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

T. had a project in mind for me, Egg... libraries? I'd finished FIT twelve credits short of my BS, and there I've remaindered... though a women's college in the Midwest wants me to address their graduating class next month, bribing me with an honorary Doctorate. T. said he'd pay for me to take the MIT seminar... Lentex had a selfish interest in that direction, as he pointed out when we arrived to check out the folk and jazz festivals, do a little sailing, fishing, watch the sun go down. Even the sisters came out of their parlors to sit on the veranda with their tea on summer evenings. I shouldn't think of it as charity.

I don't know whether the cancer was in remission or active, but T. was, himself, attempting to stay as much out of the city as possible. Lentex was involved in the Lockheed bailout... SRAMs and Cheyennes, mighty dollars... T. would fly Generals up, take them out fishing on Liverwurst II. Jeff asks about the name, naturally, and T. said it came out of a Honeymooners' episode, also naturally... Harry Stone christened Liverwurst I after one of Ralph's outbursts on the parrot show, where he tells Alice to stop with the liverwurst, "I'm talking high finance!"

Sad as it is to say so, I think T. might have managed to run Lentex into the ground if he'd lived a little longer... not that we would have folded, just been absorbed by some bigger, hungrier fish. T's Pentagon contacts were Harry's old men and, despite all the stars and maple leaves and guest appearances on Sunday talk shows, their purchasing influence was declining beyond a general wave of wands. Specs were designed and choices made by younger, puny people with thick glasses and stick-up hair, without respect for Patton or the memory of Harry Stone... FIT and MIT graduates, just a little bit too sharp for Oscar Meyer but too slow for NASA.

A few weeks back, when I was hurrying though Chinatown with Geneva, Peter Bach and Manny to the Thanagar Bliss exhibit on Canal to cop Daimon designs, I see these pigeons squabbling over a discarded turkey leg in that little coffin-sized park where Mott runs into Little Italy; this wino on the only surviving bench raises his snout muttering "birds eat a bird, man, it's a dog eat dog world..." and what was that Jack Nicholson said about Chinatown anyway?

Mitch has odd ideas about birthday fun. Maybe I'll return the favor sometime... bring a crasher, maybe. Abner?

Anyway, Jeff predicted kids would grow up into reactionaries long before Mitch... on the drive up to Rhode Island as a matter of fact. "The last frontiers are closed, conquered... stripmined and malled, the only avenue for kids to rebel's through a return to order. Look at this shit," he waves; we were somewhere out in Connecticut, I think, fringes of New Haven... malls and movie multiplex marquees, Golden Arches whizzing by the thruway. Thrones of stone, domino hedges, import outlets selling Cafe Nit.

We were being followed, too, though we didn't know. After Jeff rewrote Pielcock's final using Conrad Crane's old paper as a model and got his B, Conrad came to Gallatin looking for his fifteen dollars and Jeff said no gain, Crane... "I can't afford B's. Do you have any notion what it's like out in the jungle without a four oh?... tongue-in-cheek, he'd received his Boston papers twenty four hours after Pielcock's grades were posted.

The gaunt pornographer protested Pielcock never had given A's, except to Crane himself... he was a psycho... grad schools and employers knew that, and judged on curves, but Jeff had replied the Prof might be psychotic but was no amnesiac and would have detected plagiarism. So Crane went back to his Newark hovel, calling a few times from pay phones, demanding money and blathering threats until whichever of us answered would hang up.

It was only a temporary hasslething... Franklin and Gallatin had nothing left to offer, history now, we left most of the furniture in the apartment for Crane or the landlord or somebody to take and didn't leave a forwarding number. I don't think Conrad Crane knew who I was at the time, so that would mean he'd been watching us, stalking... biding his time and driving up behind us to Rhode Island.

"I used to know people like him in New York before the war," T. tells us, "poets and half-assed Communists... Bohemians, we called them. They could be amusing in small doses. Hitler and Stalin cured a lot of them, the rest lingered on, going into advertising, quite a number of them, or real estate. A few held on, ending up unhappy, bitter men... when you grow old and bitter that way, when you stop searching, you start looking for obstacles to set in other people's way," T. ventured. "You've begun to die, even if your body's young and strong like this one here." And he'd punched Jeff lightly on the forearm; a shy and somewhat furtive contact, a Winchester Mystery blow.

We eventually do find the gallery a few blocks from hungry pigeon park... Bliss is a self-designated "psychickal Thebetan" which spelling recalls to me Marco's observation that Kublia's palace at Shandu was infested with "wizards and astrologers from Tebeth and Kesmir who devour the corpses of criminals", made prostitutes of their wives and daughters "and are famous for theft and necromancy".

The artist is a disciple of Roerich shot through Futurism's canons; his compositions great thrusting of slabs of rock and faces in torment under banners. Granite bowls of human blood - torches and pyramids, invocations to Shamballah, to Man Ray, Aimee Temple McPerson and Abner LaSalle... amid banners and manifestoes hailing "Mystick energies" and "flaming ecstasies of lofty spirit" is a concentric pair of circles enclosing a clover-like aperture... a perfect depiction of H-bomb architecture passed down from Harry, Fermi and Oppenheimer through Billows and T. to our New Jersey lab, probably classified above COLONADE!

"Only coincidence," Manny dismisses Thanny. "Civilization breeds wealth, which breeds information... which engenders a moral paralysis. And after Bliss come the barbarians and their razor graffiti. Sooner than later, the market and society are both sold to the bare walls!"