THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 12, EPISODE 6

Old burglar moon's certainly roped Eileen and Geneva under its spell by now; night's alarms subdued, worry breaking apart like old iron corroding... high in Delfinas, Melanie must be tossing under Capricorn, dreaming of alchemies of number.

Does Mike snore beside her - more likely on the couch!

Korbel, having completed his threnody earlier, yesterday, sat back smugly to enjoy our questions, our Malthusian in mufti.

"So?" Melanie asks."

"So smoke begins to clear," coughs Michael, "and twenty million poisoned Mexicans flood over the border in jalopies too old and stupid for EMPT pulses to deter, or maybe even in carts, drawn by teams of sick mules. Nobody's able to do a goddamn thing about it because immigration and social security data will have been EMPTied too. First blown to bits, then silvered, finally everybody becomes unpersonal."

Iridescent, transparent... absent!

"Which means," I tell them, "we're all going over the edge together on this one?"

"Hey," Mike defends himself, "it's only a game!"

A telephone rings... sometimes I can't pass by a phone bank without thinking about what I heard of Wilson Leonard Senior; he virtually single-handedly invented a switching device that made rural party lines feasible... Bell sent him a nice letter and bonus (I've heard fifty dollars, down to five, with the lower estimates predominating as time widens), angering him enough to march off on his ownsome with that polite stranger, Harry Stone, and his carpetbag of capital. When Sopher called, in February, it was half past five, sky already dark, 53rd floor all but empty save for random flashes from the copy room where lawyers working overtime for Evan were photocopying their night pleadings.

Some engineers do their best work at dawn... more lawyers start to come wholly awake at dusk. Things simply happen that way and all over - New York, Los Angeles, Italy. Sopher had played badminton with Cuthbertson's hired appraisers in East Providence all afternoon, and now he pauses, saying he needs a pencil to take down what I'm telling him.

"We're even better off than this morning," he says, thinking he can hold me off. "They're on second appraisals... they won't take New York, so Boston... we'll get better quotes on art and the furnishings. Oh... the sisters want the cottage deeded over to Narragansett Historical Trust when they've gone... Cuthbertson thinks it ought to count for something. One of his associates, an Italian-appearing gentleman who seems to have rehearsed a role, kept saying the matter ought to be probated, airing all T's bloody laundry. Ruth seemed shocked but wasn't very proficient at hiding it. I think we have the makings of a settlement."

"What kind of settlement?"

"A favorable one. These provincials don't fully conceive the subtleties of Lentex valuation. I don't want to scold, but the land beneath headquarters has outperformed all of our lines, although we are, of course, expecting an upturn once Defense starts handing out its contracts. You know how I feel about Quad, of course... I gather you have absorbed the Colorado implications? The market seems to have done so..."

One of our competitors, a giant with money to toss around, has pulled out of video-on-demand tests in a Denver suburb... their signal used different identifier codes, close enough in their architecture to zebritude to be in the public domain. Theoretically, substantial gaps between digital strings should enable multitudes of information packages to traverse copper wire with the fluidity of traffic on an American superhighway, but consumer obstinacy causes bottlenecks... of hundreds of choices, most subjects want only a few popular movies and live sporting events, so bitstream traffic begins choking bandwidth chickens. The fallout has sent Lentex stock down another three quarters.

"It's only a test, Charles. VOD never was meant for copper wiring. They're just burning surplus capital from network deals... when taxes go down they'll bail out and we'll have their mistakes to learn from."

"Well, you're the expert on that sort of thing, so I suppose damage to the stock will be recoverable. Used to be when a technology was defeated, its defenders... Ludwig Boltzmann for example... took their lives rather than endure professional disgrace." Sopher sighed as if mourning the passing of a more honorable way of life... his own as much as T's and Harry's. He's such an old Grotonian he hasn't even asked me to explain VOD. Video On Demand's yet another queasy, Lovecraftian acronym destined for the dustbin posthaste once the Jack Dolls get their turtle geometries around its throat.

"The good news is the write-off we'll take when the property is donated. But I have to question the wisdom of cutting off the sisters' payments... it seems rather petty..."

"It wasn't in T's will, it was discretionary. I'm only exercising my discretion."

"But Cuthbertson said the front drive hasn't even been plowed, they didn't have money to pay Jenks. He had to walk through two foot drifts and when he got inside, they'd brought in one of those little tinkertoys trailer people use for heating. How are they going to keep warm... start chopping up furniture? And Tania and Gus haven't been paid for two weeks either."

"They're just learning how the other half gets by. There's money hidden all over that house, you know that!"

"Well they seem to have forgotten where. It's undignified, people in town are talking."

"Well I don't intend going back, so if the sisters don't like gossip or shoveling snow, then they can damn well settle. And if Cuthbertson protests, let him send his Italians over!"

I sense a brooding on the other end, between intervals of groin-scratching. Charles shouldn't brood... at his age it subtracts from what life one has left. "How soon do you think you'll have numbers?" I ask.

"Not tonight. Don't hang around, you still don't sound too well." He always worries about me; my health, my marriage... he doesn't understand Bud pretends to be dumber than he really is. Either I mean a lot more to him than he's willing to admit or he's just a nice, lonely old man.

Whom I'd much rather talk to on the telephone than deal with in person.

"I won't," I say, "I'm going home to bed."

"Do that," advises Charles.

Before Sopher and Wright, Harry used a lawyer named Thompson who did work for both Lentex and the family, an arrangement faintly improper but, probably, not uncommon in those more relaxed times. He died, rather suddenly I recall, while Jeff and I were in Utah... before that, T. had used him to set things in order during those days I was a feather in the hurricane of military red tape.

Carlo said, during his one and only leave between Fort Dix and Carolina, that, if he died, he wished to be buried in Arlington next to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who impressed him less as a politician than as husband of elegant Jackie and reputed lover of breathy Marilyn. Well, as to placement of his grave, that was a dream, a stone dream, Egg... I'd called a Colonel long distance who'd looked up his file and said Arlington was for Americans, not damn foreigners stupid enough to be drafted and killed fighting the Yankees' war. The Congressman's office said the same thing... I asked whether Carlo should have been drafted in the first place and they answered "No! Of course not!" but two wrongs don't make a right, you know, and Arlington was flat out of the question.

They did say they'd get Carlo's last paycheck to me under some provision for survivors and, surely enough, six weeks later I am forwarded an official check for no dollars and no sense.

Biting the bullet... figuratively, then... I'd complained to T. who said he'd get Thompson on the case and asked if I needed help with the estate. Carlo, of course, left nothing... even the James Brown car totally expired a week before he went in... I told T. my job was OK, classes interesting.

We talked some minutes more of fish and Christianity, then I hung up and watched mice chase cats on the television, trying not to be sick from the smell of cigarettes, pork frying in Trailerville across a muddy alley from my back apartment... feeling like one of those frozen ants in Harry's little farm. Since it was a whole lot easier to get prescriptions in those days, I swallowed a little rainbow coalition of downers and went to sleep, wondering, again, whatever became of the autistic girl whom the cops mistook me for when I broke out of the Meat House.

Somewhere that Trailerville inside presses against my skin... a bitter park of cripples living out their lives in shadows of a counterfeiter who's stolen their souls. Civilization robs ytz of genius and criminality alike, but Harry hated the poor with an intensity beyond all reason... as if he had a vision of himself: broke, pension busted, reaching a claw across the formica of a nineteen cent burger palace, croaking: "Want flies with that?" He'd seen that day a-coming... nearer now... when life for working men or women wouldn't be worth that of a cow or sheep, from which you can, at least, get milk or meat or wool.

Another cigarette in Trailerville.

T. called, the next morning, to tell me Carlo would be interred in Arlington. I drop JFK... there's such a thing as pushing luck and what scared me about T., at that time, is that he might just have be able to procure that adjoining gravesite.

I also decline his offer of money to fly to Washington. "Well," he says, "that's your choice, and as there doesn't seem much left to bury I suppose there wouldn't be much there in the cathartic department. Thompson informs me that explosives were involved. Anyway, what's being laid in Arlington's a shell, I'm certain the real Carlo's already Heavenbound."

"Do soldiers go to Heaven?" I surprise myself by asking and I hear T's embarrassed silence.

"He was drafted, wasn't he? Jesus welcomes any man who's done his duty." There's another pause. "That's what my father would have said, and nobody could talk Biblical salt and light round Harry Stone. We're less sure ourselves, so I suppose that that is why we must have faith, eh?"

Wally Martyn thinks it a fine gesture that T. got Carlo into Arlington. "Several of my special friends are buried in our nation's capital," he says. "Someday I'll tell you how some of them arranged for Kosygin and Chou En Lai to gang up on Khrushchev which, in turn, stripped Goldwater of his ammunition against President Johnson.

"But Goldwater was Jewish!" We're having lunch with Ulysses Kharragh himself... who finds this hilarious.

"Still is," said the agent. "Ariel Sharon, Morgenthau, even Kissinger and that Orthodox momzer in Brooklyn... all Israelites. Not every Jew's Israelite, not even every Israeli. Tell me..." and he turns to the husky traveler in his black cape... "do you think it possible to buy peace with the Arabs?"

"Why not?" Kharragh chuckles. "I would establish a first offer at exactly thirty shekels of silver."

"A shekel isn't what it used to be worth," Wally laments.

"Well that's too bad... but neither are Philistines!"

Six physical files accompanied Jeff and I to Salamanca, rolled and tucked into a spare pair of boots (several more boxes with paper and magnetic tapes... even punchcards... Jeff buried in the desert and forgot where). I explain certain difficulties to Manny, might there be a friendly pharmacist able to help bring Jeff down the sky-escalator? Arcilla still fishing for power, Bat Marauders shooting up streets, haven't police better things to do than shake down farmacias? "Wasn't your husband that fellow who took the orphans' car and was made to give it back?" Manuel remembers... something like that, I mutter, wanting to get myself and the files to Xul before someone else remembers. Jeff, however, would not be moved until he had accumulated his stash.

So, between the chase for pharmaceuticals, we hang out at one of the few cafes still serving gringos. Nixon's re-election, the previous year, provoked a new flight from the decaying gringo colossus... an older, harder bunch than the pot smokers and Jesus freaks five years back. Formerly respectable machinists, accountants and bus drivers poring over grimy Herald Tribunes and week old issues of the New York Times like cats devouring the contents of open garbage cans in old Doña Eusebia's alley.

Might run from world Nixonismo but you can't hide!

Zamora tearfully retired after setting, in his place, La Novilla - a corrupt, amiable idiot with the initiative of a coprolite... the wars nearby closing in from Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

"Can your American soldiers fight war in Vietnam and also four countries here in Central America?" one of Salamanca's perpetual students, a cousin of Roj, challenged.

The students looked at him as though he were Che come down from the mountain... and look what happened to him!

Military issues brought Libby a cliffhanger win in the first defense of her title when we went back for two more rounds of Twenty Questions. It was a grind; she'd started third, missed twice, and was six hundred down when the leader blew Question 19 and Libby said "is the answer the Battle of Plei Me?" Bing! Bing! Bing!... a hundred bucks ($79 for an outdoor play set, fifteen for a pressure cooker, busted for the rest). Libby had learned a valuable lesson... quiet accumulation of safe guesses. During the second match she held the board for questions three through nine, regained on twelve, held her place with puffballs, racking up eight hundred seventy more in prizes.

"Shame you kids are married," said DeFranco, winking at my ring (which I kept on for exactly such occasion) and chucking Libby under the chin. The crowd had gone dancefloor berserk in the first match, applauded the decision victory politely in the second and sullen old Fred, watching Elvis in "GI Blues", grunted: "... but what are we going to do with a barometer?"

Now this comes from Wilson Leonard Junior so, most likely, it's true and the implications and what-ifs fascinate. Jackie Gleason fancied himself something of a parapsychologist and liked to shoot the shit with Harry, Wilson, buddies like Rocky Graziano and Bishop Sheen and his writers in the Mermaid Room of the Park-Sheraton. One day, after taping, who should come along but Colonel Tom Parker... overextended and desperate... offering half of Elvis Presley to any moax willing to put up twenty five grand.

"Harry looked like a tombstone fallen from the moon had conked him on the head," Wilson remembers. "Elvis who?" Nobody else said a word, waiting for the Great One, who finally laughed into his Scotch, said "who wants that shimmying son-of-a-bitch?" We all had a good hoot and the Colonel rustles up his hat and slinks out. So I guess he had the last laugh on us! There we sat over our drinks, Holy Doctors of DuMont... approved, perfect men! Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity any working stiff would have murdered his mother for drops in our laps and it's this big joke. Christ! what a country we live in!"

So... that night, last February, staff gone home, lawyers making their copies, I lock my office, take the private stairwell up to 54 and brush the dust of T's piano in the white room. Poor thing. I plink a plink of "Celebration"... seven notes... F E F E D G G, "Thanks for the memories"... six... C A G F D D, and almost hear it plead for silence. One more art wherein I'll never approach my ancestors... though with practice I've finally made a go of it.

Music's mathematical... a piano tinkler, T. preferred Beethoven's late sonatas to the late quartets that Oppenheimer praised. Over the cottage summers he'd variate - making clear the intimations of ragtime, or of silent movie scores featuring William Hart or Tom Mix... perhaps "Birth of a Nation". Here, he believed, occurred the crack between centuries... not at their ends, but fifteen or twenty years after... World War One ushering in the Twentieth as Beethoven, perhaps observing Napoleon's fall, declared: "the pianoforte, after all, is an unsatisfactory instrument."

But what, then, is pianoforte save scraping of blades across Vaucanson's ice... digital plinks of ones and naughts... where violin tremors break in waves, analogues of wrist and gut and horsehair. The string quartet and pianoforte are Kipling's east and west, but Beethoven's symphonies are mixed curiosities, great atomic cocktails colliding on a pool table of truncated centuries. If, as it seems, Paul's stalking me was a sad child's gimmick to reunite warring Stone and Leonard houses, what a muddle was made!

I leave the keyboard open, as I found it, lights on... not in Evie's interest to economize tonight... go back downstairs before leaving and find a telex... Ralph crashed in nidiana... O tempore morays! Shit-prick lotion! as Gleason mangled one live commercial.

When dataverse collapses, so went the good doctors at FIT, the lost bits whirl off to Confusion Mountain, presumably beyond the pale of recovery. T. said that, when disk tech began its evolutionary crawl upslope against entrenched punchcards and paper tape, a dying Oppenheimer would twirl them around his bony fingers, chanting Vedas as he coughed up pieces of lung, asking if this bit string or that might not be one of God's names...

"The logic of the West, for him, collapsed into inviolate and perfect squares of What... the material cause, or "aitia" in Greek... the Where... formal aitia... When... the efficient aitia and Why... that final cause Aristotle called the "telos".

"He looked at me with such terror and such pain... I know that pain now," (so this would have been, I think, early '77)... that there's no observer - no you, no I, no who in the republic of Aiti. Who's on the missing fifth?

Transcribed onto the Kramdens, they toss back... punctuation error. "Wrong," I reply, "retry!" Punctuation error, syntax error... together they cannot resolve ambiguities. Vern Rice... remember, Egg... lurks on the third and eighth plateaus.

I separate them now and set the dog loose in its web... more than a few rats in the wires have had backs snapped this way. Most revolutions fail because rats have a higher revolutionary quotient than do mice.

Ralph jumps on the problem like a pizza... Celebration's opening F three hundred forty nine cycles per second, E... 330. 349 and 330 again, 294, 392 twice. Thanks for the memories... a high C, 523 cycles, 440, 392, 349, 293, 293. Alice... streaming Indiana cancer, is longer with her reply... I type back, uncomprehending...

T's fading into his own mist, like spray kicked up by cheerful skaters of Daimon. The zamboni man with the cigar, watching his ice pitted and slashed; squinting towards me, he mutters "Woitlessness, woitlessness," as the beautiful people tied on skates and laughed and tumbled. "More woitlessness ter dis t'ing den meets de eye!"