THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 4

The present he'd brought me was an ant farm... go figure! Harry Stone told me it was my ant farm and said, "Now, what is the name of this?"

"Name!" I replied and Harry, first looking as if he wanted to strike me again, said that the Meat House was even colder now. "Name!" I repeated and he threw the ant farm on the table and stomped off. The insects survived though, for a while... they lived through most of the winter then died.

"Only a rare few ever got the better of my father," T. remembers, "Lindbergh, Eisenhower, finally time itself. You did know what he was talking about, didn't you?"

Oh yes, I had... very much so. In fact, my English had improved so that, by January, T. had me enrolled in public school (although with children one year younger). There I learned to read Dick and Jane, to add and to subtract... and to hide under the desk when Russian flying monkeys attacked.

I sometimes wonder, however, whatever happened to the real little missing girl. Certainly nothing good... if she was fated to inhabit places like the Institute. A decade ago I would have said good for her... got away!... but that's not so, any more, most people these days neither desire nor deserve their freedom, only a little money in life suffices, then an embroidered death. I do wonder if her fingers were small...

Anyway, Bud and I never did make it down to Washington for the Inaugural. Instead, we raised a few glasses in Kazelka's townhouse off Fifth Avenue... Mitch changed his registration twenty four hours after polls closed last November... laughing at Frank Sinatra's wisecracks... and cheered sentimental statements by the hostages, themselves, before their being flown to Germany to be debriefed... replaced, onscreen, by Donny and Marie.

Mitch had even brought Barry Freiberg back from the uranium mines of Asbury Park or thereabouts for a reprise of his act... Will Scowl for Food. "Doctors and plumbers need certificates to practice," Barry complained, "even attorneys, but all a politician needs is criminal, neurotic ambition, a brutal lust for power and access to money. Did you know that, when liberalism first appeared in Spain during the 1820s, its opposition was not conservative but the Servile Party? Is that crab fresh or from a can?"

He'd worn this Harpo Marx overcoat with big pockets to Kazelka's Inaugural klatch: "Barry, shouldn't you be filling those pockets with my hors d'oeuvres to give out to the rest of your vagrants and unemployed downtrodden?" Mitch smiled as he'd drifted by.

"Why? If the hungry are fed things won't get worse," Freiberg says, "and if they don't get worse then revolution will be delayed." (I hear much the same regarding Max, though the Templar party line is that King Jesus is the deus ex machina, who won't return without a sufficiently desperate environment.)

The Lentex contingent to the Beltway, thus, numbered Evan Wright, T.'s private attorney Charles Lyon Sopher and Baggott... a nominal Democrat who sprinkles the money like manure over the cornfields and wheatfields alike. Wilson Leonard went down, of course, Herbert Peake, even Tom Wendell (it must have been a sight to see Tom stuffed in a monkey suit, probably knocking over scenery). Bud says brother John was around too, but nobody's s'posed to know! John told Pat, Pat told Bud and Bud broadcasts - lies on napkins! Adam says bye bye, dupes!

Anyway it seemed like a pretty damn good old party with the Rat Pack ratting like 1962 again, however cranky old Goldwasser got, probably the last good party before the last party when Millennium arrives. A very good year, Frank sang, and as January wound down I would hear even more good news out of Washington.

I get back to the office, dizzy with Hollywood bullshit and Lo! there's Geneva, talking up a storm with Cynthia. "These just came in, I thought you'd be flattered..." and she dumps a pile of foreign papers in my arms. The one on top is from East Germany, Jersey collects them for insights into an alleged Hungarian Super with a core storage capacity seven times the volume of Earth... but what Geneva's pointing at is a photograph, in drab Communist grays, of burned-out Aeon under the headline "Disco im Flammen!"

"See?" she says, "now we have to reopen! What will the Iron Curtain use to highlight Western decadence if we don't?"

"Oh, also," Cynthia adds, "Brinkman's office called..."