THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 11, EPISODE 2

The Oatmeal test refers to that Honeymooners' episode during which Ralph Kramden, to demonstrate five dollars' worth of vacuum cleaner, sprinkles oatmeal on the floor to show off his wares and, of course, makes an unholy mess. Oatmeal insinuated itself into the Zone as a measure of disposal of unsound theories for OPIE, at heart, was a conservative venture... it had to be, with so many applications spinning from core research. Many rejected applications were sucked up... more than a few by Lentex, I may add, so public good was eventually achieved, and at a private profit.

Carlo sold vacuum cleaners for a few weeks, afternoons and evenings, before finding his niche at Goliath Carwash. And he gave up on the community college classes because he couldn't handle the registration process and the hostile woman at the desk mistook him for a Mexican. "Another one!" she'd said, "hiding out from the Army, looking down at patriotic Americans that way. All you Mexicans would rather fuck than fight."

"Wouldn't anybody?" Carlo responded, but the bureaucrat retaliated by misplacing his forms; after a few forays out of our garden apartment, with its bars and barbed wire fence, he gave up fighting the system, preferring the easier task of assimilating English by flopping in cinemas... "What's New, Pussycat?" and "The Loved One".

America always has had difficulty distinguishing one small, Spanish-speaking country from another. The Games have come as a complete shock to Melanie Kahn who, after all, absorbed so much of Julian's ban-the-bombery (except for, of course, Germans and the Arabs) that she fairly wailed, "You didn't tell me Americans would add Cuba and Nicaragua to the universal funeral pyre!" Fortunately the Nans have already driven off in Berto's pink T-Bird.

"That's like, so totally uncool... I suppose you men also blew up all of those great old cities like Paris and Florence... New York is, well..."

"Hey," Korbel tried to assure he, "it's only one scenario, the worst in fact. Herman Kahn sat down with Harry Stone way back, when devising his pyramid of thirty nine steps towards five platforms of total war... just the fact of our being here and thinking this way makes the real thing less likely, especially once word gets back to the Kremlin that we've handed them their head. The Fourth Age, our Iron Age, is finally drawing near its grave... now we approach an Age of Sand that spits out Communism and its paranoias. Poor Tess! Thought he was so quick, smuggling memories for the Soviet Academy of Sciences... how long do you think it'll take to get the bugs out of those programs? Probably he'll be slinging salt with Sakharov in a salt mine by September. Pitiful these Pavlovian suits, pitiful!"

Korbel shakes his head and breaks into a shit-eating grin.

"OK," I tell him, "no Boris Badenov around, how did we do it? Dog?"

"Never even got out of the room. Knocking over everything, trying to override... one of these crewcut Cossacks with terrible sunburn screaming Man Is In the Room, Man Beat Dog... don't know jack about concealing ground movements before their pre-emptives, they have no concept of counterstrike. Then they begin to panic... stupid keyboard mistake, if I were Mr. Nan that's what I'd worry about, not your so-called high-reasoning errors. Thick fingered Russian bastard with a flying monkey to send the geezers in St. Petersburg to St. Peter's gate misses his latitude key by ten degrees and Boomf! goes Salamanca! Did you know..." and he'd regarded Melanie as... what? (a meal? leftovers? cockroach on his wedding cake?)... "it takes them seven tries and forty minutes... forty!... before they get a clean hit on New York?"

"So," Melanie counters, unimpressed. "Millions of people get forty minutes to work themselves into absolute panic... then they die."

Since New Years' Mike's been on my case to get Lentex a corporate jet, so as to shrink the black spaces between sunrise and the sea. Everybody has one and there's a glut on the market, prices low as they'll ever be.

"I guess, on a superficial level," Mike admits, "it ain't fair ordinary Cubans get burned so bad, but they did let those two Cienfuegos reactors be installed. Life's never fair." Because a racist old bag with a brainful of expired shopping coupons having a bad day chose to lose Carlo's college registration, he gets drafted and killed, leaving me to marry Jeff Streich, then Pritchard V. Robinstett.

"All this barbed wire, dogs," Carlo saying, driving through LA's westside in one of a series of fifty or sixty dollar James Brown cars that would die and resurrect every ten miles or so, wailing Please! Please! Please! on fumes. Venice and Santa Monica were dirtier in those days, and a lot more fun... with rides and freak shows, cheap sweets and greasy food. We'd been out more than two hours, taking Lorenzo and Diana's kid Jaime on all the rides, finishing all the beer.

"No worry, amigo, I buy more," Lorenzo said. "I'm well to do. You, on the other hand, are a fool for keeping that job." Lorenzo was unkind but Carlo thought him right... being legal through one's wife was the next thing to being illegal yourself.

More beer was bought, consumed, games played, money spent. Lorenzo was especially tipsy when we passed this gypsy's shack... it gets muddled, in my mind, with the one from "Inside Daisy Clover" filmed, a year after, with Robert Redford and Natalie Wood. He bought two tickets without even asking. "You n' me buddy, women... a woman has no future, right? You afraid?"

"I ain't afraid!" I could see Carlo drawing memories like fishing lines, his compiler spitting out... old lady, hoodoo, contempt. You fight or fuck... no quarter to Pope Joan of the boardwalk, waiting to blow Carlo's proportions.

"Sure I'll go in with you. I'll even go first..."

"Now wait," Lorenzo stopped him, "I paid for these... you wait your turn. Who do you think you are, my friend, Ilya Kuryakin?"