THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 4

Hope I'm not catching anything... isn't that the most ridiculous apprehension, as if a baby were a bug! Usually healthy as a horse, I haven't felt so rotten as during the year before I married Carlo, right up to the wedding. Stumbling to the window in a borrowed bathrobe to watch Kitagawa's comings and goings, I'd realized I'd accumulated nothing but fat... I shook the sick out, picked up trails of old companions from the city and from Xul, and allowed myself to be slowly drawn into the drama of the 1964 Olympiad.

I said Rome but couldn't have been... that leaves Tokyo or Mexico, one of those? Suelans reacted to the Mexican Olympiad like jealous cousins to a prig who's won the lottery and won't give them a dime!... but wasn't that the Games of Black Power salutes? So it would have to have been Tokyo... at any rate, during the spring, Rudyard Hayes training on beaches, Xul to Salamanca. (Without a drop of oil to stain his toes!)

Hayes believed sand strengthened his calves and ankles... Rogelio Aquino, his pacer, would nod, say this was so. They made a curious pair... Roj, a deferential young mascot of los Nueve with his carefree smile and expensive Bermuda shorts, and the black postman, wild of hair but stiff with British manners.

Bud's recently expressed a theorem by which all extremes converge towards a center, muddling moils of mediocrity into which everything falls to die... he claims it is a principle of marketing. S'basketball and hockey season after all; Bud's red lights on the console beg reality.

"What we've derived from research," he says, "is that consumers are passive when they watch TV or listen to the radio... they fail to think about what might be on another station so they won't switch until something irritates them... a song, annoying character, some wrong commercial. What we're doing is research, find out what activates people, then get rid of all activating motivations. It's not that we want to put the public to sleep, it's that the choice of choosing to consume has to be delegated to the subconscious."

Even before we went to Utah, Jeff had a compulsive interest in using the computer to weld synthesia of culture, finance and politics - breaking down the vast historical tapestry of the late '60s into common strands of transition. Bugs, chewing on rugs. Those clunking, grinding Franklin kludges were introduced to chronological, ideological, geographical accidents of sorting... baseball scores and NASA trajectories, stock market transactions and movements of armies across the plains of Tet, infants through Prague, artichokes to Jerusalem... transactions saved on punchcards, transferable to the Zone.

Those cards from Franklin now... and at least one generation of tape they were transferred to... Jeff claims no idea what became of them. He finds his memory gaps useful and that data was so merged, copied and altered that some of it probably still runs beneath the ratpile like a puddle of white, lymphatic blood - exerting a strange but distinctive tidal pull on certain silver people whom Barry Freiberg, our oldest surviving New Left icon, terms "kachina dolls... spinning conspiracies and cashing dividend checks."

After January's Board meeting, maneuvers settle into a quiet humming. I'm starting to pay off obligations, including a promise of lunch made at Kazelka's. Barry's a cheap date... has a dread of silverware and service so coffee and a sandwich at Stage Deli is our settlement. Capitalists are still "the pigs", so the Carnegie Deli across 54th is on his extensive list of boycottees.

And, like so many drifting humanitarians marooned between blowing up toilets with downtown's leftover Yippies and Burger King's junior management seminars, he's gone off the pig literally - kosher, not quite vegetarian yet, but there are more sprouts than corned beef slices coming through the rye. I tear at my ham and Swiss with Barry throwing me the malocchio...

"So," I say, "still working for that paper?"

"Hard Times?" He shakes his head. "Folded. Last issue comes out day after tomorrow, wouldn't even have had that except somebody that uh... comes in with a subsidy? The government here isn't like Costazul, they don't control media and jail or shoot opposition... they just raise postal rates. Same end result, and it doesn't leave any messy martyrs around."

"Too bad. So what are you doing to pass the hours?"

"Teach math. Three days at St. Janier Nevis, Catholics... public school system has a shit list. Long as I don't poke the Pope, they leave me be. Bishops these days aren't so prickly as they used to be, or maybe it's that they don't care... so long as you keep your mouth shut about sex you can say anything you will about Descartes."

"I guess the shut mouth'll replace the smiley face for the eighties," I say. "So you can pay your rent."

"Keats?"

"Yeats. The Party didn't win..." I don't bother asking whether he's with Peace and Freedom these days or migrated to the Socialists, Workers or Labor (we called them SWOPs and SLOPs in anarchic days of Franklin) "...we didn't even cause Carter to lose any states so it's over. Over!"

There is an old, cold silence, then I ask about a few of the old hands at FIT; Cobb still in jail, of course, "coping," says Barry, a 70's buzzword fast-tracked for obsolescence. Another of the FIT Bookstore buckaroos in prison for dealing has had growths removed from his larynx, talks like that Danger! robot on "Lost in Space". Marshall Sellars' a Gender Equity Facilitator out in California and, of course, everybody knows about Mitch. "Nobody I know was very surprised by Kazelka going over. He was always a Republican, personally, politics is just the art of coming over to the side on top, without appearing greedy."

The countergirl refills his cup, his fifth... I've only had three. Pretty soon Barry's bladder will be carrying him away to wherever people like him do their business... Port Authority, perhaps, or behind a bush in Bryant Park. "I'm checking out Cuba... Vietnam would be more politically correct, but I don't know the language. Do you think this President will bomb Cuba?"

Not then knowing what the games would bring, and not feeling particularly loquacious on the subject while Louis carries water for Al Haig, I just answer: "do you know of any place that would be safe if we bombed Cuba?"

"I guess not," says Barry, still the long-faced loser who started the decade going down to Mexico, looking for a job.

"Uh about that last issue of Hard Times, you might say there is a little problem. I spoke out against it in fact... uh... the problem is that we were a collective, but not a consensus collective, meaning I couldn't block. They just wanted one last chance to clue the people in to what's going to happen before fadeout..."

"What problem is that?" I ask.

"This article? By Richard Flagler? See... I don't think you're Nazis or anything, I even met your father, typical rich prick, but clueless. It's hard to talk about, but I'll see someone gets an advance copy to you."

And then another twinge kicks in. Kids catch bugs, and then girls catch the lads. "Don't worry... nobody really reads Hard Times, not since Watergate," Barry adds, ruefully. "That was our problem..."