THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 2

From Parsonage I've heard another Honeymooners' writer died out on the Island, services January twenty fifth. I'm not going to input this, it's never smart to inform the faithful another God's dead... maybe not quite The Great God Pan, but one of his pantheon, certainly, a Bacchus or Ghede. Sid Zelinka, I understand, also wrote for the Marx Brothers... in television, no less than myth, heroes, centaurs and demigods are sometimes struck down by mortal inferiors... Achilles by the playboy Paris, the real Kramdens slain by Perry Como, ascending into syndicated Gloria. I enter...

 Ralph and Alice are divided into hemispheres, Alice is East and Ralph is West but often the twain merge, if defaulted. I...

I respond...

 I look back, enter 1818... coincidences have been known to blow systems... terminal pauses...

Furniture was one of the first additions to the program, largely my own, through Harry. It's generic for anything complicating Dogmaps - from a white credenza to bloody guillotine. Doña Eusebia's another unwitting begatrice, a spinster of the Pinellas and Zamora branches of the Nine, punctuated by economics and a bad choice of dead husbands; her third floor flat in the district of Nuestro Señor was my home after the hurricane in 1952 and for most of 1953. Most of the homes in that colonia (as Suelan burbs are called) date from the eighteenth century; Eusebia's front room looked down over a boulevard on which horse-drawn carriages were just beginning to receive competition from prewar American sedans... Nuestro Señor resembled nothing so much as a crowded set in Hollywood where a John Wayne western adjoined a gangster movie starring James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson, both directors having stormed off set, forgetting to tell their extras and propmen to go home.

Eusebia was very proper, though not quite so clean. In fact Alicia, Carlo and the other children of Xul, having the whole Caribbean as their private tub, would not play with me until I'd washed all Salamanca from my hair.

It is a violent tide here that cleanses, slapping these rocks with frothsome, Dionysian ytz, grinding them to soft white sand with which both Zamoras plotted to entice the eager gringos - dollars, pounds, francs, deutschmarks in their clammy fists. Though still violent, the waves are dirty now for the time being, dirty as Lentex... no matter how antiseptic the Beethoven T. pounded out from his piano in his solitary whiteness of the 54th floor. An irresistible force impeded by old numbers.

How many hundred times these past four days has TeleNacional rerun assassination footage? There's loops in time... floats first, gyroscopes of sequins, flesh, feathers... a breast jiggling beneath Junior's unsmiling benediction. Shots, the President falls back and Ernie's guardia make carne hamburguesa of the clown-masked assassin.

Fish, Dr. Ventura also tells me, have a splendid sense of smell... it is, in fact, the olfactory sectors of their brains that evolved into reptilian cerebral hemispheres and the hypothalamus - overstimulation of which leads to paranoia, rage and what the good doc calls "morbid, unnatural sexual behavior". Partial or total removal makes for the dociled mind.

"I never saw any assassination," Eileen complains to Cancinas. "It happened in front of the reviewing stand, didn't it, Minister, while that float from who was it... Budweiser?... was passing?"

Harry Stone, grown increasingly dour since his overtures to Eisenhower foundered, still used to throw me up and catch me when he came home to the cottage; the papers called him a "cheerful devil" to the end and his obituary repeated those old chestnuts of meeting Breton, playing chess with Duchamp. The "cottage", as locals deprecatingly call homes of less than thirty or, perhaps, forty rooms, was erected in 1810 by a whaling magnate; Harry bought it during the Depression from his heirs, by then down on their luck. Harry held Dumont stock and knew most New York and Washington society from the war; sometimes people I'd seen on television would spin out on Liverwurst at warp speed (for the early '50s). Buick executives, who gave Audrey Meadows a red convertible and time off to moonlight as Ed Murrow's substitute on "Person to Person". Senator McMahon. But most of Harry's visitors were received in the library, sober men in hot, dark suits talking of news and science and, less often, religion in hate-fueled whispers... assassination plots and coup rumors swirling among the strains of string quartets from dusty 78 RPM records on the hand-cranked Victrola (Harry distrusted the piano, government electricity and disks that could not be shellacked over and used again). T. sat in the corner in a fawn-colored suit, taking down notes which... much, much later... would reveal to me a tantalizing fraction of the enigma at the center of that vacuum that was Harry Stone.

Behind the house was that garage, approached by a flagstone walk, converted to a walk-in freezer T. and Harry called the Meat House, padlocked now. In Wasconshire, I ask...

 (Although the Dog is always in a white room, a window may be raised to admit influential winds.)

Most kids these days are bored to tears by Dogs and Dominoes, and why not... no breasts, no beasts, no explosions. The few who bother to learn do so because older people have told them that they must... like reading Faulkner, Joseph Conrad. Before I took him to the hospital, Paul came home with a new cartridge INFERNO, evidently programmed by RAND dropouts... you duel to the death with blowtorches in a warehouse of Chinese fireworks, canisters of dynamite, gasoline and nerve toxins for spice. Melanie found this at... Sagittarius? Two can play, or one... the program allows assessment of psychopathic qualities of an opponent... is he suicidal, simple, or simply mad. "Lighting's critical," Paul shrugs, and who am I to disagree?

We wait after all, my Egg, on this beach of jacklit deer, fish stunned by dynamite, nerve toxins and unlucky crustaceans poisoned by oil. A quilt of starry trivia is thrown, a mountain razed, a legend humbled. Everyday Uayday by the sea.