THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 1

In the dream I follow a tunnel, like that running under Stockton Street in San Francisco... a wormhole joining China to America in space as my tunnel of dreams leads backwards to Trinity, or forward to the Gran Xu'tan. I reach through Shirley Smith's vitals like a psychic surgeon, Paul's mind like an anteater slurping DNA.

Death by water takes so many forms. The fall of rain-whipped mountainsides, the seeping death of oil, bobbing heads that disappear beneath tides. Or on land, from withdrawal of moisture; tentacles of cancer squeezing water from cells in T's abdomen, Gunter's lungs... blood vaporized from violence at Aeon, washed down Texas gullies.

No, Egg, Frank Ellinger did not go gently in Texas... we must have been two hours allowing him to die for the name he'd finally given up but refused to embellish. Twice, Reina Tanka asked if I'd rather wait in the truck, twice I refused. Ellinger died pockmarked with cigar burns and little oozing cuts; if you weren't going to be scrambled, you'd see, eventually, a silent movie, a surrealistic classic: Bunuel's "Chien Andalou". They'd cut a woman's eye open with a straight razor, and water and gelatin dripped out. Not that surrealists weren't misogynists, but Bunuel admitted they'd cut on a cow's eye being slashed. Editing was still a novelty in 1928.

No editing table available in Texas.

Manuel, years after, allowed the Texas transfer to have been a burn from the get-go. All he'd wanted to provide was... he uses this ambiguous Suelan word implying insurance or security in sending Juan and Reina along to seek out Ellinger beforehand, arrange an accident for his San Antonio goons, and take their place. But somebody was behind Frank Ellinger, somebody who'd laid money down to have our heads. A name.

Naxroth? Who'd wanted Jeff offed, like Carlo?

"Take a lot of money to find out," Manny allowed a few months later, after we'd shot the summer of 1970 hauling weed and codes up the Eastern Seaboard, "and then, what do you do when you have it? Ellinger's family to nobody, they've other fish to fry. Unless you plan on going back to Texas, buy one of those ranches you always talk about. Sip margaritas in the sunset with a shotgun on your knee... No? Then forget about it... I'm watching your rear, now."

But I haven't forgotten. Over the years I've put Naxroth through every one of Ralph and Alice's hunter programs; but there is no birth certificate for the burn embedded in Suelan concrete, no trail of disturbed dollars, nor pesos; no disinformation Jesus hanging with his barbershop apostles. The most I can recover is a squib from '58, lifted from an Oak Ridge Petra... declassified, debriefed, deboned and dumped in that lot up by Dog School where surplus Lentex iron rusts like dead, Freon-dripping refrigerators. A string of cyphers: "Naxroth... Eulenspiegel... Grunspiegel... Drachespiegel... th'ammuz..."

No recursives, even those milking oldest postwar data from Farm Hall, produce coherent explanations for this chain. I don't think any German catalog's at issue, from the last entry someone's nailing Chaldean magic to Zone teleology... it could be Kharragh? Billows?

Oak Ridge supplies wings for the flying monkeys...

Julian Kahn has been approached by Templars... whom he fends off as "nishtagea", lunatics. "These Christians want to make a Samson for all Jews... let us perish in an embrace of death with Philistine for their imagination of our sins. Sins they've stabbed to the door of Israel as... do you remember Ralph's five virtues and his twenty two vices?" Julian's hip. "Posted above that evil electric outlet of Chancey Street... der Teufeltur?... that explodes and shorts whenever something's plugged in?"

Jools also expresses sensitivity about this area of inquiry because of David Greenglass... grunspiegel!... the Rosenberg brother-in-law who was a machinist at Oak Ridge Manhattan Engineering District (MSD), grinding Trinity lenses for a man who reported directly to Klaus Fuchs. These lenses have been described as "petals" and did rather resemble a four leaf clover of high explosive molded round a core called the Initiator, incorporated into one of Brendan's occasional rambling Resonator riffs... "initiator, procreator, incubator, fractionator..."

Cha cha cha... Tequila! Hostile Fender-fire raking scat; Baron Samedi's Jim Crow theatre and Ellinger, his emissary, died ugly... exposed, blind, alone... the last thing he heard must have being Jeff amateurishly throwing his voice like that wastrel pluviation of ytz that didn't really start coming back at me until those long naps on European trains, speeding through Germany and Belgium. Gloomy towns with sloped roofs, always raining.

I reach out from these wheeled dreams, jot down a line or two of code... water always running... down the roofs, down railroad windows, weeping from the plucked eye of Ellinger's, sweeping Elena off, and T...

Once I was rock, then sand... now I'm that water, too.