THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 11, EPISODE 5

 

     ADLAI STEVENSON!    

 

          Domestic sons of Che, Brown Berets and Watts looters, even Barry McGuire aside, Carlo never questioned the intent of his adopted government. He looked to the circus, to the boardwalk as we had approached the gypsy's shack... game booths with stuffed bears, cotton candy, hula hoops, the Carrousel. "How could people who make all these beauty things be bad?"

          Nine months later Carlo's in the Mekong Delta dodging rats and Charlie... if Dogs and Dominoes existed in those days, my interrogations might have taken on double meaning:

 :

E:

IS A DRAFT IN THE ROOM?

To which a peculiarly tweaked Dogmap might have replied:

:

:

:

k:

at your suggestion, the dog has been drafted for immediate duty in viet nam. during the process of removal, all the dominoes fell, beginning from 52 degrees northeast, antipodal to the opening door. game over!

          "A funny thing," T. said, before he died, "the greater the reputation of information scientists, the more some feared supernatural incursion. Harry was quite ordinary in this respect if, as I do, one counts the more fanatical Christian believers with the legions of the superstitious. Hungarian engineering never wholly displaced the werewolf in von Neumann's soul... Einstein sank into Qabalic trances, Oppenheimer... his Vedas. Fermi? God only knows! Turing used to go down Brighton... when he wasn't looking for boys, he'd cobbled up with fortune tellers and, so, developed a speech enciphering device he named Delilah... the biblical deceiveress." A computer-simulated voice recognition technology - vanity's rathole, down which millions of Lentex dollars (billions, industrywide) have vanished like wascally wabbits! They'll still be prying hippies out of VRT in the twenty first century!

          "Dogs recognize their masters," an unfriendly General in Jimi Carter's D of D charged last year, "a computer doesn't." Since I avoid confrontations with blockheads lacking powers of procurement, I declined to show him otherwise... machines are quite capable of discerning the identity of human operators via textual analysis, keystroke strength, pacing recognition (not to mention one of Phil Diamond's few good ideas, optical scanners in the special blue keys that read fingerprints and check for authenticity).

          This doubting General's gone with the rest of Carter's team. After four years of rude questions, sweaters and malaise, working with the new gatekeepers of Defense is like waking up in heaven. Blue skies and anti-ballistic missiles; warbling birds and nobody really works, just updates old specs and forwards them to Lentex for production.

          Carlo returned slowly to real life, blinking from his sojourn in Xibalba. "This is not my writing," he denied.

          "Nor mine!" Lorenzo's eyes had grown bright with horror - Diana had grasped both papers, he wrestled them away from her as Jaime's screams trailed off to whimpering. "See - the writing's the same! One begins where the other leaves off."

          The fortune teller snatched the papers back and crossed herself... evil spirits had blown ashore, seeking, perhaps, the weak, repulsive force said to inhabit the center of all GUTs. She lay them in a big bronze ashtray, lit a match. Then she gave Lorenzo his dollar back, made a sweeping motion and we backed out.

          On the boardwalk Carlo began swallowing, trying to summon back his ytz... saying that it was no more than hypnotism. "If so?" Lorenzo asked, "why did she return my money. No espiritualista, in this country or Costazul, ever gives the money back."

          "Because she was a gypsy," Carlo deduced, "a Mexican fake. Now we must take Jaime to this delightful carrousel, and then find a place for hot dogs and hamburgers... I feel like Captain Kyd!"

          Though Peter Beard was hanged alone, legend persists he sailed in a union of brigands, sometimes with Kyd who, Suelans insist, was of African descent. This is an easily corrected misunderstanding, Dr. Kitagawa explains, Kyd being a corruption of Ghede, the voudon god or gluttony loa in his upside-down aspect. To scare unruly children, Suelans tell a story that, when some pyrates were becalmed, Captain Kyd tore his own arm off and roasted it for his men to feast upon... others, enthused, pulled off legs, noses... and if the parent really wanted to lay horror onto an older, incorrigible boy, another part was mentioned.

          "And pie, cotton candy, popcorn for us all! More beer..." and Carlo clapped Lorenzo on the shoulder. "After all, we have money, though tainted with ill-fortune... it's best we spend it now, and then my wife will drive us home."

          So it was done, but, at the estate of Lorenzo's employers, the rich lady was crying, all the household staff wore faces long as the white beans of science fiction. "He's dead," a gardener said. I thought of Kennedy, but that had already happened, was it Johnson this time?... no, it was Adlai Stevenson, whom I barely remembered except for a few remarks by Harry Stone who despised him... he'd been a great friend, however, of Lorenzo's master.

          So here came the producer himself, wearing a scowl and pointing, "take your hat off, you!" He sniffed, rebuked Lorenzo for the beer on his breath. "A great man who supported educating the poor, so, when this war, ends billions will be directed to the social area. So people like you might have opportunities... look at yourselves!"

          Carlo tipped his hat, his dumb immigrant's pose, wheedling a "Buenos dias!" and a "Con permiso!" and we backed out of that place as if sniffing another gitana maldita in the foyer.

          "Stevenson... shit, man, that's who possessed my hand and spooked that old puta with all the jewelry. Lorenzo's one of those pendejos - you see, he is afraid of me, even though he used kick the crap out of me when I was ten and he was twelve."

          "So you've been waiting all these years to get back?"

          "Hell no!" Carlo laughed. "I went out looking for smaller kids, Geraldo or Juan, seven... eight years old and beat the crap out of them. You see, we're all right, everything's all right... no spirits coming to ruin America, this place for me," Carlo boasted. And with his left hand he brushed his chest, with faith in the American construct, a government of Cadillacs without bumperstickers. "Look at all this space for medals to the coming! My space!"

 

   

TOMORROW:

SIN, ALAS and TOAST!

 

Biographies of Captain Kidd and Adlai Stevenson... all the pirates and Democrats, in fact, may be found...

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