clubs decals decorate the left and right sides of the back window. He Fixes the hitch to the front.

“Well, look at that!  I told him that crate was no bargain.”

“In fact, I recommended a test drive.”

“Looks like it would have been in the truck with that seal murderer.”

“Could be.”

“Come on sweetie! He’s about to tow it away!”

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

Lark Bunlush’s umbrella is dripping rain water on the floor at the Elegant Ostrich Gift Shop. She has folded her huge colorful golf umbrella into its spiral with one yellow segment flapping.  A small pool is spreading on the black and white tiles.

Lark is looking at Thanksgiving paraphernalia. She examines a life size orange cardboard turkey carved out of many laminated pieces. I walk over to her.

“How are you going to cook it?”

“Hi Fred…I think we’ll serve it as ‘Papier tartare’!”

There is a scuffle, and I hear an angry whisper.

“Muon get back here, you naughty boy!”

A small white dog, with terrier tendencies to take the initiative, is sampling the water under her still dripping umbrella.  Muon has slipped his leash.  He finishes with the puddle, bumps the bottom of the umbrella with his nose, and zooms around the displays to the back.  The rhythmic click of his claws on the checkerboard floor is interrupted as he makes a sharp turn at the cash desk in the back and skids. The sales clerk seems happy to see him.

“Oh Muon! Hi Sweetie!”

One of the del Sarto twins picks him up and stands behind the counter with him. Muon struggles out of her arms and lands on the counter.  She pets him and picks him up again. He settles, licking the side of her face.

I browse around the center display to the other side, leaving Lark contemplating the paper bird. There is Nadia Brazov, in her fitted red leather jacket with shiny silver zip running diagonally across the swell of her chest. She is looking at one of Rosalba’s portrait miniatures.

“Werner, darling, here is a portrait artist offering to do commissions.  Shall we get one done?”

Werner is in the back. Nadia looks up and sees me, instead of Werner.

“Oh, excuse me!”

Werner is chatting with the young woman behind the counter.

“How are you doing Maria?”

“Oh, pretty good, I guess.”

“You, have quite an armful there.”

“Oh! he is so cute!  Can I keep him Werner?”

“Ask Nadia.”

“Where is Meson?”

“He is at the groomer.”

“NADIA! Can I keep your dog?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Nadia is shopping.  You can’t get through.”

“I know.”

She is not going to give him up you know.”

“Oh, I guess not.”

“Well, last time we talked, you had an office job…an intern or something.”

“I know, Andrea is still there but it was too boring…I like this better…you know, cute dogs and lots of people to meet.”

“So, you are having fun, huh?”

“And, I am getting paid.  That intern thing sucks, you know, no money.”

“Yeah, that’s how it works.  You are supposed to learn from the experience…

and something for your resume!”

“Yeah, right.  I thought Lou was going to get us paid, but it didn’t work out.”

“I don’t think interns do get paid, not usually anyway.”

“Yeah, too bad… There was a creepy guy there too.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept standing too close, you know Werner, and asking stuff.”

“Ah ha, I get the picture.”

“Like when he gave me some stuff to copy and the back of his hand kind of bumped my chest…I mean it wasn’t an accident. That was my last day!”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Yeah, my sister… He kind of had a reputation at the office… and some friends…you know… …we were talking about creeps.”

“Well, you sound like you can deal with it.”

“Oh god!  I shouldn’t be talking about it in front of everyone…but it really pissed me off!”

“Sure, Maria. I have known you two since you were little kids.  I mean I am really sorry to hear it.  You ought to talk to Lou, you know.”

“Well, maybe…I don’t know.”

“Okay, here, give me that dog, and I’ll get the leash back on him.”

Werner picks him up and carries him back to Nadia. They put his collar back on and affix the leash. I look around the center display to find a suitable gift.

A loud male voice calls from behind me.

“Lark! Lark! Hey! Come here…”

Lark has left the store. I can see her through the window wall, huge umbrella, with brilliant colored panels twirling, purple, white, yellow, green, and blue, with two thin legs beneath, crossing the parking lot under the thickening deluge. Werner Plank opens the door and shouts into the downpour for Lark.  He steps out.

Nadia walks over to the door with Muon resisting, tugging hard on his leash, trying to go in the opposite direction, back to Maria. Nadia reaches out and calls Werner back in.  Muon starts barking.

“You are going to get soaked darling!”

Werner steps back in.

“Shut up whitey!”

“Don’t be so rude!”

“The dog doesn’t know!”

Muon’s tail is wagging fast and he is standing back from, facing Werner, keeping up his constant bark.

Nadia bends down to pick him up and the straps of her hand bag slide down her arm.

Muon seizes one of the red straps in his mouth.  She picks him up.

“Hush Muon, hush!”

“That peace of leather ought to keep him quiet. Nice and chewy! Huh big guy!”

Werner stands next to them petting Muon’s head with a wet hand and soggy sleeve.

“Darling don’t you have any doggy treats?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Dearest, check your pockets before he ruins my bag!”

Werner stuffs his hands into the pockets of his brown fleece jacket and pulls out a scrunched up five-dollar bill.  He offers it to Muon, who ignores it.

“Oh, come on dear, you know he doesn’t eat paper.”

“No but it might distract him.”

“Oh! darling you are so helpless!  Would you be a dear, and look in my bag for a treat.

I don’t have a free hand.”

“Are you kidding me?  Look in there?”

Werner opens Nadia’s bag as it hangs from her forearm, under the dog. He pulls the free strap away while Muon pulls back on his strap growling quietly. Werner rummages through the contents.
“Excuse me please.”

Maria steps past between me and the display case.

“Nadia!  Nadia! Here’s a treat for Muon.”

She offers it, but Muon doesn’t let go.  He just looks at it.

Werner closes the purse and watches Muon.

“Well, make a decision buddy!”

Maria picks up Muon’s forepaw paw which makes him bark, and then she grabs the strap from him and gives him a bone shaped treat.

“Oh, clever girl!”

Nadia pulls her handbag straps up to her elbow, out of reach.

“He hates any one to touch his paws.”

“I know, it works every time.”

“You have a customer waiting.”

A short stocky man in tweed cap standing at the cash desk looks around as Maria hurries over.

Werner turns to me.

“Hi Fred, have you met Nadia?”

Nadia looks at me again.

“Oh! how do you do?  Please excuse me just now!”

“Of course.”

Werner steps closer to me with his back to Nadia, as if looking out the window behind me.

He speaks softly close to my ear.

“Fred, did you see that guy who just went out?”

“I noticed his cap, that’s about all.”

”Okay, something about him…”

“He sure left in a hurry.  I wonder if he paid.”

“Darling, come over here, and look at this little portrait.”
Nadia comes over and tugs on his arm.

“Excuse me Fred darling.”

He resists, and she lets go. She is drawn back to the small painting.

“Did you come in with Lark?”

“No, I bumped into her manhandling a paper turkey over there, by the window.”

“I mean, how is she doing?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Well, we had to get over to Bulgaria in a hurry.  Something about the divorce from Brazov.  You know…I know it wasn’t right for Lark…”

“No, she was very shaken.”

“Well, any way Nadia’s marriage broke up the day after they got married in London, and it has taken a while for her to get out of it…I mean it just wasn’t safe for her after she walked out.”

Werner steps away, unzips his SnazE jacket to get out his phone, and walks back over by the door.

Nadia comes over to me with a bright yellow card in her hand.

“How do you like this Fred, darling?”

She shows me the card with a photo of an enormously fat bulldog sitting in a luxurious wine-red wingback chair next to a small white kitten lying on one arm.

“Quite a contrast! What does it say inside?”

“Oh, it’s blank my dear, I shall write something later.”

She walks back to the rack of greeting cards and picks out another.

Tries to turn the display rack, which has jammed.

“Werner, where are you?”

“Here, right here.  He has put his phone away and steps to her side.

“Can you fix this thing darling?”

“Oh maybe, but let me get the boss.”

He walks back to Maria leaving Nadia bending over to look for the obstruction at the bottom of the mechanism.

Maria comes over, and starts petting Muon.

“Muon, honey, can you fix it sweetie?”

“Dearest girl, that dog can’t possibly do the repair.”

Nadia has straightened up with Muon in her arms and her bag out of his reach. She keeps a firm hold on Muon, as he struggles to get down on the floor, where Maria is examining the base of the greeting card rack.

“Thank you dear. Can you fix it?”

Maria gets up and pulls the whole thing away from the wall revealing an extension cord caught in it half way up.

“What’s that doing there?”

“Nadia, we are getting setup for Christmas, you know, it will be for the lights.”

“Christmas already? Darling, it isn’t Thanksgiving yet.”

“I know.”

Werner is on the phone again by the door.  Maria is distracted, petting Muon.

“Do put this rack back my dear, so I can finish looking.”

Maria, still cooing at Muon, gets the rack back in place.

Werner and Nadia come behind me as I wait to pay Maria for a greeting card.

Muon sniffs my shoes and bumps my ankles with his nose.

“Are you trying to call that woman dear?”

“You mean Lark?”

“You know perfectly well darling.”

Werner puts his phone away.

“No, Meson is ready for pickup.”

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. 

“Mom and I were between maids, and I was cleaning out the cat’s litterbox.  It was in the morning, late morning I think. I heard someone knocking on a window.  This was in our old house over on the Van Rijn Estate. Mom was out West visiting a friend, so I was alone.  Anyway, I tried not to think about that, and went into the living room and saw a strange figure knocking from outside, on the bottom left window, over by the dining table. Whoever it is, knocks five or six times in rapid succession then pauses and knocks again.  It has a bunch of ragged scarfs around its head, tied under the chin. The person is short but thick set, with a dirty rain coat on.

I beckoned … I mean, even with the scarves, I am not sure if it is a woman or not…I point towards the front door.

No one is there when I open the door.  I walk outside and look around towards the dining room window and no one is there either. Just a lot of leaves blowing around. I mean it was at least a couple of weeks before Halloween. So, I don’t think it was a prank.

The next day I saw a man who looked like him, in the SanzE Super store, dressed in slacks and a t-shirt. I guess I was staring at him.

He said, “Hi, can I help you?”

He had a foreign accent.

I said something like, “Hi, I am Paula, remember?”

And then people were trying to get by and he moved on into the crowd. I lost track of him.

He was short, with a tweed cap and had the same big uneven bulbous nose with a wide thin mouth, prominent chin and pig eyes.

I kept trying to remember if I had seen this person before, but haven’t recalled any one so far.

Was it, ah…maybe it was an apparition?

Well, anyway, when I finished with the litter box, our cat Mamie, had disappeared. I looked everywhere. I don’t know how she got out.  The back door was closed and she didn’t get out the front door while I had it open.  The bedroom window was open but the screen is in intact, and no other windows are open …

I couldn’t sleep that night.  I kept thinking about Mamie outside alone, and who that person outside was and how did Mamie get out?

It was kind of scary…

Anyway, I was single back when this person came to the window. It was only a couple of years ago I guess. I was sort of seeing Chuck around that time, and that was great, but he was still married to Nadia, and they were away that week. So, I tried calling him, but he didn’t pick up.

Later on … was it that day? Maybe the next day, like Sunday, I went out to get something from the shed.  It is built into the backyard fence, right against the overgrown alley that runs between Stoffels, Street and our place on Lievens Avenue. It had been a while since I looked in there, and it wasn’t locked. It didn’t look right, when I opened the door.  Stuff was rearranged.  The lawn mower was half blocking the door. When I moved it out of the way I saw a sleeping bag rolled up in there, and a couple of shopping bags with clothes in them.  Seemed like someone was sleeping in there.  I was going to call the police as soon as I got back in the house to get my phone, but the ring tones were on when I picked it up, and I didn’t call right then.

A friend was waiting for me in the driveway, and we went shopping.  We talked it over and she said she would help me find Maime, and you know what? Andrea del Sarto found her, and that’s how I got her back, like that Wednesday. They lived a few blocks away and she called me.  Maime was in a crab apple tree in their back yard.  I forget now, who it was, someone got a ladder out and brought her down for me. By then I decided it probably wasn’t anything, and so I forgot all about the window thing…

Okay, so a few months ago, when Chuck and I were looking around the shed and throwing some stuff out.  He found an old blue tarp hanging from some nails in the back.  When he pulled it down there was a back door.  I never noticed it before.  It was kind of hidden.  Just a piece of the plywood cut out of the back wall and a couple of hinges put in at the top, so it opened from the bottom up, lifting out into the alley.

I just about screamed when I saw it.  I remembered the whole incident again. There was nothing in there though.  The sleeping bag and cloths had gone. We went out into the ally and you couldn’t see it from out there, because old pieces of tarpaper were tacked carefully over the whole back of the shed. It overlapped the edges of the door, and hid the cuts, but didn’t prevent it opening.  There was even a piece hanging over the hinges at the top.  Chuck looked carefully up there. He did a Sherlock, and saw some slight scrape marks where the tarpaper on top rubbed against the stuff below the hinges. Then he noticed there were lichens growing on some parts of the paper and then stopped in a long straight line, and there was a row of nail holes that didn’t make sense. He figured the tarpaper was taken from somewhere else.

So we called the police because there might have been illegals using it, you know, gang members, or something. When they came they couldn’t find any useful evidence, and said if it had happened two years ago, there wasn’t anything to do about it now.

So then we decided to buy a couple of pistols in case any one came around again. We got into a discussion with this guy in the SnazE gun department, about security, and self-defense, and stuff like that. He told us about his buddy, Frans Bankock, or something like that.  Anyway, he said they were militia buddies, and gave us this Frans’s phone number.  Chuck called him and he came over to the house a while later. I was outside.  It was a sunny day and I saw them drive up, and as he got out of the car I saw another guy, behind the wheel, who started to get out too, but didn’t.  He closed the door, and stayed in the car. What I did see looked like the guy I saw at SnazE with the bulbous nose, after the incident at our window. I felt really creeped out.  If Chuck hadn’t come out at that moment, I would have got my pistol, and locked myself in the house.  I mean he looked like the person who knocked on the window, but I wasn’t sure. He put on his sunglasses, and a tweed cap when he realized I was looking at him. He never got out of the car and never said anything. Frans did all the talking.  He was real friendly and checked out Mom’s home security and then looked at the shed. That guy seemed to be Frans’s driver.  Franz mentioned him by name at one point. Can’t remember what it was.  It might have been French, like Jean Pierre or something.  Anyway, Frans thought he might be able to help us, but wouldn’t say any more, at that time. He just said he would get back to us …

Oh, yeah, now I remember, he said he was a Militia organizer.  That was it. He told us about the Fauxmont Milita and asked if we were interested in meeting some of our neighbors who were going to start a Van Rijn Militia to protect our neighborhood.  You know, from creepy people in our sheds and stuff like that.  Well we were getting ready to move down by the river, so we opted out.

Then the other day we were down there, by the river, talking to one of the builders.  I think it was Tron Plank.  He told us about this bankruptcy in Fauxmont.  This guy who owned the SnazE franchise had lost everything.  They were foreclosing on his property, a while back, and he disappeared. Well, he was a friend of Tron’s Dad, Werner. I mean the Planks had built this guy’s house, and you know, got to know him. I think it was a real big one too.

Well, Tron thinks that his dad helped this guy disappear for a while.  He heard a story that this guy had spent some time on a friend’s boat, down at the marina in DC, and also spent one night in a shed. So that gave me the creeps. I asked him if he knew Frans, and he did.  He was really surprised that we knew him too. Then he was even more surprised when I told him about our shed.  He wouldn’t say any more after that, and said he had to go.”

Paula shrugged.

“That’s about it I guess.”

By the time Paula finished, the waiter had come by numerous times to get our order, which Lou had not placed in advance as he usually did.

Paula kept talking, pausing only for breath, telling Lou and me all this in the H Bar, over a glass of ice water, a paper placemat, and some menus.  Lou had introduced me as his old friend, and Paula seemed so comfortable with Lou she didn’t hesitate after that.

“You know, I seem to remember talking to Liberty about someone visiting out in California.”

“Oh … Well, it could have been Mom.”

“Paula didn’t you know that your mother was visiting Gale Trip, when she went out West?”

“Oh yes, that sounds right!

“Okay, do you know Liberty then?”

“Ah, we might have met, I forget. Who are the Trips anyway? It was just a name, you know.  Mom knows a lot of people.”

“Paula, Gale’s husband, Jake Trip, is the guy who went bankrupt in Fauxmont.”

“Oh, Wow! Was it him?”

“It was. Do you remember the name, Frans Banning Cocq, is that who came out to look at your shed?”

“Right, that’s it, really strange name.”

The waiter is looking at Paula, who has picked up a menu.

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 broken couch is alive with stains.  Long dried, but visible under a light coating of dust, and visually energetic in Artie’s studio above the Cavendish Pie Shop.  The back of the couch has separated from the arms. It is sprinkled with thick white plaster dust and supported by the wall behind. Steve removes a paint clotted towel from the nearest cushion to find a protected spot.  He looks at faint remains of the monogram in a flourishing script.  “Hotel Ducasse.”

“When did you swipe this thing, Artie?”

Artie shrugs, wiping plaster dust off the seat of an old chair for bel to sit on.  A narrow box across the back holds scrapers and a hammer with handles sticking up over the end.

Steve sits on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward to avoid getting powdered.

“Where is Bounder?’

“He and Cangiante are down stairs.”

“This looks like an old church chair.”

“It is bel.  Got it at a yard sale.”

“You are supposed to have your hymnal and Bible in back there.”

“Those are tools for worship, mine are tools for dreaming.”

“Do you think dreams mean anything Artie, or are they just random eventsin the brain?”

“I don’t think they are meaningless, Fred.”

“You know, people denied their dreams in experiments, start hallucinating.”

“Yes, it is thought to be an integrative process.”

“That’s right Fred, but no one knows much about it.”

“Well, they are so amorphous and stuff appears and disappears…who knows what’s going on.”

“Steve, I must be hallucinating now! A cat’s head just appeared up in that hole in the wall.”

Artie’s railwayman’s cap and navy-blue tea shirt are also powdered white and her hair around the base of the cap looks dowsed with confectioner’s sugar. She tips her cap and powder smokes down her back as she looks up.

“Don’t you remember Fred, that’s Sfumato?  Oooops! Now she’s gone back to the Pie Shop.”

“How could I forget?”

“She won’t come down until I am through Fred…The other two will lick the dust if I keep them here.”

“So, what are you up to?”

“I was standing on the back of the couch Steve, so as to sand up there on that wall.”

“How about a step ladder?”

“They borrowed it downstairs…seemed quicker to step up there on the back.”

“Well yes, but now you have a busted couch.”

“You’re sitting on it, aren’t you Steve?”

“Yes, very carefully, and you notice Fred is sitting on that thing over there.”

“That thing was molded, a nice smooth accurate model of the space inside an empty bucket!”

“A solid piece of space!”

“A volume Steve, rendered in plaster…coated with resin.”

“You might have used a transparent medium.”

“That’s interesting, Steve.”

“I am thinking of being able to see dust particles floating in it.”

“It might work too, but that wouldn’t look so solid, and also, I was using the plaster to fix the wall back there.”

She gestures further back into the studio, where we have never been. As if pushing air down the passage with the flat of her hand.

“You mean you made too much?”

“I was interrupted Steve, when I saw Cangiante licking the dust off her fur.  So, I asked Mrs. Rutherford if she could hang out with Bounder in back of the Cavendish.”

“With all that food? Is that sanitary?

“No bel, you know, out in the shed where they park the van.”

“We didn’t see him when we came in.”

Artie fingers the ribbed paper dust mask hanging around her neck from its thin elastic thread.

“Someone probably had him out on a walk.”

“What are you working on now?”

“Ah…” She kicks some used sandpaper from under foot.

“Well…that wall.”

She regards the wall quietly for a moment and then,

“…until you all dropped in.”

Bel gets up from her chair, groping for the handles of her bag on the floor without looking away from Artie.

“Yes, well, do you want to get back to work?”

“No, that’s okay bel.”

Bel sits down again, now looking for the handles she didn’t find.  Her ring tones sound like a Barred owl in the room. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRPYpklhiA)

“Are you preparing for a mural?”

“No Fred.”

“Well, I mean, what are you doing that wall for?

Sfumato’s tortoiseshell head has appeared again, Cheshire-like, rubbing her whiskers against the outer edge of the dark rectangular opening left by the old vent.

“The walls need patching and painting and I need something to do.”

Steve gets up and stands by Artie and they look at the high wall behind the couch together.

“What is it, about fifteen feet?”

“Yeah it is half an inch lower above the door than it is at the corner.”

“Looks like stuff has been torn out up there.”

“Don’t know what that was, but I took off a layer of yellow paint and another of gray before hitting the plaster…this is all old-fashioned plaster and lath.  See that bulge over there?”

We can see a bulge where her work bench meets the other wall, and doesn’t fit snug against it.

“Looks like the wall is giving out.”

Bel looks up from her phone.

“Artie, we haven’t seen you since the Caillebotte exhibition.”

“That long? When was that?”

“Back in 2015 Fred.”

Steve looks at Artie with his head to one side.  She pushes the ‘Shopvac’ with her foot, and it rolls over by the door.

“I’ve been up here a few times since then, during the mouse war.”

“Yeah, those two cats were raising hell in here all night.”

“I remember when we were looking at the catalogue downstairs in front of the shop.”

“Right Fred, I have been doing some dream work since then.  Since I got so pissed off.”

“Pissed off about what Artie?”

“Let’s not go there.  Any way I was teaching a course at PU last year.”

“So, Frank Vasari found you too!”

“Like I said, I am not going there…You know dream work?  I mean you ever do any Steve?”

“Bel has, I haven’t.”

“I was reading Carl Jung at the time, and started writing them down.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“Well Artie, I wrote down about sixty of them over three months, never did get to an interpretation.”

“Writing them down is an interpretation!”

“I guess it is Artie.”

“Sure, think about it.”

“Yeah, think of all the nonverbal stuff…I mean dreaming is a kind of experience, like art.”

Steve is pulling on his beard.

“When you can remember it.”

“Well, right! … I have written some, and drawn some and even did some work in plaster.”

“Plaster?”

“I used plaster dust Fred.”

“What?”

“Think of this; Goya spreads pigment and oil on a piece of woven flax and makes you think you are looking at the duke of Wellington.  It is not the duke.  Yet the image of his face is there…that illusion, that transformation is kind of dreamlike, don’t you think?”

“Well, I guess.  Maybe that’s why it was stolen. I am not sure I get it though.”

“Not just that painting…”

“Yeah, art messes with identity”

“…and appearance, Steve.”

“Sure, it does bel. If you look at it one moment, and think paint and see only paint and then the next instant you see, and think of Wellington and Waterloo…”

“Right Artie, or look at Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington, any portrait, or any rendering.”

Steve keeps walking around, looking at the floor Artie had cleaned up. Now he is standing by bel.

“Aren’t we really talking about perception?”

Artie and bel both speak at once, then we all fall silent.  Bounder is barking down stairs, and a plane goes over with its engine note rising.  Artie opens the door and looks down into the shed for Bounder.

“Can we see some of your plaster work?”

She steps back across the threshold.

“This whole room got a dustcover. It was kind of dreamlike, kind of dry granular fog too.”

“Do you have any of your granular fog work up here Artie?”

“Sure, it will turn your thoughts into cobwebs!”

Artie walks back down the hall to the right of her bench and the window. Bel stands up and starts to comment on some small white objects on the bench, but stops as Artie comes back.

Artie has something covered in gray and white on a board. Plaster particles rise into a sun beam like a cloud of gnats, as she puts it down in front of the window.

“What’s under there Artie?”

“Fred, that’s the question of interpreting this coincidence.”

We are crowding around the bench, pressing closer and closer together.

“Well, I think there is a framed photograph and some kind of box.  See there, they aren’t quite covered by the cloth or dust.”

Bel goes on, identifying an old transistor radio and points out traces of yellow in gray.

“There’s a book I think.”

Steve bends down, looks closer, and gently lifts a corner of the cloth just an inch.

“I can read the title from here Fred, it’s John Ashbery’s, Hotel Lautréamont.”

A lump of dust falls from the cloth and disintegrates into a tiny cloud. More falls through the cheese cloth’s open weave as he lets go.

“Well, no one can read it now!”

He straightens up awkwardly and staggers as he turns to Artie, but regains his balance.

“Okay Artie, I think these things were on your bench when you started on the walls, right?”

“You’ve got it Steve!”

“That’s yellow and gray you mentioned before!”

“Right bel, and I draped the cheese cloth over stuff for protection.”

Artie is standing back with her arms folded watching us look at her granulated dream work, settled on the bench.

“So, this was all an accident, right?”

“Right bel, I looked back at the bench after standing up on it, to reach above the window, and found all that.”

“Yeah, look!  You left a foot print!”

“Only one though, Fred.”

“Have you looked up what dreams mean…like water means this or flying means that?”

“Yeah, tried it, but none of the theories hold up.”

“Only the dreamer can tell what her dream means.”

“and only sometimes bel.”

“I was sanding the walls.  I was pissed off and distracted…I mean that’s what got me into to dream work in the first place. You know, I didn’t have anything else to do.”

“That’s what we were talking about before Artie.”

“Right, I was up against it at that point.”

I step aside to look at another part of the bench. Find a soup bowl discernable with a wrench and screwdriver, and Zippo lighter, under their blanket of plaster, and awakening to recognition.  A small empty can next to it, maybe the soup can, has been reduced to a white cylinder. What might be a watch, with broken strap, and other small objects lie incognito, next to the bowl, under yellow and gray powder.

Artie picks up a small hand-held electric fan and a piece of cardboard, and blows dust gently into small clouds.  Enough comes up to make us all cough, without dust masks.  Steve walks away from the bench.

“White nightmare!”

“Sorry about that everyone.”

Artie switches off the fan. The objects have dissolved into a solid mass under the settling particles, as if it had snowed all night. Then with a few skillful swipes of the cardboard, the side of a watch, and the ends of the wrench and screwdriver come clean and easy to identify.

“Are you dreaming yet Fred?”

“Yeah, the timepiece and tool handles must mean something!”

“It is all physics Fred, air, motion, direction, turbulence, etc.”

Bel is shaking her head at Steve.”

“I think that’s too reductive.”

“Isn’t that what is going on here?”

“That’s only the mechanism…”

“I see Artie, like the lump in the bucket.”

“Dr. Hollis says the content of a dream is like a call to central casting from the unconscious.”

“What is that supposed to mean bel?”

“Fred, if you say you dreamed of a rabbit, you have identified the actor, not the part he is playing.”

“Who is Hollis anyway?”

“He is a Jungian analyst.  I went to a series of his talks on dream interpretation.”

Steve is standing behind bel, looking over her shoulder at the objects Artie brought in, arranged on a board like a still life in hiding.  First, he lifts his glasses above his eyes, then looks again with them on.

“Trying to identify those objects, is like trying to recall something.”

“Trying to recall a dream Steve.”

“Okay Artie, that’s the experience!”

103 Eclipse

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

It is a stretch, but Daisy finds me on my way out of the Safeway.  She is talking to someone behind the office window. I did not notice her as I passed close by, to avoid a shopping cart loaded with two children and a huge watermelon. Without looking up, she puts out an arm strewn with bracelets, and pulls on my shirt-sleeve. I wait for her between the video rental machine and a kiosk for renting carpet-cleaning equipment.  Looking over at the newspapers displayed on their wire racks, headlines say that Armond Macadamia has called the president a Nazi and the President has called Armond Macadamia a Terrorist and Xi Jinping has called them both dangers to world peace and stability. The kids in the shopping cart are now calling for their mother’s attention near the sandwich counter.

Daisy steps away from the office.

“I have lost my password for the ATM.”

“Ouch! Were they any help?”

“Not really, I was hoping someone might have found my yellow sticky.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it was in my hat band with the password written on it.”

She puts her bowler back on, having taken it off to talk to the office person.

“You didn’t write what it was for as well did you?”

“Well, sort of…”

“Sort of what?”

“It had ‘Amy’ on it.”

“The woman’s name, you mean?”

“Right, I call the ATM Amy…It’s a long story…”

“It’s not a dead give-away, at least.”

“It is probably swept up by now.”

“Yes, if you lost it here.”

“I may have lost it at the Guild’s Board meeting last night.”

“You would have noticed. You always have something in your hat band.”

“Things got pretty heated, and I dropped it on the way out.”

“How horrible!”

“I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

“I noticed you had nothing in the band last month when we were in the Pie Shop with Lou.”

We are walking out of the building.   Daisy is draped in a loose pink silky garment with countless folds cascading down her torso.  A breeze fills it out for a moment as we go through the exit.

“I know … a shopping list … Threw it away when I had bought everything.”

Steve Strether and Diddlie are in animated conversation outside in the heat of the parking lot.  I can hear Diddlie from a distance.

“It’s a palace Coup!”

We get close enough to join them.  Steve is patiently stroking his beard and letting Diddlie talk on and on, so fast she is breathlessly dropping syllables on top of each other.

“How c’d-they-d’this?  How c’d-they-take-our-Guil-dover?”

“They were the ones elected back in the spring, you know, at our neighborhood meeting.”

“By whom Steve?  I didn’t vote for any of them.”

“I voted by proxy.”

“Who did you give it to Fred?”

“You, Diddlie.”

“You did not.  I didn’t have it.”

“Well, I put it in your mail box a few days before the election because

I couldn’t make it to the neighborhood meeting.”

“My mailbox?”

“Right, in the evening after the mail was delivered, otherwise the mailman will throw it out.”

“Oh great, the evening we had five inches of rain in about five minutes and my box and carport got washed out!”

“Yes, it did rain that night.”

“So Fred, we have you to thank for this mess!”

“Diddlie, my one lost vote did not determine the elections.”

“Every vote counts Fred.”

“How is Mr. Liddel?  I mean his hutch is in the carport.”

“I had him in the living room.  He’s scared of lightning so we had the curtains drawn.”

Steve pushes his goldrimmed glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and starts easing toward the shade of the Safeway entrance.

“I still don’t think the election was sufficiently publicized.”

Diddlie hugs her soft pink leather purse, fingering the gold clasp.

“Oh, they kept it in the dark, for sure Steve!”

“Did they have a quorum?”

“A quorum was announced, Fred.”

“Well, right!  We should have demanded to see the figures Daisy!”

“We didn’t get very far with our questions about turnout.”

Steve is now a step away from us, be beckoning towards the shade.

“This is what we get for lack of interest.”

We all move under the entrance and stand away from the swinging doors.

“Right again, there was only one person running for each office.”

“A lot of new people have moved in too.”

“I know Steve, the ones in those obscene new McMansions don’t have time for us, and we are their neighbors!”

“Diddlie, who is on the board now anyway?”

Diddlie opens the clasp on top of her purse and works her fingers among its contents, pulling up bits of paper and pushing them back down again. Her voice softens and she seems to be talking into its light brown jaws.

“Ah … I know Rank Majors left because he can’t stand Dick East or Joel McAllister.”

She pulls out a sheet of paper folded in half, and shakes it open to read in a single gesture.

“Here you are, got this as an email attachment; Albrecht Intaglio, President, Boyd Nightingale, Vice Pres. Dick East, Treasurer, and Westwood, ‘Westie’ North is Secretary”

“What about Joel McAllistair?”

“Ah Steve … Oh, he is representative for West Wicket Street.”

“And the other streets?”

“Daisy, there’s no one listed.”

“Where are the women?”

Diddlie waves the sheet of paper in the air.

“No one came forward! Can you believe it Daisy?”

She waves the paper so hard it tears.  Steve puts his hand on Diddlie’s arm to calm her.

“No wait a minute … Marshall Rundstedt … he’s a representative too.”

Diddlie scans the paper again.

“He’s not on here!’

“Well, I remember he was there as a Rep.”

“I know Daisy, see!  That jerk, Dick East can’t keep track.”

“This needs to be fixed!”

“It sure does Steve.”

“Those are not official minutes though, Diddlie.”

“That’s right, they’ll have to be approved at the next meeting.”

“Wait a minute Steve, Marshall doesn’t live in Fauxmont.  He lives outside our system. They are on city water, not ours.”

“I know Fred, but he owns a couple of rental properties.”

“Oh, does he?”

“He bought one about 2014 on Wicket and another on Bails Lane, just last year.”

“How do you know all this Diddlie?”

“Because Fred, I keep track of that stuff for News Letter distribution.”

“Oh I forgot about that.”

“Don’t you read it?”

“I don’t get it.  Haven’t seen one for a year or more.”

“Fred, maybe you are down for online distribution.”

“I can check when I get home Daisy, and I’ll get back to you Fred.”

“You know who else is missing from that list?”

“Ah … no, who?

“That militia guy, kind of a shadowy figure, ah … what’s his name?”

“Oh right, Kemp Rombout.”

“That’s it Daisy, I think he was sergeant of the Night Watch over on the Van Rijn Estate, now he’s in the Fauxmont Militia.”

“Well, he doesn’t live here Steve!”

“He’s around though, I remember that SOB for kicking me out of the area when there was talk of a severed limb down in the gully.”

“Sorry Fred, he’s renting one of Marshall’s places.”

“Yeah, he came with his AR15 automatic rifle.”

“Daisy, you are well up on your weaponry!”

“I know Fred, I asked him what it was.”

“Why did he bring that to the Guild meeting?”

“Same reason Joel McAllistair brought his old 38 revolver and Albrecht had his automatic.”

“What do you mean Steve?  There is no reason!”

Daisy puts an arm around Diddlie’s shoulders.

“They are afraid, Diddlie!”

“Afraid?  Afraid, here in Fauxmont?  Afraid of what?”

Daisy drops her arm, and grabs Diddlie’s hands in hers.

“Afraid of themselves of course. Bel, explained it to me years ago, they are scared shitless!”

“Well, they better shoot each other then!”

“No-no-no. It’s their sacred delusions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Darkness.”

“What?”

“Their own inner darkness.”

“Daisy, I know you are an artist and all that, but sometimes you get so deep, I think you have drowned!”

Diddlie breaks loose of Daisy’s hands.

“Well anyway, I think we need to be nice to them.”

“Okay Daisy, I know you and Boyd had a thing…”

“We did.”

“So don’t you see? You can’t baby them out of it!”

“That is not what I am saying.  I mean we must treat fearful people carefully.”

“Well I treat them for what they are.  Stupid immature men, like little boys playing with danger.”

“Diddlie, we need to talk some other time.”

“So, what do you want to tell me?”

“I’ll tell you this. Joel showed me the empty chambers in his revolver!”

Diddlie looks at the ground with a sigh.

“Daisy, I never realized you had such an interest.”

“Fred, she is just trying to keep the peace with… with … those JERKS!”

Steve steps forward to get my attention.

“Fred, they are protecting the meeting.”

“Steve, we don’t need their protection thank you!”

Diddlie shoulders her purse, steps towards Steve, and grabs his wrist and shakes it, while looking up into his face.

“Steve, will you stop making excuses?”

“I wasn’t entirely serious Did.”

She releases his wrist.

“Well okay, but this is serious business.”

Daisy is twirling a length from the curtain of her black hair.

“I can’t imagine Hank Dumpty, who has been on for 20 years, living with that.”

“No Daisy, I remember when he left, after bel Vionet lost the last election to Albrecht.”

“Yup, and Lou wanted to take a break too, as he has been serving on and off in various capacities for about as long.”

“How long have you served Fred?”

“The only thing I have done is serve on a nominating committee.”

Diddlie has folded her paper up and put it back in her purse.

“Fred, that was years ago!”

Daisy is pointing over to the Lighthouse Gas Station.

“Look! Is that Jake’s Hummer?”

They are lifting the old wooden oil derrick onto a flatbed truck with a telescoping yellow crane.

“See the plate number, 2 SnaZ. It is parked by that stack of old tires.”

“Yes but, I don’t see him anywhere.”

“Steve, I’ve got things to do!”

Diddlie walks away and goes quickly into the Safeway.

“I have to go too.”

Daisy walks over towards the gas station.  The sun has gone behind a small cloud.  There are a few drops of rain in the air as Steve and I head across the parking lot for home.

“Seems darker than it should be from a cloud that size.”

“Must be the eclipse, Fred.”

Steve is tapping his phone.
“Right on time, it is 2:42PM!”

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 has rearranged the Cavendish Pie Shop with legendary fire. Daisy sits alone at one of two antique black wooden tables, with three high back chairs on each side. They fill the middle of the room with marble and ebony. Six winged dragons crouch down by her legs. These are the Wyvern variety, less lizard, more bird, balanced on their tails curled underneath in back and two legs with avian claws gripping the leaf and scrollwork in front. The weight they support bows their heads. Their breath is painted gold, but flaking off, and flows like a beard down toward the floor in a broken scorch. Daisy looks unmoved by the drama. Her long folded arm extends across the brown marble tabletop, with a fist digging into her cheek to hold up her head. Her thick hair is pushed back behind her shoulders like a short spreading cape. I sit down opposite, careful not to knock my shin on a folded dragon wing. A feather tip is chipped off showing not ebony, but a pale yellowish brown. The dome of Daisy’s bowler rises on the table between us, a dense soft black without the usual orange post-it note alight in the band.

She yawns.

“Excuse me Fred…”

“Late night?”

“I find the heat soporific,” yawns again.

“Ah, ‘soporifique’!”

“Oui, c’est ça…”

“Try some coffee.”

“Fred, did you hear, we lost another neighbor?”

“No, you mean departed?”

“Yes, moved on, not away.”

“On up?”

“… or down, who knows, Fred?”

“Depends what you believe.”

“I guess it is there if you do.”

“If you can!”

“I can’t think there’s a here-after, only a here.”

“ ‘So brief,’ as they say.”

“Oh really? Not so brief if you are in pain!”

“No, but you know what happens when you’re having fun?”

“Yeah, Fred, when life stops sucking, it can blow by like a sign on the freeway.”

“Not easy to read, those signs,”

“… or stay on the road.”

“Well, depends whose road.”

“It’s all a matter of choices.”

“If you can find them; I mean some people don’t seem to have much choice.”

“Yup, in the end none of us have a choice.”

“Well, then we’re talking about attitude.”

“If you are alive to it, Daisy.”

“I choose my own road; even if it leads to PU.”

“An artist must!”

“No, you can follow some one else. There’s plenty of derivative art around.”

“Right Daisy, there is always tradition under any road.”

“Frank Vasari calls it; “That Toad tradition, cold dead weight, or lively liquid eye.’ ”

“Is that original?”

“Don’t know for sure; I mean its been said in many ways, but I haven’t heard it said like that before.”
“So what artists do you like?”

“Depends when you ask.”

“I am asking today.”

“Today, Giotto, Velasquez, and Monet, and don’t forget Chartres and sometimes Rouault.”

“How about this time?”

“Ahh, he’s kind of on the threshold today.”

“Well, you might say they’re alive right now.”

“Seen with a lively liquid eye!”

“So, who were we talking about?”

“Diddlie told me it was old Ramsay.”

“We won’t see Mr. Ramsay at the Light House Gas Station again.”

“Fred, he will never be more than ninety nine.”

“A corpse is a corpse.”

My ‘small’ earl-gray tea steams, scenting the air with bergamot.

“Diddlie is always in the know!”

“Fred! Diddlie has been in on everything ever since I first met her.”

“Lou once called her, ‘mother of the neighborhood’.”

“It is like she knows stuff just before it happens.”

“Well, she does know every one.”

Daisy, sits up, puts he hand down from her face and looks at the back of her hand for a moment in silence.

“Some times I think she is on to something.”

“You mean something mystical in Diddlie?”

“Well, what to call it?”

She fingers her hat, pulling it an inch this way and that.

“Her intuitions?”

“It is hard to say…just a feeling really, some times when I am with her.”

“A woman of many parts, is Diddlie.”

“This thing, I mean Ramsay…is getting to me.”

“I didn’t know he was sick.”

Daisy holds up an arm to shake her multiple bracelets down her forearm from where they gathered at her wrist.

“Oh God! I got this letter from him about two weeks ago. I mean I was flabbergasted!”

“I wonder why he didn’t just call you.”

“I don’t know…it is pathetic, sickening and mainly confusing … now the old man is dead, I feel terrible about my attitude.”

“Well, he was pretty obnoxious in his day.”

“Yes he was, but that letter was so maudlin…I think he must have known he was about to go…”

“A last communication of his love and passion!”

“Oh please! “

“Sorry, I wasn’t…”

“Okay, okay…he opens with ‘Don’t get between a dragon and his fire.’ or something like that.”

“A quotation?”

“I looked it up…No, it was: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath.’”

Google says it is from Shakespeare’s King Lear.”

“Another troubled old man.”

“He dragged on and on, and then there’s this check for five thousand dollars enclosed.”

“I am getting a glimmer of your position.”

“Yes, and don’t confound me with Ophelia!”

“No, none of that!”

Daisy drains her ice tea, with a glacial rattle of melting cubes. She puts down the tall pale blue paper cup.

“You know, he is the reason I wasn’t evicted!”

“How bizarre!”

“To say the least.”

“Had he been sending you checks all along?”

Daisy’s bracelets move between the fingers of her free hand, as if she is counting them on the abacus of her forearm.

“No, he paid the trustees in my bankruptcy through an intermediary, a company or something. I couldn’t imagine who it was.”

“Must have been quite a surprise.”

“Embarrassing, would be more like it.”

“At least you didn’t have to hit the road.”

“No, I was kind of psyched for it though…well in a way.”

Daisy shakes her head and lets her hair fall in two long dense curtains down each side of her face.

“Well! Well! Well!

High thigh-cut shorts, two navels, and four breasts, pillowing in SnazE sports bras, move through the opening glass doors.

“Quite a distraction!”

“Fred, I thought you were a grown up.”

“I regress.”

Cargo shorts, snaking blue veins, thick tanned legs and heavy shoulders follow in and wait at the counter while the women place orders. Daisy waves to him, with her jingling bracelets moving around he arm.

“Lou Waymarsh!”

He is talking to the two women, but looks over at Daisy and waves back.

“Those are the del Sarto twins.”

“Oh, don’t know them Daisy.”

“They grew up in Fauxmont. One is Andrea, I forget the other one.”

“Are they high school or college?”

“Oh, I don’t know, college age…I guess.”

I look up to catch Lou’s short-sighted eye, as he turns around from the counter.

He holds up his coffee as if toasting his guests.

“Looks like Lou kept up with the family.”

“He bought the family property when they left…around two thousand perhaps.”

“But Lou has lived here thirty years or more.”

“Right, his first place was on Maxwell Avenue.”

“That’s right! I had forgotten, I remember visiting them there.”

The del Sarto twins stand with their backs to the counter. Holding their iced drinks in one hand and phones in the other, waiting for Lou. He pays and goes out with the twins and sees them into a car. He unexpectedly comes back and sits down next to Daisy. Mrs. Rutherford walks over.

“You need this hon.?”

“I could do with it in fact!”

“Well so could I hon.”

She puts his platinum SnazE Visa card down in front of him.

“Let me sign you up…they have an online special this week. I’ll get points and you’ll get discounts!”

Mrs. Rutherford has gone before he finished.

“Interesting company you keep Lou.”

“Maria and Andrea start as interns at my old shop tomorrow.”

“Is that what they wear to job interviews?”

“No Fred, they were at a weekend activity. I was chauffeur.”

“They could be my students at PU.”

“Daisy, it is great experience for them. Nice and close too, near St. George’s Church, you know that office building?”

“Sure Lou, what are they doing, delivering mail?”

“No Daisy, Maria is working in the PR department and Andrea is helping in attire.”

“Attire? When did the Fib. get into Tux. rentals?”

“Its advisory, part of protocol, you know, State Department contract.”

“Some times I think we are ruled by contractors!”

“They can only do what they are told, Daisy.”

Daisy shakes the ice in her empty cup looking at Lou in silence.

“What are you teaching out at PU Arts Center Daisy?”

“Frank has me doing a stained glass course, Lou and two drawing classes, so far at least.”

“Did you know Frank Vasari?”

“Not really, I met him at one of Artie’s openings I think…any way I recognized him at the interview. Doubt if he recognized me.”

“Enjoying it?”

“Well, I am trying to Lou, trying to like it.”

“Any experience?”

“I did a class at a frame shop about 25 years ago.” She yawns.”Oh sorry…”

Lou leans back, takes off his glasses and starts cleaning them in his lap with the bottom of his T-shirt.

“‘Soporifique’, I see the subject is having its effect!”

“I think Frank hired me because Boris’s agent, ahh, what’s his name?”

“Oh, Gloriani?”

“Yes, Gloriani, apparently Gloriani saw my designs for the Trip house.”

Lou leans forward still without his glasses on.

“What, Frank hired you sight unseen?”

“Lou, Gloriani has all the influence money can buy out there.”

“You mean at PU?”

“Yes, he and Frank are building a little empire around Boris Tarantula.”

Lou sips his coffee. A diesel is ticking over outside, close by, then you can’t hear anything above grinding gears and air breaks and a metallic squeal as a truck starts backing up to the Safeway loading dock. When it switches off, a spoon’s rhythmic click, in a hot mug at the opposite table stirs the new quiet.

“Have you heard Mr. Ramsay died?”

“We were just taking about that Lou.”

“He made a bequest to the PU Arts Center.”

“NO!”

“What’s the matter Daisy?”

“How do you know Lou?”

“It came out when they read his will. I was there, in the Heisenberg Rooms. He had a big stake in one of Macadamia’s funds and it all went to PU Arts.”

“Oh…”

“I wonder what will happen to the Light House Gas station?”

“I don’t know Fred … I mean, who is handling the estate?”

“Did he live alone?”

“I don’t think so Fred, but I don’t know who he lived with. His wife died years ago and the kids are grown and gone.”

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

Bel Vionnet is standing in the street outside her house, as I walk up. She leans against the car to talk to her husband through the driver’s side window, then looks up to greet me. Steve waves me over to the car.

“You hear about Gordon Byron’s speech at PU?”

“No, what about it?”

“You know, the riot.”

“Oh yes, I did see it on TV, something about political protest out there.”

“Well, he is now Macadamia’s full time flack, and the speech was canceled because of violence.”

“Canceled!”

“Yup, announced last night.”

“So they shut the facility?”

“Fred, you might suppose that university students would welcome a challenging speaker.”

“Was it really the students do you think, bel?”

“Looks like it.”

Steve is shaking his head.

“I still suspect agents provocateurs!”

“Byron should be refuted not silenced, let alone by a mob.”

Bel steps closer to me, touching my elbow.

“He is going over there to support Gordon’s right to speak … not that we have much time for what he has to say!”

“You mean there’s a counter demonstration?”

“No, no, it will be an old fashioned teach-in and there will be a petition to sign.”

“Who’s organizing it Steve?”

“Its an ad hoc group called “Speech Therapy”.

Bel, is looking at Steve, and shaking her head.

“Yes, Steve found it on Face Book, or something.”

I didn’t see Albrecht in the back seat until now. He opens the door.

“Yo! Fred, get in. The great man should be heard!”

“Yeah Fred, why don’t you go along?”

“Okay bel, aren’t you coming too?”

“Well, I wasn’t … ”

“Come on bel, get in!”

“Okay Steve, okay then, let me go lock up the house.”

Steve gives me a thumbs-up, as bel walks over to the door.

“Thanks Fred, you made the difference!”

I get in back with Albrecht and bel soon returns to get in front next to Steve. We drive off in silence toward the PU campus past the physics department only a few blocks from their oasis, the H-bar, and then get stuck in traffic.

“Have you still got those kittens?”

“We have Fred. The cat family has taken over our bedroom and we sleep in the guest room.”

“But the cats are your guests.”

“She doesn’t see it that way. Besides she is a single Mom!”

“It has been her room ever since the storm.”

“Steve, it was the first room she ran into.”

“I can’t approach her.”

“No, Steve is the big threat around our feline house!”

“You can expect strife if you take in refugees.”

Steve drums on the steering wheel impatiently, waiting for the open trailer in front of us to move, loaded with lawn mowers, rakes, blowers, weed whackers and other equipment.

Albrecht is reading some papers and looks up.

“Say folks, I really appreciate this you know.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Steve, I know we are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum on a lot of things.”

“All the more reason to talk, don’t you think?”

“Well sure … ”

“I support civil society, where we discuss our differences.”

“On the other hand Steve, we have to get people involved you know… get them off the couch and out of their apathy … and you know when emotions ran high those liberal students turned violent.”

“If they did, it is disgraceful!”

“Remember what Jefferson told us?”

“What’s that Albrecht?”

“Fred, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Bel turns around and looks at Albrecht.

“Do you take that to justify what went on?”

“Think about Shays’ rebellion.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays%27_Rebellion)

“Oh I have, and in Jefferson’s letter to his buddy, he attributed the rebellion to ignorance not wickedness.”

“Well, that’s one interpretation.”

“That’s not interpretation. In fact, those were his words.”

“Okay, but facts don’t matter. As I keep telling you Liberals, what matters, is what people believe.”

“Albrecht, people believe all kinds of nonsense!”

“There you go! That’s just Liberal condescension!”

“Albrecht, please don’t take it personally.”

“Steve, it sure sounded condescending to me.”

“Albrecht, I apologize.”

“Thank you … People vote on what they believe, and that is what it is all about. The rest is just idle philosophizing.”

“But Albrecht, we are giving you a ride out of principle. That is no idle thing.”

“No it isn’t and I appreciate your kindness, but principles aren’t getting you liberals majorities in Congress or the presidency.”

“Albrecht, do you really think principle doesn’t matter?”

“Not much bel.”

“Have you forgotten about gay rights already?”

“No I haven’t.”

“Where do you think you and Boyd would be without that big push?”

“We would be screwed, but we did that for ourselves, as much as anything.”

“You better not forget the Democrats!”

“Bel, I wish I could! Those peace loving elite liberal students are supposedly knowledgeable, and they got violent.”

“They should know better.”

“They perceive a threat from Macadamia.”

“Albrecht, it was mindless!”

“Your words, not mine!”

“The real students are studying, Albrecht.”

“That may be bel, but elites never hesitate to preserve their privileges, and by God, our movement is going to wipe them off the scene!”

“You mean your side is just as violent?”

“Bel, violence is part of politics you know. That’s why I carry a weapon.”

“Albrecht, the idea is to change administrations peacefully.”

We move up about two car lengths, and see flashing lights ahead.

“Oh great! a traffic stop for us all.”

Bel rubs the back of Steve’s neck.

“There’s the siren honey.”

The siren gets louder and the trailer ahead pulls to the right. Steve tries to follow but there isn’t room to get all the way out of his lane. We can see an Ambulance coming up behind, lights flashing in the rear view mirrors.

“Okay, can any one see if there is room for them to get by?”

The ambulance is close, its siren screams. The car is uncomfortably hot and humid, with the windows open.

An SUV moves over parallel to us. We look up into its windows reflecting the sun back at us. Deep treads in the big rear tire are packed with clay less a few inches from the window. A twig fragment sticks from the side casting a minute shadow on the unmoving tire. Albrecht opens the door and stands outside looking over the roof.
“There they go!”

He gets back in.

“Should be rolling now Steve.”

We start forward slowly behind the SUV that is now in front.

“AC any one?”

“Yeah, its hotter out there than our dispute in here!”

Albrecht rolls up his window.

We are still moving slowly, and the noise of the air conditioning blowers reaches us in back before the cool air comes like a rescue.

“Look folks, what I was trying to explain to you is that the elites are through, but don’t know it yet.”

“Albrecht, you are part of the so-called elite. You went to Puberty High School, and grew up right here in Fauxmont.”

“Puberty High, was a waste of my time.”

“Did you study Albrecht?”

“No, I was pissed off with the world in general and that school in particular.”

Bel sighs.

“Well, you are grown up now!”

“I grew up when I left Fauxmont and found my kind out West!”

“Didn’t you get anything out of growing up in an artistic family here in Fauxmont?”

“Bel, the sad truth is that Dad is all wound up in his art and Mom is tangled up in him, you know?”

“Did you feel left out Albrecht?”

“I took responsibility for myself and moved on, as soon as I could.”

“So what made you come back?”

“The movement, Fred. I came back to where the action is here in the DC area.”

“Yes, you are addressing that by your activism.”

“Well thanks friend! My name isn’t Intaglio for nothing! You have to understand that Liberal condescension is behind a lot of our hard feelings.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well I just pointed out one example. I mean elite cultural condescension. Just watch PBS, all those shows feeding off nostalgia for the British upper class.”

“So what about it Albrecht?”

“So Steve, it is government subsidized Public TV, and that’s my taxes going to waste.”

Steve lifts a hand off the wheel to scratch his nose.
“Okay, you have a point, and I will pursue it when Congress stops dishing out corporate welfare.”

“Well Steve, we could get all the votes we need to stop that if the Liberals would just show some respect.”

Steve’s attention shifts to changing lanes and getting on to the highway. We all fall silent for a bit zooming along in the passing lane towards the exit for Prestige University.

“Is Boyd joining you out there?”

“He needs to wake up and wise up, Fred.”

“Oh, he disagrees?”

“I don’t know Fred, he needs to stand up like a man! I am not going to partner with a blubbering kid.”

“You mean he can’t make up his mind?”

“He made up his mind, if you can call it a mind. Now I am left high and dry!”

“Good grief Albrecht! You mean he walked out?”

“Yeah, with my foot in his ass!”

“Oh! You threw him out then.”

“He is like those week minded, so called students who have to be protected from ideas that might upset them.”

“So where is Boyd now?”

“He’s gone back to his mother’s tit.”

Bel turns around again.

“Albrecht, I am so sorry to hear this.”

Albrecht puts his hands up to the sides of his head.

“God! How disappointing!”

“Well Augie is there too, a father figure perhaps?’

“Bel, Augie is finishing up his contract with Nubile Sate, out West.”

“Don’t you think Boyd will come back?”

“He doesn’t know himself.”

“Did he find out who his father is?”

“He didn’t tell me. He needs to move on and stop sniveling in his Mama’s arms.”

We slow down with the PU campus in sight. The long approach past the playing fields is jammed with traffic. There are more police cars with lights flashing ahead. Officer Chastellux approaches us on foot having spoken to those in the car ahead. He looks into the car through Steve’s window, one hand on his side arm.

“Sir, the campus is closed.”

“Officer we have come for the teach-in at 11 AM today.”

The sun glints on his metal name-tag.

“Sir the Campus is closed.”

“What shall we do? There is no room to move.”

“Wait!”

Officer Chastellux moves on.

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

A stream flows from the north at the bottom of the hill on Bails Lane. It is hidden in shadow of the early morning sun, as I walk down hill towards Oval Street. Some one is working in a yard on the opposite slope. I see a big G, on the back of a yellow hoodie as it appears through a gap in the shrubs. The last three weeks of Fauxmont’s rain crosses under the road at the bottom. I walk over and watch translucent twists splashing among rocks eroded from the clay on the south side.

“Oh, I am trying to get this done before any one comes along.”

“Well, I haven’t seen any one but a fox and a lone cicada on a fence post, so far.”

Diddlie is working in the front yard of a vacant house. The ‘G’ Stands for Glamour College, her alma mater. She is filling a number-ten size can, all shiny with 18 ribs and eight glue spots where its label was attached. She doesn’t look up as I get nearer, but notices me even so.

“What are you doing out so early, Fred?

“Getting my morning exercise.”

“It’s not even six yet.”

“No, it is best to get out before the crowd if possible, but after dawn.”

“Well you didn’t see me doing this.”

“No, as a matter of fact I can’t see you from here when you move behind that bush.”

“You better get out of the middle of the road. People are going to work now and they speed up this hill.”

Walking over to the side of the lot, I find the house is hidden by a huge patch of goldenrod. It grows tall, behind thick hollies and some cedars smothered in Virginia creeper and wisteria.

“It is way too early for this goldenrod to be in bloom.”

“That’s why you can’t see it.”

“No, except I notice you picked some.”

Diddlie is gathering a bunch of long stems, all cut to the same length.

“Fred, you can write about this in your blog, but no one will believe it.”

“She disappears into goldenrod taller than she.”

“Why not?”

“Like you said, this stuff doesn’t bloom in May.”

The flowers on top of the plants wave as she speaks, moving through and cutting selected stems.

“Climate change might have brought it out earlier than usual.”

“Well, okay, put that in if you want.”

“Are you reading it?”

She comes out of the thicket as if coming out of a maze.

“Sometimes.”

“I see.”

Her hoodie is a little too big. She keeps pulling up the sleeves, which gradually fall down over her hands as she works.

“I have been gathering this at every opportunity ever since Stuart died.”

“In memory of him you mean?”

“Mr. Dodgson left me childless, with a house, a parrot and a white rabbit.”

“Mr. Liddell must be very old for a rabbit!”

“He is not the original Liddell. That was George.

“Oh, how old was he when you lost him?”

“About twelve I think. He lived on lettuce, kale and hay with mint for treats.”

She winds string around her collected stems, from a small plastic bag marked SnazE on the ground at her feet. She cuts it off with small scissors from a side pocket of her jeans and ties it. The bundle fits precisely into the empty can standing on a flagstone.

“That will be my hundredth can!”

“What do you buy in such bulk?”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Did someone give it to you?”

“Yes, my friend gives me these empties when she cooks her church’s charity lunches. It probably had tomatoes in it.”

Mr. Liddell is sitting inside his extensive sack-like net, which pushes his ears down but gives him some freedom of movement. He nibbles weeds under some spring shoots of Japanese honeysuckle. He walks deeper in among the stalks, but the net snags on a twig as he drags it behind. The twig is lodged among the young shoots. He starts nibbling the net. A bluejay shrieks from a branch in the Viburnums growing at the corner of the house.

“I think Mr. Liddell is gnawing through his net.”

“He can’t. It is a rabbit proof metallic thing.”

Mr. Liddell stops nibbling and turns towards me, blinks and remains still, as if waiting to disappear. Diddlie waves some of the blossoms, admiring the rich yellow.

“How about this yellow glow.”

I sneeze.

“Very bright.”

“The glow of sentience.”

“It is?”

“Can’t you feel it? That’s’ why it makes you sneeze you know.”

“I thought the pollen irritated my nose.”

Physiologically it is called ‘sternutation’, a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs.”

“You sound like a text book!”

“Stuart told me all about it.”

“About what?”

“About that, and ‘pneuma’, ancient Greek word for both, breath, and soul.”

“You mean you collect golden rod to make yourself sneeze?”

“No, it is the yellow. It has the sun in it, the same energy we embody.”

“Couldn’t you say that of any yellow flower?”

“Well, you could, but that’s because you don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“You are just thinking of color. I mean your soul, your flower, your breath, your voice vibrating in the air, your words in print, in sight.”

“Did. you are a mystic!”

“You didn’t know that did you!”

“Not until now.”

“Stuart knew many things.”

Diddlie starts deeper into the overgrown lot, leaving Mr. Liddell behind, and her can full of flowers. I follow her around the corner of the house past the Viburnums and through a tunnel of wisteria growing up over two smothered cedars, which have turned light brown for lack of light.

She stoops when we come out and picks a long stalk from a plant in the gravely ground, with two leaves at the bottom. We seem to be crossing an overgrown driveway.

“Here Fred, Lyre Leaf Sage”

She hands me a long stem with lyre shaped leaves at the bottom and some small blue flowers at the top.

“Thanks.”

“You are not supposed to be here. This is where I go to get away from you!”

“You do? Well, I better take off.”

“You can’t yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am making you up.”

“In a way … but I am making you up too.”

“So, I am leading you up the garden path?”

“You call this a path?”

“Well I keep telling you your blog has no structure!”

“Yes, you have mentioned it.”

“I mean I am turning the tables on you in your narrative.”

“You are?”

“You have to ask me for explanations here.”

“Well, I find you hard to understand.”

“So now you know what it is like.”

“What it is like?”

“You don’t know what to write until you think of me!”

“I sometimes don’t know what to write even when I do think of you.”

“Well, you better get thinking or all this will stop.”

“It won’t stop because the story extends beyond what is said in the blog.”

“You don’t know what that is. I mean that is a mystery even you can’t claim to solve.”

“I make no claims.”

“Fred, every story is like a loop of string.”

“How’s that?’

“It only goes so far then ends when the plot is tied up, so to speak.”

“Well, every story ends somewhere or there’d be no point to it.”

“That’s it. Is your blog endless? Maybe that’s the problem!”

“Its bound to end some time. I won’t live for ever.”

“Look, there are countless pieces of string and no one has ever put them all together.”

“No, that is impossible.”

“All stories start in the yellow and when you hear them told, they go back in.”

“Oh, you mean the unconscious!”

“I don’t use that kind of jargon.”

“Okay, I don’t follow you there, Did …

“That’s because I am beyond you in the yellow!”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it. Sometimes I have to wait”

“You have to wait for me!”

She waves her lyre leaf sage flower.

“This is my herbal song.”

“I can’t hear anything.”

The sun is high enough to sparkle in the stream along the property line at the bottom of the hill. We stand on the cracked cement of a moss-covered patio. There’s a steep drop off at one end, so we can see over the lichens growing on the north side of the roof below, and down towards the stream.

“Of course not! You can’t hear unutterable thoughts.”

“No, but they occur.”

“Oh don’t they just!”

“You said it was your song.”

“I am not singing though.”

“You mean that stalk your holding is singing?”

“Have you followed me into a dead end on this overgrown lot with its vacant house?”

“You tell me Did.”

“So what now?”

“Yes … I’ll stand here for a while …”

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 swigs the last of his house-red with the stem of his glass in a loose fist, and pushes his empty plate of Lasagna aside.

This stuff is okay for the ‘Lunch Special’, but I still prefer beer.

“Yes, back to a burger, beer and fries next week.”

“Yeah, you have to opt out of this on the H-bar app. … Careless mistake.”

“They bank on our digital dizziness!”

“ ‘Bank’, is right!”

He points to the last of the three TVs that were once distributed along the length of the bar for the election.

“I thought Mr. Hoffman was going to take all those distractions down.”

“Many of us did, but some of the regulars wanted one. The night shift from PU wanted it, I think. So he has that small one up there with sound off.”

Lou is looking at the TV, which is at an odd angle for him to see clearly.

“Looks like Ensor is going to build a new place over here.”

“Are you talking about the New York building?”

“Yes, Axel Ensor’s hundred story town house.”

“What does he need all that space for?”

“Fred that’s obvious. It is a prestige thing.  To get one up on Trump Tower, only fifty eight stories, a few blocks away.”

“Yes, he can look down on it.”

“His town house is all his, no tenants no nothing!”

“He is reported to have a nine hundred person staff though.”

“If you believe Glen Gasberg’s Festival of Facts!”

“Well maybe not, but yes, I did read all about it in his new Shrinkrap feature.”

“Fred, his Festival of Facts is mainly his fantasies and opinions.”

“Mind you Lou … Opinions that many share!”

“Yes … mind seems sadly lacking!”

Mr. Hoffman is talking to Theo Tinderbrush at the bar just behind me.

“Well, I took the damn test didn’t I Banesh?”

Lou looks up at the raised voice.

“Good grief, I didn’t know it was happening today!”

“What’s that Lou?”

“Here we go … “

“What is it Lou?”

“Here comes Lark!”

He takes off his glasses and concentrates on cleaning them with his napkin. I don’t turn around, and the voices behind me remain inaudible above the chatter and clatter of the H bar at lunchtime. We didn’t go into the quieter Quark Lounge because we expected Diddlie to join us, and she doesn’t like the lounge. She finds it dark and pretentious. Lou finishes his meticulous cleaning, but doesn’t put his glasses back on. He holds the gold rims in his fingers and stares at his empty wine glass.

“Did you know Albrecht is running for president of our association again?”

“No, but I know he is still itching to get bel Vionnet out.”

Diddlie sneaks up behind Lou in her royal blue blazer with her finger up to her lips, signaling me not to betray her. She puts her hands over his eyes and blows in his ear.

Lou relaxes out of the tension of her surprise.

“Okay Diddlie, I give up. Who is it?”

“Your, Fairy Godmother, Lou!”

She tosses some oak blossom on the table and the golden pollen spills out on the deep brown, varnished wood.

“Here! Have some stardust guys! Tiny little grains of the sun’s energy.”

Lou sneezes.
“Thanks Diddlie you’re just …”

He sneezes again.

“You’re just the allergy I have been waiting for.”

“Hi Fred” She squeezes my arm as she sits in the vacant place on my right. I can feel the deliberate pressure of her knee against my leg as she looks at Lou.

“How you doing?”

Before he responds, she gets up and moves around the table to sit on my left with her back to the window.

“I don’t want to be facing the entrance.”

“You expecting trouble?”

“No, not necessarily, but I don’t want the sun in my eyes.”

She puts her foot on top of mine, the way Lambert used to do with his paw.

“No one does.”

“Well Lou, it was never a problem until they cut down those twin white oaks out in the parking lot and took away the deck with out- door tables underneath the awning. All to make more room for those damn cars.”

“Diddlie that was years ago!”

Lou it was when it was. Seems like yesterday to me, and that’s his fault!”

She points at me with her thumb while looking hard at Lou and removes her foot from on top of mine.”

“Let’s not go there … So what’s the big hold up Did.?

“Oh, wouldn’t you two like to know!”

“So tell us.”

“Ah… well sorry I am so late guys, but it was…”

“Okay Did, so you were in a tight spot huh?”

Well Hank James brought Maximillian over, and I have to keep him away from Mr. Liddell … I mean that dog is a predator!”

“Mr. Liddell has his hutch doesn’t he?”

“Yes but he likes the living room in his dotage.”

“How long will you be walking Max?”

“Hank is going to Florence, and he won’t finish up until mid June.”

She pulls an old clamshell cel phone out of her blazer pocket and looks at the side. She passes three fingers over it with slow deliberation, and puts it away, then brushes some pollen off the front of her pink silk blouse.

She straightens the sprig of golden ragwort in her lapel and checks her hair with a quick tap of her palms.

I wave to the waitress to take Diddlie’s order and notice Lark and Mr. Hoffman disappear through a door that leads upstairs to the Heisenberg Rooms.

“Have you two been talking to them?”

“Who do you mean Did.?”

“Well, you must have seen them up at the bar Lou. They were there when I came in and then they got up stood around and went upstairs.”

“You mean Theo and Lark?”

“Well, who else, Fred?”

Lou leans back and scratches the back of his head.

“We were talking, and they were too busy.”

“Oh.”

“I did hear Theo raise his voice just now.”

Diddlie orders a shrimp salad from the waitress.

“Sorry we are sold out. How about our Quasar Salad?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, its kind of a quasi salad sandwich, ah you know… ah,

like two squares of Foccacia arranged, off set, one on top of the other, kind of star shaped, with ah, arugula, papaya, cranberries, fully cooked, freeze dried chicken chips, and ah…

“Stop! Wait wait…

“Would you like a menue Ma’am?

“No, that’s okay, I’ll have coffee and a Danish.”

“Nice quick lunch Did!”

“You guys didn’t wait for me Fred, so what am I to do? Besides, it is my cheat day. God knows I’ve earned it!”

Lou stifles a laugh.

“Ah, who are you cheating on Diddlie?”

“On my weight loss program. I am nearly nine pounds over weight according to Lark’s scales and the body mass index.”

“Diddlie, you look fine, I am sure you can get away with it!”

Her coffee arrives in a mug served by a man in a turban.

“Thank you sweetie.”

“I think that’s the guy from Emperor Babur.”

“I wouldn’t know, Lou. Oh here’s my Danish!”

Diddlie picks up her Danish with rich buttery pastry and ‘Confiture d’abricots’ filling the center, as advertized. Brittle white icing cracks around the sides under her fingers. Some almond flakes fall off the crust on to her lap as she bites into the crispy edge. She puts it down on her plate and backs up her chair to get the fallen almond bits.

“I knew it was a good idea to wear my jeans!”

Lou puts his glasses back on and leans over, looking at Diddlie

with his bushy eyebrows hiding the tops of his gold rims. Bringing the five o’clock shadow on his light brown face to bear on the atmosphere between them.

“What is going on upstairs any way?”

Diddlie has her coffee mug in one hand and her partially eaten Danish in the other.

“Here Lou, you want to try this?”

He holds up a hand, palm out,

“Did. I am sweet enough already.”

“Well honey …” the apricot filling falls out of the center of her Danish

and lands on the side of her plate.

“Honey will you lean back a little? Look what you made me do!”

Lou pulls back but doesn’t change his expression.

“You can’t sweet-talk me with that pastry kid. Come on, tell us, what is going on here.”

Diddlie puts down her Coffee and the crust of her Danish, and turns to me.

“Will you listen to this guy Fred?”

‘Oh, I do. I listen all the time! He’s a man of many interesting questions.”

“Okay, okay, so what happened was. I got a call you see.”

She picks up the Danish crust and finishes it off, and goes on after swallowing hard.

“You know, I got a call this morning as I was cleaning out the Red Queen’s cage.”

“She cautiously sips some coffee.

“This stuff is cold!”

Lou stands up to get the waiter from Babur’s attention, as he passes towards us from the swinging kitchen doors.

“Thanks Lou, any way it was late this morning and it was …”

The waiter from Babur arrives with coffee.

“More coffee Ma’am?”

“Is it hot waiter? This stuff is stone cold.”

She points down into her mug.

“This is plenty hot Ma’am.”

“Great, can I have a fresh cup then, you know, if you pour that in there it’s going to get cooled off.”

The waiter walks back to the bar and brings a clean mug and fills it with steaming coffee.

“Thanks waiter … yeah, so anyway, I got this call and … Say waiter!

She stands up and shouts to the waiter of Babur again. He doesn’t turn around. Lou gets up and takes some sugar packets from a nearby vacant table and puts them down next to Diddlie’s mug.

“Here neighbor.”

“You got any cream honey?”

He gets up again and brings back creamer.

“Thanks Lou, your service is really outstanding! They ought to hire you!”

“Right, I am a waiter alright. Waiting for you to answer my question!”

“What was that honey?”

He leans forward again and gently picks up her hand.

“Diddlie, you know!”

“Well, sweetie, I don’t know if I should tell.”

“Try me, then I’ll tell you if you made a mistake.”

“She grabs his hand in both of hers.”

“You are trying me, that’s for sure!”

“Okay Did. You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you might be involved in something bigger than you think, with Lark and Theo about Boyd’s true father. I mean, don’t you think someone is missing?”

Diddlie has taken her hands back from his, and has her finger up at her mouth.

“Ah, did you get a call too?”

“Right, I sure did.”

“From Boyd?”

“No, from our favorite hotelier.”

“Oh from Mr. Hoffman, yes he is trying to help Theo out of the jam he is in with Lark and Boyd.”

“And Harper, don’t forget.”

“Harper Nightingale? What’s that creep got to do with anything? He’s gone!”

“I know, but we talked and I had some resources for him.”

“Like what Lou?”

“Oh, an old acquaintance who can facilitate this kind of thing.”

“Like who?”

“Did Harper and Lark ever divorce?”

“Lou, I am not going there. That’s between her, Augie and Harper, and Lark and no one else.”

“Okay, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you think Boyd should be told who his father is by the responsible parties?”

“Are you telling me that Harper Nightingale is here?”

Diddlie puts both hands up over her mouth.

“Lou, Theo and Harper are not going to be in that room together!”

“Aha, yes this is a complicated problem, and there is a piece missing.”

“What’s that?”

“Did. do you know if Theo took the DNA test?”

“Yes he did.”

Lou is folding one of the empty sugar packets into a tiny square. His frown line deepens and his eyebrows grow closer, with each fold. He doesn’t look up.

“So, do they have the results up there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I am guessing they do, or what is all this about?”

“Okay honey. I brought Boyd over here this morning after the call, and it took me a couple of hours, and that’s why I need this Danish … you dig?”

Lou tosses his folded sugar packet into his empty wineglass.

“Oh yes! Did any one else call you Did?”

“Well no, I mean not in this connection Lou.”

“Okay, so then what?”

“Well I’ll tell you this, Albrecht wasn’t any help … and … and, well I don’t even remember it all, but we finally walked over, and when we got here Boyd went upstairs … that’s it, I don’t know if any one else was up there. I came in here. I mean, Boyd is so mixed up … He’s mad at every body and he loves every body and he hates the whole world and wants to see Juanita, I don’t know what … I mean, who did he find up there?

“Well, Juanita Gomez was a real mother to him. I really want to stay out of this mess, but now I am sort of implicated.”

“Well looks like you weren’t invited Lou!”

“Didn’t expect to be.”

“Have you talked to Juanita, Lou?”

“No, she isn’t at Jake’s right now.”

“What about the ‘resource’, you gave Harper, are they up there?”

“Maybe…”

“Who else could it be?”

“Harper Nightingale.”

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

Lark has started across the vast field of gray asphalt at the Hadron Shopping Center parking lot, where shiny metal heats up in the late winter sun. Oil-drips leave multi tone brown stains between the faded parallel white lines where a flattened bottle cap keeps company with a shred of squashed white Styrofoam. There seem to be fewer cars and SUVs than usual. The trees were all cut down a few years ago to make room for more parking. A new row of Cherries is in bloom, for the first time since they were planted along the street.I find Lark coming from the Ab. and Cheek Fitness Center.

Huge rectangular purple frames enclose two opaque brown lenses, which hide her eyes like blank TV screens. They are not plugged in to the currents running through the Leticia Lantern Show or Shrinkrap’s verbal pugilists, Glen Gasburg and Fulton Furay. The sky is reflected doubly. A tiny bright spot on each lens, highlights noon’s passing, while a penetrating breeze leaves her shivering under her yellow fleece.

“Are you going over to work out?”

“No Lark…”

A helicopter goes over low and loud.” … the restaurant!”

She turns around.

“Oh, anywhere to get out of this cold, Fred!”

“Let’s go down to the Emperor Babur.”

Looking down the long stairs to the Emperor’s restaurant, I notice something odd in the mirror next to the Bose Gallery. It is Daisy’s bowler with a yellow sticky in the hatband, above her long straight black coat with high collar. She is in conversation with her friend, and stands in contrast to her high cadmium-red coat, brass buttons and floral pink wrap.

“Mr. Fred!”

Indranil, the friendly manager, remembers me from my introduction by Theo Tinderbrush. Indranil has his palms together, bows slightly. A crooked upper tooth shines in the smile under his dense black moustache.

“Ms Daisy, Mr. Fred”

Indranil leads us to a table together, and one of his waiters offers us menus, but we opt for the buffet.

“Lark I hear you have a new partner.”

“Yeah, Augie.”

“So! Where is he?”

“Robin, he is a few miles outside Sacramento.”

Lark takes off her big glasses and puts them in a knitted woolen pouch hanging conveniently, by tasseled strings, outside her bag.

“What’s he doing back in California?”

“He has to finish up his contract, Daisy. He teaches English at Nubile State College.”

Robin picks up the first plate and starts down the line of chafing dishes at the buffet, skipping basmati rice in favor of Punjabi, Palak Paneer.

My Rosy Pelican beer is on the table when we sit down. Indranil stops by to ask if the others want drinks, two teas, and another beer for Daisy.

“Is there any truth to the rumor that you have a new client Daisy?”

She puts her forefinger to her lips, barely looking at me.

“Don’t go there yet. We might jinx it.”

“Are you still in your house?”

“Yeah, kind of. The roof leaks and I had to turn off the water

to the kitchen sink.”

Robin puts her fork down on her plate with a sharp sound, as if to get attention.

“My god, is that why you didn’t want me to stay? What do you do?”

“I still have the laundry tub and a bathroom.”

“We need to talk honey.”

The Fez brings the rest of the drinks. He no longer has the help of the turban. I thought he was Hispanic masquerading as Sikh, but Indranel told me he grew up Sikh in a Spanish neighborhood.

“Lark raises her cup of tea, as if in a toast.”

“Say goodbye to the ACA!”

Robin raises her teacup too.

“Yeah! Give all that money back to the taxpayer!”

Daisy sips her Rosy Pelican. Lark puts her cup down. Our table is quiet. I remember that broad shouldered round man with a walrus moustache sitting at the table opposite me. His thin white hair is combed over his bald spot in back. His sleeves ride high on his forearms. He is talking about his delay in a three-hour backup on Route One. The waiter comes to him smiling slightly under his fez. Though he has a black Hitler moustache, he is friendly, small, and rotund himself. “More water sir?”

Voices are still silent at our table.

Someone behind me is talking about a son at Berkeley.

“Herb is a straight ‘A’ student. He should have gone to Stanford.”

“Oh what a shame! My niece just graduated. She is into Bio Ethics, brilliant girl.”

“Berkeley is no longer the home of free speech you know.”

Daisy asks Robin if she is staying with Diddlie.

“No, that is no longer possible.”

“But Robin, that’s your mother in law!”

“Daisy, I don’t even want to get into it.”

Lark is looking down at her plate. She gets her sunglasses out of their pouch and puts them back on.

“You okay Lark?”

“No, Fred.”

“What is the matter?”

Lark has a fork full of butter chicken and rice in the air, half way to her mouth. A clump of rice falls back on the plate. A few grains go on the tablecloth. She says nothing at first.

The man opposite smoothes his white hair, describing an alternative route he took, to get away from Route One. His companion, sitting opposite, is nodding slowly in sympathy and her dangling earring swings like a jeweled pendulum.

“Plenty.”

Lark eats her butter chicken, without the fallen grains of rice. She faces Robin across the table with her two TV screens reflecting part of the room in miniature. The voice behind me is on about Milo Yiannopoulos.

“Well they should never have invited him to Berkeley, that creep.”

“They should have let him speak though, even if he is a nut case!”

Robin looks up at me.

“Are you people all Liberals?”

“Progressives.”

“Oh yes, Progressive government control of everything!”

Daisy is looking at Lark, who betrays nothing from behind her shades.

“Not everything Robin.”

“Daisy, Glen says, ‘the government isn’t a charity’, and I am sure you know that.”

“No, it is many things but not that.”

“So tell me this Fred, why should it be subsidizing healthcare?”

Daisy has put down her cutlery, leaving the stewed strings of her goat meat in ‘flavorful’ sauce, to congeal. She gestures broadly with her long arms. Gold and silver bracelets spread their ‘brights’ from elbows to hands.

The waiter brushes past. One of her fingers catches on the towel hanging from his arm. The towel slips and upsets his tray. The drink he is carrying spills. Daisy turns to see what has happened behind her.

“Oh NO! Sorry waiter!”

The waiter turns, and rights the glass as a few ice cubes fall on her shoulder and one tumbles on to the table. Fluid drips from the tray. The man with walrus moustache is looking over, chewing slowly. A light brown stain marks his yellow necktie, close in tone to his khaki jacket.

Indranil is at Daisy’s side.

“Are you alright ma’am?”

“Oh sure, I am so sorry. It’s my fault.”

“No problem ma’am. It is all cleaned up, right away, fast! Do you need a towel ma’am?”

“No no, I am fine, really.”

Indranil puts his palms together and bows.

“Yes ma’am.”

He looks around the table.

“Some desert ma’am?”

His smile is at full stretch.

“Sir, another Rosy Pelikan?”

“No thank you’s,” all around.

Lark looks up at him, and lifts her glasses far enough to see under the frames.

“Just fine.”

She moves her glasses back up.

“I have some eye problems.”

Indranil moves on. The Fez picks up the ice cube on our table, next to the chutney dish, and those on the carpeted floor.

“Okay, Robin, we are a rich country. So many of our people can’t afford a doctor. Well, ah, isn’t it just morally right for, for the ah, government to help out, ah, don’t you think?”

“Daisy, Glen has explained that over and over again. Don’t you listen?

“Glen?”

“Glen Gasberg! America’s favorite commentator.”

“I don’t follow him Robin, but anyway, what’s wrong with that, if it’s for people’s health?”

“Oh my God Daisy! You can get his daily commentary on Shrinkrap’s site. Honey, I mean that is all I need to know!”

“How could you say that?”

“Listen Daisy. If kind hearted people like you want to help the poor, the disabled, the sexual wierdos etc. let them do so, through Churches or independent charities.”

“Well lots of us do!”

“Well I think it is immoral to take my money away from me, against my will, and giving it to a cause I don’t believe in?”

“I don’t do all that political stuff on the internet. You think people should just die because they can’t afford insurance?”

“Listen, Glen says, ‘socialism is like the wrong cure for cancer. Yes, you are cancer free, but then cure kills you’.”

“Insurance doesn’t kill anyone Robin.”

“Glen calls socialized medicine, ‘a fungus growing on the work of others.’ “

Daisy tries to interject, but Robin goes on.

“Glen also says, ‘You lose your integrity. You lose your self-respect. You just become a dependent creature of the state’, I mean like a nothing!”

Daisy’s glance sweeps by me, and fixes on Robin, but she says nothing.

Lark lifts her glasses up a bit and looks over at Robin, who looks back.

“Yes, Lark?”

With her hand still up at her face, she drops her screens back in place.

“Nothing, forget it.”

“So where are you staying Robin?”

“I am with Boyd and his buddy Albrecht. They have a really nice guest room, Fred.”

“Robin, I didn’t know you knew those guys.”

“Oh sure Daisy, I met them at a rally for Senator Knox, raising the heat on Obama.”

“Aren’t you scared of Albrecht’s guns?”

“No Daisy, he is not scared of mine either.”

“You mean you have one too.”

“Sure, women have to stand up for themselves.”

“Oh! Ah! What kind?”

“It is a 38. Cute little thing, I’ll show you later. You can try it you if you want, Daisy.”

Lark has finished her meal. She waves down the Fez.

“Can we have separate checks please? I need mine right away.”

Indranil hurries over.

Is anything wrong ma’am?

“Yeah plenty!”

He steps forward looking closely at the table.

“Not your problem.”

She lifts her glasses for a moment.

“Service is great, food is delicious.”

The Fez comes by and hands her the check. Lark throws down a twenty-dollar bill, and gets up to leave.

“That should cover it.”

Robin looks at her as she moves off.

“What’s the hurry Lark?”

Lark says nothing and tries to get away. She is blocked by a round table of seven, all being served nearby. She comes back toward us and takes another route to the pointed arch at the bottom of the stairs.

Robin finishes the last of her samosa and swigs her remaining tea. She then holds up her bag.

“See that thin cloth on the side of my bag Daisy?”

She leans forward to touch the cloth.

The fez swings by again.

“Are you finished ma’am?”

He takes Robin’s plate.

Daisy is still looking at the bag with Robin’s hand inside.

“Yes I see.”

“Well if we have a problem in here, I can have my hand like this,

and shoot right through that cloth. Problem solved.”

“What kind of problem do you mean?”

“Who knows, Fred? There’s ISIS, Al Qaeda, undocumented crazies and rapists, druggies, I mean, the list is endless.”

Daisy chews the last of her goat in ‘flavorful’ sauce with basmati rice.

She slowly wipes her mouth on her napkin in both hands.

“That chutney is too hot for me!”

She leaves some Dahl, pushed to the side of the plate.

The walrus moustache has finished his meal and holds his companion’s hand for a moment across the table. The Fez pours the last of their wine for them. They both look up in appreciation.

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 along Walton Lane, through the bare-twig winter-woods, we can see debris everywhere from the recent Derecho. Numerous trees and branches have fallen at odd angles supporting each other in the cold gray light and dripping through warm humid air. A big red cedar blocks the lane and its massive root ball cracked open the sidewalk when it erupted. We can hear something nearby on the other side of the thick evergreen mass.

“Sounds odd.”

Lou has stopped to listen, supporting his right arm with his thumb in his back pocket, as he regards the obstacle across our path.

“Could it be a Terrier, Lou?”

There is a series of high pitched barks.

“Now that was a terrier.”

We don’t hear the strange sound again and the dog stops barking. A blue jay rasps the quiet around us with a loud call and flies across the lane.

“Yes, one was definitely a terrier but what about the other?”

We walk off the sidewalk on soggy black ground showing between dead oak leaves, twigs and shreds of bark and a flattened Mountain Dew can. Stepping around the shaggy root ball and the shallow watery hole it left in the ground, we can see a teenage girl with her phone in one hand and two small dogs pulling hard on their leashes into the green chaos blocking the lane.

She looks up and says hi, to Lou.

“Pam this is Fred, Fred, Pam Dirac.”

“Hi Pam, didn’t you used to study chess with Derwent Soot?”

“Yeah right, he was a great teacher!”

“I’ll bet he was. Are those your dogs?”

Pam has a single leash in hand with a fork at the end holding two short leashes for the two dogs.

“No they are Nadia’s. I took care of them while she was away, but I still walk them all the time.”

“Nadia?”

“Yeah, you know. She just got back from a trip. She is staying over at the Plank’s, next door to us.”

“Okay, so what is wrong with the black one? She doesn’t sound like a dog.”

“Yeah, I know Lou. That’s Meson. She got a throat injury when she was a pup. Now she sounds more like she’s quacking, querking or quarking or something”

“What is the Westie’s name?”

“Well, the Scottie is Meson and the Westie is Muon.”

“I thought the Plank’s dog was Boson, a big hound, or something.”

“Oh yeah Boson!”

Muon is trying to pull Meson towards me. Pam has to use both hands on the leash while still holding the phone in her left. Lou steps forward and holds the leash below her hand.

“Thanks, I nearly dropped my phone!”

The dogs are calmed as Lou bends over to pet Muon, but Meson stays close to Pam’s legs.

“Boson went with Liberty. I think he is in California now.”

A white SUV pulls up slowly, with smooth rounded contours, wet, and shiny like a metallic white wale. Twigs snap under the wheels with a slight ring-sound in the tires.

The dogs are pulling hard on her outstretched arm back towards the fibrous peeling bark. Pam looks at them and back at her phone.

The driver’s side window opens silently. The Westie, Muon, looks up.

Chuck Newsom is looking at us from under a NY Yankees baseball cap. He removes his dark glasses and waves with them in hand in a single sweep of his extended arm.

“How you doing?”

Both dogs seem to recognize him and bark and quark furiously at him. He puts his glasses back on, turns off the engine and steps out. As the sun comes out, the door on the other side slams shut immediately after his.

Pam pulls Muon back while Meson is pulling the opposite way towards Chuck.

A young red headed woman walks around the front of the ‘whale’ in tight white jeans and a blue sweatshirt with “Palin” in big red letters across her chest. She keeps tossing bouncy red curls out of her face and she squints with the sun in her eyes. She and Chuck hold hands and stroll over to Pam and the dogs, who greet Chuck with tails wagging. They both start up again when a third door slams shut, on the other side of the SUV from us.

A short bald man comes around the back, zipping up a red windbreaker over his protruding belly as he walks.

“Hey guys, how are you doing?”

Lou nudges me.

“You remember this guy, Fred?”

“I think it is Gloriani, Boris Tarantula’s agent.” He walks up to us with short quick steps in his pointed black shoes.

“Hi, Giuseppe Gloriani, glad to meet you. I think we’ve met before, at Lou’s party.” He talks fast in a high-pitched voice.

Giuseppe is shaking hands with Lou.

Chuck introduces his friend, Paula Pocock.

“Spring in February guys! How do you like it?” Paula tosses her hair again and raises the long red nailed index finger of her free hand to pull a loose curl from her eye.

“Yeah, great, great, great, Paula.” Gloriani stands next to Paula with his fists pushing out the pockets of his windbreaker. A breeze blows some moisture out of the beech tree above us, still full of last year’s gray brown leaves hanging like shriveled fruit.

Chuck scratches the back of his head and wipes a few drops of water from his forehead.

“Giuseppe, you know these folks?”

“Yeah sure, I met Fred before, and ah, Lou, I remember you too, from someplace.”

“Yeah it was at my party, Giuseppe.”

“You guys friends with Daisy Briscoe? You know? The stained glass artist that lives around here?”

“Oh yes, I know her well Giuseppe.”

“Yeah, right Fred, well I just got her a contract with Chuck and maybe a job out at PU Arts Center. We’ll see.”

“Yeah, that’s so great Giuseppe, I can’t wait to meet her. Giuseppe is such a great businessman. I am meeting so many interesting artists since I got with Chuck.” Paula giggles with a blazing expanse of moist dental enamel. Pam is busy looking at her phone and then at Muon and Meson, who gradually pull her away from us.

“Yeah, Paula, I know tons of people for you to meet. You know Boris or Frank? You know, Frank Vasari, out at the Arts Center right?”

“No Giuseppe, but I know Chuck has a beautiful new sculpture in front of his house. Isn’t that one by Boris, Chuck honey?”

“Sure is baby!” Chuck’s long arm pulls Paula close and she stands on tiptoe in her SanzE pink and yellow track shoes to nuzzle his neck. Chuck takes off his cap and smoothes his blond hair, and smiles down on us, nearly a foot taller than any one else.

“Either of you guys seen Tarantula’s latest works out at PU?”

“No Chuck, I haven’t seen much for years.”

Chuck gestures to Lou with his cap in hand.

“Tarantula is now making human figures out of computer circuit boards, wire and other associated hardware.”

Giuseppe looks up at him.

“Damn good investment Chuck, if I do say so myself.”

“Yeah no doubt, but I want to see some more first.”

“Oh you can! You can! You can! Next week for sure, Chuck.  How would you like that Paula?”

“Oh sure Giuseppe, you know how much I love art! Oh this is just such a great day. All this warm sun came out like it is specially for our spectacular new president!”

“Yeah, right, right, right, Paula, he is quite a spectacle, great business man…yeah, sure, but you know Paula, some of Boris’s new figures incorporate video screens of various sizes showing details of the human body; a finger joint, a foreskin, the upper eyelid. You know, real anatomical detail!”

Chuck is laughing.

“Where could I exhibit a thing like that?”

“Hey my friend, it would be great publicity! His figures showing details of male and female genitalia draw attention. You would have those people out of CUPA swarming all over it.”

“Giuseppe, I think it is a little, ahhh, kind of obscene. I mean like pornography.”

“No, no, no, Paula, listen, this is art. This is the real thing. Look at all the old masters, Rembrandt, Titian, Velasquez, and new ones like Larry Rivers, they all painted the female anatomy and some male too. Check out those fat baby putti with their ‘junk’ hanging out. Boris is doing real avant-garde Art, Art, Art, with a capital A!”

Paula pulls on Giuseppe’s arm as gets more and more excited.

“Take it easy, okay?”

Giuseppe goes quiet, and looks up into her face.

“Did you say putti or pussy, Giuseppe?”

Putti, Putti, Putti, Paula, that’s Italian, Putti from Putto. They are fat little cherubs. You got to let me take you down to the National Gallery some time. Look at some old oil paintings. You and Chuck and me, okay?”

“Well, the old masters are art. I know that, but videos, that sounds like something else to me.”

“Okay, Oaky, Okay, Listen Paula, hey Chuck you should hear this too.”

Chuck has stepped over to look at a branch that just fell on his SUV.

He pets Muon and Meson who chase after his legs along the way. Pam is focused on her phone. Chuck ignores Giuseppi’s shout. He turns back to Paula.

“Listen, Boris Tarantula, is one of the greatest artists of the twenty first century.”

He looks over to Lou and me.

“You guys could make out big if you want to invest, say 20K!”

“No thanks Giuseppe. It isn’t my kind of thing.”

“So what do you like Lou?”
“Old stuff, Norman Rockwell, or even Grandma Moses, you know, I like American art. I do have one of Frank Vasari’s early paintings.”

“Hey! Tarantula is applying for citizenship. I have him working with my lawyer, but he won’t study! He is too busy with his art!”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Lou, he is doing art in America alright?”

“I don’t know what he is doing.”

Paula is distracted by Chuck’s walking away. Giuseppe steps over to get her attention.

Paula, Paula, Paula, listen… his figure, Tarantula’s sculpture, you know, that shows close up video details of male and female genitalia. In fact that already drew the attention of CUPA. They want it removed from the gallery at PU, that, or close the place, and gallery attendance tripled the next week. You see what I mean about publicity?”

“Well it is sensational.”

Paula has drawn back. She is watching Chuck remove some twigs from the hood of his big white SUV.

“Giuseppe maybe CUPA are right…”

She shouts out to Chuck.

“Say honey! Is it alright?”

Chuck turns and smiles at her, and comes back to her.

“No problem baby.”

“Yeah, great, great, great, Paula.”

Giuseppe steps close to her.

“You know that publicity is going to raise the value. You see what I mean?”

“Well sure, Giuseppe, but that doesn’t make it art.”

“Who’s to say what art is, Paula? If I can sell it, then it is art. I promiss you that. I mean, you know, it’s a market, that is for sure, sure, sure!

Lou is backing away slightly, his face pinched his eyebrows low over his eyes. He is looking at the ground. Kicks the remains of a 9 volt battery towards the side of the road where a torn ‘big gulp’ cup lies with shreds of black plastic all tangled with twigs and other detritus.

“What’s the matter Lou? Something bothering you my friend?”

“Yeah.”

Giuseppe’s hands come out of his pockets, spread in an open gesture in front of him.

“Well, what is it my man?”

“Spring in February, this is the Northern hemisphere.”

Pam Dirac has moved further off, dexterously thumbing  her phone’s keyboard in one hand, and holding on to the leash and Muon and Meson, black and white, surging ahead of her past the parked SUV.

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 Macadamia campaign is having a post election rally led by Albrecht Intaglio at the Tentacle Coffee Bar where I met Liberty trip back in 2010. Their sign is familiar. The huge ‘T’ in the word ‘TENTACLE’ is tilted as if to support the words Coffee Bar in smaller cursive next to the long vertical.

The bar must be under new management. The walls are painted with murals of an outdoor cafe in the right hand corner and a panorama from under the ocean called, “The Octopus’s Garden”, (http://www.jango.com/music/The+Beatles) behind the bar on the left. A huge tentacle emerges from the near end of the image and arches over the bar with tiny colored lights flashing from the suction cups. The artist, Enid Starkie, signed her name on the front of a treasure chest embraced by an octopus near a cave on the seabed.

The front of a tour bus is skillfully rendered behind the small bandstand at the back, magically filling the wall facing us as we enter. It feels as if it will run right through us. The huge windscreen partially reflects the front of the café and in addition one can see mysterious passengers silhouetted in the front seats. The driver’s hand is raised, saluting patrons in the coffee bar. The saluting hand’s little finger touches the base of the tilted ‘T’ in the sign in front of the building, as if he has knocked it off balance.

“Who’s that kid waving to us over there, Fred?”

“It’s Serge, Steve.”

“Oh is it, and who is Serge?”

“You remember Steve, Derwent Sloot’s grandson?”

“Right, and that’s his mother Rosalba with him Steve.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized them, bel.”

Bel points out through the tall windows behind Serge and Rosalbaas we walk across the room towards them.

“Look at that!”

“The biggest murmuration I’ve seen around here!”

Serge has turned around to look.

“Check the coordination! They are way ahead of us!”

The oval cloud of starlings seems to turn inside out and changes from an oval to a stream heading out of sight beyond the window.

We met only briefly several years ago when he was a young boy, yet Serge recognizes me, and I remember his precocity. Now he beckons, as we walk over to them in the window seats. Rosalba sits next to him on the red banquette at a trapezoidal smoked glass table.

“Fred!”

Serge’s voice has broken.

“How are you doing Serge?”

“I am doing my junior project on technology and the Macadamia Campaign.”

He shows me his video camera with sound system hooked up to his laptop, which displays the picture and sound levels and more I can’t identify.

“See, I want to capture some of this event.”

He greets Steve and bel with bright smiles and the easy familiarity of an adult.

There can’t be more than twenty people here, including Steve Strether and bel. They drove me over, and have been following Albrecht and Boyd’s rise in the movement without being a part of it themselves.

We push two blueish gray tables together. Bel stands behind the chair opposite Rosalba.

“Hi there you two, are you Macadamia supporters?”

“My son is”

“Rosie, are you still doing pastels?”

“I’ve been doing some portrait miniatures.”

Bel puts her hand on Rosie’s shoulder.

“Congratulations!”

Rosie takes bel’s full length down coat from her and piles it on top of her own on the windowsill behind her.

“Too bad about Trump, Macadamia would have been a brilliant president.”

“Really Serge? Why?”

“For one thing he ran his campaign on line which is where the future is. He knows the score!”

“Well, Serge, I don’t think all voters have caught up.”

“They are going to have to! I mean I was teaching Tatiana’s Mom how to code over Christmas.”

Rosalba pushes back her brown hair and its highlights tumble around her ears. “That’s his girl, bel.”

“Yeah, she’s in Europe this week, and I can’t go…Bummerrr!”

Steve takes off his watch cap and black bomber jacket and lets it fall over the back of his chair. I sit next to Serge on the banquette.

“Serge, I think you’re a little premature!”

“Can’t argue that.”

Boyd Nightingale is standing at the microphone on the small bandstand at the far end of the room.

“Testing, Macadamia, one two three, testing Mac…”

The sound is clear. Serge taps his laptop, looking at the video image.

Boyd puts the mike on its stand. Albrecht comes forward and takes the mike. His hair has grown enough to be combed straight back from his forehead. His side arm is different too. Now the long barreled revolver he carried to the Guild Nominating Committee, years ago, is replaced with a small automatic, plain to see in his shoulder holster. He looks around the room. As Boyd turns to step down, his own automatic is evident under his belt in the small of his back.

“Welcome everybody! So glad to have you here bringing life and atmosphere to this occasion.”

Loud whistles and cheers rise from the audience.

“We are live at www.Macadamia.cybercarry.org

There is a murmur in the room.

Albrecht pulls at the collar of his open neck white shirt.

“Folks we have a new President elect…”

He is interrupted with booing and some one yells out,

“TWEET TWEET, TWITTER, TWEET”

Another voice shouts, “The bird brain speaks!”

A man with his gut hanging over his belt tosses a red Trump Campaign cap up on the bandstand and shouts out. “Wear that, Mother Fucker!”

Albrecht is smiling.

“Okay! Okay! Welcome, Welcome, Supporters and detractors, alike.

Welcome to a new presidency!”

“Yeah!” Shouts a voice.

“It isn’t liberal!”

“Who knows what it is Albrecht?” says a man with a shaven head leaning against the wall under a framed portrait of Ringo.

“Obama is gone!”

Big cheer from the audience.

“Right on” says Albrecht raising both arms. Then he picks up the red Trump campaign cap, and holds it in front of him.

“This guy is our president. Respect the Office!”

People start arguing with each other. Albrecht gives them a few moments while he hangs the cap from a knob on the mike stand and, and then says loudly;

“OUR MAN LOST. Okay?”

“Booooo” from the audience.

Albrecht pauses again; “So let’s deal with it!”

The heckler has left his seat and is now standing by the stage with his back to the audience silently giving him the finger.

“Sit down asshole!” shouts a big woman with multiple piercings.

“Stick it up your ass John!”

Albrecht goes on, “OUR Rights,” he pulls out his automatic and holds it up for emphasis. The heckler sits down at a chair by the stage Boyd was using earlier.

“Our initiatives, and our technical ingenuity are all ALIVE and well right here in this room. Let’s hear it for Net Neutrality!”

“Fuck the ISPs!…Stop filtering!…”

Albrecht gives the time out sign with his hands.

“Okay, Okay, I hear you, but you know, Comcast and Verizon, Google, you know, they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs, folks.”

“Booooooo. Fuck ‘em all!”

A young woman stands up in white turtleneck with a thick blond braid. She holds her rifle aloft and shouts;

“Listen! The big ISPs are getting bigger and that’s a problem. We can’t get into this now…Gun Rights! Play the video Albrecht!”

Albrecht smiles.

“It will be OUR twenty first century!”

More cheers and whistles. “Get the NSA out of my internet!”

Several others hold up their various guns in solidarity.

“We will…” Albrecht is drowned out…

“Pardon Ed Snowden!”

“Shoot the bastard!”

Albrecht goes on. “We WILL be playing the video. Boyd is getting that together, right Boyd?”

Albrecht looks down from the bandstand to his left at the heckler where Boyd was sitting and now Boyd appears from behind a curtain.

“Come on up here Boyd.”

Boyd hops up and stands next to Albrecht, both in white shirts and black pants.

“Lets give it up for Boyd Nightingale, ladies and gentlemen.”

The headlights of the bus rendered on the wall behind them are real and they flash brilliantly.

“WHOA! WOW! The man who threw the Trump cap on stage interrupts applause.

“FAGGOTS” he shouts, and he walks toward the door kicking a chair over shouting, MACA.FUCKING.DAMIA! FUCKING NUT CASE! He goes out the door.

Albrecht says, “So long fella,” in a low voice, and takes Boyd’s hand and raises it up with his own.

“Okay, let’s move on and get to our future with Macadamia in Liberty Through Technology!”

Serge looks up from his lap top and stands to cheer, as do a few others.

I notice a lot of other people are busy with their laptops, and turn to Serge.

“Serge, are you a big gun rights supporter?”

Serge is distracted, looking at his laptop.

“Excuse me, there is a lot more going on over the net than in this room!”

“What do you make of all this?’

“Kind of mindless…WHAT? Ohhhhh…

He taps his keyboard.

“My god, the site crashed!”

He looks up.

“Well Fred, I think we should all have that right, but I don’t plan on buying anything myself.”

“I am so glad to hear that!”

“Bel, I am convinced that we can’t move into our digital future too soon. The old world is holding us back, blinded by industrial pollution, and threatened by the consequences of global warming and worst of all, is ignorance. My project is about finding the way to reach escape velocity! Macadamia is the guy who has started the really big move. I am sending my material to the media lab at MIT. See if I can get him some help from there.”

Rosalba watches her son closely and then puts her arm around his shoulders.

“Serge went up there last summer. You know, on a special program for high schoolers.”

“Congratulations Serge!”

Some one in a wet suit is standing by our tables. They are wearing tanks and speak in a synthetic electronic voice through a modified facemask.

They produce plastic cups from a spring loading cylindrical holder worn on the hip. Another plastic cup comes out with each click of a small lever.

Serge takes a cup. “Cool!”

The person behind the facemask offers us coffee, which they pour from a hose extending from the tanks on their back. There turns out to be more than one hose. Of course! There is more than one tank. One has hot milk for café au lait, and a third tank produces cappuccino, which froths forth into Steve and Rosalba’s cups.

I get my wallet out. The diver moves on with a cloud of steam condensing from a valve on the cappuccino tank.

“You have to pay by phone Fred.”

I don’t have a smart phone.”

Steve has his in hand.

“I’ve got you covered Fred.”

“Was that male or female bel?”

“Female of course!”

“How can you tell Serge, with all that gear on?”

“The shape of the hips Fred. The hips are largely unencumbered.”

Steve leans forward and pats Serge on the shoulder.

“What a discerning fellow!”

Now the stage is empty. Music is growing in volume.

“You know what that is Fred?”

“Ah…no.”

That is, Formic Acid Blues, by you know who!”

Rosalba nudges Serge, “Oh come on, tell us!”

“Its our very own Toxic Blob, that’s what they played while Liberty released the ants at PU! I’ve got the vid.”

Steve and Serge do a high five across the table.

The barista behind the bar moves to the beat wearing a facemask and snorkel. Her breasts jiggle under a tight fitting gold turtle-neck, like iridescent fish scales.

Boyd and Albrecht are standing in front of the curtain talking to Frans Banning Cocq, the Militia leader. His rifle hangs by its strap from his right shoulder. His thin straw blond hair is flying out from his bald patch in a frizzy star shape. Beyond our window seats, I can see an outdoor café rendered by ‘Chaz Baudelaire’ in the corner of the wall. He signed his name on the awning as the name of the café. A display window by the entrance is drawn on one side of the corner. Outdoor tables and chairs are pictured on the other side. I can see the diver serving four Seahorses seated in the picture like customers.

“So these are the gun and Militia people huh?”

“It’s the cyber freaks too, Steve.”

“Well some of them are sort of futurists aren’t they Serge?”

“Mom, most of it is online.”

“How many meetings have you been to Serge?”

“Went to one with Tatiana last semester up in New York. That’s the only one I know of. We don’t meet in person.”

“How many were there?”

Serge is focused on his laptop and seems to have lost interest in the Rally. He doesn’t look up.

“Five or six in somebody’s loft.”

Rosalba is watching a couple, who have just come in, take off their helmets and motorcycle leather.

“Macadamia, brings some odd birds together!”

Illusions color the occasion, fixed on the wall and now flickering there. The café’s picture window in the mural, is now a video screen showing the Macadamia gun rights video that Albrecht had promised to the woman with a blond braid and rifle.

“There is no sound on that vid.”

A young woman is crouching on her bed pointing a pistol at a big intruder. He suddenly falls back revealing a dark face under his hoodie, and I can see the recoil lifting her arms.

Steve looks at bel, who is shaking her head.

“Mom, you need your phone for that.”

Serge offers his mother his phone.

“Why don’t they supply any sound?”

“Look around Fred, there’s four different vids playing. You couldn’t hear anything if they all had sound on.”

“Look at the treasure chest in the Octopus’s Garden.”

Bel points out another video appearing as if it were the treasure.

The rendered window of the tour bus has also become a flickering video screen.

Serge is looking up at the ceiling.

“Check the ceiling bel.”

At the moment there’s a high altitude view of Washington sweeping across like a city falling into the sky.

Bel looks up.

“How come I am looking up to look down?”

Steve is laughing.

“That’s politics honey.”

Feathery Touch

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 looks as if he is asleep at the wheel of his old chalky blue F150, stopped outside Diddlie’s house at the top of Oval Street. The engine is running with a rhythmic squeak, as if it were young and calling for food from its nest under the hood. Grey exhaust blends into the mist around the hollies on the edge of Diddlie’s front yard. I walk through patches of morning mist over to his window. It is cracked open and he is asleep all right, leaning back in the seat, mouth open, snoring quietly with his big fingers woven together across his gut between the unbuttoned sides of his brown leather jerkin.

“Morning Hank!”

Hank opens his eyes and runs a hand over the great egg of his bald head.

“Huh? Where the hell’s my hat?”

“Down by your shoulder.”

“How did that happen for heaven’s sake?”

He reaches back and pulls his Aberford Tweed Driving Cap out from behind his neck and puts it back on his head.

“Don’t know Hank.”

“How are you doing Fred?”

“Having a stroll in the mist.”

“Don’t know where the hell Diddlie’s gone. She said 9 AM sharp.”

“Well, it’s gone 9:20 now.”

He doesn’t turn towards me, but goes on looking out through the moisture running down the windscreen past a wet hickory leaf stuck under the driver side wiper. Two crows seem to be commenting as they watch us from the dripping oak branches across the street.

“You seen her this morning?”

“No, but I know she’s got an old friend in town.”

“She said something about moving a piece of art.”

“I didn’t know she was a buyer.”

“I don’t think it is hers.”

A Toyota Prius approaches slowly up Oval Street hill indicating a left turn, but stops short of the driveway facing Hank’s truck. The engine kicks on ending the car’s electronic quiet. Hank looks past me towards the car. The headlights go out.

“You know that silver car?”

“I think I’ve seen it here before. Don’t know whose it is though.”

The left side passenger door opens. Two long denim covered legs emerge placing black boots cautiously on the ground. The jeans have black leather fringes sewn around the bottoms.

“Fred…Hankie!”

“Daisy! What’s the hold-up?”

After Daisy gets out, the car turns onto Diddlie’s gravel driveway and parks. The passenger side window opens, and some one yells “Thanks Hank!” as it goes by. He looks over as Daisy walks towards us.

“Is it icy here?”

“No, the leaves are slippery though. Its still in the high thirties.”

“Sorry we are so late Hank. There’s ice all around my place. Had to spread grit which I couldn’t find right away.”

“Thanks for what by the way? What is this art piece Diddlie wants to move?”

“Need to move some of Lark’s stuff, Hank.”

“Lark’s stuff? What are we doing here then?”

“Well some of it is here at Diddlie’s.”

“Aha, how big?”

“Nothing you can’t handle.”

“Diddlie called me about moving a piece of art.”

“I know, Lou is away, and…”

“Yup, I am the fall back.” Hank scratches his cheek. “Done it before.”

Diddlie had gone into her house as soon as the car parked. Now she is running from her porch waiving to the Toyota departing in its own cloud, and over to Hank’s truck.

“Hi Fred.” She is out of breath and grabs my arm. “Are you going to help?”

“I guess I can help.”

“You guess? You’ve got to do more than that!”

She pulls the hood of her bright yellow sweatshirt up over her hair sparkling with moisture as passing headlights break through the mist for an instant. The words Glamour College, in purple gothic script, bend across the curve of her breast.

“I’ve got about a dozen boxes of Lark’s stuff in the spare room.”

“Is it all that political campaign material you two were distributing?”

“No it is not. It’s personal stuff, books and clothes and so on.”

Daisy isn’t wearing her bowler but she keeps her hood up.

“She’s also got a glass piece I designed for Jake, but he never picked it up.”

Diddlie starts flirting with Hank through his window. Daisy rests an arm on the truck’s side and bends slightly to look through the window.

“Hi Hank, are you going to come out honey?”

“I was telling him about the art glass.”

“That’s right Daisy’s big stained glass…yeah, mustn’t forget that.”

“So where is Lark?”

“Hank, Lark’s got her hands full at the moment.”

“It is over there behind Mr. Liddell’s hutch, all wrapped up.”

“Aha, full of what?”

Diddlie is giggling, but not Daisy.

“Lark’s got a new man in her life and he is going to move in.

Diddlie stored this stuff while they repainted.”

“Well that’s part of it.”

“They could have rented one of those containers for that, and put it in the driveway.”

“No, No, Hank.”

“What do you mean Diddlie?”

“You know Daisy.”

“What?”

Diddlie tries to communicate with a look.

“No Did., what are you talking about?”

“A few things Augie doesn’t need to see, okay?”

“Oh! enough said, Diddlie.”

“I mean we didn’t move all this stuff at once, okay?”

“Okay, but I still don’t get it Diddlie.”

Diddlie pulls on my arm and points toward something draped in a blue tarp behind Mr. Liddell’s hutch mounted on two paint-stained sawhorses.

Hank is drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while idly whistling but there’s more breath than notes coming out.

“Yeah, enough said. Time to get moving.”

Hank opens his door a crack.

“Excuse me ladies, I want to get a closer look at what we are dealing with here.”

He leaves the engine running and climbs out. We all follow him over to the carport. Hank looks in at Mr. Liddell and then reaches for the tarp.

I can see Mr. Liddell moving about in a lot of straw. Then his pulsating pink nose presses through the chicken wire door of the hutch. Diddlie rushes inside again.

Hank turns and watches her go with his hand still on the tarp.

“What’s that sound?”

“I think it is the Red Queen, Hank.”

“That doesn’t sound like a dove to me.”

Daisy coaxes Mr. Liddel, who has moved back into the privacy of a straw curtain he kicks up against the opening.

“It isn’t a dove. It’s a parrot.”

“You sure she isn’t a myna bird Fred?”

“Yes, the Red Queen is a grey parrot with a few red tail feathers.”

Diddlie appears with a tray full of empty pint glass beer mugs, which she leaves on top of a tea chest. Then she goes back in and returns with a big steaming pot, which resembles Daisy’s hammered copper coalscuttle, but it is marked on one side with ‘Enjoy’ and ‘Drink Me’ in bold silver letters on the other. She puts it down on the cement floor, and starts dipping mugs in.

“Here, have some mulled cider. Here Hank.”

He takes a hot dripping pint mug full, as a strong scent of cinnamon mixes with the damp in the air and the tea-like aroma of fallen wet leaves. Hank holds up his mug.

“Skol!”

Some mist rolls in and Diddlie strides out of the carport and disappears into the cloud. Mr. Liddell is rummaging around covered in straw. Hank pulls aside the tarp behind Mr. Liddell’s hutch with his free hand.

“This looks about the size of a door.”

“Yeah, that’s what it is. A door with three glass panels.”

“So why didn’t Jake take it?”

Daisy throws back her hood and swigs her mulled cider.

“Daisy, where’s your hat?”

“It won’t fit under this hood…I know Hankie…I feel kind of naked without it too.”

“Look fine to me kid.”

“I don’t know about Jake. He made a down payment for the materials and I never heard from him again.”

Diddlie returns with cider in one hand and a small plastic tool box in the other.

“How long ago was that?”

Hank shakes his head as Diddlie offers him the tools. So she puts the box down next to the cider pot.

“Years ago. About the time of the financial crash.”

“Aha, now where do you want to put it?”

“I am lending it to Lark until he pays it off. Then we’ll unhinge it and hand it over.”

“It’s as good as a gift, Daisy.”

Daisy shrugs. Diddlie reaches up to put her glass of cider down on top of Mr. Liddell’s hutch and starts gesticulating.

“Yeah, and good riddance! I only took it as a favor to Daisy as she was having complications.” She gives Daisy a hug. “…and because I am next door to that SOB Trip, so it would be easy to give it to him. Not that he will ever pay up!”

“Okay then. I’ll back up the truck.”

Hank moves Mr. Liddell’s hutch and saw horses away from the tarp draped door to make room to work, then walks back to his truck blowing mist into the hollies. The tailgate rattles with vibration as he goes into reverse and the squeaking turns into a shriek and then stops. He gets out of the truck and opens the hood, and sprays something into the engine and gets back in. Hank’s F150 crunches slowly over the gravel, back towards us until we can smell the exhaust with our mulled cider.

“Drink up Fred.”

“This stuff is hot Did!”

Daisy steps behind the hutch and starts clearing the tarp off the door revealing a layer of bubble wrap over the glass.

“Well, leave it here with mine to cool off.”

Diddlie leads me back into her house to the spare room stacked with cardboard boxes of various sizes.

“Okay, lets get started!”

“You are in a hurry!”

“Yes, Maximillian is coming to stay tomorrow and I want this stuff out of here before he can gnaw his way into it.”

“You have some pretty weird and unruly guests.”

“It isn’t a person Fred, Maximillian is Hank James’ dachshund. Wake up, will you!”

“Yeah okay, here’s a lovely red dawn!”

I look around the room and see a bright red lacquered wooden chest set aside from the boxes. The rounded top is cracked along its length and there’s a key in the lock with curled paper label attached by old brown string. It is written in an old fashioned script in a foreign language I don’t recognize. Diddlie’s face is close to mine looking at it with me as I open the lid.

One of the hinges is loose.

“Careful Fred.”

“It is loose but not broken.”

“Honey that is private. You shouldn’t be so nosey.”

“No, but it looks interesting.”

The inside is shiny black. Looks like inside of the lid might have been decorated with gold leaf but there are only a few traces left around the rim. Several long necklaces with large beads in black and pearl and Lapis blue are jumbled together with a gold chain on top of green, yellow and pink silk scarves.

“This must be some of the stuff from Hungary that Daisy gave Lark after she got that trunk from her Uncle Theophilus.”

“Uncle who?”

“You remember, Gladstone Theophilus! The intelligence officer in WW II.”

“Or it might have been his older brother, the one with the Hungarian Fascist minks!”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Wait a minute, look, this is just the top tray.”

“Fred, no!”

“Why not? We’ve gone this far.”

“She puts her hand on mine and pulls away.

“Much too far.”

The Red Queen flies in circling the pile of boxes fluttering wildly. There’s more cinnamon in the air with every flap.

“Don’t look up! Try not to sneeze Fred!”

Diddlie stands up.

“Why not?”

“Queenie, here Queenie! Come on sweetie, lets go back in the living room.”

The bird drops a grey feather brushing against the curtains and jingling the old brass rings against the rod.

“Off to bed! Off to bed” says Queenie landing on the highest box in the stack.

“Queenie, be careful sweetie.”

Diddlie doesn’t answer me from the doorway, where she holds out her finger for the Red Queen to find a perch. Queenie flutters close over my head to the proffered finger and I feel the feathery touch.

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

There are no sidewalks in Fauxmont and no street lights. The sun has gone down behind the tree line. A huge white cloud high in the West is still brilliant while I stand in deep shade. Willow oak leaves are swirling around in freshening evening gusts. Diddlie’s porch light is on and she sweeps, muttering in frustration as I go by.

“Why don’t you wait until the wind dies down?”

“Why don’t you come over here and help!”

I walk over through thick ivy, spreading on long vines across the driveway absorbing dead oak leaves under its own.

“Okay, here I am.”

I stop and stand behind her, as she works under the porch roof. Her sweeping action is erratic. She accidently bangs the broom into her new wicker table, with glass top. She gives up, and leaves the broom handle stretched across the width of the porch leaning against the table and turns to me.

“Fred these things get everywhere and blow into my house when ever I open the door, and track into the kitchen. The Red Queen is eating them during her fly around, and I don’t know what they’ll do to her. I’ve never had such problems before. We had that drought though August and September. That didn’t help either. Damn it! There they go, blowing right back in here over the wall.”

“Why don’t we sit down on your nice new comfortable chairs by the table, and enjoy the whole windy spectacle?”

“Aha, and just let these things go all over the place?”

“Might as well, sweeping isn’t getting you anywhere is it?”

“Ah, no it isn’t Fred.”

She turns away and goes in with her broom, followed by a few more leaves, letting the screen door slam shut. A car passes with its lights on. Something runs across the road in front of it, but I can’t tell what. It crunches among the dried leaves in the ivy, too large to be a squirrel, a cat, or a fox perhaps. Two doves are roused and fly out into the trees like shadows out of a slingshot. Diddlie is back with a bottle of wine and two glasses. The screen door slams shut again.

“Lou said he would fix that months ago. I have to get after that man.”

She puts the glasses and bottle on the table between us.

“Sorry, we drank half of this last night.”

“I’ll take what’s going Did.”

“Okay, you pour, I am going to get a sweater.”

I pull the cork, only about a third in, and pour two glasses of refrigerated Pinot Grigio. I can still hear something moving in the ivy between me, and the road. Diddlie returns with one hand in the pocket of her white cable stitch cardigan. She comes around the table and sits next to me.

“Well?”

“Well, its getting dark.”

“Well, don’t you want to know who I drank that wine with last night?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“Oh my god! Don’t you ever get excited about anything?”

“Sure.”
“Like what for instance?”

“Like my new copy of the catalogue from the Delacroix show in Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis? Is that where you’ve been?”
“No, that’s why I bought the catalogue.”

“Oh good grief, why don’t you get going and see it Fred? I mean don’t you feel you are missing out? Don’t you get excited about anything?”

“You keep saying that.”

“Saying what?”

“Asking if I get excited about anything.”

“Well, do you? It’s hard to tell you know.”

“Well I am very excited about the idea of Macadamia losing the election. His winning would be a real disaster I think!”

“Okay, it is an election year. So I’ll tell you Fred. Lark and an old friend of ours came over last night. A guy we used to know at college.

It was hysterical!”

“I’ll bet you drank more than half that bottle.”

“Oh you better believe it. We drank our way back to our twenties,

and smoked our way back into the sixties.”

“Sounds perfectly delightful.”

“Delightful! It was absolutely wild. We had some help from the Stones, and that guy Augie likes, the jazz guy…ah, Ornette Coleman, and Lark danced topless in the kitchen. Do you believe that?”

“Sure, I’ll bet I know who you were with too.”

“and how would you know that?”

“Because a couple of weeks ago I found Lark in the H Bar with Niels Plank and her old lover, August Carmichael.”

“Oooooo, so you met our sex object!”

“Your sex object?”

“Okay, well I am telling you, even with his beautiful blond hair all short and grey, and his kaki pants and polo shirt and a lot of mileage on him, he’s still hot.”

“Okay, what was he doing at Glamour College in 68?”

“He was reading his work to our poetry class. I think professor Lang wanted him for herself. I mean he was young, cute and innocent, well seemed like it. Don’t even know how she found him. Lark wasn’t in that class and she got him.”

“That could be problematic!”

“No not at all. He was kind of shy at first. I still love his deep sexy voice though.”

“Oh yes, his effect on Lark was easy to see.”

“And you know what Fred? He’s intellectual, I mean he is more intellectual than you, but he is alive and exciting!”

“Well, this corpse here was not unmoved by the quality of his mind or his physical grace.”

Diddlie giggles and falls silent, sipping wine and then shaking my arm and pointing over to the table beyond her reach, to indicate her glass needs refilling. I pour. We say nothing. The wind is up and it is darker. Another car goes by with its lights on and we can see leaves blowing through the light beams. I get up and walk out from under the roof of the porch.

“Hey where are you going?”

“To see if that big cloud is still there.”

“What big cloud?”

Diddlie runs out to join me.

“Where?”

I point to the Eastern sky but the light has dimmed and the cloud has moved. It is one dark shape among many. We start walking through the dark to the road.

We walk up to Wicket Street and keep to the middle of the road, so as not to fall in the ditch, and keep on into the evening light. Diddlie has her arm in mine.

“You know, Theo is procrastinating over helping Boyd find his true Father.”

“I am told he is still interested in Lark.”

“Oh wicked! Who said that? Well he’s going to have a long wait.”

“Why?”

“Because Augie has done his gig in New York and he has come back to live with Lark.”

“Live in? I thought he was more of a troubadour.”

“No she has proposed to him.”

“What about his wife?”

“They lost her in an accident quite a while ago.”

“They?”

“Yeah Augie has two grown kids, one, the girl, is teaching college the other, I think, has a startup in silicon valley.”

The wind is in the hickories and we are pelted with the last nuts of the season.

“You heard Max is with Nadia now, right?”

“Yes, so she ditched Chuck?”

“Oh Chuck, he’s a hunk, but he’s a hunk of boredom.”

“What kind of boring?”

“Like business boring. All he talks about are his deals and his money and all this financial stuff, like ‘short selling’ what ever that is.”

“Well Nadia was taken with him.”

“Yeah, she’s taken his money, or a bunch of it at least.”

“Have you spoken to Chuck since?”

“Yeah, he called me trying to find his wife.”

Another gust knocks twigs and branches out of the trees. We walk more slowly, snapping twigs and crunching acorns under foot as we go under the red oaks.

“So you know him quite well.”

“No not really.”

I can see a flashlight in the distance. It seems to wink with the owner’s movements. Diddlie says something.

“What? The wind carried your voice away. You have to face me when you speak.”

“I said, look, fireflies!”

Diddlie is tugging on my arm.

“No, I think its some one coming.”

“Oh look, there’s two of them.”

We walk on in silence. Diddlie trips on a fallen branch trying to catch her balance by holding on to my arm, but I trip too and we collapse together slowly on to the ground, she on top of me.

“Oh Sweety, are you alright?”

“Mind your sweater Did, it’s caught in the twigs.”

We disentangle ourselves from the broken branches and twigs and sit in the road.

“Why did we walk into this storm?”

“I thought you wanted to go for a walk.”

“No, I thought you did. You led the way.”

“It’s not a storm, just autumnal gusts to clear the leaves out of the forest canopy.”

“Well, there’s no stars and no moon, just wind dust and god dam skinny little leaves in my house.”

“There’s people coming up soon.”

“And I thought we were going to have a romantic evening under the moon and stars with wine…Ha!”

We are engulfed in swirling leaves for a moment, then the air is still and quiet enough to hear an acorn hit the ground nearby.

“Wow, that was kind of fun!”

“See, enjoyment was my object to begin with!”

“So what were we talking about?”

“Chuck Newsom I think. Did you tell him where his wife had gone?”

“I told him to call Lark and gave him her number because she found out the day after they took a night flight out of Dulles. She found out when she saw his stuff was gone, and Niels, yeah, Niels told her about Nadia months ago.”

“He did?”

“Well you know Niels was on the building site a lot, working with Max. He’s such a dumb-ass, and he drinks way too much and he didn’t even realize the sensitivity of it. He just says stuff.”

“Ouch!”

“Yeah. Ouch! Lark left me a real scared message on my answering machine. I lost my cel phone and I was out looking for it over in Lou’s yard.”

“Look its bel and Steve!”

Steve shines his flashlight up from under his chin so we can see who he is, with a strange effect of illuminating his nostrils.

“Why are you two sitting in the middle of the road?”

“We fell here.”

Diddlie sings into the night.

“Why don’t we do it in the road?”

(https://www.google.com/#q=why+don%27t+we+do+it+in+the+road+beatles)

Steve stoops to help Diddlie up, but she doesn’t move at once.

“So sweety, here’s your chance!”

“Okay guys, are you sure you want an audience?”

“Yeah, cold, gritty and exposed.”

“Oh where’s your sense of adventure Fred?”

Diddlie takes Steve’s hand and gets up.

Bel embraces Diddlie.

“Bel why are you wandering around in this storm?”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know, ask him. He brought me out here. I was just trying to sweep leaves off my porch.”

I get up and drag the fallen branch to the side of the road as Steve shines his flashlight and kicks some remaining bits of wood out of the way. Another gust blows dust in our faces.

“Fred, this was a dumb idea. Lets go back to my porch. Steve, bel, you want to come sit on the porch?”

“Fine, we’re right with you.”

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 don’t recognize Lark Bunlush when I get to the H Bar early to meet Lou for our weekly lunch. The place is nearly empty and smells a little stale, seems darker than usual too. Lark’s head looks different. Her hair is bunched up at the back. It always used to hang from her head in a thick grey spread like a lampshade. She has a small black lock combed back from her forehead in single vivid stripe above the left eye. She is sitting next to Niels Plank. I don’t know the other guy, and move to the right to say hello to Niels.

Before I can order a drink from the bartender arranging his stock at the other end, Lark turns towards Niels and me. She introduces me to Augie Carmichael, on her left and to Niels. She is wearing sunglasses and her face looks puffy.

“Yeah, how you doing Fred? I remember you from somewhere.”

“Probably around the neighborhood. The Trip’s driveway perhaps.”

“Why don’t we move to that table Lark?”

“Sure Augie. Lets get away from TVs and election scandals.”

Augie helps her off her stool and brings her drink over to a nearby round table with lots of chairs where we all sit down with room to spare. The sun hasn’t come around to the bay window yet and we don’t have to arrange ourselves to avoid the usual glare in our aging eyes.

“Fred, Augie and I … We go back a long way.”

Augie offers a powerful well shaped hand in greeting.

His hair is cropped short all over and his high forehead is tanned. He looks at me with watery blue eyes under thick lids.

“What you drinking Fred?”

“Bass Ale please.”

Augie goes to the bar and brings back a straight pint glass with a thin head spilling over the brim as he puts it on the table in front of me. He fits his arm around Lark’s shoulders in one easy movement as he sits down. He speaks in a low gentle voice with his face close to hers and puts a finger on the bridge of her nose where the pink and yellow frames rest.

“When are you going to come out from behind those shades baby?”

“Not yet.”

“So how far back do you two go?”

“We lost our virginity together Fred and have been inseparable ever since.”

Niels swigs his beer, takes the glass from his mouth and coughs.

“That’s heavy shit! You never told me that!”

“Well, I had no reason to discuss it.”

Augie devotes himself to Lark.

“We started a publication, I think it was called Shrinkwrap, you remember?”

“It still is honey.” She put her forefinger on his lips.

“Are you still writing for our word-child?”

“Yes, sometimes, I sold it and now it’s a website.”

Augie sips his beer. We are all silent for a few moments. I can hear thebartender working with glasses.

Augie puts down his beer and moves his face close to Lark’s ear.

“Hey, you still know that other girl, ah, Diddlie, what was her last name?”

“Drates, Augie … after me, you had her and all the other hens in her coop!”

“Well okay, those were the pretty birds of the Glamour College cage, and you had some on the side too. I know that, but we were solid.”

“Right I know, I know, we are solid.”

“Yeah we are! It was right before you and Diddlie were sharing that dude from Princeton, who had such a high opinion of himself.”

“Oh right, we had some fun with him!”

Niels belches and leans forward to look at Lark.

“But you just said your are inseparable.”

Augie has moved back from his intimacy at Lark’s ear and on the bridge of her nose, where soft reminiscence flows, as if Niels and I aren’t here.

He looks up into the distance, through the gloom of the bar room to the walls and beyond:

“But for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections

Which, be they what they may

Are yet the fountain light of all our day

Are yet a master light of all our seeing.”

(http://www.bartleby.com/101/536.html)

Lark grabs his forearm, “He is still quoting Wordsworth!”

“My first love, British romantic poetry!”

Augie returns his gaze to our party and to Lark. He holds up Lark’s hand clasped in his, to salute the poet. His sleeve falls down his arm revealing his watch mounted on a silver bracelet jeweled with blue green turquoise.

Niels stands up, swaying a little and raises his nearly empty glass and addresses the beginning of the lunch crowd as they gather at the bar.

“This is Doctor Augustus Carmichael, my brother, with a Phd in English from Berkeley and he is a poet and Viking spirit warrior, and …” He mutters something I can’t hear.

“Hey Niels, I don’t have Phd, I am ABD.”

“I don’t care if you are ABC brother. You told me to read and contemplate the poets, back in the day, when you were a Prof.”

“Yeah, visiting writer gigs, for a few extra bucks. There’s too many academic egos in that game, kind of crowding out the art.”

“Well, shit, artists have bigger egos than anybody.”

“Right Niels, but that’s art not the academy, its endowment, its new buildings and its bureaucracy and politics, AND underpaid adjuncts doing too much of the teaching.”

Niels, growing unsteady, spills the last drops of his drink down his shirt as he sits down again.

“Niels, what have you been reading?”

“Shit, I don’t know, the Bible I guess.”

Augie is looking at Lark and now at me.

“Our souls have never parted. You know what I mean Fred?”

“Sort of, I mean, have you been in touch over the years?”

“We are never out of touch, out there in the ‘soul space’.”

Lark waves at me, from across the table.

“Fred, that’s where the action is.”

“Okay Lark, I don’t get it though.”

Augie puts his hand on my shoulder, and looks into my face.

“I’ll tell you Fred. I was driving East from Tucson last week and came thru DC on the way to a reading in New York. So I am walking down the Mall on a little nostalgia trip and who comes up out of Smithsonian Metro as I walk by? This one here!”

He moves back and gives Lark a big smooch and knocks her glasses askew. Niels gets up for another beer, but stops, steadying himself on the back of Lark’s chair and facing me.

“See Fred, my bad ass Dad took off with Nadia Brazoff. When was it?

Last week or something, right Lark?”

“I don’t know, that creep didn’t tell me!”

“Hey the dude was too busy!”

“Shut up Niels! I didn’t know where he was and went down to the Mall to check out the Buddha show at the Sackler.”

“The Buddha show?”

“It’s called the ‘Body of Devotion’ Fred.”

Augie lets go of Lark’s wrist.

“The Cosmic Buddha’, interactive exhibit, real heavy technology too.”

Niels has half turned away, but is still listening.

“That’s pretty awesome cosmic shit Augie!”

“You see Fred, the cosmos sends me here at the precise moment when I am needed and sets up a rendezvous.

‘Whether Buddhas arise oh priests, or whether Buddhas do not arise, it remains a fact and fixed and necessary constitution of being, that all its elements are lacking ego…”

(http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/bits/bit-4.htm)

Niels goes to get another drink at the bar. Lark grins, “The Three Characteristics, Hinayana! I’ll bet Fred is thinking coincidence!”

“Well that’s what it is! We are not in control. We perceive coincidence all over the place. That’s how it is!”

“So you and Max have split.”

“He’s split to Bulgaria with Nadia Fred, I am still here.”

“That’s different Lark. What’s in Bulgaria?”
Augie’s voice deepens with his more confidential tone.

“Roses! Doesn’t that make sense Fred? Not quite so red roses. You see what I mean?”

“Right Augie the Soviets are history.”

Lark puts her hand up in her hair and twirls a few strands in her fingers.

“Max thinks it’s a business opportunity.”

“To Max, everything he does is a business opportunity.”

Niels spills some beer sitting down again next to Lark.

“He’s getting his romantic rocks off in Thrace!”

“What do you know about Thrace, Niels?”

“Remember, you turned me on to the Oddessey.”

“Did I? I haven’t lived in vain!”

Augie looks down at his lap.

“Oh! The corny rose red petals of romance.”

Lark grabs Augie head in both her hands and brings herself up so their noses touch.

“Fucking, you mean!”

“Well that’s all part of business, my long lost love.”

My ring tones sound. It is a text from Lou. “Sorry can’t make it. See you at the party.” I can’t think what party he means but forget it for now.

“Shit, I’ve known Augie since about eighth fucking grade. You were working for Daddy Max.”

“That’s right, I was doing some carpentry and some readings around DC about that time. It was Nixon time, and the hippies were still hanging in Georgetown, the war was driving us insane, and grass was green all over.”

“Yeah I remember you guys smoking the profits up at Great Falls, thinking me and Werner didn’t know!”

“I told you it was a bonfire Niels, and we all saw the smoke over across the rocks.”

“What ever you say Augie, my brother!

“Niels have you finished building that property down by the river?”

“No way Fred, we have fucking six months to go on the Newsom place.It’s a goddam city!”

Lark is in the midst of a long drink and puts her glass down suddenly. Takes off her glasses and rubs her red eyes.

“That’s where your father went to hell!”

“Well, he split with Mom when I was like, fucking snot nose three years old.”

Lark is trying to get up from her chair.

“Lark, Lark, Lark, stop.” Augie embraces her and she leans into him from her chair, as he leans towards her.

“Augie listen man, Nadia had her cantilever spread for Max at every fucking opportunity. It’s like the finest piece of engineering since fucking Howard Hughes got hot Jane Russell rigged. I am telling you. Now the old man is selling our company to Dodrechts. Me and Werner are staying on as co- directors.”

“I always thought he would leave the company to you two, not sell it.”

“Fred, I got no complaints brother. The selling price takes care of all three of us Planks plus we brothers get stock Dordrecht options, good pay, golden parachutes, the whole package. We are happy as pigs in shit.”

“Niels, there’s another part of the package, you left out my man.”

“What’s that Augie?”

Lark is roused again, breaks out of Augie’s embrace and takes up the front of Niels’ shirt in her fingers, getting behind a couple of buttons, and closes them in her fist.

“Supulveda! you greedy little shit!”

Niels has his hand around Lark’s wrist, to pull back and save his shirt front from tearing.”

“Okay Lark! Okay! God, what’s the big deal?”

“What do you think happened to the Williams and the Scroggins and the other families who used to live where the Newsome place is going up?”

“We bought them out Lark, we bought…”

“Like hell…”

Augie gets up and stands behind her chair. He puts an arm under each of her armpits and lifts her up out of her chair. She raises her knees to her chest and Augie moves her into the vacant chair next to him, on the other side, away from Niels.

“Okay, put it here. Put your ass in that chair.”

Lark doesn’t struggle, and allows her self to be lowered into the chair.

“You are going to get us kicked out of here, manhandling me like that.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time!”

“Okay people, let’s settle down now, okay?”

“We’re cool Niels, we’re cool.”

“Yeah, okay so who is Supelveda?’

“Fred, he’s got a ‘rent-a-cop’ business, I forget the name. They have a contract with with Dodrechts. He put together a bunch of Israeli Russians, or Mafia or Russian mafia, I don’t know which, maybe both and a few ex narcos.

Lark interrupts Augie. She bangs a fist into her palm repeatedly as she speaks.

“Yeah, and dogs, and mace, and all these guys are over two hundred pounds, ugly, violent, lowlife, rapist, thugs!”

“Supelveda is a bad ass hombre. You know, ‘Guerra Sucia’, and all that.”

“I get it Augie, ‘Dirty War’, right?”

“Fred, I’m talking about what went down when Macadamia sold his estate to the Chilean General, and Juanita …”

Lark bangs the table again, now with the flat of her hand and spills the drinks.

“I published some of that story and I got more I can’t substantiate, Juanita is too scared to talk and those dope dealing rapists got away with it thanks to my government, thanks to Nixon!”

Augie has his arm around Lark’s shoulders again. He gently pulls some gray hair off her face.

“Ease up, will you, you’re spilling our fun all over the table.”

“What about the blood those creeps spilled? Look what we have done since 9/11. The anniversary was last month right? Three thousand people from all over the world were killed in New York, and more of us in Pennsylvania and here in DC.”

“Lark! Lark! Stop!”

“No no no, I am going to finish; since 9/11 we have killed how many mothers, fathers, and children, brothers and uncles and grannies, over there? How many? Where’s their memorial? What about that? What about the bloody Saudis who made it all happen? What about that?”

“I hear you, okay?”

Augie voice pours into Lark’s ear, his lips touching her hair. Lark is still agitated. She pushes Augie away, and gets up, her face is wet. She walks slowly towards the restrooms. Augie is soaking up the flood on the table as it drips on the carpet and the aroma of hops keeps memories flowing. Niels sits back in his chair staring into the air, one hand up on the back of his neck.

“So Niels, is Max past the trouble he was in with Judge Grackle and the subpoena to Fulton Furay for his sources?”

“Oh Sherman got that shit settled Fred. Shit, I don’t know about Fulton. Maybe he is still fighting”

Augie looks over at me with wavy lines deepening along his brow.

“You know about that?”

“Not the details, I just know it sounded serious with that incident in the parking lot, and all.”

“Yeah, it was serious Fred. It was dead serious. You know big money speaks in many voices. So the money starts talking and moving under Shrowd’s direction. He draws the map. You know who am I talking about?”

“Oh yes, Sherman Shrowd, attorney at law.”

“Right he’s the man, and all that stuff got smoothed out in a deal,you know.”

“Well, sort of. I never could figure out whether Jake’s house went into foreclosure or not. Beside, what did the Planks have that got Newsome, Jake Trip and Macadamia involved?”

“You’ve got it Fred!”

“I mean what else happened?”

“Don’t ask me Fred, don’t ask.”

“It was Newsome and Sherman Fred.” Niels leans forward bumping his glass but it doesn’t spill. “Sherman makes shit go away and other shit happen. That’s his thing. Shit, Max and Werner built Trip’s place. That’s where it all started.”

I look at Augie.

“Don’t ask me!”

Lark walks up behind Niels and puts her hands on his shoulders. She whispers in his ear, and kisses his cheek. Augie has finished wiping the table with a pile of paper napkins he got from the bar. He looks over at Lark and Niels.

“Urpsky dirpsk!”

Lark sits down again between Niels and Augie where she was before, and holds Augie’s hand in both of hers.

“Urpsky dirpsk!” Lark’s last syllable merges with her laughter and theyboth continue laughing uncontrollably at their in joke.

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

Mr. Hoffman has put TVs in the H Bar for the first time. Three big screens one at both ends of the long bar and one in the middle. They run political commentary with subtitles and the volume down. One can rent wireless headsets for $5.00 or get a lifetime usage for $100.00.

Albrecht is sitting with me chatting about the upcoming election. I had remarked on the dismal coverage I think we get at election time.

“Fred, my friend, don’t get distracted by the prevailing goofology.”

“So you are not impressed either.”

“Look Armand has got the media’s number and he dials it up every chance he gets.”

“He knows how to get attention alright.”

“That’s his thing and theirs. He is a celebrity candidate. Now Hillary is stuck in the stone-age giving wonk headed speeches, and also spouting vague liberal platitudes that no one cares about, and that’s what is covered.”

“Yes, what they say is news.”

“No it’s not news Fred. It is nonsense and as old as the hills, and that’s what the repeating media keep repeating.”

“Isn’t this the trap, what ever some one in the news says, becomes news, while important issues get buried with skillful PR.”

“That’s why we, in the Macadamia campaign, are way ahead. We have it all on line, a two way street, we talk and tweet, and America talks back!”

“I think you may be a little too far ahead, the TV age isn’t over yet.”

“Fred, go to the ‘Think Right’ web site. That’s where right thinking people go for real news.”

“Wait a minute Albrecht, look at that headline on the TV!”

Albrecht looks up at the nearest screen and reads aloud to me. “

“ Dr. Sardanapalus dead in yacht scandal”

“The news anchor appears and tells the story:

“Presidential candidate, Armond Macadamia’s doctor and confidant of a lifetime, Dr. Sardanapalus, has died on Mac’s yacht, Nineveh, in Biscayne Bay, Florida.”

We see a picture of his three decker yacht, with black hull and white superstructure and red funnel.

“That thing looks like an old fashioned steam yacht doesn’t it?”

“Fred, our man is a conservative!”

The TV commentary continues in white letters across the bottom of the screen. Some words drop out in the lightest parts of the image.

“Our special corres…., Leticia Lantern .. …. at Biscayne Bay with Gordon Byron, Macadamia’s campaign spoke…..”

Gordon Byron appears on screen in an open neck white shirt, khakis and aviators, and a white baseball cap. He is holding the brim against the breeze.

“Gordon, your comment.”

“I can tell you this about the Dr.’s tragic death. Doctor Sardanapalus died in the owners suit with a nurse in attendance after he had a seizure.”

“How long had they been friends?”

“He met Sar when he was married to Teresa, Countess Guiccioli. That was over forty years ago.”

“What about the story on Shrinkwrap saying he had the three naked underage girls with him.”

“That is mischievous fabrication. Just dirty politics, trying to tarnish Mr. Macadamia’s reputation during the election campaign by going after his close friend.”

“Well Gordon, Fuzzy Leaks reports he was romping with naked under age Asian boys.”

“Leticia, why do you repeat these lies?”

“Gordon, the public deserves an explanation.”

“Look, if there were naked girls or boys in there then they were directed by a Martian and two Vulcans.”

“Okay, thank you Gordon, This is Leticia Lantern reporting from Biscayne Bay Florida.”

Steve Strether is standing by the empty stool next to me on the other side from Albrecht.

“Fred, this any one’s seat?”

“All yours. What you got there, a tablet?”

“Yup, I was sitting over there and didn’t notice you guys at first.

“Look at this link, bel sent me.”

He taps the link and hands me the tablet.

It is all in French, but Steve translates from the news item in ‘Photo Français Delacroix’.

“This picture is said to have been taken by one of the Sardanapalus girls with her smart phone as the seizure began, and shortly before his death.”

“Here Albrecht, have you seen this?”

We all look at the picture together.

The Dr.’s face is partially hidden by one girl’s elbow. He is obviously naked. The lower part of another girl is visible stretched across his groin and there is a red sheet wrapped around her lower legs. The picture also shows she has a prominent birthmark on her left buttock.

“Well guys, that old man could be anybody. Besides, you know … it’s the French.”

“Know what Albrecht?”

“Fred, sex is their thing. I don’t believe it is real anyway.”

“Why not?”

“The wallpaper in the background of the French picture is nothing like the walls of the owner’s suite in that old boat. I am sure it is all polished teak.”

“Albrecht, it makes sense they would take a picture to show no one killed him.”

“Steve, that picture doesn’t show much.”

“Well, it looks like a rerun of the Leticia Lantern show is up next on TV.”

“The weekly Leticia Lantern show is brought to you by Spong Products.”

We hear two tones of a gong, and then the voice over says,

“When it comes to your beloved seniors,

you can’t go wrong with Spong!”

Two more gong sounds. A trim woman in a leotard smiles at the camera and turns away to get on a rowing machine. She tells us she is 72 and still ready to row and ready to go, then rows vigorously. The camera pulls away.

Leticia appears sitting across from her guest, Gordon Byron.

“Gordon, welcome back to the show, here in Key Biscayne.”

“Always glad to be here Leticia.”

“Gordon, why doesn’t Mr. Macadamia come on the show himself?”

“He doesn’t do TV appearances. We think the medium distorts rather than shows the American people what they need to know.”

“Really Gordon, do you feel distorted right now?”

“No not at all. I do occasional appearances on TV for Mr. Macadamia, when he feels it is necessary.”

“and why is your appearance on my show necessary at this moment?”

“Because Leticia, we respect, your show, is the right place to raise and settle important questions when there is no other way.”

“What’s your question Gordon?”

“Why is the tragic death of this great doctor being covered with garbage instead of real reporting?”

“Well Gordon it is a sensational story, and we both know that’s what the audience wants!”

“Leticia, we both know that good reporting is fair and balanced. Where is the coverage of Dr. Sardanapalus’s services to Syrian orphans and his long running practice in Calcutta, for instance?

“Gordon, let’s look at this clip from CBS News.”

They run a clip from Sixty Minutes, saying it aired in 2010.

“We are here at the famous Sardanapalus Clinic in Calcutta to talk to Dr. Gupta, the founding director.”

“Doctor, how long were you director?”

“From the beginning in 1991 until 2002.”

“And how long did you practice with Dr. Sardanapalus here?”

“Oh never here. He wasn’t practicing here you see. He was our consultant.”

“Okay, were you in regular consultation?”

“Ah, no, I have never spoken to him.”

“Right, so what is the connection between this clinic and the Dr.?”

“Oh, well, you see, he donated the funds to start us up and keeps the clinic going.”

“So the Sardanapalus Clinic is named after the donor.”

“We are going to take a break now for this message.”

The voice over says.

The Liticia Lantern Show is brought to you by Spong!

“Here is a new Spong product you have to have!”

We see a picture of a wheel chair with a blond woman sitting in it. “This chair has hydropneumatic suspension, just like a luxury car! Spong helps you gently out of your seat when the time comes!

and it costs less than you think.”

We see the blond woman pull a lever on the side of the chair and the seat slowly tilts up at the back and down at the front while the cushion also moves forward from the back. The blond woman gets up slowly into the arms of a younger woman with the close attention of three children who clap with joyful expressions on their faces.

“You see! when your favorite seniors need a little help.

You can’t go wrong with Spong.”

A group of healthy looking ‘seniors’ in front of a bed of roses in full bloom, all wave from their chairs, with perfect ad-ready smiles.

A two-tone gong sounds.

“The sound of success is Spong!”

“Here we are, back with Gordon Byron” says Leticia, and the camera zooms in. Her face fills the screen, showing her unblemished complexion and perfectly aligned moist white front teeth under her deep red upper lip, in an unforced smile.

“Gordon, on Slur.com, Mac has said that certain sections of this country are going to have to get back in their place.”

“Yes we put that out, in September, as things were heating up!”

Yes Gordon, and when asked, who do you mean by ‘certain sections’ on local tv. You said, ‘We all know that don’t we folks?’”

“Correct, that is the right answer for that demographic in that part of the country.”

“Okay Gordon, and who are you talking about now?”

“We are talking about a situation where things are just out of line.”

“Who is out of line?”

“Well, Hillary and Trump are both out of line. Saying they are going to retrain people or bring back those jobs from over seas. Retrain for what jobs? Those jobs are taken by technology!”

“Are you coming out against technology?”

“We are against job loss what ever the cause, and the lies being spread about it.”

“Okay Gordon, getting back to those ‘sections of the country’. You were quoted on the blog, ‘Think Right,’ ‘that the over educated sections of the country are going to be wiped out by the Macadamia campaign, which speaks real plain English, not Spanish, not Chinese, but American English’ ”

“Yes that was a direct quotation. English is the nation’s language.

The Constitution wasn’t written in Portuguese or in French or Spanish.”

We interrupt this broadcast with a statement from Mr. Macadamia.

Here’s our special correspondent Glen Gazburg in San Clemente California.

“This is Glen Gazburg on the tarmac at Mr. Macadamia’s estate here in San Clemente.”

The screen shows a group of figures walking away from the camera towards a waiting helicopter. Glen has his back to the noise and backwash from the rotors, but he is not easy to hear.

“Mr. Macadamia never does TV appearances, but he said to me, on the record, just moments ago, that he ‘is heartbroken at the loss if his fine old friend.’ Back to you Leticia.”

Thank you Glen, now back to our tape of the Calcutta interview with Dr. Gupta.

“Doctor, tell me, who was the donor?”

“I don’t think it was Dr. Sardanapalus’s money. No, it was donated in his name by the American, Mr. Macadamia.”

“Ah Leticia, Leticia just wait a minute. That interview is a gross distortion of the truth.”

“Gordon, that’s what the record shows.”

“I respect this show too much to let that go by. Of course Dr. Sardanapalus didn’t talk to Dr. Gupta. Dr. Sardanapalus was in regular contact with the doctors in the operating room, and at the bedside through Sard-Surgical, our own video link.”

“Thank you Gordon, that is the last word on today’s show.”

Albrecht gets up and pays his tab. He turns to Steve and me before walking out.

“Fred, like I said, don’t get distracted by the prevailing goofology.”

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. 

 Theo Tinderbrush pulls up at the Hadron Shopping Center opposite me just as I get out of my car. We are both heading for lunch. I follow him out of the heat and the sound of helicopter rotors beating the humid air over head. He gallops down the steep cool stairs to the entrance of the Emperor Babur Restaurant, in the basement, under The Ab. and Cheek Fitness Center. Hundreds if not thousands of different colored strings hang across the windows on either side of the Bose Gallery’s glass door at the bottom of the stairs. Unsurprisingly the show is called, “Strings Attached”. Under the announcement I am told in Copper Plate Gothic Bold, ‘reading Buddhist scripture inspired the artist’s interest in pain and attachment’.

Indranil, the manager is standing to the right under the pointed arch at the entrance to the Emperor Babur. When he sees Theo he walks out and greets us with his palms together, and a bow.

“Ah Mr. Theo, are you having the buffet today?”

“As always.”

Theo shakes his hand and Indranil then shakes mine with a brilliant smile under his thick black moustache. He turns and points out a table then leads the way.

“Please, this way.”

Walking past occupied tables in the busy dining room, I can see Frans Banning Cocq sitting across the room by the wall with Albrecht. The top of his head is bald with long strings of light blond hair falling from the back over the collar of his red tee shirt.

Albrecht doesn’t notice us although he is facing this way. Theo puts his brief case down on his chair.

“I left Boston about five hours ago and haven’t had a bite to eat since.”

“Not even peanuts?”

“They don’t do free peanuts any more.”

“Your case looks heavy.”

“Yeah, conference materials.”

We go back to the Buffet in front of the bar. Theo opens the top of the first chafing dish and yellow scented rice fills the air with saffron.

“So Fred, what’s new in Fauxmont?”

“I haven’t seen a copy of the neighborhood newsletter in over a year.”

“Haven’t you got the web address?”

“No, I used to get a copy in the mail.”

Theo loads his plate of rice with dhal, curried goat, and now butter chicken.

He is about to close the lid on the chafing dish,

“You doing any of this?”

“Always Theo.” He leaves it open for me.

“Fred there hasn’t been a paper news letter since 2014, now it’s an email attachment or you can see it on FoxmontHood.org.”

“Sounds Hiphop!”

“No, Macadamia! Albrecht has put a link in there to the Armond Macadamia campaign site.”

“Albrecht is sitting over there, look.”

“Yeah, is that the militia guy with him?”

“I thought Macadamia’s campaign had folded.”

“That’s what the media say, but I checked out the link and ended up on Shrinkrap.”

“Albrecht for Macadamia? I thought he would be for Trump!”

“Fred you have to get on line! Shrinkrap has a piece saying his campaign never did fold. It reorganized.”

“So where did that story come from?”

“Who knows? So much info out there is simply mistaken or designed to mislead. One thing about air travel, it gives me time to browse on my tablet.”

“Theo, Mac is tied up in the Axel Ensor deal in Europe.

“I saw that too, about the tower in Brussels … by the way, I want to talk to that Militia guy, ah, what’s his name again?”

“Banning Cocq.”

“I should have remembered. You know, Daisie told me that’s the name of one of the leaders in some painting by Rembrandt.”

“I think she’s right, it’s called the Night Watch.”

“Well she’s our local Rembrandt, she ought to paint him.”

“She could use the commission.”

“Any way, being a militia guy, he is snuggling up to Macadamia. I’ll bet that’s why he is lunching with Albrecht, you know, getting his ‘troops’ in line!”

We return to our table and the Hispanic waiter with a turban offers us a wine list, which we refuse. Theo requests tea. The turban serves us both aromatic tea he calls Masala Chai. The waiter turns to serve others.

“I thought Chai was Russian!”

“Fred, it is also Hindi and Turkish and some other languages use it too.

“I don’t see how Armond Macadamia can run Theo. Mac is getting old. I hear he needs Jake Trip to take care of business for him.”
“Fred, he doesn’t have to do much he can’t do from his office. For instance his campaign is using Fibonacci Corp’s enormous PR databases to identify various constituencies.”

Theo’s red hair is graying, his gut keeps him back from the table.

“You sound pretty cynical today.”

“Not at all! My researches on the web led me to Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, you can catch it on You Tube. I’ll send you the link if you are interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s) It’s about Edward Bernays, called the father of Public Relations.”

“Not a well known name.”

“No, given his extraordinary influence, he should be up there with Einstein and Freud, household names.”

“So famous, and so little understood!”

“Iconic”

“Come to think of it what was his influence?”

“He realized that most people react emotionally and intuitively, not thoughtfully when it comes to voting and buying products.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I think it is historical fact. Just think about all the successful promotions in our lifetimes?”

“Well yes, our candidates are presented just like products.”

“Way back in 1952, Eisenhower reluctantly did a series of tv spots for his presidential campaign. He felt it was beneath him to do ads, but said he  “Its time for a change” in various contexts. (https://www.c-span.org/video/?188176-1/eisenhower-answers-america) Sound familiar?”

“You notice how successful modern candidates have all run on change?”

“and the more things change Theo, the more they stay the same!”

“Change is a wonderful slogan. Makes you think things will get better, if the pitch is right.”

“Okay, so what is Mac offering.”

“His whole campaign is on line, no tv spots.”

Oh so the Fib. can craft messages precisely to relatively small groups.”

“Individuals even!”

“The Republicans have chosen. Isn’t it too late?”

“He is running as an Independent, a sort of post party candidate, with a variety of messages, a lot of nostalgia centering around strength.”

“Military strength…”

“What else?”

“American soaps are big and emulated all over the world. American Hiphop is catching on too, I have heard both Christian and Moslem Rappers. How’s that for power?”

“Yeah, but that is soft, commercial and cultural power.”

“Oh yes, military power is sexy.”

“Profitable too.”

“Well, young people all over the place love rap …”

“… and it gets the extremist Mullahs excited too, goes against their ideas of purity and all that.”

“They too have learned to tell people what they want to hear!”

“Yup, and they are huge online.”

“Interesting how jazz, rock, British Pop and now hip hop all came out of our poorest black population and took off!”

Our waiter refills the teacups and offers more Naan, which Theo is glad to have.

“You think Mac is stealing Trump’s thunder then?”

“Partly, he is banging the war drums. War is where men prove themselves, and women do their duty at home, gory glory … you know!”

“Right, the oldest play in the book…”

“ … and it works Fred. It just keeps on working!”

“Wars are great for the party in power.”

“Oh yes! You can call the opposition traitors!”

“Though it didn’t work that way for Lyndon Johnson.”

“It may have been good for Mac’s generation but not now…the heat has gone out of it. It’s cooled off, do you really think it will fly?”

“Look what Bush did after 911.”

“Yes, if there is another attack, maybe Mac has a point.”

“I’ve seen a variety of his posts on line showing Mac as a sort of Col. Sander’s fried chicken figure, friendly, avuncular, with flowing white hair, selling Southern fried prejudices and taking a dig at illegal immigrants. He takes a dig at Wall Street for Liberals like us. For conservatives he points to eight years of Obama’s socialism, and his cowardly foreign policy. Appeasing the Iranians instead of getting in there and taking them out. It all depends which segment he is messaging. He’ll be a kinder gentler more thoughtful Trump.”

“Yeah broader appeal … maybe he is on to something.”

“So, we must all be pretty unhappy with the status quo.”

“Look at the insurgent candidates from right and left. Now we are called consumers rather than citizens. At the same time a lot of people are losing jobs to technology, so they can’t consume as happily as ‘When America was Great’.”

“We are so attached to our possessions, not to mention our beliefs.”

“Oh I know, look at all the Snaz Self Storage places Jake Trip has opened around town.”

“Yes, he is sponsoring Laticia Lantern’s Spin Show’ now, ‘Keep your dreams and memories safe at Snaz Self Storage!’

“That is all Mac’s capital at work.” Theo wipes his mouth and drops the napkin. “I don’t even remember my dreams.”

“You don’t have to. Our commercial tv culture provides endless ways to remember and realize them.”

“Yeah, some kind of Nirvana! reality tv is the bottom of the barrel tough.”

“It is no more real than other shows.”

“Well right, but if we all start thinking about reality there is no knowing what might happen.”

“Sounds painful.”

“Yes, and therefore unlikely!”

“Are you still working on this sir?”

“All through thanks, nothing left to work on!” Theo backs up his chair to pick up his napkin from the floor. He strains to lean down but can’t reach over his own bulk.

“I will get that for you sir … see, no problem.”

Our waiter stoops down easily for the napkin and flips it over his shoulder, then takes away our plates. We are the only customers left in the place.

Indranil is walking over to us.

“Mr. Theo, Mr. Fred, did you enjoy your meal?”

He puts the check on the table for us in a lotus leaf shaped leather folder, skillfully tooled with a rendering of the Emperor in yellow.

 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. 

Branches in the huge southern red oak, in Diddlie’s yard, are waving violently as if stranded there and anxious for rescue. One massive bough grows out over the road with a sharp angle where it was trimmed, now growing back like an arm bent upwards at the elbow. Now, animated by a gust, it might be shaking its fist. While the white oaks are strangely still, across Oval Street and beyond, at bel and Steve’s place. The rain holds off until I reach his house. Bel lets me in, but doesn’t close the door. A brilliant flash of lightning is followed at once by thunder, and the sound of a tree coming down nearby.

“I can’t see anything. It’s like trying to see through frosted glass. Look at this rain!”

Having stepped in, I turn around to look outside with bel.

“Did it hit us?”

“No Steve, I can’t see where it went down.” Bel steps back as the wind blows rain in the front door. Leaf bearing twigs from the sweet gum at the roadside, land outside in front of us. Steve steps forward to close the storm door, when a drenched critter turns up to the left of the doorway, and takes shelter behind an azalea, under the limited protection of the overhanging roof.

Bell opens the door again. “What’s that?”

Another gust blows rain and leaves in and Steve pulls the storm door to. Bel puts her hand over his on the door handle and pushes it open again after the gust subsides.

“I can’t tell, Steve. Is it a possum?”

The rain slackens as suddenly as it starts. There’s a moment’s sunlight. I can’t see past them at the door but hear drips, and running water, and then mewing from outside. “It must be a cat.”

Steve steps outside into the saturated sunlit air. “It is a cat. Who’d have guessed?”

“Will it let you pick it up?”

Steve picks up the dripping animal with his hands behind the front shoulders. It hangs from his grasp like a wet tabby rag, mewing from its wide-open pink mouth. Bel leads the way back into the house.

“Come on Steve, we can dry it off in the kitchen.”

“Does it have a tag?”

“I don’t see one Fred.”

“Maybe it’s got a chip imbedded.”

Bel has got a towel around the cat and tries to dry it off squatting down on the kitchen floor.

“Fred, I think this thing has been wild for a while. She is in bad condition. Lots of mats and look at that torn ear.”

Steve puts a heavy old-fashioned glass ashtray on the floor, and pours some milk in.

“Ouch! Steve, get me the gardening gloves will you. This cat is wild!”

Bel has it wrapped up in the towel like a mummy, but a forepaw has escaped and thrashes back toward bel’s hands holding the towel. It is hissing and getting angrier the longer she holds it.

“Maybe you should let it go?”

“Well Fred, close the door, would you? And we’ll see.”

I close the door and bel lets go of the towel. The cat lets out a screech, which seems to come from the center of its body. It hisses and frees itself of the towel, and turns towards us for a moment, with its ears down. Now it runs behind the dryer and goes quiet.

Steve opens the door and offers the gloves to bel who stands up but doesn’t take them.

“What’s going on?”

We all look towards the dryer and the sound of claws on the metal venting pipe. The cat has climbed on top of the dryer from the back. Its ears are up and its wet tail is snaking in the air behind it.

Steve moves towards her with the gloves on, but the cat jumps down and escapes through the open door and down the hall toward the bedrooms.

“So much for the milk and hospitality!”

“We might as well go and sit down. It will come out eventually.”

“Steve, she’s probably got flees and ticks and…”

“I know but do you really want to search the house for that terrified animal right now?”

Steve leads the way into the living room. Painted cranes fly across a silk sky and settle onto a marsh depicted on three Chinese scrolls hanging over the fireplace.

Imagery from the gardens of paradise woven into the prayer rugs is subtly changed, rendering tanks, aircraft, and bombs. Yet they are not obvious, the stylized images of war have the same character as the garden images. Steve notices me looking at his Afghan war rugs.

“I did a double take, looking at the patterns.”

“These rugs are woven with the blues.”

“They weave art out of pain, Steve!”

“It’s the woolen blues!”

“Sometimes I don’t feel we should be treading on them.”

“Why not bel? They are rugs.”

“But Fred, they were made for prayer. Now we have them, and we just tread on them. Doesn’t that make you think?”

“Well, yes it does…but you appreciate them too.”

Steve looks up at bel and me.

“I think they are like a lot of other religious objects in that respect.”

“Such as, Steve?”

Rememeber, Pierro Della Francesca’s Baptism, for one. We kept going back to it in London.”

“Oh, how could I forget? We must have spent all day in the National Gallery.”

“We did bel, I mean that painting used to hang in a Church to inspire the faithful.”

“That’s right, part of an altarpiece in Sansepolcro.”

“Yup, Pierro’s Tuscan hometown.”

“We buy sacred objects and they become commodities.”

“That’s the art business Fred.”

“And business is secular, so what is left but aesthetics?”

Steve’s ring tones interrupt us. He takes his phone out of the pouch on his belt and looks down at the screen.

“It’s a text from Artie. She is stuck down the street behind a fallen tree.”

“So that’s where it fell!”

“Fred, looks like it fell right outside that vacant house below Macadamia’s place.”

Steve is texting back. Bel gets up and goes down the hall.

“I am telling Artie we can walk over to her.”

“Steve! Come here honey, look at this!”

Steve gets up and walks down the hall. “Fred, come on back.”

I follow him down the hall and see the cat asleep in the middle of their bed.

Steve walks out towards the kitchen.

“I’ll bet she drank the milk too.”

The cat wakes up and jumps off the far side of the bed and crawls underneath.

“Has she Steve?”

“YUP! We have been adopted.”

Bel is smiling, and she bends down, pulls up the bedspread, and looks underneath.

“That animal is used to living in a home.”

Bel and I walk back towards the kitchen where Steve is setting up a litter box using an old plastic dish washing bowl.
“What are you going to put in it?”

“Bel, we have some sand in the shed. I’ll use that for now.”

As soon as he has poured sand in the bowl we go out to find Artie. It is a short walk. The tree fell around the bend from the Strether’s on Wicket Street. It has fallen diagonally across the road missing the power lines by a miracle. The trunk is about eight feet thick at the base and the bark is covered in ivy and Virginia creeper growing over that. It is hollow and blackened, and broke off in a jagged fracture near the ground.

“There she is!”

Bel has found a way under the blockage where a huge branch holds the trunk several feet off the ground. We all duck under the fallen oak. Artie is standing by a small red pickup in a black slicker with the hood up. Her yellow shoes and white sox shine against the black wet road, which makes a dazzling reflection as the sun comes out again. Two thick boards stick out beyond the bed with a rag tied to the ends. Something else lies in back of the truck draped in a blue tarp.

“Did you guys bring a saw, Steve?”

“No I don’t have anything big enough for this.”

“We need Hank Dumpty. He’s got everything.”

“Right bel, so have Albrecht and Boyd.”

Steve has his phone out again. “I am trying Hank first, Fred.”

The sun goes in. A gust of wind brings rain down from a maple above and the leaves pull against their stems showing their light undersides as they dry out.

“Well, start her up and see if you can turn around and come the other way.”

“Wicket is one way bel. Besides I may be out of gas.”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No Fred, the gas gauge is broken.”

“That makes every trip a gamble!”

“Well, it stalled about ten minutes ago after I stopped and texted Steve during the monsoon.”

“When did you last fill her up?”

“I didn’t, this is a friend’s.”

I look in the driver’s window.

“How old is it?”

“At least fourteen-years-old … see, stick shift, hand crank windows and a cassette deck.”

Steve walks over to look at the truck.

“Paint work is in good shape Artie.” His ring tones sound, and Steve looks down at his screen.

“You have to turn around. Hank is up in Pennsylvania.”

“Okay Steve, say hi to Hank for me.”

“I don’t think you’ll have any problems going the wrong way. The cops never come around here anyway.”

“What about the Militia and Urban Safety Solutions?”

“Safety Shmafety… to Hell with both of them!”

“Hey, if you don’t see me at your house, come with gas and a posse!”

“You can coast most of the way Artie, down Bails Lane and Oval Street, so saddle up.”

Artie gets back in the truck and it starts. She turns around and heads back around Wicket street the wrong way.

The truck stalls with a shudder in Steve’s driveway and he excitedly pulls down the tailgate before she gets out of the cab. He loosens the tarp and now I can see what I came for, “Dr. Tulp’s Stone”. I had seen it before with Steve, in her studio, back in the winter of 2011, and that’s why he asked me over for the installation. It is one of Arties’s old carved stone pieces, covered in varying thicknesses of translucent resin. It gives the carving a painterly quality as you see the contours softened by resin.

“So Steve, where would you like it?”

Steve points out a spot to the right of the house where he has laid an oval gravel bed on the grass and stacked some big flat stones to act as a plinth. He gets a hand truck from his shed. Artie sets up the two boards to serve as a ramp, while bel and I watch. They both climb up into the truck bed and ease the sculpture onto the hand truck. Artie has two bungee cords to hold it in place as they wheel the sculpture down the ramp to the driveway and over to its plinth.

“It is all yours Steve, Steve, and thanks, I don’t know any one else who likes it.”

“You now, I always find a feline quality in this, Artie.”

“Well Sfumato had just moved in with me when I worked on it.”

Steve walks around the piece gesturing as he speaks and wiping his face on his sleeve. The sun is out heating the ground and humidity fills the air in sunlit columns of light coming through the trees.

“My eye is drawn along from this lower area, evocative of haunches and curved tail, up to here, where the two bumps suggest a cat’s ears. This topmost point suggests a cat’s snout when seen in relation, but overall, I think it is just the smooth undulating flow of the thing.”

Bel walks over to look more closely.

“This resin covering the stone is kind of smoky in places and here on top I feel I am looking through frosted glass.”

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 in an underground room. Hard to say how big, as it is full of IT equipment in rows of racks, like wired and winking library stacks. The ceiling seems low. The air-conditioning is brisk.

“Sir, this way please.”

The voice comes out of the cold air.

“This way? Which way is that?

“Hurry up!”

“Have you seen a white rabbit down here?”

I look around for a person, or speakers, also for a camera, but see nothing.

“Don’t look for me, look down.”

Looking down, on command, and I see a row of dot-like amber diodes in the floor lighting up in sequence and suggesting a direction to the right. New ones come on ahead as I followed them. The floor is zinc color with countless tiny holes in it like the bottom of a fine sieve.

Diddlie’s white rabbit, Mr. Liddell, ran off again this morning as she was changing the straw in his hutch. She called me asking for help but I was out in the garden. So she ran down the hill and found me, complaining that I didn’t carry my phone. She wouldn’t stop to regain her breath. She waved a string bag in the air and insisted we go looking for him immediately. We started searching in the field of golden rod up by The Ashes where he was found once before. Then Diddlie and I lost track of each other. I went looking in the garage. She explored the weeds calling out to him. Now I am following lighted diodes like bread crumbs dropped in the woods.

I can see someone, way down the aisle between the shelves of servers, by an orange metal door. Waiting for me, in black t-shirt and grey cargo pants. He carries his phone in one hand and his side arm is holstered in black fabric on his belt. He says nothing and opens the door.

“Have you seen Diddlie’s rabbit, Mr, Liddell?”

“No.”

“I chased him down under the car and he disappeared in the grease pit.”

“They would have caught him on the monitors just like they caught you.”

“What monitors?”

“You shouldn’t be down here.”

He guides me through the orange doorway and then I remember seeing this guy before. He used to sit at the site of Derwent Sloot’s old house while they built that huge new Macmansion. We climb three flights of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell. Now I notice LEDs in the steps too, but they are not lighting up. There is a flat screen built into the wall at each landing, which emits light but has no picture. They look like windows on to a brilliant void. At the top-most landing, two flat screens face each other on opposite walls of unfinished poured concrete. Each displays a picture of a gilded mirror and they reflect each other into a mirrored infinity. I think there’s a small Dordrecht’s logo in the bottom right corner, but it is so faint I am not sure. These mirrors look the same as those I saw years ago in Jake’s foyer. He pulls down an attic ladder, set into a high concrete ceiling, with a length of dirty white clothes line attached and hanging down about chest high with a knot in the end.

“That seems rather low tech!”

“It does the job.”

“Where’s Diddlie?”

“Who?”

‘Did she find Mr. Liddell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she is looking.”

“Go ahead.”

Looking up I can see an old brown Bakelite household light fixture, in the plaster ceiling of the room at the top of the ladder. I climb up the first four or five steps and pause. The floor above is now at eye level. I can see small grey dust ball on a parquet floor, and a dead fly’s thorax hangs in a cobweb stretched between the floor and the chipped white kick board. There are tiny spots on the floor, perhaps droppings from undisturbed spiders. I hear something like claws running on the wooden floor, but it’s too late to see anything.

“Keep going!”

I climb on, and cough. There’s a lot of dust in the air. I step off the top of the ladder into the narrow hallway of a house. There’s an open door to my left admitting daylight from an old sash window with faded green drapes, shredded at the bottom, by cats perhaps. The walls of the small room are a light brown nicotine color and the smell is unmistakable. A single bed sags under the window with a faded scarlet eiderdown stretched from the bottom up to and over a flattened pillow at the head and reaching down to the floor. I pull up the bottom of the eiderdown at the middle of the bed and look for Mr. Liddell. He runs out at the head of the bed and down the hall. A thread hanging down from a raised corner of the eiderdown catches on his ear. He takes it with him and the attached cobwebs too. He is much too fast for me. Stan is now standing in the hall closing the hatch with a handle let into the top. It has a small parquet covered lid which blends perfectly into the floor of the hall, as does the hatch after it is closed. The fit in the old floor is precise. I can barely see the outline of the hatch in the irregular pattern of small gaps between the worn parquets.

“That never happened.” He steps away from me.

“What do you mean? You must have seen that rabbit as well as I did.”

“There’s no rabbits in here.”

Stan walks down the hall and comes back with a dirty corn stalk broom. He taps the floor with it as if stenciling. Instead of ink he spreads house dust. Then he sweeps carefully over the top of the hatch in circular motions to spread the load from the broom into all the cracks, and leaves the excess dust lying around. Now the hatch’s outline is concealed.

Stan points down the hall.

“Go that way.”

“Yeah, alright. Are you coming?”

“I’ll be a while.”

I walk down the hall and find Diddlie sitting in the kitchen trimming stems of goldenrod to fit into different size vases. Two big earthenware ones are on the floor at her feet, other smaller glass and some white porcelain reflect the yellow blooms all over the table.

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah, I caught him just now, see.”

She has put Mr. Liddell in the string bag and tied it to a chair leg. He has settled down with his eyes closed and ears held down by the string squares of the bag.

“He’s going to chew his way out of that you know.”

“No way, it’s made of fishing line or something indestructible.

“Isn’t this a great crop, Fred!”

“This isn’t your kitchen.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Can’t you see, I am preparing these flowers for display.”

“It is too early for goldenrod you know….Why, haven’t you been looking for Mr. Liddell?”

“Well, for one thing he is right here, and for another I had to harvest these early flowers some time, and thought I might find him in among them.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Have a seat honey.”

“I call this my harvest house, because I always do my flower arranging here, ever since I found that really good stuff.”

“Is it Rank’s house?”

“No.”

“I don’t get it. How did he get from the grease pit to this room?”

“How should I know? I saw him run out of the back of the garage though. He escaped through that gap in the boards. So I figured he would come in the house. He likes it better than my place.”

“Well, I was looking for him in the garage. I saw Rank in there, as he stepped down into the old grease pit to work on a car.”

“Oh, he’s always working on that old thing, and you know what?I have never seen it run. I don’t think he can even start it.”

“Well, where did Rank go?”

“Did he start it?”

“No, he dropped something though, and it seemed to bounce down into somewhere way below him in the pit, and he went after it. Maybe he didn’t know I was there. I said hello, but no one answered. Then I saw Mr. Liddell looking at me from under the car, right at the top of the steps down into the pit. That’s when I went after him and Rank.”

Diddlie puts her scissors down. She bends to tickle Mr. Liddell’s ears. Then reaches into a big pile of golden rod on a threadbare blue tarp spread on the floor, and puts more blooms on the table.

“So what’s down there?”

“A big server farm. What is it for? I mean I was amazed. Who’s is it?  Some company’s installation or what?”

“Oh so that’s where it is!”

“What Diddlie?”

“It’s dead people’s data.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when you die all your data lives on after you, down in there.”

“Oh you mean there’s a cloud down there.”

“Yeah, but an underground cloud, like for the dead you see.”

“A data ossuary?”

“No, that’s for bones!”

“Is that what he told you? Dead people’s data lives on?”

“I figured it out for myself. I mean it’s obvious when you think about it!”

“I don’t follow you Diddlie.”

“Well, Lou once told me that old data are valuable and that it is all being salvaged.”

“Did he explain who is doing it?”

“No but he said some of it is going on around here.”

“He never told me that.”

“You know Rank is weird too. He once asked if I have a vacuum cleaner. Then he took the bag out, which was nearly full and put a new one in from my cupboard; but he didn’t throw the old one away. He said he needed it!”

“What house are we in now?”

“The Ashes of course.”

“This place isn’t as ruined as it looks.”

“No, some of the rooms are okay. There’s no water in the faucets though.

“I wonder if that old Ford Torino is still in the garage here.”

“Well, I don’t know what kind of car it is, but it is there.”

I can see people and a black SUV outside the dirty kitchen window through the space where the blind has broken. They are in black uniforms and one has an automatic weapon. Someone slams the door of the SUV and Diddlie turns to look too.

“Oh look Fred, it’s Rank, out there with our Militia! Come on Mr. Liddlell, we have to go.”

She puts a few small stems of flowers in the back pocket of her jeans where they wave as she bends over and unties the string bag from the chair leg. She picks up Mr. Liddlell in her arms, and I follow her out to the hallway. She leaves all her flower work, and runs surprisingly fast down the hall, past the hatch and the old bedroom and through ruins of the old sunroom and onto the terrace in back, where they let off fireworks on the Glorious Fourth last year.

“Come on Fred, you have to move much faster or I’ll miss Mr. Fawkes. Oh God! I am late for Mr. Fawkes.”

Diddlie leads the way, racing back with Mr. Liddell to his hutch in her carport.

 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. 

Light rain drips from the Arrowwood Viburnums blooming outside on the patio. It is cool. I need a jacket. Overcast low light days and rain keeps Fauxmont’s chilly streets black and shiny. The Shrinkrap news site, tells me that Snaz Inc. was bought for $95 billion by Ensor International the secretive Belgian conglomerate owned by Axel Ensor. The new company will be called “SnazE’. He’s known in the tabloids as “The man of many masks.” He is said to be negotiating a deal with Armond Macadamia for a Macadamia/Ensor tower in Brussels, two hundred stories high. Axel wants to call it Ensor/Macadamia. According to a wire story quoted by Shrinkrap, Macadamia is running for president as an independent, and has lost interest in the project.

The rain lets up. I turn off the computer to go shopping and when I open the door, a Carolina wren flies out from among the drenched blossoms, as if to take advantage of the break, like me.

I run into Daisy at the Safeway in her yellow polka dot boots, engulfed by a brilliant orange plastic poncho.

“Hi Fred, our stomachs growl together!”

“Daisy! It’s a rumble.”

She is standing out of the rain under the covered entrance and turns from the bulletin board covered with old business cards, and other ragged papers fastened by thumbtacks and in one case a long pin. When available tacks run out, a single tack may fasten several messages at once.

“You got a spare thumb tack Fred?”

“Sorry, I don’t carry.”

“Yeah, well neither do I”

“You might try the internet instead of this thing. I don’t think any one reads it anymore.”

“Well, my old PC died, and I never did get a smart phone. Can’t afford one now. You know any one who needs a dog walker? I am going into business…see.”

She points to a generic dog shape, cut out of purple paper, hanging from the bottom of the board by a single rusty tack positioned like the eye of the dog. She has typed her phone number on to a lot of thin strips coming off the dog’s back like long shaggy extra thick fur. The same tack holds down the bottom of a flyer offering a reward for return of a lost ferret; with an email address not a phone number.

“How about ferret walking?”

“No, wombats were enough. It’s just pet dogs from now on.”

Her long arm reaches out of the poncho and some water drips in through the arm hole. She shakes the whole thing, then takes off her bowler and shakes the rainwater off it. Her shopping list falls from the hatband and blows out into the parking lot. I try to pick it up before it is too wet, but a black Humvee, though it breaks hard, runs over it. I am too late.

“This thing may be pulp by now.”

I hand her the soggy paper and can’t help noticing it is a check, or the dripping remains of one.

“Fred, you should be more careful. You ran out way too close to me!”

Boyd Nightingale is standing next to us in a black Stetson and fatigue jacket, with Militia patch.

“I did?”

“Yeah! I don’t know why you didn’t see me!”

“Oh, I did, sort of, I wanted to get a piece of paper that fell out of her hat band before it was turned to pulp.”

Daisy is holding her soggy check in one hand, and has grabbed my arm with the other. She looks into my face frowning and then whispers in my ear.

“My God Fred! I don’t know if this is any good now.”

I start to reply but she shakes my arm.

“No no no, forget it, forget it!” She puts the paper in her purse and goes into the store. Boyd goes after her but soon comes back out.

“What’s up with her?”

Without giving me time to answer he walks back to his Hummer and gets in and I go into the store.

After picking up our groceries, Daisy and I start back to Fauxmont and there’s Boyd sitting in the monster of his aspirations, engine idling, waiting for us outside the entrance. The window is open.

“Hey guys! You want a ride?”

“Boyd, what are you doing?”

“Daisy, I couldn’t miss you in that orange thing while I was gassing up. Thought you might like a ride home on such a rainy day.”

The rain has started again and it is getting heavier.

“Thanks Boyd. Daisy you get in front.”

Daisy pushes past me.

“No Fred you get in front.”

Daisy opens the back door as I get in the front. After climbing in she takes off her bowler and puts it on the seat next to her, then flips her poncho over her head, and over the back of the seat. Her long black hair flies up and falls in wet strings and she smoothes them out with long thin fingers.

Boyd takes us on a roundabout route via Bails Lane and then down another lane I have never seen before, called ‘Mid Off’. It is even narrower, steep, and unpaved with huge potholes full of water like little ponds. Parts of it have washed away as it becomes a stream in heavy rain. The Humvee’s big tires roll slowly over exposed tree roots, fallen branches and through the potholes, splashing muddy water. Gravel rattles under the fenders.

“You’ve got to see Chuck’s new place down here by the river.”

Daisy is holding on to the side of her seat as the vehicle tips into and out of the next hole.

“Chuck’s who?”

“Chuck Newsome, Daisy, don’t you remember?”

“Oh maybe, is he that giant blond guy? Kind of looks like Carl Sandberg, only he’s about 7ft tall?”

“He’s not seven, he’s only six nine.”

“Yeah, big difference, so he’s the one you mean, right?”

“Right, he is helping Senator Lee Levenworth’s, ‘Jobs for Americans’, campaign and he’s a great guy. Albrecht met him out West back…ah, well a few years ago, at a CUPA event.”

“Is he still married to that Hungarian trophy?”

“He sure is, Nadia Brazov, the beautiful Transylvanian.”

“I thought she was Hungarian.”

“Her mother was. Her father was from Transylvania, Rumanian I think.”

“That’s not a Rumanian name.”

“No, well, I don’t know…Russian maybe.”

We arrive at a building site on a long gradual curve, where the road levels off and drains through the gravel bed. We seem to be on a mansion size peninsular jutting into the river. I can’t see anything on the right at first but a field stone retaining wall. The mansion comes into view further around the bend, and we keep going with the river on the left. Further along the building looks more finished. The first floor in dressed granite blocks like Trip’s, but the next three stories are half timbered, mock Tudor, with huge black painted beams, like glowering brows above all the countless leaded diamond-shaped windows.

“It’s the house of seventy gables!”

Boyd stops outside the driveway as the rain slackens again. We look at the approach to six garage doors. Some faint shadows appear for a moment, then grayness. All deep brown teak with elaborate ironwork. A huge rusty steel I-beam sticks up from a raised concrete island in the middle of the driveway at its widest. Thin stainless steel spirals grow out of the sides about fifteen feet up rising vertically like big conical blossoms, shiny and wet.

“You should see that thing at night!”

“Is it some kind of antenna?”

“No Fred, It looks like one of Boris Trarantula’s sculptures.”

“Yeah Daisy, Chuck commissioned it for the house. At night the red white and blue lights come on and reflect off it. Those spirals move in the wind. It’s pretty awesome! And you know what?”

“What Boyd?”

“Each one of those spirals has the entire constitution of the United States engraved on it.”

“Hard to read though.”

“Well yes, but our guarantee of liberty is still there.”

“So that’s where he met Nadia! Artie told me about it years ago. Nadia used to work at Osiris Tarantula’s boutique, as a model or something.”

“Nadia is still pretty hot Daisy. Chuck went for it and got it!”

“Oh Boyd…it, being his sex object!”

“She is sexy Daisy, I mean that cantilever is…you know what I mean Fred?”

“Boyd, I am pleading the 5^th on that one.”

“You never used to be so obnoxious Boyd!”

“What do you mean? I am just enjoying life!”

“Can we go now please Boyd?”

“Daisy, you called Nadia a trophy, not me.”

Boyd doesn’t move. He is looking at the wine red two door Porsche Panamera parked in one driveway and a hot pink Humvee with gold tinted glass parked under the porte-cochere. The massive double front door is also teak with brass work and a split Chippendale pediment. Nadia’s Hummer is even bigger than the one we are in, with a white cover over the spare tire and two gold jerry cans, one mounted on each side.

“Well I guess Nadia is here, that’s hers.” Boyd is pointing towards the entrance.

“Chuck says his house will be half a mile long when it’s done and he’s going to jog his five miles a day inside, all winter.”

“Well, Nadia is going to burn a tank of gas just getting out the driveways!”

“No way Daisy, that vehicle has a huge tank, custom job all the way.”

“Why is the house British style Tudor and the port-cochere is supported on Ionian capitals?”

“You’ll have to ask Jim’s architect that one.”

“Boyd this is worse than Trip’s place…I mean it is just a half mile mishmash.”

“Oh get off your high horse. You sound like my Mom. Have some fun Daisy!”

We drive further around Chuck’s massive curving folly, past the driveways and there’s a dock on the left, with two barges loaded with building materials. No one is around to unload though.

“Boyd, you sound like Albrecht’s mouthpiece, “Get Back JoJo”

“Hey, I’m back baby, I, am, Back, in the driver’s, seat!”

“I just don’t understand. It seems disgusting to me. That place is like an old movie set. I imagine Nadia climbing out of that pink penis she drives, to a rank of courtiers in gold brocades and jeweled turbans playing a fanfare on squeaky tin horns.”

“Not with Jim. No, those things would be solid gold trumpets trombones and tubas.”

“Let’s get out of here Boyd!”

“Honey don’t take it like that. This is a huge development. Down here used to be real poor, old shacks and lean-tos. Now look, multimillion dollar property.”

“Development? What happened to the people who used to live here? I mean what developed in their lives?”

I turn to see Daisy is looking down at her arm, moving her multiple gold and silver bracelets up from her wrist. She unfolds the soggy check and presses a Kleenex against it to dry it out.

“…and Boyd, don’t ‘honey’ me, okay?”

Boyd adjusts his navy blue American Glory baseball cap with a flag on the front and the words curling over and under it in a flourishing script. He drives all the way around and joins a new paved road with no name. He must have noticed me looking at the label on the back of his cap.

“Fred, you like my hat? I can get you one.”

“Sure Boyd, I see it is made in Sri Lanka.”

“Yeah, Ensor International finds good cheap labor!”

“But what about American jobs?”

“Fred, what can I say? You know, life is complicated.”