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BLACK
HELICOPTERS EPISODE 19 THURSDAY the SIXTH - 8:12 PM Glenn and Anne did wind up going to Cohen's – if only
because so many foreign Conks approached them for advice over the afternoon caucuses
that it would have raised eyebrows if they hadn't. Elbert (“El”) Cohen was
the city's largest furniture dealer (outside of two national chains); the
reception taking place in his showroom where, in fact, they encountered, and
without iteration, Tom Beedle – reclining upon a Barcalounger twixt two of EL’s TV models – a lesser Roman
Emperor sipping three fingers of Jack as Hollywood –bedazzled smalltown sirens fed him grapes and crackers smeared with
crab dip. |
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Hector Nescoso
circled clockwise amidst the blond plywood kitchen cabinets, hanging chrome and
faux-gold faucets, working delegates. Counter-clockwise... and at a somewhat
slower pace... Paul Rinker bent the occasional sympathetic ear on behalf of the
patriarch from Colorado. Around nine they heard Mayor Potter braying at the
threshold, but someone quickly approached Pinhead, a man from the Urinal... or
one of the TV stations, maybe... there were rumors of trouble at City Hall, so
the Mayor hustled off, adult beverage in hand.
Cohen leaned Catfish, Glenn learned,
but Parnell was a no-show… still holed up on Miller's Ridge, Kentucky, probably
shooting birds and small animals… the candidate pandered to his elderly,
working-class base who distrusted the zooms and the skypes
and the skittles of remotish media, so Pat O'Neraghty dropped by with a DVD, which enticed delegates
drifting towards Home Entertainment where the propaganda was set up to play on
sets ranging from the new, portable four-inchers to one flat wall model, six
feet high, using the newest high definition technology, imported from Prague.
Catfish, sitting on a stoop or a stump or a fencepost… something rural and
woodsy and attended by an honor guard of dogs… began with a funny story about
sex and the Internet, then started talking about Japan, the desolation in
Hungary caused by American and German runaway companies moving out to China or,
increasingly after the plague and in consequence to its dictator’s support of
Putin’s War, Vietnam. And
Arabic-speaking migrants (who might or might not be terrorists) moving in,
while Russian troops on the march rolled north and east from occupied Eastern
Ukraine across their former “stans” as opposed to a
potentially humiliating confrontation with NATO – now on the west bank of the Dneiper. He restated
his contention that President Joe was weak, Trump was “batshit
crazy” and MAGA a scam, ridiculed more Congressional and Bidenesque
posturing in Washington on inflation and the trade deficit against which no
action would be taken due to the rampant and rancorous partisanships and
scratched the ears of the two hounds at his feet. Pat tapped Glenn on the shoulder, nodded to
Anne while the delegates applauded an ancient (and, under the circumstances,
rather cruel) Bob Dole Viagra joke, discussed which issue (or combination
thereof) had lowered the President’s popularity to thirty-one percent (the
G.O.P. to twenty seven and Congress to eighteen) and, deriding Justin and Beyonce, reminisced about Paris and Britney, knocking back
bottles of frosty Heinekens and Zero Clock. Both followed Pat, Cohen and a man
they'd never seen before upstairs to the office as soon as the obligatory
answering skype from tech-friendly Tillerman began.
The stranger introduced himself as
Tauter, Duane Tauter; Cohen waved and departed, Pat locked the door. "Tauter's a sort of hacker, knows his way around the big
data," O’Neraghty began. “Wiki-Big!”
Actually, he looked as if he'd be more comfortable breaking legs in Vegas,
Glenn would remark to Anne later that night, back at the Ivona,
but both had just nodded and let the big man speak his piece.
"Rayna Finch has had me tracking Tillerman," the big fellow said in a rather
surprisingly high-pitched voice, a nerd's voice... and Tauter even took out a
pair of plain, black nerd-glasses to read some of the printout he'd brought.
"Eighteen months ago he installed cookie-cutters on his office and home
terminals, upgrading as soon as the new codes came into effect, so I haven't
been able to draw much of a recent profile. Before that, however..."
Tauter coughed discreetly, allowing
Pat a second opportunity to check the locks on Cohen's office. "We're not
here, as if anybody didn't know already," he smirked.
"What's the payoff on our
sequoia-spiking laddie?" Anne rapped her fingers
impatiently on the furniture mogul's personal desk. "Downloading Metallica
or Jurassic Six from the Pirate’s Rook?
Playing footsie with Big Oil? With the Attorney General?
The Russkies?"
"Playing footsie... period. Oh,
and other bodily parts," Tauter added. "Our grand old man of the
Rockies is… or, to be fair, was… into webporn. Creepy
stuff!"
"Kids?" said Glenn with rather
Roy Moorish hope in his voice than he'd have liked to express. “George Santos? Prince
Andrew??”
Tauter held his hand out, palm down, then wiggled it three times.
"That?" Anne recoiled. “Officer in the Kevin
Spacey-force? Gives new meaning
to Senator Craig’s list…”
"Tillerman
claims that he's an atheist," Pat
O'Neraghty said, leaning against Cohen's wall,
"but he's like God to some of those Christian militia groups who deserted
Ted Cruz after Caitlyn Jenner endorsed him and then that flap over endorsing
Trump despite his flaking out on the one-six and getting rewarded with that
military transgender ban which the Supremes overturned and now are
over-overturning after the assassinations. Or at least, I guess, a sort of
parish priest of... ahem, the
"Tillerman
says we dilute the purity of the movement," Anne grasped,
"...but if..."
“Full Milo,” Pat smiled.
"Before he upgraded his security,
Tillerman also had hits on some pretty hard websites
here and in Europe," Tauter continued. "Hundreds of presumably
congratulatory e-mails to out-and-out Law and Justice fascists
in Poland and what’s left of the Ukraine, nothing neo about some of those. The Youth Traditionalists before they crawled
back to Trump and the Charlottesvillians. Haider, the Hunkies and the French, of course; Brigitte Bardot's
homepage, Marie LePen's. Sturmwatch, the Rudolph appreciation sites here, Church of the Covenant
etcetera. Tree poisoners! Kenosha teenagers.
Alt-everything! Dilbert! Steven Seagal! Plenty of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloos,
Argentines and Venezuelans, before and after the coups. Gun show
dealers..."
“But all environmentally progressive,”
O’Neraghty allowed.
"You sure there aren't also any
communications with the oilies?" Glenn
persisted. "Maybe through their lobbyists? I can get lists..."
Tauter reached up with a tired hand
and removed his glasses. "All of us can get lists. Thing is... can you get
bodies to do the crosschecking, or better programs?"
"I'll work on it!" Anne
promised. She held up a hand, crossing her fingers, then only the middle
finger, pointed in the direction of Masty Hall.
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THURSDAY the SIXTH - 11:00 PM
Most toilets in the Hall of
Justice holding cells were stopped up so, unlike at State Prison, the desirable
beds were those uppermost on two three-tiered bunks facing one another across
the sides of the cells. These, to Andy's relief, were solid concrete blocks,
not metal bars. Having one of the low bunks sucked, but it was a hell of a lot
better than having no bunk at all, which was the case when late arrivals
started filtering in. After one bloodied, unconscious man was deposited on the
lowest opposite bunk just before dinnertime... snoring alcoholic fumes that
made Andy's meal of baloney and cheese sandwich, stale potato chips and some
green, vegetable mush even less palatable than it could have been... three
newcomers were sent in at around a quarter after eight, holding the inch-thick
spongy foam bedrolls that HoJo distributed to its
overflow. Street vermin... Andy recognized one eighty-sixed from the Sanctuary;
he tried to pull the little Spanish guy out of his second-tier bunk until Andy
and the disco fellow with the tattoos took turns holding and kicking him. Andy
finally threw the skell against the toilet where he
lay, moaning, while the rest of the holding cell watched the last five minutes
of "You Bet Your Car!" on the off-brand channel ubiquitous to the
incarcerated and the insomniacs…
The host, an actor who'd bounced from
one failed sitcom to another as long as Andy could remember, offered his
surviving contestant fifty thousand dollars as grand prize against their ten
year old Buick… sole transportation (and, Andy suspected, housing, too) for his
stringy-haired, haunted wife and two fidgety children. The question was about
the Franco-Prussian war; poor moax didn't have a
prayer and didn't even guess... the camera zoomed in to follow the progress of
a solitary teardrop down his dusty, stuttering cheek while the Jumbotron showed his car gripped between the jaws of the
crushing machine and crushed. Just before a DreamBellTM
pop-up, one of the cameras caught just the knees and feet of a doll, thrust through
the crumpling metal of a back door, then severed; the half of the studio
audience visible went batshit, screaming and
applauding while the wife brushed tears and strands of hair out of her
daughter's face and a pretty lady in sequins and cleavage handed the loser his
one way bus tickets back to from where they’d come.
Then, after conventional commercials
for banks and burgers, ABM malt liquor with the mushroom cloud exploding over a
desert and Daimler-Chrysler, on came a "Friends" rerun... old
friends, Andy thought, having lost interest years ago. Nobody had ever
been there for him, and he'd gotten used to it.
"Remember when they used to give
away millions on the game shows?" the tattooed man said to
nobody in particular.
"That was then," said one of
the new arrivals, a black man with an accent that reminded Andy of the Ghanians who sold rugs and prayer shawls on Bendis Street, across from the U., squatting on his
government bedroll, back against the bars, far away from the toilet as he could
squeeze. "Back in them good times!" he added.
"Good times, yeah!" answered
Disco... "I was driving, then, for that parcel service and I'd watch them
all on this little battery six-incher I kept in the cab... twenty-one,
sixty-four, millionaire... who'd wanna marry any
millionaires now; the world so full of billionaires? Used to clear
four large a week, with overtime!"
"Th...thousan'?" the bloody drunk
sat up and rallied...
"As if," Cleveland smirked,
then shook his head ruefully. "But you could buy a cuppa
coffee for under a buck before the tax.
Good times!" and he shook his head, "then they wired those spy
devices into the transmission where, if you go over fifty-five on the fuckin’
highway, recalibrates to keep the per-mile payments level. Fired me for tryin’
to disconnect…put me on the redlight list."
"People now desire to watch
people get beat up worse than they get beat up," said the
African and nobody had anything else to say, so they watched syndicated sitcom
reruns with pop-ups they couldn't control, for lack of a remote buzzer, until
around ten, when the guards brought in two more detainees... thin, elderly
wraiths, almost collapsing under the weight of their bedrolls. These shuffled
like a couple of Christ's sick uncles carrying their thin, foam crosses...
blinking, as if the dim light from the television and the low-wattage bulbs in
the corridor hurt their eyes.
One wanted to talk, speaking in a
far-away, lost little mumbles Andy strained to barely hear above the true crime
documentary. "Cops all over
"Making the city safe for the
Conks," Andy determined. "Where were the Turks?"
"Oh... them You-nighted Nations officers, they was there,
too," the little man murmured, punctuating his remarks with coughing and a
sibilant sigh at the oddest interval that started a little worm of paranoia
crawling through Andy's gut... CV Seventh Wave, the Malaysian variant? Tuberculosis?
"Had their helicopters up
there with searchlights and about a thousand drones, helping the police roust
people out of bushes... wouldn't let them beat on me but they said my blankets
'n water had to be burned, 'cause they might have bugs. They don't have bugs!"
he insisted, "except what are them natural types, for the outdoors?
Crickets and centipedes, that kind, you know, don't hurt nobody.
Gimme their card," and he proffered a little
blue pamphlet with the globe and weeds on the cover and, as Andy well knew,
simple advice within, like: "Do not argue with policemen!" and, also,
a directory of local information. Much of that was out-of-date or just plain wrong,
like the mention that the Jefferson Street Sanctuary was City funded or, for
that matter, that Reverend Malik's operation was "nonprofit,
nondenominational and nonpartisan and open to all".
Andy would have skimmed it towards the
busted toilet, but the little man looked like he might have need of it, wrong
as it might be, so he handed it back and everybody watched the television until
the late Thursday news came on. After
the muted imagery of the Sanctuary broadcasts, this was almost a novelty.
"This is Bobby Weeks," said
the male announcer with the blue blazer and big hair after his music faded
down..."
"And I'm Marla Segretti," chimed in his even grander-coiffed
co-anchor, eliciting a chorus of obscene hints and suggestions...
"And this is Eleven at
Eleven!" finished Weeks. "At the top of the news, Mayor Potter
declared today that, with help from the Governor, Federal
forces under the Patriot Act Revision Six, Insurrection Agency and the United
Nations, the city was being made safe for the opening of the convention
of the Coalition for a New Consensus tomorrow morning!"
Far away and unseen, in the Channel
Eleven newsroom, Nelson gestured to the console technician to bring up the
Mayor's press conference, which Tom Lavin had taped, earlier that day. The
rotund, sweaty profile of Pinhead brought groans and obscenities, not only from
Andy's own holding cell, but from others, all the way up and down the block.
"As the Coalition for a New
Consensus prepares for tomorrow's opening," Mayor Potter waxed triumphant,
"another united coalition of Federal, state and local law enforcement,
U.N. peacekeepers and community human rights observers under Reverend Malik
Owen is engaged in the difficult but necessary task of making our streets safe
for these distinguished visitors. With the co-operation of former Congressman
Jack Parnell, environmental activist Austin Tillerman,
businesswoman Rayna Finch and literally hundreds...
both Coalition staff and local volunteers... tomorrow morning will see the
opening of a safe and successful convention that can only reflect positively on
our City, and on all who live and work here..."
And then, for the seven seconds
allowed by the FCC, a swarm of animated vermin died horribly in a
quarter-screen pop-up touting the virtues of a brand-name insecticide...
someone at the station with a sense of humor, Andy nodded. Pinhead turned, his
porcine snout quivering with satisfaction as his lips, thick as turkey giblets,
pursed into a rigor mortis smile... "and,"
he added, "send the right message out to any employers thinking of doing
business here!"
"Four hundred a week," Disco
reminisced with a misty, distant smile.
“Dollars!… twentieth-century dollars!
Could take home a pizza every Sunday afternoon for the
game, on that!”
"Mayor Potter and Reverend Owen
stressed tonight," said Bobby Weeks, now back in focus and shaking the
papers he held authoritatively... though Andy noted his eyes were well above
them and slightly off to the right, probably reading from a monitor...
"that the civil rights of delegates, the press, people with no affiliation
to the Coalition who, nonetheless, have come here to lobby or to protest, even
local homeless who have, in the past, expressed objections to the Convention,
will be well protected."
And then Weeks dissolved and Malik
appeared, dark glasses bobbing on his nose like a car with bad shocks bouncing
down one of the neglected streets of the South End. "We got kitchens at
the church workin' overtime... we got the good folks
from the Living End and Pizza Factory lending us their ovens. We got plenty of
yesterday’s best Starbucks coffee and TastyKix
donuts; we've fixed up dinner for three hundred tonight, we'll do five hundred
tomorrow. Chicken and slaw, biscuits and beans... you know,” he grinned, “ – whenever Owen Malik comes
around, there’s gonna be a lot of beans..."
"He told all the reg’lars don't come in tonight," sighed the little
Costa Rican man in the second-tier bunk during the commercials for GenoSpin, the hormone for healthy fetal development (with
the doctors who emphasized it was not cloning), and Fowler's
Transmissions, "tomorrow night, all the way through to Sunday."
"In national news," Marla Segretti said, "relatives and supporters of Baby
Claire said that their dramatic appeal to the public has already raised over
three hundred thousand dollars. Doctors in Florida have agreed to perform the
difficult, experimental surgery if seven hundred forty-five thousand dollars
could be raised by the end of the week and father, Steven, a forklift operator,
said they'd make it, no matter what."
“Fucker still got a job,” snarled
Disco…
In the box over the newscaster's right
shoulder, a pop-up touted insurance, over his left shoulder appeared the head
of a man, somewhat balding but determined in a knit shirt with other men in
suits, maybe attorneys, looking over his shoulder. "We're
gonna do this!" said the man, presumably the father, straining as if to
drown out the insurance salesman. "We've sold the house, set up the
eight-eighty-eight number and the Internet site; if I have to, I'll drive all
the way to Hollywood to gamble my car. We're gonna do this!"
"Oughta
go to Malaysia!" commented Disco as another commercial aired – this one
for an ambulance chaser seeking victims for a class-action lawsuit against GenoSpin. "Doctors there fix your prostration for six hundred, cash... get you out of the hospital and back into
the whorehouse in three days. Three
days! Who needs the fuckin' Conks? Or Greece – the Don Jones people say that
country’s so damn bankrupt that doctors are cutting their fees to the bone…
good doctors… they slice and dice you and then you’re up and touring the
Parthenon in no time!"
From his bunk, Andy wished them all
the best, thinking of a remark he'd heard, or maybe glanced at in the Catfish
book, or read in today's Urinal... that was it! "So let a cry of: 'We're
from Washington, and we've got to do something!' go up at any
crisis-of-the-week," Jack Parnell had said, "and, folks... all I can
say is lock your daughters up..." then something else, finally
"because the politics of posture's on the march!"
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