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.

I am sitting with Lou and Albrecht Intaglio under the awning outside the Pie Shop.  It has stopped raining for the moment.  We got nearly two inches of rain in twenty minutes the other day.  Now there is a pleasantly cool breeze blowing, with an occasional gust.  Just now several napkins blew from the table next to us across the parking lot.  They spread out into the wind like crippled white ghosts.  Flopping and unfolding, until they’re pneuma left them and they collapsed on the crumbling impasto of faded parking lines marking the puddled asphalt.

“So Boyd filled you in Fred, huh?”

“No, Albrecht, it was Daisy who mentioned your political work to me and I have been telling Lou what I can.”

“So our ‘boy’ got through!”

“What?”

“Boyd must have told Daisy about Clean Up America’s new program. I mean, I thought they were over Lou.”

“I don’t think Daisy buys it.”

“In fact Lou, I am working with CUPA on this at the national level now, and I have learned a hell of a lot from some very smart people.”

“Congratulations Albrecht!” Albrecht unexpectedly drove up in his Fauxmont Militia Hummer and joined us soon after I sat down with Lou.  Lou is interested in asking him about his, or maybe CUPA’s plan, to privatize Congress.

Thanks dude … look the idea is … I mean as it is, Congress is basically a TV show with corporate producers right?  I am just saying let’s go all the way with this thing and privatize.”

“Albrecht, Congress is not a TV show.  It is an elected governing body.”  Mrs. Rutherford stands over us waiting for our orders with out saying anything, but staring at the huge black vehicle parked two yards away with a stainless steel grin spread between the headlights facing us.  Albrecht buys us all coffees.

“I’ll be right out with your order gentlemen.” She walks out into the parking lot and picks up the soggy napkins lying on the ground where they had blown, and then she disappears around the corner of the building.

“Sure it is an elected governing body, but where would it be in the twenty first century without TV?  That’s how they get elected and that is where the public finds out what they want us to know.”

“Also what they don’t want us to know, but any way … Albrecht, how does privatization work? I mean how can it?”

“It will operate under the umbrella group ‘Congress Corporation of America’.  You need to buy, say 20 million shares to run for the Senate and maybe two million to run for the House.  Something like that, to sort the wheat from the chaff.”  Albrecht pulls his long barreled pistol out if its holster at his hip.  Spins the drum and unloads it into the palm of his hand. He puts the gun on the table in front of him and starts arranging six bullets from his hand, standing in a row with their blunt lead points up.

“Like dues at an exclusive club.”

“These are the only dues I pay.” He places the last of his six bullets in front of the row of five, like a commander in front of his troops.

“Wait a minute, no!  What about state governments?”

“Fred, they can run along the same lines.”

“What about ordinary citizens?”

“What about them Lou?  They vote for the candidate they want to run the corporation just like share holders voting for board members.”

“… and what does this corporation do?”

“It governs by market forces, buying and selling influence and confidence in various interests.  We turn the old Capitol building into a museum full of paper.  That’s where the past is, all on reams of paper. Now its time to build something more like a corporate head quarters with all the digital technology to make it work efficiently.”

“Sounds like we are electing traders not legislators. Do these people pass any laws?”

“Does CUPA have plans for the other two branches of government?”

“One at a time now, one at a time gentlemen.”  He starts cleaning his pistol with a small cloth from his brown suede waistcoat pocket. “Laws are part of the market place too.  Every word will be paid for.  You can be sure of that!”

“Albrecht, that eliminates our civil government and the constitution!”

“It’s a nightmare!”

“You think the laws we have now were written for free, Fred?  Come on folks, we all know how generous lobbyists are these days.”

“Yeah, they write the text in many cases … and they are way too generous.”

“Who’s to say Lou?  You make my point for me.  If we had a proper market place up on Capitol Hill then we would know exactly how much a law was worth.”

“Here you are gentlemen, three coffees, one black for you sir and these two with milk.” Mrs. Rutherford sent her summer hire out with our order.  “Will that be all?”

Lou turns and looks up from his black coffee. “That’s it.”  He

down at the ground, and doesn’t look at Albrecht.

“You’re right Albrecht, markets do set prices, but I think you are just selling us out!

“Like I said dude, the sale has been on for years.”

“Does the Supreme Court and President have a role in all this?”

“Well I think we could leave the Supreme Court where it is but the presidency is another question.  I think CUPA might overhaul the process.  We could replace the Electoral College by something like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who do the Oscars.”

“We aren’t going to be governed by Hollywood, Albrecht. The citizens elect the president.  You can’t change it.  That is a basic principle of the Constitution.”

“Fred where have you been, dude? It is already changed.  The most telegenic candidate wins with a little help from the data miners, but that stuff is too technical for me.  I’ll leave that to the market research folks.”

“Albrecht you can’t reduce our governing institutions to show biz!”

“I am not reducing anything.  It has been happening gradually for years.  Folks just don’t notice.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, did more for civil rights than the abolitionists. Her novel, made people feel what it was like to be persecuted, and that got them going. Right now, the media are gods filling us with feelings about our lives, our world and all.”

“What do you mean gods.  The media are just a business?”

“I mean let’s look at the forces at work in the 21^st century. Commercial entertainment is our religion.  The Christian Broadcasting Network have it all figured out.  But that’s old religion.  The new religion isn’t even called a religion. Look how happy people are in commercials.  It’s heaven!  The American dream realized.”

“Albrecht I thought the American dream was about home ownership, and a steady job and so on.”

“So it is Fred and the omnipresent media keep it alive. They’re invisible until you press the button, but all-knowing and constantly playing on your emotions with sensational shows. It is such a part of life people aren’t aware of it any more than they know they are breathing.”

“Albrecht most of TV is just junk it seems to me.  I hardly ever watch it.  I use the TV to watch stuff on disk.”

“That’s because you Fred, are an elitist.  What’s your favorite sport to watch on TV?”

“I don’t watch sports.”

“What about soaps or CSI or game shows?”

“No, afraid I don’t watch them either.”

“Well Fred, I hate to say so, but you are out of the main stream.  You’re kind of out of the dream, dude.”

“Albrecht, TV programming is a waste land.  Those shows are nothing to do with religion.”

“Come on Lou, you have to understand; being on TV is like becoming a god. You become the center of attention in every viewer’s mind. That’s millions of people. That is god-like power, gentlemen.”

“Yeah but Albrecht, you can’t appear on TV with out your personality becoming a product because some one is paying for your appearance.  Not so much godlike as cold commerce.”

“So you are talking about mammon’s sacred work!”

“Right Fred!  a product and personality.  Personality is the name of the game and it takes money to play. You’ve got to look right.  Isn’t that it Lou?”

“None of this sounds right to me.  So forget TV, what else you people got in mind?”

“I expect we will consolidate all intelligence under one organization and cut the budget in half at least.”

“Albrecht, now you are singing my song!  But you are going to put a lot of people out of work.”

“Why thanks Lou. We’re talking about abolishing departments such as Labor, Education, HEW, HUD and a number of others.  Merge homeland security and FEMA the FBI, with some more cuts there too.  All the people put out of work will soon find jobs as the economy expands free of government regulation.”

“You would cut the FBI budget?  No!”

“Sure, all these government organizations are too fat and need right-sizing and outsourcing.  We need a few good law and accounting firms to enforce and manage government contracts effectively, and make them compete for business too. There should be plenty because we are going to outsource a lot of stuff.”

“Albrecht I just can’t agree with you on most of this.  With no regulatory agencies business will go crazy and self-destruct.  Look what the banks just did with their freedom!”

“Regulation doesn’t work Lou.  You just get bogged down in the legal weeds, and the lobbyists get around it over time anyway. With participation in free markets, competing interests work themselves out.  The banks and all went crazy because they were still over regulated even after Glass Steagall went out.”  Albrecht puts his gun cloth back in his pocket and slowly reloads his pistol.

“Over regulated?  Look Glass Steagall was a sensible separation of regular checkbook banking from speculation in international finance.”

“I understand Lou, and we haven’t got our programs all figured out yet, but I can assure you Clean Up America will have a slimmed down and more efficient operation here in Washington DC under the Congress Corporation of America.” He puts the last bullet in its chamber and gets up from the table.  “Gentlemen it’s been a pleasure enlightening you.  If you will excuse me, I have business to attend to with our militia commander, Mr. Banning Cocq.” He strolled back to his Hummer.  His black jeans ride up on the brown leather of his cowboy boots.  He pulls a wet napkin off the windshield and climbs in with his phone chiming an electronic approximation of  “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta”, from Puccini’s, La Rondine.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xosvn2LFsWI

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

Diddlie and Daisy are standing in Daisy’s front yard ready for rain. Daisy waves with her yellow souwester on, though they are talking under a huge umbrella with panels in pink, yellow, white and purple with a Snaz logo on each.  It isn’t raining yet but low cloud, thick and gray, is pressing much of the light out of the day.  It feels as if we are in pre-dawn gloom and it is well after noon.  The Fauxmont militia left me a flyer last night asking me to join, and inviting me to join a deer hunt to cull their rising numbers locally.  A link to CUPA’s web site is shown at the bottom in bold face type, prompted me to consider further exciting new initiatives explained there.  “Are you armed for self-defense yet?  Do it while you can!” said Albrecht’s handwritten note.  I had noticed Steve Strether coming towards me with Lambert, a few houses down Bails Lane from Daisy’s.  Now Lambert is backtracking so they are walking away from us as I join the two under the umbrella.

“Where are they?”

“They have grown too big.”

“What do you mean, too big?”

“Dante, Gabriel and Rossetti, they are the size of small dogs!  I had no idea Diddlie.  I thought they were going to be hamsters’ size.”

“Didn’t any one tell you when you bought them?”

“I didn’t buy them.  Lizzy Siddall brought them over from Australia as a present when she was visiting.”

“Lizzy should have told you!”

“Well, I don’t remember, maybe she did.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I have farmed out Gabriel and Rossetti to friends but Dante is here, or he was.  Now I can’t find him. Diddlie, you want a pet wombat?”

“No I don’t.  The Red Queen is enough, and I don’t know if parrots and wombats get along.”

“What about you Fred?  Wouldn’t you like a nice friendly Australian in your home?”

“Daisy, why don’t you keep him?  I can’t take Dante.  No, no, I am out too much for pets and my wife’s job leaves her with little time.”

“He’s too big!  Fred, remember how cute baby Rossetti was at Hank’s barbeque?”

“Small enough to fit in a tea cozy.  In fact I didn’t see much of him, it was such a good fit.”

Diddlie is tapping her i phone.

“You have got to see this.”

“Fred, we’ve been looking around the yard for him. Did you see anything as you walked over? Will you help find Dante?”

“No Daisy, haven’t seen anyone but Steve and Lambert down the road.”

“Lambert!  Maybe Lambert will track down Dante, Fred?

“Have you seen this site Albrecht has started?”

“Diddlie maybe we can get Lambert on this search.”

“I hear Albrecht wants to privatize Congress.”

“It is more than that Fred.  CUPA has launched a campaign to give Corporations the vote.”

“How?  They aren’t mentioned in the Constitution.  Only citizens have the right.”

“Fred, it was land owning white male citizens in fact.”

“Daisy I realize we have only gradually come to universal suffrage.”

“Not quite Fred, hear this; “corporations are effectively persons in court, says CUPA, and they should be voters too.  It is right here in the talking points.”

“Our great Corporations are the most productive organizations in history. They collectively express the will of the American people to improve the lives of individuals the world over, and should not be denied the right to vote a day longer.”

“Diddlie that is not convincing.  Are you going to help find Dante?”

“Of course Daisy … but just understand this idea.  “… to have companies issue special national election voting stock.  The wealthiest and most productive voters will be able to buy the most stock and cast the number of votes proportional to their wealth.”

“Seems they have forgotten the idea of one person, one vote Didd.”

“Yeah, it was one man one vote as the founding Dads wrote it.”

“Picky, picky, picky! so political all of a sudden, Daisy.”

“They are talking about changing things Didd.  Let’s keep it in perspective.”

“So if I buy a million dollars worth of voting stock in say Fibonacci Corporation, is that for me to vote or for them to vote?”

“It’s for you to vote sponsored by the company … but is Fib. stock for sale?”

“So corporations aren’t getting the right to vote … Fibonacci better not!”

“Boyd says it is a way of replacing political parties with companies.”

“You two are talking again!”

“Briefly, Boyd called me last Thursday to explain the idea.”

“He’s persistent isn’t he Daisy?”

“No, he’s just possessed by his ideological daemon,”

“ … or is it Albrecht?”

“Same thing Fred.”

“I’ve told him not to call again, but I listened for a while then found an excuse to hang up.  I hate politics anyway, and don’t think much of our political parties right now.  He knows it, but this isn’t the answer. ”

Lambert seems to be off leash rushing around in the undergrowth. It covers a common area along the old path between two lots that takes you down the hillside to Wicket Street, or used to, before the steps were washed out in the derecho. Lambert has stopped bounding around and started barking, one bark after another every few seconds, getting louder as he gets more agitated.  We all start walking down the road toward Steve, who is moving toward Lambert deep in Japanese honeysuckle, with wisteria growing through it and Virginia creeper and  ivy climbing it too.  As we come closer he shouts something through an intervening curtain of bamboo thicket, but we can’t make out what he is saying.

“What’s up with Lambert Steve?”  A Carolina wren answers in about six loud notes.

“Perhaps he’s found Dante!” The wren flies out of the shrubs towards the utility lines.  It seems far too small for its extraordinary high volume.

“Maybe Daisy, but wouldn’t Dante run away from all that barking?”

“Steve is asking for a phone Diddlie.”

“Diddlie waves her’s at the bamboo, “right here Steve.”

“Call nine one, one, Lambert’s found a body.”

“A human?”

“Looks like it, Daisy.”

As Diddlie uses her phone, Daisy and I follow the tangled green trail Steve had just kicked through.  Steve is standing on a tree root above a deep gully with crumbling sticky clay banks freshly eroded by the recent torrential rains.  Lambert is down in the stream bed sniffing something sticking out from the bank into the water.  The torrent that washed through in the night is now a stream rushing along only an inch or so deep. Looks like part of a leg is protruding from the mud.  Exposed from below the knee with blue denim and a foot with some of a white sock covering the lower half. Lambert is still barking and staring at the leg bumping it gently with his nose.  His ears pointed as horns are directed towards the silent limb. He stops barking and looks up stream, and then growls shifting his stance to face the new threat.  His stubby legs are wet and look thin as twigs where his long hair is stuck down against his skin. The rest of his coarse dry fur is matted with broken stems and leaf fragments.

“Look it’s Dante!”

Daisy steps into the stream near Lambert who jumps aside as he gets splashed by Daisy’s new pin striped wellingtons.  She has to pull hard to free her boot from the clay and take the step.  She calls Dante who looks at her from under his drenched fur. Daisy starts walking up the gravelly stream towards Dante who lets her pick him up and carry him back toward the street. Her wellingtons are coated in reddish yellow clay and Dante is smeared in earth tones too.

I can hear a big engine above us on the road. It’s a Hummer flying a black pennant from the antenna with an orange “don’t tread on me” logo. It pulls up with windows down releasing squawking tones from the radio.  Sounds like the long code numbers Urban Safety Solutions use.

“Fred I can’t believe this … is it our militia?”

Steve is moving over towards me, and trips on a vine as he speaks.  He catches his balance on an ironwood sapling.

The driver is looking at us from his vehicle. “You alright there sir?”

“He’s fine.”

Steve regains his balance and calls Lambert who is too excited to notice. The enquiry from the Hummer is followed by more electronic squawks.  The door opens and the militiaman nearly falls out.  His weapon caught on the doorframe.  He rights himself.  He adjusts his assault rifle strapping it on his back and follows Fred’s path towards us by the gully.

“Its okay, I just called 911.” Diddlie is watching from the edge of the road with Daisy.

“Why is that ma’am?”

“Looks like some one’s leg in the stream down there.”

The militiaman moves further down then jumps into the stream. It washes the clay off his boots, but his black fatigues are stained.

Lambert backs away, barking at the militiaman. “Call your dog off!”

“Steve calls Lambert again and then jumps down next to the militiaman to pick up the dog.

He bends to get Lambert.

“Clear the area!  Sir, you need to get back up on the road right away.”

“Lambert has relaxed in Steve’s arms dripping with watery clay like slip from a potter’s hands and Steve moves back up to the road. A small spider climbs a hair at the top of Lambert’s left ear.

“A heavy rain drop hits the polk weed next to me, then another.  Now the rain is pelting every leaf in the thicket and we are all getting soaked. The militiaman shouts at me to get back on the road and I follow Steve with our armed protector behind me.  A black suburban SUV pulls up behind the Hummer with wipers racing across the windscreen.

“Where are the police?”

Diddlie, Daisy, Steve, Lambert and I have all crowded under the big Snaz umbrella.

“I called 911 Steve.”

“I am sure you did Daisy and look who answered!”

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 hung down from the top of the door, in black twists and curls like ornate cast iron work.  Lou was looking for his auger when he opened his shed. The snake made a brief wet sounding hiss, as if it was spitting as it fell against his arm from above the door.  As he backed away, the door swung to, and the black snake’s tail was caught in the top.

“That will be the end of the mice in here.”

“The thing looks well fed.”

“Too many people kill these guys without realizing how helpful they are.”

“I saw one looped around the branches of a big azalea last summer and I think that was killed.”

“Oh over at the Rundstedt’s you mean?”

“Yes, it wasn’t them though, some visitor thought he was protecting the kids.”

Lou started using his cell phone, capturing 8 megapixels of information per shot while making a faux shutter click with each.

“Your phone is trying to sound like an old film camera.”

“There’s an option to make it hiss like a snake.”

“Now it is unwinding it looks about four feet long, what do you think Fred?”

“No more than that.”

Lou used a stick to push the door open again and release the snake.  The snake pulled its head up to the extended length of its body to the top of the door and started out toward the mansard roof overhung by viburnum coming into bloom. On the other side dying pink azalea blossoms hang in rags under the lotus-like symmetry of the four-petaled Kousa dogwood flowers. The shed is full of garden tools, and things hard to identify, stacked in the dark towards the back. In spring Lou fertilizes the expansive white oak that shades his living room and iron wood trees outside the kitchen. He drills down with the auger and pours granular fertilizer in four or five holes around the base of each tree.

“The auger used to be here on the right.”  Lou is looking to the left, though pointing to the right.  Something had drawn his attention and he moves further in.

“Lou, it has probably fallen behind your shelving unit.”

“Here, give me a hand with this.” He is bending over a powder blue wooden chest covered in mouse droppings and stained across one end.

“It stinks!”

“That’s what the snake found too.”

He adjusts his gloves and gives me a pair.  We tilt it to the right far enough to get a hand underneath one side, and lift the box out of the shed and put it down on the grass. He drops his gloves on the ground and takes out his phone. An unusual looking padlock hangs from the hasp like a large brass cube. It has a small rectangular window on one side.  He puts his phone up to the window and the lock springs open.

“What do you keeping here?”

“Not the auger … “

He breaks off as he removes the padlock and opens the lid revealing a lot of small cartons and some six packs. “These look familiar?”

“Lou that looks like the blue stuff I drank at your political party.”

“The very same.  There are a few bottles of solution in here too.”

“Is that the top there?”  I pointed out the cut glass on top of a bottle shaped like an Ionic column.  “That’s it Fred, clean air solution.”

“Did you get that from Alice or do you have your own supplier?”

“Oh we have the same supplier.”

“What are those things that look like small diving tanks?”

“They are still experimental.  You might call it fog.  Once released,those under its influence believe what ever they are told.”

“Sounds dangerous.  Do they go on believing after the stuff is dispersed?”

“Probably, the results are not all in yet.”

“Where has it been used Lou?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“I mean did Romney or Obama use it in the campaigns?”

“Possibly.”

“You mean they both did.”

“Oh well, that’s possible.  This product will be sold to any one with the money to buy it.”

“Is it a gas, or what?”

“Not a gas, though it is under pressure.”

“What kind of pressure, is it a fluid?”

“No no, nothing like that.”

“What kind of pressure are you talking about?”

“Rhetorical pressure.”

“You can’t get that into a cylinder”

“Couldn’t tell you how, but it is.  This is cutting edge stuff.  I know the shape is suggestive but there isn’t anything like gas in there.”

“So what is it?”

“Something like ‘talking points’ and other stuff too.”

“So there’s an agenda bottled up in there.”

“That’s the idea Fred. Talking points enable the candidate to lead the discussion and avoid difficult questions. Also they keep every one on the same track.”

“Yes, high pressure would tend to blow away unwanted questions, but the idea of having candidates available to reporters and the public is to make them answer questions.”

“True enough, but a lot of money goes into elections now and that buys the discussion.”

“Buys the discussion?  What discussion?”

“The discussions kept in tanks like these.”

“Lou that kind of scripted talk misses my point.”

“Your point is an idealistic one, and now obsolete.  With this technology buyers can get the perspectives and opinions they want out there, on the internet, on TV where many consumers are passionately taking in every word.”

“But this kind of passion is aroused by misleading statements and outright lies.”

“That is as old as politics and there you have a point.  Nothing obsolete about that.”

“Lou what are you doing with this stuff?”

“These are just a few trophies I keep for sentimental reasons.”

He pulls out a lot more small cartons and more tanks and then as he removes the last item, the bottom of the box falls away revealing the top of a long shaft that appears to be going deep underground. “Come on Fred.”

Lou climbs down into the shaft and starts down a ladder built into the side.  I find it is a snug fit climbing down and feel no vertigo as we go down for at least ten minutes. It is like sliding down the earth’s throat. Stepping off at the bottom we are in a damp triangular chamber.  It is like being in an elevator painted powder blue with a flat finish.

“I think we have been swallowed Lou.  Is this the stomach?”

“The stomach of what?’

“Exactly Lou. Where are we?”

A metal door in the wall facing us is painted same color but gloss.  Lou doesn’t answer.  He is working on his phone again. He swipes and taps the glass a few times and the door opens. There is no visible handle or lock.  The oval shape passage beyond the door is high enough to walk down with a good foot of clearance above Lou’s six foot height. It curves to left and right of us, and he asks which way I want to go.

“How about this way”, I point to the left.

“Okay Fred, go ahead.”

We soon come to another door in the side of the passage marked “WT7” in orange light.  It is hard to tell whether it is projected onto the door or if it is somehow coming out of the surface.  I put my palm up in front of the illumination to see if there is anything projected on the back of my hand.  There’s nothing, nor anything on the palm.

“There is a strange light down here.  Why is everything blue?

“You chose to go left.”

“Right”

“These are issue the left finds important.  For instance the question as to why World Trade Center building seven collapsed on 9/11 is wide open on the left.  They point out that it wasn’t hit by aircraft, like the two towers, and nothing fell on it.  So why did it go down?  Some want to say demolition charges were set and claim there is residual evidence in dust collected from the site. Was it a false flag operation?  Had we gone to the right there would be no mention of it.”

Moving along, I notice a huge green pipe over a foot in diameter running along the top of the passage, secured to the ceiling every few feet by massive braces.  The words, “DANGER HIGH PRESSURE” move along the outside of the pipe in glowing white letters in the same strange light as the signs on the doors.

“What is in that pipe?”

“Don’t worry that’s the truth factor.  It runs throughout the system.”

“Oh really, truth factor?”

“Yes all these issues have to be processed under high pressure with truth factor so people will believe them when they are released.”

“Some of it may be untrue Lou, a lot in fact!”

“That’s not important.  What matters is that people believe things if they think they are true, or at least want to believe they are true.  That is critical.  It can be explosive!”

“What is?”

“To feed that yearning for truth in every good consumer.”

“For truth Lou?”

“Yeah, no one is going to believe something they think is untrue!”

“We are not talking about truth.  We are talking about credibility, and bias and deception and so on.”

“To be sure Fred, those ingredients are piped in as well.  You see that cable running along the side of the pipe?”

There is a thick purple cable fastened to the pipe along one side.  “Yes, it seems to be glowing.”

“That’s bias factor. That purple light moves down the fiber optic at enormous intensity and shines into the processing unit so all the information will be seen in the same light.”

“So when this stuff comes to light, so to speak, it is all purple!”

“No, it simply has a consistent bias.”

“Lou, I don’t like the sound of this.”

“As Dick Cheney famously said, ‘the facts don’t matter any more’.”

“You mean the facts can be hidden or ignored.”

“They are producing food for thought in here Fred.  That’s what the consumer needs.”

“No Lou, thoughtful people question the information they are given and examine it critically.”

“Fred, that kind of detachment is out of the question. This high tech stuff works on feeling, not abstraction or self reflection.”

The passage narrows as we move along under the threatening pipe and its attendant purple bias line.  We have to face the wall and move sideways.  Now here’s a door marked “Watergate” and further on another marked “Iran Contra”.

“These aren’t open questions.  The doors are all shut.”

“Not if you have one of these.” Lou flicks his fingers across his phone glass and taps, and the door opens.

“There’s Oliver North climbing into a helicopter … Look, Lou isn’t that Manucher Ghorbanifar?”

“I don’t know.  Who is he Fred?”

“Its getting uncomfortably hot in here Fred.”

“Things heat up as passage narrows Fred.  The rhetorical space is restricted while the heat and pressure go up.  Too much information can be confusing.  They pressurize a a little with emotional factors to keep people’s attention. ”

“Okay Lou, by the way, Ghorbanifar was the go-between selling arms from the U.S. to the Iranians to increase our influence in Iran. Money from that deal was diverted to the Contras who were fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and that contravened the Boland Amendment.”

“Yeah, that’s what brought about the famous hearings.”

“That’s why we recognize the name ‘Ollie North’!”

“ I see where this is going Lou and it is too hot.  Now let’s take a look to the right.”

Using his cell phone again, he opens an unmarked door and we walk through into another passage but this one is painted red with glossy red doors.  Here’s one marked ‘Whitewater’, the next is “Vincent Foster”, and soon enough we come to “Monica Lewinsky” marked, like the others, in powder blue light against the red, a contrast, which leads to optical irritation.

“Lou, there doesn’t seem to be anything there!”

“Where Fred?”

“Right here, see!  I am touching the door and my hand goes through it.”

“That’s right Fred you are in a rhetorical structure.”

“Do you mean a virtual structure?”

“You might say they are related.”

“I thought we were in a stomach.”

“Mind and gut are intimately connected and this is all about that kind of connection.”

“Oh you mean the so called ‘gut reaction’.”

“You might say that, yes.  All kinds of controversies are kept alive down here ready for deployment at the right political moment.”

“Whose moment?”

“Whoever has the money to buy it Fred.”

“Fibonacci Corporation for example?”

“I couldn’t say Fred.”

“But Lou, that’s the good old free enterprise system at work!”

“You sound like Albrecht Intaglio Fred.”

“I must be out of my mind Lou.  What’s to stop me from walking right through there?”

“Try it.”

Stepping forward, I see the big mock orange blooming in Lou’s yard. The sky is brilliant and the wind is gusting. It is remarkably cool for late May, under 65 F with low humidity.  Mr. Liddell is crouching as still as stone in the shade of a holly.

“Lou, is that Diddlie’s white rabbit?”  As I speak Mr. Liddell hurries off with his ears down, toward the front of the house.

“Could be Fred.  He is missing again. You must have dropped off under that mock orange so I went ahead and started.”  He is using his auger to drill holes in the ground around a tulip poplar. There’s an old wrought iron gate rusting against the side of the shed, with climbing ivy curling into the decorative motive with light green runners.

“So what happened?”

“What’s that Fred?”

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

I keep thinking of the strange story that emerged in conversation with Lou and Rank Majors last year, walking back from Hank Dumpty’s barbeque.  Rank had been an air force pilot.  He flew stealth fighters over Iraq, and later retired from a desk job at the Pentagon.  When I asked what he was up to at the moment he said he worked for a consulting firm.

“Oh”, said I.  “Sounds interesting, what field are you in now?”

“Pretty much whatever they throw at me.”

“Do you find your air force background useful?”

“Yeah, it has been, once in a while.”

We had reached Rank’s place on Bails Lane.  He said good night to Lou and me and went in.

“Rank doesn’t allow much does he?”

We walked on through the moon shadows around Bails Lane toward Oval Street.  Lou’s voice went quiet.

“I think he works for Fibonacci”.

“Yes, Diddlie said the same thing.”

“What do they do?”

“Rank was right about one thing, Fibonacci does all kinds of work.”

“Did you read that a big expose years ago, on the Shrink Rap?”

“No, Lou, was that before it became a web site?”

“Not sure, a while back. Fibonacci was a silicone valley start-up which turned out to be a front company for one of  the secret agency acronyms that we all know, CIA or something.  The front company was unexpectedly successful.  It made embarrassing amounts of money.  It isn’t clear which agency started it.  Maybe it was a partnership, but it looks like they got into a turf war over the money that then led to a leak to the press.”

“No, don’t remember reading about that either.”

“So, they went ‘legit’ to avoid further embarrassment.  They had a story which I didn’t believe but it enabled them to answer questions openly.”

“Openly?”

“Well, not all that openly I guess, but government secrets were no longer at risk.  It was taken over by a couple of retired Generals, or maybe one was an Admiral.  I don’t know.  But anyway, these guys hired a lot of their old buddies as they retired out of the service.  Some of them had valuable specialized knowledge and contacts so the company diversified into many different areas as they developed their own divisions of the business.”

“Sounds to me as if there is a lot more to be said!”

“Oh, no doubt.  It is all about relationships and money.  Once a Congressional appropriation is put into a contract with Fibonacci, the money can be ‘re-papered’ and used for anything.”

“What do you mean ‘re-papered?”

“I mean the accounting and finance people make everything look one way while the money is spent some other way.  It sounds illegal, but it often isn’t.  It all depends on how clever they are.  No one has time to follow up on this stuff anyway. Sometimes it is less than a million, but it is critical to some project.

“Less than a million?  Is that some threshold?”

“Yeah, anything less than a million tends to be overlooked by routine audits when you’re dealing with multibillion dollar government contracts.”

“You mean Fibonacci is in that league?”

“Sure is.”

“What happened to all money the front company made?”

“That’s one of the things Shrink Rap was interested in, and they got a lot of interesting leads but ended up with nothing solid on that one.  The big scoop was the front company story, but it never got into the rest of the media.  The story ended there.”

“It sounds like the sort of sensational muckraking that would be ideal for the media!”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“So what happened?”

“The story may have been killed in any number of ways, but the thing that struck me was that the same day that the Shrink Rap broke their story, the Armond Macadamia story broke all over the evening news.

Oh yes, Armond has a place in Fauxmont, but I don’t remember which house.”

“Oh, I can show you some time.  He’s never there.”

“I remember reading that one, Lou.  Armond is, indeed our local billionaire.  He was supposed to have trucked half a trillion dollars in used green backs down to Honduras.  The big news networks all had people down there showing much the same thing.  The correspondents stood on the road beside a ravine where a truck had tumbled off into the jungle.  The lead into the story was pretty funny.  They asked if anyone had ever seen money grow on trees?  Then the footage from Honduras showed dollar bills all over the canopy below the road, and in a stream flowing down beside the wreckage.  ABC said Macadamia was planning to buy the whole country and turn it into a ranch.  Someone on CBS questioned if there was really enough money there to buy a ranch the size of Honduras.”

“Do you remember the CNN interview with that funny looking guy in a head cloth, no shirt and ragged shorts?”

“Yes, and he had no credibility to my mind.  He gestured with his machete assuring us through a translator that he had seen a whole convoy of trucks.  He seemed like he was acting or put up to it.  Then we saw a lot of low denomination bills among torn fragments in a puddle.”

“So Fred, that was the picture on television.  You know, I once asked Jake Trip about this, years back when I was talking to him about his plans for his new house.  He happened to mention Macadamia, and he told me Armand had no intention of buying anything in Honduras.”

“So why didn’t he come out and deny it?”

“Good question.”

Lou stopped.  We stood outside Derwent’s house and he seemed to be somewhere else, just staring into the middle distance.

“Excuse me, some of these memories have painful associations.  Where was I?”

“I had asked why Macadamia didn’t disassociate himself from the money spill in Honduras.”

“That’s it.  He wouldn’t answer that one when Jake asked him.  He just said a deal is a deal, and Jake assumed he made out all right somewhere.  Macadamia always did in those days.”

“Do you think they paid him off to use his name?”

“I have no idea.”

“I mean where did all that cash we saw on television come from?”

“Maybe it was dope money.”

“Those Narcos do have truckloads of used bills.”

“Fred, I would like to know how the networks knew where the wreck was in the jungle?”

“That was never divulged.”

“Those reporters keep their sources confidential.  That’s how the system works.  Otherwise no one would talk to them.”

“So, your thought is that the Macadamia scandal was cooked up to draw attention away from the Silicon Valley story.”

“Yes, that is one of the tools of perception management”.

“How do you know so much about it Lou?”

“Reading this and that.”

“Come on.”

“What?”

“Were you privy to this operation”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean do you know someone with inside information?”

Lou kicked a twig out of his path.

“I sold out, remember?”

A white rabbit hurried across the road a few yards in front of us, and stopped in the shadow of a hydrant.  Some one’s porch light made it visible, and we could see its twitching nose.  It was looking at me with its right eye, its nose pointed away.  Lou pointed.

“That looks like Mr. Liddell”.

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 turn left off Oval Street on to Bails Lane past Diddlie’s on the corner.  Crows keep up a lively chat in the branches of a bare sycamore outside Rank Major’s place ahead, and near the highest point in Fauxmont.  Dr. Wittgenstein’s house next door can only be seen from the road in winter, when leaves fall from pin oaks under the power lines that cross the hedgerow surrounding his property.  The power company keeps cutting the branches back and they look like old coppiced oaks.  Four square walls are visible through the branches beyond the curvy driveway, set back from one another; two stucco and one faced with vertical boards and one with horizontal boards.  Each is a different height and has its own overhanging flat roof.  A single rectangular window is off set to the left on the right hand pair and off set to the right on the pair to the left.  From here his house looks like four huts in a small village.  Diddlie calls it the ‘cross eyed house’.

Holly, juniper, and a patch of bamboo also shade his perimeter.  A pickup marked ‘Women’s Wells Cooperative’ blocks Dr. W.’s driveway.  Before the property was developed, his driveway used to be another, even narrower lane called Mid Off which led off through the woods to Wicket Street at the mid point along its length.  The old Mid Off sign can still be seen leaning into a thicket at the Wicket street end.  The truck’s right hand door is crushing juniper branches hard against the driver’s window and they hang over the dented newly painted cherry-red hood.  Lights blink on each side of the bent tailgate.  The growl and click of the diesel drowns out everything but the crows as I get close enough to notice a flat front tire.

A woman’s voice yells from the pickup at someone in the grounds.  The door slams on the other side of a big white truck with a circular logo on the door.  A  single water drop pictured in brilliant blue with star shaped highlight.  The Coop’s Vienna Virginia address is printed in a yellow semicircle beneath.  A fair-haired woman leans out the window backing the big truck loaded with drill-pipe further into the property.  Her thick hair is wound up on top of her head, flat and compact with a loose strand flying like a pennant above her ear.  Some shrubs are cleared and several small trees are cut down, and you can see from the gate how they have planned the approach to avoid cutting down a large hornbeam or any of the mature post oaks nearby.

It was announced in the Community newsletter last year; “Dr. Wittgenstein has donated a thousand square feet of ground on the old Mid Off lane, now his driveway, for a new community well.”

The pickup’s engine is turned off and the driver gets out as I approach.

“You need any help with that?”

The driver moves toward the tire and bends down to look.  “I can take care if it.”  Her faded black jeans stretch across wide flat hips as she bends down, examines the valve and runs a hand around the tire.

“We often get flats up here.  Looks like this one may be another bad valve stem.”  She gets up and looks at me with a grin.  “Hi, I am Eddie Carnap.”  She rubs her hands together.  The dirt is still there from examining the tire and she pulls back form a hand shake.  Eddie is tall with big shoulders rounding out the contour of her faded crimson hoody.  “Haven’t seen you around before.  Have you just moved in to the neighborhood?”

“Yes, I am, Fred Bloggs.”

“Okay you must be Lou Waymarsh’s friend.”  Eddie brightens.

“Yeah, Lou told me about you, well, that he was looking forward to having you here in Fauxmont.”

“Eddie, you seem to be well connected around here.”

“I went the Fauxmont preschool.  Do you know Arty Bliemisch?”

“Yes, Steve Strether introduced me right after I moved in.”

“We were there together.”

“She is doing interesting work.  Have you kept up?”

“We did until she went to Italy, then we lost track of each other.  We moved up to New England when I was in seventh grade, but Arty and I did email for a while.”

“Have you ever met Wittgenstein?”

“No, but I have heard a lot about him.”

“Same here, seems like no has seen him.”

“Dr. Wittgenstein isn’t really the owner Fred.  So he probably isn’t the donor of this ground, as you have may have heard.  I have also heard that he has the place on loan from a friend who is seldom around either.”

“Oh, do you mean Derwent Sloot?”

“No, but I know him too. He tried to teach me chess.  Derwent told me Wittgenstein isn’t really a doctor.  There’s a story that they used to meet at the Pie Shop all the time, and often got into heated discussions.”

“Yes Mrs. Rutherford mentioned that.  They had a falling out in the late eighties and Derwent now claims he doesn’t know the man.”

“Fred, I have also heard Derwent Sloot say Wittgenstein is a boat builder.  You may also hear he is, or was, a physician, and an architect, even a philosopher, and that he is over a hundred.”

“From Derwent?”

“Oh from various people.  Seems like every one around here has a story about him.”

“Eddie, Derwent told me Wittgenstein is bewitched.  Not like a witch, but bewitched by language, what ever that means.”

The big truck engine sputters and shuts down and within moments the sound of a blue Jay’s shriek breaks what seemed like an extraordinarily quiet.  The blond woman appears behind Eddie in gum boots, jeans and a heavy brown corduroy jacket.  She looks into Eddie’s truck, pulls a clipboard out through the open window and starts reading the attached papers.  “That’s Olga Hahn, Fred.”  Edie doesn’t turn to look at her.  Olga nods in my direction and her pennant flies up, while her eyes scarcely leave the page she is reading. She has a square face with Roman nose.  Eddie carries on as if Olga had never appeared.

“Apparenly Mrs. Rutherford heard enough of one their discussions to drive her crazy.  She got carried away telling me about it anyway, saying, ‘I never thought I would hear two grown men get so upset about whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room’ and after that, Mrs. R. started giggling uncontrollably.  She said they were expecting another friend called Russell, but he never showed.  “I’ll bet his ears were burning.”  Mrs. Rutherford kept repeating that and got breathless.

“She must have been bewitched herself.”

“Quite possibly Fred.  I sat her down to calm her, and she gave me a free coffee. While she was making it she also told me after that incident Wittgenstein ignored Derwent and read poetry in silence when ever they sat together.”

Eddie stopped to answer her phone.  She beckoned to Olga, still without turning around.  Olga noticed and stepped over next to Eddie, without looking up from her reading.  Eddie put her hand around Olga’s head and pulled her close to listen to the phone.

“Who the hell is that?”

Olga grabbs the phone and presses it to her ear, catching her pennant in the action.  A deep frown incises two vertical lines above her Roman nose.  Having given up the phone, Eddie steps closer to me.

“Fred, you ever heard of the Fauxmont Militia?”

“No, it’s news to me. Well, may be not so new, now I think of it.  It is probably Boyd Nightingale.”

“Okay, what’s he got to do with it?”

“He and Albrecht Intaglio have bought weapons and I imagine they are the ones behind this militia.”

“That was Lou Waymarsh on the phone telling us, or was he warning us?  We shall be under the protection of the Fauxmont Militia.”

“I can’t imagine what Lou is up to.”

Olga is off the phone.  “Eddie you seen any armed men around?”

“Not yet”

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Not yet, they may be harmless.  Just call Tract and Arts and see if they know anything.”

Olga is on the phone again.

“What?  Tract and Arts?  Never heard of them.”

“They have managed the property for a while.  They do restorations on high end properties as well as property management.  Good people, they all talk German up at the office.  So I get a little small talk in, some consideration and practice my German,.”

Eddie lets her hood down and shakes out curly brown hair.  The sun is out warming the wintry morning air even though it is now early spring.  Last night’s snow still lingers in the shadows.

I point to the Harvard shield on her hoody.  “Are you an Alum.”

“Yeah, I was doing philosophy with Goldfarb, but left Emerson Hall, and all that ABD, to dig wells.  Are you?”

“No, no, no … How deep do you expect to go?”

“Between three and four hundred feet, if the survey is correct.  Sometimes the water table sinks.  There’re a lot of industrial users in this area.”

Olga steps over to give Eddie her phone back.

“They say they don’t know any Militia around here, but I don’t trust them, never have.” Olga ignores me and only looks at Eddie.

“They are not a problem now.”  Eddie’s tone is gentle and patient.  She seems distracted for a moment.

“Olga turns and walks back to Eddie’s truck.”

“Olga is suspicious of Tract and Arts.  They used to be two separate companies.  One of which owned a lot of land around here was known as just “Tract”, and the other was Fine Arts Real-Estate, doing antique properties.  There are as many stories about Tract and where its money came from as there are about Wittgenstein.”

“Any of them concern Prestige U. and it’s founding?”

“How did you guess Fred?”

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

He jumped the split rail fence with the casual ease of someone accustomed to clearing four-foot obstacles.  It was a fox with a hairless tail poking out behind like a long thin pink stick.  The fox trotted on a few yards and stopped, then started shaking, as if shivering from the cold.  It has mange.  The temperature is well below freezing after days in the sixties last week had brought up daffodils and hyacinths.  It snowed a little in the night and the fox stands out against the white driveway as it crosses.  It is moving behind a curtain of stems, becoming a shadow among leafless shrubs.  It is gone from sight.

Steve and I are looking for the water shutoff valve on the Wittgenstein property.  A plumber is due to start work in the house next week and needs to know where it is.  If we could only give Lambert the scent he would find it in an instant even though it is hidden from us by a dozen square yards of ivy leaves.

Steve is looking at an old barbeque.  He opens the rusty top.

“There’s a dead mouse in here.”  He holds it up by the tail and throws the corpse into the ivy.  Lambert turns toward the sound of it splashing into the dry green sea and runs toward it.

“Steve, there’s Boyd Nightingale.”

Boyd is standing by the back door talking on his cell phone.  He notices us looking at him and waves.  Lambert has found the mouse and Steve has to run over and exchange it for a treat before Lambert eats it.

“He’ll get sick eating that thing.”

“I wonder how long it has been in there.  Might have been poisoned.”

“Fred I should have left it in there.”  He puts the corpse back.  Lambert can’t reach up to it and moves on; his nose to the ground near the base of a pignut hickory probably scenting a squirrels’ stash.  He barks sharply once.  Now he must have caught scent of the fox in the air, which he hadn’t seen with his head in the ivy, and pulls hard on his extended retractable leash, trying to bound ahead yet barely inching forward under the restraint.  Though Steve holds him back he keeps pulling hard.  Lambert suddenly doubles back towards us and over toward the fence.  Finding the trail he follows it out to the full extent of the leash, breathing hard.

We follow him into the ivy carefully looking for a short length of steel pipe sticking up from the ground.  It should be capped and lead down to the water main and valve to the Wittgenstein house.  It may be painted blue.  It may not have been seen for forty or fifty years in which case it will be rusty.  The pipes were laid in the early fifties in this part of Fauxmont.  People forget where their valves are, sometimes planting azaleas over them, or covering them with mulch, to keep some other shrub alive through a dry summer.

Boyd walks over to us from the house.  He’s wearing a light brown Stetson and carrying his black briefcase in his black-gloved hand.

“You must be the water committee.”

“We are part of it.”

“Did Daisy drag you in on this too Fred?”

“I am now a member of the search party Boyd.”

“You guys seen Edie?”

“We haven’t seen any one but a fox with a bare tail.”

Boyd bends down to pet Lambert who has giving up on the fox expecting a new person to be bringing treats.  “Haven’t got anything buddy.”  Lambert keeps sniffing the bottom of his black jeans where they hit the top of his cowboy boots.  “Hope you guys can find that valve.  Then we’ll know where to find the service line to the house.”

“Does it matter?  Thought Edie was going to start drilling the new well.”

“She is Fred, as soon as Daisy straightens out the contract payments.”

His coat swings open as he reaches into an inside pocket.  Looks like he has a pistol holstered on his belt.

Steve is kicking through the ivy as we speak hoping to connect with the pipe.  “We need to get this cut back.”

“You all bought anything to defend yourselves with?”

“What do you mean?”

“Steve, I mean one of these.” He pulls an automatic out from under his coat.  “Pretty soon Obama is going to prevent you buying them.”

“What do I need one of those for around here Boyd?”

“You never know until it happens friend.”

“I’ll just call the police.  That’s their job.”

“Steve, suppose an attacker came out of the house right now.  What could you do?  There’d be no time to call any one.”

“The house is vacant as far as I know.  The agent called us about a plumber coming over.”

“Oh I thought it was about the new well.  Anyway, just suppose someone might be squatting there.”

“I don’t feel the need for a weapon Boyd.”

“Well, Fred how about you buddy, what are you going to do?”

“I won’t be buying a gun.”

“Gentlemen, this is a Heckler and Koch P 30. “

“Oh, does that mean 30 caliber?”

“9 Millimeter Fred.  Albrecht advised me to get this thing right away after the tragedy up in Connecticut, and I am just passing on his good advice to you.  The government has got every nut case they can find screaming about it.  Taking our guns away isn’t going to stop the homicidal maniacs from finding what they need.”

“Boyd, you have a nice looking Stetson there.  Isn’t that the same kind of outfit Albrecht wears these days?”

Boyd takes his hat off.  “Yeah some one has to get the old values back, and this is a pretty good symbol don’t you think?”

“Symbol of what?”

“The real individualistic values that made this the greatest country in the world.”

“Didn’t the railroads and cotton have something to do with that?”

“Steve, we are sinking into socialism here in the East.  Pretty soon we’ll be like Europe.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“Fred, Europe is going under my friend.  You see that gigantic mosque they have built in Rome.  It’s the biggest in Europe.  That’s way the Pope is retiring!”

“I think he’s just getting old Boyd.”

“Fred, the new Muslim majority is going to take over their weak socialist governments.  The governments over there have all the guns too.  I mean you can’t own or carry over there.  Won’t happen here though.”  Boyd puts his weapon back under is coat.

“Pretty soon it will be Sharia law over there.  The Euro has been strangled by socialism already.”

“I was in England in 07, and didn’t see any signs of imminent takeover by Muslims.  They aren’t in the majority, far from it.”

“You were in England!  Daisy was going to take me over to London to look at paintings in the National Gallery.  Yeah! she’s got people over there.”

He holds his hat with both hands in front of him slowly working his way around the brim with his fingers.  I look over at Steve who looks back at me with a questioning shrug at Boyd’s sudden silence.  He takes a step towards Boyd who doesn’t notice.  He seems distracted, looking into the tangled vines of ivy.  They have covered both wheels of the old barbeque and are growing up into the bowl where they have rooted in the remains of the last fire.

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

Daisy is carrying an old copper coalscuttle across the room to the couch.  Sitting down under the Tiffany style standard lamp with her bowler hat balanced askew on top she hoists the scuttle up onto her knees. Its shape resembles a huge helmet with the handle as chinstrap, but its swelling sides are green with verdigris.

“These are my files.”

They are crammed in vertically and tight.  The tops of faded rose, yellow and blue folders are visible, above the graceful line of the rim.  They are hard to get out.  After some searching among the labels at the top of each folder, she pulls out two with a sharp jerk and deeper original colors show where the tight fit kept them from the air.  She coughs and sneezes as dust rises from the first one she opens on her lap, putting others on the cushion beside her.  She gently pulls the lamp string threaded with yellow and blue beads and weighted at the bottom with a large piece of purple glass cut like a gemstone.  The light comes on but the string breaks close to the lamp socket.  She has the purple glass in her fingers but the blues and yellows are scattered across the floor and couch. There’s a little wisp of string visible near the mechanism.

“I knew that had to happen!”

“Did you have a premonition?”
“No, this is so inconvenient though … I mean it’s Murphy … his law  … there’s no time to fix it … well it is lucky the boys are sleeping.”

“The boys Daisy?”

“Yes Fred, Dante, Gabriel and Rossetti, you remember Rossetti from the barbeque at Hank Dumpty’s ?”

Yes the Dormouse, of course, sorry I had forgotten.”

“No Fred he’s a wombat, all three are.”

“Okay, he was asleep under a tea cozy, or was it a hat?”

“It was my aunt’s old hat.”

She looks up at the lamp distractedly, reaching for the wisp of string and having grasped it between thumb and finger, she lets it go.

“Ahhh!  At least eighty years old.”

“Same age as the coalscuttle?”

“The lamp is probably younger than that, but they both came over from England with a bunch of stuff from my Aunt’s place.

“Oh, when did they emigrate?”

“They didn’t but their house was damaged by blast from a Nazi V2 rocket and their furnishings went into temporary storage.  I don’t know how this lamp survived.  I made a lot of repairs to that glass shade though, and the colors aren’t a perfect match, but I love it. Anyway their house in London was rebuilt after the war.  The American relatives had sent money to help and as they liked Art Deco design some stuff came over here and the rest went back into the house.”

“Daisy your files look as if they’ve been rolled up?  I mean the paper is all curly.”

“Yeah, like trying to keep an old scroll flat.”

“Why a coalscuttle Daisy?”

“Well, the file cabinet is used for stained glass storage and this was empty and convenient when I first got it from the New York cousins, plus, I needed to keep these papers handy.”

She pulls out a ragged soft toy.  Looks as if it has been chewed or possibly clawed.

“What is that doing in here?”

“You tell me Daisy.”

“It’s Rossetti’s.  Well I thought it was but Dante had it for a while too.

Maybe he hid it in here to keep it safe.”

“I felt sure the water committee folder was in here …” She stops to focus more closely.  “These are old Guild meeting minutes and bylaws from the forties and fifties.  Mr. Ramsay gave them to me to read when I joined the Guild for the first time and here they are, still unread.”

“You mean you were elected.”

“Right, and I wasn’t ready, but Mr. Ramsay talked me into running and of course, no one else ran.  I had been here less than a year and there I was trying to vote on community issues while not knowing the history; a big disadvantage.”

“I suppose Mr. Ramsay expected your support.”

“How did you guess Fred?  Then I got to know Diddlie who brought me up to date, and changed my mind about a few things and I didn’t always vote his way, so … you can imagine …”

“I have the impression you get more of his attention than you want.”

“He’s unbearable when he’s had a few drinks.  I saw him stoned once, just babbling to himself, so I used to offer him a smoke when he came around.”

She pulls out more folders and finds pages and pages of carbon copies on old-fashioned onion skin paper with rusty paper clips holding them in a reddish grip whose acidity had burned some of the paper away.  Documents in the rose folder were held together with string.  It runs through a single hole punched in the top left corner.  Daisy holds up a sheaf of documents fastened with string.

“Oh these things are called “Treasury Tags”.  See this little cross piece on the end of the string prevents it getting pulled back through the holes.”

“Good grief!  It looks like something Scrooge might have used.”

“Sure, he would have, and so would ‘the King in his counting house.’      This is all to do with my British side.  Looks like legal or financial stuff.”

She turns through several pages without unfastening the string.

“See the string is long enough to look through them!  I don’t know … Oh I have forgotten … no time to read it now.”

Daisy doesn’t use her living room much as she prefers daylight in the conservatory out behind the kitchen, but she says it is too cold out there now.  The thermometer read 27F this morning and now it is overcast there will be no warmth out there unless she lights a fire.  The living room is dark with a large picture window shaded by huge azaleas growing outside in front.  I can see numerous bookcases around the walls, but some are hidden behind the dented grey metal file cabinet.  It looks like government surplus.  A big bookcase fills the opposite wall while next to me, under the window there’s a row of small Arts and Crafts style oak bookcases.  Here’s a copy of Ten Days That Shook the World by John Read.  It’s a Modern Library edition with the red and white dust jacket nicely preserved since this reprint came out in New York in 1935.  Under the dust jacket in faded gold, the logo’s Promethean athlete has reached the center of the red cloth binding carrying his torch aloft with two flames streaming back over his head.

While Daisy is busy with her coalscuttle collection I pull out another small volume, Holinshed’s Chronicle in another well preserved red paper dust jacket from J. P. Dutton’s Everyman’s Library.  This is number 800, published in London, reprinted in 1955.  The whole shelf is devoted to these small hardbound books, all of them either Dutton or Dent and all the same size though varying in thickness.  Here’s,  The Medici by Colonel G. F. Young, with Lorenzo on the dust jacket rendered in the style of a wood block print.  Some papers fall out as I open it.  They are penciled notes.  Seven Medicis are listed from Cosimo I, 1519 -1574 to Gian Gastone, last of his house 1671 – 1737.  The old paper is still white, only a little brown along the fold.  At the top left it says “Park Otesli, Ayaz  – Pasa, Istanbul – Beyogle” in blue ink.  The Hotel stationary also provides a preprinted date on the right showing 195 with a blank space to fill in the year by hand.  A small rectangle of stiffer paper also fell out and picking it up from under my chair I see it is a map of Firenze from the Hotel Porta Rosa with a space for notes on the back.

“Whose collection is this Daisy?”

Daisy has emptied the coalscuttle and the files are now arranged on the couch next to her and surrounding her feet on the Afghan war rug.

“I can’t find any record of the new well.”

“What new well?”

“You know the one the that Edie Carnap was drilling over on the Wittgenstein property.”

“Yes, The Women’s Wells Cooperative, I met her once on the street.  A year ago, or more probably.”

“She hasn’t done much work on it since.”

“Why?”

“Ah! a number of reasons, for one thing, we haven’t paid her.”

“No, but she hasn’t finished.  In fact she was only just starting that day we met.”

“Right, and we were supposed to give her some money upfront.”

“Ouch!”

“She is feeling the pain alright.  This is disgraceful.  I promised her I would get this straightened out.”

“Why you Daisy?”

“Partly because we are friends and also with Boyd on the Guild, I thought he would help push things along.”

“I should think he’s been too busy.”

“He’s so wrapped up in Albrecht, and all that political stuff its ridiculous.”

“Why don’t you talk to bel?”

“I did, and she said get the paper work together and we can move on it.”

“Oh!”

“Those books …  Fred, were you asking about those books?”

“I was.  Looks like an interesting old collection.”

“Those are from one of the New York Uncles who spent a lot of time in Europe.  I forget how they ended up here.”

“I didn’t see any names written in them.”

“No he seldom wrote in his books, only if it were a gift.”

“Daisy, sorry I haven’t been much help on this project.”

“Fred, your time will come after I find the paper work.”

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

After enjoying the buffet lunch at The Emperor Babur Restaurant at the Hadron shopping Center I climbed the stairs to street level. The orange “open” sign at the Subway blinks on and off surrounded with holiday cheer in LEDs rendering images of holly and red berries.

Turning from this pulsing orange and green merriment, there’s Diddlie and Lark across the street loading the last of their Obama campaign paraphernalia into the back of Diddlie’s Prius. They face me as they step out of the glass-fronted office and into the fine rain that fills the mid afternoon dark, and intermittently refreshes the puddles out here.

Keeping the umbrella facing into the wind and walking towards them, I can see Diddlie waving a picture of the president on the end of a pole to get my attention. Next door, by a quirk of fate, the silent image Senator Lee Levenworth Knox fills a seventy two inch TV in the window of Dream Screen, the big screen TV shop with its ‘Great Wall of Entertainment’ stretching around the far corner and beyond towards the Snaz Super Store.  Snaz and Dream are the two anchors for the Hadron Center’s lesser outlets and restaurants.  A block long row of huge screens with smaller flat screen sets stacked above and below them make the ‘wall’ of identical images shining through the display windows, accompanied by the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ from the store’s outside speakers.  The row of smaller screens below the giants, advertize electronic products under falling snow that never buries them.  Those above the Senator show us beautiful people at the beach using their laptops under colorful umbrellas displaying the Dream Store logo in red white and blue. The president is pictured up on Diddlie’s pole pointing high into the air with his mouth slightly open facing the Dream Screen store. For a moment the president and the senator seem to be talking to each other, but it is an illusion. I look up at the crawl under the image of Knox,  “…end of America as we knew and loved …”  A cold gust of wind catches the president’s picture like a sail, blowing the pole against the side of Diddlie’s head.

The rain lets up.  Lark drops the box she is carrying and moves over to steady the pole. Another gust sends papers in Lark’s open carton fluttering into the air like pale yellow paper birds.  I wave and walk towards them across the street streaked with colorful commercial reflections in front of the vacant store-front they were using for the campaign.  The crawl on Dream Screen’s set continues … “over- whelming numbers of takers are swamping the makers” … “Knox is surrounded by his supporters in Dyspeptic NY”.  I try to catch some of the sample ballots blowing around my knees from Lark’s box, and pick two off the surface of a gleaming amber puddle before they are saturated.

“Lark, I see the “dynamic duo” have been working hard for the President’s reelection.”

“Its time to leave the bat cave Fred.  I couldn’t have lived with myself if Romney had won while I sat back.  Could you ‘Did’?”

Diddlie grunts from behind her grimace.

“How’s your head, honey?”

Diddlie is biting her bottom lip and rubbing the side of her head with one gloved hand and brushing her wind-blown hair out of her eyes with the bare fingers of the other.  Lark takes the pole and slides it into the car letting the end rest on the dashboard with the rectangular picture flat in back.  She picks up the bright red leather glove Diddlie dropped and stuffs it into her shoulder bag.  The tips of three fingers stick up from the top like a cock’s comb.  I roll the papers in my hand into a tube and offer them to Lark.

“I felt like the election was a toss up right up to the end.”  She takes my tube and puts it in her carton before picking it up and loading it in the car.

“Too true Diddlie.  Have you seen today’s paper?”

“You mean that headline announcing Fibonacci Corporation is in chapter 11?”

“Yup they are reorganizing, and there’s a picture of Jake Trip and Aaron Macadamia getting out of Jake’s Hummer Limo, or is it his?”
“Probably not.  They are in Detroit.”

“Hi Bel!”

Bel Vionnet is walking towards us past the ‘Great Wall’ with a bag full of groceries from Snaz.

“Bel would you like a memento?  Would you Fred?”

Diddlie offers us both an Obama poster, one in each hand.

“Thanks, I’ve got plenty.  I am not sure I want to remember that horrible campaign.”

“Horrible, Bel?  That’s entertainment!”

Bel doesn’t look happy “I am relieved to know that Romney is not in the White House.”

“Bel, Be Happy!  Our guy won!”

Standing silently next to Diddlie, Lark eases down the hatchback of the Prius, so as not to damage any of the cargo.

“Yes Lark, and that’s fine with me, but the campaign was not.”

“Bel, that’s what seven billion of dollars buys in the political speech market.”

“Later Lark … I know I’m not ideologically correct, but there are times when I put that load down … Excuse me for now, but I have to move on home.  This is my exercise for today folks.”

“May I walk with you Bel?”

“Come along Fred.”

“What do you make of the Fibonacci debacle?”

The sky is clearing and the rain has stopped blowing across the parking lot as we turn our backs on the ‘Great Wall of Entertainment’

and walk homeward talking quietly.

“Business as usual.”

“I was surprised.”

“What is so surprising about greedy people ruining themselves?”

“Nothing much I suppose.  They take a lot of employees down with them though.”

“Fred that is the tragedy of it.  It is a betrayal of those employees and I think it is a crime about those pensions.”

“Their pension contributions were automatically paid into company stock and they weren’t given a choice.”

“No, true enough, and for years they did very well.  I think at some point the company got more interested in making money than doing business.”

“What do you mean?  Aren’t they the same thing?”

“Not in this case.  They were a diversified company and they put too much into bets on Wall Street and less and less into the rest of the company and the services it provided.”

“Lark tells me they had a huge contract with the Defense Department.”

“Yes, won’t it be interesting to see what happens?”

We stop at the long light on Route One and look at the pigeons sitting in a row on the utility lines, as if to watch the spectacle below.  Facing us at first, the flock flies up in a huge cloud and circles back over the traffic and shopping center to lines that run perpendicular to Route One, up Boltzmann Road.  Traffic is backed up at the lights because the long cycle allows for left turns from three directions.  As we cross Bel tells me that risk management at Fibonacci finance arm grew weaker as their profits grew stronger. A fire engine races up to the intersection with horn and sirens loud enough to send the pigeons off again and when the engine passes they take up their positions facing us again.  “Bel do you think each bird found his original spot?”

“Fred, I have no way to tell, but they all know when to take off and land, even without the sirens to scare them.”

“Yes, they don’t have to take a vote on it.”

“Pigeons know, Fred.”

“Where did you learn all that about Fibonacci Bel?”

“Sherman Shroud told me at a party.  It was a bunch of Steve’s old colleagues mainly and I didn’t expect to see Sherman there.”

“So you know Sherman?”

“Sure, he has done some pro bono work for the Fauxmont Board.”

“I had no idea of that connection!”

“Steve knows him because they both visit Arty Bliemisch’s studio.  The Shrouds collect her work.”

“I would have thought he was too high powered for us.  I mean

Jake Tripp hired him!”

“He is high powered but that doesn’t put him out of reach.  He spent his first five years here and went to the preschool.”

“ … and hasn’t forgotten us!”

“By the way Bel, have you seen Jake’s house is empty, with a foreclosure notice on it?”

“No, but I am not surprised.”

“Snaz is till open I see Bel.”

“Yes they won’t go out of business in this area.”

“So why should Jake be in foreclosure?”

“He got caught in Macadamia’s meltdown.”

Bel shows no sign of flagging after this long stretch with bag in hand.

It is a good mile up Boltzmann Road.

“This thing’s not heavy Fred.  Just paper towel and some radishes I couldn’t find at the Farmer’s Market.”

We reach Victor de Broglie Boulevard with cherry trees growing in two rows down the broad grassy median and three turreted mansions towering over their new landscaping along one side.  We take a short cut over to Maxwell Avenue, through an expanse of weeds in the last vacant lot on the street and come out in sight of the Light House Gas station up the road.  Long before it was torn down, a Fauxmont style house stood here with a sign outside saying ‘Lot for Sale’.  Bel stops and reads the number still visible on the old mailbox lying on the ground.

“1775, I think Mrs. Rutherford grew up in this house when she was Marguerite Ampere.”

“Did you know the Amperes?”

“No, but Margaret and I chat.”

We pass a few broken bricks strewn on the ground and a length of privet hedge the bulldozer left when it tore out the azaleas growing around the patio.  The azaleas dried out over the summer on a mound of excavated dirt, now flattened.

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

Daisy Briscoe is painting at her French easel off Slips Lane on the wide grassy verge at the corner of Wicket Street. Although the weather has cooled since July and it is no longer in the high nineties, she uses a golfing umbrella to keep the sun off. First she scrapes some thick wet paint off her small canvas with a palette knife and wipes it onto a paper towel and then wipes that spot precisely with a rag around her forefinger not smudging wet paint anywhere else. Now she mixes more color on her plate glass palette arranged along the top with blobs of assorted blues, browns and yellows and a long extruded snake of white, fresh squeezed from the tube. She picks up a tube of chrome yellow for  second and puts it down in favor of cadmium. Squeezes some cadmium yellow out onto the palette and spreads white and a little yellow across the glass with her palette knife.  Yellow streaks appear and she keeps blending until it is the pale shade of unsalted butter.  She scoops it up into a blob only to spread it again with a little blue from the top of the palette. The streaks of unmixed pigment gradually blend together into a uniform pale green tone.  She positions a few brush-loads on the painting, mixes again, and positions thicker paint next to the first daubs.  It is a highlight.  She doesn’t look up.

“Where’s Lambert?”

“He isn’t with me Daisy.”

“Oh hi Fred.  Thought you were Steve.  I was expecting him as we were talking about painting last week and he said he’d stop by.”

“I didn’t know you were a painter Daisy.”

“Welcome to the late nineteenth century!”

“Thanks Daisy, what’s so 19^th Century?”

“This folding wooden easel for one thing, and oil paint in tubes was invented at that time and that’s what gave artists the freedom to go outside and paint wherever they liked.”

“So you are enjoying the hard won freedom of the French Impressionists!”

“Well, I haven’t been for years.  Doing it now is like a ‘brain-wipe’.”

“Painting clears your brain does it?”

“Well I need a new picture.”

“Oh?”

“DON’T say it!”  Her emphatic tone cautions me, and it dawns that she is talking about Boyd Nightingale.  It is rumored that their summer affair is over.

“No I won’t, the thought has vanished while watching you work!”

“See what I mean?”

“Oh yes, I watched you change the picture!”

“Yeah!  It takes time to build a new picture, a long time!”

“This certainly is a departure from stained glass.”

“Used to spend part of the summer painting in Brittany.”

“Landscapes you mean?”

“Yup, and the rest visiting my aunt Virginia in Sussex.”

“Fall has started early.  Look at all those dead leaves blown off the path into a dusty brown heap.”

“The wind has died down now.  It blew a whole cloud of them down earlier which gave me problems with the umbrella.”

“Is it the perspective of this avenue of white oaks that got your attention?”

“Steve remarked on that too, but no that’s not what’s getting me.  Do you know Hobbema’s Avenue?”

“Whose?”

“Meindert Hobbema, the 17^th century Dutch painter.”

“Not sure I do, what about him?”

“Well he moved on to selling wine later in life, but painted the ‘Avenue at Middelharnis’.  It is over in London.  Love at first sight!  Oh that painting! … first set eyes on it when I was a kid visiting my aunt and  she bought me the print.”

“So that’s your inspiration.”

“That picture of a huge Dutch sky with tall spindly tree trunks is different from this.  But yes inspirational in a way.  Holland is so close to the sea and flat.  They have ocean light, not land light like ours. That painting was a starting point, and my painting is a new starting point and in that sense this avenue is a change in my perspective.”

“So you are finding a new outlook through these trees.”

“I am not so interested in painting a picture of the avenue.  There was interesting light going past the trunks and through the lower branches, but the light soon changed.”

“Yes, it isn’t a raking light any more.”

“No, but that’s okay.  The avenue doesn’t matter now.”

“But you are looking right down the avenue!  I can see it in your work”

“Oh of course I am, but I am not looking at the perspective now, I am looking at the color … it is just something to hang color on.  Like an armature in sculpture.”

“So what are you doing Daisy?”

“I am making the light I saw into thick oily pigments”

“That’s what they call high impasto.”

“There is something fascinating about thick paint becoming light in a painting.  I mean that is what got me as a child.”

“The thing is to see paint and light at the same time while knowing that it isn’t light.”

“That is the frisson!”  It’s Steve Strether with Lambert covered in leaves and mulch, pulling so hard on his leash toward Daisy’s legs that he chokes.

“Lambert you look a mess!”  Daisy is wearing a pair of bib overalls and a man’s button down oxford cloth shirt with the cuffs cut off at mid forearm.  A loose thread hangs from the fabric on her left arm drifting in the wake of her movements like as though it were spider’s silk.  Lambert trots over nosing the ground at her feet, then looks up. He raises his paws against her legs and tries to sniff the paint rag in her lap.  She reaches into her shirt pocket and gives him a treat. “Lambert, honey let me get those azalea leaves off your nose.”  She tries to pick them off but he dodges, looking for another treat in her hand. “Honey your mustache is twisted out of alignment and your ears are covered in something.  Just look at him Fred.”  Lambert quickly backs away and starts crunching on his treat and bits fall out of his mouth at Steve’s feet and Daisy looks up at Steve.

“What is the frisson Steve?”

“What Fred just pointed out about seeing paint as light.”

“Color makes its own light when you mix the tones just right.”

Daisy has started mixing another green.  Deeper this time, but she doesn’t use it yet.  She looks up.

“I found interesting tones on the tree leaves and trunks and the tones on that grass and dry gravel in the path underneath.”

“Two kinds of grayish browns and grayish greens.”

“Yes all broken up by light coming through the branches here and there.  Except it’s getting late. The light has changed again in the last few minutes.”

“Sorry to interrupt, every moment is valuable.”

“In fact I am looking more at the painting now, and less at the view.”

“Why?”

“Fred, once I have got the areas and proportions massed in, the painting is more about the paint than the motif.”

“You mean you are concentrating on relationships within the painting.”

“Now finishing is a matter of balancing and contrasting.  Composing the tones and hues.”

“That Fred, is how the work sort of ‘lifts off’ from representation and goes more abstract.”

“Daisy’s inner landscape, Steve.”  Daisy discards her deep green mixture and starts again, but pauses.

“That’s where we started Fred.”

“Painting can be a risky business.”

“One line placed on the canvas commits me to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.”

Lambert has moved under the easel.  He is bumping one of the legs with his nose. Steve bends down to pull Lambert back before he upsets the easel.  “These white oaks got you I see.”

“They did Steve.  This Avenue is my escape route.”

“Yeah arborists call white oaks ‘grey ghosts’.”

“A ghost, yes, that is what I am dealing with now.”

“Look down there Fred.  There are 11 trunks on the left and only nine on the right, and see that cherry growing two trunks along, filling a gap on the right?”

“Got it Steve.”

“Now look at her painting.”

I can see the cherry foliage is painted in strokes of deep orange.

“Guys, that is Fall.  Also the color of a dying fire, these oaks are forgetting summer.  Summer is just a dusty heap that you pointed out Fred.”

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

I am looking for quick connectors and a soaker hose in the Garden section of Jake’s Snaz Super Store.  Snaz has mounted electronic tablets on each shopping cart.  Type in the product you want and its graphic display tells you where to find it, the cost, and then bombards you with ads for related products.  I wave the bar code on my connectors in front of the tablet’s electric eye and it gives me the option to purchase by touching an outsize red purchase button on the screen or one of the small buttons to hold, or reject the item.  Hoses are in the next aisle.  There’s Lou Waymarsh walking towards me with a couple of GFIs in one hand and a pistol grip device in the other that serves the same purpose as a cart mounted tablet.

“Electrical problems Lou?”

“Not at my house.  An outlet has burned out on Diddlie’s kitchen counter.  I am going by her place after lunch to fix it.”

I hold up my quick connectors.  “There is no more rain this Fall than there was over the Summer, and all my chrysanthemums are drooping.”  My cart holds 50 feet of coiled black hose with ‘genuine brass fittings’.  ‘Made with 100% recycled material’ says the yellow and green cardboard packaging with Snaz logo. Perhaps it’s the voice of the woman in the picture standing above a column of printed warnings and smiling as she points towards a bed of brilliantly colored dahlias.  The image of colorful petals is cut off by a fold dividing the photo from a column of directions for use on the back of the package.

“So what you been doing lately Fred?”

“Reading back issues of Shrink Rap.”

“What’re you wasting your time on that for?”
“Keeps me out of the heat.”

The tablet on my shopping cart seems to be listening to us.  Pictures of various beverages flash into a rectangle sharing the screen with a promotion requesting my email address and the possibility of winning a free weed whacker.  Also a separate offer of a discount on ride on mowers if I apply today, ‘just touch the green happy face’!

“How about a coffee Lou?”

“Yeah, I see it on that screen too, opposite Isle 23.”  We walk towards Isle 23 and find a spacious elevator waiting to take us up to the ‘Gallery and Gables Café’.

“Do you get a strange feeling Fred?”

“This elevator is gentle.  I don’t feel as if my stomach was left down in Isle 23.”
“No I mean the way that we both responded to the suggestion pictured on that tablet.”

“Is it any different from seeing a conventional sign at the right moment?”

“Maybe not, but that was not a conventional sign though.”

“Are you thinking of subliminal suggestion?”

“Nothing subliminal about it Fred.”

The cafe is a long narrow area with huge round windows on one side looking out over the mall and a view across the interior expanse of Snaz with its numbered isles like a maze below.  Heavy timbers cross above us as if we are under the gable of an old wooden building, or is it supposed to evoke an old ship with the round windows?  The rest of the store looks as if it is built of steel and cinderblock.

A menu of snacks and drinks comes up on the tablet as we get off the elevator.  We walk over to sit at one of the many vacant oval tables well spaced to accommodate shopping carts.

“ShrinkWrap?  They must be years old …  I mean where did you get them from anyway?”

“Lou, They are on loan from Diddlie.  They turned up when rain soaked her attic in the big storm and she had to clear it out.  I’ve been reading about the beginnings of Prestige U.”

“Surely you don’t believe that malarkey Lark Bunlush wrote!”

“It didn’t seem all that implausible Lou.”

We order coffees from a young waitress in stylized white bib overalls with navy blue work shirt.   She taps our order into a phone and soon returns, the Snaz logo on her cufflinks shining as she serves the drinks.

“Armond Macadamia is a plutocrat and you don’t get that kind of money without cutting some corners.  That I accept, but this idea that he was laundering drug money for the CIA is ridiculous.”

“You mean he isn’t in the drug business at all?”

“He may be implicated in it somehow.  He may have had accounts at BCCI too, but he keeps his hands clean.”

“Well that doesn’t preclude his involvement in intelligence.”

“Well no, but I don’t find it credible.”

“I wonder how he weathered the recent bank melt down.”

“Not well.  I believe he lost a bundle in that new fund of his.”

“I thought he got out of that.”

“No he’s started Amphibian Investments.  Their slogan is ‘We take a cold blooded look at the market.’  I think it was the Toad Skin Fund that took the hit.”

“Is he in this with Jake?”

“Don’t know about Toad, but yes they are partners in some ventures.  He helped Jake get started and now he is going to help him on this settlement Sherman Shroud has cooked up.”

“Liberty was skeptical about that.”

“That’s Sherman’s specialty.  I wonder if he’d know what to do as a litigator.  I’ll bet he hasn’t done a trial in twenty years.  One aspect of it is that Prestige U. is going to get a fifteen million dollar endowment for a new chair in finance.”

“So Armond is going to bail Jake out!”

“Sort of … Jake is going to do Armond a favor too.”

“What can Jake do for a man with all Armond’s resources?”

“Armond is getting too old to get around.  He needs an energetic young guy like Jake, whom he trusts to represent him and travel for him.”

“Good grief Lou, how did you get all this?”

“Oh I hear stuff here and there you know, and folks in the neighborhood such as Derwent.”

“Derwent?”

“Yeah he’s in a wheel chair now … had a long chat with him … that’s after he got through complaining.  Derwent was on the founding Board of Regents for Prestige U.”

“I thought he was an obscure expert on little known arctic life forms.”

“He is an authority of some kind.”

“So how did he get from the ice pack to the board room?”

“That is a story in itself.  Derwent married one of Macadamia’s relatives, a cousin or something.  There was no money in it, but the connection helped him get tenure at Prestige U. after he published some important work.  He was also having an affair with a secretary up in the admin office.  Oh it was quite a scandal!  That secretary had a lot of influence showing a little cleavage here and spending some couch time there.  Come to think of it Diddlie was in the midst of that scene.”

“Diddlie has never mentioned it to me.”

“Oh well, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Did she work at Prestige U. too?”

“No, no, no, it was a social scene … Diddlie her husband Stuart Dodgson, and Lark, Harper Nightingale, her ex, and a bunch of others.  I better let her tell you, we never got into that swinging scene.”

“You mean the secretary was part of this too?”

“Yeah, she had been a scholarship student from Guatamala I think, or was it Chile?  I forget.  Somehow she ended up working in the front office.  Derwent was only one of her sexual partners.”

“Sounds like trouble right there.”

“Yeah it was really something.  My wife used to get a lot of gossip from Diddlie and pass it on to me.  I found it pretty amusing in some respects, and kind of disgusting in others.”

“The promiscuity you mean?”

“Yes, the promiscuity.  They called it ‘a liberation’ and I question that idea.  I’ve got serious reservations about the liberating aspect of promiscuity.  I get in trouble for it some times, but there it is.”

“It’s liberation from generations of repression and hypocrisy, from the demons their parents haunted them with, the demons that block expression of real feeling.”

“I know, I know, heard it all before Fred.  It’s fine to get past hypocrisy about sex, and fear and all that chauvinistic stuff.  Sure I am all for that, but promiscuity ‘ain’t it’ to me.”

“Well if you are mixed up, acting out is a way through it all.”

“That is understandable in some cases, maybe many.  I don’t know how messed up these people were.  God knows there’s plenty of trash talked on the street and on TV.”

“Yes I think TV is mimicking ‘the street’ and visa versa.  It has proven to be an effective way of getting attention …”

“ … and attention is what it’s all about.  You know that reminds me.  Derwent’s affair never attracted any one’s attention at the time.  He was apart from that scene, but she was into it.  My wife and I used to discuss these goings on endlessly.  At one point it became our evening’s entertainment after work.”

“Lark tells me that when she and Juanita were getting to know each other they ran into Rank Majors on the street and Juanita went into shock.”

“I have heard it from her too.  Then one day I had a chance to talk to Juanita about it privately and she described seeing a big snake partly wound around a limb and partly looping down between branches with its head in the air immediately behind Rank.  That’s what frightened her.”

“Oh well, Lark made no mention of a snake.”

“No, and I don’t want to get into it with her or all that stuff between Jake and Derwent.”

“I have heard Derwent rant about Jake Trip and saying he’s a drug dealer and Macadamia is in it too.”

“Yeah there was a big falling out there … a squabble over family documents I think … there’s probably more to it than that though. Well, that’s Jake’s take on it.  Now Derwent is going off the deep end, saying all this crazy stuff about dope deals.”

“Jake did tell me he was in a jam, a ‘hell of a jam’ in fact’.”

“Lark tells me that when she and Juanita were getting to know each other they ran into Rank Majors on the street and Juanita went into shock.”

An alarm is going off by the exit as we walk towards it.  Three security people with pistols on their hips converge on two Hispanic men with a cart full of paint, brushes, rollers and plastic drop cloths.  They look frightened.  A roll of masking tape bounces on the floor and rolls out the door as it opens, with a snake like hiss, for another exiting customer.

“Get back here, sir.”

The man is chasing his role of tape out the door.  The larger older man is explaining in Spanish but the guards don’t show any sign of understanding.  Lou walks over and offers to translate.

“Thank you sir, we have the situation under control.”

He translates the man’s explanation anyway but they ignore him.  The

The two men in paint-splashed jeans are escorted behind a counter used for returned items.  They stand there with their cart and the uniformed guards bar the way out.  Lou leans over the counter and tries to talk to them.

“Sir, this is a restricted area.”  A female guard flashes Lou a beautiful smile from under the countless fine braids arranged around her head with tiny gold charms interspersed. Putting her arm in his she guides him away as if she were a close friend about to have an intimate conversation.

I wait for several minutes while Lou huddles with the glamorous security woman.  Then he comes to explain that they are following routine store procedure.  “If this is routine, I think we are all in big trouble!”

“Those two think they have paid but don’t understand the system, so the alarm is going off.  Maybe his purchase didn’t go through.  His cell phone is now out of juice so he can’t produce any proof of purchase, now what?”

We exit the maze of Snaz knowing receipts for our goods and coffees have been transmitted to our phones and the price has been deducted from our credit accounts.

 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.

Goldenrod is blooming heavy with pollen.  Tall clumps grow vigorously around the far end of the shaded bench I am sitting on. More long stems with drooping leaves lean towards the unprotected trashcan only a yard away.  I am looking at the river through a gap in the trees from Wicket Street.  The water is glassy over toward the far bank and textured under the shadow of massive clouds, like vanilla ice cream scooped and stacked up further down stream.  The dogwoods are dropping leaves and the branch over my head looks scorched.  It is nearly ten, later than I usually go out, and already hot in the high morning sun.  Warm wind comes off the water and blows an empty slate blue plastic bag up the steep bank from the road. It catches on a twig in the wind-whipped Kentucky coffee tree below me.  The shopping bag looks for a moment like a garment hanging from its shoulder strap among the remaining dark brown leathery seedpods, until the plastic twists unmistakably, becoming trash.  A succession of low flying jets whistles and roars over the river heading north to the airport runway, echoing under low cloud approaching from the west.  Cloud has been rolling in all summer dropping enough rain to leave puddles in the street, and drip from the azaleas along our path.  Enough to drench your shirtsleeves brushing past but there’s little sign of moisture on the ground still hard and cracked.  Another jet circles higher up, its engines whine, as if in frustration at having to wait.  The power of internal combustion and spinning turbines disturbs air and water.  A speedboat thunders into view and throbs as it moves further up stream and as it grows fainter the wake moves a large mat of detritus undulating at the river’s edge where it could have been mistaken for solid ground.  The noise abates long enough for a blue jay to screech into the pre-industrial quiet, followed by the buzz of a distant chain-saw ripping through rings of history.  If following loud noise, the quiet lasts long enough, it often turns out to be alive with a softer range of sounds.  In this case it is an exhalation close by, more exhaust you might say, and a step falling on the patch of gravel around the bench and then a gentle sigh.

“Oh, finally some relief!”

Diddlie sits down next to me.

“Didn’t see me, did you?”

“No, lost in thought I guess.”

“I have been walking as fast as I can for exercise … feel like I’m burning up.”

“Hope you don’t have a fever Diddlie.”

“No, just not used to doing all this walking.”

“You might try going before the sun rises above the tree line.”

“The humidity is just as bad.”

“Exercise will add years to your life.”

“I feel half dead.”

“I am still reading the blog you know.”

“Oh are you?”

“Let’s see now. You are digging up the past, old gossip and stuff.  Piling up questions, right?”

“Yes, I am getting more and more interested in my neighbors and I’ve been here long enough to gain their confidence.”

“How can you remember all those conversations word for word?”

“I mean its kind of creepy to think Fred is listening like some one hidden behind the bedroom curtain, and keeping track of it all.”

“But I am in plain sight!”

“What you’re doing is an invasion of privacy!”

“You don’t have to read it if you find it offensive.”

“No one is reading it!”

“You just said you are.”

“That doesn’t count because I know you.”

“That the moral issue is eavesdropping, not readership.”

“The moral is … I mean, like I said before, what you are doing is voyeurism.  Isn’t that kind of trashy?”

“I don’t think telling stories is voyeurism.”

“The way you tell this story is, though.  Why is that so interesting to you?”

“I find it interesting that we are able to put together lots of different conversations with the same person over time and not get mixed up.”

“That’s called ‘getting to know you’.”

“That’s it.  All these disparate experiences are categorized automatically.  They easily come together Diddlie and become ‘you’ in my mind.”

“So when you recognize me you recognize yourself.”

“Yes in a way some part of me becomes a straw you.”

“So you think I am doing that too?”

“Kind of a me, me, me, thing.”

“No, you are the center of interest in this case, not me.”

“Well, yes in one way, but not really because you are making it all up.  So it’s all you.”

“Yes the blogger is listening to things I make up.”

“It’s not believable.”

“No, it is a conceit, you have to suspend disbelief.”

“I thought your blog was supposed to be real!”

“It is in other respects.”

“You’re a good listener Fred, but why write it down.  I mean gossip is gossip.  It’s fun to tell and it can get exciting to hear but then who cares after that?”

“I don’t know if any one cares but I do want to ask you about your days with the Prestige U. crowd.”

“Oh more hot gossip huh!  I am not sure I want to be a part of this thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the moral issue!”

“Which is?”

“Fred I have been trying to say it ever since I sat down.  So tell me again.  What are you doing?”

“The blog records many conversations.  All of them are fragments of some larger picture or story that emerges over time.”

“It is too fragmented.  Too many characters, and so little development I’ve forgotten who many of them are.  There are too many starting points that don’t fit together.”

“Some things will come together out of the past.”

“Out of the past, what do you mean out of the past?”

“I mean Fred asks people to reminisce.”

“So okay, and every one’s memories will differ.”

“That’s right.”

“Sounds like more fragmentation.  How are you going to bring it all together?”

“In a way similar to putting all the experiences I have being with you together to make sense of who you are.”

“So you can’t explain it.”

“No I don’t know how the brain works or how the mind puts all my different experiences over time in one place which make up my sense of you at this moment.”

“So, are you interested in people or is the blog some kind of experiment in brain science or something?”

“No Diddlie, there is no science in it.  People tell the blogger stories.  Perhaps it is gossip.  Whatever it is, there are differences in people’s memories of the same thing, and that is interesting.”

“That happens.  Witnesses to an event often describe it differently.”

“Yes seeing is selective.”

“So is hearing.”

“It is, and that’s part of what the blog is about.”

“I hate to tell you this Fred, but I fell asleep reading your blog.”  The low clouds are now overhead darkening the water.  They look like smudges against towering white clouds above them.  Freshening wind dislodges the plastic bag from its twig and blows dust in my eyes. “Maybe I was just tired though.”

“I hope it isn’t that boring!”

“Sorry Fred, but there it is.  So go on, what were you saying?”

“I am really talking about perception Diddlie, not gossip.  Also there is what people choose to say, and choose to leave out.”

“Oh so you’re looking for lies and deception and selective memories.  You sound like a detective!”

“That’s part of it, but the blog is a series on conversations.  I want you, well any reader, to apreciate the value of conversation.”

“What is so special about conversation?  It goes on all the time and has been for generations.”

“Yes it has, but I think a lot of conversation deteriorates when contest and conflict become too pronounced.  Instead of drawing one another out in give and take, the participants do battle!”

“So people fight, so what?”

“The point is to see what conversation reveals.  It broadens perception. One senses conversational pressure in the play of emotion but it doesn’t break out into coercion.  That ruins everything.”

“Fights are revealing too”

“Yes of course it is always revealing to see when some one gets defensive.”

“It depends on whether you take things personally or not.”

“Right, and what leads one to take personally something that is not intended that way?”

“If you take it personally, I guess you sense a threat or something.”

“Yes one looses detachment.”

“Well you can’t live in your head all the time.  I keep telling you that!”

“So you do.”

“You think we are broadening our perception now?”

“Yes in as much as we communicate.”

I look up after rubbing the dust out of my eyes.  “Diddlie, where are you?”

Getting up and looking around I still can’t see her.  A jogger disappears around the corner further down Wicket Street.  The big clouds are passing over fast and a toad is revealed by a sunburst sitting in the shade of a fallen hickory branch.

 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 99 degrees outside with humidity hanging in the willow oaks like monstrous cobwebs illuminated by street lights above the Hadron Shopping Center parking lot.  What a relief it is to get downstairs to the basement and The Emperor Babur restaurant with the Bose Gallery opposite. Strange to say, it is under a Subway franchise featuring ‘Fabulous Five Foot Long Subs’.  Daisy, who has yet to arrive, tells me Babur’s biryanis get five stars on Yelp.  Lark is already sitting at a large table under a picture of ‘The Emperor’ overseeing his gardeners.  She is anxious about Juanita, and Gale Trip still doesn’t know where she is detained.

“It doesn’t make sense.  They ought to be able to get her out of there.”

“How, if even the Trips don’t know where she is held?”

“Jake has connections through Macadamia going way back.

Macadamia sold his estate in Chile to one of Pinochet’s generals a few years after Allende was murdered.”

“I thought he committed suicide.”

“No way.”

“Oh! What’s the connection with Juanita?”

“It’s all about money.  Most people don’t know it, but Jake and Armon Macadamia are close.”

“They are secretive alright, but you seem to know something about it.”

“Juanita used to work for us when Boyd was growing up.  As I got to know her I could tell she was deeply upset about something.   She told me part of her story over the first few months.  Then, suddenly, she wouldn’t go any further.”

“Do you think some one frightened her off?”

“I often wondered about that.  I meant to follow up too.  We don’t see much of each other since she has been with the Trips and I have been away, all over the place.  Haven’t got to know the Trips either.”

“Gale told me Juanita’s husband, Hector was killed by leftists during the Coup.”

“Fred, that’s what might be called the, ‘official story’ but it’s not what Juanita told me!  In fact Hector was a go-between for the CIA and one of the drug cartels.  What they call a ‘cut out’.  That’s why he got killed.”

“You mean she told you that outright?”

“Hector’s American friend Stan who helped him get a truck turned out to be CIA, and Hector’s contacts with the cartels were through his extended family.  She said they once slept on sacks of hundred dollar bills.”

“So it was drugs more than politics.  Is that what Juanita told you?  Where did you get that story Lark?”

“Not from Juanita, I was still writing for Shrink Rap and researched a piece on Macadamia.  I caught scent of something while talking to Chilean émigrés, and one of them had had a falling out with the General involved in the coup.  Well, her husband had.  I guess that’s why they were living in this area, and living very well too.  She was bitter about the mystery of her son’s disappearance on a drug mission with the Chilean army.  She talked to me in the hope … huh! … that I might find out something.  Maybe he was running some drugs himself, maybe not.  She mentioned the Macadamia deal in passing.  She said she overheard a fifty million figure discussed by her husband and a group of men he had invited to their home in secret.  She said one sounded American but couldn’t confirm it was Stan.  She didn’t recognize any of them.  Well, I didn’t find out anything helpful to her, but she helped me.”

“I didn’t see this, looking through the back issues of Shrink Rap Diddlie loaned me.  What was your article about?”

“For one thing, I asked how did he get the fifty million dollars out of Chile and pointed out that was the same amount as the fifty million he gave to Prestige U. when they first opened in 1979.”

“So did you cause a stir?”

“No, no one followed up and the story died.  Even my colleague Foulton Furay wouldn’t touch it.  I think some one got to him.”

“Who?”

“He won’t say much about it but I know he was doing a piece about BCCI and the CIA and I am sure he found Macadamia had accounts there too.  Any way he didn’t deny it when I put it to him.”

“I didn’t see his article either.”

“You won’t.  It was never published.”

“So that’s how he got his money out! I have read that the Bank of Credit and Commerce was an intelligence operation itself.”

“Fred a lot of people were betrayed by that BCCI bankruptcy.  The whole thing reeks of hidden transactions.”

I can see through the stair railings from where we are sitting.  Two long thin calf muscles are moving below long black Bermuda shorts.  Daisy’s distinctive arms appear draped in dark purple voile to the elbow, with forearms loaded in bracelets.  She takes off her bowler to duck under the low arch at the bottom of the stairs, and walks over pulling out a chair with a jangle of jeweled metals.

Daisy doesn’t sit down, but stops in an awkward posture half way down with a hand on the back of the chair for support. She notices the picture above our table.

“Have you two looked at that picture?  Isn’t it gorgeous!  I love those Moghul paradise gardens!”

“I have Daisy, look at the abundant fruit on those trees!”

“Fred, I know … are they pomegranates? …

I’m ready to eat … I hope you have ordered … sorry I am so late … my car broke down by Higgs Field.  I called the ‘Light House’ and they got it towed and ran me down here.”  Daisy sits down facing the picture.  Lark and I face each other to her left and right.

“Isn’t Boyd coming Daisy?”

“No, let’s not go there.”

The waiter serves bottles of Rosy Pelican beer with quiet murmurs of ‘Sah’ and Mam.

Another comes with murmurs of his own, and serves papadoms and chutneys, grated coconut, sliced banana, pickles, cucumbers, raita, lemon pickle, and more, all in triangular glass sections on the wide wheel of a lazy Susan. Daisy gazes at the picture in silence.  Lark slowly turns the lazy susan  looking carefully at each section. The piped sitar music, suddenly intrudes on this lull in our conversation.  I wonder if I will be moved to hear the ‘unstuck sound’, or Anahata Nad of the Yogis, by this evening raga.  I am not.  Daisy is still preoccupied by the picture.

“You know that picture is all about water.”

“Irrigation you mean Daisy?”

“Yeah Lark, see those cute little rills around each bed, like frames making each garden a painting within the painting.  That’s just part of a complex network that spreads water all over these gardens.”

“It’s geometric, kind of like a rug!”

“Same theme Lark, Persian influence.  Check the curvy Persian script.”

The waiter in a blue gray jacket positions a folding table at her side with one dexterous motion and lowers the tray held aloft in his other hand with ease.

He distributes numerous covered dishes around the lazy susan. Now it is obvious why we have an outsized table. Then lifts the shiny metal tops with a slight flourish which brings forth the scented Moghul genies.  Clove, mint, garlic, and turmeric, dance their aromatic turns through the atmosphere.  A pale coriander pod rolls out of the saffron yellow rice and lodges in a crease of the tablecloth.

“Daisy, in fact we have been discussing some one as wealthy as a Moghul emperor, and he’s a gardener too.”

“Oh Lark, have you told him about Armond?”

“Daisy I have been telling him about Macadamia and Prestige U.  You know those stories that came out in the seventies about the money for that campus.”

“Yes Lark, you wrote them!”  Daisy orders cardamom tea and Lark and I split her Rosy Pelican.

“No I didn’t write them all.  There were pieces in the Post about that whole group who gave money at the beginning and their common Latin American connections and …”

“I remember Lark, the CIA connection.  They supposedly had students and faculty there.”

“They were called scholarship students, and that’s what they were, but favoring certain people in certain governments they wanted to reward and influence.”

“Well, if you have to recycle drug money a University is a nice benign way of doing so!”

“Oh Fred, it stinks!, and it has all been covered up.”

“But of course!  You know I did see an article in Diddlie’s back issues about a truck load of money that spilled into the jungle some where after a crash, and Macadamia was involved.”

“You know who else is involved Fred?  Rank Majors.”

“I don’t know about that Lark.”

“No, I am convinced because I found the records showing he was an attaché at our embassy in Chile in the late seventies.  He was coordinating flights in and out.”

“You mean secret flights Lark.”

“They weren’t commercial that’s for sure!”

“How can you be so sure.”

“I was with Juanita one day years ago when we ran into Rank on the street, and she turned as pale as marble, and I asked her what was wrong.  All she’d say was that he’d got them out.”

“You mean Rank got them out of Chile and up here to Washington?”

“Fred, I don’t know how they ended up here but Juanita’s first job was working for Macadamias here.

“Does she have relatives here?”

“They are all in Troy.”

“Has she any children?”

“Two, they are both grown up.”

“Did the rest of the family come north with Hector?”

“I think they may have come years before, quite separately.  I suspect that CIA found them in Troy.  Juanita and I never got to that.”

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 keep hearing a familiar voice while having lunch with Lou at the H bar.

“Who’s that behind me Lou?”

“I think it’s Theo Tinderbrush.  He just sat down a few minutes ago but he has his back to us.”

Lou is enjoying his usual ‘Berger and beer’ and we have just heard Tinderbrush tell some one standing next to him about his trip to Australia.  Dr. Theo Tinderbrush has returned from Melbourne where he attended the “Atheist’s Global Convention” in April.  “Atheists,” he says “call it their ‘Celebration of Reason’.”  I turn around to see who is with him only to find Lark Bunlush approaching and the one he was talking to walking away towards the door. All at once Lark waves to us and speaks to Theo, and then suggests we sit together.  Tinderbrush gets up excitedly and one foot catches a table leg and he staggers as the small square table scrapes across the tiled floor against his chair. His thin summer weight linen blazer swings open as he raises his arms to embrace Lark sweeping the pepper and saltshakers and menu off the table-top with the bulk of a weighty pocket.

“My God!  How did that happen?”

“Theo why don’t you move over and sit with them.”  Lark introduces me to Theo, who, still flustered, moves heavily towards our table but doesn’t sit down.

“Was that Ms Flack, Theo?”

“Yes it was.  The congressman can’t make it Lou.”

“I wish he could have joined us.  Why don’t you sit down Theo?”  Lou stares into his beer.

The waiter comes over to clean up.  Lark apologizes for the mess and bends down to gather some pieces of glass that he cannot reach with his broom.

“Where are you from?”

“Tibet”

“Really!  Were you born there?”  She hands him some bits of broken peppershaker including the metal top.  He sneezes.

A baby is crying over by the bay window.  The father takes the child from its mother and walks around the room toward us to calm it.  The Tibetan waiter takes away the debris in his dustpan without answering Lark standing up to look at the baby.  Now Herman Intaglio joins us, and starts sneezing as he sits down.  Lou looks up at him.

“It’s the pepper Herman!”

“That’s my fault Herman, sorry.”  Theo sits down opposite Herman while Lark is still cooing the baby.

“Theo, are you throwing pepper around for some reason?”

“No the shaker fell on the floor and broke and when the waiter swept up, it seems to have filled the air.  Theo tries to stifle a sneeze and sinks behind his hands, hunching his shoulders.  Lark pats him on the back, sneezes into the crook of her arm, and sits down next to him.  She puts her hand on his shoulder and leans over to him.

“So what’s with Congressman Bean? … is Boris Tarantula going to design the replacement for the Washington Monument?”

“It’s still simmering in the stew cooked up by the Select Committee on Aesthetic Crime.  I think it’ll get buried with the election coming up.”  Theo has grown a big reddish gray goatee and his front teeth flash from the overhanging mustache curling east and west under his nostrils.

“Come on then Theo, I want to hear about the convention.”

“What are you professors up to now?”

“Herman, I have been in Melbourne with the atheists and my old friend Sylvester Paumgartner.”

“Your benefactor Theo!”

“Let’s not go there, Lark.”

“I didn’t know you were an atheist Theo.”

“Yes, have been since … well since I was twenty seven.”

“So what led you away from the good Lord?”

“I found it didn’t make sense any more.”

“What didn’t make sense?”

“The existence of god.”

I ask if any of us is a regular churchgoer.  Only Herman responds.  Rubbing the back of his head and looking down at the table he says he doesn’t get to Mass very often these days.  He is obviously more interested in discussing Theo’s skepticism.

“So, Theo, why should anything exist?”

“No one knows why, Herman.  The world is simply given to us.”

“Yes, given by God.”

“No, our world evolved out of the big bang, from a singularity.  At least that’s the current theory.”

“Yes, a single God!”

“We don’t know what the singularity was.”

Lou offers up his open palms and shrugs.  “Well who can say what god is!”

“No one, it doesn’t exist.”  Lark is following this with one hand twirling the lock of black hair growing out of the waves of grey above her forehead, while her other hand supports her chin.  The waiter comes back for orders and Lark looks up and puts her hand on his arm.  “Say, were you born in Tibet?”

“Yes”

“Wow! … How did you get out?”

“Walked”

“That’s amazing … How long you been here?”

“Ten years.”  The waiter’s face remains expressionless, his voice is soft.  Theo interrupts and places an order followed by Herman.  Lark doesn’t place an order.  The waiter steps away quickly.  Lou puts down the beer he was drinking and addresses Herman and Theo.

“You were talking about two beginnings which are both mysteries.”

“Except one is Divine and the other is a sort of calculation.”

“Herman, do you also mean supernatural when you say divine?”

“Of course Lou.  God is a supernatural all knowing being.”

“Okay, but if both god and the big bang are essentially unknown, how do you know that God is supernatural?  How do you know they aren’t both the same thing?”

“For one thing Lark, the bang is said to have been 13.7 billion years ago. There’s no such figure for god. Besides we talk about them so differently.”

“Well you might say Theo, it all begins at birth?”

“What’s birth got to do with this Lark?”

“It is our beginning isn’t it Herman?”

“I would agree that birth is a miracle, but not a supernatural one.”

“What sort of miracle is it then Theo?”

“It seems miraculous Lark, because birth brings a new animal into the world. I mean don’t you find that extraordinary?”

“A new animal?  Theo don’t you mean a new human being?”

“Possibly, but we are not the only species that is born.”

“Yes, but the others don’t argue about god.”

“That’s right enough Lou.”

“They don’t have to argue in Eden!”

“Well, perhaps talking is the real point.”

”What do you mean Theo?”

”You might say the whole fantasy about a supernatural god and associated myths, and scientific theories, all came about through talk.”

“A lot more than talk; divine revelation and human ingenuity and calculation.”

”Well I don’t believe in divine revelation Herman.  It really boils down to people talking to each other, or writing and reading articles and books etcetera.”

“I don’t know if you can reduce the word of god to that, Theo.”

“Lark, what has god ever said?”

“I am that I am.”

“That is profound alright, who did it say it to, I forget?”

“In King James, God said it to Moses, Exodus Chapter 3 Verse 14.”

“Lark, you are quite the Biblical scholar!”

“Why is life so short?  Why is it so inexplicable? Lou, I have always been interested in belief and faith.  I really want to ask our waiter about Tibetan Buddhism.”

“Now is not the time … he’s working besides … ”

“I know Lou, I shouldn’t have gone there … you’re right.”

Theo puts an arm around Lark’s shoulders.  “Lark and I have discussed this many times.”

“Yes and you always point out that some human wrote the biblical texts.”

“That’s it Lark.  I mean we only have the writer’s word for it.”

“Look, you have to accept tradition in this case.”

“Why Herman? Tradition tells me that the earth is flat.”

“Theo, you don’t know who you are, without tradition, and if you don’t know that, then you are nowhere!”

Lark breaks into song:

“He’s a real nowhere Man,

Sitting in his Nowhere Land,

Making all his nowhere plans

For nobody.”

Lou laughs and claps silently.  “Bravo Lark!”

Theo is leaning back with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Okay Lark, I know, there’s no challenging the authority of the Beetles!”

Herman leans forward across the table towards Theo.

“Look Theo, have you ever been really terrified?”

“Yes, every time this topic comes up!”

“No seriously Theo.  If you have ever been really scared shitless, then you knew God!”

“I did?”

“That’s right! … When you’re that terrified your ego isn’t getting in the  way.”

“Well the experience isn’t like that for me.”

“Thinking is ego Theo, and no thought can help you in that instant, only God can help you!”

“Herman, how about meditation?  Doesn’t that take you to the same place?”

“Maybe Lark, I pray but don’t meditate, nor am I a Buddhist.”

“I mean is god necessarily supernatural?”

“Of course Lark.  That’s what I said to begin with.  How else could the world have been created from nothing?”

“Well if God created the world then it’s not that nothing was there, God was there.”

“God was there but he had nothing to work with.  He had to create it.”

“Herman, I take your point about the ego, and Lark I see what you mean about meditation, and I don’t think that we are talking about the supernatural in either case.”

“What do you think Theo?  It’s just psychic states?”

“Yeah, I can go with that Lou.”

“What is a psychic state? What do you mean?”

“Lark, I just mean something that isn’t supernatural, that science might explain.”

“Do you think psychic states are supernatural Herman?”

“Psychic states, that’s just reductive jargon Lark.  I am talking about your immortal soul, the center of your being, your heart, okay?”

“Herman, all I am saying is that I accept the known and the unknown, and I don’t see what the supernatural adds to knowledge.  I think it is just mythology.”

“Theo, you must understand we are talking about a matter of faith, not knowledge!”

“Are you saying that you believe things you don’t know Herman?”

“Lou, I know that my faith is strong and I believe in God.”

“Yeah Lou this is getting into semantics or philosophy or something … I mean is faith knowledge?”

“Lark, knowledge is justified true belief.  I think that sums it up as simply as possible.”

“Okay Theo; are you trying to say that Herman’s knowledge of God is justified by his faith?”

“Doesn’t make sense to me Lark.”

“I am not going to deny Herman’s faith. Faith needs no justification. ”

“Are you a materialist then Theo?”

“No Lou.  I just favor rational thought.”

“Theo do you have no faith at all?”

“Sure I have faith Herman. I expect the sun to come up tomorrow morning, and I trust my friends, my bank will … “

“You’re on thin ice there Theo!”

“Right Lark, let’s leave the economy out of this for now even though trust is essential there too.”

“So Theo, you believe in God’s work but you deny God’s existence.  I can’t understand that!”  Herman’s phone rings before he can get the first bite of his fillet of trout.

The waiter is standing next to Herman with plates balanced half way up his arm.  “Chicken Salad?”

My cell phone chimes.  It’s the Light House gas station.  My old Saturn has soaked up another $1,300 in parts and labor.  The Battle Hymn of the Republic sounds from Lou’s cell phone, and he pulls it out of his pocket.  Theo’s ring tones sounds like the opening flourish of Schubert’s A Major piano quintet.  Lark’s phone didn’t sound, perhaps it vibrated, as she opened it up at the same time as Lou.  Theo spreads his thumb and finger through the whiskers on his lips to clear the way for lunch, but goes on talking.  At the moment it doesn’t look as if any one will eat.

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

Daisy is walking Maximilian, a longhaired Dachshund belonging to Hank James, an old friend. He occasionally zooms off the road on the end of his extending leash and through the Virginia creeper like a canine torpedo leaving a trail of pale green agitation. She tells me about Derwent’s recent trouble as we walk along Wickett Street towards Slipps Lane and Boundry Circle with the river visible through the trees.

“How did he fall Daisy?”

“Medications I think … they affect his balance.  Bel is very concerned.  He is our oldest resident, and she has found him full of useful advice.”

“About the Guild and its politics you mean?”

“Yeah, Derwent goes all the way back to the beginning.  He is strongly opinionated but he also sees how things work, and he was on the Guild in some capacity for most of the first twenty years, at least.”

We reach the smoking remains of a stump.  A dead gum tree, cut down years ago, left a substantial canyon of rotting wood.  Some one emptied a pan of hot coals into the middle of it, which has smoldered for days.  Now we can see a fine layer of light gray ash accumulating which looks like the end of an enormous lit cigarette some chthonic smoker enjoys under the peace of the lawn.

“Do you know who lives there, Daisy?”  We are looking at a typical Fauxmont brick house beyond the close cut lawn. Blue hydrangeas lean out towards the light on long arching stems in front of the entrance.

“That’s the Rundstedt’s. They are building a big new place up on Boundary Circle”

“There’s a Rundstedt amongst Derwent’s chess students.”

“Yes after Heidi Guderian started, the neighboring kids all wanted to join in.”

“Derwent to me is irascible, yet so different when he is with the kids … what’s wrong with him anyway?”

“He once referred to his ‘Hep C’. I know that’s a disease that could drive any one crazy.”

“Don’t know much about it.”

“Boyd said he’s always been cranky.  I don’t know him that well but it’s his back too.  I heard he fell and hurt himself.”

“Yes Daisy he told me that, and then went on a rant.  By the way, I hear there was a political event, a rally or something, did you go?”

“Yes, I haven’t seen Boyd for two weeks.  I guess he is losing interest.  He says he’s been away on business, but won’t say what … ”

“Has he found work?”

“No … it is not hard to guess what he’s doing!”  A breeze comes up and shakes water from a recent shower out of the oak leaves above us.  The stump’s smoke rising from the ground to our right thins into a hazy curtain drawn across the grass.  The breeze changes direction and the curtain falls across our path.

“You think he was organizing it?”

“Helping Albrecht organize.”

“Did Boyd or Albrecht speak?”

“No, not publicly, but I had a chat with Albrecht.  He had Boyd running around for him.”

“But Boyd is vice Chair of the Guild.  Shouldn’t he have spoken?”

“I would have thought so.  Albrecht said this was Senator Knox’s show, and we will benefit from giving him the venue.

I mean it wasn’t about Fauxmont it was about CUPA.”

“I gather Albrecht organized the thing.”

“Yes Fred, and Boyd seems to be in such awe of him … I would like to know where the money is coming from?”

“All what money?”

“For printed material, P/A systems, tents, food and drink and so on, and that car Albrecht uses now, and, I mean, he doesn’t seem to have a job.”

“I had no idea it was that big?  Here in Fauxmont?”

“Yes Fred, on the grounds of the Co-op.’  A lot of Fauxmont turned out too.  Where were you?”

“Oh, out of touch again … were bel or Lou there, Daisy?”

“I saw them both but we didn’t get a chance to talk.”

“Maybe Albrecht has PAC money?”

“Oh sure, I think so, but which PAC, Fred?”

“Lou tells me that Fibonacci Corporation has put millions into the Prune Stone Group and several others.”

“Others, Fred?”

“Is it that 527 organization called ‘Platitudes for Plenty’?”

“Yes that’s not a PAC though Daisy, it’s registered as a social welfare organization, so they don’t have to reveal their sources.”

“Fred, that’s just a technicality!  I think they are acting as a PAC … ”

“And it is tax exempt.”

“I don’t know about Prune Stone Fred, but I am sure Jake Trip is mixed up in it.  He’s been traveling around the country a lot lately too.”

“Well there’ no limit to how much he can contribute.”

“The Groups like “Platitude” have anonymous donors, so how would Lou know?”

“That’s why it’s called “dark money”.  Lou has connections and Daisy, I think Lark said something about Tinderbrush.”

Maximilian wound the extended leash around the trunk of a willow oak chasing a squirrel.  Now it is so short he can’t take another turn around the trunk in search of his quarry, which keeps to the opposite side as it climbs away from him.  Daisy walks toward the tree past the dog and tries to lead him around to unwind, but an old Volvo station wagon pulls up.  A black cairn terrier leaning out of the back window starts barking at Max which makes him pull all the harder in the wrong direction.  Daisy waves to the driver, who she knows from the Elegant Ostrich, our new local gift shop.  Two more cairns muscle their way up to the open window and all three bark at full volume.  After barely audible human voices exchange greetings, the car moves on and Max finds his way around the back following Daisy’s treats.

“How do Dante Rossetti and Gabriel get along with Max?”

“I keep them apart.”

“Do Wombats get along with dogs?”

“I think Max would be trouble.  So he stays in the front room and my gang is kept out.  There’s some communication under the door though.”

“Yes, like the Prune Stone group and dear Senator Knox.”

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 was awake when the phone beeped early this morning. It was Jake Trip calling from Cleveland on an issue that couldn’t wait.  He was full of questions.  He asked if I knew anything about Juanita’s situation, which I didn’t.  Then he asked if I had seen Theo Tinderbrush when he visited Gale and I had, but little was said.  “When will you be back?”

“Pretty soon Fred.  Say Fred, would you do me a favor?”

“I’m listening.”

“Listen Fred, sorry to have called so early on a Saturday … would you look in on Gale … I mean you … you’re nearby and I know she is comfortable with you … Liberty is out west, and she is alone in the middle of this thing.”

“What thing Jake?”

“This whole thing with Derwent.”

“With Derwent?  What do you mean?  I thought you were talking about Gale or Liberty or Juanita?”

“Yeah, yeah, that too … but the Derwent thing … I mean you know him a little don’t you?”

“Yes, well enough to know you two have had words.”

“Derwent’s alright, I mean yes, he’s a pain in the ass, but he’s basically alright you know … I mean I am asking you to intercede for me, because right now, there’s no one else I can ask.”

“What is it all about?”

“Would you just tell him that you’ve got it from me that I’ll straighten things out when I get back.”

“What things Jake?”

“Didn’t Gale tell you?”

“No, she told me nothing about Derwent.”

“I must be mixed up … anyway see if you can find him and just tell him that, okay?”

“What’s it all about Jake?”

“Derwent’s got some material I need …  anyway this is embarrassing … sorry Fred … forget it … I shouldn’t have said anything … I am in one hell of a jam here.”

Jake hung up.  The latest Fauxmont newsletter had fallen on the floor when I picked up the phone.  I noticed that Marshall and Gerda Rundstedt and Jakie Guderian need help at the Co-op Saturday afternoon.  I went over to see what I could do.  The Co-op is a regular Fauxmont house which is used as a preschool for local children, and there is a farmers’ market held on Saturdays in the parking lot.  It is mid June with weather in the high seventies, what a change!  The sky is like a regatta of majestic billowing white clouds interspersed with infinite blues.  I walk out on to the thick grass not yet dried out to summer’s thin dry browns.  The hydrangeas are a mass of blue hemispheres and the mulberries are soaring fifteen feet up supporting cardinals, blackbirds, wrens and of course sparrows, and everything else is thick with green including the weeds.

Derwent Sloot greets me from his wheel chair when I get to the co-op’s mulched grounds.   He is pulled up to a picnic table in front of several unusual looking sheds fenced off behind chicken wire.

“Hi there … ah …”

“It’s Fred, Derwent.  I understand the Rundstedts and Guderians can use some help at the Farmer’s market.”

“Yeah ah … Fred, they’ve got all the help they can use over there.  Stick around.  This will be interesting.”

Two goldfinches streak past, one overtaking the other in their rising and dipping flight path toward the sheds.  They rest every few wing flaps and their bodies fly like momentary bullets until their wings propel them again, birdlike.  They land on the replica of a Snaz super store.

The picnic table is covered in glass objects and three yellow and black checkerboards are laid out along its length to accommodate three games.

“Thanks for pushing me along the road the other day!  I have some students of the game due here any minute.”

“I thought you played chess … ”  A loud cry drowns him out.  Hens and two red roosters live behind the wire in a spacious coop designed to look like a town house, only a couple of yards away.  His head sticks out of a window with green shutters on either side.

“Yeah, you birds get to work there … we need fresh eggs …  and yes, chess is the name of the game.”

“By the way Derwent, I just got a call from Jake.”

“You poor bastard!  Did you hang up quick?”

“No, I … ”

“Don’t talk to me about that son of a bitch!  I’ve got some important business here.”

“What are those things?”

“Vacuum tubes.  These were the things in radios before transistors and printed circuits.”  He has a vast number nested in boxes.  There are tall curvaceous cylinders and small ones with straight sides.  There are a few with metal cladding.  I pick up one of those.

“You know where to position the knights?”

“In chess you mean?”

“Yes in chess, this isn’t checkers you know.  I have some prodigies coming here too.  Well I think they are prodigious.”

“Here” he pointed at the oversize yellow and black board. “Put that thing down where the knight goes.”

I put it down, one square in from the end where the rook would be.  It sat on a number of pins sticking out from the bottom like pilings.

“That’s right.”

“You can tell it’s a knight because of the armor, right?”

“Obvious when you get the hang of it.”

He picks up another very tall one with a metal wires sticking out of the top.

“We switched to these last month after the yard sale over at the Intaglios.  Herman had a basement full of these things and the kids love them.  Where would you put this?”

The circle of metal wires coming up out of the top resemble a crown.  I point to the Queen’s square, and get more encouragement.

“How about this?”  He picks out another fat tube with complex rings of filament wound inside and a sharp pointed top.

I point to the rook’s square.  “Well that’s understandable, but we use this as a bishop around here.”

“See this?”   Derwent holds up a broad, fat vacuum glass rook.  “We use these as rooks”.  It is marked with a GE logo, on a gray metal base, designated 6080 with five white stars.  The brown center pin had been ground down to the same length as the surrounding metal ones, and it stands steady.

“Yes.”

I can hear the kids shouting as they scramble out of various vehicles parked up the hill.  Derwent points out young Alekhine who is throwing old pine cones at Jeff Petrosian.  He has positioned himself among the fir trees, with a vast supply of ammunition close at hand.  They are coming to play chess with vacuum tubes at the Co-op, under Derwent’s tutelage.  Little Heidi Guderian is first to reach the table in her yellow top and pink jeans.

“Why don’t you use regular chess pieces?”

“Because these are so cool.”  She picks up two short cylindrical tubes with brown bases and places them in front of a knight and a rook.

“These are black pawns.  The red pawns have this tape around the base.”  Heidi explains further as she shows me a cylindrical pawn with its pins up, and red tape around the base.  Derwent is grinning.

“And what is the base made of ?”

“Bakelite”

Pam Dirac walks over, Heidi’s opponent for this afternoon’s game.  Her pink jeans are topped by a baby blue jacket.

“I can use the regular pieces too”.

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

We walk out across Miletus Marsh Park on a boardwalk, in the last moments of brilliant evening sunlight.  We can hear redwing blackbirds call as they fly past and settle among the cattails.  Further along we see a pool through an opening in the reeds.  A snapping turtle surfaces to catch its breath in a sudden splashing sound.

“Look at that pile of logs and twigs up ahead, Bel.”

“Yes it seems like a random collection of detritus, yet the beavers have deliberately placed each one.”

“Millions of years of evolution have brought us engineers …”

“… and Fred, it’s hard to see how the thing works!  I mean why should all that mud and those sticks and logs hold together?”

“Why indeed.  It is nothing like a human structure where the logic is often obvious.”

“Look, for instance, at those screws or fasteners in these boards … what are they Fred?”

“Look like screws to me Bel.”

“Anyway, you see what I mean … neat rows holding the boards to the cross beams underneath.”

“You know beaver have returned to the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, and they are recreating the old marshes.”

“There was something on PBS about that.  We missed it taking Lambert out in the dark.”

“Yes, that’s where I found out, a good deal of the Marsh around the Pripyat River was drained.”

A group has gathered up ahead, looking over the other side of the boardwalk, and we join them.  There’s an open channel through the cattails about a yard wide, leading to a large expanse of mudflats beyond.

“See those weeds moving towards us there, Fred?”

Bel speaks quietly, as if we are in a library.  It is quiet immediately around us, even though the air is full of sound, most of it seems to be distant.

“It’s one of the ‘engineers’!”

“Engineers of Eden.”

“Or is it a muskrat?”

“No Fred, look at the broad tail and here’s the dam.  Look, it extends up onto the boardwalk.”

Bel pushes one of the branches in our path to one side with the sole of her Snaz ‘Wing Foot’ walking shoe.  The logo on the side of her shoe, shows the dark brown silhouette of a swallow in flight against an orange disk.

“Extraordinary how they seem to understand the lie of the land and build their dam accordingly.”

“Instinct Bel”

“Imagine trying to write them a manual!”

“A sort of Dams for Dummies you mean?”

“These are no dummies.”

“What do beavers know anyway, Bel?”

“The philosopher Wittgenstein insists that you don’t know something unless you can say it.”

“These critters aren’t about to discuss it with us!”

“No Fred, how could any one speak with that much fibrous weed in his mouth?”

“What more concrete evidence of knowledge at work could there be than that dam?”

“As you said Fred, they work out of instinct.”

“Well, isn’t that a kind of knowledge?”

“Instinct is something they are born with, knowledge is acquired.”

“Suppose beavers learn their engineering by imitation Bel, I mean from their parents?”

“I don’t know if they do or not, but even if they do they can’t tell Wittgenstein about it.”

“No he’s dead, but I would like them to explain a thing or two!”

“So would I Fred.”

“Learning by doing.  That’s the most practical kind of knowledge …  quite natural to hard workers like these.”

“Even if they learn by imitation I still don’t think it’s knowledge Fred.”

“Hard wired for dam building you mean.  While we, with claims to knowledge, seem to have little instinct.

“Fred, we have to bear the burden of working everything out … ”

“Once Eve took a bite out of the apple Bel, we were lumbered!”

“Many of the fruits of knowledge have proven to be indigestible!”

“What do you have in mind Bell? … the difficulties of self reflection and conscience?”

“Yes, and most of all, the difficulties of growing up without instinct.  That is to say out of Eden”

“You know that’s Otto Rank’s point, Bel.”

“Is it?  I don’t know Otto.”

“Yes he thinks we all suffer a deep fear of death and of life.”

“Fear of life?”

“That’s it Bel … he is saying that there is too much for us ‘to work out’, so to speak.”

“Too true Fred, there’s more knowledge available now, well more data at least, than any one person can ever get to.”

“Otto’s point is different.  He’s talking about childhood Bel, saying we are emotionally overwhelmed by life early on …”

“…  and that accounts for our fear of life?”

“Yes as I understand him Bel … he thinks that’s when people build up their defenses as it were, delude themselves, fail to see important implications … avoid difficult questions and so on.”

“In other words Fred, the deep stuff gets buried deeper.”

“What ever the ‘deep stuff ‘ is!”

“I am thinking of all the ‘fall out’ so to speak, of one’s childhood weaknesses … the ‘questions avoided’ etc. you just mentioned.”

“So we are swamped by everyday life because the boat’s not built right!”

“That’s it … we kids are such poor boat-rights!”

“So much energy goes into storms”

“Emotional reaction you mean?”

“Yes, I think one gets swamped by that at times, and then one loses perspective …”

“ … and Bel that energy is needed for boat building!”

“ … AND, perspective gets scary!”

“Fred, one doesn’t meet many people interested in discussions like this … ”

“ … trying to ‘work something out’ you mean?”

“ … and we take a big risk Fred.”

“What risk?  You mean of getting it wrong?”

“Well, yes, but also risk getting into trouble with each other!”

“… Oh the risk of getting carried away … of words giving way to violence you mean Bel!”

“Yes, have you ever been in conversation with some one who suddenly gets angry or upset, and there’s no obvious reason for it?”

“Bel that happens … and I never know what to say.”

“There you are.”

“There what is?”

“You hit on something they haven’t ‘worked out’, which leaves them sort of, ‘spring loaded’ with emotional reaction.”

“Well, the risk you pointed out also applies to one’s self doesn’t it?”

“But of course …”

“So much of history seems to be a violent story of killing and conquest.  The Greeks were in it for glory and the Romans for empire.”

“Not unlike like us Fred.”

“We do seem to have followed the classical model.”

“Conquest is a pre-classical model really!”

“Yes, too true.”

“The victors like to write about their victories.”

“There’s glory to be had there too … ”

“ … and writing it down preserves it, embroidered, for you and me Bel.”

“Don’t you find it ironic Fred, that Christian tradition which preserved the teachings of Jesus, in spite of the Romans, has over time divided into warring denominations?”

“The very thing that preserved the teachings betrayed them.”

“Like the very thing that preserves us, as Otto has it.”

“Bel, we can’t work it out …”

“No, not as the children of our parents or of God.”

“We continue to fight it out though …”

“Think of the Crusader holding up his sword like a cross.  Isn’t there something wrong with that Fred?”

“It might be the symbol of Christian ideology as opposed to faith.”

“Go on Fred.”

“The prophet’s words which led his followers away from Rome, now turned around and lead back to Rome.”

“Exactly, Christ didn’t advance with an army.  That was the Roman way.  He was deeper.”

“You mean Christ was working on another plane Bel?”

“Yes, not a battlefield … not literal one anyway.  He did it all with words!”

“… and also through actions Fred.”

“Rather puzzling words too, in many cases.”

“… ‘Actions speak louder than words’.”

“That’s always the way with oracles and prophets Fred.  They are trying to communicate from the depths.”

“Why should that lead to such ambiguity?”

“Fred I think this takes us back to Otto.  What you were saying about our building defenses, as it were.”

“How does ambiguity help with that?”

“I am thinking of the oracle’s problem, if you like.  That is to get past our defenses with her message.”

“Are you thinking of Delphi now?”

“Yes, she was always ambiguous.”

“I see, she couldn’t speak in plain or literal terms because people would not reflect deeply enough to get her message that way.”

“That’s it, Fred.  Look at the power, the influence, of her words in the ancient world.”

“Reminds me of the old saying about the pen being mightier than the sword.”

“There’s a lot to be said for the printing press too.”

“The Reformation for instance?”

“What about radio?  Where would Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini or Roosevelt have been without it?”

“Yes they were all famous for oratory, and now television Bel, think what TV has brought us.”

“I don’t want to.”

Swallows are intercepting insects, weaving acrobatic displays through the last evening sunbeams.

“I saw those birds flying around the Snaz store garage.”

“Were they trapped down there?”

“No there were plenty of openings on the first level.  They were nesting.”

“Oh, I can imagine they would have to be agile to dodge all the pillars supporting the ceiling.”

“They were noisy too.  Found a nest built on a thin pipe running along the wall near the ceiling.”

People nearby get into a dispute over whether they are looking at barn swallows or bank swallows, then someone suggests they are chimney swifts.  We walk on into a low sound, which seems to be coming from everywhere at once.

“How can any one tell now?”

“Some people can identify birds from those fleeting silhouettes Fred.”

It’s dusk.  The sun will be gone in a minute.  The bullfrogs are getting louder as it gets darker.

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 wasn’t sure at first if it was Diddlie contemplating something on the cross walk in the middle of Maxwell Ave.  There is little traffic this early on Sunday morning and the gloom at first light leaves the figure indistinct, but for the golden rod hanging out of the top of her backpack.  Getting nearer I can see a furry corpse spread out unblemished from the point of the striped tail to the point of the snout.

“How sad … looks like it’s asleep doesn’t it Fred?  I mean its not flattened out or anything.”

“Must be a bumper … another road kill Diddlie.”  The traffic light turns amber.  The road is dry though the potholes at this intersection are full of water from last night’s showers.

“How could such a violent death leave a carcass looking so peaceful?”

“Wild life is moving back to live with us and all the hazards we bring.”

“Yeah it’s a whole new world of adaptation!”

“Don’t think this thing has been here long … no stain on the road, no insects.”

“I’ve been feeding a family for the last three years … hope this isn’t one of my raccoons … I think the foxes got one of the babies last year.”

“This one isn’t full grown.” A van pulls up as the light turns red, towing an open trailer with mowing equipment, and several bales of hay.  The driver’s hand hangs down the side of the door from the open window with a cigarette between the fingers.

“Foxes I don’t mind.  They are hunting to eat.  These cars aren’t hunting …  just inanimate casual killers!  Do you think the driver even knew he hit it?”

“It would be hard to tell what they hit in the dark.”

The light turns amber again.  A rhythmical click from the van’s engine suggests a loose belt somewhere.  The first sunlight catches the driver’s tattooed forearm as he flicks the remains of his cigarette into the road.

“Look out Diddlie, the light is going green!”

“Oh I don’t want them to run it over!”  She runs over to the van waving.  “Hey there … don’t run over the raccoon okay!”

“It’s dead lady.”

“I don’t care … just don’t … okay?”  The driver guns the engine.

“Get out of the way!”  Diddlie is slow to move.  He veers over into the oncoming lane to avoid her and accelerates through the green light.  The trailer’s small tires squash the dead raccoon’s head.

“What do you think you are doing!”

“It’s no good shouting at them.”

The faint outline of an old logo shows through a crude attempt to paint it out, in white, on the side panel.  We can see the outline of a caterpillar smoking a hookah.  The small square windows at the top of the back doors have been filled with cardboard attached with irregular lengths of silvery tape.  After the van, it seems quiet on the street.

“Death … all this death … our lives depend on the death of other living things … we live by death then we die Fred …   think about that.”

“Our eating also renews life.”

“Yeah, also renews lives like those ass-holes who have no respect.  What are they renewing by running over this pathetic corpse that some other jerk left behind.”

“Well they didn’t kill anything either.”

“They are just heedless jerks, and smoking too.”

“So what?”

“They are doing hard work for low pay.”

“Well!  would they smoke if they cared about life … like their own life for instance?  What do you mean low pay these lawn care people charge a lot.”

“Did you look at the van, Diddlie?  How much do you think they are making?”

The lighthouse gas station across the road isn’t open yet.  No bird calls, there’s nothing but our voices in the air until a faint roar comes in.  Echoing in waves of noise seem to tumble out of the billowing clouds growing louder as a low flying jet turns into its approach to the airport.

“That might be Bel’s flight.  She’s coming in this morning from Boston.”

“They shouldn’t be coming in at this time.  It is way too early.  I thought there were rules against it.”

We leave the corpse behind, step up off the road and start across the gas station past the pumps, the closed doors to the repair shop, a late model Dodge pick up and a nineteen forties’ Rolls Royce limousine with the seats taken out.

“Bel strikes me as a wise one.”

“Fred, she seems to know everything.  She has the gift of friendship.  I mean there are a lot of people in the neighborhood who trust her, and confide in her.  That’s a rare gift.  How many people do you know like that?”

“Hard to say.”

“Why?”

“Because if people confide in her, in anyone, their confidence must be respected, so how would I know.”

“Bel is about my best friend … well, I mean I can talk to her about difficult stuff … I think there are a lot of others who might tell you the same thing.”

“But how do you know? I had no idea you were so close.”

“Well it isn’t the kind of thing I would normally talk about.  Nobody would, but people say odd things.  You know, I just have a feeling about it.”

“No, I do appreciate you’re confiding in me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean just that.”

“Let’s not get into that again okay?  It really pisses me off Fred … this whole thing about you writing me and what you know … and anyway, we’ve been there already!”

“Okay, sorry Diddlie.  I am not trying to score any points.”

“Oh Fred! okay, okay … I got the wrong idea I guess.”

“Are you close to Steve as well?”

“No, not like Bel, but Steve has lots of women friends besides Artie.  He can set sex aside and talk to people as people.  I mean he’s the same with every one, male or female.”

“I have noticed Bel has a kind of detachment.  She can keep her judgments and feelings in reserve in the interests of conversation.”

“You don’t think she is always frank, you mean?”

“No I think she is genuinely interested in people and that leads her to draw them out in conversation.”

“Sounds like manipulation to me, and I don’t think she is.”

“I don’t think so either.  Its not manipulative to hear people out, any more than it is to be polite.”

“So are you criticizing her or not?”

“No, to her the conversation is more important than her own immediate impulses.  She always seems to know her own mind, even if she doesn’t spill it all out.  Not every one can do that.”

“You mean she doesn’t compete.”

“Right, conversation is give and take, and she gives a lot.”

“Bel gives by listening.”

“That’s it.  She uses a certain amount of restraint and her silence is her gift.”

“Hardly any of the men I know … no, I mean none of them can help competing!  I mean some guys can never let you forget it.”

“Forget what.”

“That they are the man and I am the woman, and it’s like they have to prove something.”

“There are women like that also.  Some women have to flirt, even if it’s only very subtle.”

“Well you wouldn’t want a bunch of sexless bodies in your life would you?”

“No, of course not.  Sex is always going to be there between people.  It’s complicated.”

“Yeah about as complicated as anything can get; and as simple when you get right down to it.”

“You mean the physical part of the conversation.”

“Not conversation, getting it on.”

“Okay, simple as in a spasm, not a thought with all its ramifications!”

“I just mean fucking, Fred.”

“Oh as in spontaneous copulation with nothing said.”

“Spontaneous copulation Fred!  Is that what you call it?”

“Call it procreation if you want, but there ought to be some understanding between the parties before the act don’t you think?”

“Fred, do you ever get out of your head?  I mean sometimes people just fuck.”

“You mean total strangers?”

“Could be, if they can get out of their heads.”

“Out of their minds you mean!”

“No, I don’t mean crazy.”

“Good grief, are you speaking from experience?”

“None of your business Fred, and I am not suggesting we try it.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“Fred don’t you ever get out of your head and just do it?’

“None of your business Diddlie.”

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

(Edited 24 Aug. 2015, thanks Francie!)

There’s a wooden ramp leading up from the roadside to Derwent Sloot’s front door in a long gradual planked slope.  The wind is gusting fresh and the cold is penetrating in the shade but it is warm as I walk into the early evening sun from the shade of a big redbud in Derwent’s front yard.  He is maneuvering his wheelchair out the door.  His head is half hidden by the high collar of a red fleece jacket, and he wears a Greek fisherman’s cap with long strings of white hair blowing out from under it.  “Hey there!  Come up here will you?”

I start up the ramp from the street towards him.  “Turn this goddam thing around.  It’s new and I can’t deal with it.”  He can’t see that one of the big narrow wheels is lodged in a gap between the planks.  I push to the right and it comes out without much effort and he turns the chair the rest of the way himself.  “What’s your name again?”

“I am Fred, Derwent.”

“Yeah!  Fred, I appreciate the help.”

“Do you want to go down to the street?”

“I didn’t come out here to twiddle my thumbs!”  I start pushing the chair down the ramp.

“I can do this.  Keep your hands off.  It’s downhill.  Too damn steep if you ask me, but you can’t tell those numbskulls anything.  Okay Ted … no … tell me again, what’s your name?”

“Fred”

“Fred, that’s it right?  Fred not Ted.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Yeah I’ve got it alright.  Damn near broke my back.”

“What happened, Derwent?”

“What happened?  What do you think happened?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I knew.”

“Just look at me … isn’t it obvious that I am old and rotten? … use your eyes Ted.”

“It’s Fred, Derwent.”
“Yeah Fred, alright, did I say Ted?”

“You did.”

“Sorry there, Fred.  Like I said I am getting old and rotten and fell on the bathroom floor and threw my back out and now I’ve got to wheel around in this chariot and find a horse where I can.  I’ve been around here too long … remember too much.  Now I’ve got to listen to all this election crap.”

“You don’t have to listen.  Turn the set off if you don’t like it.”

“I watch only as much TV as I can stand.  That’s not much, some days not at all.  There’s still a few newspapers and the Internet to stay informed.  We won the right to vote at York Town and now have no idea how to go about it.  I voted for Obama, you know.  Now I’ve got to make the same mistake again because the alternative is sheer self-destructive insanity.  Did you vote for him?”

“What mistake?  I voted for him too and don’t think it was a mistake.”

“Yeah of course you did.  Living around here with friends like Lou and Bel you must be a liberal of some stripe, or do you call yourself a progressive?  That’s what they are now.  They think they are progressing.  Progressing where?  To hell most likely, to a hell full of wealth that belongs to others. Here we are, four years after the great financial collapse.  Here’s one of the big mistakes.  The president is only now going to investigate the role of fraud in the big financial crash, and its too late.  The statute of limitations is about to run out in many cases.  Occupy Wall Street, that’s what we get!  Did you take part in the occupation?”

“No …”

“You got some sense then.  What a goddam travesty … bunch of ragged know-nothing naïve fools saturated with mind rotting media noise!  What’s the matter with organizing a movement for God’s sake, instead of sitting there on their cans until the fuzz sweeps them away like trash.”  We reach the side of Wicket Street and Derwent turns right towards the long curve that will take us to Bails Lane.  “You can start pushing now.  My arms are as scrawny as a rag doll’s and about as strong.  Now we’ve got a nut case on the Guild here in Fauxmont, that young Boyd Nightingale.  His mind was addled by his mother years ago.  He’s on the Guild … he’s ON THE GUILD!  How the hell did that happen?  I know how it happened.  I know!  Bel fell asleep at the wheel.  That’s what happened and she isn’t denying it either.  She’s no dummy.  She should have made sure there was another nomination for the V.C. besides our boy Boyd.”

“Derwent, I was at the nominating meeting.  No other names came up.  What could she do?  She wasn’t there.”

“I don’t care what goddammed meeting you went to.  She couldn’t be there any way.  The Chairman has no business at the nominating committee meeting.  I’ve served on enough of them to know.  She should have acted outside the meeting, and she knows it.”

“I …”

“Yeah Fred, I know you’re new to this Guild we have here, and I can tell you we’ve had it too easy too long.  Now here’s Boyd, oh boy!  Well Juanita Gomez was probably the only sanity he knew as a child, but what could she do?  Lark is as nutty as a fruitcake and energetic as a fast acting poison.  She can make an ass of herself fifteen different ways before breakfast, and look at the result: mindless reaction armed with a revolver no less!  If that kid doesn’t end up shooting himself he’ll end up in court for manslaughter.  I mean he hasn’t got the sense to plan a crime!”

“Dertwent, it is Albrecht who’s got the revolver.”

“Albrecht is the one packing heat?”

“That’s right.  He brought it to the Nominating Committee meeting.”

“He brought a weapon?  Was Hank Dumpty there?”

“Yes Hank was …”

“He’s lucky Hank didn’t tear that gristly piece of offal into dripping shreds.  My god, you don’t want to mess with Hank.  I saw him flatten young Charlie Tansley outside the Co-op when Charley tried to throw a punch.  That was about ‘64 or five I guess.  It took him about as much effort as picking up a shovel, and about as long.  I thought Albrecht was more on the ball than Nightingale.  His head is as empty as Albrecht’s weapon before they loaded it.  Now Boyd is loaded alright.  He’s been loaded by that goddam Clean up America movement with slogans and enough other toxic bullshit to pollute the neighborhood.  Those people are organized and ready to occupy the attention of all the lost souls in this benighted country and there are herds and herds of them wandering the urban wastes like cattle looking for pasture.  You ask that kid his opinion and all you get is a talking point.  The same utterance you can hear from any of the political commercials.  It’s no more his opinion than it is mine, the poor yawping fool is just a mouth piece.”

“Derwent, do you really think Americans are just a herd of animals?’

“Hell no!  God love them, Americans are the salt of the earth.

You remember that song Fred, ‘Little Boxes full of ticky tacky?’”

“I …”

“You may be too young, but ticky tacky is what we’ve got now.  Dreamed up by some goddammed brilliant minds too.  Those bastards are getting paid by the big money to keep the conservative herds blinded by television, stampeding towards the voting booth in November.  Well, so called conservatives.  The word is meaningless now, much like ‘liberal’, these are just noises made by scripted talking heads.

Cyber puppets I call them, digitally manipulated, pixel by pixel, right into your home sweet home.  I told bel, that Boyd and his buddy Intaglio are the beginning of the end for Fauxmont.  ‘You better move fast’ … and she can.  Bel is a smart cookie.”

“Yes I …”

“Bel knows how to listen, and everyone else wants to talk.  Like me.  Yeah!  I admit it.  I am a loud mouth talking son of a bitch, and she just goes along with me like she’s debriefing an agent or something.  That’s why she knows this neighborhood so well.  Hey! turn here.”  We have reached the turn on to Bails Lane.  It is narrow and unpaved.  “Mind the rocks, will you!”

“Okay Derwent.”

“We are going to that house there.”

He points down the lane through the avenue of hickories to a house half hidden by purple azaleas. An inchworm floats by on its strand of silk, and settles on his shoulder. It measures its way across the fabric on course to become a geometer moth, arching its back, stretching its front out, then bringing its back end forward to recreate the arch.

“I need to talk some sense to Guderian, about his daughter’s prospects as a chess prodigy.”

“Are they expecting you?”

“They invited me to dinner.  How’s that for expecting?”

“Very nice.”

“Very early!  I have to eat early because of my stomach.  I’ll burn up all night otherwise.  They understand about my goddam stomach acid.”

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 and Steve left Lambert at home because dogs are not allowed in the National Gallery.  They want to look at some paintings in relation to Artie Bliemitch’s work before we go on to her studio.  Steve is embarrassed to find the works he is looking for, Rembrandt’s portraits of Jacob Trip and that of his wife Margretha Geer, are in London’s National Gallery not here in Washington.  “Sorry about this Fred, I felt sure they were here!”  He strides past the museum guard in the doorway who seems to be looking past us, unmoving like a statue, and then reappears from the next room.  “No more Rembrandts in there.”

“Here’s Lucretia, Steve, about to commit suicide.  Look at that dagger.  Can you tell where the point is?”  Bel has also pointed out to me the big faceted jewel standing out from its setting in heavy impasto.

“She was raped you know Fred.  A most consequential rape too.”

“So that’s the point, is it?”

“Oh Steve!”

“It was Sextus Tarquinias, Steve.

“So the story goes Bel.”

“Who was she Steve, beyond being Rembrandt’s subject?”

“Don’t forget, Fred, that rape and suicide led to the over throw of the Roman monarchy.”

“I can’t forget poor Lucretia.  Rape seems more important to me.”

“But Bel, Steve is talking about a basic political change in Roman life.”

“Yes Fred, and men have gone on raping women ever since. We don’t find that historical lesson if we only look at the political fall out.”

“This argument could go on and on Bel.  Rembrandt is provoking us.  What is it about the Trips Steve?”

“For one thing the old man is sitting with his night cap, dressing gown and walking stick, which strikes me as surprisingly informal, because Trip was a very wealthy weapons merchant.  I would have expected something formal”

“Sounds like he ran the ‘Interarms’ of the 17th Century.”

“Yeah!  Too bad Sam Cummings didn’t have the big “R” to immortalize him.”

“And who may I ask, Steve, is Sam?”

“Bel, you must remember he operated Interarms here in Alexandria for years.  One of the biggest weapons dealers around.”

“Oh Steve, how could it have slipped my mind?”

“Okay Bel.”

“Steve your interest in those warehouses on South Union Street has always worried me honey,”

“And to reassure you Bel, I keep telling you, it was strictly professional.”

Bel points to her leg.  “Pull the other one big guy!”

“What else Steve, why did you want to show me the Trip portrait?”

“It’s the texture Fred.  He used an unusual mixture of yellow and red lake pigment bulked out with smalt which left dark translucent ridges of impasto.”

“Smalt, did you say smalt?

“Smalt is the oldest form of cobalt blue pigment.  He sometimes used it as an additive to speed the drying time of the paint.”

“You remember Artie’s ‘Van Rijn’s Express’ Fred?”

“Yes vividly Bel, that swooping stroke bellying across the bottom with those exaggerated ridges of translucent impasto.”

“So guys, shall we get away from Mr. Trip and his wife, as the relevant dismal brown oily residues are all hanging on the other side of the Atlantic?”

“Bel, I take it you’re not into Rembrandt.”

“Not to the extent Steve is, Fred.  I prefer the bright lights of impressionism and much that followed.”  We move on to the East Wing where Bel points out a work in front of Steve. “What do you make of that Fred?”

“It hangs like no other!”

“And we are out of candle light and into day light!”

“We are Bel, but it is just a grid with bits filled in, some in color some in gray.”

“Up, down, and across, along with the primary colors.  Those are the basics here Fred.”

“I see Steve, but what am I supposed to be looking at?”

“You might consider the balance of masses and the proportions of the grid.”

“It is the only painting around here that hangs as if it were diamond shaped, with two corners pointing up and down and the other two pointing left and right.”

“It’s Piet Mondrian’s Lozenge Composition.  Artie found it inspirational.”  We stand silently regarding the proportions and masses held within black lines of the grid.  Some lines are heavier than others.  The lightest most luminous gray shape is also the only true rectangle.  Its upper right corner touches the edge of the canvas where two of the black lines describing its sides run off the edge.  All the colored the shapes look like triangles and the others rectangles until you notice one corner snipped off in each, making more than four angles.  Bel leans too close and the voice of the guard calls out.  She draws back, undistracted.

“You can’t see much of brush work.  See his signature down here?”

‘Where, I don’t see anything written there, Bel.”

There’s a faint ‘P.M.’ hidden in the black down at the bottom, see?”

“You notice the colored shapes are off center on the sides Steve?”

“Bel, most of the painting is gray, like the sky outside.”

“It is Steve, and those subtleties seldom show up in reproductions.”

Steve is anxious to move on and get over the Artie’s studio.  He apologizes again for his memory lapse and leads us quickly out of the Gallery to the car for the forty minute drive out of the District and over the Potomac  to Northern Virginia.  As we look left down the river we can see a gleeming silvery building in the distance. “What an irony.  That’s the DIA building.”

“Where’s the irony in that Steve?”

“The irony is that DIA stands for Defense Intellegence Agency and it is a secret intelegence organization.”

“Some secret! … shiney as a mirror.”

“Yeah, they reflect the world in ways we shall never know.”

When we get to Artie’s above the Pie Shop on Maxwell Avenue, Bel and I sit down on the old couch and Steve walks over to examine the work on her bench.

There are ten wooden boxes lying on their sides across her workbench, all about three feet long but well under a foot in width and height.  They all look triangular, most are painted, in subtly different shades of gray, and there’s one in each primary color, red, blue, yellow.

Her cat sleeps cradled in a warped piece of mat black cardboard.  Its fur shines next to the aloe plant at the end of the bench.  Artie wears an old white damask tablecloth cut into the shape of a lab coat and sewn with bright purple stitching.  It is splashed with the primary colors she uses in her latest work.  The left side is torn showing her black jeans.  Bounder has the edge in his mouth trying to tear it further, but she stops him with her hand around his long graying nose and pulls him away from her side.

“Down Bounder, Down!”  The old golden retriever pants when she lets go.  His tail swishes across the floor like a soft brush, and when raised becomes a blond banner waving through the sunbeams.   After looking up at her panting, he sinks down to the floor with a squeak and a few grunts.  He has trouble getting his tail comfortable as he settles at his designated place on the shredded remains of a blue Kilim by the wall.  It has turned cold today after so much spring-like warmth in February.  We smell baking dough from the ovens below, when the heat comes on, blowing warm air out of a vent near the dog.  Bounder gets up again and presses his nose to the vent.  He runs his paw across it as if to remove the obstruction to his interest, but Artie steps over and settles him down again.  Sfumato is roused for a moment, stretches and looks across the room at us blinking with feline composure as she relaxes again by the aloe plant.

“Congratulations on the show at Gentileschi’s Artie.”

“Thanks Bel, I made enough to last the rest of the year.”

“We have been worried about you.”

“You were, Steve?  What’s to worry?”

“In a word Artie, Tassi.”

“Augustino, that jerk!  Steve I don’t care if he is in or out of jail.  I don’t know why Daisy got so wound up about it.”

“After what happened to you we thought …”

“Steve there was nothing between me and him.  I got mugged in the alley behind Donna Tuzia’s.  Donna spread it around that he raped me or something.”

“Why?”

“Because she hated his guts.  She had a friend on the police force and thought she could get him arrested or at least embarrassed.”

“Why didn’t you explain when we saw you in the street that horrible day back in Florence?”

“I couldn’t explain anything at that time.  I was having personal problems and then been mugged.  I mean it was all too much at once.”

“So Artie now we know it was nothing to do with Augustino.”

“Bel it is none of Daisy’s business any way.  I told her to shut up about it.”

“ ‘nuff said Artie.”

Artie has picked up a black not quite triangular box and looks it over before waving it at us.  “This one is called “’Box of Lozenges” and here’s a lozenge.

“So Steve do you recognize anything?”

“Yup, I remember.  Did you put Piet’s initials on there Artie?”

“Oh Artie you have moved him into three dimensions!”

“No Fred, I put my own initials on there.  Moved from the ‘Neo Plastic’ to the plastic.  Like pulling out a drawer Fred!”

“What do you mean Artie?”

“Fred, imagine you are standing in front of that painting.  Now imagine that each shape has a handle on it that you can pull on.  If you could pull it out you’d get a shape like this box.”

“Or I’d be apprehended for pulling down the masterpiece!”

“That’s why I said ‘imagine’ Fred.”

Artie has put the box into a framework like a chest of drawers with an opening to receive each of the boxes on the table.  It sits on a couple of sawhorses cut down to half height.  “Okay Steve, you want to give me a hand here?”  She places the black triangular box in the bottom opening, and it is a perfect fit.  They keep loading in the drawer-like pieces until every opening is filled reproducing the colors and shapes and proportions of Mondrian’s  Tableau No. IV on the rectangular face of their chest-like container.

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 bar is full. I am standing in a crowd under the thin light from overhead halogens having a drink with Lou in the H-Bar. The lights tend to localize their illumination immediately under the bulb while leaving an impression of dimness overall.  The duct work stretches across the room high up, in darkness under the black painted ceiling.  I haven’t seen Lou since the gathering at his house to watch the Spin Show with Albrecht and the others.  Also I am curious as to his reaction to the discussion that evening, given his confidence in the cooperative spirit of Fauxmont.  It didn’t seem to me we reached any common ground.  Where was the spirit?  In fact the differences between Frank Dumpty and the Albrecht and Boyd faction seemed all the more irreconcilable.

Diddlie walks over unexpectedly as we lift our first beers.  Her face is flushed.  Lou steps forward to put his arm around her shoulder.  His thick stubby paint stained fingers spread across the upper arm of her royal blue blazer.  Diddlie speaks without looking up, leaning gently against Lou.  A bounding silver rabbit leaps from her lapel broche toward the white silky scarf around her neck.

“Where’s Lark?”

“I don’t see her Diddlie.  Are you expecting her?”

“Lou I came in with her a few minutes ago and didn’t see you at first.  Hi Fred, sorry didn’t realize you guys are here together”.  Diddlie speaks softly holding her right hand in a tight fist up by her cheek.

“What is the matter Diddlie?”

“I am very angry.  I am, and I don’t know what to do Fred!”  She opens her fist spreading her fingers palm up as if to offer me something, though her hand is empty.

“What is it?”

“You mean you guys haven’t heard?”  She pulls away from Lou and rubs her eyes.

“No Diddlie.  Oh there’s Lark.  She’s over there talking to Tinderbrush and someone else … see over there.”

“No Lou, I can’t see over all these people.  Oh! I am so disgusted!”

“Shall I go over Diddlie?”

“Theo!  What’s he doing here?  No no, don’t interrupt them.”

“So what happened Diddlie?”

“Lark came over right after I called this morning.  We’re going to have dinner here.  I mean I called her after all this, and she dropped everything.”

“ All what Diddlie? I didn’t know Lark was around.”

“She’s occupying DC.  Spending time down at Lafayette Square organizing a library in a tent for them.  Well I have her cell number.  I mean we needed to catch up anyway, then this happened”.

“Oh it’s something about Tinderbrush and the Washington Monument thing with … ahhhh … what’s his name Fred?”

“Congressman Bean … no no, I mean the artist was Tarantula wasn’t it?”

“Is that what you’re so upset about Diddlie?

“No Lou, listen this is different.  I heard a lot of doors slamming outside at about four o’clock this morning.  It was down at the Trips.  I mean a SWAT team was invading their house … seemed like a whole lot of them.  It was overcast and dark except for their flash lights.  I mean what happened to all those security lights Jake has? Anyway, I went out to see what was going on and Mr. Liddell went out before I could stop him.  Then it started raining.”

“Were they real police or Jake’s rent-a-cops?”

“I couldn’t tell Lou.  Well, I think these were real government types.”

“Diddlie, Mr. Liddell has run off before but we always find him.”

“I know, this time he may have be run over by those SUVs.  I don’t know.”

“Did you look around when it got light?”

“No those creeps were still there and they won’t let me near the place.”

“You mean they are there now?”

“I don’t know.  We have been out most of the day.  Lark and I just wanted to get out of there Lou.”

“So you have lost Mr. Liddell, okay.  What was the SWAT team doing at the Trips?”

“Lou there were all these flashing lights, and I could hear Gale yelling  ‘Juanita, Juanita’ over and over.”  Diddlie stops and sobs and stares silently down at our feet.

“Do you mean they arrested Juanita?”

“I am sure they took her away, Lou.”

“It must have been ICE.  Have you talked to Gale or Liberty, Diddlie?”

“I was talking to Gale about Juanita’s status here not long ago.”

“Oh, what was that about Fred?”

“It just came up in conversation.”

“I am sure all her papers are in order Diddlie.”

“Maybe not Lou.  Is that what she said, Fred?”

“No she seemed rather vague about it.”

“There it is Lou.  See!  They have taken her as an illegal.”

“It must be a mistake.”

“Lou, mistake or not, now she will have to prove she’s legal.  It’s making me crazy, I mean so many things are screwed up these days.  It’s like spring already in February and these Gestapo types raid my neighbors in the middle of the night, and this is America?  Can this be real?”

“Relax Diddlie, enjoy the nice weather!

“Don’t you find this early spring kind of creepy Lou?”

“Yes when I think about it.  I kind of enjoy a big snow.  It slows things down and people can’t use their cars so they come out and walk around.  It brings on a ‘spring’ in social contact“.

“That’s right, remember how we all caught up during the big snow a few years ago, helping to shovel Derwent’s driveway?”

“Oh that was quite a crowd by the time we finished.”  Theo Tinderbrush walks towards the exit.  It looks like Congressman Bean is with him.  Lark squeezes toward us past a large group standing around a nearby small table.

“Why aren’t all these folks down in DC supporting us?  We need a crown like this!”

“Lark, what happened to you?”

“Nothing, I was talking to Theo and you disappeared.”

“I told them about Juanita, Lark.”

“Yea Theo says they can’t even find where Juanita is being held.”

“How did Theo get involved?”

“Lou he’s been trying to get hold of Jake Trip, but Jake has been out of town, and now Liberty is away too.”  Diddlie looks up at Lou and gently runs her finger along his right eyebrow.  “Why don’t you trim these things Lou?”

“It just makes them grow more.”  Lark puts her arm around Diddlie’s waist.

“Diddlie, leave the poor man’s face alone.”

“Somebody’s got to take care of him.  I mean those …”  She trails off and starts again.  “Wait a minute.  What about Gale?”

“What about her?”

“Is any one with her.  I mean she must be freaked out Lark.”

“Theo has gone back over to Gale’s. He saw the convoy of SUVs leaving on Wicket Street when he came over.”

“Why can’t they come during the day?  You know, a couple of guys in business suits.  What’s with the terror tactics?”

“Diddlie, they think it’s drugs.  They always do with Hispanic illegals, so they come in prepared for a shoot out.”

“Juanita Gomez selling drugs!  Can you imagine?  Lou, that’s absurd.  There’s nothing to stop them calling up or writing first.  Who’s to say Juanita is here illegally anyway?”

“Diddlie, they want to catch the fugitive at home, before they can get away.  Besides things were a lot more relaxed when the Macadamias first brought Juanita back to the states.  No one thought about papers that much.”  Lark smoothes back her thick grey hair with its shock of black flowing in the front wave, but stops in mid motion with a hand above each ear.  Her bony elbows jut out like two horns pointing at Lou.

“Lou Juanita is not a fugitive. That’s a police state mentality.  Don’t talk that way. This is what it’s come to since 9/11.  We get our homes raided by thugs in the name of homeland security.” She pushes her hands further back completing the motion she had started, and brings them forward spreading out her arms with palms up to each side of her waste.  “That’s another reason to get out there and organize and protest, and get the country back from these finance crooks, and their cops.”

“Okay Lark, okay …

Lark brings her arms down to her side and presses her palms against her thighs bending slightly towards Lou. “Come on Lou, don’t okay me, join in!

Looks like I’ll have to catch up with Lou some other time about our gathering to watch the Spin Show.  The lights flicker.  We all look up into the black beyond, as if we could see what is going on.