THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 2

Dr. Kitigawa's interpretation of the carvings on the old walls round the Pyrate's Temple suggests a convocation of Uay wizards in either the fourth or seventh century AD. Time in Other America is polarized... accurate to milliseconds or thrown off by centuries because scholars don't agree on the longest of the long count dates... there are discrepancies of two hundred and sixty up to, sometimes, almost four hundred years' duration. This happens because the Uay, like all Maya-Itza civilizations and most of us today, in New York City, wrote down their days and dates but left off the defining centuries... I was born 45, married Carlo in 63, Jeff 68, Bud in 78. Brendan cut "It's A Happening" on 45 in 68, "The Resonator" on 33 and a third in 80. None of us expects to go back to our middle ages, understand? But if Martians, say, flew in with their space hats and ray guns to vaporize ninety nine point nine percent of human endeavors, leaving only a few cryptic references to 7/4/76, scientists of the future might have trouble recollecting whether that moldy old empire, called US of A, began in sixteen, seventeen or 1876.

It seems the purpose of this Congress was to standardize reckoning of the intercalary or leap years, variously sorted by fours, twelves, thirteens or not at all. These had begun to pile up, sort of the way they did in sixteenth century Europe before Pope Gregory's correction. It seems, also, that this conference failed... calendars continued to differ between south and central Mexico, between Guatemala and Costazul and the rest of Middle America. Eventually local disagreement over what day it was prompted wars... Tuesdays invading Fridays, Junes laying siege to Julys, with the result they all destroyed each other and calendar stones ceased to be raised.

In came the Spaniards... zip, zip... and zip!

By the middle 17th century, however, Peter Beard... a naval officer during the Cromwell years... went so mad that he declared himself the reincarnation of a 900 year old King of Copan. The pyrate used confiscated wealth to commission stelae and temples depicting cosmic monsters and Uay, with tongues as snakes, gathering in the clouds with Roman bishops, odd artifacts of old Europe... perhaps a dozen of these Pyrates' Needles survive - none whole, but Palin deigns to counterfeit the obelisks for IAP. Dupes of dupes, for dupes.

"Particularly vexing problems," the American President said to Indonesia's just the other day, "await particularly creative solutions."

"Harry enjoyed those old stories so much," Billows said... I asked T. but never got a direct reply... "he wrote mathematical foundations of the Alice unit as a wholly fluid algorithmic organism, a ball of chaotic jelly. A cannibal mollusk or crab straining against its shell of disimagination." So here's another domino of contradiction. It wasn't the Zamoras nor their creatures among the jaded cosmic dust of the Nine who instituted the progressive laws allowing Costazul's Señora Manicottis to vote, hold jobs, property and drive automobiles, it was the tragic ultramontane dictator Don Jaime Arcilla. He also loosened economic fetters, so allowing all the cheap toys of the world to flood our markets... where campesinos cried for bread and liberty, Arcilla distracted them with Rubik's Cubes, with Pong and Dogs and Dominoes installed in every flyspecked bodega. So Costazul entered the computer era far in advance of the rest of its neighbors.

Go figure! Instead of firing on the troops, the legions of disgruntled and the dispossessed trained their sights on Space Invaders. Only for a while... inevitable contradictions could not be turned back, only postponed... but, during those few years, the profession sunk its claws deep into Costazul. I can't help but wonder whether Harry Stone foresaw it all during those busy years before he disappeared.

"I say that old man molested you," Geneva tells me one crazy night at the Aeon last November. "That's what my grandpappy did, with the men he brought around who called themselves my uncles. We try to forget it, but that's what men do. He was a man... wasn't he?... that's what they do!"

I do have problems remembering... Harry would stop sometimes whenever he passed mirrors, checking his hair maybe or assuring himself he still had a reflection!

Be that as it may... Berto and Kara Nan deposit me at Casa Miel. The dove hunter was cooking his supper behind shuttered windows, so I insist they come in for a drink; and who is at the bar but Mike and Melanie Kahn, lifting touristy little cocktails with umbrellas (the kind for sipping beside the sea except that, when La Grua changed direction yesterday, the stink was blown back into Salamanca so we had to sit at the small lobby bar Nestor stocks with a cooler of Red Stripe beer and several bottles). Windows shut, temperature skyrocketing, Michael glowing with grisly good spirits at the pretense of the surprise party and with the results of the games in the basement.

"Do you understand what Washington is going to do when the extent to which we've creamed them becomes known?" I'd ordered a cold pineapple jugo, hold the rum, please and Nestor opened a can. Mike does look like a rodent... a mouse grown weary with Velveeta afternoons, who's just bitten into a warm, ripe wedge of Camembert. And not a cat in sight.

"Yeah," I say, hot and tired, "hope they're not persuaded to let our contracts lapse."

"Not a chance!" beams Michael, nodding to the Nans.

"Should you be talking of these things, Mr. Korbel?" worries the owlish Berto. "I am a publisher, you know. And who is that young person?" he points.

"Melanie's father works for Mrs. Stone," Korbel assures him. "And you'd be a pretty lousy publisher not to know what's going on, so presumably our government and that ugly General whom you have nosing around the games have placed an influence upon you."

"Minister Cancinas is only a working Colonel," I hasten, "he does look like one of the meaner Uay gods, but is a kind and useful man."

"Not one to cross however," Humberto adds.

"Kaboom!" Melanie finished.

"Birds, you see? Pajaros de muerte?" Humberto nods, pretending to understand. "What's with the long face, that fellow with the droopy ears, like some dog in a cartoon? What's with him?"

"Roj?" Funny - the ones who've gone too silver lose tension in their faces; earlobes sag, gravity begins shrinking them into dwarves. I start the Olympic story, Roj and Rudyard Hayes, but a stiff zephyr brings La Grua rolling in through cracks in the molding of the Casa Miel's windows and under its door, and Mike puts a hand over his mouth.

"This is not so bad," observers Berto with no little malice. "A few years back most of Salamanca, the whole country in fact, had a terrible smell, but from human bodies, then, not fish. In fact it always has been bad... you cannot compare Costazul to America and its cities although, of course, with the exception of Los Angeles. Our streets converge on plazas, dividing Salamanca into a city of the pies... some plump with fruit, a few in which the fruit may be a little ripe or even past that, many other slices of sand pies, dirt... and, always, flies..."

The flies had been thick when I came back to Costazul from Rhode Island in the summer of '63, taking fever as a warning from Santa Viruela. The stone house where I lived with Tia Eusebia and Creole Crogan overlooked a stinking alley, the locksmith on the other side having died, his house was rented by a Japanese.

"A secretive man," I'd told Geneva at the Aeon last year, a few days before elections. "In the States, he would have ended up in Utah... grinding his teeth in the concentration camp they made over in the Zone."

"The one left out of all the books..."

"That one. But he also tended flowers in boxes, both out of the windows and along the roof."

Eileen was in her little cigarillo phase, stuffing them into an ivory holder like FDR. "Green thumb don't mean nothin'. I knew a man that way when I worked that department store on North Razor Street in Chicago. Cosmetics. Little creepy guy selling Oriental toys, powdered with sunshine, funerals. That sound like your Japanese?"

"Well," I said, "Dr. Kitigawa was not without his problems. But he also wasn't quite without colleagues..."