THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 5

  But even more than lies, naivete depresses me. If Carlo knew what he really had married into, he should have bolted our crummy hotel... one of those seaside fleabags torn down now, in anticipation of the great, illusory Casino Strip. But he was so proud it had a real bed, not a hammock; he couldn't overcome pride in what all those Swiss and Austrian anthropologists had taught him, so naivete quietly pushed him along to doom.

The old walls erase vicious evidence with a sweep of the quetzal's tail. Before the telegram, even Vietnam, while Carlo was posted to Carolina, the men of our street in Los Angeles... buddies he drank beer with and went to Dodgers' games with... came moaning round like tomcats, under my window, whispering how sad it was for a woman to be alone.

Rogelio and I were never intimate, no matter how Carlo fumed and feared... Roj was only interested in running his races. "Were I a torero," he said, long face drooping towards his even longer legs, "the muchachitas would be hanging from my shoulders like a cloud of lovely garrapatas. But I only run, not even best in Costazul," he'd had to admit. Rudyard and Roj sometimes came out to Xul, dodging the pigs and an occasional tourist, but mostly used the beach north of Salamanca which had only some suburban shacks and love motels... Aquino would take a head start, pacing the black man until passing a triangle of palms where Hayes would surge into overdrive, in order to overtake Roj by the time that they reached the road. Then everyone would laugh and Rudyard would accept congratulations and a few taunts about learning to speak Japanese... yes, it had to have been Tokyo where those Games took place.

John tells me Bud used to stay fit until the day he married Audra, which also was the day he married television and the couch and seats at West Point or Madison Square Garden. He rooted for the Titans, Jets after, but when they won Superbowl III his ticket stream dried up and we only went once, last fall, when Oz McCutcheon let us have his seat. Maybe Bud's fortunes would wax if he played golf as diligently as Jeff... practicing amid Zone scrub and rattlesnakes until he was able to present himself to Duck and Billows for humiliating rituals - defeats that, with practice, ceased to embarrass the victors. Fortunately Billows was a fast golfer, not a good one... that was the influence of Forrestal who, T. says, used to dash about Chevy Chase as if pursued by Jews and rattlesnakes. Baruch and Einstein, the whole Stern Gang, reaching for the Uzis nestled in their bags.

Of course Jeff never really fooled silverdom, least of all himself, but I like to think that the attempt did, at least, delay the end long enough so that he could steal time on one of the Zone's aging Control Data 6800s to copy and gather up those things he needed before the shithouse exploded.

So "Kaboom!" Melanie repeats this afternoon, lifting her shades. Those frothy pastel drinks in the big glasses with the little umbrellas look innocent but sneak up on unbelievers... sweetness is sometimes a cloaking device.

"Well then, kaboom!" echoes Kara Nan, drily. "Wasn't one of those foreign battalions..." she didn't finish but I knew just the contingent she meant... they were Jamaicans or perhaps migrants from Trinidad: black dancers, drummers and a vocalist in eye-gouging red and yellow silks and crepe whirling round a blast furnace with crimson paper bricks... a tribute to Mao's backyard nukes. Why not a festival of plutonium for the streets of Salamanca?... we laugh at faces of Death that old, cold controllers of the north repress. Their Carnevals are somber, with gray and blue predominant, Sousa or... worse!... Sibelius! or Wagner, maybe, oozing out of loudspeakers. Clotted, freezing blood dripping from the distended tongues of dead stags in Clay Curtis' den, from the palms of stigmatics or the nose and ears of T.

Berto twirls the long spoon in his longer glass of iced English tea, I see thought swelling behind his eyes, like a slow, rolling thunderclap.

"Do you remember when old Zamora allowed the Monarquistas to stay after their revolution failed in '42? Of course... you weren't born yet, I was only a boy, myself, but you must have heard how they were made to pay according to their capacity. Millions of pesos for baksheesh... he kept some, but used most of the rest to build rural schools, which cemented his reputation as a statesman. What a great conciliator, eh? Those were the men whose sons gathered behind Arcilla, so what did this gesture gain us beside a harvest of corpses. Right?"

I would have let it pass but Mike thumped his glass on the table. "When people's lives fall into chaos, they demand quick and cheap solutions. That means dependence on intellectuals..."

Thump! went the glass again. "Bring me some experts!" Michael cries.