THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 4, EPISODE 6

To hear Michael complain, a few months back, you'd think I was buying a Nazi or Soviet gulag, in Corona, instead of a tech school! The morality of using students on Lentex projects and their paying us tuition, instead of us paying salaries, isn't at issue... painting picket fences on white credit's old, and as American a custom as floating down the Mississip. It's not being consulted that has him storming round; that and the Kramden "hippies" cascading like cheap ketchup from the bottle at Tom Wendell's favorite cafeteria. At least he's on the phone... from Jersey, not here where, I suppose, he would be obligated to break something, just to show who the man is in the little room, and who he's not.

Mike's been opening a lot of wrong doors since Aeon burned, maybe it's lower quality cocaine. "What..." I repeat, "... is the problem! Why turn a perfectly adequate love story into The Exorcist? Nothing's been signed. Finance is going over Corona's books, Angie has researchers looking to see if there are any rubber cats in the room. It seems a nice place, dingy building, but with a reasonable lease, all in all doable." No sense inflaming him with the disclosure that Manny is looking for real estate on the cheap side of the Hudson, and leases will be signed before I drop Heaven's Gate on Quad. No moldy warehouse for Corona... I concur, with Ruskin, that while a picture or poem (or computer program) is the work of men (sexism noted, but anyway)... architecture is the work of races.

I hear Mike catch breath, his voice drops thirty decibels as he wrestles with conscience and expediency... given time, of course, the latter is to prevail. "I would at least have thought that you'd extend courtesies."

"Negotiations as these always are better worked out through Louis," I said, realizing it's not so smart to press him just now. Jersey looks to Korbel to protect their jobs... it can't be fun to have to work with people every day, then have them tossed them out like old shoes on the say-so of bosses. I've had enough trouble between the maids and Paul...

"You," said Korbel, "have a manner of reassuring people that doesn't."

"Hey, have I excluded myself? I don't dare play Dogs and Dominoes competitively any more! Corona gets the bright ones without money... those who go to Harvard, Stanford and the rest are past their prime by the time that they graduate. You see them driving cabs or pushing racks, these Roderick Usshers of the garment district with their Ph.D's! The most hopeless of these hopeless we meet working for the government. We take the poor, the hungry... squeeze what we can from them; keep the best and throw the rinds back in the lake for the competition to snap at."

"Are you sure you didn't send Manny to California to cut that Apple fellow's fuel line?" Mike winks. A few days before we're speaking, back in February, a co-founder of one of those hot new personal-computer companies, crashed in his rat-plane; he survived, but I've heard his memory's wiped. Evidence for the prosecution against Lentex corporate jets... bad things happen in the air. From Mike, this is a low blow... like Remington, telling me I'd killed that old wino by wrapping him in artificial snakeskin shrouds. "I think, on a superficial level, the word for what you propose is slavery!" he continues, though I sense silvery footprints of defeat already trekking up his spine.

"It's not slavery, I'd rather call it... uh..." and the word I'm seeking hovers in the musty recesses of education, not Xulan, not in Salamanca but some dank schoolrooms of Rhode Island, there it is, closer now... got it! "...uh, it's only indentured servitude. Yes! Quite a difference!"

"I'm only concerned about Tom Williamson," Mike scuttles backwards like a crab, "and I don't like to be left in the dark!"

"Tom Williamson is a Corona employee who has no future with this company. And since when have I ever left you in the dark?" I'd said. Hamster! "Ciao!" and with just a fingly wigger I sent Korbel spinning away towards Confusion Mountain.