THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 1, EPISODE 4

Eileen desires her sixties room in Daimon to be a tribute to Brendan's memory or, rather, her memories of Brendan before he grew old and cynical; the "fat old fart" of all that perished speech. Two months after the fire and she already talks of him like Elvis... "I thought he would make it after we found that driver," she tells me when I let her borrow Manny for a day to scavenge Goodwills out on the Island for hippie shit. "I always thought he'd flame out in a car like Bolan or James Dean..." They find Barbies, two of them, rare, holey tie-dyed t-shirts and a Star Trek lunchbox... the clerk at Goodwill tells them they used to have a whole Rambles' suit, but it had been snatched up by someone from the City who comes round looking for curiosities to resell at ten times the price.

Brendan was nothing but a giant headache driving Jeff's truck, blind passing on curves after we'd hit the Coast Highway, just south of Jenner. "Think it's about to rain," he grins, though it never rains in June in California; he needs any excuse to justify his driving like a 16-year-old. Finally the road curved inland towards Bodega, of Hitchcock's determined birds, allowing him to speed up to a brisk 70 before braking in front of a hitcher who'd manifested just outside of town, a shambling hippie glaring at us as if we were Norman Bates and ma.

"Get in!" Brendan waved the nearly empty bottle, "we're gone to town for reinforcements then back to the ocean, over some cliff and underwater to Japan..."

The hippie starts running off through a sheep meadow leaving his pack behind. Brendan eyed it a moment, then drove off. "Nothing worth taking, prob'ly. Hate a hitchhiker, always trying to cop something for nothing. Soul of America! Wouldn't want him along anyway, even in the back... might attract a cop, spoil our day for dying..." instead he turns the radio on, works round to the station playing "Give me a ticket for an airplane..." A particularly stupid sheep edged out towards the shoulder and Brendan jerked right, but not quickly nor decisively enough. "No lamb chops for the wicked," he'd cackled.

"The Letter" is quickly succeeded by commercials for nerve medicine and the SPCA.

"Government spends a half a billion dollars every day to put low-rent dogs and cats to sleep," he says. "Hear it on the radio, so it must be true, right?"

Anyway, they sell beer in a restaurant full of prosperous hunters and fisherfolk, I think, or maybe just Alfred Hitchcock people between gigs. Brendan bought a warm six pack from the frosty proprietor; I talk him out of heaving one of the bottles through the plate glass window. "Green Lantern wouldn't waste the time," I remind Brendan, cunningly exploiting his favorite DC comics hero. "And Kato wouldn't waste the beer." Faces flicker like reflections through a scratched and spotted window, rather like those on that hijacked bus climbing up and down little hills of a forgotten neighborhood of sad houses... a place for Patty Hearst to hide out, quite successfully, for months during that movie... I ask Brendan again if it's time to drive off his cliff yet.

He'd sucked down more beer and said it wasn't; first we'd have to go south and find a real liquor store. "I control when people die, and how we do it. Not you, not them, not anyone else! Me! Not those people out in the parking lot, not limp-wristed scientists out of Berkeley, me! I'm not afraid of Jeff or death or anything or you... just what are you afraid of?"

I measured his temper, popping open another beer; after all, better me drunk than Brendan. "Spiders?" I ventured. He sneered and said spiders couldn't hurt you... soon enough we'd be down in Costazul, he'd sing a different tune about spiders, even transporting a few hairy, poisonous fellows into "Man", though Suelan jungle crawlers would survive maybe an hour in the desert. Details!

Like Whitehall Street. While Brendan drives around Byronically in Jeff's pickup, Arlo Guthrie sings about the draft induction center, used to be there. Haven't heard from Arlo lately, nor did Whitehall come out of the war in very good shape... in fact it's been boarded up for years now. Faded punk rock and Raging Bull posters, demonstration notices and old spraypainted obscenities. Looks closed - but it ain't.

I've been down to Whitehall once with Korbel and, another time, with Baggott too... the G-men prefer working out of cold, dark offices with tin sheet windows because their mission is analyzing our proposal for the national ID card that's either to interface or interfere with Omni. National security, like a toadstool, abhors light. Or, as Jeff pointed out in Vegas, "...they say, you know, that if the spacemen's rays get painful you can block them out by wrapping tinfoil 'round your head."

Three of us go down in February... myself, Lou and Korbel... everyone knows a shitpile of money's going into zebras, only question's where and, after Manny let us off at Battery Park, we're stuck at the traffic light with a downtown loony clinging to Baggott like a bewildered snapping turtle to a middle finger. "What they don't say is that your thoughts hurt UFOs even more than theirs bother you, so it's only a clever way to render more Americans defenseless."

"One of Haig's people," Lou jokes as the light turns green. Brendan's passed another crossroads and I'd asked, again, if he planned to turn off to look for liquor stores, but he said he wouldn't until he'd finished his beer. A fog was quickly settling round the highway like cold clouds in some slum Heaven; I didn't feel particularly hot but took the last beer anyway to hasten whatever deviance he had in mind towards its appointed end.

Back in November, the Whitehall spooks were ordered round by Pete Mulroon, a stubbed down Cagney, down to the snubbed-out cigar dangling from his mouth. By February, however, he must have been down to fourth or fifth in rank, a dentist who pulls your tooth but then has to call in the Tooth Fairy... in this case Justice, a spherical little toad in glasses. Walter Mays offered his batrachian hand, bubbling over our proposals. Mulroon, I saw, had already begun to fade out into the old, pale posters.

"Enchanted," Mays said, "Omnicard is so... so... well, magnetic tape is so much less intrusive than efforts of so many of your contemporaries that..." and he shook his thick, wet head... "I wouldn't embarrass them by name but at least two proposed fingerprint ID."

"Which might be good in a secure facility," I agreed, "but, as a mass marketing tool, would certainly provoke resistance. Only criminals get asked for fingerprints, so such cards would have an inherently anti-marketing resonance."

"Exactly. Also, they cost a fortune... the Administration's generous, not stupid. Besides, who'd admit fearing anything from little magnetic strips? Why... I understand they're being instituted in public transit systems on the West Coast, the better to draw psychological profiles by keeping track of who's going where, before Europe or Japan does it for us. And it's not as if the world's likely to run out of iron..."

Mays giggled again, inhabitant of a dimension lighter than champagne. He didn't quite say Omnicard would get the contract, but did nothing to dispel a feeling that it's a matter of when, not if. "The simpler the medium, the less slack given what we call C-CRAP... the Consumer Credit Reporting Agency, whose mission is to remove dero from databanks. Sometimes," the amphibian added before diving back into his pond, "it's harder than you'd think, turning the screws on those who require screws be turned on them. We need knobs."

"I'm having a late lunch with Wilson," said Baggott on the now loony-free Battery, awaiting the next pass of Manny's orbiting Lincoln. "Would you join us?"

"Afraid I have to go to Jersey," Mike said, fading agreeably like a Shakespearean messenger, or Fillmore backup band, into one of those posters, peeling from Whitehall's tin windows.

"Evie?"

Whatever love takes!

Brendan's fury over my dicking him out of the last beer almost pushes him over the edge. "You don't trust me! You want to hang on to a shitty life full of... LBJ!..." pushing the truck up almost to its maximum 75 before braking sharply because there was a store, and a bunch of pissed off looking firemen in the parking lot. Having to wait in line with his fifth of Cutty further infuriating him into mutterings about how losers who had fires didn't deserve rescue, and I told him to shut up because the store owner would undoubtedly be calling the pigs as soon as we'd gone.

"Police?" he sneered, effectuating a tough guy from movies, Lee Marvin, perhaps, but fumbling change... dropping something, a dime or a quarter even. Leaving it lie... too cool to bend over in front of all of those firemen... "not afraid of your fucking police!"

"If they stop us," I whispered, "you won't be able to drive off a cliff to Japan. You'd lose your chance. They'd laugh at you."

Brendan cradled the bottle under his armpit, pushing past the firemen without a word, without even a glance - like one of those Egyptian dogs Aratus describes, who run along streams as they drink for fear of being snatched by crocodiles. "Since Herman Kahn," General Johnny tells me, "the most effective game strategy has been to convince the other side that you're utterly mad." Bang zoom, John! Down comes the moon!