THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 12, EPISODE 3

The moon imbues Xul with ghostly shimmerings... hurricane battered huts and shacks wavering atop rubble where Janet blew their predecessors down after Elena had her visions of the father and the son who'd scrammed back to Amurka. Moon of souls that whitens faces... the Chinese peddlar who sleeps in Salamanca's garbage, emerging at dawn to offer little wind-up toys, snatched up and then ground under by policemen's heels... it lights the path for even the most desperate prostitutes crawling their way back from the Malecon to their barrios, fingering their promises and pesos.

Bill Streich was a military officer whose career was besyruped by moonlight; Major Tom in amber, trekking through a succession of dreary Stateside postings: Missouri and Washington (the state) and, finally, New Mexico. There, he'd started to learn and... worse... talk about things he'd seen. He'd wrapped up his twenty, moved to Ohio where Helen had family and Jeff could serve out his term in one high school. Bill taught junior high shop and physics himself, repaired appliances and televisions and corresponded prolifically with others who share curious beliefs.

The first time Jeff introduced me to Bill and Helen, I recall his father obsessed with teletext... an old radio computer that broadcast between the frames of 30 frame per second TV images. He'd nattered on all week about subliminals, so I used to think Bill somewhat insane until Mike Korbel said it was quite viable, probably even common, dating all the way back to the JFK years. "Further," Mike says, "subs under, say, Dobie Gillis could have fluttered in '62, could've wound up on radar or something... hell, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have really spun out of a wrong signal from Route 66 or 77 Sunset Strip, or Liberace striking a loaded chord on his crazy 88s."

Time has taught nothing if not... never... to underestimate a Streich... no matter how loopy, bounded or free.

Korbel again looks round the sleepy bar in Casa Miel; finding no microwave antennae peeking from spider plants, no ears pricked save Melanie's... with silver circles, four left, five right... he invokes the shade of Lyndon Baines Johnson. "Don't forget, ol' Dog Ears said there are only two hundred million of us in a world of three billion of them. They want what we've got and we're not going to give it to them.

"JFK, you know, was handed a victory scenario that had fifty million US deaths in our first strike against one thirty meg Russians, but said, 'I do not consider this an acceptable level of damage.' So, like I've said, and like old Dog Ears would have wanted it," Korbel repeats, "the second half of the games is pretty much simply potting squirrels."

"Speaking of Presidents," Melanie has to ask, "what about Him and the big shots He wants to save." Indeed... Melanie's given me an idea, you wonder who will get advance notice. Jimmy Stewart? John Wayne... John Wayne Gacy, probably, given the sad status of White House communications? Gabby Hayes, one would hope... world would be a sad, sorry place without old Gabs. Jane Russell? Nipsey?

And what Soviet icons, cultural or human, would the Brezh-man haul up with him in Mig One? I think this important enough to ask Tess... "a couple of Faberge eggs?"

Tess shrugs. "Real eggs be more use."

"Well," Mike continues, "they'd be circling round in Air Force One but with all the EMPT forces jizzing communications might not be all that good... in fact Air Force One nav gear wouldn't be working so well either. So we've got boys in silos out in South Dakota that the Russian first strike missed, the counterstrike missed and counter-counterstrike; it's getting late, the only topless bar in town's blown off, they do know that their primary... Bulgaria, Ukraine, whatever's, just a pile of dust... why not just recode the monkeys to drop shit on somewhere personal or let the computer do it for them? So they let the Kramdens decide, or Max... when he's installed... and Max gets to rain hell down on whatever coordinates his EMPT-damaged magnetic currents determine.

A little joke for the cognoscenti... I think that's what they are?... Max Hell's the villain of Adam Threat Twelve, a magnet who thinks that he's a man, throwing his magnetism round. Sucks up policemen's guns, causes bank vault doors to swing open - it's a rather crummy issue, if the truth be told, but Korbel calls it an important lodestone in the prophecy of EMPT-pulse technology, mongst other things. Duck agreed. Some of the best technical hits came off the worst episodes, like Star Trek...

"I don't see what the point is in surviving," Melanie sighs, "...living in a world where everyone's afraid of everything."

"Asperger's Syndrome," Mike nods.

"Assburgers to you," she answers, throwing a piece of melon at him. Damn if I'm not reminded of something here, a face...

"No... Asperger's with P. Like Howard Hughes had... fear of it all, panphobia..."

"What are the Russians doing all this time?" I ask, trying to refocus our Humbert Humbert. "Tess claims to know nothing of their plans, but Moscow has to have a version of SIOP."

"Tess lies as he dresses, badly. Russia's SIOP is geopolit - look at any map. When they get down to subs and trash missiles, they'll take care of borders... sayonara Japan, China. Their own Moslem states. Forget the brotherhood of Marx, it boils down to light and dark people, same as NATO and Africa, Bonzo and Zorro. Hit that stage... third or fourth level, with people still making decisions half-rationally... hell yeah, the Yankees are going to pre-empt everything north of the Tropic of Cancer to Rio Grande. Wouldn't you? That's why Zamora sent that old saddle to the White House in January... pure tribute. We're not so far removed from Genghis Kahn... that's a name for Jason to try out when he gets his band. Caesar, Alexander, guys who swing that way. All of them claiming to be on the side of progress."

In the silence that falls while Mike deliberates over which looks the least poisonous morsel on Nestor's plate of fruit... mango, papaya, orange sliced with processed, shredded coconut, more papaya... the bar radio plays Mexican music on RadioNacional Three. Colonies of colonies of colonials. A caffienated DJ lurches into his first messages - loosely translated, "...if it's rope you want, get it from Blind Bob, the rope man. Rope of any length, for any purpose, visit Blind Bob, Calle Montevideo at Avenida Catorce..." The jock reminds me of... not D. B. Pearson in LA... but someone who used to be on the New York station while Brendan was backing Purdon Leaviss. The two of them enduring Mitch Kazelka with the assistance of chemicals, in which they marinated like shrimp at Delfinas.

Does Brendan dance to the deejays of Hell in his cavity of bones and foreigners? Purdon's hand brushes flies from his blind population of a face.

"Hey," Mike reasons, brushing away a few more disinterested flies, "somebody asks questions, where did the flash come from? smoke... nobody expects reports, other guys did it, of course!" Papaya juice dribbles down his chin, twisted into an undertaker's smirk. Victims shot in their own homes by the international Bat Marauders, cool as masked ice. "It doesn't happen in the game because it's just a game, but you know they know you're thinking about it and they know we know, and what they know is we know they know."

During the Uay revolts at the turn of the century, a Costazuelan General entered into treaties with pro-English rebels to sacrifice a few traders and Catholic missionaries in bloody ceremonies recalling Peter Beard's brief stab at reviving the preconquest era and its brutalities. He reaped a fortune milking outrage among the montes and in Salamanca, pocketing taxes raised for war until Guatemala invaded from one side, Honduras from another and his own officers took him downstairs in the very same Armoria Vern Rice prowls today and slit his throat. Truth or consequences!

"Look at this capital," Junior said proudly from his box during Popo's concert, pointing down to the American journalists holding their noses against La Grua as they swarmed in from mal hombre streets. "What I wouldn't give to be young again!"

Nothing changes but the faces of the collectors and their coins of tribute.

That cold that hinted to me back in February arrived with Phil's shadow... not Diamond, rather that Punxsatawny rodent... that morning at Rockefeller Center I had a cyanide taste at the back of my mouth, sinuses stuffed as if David Bowie had flown all of the German army up my nose to conduct their maneuvers. But work has to go on... and what work!

Manny leaves the Lincoln idling, I watch the skaters until my head starts to pound. The ice! Ice!

Mr. Satan - froze in a prison of his own device...

Fortunately it's good news day... Sopher had called a little before noon, said Cuthbertson was willing to consider settlement. I encourage him to keep up the good work, thinking of ice and fire in my poor old head... the dreadful cottage with its bleak furniture and Meat House, out back, weighing on my eyelids. A thin spray of Scofieldy spittle, dropping to the filthy carpet. Museums breed flames.

Charles hung up and I celebrate with a sneezing fit, another handful of pills washed down with antacids. Cynthia has left mail, including a press release from IBM settling with a Seattle garage upstart in the PC software wars and a competitor's memo Manny's made manifest. Augurs transit out of doomed plasma tech into SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices), little magnets plugged into brains to map reasoning patterns... and, inevitably, tweak them... which is why, in the public interest, they're calling on all SQUIDmakers to voluntarily embargo key modulation frequency standards from Japan while they pursue their own experiments with the Indonesian military. One more reason to go on living at least a few more hours.

It's funny how Carlo's English improved over his term in Vietnam. "We're not winning the war," he'd parrot McNamara, "but we have begun not to lose it.

"The use of small nuclear weapons on Hanoi would bring this war to end within weeks," Carlo also suggested, leaving me with the fatalistic feeling of accepting another wild ride with Brendan - although that ride, of course, would not even begin for one more year.

And would, like so many other things, have its beginning in that telegram.