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.

Thin beams of light from countless halogen spots divide the atmosphere at the Gentileschi Gallery. Artemisia Bliemisch’s work is well lit but much of the room seems dark by contrast.  It is hard to see who’s here in this gloom.  I sign the guest book careful not to spill half a glass of white wine left next to the pen.  Artie stands nearby in a bright red shirt with black waistcoat and long dark skirt. She hunches attentively over a small woman with short gray hair moused into curved spikes. Her firm upper arm muscles are well defined as she moves under a spotlight.  Her knuckles shine white where she is fastened to Artie’s elbow with platinum ringed claws. “Artiemisia! I just love your new work!”

“Thank you Mrs. Shrowd.”  Mrs. Shrowd is thin.  Her sleeveless blouse is unbuttoned at the top and tucked into loose fitting faded denims.  Could that have been her wine I didn’t spill?  Where is wine served?

“I’ve got to have one of these for sure, Artie.”  Mrs. Shrowd slowly pulls Artie out of earshot, in front of a series of paintings stretching along the wall towards the back.  They pause before the biggest.  Mrs. Shrowd steps in close to examine the surface.

Bel Vionet stands near the front window by Artie’s “Main Squeeze” series where she introduces me to Frank Vasari.  I am told Frank ‘knows everybody’.  He represented a generation of successful young local artists at his Gallery Sforza when it was on Seventh Street.  He’s in the middle of a story about Artie when he knew her in Florence.

“Yeah I was trying to get into her pants.  Yeah I admit it and so was Steve by the way.  I mean it was no secret, but she didn’t want anything from me.  That’s why we are standing here, not at my Gallery.  So anyway we were walking over to the Uffizi.  She was studying Botticelli or something, I don’t remember … Steve Strether how you doing?”

I had been watching Bel’s husband Steve as he walked towards us through a wilderness of elbows, flabby, boney and bare, denim, rayon, tweed-covered protruding at the sides of those facing away from us with their drinks. Bel can’t see him coming.  She seems unmoved by this story, and keeps her interested smile fresh no matter how long she has to wear it. Is this “no secret” from Bel?  Haven’t seen much of Steve since last year when we first met by chance in front of the Pastry Shop, and then went on together visiting Artie in her studio.  I lost track of Frank’s long-winded story moments ago wondering what to believe.  Diddlie has told me Steve first met Artie here in Fauxmont.

The others are sipping white wine from thin plastic glasses.  All except Frank, who has a can of beer, and drains it as Steve arrives.  Crushing the cylinder in his thick fingers, he puts it down distorted on a narrow ledge along the wall at his back.  His welcoming arm wraps Steve’s neck in light tweed.  Frank’s gut sags over his belt and a white shirttail hangs out the front of his black jeans.  Steve is thrown off balance by Frank’s friendly gesture and bumps Bel’s hand spilling wine down the front of her dress.

“My God Bel I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay Frank I’ll probably live.”

“Frank that’s the only wife I’ve got.”

“Look, we can go across the street.  I’ve got friends in that house there, see.  They’ll take care of everything for sure.”  He is pointing out of the window with his free hand and hasn’t let Steve go.  A long stain is spreading across Bel’s lime green dress starting below the empire waist and bleeding down her stomach.  The fabric clings around the hollow of her navel and sticks to the belly’s contour then falls in thin pleats to her ankles.  Wine drips from the hem beading on the varnished bamboo floor.

“Whoa!  Step back Bel, I mean don’t slip on that wet floor.”  Frank has let go of Steve’s neck.  The can falls off its ledge and bounces on the floor. Frank’s hair has flopped down into his eyes and around his ears. He uses both hands to push it back from his face. He steps on the can and flattens it under a booted heel.

“How many you had Bel?”  Artie is standing next to her and whispers something else in her ear.

“Artie honey, how are you?”

They both turn away ignoring Frank, and Artie guides Bel through a white door concealed in the white wall behind the receptionist’s desk.

It feels hot in the thickening crowd.  I see the receptionist through a momentary gap, distinctively braless, under a tight white Tshirt. She serves wine and beer with long thin bare brown arms from behind an arched window in the far wall with a deep sill.  Steve is walking towards the refreshments. I catch up and reintroduce myself.

“So now you’ve met Frank!”

“Was he drunk?”

“He’s not the man we used to know on 7^th Street.  Gentileschi’s is well known for representing Woman artists.  You know Artemisia shows here because this is best for her.  It has nothing to do with Florence. Frank’s mixed up.  Since he was appointed to direct the arts center out at Prestige U. I don’t think he has anything to do but drink and schmooze.”

“Where’s the owner, I mean Gentileschi?

Steve points toward the back.  “How can it be so dark in here with all these spots? I saw her talking to Mrs. Shrowd over there.  You know, Sherman Shrowd’s wife.”

“Never heard of them.”

“He’s a big lawyer in town.  Never goes to court.  Sherman settles quietly behind the scenes.  She’s the collector.  Don’t see her now.  Gentileschi is in a black dress with big red hair like wild fire. You’ll feel the heat.”

“So why did Vasari get the job?”

“Prestige U. got millions, don’t know how many, but millions, from Armond Macadamia.  Frank is the biggest name in local art and that’s what Macadamia wants to collect.  He thinks Frank can put his Macadamia Art Center on the map.  Frank’s closed his old gallery and now he’s under the thumb of that meddling board.  I don’t think it’s working.”

“I’ve heard a lot about Macadamia.  He’s local talent isn’t he and made his fortune in stocks?”

“Freddie!”  Daisy Briscoe greets me like a beloved relative.  Bending over and folding her arms around me she brings down a cloud of scent and her silvery hardware rattles against my ears.  She presses her cheek to mine, unfolds and then engulfs Steve in the same way.  Now she has brought us into her family she flourishes a price list.  “You guys buying?”

No one speaks.  Daisy folds up the list.  Takes off her bowler and slides it into her hat-band.  I haven’t seen prices but doubt that I can afford anything.  Steve begins to say something but before a full word has come out he is distracted.  Bel reappears standing close to her husband.  She is looking up at Daisy.

“Hi Daisy, are you alone?”

“Oh Bel, have you heard?”

“Heard what?  Is it Boyd?”  Daisy is looking at Bel.

“Sweetie I’ve been looking for you!”  Steve squeezes his wife’s hand without looking at her as Daisy answers.  “Oh I don’t know where Boyd is.  He wouldn’t come anyway … but listen … they’ve released Tassi.”

“Get out of here!”

Steve puts his arm around his wife’s shoulders and gently pulls her

against his body.  She leans towards him in graceful exaggeration, raising one foot and showing off her silver shoes.  The now dry pleats unfold in a cascade from her extended leg as she rests her head on his shoulder.

“They only just put him away!”

“I know, Steve.  Who understands Italian law?”

“Does Artie know?”

“I don’t know.  Where is she?  I’ve got to talk to her.”

Bel reaches out for Daisy’s arm.  Then using both hands, she separates the multiple bracelets and closes her fingers round the narrow wrist, pulling Daisy towards her.  “Maybe now is not the time.”

“Maybe Bel, but I mean she’s got to know … I mean …

don’t you think…?”

“I think she’s got enough on her mind right now.”

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

The first rain in two months has knocked withering leaves out of the willow oaks.  A dry front has come in quickly, clearing the sky and sun light flashes from countless puddles making the black top blinding.  I am dodging the puddles while walking towards the Safeway across uneven pavement through rows of vehicles parked across my path.  First, her voice seemed to come from behind me.  Now unexpectedly, I see Diddlie ahead of me in the ally between an SUV and a tall  delivery van.  It is checkered in large red and black squares.  ‘Duchess Bakers’ is written in flowing white script along the sides arching over a steel engraving of a woman with Edwardian décolletage.  She holds a basket full of the Baker’s goods becoming a ‘Duchess’.

“Hello Diddlie”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Nothing much.”

“I thought you were running away from me.”  She flourishes long stems of golden rod for emphasis and pollen fills the air around the ‘Duchess’.

“Didn’t realize you were there.”  We are both sneezing.

“Is that so?”

“Please stop waving that stuff around!”  Diddlie holds her weeds still.  The leaves droop from the stems while the long flowers bob in a breeze above our heads.

“We need to talk some more.”  I sneeze several times.  A yellow film has covered the once shiny black hood of the Ford Explorer next to me in the lee of the tall box like van.

“We need to get away from that stuff!”  I run a finger across the hood leaving a long black line snaking towards the windshield.  Diddlie slowly brings the flowers down, until they brush the ground between us.

“I am challenging you!”  Diddlie sneezes again.

“Can’t you leave those things aside somewhere?”

“No there’s nowhere … I mean about … ”  She is incoherent with sneezing, and I step back to get away from the pollen.

“Hey hey hey, come back”!

“I am trying to get out of the sneezing zone.”

“Don’t run away okay?  This is important.”  The toes of my right foot feel cold and wet.  Water is lapping over the top of my Chinese-made canvas shoe.

“Let me get out of this puddle too.  I am not running away.”

“Boyd Nightingale.”

“What about him? This is no place to talk!”

“Talk to me anyway.”

“Okay what about him?”

“Why is he taking over Fauxmont?”

“What do you mean, ‘take over Fauxmont’?”

“I mean he is vice chair of the Guild.”

“He won in the election along with Bel for chair.  I forget the other positions.”

“Yeah, I heard.”  Diddlie leans against the side of the van.  She looks bored, or is it sullen?

“Diddlie, no one else ran.”

”So now I have to live with that creep in the Guild.”

“Make’s life interesting though.”

“That’s easy for you to say.  I don’t need that kind of ‘interesting’. I’ve got to buy chicken for the Red Queen.”

She raises the golden rod as if she had a sword and jabs at me with it.

“Mind what you’re doing!  Not so easy really, I have to live with him too.”

“So you don’t support his views?”

“No.  I disagree with a lot of what he says.”

“Why did you do it?”  She lowers her weapon.  The tops of the blooms are dipping in the puddle.  The hood of her yellow slicker falls down over her eyes like a visor.

“Do what?”

“Give him a place in the Guild.”  She shakes the hood off her forehead with a head-toss and pulls it down from her hair with her free hand.

“Like I said, he won in the election.”

“Like I said, you wrote it that way.”

“Okay Diddlie, let’s not repeat ourselves.”

“You disagree with him right?”

“Yes.”

“It is your story right?”

“So what are you getting at?”  With every question she takes another small step towards me through the puddle, in white rain boots with red and black hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Oily puddle water drips from the golden flowers at about knee height.  If she waves it again, I will be splattered.

“I am saying why give him that position?  You didn’t have to.  You could have put a friendly face on the Guild.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Even Jake Trip would have been better than …”  Diddlie slowly lifts her flowers higher but off to the side, away from me.  “I don’t believe I said that.”

“You could have nominated him.”

“Very funny Fred.  Listen, I don’t think you’re ready to face up to this, but I am sorry, you have to.”  Diddlie has balanced her sodden long stemmed flowers on the seat of the open van with the blooms drooping across the steering wheel. The stems are wound with narrow purple ribbon extending about almost a foot like the wrapping of a samurai sword handle.

“Face up to what?”

“Your responsibilities.”  She spreads her arms out palms up.

“Can you explain a little further?”

“Look, putting Boyd on the Guild is wrong.  I mean why do that?’  She folds her arms.  “If you care about Fauxmont, why?”

“If the Guild is a democratic body, what’s wrong with people coming into office with dissenting views?  Besides, he was elected.”

“He’s a …”  Diddlie puts her hands up to her face.  “Excuse me … No I won’t say that … ”

“Diddlie, his day may come, who knows?”

“Get Boyd off the Guild.”

“How can I do that Diddlie?”

“I am sure you can find a way.”  Diddlie folds her arms again.

“He’s only vice chair. Diddlie, don’t get so upset.”

“Don’t tell me how to feel.”  Diddlie’s hands have become fists clenched at her waist.  “I have to live with this.”

“Thanks lady!”  Climbing into the driver’s seat the deliveryman admires the goldenrod he picks up off the wet steering wheel.  An unlit cigarette projects at a steep angle from his wide frog like mouth under sunken cheeks and bulging eyes.

“Oh they’re not for … Sorry I mean I just … ”

“Sir, are these your flowers?”

“No!  They’re not his.”

He sneezes.  The cigarette flies into the windshield and drops behind the clipboard jammed between the dash and the windshield.  Passing his fist across his face the delivery man wipes his nose on his short red sleeve.

“These yours lady?”

“He hands the flowers down to her, carefully pointing the blooms out the door first, away from her face and then angling the stems towards her.  He sneezes. “Those things are worse than pepper!”

“Sorry, I just put them there for a moment.”

“Okay lady.  You better wet them down some more! know what I’mean?”

The down cast corners of his mouth rise into a yellow-toothed grin.

She takes the flowers.  He wipes his palms on his black pants.

“Thanks, sorry about the pollen.”  We retreated from the van and the puddle into the open. The van moves off slowly and the rising pitch of its quiet electric motor runs out of earshot.

Diddlie comes towards me putting her arm in mine.

“We could collaborate on this thing instead of arguing.”

“That gets complicated.”  Diddlie tugs on my arm.

“Why are you so hostile?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I am going to write okay and then we’ll see.”

Diddlie has the golden rod over her shoulder as if she were carrying a rake or a pike, and the blooms are behind us as we walk slowly together.  “Okay Diddlie, but that’s another story.”

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.

Out for an evening stroll, I find Steve Strether walking Lambert outside Diddlie’s on their post meridiem promenade.  He is at the top of Oval Street before it begins the steep descent past the Trips’ towards Wicket Street.  Lambert is leading from the middle of the road where the camber is highest.  Lambert suddenly doubles back to sniff the roadside.  A light in the eaves illuminates the ivy covered brick pillar supporting Diddlie’s mailbox and house number. A breeze agitates the ivy leaves and the hickory above.  Their shadows move on the road as if something in the road bed has come to life.  Lambert trots over to the base of the mail box, sniffs around for a moment, then sits down and stares at Diddlie’s house.

Steve waits for Lambert to find what ever drew him away from the mail box pillar.  A faint rhythmical female vocalization grows slowly in volume and intensity above the sound of Lambert brushing through the ivy.  It seems to be coming from the dark opening of a bedroom window on the Oval Street side of Diddlie’s.   Steve is looking at me when I look up from Lambert towards him.  He has the leash in his left hand and he is waving his outstretched right arm in time with the voice like a symphony conductor.  He brings up the hand which holds the leash as if to indicate a crescendo.  This pulls on Lambert, and he growls in protest resisting the pull at his neck.  There is no crescendo, but the beat is gradually speeding up with rising pitch and Steve skillfully stays in time, as if he were leading.  Then after a whimpering sigh, the voice trails off to be joined by a male sigh followed by silence from the black rectangle on Diddlie’s wall.  Lambert loses interest and tugs on the flexible leash like a fish drawing out more line as it fights in the water.  Lambert pushes through the dark sea of ivy leaves towards the Trips’ perimeter where there is a grass verge before the first driveway.  The sound of a door slamming from inside Diddlie’s, provokes Lambert to bark in response.  He barks only once and then stands still in the ivy growling quietly with his short white tail straight out and his ears moving in tiny adjustments. Steve locks the leash and tries to pull back.  He doesn’t want Lambert to set off Jake’s security lights and blast the newly eroticized mystery of the evening with a blinding alert.  We both thought Diddlie lived alone.  There is no vehicle but Diddlie’s in the car port.

Steve describes Lambert chasing something out of Diddlie’s ivy once before, setting off the lights, and Lambert’s most earsplitting bark, as his prey crossed Jake’s grass verge.  Lambert flushes something from the ivy this time too.  Steve is too late getting him out.  Bright lights flood the Trips’ perimeter with blinding intensity.  Minutes later, when our eyes have adjusted to the extraordinary new visibility, an SUV turns the corner of Wicket and goes up Oval.  Steve tries to hurry Lambert away from the scene, down hill and around the corner towards home.  The SUV stops, the driver’s window slides down and a serious official sounding voice asks if we have seen anything unusual on the hill.  Steve explains the events of his recent descent past the Trips’ without mentioning the operatic performance he conducted with such mastery further up.  Thank you sir, said the voice as a female radio voice emanates from high in the interior with bleeps and crackle.  “It’s a ‘39’, Peggy” says the driver.  His window goes up and the engine revs quietly pulling the left rear wheel close enough to the roadside ditch to cause further subsidence of the asphalt.  Lambert cautiously goes down to investigate.  Steve explains he and Lambert are a code thirty-nine.  He had heard it before.  That report to Urban Safety Solutions data center is recorded on a log with many other coded entries, showing all their responses to events at the Trips’.  Lambert stays in the ditch, his nose to the streambed with Steve walking along the side of the road above.  He keeps the leash pulled in taught along the stretch of Wicket Street that marks the end of the Trips’ corner lot so as not to cause another ‘39’.  “Wish I was thirty-nine”, quips Steve.

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 walking back from Hank Dumpty’s barbeque with Lou and Rank Majors.  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” said Rank with a grin.

“Do you find your air force background useful?”

“Yea 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?” I said to Lou as we walked on through the moon shadows around Bailes Lane toward Oval Street.

“I think he works for Fibonacci” said Lou. “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, in Rolling Stone Magazine?” asked Lou.  I had not and Lou went on.  Fibonacci was a silicone valley start-up which turned out to be a front company for either the CIA or the NSA.  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”.

“So they went ‘legit’ to avoid further embarrassment and to be able to answer  questions as openly as a legitimate business would.  Well not all that open 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.  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 doing it.  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 be overlooked by routine audits when your dealing with multibillion dollar government contracts.”

“So what happened with all money the front company made?”

“That’s one of the things Rolling Stone was interested in, and they got a lot of interesting leads but ended up with nothing but speculation 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?”

“The story may have been killed in any number of ways, but the thing that struck me was that the same day that the Rolling Stone broke the story, the Armond Macadamia story broke all over  the evening news and in the morning  papers.  I am told Armond has a place in Fauxmont but I know little more about him.”

“Yes, that I remember.  Armond is our local billionaire.  He was supposed to have trucked half a trillion dollars in used green backs down to Honduras.  The big networks all had people down there showing much the same thing.  The corespondents  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 side, and in a stream going down beside the wreckage.  ABC said Macadamia was planning to buy the whole country and turn it into a ranch.  Some one on CBS questioned if there was really enough money there to buy a ranch the size of Honduras.”

“CNN interviewed a man with a head cloth, no shirt and ragged shorts, who gestured with his machete assuring us through a translator that he had seen a whole convoy of trucks.  Then we saw a lot of low denominations among torn fragments of bills at the road side.”

“You’ve got it” said Lou.  “That’s what was on television.  You know, I asked Jake Trip about this a couple of years back when I was talking to him about his plans  for the new house.  He happened to mention Macadamia, and it turns out he’s close to the old man 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” said  Lou.”  He  wouldn’t answer that one when Jake asked him.  He just said a deal is a deal, and Jake assumed he made out alright  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 truck loads of used bills.”

“How did the networks know where to go in the jungle to find the wreck?” asked Lou.

“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” said Lou.

“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 some one with inside information?”

“I sold out, remember?” said Lou.

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 us with its right eye, its nose pointed away.

“That looks like Mr. Liddell.” I said.

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 introduces me to the new vice chair of the Fauxmont Guild over the sound of cicadas.   It is mid afternoon and the heat is tolerable in today’s low humidity and the insects seem subdued compared to the intense roar they added to last weeks extreme heat.  I congratulate Boyd sitting on Daisy’s screened and shaded front porch.  Leggy rhododendrons stretch for light from an evergreen wall of azaleas growing between her house and the narrow street.  “Thanks Fred.  Now we can make some changes around here.”  Goldfinches visit to feed on Nyjer seed from Daisy’s carbide tube feeder.  She is enthusiastic.  “This could be big for you.  I am so glad you won, Boyd.”

“I didn’t win Daisy.  No one else ran, so how could I lose?”

“Suppose no one voted for you?”

“I don’t think I got more than about four votes Fred.”  The cicadas reach a crescendo, then all but one nearby go quiet.

“When was the election?”

“Back in May Fred.  Where have you been?’

“Out of touch obviously.”

Daisy offers me some iced tea and goes on.  ”The election was the first week in May.  I think you were out of town or something.”  Three goldfinches fly off leaving the hanging tube swinging outside the screen.  A lawn mower starts up very loud next door, and soon stops with a metallic knock.  The porch falls silent as it takes a moment to hear the wasp working against the screen above my head, the more distant cicadas and water running in the pipes somewhere indoors.

“It’s funny I haven’t heard about it though.”

“Bel is still chair, and I think its great, but Boyd keeps complaining …”

“Yeah, she’s taking her time about announcing anything and calling a meeting of the new Guild.”

“It is vacation time Boyd.  People are away.”

“That’s a lame excuse Daisy.  In fact they are trying to screw me out of the job.”

She is standing next to his chair and gives him a kiss.  Boyd holds her hand until the full length of her long arm is stretched out as she pulls away to get ice tea from the kitchen.  The lawn mower starts again and gets fainter as it is pushed around the other side of the house.

“How, Boyd?”

“Seeing as how I only got four votes, they are talking about another vote for vice chair.”

“Can they do that?”

“No, Hank Dumpty has already told them the by-laws don’t allow it.  They’ve got to find some way to live with me!”  Boyd laughs.  “We are going to shake things up, big time.  Bel, Diddlie Drates, my Mom, Albrecht’s parents, all those other liberals won’t know what hit them.  Get every one in the neighborhood involved and voting for freedom.”

“We, Boyd?  Doesn’t sound like you have much support.”

“Fred, with Albrecht, the master mind behind me, we will get all the support we need.”

“Be a good thing to increase voter turn out alright.”

“That’s just the beginning Fred.  We’ve also got to get Bel out of there, and find a real chairman.”

Birds return to feed, gold flashing so bright it seems apart from the bird, like tossed coins falling through the dappled light.  The engine’s volume grows again in the mower’s turn towards us.  The odor of dust and hydrocarbons mixes with the sweet, sour lemonade I am sipping.  A cloud rises above the intervening ferns, like visual noise, obscuring the figure of the figure behind the mower. There’s a rattle of stones and other hard stuff against the machine. One of Daisy’s pet wombats comes out the door on to the porch.  “What is that Daisy?”

“That’s Dante.  The racket must have woken him.”  Daisy’s three wombats were sleeping in their large wooden salad bowls, each with a name engraved on an attached silver plate; Dante, Rossetti, and Gabriel.  The other two sleep on while Dante walks on slowly and settles on the floor with his nose against the screen.

“Can they read Daisy?”

“What?”  I wait for the mower to pass so Daisy can hear me, but it stops again with another sudden crack of the blade.

“Daisy, I said, can they read?”

“No, they’re wombats Fred.  What do you mean?”

“I mean I noticed they have their names on their sleeping bowls.”

“Oh right, Fred!  I put those up after they had chosen the bowls themselves.”

“How do they like salad?”

“They don’t Fred, but I found Dante sleeping in my salad bowl one morning after I had left it out on the kitchen counter. I never did put it away, and then the others also wanted to sleep in it.”  She stops, waiting for the sound of a truck revving to subside.  It must have gone into reverse. We hear shouts in Spanish between the warning beeps.  Daisy is frowning.

“I hope they have finished with that mower!”

Boyd shouts as loud as he can.  “They’ll never be finished here until we seal the border.”

I remind Boyd that not all Spanish speakers are illegals.

“Okay Boyd, enough about the Hispanics!  Fred, I was trying to tell you that I went to Ikea, and bought two more bowls so Rossetti and Gabriel could sleep comfortably without a fight over one bowl.”

“What do you use for salad now Daisy?”

“Fred she’s got a ton of other bowls in there.”

Daisy had gone inside and didn’t hear my question.  She reappears with more iced tea.  “Boyd, I like Bel.  She’s been doing a good job too.”

“Daisy, who said she’s doing such a good job?  Rossetti?  You’ve been fooled by all the socialist bullshit they talk around here.  You know Fred, this is one good woman, and she’s been taken for a ride for years by these people.”

“Oh come on Boyd honey.”

“You have.  The whole big government thing takes you in.  The big daddy who’s going to protect us all, until he’s taken all our money in taxes, and all our freedoms with it.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with the government helping unfortunate people.”

“What’s wrong is that it is the community’s job to look after its own.  Not some over-paid clown in Washington spending my tax money.”

“Do you think Fauxmont could take on such a job?  I mean where would the funding come from?”

“Fred, you don’t need funds when you got people who are organized to take care of themselves.”

“So you think it could be done by volunteers?”

“Yeah, maybe, partly, but mainly the “unfortunates” as my sweety likes to call them, need to do something for themselves.”

“Boyd, where do you get all these ideas?”

“All you’ve got to do is think about it honey.  Government is basically evil.  It is …”

Daisy was about to sit down after handing me a drink, but she strode toward Boyd’s wicker armchair and grabbed both his hands, interrupting him by repeating “Evil!  Evil! Evil Evil Evil kneavel!” so close to his face they rub noses.  She draws back laughing.”  Boyd pulls her on to his lap where she lands with her legs up over the arm an of chair, one of her arms around his neck and the other tangled in his.

“Seriously Fred.  Think about it.  We all know power corrupts and absolute power …”  Daisy interrupts again as she is trying to get up from Boyd’s lap.         “ … corrupts absolutely”.

Her voice distorts as she rolls off his lap and unfolds on the floor bumping her head.  They are both laughing and I laugh with them.  Boyd is still determined to make his point.  “The more taxes they raise, the more power they have, the less we have.  The bigger the bureaucracy gets, the more inefficient government gets, and the more wasteful, corrupt and self serving.”

Daisy looks up at Boyd from the floor.  She lies on her back playfully waving her arms and legs in the air.  She addresses the ceiling, “Professor Boyd, I am listening honey, but come on.”

“No I am not rolling on the carpet with you.  I got to educate Fred here.”  Dante has walked over to sniff Daisy’s ear.

“Our government isn’t evil Boyd.”  She stifles some more giggles as Boyd prods her with his bare toes.

“Daisy you’re acting like a cicada down there.” Dante jumps at his foot but he moves it away in time.

“Well you are going on and on like a cicada in woven wicker tree.”

Hoping to change the subject, I ask, “the seventeen year cicadas were here in 04, so who is making all the racket now?”

“Seventeen years, isn’t that about how long Bel has been in the chair?”

Daisy gets up from the floor and sits opposite Boyd, pulling her chair up so close they press their knees together.  Three goldfinches fly off the feeding tube which swings empty.  The mower starts up again but sounds muffled.  It is on the other side of the house.

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.

Boom chic chic … Boom chic chic … sounds like a dance band.  A small couple are stepping in time to a jingle, waltzing in a big empty room with a shiny hard wood floor.  I watch their tiny legs moving; legs only about as big as their teeth looked just now, when their smiles first filled the screen.

“Waltz through life with windows by De Hooch” says the commentary.  I am curious to see whether they will grow bigger or smaller in the next instant.  A woman’s voice comes over the fading sound of the jingle.

“These windows are designed to stay clean”.  Is this the voice of the dancer?  A chorus sings in the background “Created by De Hooch to stay clean”  with a long sustained note on the word clean.

The dancers have stopped.  Her face grows gradually larger as the chorus sings more of the jingle about clean windows by De Hooch, the sound rising gradually until her face fills the screen and the volume is loudest.

She seems to be the same tiny woman in a white turtleneck who was dancing just now. She has stopped growing and she speaks. The screen is filled with her fresh clean face. I can see her as an animated portrait bust, framed by the TV.  Short light brown hair curls forward informally over her brow.  How friendly she looks!  Her eyes are bright blue and moist.

Her shiny pink lips move distinctly with each word.  Now she has finished speaking, the woman is growing smaller again and I can see her standing looking towards a man, appearing magically in the background on an upbeat in the music.  It is her dancing partner looking at her with his warm smile.  He moves towards her until he is close to her, instead of resuming the dance he looks adoringly at her.  A voice says “At home with windows by De Hooch.”

Then he and the woman keep shrinking and growing, and partially appearing and disappearing, framed by different kinds of windows accompanied by the waltz string music without vocals.

Now the jingle tells me that everything will look better through his windows.  Are they his windows not hers?

They are Peter De Hooch’s windows.  The dancers have gone.  Peter owns the company.   He too looks handsome with silvery hair, perfectly aligned teeth in his smile, a strong jaw. His small blue eyes shine from his tanned face.  After a moment’s distraction I see Peter is diminishing.  The man and woman are waltzing away from Peter, and he gets smaller as they move through their big bright house disappearing into the garden.

Now Peter is back, framed by a window.

“These windows keep out harmful ultraviolet rays with such transparency you could admire a painting through them.”

He says in an enthusiastic voice, pitched to sound more sympathetic than authoritative. There is another flicker on the screen, or perhaps I blinked.  No it is not really Peter, it is a painting of Peter.

Peter has gone again.  The painting is gone.  A female voice says in welcoming tones “It is as light as day in our new living room”.  I think it is the dancer’s voice but there is no way to really tell.

The male dancer returns to the screen to hug the cheerful looking woman who reappeared opening the glass door and passing through it.  As the waltz music swells, the image of a golden retriever in the garden beyond the door grows to fill the screen.  The dog barks, but looks friendly, wagging its tail and panting, showing its teeth as harmlessly as Peter de Hooch showed his when he smiled.  The dog slowly grows smaller.  The couple comes back into to view getting larger as the dog gets smaller and disappears.

Now all I notice are their rows of gleaming teeth and their eyes, filling the whole screen.  As suddenly as the couple grew, they shrink again, waltzing across the shiny floor framed by one of Peter’s windows.

I get up from my chair.

My old friend Alice remarks on how annoying she finds commercials interrupting the news on TV.

The news is back.

“That was the chairman of the select committee on Aesthetic Crime, Congressman Lee Leavenworth Knox outside the hearing rooms this evening, after the third session of these hearings to clean up America.  Presented to you live by De Hooch’s windows.”  Says the newsman whose picture is gone in a flicker.

I can hear the theme from that famous Lutheran Hymn, “A mighty Fortress is Our God.”

Or is it?  Well, I am hearing something very much like it.  Was that the news?  There is a picture of Lee Leavenworth Knox.  His serious face fills the screen with battleship gray hair combed back in a bow wave above a square face.  His bushy graying eyebrows arching on his brow could be comic, but the Congressman is in a somber mood.

“We need to clean up America” he says as if he wishes it weren’t necessary, like having to do the kitchen after a party when you would rather sleep.

“As the Congressman marches down the narrow streets of this small town in upstate New York the country wonders about the progress of his hearing in Washington” says the sententious news voice, somehow speaking for all of us in the country.

We can see the banner of Knox’s “Clean Up America” (CUPA) movement carried down a narrow street in a parade.  A male voice talks from the street about cleaning up America in authoritative tones.  “That was our correspondent reporting from the town of Dyspeptic New York.  Stay tuned for the interview” the news voice tells us.  I can’t hear who is reporting.

The scene changes.  Knox is being interviewed:

“Are you going to pull down the Washington Monument?”

“I do not regard it as an aesthetic crime.”

“Congressman, what is your position on a replacement design?”

“We shall hear from all sides about aesthetic crimes in America.  That is the purpose of these hearings.”

“Do you think the Washington Monument is an aesthetic crime?”

“No I do not.”

“Okay, let’s put it another way, do you think the design or construction is or was an aesthetic crime?”

“As I said before, I do not. That is a question the committee is exploring and it would not be fitting for me to comment further at this time.”

“What is an aesthetic crime?”

“It is an offence against the good sense of Americans.”

“What do you mean by ‘good sense,’ Congressman?”

“I think that is plain to the American people.”

“Which Americans Congressman?”

“The majority of American voters.”

“Congressman, we are just about out of time.  One last question: What law does aesthetic crime fall under?”

“It falls under God’s law.”

The interview is over and teeth are back on screen along with the bright eyes of the smiling couple in a De Hooch window.

I go back in the kitchen again to get a beer and can hear the Waltz and jingle from the other room and get back in time to watch a crowd dispersing on the street outside the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill.

Now the commentator is reporting from the street looking down from Jenkins Hill, amidst the mixed evening lights.  Orange brake lights flash on and off against the constant white headlights of oncoming traffic moving slowly along Pensylvania Avenue below.  The evening’s remaining light filters through low cloud filling the background.  “That was Lee Leavenworth Knox fighting aesthetic crime in Washington,” says the commentator.

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 has cleared out her attic since the branch fell on her roof and the ceiling caved in.  She offers me a look at what she retrieved from her collection of clippings and old magazines.  There’s a carton on the dining table with a stack of old magazines next to it.

“I only take it for the pictures”, feigns Diddlie, as she hands me an open copy of “Shrink Wrap Magazine” from the top of the stack.  “Here sit down at the table.”  She remains standing and turns over the page picturing a very substantial male member.

“Oh wait, this came last week.”  She walks across the room and returns, handing me the latest edition, a lot thinner than the old ones.  “You can subscribe to the website but I still like paper.”

She points out Foulton Furey’s article about Armond Macadamia, the financial wizard, on the front page.  I have to admit that I have never seen Shrink Wrap Magazine before, or the website.

“Shrink Wrap isn’t on the rack at the drug store or anything. See that!” She points out an article.  “Armond is probably one of the richest guys in the world.  I mean billions, yet he spends part of every year here in Fauxmont.”

“Which house”?

“Oh you can’t see it from the street.  He’s got a double lot and the front yard is full of hollies and cedars.  It’s all hidden.  Armond has investments all over the place.  I heard he’s funding a big building for the business school out at P.U. and he’s way in deep with that secret company.”

“Do you mean Princeton University?”

“No, not that, P.U., Prestige University, where they had the bug incident.”

“Yeah, there’s no ivy growing there. What secret company?”

”Oh Fibernasty or something.  You know, Lou sold his business to them.”

“Are you thinking of Fibonacci Corporation?”

“Yeah, Lou calls it ‘the Fib’.”

“Do they fib Diddlie?”

“They do public relations.  What do you think?”

“They call it ‘Communications Strategy’ in the PR world.”

“Like war… Yeah right, military terminology … as in an Advertising ‘Campaign’.  Tells you something doesn’t it? God! what creeps!”

“You ever met Armond?

“Sure.”

“You seem to know a lot about this secret company!”

“Not really, but word gets around among friends.  It isn’t known much outside of here.  I think they’re dangerous.”

“Do you?”

“They do a lot of propaganda, undermining governments and that.”

“What governments?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I think they secretly support political parties overseas and influence elections right here.  It’s all for the big corporations, so they can go on with their rip-offs.”

“Sounds like CIA stuff.”

“Yeah! What’s the difference?  I mean they have contracts and hire people from there all the time and pay them a fortune.”

“How do you know?”

“I know people, hear stuff … and read Shrink Wrap.  That’s a great source.”

“But is their stuff true?”

“It’s mainly true, I think.”

“People who leak that kind of information usually have an axe to grind, or they may be deliberately given info as part of an operation.”

“Maybe, maybe not … how can I tell? I just hope the reporter can figure it out.  That’s what Lark started it for, to get the inside dope!”

“It is hard to know what to believe.”

“It’s not just governments, the CIA, or the Chinese … there’s secret people doing secret stuff together all over the place to make money.”

“So what’s so secret about the Fib?”

“I mean have you ever heard of them on TV?”

“No, it was all news to me when Lou told me about selling up.”

“I think Rank Majors works there too, but he’ll never tell you anything about

what he does.”

“Has he told you he works there?”

“No, no he wouldn’t do that.  Rank’s pretty quiet.  I just heard stuff, you know.”

I notice Shrink Wrap’s subtitle printed across the top of the cover in large yellow and orange letters resembling the texture of crinkled plastic-wrap:

“The magazine of sex, investigation, politics and opinion”

“What could be spicier?  Here, take this stack.”  Seeing my interest is growing, she slides the stack of about thirty issues across the table to my elbow.  “Thanks Diddlie.”  Turning the magazine over, I read the bottom of the page where it says in bold type:

“We Fight on Both Fronts.”

The back is designed to look like a front cover too, except it is upside-down. Diddlie looks over my shoulder as I sit at her table reading.

“See, it has no back.  It’s front to back, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.”

One front pictures the female bosom, the other shows off manly ‘pecs’.  At the top and bottom of each page they recommend that readers “keep turning things over…” The two ‘fighting fronts’ meet, stapled down the centerfold of the middle page, which features Mars and Venus fighting out their cosmic differences in a tabloid universe.  Male and female correspondents write out their complaints against each other, which are printed in red ink on narrow columns down each side of the page while the middle wider column carries investigative reports in blue ink.  Shrink Wrap mixes imagery of the male and the female, with short articles on sensational themes.  It is where Grant Gazburg the conservative columnist, started his famous byline “Today’s Rushes”.

“We are living the movie of our times” says Grant Gazburg in his byline, “and I am reporting the first take on it.”  One of his earliest scoops was to skewer Boris Tarantula’s bogus Dracula story.  Foulton Furey writes from the other side, discrediting the greedy and the selfish and refers to Grant’s column as the ‘Bull Rushes from Life’s Swamp’.”

Lost in this backwater of the media maelstrom, one might not know that Grant refers to Furey as ‘Furious the Fool’.  Grant’s fame on radio is now so great that poor Fulton is no real competition.  Being little known beyond his Shrink Wrap readership, Fulton’s humiliation is that much diminished.

Looking through selections from her magazine collection, I find Boris’s mother, Osiris Tarantula, had predicted his success in an interview for the Herald Tribune, quoted by Shrink Wrap.

This was part of the publicity surrounding his apparent defection from Transilvania.  Osiris is quoted as saying ‘Boris will do well in the West.  He has inherited the family’s talent for business.’

Osiris left out his true gift for public relations.  Mrs. Tarantula reportedly owns boutiques in Paris and Milan.

“New York is my son’s turf” she said when asked if she would be opening in America too.  There is no word about Osiris’s earlier defection nor is there anything about Boris’s father.  Judging from Diddlies’s archive, Boris’s career has been reported in fragments here and there.  Osiris seems to have been in Paris for some time before she appeared with her son at the Paris press conference years ago.  Diddlie says she has a picture of Osiris in the crowd at a Dior fashion show well before Boris came on the scene.

Boris’s earlier work was described as ‘little more than welded rust’ by hostile critics in the 90s.  While more discerning art lovers find merit in his innovative use of I-beams, re-bars, rust and advertising space.

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.

Herman is concerned about his son, after hearing about his provocations at the Guild Meeting.  Herman Intaglio’s son Albrecht is 23 and has been living with his parents for most of the year. He has quit Tenniel’s Art and Frame shop.  He went to art school for a while but didn’t get a degree.  He worked for the Plancks on and off, and he didn’t work at all for long periods.  He moved in with a girl, and when that broke up, he moved back home.

He also worked at the local Seven Eleven for a few months, after that Herman thought he was working for the online music service called “Prime Numbers” but his wife Dona says that never really happened.  He was just downloading a lot.

Herman had told me that much before.  I am listening to Herman as he chats with Lark Bunlush outside the door on the corner of the Cavendish Pie Shop. Dona has gone in the shop for coffees.

“Did he find God, or did God find him?”  He laughs, Lark looks puzzled and Herman goes on, “If God found him there is hope, but if he found God, this relationship may not last any longer than his others. Now he says he is a full time activist with C.U.P.A.”

Lark nods slowly, looking at Herman and asks him why Albrecht doesn’t work with the Plancks any more.

“I don’t know.  He helped me move the etching press this morning.  I have been working on some plates by the way, but I couldn’t really get much out of him.”

“You talking about those sheets of copper you were cutting the other day?”

“Yup”

“Are you going to show?”

“Well, I am doing some dry point now.  Not etching, no acid, no fumes either, just pressing the stylus into the metal, and printing.  Yeah, one day I’ll show ‘em.”

Albrecht’s father, Herman, returns to the question of where his son has suddenly found all his fanatical zeal.  Albrecht’s mother is convinced a retreat in Idaho sponsored by Citizens to Clean up America had ‘set him off’.  “I was happy for him when he left, but now… well, this shocks me.  I’m disappointed too in the way he behaved at the Guild meeting. Herman says he can only hope Albrecht will get over it before using his new gun. His wife Dona comes out of the shop with two coffees.

“Are you talking about the gun?  Lark can you explain why is he carrying that thing?”

“I can’t explain it. I’m opposed to people carrying weapons around here.”

“He was unarmed when he took off and as full of confidence as I ever saw him, but now…” Herman scratches the back of his neck, looking down pressing his chin against his throat until his half-shaved jowls bulge and finally mutters

“He told me it was the only guarantee of liberty left to patriotic Americans,”

“So there’s your answer Dona,” said Lark.

“What do you mean?”

“Dona, he has told you Albrecht’s reason for carrying the gun.”

Dona gives a cup of coffee to Herman. She and Herman sip in silence until she breaks out, as from a prison, “It doesn’t make sense.”

“At least he has found something to do,”

Dona looks at Lark and clasps her wrist, “Lark, my son has turned into a thug,”

Herman let out the words “Oh God” as if in pain.  Dona looks off towards some crows gathering in the trees across the road.  Herman sighs into the conversational lull, which extends it further.  A jet whistles over in a descending tone, adding its own sigh and banking steeply into the sun on its approach.  Lark squints at it, following its turn until she has to shade her eyes.  “Herman the way I see it, if your son is working for CUPA then he has found some direction.  Look of it that way.”

Herman lifts his chin from his throat.  “Lark you’ve been looking into the sun.”

They all laugh. Then Herman’s concern weighs on him.

“What has he found though?  Clean Up America?  I object to a lot of the same stuff they object to, but I am worried about those people.”

“Throw him out now Herman!” laughed Lark.  “Let him find trouble on his own.”

“Those people are fanatics in my opinion.  Besides I am not going to throw my son out of our home.”

“Herman you’re just a hard headed Liberal!”

“I am a progressive if you please.  Home is home and that’s my greatest family value.”

“Family what?”

“Value!”  Lark grabs his arm and puts it around her waist, tossing her hair and

laughing, she presses her cheek against his.  “Lark are you flirting

with my man again?”

“I am Dona, I am!” We are standing next to some tables and chairs arranged under the awning outside.

Dona, puts her cup down on one of the tables and pulls on Herman’s other arm.  Herman pulls his wife close, “He’s my man.” Lark breaks away, to emphasise her point.

“It’s such a fascist, totalitarian idea, ‘Clean up America’.  All those who disagree are dirt or something.  That’s the implication.”

“Lark, I don’t know about being fascist, but they are fanatics.”

“What do you mean fanatic?”

“I mean they are extremists, not interested in listening to reasonable objections.”

Herman objects, “politics isn’t reasonable.  It is about power and persuasion.”

“The implication is clear.  Dirt should be swept away.  They have no respect for argument.”

“Wait”, Dona waves her arm at the others as if to flag down the conversation. “Look, we can disagree on principles without carrying weapons and becoming mortal enemies.” She pulls out chair to sit at a table and then another.  “Why don’t you sit down Lark?

“No, I am in line, but right, that’s the whole idea of our system.”

Herman pulls up another chair and sits next to Dona, loking up at Lark. “Yes some people can argue reasonably, but not them.”

“Don’t you think it is just rhetorical heat Lark?”

“No, I think it may start that way, but it can easily become more than that.” says Lark losing her place in line but still not sitting down in the vacant chair.

Dona closes both hands around her coffee paper cup slowly distorting it into an oval taking great care not to spill any, “Okay it could be more than that, but is it?”

Herman explains that CUPA tells its membership what they want to hear.  Strong words attract media attention and that’s what CUPA needs.

“How do you tell it’s just heat?  Do they need to be storm troopers?”

“Come on Lark,” said Herman.

“I am serious.”

“What are you proposing, Lark?  A Spartacus movement?” asks Herman.

“No, and I am not trying to be Rosa Luxemburg,” Lark goes on.  “I am just saying watch carefully.”

Dona lifts her cup as if to sip, but hesitates, breaking in, speaking across the top of her cup,“Are you talking about Rome?”

“No they used the gladiator’s name, but this movement was in Weimar Germany.” said Lark. Herman gulps some coffee and leans forward.

“You mean the Commies.  Don’t lump me in with them.”

“Okay” said Lark.  “So Albrecht has joined CUPA.  Don’t worry.  It’s not personal. Feeling the way you do, doesn’t make you a Commie.  In fact I’d like to talk to him.  It’s been years.”

Dona looks at Herman who is looking at Lark and Lark breaks another uneasy silence.  ”Is something wrong?”

“No,” said Dona and Herman together, and Dona goes on.  “He’s probably home right now.  You want to come over?”  Lark is preoccupied, looking across the street towards Fauxmont behind the tall trunks of oaks and hickories and some small cypresses further up the gentle slope from the road.  There is someone standing under the huge southern red oak by the bus stop.

“Isn’t that Boyd Nightingale?” said Herman following her gaze.  A bus pulls up, red, with dark windows, the engine rumbling, under a higher hollow throaty roar.   The driver leans out of his window to greet a motorcyclist pulled up next to him.  We can’t see who gets on or off on the other side.  “Did you see that?”

“What?” asked Dona.

“That kiss!  Who is my son kissing?”

“I only saw one person and that was Boyd.”

“No, look Dona, there goes Daisy up the path, there.  See.”

“Herman that’s not Daisy.”

“It’s her, Lark.  She’s all arms and legs.  Couldn’t be any one else.”

“What is my son doing with Daisy Briscoe?”

“I don’t see anyone Lark.”

“No, she’s gone behind those evergreens.”

“Lark you might as well walk back with us and talk to Albrecht.

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.

“Say there, I’ve been looking for you!”

“Oh?  I’ve been around.”

“Haven’t seen a new post on your blog for over two months.”

“No my editor was away, and it’s time to reassess anyway.”

“Didn’t know you had an editor.”

“It is a friend who has taken an interest, and knows how to spell.”

“So what are you reassessing?”

“There are about sixty four characters in Fauxmont so far, including a cat, two dogs and three wombats.”

“I told you there were too many characters before, like weeds in my yard.”

“So you did.  Also I need to catch up after spending last summer and fall lying around waiting for my back to heal.”

“You did that in 2009 according to the introduction.”

“Yes, too much strenuous gardening two springs in a row.”

“But you said that this whole thing came to you while you were recovering the first time.”

“This time I left Fauxmont completely.”

“Why?”

“It’s hard to say, distracted by the pain perhaps.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“You are where you are.”

“You mean the whole of Fauxmont comes to a grinding halt just because your back hurts?”

“No, what is going on keeps going on.”

“How can anything new happen if you don’t write it?”

“Fauxmont extends far beyond the blog posts.”

“Listen, I’m just so many pixels, computer bits, what ever, until a reader comes along, right?”

“The postings are just glimpses of something larger, infinitely larger!”

“Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes thanks.”

“‘Infinitely larger’?  Who do you think you are?  You don’t make sense. You sound feverish to me.”

Diddlie is carrying her groceries back from the nearby Safeway in a reusable shopping bag, with a thick bundle of golden rod spilling over the top.  She starts looking for something in the bag.  We are standing under the hickories opposite the Trips’ at the intersection of Wicket and Oval Streets.  Ivy and Wisteria are climbing the trunks thicker than ever in the wet spring.

“Are you looking for some medicine for my fever?”

“I keep wondering why you write fiction anyway when so many of us are writing on line for real?”

“I am interested in telling this story.”

“Some people assume new identities on line.  So could you.  Wouldn’t that be more like it?”

“Like what?”

“I mean a new kind of on-line novel where there’s often no way to tell who’s writing it, or the difference between fake names and real names.  Readers could write you their ideas.  You could fool lot of people, and ….”  Diddlie pauses and looks down at her bag again, switching hands.  Holding it in her left hand she reaches in, trying to find something.

“I am not trying to fool anyone Diddlie.  Fauxmont is categorized as fiction on the web.”

“Yeah right, so I am a fiction.  Okay we’ve been here before.”

“No, no, think of this, Diddlie.  On-line is instant publication not like old fashioned novels on paper where you have to wait for editors and printers and booksellers to get the book out there.”

“Look, writing fiction is fooling people into thinking stuff that isn’t real, isn’t it?

What is the difference?”

“No one is fooled by fiction, they just go along for the ride.”

Diddlie pulls a book out of her bag and gestures with it in her hand.  “You think novels are outdated?”

“No, far from it.  The net is a new medium.  Movies are like novels in many ways, but don’t replace them.”

“Movies are more like plays.  They have scripts and actors.”

“Novels have narrators.  In movies, the pictures carry you along like a narrator’s voice.”

Diddlie has put the book back in her bag, and holding the bag in front of her with both hands she says, “Yeah!  They do the imagining for you!”

“Well, you don’t have to visualize as you do when reading.”

”On the internet we can be our own narrator and actor, and even video maker, and producer.”

“So Diddlie, do you think movies are obsolete?”

“No, that will never happen.  Why don’t you do videos too?”

“Not interested.  Anyway, I don’t think the Internet has killed off novels any more than movies have.”

Diddlie steps forward to make her point in a confidential tone.  “Who wants to read about some one else’s invented worlds, when we already live in our own internet world together with friends, or any one out there?”

“You do.  You just bought a book.”

Diddlie steps back.  “This is different.”

“I think you’re right.  You might say we create a world writing on the internet.”

“You might.  I wouldn’t say that.  What do you mean?”

“I mean writing is turning thoughts into words.  It is like inventing something.”

“Well, I still read novels at the beach.”  Diddlie pulled out her book again.  “See, I got a nice romance here.”

“Okay so that’s an escape, but a good novel can tell you something about the real world.”

“I know, this writer really takes you there.”

“How?”

“You get into the emotions of the characters.  Then escape to a happier place.”

“What about the circumstances?”

“What about them? Sometimes it’s a real pain.”

“I mean a novel can tell you something interesting about experience as well as taking you into it.  It isn’t just ‘escape reading’ though it is an imaginary encounter.”

“Well maybe, but who has time to read that old stuff?”

“You can find the time if you want to.”

”It’s more fun to watch a movie or TV!  It’s like who writes letters any more now there’s email?”

“Okay, so old novels can be long and difficult, partly a narrator’s story but also like a play with the author’s cast acting in the reader’s imagination.”

“When I read, it’s like enjoying a movie in my mind.”

“Even if you are on the beach?”

“Sure, the beach is an escape too.  Maybe you don’t get it.  You are writing like an old fashioned novelist, and you need to get my character right.  Like I keep telling you – younger!”

“Unlike traditional narratives, it is all in the present tense.”

“So what?  How does that make me younger?”

“It doesn’t.  It isn’t a story the narrator recalls.  It’s more like a reporter’s work.”

“You aren’t a novelist. You’re a journalist.  No, no, wait a minute, you are a voyeur imagining you’re a journalist.”

“I am not a voyeur.  I am talking to you now.  Fauxmont is happening to the reporter on line now.”

“You are so mixed up!  We are talking about Fauxmont, your imaginary place.  This is different from your imaginary place.  This is me.”

“Okay, this is a separate story of Fauxmont in its own time.”

“Its own time?  I know mine is running out!”

“Yes, when we talk about writing Fauxmont now, no one else is in it.”

”Now, what do you mean ‘now’ anyway?  People don’t read your blog while things actually happen.”

“No I am talking about the reader’s now, not the writer’s now.”

“You mean it is ‘now’ even if I read it next year?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t posted anything for nearly three months.  Where’s the ‘now’ in that?”

“Right, it’s taking a long time to write new material.  A lot of what I’ve posted was written a year ago or more.”

“So when are you going to post another report?”

“Soon, but it will only be once or twice a month, not every week.  I need more time for work.”

A moving van approaches us slowly like a huge shoebox.  The wide square top hits low hanging branches which catch for a moment against the front and then whip back as the truck moves forward.  Squirrels chase each other across the street in the branches overhead.  A leafy twig falls on Diddlie’s shoulder.  “Yuk!  I’ve got to get home.”  She starts shaking her head and tries to brush something out with her fingers.  “There’s something in my hair.  Now it feels like it’s down my shirt.”  She walks away.  The truck doesn’t take long to pass but there’s no sign of Diddlie when I look up the hill for her.

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

“Hank, I’ll bet this is Helga’s potato salad,” Rank Majors speaks through coated lips.
 “It is, Rank – but listen folks I need to talk about Albrecht Intaglio, confidentially of course.  I have never seen anyone behave like that around here.  This is not an official meeting I know, but we neighbors must talk.”  He speaks quietly in a matter of fact tone, and pauses while twigs and leaves from an old squirrel’s nest rain down on our heads, into the food and clang on the metal pot lid.  Wind sweeps dry leaves and falling twigs into the fire, which crackles as if laughing at the squirrels’ ludic leaps among the boughs above.  He goes on, “I mean we can’t have another meeting with that disrespectful little brat throwing his weight around.”

Rank Majors remarks on Albrecht’s side arm, at which Diddlie yells “Albrecht must be out of his mind” and fills her mouth with venison.

“Far from it” said Lou.  “He and Boyd Nightingale have seen the light.”

“What light is that?”

“Daisy, these young men, like so many others before them, think they must change the world.”

Rank Majors takes a moment to wipe his mouth with care. “This is kind of an out of the way place to start that project.”

Rank thinks Albrecht and Boyd are two lost souls. He describes Albrecht as a “Mome.”  He has known them for twenty years.  His own kids grew up with them in the neighborhood.  He is surprised to see Albrecht walking along Wicket Street with Boyd Nightingale as he doesn’t think they have much in common.

“Yes I saw Boyd last week.”  Rossetti stirs under the tea cozy at the sound of Daisy’s voice.  “He was all dressed up in a business suit, with a buzz cut, brief case and sun glasses.  It’s his new look.”

“I heard that Boyd was camped out in Ash’s old lot next door to Dr. Wittgenstein’s.  Haven’t seen either of them around much lately.”

Mr. Ramsey looks at Daisy, offering her the diminishing plate of venison. “Diddlie, it’s the Clean Up America thing.”

“They have joined the fold and Albrecht was right.  The other night, we didn’t vote on the last motion to adjourn.”

“Lou, that’s because we were all in a state of shock.”  Diddlie passes the venison to Daisy who puts it down without taking any more, remarking that she loved the subtle tones of gun mettle blue even if it is on a deadly weapon.  “I find guns kind of fascinating.  He had it out of that strap and Velcro thing to clean and showed me how to load the chambers of the revolver.”

“We had better clean up our act.”

“For that little squirt Lou?”

“No not for him, for ourselves.”

“He’s not dangerous Lou.  I’ve been talking to him ever since he got back from Idaho.  We shared a taxi back from the airport after my Denver trip”

“You should have been at the meeting Daisy”

“I know.  Sorry I missed it.”

Hank Dumpty throws a piece of bone across the yard.“  I don’t like being pushed around like that.  It’s bad for my blood pressure, well I mean I got to tell you, I felt like disarming that kid, and … “

“I am glad you didn’t.  He knows his rights, and he is shrewd.  He has learned well.”

“Taught by whom Lou?”  Diddlie’s question is hard to hear as another gust of wind blows the leaf out of Hank’s hair.

“I’ve been to hundreds of meetings around here.  We all have known each other long enough to tell.  I mean we don’t have to be so formal and all that.  Everyone has always had their say.  I don’t see what the problem is.”

Mr. Ramsay points out that the community meetings do need formal structure, if we are to be a community of lawful citizens.  It will prevent us degenerating into a rabble.”  Lou is looking at Hank Dumpty and chuckles, waving a clean rib in his hand.  “Even a friendly rabble”

Hank Dumpty wants to nominate Mr. Ramsay to run against Bel and Boyd for the chairman’s position.  A helicopter comes over low and loud drowning out all conversation.  Rossetti grows restless in his tea cozy and I see his furry tail for a moment.  More squirrel’s nest fragments fall on the table.  Some fall in the salad.  Three squirrels chase each other across the overhanging branches and one comes down on the bird feeder.  “No way,” looking up at the squirrels.  “That just plays into his trigger-happy fingers.”

Daisy raises her arms in applause, at Diddlie’s remark.  “Let’s hear it for Mr. R.” then puts her hand down to stroke Rossetti who may be getting interested in the squirrels.

Lou tells Hank Dumpty he must make that proposal when the committee reconvenes.

“Look we are all friends here.  It’s just an idea.  Bel hasn’t been up against guns before.”  He is interrupted by more squirrels’ nest fragments falling around him, in his hair, in his plate and down his back.  “She has been dealing with reasonable people who listen and argue and maybe get mad once in a while, but so what. There’s no guns in it.”  Hank tries to reach back and shake the bits out of his collar, but they fall down inside his shirt.  He wriggles uncomfortably.

“Okay Hank, I hear that, but as you said this is not a meeting.”

Mr. Ramsey accepted another plate of venison and salad, congratulating Hank on his cuisine and his aim with a rifle.

Hank leans forward with both elbows spread out wide on the table, and his hands folded in front of him.  “If it comes to guns I can play that game too.  I know all about them.  I have been a Republican and a gun owner all my adult life and that kid is not going to reduce the number of voters with bullets.  No!”

“Oh Hank! Sweetie you are too upset.”  Daisy gets up leaving Rossetti to himself, and embraces Hank, standing behind his seated bulk and spreading her long wooly arms across his back, filling her hands with his elbows and placing her head against the back of his neck.  This bumps her bowler off.  It blows towards the fireplace.  A cloud of dead leaves surround it like a swarm of ragged insects.  The wind gets under her bowler and it tumbles across the patio bouncing into the air from its brim and lands upside down against the brickwork next to the embers in the grill.  Her hair blows around Hank’s head and into his face.

Mr. Ramsay shifts his weight, and smoothes his hair with both hands “There’s no knowing what it will come to.  Did he threaten you Hank Dumpty?”  He ignores Daisy and the distraction of the wind blowing Daisy’s hair in Hank Dumpty’s face.

“He sure did.”

“Diddlie, I don’t think it was an outright threat to kill anyone.”

“I felt threatened, Lou.”  Hank Dumpty is still speaking through Daisy’s black hair and making no effort to dislodge her from his back.  He blows some hair from his lips.  “I wish I had disarmed that kid then and there.”  Daisy remains in place mumbling Hanky oh Hanky.”

“No, no, no, your restraint was appropriate.  He said the number of liberal voters would be reduced, or something like that, if he used his gun.  Not that he would use it.  He stated a fact, he didn’t make a threat.”

Rank drains his beer before speaking “Lou, he stated it in a clever way that made it sound like a threat without being one.  How did he get so clever all of a sudden?  That’s what I want to know.”

“He’s always been smart, Juanita used to remark on how clever he was when she looked after him during Donatella’s trips to Europe.  He’s got two intelligent parents.  He ought to be smart.”   Hank Dumpty quietly asks Daisy to release him as Diddlie speaks.  Forgetting her hat, she pulls some leaf fragments out of his hair and moves back next to Diddlie and Rossetti.  Diddlie warns Daisy that her hat is about to blow in the fire.  An Irish Wolf hound trots onto the patio, picks up the hat and runs off.  Mr. Ramsay stands up and calls the dog.  I can’t hear the name.  The dog comes to him, sits down and exchanges deer bone for the hat.  Daisy walks over and Mr. Ramsay hands her the bowler pointing out the glistening drool stretching into a sunbeam from one side.  “Oh viscous drool!” exclaims Daisy, petting the dog and addressing it as if that were its name.  She wipes the drool off her hat with leaves and puts the hat back on.  The dog licks its bone quietly, lying on the ground by Mr. Ramsay’s feet.

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 first person I meet at Hank Dumpty’s barbeque is Mr.Ramsay, introduced by Diddlie, who calls everyone else by their first name.  The Ramsays own the Light House Gas Station on Maxwell Avenue.  He has lived in Fauxmont all his life, and was a founding member of the Water Organization.

As there were no water mains out as far as Fauxmont in the early forties when the first houses were built, Mr. Ramsay, then a teenager, and his father, James Ramsay, planned and organized the water system for the neighborhood.  Two wells served all the residents from two pump houses through a system of mains pressurized with air.  Mr. Ramsay, is widely respected, but no one seems to know him very well.  Diddlie tells me he was close to her husband, Stuart Dodgson.  When Stuart died she lost her connection with Mr. Ramsay.  He was famous for saying “We can fix it” whenever anyone called about a problem with the system.  So far, the word is, he always has.

Hank Dumpty comes over, slogging through last year’s leaves, as a gust of wind blows dry oak and gum tree leaves up from the ground to gyre around us.  It is warm in the sun under the bare trees but winter still chills the wind and shade. He greets me with his big hand, his scarred fingers are stained with barbeque sauce, and a shriveled brown oak leaf has landed in his hair, right on the wave, like a carefully placed decoration.  He suggests we join the others over by the fireplace.  We walk well away from his house where his wide brick fireplace with tall chimney stands by a patio surrounded by azaleas and forsythia.  We sit down at a long picnic bench bracing against the wind, while the fire hisses and the meat sizzles.  The nominating committee is all here.  Hank introduces me to Daisy Briscoe who had missed the committee meeting though she is on the committee.

“Daisy is an artist,” announces Diddlie, and then Mr. Ramsay calls her “The flower of Fauxmont, adding that she grows the finest lilies in the area.

Daisy waives Mr. Ramsay off with a long arm.  She seems long in many respects.  She goes on and on in response to Mr. Ramsay’s question about Dante and Gabriel.  “They don’t travel well.  I didn’t bring them.  I had them on the Acela to New York last year.  Dante chewed his way out and Gabriel pooped and peed and ruined that wool hat he travels in.  It had been my grandma’s, and she had worn it in Gstaad every season for years before the great depression ruined grandpa’s business.  Maybe a dormouse can’t be expected to travel on a high-speed train. They were both terrified when the train jolted over some switches.  They ran across the vacant seat next to me in a panic and it took half an hour to catch them again.  I mean, imagine if we had pulled into Grand Central with those two loose in the car!

“Good guy, good guy” she chirps as she rubs her finger gently into a blue and gray woolen tea cozy on the table beside her.  Rossetti is asleep in there.  “He travels short distances well” she remarks.  “I think he likes the tea cozy better than home.”  Mr. Ramsay nods, smiling at her as Rossetti sleeps in his tea cozy.

Daisy is wearing a purple turtleneck sweater, long and thick, reaching down over her hips to her thighs gloved in tight brown corduroy.  When I was introduced she stood up to give me a mock bow, holding on to the brim of her black bowler hat with a shopping list tucked in the band.  Her straight black hair hangs down from under the hat as if hair and bowler were one.  She asks if I remember her from the supermarket, gesturing towards Maxwell Avenue with long fingers.  “Yes I do.”  It was the other evening, in the early part of the storm during which Diddlie’s roof was hit by the tree limb.  We bumped our carts together trying to maneuver them through the door into the store, she with a shiny black slicker and yellow so’wester, smiling apologetically with deep red lips stretched around her big teeth.

Hank Dumpty distributes venison, beer, sauces and salad, and grins at us all.  He gets every one’s attention by looking in silence at those still talking until all conversation stops.  He sits on a smooth topped stump at the head of the table.  Before he could start Mr. Ramsay asks him how’s Helga?

“She is still up at the cabin.  I came back because I have things to do.”

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.

Shoveling last night’s light snow from the cement path outside the front door I notice Hank Dumpty towering over the garden gate, with the middle fingers of his bare hands resting on top of the gateposts.  He is wide enough to fill the opening, but hasn’t opened the gate and seems to be waiting for an invitation to come in – don’t know how long he has been watching me, but his ursine presence is not disturbing.  He has parked outside the neighbor’s, unsure which house is mine.  I go over to him and look up at his steep forehead shining in the sun.  Wiry gray curls spiral around his pate and dangle around his ears.  He has round eyes under a heavy brow, with a broad mouth, which seems on the verge of a grin.  He holds out a large scarred fat-fingered hand asking gently if I remember him from the Guild meeting.  His voice is surprisingly high.  One might expect a resonant baritone from such a large man, and he sounds hoarse too.  Even when he went off in anger at Albrecht Intaglio at the meeting, his voice didn’t embody his animus the way furious schoolteachers used to roar at their pupils.

I remember him clearly.  He was restrained given the circumstances of the meeting.  He goes on to invite me to a barbeque at his house on Bails Lane on Saturday afternoon.

“Bit early in the year isn’t it?” I asked, half joking.

“It’ll be fine on Saterday.”

“Yes anything is possible in March.”

“I’ve still got plenty of meat from last year,” he said.

“From last year?”

“Hunting season – you like game?”

I said I hadn’t eaten it much.

“If you like meat, you will enjoy this.  You already know some of the others.”  I thanked him and agreed to go.  “Glad you can make it.  It’s important.”

“Important?”  I open the gate to invite him in but he declines, by raising a hand palm out.  He goes on “Meet some interesting folks, and talk.”

“Yes I’d enjoy that.”

“You’ll get a different picture.”

“What’s that?”

“Our meeting the other night was unusual.  That’s not Fauxmont.”

“Disagreement and dispute can be stimulating Hank.  Don’t want you to think I was too offended by Albrecht.”

“I was offended.  That’s no way to do business.”

“He’ll learn.”

“He can do a lot of damage.”

“Do you think he might use that revolver?”

“It’s not the weapon.”

“What then?”

“He has a right to carry it, but he’s a damn fool bringing it to the meeting.”

“I found it provocative.”

“Once he’s broken it we shan’t get this thing back together again.”

“Broken what Hank?”

“The Guild”

“The discussion you mean?”

“There’s no place for weapons – strictly verbal.”

“Oh, Roberts rules of order and so one.”

“I mean serious disagreement.”

“Albrecht’s disagreement?”

“Any disagreement. He doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“He’s young and hot headed.”

“I’ve known him a while.”

“Albrecht grew up here didn’t he?”

“He did, and he’s a fanatic.”

“How does one deal with fanatics?”

“That’s it.”

“You think he might take over the Guild?”

“Not a chance.”

“No one would vote for him or Boyd I guess.”

“We need the Guild to contain our disagreements.”

“Contain our disagreements?”

“Yeah, the Guild – it’s a handling mechanism for containing disagreement.”

“Yes, and find agreement too.”

“It’s based on respect.”

“Fanatics seldom have respect for institutions.“

“Respect prevents disagreement from growing destructive.”

“Yeah, there a chance to learn something too.”

“If you’re capable.”

“Capable of learning?”

“Capable of listening”

“Its important to make the effort.”

“People tend to hear what they want to hear.”

“Oh and fail to understand others people’s views.”

“Sometimes they don’t make sense.”

“But we should try, don’t you think?”

“Understanding is different from agreeing.”

“Yes it is.”  Hank shifted his weight and paused before saying “Extremists’ win where there’s no respect.”

“… and the Guild works quietly and slowly.”

“It isn’t necessarily quiet or slow.”

“No but it takes time to work through every one’s views.”

“The result can be fast acting.”

“You’re concerned about the deliberative process right?”

“The lack of respect.”

“Oh you mean CUPA.”

“I mean that individual. I don’t know about CUPA.”

“The Campaign to Clean up America.”

“Yeah, ‘clean up’?  What’s that?”

“A slogan to get people’s attention.”

“Excited huh?”

“To get viewer’s attention on TV.  That’s where the profit is.”

“It’s a lot of noise.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning what ever you want it to mean.”

“That’s the thing about slogans.”

“TV shows – they’re killing us.”

“Slogans repeated like commercials on TV.”

“Don’t watch it.”

“Why not Hank?”

“Nothing to it.”

“Not even the news?”

“The Wall Street Journal – Helga watches – she keeps me up to date.”

“How do you like the Journal’s editorials?”

“I like the reporting.”

“TV’s both entertainment and distraction Hank.”

“There’s no respect in it – been like that since the sixties.”

“Hasn’t it been commercial from the beginning?”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“I thought we were talking about commercial slogans.”

“That’s nothing to do with the Guild.”

“Albrecht is bringing CUPA’s slogans to the Guild.”

“I didn’t hear him use one.”

“Okay so what is it about the sixties?”

“We lost our way.”

“How Hank?’

“Drugs, war, civil rights, demonstrations, it all became a show.”

“A TV show.”

“Trivialities on a screen.”

“You mean TV reduced it all to trivia.”

“I served, lost friends, we pulled out – it wasn’t trivial.”

“Far from it. So what about the sixties?”

“We are paying a heavy price.”

“Paying, Hank?”

“Disrespect has taken hold.”

“Were you opposed to the war?”

“We should have beaten the commies.”

“They have lost now anyway.”

“Have they?”

“Who’s left Hank?  China?  Cuba?”

“I am not talking about countries.”

“What are you saying Hank?”

“Respect that’s all”

“When was there ever any respect?”

“Up until the sixties.”

“I don’t follow you Hank.”

His solemn expression hasn’t changed throughout our conversation until now. He grins, looking me in the eye.

“Later Fred, I have things to do now.”

“Okay Hank.”

He turns and walks towards his truck with a slight limp.   Something about his intonation makes me wonder if English was his first language as I watch him drive off with a rattle in the tailgate and some smoke in the exhaust.

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

Lou invited me to the nominating meeting as an introduction to the community even though I have lived here only a few months and have yet to meet many of my neighbors.  Albrecht Intaglio and I are both at our first nominating committee meeting, preparing for an election of new officers in April to the Fauxmont Water and Grounds Guild.  The proceedings start with nominations for the Chairman’s position.  Steve Strether and his wife Bel Vionnet are the only black couple in the community.  “It is only liberal guilt that has kept Bel in the chairman’s position” says Albrecht .  He can’t deny her effective leadership, but qualifies his assent on that point by adding “You liberals are just too lily-livered to oppose her.”

The meeting falls silent until Diddlie stammers out a response explaining how Bel Vionnet Strether has kept the Fauxmont Guild on track for a decade since Mr. Ramsey stepped down.  Then Diddlie finds her stride and goes on praising Bel.  “She has the tact, the wit and the energy to run those meetings and keep us all out of too much trouble with each other.”  Diddlie is almost drowned out by rising calls from the dovecote and raises her voice.  We are meeting in the Co-op building and the dovecote is a project for the preschool upstairs.  “Bel kept the peace between Westwood North and Dick East over the expense of laying new water mains and again when Dick East and all those on Maxwell Avenue were so upset about the proposed building restrictions.  She guided us through our disagreements.  Then there are the militants in our Water Organization, with their vigorous clean water agenda and she knows how to cope with them too. I for one don’t feel any guilt at all.”

“You should.  You should have more respect for liberty, democracy and the right to vote.”

Albrecht has adopted strong libertarian views since joining CUPA, the Campaign to Clean up America.  He carries his long barreled revolver in a holster slung from his belt and strapped on his thigh.  He has applied for a job in Senator Lee Leavenworth Knox’s committee on aesthetic crime.  He doesn’t own a home in Fauxmont himself, but no one raised any objections when he joined the community nominating committee as a resident of his father’s house, although it has only been a few weeks since he returned from his latest visit out west.  Those who had known him as he grew up in Fauxmont were full of praise for his finding a direction in life after his youthful troubles, and for his taking on some civic responsibility.

“Listen Al” said Lou.  “We all respect the process, and so far the overwhelming majority of voters have voted for Bel.  In fact I think it has been unanimous for the past ten years.  Anyone in the community can be nominated, and run against her.  It is just that no one has chosen to do so.”

“That’s the problem!  Ten years!  An entire decade!” said Albrecht glaring at Lou.  For the best part of that time she has run unopposed, UN-opposed!” repeated Albrecht, growing more heated and the doves are quiet upstairs.

“Al” Lou begins but Albrecht jumps in.

“I would appreciate it if you’d use my real name which is Albrecht, not Al.  Al Sharpton is Al.  I am Albrecht, okay?”

“Fine Albrecht.” said Lou.

“How many people voted last time?”

“Sixty one if I recall.”

“Sixty one if you recall” said Albrecht “and there are over a hundred eligible to vote right?”

“A hundred and twenty three.”

“Speaks for itself doesn’t it?”

“It does?” asked Lou.  “What does it say?”

The doves start up again, and there is a shriek.  “That must be the macaw” said Diddlie.  “Let me go up and feed those birds.  Maybe they’ll settle down.”  Diddlie scrapes her chair noisily and bangs up the boxed-in wooden stairs in her gardening boots.

Albrecht watches her in silence.  When she has disappeared upstairs, he continues.  “It shows how you people here at the central committee are controlling the vote.  That is why I am the only conservative in the room.  That is why I have to fight like hell just to be heard, and by God I can make plenty of noise when I need to.”

“It doesn’t show anything of the sort” said Hank Dumpty.  There is a loud crack from his chair as he shifts his weight.  A back leg has broken off, caught on the tile floor instead of sliding.  We all jump at the sound, all but Albrecht.

Diddlie is clomping around on the old wooden floor above.  I can’t tell if Hank is shouting in anger or to be heard above the noise.  He has been shifting his three hundred pounds restlessly and his chair creaks more and more often as Albrecht’s questioning continues.

“What accounts for this reluctance to vote?”

“You’d have to ask around to find that out.  I would guess, it is because no one felt they could do any better, and saw no need for change.  People are very busy and don’t find time to get involved” answered Lou.

“I am here to tell you it is time for change” said Albrecht.  “Everyone should be involved.”  Diddlie comes down more quietly than she went up.  The macaw is quiet, and the doves’ chatter is barely audible.  She asks if he wants to make a nomination as she walks back to her seat.

Albrecht looks over towards Diddlie, “I thought you had left.  Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yes I heard you think it’s time for a change, and figure you want to make a nomination.”  Albrecht says he is nominating Boyd Nightingale.  Diddlie sighs as she sits down.

“He is a very troubled young man you know Albrecht, are you sure?” asked Lou.

“Are you going to block my nomination?” asked Albrecht, putting his hand down by his revolver.

We are sitting in a circle on straight back wooden chairs.  Lou has a stool in front of him with a pen and some papers on it.  The rest of us hold our agendas in our hands or didn’t bother to bring them.

“No, no” says Diddlie, looking at her watch.

“No one is going to block your nomination, Albrecht” said Lou.

“You’re damn right” said Albrecht with a big smile.

“I second the nomination” says Diddlie.  Looking at her watch again she suddenly excuses her self and leaves the meeting.

Albrecht nods at her and turns to Lou.  “What do you mean, no one’s going to block the nomination?  Why don’t you let people speak for themselves?  Here you go again.  This is the central committee at work.  Are you chairman Mao or something?”

Hank Dumpty’s chair creaks more as he tries to balance on it’s three remaining legs.  “You can nominate any one you like Albrecht, but don’t think you can influence my vote with that weapon.”

Albrecht pats his gun with a smile remarking that if he used it there would be one less liberal voter in the neighborhood. Diddlie, Rank Majors and Hank all speak at once.  Albrecht tries to shout over them.

Lou, as chairman of the Committee, calls the meeting to order and asks if there are any more nominations.  Rank Majors nominates Bel. Nominations for vice chairman and treasurer are taken and seconded.  Lou asks if there is any other business.  Rank Majors, moves immediately to adjourn the meeting.

Albrecht stands up and says he has plenty of other business.

“That’s fine” said Hank Dumpty.  “I move we adjourn and meet again next week on the rest of the business.  It’s five minutes to nine and we never run past nine.”

“We are going to tonight,” said Albrecht straightening his stance.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” said Hank Dumpty softly.  “Get your ass and your weapon out of here and read the bylaws before you show up again.”

Hank stands up and carries his broken chair towards the door.

Albrecht giggles and stares at Hank’s back, stroking his holster.  “I sure hope you’re going to put down the chair you broke, nice and peaceful, big guy.”

“Hank Dumpty carries on toward the door, ignoring the taunt, and puts the broken chair outside.  He comes back, stands in the doorway, filling it, and says softly and gently, “Saddle up folks.  I’ll lock the door.”

Albrecht moves slowly towards the door ahead of the rest of us, looking hard at Hank and pauses as close to him as he can get without touching him in the doorway.  He can’t move through without squeezing past Hank’s belly.  He turns back facing into the room to say “There was no vote on the last motion to close this meeting.  Seeing how the big guy here is getting over-heated.”  He gestures behind himself with a thumb pointed over his shoulder.  “I’ll let it go this time, but don’t try and intimidate me again with your commie tactics.  And you, new boy, he said pointing at me.   Don’t let these Socialist bullies put you down.  Speak up for yourself next time.  I want to hear your voice.”

Hank stands still.  He looks bored and he has one hand up behind his neck as if to ease some tension.  His upper arm looks thicker than the thigh in Albrecht’s black jeans.  If he brought it down hard in response to Albrecht’s ruction, Albrecht would go flying.

I hadn’t thought of it before, but he was right.  I had not said a word all through the meeting, only raised my hand to vote silently.  Then again, knowing so little about it, I felt more like an observer than a participant.

Hank moves out of the doorway back into the room, and moves his hand from his neck on to the door handle, waiting to close it when we are all out.

“Goodnight neighbors,” says Albrecht sweetly and walks out into the dark.

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“I am waiting for the bus.”

“Where’s your car?”

“In the driveway.”

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

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

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

“No, never could.”

“You’re a writer aren’t you?”

“Yes”

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

“Writing isn’t just spelling.”

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

“I’m working on it.”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“So what’s the secret?”

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

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

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

“You wouldn’t understand” she says.

“Wouldn’t understand what?”

“You don’t understand who I am.”

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

“You said yourself you get lost.”

“So?”

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

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

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

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

“You have, it seems.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay how’s it going to end?”

“What do you mean?”

“In contrast with books, that is novels.”

“Novels end when the plot works out.”

“Yes and blogs?”

“Do they have plots?”

“That’s it.  Do they?”

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

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

“I don’t know.  I don’t expect much.”

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

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

“You have too many characters.”

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

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

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

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

“I would if I knew anything about sports.”

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

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

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

“It’s one way of putting it.”

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

“I remember that.”

“Who do you think is reading it anyway?”

“You.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

left comments.  Nothing embarrassing to you though.”

“Who has time to read it anyway?”

“Over two hundred spammers left coments.”

“Are they readers or even real people?”

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

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

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

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

“Right, and who’s interested?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are they twins?”

“No, they don’t even look the same.”

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

“Who’s Lark?”

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

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

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

“Oh were you comparing notes?”

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

“So who got him in the end?”

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

“Is that what is called free love.”

“Love isn’t free, sweetie.”

“No, well love is a big topic.”

“We wanted a new experience.”

“Sexual experience?”

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

“Are you still that close?”

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

“What? You’ll interrupt the game!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi Lou”

“Glad you could make it.”

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

“Speech.”

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

“Like I said, speech.”

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

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

“What do you mean research?  Sounds expensive.”

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

“Where do you get it?”

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

“Your party?” I asked.

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

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

“Why Lou?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Soak in?”

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

“Yes, like rising damp!”

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Where do you get it from?”

“The freezer.”

“No thanks.”

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

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

“Lively isn’t the word.”

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

“No, this is my first experience.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, they sound much needed.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes I get it.”

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

“Yes that much I saw.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I explain who I am.

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

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

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

“Yes”

“Liberty told me about you.”

“What exactly?”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“No not Fong, Liberty.”

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

“She had the band with her did she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Big office you have.”

“Yeah, they are very generous.”

“What is ‘Gender Studies’?”

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

“What interests you about gender Dr. Finderelli?”

“The way language is used.”

“What about the sex aspect”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only an idea?” I ask.

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

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

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

There’s another pause.

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

“Have you any trouble?”

“Trouble” repeated Finderelli.

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

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

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

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

”See anything?”

“Yup”

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

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

“Helpful” “Repeats Finderelli.

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

“Care to testify on their helpfulness”?

“Is my opinion really germane?”

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

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

“Who’s the kid?”

“That’s me.”

“Any relation?” I enquired.

“Hard to say.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

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

“What piano bench?”

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

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

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

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

“Where was that?” I asked.

“Oh, down in Virginia, near Winchester.”

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

“The thought has crossed my mind” said Finderelli.

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

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

“Was the commune still going?

“No, long gone”

“But you met there for old time sake?”

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

“Creasote” said Finderelli.

“Yes, I thought I could smell something.”

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

“What happened?”

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

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

“Conception,” said Finderelli

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

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

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

“Under the stars” said Finderelli.

“How romantic” I remarked.

“Skinny dipping” said Finderelli.

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

“Hot summer.”

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

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

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

“Pearle is a gem” says Finderelli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You got it right too.”

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

“Politics.”

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

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

“Hi Flower.”

“Pull up a seat” said Flower gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Praise God” replied Hoffman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

“Are you listening to those crows?”

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

“They are blogging in crow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, do you have time right now?”

“Your time is my time Diddlie.”

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

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

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

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

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

“We can talk about it next time.”

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

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

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

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

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

“They do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is still all in you’re head.”

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

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

“Up to a point.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am only part of the story.”

“But you claim to be ‘reporting’.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

“Out of what?”

“Out of the narrative.”

“What narrative?”

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

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

“What’s so hard to understand?”

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

“You are questioning me Diddlie.”

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

“Sorry you are so upset about it Diddlie”.

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

“True enough.”

“So…Change it!”

“We have already been through this.”

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

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