THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 3

Bud grows restless as any mad dog awaiting the Superbowl. Moving Inauguration Day to the week before Super Sunday a grave tactical error for these years of cake and circuses... damn little bread for all those warbling "spare change?" on the corners and in Grand Central. The blue suit man plays scales Tuesday, before the bash; I see a terribly bright German-looking youth with a determined stare and thousand dollar blazer drop a dollar in his box and, I swear, I also see a pink bubble emerge from his throat like one of those balloons that lurched from the sea to vex Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner". The gum pops as he enters the revolving door ahead of me.

Cybernetics - what a young man's racket!

Our litigation chief under Lou and Evan, Angela Dreyfuss, is the exception proving the soundness of the rule... an old hand, practically, thirty one. With her is another attorney, sick and palsied, and the oleaginous Reverend Doctor Tom Neptune, a fat, Bacchus-browed mail order minister, off the bus from Arkansas with a briefcase of bad news for Quad... clippings and chartings that reveal a Godless gumbo of evolution, feminism, sin and negritude brewed up by damn Jew mediums, which Quad stands to unleash. As God's own spokesmen for the decent people of Amurka, he's divinely obligated to file suit against Quad's direct-dial applications... "and this is a restraining order, halting all applicable research in the interest of the children."

"I don't see a judge's signature," Angela replies.

"It's a draft," Tom Neptune waves a flippery cuff. "Be assured, the Attorney General-designate's my brother in Christ... I snap my fingers and Washington jumps!"

"Really?" I say. "How nice!"

I turn to the withered old lawyer. "I trust that you have explained to the satisfaction of the Reverend that we're not talking about airwaves... the FCC's not involved, so, neither is Constitutional separation of church and state."

"Uhh, Reverend?" the lawyer croaks. If he really croaks here we'll have one spitting hell of an image problem.

"We're only doing what's right by the children," Reverend Tom primps. I get the same unpleasant feeling I get talking to those new automated call machines from Ma Bell that read you preprogrammed answers no matter what you say.

"Angela?" I punt.

"Mrs. Stone believes Quad will disestablish the broadcast culture of scarcity. Competition... need numerous Scriptural justifications be cited?... will flourish, socialistic principles wither. The Reverends Dr. Graham, Van Impe and Robertson will have to share their podium, and revenues, with others."

"Dreyfuss..." Tom Neptune struggles, "that's a Jew name, I reckon..."

The Reverend Doctor Tom Neptune straightens up, quick. Truth be told, Egg, he's just another parasite feeding off grease on the gears that govern cycles of license and repression - one of those who enjoy the former for themselves while inflicting the latter on others. Supply siders, as the buzzword of the month goes. Take Raimundo Arras, now Airport Customs boss... he passed his working days under Arcilla sorting lists of people to be jacked around from those to be jailed, deported, maybe killed. An extortionist who kept the gratitude of his victims after they were allowed to come back... three years ago, after Junior's homecoming inauguration... we shared some excellent French brandy lifted from tourists who, he assured, were smugglers "of the most suspicious sort".

"How cynical we become," he toasted. Under old Zamora he was a cadet, military scholarship, like Alejandro he'd pinned posters of Jeemy Morrison to bottom of the bed over his own. Quickly replaced by a portrait of Franco after Arcilla's coup.

"Ray," Zamora said, "was smarter than Sandy... poor fellow fell in love with Che, that loser! Poster boy for walls of students and masturbating firebug janitors." The President made a little gesture halfway between shrug and benediction.

"His was the way of mixtos... the Uay trust them as little as we sons of old Spain."

Somewhere a neuron fires in the illusory contours of my mind and I point out... "but you gave him his street?"

"Yes," Junior admits... he signed the dedication himself last year... "and it's probably safe if we make it through this decade without another Arcilla. But whether Calle Alejandro R. Canul or Calle Orfeo, it is the same dusty and hidden place, and you may imagine how long I deliberated before finding it. Alejandro never would have taken up the gun if he was any good with his guitar."

"Do you remember those people in trucks who came round with a little cabinet and mirrors?" I now think to ask Ray. "Did the boys have to inspect... you know..."

"Of course!" Zamora laughed. "Even now the shame of that time brings me a coldness a... did they describe, to you girls, the diseases?"

They had. Despite the Aristotelian Christianity of Costazul which, at its ineradicable extreme denies the existence of the female soul, the crawling men with crawling dactyls had held their mirrors up to Hellsgate.

Raimundo, however, has another take on the nature and number of the Beast, yawning and slinking across God's wallpaper. "It is the TeleNacional which has made strangers of us to each other and to God."

So I take my obligation to dissent seriously... a Chef of the Past juggling knives to rend suns and moons and planets into smiling slices, like Oscar's tomatoes, gutting stars of Banco Bunco brilliance like shrimp. Salamancan democracy is just more bad electricity to Xul... Suel-dorado, always melting back down to its homuncular ooze. Leaving useful metals by the tapir highway.

"No, Ray, it's just us, we're only growing old."