THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 13, EPISODE 4

Near death in Sicily, Gunter Adrian sketched, in carbon, the mortal terrors returned to haunt his waking dreams: a fly arising off its strip of sticky paper, a stabbed parrot, the charred mannequin of his first wife with bloody charcoal streaks, nails pressed into her Madonna's crown.

The most garish Salamancan gallery displays Gunter Adrians openly, next to Flintstoniana... I knew Isaac fifteen years ago in San Francisco, one of many who claimed to have crawled down the fire escape the night of Nureyev's famous bust. There must be thousands of these, now. Only now does it hit me... Isaac would have been the perfect customer that night Jeff and I tried to find a buyer for our stolen snakeskin overcoat on Haight Street. In those days, history could be worn... the only burden facing Isaac's Galeria Univac today, with Arcilla gone, is the taxman.

Of whom... one afternoon, two weeks after the showing of Libby's episodes of "Twenty Questions", I received a call from Libby herself. Since I was working weekends to make up for the missed work, I had a few weekdays off, it was... would you believe this, Egg?... a Thursday!

"You won't believe what happened. We were eating dinner last night... in the kitchen, of course, they're still holding up the dining room set, like everything else... and these tax men just walk in. Don't even knock... just waltz right in, say they have papers that give them rights to snoop around, they whip out notebooks and start writing shit down. Fred says that's ours, he'd earned our stuff, I didn't win it and they said he'd be taken downtown if he said one more word. One of them slaps him, right in front of the kids. And they keep taking notes."

I try to sympathize... IRS never bothered with me when I was poor, OPIE ran interference in the Zone and, now, Charles has people to keep them at arm's length. My God! the damage they could have done in Utah!... friend Archie's guns, the cores, silvers... what a break, being on the right side of power. An artery-busting plateful of privilege, all you can eat!

Eileen finally shows up at Regine's ten minutes late, Geneva fifteen... mistaking my medical condition for the will to party, they each order doubles to catch up and bowls of soup. Both have been tagged by the same process server working for Brinkman (or is it Brickman?) which only makes me more determined to have Manuel cut off his fingers. Eileen accepted service through Wally... Geneva bobbed and weaved until offered a half hour on Sy Lindster's show... a syndicated piece of chalk beamed out of this shitpile in Jersey. Sy's a trip and his English still almost as lousy as that of Tess... "It is not the mattering if what you do is art, so long as it captures the people in their deepness," Sy praises her. Process Man waits until the taping's over before vaulting from the tiny audience and dropping his papers in her lap... kissing off the crew and Sy and scramming out the fire exit. The show airs just as taped, two Sundays after, but by that time I'm worn out with the shuttle problems and miss it.

"So what did happen, with that friend of yours," Geneva asks. "All that tax shit... see, Wally and Harry have this man takes care of me but I got other problems. You know my birds... there is some panic about diseased foreign birds, now I have government people, keep showing up with papers to have them brought in for tests."

Sick that night, I get out of bed, throw up, and look out of the bathroom window somewhere round four AM... Ikeya Seki is that little blur, fleeing the solar system like a rat off an exploding starship. Zebras in Givenchy gowns printed with cartoons, man in blue approaching, lifting his guitar...