THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 6, EPISODE 4

And then Harry had made his second overture to the silver bees: November, '54, two years after Elugelab. Six years, six months, six days after the founding of Israel that crazy spring of '48. Months of fishing voyages on Liverwurst during Berlin's blockade with Forrestal, LeMay, even Bertrand Russell... the disastrous games at SAC enabling Lindbergh to turn Truman's gaze west from Armageddon. "It was the end for Forrestal, like '56 would be for Harry," T remembered on one of his better days that last summer. Black and purple pustules dotting his neck and lips, hair fallen out... he'd cough wondrous shades of mucous punk rockers would pull out their mohawks, spike by lacquered spike, to recreate. I'd wheel him to the window, below which lay a path leading in two directions... the driveway and gated, electrified wall left, the Meat House to the right.

"Forrestal jumped out a window of the hospital they'd taken him to for saying Jews were coming for him; that Bethesda Naval Hospital was an arm of their Central Personality Bureau. Father didn't much like Jews either, but realized their importance to the faithful workings-out of prophecy.

"In the spring of that year... 1954.... all the auspices - entrails, he'd call them - became favorable. Two years earlier, the AEC had authorized Livermore Labs... Teller was like a kid with a new pony. The Univacs he ordered... everybody called them Univacs in those days... had Lentex peripherals and switches, good to go! Eighteen months further back, All Souls' Day, we'd tested Mike at Elugelab... Teller's message was 'It's a boy!' Like one who'd spooked all those dignified men with nineteen cents worth of Taiwanese firecrackers..." T. chuckled, "and so forfeited his reach for Dominion!

"Eisenhower and Nixon, of course, blew right into office on that Elugabal wind. Nine months later, Russia tested its own Super... Stalin died, most of what passed for intelligence believed Beria would take over. You've heard what that came to!" I had, and heard more from Tess. "It was the epoch of testing... and three dimensional movies. Castle Bravo doused a Japanese fishing boat with radiation, accidentally..." T. tried to hold up his fingers in quotation marks but winced, "... Castle Romeo, House of Wax, Yankee, Nectar, Bwana Devil, Jughead... all sounded alike. Creatures from the Black Lagoon. Interchangeable!"

He'd paused to cough a technicolor gob of phlegm and lung tissue across the deck of Liverwurst.

"The Generals and RANDies sat down with Ike, presenting him with Oppenheimer's recantation and stating their case for preventive war. Near as I figure, it was to have started round the end of May... Father even dogged Gleason's writing team at the Mermaid Room, the odd reference crept into episodes. Shoe polish that glows in the dark. Albuquerque. Harvey Wohlstetter. Ike was a Honeymooners' fan. Ridgway's dissent was filed the 17th; he thought aggressive war "contrary to every principle upon which our Nation had been founded" and "abhorrent" to the public. Father could have tipped the balance but held back, he'd never wavered from his own sixtieth birthday, October 23rd of 1956. Pure Ussher, married to pure ego... the war was to inaugurate forty years' tribulation climaxing with the seven years' reign of Antichrist on his own hundredth birthday.

"LeMay blamed Harry and, though they mouthed off a few times about getting rid of Eisenhower, one way or the other, he paid Harry back in '56. Dick Nixon was always hot to trot... LeMay resorted to unauthorized U-2 overflights, hoping to provoke the Russians... but when that didn't work, Harry cast down his anathemas over humankind in toto and flew the Spirit of Montsegur off into the midnight sun. When search parties gave up, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, still pro-Oppenheimer pink, moved its death clock back... as Harry predicted from 2 Kings 20:8-11, a sign of God's healing liberal clergy celebrated in their journals, "the shadow of Ahaz retreats ten steps". Drew Pearson memorialized him as a fallen patriot... Carl McIntyre, a few others; when the crazies out at Livermore proposed to use Supers to blast a tunnel through Sinai, during the Suez mess, someone suggested that channel be named in his honor. And that was that!"

What also happened was that, in the summer of '49, after all the commotion had died down, Cthulhu's typewriter repairman repaired to his hunting of brightly plumaged fowl who'd hang in the Meat House for midwinter suppers. One day with Harry in New York, T. playing his Beethoven and the front gate left open, I'd walked out... four years old and full of myself... into the street.

Now I've plenty of dogs to walk... Shannon Joyce suggests, atop Jonesy's suggestion, that magnetic Omnicards (phallic) be inserted into the black box (vaginal) to deduct client usage from a theoretical balance. Thousands of choices... "I Love Lucy" to "Masterpiece Theatre" to news... one problem was: what if the card ran dry in the middle of Quad programming?... does debit switch over to credit and, if so, who pockets the float? World-quaking decisions, I know, Egg... exactly like that line T. told me from that Lost Episode, "a bald man running down the street with a French poodle under his arm" but there's money in that dog, lots of money. And a shitload of government fingers wriggling and wallowing in Quad's pie.

General Johnny carries gossip too... "the President, you know, bases defense priorities entirely on a movie he starred in before the war. 'Murder in the Air', 1940 I believe, had a so-called "inertia projector" that cut off electric current and caused Nazi planes to crash. "Of course, since Spielberg's movies came out, he's changed this Umbra initiative to Star Wars. Wouldn't want to appear egocentric..."

Great nightmares being heroin for little minds... didn't the President work for Republic Pictures? The only Republic Bank contribution in three months of Quad meetings has been whether tickets with a magnetic stripe for bus or subway rides will also unlock locked restrooms, leaving the great urban unwashed fuming at barricades with bursting bladders.

"Buzz!" My Cynthia's left a list of messages on tape and paper before going out to lunch. That pest of an Aeon plaintiff lawyer! The baritone of Arthur Banks, sooty with disrespect... "Downtown has written your fire off as an accidental electric incident... off the record, I've never seen anything like this circuitry... almost as if it was designed to blow."

The ghostly voice seems almost to lift itself off the flat monotone of ferrous oxide like a Caribbean ghost, a bureaucratic Cthulhu hunting and pecking crosses on its forms... "Almost as if someone designed a fuse to do the opposite of what fuses usually do. But... Downtown speaks, I've other jobs to do and I'm closing the book on you. But I know you know that something's rotten... I'd be interested in hearing about it someday. On a technical, confidential level, of course... (a little malice for Korbel too!)... you have my card."

Bud's also left a message, him I call back... but all it is is that he has been thinking about Paul ever since the drive back from West Point and what he has deduced is this... "They'll want him back."

"I concur wholly," I reply. "And I'll work something out. Trust me on this!"

"Super Sunday's on the way. I've got important people... my pizza and yogurt people coming, I don't want that matchheaded little shit interrupting my day."

"I'll take care of it," I repeat. "Trust me!"