Red Bells and the Bushmen
by
Phil Mershon
602 218 1649
Story is like the wind. It comes from a far-off place and we feel it.
—Motto of the Bushmen of the Uitspan Hunting Ranch
Part One
The Power of Scrambled Eggs
Chapter One
Bert Kerns died over the third weekend in June, 2024. He had tuberculosis, but it wasn’t the disease that killed him. He turned up sitting beneath the big old oak tree in the center of Pickaway Square Gallo Port Korea
I hear it isn’t all that odd for a friend to feel responsibility for a loss like this, in particular when the dead guy was as good a chap as old Bert was. I know that sounds corny as a cob, but he really was a friend of mine and he never hurt a soul on purpose. Well, nobody unless you count that no account ex-wife of his, a right tramp everybody knew as Judy Booty. He caught Judy Booty cheating on him with Royal Wunk, the television repairman from over in Washington Courthouse. That woman hadn’t been much to look at in the face, that was for sure. Like you might guess, she had a derriere that never seemed to end, which was maybe the best thing you could say about her. Oh, she was a clever one, don’t get me wrong. Bert was fond of saying that Judy had brains she never used. He’d grin when he said that, knowing you could take it two ways. In any case, I’m here to tell you there’s nobody could really blame my friend for throwing Judy out in her skivvies after she went and broke his heart the way she did with that shiftless stack of dog vomit Royal Wunk. If there was ever a guy who had a name stuck on that fit him like a Playtex glove, Royal Wunk was just that guy. He wore the tops of his pants so high they almost reached his underarms, he spray-painted the top of his head the same color his hair had been when it was thick back in third grade, and he had teased me uinmercifully when we were kids—teased me about my clicking when I spoke, not so much a speech impediment as a family tradition. He’d been in kids shoes back then. These days that balding bastard wore a pair of fancy leather boots that pretty much announced he was a big turd in a little bowl. When you saw last’s night’s spinach still clinging to that Rotarian Club smile of his, you knew his name before he ever told you, just like you knew that someday somebody was gonna catch him in bed with another man’s wife. Then you’d wonder why the dopey gal would be caught dead with a hump like Wunk. But I’m getting off the subject again. Damn senility. Well, like I say, Bert was a hell of a good guy in spite of punching that TV repairman right in the stomach and throwing his idiot wife out in the cold. She ended up selling—and this is no joke—seashells by the seashore two states over on Virginia Beach
Bert walked up to me as I was sitting over at Elroy’s Sunoco Station. I saw him coming from the corners of my eyes and I could tell right away that something bad was up with him because it wasn’t like him to butt in when I was catching up on my reading. I read. I’m a reader and I read what some people say is a lot and I don’t give a good God damn because I enjoy myself and what business is it of anybody what I do with what little spare time I have left? I’m sorry to be so wound up about this and I really need to stop digressing. It’s just that there are so many details that connect to one another and the story itself is an amazing thing and I want to set it out just right. Okay, alright, I’ll try to rein myself in and stop wandering. Well, this particular day of which I am talking, Elroy was out back taking a leak and my nose was buried in a book of baseball wisdom by Yogi Berra—Him? Oh, he was a dead and retired baseball catcher who had all kinds of clever things attributed to his wit, most of which he never actually said, but somehow it pleased people to give him credit—and I was just getting ready to spit out a watermelon seed that was threatening to choke me when up comes Bert with this look plastered on his face like a man who just lost his best friend. Under normal conditions, he would have seen me reading and rolled his eyes, cleared his throat, sat down and waited for me to take a break. But not this time, no sir. His shoulders were slumped almost down to his ankles. His surly smile was gone and in its place was a turned down horseshoe of a frown. His fingernails were digging into the flakes of skin on his arms and to put it short and sweet, he looked like death warmed over. I nodded hello and felt a chill in my bones as he took up a chair and grabbed my page-turning hand in one of his own. Those thick, long yellow fingernails of his dug right into me. His nails were so thick that he actually used them as screwdrivers when the need arose, which wasn’t really all that often. They were so thick it took a pair of tin snips to cut them.
I gave him a solemn look that I hoped said it had better be important, what with me reading this book of pure specific genius and general foolishness. I regretted giving him that look almost immediately. He shook the hand that held mine and told me he had just come from Doctor Seitz’ office. Rocky Seitz grew up here in Circleville just like most of us old farts did, even though Rocky himself was a good bit younger than his patients. He did real well in high school—salutatorian, I think it was—and he got himself a tennis scholarship, of all things. He went off to study medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus Columbus
He said, “Ain’t never going back to no doctor again.”
“That so?” I asked him, steeling myself from what looked to be some sort of fatal news. When somebody comes back from the doctor with a big old smile and you can hear the laughter in his voice, you don’t mind so much asking how things went. When a guy’s eyes are sparkling, it means he either had a good dose of painkillers or the news was positive. But when the look on the guy’s face reminds you of the Balkan Death Camps and his voice sounds like something calling out from the La Brea Tar Pits, you know it’s gonna be bad news and you try to brace yourself so that you can show sympathy and yet try to be optimistic for the other fellow’s benefit. All the same, I blurted out, “What’d he tell you? Cancer?”
“Naw, it ain’t cancer.”
“Brain tumor?”
“Naw, ya dumb hick. Ain’t no brain tumor.”
“What the hell is it, Bert? Pink eye?”
Bert said, “No, wise guy. You know what he told me? I’ll tell you right now. He told me I have TB.”
I have to admit I felt a little relief, even though at the age of eighty-eight you can’t take any news like that for granted. Before I could say anything about it though he squeezed my hand and told me how good it had been to know me all these years. I had to smile a little at that and broke into one of my mini-sermons, which by now you may have already come to suspect happens far too often. This is the kind of situation where you are secretly glad the other fellow is overreacting—glad, I say, because it puts you in a position to make the guy feel better. Bert was my friend. I loved the guy. We had grown up together, gone on double dates together, worked in the same Bulk Plant together and gone down and applied for retirement together. He was as fine a friend as I’d ever had.
I told him that tuberculosis wasn’t fatal. It wasn’t some death sentence. They had vaccines and antibodies and all kinds of cures for that these days and while it wasn’t good to have TB, it sure wasn’t the bad news his face was making it out to be. But old Bert, he just looked at me like I was the world’s biggest idiot and said that he didn’t plan to spend his golden years laying up in some treatment center and that he reckoned this was all God’s way of settling the score with him for the way he’d chased off Judy Booty forty years before because of her infidelity with Royal Wunk.
Now, truth be told, I wasn’t all that thrilled with Bert sitting there breathing on me and holding my hand that way, what with him having a case of TB which, despite all the modern day treatments, was still, last I heard, contagious in the extreme and not a nice thing to have. But hells bells, he was my best friend, so when that’s the situation you don’t worry about how it might affect you. You don’t worry as much as you would if it was some traveling salesman trying to unload Bibles and coughing up a lung all over you. I just pushed the thought about me getting sick and dying to the back of my brain and gave my friend what I hoped was a look of two parts sympathy and three parts wisdom. “Bert,” I said. “This ain’t the end of the world. Worse thing’ll happen is they’ll make you spend a week or two in the Berger Hospital and you’ll get one of them pretty candy stripers to give you a sponge bath every day, you lucky bastard. You’ll be back to boring us with your old stories in no time at all. Come on, what’d Doc Seitz really say?”
Bert went on looking at me like I might have just dropped in from some planet where people didn’t have enough sense to recognize bad news when it was staring them right in the eye. He sighed like it was causing him considerable discomfort and said, “He told me all that stuff you just said. What you and Rockwell Seitz don’t comprehend is that it’s the idea of that bad stuff buzzing around inside of me. When was the last time I was sick, Moe? Huh? I’ll tell you when it was. I ain’t been sick a day in my life. That means that if I’m sick now sitting right here next to you today, then that has to mean something. It has to mean something bad. Naw, I’m not going to take it. No way in hell. I’m not that kind of guy. If I still got this bad thing in me this time tomorrow, well, I know exactly what to do about it. I know just what to do.” Then he cleared his throat and I could hear—man, I could smell that sickness on him—and it was right then that I knew what I needed to do to help my friend. But the truth is I was scared. I was scared of the power. I was scared because the power was a new thing to me. I hadn’t known for sure that I had this ability until about two weeks before Bert came up that afternoon and I should have done something a lot more substantial than just telling him he was overreacting. Like, for instance, I should have done a better job of hiding my Phenobarbital. It’s too late now, of course. Bert is gone like a book you know you want to reread and can’t figure out where you left it. You look everywhere and you check with everyone you know but you just can’t find it. Then you curse yourself because you forgot to write your name in it. So now he’s gone and I’m here to deal with the future. And I’ve seen the future. I’ll tell you about it.
On June 1, 2024, about two weeks before Bert Kerns passed away, a big mess of things started happening that changed life as we used to know it on this here madly spinning orb. Most of you probably think things have always been the way they are today, but I’m here to tell you it all used to be different. The way it went was like this. Just a few breaths after midnight, June 1, Ohio
The news of this situation came to me over the talk radio station, the one I like to listen to as I’m trying to get to sleep at night. I listen to it almost every night even though you can’t believe most of it any more than you can the slop that comes over the TV set downstairs. It’s almost all a bunch of trumped up horse manure, everybody says it is, everybody knows it is, and yet we all keep right on listening and watching. All the same, this was one hell of a claim the radio announcer was putting out, so I turned the damn thing off and walked down the hallway in the dark and by touch I was able to find my old Moon Copter Telescope. What I knew about Jupiter at that time you could put under your pinky fingernail. I blew the dust off of it—the scope, not my fingernail—and got back over to my bedroom window. The fool on the radio had said that Jupiter was visible just to the left of the Moon. I saw what I knew had to be the big planet blazing up in the smelly sky. I lined up the Moon Copter and after fiddling around with it for a while I zeroed in. I hadn’t used the Moon Copter Telescope in a long time—How long had it been? Had it been during the first moon landing back in 1969? Yeah, that was it!—but after a few minutes I found the planet’s surface. Sure enough, there was just a big swirl of green and white where the Great Red Spot had loomed for centuries. I’m the first guy to admit I’m no astronomer, yet all the same, I knew the Red Spot had been there and now it wasn’t. It was gone. Puff.
That was the first thing and as far as I had known it was going to be the last. I mean, hell, it was more than sufficient. I put the scope away and treaded down the staircase. No way was I gonna get any sleep anyhow. I went to the refrigerator and took out a couple slices of bologna. They tasted foul as spoiled mincemeat so I washed them down with a glass of iced tea that had just started to turn bad. I spat all of this out and went into the living room and dropped down in front of the TV. I flipped on one of the dozens of lying news stations, planning to wait out the night. Aches and pains always hurt worse at night. Nobody knows why.
The next bizarre thing happened about two-thirty that morning. A barrel-chested bug-eyed bastard was on the TV in a shirt and tie and a two hundred dollar haircut screaming about how cosmic rays had caused the U.S. Army to turn gay except for a few Lieutenants who had presciently locked themselves in a titanium shelter. This was the kind of nonsense that passed itself off as information in those days. You’d sit there and nod while you ate chicken soup in your pajamas, knowing full well that in a couple hours time this same lying newscaster would come back on the air, shaking his head and sadly reporting that while this particular rumor had been disproved (and didn’t that just go to show you how you couldn’t trust people these days, especially what with all those cosmic rays beaming down on us? Slurp, slurp), but all the same a bunch of two-peckered goats were sodomizing one another in the middle of the Potomac River and wasn’t that just as bad if not worse? Oh, it was a freaky time to try to sort out fact from fiction, so even with the earlier proven news about the Great Red Spot, I was a bit doubtful of this man’s report that every black person of either gender aged sixteen years and above had suddenly developed a purple ring in the center of his or her chest and within that ring sat the thin lines of a perfect acute-angled triangle, this one the color green.
I unsnapped the top two buttons of my flannel shirt and peeked underneath. There it was: a flat purple circle with a green angle jutting out of its middle. I saw it and still did not quite believe it. You get so accustomed to being lied to that sometimes the truth—even truth that stares you in the face—is hard to believe. A man’s eyes are not always the best indicator of things, although usually that is all we have to go on. But I was clinging to the notion that this change was somehow unreal. After all, the guy on the TV was a semi-professional liar and I had taken a hell of a lot of illegal drugs in my life, some of them earlier that evening, so there was really no telling. I knew the TV man was a no good liar just like he probably knew it himself, just the way his mother and wife and children knew it, all of them sharing in the shame when they weren’t buying things they didn’t need at the store to take their minds off the embarrassment. All the same, I clicked the remote to the Telephone position and scanned down until I came across the name of Randolph Mosley. It was late. I knew he’d be unhappy. But I called him anyway. I screwed up immediately by calling him Randy. He had told me forty-eleven times that “randy” was an adjective and “Randolph
Things were kind of quiet for a spell then, except for the bad news that Bert was gonna lay on me but hadn’t yet, when just before dawn on June 21, not so much the longest day of the year but rather the one with the most daylight, Earth’s northern polar ice caps—which had over the preceding three decades shrunk to half the size that they were back in 1984—began to rebuild, and by the end of the night they were back to the dimensions they had possessed toward the end of the twentieth century. That was pretty important because of all the concern about global warming. I know today we take climate change for a pretty obvious condition, but for a long time people actually argued about whether it was some sort of political ploy or science fiction nightmare dreamed up by environmentalists so they could get paid to do research on it. So when the ice caps started to reform themselves after decades of thawing out, that really blew the minds of everybody with minds left to blow.
The weirdness continued. The physiology of dolphins, as of nine a.m. that first summer day, mutated so that all ten million of those that hadn’t been exterminated during the Big Dorsal Purge of twelve years earlier woke up to find themselves with tiny legs and external lung sacks that somebody said resembled the breasts of the well-endowed President of the United States and which enabled the intelligent sea creatures to spend time on land for short durations, during which water breaks they appeared to be plotting some type of shoreline coup d’etat against the erstwhile leaders of the planet, not that anybody seemed to mind very much. I had felt very bad about the Big Dorsal Purge because dolphins had always struck me as highly pleasant creatures, much more so than the orangutans from Borneo that some folks said were ninety-nine percent similar to humanoids, at least before those orangutans took over Plymouth, Michigan, and then the story changed to how human beings were ninety-nine percent similar to the great apes.
All this was a lot with which to come to terms. Some wiseacres used to say, “Change is good” with a perky lift on the word “good,” the kind of ageless balderdash you’d expect in this spinning nuthouse world of ours, despite the obvious fact that change is actually neutral and it is the results of change that are either good or bad or both. So I was reeling from the aftereffects of this new pack of sensations when just before noon that fateful day, I was stricken with the power to alter things without the use of medicine, psychotherapy, modern tools, electricity, radiation, or any of the other methods in common practice in those days. All I had to do was clear my mind of excessive nonsense (easier said than done), focus my thoughts on what it was I wanted to see happen, get all worked up emotionally, and within a few seconds that thing would exist in just the way I wanted. If I had told anyone about this, chances are they would have booked me a small room in a big hospital. Well, it was odd, I’ll admit, but not any more peculiar than all the other weirdness going on in the galaxy around the same time.
It came about just as sudden as all the other changes had come about. I was having my breakfast the morning after all this other stuff happened. I was over at Lucado’s Restaurant on Court Street—I like Henry Lucado’s scrambled eggs and toast—it wasn’t exactly Italian fare but then again Henry was about as Italian as the Black Panthers—and I was reading the late edition of the Herald newspaper—one of the few papers left in the state—when Henry comes over to my table and says he’s going to be closing up early today because, the way he figures it, the world is coming to an end and there was no reason for him to miss it just because of business that he didn’t care about anyway. At that time a lot of people obsessed over the notion that we were living in the “last days.” In fact, the fretting fever about the end of time was so pervasive that you had to watch what you said sometimes or else certain alarmists would misconstrue your meaning. Like, you couldn’t say, if you were all exasperated, “If it’s the last thing I do,” because if you did, it could be taken the wrong way and people would say you were hinting that the end was near. Another expression you had to stay clear of was “What’s this world coming to?” and you never wanted to say, “That’s his cross to bear.” Words with apocalyptic or even religious overtones could send even reasonable people into screaming fits of paranoia. So anyhow, I looked up at Henry and smiled patiently since there wasn’t much else I could do at that point. He smiled back as he sat down beside me and leaned his mouth in toward my ear and whispered, “I put something special in the eggs this morning. Everything is just right. You won’t thank me today. Some day you will. Enjoy.”
I thanked him just for spite and with that he got up and hung the CLOSED sign in his window and never did return to take it down. I was hungry as a pothead, so I ate the scrambled eggs and locked up for Henry. I wasn’t in any hurry to go back home because it felt like the conditions Henry had hinted at must have been just right at that. I patted my stomach, impressed with my condition. I felt downright strong and confident and at peace with myself and everything else in this madcap world. I had a buoyancy in my heart that had not been there for a long time. All the same, I didn’t really think of things as being different inside of me. I just felt nice and full. I went outside and smiled up at the brown clouds drifting between myself and the noonday sun. I hiked up my pants and decided to walk off the breakfast.
I didn’t get much more than twenty feet from the back door of Lucado’s when I spied Old Lady Maxwell hobbling down the sidewalk with that ugly old walker of hers pushed out in front of her trembling legs. A baggy flower-print dress hung from her knobby shoulders down to just past her shaking knees. A pair of nylon stockings were rolled like baby elephant skin at her ankles. Her big black shoes looked like something an orthopedist had tossed in his trash bin. She had a pair of reading glasses hanging by a chain around her neck. If I’d have looked closer, I might have seen her hanging from a chain, that’s how worn out she appeared. Poor old Margaret, I thought. How in hell was she going to survive in this unstable world where dolphins invaded state houses and planets changed complexions and people like myself grew tattoos overnight? How could a person even talk to her about those things? If I had walked over and asked what she thought about the North Pole coming back to life, she would have wet her drawers right there on Court Street. She had gone a bit soft in the head in the last few years, some days remembering details the rest of us had forgotten and other times not remembering where she had left her front door. But son of a gun if she hadn’t been some kind of beauty back in high school. Who am I kidding? She had been a lot more than beautiful. She had been the kind of girl who didn’t get by only on her formidable looks but rather the kind who also knows the answers to the algebra problems and who looks forward to French class and who helps out her less pretty and far less gifted girlfriends with their homework and who never one time acts snotty about being a clear cut above most of her classmates. Yet there she was, inching along the sidewalk, having one hell of a hard time making it off the Court Street footpath to the Howard Avenue
I still had that image of her from those teenage days of long ago in my mind as I walked over to lend her a hand, not that I thought for a minute she’d let me. Even as a high school senior she had been independent to a fault, sometimes even getting herself in danger when tough guys sniffed around and she’d get scared. She’d get real scared, but she never cried out for help. She’d just run on those perfectly pronated legs of hers.
What with her being such an independent type, I’ll admit to a little nervousness as I laid a hand on one of hers, one that gripped that walker. I didn’t want to take her by surprise, but she was half deaf so it was hard not to catch her a little off guard. She looked up at me with a most terrified countenance. For a second I thought maybe I had imagined that spasm of fear because it left her eyes in a flash and what came over those witnessing orbs was the look as she had been seventy-odd years earlier, back when she soared with the wind at her back, when the biggest problem she’d had to worry over was whether she’d go to the dance with which one of the twin Dover brothers. God, she was beautiful. She looked up at me. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile and as I did, that bend in her back, that grip on the spine that taunted her with failed dreams, with disappointments just dissolved and dispersed, went away clean and was gone, a lot like the way that Big Red Spot vanished from Jupiter hours earlier. Her frightened look faded as she straightened up and as she unstiffened I swear on my birthplace that those track lines in her face and on her hands and arms—those lines that had screamed she would never find her pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and that only fools tried—those bastard lines lost their power and dissolved, revealing her as a young woman, as the young woman inside her that had refused to die. Somehow she had kept a tenuous hold of her earlier self. Somehow, despite all the television lies and screaming headlines and threats of doom, the girl in her had stayed on life support. Maybe this was the young woman I remembered or perhaps it was the woman she had always been deep down. You can never trust your recollections one hundred percent since your own fantasies color things one way and reality never has a fresh paint job. Whatever the case, she was a damned sight closer to her young beauty than she had been a minute earlier.
If I couldn’t put faith in my eyes, I sure could hear it in her voice. “Good morning, Maurice. You’re looking well today.”
It was as if some rare bird had flown into my frame of vision and displaced Margaret Maxwell with this young female we’d known long ago as Margie. For some people maybe it’s a rainbow that sucks breath out of their lungs. Maybe it’s a baby’s first giggle or a sunset or a rookie hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. For me, it was looking at Margie Maxwell as she looked back at me, her eyes wide and unwilling to blink. “Can’t imagine,” she sang. “I cannot imagine why this walker is here. That is the last thing I’ll ever need.” As she breathed out those words, she let loose with a laugh. Lord, it was a laugh we have all heard in our young and old days alike. It was the laugh of a girl up on the hill in the throws of indescribable cheer over nothing more or less important than the grasp of the universe around her. It was the laugh of a child sitting next to his father on a rollercoaster ride as the dad turns green with nausea. It was the laugh of lovers tickling one another on the sofa during a solemn moment in the motion picture they are watching. Margaret—Margie—laughed just like that and then went on her way up the incline toward her house, leaving that walker alone on the sidewalk beside me. I still freeze in my bowels when I remember the transformation.
I stood there on Howard Avenue
I looked up into the big, late afternoon Ohio
I didn’t know what else to do, so I turned around and walked back down Court Street, hands shoved deep in my pockets, head a little low, mind absorbed with trying to figure out if what I’d just seen had really happened or if I was at long last giving in to the pangs of senility, a concern I’d been dealing with off and on since I’d retired from the Bulk Plant twenty-three years earlier. If a man can’t stay busy after he gets his gold watch, he’s apt to go crazy pretty quick. A lot of guys do just that. Rocky Seitz told me way back last year that I needed to keep my mind occupied or else he’d stop by one day for a visit and find me counting my toes. I had a big laugh at that at the time, but the truth was he knew what he was talking about because going nuts kind of ran in my family. Oh, I knew about Ma going off for long walks out in the woods back of her house after Pa had run off with that decorator from up Columbus
I never had any brothers or sisters, at least not in the sense of them coming from my Ma or Pa. But I sure had a mess of goofy relatives, mostly on my mother’s side. One of the craziest was Jim Shoemaker. He was my mother’s brother. I called him Uncle Jim. He worked for the railroad. That was a means of transportation that ran on steel tracks and always seemed like it was running later than you wanted. Uncle Jim was what they called the engineer. It was his job to steer the train, which was kind of odd since the train was on tracks, like I said. If you were moving, you could only go backwards or forwards. It didn’t seem like that complicated a job to me. Well, Uncle Jim, he liked to walk around and talk to the passengers while the train was in motion. He wanted to make sure everybody was having a pleasant ride. They would have probably had a much more pleasant experience if Jim would have stayed up front and just tended to his business. More than once he rammed that railroad train right into the rear end of the caboose of a train that had stopped ahead of him. After about the third or fourth time this happened, the railroad company had to let Uncle Jim go, meaning they fired him. He started hitting the bottle pretty heavy after that. The last time my family saw him he was screaming at the door of an elevator in a big office building. He kept telling the elevator door it was going in the wrong direction. Some soft-spoken men in lavender suits came along and we never saw Jim after that.
At the same time there had been Aunt Nettie Shoemaker. Now she was one for the books. She had herself convinced that every woman in Pickaway County
So I was more than a little upset that afternoon as I was moping my way down Court Street, worrying that just possibly the Mad Hatter was about to hang his jangling cap on my head so I could join the tea party. I was so beside myself that I walked right past Henry Lucado and he must have called my name a bunch of times before he finally took me by the sleeve and gave me a little shake.
“Moe! Moe, for God’s sake, you look like a ghost. Didn’t my breakfast sit well with you?”
I looked hard into his eyes, trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. My scalp tingled and my blood sugar was scraping bottom. What had he just asked me? Breakfast? What? Oh, right, right. He had served up some scrambled eggs that morning, sure, just like half the mornings over the past twenty some odd years. Right, I knew that. Where was my head? “Henry,” I said. “Your eggs were just fine. Just fine. No, I just—Henry, I’m getting old.”
He dropped my sleeve and said, “Boy, we’re all getting old. Beats hell out of the alternative, huh?”
I was gonna tell him I’d heard that line about as often as I’d eaten his eggs. His eyes caught a stray ray of wanton sunlight, though, and the old proprietor looked like he was trying to say something with those eyes instead of with his mouth. I’d had enough strangeness for one lifetime. I was feeling sick, so I made to get back to walking on when he reached out and took me by the shoulders. He said, “I picked you for this project and you can’t let me down, damn you. Now you listen here. The universe is messed up bad. Been getting worse and worse ever since I can remember. Now things are breaking apart. You know it and I know it. A man can’t hardly see the sun these days. Pollution’s so bad a man’s got to be a freak just to survive. Schools are shutting down. The police lock up jaywalkers while a bank’s getting robbed right behind them. It’s the universe, Moe. It’s screwed up. We’ve seen it coming for a long time and now it’s here. But there’s always a way out. Always. I may have been wrong, but I picked you. I don’t exactly know why I picked you. I knew somebody had to be selected. I was staring out the window, trying to find the planet that lost its spot. Jupiter? Yeah, that one. I was looking for that with my pair of binoculars and all a damned sudden: WHAMO! The image of you filled my head, Moe. Soon as that happened, it made perfect sense. It had to be somebody a little twisted, but somebody most folks like. Somebody who sees the world for what it is and not for how he wants it to be. Besides, you ain’t all that crazy. You got more sense than your mama. You, Moe. You have been selected. Now you need to get out there and do what needs to be done. But don’t you go questioning yourself. You know what to do, boy. Get on about it.”
With that he let go of me, his eyes still twinkling, his mouth nice and still. He let me go with a little push and eked his way up Court as if he had some place to go. I shouted after him, “What am I supposed to do? What are you talking about, Henry?” He must not have heard me.
Henry Lucado. What did I really know about him? Was he crazier than I felt I was? How did I feel anyway? Blood sugar back up, tingling all gone. I felt great. My mind was at peace. The harsh air no longer burned at my lungs when I took in big breaths of air. The skin on my arms had a radiance that I had not seen there in years. My joints didn’t hurt. They felt limber! My spine actually felt artful and strong. Yet I was definitely the same old Moe Washington
The dusty shops selling souvenirs and liquor and microwave meals stared back at me without comment. The hardware store across the street boasted a sale on roof nails. Some woman named Tiffany wanted to paint fingernails. The Western Auto store was doing a brisk trade selling bicycles. Tiny Mitchell’s Realty Market glared out with a quiet hostility, the opportunities for things such as homes, businesses and other forms of realty having shifted up north Columbus way, to the extent that they existed at all. Tiny Mitchell looked up from his desk just as I was glancing in through his window with the painted words GO “BIG” WITH TINY MITCHELL forming an arch across the glass. Tiny loved that window sign. He must have washed and shined that glass five or six times a day to keep it as sparkling clear as it was. I was instantly sorry he had seen me. If I had been on my game I would have crossed to the other side of the street before I’d gotten this far. But he’d seen me and he’d seen that I’d seen him. He waved a remarkably enthusiastic and insincere hand at me. I opened his door and a little bell clanged. Tiny smiled at me. I smiled back. He motioned the chair across the desk from him. I pulled at my pants knees and sat down. He offered me a cigarette and I declined, although I don’t know why. If there was ever a person you wanted to blow smoke at, it was Tiny Mitchell.
“Glad you stopped in, Moe. Glad indeed. How the hell you been lately? Can’t recollect the last time we had you over for Pinochle.” There was a reason he could not remember. The reason was I had never played Pinochle with him or anyone else. I didn’t know the first thing about the game. I heard it involved a deck of cards. “Been wanting to talk to you for a coon’s age, Moe! How’s the world treating you?”
“It’s treating me about like a baby treats a diaper.”
Mitchell snorted and roared as if I was Richard Pryor in spite of the fact that he set me up for that line every time we met. “Moe, that doesn’t sound too good! No, sir-ree bob! Maybe I can clean up that diaper for you a little bit. You want a shot?” He tilted his head toward the tequila bottle standing proud and strong on the edge of his desk. I shook my head.
“Okay, Moe, let me get down to cases. I know the real estate business in Circleville hasn’t exactly been like fireworks the last few years and home prices are falling like, like, well, like I don’t know what.”
“Like a virgin’s pants on prom night?”
My suggestion was met with another round of snorts and roars. I should have been charging by the laugh.
Tiny cleared his throat and went on. “Okay, Moe, the thing is that there is always an upside to these things. Prices drop one place, they go up somewhere else. What was it my Daddy used to teach you all in Physics class? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? Okay, Moe, that’s how it is in this business too. Prices drop one place and go up some other place. Like your place, for instance.”
I stared at him. Sometimes a man just can’t believe the way other people think. I said, “You hear about all the strange things that have been happening, Tiny?”
“Strange?” he asked, looking as if the word made him uncomfortable. Strange might mean unmanageable and that, of course, would never do. “What do you mean, strange?”
“I mean the way Jupiter lost its red spot the other night. In less than half an hour. Ice caps rejuvenating. Dolphins taking over. Oh, and Bert Kerns died.” I gave him a hard look with that last one.
Tiny poured himself a shot and downed it. His face came up grinning. “That’s something, all right. But you know what I always say, Moe? I always say that I’ve got my hands full dealing with local real estate. Ha ha ha ha! You get it?”
I decided to take one of his cigarettes after all. If he could use the bottle of tequila as a prop, I could use a smoke stick. “Then there’s always the orangutans,” I said. “The ones fighting the dolphins in taking control of world capitals? I’m sure you’ve heard.”
He smiled. “Sounds like a game of Risk, huh? World domination! Ha ha ha ha!” By now his laughs were coming in fours. “But we were talking business, weren’t we? Yes.” He lit my cigarette and said, “We were talking about your place.” I could have told him the lepers were raping his bulldog and he wouldn’t have blinked.
I was halfway into hating the day of June 21, 2024. Too many things were happening and they were happening too fast for me. The day side of this twenty-four hours couldn’t pass by fast enough for me. I asked him exactly what he was talking about.
He looked at me the way a working girl looks at a young rich guy with a grin in his pants. He said, “It’s possible that I know of somebody that might be interested in buying that place of yours. Yes indeed I might.” I exhaled smoke over his head. He still didn’t blink. I wished I could pass wind. “Okay, Moe,” he said. “We been friends a long time, so before you tell me you’re not interested, just hear me out.” We had never been friends. His daddy had been a jerk and a lousy teacher to boot. Most teachers had had the decency not to laugh at the clicking I had made when I talked. Not Mr. Mitchell, though. He found the whole thing hilarious. I guess he passed his sense of humor onto Tiny. I knew what this dirt hole said about me behind my back. He went on, saying, “You got no family left here in town, right? No heirs waiting in the wings to suck dry your last dollar once you depart from this here mortal coil? No one to claim their so-called right to your estate, am I correct?”
I admitted that he was. I had been feeling so good for a while there.
“Okay, Moe, what I’m getting at is this. You got five acres plus your house. Now just suppose you were to find yourself sitting pretty with enough cash money on hand so that you could do any damned thing you wanted, huh? Go to Europe ? Go to Africa ? Hell, just fly around and around and stop wherever you wanted and stay in the nicest daggone hotels this side of the Taj Mahal. You’d have to fight off all those fine looking young gold diggers, but that’s not such a bad problem to have when you think about the amount of time you have left. No offense now Moe, but facts is facts, just like they say. You ever give any thought to what I’m saying?”
I nodded. “You know where I’d really like to go, Tiny? Where I’d like to spend what little time I have left?”
He leaned forward and cocked his head in the most sincere pose I have ever seen in a thief. “Tell me, Moe. Where?”
I said, “I would like to spend the rest of my life in the Federal Corrections Facility down in Chillicothe
My words were met with a final burst and spray of laughter. Ha ha ha ha. When he finally pulled himself together and stared back at my solemn face, he asked me why in the known world I would ever want to visit such a place.
“I would enjoy doing a life sentence for shooting you right between the eyes, you stinking, rotten, barnyard hayseed. Why don’t you tell that to the ‘somebody’ who wants to buy my plot out from under me?” With that I got up and walked out of Tiny Mitchell’s Realty Market. Damn, I was mad. I hated to get that angry, but it was hard not to when talking with a polecat of that sort. But then the strangest part of the whole scenario—and the reason I mention it at this point in the story—is that just a second or two before I slammed the door to Tiny’s office, his big glass window exploded out onto the street, jangling and crashing and splattering in a cascade of splintered color as pretty as anything I had seen since the inside of my kaleidoscope when I was a kid. By the time the last sliver had struck the sidewalk, Mitchell was out that office door of his, holding onto his head, shouting, “What’d you do, you crazy old bastard? What in hell’s wrong with you, you clicking freak? You break my window? You know how long I’ve had that window? What am I gonna do for a window? Why’d you do a thing like that to me? My winnnnnnnnnnndooooowww!”
I told him I didn’t do it, that I hadn’t had a thing to do with it, and that he was nutty as a fruitcake for even suggesting such a wild idea. But deep down I knew I was lying. I had done it. I just didn’t know how. All I knew was that it had something to do with polar ice caps and morphing black people and vanishing storms in outer space and land-bound dolphins and Henry Lucado’s scrambled eggs.
Chapter Two
The spring wheat fields shivered that night beneath a half moon of indifference. Maurice Washington would not have known what to call the long arm of frigid air that wafted along the powdery topsoil, lifting fallen pollens and setting down dry dust. The dark side of the half moon occupied itself with peeking out at the far away planet that had passed that way infinite times unchanged. Cool water ponds chilled beneath the twitching night sky, freezing over and thawing, freezing and thawing, many times throughout that long night of oblivion. Raccoons chattered, restless, nervous, sensing a shift in the landscape, with nowhere safe to scurry. The rabbits that hung around Maurice Washington’s backyard, down near the spoiling carrots that had been there since last fall, forgotten about and slimy, those rabbits nibbled on one another’s ears in silent frustration, the wind filling their furriness with an anticipation they did not recognize. Smells unnamed by scientists floated in and out of opened windows in the small town and across the flat country surrounding it. The farm bureau scientists, had they been out that particular evening, would have dismissed the readings their equipment blurped out. Nothing that night in Circleville and in a thousand towns just like it was the way it had been, nothing moved with the earlier certainty, nothing yawned with the former complacence, and nothing reached with the same expectation.
One thing in particular had been changed in the wake of these cosmic reshufflings. The red bell peppers served in Henry Lucado’s restaurant had mutated. To the taste they offered a sharp sweetness, somewhere between the lick of an apricot and the cold metal of a straight razor. To the eyes the redness blazed in its proud audacity, even under the half moon light. The seeds inside trembled with desire. The taste came to one’s mouth before the skin of the fruit was even cracked. The potency of the fruit swelled wild and untamed, so confident in itself that hopping creatures and those that crawled alike were unable to so much as approach the peppers as they grew in Marybeth Gowan’s farm. Powered by their own intent, they existed for the humans alone to experience. Henry Lucado, the enthusiastic restaurateur who had commented on their appearance had been privileged with the first taste. It had stung him like a wasp in the mouth, one that refuses to give up until at last it is swallowed. His sense of awareness—one which was far more reality-based than his neighbors ever sensed—was ignited and in an instant he had known he must select one person to protect the world from the awfulness that loomed nearby, taunting the frightened people and animals in its invisible wake across the land.
He had selected with care. Moe Washington
Henry got as far as the county line. His 2019 Mercury Stabilizer blew a rod and the electric motor sputtered, spat and made more noise than the worst of those old internal combustion engines of not so long ago. Then the stupid thing drew back and just heaved one last time before two of the factory warranteed wires heated through their rubber coating, connected, caught fire, and launched a spark back to the reserve tank of compressed natural gas. It took maybe one long stretch of a second, Sheriff Radcliffe told us, for that whole little car to turn into a huge fireball, leaping something like twenty feet in the air and landing just inside the home track of the Pickaway-Ross county marker.
It was one thing to think about colossal abstractions like Red Spots and ice caps and sea mammals or whatever. It was a whole different kettle of fish, so to speak, for two people we all knew to up and die so close together. My folks had been Presbyterians, so I wasn’t a religious man, but even I was beginning to ask myself questions about coincidence and fate. Sometimes I get lost in thought that way and this time I was staring at Elroy without knowing it. He snapped his fingers in front of my face and asked me if I was checking out his derriere. Elroy truly prided himself on being the local comic. Timing is everything.
Elroy topped off the sheriff’s tank with Ethanol. The Sunoco proprietor was actually a corn farmer, but he figured he’d cut back on his expenses (or add to his revenue, I could never remember which) by franchising for the Sun Oil Company. Sunoco paid his processing costs and even sent out engineers and inspectors from time to time to make sure El didn’t need a hand, which he didn’t. It was a sweet deal all around and pretty much every Ethanol-fueled automobile driver in the area patronized his station. The state law said that Ethanol had to be pumped by a licensed dealer, so Elroy got himself a license and because I liked to hang out there and read my books, he got me a license as well. It didn’t take any special talent to fuel up a rig with Ethanol, any more than it had to gas up with gasoline. But who was I to argue? I pumped and in return I could take up space and chat with folks who needed a fill-up and drink all of Elroy’s soda pop that I could handle. And let’s not forget my major joy in life: reading. I actually gave the matter some thought and it came to me that reading a book on baseball was just plain inappropriate at a time like this. The only reason I really considered it was because I had been sort of angry with Henry for “selecting” me. I was angry with him for dying without explaining himself. I was angry at him for dying, period. A man doesn’t have that many friends. Good ones are even rarer.
Sheriff Radcliffe hadn’t much more than left the station when Bert Kerns came up with his news about the tuberculosis. After he moseyed away, I sat and thought about what had been happening and what my responsibility to improving things might be. With Henry Lucado dead, I was gonna have a hard time finding out what he’d put in my eggs. But by gum he had added something. He had “selected” me for something. He had chosen me because things needed to be fixed and because, even with a family history of silliness, I was still somewhat acceptable to the local folks, excepting an overfed realtor with a broken store front window. Looking back on it, of course, I wish I had kept a better eye on my barbiturate stash. If I had, well, I don’t have to spell it out. How does it go? “If things were different then they wouldn’t be the same.” That was in Yogi’s book.
Things were a mess in the world, there was no doubt about that. In the New United States alone we had gone through three Presidents in the last two years, one dead from an assassination, his successor impeached and jailed, and the current commander in chief a nice enough woman but the leader of a political party with about as much credibility as a chain smoker in a cancer ward.
And speaking of the government, some well-intentioned clown a few years back decided that public school children weren’t learning enough in twelve years and so what we needed was not so much better schools but ones that kept students for an additional two. As it turned out, it was hard enough to convince young people that there was any value in going to school at all beyond the tenth grade; the notion that most of them would be twenty-years-old before they graduated was just too much and the immediate result became an eighty-five percent drop-out rate among American high school students.
Good jobs were harder than ever to find, unless a person wanted to work in the outer space business. You had to hand it to the Chinese. Oh, I know a lot of people in my neck of the woods were mighty pissed when Dung Myk-Jung decided to make a bid on the U.S. China United States United States California
Lord, those jobs did come. Anyone with at least a tenth grade education who could pass an easy physical examination was eligible for a job in space work. According to the Circleville Herald of June 1, 2024, twenty-nine million five hundred thousand Americans held jobs in the private sector of space travel. Of course, not each and every one of those men and women actually got off the ground. Lots of them worked behind the scenes in button pushing and knob polishing capacities. Not only that, but stories trickled in once in a while about really bad working conditions out there on unregulated Jupiter. But better than one in one hundred of the people willing to work for NASA found out what it was like to leave Earth’s atmosphere. The Chinese Fascist government recruited a German administrator name of Ernest Eichmann to be the head of NASA. Eichmann was wildly popular out here in the rurals for his anti-immigration hiring policy. His first rule was that if an applicant didn’t have at least three preceding generations of natural born citizenship, that person was informed not to waste his time in the job line at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Having been on the raw end of discrimination myself, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with that policy but, as usual, I was in the minority.
Naturally there would never have been such a demand for labor had it not been for the discovery of fuel on Jupiter. Once again, those Chinese were a few steps ahead of us. It turned out that all those swirling gases, all that hydrogen and helium that had obscured astronomers’ views of the largest planet for millennia, well, it turned out those gases were masking an actual repository of Vludium deep down in the planet’s core. Vludium was the newly discovered wonder fuel that was revolutionizing the way Earthlings powered their cars, planes, homes and gardens. Already one in nine new cars manufactured in Atlanta , Georgia Ohio
All the same, I have to confess that I was a little skeptical about the Chinese takeover. I mean, any kind of big change like that is bound to leave an old timer such as myself a bit weary. One thing I did know: smart as he was, nothing in the book Yogi Berra had written was going to help me figure out what Henry had put in those eggs, much less what it had done to me. That being said, I did what any other eighty-eight year-old man in my condition would do. I broke into the restaurant.
I don’t want to make it sound like that big of an operation on my part. Truth is, it wasn’t all that hard. After all, I did have a key to the place. Still, I waited until long after dark, holding a flashlight in one hand and my cane in the other. I didn’t really need the cane, but my thinking was that if I got caught, a cane might be good for the sympathy vote. For that matter, I had a couple explanations planned, just in case I needed them. The first idea I came up with was that, before he died, Henry had asked me to stop by a couple times that night just to make sure the joint wasn’t getting burglarized. In the event that I couldn’t get that set of words out of my mouth, I could always tell the deputy or the Sheriff himself that I’d forgotten to lock up earlier and raced over to Lucado’s to tend to that detail when all at once I realized I needed to use the restroom. Or I suppose I could have just told them I was looting the place. It probably wouldn’t have mattered.
As it happened, none of those contingencies was necessary. The key worked just fine and my Chinese-manufactured Lite ‘n’ Dark Infrared Flashlight lit up the inside of the restaurant mighty nice. Chances are the law enforcement folks were busy breaking up local small-time radical organizations that had sprung up in response to the formation of the New United States. There were some folks on both the left and the right who didn’t like the new way and they kept Radcliffe and his boys busy. Even without worrying about that, I still felt jangly. There is something inherently creepy about walking through a closed-up greasy spoon at three in the morning, especially when you got no legitimate business being there. I’d left the chairs all upside down on top of the tables and I’d wiped down all the booths. Not a note of music piped out of Henry’s ratty old speakers. The taste of disinfectant hung in the air thick enough to kill the most treacherous bacteria. All those observations coalesced in my thinking and it struck me that it’s kind of curious how when you’re in a place that’s dark, even if you know the place as well as I did Lucado’s, you still move slow so you avoid cracking your knee on the edge of something that an idiot repositioned even if that idiot is yourself. I swung my flashlight across the dining room and found it deserted, true to form. I hooked my cane in my belt loop and tread back through Henry’s kitchen and into his pantry. Henry had been a big one for labeling things. He had a section marked for seasonings, spices, toppings, tenderizers, garnishes, fillers, and additives, but not one blessed thing saying “Special powers to use in the event the world goes nuts.”
I tried to remember what was so special about the taste of those fine scrambled eggs he’d served me. I knew how he normally made them. Beat two eggs into a mixing bowl with a fork, plop in half a cup of milk, pour it on the grill and dabble in a tablespoon of cottage cheese and chives. Sometimes he’d spruce it up with a pinch of garlic or maybe he’d go wild and sprinkle in some blue cheese. But God knew he wasn’t gonna spare the chives. Practically everything Henry ever cooked had chives in it, except possibly his apple pie, and even with that there was no way to be sure. Funny bugger that he was, he had chives in every one of his marked-off sections. I guess he figured they were good for seasoning, tenderizing and garnishing all at the same time. But those eggs: they had had an unusually sweet taste, something that wasn’t quite sugar or honey and wasn’t enough like cinnamon to be related to that. It didn’t have enough tang to be paprika or cayenne pepper. What the blazes could it have been?
I closed the pantry door and turned to head back to the kitchen when the tip of my cane got caught on the flap of a box of produce sitting next to a chopping table. It didn’t make any kind of logical sense to check, but there are those who still swear by divining rods, so I figured if my cane had more sense than I did, the least I could do would be to check and see what was in that box.
Red bell peppers. I held one up to my nose and knew for sure. Something I’d forgotten came back to me just that fast: I had seen little pieces of something red in the scrambled eggs and hadn’t given them the slightest thought. Everything Henry made always hit the spot, so I’d gotten out of the habit of even thinking about questioning his recipes. A guy gets hungry, he goes to a restaurant, orders food, gets it brought to him, eats it, pays for it, and doesn’t even slow down to think about how much better he feels. Red bell peppers were no stranger than anything else Henry might slip into his eggs, just to see how it went over.
Red bell peppers. I’d seen those things my whole life, of course. But there was something very odd about this one. It had a faint glow, even in the dark. Its feel was different, too, kind of like holding a ball of slime that had hardened over. And something inside it seemed almost alive, shivering to get out. Henry, what the hell did you have here?
I shoved the pepper into my shirt pocket and hoisted the rest of the carton up on my shoulder, leaving Lucado’s otherwise just the way I’d found it, tossing the fruits in the trunk of my Challenger and returning to lock the place back up.
Red bell peppers. How many times had I eaten such things over the years? One hundred? One thousand? Ten thousand? I’d always loved the taste. It never once crossed my mind that there might be something extra special about them. Or that years of eating the sweet things might actually have meant something.
Back at my house I put my ill-gotten goodies in the refrigerator and scurried over to the gardening section of my home library where I finally settled on Jasper Hedges’ definitive Fruits You Thought Were Something Else. Deep in the book I read that bell peppers, which the people around my neck of the woods had often referred to as “mangoes,” had been around for better than 5,000 years, originating in South and Central America . Matter of fact, it was Chris Columbus himself who brought a big bag of seeds back to Spain with him, thereby introducing what he mistook for traditional pepper to the Eurasian continent. One of the things that set bells apart from the spicy type of pepper was the showing in the bells of what they call a recessive gene that killed off something called capsicum, the stuff that gives regular peppers their flame. Jasper Hedges listed all the known nutrients and the ones that jumped out were Vitamins A and C (neither of which had been shown to let a person change old women into young ones or shatter windows just by force of will, and my apologies to Linus Pauling), lycopine, zeaxanthin, and something called xanthophylls, also known as beta-cryptoxanthin. This last nutrient had been scientifically proven to enhance eyesight in cataract sufferers and also looked to be promising in warding off lung cancer in heavy smokers. Beyond that, there was little encouraging data and I was getting ready to bail on the whole idea when I unstuck a pair of pages and saw that there was a word or two mentioned about pre-Columbian uses of red bells. I now quote from page 122 of Hedges’ manuscript:
Indian tribes along the mountainous borders of Brazil and Uruguay
I didn’t know for sure what I knew, but I did know I was on the right track.
The problem was that lots of people ate red bell peppers every day and so far as I could tell not a one of them grew any special powers the way I had. I wondered if you had to mix them with some of Henry’s chives, but that didn’t make any particular sense. Somehow he had gotten hold of a very special variety of sweet pepper.
The box the bells came in was marked Marybeth’s Fresh Fruits. The address in letters so tiny I had to put on my reading glasses was local, a whole foods farm just off Lancaster Pike. I copied the address in my little notebook and decided to visit this Marybeth individual the very next day.
Chapter Three
Back when Bert Kerns and Henry Lucado and I were all kids together, say maybe around the age of seven or eight, back when I still had to concentrate so that I didn’t click too much when I talked, one of us, probably Henry, started spreading the idea that there was such a thing as magic food. It was a curious idea, that one was, that if a person ate a lot of certain foods, he or she would not only be stronger than the average bear, but might even just possibly if he played his cards right and didn’t get run down by a train just go right on and live forever. Being kids, Bert and I suggested that the magic foods were things like ice cream and candy bars, but Henry, being even at that age more culinary-minded than the rest of us, he shook his head and spat and told us no, it wasn’t sugary things that would keep us alive but instead foods he happened to like. He convinced us that radishes, for example, if eaten in the proper quantities, added some ingredient to the bloodstream that would fight off any disease known to mankind. Likewise, raw yellow onionskins, if flash fried in natural butter, was guaranteed to so improve a guy’s memory that pretty soon he’d be able to recollect details from the day he was born. And green olives, sans pimento, if eaten by the handful every day, would make a boy wildly attractive to the opposite sex, while presumably doing something similar for young ladies. Henry was also big on garlic and vinegar as foods that would ward off infection, and, truth be told, until that last day of May when Bert came up to me outside Elroy’s Sunoco station, I never knew either one of those fellows to be sick a day in their lives. Eighty-eight years old and neither one ever missed a day of work, ever missed a day of school, ever missed out on anything that I’d heard about. As for myself, I was a bit less of the fanatic about my diet. When the three of us had talked about magic foods, I’d thought of it as just a kid’s game and nothing more. All the same, I did like my fruits and vegetables right along with my can after can of Circle-Cola.
It was true. I’d have a can with breakfast, a can with lunch, two cans with dinner, plus I’d sneak in a couple more here and there so that by day’s end I had gulped down at least a six pack and sometimes a little bit more. Around town, everybody more or less joked about how much of the stuff I drank, but at the same time it seemed to distract them all from the occasional click sound I made when I was feeling stressed out. Now I’ll be the first to admit that such a heavy concentration of caffeine and sugar might account for why I had trouble sleeping nights, but Doc Rocky, he told me, he said, hell, you gotta die of something so it might as well be something you enjoy. But there was more to it than that. There was a lot more. Right after the first of the twentieth century, Circle-Cola and a few other of those things that we nowadays refer to as soda pop, they were marketed as remedies for what ailed you. Naturally, when people said, hey, I wonder what it is that’s so good for you in a soft drink, it turned out that the amphetamine in Circle-Cola tended to give a fellow a bit of a lift, but that by and large it was nothing more or less than the carbonated water that made people so convinced that what they were drinking was a real health treat. After a few decades passed by, the head honchos at Circle-Cola started concentrating all their energies on manufacturing the “product” or “formula,” which was just in-house terms for the solid material that the bottlers added actual carbonated soda water to in order to make the real elixir. And that formula was a well guarded secret for a lot of years. Some wise acres used to taunt me by saying that I couldn’t tell the difference among Circle-Cola and Pepsi and Royal Crown and Coca-Cola, but those smart alecks was full of something other than cola beans, because I would set up my own blindfold test and show them wrong every time.
Well, the long and the short of it is that Circle-Cola, or Double C as we sometimes called it, was a mighty popular drink in the central Ohio area for better than a hundred years, Coke and Pepsi and all those other boys never quite making it the poor man’s beverage they’d hoped it would become. Marybeth Gawon had worked at the Circle-Cola plant right there just outside of town for better than forty years before she retired to a life of raising her own popular brand of organic fruits and vegetables.
I dropped by Marybeth Gowan’s farm that next morning to do a little friendly inquiring. From the looks of things, I took Mrs. Gawon to be somewhere near her late sixties, but when I pulled up in my Dodge Challenger, before I could even get out and shut my door I heard her bellowing at her helpers with the force of a woman half that age. “Claude, you lazy miscreant! You haven’t got sense enough to pound sand in a rat hole! Take that bushel of carrots to the back of the pick-up and get on down the road! I hope you don’t think they’re going to drive themselves! Larry, you brain damaged fruit loop! That’s a hoe you’re holding, not a shovel! Lord in heaven, it’s a wonder I haven’t gone broke with lunk heads like you boys working here! Hop to it! Chop-chop!”
Her two field hands just grinned and nodded and kept on about their business, tipping their hats as I walked by them to extend my shaking hand to Marybeth Gawon. “Morning, ma’am,” I said, removing my own hat and waiting for her to dust off her hand before slapping it firm into my own.
“Maurice Washington, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mrs. Gawon. How are you this fine day?”
“Little busy trying to keep those idiots from driving me to the poorhouse. Never too busy to set a spell and chew with an old friend, though. Take yourself a seat, Mr. Washington
Once she made to do the same I straightened out an old sun-battered lounge chair and tried to lean forward in it. “How’s the crops this season, ma’am?”
She took a pair of small silver-framed lenses out of her apron pocket, polished them on the hem of her dress and perched them on her nose, regarding me over their tops. Looking back at her, I got the idea that she’d heard every line of bullshit ever uttered and had spread some of it herself as needed. “Just fine, thank you,” she said. “I expect this to be a record season in organics. People’s sick and tired of gnawing on that wormwood that passes itself off for food these days. Genetically modified pig slop. Here, taste this apple.” She plucked a red delicious out of her smock pocket and fired it to me like a pitcher throwing to first base. I caught it barehanded and sunk my teeth into it.
“Bet you haven’t tasted one that perky and sweet in thirty years, eh?”
She was right. Biting into that apple was like somebody had placed a cold washcloth over my face. I had been so tired from lack of sleep that I was struggling to keep my thoughts straight. I took a couple bites of that apple of hers, grown in her orchard about half a mile back off the main road, and daggone if I didn’t feel more clearheaded right off.
“It’s very good, Mrs. Gawon,” I said, trying hard not to click. “Funny enough, that’s kind of why I stopped by today. You grow bell peppers here, don’t you?”
She tipped her head back and looked at me right through her tiny glasses. “I do. Been raising bells since back in the days when some fools called them mangoes.”
“I had one of your red bell peppers the other day. It was—amazing.”
Now she was the one leaning forward. “They turn red if you leave them on the vine long enough. That’s when they’re at their peak. I’m delighted you enjoyed it. How do you know it was one of mine?”
“It was in my scrambled eggs. I eat most mornings at Lucado’s.”
Her lips formed a straight line. “Henry Lucado? One of my best customers. Always paid on time and never bitched about an order. Tragedy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Who’s going to tend his restaurant now?”
She was a smart old bird. I had to give her that. “I really don’t know, ma’am. His kids have all moved away. Arizona
She looked at me until my cheeks grew warm. I blinked and she stood and motioned me to my feet. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said. I walked alongside her back around behind her barn, past a pair of silos and a couple of sheds. The smell out here was a fine blend of fruits, vegetables and animal excrement. Anyway, I hoped it was from animals. At last we entered a small building with a purple ring and triangle in the middle hanging up over the entrance. She uncorked the lock on the door, dropped the key back in her smock, and opened the door just wide enough for the two of us to enter if we inhaled and didn’t swallow on the way through.
Sitting on our right were some fat cylinders wrapped in the kind of paper that grocery bags used to be made out of. A strand of thin rope wrapped around in a cross shape secured each cylinder from invaders. Straight ahead was block after block of what my nose told me was horse dung. It was compressed and shoved into squares about the size of a brick you might use to build a house, that is, if you had a couple thousand of them and didn’t mind the odor. The stench was difficult not to notice. And then to our left sat what had to be at least two dozen shelves, upon each of which was a long row of small clay pots.
“Do you like to watch what you eat, Mr. Washington
“Not that much, ma’am. I like to taste what I eat.”
“Let’s not be glib, sir.” She turned to face me. Even though I stood nearly a foot taller, I somehow sensed that she was looking down at me. She said, “Henry served you one of my red bells, didn’t he?”
“I believe he did, yes.”
“He must have considered you to be an honest and decent man.”
“Well, he didn’t make his intentions especially clear to me.”
She nodded as if internally debating whether to swat a fly or save the universe. “Him serving you one of my red bells speaks for itself. He wasn’t an idiot, would you say?”
“Certainly not.”
“He didn’t appear to be inebriated at the time, did he?”
“He did not.”
“No Chinese soldiers with knives to his throat?”
“I didn’t see any.”
“Fine. Then he selected you.” She appraised my appearance. “I would take you to be in your late seventies?”
“I’m eighty-eight as of last month.”
She drew back a step. “Eighty-eight. Same as Henry. Same as another recently deceased young fellow, Bertram Kerns. You all must have grown up together. But you were the only one with the click, weren’t you?”
I felt my cheeks getting warm again. “What do you mean by ‘the click’?”
She stirred at the dirt with one shoe and finally looked me back in the eye. “Where are your people from, Maurice?”
I was getting uncomfortable and decided to change the subject. “What do you mean he selected me?”
She walked around me as if inspecting a steer someone was thinking of hiring out to stud. “Yes, he selected you. Mr. Washington
“I would call myself a socially confused individual.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “I see. Perhaps I can clear up some things for you. But first, I am curious. Have you had any feelings or sensations since your meal at Lucado’s? Have you noticed anything different about yourself?”
I nodded. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth that all my brains would come spilling out.
She continued. “Yes, you certainly have, haven’t you? How is your general health, Mr. Washington
“You can call me Moe, ma’am. Most everybody does. My health has been pretty good, I suppose. I mean, I get the occasional ache and pain. Rheumatoid arthritis in my back and shoulders from time to time, that’s about the worst of it.”
“And how is your discomfort today, Maurice?”
I thought about that. Another shiver went through me as if a goose had just walked over my grave. I hadn’t had so much as a twinge of pain in two days, not since right after my breakfast at Henry’s. But I didn’t answer her question. She didn’t seem to need me to do so.
She said, “Do you know anything about genetically modified foods, Maurice?” I did know a little about them, yet before I could answer she went on. “No, I don’t suppose you would. Here’s a quick lesson for you. Back as far as the early 1970s, big agricultural conglomerates started messing around with the food that people ate. They started radiating seeds, started figuring how to get more produce out of smaller and smaller tracts of land. Pesticides not only killed off the bugs that plague any farmer, they managed to grow two stalks of corn where only one had grown before. If you take the gene out of this seed and grow it with the gene of this other seed, you’d get a super seed that would grow more food in less space. Sounds ideal, doesn’t it? It most certainly was not ideal. It was a disaster. What ended up happening was that the taste eventually went out of most of the foods and along with the taste went the nutrients. But by golly, there was plenty of food raised. Food could be bought by poor countries and starving kids and mothers could be fed where before you’d have just had mass starvation. Nobody much cared that the fruits didn’t have one-tenth the vitamin levels they’d had before, and as for the taste, well, hell, when you’re hungry, taste doesn’t matter as much as getting full. Never mind that the fat content of these foods was so high that the person eating them couldn’t ever quite eat enough to feel satisfied. Remember when you were a boy, Maurice, and you’d slice open a nice fresh watermelon and sit there and eat the whole thing and you’d be so full of juices and sugars that you thought you’d never be able to take another bite as long as you lived? It looked like days such as those were gone forever. But that turned out to be incorrect. You see, there are a few smart folks out there. I was one of them. I had a plan. And I made it work.”
She was rolling now. I could see the wide forehead clear itself of wrinkles as she motioned first to the cylinders, then to the dung bricks, and finally to the clay pots. “I am a smart woman, Maurice. There’s no reason to hide my candle beneath a basket, as the Lord says. No reason indeed. Things are mighty strange in the world right now, wouldn’t you say? I would be very interested in knowing how my pepper affected you, Maurice.”
I told her about Margaret Maxwell. I told her about the window glass in Tiny Mitchell’s office. I even told her about thinking that maybe I could have helped Bert Kerns but had been too chicken to do so. With each detail she squinted at me more closely. At last she took another step back. “Maurice Washington, I am going to trust you, just as our friend Henry trusted you. I tried out my first batch of red bells on Claude and Larry two summers ago. It made them into work horses for several weeks, although it didn’t do much in terms of smartening them up any, as you can probably tell. Trial and error, repeat ad nauseam, and late this spring I came up with a combination of processes that looked promising. Now with your visit here, I suspect that these days in which we live are not merely strange but interesting times. Let me show you something.”
I never was much of a science buff, but the gist of the thing was that she soaked her bell seeds for about a week in a mix of apple cider vinegar grown from apples on her own trees. Then, before planting, she plotted about a dozen of them in a brick of horse manure. All this, she assured me, only came after she had experimented with different strains of pepper seeds. She had worked over a microscope for months, burning out what she called the impurities until she felt satisfied and started the growing process. The vines had shot up fast and the fruits had hung heavy. She had eaten several of the peppers herself and, despite finding the taste richly satisfying, hadn’t noticed any particular change in her own physiology. According to Mrs. Gawon, there was a racial component to the make-up of the person eating the fruit that affected the individual reaction. “I would wager,” she said, “that you can trace your genetic heritage back to the Bushmen of Namibia. I mean, it’s common knowledge that everyone can, to some degree. Spencer Wells and half a dozen other scientists have demonstrated this. But in your case, just based on your manner of pronouncing certain words, I would guess that your lineage is perhaps more direct than that of many other people. What do you know about your ancestry?”
“From what I’ve been able to learn, my great-great-great grandmother came from Africa . Not of her own free will, if you take my meaning.”
“Go on. Go ahead.”
I knew my history better than most. I knew it well. “The language my ancestors spoke is called Taa. It’s the tongue spoken even today in southern Khoisan. Most of the 2,000 or so people who still use it live in Los Angeles Namibia and Angola
“This is amazing. Do you realize, Mr. Washington
I supposed we were beyond the point of modesty, so I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled at both collars, displaying my very own newly grown purple circle with interior triangle, a smaller version of the logo above this barn. It stood out about a quarter inch from the rest of my skin.
She moved very close to me. “Yes, see how pronounced the coloring is? Surely it is. It’s likely harmless. It may not even be connected to the plant at all. But what if the accidentally created genes in my red bell peppers triggers something in your system and does it because of your connection with the very first people? I suppose I’m speculating too much.”
I smiled. “I don’t know, Mrs. Gowan. Marybeth. I don’t know. I guess it is possible.” Things were spinning in my mind like cats in a mouse house.
She continued. “My guess is that whatever it is that birthed that marking on you interacted with my special bells and gave you your new abilities. You saw that same symbol on the barn out front? That came from me. I should say it came from a sort of dream I had. It wasn’t quite a dream, though. Whatever it was, I had that symbol in my mind and I didn’t even know why but I had a strong yearning to paint that symbol on this barn. Peculiar, I know. Have you had that young quack Seitz examine you?”
I told her I had not. “He’s not really a quack,” I put in. “Matter of fact—”
“It’s just as well. Still, I’d love to take an epidermis sample, if you have no objections. We can do that before you leave today.” She was in her own head now. She stared at me and I could tell she wasn’t really seeing me any longer. I took a step back and was trying to think of a gracious way to get out of there. Then she said, “I’d be fascinated to see your power in action.”
I buttoned my shirt and shook my head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve never tested it before. It’s always just been sort of an emotional thing that I didn’t have any control on. Sometimes I even wonder—I’m agnostic, Marybeth. But sometimes since this thing started I have wondered if something—I don’t know—cosmic?—was going on. If it is then I think it would be almost disrespectful to put it to a test.” She kept staring at me so I said, “What did you have in mind?” Shoot, I was every bit as curious as she was. It was even funny how she’d landed on the idea of me tracing my lineage back to the beginning times. My mother had told me stories that had been passed down for hundreds of years. I’d always had inklings that I was sort of connected to something bigger. Always. Then again, maybe this white lady here was just feeding off my insecurities.
She walked me over to the rear of the building and pointed through the opening in the window. She asked if I could see the horse grazing in the field. I said I could see it just fine. Then she said, “Make that horse walk over here. Tell her with your thoughts. Tell her with your mind. Use the inside of you. Tell that old mare, Julie’s her name, tell her to walk over here, that you want her to come over here.”
I did not want to do that. I truly did not. Even if it turned out that Marybeth was right, that the little seed of hope in me was right, that we were both dead on correct, I was still worried that just maybe something—I don’t know—holy isn’t exactly the word, but it’s close—was involved and if it was then I sure kind of needed to back off. I’d lived my whole life as a skeptic and I like myself just that way. All the same, after a time you can get skeptical about your own skepticism. Still, that woman kept staring at me with that curiosity burning in her eyes. I had to admit I was wondering what would happen. So I planted my feet firmly in the straw and stared out that window at the horse, saying in my mind, Julie, stop eating at that grass and come here so I can give you an apple. Come on, Julie. You want my apple. You need to come here to eat it. I ain’t bringing it to you. Come on, girl.
The horse lifted its head and looked from side to side. Then it went back to its grazing.
“Try harder,” Marybeth said. “Get mad if you have to, but make it work.”
I felt more than a little ridiculous and substantially terrified. But I yelled in my mind. I yelled, Julie, you overfed grass-eating galoot! Get your unsaddled ass over here and eat this goddamned apple before I get mad! She looked up. She looked up and tilted her head to one side and then the other the way a dog will do if he’s trying to decide if the person on the other side of the door is a friend or a stranger. She tilted her head once again and darned if that mare didn’t stop grazing and look around a third time. I’ve got an apple here and it tastes better than that damned grass you’re eating! Come and get it! Then slow and uncertain, she drifted in our general direction. It wasn’t as deliberate a response as I would have liked to have seen, granted. Still, it looked promising. As I started getting more excited about what I was seeing, that mare picked up her speed to a slow trot and at last was poking her long nose through the window at us. Mrs. Gawon grabbed another red delicious from her smock and gave it to me to feed the horse. I did so as she patted the animal on the head.
The farmer woman didn’t look at me as she said, “We live in interesting times, don’t we, Maurice?”
I said, “Isn’t that a Chinese curse?”
Chapter Four
The wheels of change spun out of control. Along each wheel-spoke stretched genetic material strewn with intellectual properties and cosmic confusion. For example, in the old days, the personality reflected itself in the clothes one wore. In the strangeness of the new moment, clothes influenced the attitudes of those who wore them. So the men and women from the National Aeronautic Space Administration dressed themselves in polyurethane suits and lost much of their former empathy and curiosity and became simply officious. Lies hung in the air like the cancer clouds outside the sterile facility. On all sides of the pain equation, everyone knew just a little less than was necessary. Scientists stared through scopes. Specimens smiled to show cooperation. Confusion crawled across surfaces like maggots on meat.
In the NASA cafeteria, friends did not meet one another’s glances. Forks poked tasteless fruits and meats and grated across the stainless steel serving trays. On even the most primitive level, everyone understood that this day represented a line of demarcation in time, that on one side was the way everything had been and on the other the way all would forever be. Somehow, a smaller number of them knew, all this involved an African-American male named Maurice Henshaw Washington Washington Washington
The man from NASA told me, “You have a clicking when you talk. Your ancestors would have communicated almost essentially with those sounds.”
“Yas, sir,” I said. “We’s been clickin’ and clackin’ like fo’ ever, massir. I’s hopes you all don’t mind.”
The man from NASA cleared his throat. “There’s no need for hostility, Mr. Washington
The way he said “abilities” was like the way a teacher says “dog” when a kid reports that his pet ate his homework. I was tied to an otherwise uncomfortable chair with my legs up level with the rest of me, staring directly overhead into a white light that I couldn’t block out even if I closed my eyes. “What do you want to know?”
The man’s voice was deep like the water table, rich like a bank vault, and not altogether unfriendly. His words had the faint aroma of old Europe to them. “Vat vud ya likes to know, mein friend? I said, just to make it easier for him to understand me. Once in a while I would crack wise with him and he would repay me with a low voltage shot of electricity through the wires and cables they had attached to my genitals. But for the most part he spoke in the high tones and rich delivery of a civilized man. He said, “We extracted from your cohort, Marybeth Gawon, that you claimed to be able to command animals to come when you called; that is, without speaking to them in the conventional sense of the word. We further extracted that you claimed to have regressed the aging of one Margaret Maxwell. We have been unable to locate this woman to confirm the story. However, we did speak with a Leonard Mitchell of your rancid burg—I believe it is called Circleville , Ohio
I said, “It sounds like you know quite a lot.”
I thought I heard a small chuckle from above. Apparently even the watcher was being watched. The man continued, however, saying, “We consider it likely that if these events actually did transpire that you would have been unable to resist using them in other capacities.” We? Queen’s English, mouse in pocket, or unconscious slip?
I said, “If your goons hadn’t picked me up so soon, I might have done just that.”
A large black car had pulled into my driveway. I didn’t see any plates on it and I sure didn’t recognize the people who hopped out of it. I walked over to my front door to get a better look at the four of them. When I turned my knob to pull the door open, somebody from the other side had kicked it in and before I knew what was happening they’d shot my arm full of some kind of knock-out juice. When I woke up, I was staring up into a white light, listening to this German-American scientist prattle on about power.
That was my end of things. How had they treated Marybeth? What was the word he had used? Extracted?
“Come now, Mr. Washington
He sounded to me like he’d spent the weekend watching the movie Goldfinger. I couldn’t help myself. I said, “Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” He didn’t get it. I never trusted a man who didn’t know classic films. All the same, there was little I could do besides cooperate.
I said, “It’s not like I have a scientific background. I told you. I ate some scrambled eggs at Henry’s and the next thing I know I’m able to do things I couldn’t do before. The only three times I used that power was once at Marybeth’s, once at Tiny’s office—you know him as Leonard—and that day on the street with old lady Maxwell. As far as I know, the power wore off already. After all . . .”
I left the words hanging, but the NASA man knew what I was getting at. He said, “You mean to say if you still had the ability, you would just get up and walk out of here?”
“I mean that if I could, I’d treat you to a shock from your own machine, you Nazi bastard.”
The pain gripped me with the force of an ice pick and this time it held on and didn’t let go. This time it hurt so bad I wanted to grab myself and couldn’t because my arms and legs were strapped down so tight against the leather that I felt like my circulation, my own blood, was boiling in my veins. Beyond the edges of my own scream I could hear the NASA man saying, “We are not here to endure your insolence, old man.” Despite the agony, I mocked back at him, “Ve are not he-are to endure your insolence, old mensch.”
After a few more moments of punishment, the pain recoiled just as fast as it had come. Yet somehow even the absence of the violent aching made me seethe with bitter contractions throughout my body. When those finally backed off, the good doctor up above cleared his throat again and appeared to be muffling his microphone so that he could speak to someone there with him. I heard him say, “We would like you to be part of a little experiment. I promise you that I very much dislike what just happened, Mr. Washington
Neither one of us spoke for a couple minutes. He was watching. I was thinking. Then when I thought that white light was sure to blind me forever, the NASA man said, “Try and see if you can free yourself.”
“What did you do with Mrs. Gowan?”
“She is back at her farm, of course! She was, shall I say, unaware of who we were. It is possible that we misrepresented ourselves. It is possible that we led her to believe we were associates of yours.”
“So much for truth.”
“You are a difficult man, aren’t you?”
“You are a stupid man, aren’t you?”
“Do you plan to cooperate, Mr. Washington
I heard a lot of commotion coming through the microphone at me, kind of as if some of the other people up there with NASA man didn’t think that my “cooperation” was such a good idea. When the ruckus settled down I set to work.
I knew I still had the power. I had it stronger than I ever did. The gongs clanged in my skull right behind my forehead. But just like when I was sitting with Bert Kerns, just like when I was standing with Mrs. Gowan, and even more like when I was leaving Tiny Mitchell’s office, the thing in my head scared me pretty bad. But now after all those shocks and jolts and blows of electricity, I wasn’t so much scared anymore as I was angry. And I decided to put that anger to good use. If emotion was the trigger, I was gonna unload an entire clip at these bastards. I closed my eyes against those damned white lights and imagined myself—saw myself—lying there, strapped onto that hard recliner chair. I looked out as if I was up there with them, standing above myself, looking down on that poor old man with leading wires attached to his testicles and I pictured those wires snapping free, pictured them falling to the floor. Those wires were my enemies. Those wires and the electricity that was capable of incapacitating me were the source of all evil in the world. I needed those wires to break apart. I needed to snap them like a sparrow’s neck. Caution! Look out! There are other enemies lurking around. Yes, those walls that surrounded me. I pictured the walls of the large room shaking just a little and sending a rush of fear into whoever it might be that had shot my arm full of knock-out juice and tied me down here like a pig. I thought about an image I had of the man from NASA—What a TV show that would make! The Man From NASA! Hooray! Jesus, I was getting crazier by the second—with his highly cultured voice and I imagined him telling some underling how tight to tie the straps and how to attach the wires to the side of my head and to my ball sack and as I thought about all this I got madder and madder and all at once I heard something thin and fragile strike the floor and I knew what had happened. The wires on my privates had broken free.
Something serpentine slithered across my arms and chest and legs and feet and I was able to wiggle myself around a little now that I was no longer strapped down. They had had me roped down pretty tight and it felt great being able to move around. From up above I could hear someone, a woman, I think it was, say to somebody that this was getting out of hand, that they weren’t getting paid enough to handle this. I could hear someone else outside the large door in the wall fumbling with a key and trying furiously to open the lock, but at the same time I saw in my mind that the lock did not need to be opened just now, it did not want to open, and so I forced the key to break off in the man’s fingers. I heard shoulders striking against the door and it came into my mind that the door most likely did not appreciate people trying to beat it down, so I told the door to push back and when it—sproing!—did push back a lot of bodies went flying the way they had come. They fell. They fell hard. Most of them wanted to cry. The sound of their whimpering glowed in my mind, joining from above me some extremely foul cursing—I don’t actually know that much of the German language but sometimes you can just tell—the word “shite” was featured prominently—and I found myself aware that I was clicking back at the voices, using the ancient Taa language to warn them all that they had better not bother me right now, that I was busy giving them what they said they wanted. They wanted a demonstration and I was going to give them one they would not soon forget. Crazy or not, the black Jimmy Bond was on the scene, baby!
I jumped up from the chair, standing cold and naked in this large room, standing on that cold floor. I looked around and couldn’t see anything except those blinding lights, couldn’t see anything because of those lights. So I busted them. They popped like firecrackers and in seconds the room flooded with a darkness cold and icy. Then I shook the hole through which they’d all been gazing down upon me in my vulnerability. I shook the area just around the hole and suddenly I wasn’t the one quivering in fear. I wasn’t the one thinking he was gonna die. I wasn’t the one under the microscope. People up there were shouting and begging for help. The man from NASA said, “Stop it, Washington
They pounded on the doors, trying to get out. Suddenly I was Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers. I yelled, “There’s no escape!” There was no escape. The doors wouldn’t permit it because the doors were taking their orders from me now. I heated up the floor so the soles of the scientists would get sticky. Every one of them wanted to leave. Each and every mind up there was dying to get away. They all were very sorry for the harm they had caused me. Couldn’t I understand? After all, they were only doing their jobs! That crap didn’t fly in Nuremburg and it wouldn’t fly with me. I was Butch freaking Cassidy: “Woodcock! You don’t owe them anything!”
I let the bastards sweat for a few minutes before I smacked my fist into my opened hand and mentally willed everything back to cock-eyed normal. The door to my large room flew open and two armed guards very sheepishly walked inside and asked if I wanted my clothes. I said I did. After I dressed, they escorted me upstairs to meet the man from NASA.
Chapter Five
The Huntsville , Alabama
“The purpose of our division is to help the modern American man and woman adjust to the complexities and diversities of extended missions to and from the planet Jupiter,” he said, talking to me as if this were a lecture he had delivered more than once. “Right now this country has one quarter million people on Jupiter, on their way to Jupiter, or on their way home from Jupiter. That’s some responsibility and we at Interstellar take our mission most seriously. When I first took over the Health Alteration division a year and a half ago, morale was low, productivity was poor, and mistakes out there were happening every Earth day. But as of this instant, we’ve gone sixty-three days without an incident, productivity has been streamlined, and our people are again excited about their work. Heck, I love this job and the people here, Mr. Washington. These are my extended family.” Heck? He was lying. Any time the other guy says “Heck,” you can take comfort in knowing he is lying. I didn’t need special powers to know that no one here had any use for him. When I’d called him a pig in German, I’d heard his “extended family” laugh.
He swept his arm in a wide arch to indicate the people we saw through the spider webbed glass walls, nearsighted people leaning in toward computer screens, grizzly people hunched over flow charts and inventory lists, sterile people nodding to one another as their paths crossed in the carpeted hallways, jaundice-eyed people making their ways through the maze of corridors and tunnels that comprised the buildings. Otto Ehrlichmann said that he considered himself to be a simple man with a simple mission: make things better. His beatific smile said it all.
I said, “Let me get this straight. You’re in this Health Alteration department.”
“Division.”
“Right. And above that there’s the Location for Interstellar Flying—”
“Aviation Resources.”
“Yes, yes. I’ll remember the acronym. And above that is NASA itself?”
“In a manner of speaking, you are correct. You see, there is much overlapping of responsibilities and titles. You must concern yourself with appreciating the fortunate position in which you find yourself. After all, Mr. Washington
“Immortality?”
“I was going to say enthusiasm. Let us take things one step at a time, shall we?”
“Oh, let’s.”
Back in his office, he apologized for the earlier treatment. “We call it hostile interrogation. Hardly use it any more these days, but the pressure on us to produce intelligence from you is just tremendous. I hope you can understand our position here.”
“Dr. Ehrlichmann, I don’t have the slightest interest in understanding you. It doesn’t even matter to me that I don’t really know what’s going on.”
He brushed a stray hair out of his eyes and blinked. “What’s going on?” He seemed amused by the question. “You, Mr. Washington, you are what is going on.” He offered what I guess he took for a reassuring smile and continued. “Your abilities, for lack of a more precise word, are of interest to the Administration. Enormous interest. Suppose someone with nothing more than the abilities you demonstrated last night were to harness those powers in such a way as to benefit the Jupiter Missions? Can you imagine the advances in cost saving initiatives, the advances in acclamation, the advances in per unit production? Great God, man, you are exactly the shot in the arm this division needs.”
I was beginning to think this fellow must fill his spare time giving lectures to bare walls. Yet he was not finished. “As always, there are those in the current administration who cannot see beyond the science of the matter. I assure you, Mr. Washington
He reminded me somewhat of the teachers we had in high school, back when high school went all the way up through and stopped at the twelfth grade. He wore a thin little tie and he was always messing with his hair underneath that black hat of his as if he feared that somebody might notice he had a bald spot, when in reality everybody knew it already and didn’t give the matter much thought. He had a brisk way of walking that sent the message that where he was going was far more important than any place you might be going and that it would be a good idea if you understood it so that he wouldn’t have to swat you out of his way. When he wasn’t talking—which I’ll admit wasn’t a big vacuum of time—he was grinding his back teeth like a dog that doesn’t know whether to bark friendly or growl. But more than that, he had an aroma about him, and I know I’ve used that word before, but it was a real odor that made me think of ammonia or some other chemical that would clean a bathroom toilet. It’s the kind of smell that on the one hand is sort of reassuring and on the other makes you wonder exactly what it was that got so dirty in the first place.
While I ruminated, Dr. Ehrlichmann continued. “We have the opportunity here to do great things, that is, if we can only get our arms around the project, if you see what I mean.” He stared at me, waited for me to begin to speak, and then charged on ahead. “What is there about you, Mr. Washington? We have fed Marybeth Gawon’s peppers to other African American people without this type of reaction. True, some of them did demonstrate a minor telekinetic flicker, but it was insignificant compared to that of our control group. No, there is something special about you. I am of the opinion that it is your ancestry, your ties to the Bushmen of Namibia, which explains your strange talent.” I kind of hated it that this idiot and Marybeth agreed with one another.
I managed to ask a question. “What happens to me, Dr. Ehrlichmann? What happens to me while you all are figuring out the how and the why, I want to know what you plan to do with me.”
Again he found a wild hair and brushed it back from his face. “Do? You mean right now? Why, nothing severe, I assure you. No, for the next three weeks you will return to your home in Circleville , Ohio , where you will busy yourself with whatever it is that you do for fun, Mr. Washington
And that was that. They flew me back to Ohio
Chapter Six
From the June 20, 2024 edition of The Circleville Herald:
Headline: Life on Jupiter, Yes! (But we put it there)
Next to the sun itself, the fifth planet Jupiter is the largest object in our solar system. So when astronomers noticed a while back that a raging storm that had plagued the huge orb for centuries had run its course, the story made the science sections of online dailies and will no doubt be the cover story in space journals for the next few months. It may even land on the business websites the world over.
Jupiter is not only the largest planet. Since the Chinese takeover of the New United States’ economy, it has become the biggest enterprise of all time. Vludium, a recently discovered element, is these days being extracted from the planet’s core, a core astronomers estimate is ten times the size of Earth itself.
“We’re happy that this discovery has helped employ people in America
As it happens, more than half the people involved in the NASA-led project are said to be from the New United States. That pleases politicians and economists alike. But not everyone is happy about the situation. Circleville physician and amateur astronomer Dr. Rockwell Seitz told the Herald that he thinks NASA may have bit off more than it can chew. “Jupiter makes a lot of electricity and it generates more heat than it absorbs from the sun. Radiation spews off Jupiter and extends millions of miles, some of it hitting Saturn’s rings. That means that people who work on this Vludium extraction project have to be protected. The gear we use in power plants for safety here on Earth wouldn’t last five minutes out there.”
NASA scientists think skepticism is natural. As Dr. Eichmann, head of NASA, puts it, “We welcome concern from the public. That shows they are thinking. But I can assure everyone that we have taken every precaution necessary to safeguard the health of our workers.”
Dr. Seitz disagrees. He has even aimed his wrath at what he maintains are “slave labor camps” on some of Jupiter’s satellites. Says Seitz, “There are sixty-three moons orbiting the planet. That’s a lot of hiding places. Friends of mine in Boston
The controversy, it seems, will continue. But as long as the jobs keep fulfilling the need for clean energy, NASA has no plans to scale back its operation. Eichmann says, “If anything, we anticipate something of a labor shortage by next year. I’m no economist, but I believe that usually drives up wages, something most working people see as a positive thing.”
As for the missing storm, with so much money flowing in and out of the exploration, research into this phenomenon may have to wait.
It was the last week of June when Margaret Maxwell stopped by for a visit. Five acres didn’t take care of themselves, so I mowed the lawn. I hosed off the porch. Grass liked to grow and birds liked to poop. I appraised the outside of my house to consider when a new outer coat of paint might be in order. The place had four bedrooms, three of which hadn’t been occupied in damn near fifty years. I knew they needed dusting. I knew it and didn’t even consider it. There was no way, even now, that I was traipsing through collections of baby shoes, snippets from first haircuts, portraits of the person who had been the woman of the house, all that stuff. Every reason I had for going in those rooms had left too long ago to dwell on or to be reminded of. I’d been to weddings, birthings and funerals. Too many funerals. After the funerals for Bert and Henry, I had sort of forgotten all about Margaret and what life might have been like for her in her new condition. I don’t want to make her out to sound like a restored automobile or something, but in a way she had been brought back to the way she looked, felt and acted when she was just twenty-years-old, and even though I had witnessed her transformation—had apparently caused it—when she came to my door in the early afternoon, I didn’t recognize her right off.
I stared out through my screen door onto the freshly scrubbed porch and looked into the lightning blue eyes of this young woman, a woman not quite old enough to legally drink but with the wisdom of three-quarters of a century of living, this woman with golden hair that had thickened and swayed and bounced when she walked, this woman with a white and perfect smile that radiated a sureness that had deserted her years before, one that had known the world was hers to command and had forgotten what that felt like. I looked at her and felt a warmth in my chest that I hadn’t sensed in a long time. She was beautiful. She was powerful. She was young.
As she spoke I recognized her all over again and felt a little ashamed that my face hadn’t signaled recognition sooner. “Afternoon, Maurice. I hope you don’t mind my stopping by.”
“Margaret! You look—I mean, yes, please, come in. It’s great to—I mean, yes, sure! Come in, please!”
I held open the door and as she passed I could smell a perfume that would have been out of context behind the earlobes of the old Margaret. This scent proclaimed her entrance as if she were royalty, perhaps the queen of hearts on a frisky Friday night. And as she brushed by me, I swear her hips wiggled. I couldn’t help staring and she caught me doing it as she looked back over her shoulder. Her cheeks lifted with her smile and turned red.
I offered her a chair and she sat, crossing her legs at the knee and eying me with the innocent allure only women who know themselves well can possess. I sat across from her on the divan and tried to put my words back on the string that had broken and spilled them all over the floor. “Margie,” I began. “You look just the way you did when we were younger. I’m sorry I didn’t call you right away. I’ve been through—well, let’s just say that things have been a little strange around here recently. How are you feeling?”
Her eyes looked from just this side of the ceiling and settled their focus right on my own. “Maurice, I feel vibrant! Alive! Happy for the first time in years. I only wanted to thank you. I wanted to connect with you. I wanted to let you know that I appreciate what you did for me.”
I grabbed a tissue from the table beside her and folded it into her open hand. She wiped away a tear and brought back out her brave smile. She said, “Of course, I’m going to have to change back, if you will do that for me. You see, I make my friends nervous. They don’t act comfortable talking to me about their sewing projects or block watch meetings when I’m sitting there like a schoolgirl and they can’t even open their bottles of arthritis medication.”
“Change you back? I’m not sure I know how to do that.”
“Beg pardon?”
“What I’m saying is that I didn’t change you on purpose in the first place. I had the thought that you would be more comfortable a certain way, you know? I had eaten something that—well, it doesn’t really matter. I was just feeling bad for you as you were moving along and I went over to you to see if I could help out a little. When I touched your hand, your hand that was holding that walker, something just went off in my head, something that felt like two huge steel balls colliding, and the next thing I knew I was watching this pretty girl waltzing on down the street. I was confused as all get out. I was also very happy. I never figured that you wouldn’t want to stay this way.”
She looked relieved. Her request and her demeanor didn’t jive. She sighed with dejection and brightened even more. It was a sigh that softly suggested that her request and what she really wanted had been two different things. “That’s the other part,” she said. “Will I stay exactly this same age, whatever age that might be? Or will I be starting the aging process all over again? Do you have any idea?”
Those were very good questions. They were questions I wished I’d thought about before I went messing around with stuff I didn’t understand. I guess my silence must have been the answer.
She resumed. “Okay. I’m not a child, Maurice, no matter how I may look. I can take bad news. If the answer is that you can’t change me back, I can live without the aches, pains, and pills of old age. As a matter of fact,” she continued, changing the cross of her legs just the way she would have six decades earlier, “my only complaint with all this is that I am so lonely. You know how isolated you get in your old age? You know how that feels?”
I nodded. I knew the feeling. I knew it all too well.
“Imagine being that alienated as a young person,” she said. “Everybody you know is old as Jack’s beans and all the young people are interested in things you don’t care a whit about. The music, the clothes, the chatter: it’s just indecipherable to me. I had to go out and buy all new clothes. I shrank as I aged. I had to buy new lotions and perfumes. I had to get my hair done! Things I haven’t had to worry over in years.” She paused and the smile came back, replacing a trembling lower lip. “I came here today to ask if you would—or could—change me back. Not today, but in a week or so. There are still a few things I want to do first.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, I want to be extremely rude to the people at my bank.” With that, she tossed back her head and the laughter that came out her mouth played like a tango by a small, intimate brass band. “I want to retake my driver’s license exam. Not that I ever plan to drive. I want to flirt with young men. Not that—anyway. There’s so much. I want—I want to remember who and what I am. Over the years, a person can lose track of that.”
I invited her to stay for dinner but she said she had some appointments to attend. However, she promised to return around the same time tomorrow when we could resume our discussion. I hoped that would give me time to figure out some way to admit that I really hadn’t known what I was getting her into. I watched her walk down the porch steps, out onto the sidewalk. The sight of those hips wiggling in that tight red dress invigorated me in ways I thought I had forgotten. She had already begun to flirt. All she needed now was the young men.
From The July 1, 2024 edition of The Circleville Herald:
Headline: Local Woman Charged with Disturbance
Bank Manager Randolph Mosley claims he’d seen nothing like it in fourteen years of service. Pickaway County Sheriff Dwight Radcliffe seconds Mosley’s astonishment. “It isn’t exactly against the law,” the Sheriff admits. “But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.”
What is all the brouhaha? That is just what local resident and Third National Bank customer Margaret Maxwell wanted to know. “I have been a customer of this silly bank for more than thirty years and now there’s all this brouhaha. What is all this brouhaha?” Bank Manager Mosley told this reporter the problem began when a woman purporting to be Ms. Maxwell attempted to make a withdrawal from a savings account at Third National. “It’s my money and you (expletive deleted) had better give it to me,” she is alleged to have screamed.
The problem arose when the teller failed to recognize her long time customer. “When she came to my window and tried to make the withdrawal, I told her this account belonged to Ms. Maxwell,” the teller says under conditions of anonymity. “She got all in a huff and started yelling that she was Margaret Maxwell. I’ve been working here six months and I guess I know my customers by now.”
When the woman was turned away, she reportedly refused to leave the bank until her request had been fulfilled. The bank manager tried to reason with her, all to no avail. It was then that something peculiar happened, says Mosley. “She began flirting with me. I mean, it was pretty intense, sort of in the level of harassment. If she’d been an employee, let’s just say she would have been fired.”
Everything seems to have worked out in the end. After refusing to leave the teller window for more than two hours, Ms. Maxwell was escorted away by Sheriff Radcliffe. There was plenty of egg to go around on faces that day. Radcliffe: “It was actually her. We compared signatures. We asked her a bunch of questions. It was just her. So we took her back to the bank and she got to make her withdrawal. They can do a lot with plastic surgery these days. I’ve never seen a case this good.”
Bank Manager Mosley says he pressed charges. “I think they call it disturbance,” he said.
Part Two
Welcome to Los Angeles : City of Tomorrow
Chapter Seven
The four of us left Margie’s house on the morning of July 3, 2024. There was me, of course, and Margie Maxwell, Marybeth Gowan, and someone you have to this point only heard about, Dr. Rocky Seitz. We left Margie’s house on foot. None of us could quite say why we chose that particular mode of transportation. After all, each of us owned bicycles and they would have been much faster. All we knew was that the weather was excellent and each one of us felt fit as fiddles. It crossed my mind that possibly there was an appeal to walking beneath these skies in the brittle daylight with the sun’s warmth nourishing our muscles and bones, as well as in the mysterious nighttime with uncounted stars, planets and moons tracing an advance path for us along dirt roads, abandoned trails, and massive highways. I shouldn’t put it quite that way. All that fluffy stuff came from Margie. She said (approximately) those words as the four of us were getting to the decision-making point. Personally, I didn’t feel much sense of poetry about it. I even warmed to the idea that we were doing it because we were all half nuts. Ah, there I go being negative again. I should watch that. So on a positive turn, the backpacks we carried didn’t weigh us down at all and every breath was like a shot of B-12. All four of us had tied on our most trusted pair of hiking boots, thick white socks, floppy hats to block out ultra violet rays, along with comfortable T-shirts and loose-fitting blue jeans. We weren’t quite the Joad family, but we sure were on our way to California , the Promised Land, and onto an encampment deep in Los Angeles Santa Monica Civic Center
We didn’t talk much that first morning. I imagined that my three traveling companions were as anxious as I was about our journey, both in the good and the bad. On the one hand, the four of us knew we had to get out of Circleville or else those bastards from the Health Alteration division were going to swoop in and probably kill us once they wrapped up their assessments of our progress. The truth was that we all felt far too good to die just yet. On the other hand, there was some fear as we left behind so much of the familiar, the cozy, and the safe. Personally, I worried that Tiny Mitchell might find some way to sell my home out from under me while we were gone. Rocky was leaving his practice unattended—nobody would be filling in and that would undoubtedly present a hardship to his clientele. Marybeth had chosen to leave her farm in the dubious care of her two primary field hands. Only Margie was leaving nothing behind, nothing but ugly memories of the last fifty-odd years, a period of time she said she was eager to forget.
Rocky and I had been to California
Once we’d all decided that this trip of ours was necessary, Margie changed her mind about wanting to go back to her previous condition of old agedness. I guess she’d run into some trouble at her bank and nearly gotten herself arrested. Some people would get scared or at least a little spooked by having to deal with Sheriff Radcliffe. He’d been known to swing a pretty mean club in his tenure. Margie, though, her scrape with the law made her more headstrong than ever. Nope, she told me, she was gonna stay just the way she was. If the rest of the world couldn’t adjust to it, she insisted, that was their damned problem.
For a while I sort of expected Marybeth Gawon to ask me to change her the way I had Margie, but it never happened. I don’t even know if I could have done it anyway. The way it worked was I had to have some kind of emotional upheaval—sad, happy or very angry—and I could do things, at least before that part of my talents petered out. In any case, Marybeth always struck everyone who knew her as ageless anyway and probably that was the reason she didn’t ask me to change her from the way she was.
Funny enough, the most interesting member of our little traveling party, at least as far as I was concerned, was the neighborhood physician. Rocky Seitz turned thirty-four on the day we all left Circleville and was in fine traveling shape. I liked the guy and not just because he had prescribed kicker pain pills for me, which I’m pretty sure he knew I was using recreationally, only from time to time, mind you. They didn’t write scripts for the stuff I really preferred. I liked Rocky mostly just because of the way he was. He had read a lot, just like me. Hell, he could quote Shakespeare and Milton at the drop of a dime. That’s the thing right there, now that I think of it. Rocky knew things. He knew planets and stars better than any of us did, that’s for sure. Plus he even knew practical stuff, such as how to travel light and how not to get dehydrated on a long journey and all sorts of useful information.
As for myself, I had never willed my body to be stronger or younger or anything else. Again, without that push of emotion, I couldn’t have done it if I’d wanted. And I didn’t want it. For all that, I was doing well, even getting a bit younger without willing it, the lines in my face having faded from sight, the aches in my hips and knees an ancient memory, and the brains in my head clear and unmuddled for the first time in years. The fact was I felt great. I planned to enjoy this season-long walk and to hell with the bastards from Health Alteration. To hell with Otto Ehrlichmann. Onward toward the Bushmen!
The Bushmen of Los Angeles
“You know how they got there, don’t you, Moe?”
“Suppose you tell me.”
Rocky laughed. “Alright, I will. Read an article couple years back. One of those linguistic journals I get from time to time. It seems the tribe had been dwindling and getting smaller because the city kept pushing them one way and another.” I hadn’t realized cities were pushing people around in Namibia California
I laughed a little too, but not quite in the same way. “What kind of deal was it really?”
Rocky said, “It did have its advantages, Moe.”
“Like for instance?”
The doctor tugged on his moustache as he considered. After a while he said, “The weather is great, they don’t have to run through the jungle, they won’t be rubbed out by city folks or other tribesmen, they can contribute to our knowledge—”
“Bingo,” said Marybeth. “That’s what it was all about. Let us not pretend that everything that comes through the Liberal Arts is strictly benevolent.” I was beginning to get a sense that Marybeth liked to take the opposite side of any argument. That was fine with me. I didn’t quite know what she was getting at, but I guess the Doc did because he just shook his head and looked at his feet.
“My only problem with it,” I said, “is that it sounds like these people were being promised all kinds of nice things. Maybe it was with a good heart. Maybe not. I’m just saying that the first slaves brought to this country probably were told how great things were going to be, too. Didn’t quite work out that way, though. ‘Come on, nigger,’ I mocked. ‘There’s perty old cotton fields for you to comfort yourselves in. Don’t pay attention to that man with the whip.’”
That was sort of a bring-down thing of me to say, I realize. None of my traveling companions thought of themselves as slave masters or descendants of slave masters. You know, I wasn’t one of those militant guys always putting whitey down or any of that. There’s good in all peoples and bad too. Circleville , Ohio
Margie shattered my morose thoughts. “Moe, do you think the Bushmen will have the same markings?”
That was the whole premise, wasn’t it? If they didn’t, we were making a long trip just for our health, literally. I said, “Margie, I’m sure they do. You weren’t there, but Rocky and I got on the land line phone and called the Botswana Village Project out in L.A.
“All the e-com links into the Village Project are down,” Marybeth added. “There is no such thing as a coincidence.”
Margie looked up at the morning sky. “What do you suppose is going on?” No one offered an idea, so she went on. “Planets changing, country splitting up, animals taking over. Do you guys think it might be. . . .”
Rocky tugged at his moustache and smiled. “What? The end of the world?”
I stared straight ahead and focused on picking up one foot and putting down the other. It was going to be a long journey and we had plenty of time to think about things like that. But when the Doctor got his teeth into a topic, he hated to let it go. He said, “The Mayans thought the end would come in 2012. The Jehovah’s Witnesses thought it would happen in 1975. Before them came the Great Disappointment of 1843 and then the same disappointment the year after that. The only thing any of these prognostications have in common is that they have all been wrong. Forty year harvests? Universal acknowledgement? The power of Jehovah versus human love? Folks, even if that were all true, you’ve still got to reject this ‘end of time’ stuff. Why? Because it doesn’t address the Alpha and Omega, does it? If there is no beginning, which I believe, then there can be no end, can there?”
I understood about one-tenth of that. But I nodded anyway, figuring that it might sink in after a while. Sometimes I learned a lot that way. Interrupting my ruminations came a road sign that informed us Washington Courthouse was five miles ahead. The green and white sign was littered with the pellets of a shotgun blast.
Margie asked Rocky, “What’s the Great Disappointment?”
I had been wondering the same thing but hadn’t wanted to ask. The doctor seemed pleased with the question. His moustache-twirling hand was having the time of its life. The good medicine man replied, “Margie, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses?”
She nodded. “The JW’s have a Kingdom Hall over on Ludwig Drive
Rocky winced a little when Margie said “JW’s,” kind of as if he had been offended. Well, you never knew. The Doc went on. “There was this preacher named William Miller. He had a huge following all throughout these parts and across what we used to call the Midwest . This was back in the nineteenth century, the first half. Well, his widespread congregation called itself the Millerites, which tells you something about the man’s ego, huh? One thing and another and William Miller decides that Jesus Christ is coming back in October of 1843.”
“Let me guess,” I put in. “It didn’t happen.”
“It most certainly did not. As far as I know,” he added with a grin and a twirl. “But that wasn’t going to stop the prophesies. No way. Miller turns right around and says that he had the right month but the wrong year.”
Marybeth said, “How convenient.”
“It sure was. So he told his millions of followers—”
“Millions?” Marybeth was really getting into this.
“I told you he was popular. Yes, so he tells them, oops, it will be 1844 instead, so get your houses in order. That’s just what they did. Sold off their property, gave away anything they couldn’t take with them. Then they all waited around and you know what happened, of course. Not a thing.”
I spoke up. “How did this guy Miller get the idea in the first place?”
Doc Rock, who was now walking alongside me and ahead of our two companions, smiled and asked, “Do you know your Bible, Moe?”
“I didn’t know it was specifically mine, but yes, I know the general plot.”
He nodded. “Of course you do. Well, somewhere in the Old Testament Book of Daniel it says something about the Earth being cleansed after—I think it was—after two thousand three hundred days. William Miller didn’t have a calculator in his shirt pocket, but all the same he derived from that passage that first 1843 and then that 1844 would be the fateful year.”
“And the JW’s?” Margie asked, getting another wince prior to the answer.
“Sure I’m not boring you guys with this stuff?” We might have been getting freaked out, but bored? Not likely. He went on. “After the second miscalculation, a lot of the masses of true believers broke off into different religions because there have always been a small number of people with the charisma to take advantage of a lapse in faith. I don’t want to get political about this so I’ll just tell you what happened. You had Mary Baker Eddy founding the Christian Scientists, a group that nowadays is pretty mainstream except for the dictum about not using medical professionals. I’m not testy about it personally, but a lot of my colleagues in Columbus
“TB?” I suggested instantly.
“Yeah. TB, or whatever it might be. You tell him he needs isoniazid and rifampin and he’ll be fine. You draw up the orders and he says ‘Hang on, I’ll do it my own way.’ Extremely frustrating. Sad, too. Anyway, so that was them. Then came Ellen Harmon White, a big time advocate of converting the unbelievers. She headed up the Seventh-Day Adventists. Most of their small flock these days is made up of a few blacks and Mexicans who hate the material world and believe that America —and by extension China
“And the JW’s?” Margie asked.
“The Jehovah’s Witnesses struck their vein when a fellow named Charles Taze Russell split with the Adventists over the idea that the rapture would be a thing of the spirit rather than of the flesh. Their Jehovah is the universal father and not all that loving a father, at that. What turns him on is power. He needs to have widespread acknowledgement. That’s why even though only 144,000 people are getting into Heaven, they say, it’s still crucial that everyone recognized Jehovah’s supremacy. Things evolved, as it were. First the world was going to end in 1914, but World War I got in the way of that. The year that war ended—the war to end all wars—was 1918 and that was when their Savior, Jesus, came back to his temple to ponder what to do with this wicked old world of ours. Babylon
I was watching him from the corners of my eyes. I’m not the kind of guy to criticize another man’s religion. I had a hunch that Rocky might just have been a secret member of Kingdom Hall. I guess he must have been reading the thought on my face because he made a laughing sound and said, “I’m Jewish, okay? Always have been, always will be.”
Margie said, “You sure know a lot about religion. Are all Jews that way?”
I felt embarrassed. My shoulders tightened and I had to put a lot of effort into not snapping at the young woman. But Rocky handled the matter himself. He said, “The source of our religion goes back a long way, Margaret. We tend to absorb a great deal of information because of being literally on the defensive. Pharaohs, Blood Libels, Holocausts—those things practically demand that we know the bases of many faiths in addition to our own.”
I did know “my” Bible, at least some of it. I sort of shut the conversation down when I said, “Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee.” That was from somewhere in Lamentations. Close enough for rock and roll.
None of us said anything for a while. The road was wide and flat and empty except for us as far as we could see. The wind felt around in the pockets of our clothes. The road was flat and looked like it was gonna stay that way for a long time. There still lingered that old familiar scent of burned rubber, even though it had been three years since the government had closed the Interstates and many of the Intrastate Highways to motor cars. People could drive whatever kind of car they wanted around their own towns on the surface streets: gasoline-powered, nuclear-charged, diesel-fueled, ethanol-based, solar-saturated—it made no difference. All but the tiniest dots on the map were self-sufficient entities and they all looked pretty much alike. You had your Mal-Wart and your Taco Stand and your Hair Salon and your Hardware Store, same size, same inventory, same lack of personality. But if you did want to go from one town to another, you had the choice of riding a bicycle or walking, unless you happened to be one of the wild guys who still had those old cargo planes propped up in their backyards. If you did have, you could usually get from your home city to the closest neighboring town without attracting too much attention. But going beyond that was risky. The cops were always on the lookout for people they didn’t recognize. Besides, the chance always existed that you would get to where you were going but not be able to make it back.
We made it to Washington Courthouse a little after 1 p.m. The sound of children at play caught our ears, so we followed that thicket of jumping and yelping urchins to its source in the George Park, the pastoral recreation area named after the first of the Old Presidents. Hunger made its presence known and we responded by dumping out our packets of vittles on a picnic table: snow peas, radishes, sweet onions, and red bell peppers. Marybeth had freeze-dried our vegetables before we left and that was one reason our loads were so manageable. I didn’t personally care if it was the Beta-cryptoxanthin or something else. I just was a slave to those peppers. The taste, even when they were freeze-dried, was like something I’d never had before, each and every time I ate them. Sweet, as I say, but not in the same way chocolate or even Circle-Cola is sweet. They were sweet more in the way a gift from a friend is sweet, or the way the morning smells when you wake up next to a bouquet of flowers.
Rocky reached into his pack and retrieved some powdered goat milk. We only had two complete protein sources: the goat milk and the soybeans. While the doctor hopped over to the spigot to fill the canteens with water so we could make the powder drinkable, I set the vegetables out on napkins for the four of us. I smiled at how the children over at the playground area fell silent when we first arrived, probably finding us quite the curious bunch, but by the midpoint in our meal they had forgotten all about us and were busy with their own imaginations.
I have never in my life ever been a “back to nature” kind of guy and I have to admit that I could sit around eating nothing but burgers and fries until the world actually did come to an end, but it is nevertheless an absolute fact that those vegetables that first day tasted fresh and sweet and so delicious you could almost forget they were good for you. The whole journey was punctuated with just this type of meal and our food was good enough to almost convert me from my carnivorous lifestyle.
Back on the road—or “on the path of transfiguration,” as one of my companions called it—Doc Seitz hadn’t quite let go of the old bone. “One of the differences between the predictions of the past and the ones these days is that right now there are things that we can see and hear that are unusual. So I would expect a lot of loony groups to start forming. It’s happened before, you know.”
“That right?” I asked, hoping he might detect the irritation in my tone.
“Sure, there was Otto III. He looked up at the sky back in 968 and saw a solar eclipse. Decided that was it: Doomsday. Two hundred years later, John of Toledo checks the planets and sees that some of them are in alignment. Uh-oh, he says. We’re all gonna die. Paul of Tarsus, Saint Clement, Hilary of Poitiers—they all knew the bad moon was on the rise. Yet here we are today.”
Marybeth said, “Doctor Seitz, you are quite correct about the likelihood of fringe groups spreading manure. All the same, perhaps we could change the subject for a while?”
We could and we did. We talked about how pleasant the weather was, how good it felt to be on a mysterious journey like this one, how with autumn the trees in central Ohio changed so beautifully that it would be good to be back in time to see them, how the Bushmen would react to seeing us, how they must hate being on display, how it might be possible for the polar ice caps to regenerate, how good our legs felt, and how come it is that some people can be so stupid.
We spent our first night on the far south side of a small town called Chillicothe
Chapter Eight
The New United States of America
One group that found itself in proud disregard of the enforcement of all things celebratory was the Health Alteration division of the National Aeronautic Space Administration. Otto Ehrlichmann ran that ship and he ran it tightly. He had plans for every day of the year and for the Fourth of July he had scheduled a pick up of the group of four in that rancid farm town in Ohio
He rubbed the latent sleep out of his better eye and smiled despite the news lying on his large and serene desktop. He had read the memorandum three times and could practically recite the thing in its entirety. “The General Mayor of Circleville reports that Maurice Washington, Rockwell Seitz, Margaret Maxwell and Marybeth Gowan departed the township sometime the previous day. Their destination is at this time unknown. Furthermore, the General Mayor declines to recognize the Health Alteration’s authority in making this or any follow-up inquiry. Message ends.”
Otto Ehrlichmann gripped the edge of his handmade desk and stared at the paperweight that held the message in place. So they think they can just run away? Of course, they could try. They even had had cause for hope. After all, it had been internal stupidity that let them get away. The Chief of Staff had made it clear that the President did not want to implement harsh restraint on the four variables in the celestial equation. The Chief of Staff had likewise made it clear that he himself was a pussy-whipped moron who jumped every time the President said “frog.”
Fine. It was fine. Everything would be just fine. A few days delay wouldn’t change things that much. True, Maurice Washington would continue to expand his abilities, just as some of the ones he initially exhibited would recede. After a certain amount of unknown time the regenerating DNA would settle on a highly specific and individualized mesh of instructions and Washington
The director of the Health Alteration division—oh, how he loved that name—took the paperweight in his hand, gave it one last kiss, and hurled it against the back of his office door. It cracked but did not shatter.
There was no place opened for us to get a hot cup of coffee that next morning. Instead we sucked down canteens of water and munched on soybean nuts. Then we hit the road. The road in this case was Route 23, junctioning as it did with Route 22 just outside Chillicothe Portsmouth
I had my doubts about that. In fact, I even tried a little experiment that morning. I reached down to where Dr. Seitz had been resting and offered him a hand up. When he took it I closed my eyes and tried to picture him free of pain and full of endorphins, but nothing happened. I got the same non-reaction when I tried to change the soybean nuts in my pack into fried eggs. Even though I didn’t let on to the others, I could tell I was fast losing my ability to change things just by stint of willful emotion, which was the only way I knew how to do it. All the same, my own personal health was just incredible. I felt the way I had when I was the Doctor’s age, or maybe younger. I still looked pretty much the same as I had when we left—wrinkle-free and well-oiled in the joints—but damned if I didn’t feel so full of life that I could have taken on that bastard Ehrlichmann if he’d swung on me.
Now that was weird. Why would I think of that porkpie hat wearing freakazoid? Oh, I knew this was the day he was expecting me to return to Huntsville
All the same, I had thought of Ehrlichmann and that thought scared me a little. He was one determined son of a bitch and I wasn’t so far gone in the head with senility that I expected him to just shrug his shoulders and move onto some more productive enterprise. I’ll admit I should have told the others about it sooner than I did, but I was just plain old afraid that if I had said something sooner they wouldn’t have come and this most definitely was not the kind of trip I wanted to make alone.
Ehrlichmann. What would that rat bastard do to find us? He couldn’t know we were on our way to Los Angeles
“What’s eating at you, Moe?” That was Margie. She placed her hand on my shoulder and looked right into my eyes.
“Nothing,” I lied. “Just lost in my own thoughts, I suppose.”
She stepped around and faced me. “For a second there you looked like you’d seen a ghost. Sure there’s nothing wrong?” Rocky and Marybeth were staring at me now too. What else could I do? I told them Ehrlichmann was after me. Me, and by extension, them. Why they didn’t hit me I’ll never know.
By all appearances they were unruffled. Rocky mumbled something about it might have been good to know about these things earlier on so that we could have taken some precautions. That was it.
“The bottom line,” Marybeth Gowan said, “is that whether we’d stayed or left, we’d all be in the same fix. I grew the food. Moe, you ate it. Margie, you were affected by whatever got into Moe. Doctor Seitz, you examined all three of us and knew far too much for your own good, as far as the NASA people would be concerned. No, Moe. There’s been no harm done. Just don’t hold anything else back, okay?”
Margie added, “I’m glad we’re going to Los Angeles
That was nice. They were all considerate in the extreme. But I couldn’t help notice that my recently revealed secret had cast a shadow over this part of our journey.
From out of nowhere a voice cracked into my head and blinded me. I fell from where I stood and grabbed my head. God, it hurt. I could sense that my friends were standing around me, calling out to me, and it made no difference. The pain was all. It felt like a star going nova in my head. The pain was wrapped around a booming voice, a voice that dripped saliva and sought cruelty for its own amusement. That voice, it was so loud, like a shot of electricity right in the ear holes. It was so damned loud that at first I couldn’t make it out. I kept rolling around on the road and finally made out the words it kept repeating. It said, “I will make Revelations feel like a picnic when I get to you!” There was a huge face behind the words. I knew that face. It was the grinning face of Otto Ehrlichmann. I vomited on myself and rolled off the road and passed out.
When I came out of it I was wearing a clean t-shirt and Margie was splashing my face with water from her canteen. They were huddled around me with scared looks in their eyes. I burped. I couldn’t help it. Marybeth chuckled. Then the others did too. I couldn’t help it. I joined right in. I got up and fell right back down. I stared at the sky while I lay on my back. A cloud drifted overhead. I pulled myself up and we went right on walking. No more secrets? Fine. But they had asked for it. I told them what had just happened to me. We walked on in silence.
The good news was that our diet of Marybeth’s food was having a positive affect on all of us and I regretted tossing up such excellent fare. Granted, central Ohio
We ate our lunch near the small industrial town of Piketon
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The sirens screamed loud and shrill. They started just as our lunch was winding down. I knew right away where the sirens were coming from. There was nothing else us that could possibly have made such a painful sound, excepting Ehrlichmann’s voice in my mind. It was really three sirens at the same time, one pitched so high it actually hurt the head, the other two possibly louder but lower in their edginess. In my shock I heard a memory of a snatch of an old song: “The lion tamer’s whip won’t crack anymore. The lions they won’t fight and the tigers won’t roar.” Everything in the world—in those first moments—looked just that way to me, queer and on its head and inside out and just plain stupid. What was the name of that song? Was it “Death of a Clown”? No, not death. Not that. And just as fast as it had come the recollection snapped away and I was looking at my friends’ faces. They all shared the same expression: instant terror.
You couldn’t hear yourself talk, much less understand the people nearby. Margie seemed to be asking me what it was. Her eyes stood tall as fence posts and her mouth was wide as a train tunnel. I don’t mean that as a metaphor, either. In those first seconds everything around me was like an LSD experience. Things magnified and recessed, expanded and contracted. I focused on her face and as my perceptions fell back to normalcy, she was shouting at me: “What is going on?” She was begging. As I pressed my mouth against her ear I could see Rocky zip up his pack and motion to Marybeth to do the same.
“The Atomic Plant!” I shouted into Margie’s ear. “It’s the A-Plant! An alert!”
I pulled back to see if she’d heard me. Things kept oozing in and out of various distortions. Her eyebrows narrowed and a look of nearing death seized her and I saw she’d heard me all right. She looked over my shoulder and just that fast Rocky and Marybeth were standing there, motioning us to our feet. The hallucinatory nature of things fell from my mind like lint off a dress shirt at a funeral.
On one level it was stupid to run. If the atomic plant was at what they called Site Area Emergency Status—which it had to be with the meanness of the racket—we had learned this terminology at town meetings over the years—then everything within a two mile radius of the plant was likely already contaminated. I didn’t think we were quite that close, but who the hell knew? On another level there was nothing else we could do, so running is what we did and when I say we did it I mean that any athletic shoe company in the world would have offered us a contract right on the spot. We dove one after another into an opening in a copse of trees, landed hard and kept right on running until the shrill of the siren was far enough away to make conversation possible.
“That’s a centrifuge plant,” Rocky yelled. “There must have been a leak!”
Margie started crying. “Radiation? Is that what you’re saying?”
Rocky didn’t answer. Margie looked to me. I nodded and said, “Maybe they had the wrong people working because of the holiday and something went wrong. Who knows?”
The siren broke off for a few seconds and then went crazy again, this round of sound even louder than the last. We ran again, making our way through the small thicket of trees and coming out on a narrow farm road that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. By the time we got there we were all panting and moving a bit slow, at least by our usual standards. The idea must have sunk into our heads that at this point it wasn’t going to do any good to kill ourselves running, since radiation—if there was any—was traveling a whole lot faster than we were.
That was when we saw it. None of us said a word. What we saw was beyond words. I hoped it was the unexplained hallucination at work but deep down I knew better. Some things are so actual, so certain, that it’s impossible not to believe in them. A pure red cloud a good ten miles in the air opened its top like a dragon in the sky and beneath it a plume of smoke in the shape of a stem stretched down to the surface. Just as all this folded into focus, we could see a wave in the ground roll toward us. The wave passed under us and turned the dirt we were standing on into even finer particles. The wave shook the ground and the ground shook us. We all dropped without a word and covered ourselves with traveling packs. Like anyone else, I have known fear in my life. This, however, pronounced itself as the End of the World and nothing scares quite like that. I had no moisture in my mouth, no fluids in my bladder and no thoughts in my mind. I actually saw the fear, big, angry and unrelenting, soaring right over us, looking down and drooling. I closed my eyes and waited to die.
We didn’t get up from under our packs for at least two hours. By the time we did, the sun had paled and the corn on the stalks to the north of us was shivering. I stood up first, nice and slow, and searched the sky. A huge drift of dark orange mist far up in the heavens was gently trickling with streams of what I took to be rain sheeting through it. I couldn’t tell if it was coming our way or going south—it was just too big to tell. The four of us stood close together watching, afraid to speak, afraid to even think. The big Old Man Fear might have moved on, but his children were still scampering around, stirring up dust and hollering with a complete lack of self-control. It must have been at least another two hours when the doctor spoke up. “Radiation sickness. That’s what will tell us. If we have any symptoms. If we—Christ, this is so awful. Yes, yes, okay. Marybeth, how do you feel? Stop cursing and tell me.”
There was a choking death scent to the air. All the grass was flat with the weight of it. The trees had shed their leaves without the seasons changing. My clothes itched me. My eyes burned. Through the scratching and tears I looked to Marybeth, waiting for her answer.
She brushed the lingering wrinkles from her jeans and said, “Terrified. Oh, you mean physically? I’m out of breath. I have a headache. I itch. That’s about all. Fine, otherwise.” Her sarcasm remained undiminished.
He put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her face with the same exploratory expression doctors must cultivate over years of practice. He asked if she was tired. Was she nauseous? Besides her headache was she in any other pain? How was her breathing? Could she inhale deeply? He looked each of us over and asked the same questions. We all assured him we were scared to death and in decent physical condition.
He said, “Same here. Just not as decent. I don’t want to make any hasty prognoses here—”
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Prognosticate away.” My vocabulary was growing by leaps and bounds. It was such a strange time.
He said, “If we had radiation sickness, which we would have if we had been irradiated, then we would manifest certain symptoms: yellowing of the eyes, vomiting, fatigue. Then there’s the secondary symptoms, the gory things that don’t show up right away. Things like bone cancer, liver cancer, tumors in the lungs, death.”
Margie joined the crying. Marybeth cursed. I stared at Rocky and said, “What the hell was that?” He knew I meant the explosion. We all knew I meant the explosion. There was only one thing I could have meant and it was sifting down through the atmosphere all around us.
He looked behind him and turned right back. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was a low grade nuclear blast. It sure as hell wasn’t the Myers kids setting off firecrackers. Meltdown, most likely. Hydrogen bubble escapes, ignites, geyser goes off full of radiation, core explodes and blasts right up through the same hole it dug. That, or somebody dropped a bomb right on top of the reactor. Who knows?”
Doctors are sometimes crazy and sometimes correct and sometimes you can’t tell the difference. You sure don’t want to give them the benefit of the doubt just because they went to medical school. As it turned out, though, young Rocky Seitz was right on the money. We all knew it. We didn’t know how we knew it, but we knew. Off and on the remainder of that horrible day I kept thinking, low grade? This is low grade? Just to show you how naïve a guy can be, it never even crossed my mind—didn’t cross any of our minds, I’m sure—that this accident had been created—had been allowed to happen—for our benefit. Right. Thousands of people had been deliberately exposed to the fallout from a radioactive cloud simply as a way of testing how the four of us would react. Later on, the way Rocky explained it to us, the people of southern Ohio , northern Kentucky and western West Virginia Kentucky
“Do you know your Shakespeare, Moe?”
Again I told Rocky I hadn’t known it was mine alone. He didn’t smile this time and simply quoted. He said:
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
When we awakened the next morning, the first thing I noticed was that over night Rocky’s mustache had turned gray.
Chapter Nine
The orangutans in Plymouth , Michigan Detroit Detroit
The session itself was problematic. Some of the apes were still angry over nearly becoming extinct because of human beings. Others felt a smug superiority to the humans because they—the orangutans—had not only an opposable digit on their hands but also one on their feet, giving them something of an edge. By in large, the female orangutans were far more sympathetic to the possible plight of mankind. Indeed it was mostly at the behest of the women apes that the assembly was called. The males were threatened with the old Lysastrada number if they didn’t come along, so at last the semi-sociable males gave in and agreed to help.
All this time there were those among the humans who felt that too much was happening too fast. As long as changes limited themselves to technology, nobody much seemed to mind. One day a guy was getting used to carrying his computer in his pocket and the next he was downloading songs onto his self-percolating coffee cup. Things changed and people adjusted through the thrill of commerce. But the sociological changes were more challenging. When the apes migrated to Plymouth —a city chosen for its historic name more than for its geographic location—the human residents were so exhausted from their generational economic woes that most of them just shrugged and drowned themselves in Lake Michigan . One city official was even heard to say, “Somehow I thought it would be chimpanzees” immediately prior to sinking beneath the top layer of water. Had the orangutans chosen a more prosperous locale, such as Atlanta United States
All in all it was the older humans who expressed more acceptance to the rapid societal change. Perhaps this was because the older folks still had vague recollections of an earlier time when every day brought about massive social upheaval. The elder humans called this earlier time The Sixties, although few of them seemed to be able to remember why they called it that. All they knew for sure was that there had certainly been a period of time when leaders were assassinated, governments fell to coup d’etats, music fads popped up and faded quickly, fashion changed with the wind, drugs were still exciting, colors radiated a real vibrancy, art was edgy, and religions could be absorbed and discarded like changing one hat for another. The old people spoke of the tribal aspects of The Sixties and a look of solemn ecstasy came over their faces whenever this subject came up. The only part of the recollections that really interested the younger people was this tribalism. Many of the young of the 2020s had concluded that man’s rule of the earth was rapidly declining and that the so-called primitive creatures who clung together in coveys, packs, congresses, pods and schools—that these creatures had the answers humans had long been seeking. One thing that truly united the human age groups was their fascination with the great apes.
The orangutans gathered in an abandoned football stadium. At one time this stadium had been very pro-lion, yet that did not appear to trouble the apes. A little better than half of those in attendance had developed a system of communication based on facial gestures and hand signals. As mentioned, many of them came because they feared being sexually ostracized by their partners. The others came because there was nothing good on TV that night.
The message of concern was expressed and the floor made open for energized discussion. A few engaged in rumor mongering—the dolphins were said to be fomenting global revolution by some, while others maintained the “skinny whales” were obsessed with religious deconvertion—but in the end the apes agreed that they would send a small congress to Providence, Rhode Island, where the dolphins had completely taken over the city government. The goal would be to learn the short and long term intents of the evolving sea mammals and to offer an olive branch (or sardine) of peace.
So it was that at the same time that the four humans from Circleville hiked their way across the country in a more or less westerly direction, four herbivorous arboreal anthropoids swung and danced east toward Providence
July Fifth came along, just like it does in most years. From the newspaper scuttlebutt the four of us picked up along our way through northern Kentucky Louisville
It seemed to us that things were sufficiently horrible. Although the two women and I showed no signs of sickness, radiation or otherwise, the doctor was fast developing health issues. His joints and muscles ached him throughout that next day. His color was wan and his thinking struck me as being slow and way off the point, the way a guy is when he’s so tired he can hardly stay on his feet. Punch drunk, they call it when a boxer gets that way. Rocky looked like he’d been in the ring two rounds too long. What with him being a physician and all, it might have appeared he would have seen the importance of seeking immediate medical care. But not our Doctor Seitz, no sir. What he insisted on doing was rambling on about how this was not the end of the world, no way, no how. He said, “The only reason John the Divine’s Revelations got stuck in the Bible was to improve the morale of the First Century Christians.” He coughed then and coughed as if he might cough up a lung. I suggested he give his lecture some other time. He coughed and said he didn’t know what I meant.
Once he got over that coughing jag, he went right on. “This is important, dammit. The Roman Empire was kicking the butts of the Pauline Christians. So to keep the Christians from giving in and worshipping the Emperor, John stuck Revelations in the Bible so the end would seem near. But that’s not all, that’s not all.”
I told him that was indeed quite enough. He wouldn’t hear of it. “Moe, listen. I know you think that all the shit that’s going down now means something big, right?” He coughed, cleared his throat, and coughed some more.
I didn’t think anything of the sort, but I agreed with him anyway. He said, “There was an asteroid that was supposed to croak us all back in 2019, you remember?” Cough, hack hack cough-cough. “It was a big rock moving at something like 60,000 miles an hour. Everyone was saying that was the end, except, whoops, it only missed us by two million miles.” His throat crackled and his chest contracted and he fell over on the road and just held himself all fetus-like.
I begged and pleaded with him. Marybeth implored him to be reasonable. Margie used seduction. None of it worked. Rocky steadfastly refused to let us take him to a hospital for treatment. I thought about taking him to one anyway. Marybeth whispered to me that just maybe that porkpie-wearing sociopath Ehrlichmann might have the area hospitals on the lookout for us. That cured me of thoughts of defiance. Still, I had to do something to help him.
I made him a makeshift wheelchair out of my backpack—kind of a stretch, I’ll admit—and we took turns pushing him along ahead of us. It was a little awkward, but the pack had wheels on its base for a reason, I guess, and we just made the best of it. Rocky slept off and one as we walked and rolled into higher elevations. That meant thinner air, which meant his breathing might become more strained. So I insisted he not say another word for the rest of the day. Even though he did stop talking, he sure threw up a hell of a lot. And every time he did I made him eat some more of the dried red bell peppers. If he really was under the cloud of radiation poisoning, he was gonna need all the help he could get.
In the meantime, I became faintly aware of the fact that Margie had developed kind of a crush on me. She didn’t say anything outright, mind you. It was just that she kept manufacturing reasons to stand beside me when we walked and kept bumping into me with those perky, prodigious boobs of hers and kept looking at me all moony-eyed as if she thought I had been the genius who invented sliced bread or the doggie door or maybe even the oven mitt.
Now I should make it clear right here and now that I was very flattered by this attention. I should also admit that she was a mighty fine example of “feminine pulchritude and luminosity,” as Seitz blurted out during his delirium. Shoot, I hadn’t been with a woman in the Biblical, Talmudic, Koranish or Bhagavad-Gita sense of the word in damn near fifteen years and I was, to put it gently, kind of backed up in the tubular department. To say it nice and indelicate, I was horny as a toad and she would have made me very happy and I would have sure tried my best to please her in kind. The only problem was that this just wasn’t the time or place for that kind of fiddlefarting or slap and tickle. I did make a mental note, however, that once we got to Los Angeles
In spite of being slowed down a little with the doctor and with the distraction that Margie pleasantly enough created, we still made amazingly good time. I have to say much of this was due to the relentless encouragement of Marybeth Gowan. That woman never met an obstacle she couldn’t whack out of her way. When the Doc got sick, she was the one to suggest the makeshift wheelchair. When we said goodbye to the flatness of Ohio and were introduced to the rolling hills of Kentucky
Besides, she was one of the best joke-tellers I have ever met. A little later on I’ll be sure to share some of her humor. It would be out of place right now though, what with the doctor being so sick and all. Oh, alright. I can’t help myself. Besides, with all the doom and gloom, it’s probably time for a side-splitter. Here’s a good one. A guy goes into a bar, as guys will do. He sits down and orders a beer. As he sips the beer he hears a voice say “Nice shirt, fella.” He looks around and sees that the only other person in the place is the bartender and he’s way down at the other end of the bar. He shrugs and takes another sip. Sure enough, he hears a voice say “Love that necktie.” Well, now he’s like internally spazzing out, so he motions the bartender over to him and says to the guy, “Dude, I keep hearing a voice that’s saying real nice things to me. Where’s that coming from?” The bartender smiles and says, “It’s the peanuts.” Guy says, “Huh?” Bartender says, “It’s the peanuts. They’re complementary.” Ain’t that a hoot?
We went through some stretches of time, though, when each one of us seemed lost in personal contemplation. Naturally I don’t know what was on the mind of my friends. For myself, I kept wondering what it would be like when we reached the Bushmen. I knew the Taa language inside and out, so there’d be no trouble communicating. But would they feel like talking? After all, they were a long way from home themselves, farther than any of us were, and we—or at least the country of California—had lured them away from that home and set them up residence in an artificial village where they would supposedly be safe from the encroachment of the evil city. So they got moved to L.A.
What would the changes in the universe have done to them? I knew something had to be going on or the caregivers there wouldn’t have been so rude and evasive. I did have a theory on the subject, a theory that made my stomach kind of queasy. It occurred to me as we wandered up and down those beautiful and horrific hills that the Bushmen could just possibly possess powers that would make that nuclear accident at Piketon seem tame by comparison.
As we moved on we came across a small, raggedy family along the roadside. There were empty boxes strewn all around them. Their clothes were ripped and torn and you could almost see the woman’s ribs through her blouse. She was nursing her baby, two other small children were tossing a ball back and forth, and the man was holding up a sign that read: MORE THAN WE NEED. TAKE WHAT YOU WANT. The man’s eyes followed us as we moved by them. I nodded hello and he just kept on staring. The kids were oblivious. The woman tried to smile but she just didn’t have it in her, I guess.
A few miles farther down the road sat a short row of round and tall metal trash containers, each with a roaring fire spewing from within them. Summer clothing was littered all around the bins. We didn’t see any people that might have belonged to these things. It was far too warm out for anyone to have started the fires for heat. It was as if some people had been burning what was left of what they owned and had left right in the middle of it all. Rocky stirred as we were parallel with the blazing cans. He said in a very low voice, “A very nice man once said that this generation would not pass until all these things were accomplished.”
Marybeth rolled her eyes and replied, “But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven.”
Rocky nodded and fell right back asleep. I whispered to Marybeth, “You believe these are the last days?”
She didn’t look at me. She just said, “No,” and let it go. I didn’t think so either. She probably thought I meant Rocky’s last days. I meant something else. Still, no matter how bad or weird things get, they can always get worse. For that matter, they can always get better. I think people turn to religion or what the kids call “spirituality” when they just can’t figure out what’s happening. They have to have some way of making sense of things. If they can’t make sense, it helps them to give credit to the cosmos for all the confusion. As for me, confusion had long been a way of life. Sometimes that confusion was kind of nice, especially when you were in the mood for surprises. But then there were the bad times, bad like as if you were hearing every spoken word in reverse and some bearded form was off in the mouth of the sky laughing at you as you tried to scream that it wasn’t funny anymore.
It was right after daybreak the next morning that we came across the poachers. None of us got a whole lot of sleep the previous evening because poor Rocky coughed and wheezed so long and hard that even if the noise didn’t keep you awake, the thought of what had to be going on inside his lungs would scare sleep away. I brought him a big cup of black coffee from the donut shop across the road from where we camped and I guess maybe it was the caffeine that put a little color back into his cheeks. We were all just sitting around him when we heard somebody speak. It was a voice we didn’t recognize.
“Who’s the perty lady?” It was some kind of thick British Australian mix stirred together with bathtub gin. You could hear the spittle dripping from each syllable.
The three of us who weren’t sick turned around slow and looked. Rocky did not stir. The man who had spoken was wearing some type of African safari garb, just as his two companions were. He had one eye pinched down nearly closed and the other wide beneath a cocked eyebrow. His face had been in a fight or two in its life. He stood in front of the others with one shoulder noticeably lower than the other and his neck warbled when he spoke. All three of them were big, muscular types, unshaved and unbathed, but not unarmed, one of them—not the one who’d spoken—hanging his mouth open wide enough to catch flies. Big flies. I stood up fast and said hello. None of them said anything back. I said hello again and introduced myself and only myself. That was when the guy who’d asked about the pretty lady said, “We’s poachers. You know wat dat means?”
I cleared my throat. I said, “It means you poach?”
“Tha’s right,” he said. “Poachin’s wat we do. Now we’s on ar way to the Island . Yas, the Island ’s where wull be. Ya know which Island I means?”
“No. Which one?”
The second poacher stepped forward, knocking his friend to one side. “Wat for ya wanna know about that? What’re ye all? Spies?”
“They looks to be new spies,” the third one observed. “Might light in the loft.”
I said, “You brought it up.”
They all thought that was funny. I could tell because they slapped one another on the backs hard enough to knock out teeth.
“Waddya gots to eat?” the first one demanded as he regained his position up front.
The second one added, “Never crossed yer minds, I reckon, day udders might ave need, eh?”
Margie came up behind me and peered around my shoulder. “We have just fruits and vegetables. Only enough for ourselves. We’re on our way to Los Angeles
The second one grunted. “Lo’ Angele, is it? Ain’t that some rot?”
The first one butted in, “Who duh hell eats fruit un vegs dese days? You ain’t spies, are ye?”
The third one said, “They looks like spies. New spies is wut it is. La dee stinkin’ dah!”
I could feel Margie trembling as she squeezed up next to me. She asked, “What is it you men poach around here?”
That stopped them all for a few moments. Honest to God, they were scratching and shifting in a way that made me wonder if they could remember. At last the first one, who I took for the leader, said, “We poaches watever it might be dat needs to be poached. Today dat looks to be grillas.”
The second one punched the first one across the jaw. “Ha many time I gots to tell ya, dey ain’t grillas! Ya can’t calls em grillas or dey will get pissed. Dey calls em rangis.”
Marybeth spoke up at this point. “Excuse me. Are you trying to say orangutans?”
The third one swallowed hard and came back with, “La dee stinkin dah! Orangatangs! Call em wat ye like, muh deary. When we gets to em, we’s gonna poach da hell out of em.” Again, this wittiness was met with assaultive laughter. From themselves, that is. Then, as if on cue, they all three broke out into an unharmonius song. It went:
We’s poachers poachin for to poach
Cuz poachins wut we do.
Lollygagging alligators hide in snake skin elevators
Ever word they lies about is true.
We eats raw meat an use ar feets
To mix and stir and dip out ar fondue
It’s a might fine life, go ask muh wife
She’s that Billy goat painted blue
Aw it’s a fine old way to spend ever day
Killin an ape or two
Cuz we’re poachin poachers
And tha’s wut poachers do.
“Think dat sums er up,” the first one announced. “Wut kinda meat ya got? We’s hungry. Speak up, ya wretched, or else we tree’ll make ya sorry ya met us.”
“We’re already sorry.” Those three words came from Marybeth. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Foonie is eet?” inquired the first.
“Not so clever in the grave,” mocked the second.
“La dee stinkin dah!” taunted the third.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked.
“Wuts wrong wit him?” the first poacher asked, pointing at Rocky.
Margie stepped out from behind me and pointed a finger at the leader. “You listen to me! Get out of here and leave us alone!”
All three poachers laughed again. Teeth flew everywhere. “Wut ya think we is, pestilence?” the first one demanded. “We goes where we goes when we gets there!”
Margie was not dissuaded. She continued to point and shout. She said, “You get out of here right now, or, if you don’t, well, we’ll just tell everybody which Island you three are going to.”
Their laughter died so fast it sounded like some giant foot had just squashed a pack of hyenas. The second one said, “God in heaven! Ya wuddint tell em about da island dat isn’t? Oh no! Not da island dat isn’t!”
All three expressed that they would leave us to our business if we promised we would not tell anyone about their destination: The island that isn’t. We swore we’d keep mum. They pledged to move on.
The island that isn’t. That riddle kept tickling at me the whole rest of the day. No man is an island. He’s a peninsula. Maybe they meant Greenland . No, they were headed the wrong way for that, although that might not have meant anything. Just about the time I stopped caring about it, Marybeth and Margie came up with the solution, although when they first suggested it, both the Doc and I shook our heads. After all, what was there to poach in Rhode Island
Chapter Ten
Late in the afternoon of July 6, Margie, Marybeth and I talked over the fact that Rocky looked like he was going to die. His color had faded from washed out to that of bed sheet gray. He couldn’t even keep down the bell peppers for throwing up so much. He was dropping weight by the minute and hurting so bad in his muscles and joints that every bump we hit in the road sent him screaming in a fragile, trembling voice that sounded like very thin glass breaking apart.
At one point near what we figured might well be the end, he whispered that he was thirsty. I reached into the pack that he was riding along on and pulled out a warm Circle-Cola. I twisted off the cap and put the plastic bottle to his lips. We pulled over to the side of the road to wait out the dark end of our friend’s life.
We camped inside the confines of a long-deserted roadside rest stop. The night air had cooled a bit, especially with a crisp Kentucky
Those poachers might have been a slightly high-low form of traveling slapstick, but their general attitude had left me a bit tense. I stayed up with the doctor, keeping an occasional eye on him while I listened to the night. Crickets nattered, bull frogs farted, owls hooted and screeched. The only major interruption in the peaceful orchestration was the unearthly wail of what had to be either a big dog or small wolf. I love a good dog. I hoped he would find his way to us if it pleased him to do so. I guess it didn’t please him and after a while the wailing stopped just as abruptly as it began.
Once the night settled into quietness, Rocky’s eyes fluttered closed and he drifted off into a light sleep. Watching him, I reached into memories of my father sleeping in what turned out to be his death bed back in Circleville. We’d had something called hospice at the time. Hospice was a great program where nurses and social workers and other volunteer types would come over to the dying person’s house to help out and make the transition out of this world a little easier for all those involved. This one nurse came out of my father’s sickroom and she sat down right next to me. I remember she put her arm around my shoulder and told me that I needed to go in there and give my daddy permission to die. “He’s holding on because he’s waiting for you to let him go.”
“But he’s asleep, isn’t he?”
She patted my shoulder and said, “The hearing is the last of the senses to go. He’ll understand you. You go on.”
I felt like an idiot and I was scared. But I went into his bedroom and sat down beside him and said, “Daddy, this is Moe.” He looked so frail and underweight that it just ached me to remember how strong and fit he had once been. I said, “I don’t want you to worry. I’ll take good care of Ma. I’ll take care of my sisters and brothers. You did a great job of getting me ready for this. Now just don’t worry. I’ll be fine because you did such a great job.” He breathed out a heavy sleep sigh. “Daddy, you go on now. God’s waiting for you.” I didn’t necessarily believe that, but I knew he did, so I didn’t see any harm in saying it. Half an hour later my father was gone. I cried like a cold drunk lost in a rainy night a long way from home.
I thought about all this while I was watching the young Doctor Seitz sleeping in south Kentucky
I heard the women whispering together. All at once they were beside me. Margie hugged me from one side and Marybeth from the other. I said, “I cannot let this happen.” Rocky’s lips were dry and chapped. He was badly dehydrated from all the puking he’d done. Even with his lids closed, his eyes bulged like a guy with a thyroid problem.
I shrugged off the embraces of my friends and pulled another Circle Cola from my pack. It was warm and fizzing. I snapped off the cap and shoved the opened tip right into Rocky’s mouth. He was still asleep and a lot of the liquid splashed off down his cheeks and neck. Some of it, though, got into him because we watched as his weak hands tenderly clutched at the container. He started sucking that soda just like a baby at a bottle. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, slow at first, and then with a steady rhythm. By God, if he was going to die he wasn’t going to die thirsty.
He lifted a hand and I eased away the bottle. He spat a weak bit of spittle and said, “That’s good.”
The moon was almost down by this time so the women relit our small campfire. I kept watching Rocky’s face. I whispered to him, “If you can hear me, Doc, I have news for you. There is no way in hell you are gonna die. You hear me? I do not give you permission. You kick the shit out of that radiation stuff and you drink that Circle Cola and you get better, dammit. We need you.”
It must have been pure exhaustion rather than peace of mind that overcame us that night. When I woke up the next day, the sun was already hanging high in the sky, Margie and Marybeth were softly snoring in their sleeping bags, the campfire was out and the road was quiet. I looked around and saw Rockwell Seitz staring at me out of one eye. “Morning,” he croaked.
I had slept so sound and so deep that for a few seconds there I had forgotten where we were and what we were doing. I blurted out, “How’s it going?” and just as quickly the real world came flashing back. There was Rocky sitting up with one eye half open, a tiny little single watt smile trying to light up his face.
“More soda?” he asked.
I looked at him with something in my brain located somewhere between disbelief and wide-eyed wonder. He asked me again and I jumped up and snatched out another bottle, making a mental note that we would need to get some more before the day was through. Rocky drank about half that container before the women even woke up. Once they pulled themselves out of their sleeping bags, they joined me in a huddle and we all agreed that our friend was looking a little bit better, a little stronger, and I hate to say it this way, a little more lifelike.
By the morning of July ninth, he was back on his feet. The day after that he was talking so much I told him I liked him better when he was sick. That wasn’t the truth, of course. Shoot, we were all glad he had recovered. It’s just that when somebody has been out of it for a few days, that person tends to act like every thought that runs through his own mind is worthy of deep discussion, when in reality it usually isn’t worth spit. All the same, we were starting to make good traveling time again and I have to admit I felt genuine encouragement that Rocky had licked that radiation sickness, if that’s what it had been. I tried to remember what it was that Jasper Hedges had written about beta-cryptoxanthin. It regenerated cells, I remembered that. People took it in a capsule if they were prone to getting cancer. No, he hadn’t written anything about overcoming radiation sickness. Then again, we didn’t know for a fact that that was what had been eating at the doctor. He might have just had bronchitis. I didn’t believe that was it, but I was willing to consider it. Hell, maybe he had caught Bert’s tuberculosis. Who knew? All I knew was that Rockwell Seitz was convinced he’d been poisoned by nuclear radiation, so that was the theory the rest of us held onto.
“There has to be something in that cola,” he kept saying. “I wonder what it is.”
Maybe he was right. I can’t say. I was more inclined to believe that it was a combination of things that cured him. Sure, it might have been the Double C. After all, that soda did have the reputation of being a cure-all. But deep down I felt then and feel to this day that it was the cola, the red bell peppers, the being out of doors, the being with the rest of us, and the power of curiosity about the Bushmen of Los Angeles—that it was all those things and maybe even my little speech to him about not being allowed to leave us behind that worked together to pull him through. I believed that then and I believe it now.
Whatever the cure, it didn’t come a minute too soon.
We were in southwestern Tennessee
We were on a comfortable downhill slope when I’d stopped to run into the roadside bushes to take a leak. I’d needed to go for more than an hour but I hadn’t wanted to stop because we were making such excellent traveling time. I was very fired up about getting to the Bushmen. The sooner we reached them the sooner we would know if they too had the markings, if they too had been transformed, if they too were in danger from Ehrlichmann and his assassins. So, one thing and another and I just couldn’t hold it any longer, so I signaled the others that I was going to visit the little boys bush. I must have peed for three solid minutes. I felt so good immediately afterwards that it was like I was waking up from a twenty hour nap. When I came back out of the foliage I saw that two guys in military garb were patting down Margie, Marybeth and Rocky. A solar-saturated jeep was pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Those things made quiet transportation. Too damned quiet, as it turned out.
I froze and watched. I hadn’t been seen yet. That was good. Good for all of us. I saw on the soldiers’ armbands that they were military police. I also saw that they were big guys, far tougher looking than any of us. They wore guns in their holsters, whereas we had exactly zero guns among us. I knew right away that they had to have been sent by Ehrlichmann—who else could it have been?—so I very slowly bent down to my knees and then stretched out prone on the bank beside the shoulder. I took pains not to make a whisper of a sound.
My three friends had been pushed over so that they were leaning against the jeep with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One soldier held a gun on them as the other lifted up the front of their t-shirts with one hand and snapped a few pictures with the camera in his other. Margie whimpered when her turn came. When they got to Marybeth, the farmer woman suggested the soldier fornicate with every one of his female relatives, living and dead. Rocky didn’t say a word.
Under normal circumstances—whatever normal might be in a situation like this—I have to admit I would have been too scared to be of any use to anyone. Whatever else these circumstances were, however, they could in no way be perceived as normal. So instead of fear, my old friend Anger took over my emotions. Nice and slow I crawled along that embankment until I found what I had been feeling around for: a broken tree branch. I don’t know an oak tree from a ficus. All I knew was that the one I had scrounged made a good fit in my swinging arm and felt just heavy enough to pack one cold bad bitch of a wallop. I kept staring at the soldiers as I crawled on my belly off to the right of them. The gun-holding soldier wore an inhuman grimace as his companion pulled my friends’ t-shirts back into place and swung my pals around so that they were now facing the jeep. All I could think was that these guys were going to blow my friends away. I was so furious that I know my blood pressure reading would have scared the doctor more than the prospects of getting shot. I jerked my legs up beneath me, straightened up as I got to my feet, and swung that branch through the air like a pirate slashing with his cutlass. I screamed an incomprehensible sound that came from deep in my chest, from a place I had never explored before, and I ran. I ran right at the soldiers. My eyes were wide and my face screamed death. That was when a German shepherd came out from the front of the jeep and sunk its teeth into the calf of the soldier with the gun.
The soldier froze. He couldn’t seem to move. Then he screamed. He screamed and tried to shake off the dog. The dog refused to let go. That was very fortunate for me because if that dog hadn’t been there and the soldier had been free to move during those first two or three seconds, things would have turned out a lot worse for us. As the other soldier quick-snatched his own weapon, I brought that branch down at an angle and I swear I could feel the second military policeman’s arm snap as I leapt in the air and brought the branch across him with all my weight and strength. I filled with a jubilation and energy I’d never known. All in the same motion I bent my left leg at the knee and kicked out with my right, striking the first soldier—still attached to the dog’s teeth—hard in the side just as his weapon fired off a millimeter or two over my head. He hit the ground hard and slid across the road’s shoulder and then fell back over the embankment.
With both men down, the German shepherd trotted over to me, wagging its tail all the way. I pushed Margie, Marybeth and Rocky into the back of the jeep. The dog looked to me, then looked at the jeep, then looked at me again. I tapped the inside of the vehicle and he leapt up and inside, snuggling up in between the two women. I was completely hung up in gratitude for this beautiful dog’s assistance. I imagine that is why I didn’t see the first soldier—the one who’d had his gun drawn—charge and hit me with his head right in my back. I rolled over backwards and tightened myself for a hard kick that never came. Oh, he tried to kick me but somehow he simply missed. I was back on my feet in an instant and punched the off-balance soldier right in the nose. He stared at me for a moment and then dropped. My fist throbbed. I’d never realized so much pain could be concentrated into just a few small knuckles.
The keys were in the jeep’s ignition. I started the vehicle and it died immediately. I then hopped back out to throw our packs into the front seat. While I was doing this, the second soldier, fading fast, weakly grabbed a handful of gravel and tossed the pebbles at me as he passed out.
I climbed back in the driver’s seat and stared at the shifter. I hadn’t ever driven a stick shift. There never had been any need. “Go go go go go!” Rocky shouted. I pressed the clutch and moved the shifter and we lurched forward. Then the engine died. I studied the diagram on the shifter’s head. I depressed the clutch, swung the stick into what I figured was reverse, and turned the switch. Ignition! Houston
We stayed in first gear for the next few miles. Marybeth kept hollering advice about how to drive the stupid jeep and the dog leaned forward from the backseat as if he planned on giving me instructions. I could have used them because I was so damned confused I couldn’t think clear enough to even pay any attention to the road. I finally brought the jeep up into second gear and from there we accelerated and third gear came easy after that. To this day I have no idea why any sane person would opt for a stick shift when Atlanta was making perfectly fine cars, jeeps and trucks with automatic transmissions that work extremely well to free the driver up so he or she could focus on things like helping the people in the backseat get out of their handcuffs. All in all, my time behind the wheel was hurky-jerky. Finally, Marybeth demanded that I pull over and the others concurred. I relented. Just as we came to a stop, the dog jumped out and ran away into an opened field. He didn’t look back. I think my driving had made him nervous.
Even with the cuffs on, Marybeth did a better job of driving than I had with both hands free. But I had beaten the shit out of two of Ehrlichmann’s goose steppers. Nobody could take that away from me. Albeit, with a lot of help from a dog.
A road sign warned that the state line was twelve miles ahead. That meant we would have to abandon the jeep in a few minutes. There had been checkpoints set up at every state line crossing so far. They were a nuisance but pretty easy to avoid. You just got off the highway and pulled yourself through whatever foliage cover there was until you were a mile or so across the line. Then you worked your way back onto the highway and kept right on going. All in all, Ehrlichmann’s recruits put up a pathetic effort, but then again we weren’t on his side so we sure as hell weren’t going to complain. I leaned over near Marybeth and watched as the odometer clicked off the miles. When we were two miles shy of Arkansas
As I was pulling our packs out of the jeep, Margie offered up a brilliant idea. She said, “I wonder if the key that unlocks these handcuffs is on that fob in the starter.”
I slapped myself in the head. There was a second key dangling from the key ring. I’d looked right at it and never made the connection. Judas Priest! Naturally it was a perfect fit. The obvious is sometimes the last thing we notice. If Margie hadn’t been thinking so clear, chances are we’d have had a devil of a time getting their wrists free. We left the empty shackles on the hood of the jeep and headed off the highway on foot.
A Tennessee walking horse came out of nowhere and galloped across the road and up the hillside that greeted travelers approaching Arkansas and the Ozark Mountains . The horse paid us no attention and disappeared into the thick green and blue colors that made up the foothills of the beautiful mountain range.
I couldn’t sleep very well that night. I was sort of hoping that dog might come back but I didn’t even hear a cry or a howl the whole night. We had camped at another abandoned roadside rest stop, chopped some branches and leaves and put them in the grill to make a nice low-burning heater and stretched out on top of our sleeping bags. I guess the others must have thought I was deep into dreamland because they started whispering about me in glowing terms. Apparently I wasn’t the only one having trouble catching up on my z’s.
“He’s eighty-eight, you know?”
“That’s just chronology. Did you see the way he threw those soldiers around?”
“Amazing, yes. I could fall in love with that man.”
“I say, he is eighty-eight, darling.”
“What does that even mean? He looks like he’s maybe forty.”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Those bell peppers, Marybeth. They saved us all.”
“Especially Moe.”
“You sure he’s asleep?”
“Has to be. He had a hard day.”
“I wonder who that dog belongs to.”
“Lots of people just leave them behind when they move. The poor things have to fend for themselves. Listen. Is Moe snoring?”
“I don’t think so. But he’s asleep.”
“Rest well, my friend.”
It didn’t matter who was saying which set of words. I was with my own kind. I was safe. I was strong. I was warm. I wanted for nothing. I couldn’t sleep from the excitement of it all.
While the four seekers after the Bushmen of Los Angeles Huntsville , Alabama Damascus
All that had been many years earlier and many rough flights ago. Eichmann had discovered that he had a flair for the calculations inherent in high-level administration and had blackmailed his way to the top position at NASA, a position he told himself was the most important job in the known universe. It had been under his command that Vludium had been discovered on Jupiter. His insights had initiated the very first interplanetary mining expeditions. He had anticipated the reclamation of U.S. debt to the Chinese fascists and had even played a minor role in brokering the deal, a deal that resulted in NASA appearing to be the good guys because they offered the New United States
Eichmann tapped out his pipe into the ashtray his grandson had made him. It was a miniature replica of Jupiter, with the planet’s many moons serving as indentations for resting cigarettes. He looked across his desk at Ehrlichmann. There he sat, wearing that pretentious pork pie hat of his, smoking unfiltered smoke sticks one after another, beaming with pride over his most recent failure. What chutzpah! Ernest had never been able to completely accept his own accomplishments because he always yearned for more perfection, more power, more knowledge. He genuinely envied Otto his ability to be smug, especially in the face of fiasco. And that was beyond question the way to describe the mess that had been made up in Tennessee Arkansas
“I’ll come to the point, Otto. You fucked up. We can’t find them. We can send millions of people across the solar system and develop cheap methods for element extraction that makes us among the wealthiest institutions in galactic history. Yet somehow you find yourself unable to follow simple, even childlike instructions. Why would that be? Explain it to me.”
Ehrlichmann punched out one cigarette and lit another. As he waited for the smoke he had exhaled to float above his superior’s head, he considered his answer. At last he replied, “All you are interested in is the science.”
“Dammit, Otto! This is a scientific organization! That is what we do! We study and exploit. Study and exploit! Is it that difficult to get this fact through your hard German skull?”
Ehrlichmann met the outrage with a thin smile. “Ernest, my friend. Perhaps the Germanics of your skull is as hard as mine, eh? Look. I too am interested in learning what the pepper genetics have linked themselves to. The mitochondrial DNA of Gowan’s produce is insufficient to account for the changes that we already know about.”
“Yes! That’s my point! What are the changes we do not know about?”
Ehrlichmann allowed himself to frown. “I do not know what I do not know.”
“Do you know what you do know?”
“Possibly.”
At this the two old friends laughed together. The sound was like that of a cat being strangled. After a minute or so, Eichmann resumed his criticism. “I know what you are after, Otto. You want to jump the gun and leap off into the celestial consequences. You want to find out how this power can be harnessed to rule galaxies.”
The head of Health Alterations shook his head. “Not quite. Oh, you are right, as far as it goes. But my ultimate aim is to provide this genetic advantage to a very few of us: yourself, of course, the leaders of the Chinese fascist party, myself. Then we will be positioned to move beyond these primitive concepts of full-employment and return to the natural order of things.”
“By which you mean slavery.”
“That is what I mean. Mastery and slavery. The history of humanity demands it, Ernest. It slaps us in the face with the fact that we as a species have arrived at different levels, that we are inherently unequal. Anything outside that realm is against all that science teaches us. And I mean to have my way in this.”
Otto Ehrlichmann was a sociopath. Of that Ernest Eichmann had not the slightest doubt. He recognized that to go against his friend in this matter would only slow things down even further. He said, “You have my permission to proceed on one condition.” He paused, never taking his eyes off the face of his friend and adversary. “Aren’t you curious as to what my condition is?”
“I can guess it.”
“Go ahead then and guess.”
“You will grant your divine permission”— and here he sneered out the adjective—“so long as I am able to recapture the four Ohioans and tell you what you need to know.”
Eichmann relit his pipe. “It is as if you could read my mind, old friend.”
Ehrlichmann nodded. “After we extract our information, that might just be possible.”
The room again filled with the screeching of strangled cats.
Chapter Eleven
We popped out of Texas and into the little jut of New Mexico that prevents the lone star state and Arizona
“What the hell are they waiting for?” Rocky demanded. “Why don’t they just shoot us down like dogs?” He’d been getting kind of hysterical off and on ever since his big recovery. I was hip to his paranoia and just let him carry on until he tired himself out. After that he wouldn’t speak for maybe an hour or two and then one of those frigging whirlybirds would come soaring by overhead and he’d start up all over again.
Margie, on the other hand, was very cool about it. She was changing daily and when I say that I mean she was becoming fantastic. And she would have been the first one to tell you that. The sun that hit the southern New United States had tanned her face, arms and shoulders and she was invigorated with a confidence as attractive as her new suntan. Her ego was what wore on the rest of us. That and her deranged sense of humor. She would skip along, making up songs as we moved beneath the summer heat and the helicopter tracking party. “Going to the Bushmen and we’re gonna get murdered. Going to the Bushmen and we’re gonna get mur-ur-ur-dered. Gee, I love the Bushmen and we’re gonna get murdered. Going to the Bushmen of L.A. Yeah a-yeah a-yea-eay.” It was as if she didn’t care and yet I knew that wasn’t true.
Marybeth, meanwhile, was turning into something of a weapons freak. She had insisted we stop off in a military depot store just outside Dallas California
As for myself, I tried to stay merry about things if only because I didn’t see any sense in losing my head, especially when the other three were acting like candidates for the joker’s jailhouse. The truth was though that down deep I kept hearing my inner mind telling me that we had not come all this way—more than one thousand miles, all but ten miles of that on foot—just to get offed by some fly boys on a “seek with and destroy” assignment.
The stretch of I-10 that runs through the hind tit of New Mexico
The reality of the matter was that we were all getting on one another’s nerves more and more often. I might have been jolly on the outside, urging Marybeth to tell certain tired jokes again and again—“Those peanuts, they’re complimentary!”—bragging at Margie on some aspect of her person in order to feed what was becoming an insatiable ego, and trying to keep Rocky from calling forth the more apocalyptic aspects of his personality. Add to that the fact that each one of them was holding me back in that I could walk faster and longer than they could without needing to stop for a rest or a meal. I admit that sounds harsh of me. I admit it, sure. But I had spent a long time pretty much tied up in reading my books—“Get your nose outta that danged book and pump that guy’s ethanol!” Elroy had ordered me more than once—and I liked it that way. I liked it when kids had skirted by my house sniggering to each other about the crazy old guy who lived there. I liked it that Timmy Snotnose Watkins and Snuffy Langston were half scared of me. I liked it that when Royal Wunk came to town that he went a mile out of his way to avoid driving down my street. I liked it that Leonard Mitchell kept trying to get me to sell my place because that gave me a chance to tell him to go screw himself. I liked the hours after hours I spent in my kitchen, wondering what to cook for dinner, wondering if it mattered. I liked the isolation. Hell, I loved it! So if I had been so damned happy, why had my heart fluttered at the thought of making this trip?
In more ways than one I really did love my three traveling companions like members of my own family, if I’d had any family left. But all the psychological pressure of trying to stay alive and stay focused and trying to pick up news here and there—well, it drained me. I’ll just leave it at that.
Speaking of news, the farther west we traveled, the harder it was to get any kind of newspaper. Those things weren’t all that popular back east, come to think of it, but once we crossed the Mississippi River, we would be days in between updates. I got the impression that that was because people out west didn’t really want to worry about what was going on. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that had been why they moved west in the first place. Aw, there I go getting all philosophic and morose again. I swore I wasn’t gonna do that.
We had just passed the sign that proclaimed Arizona
“What do you think you’re doing?” Rocky called over to her.
She started taking supplies and various whatnot out and throwing things to one side. She completely ignored the doctor.
Margie sang, “Marybeth reached in her pocket. Marybeth pulled out a rocket. She tried hard to find a light socket. When she got to court she was third on the docket.”
“Hey, Margie!” I said. “Knock of the nonsense, will you? Marybeth, you can’t be thinking of—”
Her head sprang up from her pack. She snarled at me and shouted, “Don’t tell me what I’m thinking and don’t tell me what I’m going to do! If you people don’t want to help me, that’s just fine. Nobody’s holding you back. But I’m going to blow those rat fuckers out of the sky!”
The rocket-grenade launcher had set her back five hundred dollars. The salesman had told her what a deal she was getting because this Russian model was very much in demand and the Russians didn’t make this kind any longer. Rocky had asked the salesman, “If they’re so popular, why’d the Russians stop making them?”
The salesman ignored Rocky and kept pointing out the limited special features of this killing device. It had originally been designed to be secure for firing from a tripod, but this much-in-demand-model could be easily converted into one that fired from the person’s shoulder.
“Aiming it,” Marybeth had kept asking. “How do I aim the thing?”
The salesman had smiled. “We can certainly hook you up with a fully compatible infrared homing device that will allow you to lead a target by dawn, dusk, or any time the need should arise.”
Marybeth asked, “Oh? And how much more would that be?”
“That marvelous accessory can be yours for only $679, plus federal sales tax.”
“Goddamn!” she’d shouted. “That’s more than the weapon! Forget it. I can aim it myself.”
The salesman had smiled and replied, “Yes, ma’am.” What the hell did that smarmy bastard care?
So there we were, out in the far end of the desert, watching helplessly as Marybeth Gowan, late of Circleville , Ohio , 43113
She did not have long to wait. This time all three pilots were flying high enough above us that we could see them, hear them, and no longer feel them. Even clustered together as they were, I didn’t believe Marybeth could hit any of those moving targets.
Rocky shouted, “You’re just going to antagonize them!”
“You bet I am!”
None of us knew what kind of range the launcher had. None of us had thought to ask the salesman. It wasn’t as if the device came with an instruction manual. Marybeth kept tracing their movements but it looked as if they weren’t going to venture near us on this pass by. I sighed a bit of relief. Then Marybeth slapped her thumb against the ignition switch and the weapon made a loud ker-plop sound. We looked as that grenade soared higher and higher and just about the time it reached its apex, it blew.
The grenade didn’t make the kind of explosion we’d seen with the reactor back in Piketon—not by a long shot—but it was still an amazing thing to see. She missed the nearest helicopter by a quarter mile, but the blast rocked all three of them. The front of each copter spun around and during those few seconds the pilots did not have control of their birds.
At first I was raging angry. Then before I could yell at Marybeth, the thought slapped me that just maybe that had been exactly the right thing to do after all. Put a little distance between those flying buzz bastards and us. I figured Ehrlichmann had put together our destination by now. But that didn’t mean he was free to torment us every step of the way.
The helicopters did not return.
The four of us got along much better for a while.
Chapter Twelve
Getting into the country of California
As I say, getting in was no big thing. All by myself I walked up to the security gate that sat between the two different directions of highway. I approached the window and a man slid the Plexiglas partition open and said, “Yes?”
I smiled and introduced myself. I said, “Are you able to see my three friends standing back there about half a mile?” He said he could and what did I want. I said, “We’re on our way into your oh-so-nice country. The problem is that we don’t have hardly any paperwork with us. Besides, I’m pretty sure you all have a bulletin to detain us.” The man asked my name again and I told him the truth. His face twitched a bit and his hand started to reach for a button beneath his little desk. I told him to please not do that and to instead open his door and come outside with me. He asked me why the hell he ought to do that and I smiled, saying, “We have a rocket-grenade launcher set up back there. Marybeth Gowan—that’s G-O-W-A-N—she’s crazy as a loon, I’ll tell you. What she’s gonna do is fire a grenade into this guard shack of yours and blow it to kingdom come. I just wanted to give you fair warning, young fellow. I understand you have rules to follow. Those rules are probably a whole lot more important to you than saving your own skin. Hey, it’s your call.” With that, I turned on my heels and jogged over to the right, over into a nice big opened field of dried yellow weeds. The guy in the guardhouse shut the Plexiglas and just sat there for a few seconds. I watched from a safe distance as Marybeth lined up the launcher. The guy inside finally came to his senses and leapt out and onto the road where he laid flat as click-click-click BOOM went the launcher and when the dust cleared that guard shack was flat out gone, nothing left but the carefree falling of Plexiglas and cheap lumber. The guard was still trembling with his head beneath his arms as we walked by him and into the country of California
Once we hit the Golden Nation, things began moving at a much faster yet somehow more peaceful pace. One big difference that we could not help but notice was that cars were legal for in-country travel. And Lord there were a lot of them. Almost all of the ones we saw were either nuclear-powered, solar-saturated, or ethanol-charged. Fact is I don’t think we saw one gas-powered car with an internal combustion engine the whole time we were there. You couldn’t buy Vludium in California California
We had been in California San Diego
After a perfect night sleeping at the beach, we were up with the sun and hitched a ride that took us to LAX Airport. From there we flagged a taxi van and told the driver to take us to the Bushmen. He hesitated a moment and said, “You mean the Bushmen of Los Angeles?” We said that was exactly what we meant. He turned around in his seat and said that the Bushmen exhibition was closed. “No Botswana Village Project for you,” he said with an uncertain smile. I told him that was alright, to take us there anyway, as long as the Bushmen were still there. He said that as far as he knew they were. He added that he only knew about it being closed because he had taken his wife and kids there over the preceding weekend and had been turned away. The kids in particular had been quite disappointed. We said that was a shame and he started his meter. We sped over to Highway 1 and went north to Santa Monica Civic Center
We paid the taxi cab guy and he sped away as we stared at the flashing sign: SANTA MONICA CIVIC CENTER. BOTSWANA VILLAGE REUNION TOUR OCTOBER 6! JUPITER ON IMAX SCREEN IN 4-D! CALL TICKETMASTER!
Something about that word “exhibition” had been bugging me all along. It had the scent of a circus about it, specifically a freak show.
We didn’t stand much chance getting by the two armed guards in front of the main entrance to the Center, so we pretended to be terribly dejected about the Bushmen being unavailable and instead sagged our tired asses around to the west side of the building, parked our packs alongside the outer base of the structure, made sure no one else was around, and climbed up the curved wall. If this feat seems amazing, it should not. We had been right in making our trek to the west coast a walking one. Between our diet and the exercise, we had become physically powerful as orangutans, smart as dolphins, and lithe as circus clowns. We scampered up the staggered brick exterior, pulled ourselves up and over the brass railing at the top, and landed in row G-147 on the inside of the Civic Center. Forty-five minutes later, we found ourselves in the inner sanctum of the Bushmen’s nuevo lair.
The setting was unlit and thick with brush, twigs, long leaves of grass, colorful and blooming plants, thickets, thatches and huts. The place appeared deserted as we stepped lightly along what should have been trails but were really just ever so slightly broken and bent flowerings of weeds and other small plants. The air whistled across our skin and our ears were teased with the high chatter of African Grays and Blue-Crested Amazons perched on dipping tree branches. The parrots eyed us with nervous suspicion as we peaked first one way and then another, looking for the direct ancestors of the first human beings inside an auditorium in the largest city in the world.
Rocky pointed to a small pool of water. We saw that it was clean and transparent and situated just outside a stack of honed branches that suggested a primitive animal trap of some sort. I bent down to smell the water for any kind of clue. Marybeth asked me what the hell I was doing. Margie told her to be quiet. I felt Rocky’s hand on my shoulder and as I stood back up I saw that we were no longer alone in paradise.
On the contrary, we were now the exhibition, surrounded by twenty to thirty nearly naked dark-toned skinny Africans. Their heads leaned in toward us in an odd, exaggerated stance, their legs and feet pulled back, just in case they needed to make a hasty retreat, I assumed. The chests of the men and women were bare and I saw that purple circle with the green angle inside it on every one of them that would have been out of puberty. These people were scared and yet they were brave enough to have approached us, short spears gripped in their tight fists, their eyes narrow and bulging.
I moved slow to extend my arms at either side. No danger here, I hoped to project. Their eyes followed my every twitch. Then I nodded my head forward, slowly brought my opened hands to my waistline and ripped off my t-shirt so they could gaze upon my own chest. One of the women near the front elbowed her way forward as she lowered her spear. She stood right in front of me, fascinated with my skin symbol, one that was a mirror image of her own. She reached out a nervous hand and touched her fingertips to the purple circle I had grown. The crowd behind her leaned in closer. She traced a finger across the circle and even though it tickled I did not make a move. I wasn’t so much afraid of these people as I was in awe. I had no interest in spooking them. Okay, maybe I was a little afraid. I kept trying to think of complimentary peanuts.
She drew back and made a short series of clicks with her tongue and lips. The men and women behind her lowered their spears and expressed smiles of curiosity. Then they joined in the clicking. The sound they made was musical. It drew us in. Before we realized what was happening, we were sitting cross-legged on the weeds and grass with half a dozen of their more verbal clickers, all of us making wild hand gestures, face communications, and clickings.
As I said earlier, I speak the language Taa, and so did the Namibians. I listened to several of them relate tales of their journeys from their homes aboard mighty ships and the times they spent in the hulls of those ships, wombed by the Atlantic Ocean; of the times they had been beaten for failing to understand commands; of the times they had been separated from their families, deprived of their heritage, forced to watch as their children were raped and murdered; of the times when the sun did not shine for many days; of times when the left feet of some of the men were chopped off; of a time when one of their more militant members was tied to a wooden board, then nailed to it through his hands and feet, then doused with lighter fluid and set on fire while his woman was made to look on; of the times whole families cried themselves to sleep only to have that sleep broken by the crack of bullwhips; of times when God did not answer their desperate pleadings but only turned His head indifferently while the waters surrounding the mighty ships splashed into the hull and drowned some of their best and brightest—perhaps the Jehovah God of the JW’s—; of times when—after they reached Los Angeles—people of different shapes and colors had stood on the far side of a velvet cord and stared in at them, giggling, holding up mirrors to taunt them, pointing, and just staring as if trying to discern how much of what they were seeing was real; and of times when these proud Namibian people had wanted to stare back and scream that the wrong people were in this false jungle, that the spectators were the real prisoners and that despite the captivity of the Bushmen, they remained more free than those outside. A few of them had dared to shout back. The woman who had traced the circle on my chest was one of them.
She said her name was Tumata. Her husband had rebelled after they had been brought to Los Angeles
Marybeth kept nudging me to ask her about the tribe’s diet. That didn’t really seem to me to be the most important aspect of our visit, at least not at the moment, but Marybeth was quite properly taking the long view. That is, it was proper for her in the sense that no matter how offended she might have been at the behavior of those who had brought the Bushmen here, she had no means of grasping how this permeated our souls. As I listened to Tumata, to Gventa, to Csawhatuoka and to Muneeta and the others who had lost their husbands and children to the whims of those with whips, chains and guns, I knew what our mission here was really all about. Nevertheless, I humored Marybeth by asking Tumata what they ate. I learned first from Tumata and then from all the others in the tribe who would talk with me that while they had been omnivores in Namibia
It was at this point that I, Maurice Henshaw Washington, former misanthrope and sudden philanthropist, made an important decision. I asked Rocky if he would mind bringing me my large packet of freeze-dried peppers. He said he would. While I waited for him to return, I explained to Margie and Marybeth that I wanted them to leave with Rocky when he returned, to check themselves into a hotel close by and to rest up, to stay attuned to the California news on TV, and for them to basically lay low for a couple weeks. The women waited for Rocky to return before they asked what I was supposed to be doing during this period. I explained, briefly, that I was going to feed the dried peppers to a few of the Bushmen to see if that fruit affected them the way it did me.
Marybeth said she could get word to her workers back in Circleville to ship some more of the fruit out here. I had reservations about making contact with outsiders but I was aware that we were going to need more of the stuff before too long, so I told her to go ahead.
None of them were any too happy about leaving me behind. Rocky said they’d give me two weeks and then they were coming back for me whether I liked it or not. I thanked him, unaware at that time that he would be dead in three days. I hugged Marybeth and even accepted a warm kiss from Margie. The three of them left the way they had come. I ripped off my clothes and settled in for a period of living in the jungle.
Part Three
How to Have Fun on Jupiter While on a Budget
Chapter Thirteen
The miniature cameras inside the Bushmen exhibition sent back the visual and audio data that Ehrlichmann studied off and on throughout the period of Maurice Washington’s visit. His three assistants took copious notes over the long Management Day Weekend, feigning fascination at the specimens inside the exhibition. They described in writing every gesture, twitch, utterance and action of the forty-odd members of the tribe. Ehrlichmann knew his assistants were industrious beyond pareil and yet that they were light years removed from comprehending the real significance of what they were seeing. What his assistants actually represented to him was the absence of intellectual rigor that had been plaguing so many of the colleges and universities in the New United States
The woman, for instance, had been very satisfactory in the sack. The two men—Ehrlichmann could never seem to speak their names with any confidence—could be counted on to recall various statistical formulations and frequency distributions. But as to critical thinking, the three of them were a lost cause.
The head of Health Alterations turned his head away from the monitor screen and closed his eyes, steepling his fingers for a few seconds until he remembered that he was trying to break himself of such a pretentious habit. He folded his hands in his lap and allowed himself to mentally conjure the image of Maurice Washington slipping the peppers to the savages, an action that defied the edicts of Ernest Eichmann. Once Ehrlichmann had realized what Washington
It had been Ehrlichmann who had contacted his equivalent in the new nation of California , asking that security be reduced at the Civic Center Washington
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling without really seeing it. He knew his assistants would be looking at him with expectant eyes, ready to laugh at his humor, moan at his disappointments, curse at his frustrations, and plow into his questions with little hope of knowing what he was getting at.
“You have all read the diary, yes?”
They answered as one voice.
“Stephan—one of you is named Stephan?”
One of the two men cleared his throat and admitted it.
“Stephan, based on your—I hate to use this word with you—analysis, based on that, what can you predict about this woman’s immediate future behavior?”
Stephan stood. He always stood when Dr. Ehrlichmann was addressing him. It was a practice he had developed during his undergraduate days at the University of Phoenix
Ehrlichmann waved his hand and said, “Bea, what kind of separation? Assuming you agree.”
Stephan dropped back in his chair. Bea did not rise. She knew she did not need to, just as she knew Stephan was stupid to do so. She had the great man wrapped within her scent. Men had always found her attractive and she had never been able to resist using that power. Besides, for a man of his age, Otto had been more than adequate. She didn’t really understand all this genetic material and honestly didn’t care to. What she did care about was pleasing Ehrlichmann. She didn’t really understand why that would be and because it was such a new feeling to her, she indulged it. The title of Mrs. Otto Ehrlichmann had a solid gold ring to it. She said, “I do agree. They will put themselves in a motel of some sort. Probably a cheap one. Probably one near the Civic Center
Ehrlichmann sighed. What she had said was correct, but as always none of them could make the next leap. He said, “Sanjay, what would you suggest as the appropriate course of action?”
Unlike his colleagues, Sanjay did not give much of a damn about whether or not Otto Ehrlichmann was impressed. It was not Sanjay Gould’s responsibility to please this little tin god. His job, unknown to the others in the Health Alteration division, was to report back to Ernest Eichmann every last thing he could about Ehrlichmann’s activities. In addition, he was charged with trying to steer good old abusive Otto into overreacting to various situations. Though it was unstated between them, Eichmann wanted Sanjay Gould to lead Ehrlichmann into a series of policy violations so that probable cause would exist to justify the snotty bastard being terminated with extreme prejudice. In return—also unstated but nonetheless real—was the expectation held by Sanjay that he himself would one day soon lead the division.
Unlike his two moronic colleagues, he did not need to internally struggle with the question. He said, “Dr. Ehrlichmann, my recommendation would be that—given their current level of intelligence acquisition and the low payback expectation—we should proceed with their executions. The three non-Africans, that is.”
Ehrlichmann sat up in his chair. Now wasn’t that something? He had been thinking exactly the same thing himself. He reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a little gold star which he placed next to Gould’s name on the chart behind him.
From the diary of Margaret Maxwell of Circleville , Ohio
They used to call it Labor Day back when I was an old woman. Now that I am a young woman, many things are different. I do not even know where I should start. I think I will just make a little confession, Diary, that Moe likes me now almost as much as I love him. He could not really love me the same. I love him too much for that to be possible. That’s why I am so sad tonight. We had to leave him back there with the Bushmen of Namibia. I didn’t think about it until then, but Moe really is our leader. He’s been my leader ever since the day he touched me back in Circleville. From that point on, I have done whatever he asked me to do. I owe him that much. I love him that much.
The three of us are staying at a crappy motel here in what I think you’d call the outskirts of Los Angeles
The three of us are going to the California Post Office tomorrow morning. Dr. Seitz says that we have a package there that we need to pick up. Marybeth thinks it is the peppers she called home about. I hope so because that will give us an excuse to visit Maurice. I can never decide whether I want to call him Moe or Maurice. Diary, which one do you like better?
Excerpt from the news website “Sup” on September 12, 2024
As constant readers of this column know, we at Sup have been watching the travesty of justice going on over at the Santa Monica Civic Center Santa Monica Boulevard
Why this senseless taking of human life? Some at Sup have argued persuasively that the slain physician (his name remains unavailable) was a clandestine member of the Zen Fascists, a minority party in the California Senate. But that explanation strikes the rest of us as too overused these days. It seems more likely that he was killed because he knew just a little too much about the goings on up on Santa Monica
Chapter Fourteen
I became a Bushman. I don’t mean I copied their behavior or imitated their thought processes. I mean I joined them, was accepted by them, and became one of them. I became one of us.
The new peppers finally arrived about a week after Margie, Marybeth, and Doc Rocky left for the motel. The only problem was that my friends didn’t bring the peppers. Nope. The red bells came courtesy of an old enchanting enemy of mine: Otto Ehrlichmann. Naturally he didn’t bring them himself. A guy like him figures he’s too important to get his hands (or claws, more likely) dirty dealing with the common man. That was just fine and dandy with me. I had no interest in a reunion with my tormentor. The only thing was that I was a little disappointed—okay, a lot disappointed—that I wasn’t going to see my friends that day. As immediately comfortable as I was with my tribesmen, I still thought of Circleville often and of my friends even oftener.
The fruit was delivered by two of Ehrlichmann’s bootlickers. One was a sandy-haired young man who called himself Stephan. Not Stephen. Oh no, that would have been too every day of the week for him. Stephan. As a poacher of my acquaintance would have said, “La dee stinking dah.” With him was a woman who would not have been out of place in a room with the whip and tie crowd. She never did introduce herself and that was jim dandy fine okey doke copasetic with me. When these two parasites told me who they worked for, I thought about not accepting the gifts, much as we needed them. Then I thought maybe it would be better to take the fruit, even if we didn’t eat them, just so the two visitors would leave us alone. But Tumata smelled the fruits and said they were fine, that they smelled exactly like the ones we’d been eating. Okay, I said. Let’s eat.
Tumata was exactly right. The fruit was fantastic. Actually it was even better than the freeze-dried stuff we had been eating because these fruits were fresh, right from Marybeth’s farm. Two days after we started up our diet in earnest the changes became obvious. There were several things that happened to us, but the first was in many ways the biggest. Each of us began having visions.
I should say at this point that back in my earlier life in Ohio
What’s the difference between a dream and one of our visions? Simple. A dream can grip you and your body may flip and twitch around while you’re sleeping and on a very loose level your brain may not quite be able to tell if whatever’s going on is real or not. Well, in the visions we had, we were wide awake and our bodies were rigid as planks. Our eyes were usually opened and we didn’t see anything going on around us or even feel anything if somebody came along and tried to shake us out of it. You could call it a trance instead of a vision and that wouldn’t bother me a bit. But I think I’ll stick with my word for it.
As I was saying, the dolphin visions came to us first. Each person who was willing to talk about what he had “seen” shared a slightly different set of images from the others. But one thing all the sightings had in common was the image of a dolphin using his dorsal fin to create a silver ring in the ocean. The dolphin would then poke his beak into the ring and create a new ring, one that would spin and grow just as the old ring fell apart. In the visions these rings would continue to pop in and out of existence until at last the dolphin in question came to fill the mental image, laughing at our confusion.
Tumata said she felt that these sightings of ours were less visions than a way the dolphins had of communicating with us. Possibly because that explanation was too scary, the rest of us decided to tell her she was wrong, that these sightings meant something else. Besides, if that were so, then how could you explain the other visions that came, like the ones with the apes? No, this was happening because of the peppers. It had to be.
My second vision of the dolphins came in the form of a sighting, just as the first one had. In this sighting, a great pod of bottlenose dolphins were swimming in a large pool. I kept hearing a clicking sound and at first I assumed that it was the clicking of some of the Bushmen. But it turned out the sound was coming from first one bottlenose dolphin and then another and another until they were all clicking and clacking away, trying to warn one another that they were in danger, that they were in trouble, that they needed to escape from where they were. Just as the vision was ending, a huge crisscross net swept through their water and the dolphins dispersed.
My third vision involved what I was told in the sighting was a common dolphin. All I knew about dolphins before these sightings was that they were mammals and that they swam in the water. But by this third vision, I was learning all kinds of things about them that I did not know. For instance, there were more than thirty different species of dolphins. The great sea mammals stayed half awake when they slept so that they could rise to the water’s surface to avoid drowning. I learned that scientifically, whales are dolphins and vice versa. But I’m getting away from the point. So this common dolphin, as he was known, was begging the bottlenose dolphins to help him. He kept trying to tell them that he was in some kind of trouble. The bottlenoses flicked their dorsal fins and created hundreds of silver rings. The rings engulfed the common dolphin and he died from suffocation.
Probably most of us would have dismissed all these previous visions as cosmic coincidences or as collective nuisances had it not been for the final sighting. This one began in a classroom somewhere, in a room none of us had seen before. In it, a man in a pork pie hat, a man with an addiction to tobacco, a man who looked to me like Otto Ehrlichmann, was standing in front of a blackboard with a piece of chalk in his hand. He was writing words on the board. The words were large and strange, but quite clear. The words were: Paleocene, Tethys Sea , Cretaceous, reptiles, fossils, cetacean, swamps, Nigeria , Eocene, cuspids, ill-adapted, Oligocene, hemoglobin, Narwhal, squalodonts, Miocene, chromosomes, Jupiter , Namibia Namibia
Our visions about the orangutans were likewise confusing. Unlike our sightings of the dolphins, the orangutans came to us in one stretched out vision that repeated over and over. In this vision, the apes were hanging around outside a big office building. Some of them were sitting up in trees. Others were walking with their fists dragging on the pavement. And still others were hopping up and down, trying to get the others to run inside the building. The ones who wanted to go inside didn’t get any assistance no matter how hard they tried, so they gave up and just charged the door. At first they simply bounced off the door, but after a while the door began to bend inward. Finally it shattered and when it did, all the orangutans in the trees and the ones along the pavement at long last joined with the others and they all fled into the building and disappeared.
Perhaps most troubling was my vision of the death of Doctor Rockwell Seitz. He and Margie and Marybeth left their motel. Rocky was reading a written message that told him to go to the local Post Office to pick up the peppers. In the vision, Marybeth seemed skeptical about leaving, but Rocky and Margie prevailed. They got as far as the edge of the parking lot when two short and stocky men came up out of adjacent manholes and brandished huge tubular devices. There was a lot of screaming and a lot of cursing and then the two stout men pointed their weapons at Rocky and he began to burn. The women shrieked and he continued to burn. Margie and Marybeth ran off in opposite directions and he continued to burn. The two stocky men laughed and laughed and he continued to burn. He burned on and on, his arms blazing and hair falling and he burned like that for something upwards of ten minutes and then he was gone. The two men were gone. Margie and Marybeth were gone. The screen inside my mind faded to red.
Other things happened to us during those next days. I could not help but notice that the vocabulary of the other Bushmen started growing. When I had first arrived, their speech had been rather limited to matters of food, sex, hunting, and body functions. But by the time of the first visions, everyone I spoke with had begun using sounds to suggest vast increases in their comprehension of themselves and of the world around them. As always, Tumata was the most advanced. She told me about her visions and about the “sightings,” as she called them, had by the others.
As we continued to subsist on the peppers, we came to develop much the same “powers” as I had known in the last few weeks in Circleville. I don’t mean so much the changing of one thing into another as I do the resistance to regular things that would normally drag a person down. None of us was sick. The older members of the tribe lost their wrinkles, lost their bad postures, lost their failing eyesight. In turn they gained superior hearing, gained great flexibility in the back and joints, gained excellent memories, exceptional eyesight, strong teeth and masterful upper body power. This last item was very unusual among Namibians because our diet contained no meat proteins, the stuff one typically needs to get all big in the chest.
It was not all just psycho trips and eating in the Project. We spent considerable time horse playing, laughing like hyenas, and monkey shining. It was glorious. I’d open my lids up all groggy-eyed in the morning and three or four San people would be standing over me, pouring water on my head to wake me up, cracking out clicks that meant they found themselves hilarious. Even before breakfast, we’d go running through the makeshift forestry and rolling around on the fake desert sands, wrestling one another and basically just kicking up dust. They even invented a clever and mighty useful version of the hide and seek game. A bunch of them would bury their heads in a huddle and one other guy would run off and hide somewhere while the others tracked him. Personally, I couldn’t have found an elephant if it was standing next to me wearing my pajamas. But the San were amazing. They’d get their noses right down on the ground and sniff. They could remember how the terrain had looked before and pick out ways it was now different. Three or four of them would hush the others and the whole bunch would walk so soft you could hear their heartbeats before you heard their footsteps. When they found you they’d all jump on you like tackling somebody in football. And laugh? My God, I never met a happier bunch of slaves in my life.
Slaves. Dammit. That reality always kept intruding like a noisy neighbor. No matter how much fun we had or how we stuffed ourselves with juicy fruits and vegetables or how we fell on each other in delirious joy or shared visions together, there was always that one immutable fact that slapped us cold in the face. We were slaves.
So we decided to escape. And by God that is exactly what we did.
Despite our gift of visions and our evident resistance to the physical and psychological aging process, there did remain a few obstacles to our departure from the Project. First and foremost, there was the matter of where to go. The San people had never possessed or exploited the idea of having a leader. That was very nice in a lot of ways, especially because each man and woman and their friends were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t hurt anyone (and hurting another San was a concept they could not have formulated had they tried). But being without a leader did tend to make collective action a bit slow. Triko, a guy I got to know reasonably well, suggested that I make the decision about what to do. I asked the rest of them if that was all right. No one objected. In fact, if anything, they looked relieved to have someone else make the choice for them. I could tell right away that every last one of them was treating this as just another game. I mean, they knew in the intellectual part of them that this was deadly serious. But in the part of their minds that told them how to feel about what they knew, this was a new game to play. Maybe that was for the best.
I had given the matter some thought and told them I believed we should all go back to the deserts of our homeland. Triko moved his left hand up and down, as did all the others, indicating that they thought this idea was just peachy.
Another thing that set the Khwe folks (that’s another name we answered to as a group) apart from your standard citizen of California Los Angeles to Namibia
Even if somehow we did manage to break out of the exhibition, even if we broke through the barricades set up by the N.U.S. at the California
Back in Namibia Babylon had been unearthed in what is today called Iraq Ark was spotted by plane on Mount Ararat in Turkey Jerusalem
Chapter Fifteen
From an online recruiting brochure encouraging people to come work on Jupiter:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration thanks you for your interest in space exploration. With all the cataclysmic happenings on our home planet Earth, you are among an elite number who have decided to enjoy the comfort of a more harmonious existence.
Jupiter offers a comfortable alternative to life on Earth. For one thing, on Jupiter we have no air pollution. Most of you cannot recall a time when Earth air was as clean as the breathing chambers established across much of the giant planet. With a perfect blend of oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, the breathing in these vast chambers is a recreation in and of itself. But there is much more to enjoy than just clean air!
Certainly you have already heard about the massive quantities of Vludium present on Jupiter. Vludium is used on Earth but is unavailable domestically. The only known source of this element is on Jupiter. What is it good for? Oh, it is good for many things! Companies use Vludium to power their automobiles, heat and cool the homes of consumers, prepare and cook meals, and to power spaceships bound for other planets. On Jupiter, we extract this essential element directly from the core of the planet by drilling at that core from a seemingly endless number of starting points. Because the surface of Jupiter is made up of what our scientists call “unfriendly gases,” the drillers are suspended above the surface for their own protection. We should point out that there have been almost no accidents since this operation was launched and we intend to take whatever safety precautions are necessary to ensure that everyone is protected.
In these times, having a good job is necessary for people who want to have a nice life with their spouses and children. Surely none of us wants to return to the days when almost everyone we met was out of work. By clicking on the CLICK HERE icon at the bottom of this page, you can take that first step in beginning the most important part of your life. Go ahead. Click it. You know you want it. CLICK HERE.
From a paper pamphlet entitled HANDS OFF JUPITER, produced by the Armed Resistance Committee (ARC):
Brothers and sisters, the time has come to take a united stand against the profiteering imperialists who hide their avarice behind such poison monikers as NASA and the Health Alteration division! ARC has been a voice of reason that sprang up from the legitimate concern billions of people the world over have had about the slave mills the Chinese and the New United States have established millions of miles away on Jupiter. As we all know from our crucial readings, there is only so much pie to go around on Earth, only so much for the greedy guttersniping capitalists to exploit. It comes as no surprise to ARC that they have turned in their desperation to outside sources for their appropriation of the people’s rightful privileges! But the bankers and oilmen and Wall Street and Peking plotters are fat and lazy and ripe for becoming the spoils of a real people’s revolution! The time to end pointless debates has arrived! The time to pick up arms and storm the castles of the oppressor is at hand! Brothers and sisters, please consider joining us on January 1, 2025, as we descend on Huntsville
ARC
From a speech delivered by Rick Richards, General Mayor of Circleville, Ohio, October 12, 2024, at a town hall meeting:
I really appreciate all of you showing up here tonight. It takes guts these days to come together like this. I don’t want any of you to freak out or anything. I’m just saying what you all already know. This little town of ours isn’t that safe a place anymore.
I’ll try to come right to the point. Four of our nicest people moved away a few months back. You all know who I’m talking about. Now they did what they felt they had to do. I have known Moe Washington
When they were fixing to move away, Moe came up to me. He said that some guys from something called Health Alteration would be coming to see me. They’d be coming to ask what I knew about where they were going and he said he’d like it if I didn’t tell them anything about it. Just to make it easier on me, Moe didn’t tell me squat about it. Sure enough, three days later some folks dressed real professional and citified knocked on my office door and said I had better cooperate. I told them to get lost.
I didn’t really expect to ever hear from those Health Alteration people again. Then yesterday those same characters showed up at my office again. This time they weren’t polite and citified. What they were was rude. They said that pretty soon they were going to take over this town of ours and turn it into a big old “external laboratory,” they called it. Ground zero is going to be Marybeth’s farm. I asked them on what authority they planned to do this. Then this one guy, he didn’t look much older than a teenager, he stepped out from the others and punched me hard in the stomach. He said, “That’s our authority.” He called me a name which I won’t repeat here. Then they all laughed and went away.
So this morning I got a call from a long time friend of mine in Providence , Rhode Island Providence —guys on the City Council there—that the Chinese Fascists had made contact with the ZF people in California Topeka
Okay, that’s it. I’ll miss you all. This town is my life. It has been an honor to serve as your General Mayor. Take care.
Transcription of authorized audio recording, date October 13, 2024, business office of Tiny Mitchell, Realtor, location 164 North Court St., Circleville, OH 43113. Present were Messrs. Mitchell, Lewisjohn (of Health Alteration), Chang (of Chinese ZF Party), and Gould (of NASA’s Internal Directorship):
Mitchell: What can I do for you boys this morning?
Lewisjohn: We need for you to facilitate a deed transfer.
Chang: It involves a local property.
Mitchell: Deed transfer. Sure thing. It takes three guys with three different sets of business cards to get this done, huh? (pause) Alright, okay. What’s the property you are talking about? I know central Ohio
Lewisjohn: You are a very glib man, aren’t you, Mr. Mitchell?
Mitchell: Couldn’t say. What’s glib?
Lewisjohn: The property in question is legally owned by Marybeth Renkle Gowan.
Mitchell: (Pause) Let me get this straight. You want—
Chang: I believe, Mr. Mitchell, that we have made clear our objective. You will provide the documentation that will legally transfer ownership from Ms. Gowan to Mr. Gould here. Say hello, Mr. Gould.
Mitchell: You have a bill of sale? You have anything at all with Gowan’s signature on it? You have her power of attorney? An advanced directive? Forged stock certificates?
Lewisjohn: I have warned you, Mr. Mitchell, not to be glib. I warn you now for the last time.
Mitchell: But you don’t understand! I can’t just do this on my own. The people down at the title office—
Chang: We are not fools, Mr. Mitchell. We are prepared to handle your expenses. If you need to persuade your friend at the title office, we could be disposed to provide an inducement. We are also prepared to offer you two inducements of your own.
Mitchell: No kidding! This should be good. Like what?
Lewisjohn: First of all, we will be paying you one million dollars in cash.
Mitchell: A million bucks? You said one million dollars? Hey, uh, you guys mind if I help myself to a shot of tequila? Huh? (pause) Whew! That’s better. So, a million dollars in cash? That sounds mighty fair. Pardon my manners, but what’s the second thing?
Gould: You get to stay alive.
Mitchell: (pause) Mr. Gould, I’ll need to get some information from you. Just routine things they’ll need down at Ohio Title. I’m sure you understand.
Recording ends.
From WNCI radio news broadcast, 14:47 – 15:00, October 24, 2024:
Good afternoon, this is Ted Sturlock. More often than not, rumors are nothing more than just that: rumors. This time, however, the rumors were right. We have reported to you over the last few days about the mass exodus from the pumpkin-growing little farm town just twenty miles south of us. We have also been on the cutting edge of reports that the small hamlet was on the brink of being exterminated by outside forces. And so this afternoon the quaint village some natives call Roundtown met its strange fate when seven old style B-52 fighter jets strafed every home, apartment, business and church within the city limits of the deserted community. No more than had this act of military persistence been accomplished than four obsolete B-29s soared overhead, releasing the jelly-like substance known as napalm, burning every last blade of grass, stalk of corn, tree, vineyard and anything else resembling a type of plant. And yet that was not all. No. The gods had one more punishment in store for Circleville. The B-52s returned, this time to drop radioactive hexachlorine, a chemical which will ensure that nothing can grow in the soil there for millions of years.
I spoke with the former General Mayor of what used to be Circleville just a few moments ago. He talked with me via TV phone on the condition that I not disclose his whereabouts. He told me that in his opinion what had happened in his old town was just the beginning, that in a few years, or maybe even in a few months, other towns would be subjected to a similar fate, for reasons unexplained and with a complete lack of resistance.
In other news. . . .
Chapter Sixteen
They shipped Margie off in one of their rockets. I saw it in my mind just as if I had been sitting next to her. It was the first vision I had that involved people and I was completely transfixed by the sighting. Rocky was dead and now Margie was on her way all wrapped up in something that looked like saran wrap up, up, and out to a slave labor camp on one of the sixty-three moons that revolved around Jupiter. The journey itself would take the better part of an hour. If she and the other forty-nine passengers survived the trip, they would find themselves working on Vludium rigs that hovered hundreds of miles above the gaseous surface, bringing in that highly valued natural resource just as fast as they could turn the big wheels or whatever it was. That Stephan character had drugged her and the whip and tie gal had put her in the traveling outfit and some other guy strapped her in the rocket and the rocket took off, working its way up to just under the speed of light. I was yelling “No! No! No!” but naturally it didn’t do any good. It isn’t as if anyone in the vision can actually hear you talking to them.
I couldn’t get a handle on where Marybeth was, though not from lack of effort. The thing is that these sightings or visions or whatever you call them, they didn’t come when you wanted them and they didn’t necessarily focus on what you wanted to know about. I’d been lying in my hut trying to get an image of Marybeth or back home in Circleville or back home in the place I had never been and yet belonged to, and it wouldn’t do a bit of good. The visions had their own purpose and what you personally wanted didn’t matter.
As it turned out, too many of my personal visions—ones not necessarily shared with the other San people—were so damned horrible that I almost came to dread them. I say almost because the truth is that no matter how ugly or disjointed the future may be, it’s still an advantage to be able to see it coming ahead of other people. Whatever it was that was causing these sightings showed me Rocky burning alive and refusing to scream or even to make a sound. He burned right in front of two people who looked as if they were getting a kick out of his pain. But he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of even opening his mouth in agony or fear.
I could feel myself shaking terribly as the vision faded away and was replaced by the worst thing I had ever seen in my life. It was the destruction—the complete and total wiping out—of the town where I’d grown up. Big planes roared up out of I don’t know where and shot bullets through everything that was standing. Nobody ran away because I guess everybody had already deserted. The planes shot out the foundations of every last house, every last building or playground or just anything and then they shot it all again for good measure. The big tree in the center of Pickaway Square Berger Hospital Burger Hospital
Tumata, Gventa, Csawhatuoka, Muneeta, Triko and I went exploring the day after this god-awful vision. As I’ve said, the Bushmen are a playful bunch by nature and wherever one of them is in a state of despair, the others take it upon themselves to cheer up their saddened tribesman. We were not quite prepared to make our big escape, so this exploration would be limited to the area that had been designated as the local encampment here inside the Project.
With Triko and me pulling up the rear, the six of us undertook a search for a kind of plant Triko called Ilhoba but which the others said was Hoodia. Whatever you wanted to call it, they did agree that it was a leafless, spiny plant that was so ugly that you almost felt sorry for anything so unattractive. But the Hoodia had its uses. The Bushmen used it primarily to ward off infections—my mind instantly wondered about mixing it with the peppers—and to a lesser degree they ate it to kill off their appetites when on a wild hunt that might last for several days. The reason we were seeking it out today was because Gventa had convinced the others that if I ate a little of its roots, I would get over my depression. They had been accustomed to me being the life of the encampment, so I suppose they missed my sense of humor. I’ll admit it right now: I didn’t have a funny bone in my body right then. Every time I let my mind free I came back to those miserable open tracks of land where nothing would ever again grow. With every step I was more determined than ever that we were going to get back to Namibia
I was just getting ready to suggest we give up this fool’s errand about the Hoodia when the women up front began to click together like a set of old manual typewriters. They bent over and grabbed up some handfuls and each one was more determined than the other that I would accept the hideous bouquet that she had brought. I wasn’t about to get tangled up in some Baroa jealousy feud, so I stepped back and signaled them to bestow this treasure on Triko. He tipped his head to the left one quick jerk, indicating that he respected my cleverness. None of us knew it at the time, but we had just begun our escape from the Santa Monica Civic Center
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The day before Halloween a small group of us, those I have already named as well as seven others and myself, walked out of the Bushmen exhibition. We sneaked into the facility’s maintenance section and found a lot of workmen’s clothes that fit us all moderately well. Actually, they hung kind of loose, but it didn’t matter that much since we shoved spare clothing under our shirts to make us look big and bulky and very maintenance-like. I was surprised we got even that far in our scheme. Our plan was pathetic. None of us had had visions that extended beyond this day, so we certainly had no assurances that we were going to get away with this. All the same, we figured it was better to try and risk failing than to present ourselves as a bunch of freaks for simpleminded protoplasm to point at. Besides, everyone except Tumata and Triko and I thought it was all just a fun little game.
After getting comfortable in actual real life workmen’s clothing, we broke up into two groups and headed for the exits. I was the only one who could speak good English, but I had taught them all to say a few things: “Get away from me, loser, or I’ll kill you!” “You have a nice face. Wanna keep it?” And my personal favorite: “Back off. I have your mother in my pants.”
Our group reached the Northgate Exit 7 without incident. The ticket agents inside the main floor didn’t even look up at us. Neither did the real maintenance people who were pushing brooms and dusting objects. But I could see there were two security guards posted at this exit. That meant there were probably a pair at all the exits. Damn! Just couldn’t catch a break, could we? Well, I motioned forward with my head and we walked purposefully out the door. I went out first and held the door open for the others. The last of our group came out into the bright sunshine and smiled as if he would be winning a prize. “Hey!” one of the guards barked. “Where are you guys going?” Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of question that could have meant many different things. It could have been simply conversational. “Where are you guys going? Maybe we’d like to come too.” It could have been a routine question that they were required to ask. “Excuse me. You know the protocol. Give me a list of your names and destinations.” Or it could have contained sprouts of suspicion, as in “Where the bloody hell do you dark-skinned monkeys think you’re getting away to?” We all stopped. I turned, very slow, very calm, very relaxed, and was just about to say we were gonna get some burgers and fries and would they like us to bring anything back for them with us, when Triko stepped forward and said, clear as day, “Back off. I have your mother in my pants.” At that, Triko smiled, as did the four women with us. I don’t remember what expression I wore.
But I sure do remember the reaction of the two guards. The one who had not spoken cracked out a laugh that hurt my ears and his buddy got caught up in that laughter himself and as they began to settle down they waved us on our way. We turned our backs and continued our unhurried exit from the premises.
When you stop to consider that there were hardly any black people living in the country of California in those days—no Hispanics, either; just Caucasians and Asians—we were bound to stand out wherever we went. That meant we needed to get out of there just as fast as we could. After reconnoitering with the other five escapees—I had been wrong about the guards; evidently I had selected one of the few exits with security—I realized that we needed to steal a large passenger van. It probably goes without saying that none of us were particularly adept with this type of extreme criminal behavior. So we just walked along in our groups on opposite sides of the street, nodding our heads and grinning at anyone who looked our way. After something like two hours, we finally reached a supermarket and sitting there nice and pretty right along one edge of the lot was something called an Econoline van. It was large enough for us and then some. A sticker on the side of this behemoth—I had gotten that word from Doc Rocky, rest in peace—declared that it was solar-saturated. Great. The only problem was going to be how to get in it and drive off. The eleven of us sat around on the parking lot curbs, waiting for the owner to come out. Perhaps he or she would accept our reasoned explanation.
The owner of the Econoline van was a middle-aged white guy (of course) with a baseball cap and sandals at opposite ends of his body and in between he was wearing a polo shirt and gabardine slacks. He should have been ashamed of himself, I realize, but what can you do? He looked us over as he approached the car. We were still sitting on curbs, trying to look as if the fact of us being there was the most perfectly natural thing in the universe. The guy’s hand shook a little as he pulled the key from his pocket. I ran right up to him and said, “Hello, there. We’re the Bushmen of Namibia. We need to get the heck out of this beautiful country of yours. The problem is that walking will just take forever and—”
This white gentleman turned even whiter and said, “Ahg! What do you people want from me?”
I told him we wanted his vehicle. He actually appeared to be giving it a moment’s thought and then my ten friends stood up nice and friendly and the gentleman slapped the keys into my hand and ran screaming back toward the supermarket.
There wasn’t much time so I jumped in the driver’s seat and threw open the sliding side doors. I jammed the key into the ignition and suddenly had a terrible thought: What if this thing turns out to be a stick shift? I looked down and saw that my worry was for nothing. It did take me a long time to explain to my friends how to close those awkward sliding doors, however. But at last we had that situation handled, so I threw the van into gear and drove all around until after at least another hour I finally found the exit for Highway 1. We headed north. After all, that’s the way the road led. What we were going to do when we ran out of California
We were within the three mile border zone when Muneeta, one of the women in our group, asked if I knew how to swim. I patiently smiled and told her yes. She then asked me if there was some reason why we could not park the van at the beach and swim north until we were in the waters of the N.U.S. I stared at her in the rearview mirror. Could it really be that easy? If it was that simple, why wasn’t the New United States crawling with Californians? Then it hit me: the people who lived in California
Only one thing really worried me. To make this thing work, we were going to have to be in the water for quite a while, probably having to swim a good five or six miles. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any sharks in waters this far north, but I’d never swam that long before. I’d never swam half that far. Coming as they did from the interior of Africa , I assumed my friends had not either.
As I was pulling the stolen van over alongside an unnamed stretch of oceanfront, the sheer magnitude of our planned adventure hit me for the first time. What we had accomplished to this point had been relatively easy and not without some amusing moments. But once we crossed back into the good old NUSA, things could turn tragic at any given instant. I know I shouldn’t have been thinking so negatively, but doggone it, I hadn’t indulged my morose side in many days and I simply felt the need.
When we were near the great Pacific Ocean , we sat and stared out at the impossibility of that very body of water. In the language of my new old family, Muneeta said, “As we sit here it is impossible to conceive how large this ocean is. If we were all the way across this Ocean, on the shore of another continent, looking back this way, it would seem just as impossible that such a thing as this ocean could exist. Yet it is real. We cannot see the other side. Still we believe that it is there. Somewhere over there a woman sits looking this way and believes that we are here.” She laughed. “We would not want to disappoint her.”
There was something genuinely cosmic about the Bushmen, something that had predated my coming into their sphere. It had nothing to do with visions and physical resilience or anything else of that sort. Something about these fine, proud people was still beyond my understanding. I swore then and there that if we survived, I would share that something with them.
Gventa passed out mouthfuls of Hoodia. We ate them without haste. Then we walked out into the water. When we were in deep enough, we started to swim.
Chapter Seventeen
Can a person become waterlogged? I did not think so. All the same, once we reached the outer mark of our group swim I suspected no amount of sunlight and beach towels would ever clear away the water in my pores. Again, I had been in front—although not precisely leading—and the others went approximately the same direction I did, some of them even playing tag along the way. We were in the water for what felt like several hours. The sun was dipping low and the ocean was going to get paralyzing cold pretty soon. I punched my arms and legs into overdrive and the others paddled along behind me.
It took us quite a while to get to the shore. The moon—our moon—hung bright in the sky and even though we all shivered in the evening air, it was good to walk around and stretch and then just lie on our backs and watch the twinkles over head. I wondered if Margie had made it to Jupiter. I wondered how that magnetic field was affecting her with its long arm of radiation. I wondered—But before I could think about anything else, I heard the crack of a gun blast. I sprang to my feet and saw that we were surrounded. Encircling the eleven of us was a hoard of skinheads, every last one of them sporting a rifle and a scowl.
Margaret Maxwell lay quietly in her travel pod. The tubular device allowed her to sit up, as long as she did it slow and easy. The feel of the travel pod made her think of Jello. Yes, that was it, she realized. It’s like being chilled in a pod of Jello. Probably lime flavored, not that it mattered. She had been placed at the rear of the passenger section of this craft. That positioning permitted her to view most of the other people on board. None of them were moving and she got the sense that they were in some kind of suspended state of consciousness, although she wasn’t certain of that. They did not move around at all, at any rate. And that was not something that could be said for whatever type of spacecraft they were in. Up at the front of the ship or whatever it was hung a digital readout of their traveling speed. She watched it silently shift from 90,000 mps (whatever that was) to 110,000 mps to 130,000 mps and this increase in speed—if that’s what it was—didn’t translate into any kind of shift or upset inside the flying cabin.
There were other digital displays that intrigued her. One was labeled DFE. That one had a narrow screen that kept rolling in new readings constantly: 200,000,000 blink, 210,345,008 blink, 243,090,772, blink on and on, signifying what she could not imagine. One of the displays didn’t require any decoding. That was the internal air pressure. She noted how the more the speed of the craft and the other number—maybe that meant distance from earth—oh Christ no not that!—increased, the more the pressure in the cabin eased up ever so slowly.
Where were they traveling? Only one place made any sense to her and even that didn’t make what you’d call a lot of sense: Jupiter. But why would those three people have put her in this rocket or whatever it was and send her—and the others, don’t forget there are many others—on this transplanet flight? She felt a genuine confusion come over her, one that she hadn’t had since before Maurice had transformed her. Maurice? Where was he? She had been having dreams about him lately. The dreams—which wasn’t quite what they were but something about the word “visions” made her uncomfortable. She shook her head to try to line up her thoughts up properly. Maurice. She had dreamt of him and he was in a bad way. He was with the Bushmen and they were all in a lot of trouble. She couldn’t make out every last detail, but what she could see were hands gripping some kind of guns and—she could not get the images to come.
Jupiter, back to Jupiter, her mind said. Yes, she needed to think about that. She was certain now that that was where she was going, along with the others. But why? She was no scientist. What would they want with her on Jupiter?
A voice came to her. At first she thought the voice must be inside her own head. Then she realized that it was being piped in through speakers in the ceiling or top or whatever of the spacecraft. The voice was neither masculine nor feminine, just some neutral set of sounds that seemed so soft and soothing. She knew it would be good to listen to the voice. The voice wanted to comfort her and the others. The voice was—what?—her secret friend. It was a friend to all of them. The voice suggested that the lights inside the craft flash off and on and off and on and that was just what they did and when they had done so all at once she found herself staring at one small light on the screen inside her helmet. The voice stroked her soft and easy and told her to heed the message.
The voice said: “You are on a flight to the planet Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun in the Milky Way galaxy. Because we at NASA want you to enjoy your brief flight, you should pay close attention to this message. As with Earth, the planet Jupiter revolves around the sun. Being farther from the sun than is the Earth, a year on Jupiter is equal to twelve Earth years. However, one day is only ten hours long. The distance of the planet from your old home changes from day to day, but at this time it is 425,000,000 miles. We will traverse this distance in forty-five minutes as we speed through space at somewhat less than the speed of light. It will interest you to know that Jupiter has many more satellites or moons than Earth. Your old home has one moon whereas Jupiter has sixty-three. One of those moons will be your new home. We trust you will find it satisfactory.
“For your ongoing entertainment, Jupiter displays four thin, multicolored rings that spin around it. They are called Metis, Adrastea, Thebe, and Amalthea. They can be seen from any of the planet’s satellites, as well as from the planet itself.
“The reason you are going to Jupiter is because that planet is the only known source of a wonderful element called Vludium. You have heard much about this element already. Now you are going to help with bringing it from Jupiter back to Earth. Your participation in this venture means a great deal to the people of Earth and we trust you will not let them down.
“We will be arriving at the first of our stops within the next few minutes. The first stop is Io, the largest of the satellites. If you are to disembark here, your pod will automatically open. If it does, please proceed to the exits on either side of the craft. Otherwise, you may remain in your pod until your destination is reached. Thank you again for flying with us. We hope your journey was a comfortable one.”
With that the soothing voice went away and Margaret was left with her own mind and the bodies in the pods around her. She was no longer feeling serene. Indeed, she felt like screaming. She intended to scream. She opened her mouth and called forth a contraction in the back of her neck. She inhaled and pushed and nothing happened. That was weird. It was so weird that she felt even more anxiety. My new home? That cool and coaxing voice had said she would be living out here, out here with moons and rings and Vludium. She had a home. Her home was Circleville , Ohio Circleville , Ohio , 43113
She closed her eyes and waited to discover which moon would be her new home.
Lots of things have incurred my wrath over eighty-eight years. There had been the kid in third grade who called me “tar baby.” There had been the gang of boys the following year, their leader knocking me down in my own front yard and cheering as his friends beat the shit out of me. There had been the ticket taker at the movie theatre in town who had told me they were sold out of seats and yet sold tickets to all the people who’d been behind me in line. There had been those and a thousand others and I had hated them all. Such hate changes a person. He is born, he wants only to be fed, nurtured and loved. He yearns to believe that everyone else in the world is his equal and takes it as a matter of faith that certainly grown people would understand that. But child really is father to the man. I thought of the time I read in a book somewhere the words that have always sustained me. I only wish I could remember who wrote them. They are: “Do not fear your enemies, for they can only kill you. Do not fear your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, for it is they who allow the killers and betrayers to walk the earth in relative safety.”
I lay there wondering what kind of garbage these skinheads read, assuming any of them could. It is difficult for any one group of people to encapsulate all the hate-target one man can hold. But the skinheads managed it. For one thing, they chose to be the way they were. Forget stupid parents and a lousy educational system and a disjointed government. Skinheads chose to be they way they were. Then there were their solutions. Violence, hate, indiscriminate brutality. Not an intellect among them, no matter what their numbers. Most of all, though, there was their deliberate lack of hair on their heads. Call it purposeful baldness, if you like. You see, hair on men, especially long hair, indicates a sensual nature. It’s not effeminate any more than short hair or no hair is masculine. It is a choice, in most cases, and that choice announces that the wearer is in touch with his humanity, that he has the self-confidence to have his hair in spite of potential ridicule, and that he has a degree of self-love that may exceed that of his fellow man. So, given my point of view on the matter, it may come as no surprise that the baldness of skinheads was interpreted, by me, as a rejection of the sensual nature and all the other things I just said. Consequently, whenever I encountered such a depraved individual, all the people in my life who had put their boots in my face—they all came together and manifested themselves in those cretinous, mouth-breathing skinheads. I’m not saying I’m proud of my anger, but I am not ashamed of it either.
“Look what we have here, boys!” one of them shouted. He had an ink drawing of an eagle on his face. His shirtless frame was a repository for piercings and other tattoos. Swastikas predominated. His mouth suggested a cross between a snarl and a brutal smile. “Looks like the niggers escaped from their masters!”
Whooping, hollering, edgy cheering, inching nearer. Morons.
Another one yelled, “What you niggers doing off the plantation, huh?” Losers.
More mindless yelping and whooping. Idiots.
I jumped to my feet. I could have given them a warning. It would have been decent of me. But I was feeling decidedly unfair. Besides, they started it.
“Where you goin’, nigger?” came another voice, virtually indistinguishable from the others.
I turned around to face my people. They were all looking at me for some indication, some sign as to what to do. I made a fist and brought my closed hand hard against my chest. I repeated the action. And I did it a third time.
Just as one of the bozos hollered out a cry of “Charge!” I turned back around and we came for them.
It never even occurred to me that we might fail. I was so ignited with murderous rage that I knew we would win before I even gave my people the signal. And that is just how it went down.
The chicken shit skinheads ran at us, gripping their rifles by the barrels, planning to use them as clubs. That was stupid. You have a gun and you’re coming up against a group of Bushmen, you better know how to use it. I took the first clubbing across the back of my shoulder. The rifle struck me, held in place for a confusing few seconds, then flew back with twice the force that had been expended moments before. The butt of the weapon smashed into the skin’s head, right along the frontal lobe, a vulnerable part of any skinhead’s skull, since it is often the least developed area. He stared at his gun as if he could not believe it had turned against him. Then he dropped backwards and hit the sand just as a feisty rivulet of blood splashed out of his head wound. I pried the rifle out of his cold, dead hand and shot him in the chest with it. Fuck him.
Once I fired the gun, all the action around me ground to a stop. Whoa! I could tell what some of the bastards were thinking. They were thinking that we were not supposed to fight back. Something had gone wrong. We were just supposed to take it. I turned and saw Triko standing near me. A skin was just a few feet from him, pointing his gun at Triko’s head. My friend clicked his teeth with his tongue. The skin smiled. Triko stepped forward, put the barrel in his own hands and brought it down over the head of his adversary with a marvelous thwack sound. The gun discharged into the air. The bullet landed I know not where. The skinhead spun on his heels and dropped. Two down, nine to go.
And go is what they did. The bastard cowards fled. They fled pretty much the way they had expected us to do. They ran and fell and got back up and ran some more. I shot two of them in the back as they were trying to escape. That probably sounds like a mean thing to do on my part. I hope it sounds mean. It should sound mean because I intended it just that way. You take a man from his home, make him a slave in your home, deprive him of his family, his religion, his God damned freedom, for Christ’s sake, and then you tell him, “No, nigger! You can’t fight back! We freed you and you better be grateful we don’t roll you in hot tar and crucify you!” To that I say, “Motherfucking motherfuckers, you are gonna see! We slaved for you for centuries! You had no natural right to brutalize us, but you did it anyway. I don’t care it wasn’t you specifically who did it. And yes, sure, of course, we can get along. That’s fine. But when you pick up a weapon and start to hold it on me, when you tell me where I can and cannot live, when you walk across the street because you’re scared of me, that is when we cannot get along. That is when the problems begin. But even then I don’t feel the need to kill you. When you fire that weapon, when you enslave me all over again, when you get your rocks off raping my babies, then Mister Chinese, Mister American, Mister European Arctic South American Subcontinental Penguin-kissing scumbag, that is when we have a serious problem.”
I said all of this in about three seconds. I sent this little sermon right into the surviving seven heads. I set it up to repeat over and over, kind of a ricochet effect, spinning down and down into their imaginations until it either drove them insane or petered out.
My tribesmen brothers and sisters were silent. They stepped lightly on the beach sand, examining the fallen skinheads without quite touching them. Initially they had taken it for granted that this encounter was just a game, kind of like the ones back in the Project, back in the real Namibia , back in Africa . When I had turned to face them and slammed my fist against my chest, the scales had fallen from their eyes. They knew this was serious. They knew it was a battle. They knew they were in danger. And they had fought. The women shrieked terrifying squalls of rage as they ran at the rifle-bearing morons. The screams had frozen the skinheads and the women slammed right into them, shoulder against belly—victory: shoulder! The men had jumped, hopped, tossed themselves high and low, diverting the craftier gunmen and adding to the general confusion. Triko had killed his opponent. I had killed some of my own. Our tribe was now real. We were united in that horrible generational unifier, the taking of life. We had not resorted to peaceful resistance or nonviolent disobedience. We had not allowed ourselves to die in the name of a pacifistic cause. We had sinned and as a result were probably damned in the eyes of whatever holy things there were out in the cosmos. I hated that. But I would have hated being slain by skinheads much, much worse.
Bert Kerns and Henry Lucado had gone to Jupiter when they died. Of course, it had not been Jupiter proper. It had been more like the essence of the great Jovian planet. Essence is not something tangible. Essence is more like the suggestion of something that is tangible. Essence is the light that reflects, the light that refracts, and the light that radiates from within, a billion frequencies interlocking and coiled. Bert and Henry could not see or hear one another any more than they could have shaken hands and wished one another a happy eternity. And yet they did exist, drifting among the planet’s moons, rolling in the magnetic fields that would have destroyed them back when they had been alive. They sailed along the rings. They navigated without thought between asteroids and other galactic pollutions. They recognized one another’s presence, they understood one another’s existence, they absorbed the mutual essence, and they felt the interconnectedness of the solar system, the galaxy, the finite continuum that is the universe.
Pity was not real to them any more than joy or sorrow would have been. But they did observe the goings-on with some attention. They understood Jupiter as their Father. They perceived without vision that their Father was being harmlessly violated by life forms of very limited appreciation. The Father would not miss what was being taken from Him. That was not important. The important matter was that these life forms with low appreciation had deigned to disturb Him, had barged in as if they had been invited, as if they were expected. The Father found this disturbing. The Father called out to Bert Kerns and Henry Lucado. He had been calling to them for a long time, even before they had advanced into their present existence. He had called out to them when they themselves had been this type of impudent life form. It had taken a while for them to arrive. Jupiter didn’t care how long it had taken. The point was that the moment Had. The moment Was. The moment Is.
Father Jupiter knew their essences would need some time to acclimate. He allowed for this. He perceived as they drifted and swam among the celestial forms in His neck of the universe. But the moment was Now. So He showed them what He needed them to perceive.
They did not find any of what they perceived as confusing. The concept of confusion was not within their purview. What they perceived Was and that was what was important. They perceived and knew that the lesser forms were extracting from the Father. They perceived and knew that a few of the lesser forms were enslaving many of their kind. They perceived and knew that the lesser forms would not utilize their free will in a harmonious manner. The Father had blessed them with the great power of Will. Yet Bert and Henry perceived and knew that the lesser forms did not see within themselves the great power. Bert and Henry perceived and knew that the Father had bestowed upon them the opportunity to lift up these lesser forms, these men and women. They would lift them up and show them to themselves. The men and women would no doubt recoil in horror. That did not matter. What mattered was that the lesser forms have the scales removed from their eyes. This they would do. The Father was All.
They perceived and knew a man of whom they had no recollection. This man called himself Maurice Henshaw Washington. He, like the other life forms, was flawed in more ways than even a celestial body could count. Yet Bert and Henry perceived and knew that they would use the unfree parts of this man to reveal the others to themselves, to allow the others to stare at themselves, to gaze into the cosmic mirror, to know and perceive themselves and exact the proper judgments.
Father Jupiter felt the awareness of Bert and Henry and was pleased.
Jupiter recognized that there were some among the humans who believed that the end of time was near. The Father sensed a ripple of humor in this. Time was something many of the lesser forms attempted to measure. In that sense of things, as those humans would understand it, there would be no end, just as there had been no specific beginning. Man was such a deluded creature. There he was, crawling up out of shallow water onto dry land, “discovering” fire and the next thing he knew, he was inventing all sorts of ideas about how he and the rest of the universe had come into being. There were those who believed they had been created in the image of God. That notion sent another ripple through the Father. Not even He, Jupiter, Father of the galaxy, had been created in the image of God. The value that these mortals imagined upon themselves, the books they had written to justify their existences, the statues and shrines—it was all so bizarre that even Jupiter Himself, He who had confused humans and their predecessors for eons—even He could not unravel it all. There were also those among them who imagined great cataclysms behind the coming of the universe and the puny lives to whom it had given birth. These were not quite as deluded as the others and yet they were just as smug, just as off the mark. They had been given science, they had been given mathematics, they had been guided to psychology, yet they could not see the connectedness, they could not feel it and so deprived themselves of tremendous pleasure. They were, in the cosmic nature of things, a silly mess. It would be good for the noncorporeal fluxes known as Bert and Henry to set things on a more correct (synchronized, parallel, symbiotic) course. It would be easing to the existence of Jupiter, the Father, the one Who had taken from the Supreme the heed to birth all this, the sun for warmth, the seas for life, the plants for food, the other planets, nebulas, rings and moons—it would be just short of Perfect.
The storm of rage had subsided. Jupiter’s rage dissolved as He sensed the cycle of sacrifice unwinding. This ebbing of the storm effected slight change throughout the universe, change most pronounced on earth, or as He often conceived it, The Whiny Planet. Their magnetic poles dropped in temperature. The descendants of their original men and women regained their earlier blessed markings. Various animals—some beatific, others devious—gained knowledge and wanted more. The fruit among the Botswana
The Father Had. The Father Was. The Father Is. All was good.
The moment breathed.
Chapter Eighteen
I calmed down a little bit after the big skinhead ruckus. I’ll be the first to admit I was worked up and could have would have should have dealt different with the situation. All the same, a man can only take so much abuse before he blows a gasket. I got mad. The gasket blew. Everything exploded. I started to feel better.
We walked together along the passages leading out of Oregon , through the treacherous dips and swirls of Idaho Atlantic Ocean and onto the African continent. This was not a journey of logic, or even one that you could say had a reasonable purpose. It was more like I was being pulled. The more I got pulled, the more my fellow Bushmen believed in me. I was mighty scared about the prospects of letting them down, but that was all that scared me. Looking at the eleven of them, watching their strength become more and more pronounced every minute—well, it was downright inspiring.
It struck me as kind of funny how, after the skinheads, we didn’t really run into any more direct hostility. Oh, sure, there were little bands of goofballs here and there, but they only sniffed around our edges and never quite penetrated our traveling domain. For the most part—through south Montana , down into the Plain States and throughout the Midwest —we had smooth sailing. I strongly considered steering us back through Circleville. It would have taken us a little out of our way, but not all that much. In the end I decided against it because I already knew what it looked like from my visions. No good would have been served revisiting that area. On the contrary, the sight of all that waste might very well have ignited an anger in me that I was determined to quell. So we skipped all of Ohio Providence , Rhode Island Providence Kentucky and up into the forest mountains of West Virginia Pennsylvania New England proper we were clad in synthetic wool clothing and polyurethane shoe-boots and I told somebody who asked that we were Black Eskimos. I told this guy we’d all gotten drunk at a whale-eating party and had been kicked out of reindeer land. He just looked at me, staring sort of surreptitiously, and grinning like a fool as he backed off nice and slow.
As we neared the state of Rhode Island —the Island that isn’t—we kept encountering human beings on foot and on bicycle who warned us against going farther. We were told in no uncertain terms to stay away. “Stay away,” said some. “Don’t go,” advised others. The most memorable caution was “If the apes don’t get you, the dolphins will!” That seemed to be pretty much the mantra. I sung in my mind, “One fist is iron, the other steel. If the apes don’t get you, then the dolphins will!” I tried teaching that little ditty to my brothers and sisters. They clicked it so bad that not even Tennessee Ernie Ford himself would have recognized it.
The only thing that really concerned me—other than letting down my kinsmen—was that we had run out of red bell peppers in Pennsylvania
As for food, we ate what we could. We ate winter pees until I thought I’d die. Other delights were salmon, lobster, and other lesser species. I’d gotten away from eating any kind of fish, fowl or meat, but there wasn’t much choice we had that I could see and we were lucky to catch what we did.
The state line going into Rhode Island Interstate Highway
We met the first group of orangutans the day we hit Providence
Tumata and Csawhatuoka saw them before I did. They clicked out a notification. The click didn’t have the urgency of a warning and it certainly was not the call to prepare for attack. It was just the same kind of notice one might expect if a hummingbird had buzzed by and the two women had wanted me to take notice. I looked down from my sun-gazing. Four apes—orangutans—stood about fifty feet ahead of us, right in the middle of the highway, just to one side of a sign that proclaimed Providence City Limits. Muneeta and Triko advanced beyond me as we all came to a halt. The orangutans were wooly and human-like in the sense that their eyes held onto you and they did not turn away. They just blinked and scratched themselves and waited.
I stepped between Muneeta and Triko and held my gaze low as I approached the four beasts, loosely hanging together across the vehicle-less Interstate Highway Namibia
Unless you have seen this kind of thing, you have not seen the funniest thing in the world. An ape does not laugh like a human being. Humans have all sorts of variations on the laugh: cachinnation, cackling, chuckling, chortling—and those are just the c’s. An orangutan, on the other hand, has maybe three types of laugh. One is the snigger, which he uses when one of his colleagues slips on a banana peel. The second is the openly contemptuous laugh, as when a friend is swinging in a coconut tree and the rope breaks. The third is the hysterical gut-buster, a laugh reserved for only the most absurd of situations, resulting in the rangis falling on their backs, holding themselves at the groin, and screeching an ear-splitting banshee yell that causes tears to form in the eyes of nearby roosters and children to flee from the protection of their parents. It is a laugh that is in and of itself funny, indeed, often funnier than whatever it was that initiated the original laughter. Begun, it does not end any time soon. On the contrary, it builds and builds until entire villages of the great apes are incapacitated and often near starvation. In this instance, all four orangutans stared at me and their mouths dropped open. The biggest one of the bunch—they were all males—hopped just a tiny bit. The laughter exploded. One big guy rolled over on his back and kicked his arms and legs into the air, snorting and wheezing, burping and sneezing. The other three followed suit. Every time it looked like they would settle down and get over it, one of them would mimic the sound my stomach had made and the whole thing would start all over again. At first I was a little embarrassed at my lack of propriety. Then I got a little angry that they wouldn’t stop laughing at me. Then my kinsmen all cracked up and joined the apes by lying on their own backs and kicking into the air. The smallest of the apes let rip a fart that sounded like a jet airliner taking off. At this we fell apart. It was all just too much. I laughed right along with all of them. I don’t know how long we laughed, but I do know it was dark by the time we pulled ourselves together.
At last the four orangutans waved us goodbye and our tribe of Bushmen walked on, having enjoyed the experience of tomfoolery in many of its manifestations.
No lights lit up the highway. The city lay ahead and it too was unlit. That was one of the sure signs that we were the only human types in the vicinity. Our eyesight worked just fine at night. Mine never had before, so I assumed the improvement had something to do with the Vitamin A in those delicious red bell peppers. Whatever the cause, I enjoyed the improvement. It helped, too, when we came upon the poachers, camped out right in the heart of the city.
I’ll admit that my earlier encounter with these imbeciles had been kind of amusing, indeed, a much needed comic relief along the road at a time when Rockwell Seitz had been sick rather than dead. Unfortunately, I had gotten all my laughter out with the apes earlier and was starting to feel salty again. The three poaching poachers—Poachin’s wat we do. Now we’s on ar way to the Island . Yas, the Island ’s where wull be—had made it to the “poaching capital” or whatever it was. When we found them they were fast asleep, snoring with their yaps open wide enough for seagulls to nest inside, arms sprawled out like crucified thieves, stench rising from their every orifice. Rocky would have said they reminded him of the louts guarding Duncan, the ones slain by Macbeth. I didn’t plan to go quite that far. But I decided to tie all their shoestrings together while the drunkards slept.
We moved on about a hundred feet or so and I waved my family to a stop. I turned back toward the poaching poachers. I yelled, “Hey, you sissy poaching pussies! What ya gonna poach now?”
One at a time they stirred and the impact of what I’d yelled soaked through the alcohol-soaked residue that had at one time been their brains. “Whut? Who’s askin’ ’is mama tuh die?” They arose as one. Their heads teetered on their shoulders and their feet extended forwards. Then they toppled over, got back up, fell down again, got back up, clawed through the air as they smashed down on the roadway, got back up—well, you get the idea. The Bushmen found it all quite a nice demonstration of camaraderie.
The next morning, Christmas by some accounts, was an enforced holiday, so most of the things you needed to exist in a world where needs continued right on needing no matter what the day—those things typically went unfulfilled. By now I wasn’t going to have any of that. The mighty twelve of us awakened, washed in an unlocked Vludium service station restroom, forewent breakfast and headed straight for City Hall, the place against which legend had it no one could fight. Orangutans sat on the steps, resembling nothing so much as Rodan’s Thinker, except in plural form. We had played with associates of theirs and no amount of restroom washing was going to get that vile stench off our skins anytime soon. The apes on the steps sniffed a few times at the air and motioned us onward. If this was the Praetorian Guard, whatever lay inside was not well protected.
Along the hallway in these halls of justice, the marble floor reflected our images back at us. The morning, the hall, the city hall, all was stone silent. Not a creature was stirring, not even a dolphin. Somehow I didn’t think the dorsal mammals celebrated Christmas, but one never knew. I had a hard time imagining how these animals would rule, if that was what they actually were doing. The idea of them taking a day off from ruling was even harder to fathom. We hadn’t gotten a tremendous amount of information from the orangutans, partly because of our own silliness, partly because we hadn’t been able to figure out their rather complex system of communication. I’ll admit I had no inherent love of dolphins, but our mission required their assistance. What I intended us to do was to secure a ship, one that would transport us across the mighty ocean and take us home to Namibia
I spotted an old style newspaper dispenser sitting all alone at the end of the shiny hall. The date on the front page was Christmas Eve. The sticker on the outside of the dispenser claimed that two dollars worth of quarters were required to seize ownership of the Providence
From the Providence (Rhode Island
Headline: Dolphins Retire to Marina for Holiday Celebration
Where does a busy dolphin go for fun these days? The ocean? A cabin in the mountains? The annual pumpkin festival? It is to laugh, says marine biologist and Assistant Mayor Pauline Paulson. “They go to the Providence Marina.” Why there, of all places? “Today’s dolphin can exist just as easily on land as in the more traditional water,” says Paulson. “But even though their habitats may have changed, their eating habits have not. Our local Marina is one of the best locations in all of New England for many juicy foods loved by dolphins, especially in the way of sardines.” But it isn’t just the food the dolphins love. “Oh no, this particular species spent its formative years in the salt waters of the oceans. Our Marina
Speaking of elections, when pressed to suggest her ideas as to the form of government the dolphins would be erecting in Providence
The Marina
One thing must be said for the island that isn’t: it is small. When you are walking everywhere you go and you want to get somewhere fast on an enforced holiday, you want an island that isn’t, one such as Rhode Island
It was an enforced holiday. Wouldn’t the police be on holiday as well? I checked with the orangutans on the way out. They told me Providence
We hit Shorty Long’s Food Store. It was the first one we came to and we selected it for no other reason. Who cared what they called it? We were hungry. I picked up a rock and was gonna throw it through the plate glass, but Djzuko suggested I try the door first. It might be unlocked. Sure, it might be. And dolphins might be getting loaded down at the marina, swilling highballs and sucking sardines. I pushed on the door. It did not give way. Djzuko smiled at me. He pulled on the door. It gave. We entered.
My tribesmen squeaked and clacked over the amazing quantities of fruits and vegetables available to us. Their celebratory fever cooled, however, once they bit into the first yams. “No taste to this shit,” clicked Triko. “Vomit sack,” snarled Rulefi as he spat out squash. “Where is food?” barked Tumata. “We need eat!”
I had to agree that this crap lacked any of the tasteful vibrancy of what we’d been accustomed to eating. In any event, I explained, this was what some people ate and it was what we would have to try to get by on, at least for a little while longer. Brinsk, who was a very effeminate male who assumed many of the duties normally chosen by the females, dropped a cantaloupe and kicked it. The others followed suit and before long the whole fruits and vegetables section of Shorty Long’s was quite the messy place. After a time we stopped playing around and actually ate some of the contemporary fare. All the pejorative terms I had taught them came tumbling out of their mouths right in synch with the tasteless morsels going into their mouths. A Bushman is less concerned with the manner in which he eats than with the quality of his diet. This was garbage to the discriminating palate of the Namibian Bushman. It seemed only appropriate that we leave the store looking like a garbage dump.
As we walked back down Winslow Avenue Marina Saudi Arabia
According to the digital readout on the Bank of Rhode Island sign, the temperature was a balmy thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit. It was windy as hell and I knew that without a sign. To one side we could see The Breakers, the Vanderbilt Hotel over on the hills of Newport Providence and out to the Atlantic Ocean . The yipping and squealing was deafening. My friends and I covered our ears as we walked down the plank to the clubhouse where the finned wonders had gathered.
Something between thirty-five and forty dolphins lounged half in and half out of the Providence Inlet that led in and out of the Marina
“How may I help you?”
That was not a dolphin. That was the voice of a human female, from the sound I guessed perhaps early thirties, well-educated, and attitudinal. I spun on my shoe-boot heels. There she was: Paulette Paulson, Marine Biologist. This was not prescience on my part. She had a name-tag pinned to her dark blue blouse.
She was a smart-looking woman, pale without being wan, pageboy haircut grown out a bit more than was trendy, with shoulders that didn’t need padding and legs that didn’t need lengthening. Her eyes were a soft hazel and they sat above and on either side of a nose that had been the perch for many sets of eyeglasses over the years. The little pinch marks had mutated into gentle nose scars.
She caught me staring and repeated her question. I said, “We are from Namibia
She nodded almost imperceptibly. Her expression was clearly one of appraisal. I continued. “If that wasn’t presumptuous enough, we were hoping we could enlist a few of the dolphins here to guide us on our journey. Of course, we haven’t any money or anything of value to trade. We were hoping they would see fit to do it anyway.”
She still did not speak. She merely lifted her open palm out to me as if to signal me to a halt. She tipped her head very slightly and marched over to one small group of dolphins. Once there, she constructed a series of body gestures that somewhat resembled the St. Vitus Dance. The dolphins chortled out some type of reply. She marched back over to me. All she said was “No.” Then she turned her back and rejoined the pod. It was quite discouraging.
It was at this exact moment that something strange and quite wonderful occurred. As I describe this, please remember that I am agnostic, which means that I believe we cannot know the nature of important things like the existence of God and why it is that plumbers will not work on weekends. What happened was this: I was watching the marine biologist woman walk with a rigidity back toward the dolphins when what I can only describe as the memory of Bert Kerns and Henry Lucado filled me up, took me over, and left messages inside me. I couldn’t see either one of them and I sure didn’t hear their voices. All I can say is that for a few brief seconds they were in my mind, telling me what I needed to do. This wave of insight was very different from the visions I’d had. This was more like a series of intercessions, a near and direct kind of reaching out to me, planting directions and taking hold. I would ask myself a question and my mind were discover a note left by my two dear, dead friends. It was like you were walking through your house and you’d say to yourself, “Where did I leave my car keys?” Then all at once a sign drops out of the sky that says, “Hey, dummy! Check your sock drawer.”
I turned around and motioned my friends to have a squat. I looked at them and felled such love. I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile and was met, one at a time, with smiles back from Tumata, Gventa, Csawhatuoka, Muneeta, Triko, Djzuko, Rulefi, Brinsk, Loih, Vhenka, and Icol. I loved them all and I knew they loved me back.
I asked myself, “What is the next thing we should do?”
The inside of my head made a sound like cartilage grinding. My eyes were wide, yet I could see nothing except Bert and Henry collaborating on an answer. When they came to an agreement, they stopped whispering and vanished, leaving in their stead a printed answer on a cardboard sign. It said: Take ship to Greenland . Take spacecraft to Jupiter. Wait for further instructions.
I read this to myself. I thought about it. I said, “No way!”
Another sign dropped. It said, Yes!
I said, “Okay, okay! Don’t get excited. Why do we have to go to Greenland ?”
A sign dropped. It said, Because that’s where the spacecraft is.
I thought about that. I said, “Right, right, I get it. But why are we going to Jupiter?”
A sign dropped, this time with a slight thud. It said, The twelve of you will save the universe. It’s pretty important, Moe. Trust us, will ya?
I said, “Okay,” and the signs vanished.
I grinned at my eleven traveling companions. They grinned in return. How was I going to get this across to them? That was a good question.
A sign dropped. It said, Explain it first to Tumata in the Taa language. She will explain it to the others.
I called Tumata over. In Taa I told her what we needed to do. It went well until we reached the part about saving the universe. In Taa, there is no specific word for the universe. The closest it comes is “the village.” So when I identified the village that needed saving, I spread my arms to suggest something much, much larger. Even with that, she didn’t quite get my meaning. By the time the last of the tribe had been advised as to our collective plans, they were all thoroughly confused and free of dissent.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
It was the orangutans who helped us take the ship. This type of great ape prefers the small group to the wild, untamed tribe or the isolation of solitary living. The number they appeared to prefer was four. The groups were almost always separated by gender, although once in a while an aroused male would wander from his group and try to pick up an inexperienced female. This often led to the female’s maternal parent whupping the shit out of the aggressing male horn dog, uh, ape. So it was that we enlisted two groups, one male, one female, to help us persuade the drunken dolphins to let us steal their ship.
The vessel, christened Euphora, was moored to the outermost section of the Marina
She said, “I made it clear to you people that we would be unable to assist you.” She spoke the word “people” as if it had tasted spoiled on the way out of her mouth.
I shook my head. “We’re not asking for your help. We’re taking this ship and that’s all there is to it.”
I tethered another line to a metal fixing attached to the pier, thereby reeling in the near side of the ship to hold her steady.
Two of the male apes stopped watching me and started watching Paulson. She observed this herself and her voice trembled just a bit. “You are doing no such thing. You do not have authority—”
“What I have,” I said, “are eight Borneo apes who pick their teeth with string beans like you. As to these greasy slime beasts here, if they think they can stop us, they are welcome to try.”
I pointed to the plank. Tumata stepped lively. Once she was aboard, the others followed, one at a time. Once my eleven fellow travelers were on deck, the apes proceeded in kind, the females first, the males last. All the while the rotten sea mammals were glaring at us, all of them having returned to the water. Some of them sprayed us with water, others splashed us violently. But none of them could prevent us from getting on the ship. What were they going to do, call a cop?
What they did do was to hem us in. I had just killed the sails and started up the engines when I saw that we were surrounded. Back on shore, Paulson looked on with no expression. I was up top, holding the steering. I spun the stern around and rammed their stupid blockade doing what the indicator said was twenty-seven naughts. I don’t know what that translates to in miles per hour, but it was sufficient to knock three of those dolphins up and out of the water and back onto the pier. The others rammed us with their sides and we shook pretty hard, both before and aft. Still, it made no difference. We had stolen a ship named Euphora right out from under these glorified porpoises and had gotten away clean. We headed north by northeast, destination Greenland . None of us realized at the time that we had a stowaway onboard.
Chapter Nineteen
It sounds like such an hospitable place: Greenland . One somehow envisions a land that is, among other things, green. The harsh reality is that the only thing green on that large island—an island that is—is the occasional decaying corpses of people who have died of hypothermia while on their way from one igloo to another. For an island founded by a Viking named Erik the Red, the notion of a Green Land
We had sailed up the coast of the New United States, usually remaining about ten miles out from the shoreline. We crossed over into Canadian waters and the unsurprising cool winds that accompanied them. The Bushmen people had proven themselves brilliant with fishing nets and we’d fed ourselves well on the journey. But when we turned east toward the great green island, we immediately crossed swords with glaciers, fjords, and floating ice aplenty. I could follow the coastline just fine, even as far out as we had been. But sailing waters without the vantage of land masses was beyond my limited skills. Shoot, I suppose we were lucky we found Greenland at all, under the circumstances. Truth to tell, had it not been for our stowaway, I probably would have gotten us hopelessly lost. But Marybeth Gowan, one time farmer and former firer of rocket-grenades, had had some of the same pulling visions and messages as had steered me in this direction. If all that seems highly coincidental, imagine how I felt. I’m steering a big ship with almost no experience, using a gas-powered bank of engines, while trying to continue to convince my loving and trusting extended family that I knew what I was doing when it was closer to the truth to say that I was flying by the seat of my pants—compile all this and then one morning you feel a finger tapping on your shoulder and it turns out that finger is attached to a friend who had walked across the country with you, going in the opposite direction and wonder of wonders, this same person made her way out of the country of California and somehow transported herself 2,000 miles east and just happened to hide herself in the one ship out of hundreds in the Providence, Rhode Island Marina. Yeah, sure, that happens every day.
I asked her the big question. I asked, “What are—how did—where—arghhhh!”
She gave every impression of being much slower in thought than she had been when I’d first met her. She stared at me as if trying to remember who I was. At last she said, “Maurice, hello. Do you remember? Do you? Do you know so long ago now, so long? You and I lived in Circleville. Oh, the smells there made me feel so good. I miss it, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I miss it very much, Marybeth. But you were telling me how you came to be here with us.”
She digested this reminder. She said, “You remember last summer when they came for us. They came for us. Yes. We were at some place in Alabama
I wasn’t about to let it go that easy. Alabama Huntsville
She shook her head and then she nodded. She said, “There was a man in a funny hat. He smoked very nasty cigarettes. Maurice, he had a very crooked smile, that man did. Why can’t I remember? I used to have such a good mind for things.”
“Try, Marybeth. Try. How did you get onboard this ship?”
“You look good, Maurice. The weather hasn’t hurt you any.”
“The ship?”
She looked like she might cry. She caught herself and at last she said, “The funny hat man brought me here. He—he knew you would be here. I don’t know. They gave me pills, lots of pills. They—he said to wait in the hull. He told me I had to wait down there. Big pills. They hurt me to swallow them. I don’t know. I so hate not knowing, Maurice.”
Her version of what happened came out in bits and pieces over several days. As best I could put the parts together, shortly after Doctor Seitz had been murdered, Margie Maxwell and Marybeth Gowan had been captured while still in California
The funny thing was that—stunted as she had become—she was a fountain of information when it came to guiding us to Greenland . For one thing, she knew where the NASA facility was, which put her far ahead of me and the others. She insisted that it was north of a city called Godthab Godthab Arctic Circle . She said she did not know. I asked if she knew the name of the city that had the NASA space center. She said sure, it was called Thule
She then told me I needed to follow a course she had drawn for me, a course that would still require us to dodge all manner of floating giant ice, but one which would, all the same, get us to the seaport. From there we could travel the five hundred nine miles—of this she was quite certain—south to Nuuk, although she couldn’t say why we would want to do that, considering that Thule
For her to be so verbally keen about this and yet so uncertain and muddy about everything else we discussed, she had to have been given something more than pills. I thought it might have been hypnosis. In fact, I was convinced it had been until I just happened to see the faint outline of stitches beneath the hairline behind her left ear. I asked her about it and she acted surprised. “I’ve had no operations, Maurice. I haven’t been sick in a long time, I think.” This scar was recent, no more than a couple months old, if even that long ago. I never found out for sure, but I came to the opinion that Ehrlichmann and his goons had implanted something in Marybeth’s brain. Maybe it was some type of device that transmitted messages to her. Maybe it was a tracking mechanism. Maybe it had short-circuited her mind. All I knew was that she was quite loquacious—Jesus, had I swallowed a dictionary?—in some few regards and slow as melting snow about everything else.
During those long, slow days at sea, I had time to evaluate someone other than Marybeth. At long last I came to be aware of changes within myself. I was—there’s no other way to say it—smarter than I had ever been. My entire way of speaking, my thoughts, mental images, concerns, emotions, all these components of personality had mutated into something the Moe of Circleville would not have recognized. And yet the overwhelming majority of my time was spent with eleven people to whom it was a big deal to discuss the rain. When I wasn’t talking with them, I was listening to a farmer woman who talked as if someone had lobotomized her.
As I guided the ship north along the southern coast of Greenland, taking a sharp left at Cape Farewell —how ironic, I thought—I could almost detect the ice rejoining. I counted seventeen glaciers in less than a week. Marybeth announced that there were at least forty of the mammoth ice formations in and around Greenland . I asked her how she knew that and she said she did not know but was certain all the same that it was true.
I cut the engines when we reached Davis Strait . The incredible chill had sent the San Bushmen below deck. Just like me, they preferred a far more temperate climate. The waters thinned beneath us and the thermometer read a frigid minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Clouds hung so low you could actually reach up and touch them. You’d stretch out an arm, clench your fist, and draw back a jagged ball of ice. I wondered what temperature was so cold it would freeze fire. I asked Marybeth. She didn’t know. She just through more logs in the steel trash containers that burned and gave us very limited heat. The engines had provided a very comfortable warmth for the Bushmen before I had to cut them. The vibrations caused the ice to crack and slam into us. Plus, there was the fact that even at their slowest speed, the engines pushed us far too fast for me to guide the Euphora the ragged, jagged ice blocks.
As we crept along through the maze up toward Baffin Bay , Marybeth scoured through all the old newspapers that had been rolled by the previous owner of the ship. They had been wrapped tight and most likely had served as makeshift logs for burning. I had asked her to see if she could find anything relating to our destination and she discovered plenty. Listening to her read the reportage was excruciatingly tiresome because of the stop and start hesitations in her recitations. It was also essential that I listen all the same. There was far too much that I did not understand and far too little that I actually may have been clear on.
From the January 29, 2011 issue of USA
Water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the North Atlantic is now the warmest in at least 2,000 years. Waters of the Fram Strait , which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard , have warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice which helps to cool the planet be reflecting sunlight back to space. The Arctic lost sea ice larger than the state of Alaska
That sure wasn’t the case in the early days of 2,025, no thanks to the goings on around the Earth. No, it all was connected to the disappearance of the Great Red Spot out there, hundreds of millions of miles away on the face of Jupiter. It was the change in radiation levels, the rays that Seitz had said reached as far as Saturn. Well, they had reached a whole lot farther than that, as it turned out. The radiation had been working right along with our sun’s fusion to keep what would have been a pleasant balance had people not been so keen to burn fluorocarbons just so they could have aerosol spray to keep eggs from sticking to their skillets. Not to take credit where it isn’t due, that little bit of insight came from the Intergalactic Geographic Magazine of December, 2011. This is how it read:
As shown in the satellite photographs above, taken from the International Space Station, the Arctic Circle dipping into the top eighty percent of Greenland has receded in the previous thirty years to a condition that pre-exists the last ice age. Environmentalists and other scientists are alarmed because, they say, this leads directly to the phenomenon colloquially known as global warming. “The less ice,” says Geophysicist Pietier Vrounglas of Greenland’s Glacier Observatory in Svalbard , “the less chill gets reflected back at the sun. The less we have of that, the more the sun’s rays penetrate and the warmer it gets. The warmer it gets, the more the ice melts, on and on. The next thing you know, you have nice vineyards in Great Britain Canada and deserts in the Plain States of the USA
All the evidence presented by hardworking people the world over had not convinced the Earth’s greatest polluters—NUSA and China Arctic Circle would now expand at a rate such that northern waterways would freeze over during the winter months and deprive populations of much needed H20.
Something else interested me as we set port in Sisimuit. It was a news item, this one from Radio Greenland, a pirate station sending signals from just off the uranium fields floating outside Nuuk. I did not catch the complete report, but what I did gave me considerable pause. What I heard was this: “Based on details retrieved from a lawsuit initiated during a request brought about by the Freedom of Information Act, we have learned that on January 21, 1968, a B-52 bomber crashed and burned on the ice near Thule Air Base. The impact detonated high explosives in the primary units of all four B28 nuclear bombs it carried. Only three of the four bombs has ever been accounted for. Today the base hosts the 12th Space Warning Squadron, a site designed to detect and track Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles launched against the New United States of America.”
That fourth nuclear bomb had never been found. Did it just break through the ice and fall to the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean ? No. Radiation levels indicated no such occurrence. Besides, people working at the Thule Piketon , Ohio
The port of Sisimuit is around 500 miles north of Nuuk and about 1,500 south of Thule Thule
I thanked the fishermen and we rented a pair of teams of Huskies to pull twin sleds from the port on into the town. The Bushmen were immediately uneasy with the Huskies and the dogs in turn barked and sniffed at the Bushmen with an unpleasant hesitation. After a while, though, the two groups settled down and we raced off on a course the Huskies have traveled many times before.
About two hours later we disembarked from the sleds at the very small Sisimuit Airfield. Marybeth paid an amount of money unknown to me to the cargo people and after a two-day delay, we were airborne. The journey scared the Bushmen into an uncharacteristic silence. This was their first air flight. They were, to be gentle, nervous flyers.
When we landed at Thule
Chapter Twenty
He reminded himself of one of the two evil witches in The Wizard of Oz. Which one had it been? Ah, he could never remember. Whichever one it had been, it had been the one who sought to avenge the murder of her sister, the one who had been driven to obtain the ruby slippers, to extract them from the soon-to-be-dead feet of that meddling Dorothy. Dorothy, that perky bitch from that godforsaken land of Kansas
Otto Ehrlichmann suffered from no such ignorance.
He lit one Lucky Strike cigarette from the cherry of another and considered that he suffered from nothing whatsoever. He was now on the threshold of his finest moment. He was poised to set into motion his denouement, his turning of the page in history, his magnum opus, his bloody goddamned blot on the face of the future! He felt certain the Bushmen would be immune to the magnetic radiation fields Jupiter had used to destroy millions of earthmen sent to harness the power of Vludium. That was all well and good. However, it was Maurice Washington that mattered. It had always been Maurice. The original Bushmen numbered no more than 3,000 planet-wide. Washington, however, was one among twenty-five million who could be fed the special red bell peppers, who could then be immune from the radiation and who could then survive the conditions of slavery in space. The average work life of an earthman within the elliptical orbit of the farthest satellite was less than six earth months. It didn’t matter what kind of shields or protective clothing they wore. Everybody, sooner rather than later, died. A week or two after the earthlings collapsed, they had to be discharged, flipping and flopping into raw space where they broke apart in moments. This was all quite a drain on the profits the Chinese Fascist Party intended to draw from the mission. They had turned first to their own scientists and had received nothing but empty promises for their investment. At long last they had begrudgingly sought the help of Ernest Eichmann, who in turn had looked over at his longtime subordinate, Otto Ehrlichmann. By that time, Ehrlichmann had already started his Master Project. He told Eichmann and he told the Chinese. He told them all he would have a solution within one calendar year. Eichmann had smiled. Ehrlichmann had smiled. The Chinese had told them that was good. They had said it was very good. They had said that if Ehrlichmann failed them, he would he shredded. Ehrlichmann had gotten some ugly mental pictures from that word “shredded.” But it did not matter. He could not fail. He had Maurice. He had watched him and his “family” as they walked, crawled, swam, floated and flew all over the place, having not eaten the peppers in months and still going stronger than ever.
It was genetic mutation, he realized. The chromosomes Maurice carried had been altered in some way as a result of eating the peppers. He had been changed from that first breakfast back at Henry Lucado’s. He could have never eaten them again and it wouldn’t have mattered one bit. He had been transformed into an approximation of the Nietzschean ideal, the uber mensch. The only problem for Maurice—one he shared with that idiot Dorothy from Kansas Washington Washington
Ehrlichmann leaned back in his chair in the observatory layer of the Twelfth Space Warning Squadron, a facility that at one time had been used to detect and track ICBMs launched against North America . He sat and stared out the long, stretching window that looked out upon the city of Thule Washington
The worst part had been the screams that had come from the farmer woman. Otto had considered killing her first, but there was always the chance that she might come in handy in other ways. She had let loose with a shrill cry that Otto thought might crack the impenetrable shields outside the facility. In any case, he had killed Icol and he had made his point. He didn’t think that Maurice would need much more persuasion. But if he did, that too was okay.
One of the nice things about the San Bushmen was that they loved to tell stories. They loved to tell them and they loved to hear them. It didn’t matter what circumstances, if a Bushman was nearby, you could pretty much count on a story being related. The stories were mostly a way they had of helping themselves to figure out all the weirdness spinning around them. When it came to this type of lucidity—shit, there I go again eating dictionaries!—Triko was the unquestioned master. So I was not all that surprised when, just a few seconds after the Health Alteration goons had dragged away the lifeless form of Icol, Triko had cleared his throat—an attention-getting utterance he had picked up from me—and motioned us all to silence as he spoke.
He said, “A young boy had watched since his birth the huntings of his father and the other men of the desert. He had watched as they sniffed the ground. He had watched as they held their hands in the air to feel what beasts had been near. He had watched as the men had returned with meat-heavy tusks of wild creatures. He had watched. He had eaten. He had watched the gratitude on the faces of those who ate. He longed to be among those to whom gratitude was paid. One night while the men slept and the women snored, this boy crept off from his hut. He sniffed the desert and felt the air. He did not return for a long time.
“His fathers missed him. They prayed to Yasema, the father of all, for a safe return of their son. They ignored the bitter curses of Chevangani, god of evil, who claimed the boy had been slain.
“One day after many revolutions the boy returned. He had grown tall and lithe. He had added weight to his size. He looked upon the sleeping village. He looked and waited, but no one awakened. So he tossed back his head and wailed. He wailed for several minutes and at last all the humans of the village slumped out to learn what was the matter. The boy told them all about how many wild beasts he had slain, about how much food he had consumed, about how many women he had impressed. Everyone listened politely until he finished. Then they made to return to their huts. The boy was astonished. He cried, ‘You stupid people! Do you not understand what all I have done?’
“One of the boy’s fathers stepped forward. He addressed the boy in a flat voice. The man said, ‘You stupid child. The goal was not to eat and kill. The goal was not to impress women. You have always had that power. You did not need to learn how to do what you could already do. The goal was not these things. The goal was the hunt itself.’
“And with that, the fathers and mothers returned to their huts and stayed there until the boy grew very lonely and left the village forever.”
When Triko finished with the story, all the other Bushmen nodded and it was generally agreed that this had been a fine story, one which certainly applied to our present condition. I agreed with the first half of that. It had been a nice story, sure enough. But what it had to do with the death of Icol, I had not the slightest clue. I mentioned this to Triko.
He said, “Maurice Henshaw, you have ears and yet you do not hear. The boy in the story is you. You have been on this journey for a long time. The people of your home no longer miss you. They no longer weep.”
I nodded. Okay. If he said so.
“What I mean is that you have been following a path for all the wrong things. It is the path itself that sings out to you, if only you will listen. You must not think about what lies at the end of that path. What waits there is only more path. It is not what you seek but what you are that matters to Yasema, the father of us all. The planet you call Jupiter is one of the fathers as well. But the big father, Yasema, she cries in that you do not understand. I cannot tell you more. You must dig it up for yourself, my brother.”
An hour had passed. I heard the steps of Ehrlichmann and his goons coming for another victim. I still had no idea what Triko was getting at. He slapped me on the back and walked toward the door, ready to offer himself up for the next sacrifice.
The door opened. Ehrlichmann leaned his head in. He said, “Who is the next contestant, Johnnie?”
I pushed Triko out of the way and told the mad scientist I was ready.
There were two things Ehrlichmann wanted me to do. The first was he wanted me to provide seed for Tumata. The second was he wanted me to travel on the next flight to Jupiter.
Part Four
Return of the Great Red Spot
Chapter Twenty-One
It was quite an honor, Ehrlichmann told me. I would be the first human being to reach the outskirts of Jupiter without suffering from radiation poisoning. He had ordered the bomb dropped on Piketon’s A-Plant simply as an experiment. Three out of the four of us had been affected, he told me. Rockwell Seitz had suffered first, as we had seen. But he had recovered, which was pretty unusual in and of itself.
Margaret had been next and she had taken a while to show signs of illness, but it had hit her all right. The youth and beauty she had known had once again been erased and replaced with tired muscles and sagging skin. Her trip to the Jupiter labor camps hadn’t helped matters much. By the time she deboarded, she had suffered a debilitating stroke. They had jettisoned her into space.
Marybeth had turned into an imbecile. Oh, at first Ehrlichmann had doubted her transformation. After all, she had shown no outward physical signs of deterioration. So he had ordered an operation on her brain to determine just how far gone she really was. When the surgeons told him she had the mind of a sophisticated vegetable, he had told them to implant a device that would reignite her memory whenever a simple electronic signal was activated. Still, her prognosis was quite bad. What little mind she had left was not sufficient to continue sending messages to her extremities. She would die, Ehrlichmann told me, well before the New Year was out.
“That brings us to you, Maurice. I hope you do not mind the familiarity. It is just that I have been learning about you for such a nice long time, I feel a certain primitive affection for you. I am not a monster, Maurice, no matter what you may think of me. No, this experiment has been fascinating and will result in cosmic changes beyond your imagination. For that I will seek no other reward than to oversee the remainder of your life. The final proof, as it were. We will fly you to Metis, the first ring of Jupiter. You will live there with the other human beings. You will work on the drilling operations that have been so beneficial to the long-term regeneration of Earth. Oh, you needn’t worry. We do not expect you to slave away like the others. Instead, thanks to my interceding on your behalf, you will be a foreman. You will crack the whip rather than have it cracked against you. The others will die off. You will continue to survive. Once this has been proved to a scientific certainty, your demise will come, not from nature, but from a peaceful injection. It will be quite painless, Maurice. Again, I want you to understand that, despite our differences, I have grown to love you.”
I did not much care one way or another. He had by this point already extracted my “seed,” as he called it. As he spoke, a doctor was implanting it inside Tumata. “That is just to be safe, Maurice. The odds are excellent that it will be unnecessary. You see, the African continent offers more genetic diversity than anywhere else on Earth. So we should have no trouble at all in plucking men with your DNA markers. But just in case, we will have at least one child with a perfect match. If he is needed, your son will become the new age Maurice Washington. If not, I suppose he will be used in some other manner.”
“When do I leave?”
Ehrlichmann smiled. He said, “In a few hours. As you and I speak, a team of technicians is preparing a flight compartment specifically for you, Maurice. The flight will take less than one hour. You will be cracking your whip quite soon. And, unless I am mistaken, which, of course, I am not, you will be cracking it very hard.”
He was ready for damn near any contingency, you had to give the man that much credit. The only problem he had was the one he had not foreseen. He had not realized—or if he had, he had failed to appreciate the potential consequences of it—that I would understand myself, that I would know myself, that I would become myself. Maybe it was the sorrow at seeing Icol die. Maybe it was the trauma of learning the fate of my three white friends. Maybe it was the thought of Ehrlichmann ordering the murder of my future child. Maybe it was the horror of finding myself barking orders at men and women in space, men and women who didn’t have much time left anyhow. Maybe it was a combination of all those thing. Or maybe it was the flash that rocked me so hard I fell on my face.
I landed on my chin and, sure enough, I saw stars. I also saw Bert Kerns. He was standing just ahead of and to one side of Henry Lucado, with shiny slivers of metal flying right through the both of them. Bert said he had a message for me. His message was: “Call out to Jupiter. Ask the Father to ask the Holy Father. Ask Jupiter to ask Yasema for Her help. Yasema is the Holy Father. She will show your talent to you.”
In my delirium, I asked Bert if he couldn’t just show me himself. He drifted away. Henry lingered just long enough to repeat everything Bert had said. Then he too was gone and I felt myself coming out of it. I knew I would wake up any second and that then it would be too late. So I saw myself standing there, looking out to where Bert and Henry had been seconds earlier. I saw myself and I opened my mouth and cried, “Oh, Father Jupiter! I implore Thee to ask of Thy Father and the Father of all goodness, the merciful and good Yasema, to show me that of which I am sadly ignorant.”
Jupiter did not need to be asked twice. In much less time than it takes to retell it, I was lifted into a light of many colors, all of them churning and spiraling. A voice of a woman, or at least of a female entity of some sort, spoke in all the world’s languages. She said that I had only to touch someone and I could show that person to himself. If that person was good, he had nothing to fear. If that person was bad, he would take it hard. The voice told me that I had had this ability for some time. I had only needed to know that I had it for it in order for it to work.
I woke up. Ehrlichmann was helping me to my feet. His face was a vex of concern. As I made it to an upright position, I thanked him. He said it was not a problem. I smiled and touched an open hand very softly to the side of his face.
I’d heard for years that, right before dying, a person’s life flashes before his eyes. I’d always known that was impossible. The biggest problem with such a stupid theory was that such an event would have to include the person watching his life flash before his eyes right at the end of the story, on and on, and if that happened nobody could ever actually die. Well, something very much like that happened to Dr. Ehrlichmann. As I withdrew my hand from his face, he stepped back and looked at me in horror. In the three seconds before his own interior film began, he knew what I had done, he knew what was going to happen, and he knew I knew it. A small cry of “Help” escaped his lips and he was gone.
Bert Kerns was dead, just like I said way back in the beginning. And just like I said back then, if I had spared his life, if I’d known what I should have known and had done what I should have done, Bert would have lived. That would have cheated Father Jupiter out of a soul, a soul he wouldn’t have been able to use to tell me about my powers. In other words, if I’d used my power, I wouldn’t have needed to use my power. Dammit.
I spent the night in the unguarded dungeon with the ten surviving Bushmen. I slept well in the heated room. I slept and I had another vision. The only thing was that this vision really did more resemble a dream, more so, anyway, than the other visions I had had. In this one, Bert Kerns was sitting right next to me in that dungeon, speaking nice and soft so as not to wake the others. He patted me on the shoulder and I sat up and listened. He said, “Moe, most of the stuff you and I were taught in Sunday school and church? It was right and it was wrong. What I mean is this: It was right in the big sense and wrong in the details. Now, for one thing, it’s important for people to be good to one another. For another, it’s important to treat old folks and babies with love and care. It’s important to stay true to your loved ones and not to steal just for the sake of stealing. Likewise, it ain’t good to kill nobody. Man, that is a real bad thing to do. You can think about it all you want and you can yell ‘I’m gonna kill you’ at the top of your lungs, but just don’t do it or encourage anybody else to do it. Be glad with what you have and don’t fret that the other guy’s getting ahead of you. Work for some kind of justice, Moe. If somebody’s hungry, feed him. If he’s cold, get him warm. If he ain’t got no clothes, put some on him. Keep things simple and don’t get all wound up inside, either with too much happiness or too much bad feeling.”
All of that made a certain sense, I’ll admit. But it carried the weight and tone of a real sermon, as if Bert was relating to me some grand message that was coming through him from somewhere else. Now, I didn’t tell him what I just said. But he knew what I was thinking, I guess, because he went on. He said, “I don’t have the answers, Moe. The answers come from Jupiter. We all thought Jupiter was just a planet. Well, that was wrong. It was naïve. Jupiter is one of the Holies. He is a Father. You know what I mean? He’s supernatural. He takes up more space than that planet he calls home. He takes up a lot more space and yet he don’t take up no space at all. It’s deep, man. It’s very deep.
“But there’s more to it than that. Jupiter has a boss, you might say. For that matter, he has two bosses. One of them is a pretty bad dude and I don’t think He’ll get upset with me saying that about Him. The bad dude is Chevangani. He gets into people and messes around and unless people are careful they can get damaged by Him. I’m not saying He causes floods or tidal waves or that kind of thing. What He does is He tells a city planner not to worry about that dam up river. It’ll be okay. The city planner might give in to that suggestion. If he does, Chevangani withdraws and before long you can bet on a nag to win, place or show, a hard rain will fall and the dam will break.”
I said, “So this god, Chevangani, he’s like the great rationalizer?”
Bert looked at me as if I were dense. He said, “Sure, if that helps you. Fine. Then there’s the bigger of the two super gods. Her name is Yasema. I know you’ve heard of Her. She has the power to tell the other gods what to do. People don’t necessarily understand why She does what She does, but the story I get is that we have to trust in it anyway. Now, Moe, I know that part will be especially hard for you, because you like to analyze everything and you wouldn’t believe it was raining outside unless you went out and felt it hitting you on the head. But it don’t matter. If you believe it, fine. If you don’t, no one cares. My job is just to square things away for you.”
I was thinking about something far off the subject. Before he could tell me what I was thinking, I said, “Bert, I’m really sorry, pal. I could have done something, but I was scared, man. I know that’s a hell of a bad excuse. If I had it to do over again. . . .?”
He said, “You worry too much, Moe. What was it I used to say? If things were different then they wouldn’t be the same.”
“I thought that was Yogi Berra.”
“Maybe he got that from me.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“I gotta go, Moe. Just take care of yourself and remember those things I told you. You know, there was something else I was supposed to tell you. What was it?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Just give me a second. Oh, yeah. I got it. Don’t be so impatient, did I mention that? Okay. The last thing I need to tell you is that you’ve got to send some of the Bushmen back to Namibia
“What about Him?”
“Yeah, Him, too. Jupiter, that is. Yasema doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day stuff. Look, I gotta go. Talk to you later. Well, not necessarily. Anyway, take care.”
I drifted back into a very deep sleep. Before dawn, however, I was visited by Henry Lucado. Unlike my old friend Bert, Henry came across as rather hostile. I got the impression he felt that I had let him down. He took my chin in the palm of his hand. He looked deep into my eyes. He said, “Do you remember what you wrote about me after you found out I had died?”
“Not exactly, Bert.”
“Allow me to remind you.
“‘Henry got as far as the county line. His 2019 Mercury Stabilizer blew a rod and the electric motor sputtered, spat and made more noise than the worst of those old internal combustion engines of not so long ago. Then the stupid thing drew back and just heaved one last time before two of the factory warranteed wires heated through their rubber coating, connected, caught fire, and launched a spark back to the reserve tank of compressed natural gas. It took maybe one long stretch of a second, Sheriff Radcliffe told us, for that whole little car to turn into a huge fireball, leaping something like twenty feet in the air and landing just inside the home track of the Pickaway-Ross county marker.’
“Does that sound familiar?”
I said that it did. Man, he looked furious. He looked angrier than his old man had looked when kids used to come in and steal the restaurant’s silverware.
“Did it ever cross that itsy bitsy teeny weenie brain of yours? Did you ever think to ask yourself how come I blew a rod? Huh?”
I had asked myself that. It was just that, once the other details had come in such complexity, I’d forgotten to wonder about the initial cause of the fatality. Again, it wasn’t necessary for me to speak these words. He already knew.
“Moe, I love you like a brother, but sometimes you ain’t got the sense Yasema gave a goose.”
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the beef?”
He squeezed my chin. “The beef is that there was nothing wrong with any rod or anything else. Moe, I’ll bet money you don’t even know what a tie end rod is, am I right?”
He was.
“What I’m telling you is that nothing ever just happens. I’m going to give you another quote of your own. You told me once—more than once—that when unexplainable things happen, it’s only because people haven’t evolved far enough to figure them out. Well, you were right and you were wrong.”
Of course.
“Don’t give me attitude, Moe. What I’m saying is that one of your cosmic buddies blew that rod, knowing full well what would happen to me.”
It took me a few seconds to absorb what he was telling me. I said, “So you’re saying Jupiter, or somebody—”
“You heard me. I’m dead. I don’t stutter. The reason I’m telling you this is so you will get just a little insight. It’s exactly the kind of insight you’ve been trying to get your whole life. Moe, everything is connected. Everything. The connections may be tenuous, they may be obvious. They may be complex, they may be simple. That rotten Mr. Mitchell, the teacher in Physics class? He was right. Newton
Dung Myk-Jung nodded his head at the N.U.S. President of Peachtree Motors. His advisors had told Dung the weather in Atlanta Peking . In the Chinese capitol, snow did not dare land on his clothing.
It was a curse to be the Premier, Dung recognized. The masses could not have conceived of the responsibilities. Today, for example, he needed to put on what he called his “nodding face” for the benefit of the American television cameras. Dung’s government owned Peachtree, reaped the profits, paid the employees, hired and assassinated the executives, the whole bowl of wan tan. Twice a year his own government, the Chinese Fascist Party, expected him to go on an N.U.S. tour of Chinese investments. Many such investments existed, but the portly Chinese Premier was damned if he could see the sense his presence made. He did not know a dry-cell battery from a plutonium flux capacitor. What was more, he did not care. There was only one aspect of this idiotic tour that interested him. He was genuinely looking forward to his visit to Huntsville Atlanta
He smiled at the Peachtree Motors President. The man was babbling about fuel conversion modules or something equally pedestrian. This self-important imbecile was less than one year from dying in a glorious People’s Liberation Firing Squad and here he was yakking it up—how Dung loved that onomatopoeic expression—about advances in Vludium economy, blissfully unconcerned that such a thing would not have existed had it not been for the Chinese government’s investment in space exploration.
Dung Myk-Jung held up one hand and turned to his translator. He said, “Mr. Lockhill, if that is your name, please address yourself to reports we have heard of discontent among the valiant workers who have freely joined in the noble cause of Vludium extraction.”
Dung spoke perfect English. He should have, having spent four fun-filled years at Oxford University
At last the Peachtree Motors President replied, “Mr. Premier, I can assure you that the discontent you speak of is perfectly natural. We Americans have a proud tradition of questioning authority. It’s one of the things that leads to good old-fashioned progress. But I take your meaning. Listen, we have professional intercessionists in every labor union in this country. The first time some spoiled pup starts talking ‘strike,’ he’ll be put down, you can count on it.”
Dung awaited the translation, just out of respect for the protocol. This idiot, Lockhill. In China China
From Transcript of January 15, 2025 Broadcast of Lulu Sugartoes Television Program on MSNBC:
LS: Tell us about this ministry of yours.
MW: I’m not sure I should call it a ministry. Maybe we ought to change that. I’d like to call it more of a traveling advice column.
LS: (laughs) I like that. What kind of advice will you be dispensing?
MW: It’s a call for people to come together. There’s lots of religions out there and these days it seems most people are getting pulled one way or another and it’s usual that they’re being pulled to think that the other guy is a son of a bitch. What we’re trying to do, we’re encouraging people to get away from religion and to get back to respecting one another.
LS: Sounds like quite a challenge. Can you give us an example?
MW: Sure, Lulu. Say for instance this group over here, this hypothetical group, is Southern Baptist. Okay. Now they come up against a group of Unitarians. The Southern Baptists immediately focus on how they don’t believe women and gays should be in the role of ministers, because, supposedly, God has laid it out that only heterosexual men can lead His church. Then the Unitarians say, “Hey, wait a minute. Sure they should be allowed. That’s discrimination.” Next thing you know, people are taking sides. People move away from one another. What we Bushmen are doing is we’re telling people that these little details are just a distraction. We’re saying—”
LS: Let me interrupt you there, sir. When you tell people that an article of their own faith is a distraction, doesn’t that rile their dander, as you might say?
MW: Oh, it riles them plenty. But the people who are the most upset aren’t the parishioners. No, it’s the folks at the top of the church hierarchies who scream the loudest. We Bushmen have met very little resistance from the average person just struggling to find a sense of harmony in the universe.
LS: Speaking of the universe, you have come under some criticism in your espousal of your own religious hierarchy, haven’t you?
MW: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. Listen, the short answer to that is yes. People do not necessary all believe that the god Jupiter is real or that He takes His share of responsibility for things here on Earth. But I wouldn’t call it a hierarchy.
LS: That sounds to me like the definition of—
MW: No, no, see it’s not. Each person is free. Nobody has to check in with any higher power and say, “Hey, boss, how’m I doing?” If anything, Jupiter’s fate—I’m talking about the god, not the planet—rests in our hands, in the people’s hands. The more we people do what we are meant to do, the better Jupiter’s health. Then that in turn pays off well for us. We get a lot less atmospheric brouhaha, we get nice clean skies and mighty fine tasting food, all the things people really want. It’s not a cure all and we need to be clear on that. People do not bring bad things upon themselves. It’s not like, Whoops, I got cancer so I must have pissed off Jupiter. But what it is is that how we are able to deal with bad things improves when we are living the proper kind of life.
LS: We only have a little time left. Can you talk a bit about what you are telling people they need to do?
MW: Again, I prefer to think of it as advice. We recommend they—people, that is—follow the Ten Suggestions.
LS: Right. I think we can get those up on the screen, can’t we? There we are. Go ahead, Mr. Washington
MW: Okay, the first suggestion is: Show respect for other people’s beliefs. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with the other guy or any of that. You can even poke a little fun, if that’s your desire. But you need to recognize that we can’t all be right in what we believe and that means that you might be wrong. So show respect to the other fellow, because he just might be right. Also, if the other person’s beliefs are injurious, if they physically or psychologically damage someone, you have a responsibility to point that out in a respectful way.
LS: Right, that one seems clear enough. How about Number Two? It says Do something nice for people you do not like. Can you explain that one?
MW: Sure. You’ll notice that nowhere in these suggestions do we say that everyone needs to love one another. That is a noble concept and it wouldn’t hurt anyone to do that. But what we say is that if there is somebody you don’t much care for, it behooves you to give that person a gift. When you are giving of yourself, your enemy may laugh at you, rebuke you, whatever. But you are nevertheless chipping away at that person’s character flaws with each gifting. So we feel Number Two is very important.
LS: I’m afraid that’s all the time we have today. For any of our viewers who would like more information on the Bushmen Suggestions, you can check out their website, or you can use the link on our MSNBC website as well. Thank you, Maurice Washington, Field Director for Bushmen Intergalactic Ministries.
MW: (laughs) Soon to be renamed the Traveling Advice Column.
LS: (laughs) Thank you for joining us. When we come back, who really benefits from the Chinese merger with the new Dolphins United Defense Party? We’ll take a look.
The donations were coming in so fast and in such generous amounts that I got kind of suspicious. I’ll grant that’s an ugly character trait, but I was still, after all, just as agnostic as the day I was born. Don’t get me wrong: I believed every word I said. So did the other Bushmen in our assemblage. But when unsolicited funds started coming our way, I looked askance, as one might say, at the source of these contributions. For instance, one of the first checks we got was from something called The Divine Retribution Council. That had a decidedly creepy tenor, so I asked Pauline Paulson, former marine biologist and presently my personal assistant, to look into it. Turns out they were affiliated with a South Korean sushi chef with a pronounced messiah complex. I returned the check and attached a thank-you note.
After my appearance on the Lulu Sugartoes program, the hits on our website went through the roof (or the ceiling, I’ve never been sure which). But once again, I told Pauline to make a list of any senders she thought might be suspicious. She was mighty quick on her feet and I was very relieved that she and I had gotten over our earlier disagreement. It was a sure sign that Suggestion Two worked wonders. Anyhow, she gave me a list every day or two and you wouldn’t believe some of the people who sent us money. We got a check for seventeen dollars from Roger Jefferson Wilco, the man who shot the President of the New United States. That one got sent back to the Terre Haute Reformatory. Then there was a cashier’s check we received for twenty thousand dollars from the Temperance in Everything Almost Society. That sounded harmless enough, huh? Well, Pauline did a little digging and come to find out that each and every board member of TEA was also a member of the Minnesota Militia, a hate group of some renown.
One donation we did accept came from Jasper Hedges, author, you may recall, of Fruits You Thought were Something Else. Jasper’s donation wasn’t of a monetary nature. It was better than that. He’d watched me on that Lulu Show program thing and had offered to volunteer his services. While I was wondering what he might do, he explained that he could spend time getting across to people the value of Suggestion Nine. That one read: Eat all the red bell peppers you can. I realized his idea had a great deal of merit, so we happily signed him onto our assemblage.
We realized right away that we would get to more people if we divided up the Suggestions and assigned certain members of the tribe to each one. Joining the tribe didn’t take any real effort, which was no doubt one of the reasons we were so popular. Anyone who could be thought of as a human being was automatically a member in the sense that everybody could, to one extent or another, trace his or her genetic heritage right back to the tribe. That’s an established fact. The only rule we had—and I hate to call it a rule, but that’s what it was—was that you could not advocate a Suggestion that you yourself failed to heed.
That was trickier than it may sound. Pauline, for example, hadn’t specifically wanted to be my assistant, at least not right off. No, what with her being very pro-dolphin, she had wanted to be an advocate of Suggestion Four: Resist the urge to kill. She said, “Maurice, you know I would never kill anything. I’m dead set against that. I’ve been speaking out against the slaughter of dolphins and other sea creatures most of my life!”
I told her that was understood. The only problem, I tried to explain, was that she had been observed feeding sardines to dolphins. I asked her about that and she became kind of defensive, saying that dolphins needed sardines as part of their diet. I said, well, if that was true, how come the dolphins that swim in rivers don’t eat them? She told me she’d get back to me. I told her that was fine, but that in the meantime I sorely needed a smart assistant and she could have that job if she wanted it. She was anxious to join us in any capacity, so she agreed that would be fine, at least for a while.
The ten surviving members of the Inner Counsel were meanwhile doing just fine. Tumata did indeed become pregnant and was feeling pretty good about that. She worked in our Reconstruction Office in Chillicothe , Ohio South America . Muneeta and Triko held down the fort in the European Union, while Djzuko and Rulefi headed our Oceania division. Brinsk, Loih, and Vhenka were spread throughout Africa and sent encouraging messages back to us on a frequent basis.
While I handled the NUSA base of operations, Asia was untouched, at this time, with the message of the Ten Suggestions. That troubled me to no end because a big part of Asia—China
My first step in this venture was accepting an invitation to meet with Chinese Premier Dung at his hotel in downtown Huntsville Huntsville Huntsville
It was cold that February afternoon in Alabama Greenland , I’d gotten so I didn’t mind the cold so much. Nevertheless, Eichmann was unhappy with it. In the limousine on the way to the hotel, he kept pointing at ice on the sidewalks and snow on the streets, mumbling about what an abomination it was. “When my ancestors came here in the 1950s,” he said, “the weather was perhaps more compatible.”
“Your ancestors?”
He nodded. “Yes. After the war, there was much concern about to what uses the German scientists could be put. I am speaking here of the Allies. They were the ones concerned.” He smiled a little at his own remark. “My ancestors understood that they would be used, of course. The writing had been on the wall. The Allies had been fighting fascism, but no sooner was it set back than communism became a threat. Many of the German scientists were brought to what was then the USA USA
He detected correctly. History was no longer taught in N.U.S. schools. It had, matter of fact, been banned a while back. People said it was too hard. Likewise, you didn’t get much exposure to it in the media. Really, the only source was your own memory, or what somebody had written down that didn’t get widely distributed. If you wanted to end up dragging titanium pipes along the Metis ring of Jupiter for pennies a day, just go write and publish a book on how things had been a hundred years ago. Ha! Good luck. So anytime I heard somebody talk about how things had come into being, I always sat up and took notice. The funny thing was it usually was either somebody so far below the level of notice that no one in charge cared what he did or else it was somebody so above the fray that he could get away with saying any damn thing he pleased. I knew to which of those two segments Eichmann belonged.
I met with Premier Dung for almost two hours. When I got to his hotel room, he dismissed everyone else. There would be no translator, bodyguards, food tasters, nothing. We sat side by side—kind of unusual for me, but it seemed to relax the Premier—and we talked about the Intergalactic Ministries. He was, he told me, fascinated with the idea of our outreach making its way all around the world. He said if necessary, he was certain he could get the Chinese government to finance such an undertaking. He said that he had studied the Ten Suggestions and had found that they had already added to the fulfillment of his life.
I asked if by “all around the world” he was including China
His chubby cheeks jiggled. “I am certain, my friend, that such a time will come. You are familiar, of course, with the doctrine of different levels of readiness? In many ways, we Chinese have exceeded the rest of the world in coming to grips with massive changes. However, where this change is manifested in spiritual matters, I have observed that we lag behind most other nations.”
For some reason, at that exact moment I remembered that I had brought a present for the Premier. I reached in my jacket pocket and produced a Monte Guardo cigar, a brand I’d heard my host favored.
He thanked me and bit off the tip.
I provided him a light and said I was simply following Suggestion Number Two.
“Ah,” he said. “So you do not like me?”
“Maybe some day. Not today.”
We both shared a good laugh. For added measure I presented him with a bottle of Circle-Cola, one of the few left in existence.
It was time for me to leave. I left.
Ernest Eichmann insisted on accompanying me back to the airplane. I accepted his hospitality. He asked me how my visit with Dung had gone. I did not mention the offer of generosity. I simply told him that the two of us understood one another quite well. What were my immediate plans for the future, the head of NASA inquired. I said that I would be returning to Chillicothe Chillicothe Ohio Thule , Greenland . From there I would be further transported to one of the rings of Jupiter, where I would be held up as an example of what happens to people who rebel against the natural order. Then they would jettison me into space and I would most certainly die. People near and around Jupiter would be appalled and fall in line. People on Earth would consider me a martyr. The Ministry would prosper. The Chinese would reap a profit on their unauthorized investment. Hallelujah.
The thing that thwarted this neat little arrangement was the thing so many people high up on the ladder of success had allowed to slip their minds. They had forgotten about the dolphins. The semi-sea mammals had successfully recruited the orangutans and together they made a formidable alliance. Once Dr. Eichmann made his purpose known to me, I responded by uttering an echo-inflected series of clicks with my mouth and tongue. Eichmann smiled, but his smile said he was nervous. I remembered what Doc Rocky had told me. He had quoted Hamlet, saying, “One may smile and smile and be a villain.” I clicked on and it wasn’t long before a large group of orangutans surrounded us as we waited for a traffic light to change. The one nearest my side of the car took the door handle in one hand and ripped it from its hinges. I hopped out and told the apes to be gentle. I had no expectation that they would heed my suggestion. I was speaking English and so far they had only learned to understand Taa.
Back at my Chillicothe
In the meantime, I needed to figure out a way to overthrow the government of the Chinese Fascist Party.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In Providence Canada Arctic Circle was rejuvenating. The migration south into the NUSA had begun in earnest. Seven million sea turtles were in formation surrounding all the coasts Mexico Canada Belize Huntsville
Pinto, the king of all the dolphins, admired the photograph of Maurice Washington that sat framed on his desk. Pinto remembered a time when some humans had tested dolphins by holding up a mirror to them to see if they would recognize the reflection as an image of themselves rather than as another dolphin. Pinto found this very funny. Here he was now, staring at and identifying the person in a framed photograph. Most people he had met, he understood, should have put more thought into their own intelligence instead of worrying about how smart dolphins were. But that was people for you. All except The Man. Pennsylvania
Pinto flipped the map of North America aside and turned his attention to The Man’s dossier. Something the humans called the FBI had kept documents on many people. After the dolphins had chased away the skinny-tie men, they had gathered up some of the more interesting files and brought them along to Providence
Date of birth: May 30, 1936
Place of birth: Circleville , Ohio , (Old) United States of America
Current location: Chillicothe , Ohio
Level of interest: Seventeen.
Seventeen! Pinto was impressed. They had determined that the FBI’s Level of Interest ranged from zero to twenty. Zero was reserved for humans who had died. Twenty was applied to domestic terrorists. For The Man to have earned a seventeen was mighty big.
Subject has been active in subversive activities from his teenage years. While absence of record of arrest by law enforcement agencies would indicate lower interest level for subject, it is opinion of AIC that individual warrants rating. Dates and incident descriptions follow.
4.1.1950: Subject’s correspondence recd at Circleville Selective
Service calling for removal U.S. President (Truman) from office on basis alleged mental retardation. At time of
correspondence, subject’s father serving in infantry in
Korean Conflict. No disposition.
4.1.1956: Subject spoke Vice-President’s Chief of Staff,
insisting VP (Nixon) return dog Checkers to Texas
businessman. No disposition.
10.21.1962: Subject telegrammed JFK urging Turbinado sugar
cane be dropped on Moscow
No disposition.
11.23.1963: Subject telegrammed U.S. Justice Dept asking that
LBJ be indicted for murder. Secret Service determined
subject intoxicated. No disposition.
10.27.1967: Subject joined 70,000 mass protest in levitation
of Pentagon in WDC. Surreptitious Surveillance activated.
4.5.1968: Subject telegrammed U.S. Justice Dept asking that
LBJ be indicted for murder. Telephone surveillance
activated.
6.30.1968: Subject held and released for threatening to place
LBJ under citizen’s arrest. Visual surveillance activated.
11.7.1972: Subject investigated on orders W.H. due to vote cast
for Senator McGovern. Visual Surveillance continued.
The dossier went on with similar dates and descriptions right up until 1981. Pinto recognized that year as the time Maurice had lost his mate. The female, Jeri Truce Washington
Then, in the summer of 2012, Maurice Washington had joined a small group of humans in protesting The Great Dorsal Purge. Even though Pinto and most of the others had not been alive at the time, they all knew quite well what the Purge had been about. That aggression against whales and other dolphins had been launched by irate fishermen who objected to the method dolphins in particular used to frustrate the humans’ activities. Some dolphins had rammed the fishing boats. Others had ripped apart their nets. It had all been done in the interest of maintaining proper food levels for the dolphins themselves, but the men on the fishing boats had declared a war on anything with a dorsal fin, an action that brought them into contact with dolphins, porpoises and sharks. Millions of dolphins had been killed in what Pinto thought of as attempted genocide. And there stood Maurice Washington, protesting against such barbaric behavior. Getting his picture in The New York Times had gotten him elevated to a ten.
Then in 2024, the Bureau had suddenly elevated Maurice Washington to a seventeen. This had occurred initially because of his sudden friendship with a doctor named Rockwell Seitz. The doctor himself was listed at level eighteen. This rating had been given to Seitz due to his refusal to take a pledge against history. Almost all Americans had taken that pledge and then promptly ignored their vow because it was so stupid and impossible to enforce. Seitz, however, had refused and that put him on the Serious Threat List. His sudden and close association with The Man last summer had put some light on Maurice.
By the time Maurice had begun trekking back and forth across the NUSA, the dolphins had chased away the vast majority of all federal and state government officials. If he said so himself, Pinto believed things were no worse under dolphin government rule.
He looked up, having sensed that someone was waiting to speak with him. Hildago leaned on Pinto’s desk, his nose runny and his teeth quivering in anticipation. Hildago was not a bad mammal. He was, in the parlance of the humans, too impatient for his own good. Pinto nodded and Hildago spoke.
“The rangis are pitching a fit in Chicago
Pinto eyed his subordinate with an intensity he hoped would be detected. “Where do you come up with these colloquialisms, Hildago? Did you just say ‘Pitching a fit’?”
Hildago admitted that he had. Another underling, this one a bit smarter, spoke up. “It’s not such a bad language. It’s very colorful. Descriptive. Too many adverbs, though.”
Pinto said, “That will be enough from you, Rockefeller. Now, Hildago, what is it that you wanted?”
Hildago’s face conveyed a look of mounting anxiety. He said, “Pinto, I was talking with some of the others. You know, Rockefeller, Jeremiah, Saddlebags, Ruthie. We were thinking, you know, that maybe you could get the five of us out and into the action. We’d really like to see some action.”
Pinto stifled a groan. He said, “Another colloquialism. I am discouraged at the influence a measurably lower species has had on your communication skills. Nevertheless, I do respect initiative. Let it not be said that the five of you lack initiative. Very well then. You may assist me in my quest to learn more about The Man.
There was a happy, high-pitched yelping among the five subordinate dolphins. Pinto waited for the expression of excitement to cease. He then explained their new assignment.
Overthrowing even a small government can be a daunting undertaking. Crushing a fascist empire the size of the one that had overtaken China Korea
Our ministry had made inroads with the Chinese-American community. Some of them were exiled communists. Others had been expelled for their pro-democracy sentiments. Still others—mostly former rural peasants—had been unable to make the transition from an agricultural living to a highly industrialized one and had escaped one step ahead of the slave labor camps near Jupiter. Sure, there was a fair amount of infighting amongst these three groups now that they were living in the Chinatown sections of cities such as Columbus , Philadelphia , and Newark
Pauline interrupted my ruminations. I was glad she did. She knocked on my opened door and leaned in. “A woman from the Chinese Strategic Council is here to see you, boss.”
I stood and motioned the visitor inside. She was a smartly dressed woman, her black and red blouse-jacket-skirt combination not having come off any clothes rack. I introduced myself and she responded that her name was Lin Sue Chang, the Associate Vice-President of the Chinese Strategic Council. I asked her to have a seat.
I’d already done some checking before her arrival. The Council was a pro-democracy group that provided legal and financial assistance to exiled Chinese presently living in the New United States. I asked how I could be of service.
“Mr. Washington
“Mutualities of interest? I like that expression. Explore how?”
She reached into her small handbag and retrieved a document which she unfolded. Without referring to the paper in her hand, she said, “Some of us have chosen assimilation here in your country. I do not judge such people. They make decisions, sometimes decisions based on fear. I cannot object to them.”
“But not you?”
She shook her head. I was really beginning to like her. She said, “Not me, Mr. Washington, and not the people I represent. The current political party in my country uses its influence in this country, you see. How can I say it? They apply pressure.”
“You’re talking about the Chinese Fascist government encouraging the NUSA to round up Chinese-Americans and send them into space? Is that your concern?”
Ms. Chang nodded. “You have many freedoms here which our people do not have in China
In my hasty research I had learned that the Chinese Strategic Council considered itself an apolitical organization. They did not care what type of economic system was in place. They did not care what any particular government called itself. All they wanted was direct representation for all Chinese living in China Washington
Collaborators? There was a word you didn’t hear much anymore. You heard it about as often as you did the word “reforms.” I said, “Ms. Chang. I am in an awkward position at the moment. What I mean is: I would like very much to work with your Council. I really would. But I’m worried that what you all want to do and the way you want to do it might be kind of soft compared to my approach.”
“Soft? What do—How do you mean?”
“Well, I was thinking something a little more aggressive. I can explain, I think. But you’ll have to pardon my manners. Can I offer you a snack?”
“A snack?”
“Sure! Hold on. Pauline! Pauline, would you come in here for a second?”
My assistant entered with a small tray of sliced Pennsylvanian Amish-grown peppers, some red, some yellow, and some green. “Ms. Chang, I guarantee you these are the best peppers you have ever eaten. Pauline, just set the tray down, would you? Ms. Chang, you’ve met my assistant, Dr. Paulson? Pauline, why don’t you join us?”
I was acting nervous as a pregnant bride in a virgin colony.
Lin Sue Chang sampled all three varieties of the peppers. I could tell she liked the taste and it was easy to see that she favored the red ones the most, just as I did. She thanked Pauline and me and said, “I think you called these peppers?”
I told her that was just right.
She said, “Where I come from, you see, we describe them as mangoes. But, well, it is all the same, isn’t it? Here, you may look at this.”
She handed me the document she had unfolded earlier. It was a list of names and telephone numbers of her contacts within the Opposition Party.
The three of us spent the better part of that afternoon talking over a number of issues. I explained as best I could the Ten Suggestions. Lin Sue said that she understood all of them and saw the wisdom of all of them, except, she said, for number ten. “What does it mean, ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters’?”
I told her about the need for humor in any type of movement such as ours. I even tried explaining Bob Dylan, but my rendition just didn’t stick. In any case, we talked about other things. We talked about the differences between reform and change. We talked about what she meant by “collaborators” (she said it meant people who unthinkingly sold out to the enemy), about the leader of both the Fascist Party (Dung Myk-Jung) and of the Opposition Party in Exile (Lo Duk Fong), and about a peaceful protest the Chinese Strategic Council had scheduled for Monday of the following week, a protest that would take place outside the Chinese Embassy in Columbus. It was agreed that representatives from the Bushmen Intergalactic Ministries, the Strategic Council, and the American branch of the Opposition Party in Exile would meet over the weekend to work out our tactics and strategies.
After Ms. Chang left the office, Pauline stuck around for a while. She asked why I looked so excited. I told her, “This is the first time since everything changed last year—the first time that I feel like I’m making some real progress.”
She laughed a little. “You have to be kidding. You’ve been across the country I don’t know how many times. You’ve eliminated Otto Ehrlichmann, a man as bad as you are good. You’ve formed the Ministry.”
I shook my head. “I’ve lost a lot of friends. Bert, Henry, Rocky, Margie, Marybeth, Icol. I’ve lost my hometown.”
“You have gained a world, Maurice! The Bushmen you freed practically worship you.”
“No, they don’t.”
“They do so! You have people from almost all over the world sending donations. In lots of cases those people can’t afford to send them, yet they do, they do because they believe in what we are trying to accomplish here.”
“Which is exactly what, would you say?”
She leaned forward, her face very close to my own. She said, “We are trying to save the universe, Moe.”
Only my lips moved when I said, “Right. Us and Superman, Captain Marvel, and Spider Woman.”
She edged even closer. “No. Just us.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Everything is connected. That was a major tenet of the Ministry. It was true. I believed it then and I believe it now. It is also true, however, that sometimes those connections are tenuous and very problematic. Take for instance the return of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. The Father of the Milky Way Galaxy, Jupiter Himself, had willed the Spot into being many years before in something that if it happened to a human being we would call it a snit. The reaction on Earth had been an end to the Ice Age and the accompanying animal migrations that accompanied this climatic shift. Flash forward to the second half of the Twentieth Century. You find human beings mucking up the existing order with gases that warmed the planet so much that within a few short years into the Twenty-First Century the northern ice cap had half melted, Canada had become a sunny vacation land for movie stars, and even the most pro-business politicians in the NUSA had been forced to recognize that the use of fossil fuels was killing the planet. Then all of a damned sudden Jupiter gets over being mad and the Great Red Spot disappears over night. No explanation, no postcard, no return, no refund. Poof. Gone. With the storm kaput, the magnetic field that had been irradiating much of the solar system, including Earth, receded. Oh, it didn’t recede enough to avoid contaminating the people who were extracting Vludium from the planet Jupiter. But it did recede enough to stop artificially warming Earth. The result? The ice cap healed over and Canada
On March 21, 2025, a little more than nine months after they’d found Bert Kerns dead asleep beneath the tree in Pickaway Square, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot came raging back, big and foul as ever. Likewise, Jupiter the Father was so miffed at both Bert and Henry that He refused to utilize either of them as messengers to me back on Earth. For that matter, Jupiter the Father announced that until further notice He wasn’t going to have anything at all to do with Earthlings, former or present. If the dummies wanted to extract Vludium from the planet that bore His name, that was up to them and good luck be with you. But for the next several centuries, at a minimum, He intended to be incommunicado.
When a god pouts, empires quiver. I didn’t know if that was going to be good or bad. Remember, my philosophy was that change was neutral. Only results were positive or negative. So when we met for the big protest, I didn’t know whether to feel hopeful or doomed. Close to one hundred thousand of us marched and closed down Long Street in downtown Columbus
It was certain to make good television viewing. After all, how many protests could claim to have five dolphins in their midst?
Pauline recognized two of the five. Those two, Hildago and Rockefeller, worked directly for Pinto the King. The other three, Pauline said, most likely did as well. While I wondered what the King of the Dolphins would want with his underlings at this kind of protest, Lin Sue suggested that they had been sent here to keep us under observation. I’d somehow managed to get along well with the dolphins, or at least so I’d thought, so I was quite disappointed.
Give or take the surveillance crew, the demonstration was exciting stuff. As I mentioned, nearly one hundred thousand diverse peoples showed up, mostly Chinese-American, but also with a healthy smattering of African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Arab-Americans. There were even more than a few Euro-Americans, also known as white guys. Something like one out of eight people carried signs. The messages on the signs were in Mandarin, so I didn’t know what they said except that I was pretty sure they didn’t say, “Happy birthday.”
Because my group was up front, we were nose to nose with the National Guard that had been sent out to protect the people inside the Embassy. The Guardsmen wore combat visors, so it was a little hard to tell what they might have been thinking. As best as I could tell, they weren’t happy being there. But I was. This was fun. This was just like a time that I didn’t remember all that well but which I was pretty sure I had enjoyed myself in. People were shouting and people were laughing. The folks in uniforms cursed those of us in regular clothes. You got the sense that any second things could turn violent. But they did not. After something like three hours of yelling back and forth, a representative of the Embassy came out on the balcony several floors above us and said the Chinese Ambassador to the New United States had agreed to speak with a few representatives of the demonstration, but only on the condition that we all disperse. I told Lin Sue and Lo Duk that I thought this was a terrible idea, that as soon as the gathering broke up that we would lose our leverage. They agreed and the huge group surged forward, pressing those of us at the front right into the snarling faces of the National Guard. After a bit of jostling back and forth between the spokesman and his people, the officials inside the Embassy agreed to allow our representatives inside if we promised we would ask the demonstrators to go home once we were inside. It wasn’t the perfect compromise, but we agreed anyway. We didn’t want another surge to crush and suffocate us.
The ambassador was suave. In contrast, we were wind-blown and visually unkempt. I had a cut on my arm from the swing of a Guardsman’s baton. (I probably half deserved it; after all, I had asked him when he was gonna set the ends on fire and spin it in the air). Lin Sue’s hair, so well-coiffed during our first visit together, was wild and wooly from the typical central Ohio
The Ambassador led us into the inner sanctum. Drinks were served. We declined. The Ambassador imbibed. A jovial smile welcomed us to discuss our concerns.
Lo spoke first. “Mr. Ambassador. We thank you for your time this afternoon. To come right to it, we request that you transmit a message from us to the Chinese Premier, Dung Myk-Jung.”
The Ambassador stared through his glass of Remy Martin and then returned the brim to his lips. After a thoughtful sip, he declared, “That is possible. May I inquire the source of this missive and the nature of its contents?”
Oh, he was very well-polished.
Lo replied, “We are a coalition of many concerned groups. As you no doubt are aware, I am with the Opposition Party, the Peoples Revolutionary Party. This is Ms. Chang. She represents The Chinese Strategic Council. Ms. Paulson, Tumata, and Mr. Washington, they are with the Bushmen Intergalactic Ministries. We and many of the people you saw and heard out there, rattling these very walls, have united to express our great displeasure with the—”
The Ambassador rattled the stem of his glass upon the dark wood table. It seemed he had something to say. We waited. At last, he said, “Mr. Lo. You are with the Opposition Party. It comes as no surprise that you would be displeased. Displeasure is the nature of your work, just as liberating China
I would have loved to be able to talk like that. So confident, so unbothered, so full of distaste. Amazing.
Lo said, “Many Chinese people, Mr. Ambassador, have expressed an interest in a change to your version of progress.”
“Oh? May I have their names?”
We didn’t know whether he was joking or serious. Lo deflected it altogether. He responded, “Our message is a simple one. You will be able to remember it. Tell the Premier that his resignation is imminent. His position stands in the way of natural evolution. We ask that he remember the words of another Chinese leader. This leader said that when a wise man feels the blow of the winds of change, he builds a windmill rather than a wind block. That is our message. Please communicate it at all possible haste.”
The Ambassador stood. It looked like the meeting was over. If for no other reason than to justify my presence in the room, I took the Ambassador by the hand and said, “Suggestion Number Eight: Pay attention to the weather.”
I still had it. I could see it in the man’s eyes. He could feel me giving his mind a nice little push, one that would encourage him to relay our sentiments without sarcasm or snootiness. He would instead express it with all the sincerity with which it had been delivered. Indeed, he would likely embellish it somewhat, urging the Premier to strongly consider his own safety in such tumultuous times as these.
He released my hand and shrugged off the blank look that had seized his countenance. I left a copy of The Ten Suggestions with him to peruse. He said that he would.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
We did not have to wait long for the Chinese Premier’s response. Pauline forwarded to me a statement appearing under the Premier’s name on the Beijing Official Website. It read, in part, “Five years ago the people of our great empire rejected the tyranny of their communist oppressors. Today China
“With this status comes a great responsibility which we are proud to assume. That responsibility is to earn, to maintain, and to honor the continued good will of Chinese people, both here at home and in all the lands across the globe. Until such time as those billions of respectable citizens of our civilization reject the central precepts of our free and unfettered society, I shall continue to proudly serve each and every Chinese man, woman and child.”
The statement went on and on, but those two paragraphs pretty much summed things up. If you had substituted the name of any other people for the word “Chinese,” it would have worked, I suppose, except maybe for that part about being a superpower. I had to admit, it was a clever statement, if not quite as fluid perhaps as the words of Mr. Lo.
I do not know for sure what would have happened if the dolphins hadn’t interceded on our behalf. Apparently the report the five spy dolphins sent back to King Pinto had impressed His Majesty. He ordered all whales, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles to line up just off the Pacific Coast of China. That is one hell of a coast, but they were one hell of a lot of marine life. The whales had done a number on Canada
The Chinese economy felt this hit in its exports and imports within a matter of a few days. The fishing industry was still crucial to China , as was its rice harvesting in the Cochin section of Southeast Asia . When people are hungry, they can get very unpleasant, especially when they have been accustomed to looking to the government to keep things under control.
The Chinese Fascist government was hit with another blow around this same time. Some tests conducted in Zurich , Switzerland
With no new jobs and the threat of starvation looming large, Dung Myk-Jung and the Chinese Fascist Party barely got out of Beijing
I haven’t heard from Lin Sue in a while. I spend most of my time these days answering questions from the Bushmen ministers Tumata and I work with throughout the world and including China
Even though it’s been a few years since all these things I’ve written about took place, I have to admit that from one occasion to another I sometimes ride my bicycle out to the Chillicothe Observatory. You know, whenever the sky is clear and the Moon doesn’t get in the way. They let me use that big telescope they have up on the shielded platform. It always takes me a few minutes, but sooner or later I zero in on Jupiter. He’s looking good these days. Biggest thing in the sky except for the sun itself. So, yeah, I check it out every now and then, as I say, just to make sure that Great Red Spot is still there. Because as soon as a certain celestial Deity gets over being mad, I fully expect to get a nudge or two from a pair of old friends of mine.
Well, I reckon that’s about all I know. Huh? Oh, pardon me. Tumata just pointed out that I never did get around to mentioning what the Ninth Suggestion was. I told her everybody had probably figured it out for themselves. Still, you know what it’s like when you’re married. You gotta give a little and so, assuming I’m not insulting anyone’s intelligence, here it is, then. Suggestion Number Nine: Eat all the red bell peppers that you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment