THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 2

Well, now that Alice has shown her teeth to me (and I, to her, my green dentures!) we've gone our separate ways, each in the arms of that ultimate betrayer who is, of course, the grave... whose nearness I can intimate to Ralph and Alice by ordering Wolf and Goff to dilute their juice. Bad electricity should be painful to computing engines, like substituting salt for heroin, no? Not long before Carlo and I went to LA, a Costazuelan President between two of the terms of Alfonso Ananias Zamora, Senior... one of them, a little fellow whose name I cannot retrieve, not a bad man, rather, an unlucky one... fell off a roof on which he was inexplicably making his own repairs. Senior threw for him what remains the grandest Suelan funeral ever... pageantry which, of course, reflected on Zamora, the patron, not on the unimportant deceased.

(It's a shame Senior couldn't have orchestrated his own threnody... Junior tried but grievously lacked Gothic vision. Happily... if that's the word... he's sharpened his funerary faculties through experience.)

But back to that death-jubilee... it happened at a time of civil rights protests, south as well as north of the Rio Grande; soldiers massed in Salamancan streets and, it was said, suspected Communists were so envious of the whiteness of the better classes that it became almost a point of solidarity to address one's patron in English (following the lead of Peter Beard, many unrepentant Anglicans married Africans or Kiche-Uay).

"In Europe and North America, capitalism survives because imperialism keeps the price of imported food falling faster than wages," Ernie says. "The bosses, who used to keep workers' diets at a steady state, as your physicists say... just enough energy to work but not enough for the rigors of revolution... simply adapt to scientific innovation by the dispensation of empty calories. Preservatives, snacks with images of the sleepy Mexican, and plenty of salt, which is proven to increase propensities for downward violence by proxy. Having lacked such considerations, we had many revolutions in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries until the Nine set some of their own sons up as liberals to increase the finery and frequency of circuses... without bread."

"Except Pan Bimbo," corrects Berto, "which still fails to qualify as nourishment, as do the wafers of Jesucristo and so both tend to remain about, slices on Coliseum sands, forever useful for sopping up Cristero blood."

Well that is a cynical take on a great, pompous funeral, the first ever televised from the capital. Carlo and I watched the procession from Xul's Bar Juan XXIII between explorations into the hills above the old walls where indios live much as they did before Europeans arrived. He'd even stolen a pig to roast... all the police and soldiers had been summoned to the capital with the result that certain old scores were settled (and new feuds begun) under a common theatrical cloak of spurious political grief. So, last night, Ernie rose, at Delfinas, to direct placement of a large, stinking wreath and Geneva asked "Who was this mystery assassin?", poking the flowers. "Certainly they've had an opportunity to examine the body..."

"What remained of it," corrected Bert. "By the time the authorities... los medicos..." he bows towards Minister Cancinas "... gained access to the remains, it was impossible even to identify the nationality. Perhaps he was a foreigner, even a Jew! Not enough left, even, to determine that!"

"Certainly one isolated loco full of ideas from American TV," Cancinas grunted, mounting a stepladder.

"But why would anybody want to kill President Zamora?" Eileen's question followed Ernie up the aluminum steps like a sleepy boa constrictor. "Brendan always talked about Costazul as a sort of paradise, which is what he told the real estate men Mitch sent him." She'd lowered her voice, glancing round to see if gladhanding Kazelka was near, "...who wanted to sell him, for cash, that plot on the coast of Cap Hatien. Full of disgruntled loas and runaway Cubans! When we were recording I said Brendan had leased our villa in the name of the people to work on a project so secret that..."

Kara Nan laughed harshly, more of a cough than laugh. As if surprised by her own outburst, she hurriedly removed a pack of long Benson and Hedges, offering one to Geneva.

"Nuts don't have to have reasons," Cancinas shouted over our heads. His lungs are pretty good, so's his hearing. "Go to Naranhas..." a famous barrio southwest of the capital, heavily populated by Communists, Roj scoffs, and the mentally deranged... "and you may find somebody who will kill even a President for two hundred pesos and think that he has robbed you. Drunk enough or stoned to stand in the street and be shot to pieces, but not quite enough to miss the target."

"Perhaps," Humberto Nan agreed. "But also," he added for the benefit of Eileen and Geneva, "ours is a country of certain troubles, as you might have perceived..."

"Yes, there are many smells in Salamanca," the publisher concurred. "Even so, what we have now is better than before, certainly under Arcilla. There was a man for the seventeenth century! But now our progress... despite a few setbacks, of the sort which may plague anyone... our wealth, our juventud breeds expectations that perhaps are new, perhaps involving changes taking unexpected forms. These threaten people. There are at least a few drops of the Uay in all Salamancans, all Suelans... except a few old men of no importance..." Humberto grinned at his wife, "and so all of us are touched with lycanthropy. Or worse.

"Ambition, you know," he addressed me, as if tossing apples of discord to distract the foremost pursuing Amazons, "it is a terrible thing when one does not have the resources to feed it... so we exalt stinks of progress in place of those of decay and starvation, setting the clock of Marx and Darwin, waking from Newton's sleep alone, no breakfast in the cupboard. It can make an enemy... a traitor... of anybody. Even a man in his mask, without a face... a name..."

Berto had unwittingly sent me backwards across time. To 1949's morning, after the night of cries in the Rhode Island Institute when police files were pulled and it was ascertained that I was not the missing girl. So I was brought to a psychiatrist who showed a mirror to me... T. did this many years later to confirm that I possessed the Uay spot, a dark blemish near the spine, said to evidence skinshifting predilections... except that this Doctor pointed to my face in the glass, touched my cheek and asked "So... what is your name?"

And again, knowing no English save that of clowns and their commercials on television, I shouted back "Name! Name! Name!" The Doctor put away his glass and motioned for his nurses; I surely possessed some defect and, if I was not the person whom they searched for, Providence had delivered me into their place of rehabilitation.

Who, I ask now, delivers lost children from Providence?

I was put back on ward with screaming children and silent ones and another day, night and half of yet another day passed until police... hectored by Birdie, Harry Stone's venerable housekeeper, finally put two and two together. Many policemen arrived on ward to rescue me from the autistics (for the web of Harry Stone, if loosely woven, was wide, nonetheless, extending even to those Catholics in Providence, and his anger legendary).

"She ain't stupid, she just don't talk like you people do," Birdie cawed to the doctors assembled, studying her through their glasses and tobacco. "You do like this... como se yama, honey?"

"Vee..." I answer (Natividad was still a long reach for a little girl; Elena Maria had permissibly shortened it to Evie and the walk and Institute had lopped off half of that. The doctors and policemen scratched their heads but put initials on a form... I couldn't understand what they were said but it had to have gone something like "...certainly, anything for Mister Harry Stone." A whim from the cottages became Rhode Island law faster than Superman's speeding locomotive in those days.

T. and his father were waiting in the library, and T. stood up, but Harry spoke first, English words to halt even a semblance of objection... and then in Spanish. "There comes a time when children need fatherly discipline... a true father's discipline." T. seemed to shrivel. I was taken roughly by the hand and pulled outside, down the cobblestones, only to the right-sided path this time.

"Curiosity is dangerous in children," Harry declared, in Spanish, "especially for foolish girls, who lack capacity to understand the consequences of their actions. Maybe this will help you to learn that life isn't all that pleasant for curious children."

He carried what seemed a hundred shiny keys on a chain a hundred times thicker than that Jack Doll gave Bud... keys to open the door to the Meat House, keys to lock it again.

If there were places back in 1950 or 1951 where men went to hurt each other or themselves, Harry would probably have found these - instead, he hounded the AEC. Three Commissioners came from the private sector... chemicals, electricity and Bell... Lilienthal from TVA, and Oppenheimer... dead now, both of them... Acheson's creatures. Truman's State Secretary had prepared a dreamy paper, advocating international control of nuclear materials under the UN; Forrestal preferred war and Truman's Soviet Ambassador George Kennan vacillated between factions and eventually devised a compromise solution he called "containment".

"Harry believed you don't contain... how did he put it?" T. pondered, "yes... a cockroach on the wedding cake, you pluck it up and pinch its head. The UN was already lost... Harry, the Templars dismissing it as Brissago - Wells again. He'd almost pulled off preventive war in '48 with Forrestal, they persuaded LeMay to join this project with a Moon in the name, somewhere. Full Moon? Half Moon?"

One of these days...

"Anyway the public was delirious... wholly irrational, they used to mix Atomic Cocktails of pernod and gin in those days, sell green Alamogordo glass; there was even a stripper who called herself the Anatomic Bomb. A desire for annihilation my father found irresistible, and probably would have realized, except Truman sent Charles Lindbergh poking around SAC. Then Truman, contrary to all reason, got re-elected. Forrestal hanged himself, even LeMay wouldn't risk a showdown with Lucky Lindy, so Harry bagged his plans another five years... just as well, he rationalized, quite a few of Temple preconditions hadn't quite kicked in so that the rigamaroles could be satisfied with plenty of time left over before Christian heat could overcome Uay world-cold."

"This is the Meat House," Harry said, when we'd come through the metal door into a concrete-block shed, cooled by a ka-thumping motor... a dark place, only one small window of a thick, clear substance, like glass, but unbreakable. (I tried throwing pieces of loose concrete at it, no sale!) Concrete floor and walls, metal hooks from which dangled birds and halves and quarters of skinned, dead beasts... gutted, but with heads and sightless eyes still intact, staring bluely through death-film and ice crystals.

"Bad things happen to nosy little girls," he said again, giving the largest of the carcasses a little push to set it swinging in the gloom... knocking the rest of those in its path into a swaying philanthropy of Pythagorean dominoes before doing what it is men do; meathooks still squeaking when he shut the door to the Meat House behind him, leaving me with cold and painful deadness inside until even the wan light from the tiny, dirty window faded and the moon and stars appeared.

I watched slices of werewolf constellations prowl through the night, creatures of the redshift bazaar... nose pressed against the glass for its midsummer's warmth. A cold astronomer in that coldest of Uay hells, the ninth... at the base (or tip, rather) the blinking spud-eyes of inverted, buried pyramids.