THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 7, EPISODE 2

I'm absolutely certain T. set Jeff on Emil Bruns to record and, maybe, learn from his fall... that Lentex didn't fall with him was not the fault of conspiracy but of the environment. IBM being IBM... dwarves grown fat and slovenly on government pork (and corporate executives with dreamwash in their eyes whenever compatibility was mentioned). Bad Petras trundled out the door and teams of fixers wired each with gum and masking tape to keep them chugging until Lentex could steal government's fire in Ralph and Alice.

Emil has me fixing his personal accounts... a cascade of morbid disasters seeping out like termites fleeing a flooded Crazy House at IAP. More money's going to Emil's alimony and insurance payments than capital improvements... more to the secretaries between modeling assignments than to staff reviewing his designs to be sure his Turkish and Taiwanese buildings won't fall down. Above all to planning and zoning lawyers from ventures hardscrabbly past or vaporously future... these proliferate like filthy necrophagic mushrooms in Three Mile Island's rain... "I'm working on a premise," Jeff says, "that the character and beauty in a city is proportional... inversely... to the quantity of rules of its design. Grand Central Station, all of the museums, parks and townhouses of mid Manhattan, even the Empire State Building were erected with a positive minimum of regulation... today the great bureaucracies have given us... the World Trade Center! Emil calls it a pair of toolboxes stood on end."

"But they're the tallest toolboxes in the world," I'd pointed out... true, at the time... and Jeff quashes my question with another Kool. As a result he's an old wheezer, now... huff, shoot, wheeze... lungs a leaky commode. Brendan was a whooper... as there are birds who, by their noises and plumage, go extinct... thus, Brendan.

T. has us paid off the books, and we have almost unrestricted use of the co-op on Second Avenue; he comes into town only three times all summer. Instead of Woodstock, I visit the Gertrude Stein exhibition; Boston's still holding Jeff on hold, so we stay over into September, the blooming of a thousand RSUs and more toilets exploded.

T. stays mostly in Rhode Island, blaming the Opera strike. I don't quite know who's running Lentex but it seems that Clyde White's running Emil, who doesn't want to talk to T. until Petras can be purged of Harry Stone's dead hand. (Jeff concurs, but quietly, for the sake of family peace.) "Face it, Emil's burned out," says Jeff at this benefit against Amchitka tests... which T. and Baggott have been clandestinely (if ineffectually) pulling strings against, due to the notoriety it's thrown on negotiations to purchase the site of Harry's old blasts, Angita Island, sixty miles southeast... the womb of Max.

"He blew that prison contract because he was interested in making a statement, while Rockefeller's people wanted bars, not art. And how many wives is he paying off... five? Six?" Jeff's insincerity... not to mention the downright cussedness of kicking Emil while he was down... makes for the worst Halloween of my life but, come November, Emil's office almost clears out, a Notice to Vacate posted on the door and the smart skyscraper contract gone into litigation. "I am in the wrong business, yah, and at the wrong time," Bruns totaled up the ruins, before turning them over to the lawyers, "but I have lived through the dying of epochs, I am free to wander Babylon mourning, because I have something worth the remembrance. You young people, on the other hand, have nicht!... no past, no future... I envy, and I pity you."