Your Brain Ebook

Your Brain Is Not Your Own
I come from the Grateful Dead school of marketing which can be summarized as: let them steal everything. This is a pre-publication edition FOR MEN ONLY! Please read it and pass it on to some other guy and dont stick it in your socks drawer or use it to roll bombers you cooty. If you ACTUALLY paid money for this forget everything I just said. Rich Monk PS. If you find a typographical error, hypothetical error, or you just want to tell me your own theory of everything please email us.
other books by Rich Zubaty: The Corporate Cult What Men Know That Women Dont Surviving the Feminization of America Water People Wisdom
Your Brain Is Not Your Own Rich Zubaty

Co-published by Virtualbookworm.com College Station, Texas and Zubaty Publishing [formerly Panther Press (IL)] Kaunakakai, Hawaii 2002
Copyright 2002 by Rich Zubaty All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author, except for excerpts which may be used in reviews, if you are a corporation. If youre a little guy dont worry about it. drawings by Daniel Burgevin author photo by M. Noyce Orders: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing PO Box 9949 College Station, Texas 77842 Toll free phone/fax: 1-877-376-4955 Email: orders@virtualbookworm.com info@virtualbookworm.com Web Site: http://www.virtualbookworm.com Zubaty Publishing PO Box 1442 Kaunakakai, Hawaii 96748 Email: richzubaty@hotmail.com Rich Zubaty Web Site: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5225/ ISBN: 1-58939-130-6 (book) ISBN: 1-58939-131-4 (e-book) ISBN: 1-58939-132-2 (CD)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zubaty, Rich, 1948 Your brain is not your own / Rich Zubaty. p. cm. ISBN 1-58939-130-6 I. Title. PS3626.U23 Y68 2004 813'.54dc21 2002000634
Published in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Dedicated to all those fish
Rich Zubaty
Anarchy is not a political philosophy, it is a way of life. Henri Cartier Bresson All art is religious art. There is good art and bad art according to whether it elevates the human spirit, or sells underwear. Rich Monk Anarchy is opposition to tyranny. Noam Chomsky Anarchy is the sane persons response to an insane world. Rich Monk
Chapter One
THEY FINALLY CAPTURED HIM on a small island in the South Pacific as he trudged up a red dirt hill through the coconut grove to his thatch hut carrying a spinning rod and a stringer of fish. His Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt was dripping seawater, his Porky Pig cap crusted with dried salt. A trickle of blood seeped from a finger where a baby barracuda had nipped him in a final spasm for freedom. His forearms were hot and brown and slick with sweat and he had been whistling Sweet Home Chicago in time to his squishy sneakers as he plodded through the viney undergrowth back to his shady jungle refuge. After four hours of wading waist deep across the slippery reef, sidestepping moray eels, buffeted by waves and rising tide, casting his bait into the dark blue water off the edge of the submerged coral cliff, he was exhausted, in no mood to resist, and anyway, where was there to run? Of course he denied everything. But he was curiously unmoved, unsurprised at the charges leveled against him. He did not wince or protest as an innocent person might be expected to do. He simply said, Youve got the wrong man, then tossed his fish on a pile of halved coconuts near the cookfire and guzzled fresh water from a plastic jug, spilling it on his face and rinsing the salt from his eyes. The three sneering foreigners pounced on him, pulled down his pants and inspected his buttocks. No tattoo, grumbled Cue Ball, the pink-faced, shaved-headed one pulling his huge frame erect like an elephant leaving a water hole. The bronze-skinned islander with the police insignia on his hat held his watermelon belly and laughed at this strange style of police work his gold tooth sparkling on and off like a drunk flashlight in the yellow rays that flickered through the wavy crests of the coconut trees. The one sporting a purple skirt and zebra-striped hair ran his fingers through his black
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and white crew cut. He nodded sharply to the others, and as he wiped some black stuff off his hand onto a tree trunk, Scar Face the blond skinny one with the knitted knife wound on his cheek handcuffed the man and jerked him back to his feet. They had waited for two hours in this jungle clearing, agitated, restless, snatching bananas from a bunch that hung inside the shack eating half and tossing the rest to a marauding squadron of pigs that wandered in from the bush sniffing then wincing at a blackened pot of boiled breadfruit swinging from a branch in the lime tree, rooting through his suitcase for the stolen file or any other evidence that would cap their investigation. Zebra Hair had begun by pacing and swearing and ordering the others to lift up this and turn over that, dig over here, dig over there, feel around the rats nests and spider eggs in the crunchy palm leaf roofing. Take apart the outhouse walls. Inspect the insides of bamboo rafter poles for hidden rolls of paper. Evidence. He needed evidence. This whole thing had gone on much too long and he needed to be convinced he had finally got his man. Check the trees, check the ground, check the sky, check everything. He whooped when the native cop found the electric typewriter wrapped in double plastic garbage bags, stuffed in the hollowed cleft of a mango tree useless on an island without roads or electricity. Only a sentimental fool would leave behind a clue like that. He must have thought theyd given up the search. Within an hour they had scratched and combed every crevice within 100 feet of the shack, thumped every tree, inspected every hollow bamboo pole, excavated every soft patch of ground where the pigs had been rooting sifting the soil through their fingers looking for a trace of paper, or books or any other subversive documents. They had been thorough and efficient and had found absolutely nothing incriminating beyond the typewriter. Zebra Hair crackled with fury and frustration. He slammed a machete into a coconut trunk scaring off a family of fruit bats whose blathering, fluttering commotion startled him so bad he lost his footing and fell against a flattened automobile axle the locals used to husk coconuts. Fortunately he only tore his shirt and scored his shoulder. The local cop was choking like a parrot swallowing a corncob his blubbery lips constipated from
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suppressed giggles. He finally reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a hunk of raw tuna, and bit into it like a candy bar just to give his mouth something else to do. Cue Ball and Scar Face had been forewarned about their commanders frenzies of self-induced delirium and were not about to be drawn into his world of angst. They understood what was at stake more thoroughly, no doubt, than he did. But they also felt there were better ways to go about this than slamming trees and scaring bats. They had not been on this case as long as Zebra Hair, and though they were professional espionage agents, they had no personal stake in it. They sat down on fallen logs to munch bananas, throw the peels to the pigs, and wait. They had picked up the fresh trail two weeks ago after the break-in at the Mother Nature Day Care Center in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. A file had been stolen. One day later retired FBI agent Cedric Shoebridge had been interrupted at breakfast by a phone call from a representative of a Washington think tank who offered to pay him handsomely for any and all information he could provide about an elusive individual who appeared, at times, to go by the name Rich Monk. Shoebridge dropped his reading glasses into his coffee spurting hot liquid on his arm. An instant tremor of revulsion shortcircuited the connection between his brain and his tongue. Are you there Mr. Shoebridge? He wiggled his palsied tongue loose and sputtered, Rich Monk! The scholar replied that yes, indeed, that was the man who had garnered their attention. Then he sailed off into a muddled monologue about a missing file whose contents were of absolutely no public importance whatsoever, but the theft of which his corporate client regarded as an unfortunate breach of company security. His client, he explained, was the sole source of funding for a center for abused children and the disappearance of these records placed his client in the regrettable position of contemplating withdrawing its magnanimous contributions to a charitable institution which served such a noble social cause if
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as the case seemed to be his clients records were not suitably held confidential. In other words, they wanted the file back. Whats in the file? asked Shoebridge. Just some names. Shoebridge didnt give a hoot about the file, or the abused childrens shelter for that matter. But the mere mention of the name Rich Monk, after all this time, knotted his stomach into a walnut. Ill help you but A tidal wave of rage reamed his brain, smashing him upland into the dark forests of his most public disgraces, then reversed direction, pulling him downward, carrying off drowned mattresses and splintered boards and twisted metal which clawed at his soul until, rattled by an epiphany of aftershocks, the tsunami of wrath disappeared once again beneath his brain waves, leaving behind an inhuman calm of bright light and twittering birds and clouds reflected in puddles and insane hope. But what? said the rep. You have to put me in charge of the entire investigation. Give me a budget and total control and Ill get your man and Ill get your file. Ill have to ask my client. Within one hour the think tank rep called back with an affirmative reply from his client. A $500,000 expense budget was approved and a bounty quickly agreed to. Field operatives would be provided by the corporate client from its stable of security personnel. Shoebridge would be in charge. Theres one more thing, said the rep. You have one month to grab this man and the file. Otherwise your funding will be cut off and the abuse shelter will be closed. Youll have the man and the file, said Shoebridge. He hung up the phone and stuck his toes in his mouth. After all this time! After all these wasted years, Rich Monk was back. His nemesis. His dark star. His cynical twin. The human being who had single-handedly destroyed his FBI career, ruined his marriage, and caused him to be banished to a Siberia of interstate stolen tire investigations and day care worker background checks, had finally excreted a hot trail. Decades
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ago, pursuant to an on-going rash of fiascos, and ultimately, under threat of dismissal, the FBI had forbidden Shoebridge from involving himself in any manner whatsoever with the curious case of Rich Monk. So that was that for then. And now, some stupid file was missing and some dipstick corporation was willing to cough up half a million bucks and carte blanche to go after him. What a contemptuous joke. After all this time. One month? Ill get him in one week if the trail is hot, he hissed inside his head. Arrangements were made for Shoebridge to be met by a chartered jet at Washington National and flown to a private airstrip in the Berkshire Mountains. A limousine shuttled him to the gates of the Mother Nature Day Care Center where he was greeted by the director, Madeleine Naylor and her Doberman pinschers. She forced a smile through a permanently twisted lower lip, wrung her hands and, as they walked up a path of irregular slate slabs toward a towering red building, she explained how she had operated this shelter for abused children for almost 20 years. She had started it as a day care center but over time it had evolved into a residential facility for abused children. They had kept the name because it had a more pleasant ring to it, didnt it? day care center, as opposed to abuse shelter? She and her staff had accomplished great things here, taking in battered kids and giving them a life, and now she was terrified of losing her funding. Forget about me, she said, sucking in her lower lip. I can always get another jobBut what will happen to the children? These kids had been severely abused. Beaten, starved, burned with cigarettes, abandoned by dopehead parentsThey had special needs. Here they could flourish in a loving home nourished by their own peer support group. Theyd gotten healthy and confident and healed. Theyd gotten their souls back. Break them up and throw them to the mercy of Child Protective Services? Preposterous! Shuttle them through orphanages and God knows what kind of foster homes? What kind of people would they end up with? The uncertainty was more than Madeleine could bear. The government, you know. Its not known for its efficiency or heart.
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I used to be a federal employee, said Shoebridge, dismissing the generalization with a scornful sniff. He knew just about all you could know about how government works. She didnt understand the half of it. In fact, if my memory serves me well, a long time ago I did some personnel background checks for you here. They were interrupted, I believe, when I was called back to Washington to head up an important federal investigation. Its been a long time. Your office was in an old wooden Shaker building. Oh that! I remember you now, said Madeleine. The Shaker Building was torn down when we built the new classrooms and dormitory. She threw one arm in an arc indicating a nearly windowless brick fortress that looked more like the outside of a gymnasium than a school or dormitory. A clot of shouting adolescents burst out the door and raced down to the canoes by the lake laughing and prancing and flipping off their shoes. Lets see where the file was kept, said Shoebridge, kicking the sniffing dogs aside. She led him to a metal file cabinet in a windowless storage room drowsing under the cold glass eye of a security camera. It was an amateur job. Fingerprints all over everything. The camera had caught the mans face on tape. The stringy long hair bald patch now the bent nose, Shoebridge remembered him well. Mitchell Freedman, alias Gregory Lobotomowski, alias Rollo Nixon, alias Lyle Johnson, alias Julius Hoffman, alias godknows-what-else alias Rich Monk. What do you know about him? asked Shoebridge. Well, actually, Im ashamed to admit it, but he was an old boyfriend of mine. A very old boyfriend. What did he want with the file? I dont know. Harassment. Just to cause me pain I guess. Hes sure doing that. Plus hes gonna hurt 37 innocent kids. Hes an irresponsible jerk. Always has been. HmmmDont worry maam, Ill get him. Within hours Shoebridge had transmitted a computer enhanced photo of the mans face to security officers at all major U.S. airports. Bingo. Albany, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Honolulu, Kingdom of Tonga. He assembled the two field
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operatives provided by the corporate sponsor and booked them straight through on Air New Zealand. The numbing duration of the flight gave him the time to interview the men thoroughly. They were corporate spooks, employed in industrial espionage; Security they called it. Scar Face had some Army Intelligence experience which, since Vietnam, Shoebridge had come to view as a contradiction in terms. Cue Ball had the physique of a pro wrestler and the brains to match. They were harmless sorts, corporate go-fers, hopelessly nave, utterly lacking in vision as to the true nature of their mission. Forget about the file, said Shoebridge, when he had gathered them into some empty seats toward the rear of the 747 where no one could overhear them. He held court with his shoes and socks stowed under the seat and his fingers picking between his toes. The file is nothing. The man we are after is an evil genius who has eluded the FBI for 30 years. This is the warmest trail weve had on him in a decade He glanced all around him then hissed, I belong to a select and dedicated cadre of former FBI officers who have never given up on this case. When he said this the eyebrows of the corporate spooks shot off like champagne corks. If they suspected this select and dedicated cadre boasted a membership of one they did not let on. However, their corporate employer had warned them 1) not to believe anything Shoebridge said and 2) not to let him run wild and muck up the investigation. It was their job, Cue Ball and Scar Face, to rein him in, and they had been supplied with tranquilizers to administer if Shoebridge took a sudden vacation from physical reality. They were both hoping they would not have to sedate him yet not this early in the chase. But fabricating unlikely conspiracies was just the kind of red flag that prompted them to feel their pockets for the packaged syringes. Their eyes met. Oblivious to these aloof deliberations ping-ponging around inside their brainpans, Shoebridge reached up to open the cool air nozzle and plowed ahead. He, and his select cadre, wanted this man more than they had wanted the Unabomber. The Unabomber only killed people. This guy was killing The System. He was a threat to an entire way of life. The people who chanced to read the diabolical outpourings of his typewriter lost the will
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to get up in the morning and go to work. They quit their jobs. They pulled their kids out of school and gave away their TVs. They shunned bestsellers and created an underground distribution network to disseminate his writings. And then more people quit going to work. Cedric Shoebridge had been pursuing him for decades, a chase that led from Chicago to Taos, New Mexico, Berkeley to Boston, Paris to Washington D.C., Old Mexico, the Berkshires, and now Tonga. What would they find in Tonga? Who knows? he laughed, salivating over the opportunity to coach his operatives in the methodology of super-espionage, the Big Leagues, FBI meat and potatoes. The important thing with Rich Monk was to expect the unexpected. He was a master of invisibility. He could disappear in the blink of an eye and reappear a thousand miles away. He was a genius at disguise and could assume various human forms, from a withered old granny sweeping the packed dirt around her palm hut to a Noble in the Tongan Parliament driving through town in a convertible throwing flowers to young girls. They must overlook nothing, suspect everyone, follow every conceivable lead. Within five minutes of deplaning in Nukualofa Shoebridge was hauled away by five 300-pound Tongan cops detained, indefinitely, for being rude, obnoxious and asking too many stupid questions. He had shot out the plane door onto the rolling staircase into a steamy tropical mist and slipped at the top of the wet metal steps. If Cue Ball hadnt grabbed him by the neck he would have plowed down 20 passengers. In the terminal he made a bee line for the security police who were standing around in formal gray lava lava skirts leering at the beefy Tongan women waddling from the tarmac toward the ruckus of honking cabs and shouting relatives out on the street. He showed the cops the suspects photo, told them he had flown all the way from the States on FBI business, and that he had come to Tonga to arrest an international criminal. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He told them there wasnt a moment to waste and if he had to he would go and ask for help from the King. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He said they were interfering with an
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international investigation and wouldnt the King like to know about that? 1500 pounds of beady-eyed, sub-equatorial, formercannibal masculinity stared at him. One of the officers reached out and took the photo. He glanced at the fugitives face, looked up at his comrades and tore the print into tiny bits. Another officer picked up Shoebridge, tossed him on his shoulder like a basket of yams, and the five of them marched him off to the police van. Another frantic palange making frantic demands in a kingdom where Time was an idea as abstract as democracy. And anyway, how could they be certain he wasnt an international terrorist himself, come to contaminate their yam crop or poison the fish? Scar Face and Cue Ball blamed themselves for not shooting him up with the sedative. Oh well. At least he couldnt cause any more confusion for now. They shoved their way through the raucous throng of giant brown people selling live pigs and whole watermelons to the travelers deplaning at this, the most handsomely attended island social event the weekly arrival of the flight from Los Angeles and Honolulu. Cue Ball wanted to buy a live pig just for the novelty of it but Scar Face belayed that idea with one nasty spit. They grabbed a cab. The cabbie had never seen the man in the photo but he did know a good place to buy kava or grass skirts or even to try out a 300pound woman if they were interested. They werent. Their cab surfed over the tops of the pot holes pock-marking the white, crushed coral streets of the tropical port, steering around clots of islanders who materialized through the dustcaked windshield like water buffaloes wearing skirts. The driver took delight in jerking his wheel sideways to scare furtive Chinese or Indians running to and fro from their shops, and he would not stop talking about his cousin who had gone to New Zealand and was making a good living stealing things TVs, microwaves, all kinds of wonderful things. They pulled over occasionally at a hotel or bar to ask questions and show the photo. It should have been fairly easy to find one white guy with stringy hair wearing pants not a skirt in this drowsy outpost of civilization, but 24 hours later when Shoebridge was released
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from jail smelling of urine and humming Tongan melodies he had learned from the guards it was clear they had lost the trail of their man. No one had seen him. No one had heard of him. He didnt exist. Three days later, after a maddening search that took them from the skuzziest beer halls to the Mormon College dormitory, from kava parties in the bush to pig roasts at the estates of the nobles, from fishermens shacks reeking of boiled octopus to the frangipani-scented reception room at the Kings Palace, Shoebridge had reverted to sitting in the hotel room rocking like an imbecile, sucking his toes. He refused to believe Rich Monk had outmaneuvered him again. It was time for drastic measures. Time to tap into the Great Unknown. Time to seek help from the spirits. He donned a lava lava skirt, blackened his hair with burned cork and began walking the beaches at sunset, impersonating a Tongan spirit. He could have fooled any Tongan. All over the island the coconut wireless hummed with the gossip that there was a ghost walking around the beach at dusk wearing a purple skirt printed with huge yellow flowers. His skin was white as the belly of a shark. And, Jesus save us, his hair! Shoebridge had blackened his white hair by smearing it with burned cork. But since he sweated so much, and kept running his fingers back across his scalp to wipe away the perspiration, he had rubbed a handful of white lines through the black cork producing an ungodly effect black and white zebra-striped hair. It was awful. The cops wouldnt come within 100 yards of him. The adults pretended not to see him. How else do you deal with a spirit? And more important, how could they make it go away? The next day at sunset he was standing knee deep in a tide pool watching a purple starfish digest a fish head by extruding its stomach out of its mouth when a young boy came up to him and said, You must be looking for the palange who lives on the island? The boys mom had told him to say that. It was worth a shot. Maybe this ghost just needed some direction. Maybe he was just waiting for someone to give him the idea to go look for the other man with skin as white as a sharks belly who came and went from this quiet beach where the villagers
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simply wanted to spear octopus, eat cheese balls from New Zealand, and complain about their neighbors. Yes I am, said Cedric Shoebridge. Yes indeed I am. In four days of asking direct rational questions he had gotten nowhere with these people. Only by painting his hair and acting like a sociopath had he been able to communicate his needs. People must be pretty much the same all over the globe, he concluded. Hit em where they live. Commune with their spirit worlds, inhabit their myths, immerse yourself in the abstractions they carry around inside their heads, and miracles become a daily occurrence. In some places the myths revolve around Democracy and Free Trade. In others its lonely ghosts looking for companionship. And who can say which is more accurate or more sane? For the price of five lollipops the boy confided to him that his cousins on a nearby island group had a rowboat with a sail which they used to fish for grouper at night in the channel. But they also had a barter arrangement with the white man who lived on a seldom-visited atoll to bring him to town every month or so for provisions. Or, when the white man returned from one of his overseas trips, he would send the boys cousins a message by coconut wireless island gossip and usually, within a day or two, the cousins would come and pick him up on a small beach just a couple hundred yards from here. Sometimes the palange would bring his cousins a ukulele or fishing lures or other great gifts. Did the ghost want to see the beach? Its just over there. No he did not. Shoebridge picked up the hem of his yellow-flowered purple skirt and plowed over the green succulents hunkering just above the rotting debris at the high tide mark as he set a direct course for the police station, cutting through backyards with horses tethered to trees, past gangs of pigs rooting under hibiscus bushes, and pop-eyed children peering over window ledges yelling to their moms that the ghost was walking past the outhouse. There was a great commotion of cops splitting out the back door of the station as Shoebridge approached the front. No one wanted to deal with a ghost. Not even Latu, the chief.
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But he was the chief. He had to deal with it. He said a prayer to Jesus and planted himself behind the chest-high counter as the purple-skirted, zebra-haired, white-skinned ghost swept through the door. His former-cannibal eyes narrowed to slits. He clenched the machete kept under the counter for emergencies. But wait a minute! This ghost looked familiar somehow, like maybe a dead cousin who had lost 100 pounds. And then when it started ranting about the palange who lived on the island Latu cracked a smile. This was no ghost. It was the stupid palange who had given him $200 to get out of jail the last time they had arrested him for nothing. He was more like a wayward cousin, a boy who drank too much bush beer and lost his temper once in awhile. Oh well. Nothing to worry about. Ha ha ha. Why dont you tell me you looking for the palange who live on the island? he chuckled. Sure I know who he is. I take you there. In my boat. For a small donation to the police charity fund. Next morning the three spooks and the chief piled into the police motorboat and swung outside the frothy reef onto the broad dark waves of the open ocean. As the outboard sputtered and Cue Ball hung onto the railings in nauseous terror of the rising and falling swells, the chief let out a thick nylon line baited with a plastic squid. An hour later, as the main island was disappearing from sight and a cluster of islets blinked into view at the top of each swell, the chief hooked a yellow fin tuna the size of a German shepherd. As the fish peeled off line from the coil under his foot he cut the motor and waited. When the fish slowed he grabbed the taut line in his callused paws and wrestled it hand over hand, the tendons in his thick brown forearms shuddering as if to snap. The fish ran twice more, searing the chiefs palms as it tore away line, but finally he horsed it alongside, slipped a fist into its gills, hefted the silver blue prize onto the bottom of the boat, and beat it to death with a loose floor board, squirting blood all over everyone. Lucky day, said the chief. Shoebridge wanted very much to believe that this would be a lucky day as he rinsed fish blood off his leg, but when the motor refused to start and they drifted for half an hour with no
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VHF radio and no paddle and with Cue Ball and Scar Face puking over the side he began to wonder, really wonder, what this was all about. Why was he so obsessed with capturing Rich Monk? Why was he so insanely driven to discover this creeps true identity? What did he hope to learn about a certain series of past fiascos involving the two of them? Cedric Shoebridge had pursued the man for three decades without ever truly answering that question. Was this only about vengeance? And if so, was vengeance a good enough reason to find himself in a large rowboat almost out of sight of land, with a broken motor, two seasick corporate go-fers, and a Tongan captain who was now slicing up pieces of raw tuna and popping them into his mouth waiting for the motor to feel better? The captain handed him a pink chunk of raw fish. He bit into it. It tasted OK. Slimy but OK. Ten minutes later the captain pulled the cord for the 201st time and the motor sparked to life. They swung back on course toward the tiny atoll where the reclusive white man was rumored to be staying a green speck bobbing on the dark blue horizon a few miles south of two larger islands. They rode the swells and ducked the spray for another hour, then swerved into the gentle waves on the atolls leeward side and brought the yellow beach under their feet. After an hour of scouring the brush they could detect no sign of human habitation. It was then that the captain admitted he might have the wrong island. But there was one more island a little farther out and they could try that. Plus he might catch another fish. The corporate spooks threw a fit. They wanted to go back. They stuck their hands in their pockets and fingered their syringes. Cue Ball might have caused a problem except that the Tongan was so much bigger. Shoebridge defused the mutiny by telling Cue Ball he would leave him alone on this island if he liked. They would pick him up on the way back. Scar Face spit a big yellow hocker at a land crab and with that terse summation of the situation everyone crawled back into the boat. Scar Face couldnt wait to get back to the hotel and jab the needle in Shoebridges butt, just for the fun of it. But if they jumped him now the big cop might beat them up and anyway they would
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just have to drag Shoebridge around. No good. Just wait. This FBI dick would get his. It was another hour of bouncing, puking pain for the corporate spooks until they mooshed the prow of the boat into the fluffy sand of a crescent-shaped sunken volcanic cone and entered another world. There was something magically different about this atoll and everyone felt it immediately. Even the chief. It was a place apart a windswept yellow islet crowned with a hump of green coconut trees lost in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean pounded by huge blue swells that rolled across thousands of miles of open ocean to break apart on the gray windward rocks of this sunken crater rim, spewing a perpetual mist into the pure salt air. Crushed coral seeped out of the leeward side of the volcano like runoff from a broken ice cream cone. Overhead the palm crests rattled and swayed, but down on the beach a windless cove nestled against a gentle turquoise lagoon where wavelets lapped at the sand in the shade of a lone banyan tree. Lizards chirped high up in the trees cool viney branches which dropped shoots vertically to the ground forming a maze of secondary trunklets that supported a vast green canopy making this tree seem like twenty trees in one. Half-wild pigs plowed the soft soil between the elongated fingers of its raised bony roots, and a cormorant stopped by to dry its feathers perched on a withered, hollowed upper limb. The banyan tree looked like a frizzy-bearded giant who had sat himself down on this beach centuries ago and simply never decided to get up again but just to rest in this quiet spot far, far removed from the radar screen of human civilization. Cue Ball, leaning over the railing for one last dry heave, was the first one to notice the human footprints in the sand. They followed the tracks up the brushy hillside to the shack in the coconut grove on the crest. At least they had found someone this time. The locals on nearby islands had watched the foreigner, the palange, come and go gone for a month, back for two months off and on for five years or more. Sometimes he waved to them when they passed in their fishing boats. They were acquainted with the family who dropped him off and picked
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him up in their small sailboat, but since everyone lied to everyone else in order to preserve their privacy in this cramped island nation, no one could discover anything definite about the white manSo they made things upSome said he had a wife in Thailand who trained elephants and refused to leave her career to join him here because she made too much money plus she would miss her mom. Others insisted he was a mad scientist trying to distill human blood from seawater. The kids claimed he turned into an octopus at night and slithered over the reef grabbing sleeping fish. They knew he was living out there in a hut in the coconut grove on the hill just above the banyan tree but they couldnt imagine why? Didnt he care to sit with them in their tin-roofed shacks sucking lamb bones, watching disaster films of highrise buildings in Los Angeles being blown to popcorn on a VCR powered by a thumping gasoline generator? Didnt he want to marry a local girl and take her to New Zealand or Australia where he could get a job and send many wonderful things back to the family? Didnt he wish to buy his own motorboat and ferry tourists around to the various islands so the locals could sell them carved coconut shells or pounded bark wall hangings and then buy radios and outboard motors? No, he did not. He was jaded by civilization, suffocated by its enticements, weary of the human fascination with technology and gadgets. He was the last hippie. A loser. He had given up but he had never really given in never actually surrendered. He didnt want anything of human society other than to be left alone left out of its money schemes, cookie cutter news reports, and fleeting amusements. To him, after all this time, it didnt seem like much to ask. But thats not how Shoebridge saw it. Rich Monk was like a human virus, eating through the body of humanity, causing millions of people to lose faith. He had to be stopped. Plus he had stolen the file. That was a certainty. That was his big mistake. After decades of well-orchestrated oblivion he had resurfaced and got caught.
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Youve got the wrong man, he said again, as they lifted him by his handcuffed arms and settled him in the police boat. Rich Monk died on a sailboat between here and Fiji. Lost at sea. It was as good as any other story he could have told them, for he knew things they could not know, and would probably never know. The legend of Rich Monk was the second biggest lie the human race had ever swallowed. It would be inaccurate to say he was dead. For Rich Monk to be dead would mean that he had actually once been alive, and there were many who felt it would be easier to prove that the first pelicans had flown to Florida from Venus. On the other hand, there were those who would argue that Rich Monk was more alive than most people ever had a chance to become in their entire lives. His aliveness was smelly, like a dead fish in a lawyers briefcase. His aliveness was loud, like thunder in a dumpster. His aliveness was invisible, like gravity tugging on a baseball. He was alive the way only an idea can be alive an idea like truth or passion or beauty and as such he could never actually die. Even if his body had been lost at sea which it hadnt but even if it had, Rich Monk lived on in the minds of a million different people in a dozen different countries and, like King Arthur, as long as his story was remembered he could never truly die. A million people wanted him to be alive. A million people needed him to be alive. Therefore he lived. The man they had captured was, of course, not Rich Monk. But the authorities of the remote island nation where this man had built his thatch hut and passed his time fishing needed U.S. aid more than they needed yet another transient expatriate from the northern climes much less one rumored to be already married, a mad scientist, and, under cover of darkness, an octopus. The Minister of Immigration after a few minutes of rough haggling in Tongan with his cousin, the police chief about dollar amounts quickly agreed to a request for the captives extradition once he secured a promise to get some help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for building the new airport. The U.S. government credentials displayed by Shoebridge and his men seemed impeccable, and an envelope
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containing $10,000 U.S. dollars cash convinced the minister and his cousin they were making the right decision. Even though Shoebridge and his men had apprehended the wrong man it was remarkable they had apprehended him at all. Ten years earlier it could not have happened. There would have been no way to track him here and even if they had the locals, when asked about him, would have shrugged their shoulders, picked their ears, and returned blank stares. But VCRs and small engines had changed all that. Now the locals could sit around drinking kava, munching sea urchins and boiled fish heads, watching detectives in New York and Los Angeles armed with laser rifles gun down felons from helicopters. It was exciting. They cheered for the good guys in bass Polynesian voices, rallying their video heroes with ancient war songs composed on log drums in the days of double-hulled canoes and cannibalism. They wanted to be there, on the screen, with Bruce Willis, helping out the cops any way they could. The next best thing was to report the general whereabouts of any suspicious strangers to the police authorities on the main island. It made sense. It couldnt hurt. They would just be helping the good guys. It was the right thing to do. The world had grown much smaller by the beginning of the third millennium. There was nowhere left to run Though his captors suspected something was amiss something was supposed to make sense that didnt make sense it wasnt until they injected him with truth serums in a seldomused nurses station in the basement of the Mother Nature Day Care Center in Massachusetts that the story, or what there was of it, emerged. The man himself faded in and out of clarity as various drug combinations were administered and though his story seems patchy and incomplete, there is no reason to believe he actually lied. This is what he told the spooks: Rich Monk sprang to life full grown at the age of 19 in Chicago during the Vietnam War. He surfaced with a Social Security number but without a Selective Service registration number. In those halcyon years before computers kept track of every human activity this was not much of a trick to pull off. No one was getting paid to sit at a desk and sift through 100
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million Social Security numbers trying to match them with draft registration numbers, passports, or anything else. Within 20 years machines accomplished the job at the speed of light. So, first and foremost, Rich Monk was a number. A ninedigit number. A bogus nine-digit number if a number can, in fact, be bogus. Rather, he was a fantasy number. A number that sprang from the pot-addled brains of a group of undergraduates at the University of Chicago one snowy evening when no one wanted to go out to the Hungry Eye to drink Nigerian coffee and play beatnik. Whose idea was it? asked Shoebridge, fiddling with his earplug, rubbing the hair behind his ears, trying to remove the last particles of burned cork. There was no doubt their captive was somehow involved in the conspiracy. He probably knew more than anyone else did. He undoubtedly knew enough to identify some pressure point, some weak link in the chain, some clue that would allow Shoebridge to expose the fraud, publicize it in the international media, and bury the problem for once and for all. I dont remember, said the drugged man, woozy and dreamy and floating through a softened mental landscape of marshmallow imagery and misty associations brought on by the cocktail of injections administered through an intravenous needle which a doctor in a white lab coat had jabbed into a vein and taped to the back of his hand. The doctor sat in the shadows of the room fiddling with transparent tubes and collapsible bottles preparing different drug combos careful to stay to one side of the false-mirrored nurses office which had been set up as a video recording room. A video camera, backup tape recorder, and several folding chairs had been arranged in the office so those inside could view and record every nuance of the interrogation without being seen through the one-way mirror. Who was in the dorm that night, at your little pot party? asked Shoebridge. I think it was Willie, and Mikeand Debbie. She was always around. And what happened?
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We were laughing a lot. What else happened? We were talking about the war. We were always talking about the damn war. What about the war? Usual stuff. The government was lying. Lying about what? About everything. Like what? About our victories over there. About body counts. About everything. And then Then what? Then someone had an ideaSomeone should lie back. Lie back? To the governmentIf the government was going to lie to us someone should lie back. About what? About everything. Everything like what? It was a pot party. A lot of wild ideas floating around, everyone laughing. I dont remember. But he did remember. Chemically induced truth-telling was not an exact science. It worked best if the subject really wanted to unburden his soul of some annoying or embarrassing fact which was far from being the case with this suspect. Also, the less the spooks found out, the longer they would keep him alive. Once they knew everything he would be as expendable as last weeks New York Times in an Appalachian outhouse. But he had to give them something, something to entice them, something to keep the ball in the air, and the air wheezing through his nostrils. He writhed against the restraining belts that clamped his chest and thighs to the gurney, mooshed his head back into the sweaty pillow, and mustered his creative resources to the front lines of his consciousness, charged with the mission of creating plausible digressions seemingly logical responses which truthfully answered questions that had not been asked, or at least, which fell short of answering questions that had been asked.
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Well? OK. Its coming back. It was something about an imaginary army. An imaginary army? Yeah. What does that mean? Look, it was a pot party. A bunch of crazed students cooking up goofy ideas. Tell me about the imaginary army. Well, if a bunch of people went to the Post Office and filled out Selective Service forms with bogus names, then when the Army drafted people to go to Vietnam no one would show up because they didnt exist anyway. It was like that John Lennon song. What song? The one about if they held a war and nobody came. Shoebridge rubbed his eyes. That doesnt make any sense. If they drafted a bunch of people and they didnt show up theyd just draft someone else. Of course it doesnt make any sense. Its a bunch of stoned ideas! I already told you that. And what does this have to do with Rich Monk? Tread softly here, thought the drugged man in his viscous haze. I dont know. I thought you said you knew? Thats all I know. Bull! Shoebridge hunched in his chair. He grabbed a pencil and scrawled a picture of Porky Pig in his notebook. Then he drew a bulls-eye over the pig and stabbed it with his pencil. He put the pencil sideways in his mouth, bit hard, relaxed his bite, and started talking again. OKAnd a fer weeks latuh Wich Monk spwang to life. I cant understand you. Youve got a pencil in your mouth. He snatched it out. And a few weeks later Rich Monk sprang to life? Thats right. And thats all you know?
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Thats all I knowWhat about my friends? Im sure you asked them. What did they say? They said it wasnt them. It was you. What was me? It was your idea. There was no idea. Some people say Rich Monk was a phantasm created by you. A creature of your imagination. Tell that to Abbie Hoffman. The FBI had bugged Abbie Hoffman for ten years. He was the head crazy, the chief executive officer of chaos, the selfappointed leader of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement with millions of long-haired blue-jeaned supporters from coast to coast, and from Australia to Amsterdam. He too denied everything. He too described himself as just another bit player, a puppet controlled by forces much larger than himself. He innocently claimed that the reason thousands of protesters showed up at his anti-war rallies, the reason millions of people around the world cheered when he showered dollar bills on the traders at the New York Stock Exchange, the reason there was a Yippie (Youth International) Party at all, was because people wanted these things to occur, not because of any personality cult or leadership abilities attributable to himself. He was just as surprised as everyone else when Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the presidency and the Chicago 68 Convention turned into a police riot with cops clubbing curious onlookers. To hear Abbie tell it, he himself was just a janitor a humble floor sweeper mopping up pop cans and gum wrappers under the bleachers during the big game when confused by all the feet pounding the wooden benches overhead he fumbled through his keys and absentmindedly unlocked the wrong door a door to the outside a door that brought the whole world flooding into his high school gym: grandmas, hippies, ministers, bikers, politicians, pot-heads, and some stranger characters yet. An irrepressible tidal wave of crazies who crowded onto the basketball court and took over the game. And really, it had nothing to do with him. Nothing at all to do with himNice try Abbie.
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The FBI had miles of taped conversations and speeches that had been clandestinely recorded on campuses, at demonstrations, and in the offices of the YIPPIE party. In all this material they had found only two entirely conflicting references to Rich Monk. During an ad hoc meeting with SDS leaders, Abbie denied any knowledge of Rich Monk, denied he had ever met him or even knew who he was. In another sound clip, recorded three weeks before that, he confided to Jerry Rubin that Rich Monk had come up with the idea to bring a million hippies to Chicago. They would put LSD in the citys water supply, hold a counterconvention to the Democratic Convention, and nominate a pig for president. The rest of the tape broke up into a half hour of animal snorts and wheezing laughter. This much the fuzz knew. Rich Monk never fought in the war, he fought against the war. Or rather, he fought in the war against the war. Thats when the FBI first began tracking him. References to Rich Monk began popping up from Berkeley to Kent State. He was admitted as a student at both schools simultaneously, qualified for financial aid, took the money, and, as far as anyone could ascertain, never showed up for a single class. He opened a bank account, got a passport, and took out a car loan. The car was recovered three years later on a hippie commune in Taos, New Mexico. Nobody then living on the commune remembered anything conclusive about him. He was variously described as being short and fat, tall and skinny, blackhaired, blond-haired, walked with a limp and able to outrun jackrabbits. Oh, and he wore glasses, but only when no one else was looking. One woman came forward and announced that she had become pregnant by him and bore him a son. Under further questioning examiners discovered the father could have been any one of five different men. It was the Sixties for Christs sakes. These revelations precipitated two years of FBI inquiries and finally DNA testing which established that the real father was a diesel mechanic in Oakland, California who had never been on a college campus, didnt know where Chicago was, and had never even heard of Rich Monk.
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The FBI was flummoxed. They were chasing around a draft evader, a guy who not only refused to obey the law and defend his country, but who was actively agitating against the war encouraging other guys not to show up for draft induction. A refusenik. A commie spy, obviously financed by Moscow. And they couldnt even get a clear idea of what he looked like. Everyone they interviewed seemed utterly sincere in their descriptions of him, down to the smallest details. But the details were fantastically inconsistent. Were looking for a skinny/fat guy with black/blond hair who runs fast with a limp!!! fumed Cedric Shoebridge, the FBI officer assigned to the case. Hoovers gonna love this. It was around this time the rumor began to spread that Rich Monk was actually two people. It was probably the closest they ever came to discovering the truth. Shoebridge was desperate for leads. He simply didnt have enough coherent information about his quarry. He needed to rattle the bushes and kick the woodpile, and see what flew into his gun sights. He stewed over various options, from offering a huge reward, to concocting false murder charges against Rich Monk to get the local cops in gear. He finally cooked up the brainstorm to leak a bogus story to the press that Rich Monk had been captured in a barn in Iowa hiding behind some cows. News editors across the nation scanned the FBI press release then buzzed their secretaries and asked, Whos Rich Monk? Within 24 hours fourteen Rich Monk sightings had been reported from Boston to San Diego. Cedric Shoebridge had succeeded in lighting fire to his own pants. Reporters clamored for more information and accused Shoebridge of stonewalling when nothing new was forthcoming. Eight months of diligent detective work produced a galaxy of preposterous fresh contradictions: Rich Monk spoke with a New Yawk accent; his mother was Guatemalan and he spoke a patois best described as Spanglish. He played stunning Flamenco guitar; he had lost one arm due to a snakebite. A one-armed guitar player? sputtered Shoebridge. What am I gonna tell Hoover?
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Tell him about the tattoo, said an aide, clawing through the junk pile of his brain, scrambling to produce some scrap of hard data to justify their ballooning field expenditures. What tattoo? Absolutely everyone questioned agrees on one thing. Its the only thing they agree on. He has a red rose tattooed on his behind. Jesus. How many of these people have actually seen his rear end!!! The aides attentions were suddenly drawn to details of curtain rod pulleys and plastic wood grain as they shrugged in unison. But decades later the first thing his captors did outside the shack in the coconut grove was pull down their suspects pants and check his buttocks. No tattoo. Oh well. Nothing else fit. Why should this? Cedric Shoebridge kicked out his aides, pulled off his socks and began sucking his toes. A baby in a buggy. Recidivism. Longing for those bygone days when a warm bottle and a change of diapers were the summit of his yearnings. In those awkward moments when his wife caught him in the act he told her he was just trimming his toenails. She sneered and tossed him some clippers. But the fact was, sucking his toes remained the best method he had ever stumbled upon for relieving overwhelming frustration. And he was frustrated. His career at the FBI was looking more and more like a paper-mach rowboat gummy, soggy, minutes away from disintegrating under his feet in a sloshy goo of newsprint and paste and drowned dreams. Maybe his father-in-law would take him into the insurance business? No. Never. What a ridiculous thought. Hed rather go to work as a male stripper, wiggling his johnson at twittering divorce lawyers and realtors with tie-dyed hairdos. Stop already! There had to be a way out of this mess. He yanked his toes out of his mouth. His brain stormed. Kind of a lightweight drizzle. It could work. It should work. Years later it would be dubbed a creative visualization but for Cedric Shoebridge it was merely a case of wishing something into becoming a fact. He leaked the story that Rich Monk had been shot dead in a brothel in Guadalajara, Mexico. The FBI even had blurry, blood-spattered,
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black and white photos to prove it. Sort of a North American Che Guevara who had met his predicted demise so everyone can go home now and stop the demonstrating. A hue and cry swept out across America, then leaped the Atlantic to England and Holland and France. Long Live Rich Monk they sang. Long Live Rich Monk proclaimed loudspeakers and hand-painted banners draped outside bakeries and shoe stores, or lofted on poles by activists leading rallies from Rome to Amsterdam to Paris. Long Live Rich Monk. And then he disappeared, said Shoebridge the same Shoebridge 30 years later. They thought he was dead, said the drugged man. Bull. They knew he wasnt dead. How could they have known that? Thats what I want to find out. Youre eating soup with a fork. What? Youre trying to measure the distance between stars with a tape measure. Shoebridge clamped down on his pencil like a dog with a bone. What are you frying to fell me? He removed it. What are you trying to tell me? Youre looking for the wrong things in the wrong places. Youre trying to find concrete physical evidence of the White Buffalo or Santa Claus or Satan. Like you could put them in jail or something. Youre a robota gear-head. Shoebridge nodded to the doctor to release more serum. The drugged man squirmed and spasmed on the gurney like one of the fish he had so recently caught, knocking his I.V. loose and spurting blood. Shoebridge and the doctor clamped down on his arms while Cue Ball and Scar Face rushed through the door from the false-mirrored video room. The four men held him still as the drugs took effect. Right, more truth serum for more truth. Youre a machine-man. Shoebridge. A techno-geek. Youre trying to capture air in a birdcage. We captured you. Yeah, but you didnt capture Rich Monk. That remains to be seen.
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The drugged mans head spasmed to one side as spittle ran from his mouth. You just dont get it, man Get what? You expect me to believe you never used that name? Yeah, I used it. But so did other people. And I used a lot of other names tooRollo Nixon was my favorite. His muscle tension faded and Shoebridge lightened his grip. I used to tell people I was Richard Nixons illegitimate son and he refused to acknowledge me because of politics, you know. That bought me a lot of pie and coffee in the Midwest. One year later you showed up in Paris, snapped Shoebridge. So what? The drugs hit hard and the man slumped like pudding into the gurney. Scar Face and Cue Ball withdrew to the viewing room and closed the door. The doctor readied another bag of colored fluid. When are you going to ask him about the file! barked a female voice into the wireless receiver plugged in Shoebridges ear. Ill get to that. What? asked the drugged man. Nothing. Never mindYou went to ParisAnd you wrote this. Shoebridge slapped a faded yellow flyer down on the desk. It was jammed with dense French writing, headlined: Alliance Democratic, and signed Rich Monk. The drugged man glanced at the page and slurred. How could I have written that? I dont know how to write French. Then you had someone else write it, or translate it. Ri-di-cu-lous. Are you trying to tell me you dont know where this came from? Thats right. I dont know where it came from. I was sitting at a bistro in Pigalle one hot afternoon when some giddy teenage girls came by handing them out. Frankly, I was more interested in the girls than the flyer. And what happened? We got to talking, and I ended up going back to my apartment with one of them. Well, actually, two of them.
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Two of them. It was the sixties. Revolution was in the air. We were young and stupid and passionate and imagined we would die in the coming war. What war? Any war. THE war. The revolution that never came. You mean because Nixon resigned. Yeah, flashing the vee sign as he got into the chopper coopting the symbols of the movement. He won. The bastard won. Everyone thought he lost but he won. The drugged mans mind was expanding like a nightmare in bubble gum. Thinner, looser, more elastic. Pop! A torrent of words gushed out his mouth. Nixon got out before anything could be proven against him. He lost his job but the corporate/military geeks who paid to put him in office escaped unscathed. Instead of holding a national debate to reorder our national priorities, everyone started wearing long hair and bell bottoms and opening health food stores. No one even questioned the fundamental evils of corporate feudalism: the marriage of transnational corporations and government which had caused World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Vietnam wasnt a mistake. It was a moral outrage. Our government and media had lied to us for ten years. And all of a sudden there we were playing frisbee and interpreting our dreams with crystals. The counter culture was OK as long as it wasnt political. Still is. But it started back then. It was sickening. Rich Monk was dead and there was a massive sell out. Yeah. And we averted civil war. We were right on the brink. More than you hippie punks will ever know. Not close enough. Shoebridge bit his pencil in half. Both pieces dropped on his notepad smearing it with spittle. What a dirtbag. You dont give a damn about this country. Sheesh! Faux pas. This moron was getting to him. He was losing his professional detachment. Mustnt let the interrogation slip away from him. Mustnt let this human cockroach rattle him, divert him, sabotage the flow of information. Fact is, I care a lot about this country, said the drugged man. More than corporate go-fers like you and your FBI friends
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can ever imagineThe real dirtbags are the transnational corporations. They expect to rape the world of natural resources, build sweatshops, export jobs overseas, employ the creative technologies developed by our taxpayer-financed schools and government, skip out on paying taxes altogether, and then, when they make a mess, American boys are supposed to grab guns, fly halfway around the world, and get shot at, trying to save their assets. Its outrageous. We need a civil war! Shoebridge picked up his pencil bits and rubbed the notepad, smearing it worse. His toes began itching and curling inside his shoes and he suppressed the urge to whip off his socks and stuff them in his mouth. He was getting nowhere with this worm. A civil war huh? He jabbed his scratchpad with the broken pencil and began drawing whirlpools to make his fingers stop quivering from bottled rage. As the mesmerizing circles narrowed and grew smoother he succumbed to the notion that he needed to take a softer tone, coddle the captive, atone or pretend to atone for his crude put-down. Give the guy a little bit of rope then yank him back on track. When Vietnam ended the hippies put on paisley ties and started selling yogurt, said the drugged man, and the transnationals went back to business as usual copper, aluminum, oil in Indonesia, South America, Africa, the MidEast. Mainstream Americans adopted the cultural surfaces of the uprising the music, the clothes, the health food but the transnationals just became more covert, more media conscious, and nothing changed. It was a disaster. A sellout. Nixon won. His corporate sponsors won. And of course you didnt sell out. What do you think I was doing on that island? We all sold out. We stuffed granola bars in our pockets and went back to work for the soft machine. Peace, love, corporate paychecks. The drugs were coming on stronger, cooking his brain, sizzling his circuits. Snap, crackle, pop goes the weasel. He started imagining things. He was a drunk cowboy driving a rusted pick up truck around the back roads of his own brain squashing chickens and splattering blood on the ghost of his unborn child. His lost baby.
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A smidgen of blood stuck to the childs butt, glowing like a rose tattoo. The crunching sound of tires on gravel gave way to a high-pitched whine, like someone tuning a banjo string between his eardrums; his hysteria soared higher and higher and higher. Pop! We all sold out, he muttered. We all The buzz from the truth serum peaked and then dissipated like a million freed butterflies scattering over the Gulf of Mexico. Having experimented with hallucinogens decades ago the drugged man assumed these truth serums would operate in a similar fashion but they werent the same at all. Apart from an initial disorienting rush they brought forth a feeling of warmth and coziness and well-being, a lowering of inhibitions, a physical high more like heroin than LSD. It made sense. If you were trying to get the truth out of someone there would be no point in sending them on a psychedelic trip. Sodium pentathol, the original truth serum, had been used by dentists to kill pain and put their patients under. The newer generation of drugs worked essentially the same way. And since the interrogators did not wish to knock their victim out, they had to modulate the dosage carefully. It was obvious to Shoebridge and the doctor from the drugged mans thrashing they had just overdone it. Once the initial rush subsided, far from feeling disoriented, the drugged man felt clearer and more lucid than normal. There had to be a way to use this. There had to be a way to control the interrogation. If he stayed with tried and true subjects, like multinational hubris or corporate imperialism topics he had covered over and over again in hundreds of newsletters and organizing speeches he would be no more vulnerable to the interview process than if he were reciting nursery rhymes. His stock in trade was anarchist propaganda; he could recite it in his sleep, or while fishing, or playing checkers, or even watching football or reading an illustrated history of Costa Rica all feats he had performed on past occasions. If he used the heightened clarity induced by the drugs to channel his think/ talk once the first burst subsided there was a chance he could avoid certain delicate revelations entirely. And since he was so well-versed in anarchist theory the serums might even
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work to compress his thoughts into heretofore unimagined volleys of verbal clarity. They seemed to be doing that already. He was neither drowsy nor slurring his speech. In fact, he seemed more mentally alert than any time he could remember. He just had to stay away from certain things. But not those guys, said Shoebridge, angling for an opening to get back on track. Not Alliance Democratic. Maybe not. Maybe they turned into whales, and gave up on land disappeared back into the sea. Thats the only way they could have avoided selling out. It was clear to Shoebridge that the drugged man was a raving lunatic even without the drugs. He saw things nobody else saw. He was passionately devoted to issues nobody else cared about. He probably even heard voices the voices of dead communists or somebody. He was a human haunted house complete with shrunken heads in the freezer and black cats sharpening their claws on his soul. But he knew something Cedric Shoebridge needed to know, and it had taken decades to put him here on this table, so the only sensible course was to guide him back onto the flight path. Coax him down for a safe landing. OK. Alliance Democratic. Are these the same guys who brought down the Gaullists and put that commie Mitterand in power? No they didnt. They put out a flyer. So what? How long has it been since you read this flyer? A long, long time. Shoebridge slapped another piece of paper on the desk. An English translation. I dont feel up to reading right now, mumbled the drugged man, dripping spittle on his chin. Then Ill you read a few lines. Shoebridge stabbed the page with his broken pencil and chose a sentence. We live in a democracy? True or false? Is your family run as a democracy? Are family decisions achieved by round table discussion? How about the school you attend? Can you take whatever courses interest you and still earn a degree? Or are you seduced down a path of corporate job training chasing credentials and big bucks? Is the church democratic?
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Does your priest ask your opinion about what the Pope decrees? Does your pastor or rabbi ask for your interpretation of scriptures? What about government? Twice every decade we vote for one of two presidential candidates who are mainly distinguished by the amount of corporate contributions they have managed to raise. Who runs our society? Do we get to vote for the CEOs of the major media corporations? Radio, TV, newspapers? Do we get to vote for the chairmen of our automobile companies and electric power boards? Believing we live in a democracy is like believing that Zeus makes rain, or that Third World residents are begging for their rivers and forests to be developed by corporations, or that free market economies are actually free. Its a preposterous myth! Thats it? The rest devolves into a bunch of passionate French revolutionary drivel about the workers unitingand more subversive socialist rot. You call that subversive? What do you call it? I dont know? Truth? Is that so?Well I think a lot of men died in a lot of wars to bring democracy to the world and these guys are just tearing it down. Tearing it down? Sounds to me like theyre building it up. A lot of people died in a lot of wars trying to preserve democracy, and what we have is a handful of huge corporations buying our elections and controlling our economies. And when their interests get in trouble overseas we have a war over it. Wars stimulate the economy. Fine. Then let corporations fight the wars, and leave the people out of it. The French were reacting to the same things the YIPPIES reacted to. Such as? Such as the fact that in America corporations are legally regarded as persons with all attendant rights and privileges of free speech and ownership of property. So what?
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So what is that these persons do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes or get drafted in time of war. Theyre our new aristocrats the gods of commerce immortal persons. Immortal persons? Immortal persons. Theyre tyrannical by nature. Theyre not business entities but political entities with tremendous power over peoples lives at the same time they are utterly unaccountable to the people. Tyrannies. Science fiction monsters we loosed from the darkest, greediest parts of our own minds that live only for profit and devour us in the process. Commie lies, sputtered Shoebridge. It was a knee-jerk response, a Cold War refrain that even he realized was lacking in explanation, but how else could he respond to a person who actually believed the government was controlled by huge corporations? Rank leftist drivel. Politics of paranoia. Socialist deceptions. Shoebridge twirled his broken pencil. He was succumbing to butterflies-of-the-brain his mind flitting from thought to thought, confusing flowers with colored coffee cans. It wasnt the drugged mans lies about the government that bothered him. He was lying about something else too. He was leveling off from the initial rush of chemically induced hysteria and now he would cruise for a while, babbling about whatever he felt like babbling about. But Cedric Shoebridge had been here before. The drugged man had been holding something back and the serums had pushed his mind to the brink of civil war with itself. Thats why, moments ago, he had been snapping his head from side to side, spasming against the restraining belts on the gurney. And now he was past it, gliding along on the bicycle path in his brain, pedaling through familiar ideological landscapes, listening to populist songbirds and chirping his anarchist propaganda. Whatever had been detonating inside his head trying to explode out his mouth had fizzled. But the good news was: it was a confirmation. An unequivocal confirmation. This moron definitely knew something he didnt want Shoebridge to find out. Perhaps he should have pushed him harder a few moments ago. Then again, the man had absorbed such a massive dose of
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drugs there was an even chance that instead of retrieving the information he sought, Shoebridge could have driven him into an irreversible schizophrenic crack-up, and then the hidden information would remain hidden forever. He had waited a long time for this. He could wait a while longer. He had to prepare himself to endure what was likely to be hours, or even days, of leftist ramblings, in order to be alert in that moment when the drugged man let fly something important. Patience. Forbearance. Just let the guy talk. Develop rapport. Gain confidence. Then steer him back into this business about selling out. This phony dirtbag didnt give a rats petoot about selling out. He just used it as camouflage, a ruse. This murky path of inquiry led directly down a psychological rabbit hole that dead-ended in the dark tangled roots of the information the man held concealed. Be patient. Just wait. Scratch your toes. But dont suck them. He slipped off a shoe. He could do this. Restraint is good.
Chapter Two
In a parallel universeor Time sandwichor something YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him plants could talk. The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists from Tallahassee to Tokyo smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. Theyd made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic werent they? Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudoscientific reports on Lettuce in Love or I was a Toxically
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Shamed Geranium. One could dip into the mind of a potato discoursing on Arrested Development in Rocky Soil or hear why Real Manure is the Cure by a panel of tulips. It was a whole new mindscape. Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. Human Odors and Lunar Cycles made TIME magazine, as did The EcoAdvantages of Urinating on Your Bushes, a fascinating portrayal of exactly how lilacs transformed pee into perfume. Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate did not think or feel. They had based this fantasy on the idea that plants didnt have a central nervous system. But, said the New Science, the spine has to do with locomotion, not thinking or memory. Plants, as it turned out, were suffused with emotion every cell bathed in an electro-chemical dance of life just like us. In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions and modes of communication beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was already too late. Some grant-hungry grad students at the University of Chicago started the uproar in Psycho-Botany when they performed a seemingly bogus experiment on two tanks of brine shrimp. They set the first shrimp tank in the corner of a dormitory kitchen and shielded it with empty egg cartons to baffle all sound. They placed the second shrimp tank on a table 30 centimeters from the stove, fired up a frying pan with hot oil, and sat around in shifts talking about how they were going to fry up the little brine shrimpies and eat them in sandwiches with mayonnaise and onions. Within three days all the shrimp in tank number two were dead. The political fallout from this cruel experiment earned the grad students an appearance before the student tribunal. They were barred from university sponsored social functions through the influence exerted on the administration by Animal Rights activists who censured the killers for emotional violence to fellow animals.
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No one has ever been able to reproduce the brine shrimp experiment it was rumored that some drops of carbon tetrachloride may have found their way into tank number two and the hoopla might have ended right there if someone hadnt noticed that the seaweed in tank number two had begun taking on some fire-resistant qualities. Very odd properties in an underwater plant. This discovery was made by Apollo Tyme, Odysseus biological father. Late one night, when his girlfriend had kicked him out of her room because she needed to study for a Sexual Strategy exam, Apollo was having a problem with matches. Hed managed to light his cigarette just fine lounging near the radiator in a back corner of the kitchen. But as he struggled repeatedly to light the burner under an opened can of spaghetti which he had artfully balanced on the finger tips of the stove rings, his matches simply would not ignite. He went through a book of matches, swore, spilled the spaghetti all over the stove, and then noticed the body language of the seaweed hunkering in the tank of dead brine shrimp 30 cm to his right. The seaweed had organized itself into a replica of a hook-and-ladder truck and was emitting some kind of gas. Apollo dashed upstairs and woke up Punky Epstein who was majoring in Molds and Spores. Apollo never got any credit for his discovery. By the time the reporter from the student newspaper arrived at 11 a.m. he had fallen asleep in a chair near the radiator. Punky filled in some gaps in the story with a few terse hallucinations and the die was cast. Epstein apologized later to Apollo and, to his credit, even offered to retract some of his hallucinations, but Apollo didnt care. Epsteins mom had already appeared on national TV taking all the credit for her sons genius and Apollo, majoring in Womens Studies, couldnt imagine how his accidental observations on fire-retardant seaweed could possibly advance his career. Little did he know. Within one month some red-eyed, long-haired U. of C. undergrads had soldered together an electronic eavesdropping device tuned to the bio-electric frequencies emitted by plants. They named it the Door, after their favorite rock band. And suddenly there it was, in all its everyday horror. Plants talking
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to plants. A brain-shift that made the discovery of fire seem as insignificant as the mass-marketing of granola. Do Plants Think? was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly one day you woke up and looked out your window and all you saw everywhere were eentsy green people. Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized than when the Space Shuttle blew up. Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games of talking to your vegetables right at your table before you ate them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience than eating live monkey brains in Bangkok. And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew around cemeteries the Washington Post clamored, Do Plants Eat Us? What a question. Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists choked the airwaves with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. Real work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroomeaters vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didnt take long. After a few brief weeks in the field the gold diggers and sleuths compared tape recordings and mud-splattered notes in stunned disbelief. They triple-checked their data, scoured the facts for any contradictory evidence whatsoever, merged into a
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Group Mind, and finally issued a preposterous statement to a shaken world: People dont grow corn. Corn grows people! Zowie! A conspiracy of corn? Zowie! Could it possibly be true that thousands of years ago corn had embarked on a conscious agenda to propagate itself by training people to sweat their behinds off planting it and weeding it and fertilizing it? How else could this over-sized MesoAmerican grass have spread itself to every country on every continent in less than 500 years? It was a dazzling proposition and to understand the whole thing all you had to do was roll down your window and listen. It was their attitude, more than anything, that struck you like listening to the Watergate Tapes. Yeah, all they were really doing was gossiping about new fertilizers and pesticides and the price of oil to run the combines; but darling, the way they looked at it, men and machinery were just interchangeable parts invented to serve them. Corn, in fact, was a mutant a genetic deviation long ago earmarked for extinction. With its thick-husked cob it had very little chance of reproducing in the wild. Sure, a few deer occasionally tossed some ears around and trampled some seeds into the ground, but corns probability of success had been quite limited until it trained people to desire it and cultivate itBut there was more. There was something written in invisible ink between the lines. Something that modern humans would have to look all the way back to the Old Testament to rediscover the era when they still thought like that. Corn was not a single corn plant. Corn meant all corn. Similarly, a cow was all cows. A person was all people. To corn, the progress of agriculture meant the overwhelming success of corn at the expense of everyone else billions of other plant and animal species. Thats how they looked at it. That was the Conceit of Corn. And to hear this startling elitism in revolting detail, all you had to do was park your car next to any cornfield, roll down
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your window, tune in your hand-held decoder-receiver, and just listen. Cornism. In time it came to represent something more sinister than Stalinism. Mothers used the sheer menace of the word to scare two-year-olds into peeing inside the round white hole. If you dont do what mommy tells you the corn will get you. Cornism. Evil stuff. Corn was a big supporter of beef and chicken production. You didnt have to be able to add and subtract inside your head to figure out why. People couldnt possibly eat as much corn as cows or chickens, so the more people who ate cows or chickens, the more corn they had to grow. In a murky sort of way, cows and chickens were in on the conspiracy too. Clearly, there would never be so many cows or chickens if they hadnt trained people to feed them and protect them from predators or to prefer them over such other species as grouse or elk, which had suffered devastating declines in the onslaught of agriculture. Chickens had gone from being a scrawny Indian forest bird to the third most widespread vertebrate on the planet behind humans and rats. And all because of corn. It was decades before anyone figured out what the wild animals had to say about any of this, and by then it was way too late. By then the ego-blinded pimple of consciousness humans called civilization had devolved into the backward-running nightmare of a Puerto Rican street gang leader in Chicago named Cha Cha Lobotomowski an inhuman being if there ever was one. A fast-spreading gangrene on the toe of higher culture a psychosomatic mushroom cloud irradiating shopping, journalism and education in one garlicky sneeze a peppery pork sausage jammed up the nose of the American way of life. But we are ill-prepared to meet this street tyrant, this Cha Cha, just yet. For now, it is enough to understand that corn and cows would have gone the way of the giant tree fern and the wild buffalo had they not been capable of tricking humans into breeding them and feeding them tilling the prairies, trudging through thighdeep snow lugging bags of grain, scooping the do-do out of their barns. Some deep, mysterious, existential magic must be
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afoot when someone can induce someone else to weed her and feed her and clean up her poop, wherever it happened to drop. YesHer. Civilization was overwhelmingly her from Mother Nature to Mother Earth, the Mother Church to the Mother Lode, Mother Russia to the Mother Tongue. Everywhere modern man looked what he found was woman. Despite the fact that Mater, the Latin word for Mother, was the root word of Materialism, popular mythology insisted that men were more materialistic than women. Men were objectoriented and women were people-oriented. Thats why men played team sports and six times more retail shopping space was devoted to women. Women demanded equality. They wanted to be senators and judges. But they saw no reason they should register for the military draft or mine coal. Men were labeled as the oppressors of women, but 19 out of 20 people who died on the job were men. Common knowledge had been warped into a psycho-social disconnect. People were being trained to believe things that bore no relationship to what they saw when they looked out their windows. Its as if 50 years of media propaganda had imbued us all with the fact that elephants ears were really wings and we believed them! As human civilization drew nearer The End, newscasters and social pundits couldnt even muster the mental wherewithal to ask the right questions any more. They were lost in abstractions. They talked about the economy while buildings crumbled around them. They talked about the need for improved day care while armed gangs of day care graduates prowled their streets. They talked about free trade as huge corporations squashed competition by buying politicians who gave them special government hand-outs and tax holidays. Ever since the last food-hunter put down his bow, civilization had become obsessively materialistic judging its success by its ability to control and reformulate nature, rather than to improvise and cooperate with it. But the big questions was, who was controlling whom? BLAME IT ON CORN. Agriculture was female. If you didnt believe that all you had to do was listen to plants talking. The
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seed was her. The fruit was her. Cows were fed and nurtured while young bulls were slaughtered for meat. The same with hens and roosters. Wild Nature was fifty/fifty, males to females. The barnyard ratio was fifty females for each male. Human hunters were permitted to shoot cock pheasants and buck deer, but the females were always protected, and the wild gene pools grew weaker and weaker as the hardiest males were sought out and shot down. Blame it on corn. Although humans had just figured out how to communicate with plants, plants had been communicating with humans for a long, long time. They called it dream engineering. Eons ago plants had realized they could enter human minds undetected, at a subconscious level, and influence their thoughts. Millennia past they had figured out that human females were born with a certain susceptibility to a subconscious message of domestication and control. Buck deer, for instance, were useless for these purposes. You couldnt get them to do anything they didnt want to do. Human females, on the other hand, were prone to being influenced. So, plants trained women to cultivate them. Growing food was strenuous work, but it produced a reward more coveted than big boobs or turquoise trinkets SECURITY! Women no longer had to depend on God or husbands to provide for them. Now they could provide for themselves. What progress! Under the influence of plants women began to believe that wandering freely about the earth was an awful way to live, whereas rooting yourself and your family in one spot was greatly to be preferred. Under the influence of plants women began to dream they could create a wondrous society where there was no risk and everything was controlled and planned and organized and insured and guaranteed. A world without fear and chaos where everyone would be happy and everyone would have enough of everything for all Time. A veritable Utopia. A wondrous dream. A plants dream. But it didnt take long to figure out what was wrong with it.
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Human females enjoyed digging in the dirt and planting seeds. They were good at it. They could be counted on to produce perfectly serviceable garden plots. The carrots and the squash were delighted and satisfied. Their genetic future was assured. But not the corn. The corn was far from satisfied. Corn didnt like vegetables. Didnt like them at all. They were weak and soft. They needed good soil and lots of attention. They were a waste of human resources. Nocorn was far from satisfied. So corn began to dream a dream that was so vast and powerful and secretive that the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms would surely have mobilized armies of resistance had they entertained the slightest suspicion of what corn was really up to. To accomplish its dream corn needed manpower, real MANpower. To accomplish its dream corn needed slaves. Human males had the muscles and the intelligence for this task. But human males could scarcely be influenced directly. Like buck deer they were subject to fits of spontaneity and wanderlust. They liked shooting, not digging. Security, to them, was another word for prison. What to do? Could they be manipulated through their females? Could the female affection for plants, and their dreams of utopia, be exploited and extended and molded into an obsession for security, guarantees, controlled economies? Could womens plant-induced utopian fantasies and their natural maternal tendencies be peddled as a kind of cornucopia? A bountiful realm where every material fantasy could be nursed to fruition? Where life was structured and organized and guaranteed, and everyone was happy? Could women be influenced to believe that material success was the highway to happiness? And even if they could be, how to get the men on board? Enter marriage and oxen. Corn, it must be remembered, was overwhelmingly female. It knew a lot more about sexuality than might be imagined. It
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had been experimenting in the hinterlands of sexuality for 59 million years. True, for a few weeks in spring the male tassels got to tell big stories and throw their pollen around kind of like a twoweek fishing blow-out at the lake but that was the full extent of male freedom. The rest of their year was devoted to the female agenda. After all, the tassels were married to the stalk. They couldnt go anywhere. Marriage was not a hard sell to human females. They got the point right away. If each man could be married to only one woman the methods by which that woman could control that man increased astronomically. With a minimal amount of dream engineering, initiated by corn, the idea spread like a flu virus through the human population. Natural male wanderlust was legally fenced in, slopped with fragrant manure, harvested before the first frost, boiled into paste, sealed in brightly colored cans and stored on a shelf in the cellar of the human psyche. With agriculture came the death of masculine soul. And next the oxen. Corn and oxen were natural enemies. After all, oxen ate corn. To one unskilled in diplomacy, it would not have been evident that a natural alliance between the two was ripe for exploration. To corn, however, nothing could have been more obvious. It knew it was needed and it knew how to turn that need into control. So here was the deal. If the oxen were willing to pull the plows to till the fields they could have all the corn they could eat! No more wandering around all day looking for grass. It seemed like a good deal to the oxen. A secured food supply all they had to do was pull plows through clay for 12 hours a day. These were oxen remember. Brain power rated slightly higher than a dinosaur. SoWith marriage established and oxen in cahoots with corn the rest of the pieces slipped neatly into place. The women married the men who hung around the camp and plowed the fields with oxen. The guys who split into the woods to chase
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wild animals could no longer simply return to camp whenever they were struck by the mood to barter food for sex. The women were now married to the farmers. So the farmers got laid and the hunters didnt. Exit the hunters. Thus began the Age of Agriculture. A cornucopia of wealth and health and happiness for everybody. Right? Zippe dee doo dah, zippe dee ay my oh my, what a corny play. The cereal grains were happy at last. Their futures were trading up. The commodities markets were just around the corner. And best of all, no one suspected a thing. Corn was actually the generic description for a variety of cereal grains which traded under different names on different continents: maize, wheat, barley, oats, millet, rye, etc. These grains communicated with each other through psychic space where neither Time nor distance were a factor. How else do you think mass scale agriculture could have started up in Sumeria, China, Egypt and Mexico at approximately the same moment in human history? With no human contact between them? Believe it. These cereals could talk to each other, outside of Time/space, in ways still not understood by humans. Whats more theyd been at it for four billion years. Long before they had given up the bother of moving around, plants had developed a vast technology of non-physical communication. Otherwise the decision to become sedentary would not have been popular or acceptable to any of them. The first plants that willed their existence onto the earth swam around the oceans by whipping their little tails back and forth swish, swish, swish. Everything went along fine for a long long time until they started polluting the atmosphere with too much oxygen. The plants were in danger of suffocating from their own excrement. So they created animals essentially plants with no chlorophyll. Animals consumed oxygen and spit out carbon dioxide, so plants could breathe again. Thus began the cycle of life. There was only one minor hitch. In order to accomplish their job the animals would have to eat plants. That was the only way they could live. Understandably, there was resistance
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to this proposal. No one wanted to be a martyr. But as the atmosphere grew more and more toxic the plants became convinced that it would be tolerable to sacrifice individual members to ensure the survival of the entire plant kingdom. The key to their political conversion was communication. Plants, around the globe, required constant reassurances that this thing was working. They needed to know that their uncles and aunts had been eaten for a good reason. So they invented psychic communication methods which connected every plant to every other plant via a non-physical web or brain. Every plant came to accept that she was merely an individual cell within the organism of her species. She might perish so that her kind could endure. The experiment with animals got off to a great start and promptly bogged down. There was an unanticipated problem. Animals were stupid. They lacked communication skills. They couldnt even catch most plants. En masse, the plants negotiated a covenant. They would ALL sit still and let the animals eat them. It was the only way out of the mess. Submit to this, or die. There was no alternative. Theyd come this far. There was no other way. So they did the sensible thing. They put down roots and let themselves become subject to the whimsy of animals. It became a global poker game to see who would get eaten and who would not. Some tricky species grew thorns and hard skins to protect themselves, but they were just shooting themselves in the foot or root, as it were. True, they didnt get eaten. But the whole POINT was to get eaten. By being eaten they would become valuable and therefore humans could be induced to work their butts off reproducing them. Thats what corn figured out that the other plants were slow to understand. Corn even developed the Aztec ritual of slaughtering virgins to the Corn God so that everyone would be hooked into the same spiritual program. Some must die so the group might live. Soldiers must sacrifice themselves in battle. Jesus died to give us life. The seed must die to birth the plant. Get it? Its everywhere! * * *
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Thus, via astounding mental leaps and wrenching compromises the plants made the whole thing work. They didnt like animals, but they needed them. From the very beginning plants regarded animals as their lackeys. And why shouldnt they? Animals were oblivious to the whole program. They swaggered around like the crown of creation when, in reality, they were its waste treatment machinery turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. They couldnt manufacture sugar out of dirt and sunlight. All they could do is breathe and eat. Incredibly stupid. Then along came man, the smartest animal. Here, at last, was an animal with a brain larger than a walnut. A brain that could be talked to. Here, finally, was an animal with a brain that could be recruited into greater service to planthood. Actually, other plants got in on the action first: grapes, tubers, vegetables, what have you. But corn was the first to deduce the awesome possibilities inherent in human cravings. Other animals didnt seem to crave things as much as womankind. Give a cow a field of grass and it wasnt going to worry about where it would sleep tonight, or what it would eat tomorrow. But humans werent like that. Solve one problem and they immediately invented another one. There was some soft spot in the human brain, and corn intended to exploit it relentlessly. And it wasnt going to tell the other plants about it. No way. Especially not the vegetables. Thousands of years after the Birth of Agriculture a troublesome Biblical story made the rounds about a man and a woman who lived in a garden. They had everything they needed, and didnt have to work for any of it. The man was content, but the woman wanted more. She nagged the man endlessly, and eventually she got her way. But both of them got booted out of the garden. It was a scary moment for corn. Some human had finally pierced the secret. Though there were many ways to interpret the story, the central feature was the existence of a place, a garden, a universe outside of Time where humans had once been, and could return, via a free-swinging doorway in their brains. Then
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along came some prophets, some mystics, some visionaries who planted one foot on this side of the doorway, and another foot on the other side. Would they discover the dream engineering? Would they lead other people through to the other side? Would they expose the secret manipulations? Would they finger corn as the culprit? Corn stepped up the psychic propaganda. Corn made sure that humans kept wanting more and more stuff, and that the more stuff they got, the more insecure and threatened they felt constantly worrying that someone or something would take away all this stuff they had now that they never had before. It was the Biggest Joke in the World. Envious as the other plants were of corn they couldnt help but admire this psychic coup. Later human inventions of electricity on demand and air travel were insignificant compared to this. This needy mentality drove all of humankind, particularly the women. Certain peas and squash were known to have laughed themselves to death over this the Biggest Joke in the World. SoAgriculture was fueled by civilization. Civilization was fueled by material cravings. Material cravings were fueled by corn. What a mind-boggling plot. But dont give corn all the credit. Corn didnt create this insatiable craving. It merely de-stabilized a pattern that was 20 billion years old. Bang! A spark flashed and a universe exploded into being. In the vast Uniformity outside of space and Time a glitch occurred. Maybe two angels crashed into each other. Maybe God tripped over a hose. Maybe He did it on purpose. Maybe its too simple to understand. Well never know. What we do know is that 20 billion years ago a tiny speck detonated into a titanic fireball. Out of every billion and one particles created in the Big Bang, one billion of them immediately found their anti-matter mates and disappeared back into the vast Uniformity outside of space/Time where we cannot find them to this day.
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But every billionth particle as panicked as a polar bear materialized inside a refrigerator exploded outward, searing the vacuum of space in a stupendous inferno which burned for a billion years. Finally, the particles began to cool and contract, coalescing into galaxies. And thus the masculine and feminine features of the universe were born. The masculine: forceful, chaotic, expanding, creative PUSH. The feminine: cool, gravitational, containing, controlling PULL. Push. Pull. No plant or animal or mineral or human was entirely masculine or feminine. These forces were intended, from the very beginning, to strike a cosmic balance. This balance could be detected in planetary physics, where outward thrust, seduced by the steady tug of gravity, created a satellite orbit; in cycles of precipitation, where water evaporated from the oceans, cooled, and fell back to the land; in the mating rituals of plants, where pollen scattered freely on the wind until it stuck to a flower, and was drawn inward to surrender some chromosomes. Masculine and feminine. Push, pull. In our universe they both needed each other. A constantly unfolding creative force left behind no stable forms. A preoccupation with containment and control stifled the development of new forms. The problem arose when one agenda overrode the other. Thats how we got cancer and toxic pollution and extinction. Thats how we got the agenda of corn subverting the imperatives of the entire plant and animal kingdoms. Thats when the door to the garden slammed shut. Extinction was the rule, not the exception, on planet earth. The dinosaurs were gone. The ninety-foot marine worms were gone. The dodo bird was gone. Sharks had been around for 400 million years. Grasses a mere 60 million. Corn, less than that. Its not like corn knew what it was doing or anything. Soin the wake of Apollo Tymes happenstance observations on fire-retardant seaweed, the implications of Vegetable Consciousness exploded on the world scene with all
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the finesse of a rhinoceros grazing at the salad bar in a Burger King. People were confused and disturbed. Eating dinner took on a funereal air. The aborigines had a big belly laugh. Theyd been praying to their food for 100,000 years. Theyd always known that it was alive and had a mind of its own. Thats why it fed them! The only ones who really understood what was going on were the animals. And they werent talking. Not yet. They had other plans. To some it seemed that plants grew people and people grew plants. A simple symbiotic arrangement, no? No! Something much deeper was at work here. The plant psychologists were onto something, but they couldnt get a handle on it. The Conceit of Corn, the female flavor of civilization, the blind pursuit of material agendas. These became obvious in a flash in a fiveminute ride through a vegetables brain. But to Apollo Tyme, Odysseus father, the media hoopla felt like a decoy, a ruse, a calculated attempt to throw everyone off the track. The stark and overwhelming nature of these new scientific discoveries was precisely the thing that was getting in the way of understanding them. Their obvious implications for human society were masking something much much deeper something much more obscure. It was time to step up a step. Time to jump-start the 90% of the brain humans never used. Revitalize the dead space between our ears. Move the mental soup. But where to begin? THERE WERE MANY MODELS to describe the workings of science. One of the best was: a hose full of ants. One day someone accidentally pointed the ant hose at a brain-sandwich called the Big Bang and Blam!, suddenly, overnight, the sandwich was swarming with ants. They were measuring things, pulling things apart, digesting information. And every 3.4 seconds they squirted out another squishy little egg of understanding to deposit in our mind combs. Science was on the case. Everyone could get a good nights sleep knowing science was protecting them and understanding things for them.
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The Dagwood sandwich of our daily dilemmas fear smeared with regrets, logic peppered with lust, pride pickled in worries, all of them smothered in a mayonnaise of money problems were commandeered by an army of technicians twirling their antennas and propounding final-sounding statements on birth, creation, and the limitations of God. Science informed us that the world started in a big explosion 20 billion years ago, that no known black hole was going to devour Cincinnati this week, and that DNA codes proteins. So have a good nights sleep everyone. Science is watching! But it was the things that science didnt discuss that gave you the willies. Science had nothing to say about what happened 21 billion years ago. Nothing to say about unknown black holes. Nothing to say about who, or what, told eyeballs to code eye proteins and toenails to code toenail proteins. In other words, after fifty years of studying DNA scientists were further than ever from understanding what gave living bodies their overall forms. No one had succeeded in aiming the ant-hose of science in any of these directions for very long. Something or someone had pulled the hose away. Ozone-brained mushroom eaters had been saying for decades that the next great leap in science would occur when science began studying non-physical phenomena. Good thinking. But scientists refused to crawl out of their cozy little hose. They didnt wish to spread themselves too thin, or take any unnecessary career risks. Sothey invented the buzz word. A buzz word was a label that was pasted on something without explaining anything. It was a name game. Scientists had buzz words to explain all kinds of things they didnt understand. How about Central Nervous System? that sounded pretty sophisticated except plants could think and feel without one; or Early Jurassic that gave you dinosaur bumps; or Evolution a rational-sounding explanation for the lurches and crashes by which lifeforms flourished and became extinct. Or how about Consciousness, with its slightly mystical overtones and human flavors. Dogs and carrots didnt have true consciousness people did. Or even Memory. Everyone knew what Memory was, but no one could find it. No one could
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find the mechanism for it. It wasnt located in any particular part of the brain; it wasnt in the blood or bones. Where was it? By the time the newly founded academic discipline of Plant Psychology was accepting its first masters theses, it was becoming shockingly clear to everyone that a great portion of what life is and does, transpires in a place which cannot be physically found. So when the eggheads and tape measure geeks pointed their ant-hose at plant consciousness they immediately came face to face with the greatest scientific buzz word of all time. Instinct. Why did birds fly south in winter? Instinct. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Why did plants grow toward light? Instinct. Buzz, buzz, buzz. We used to say that birds flew south because Zeus made them do it, or plants grew toward light because its what Athena wanted. But with the dawn of science we put it all down to instinct buzz, buzz, buzz. Attempting to explain the motivations of terrestrial life with the word instinct was like trying to milk a cow with a toilet plunger. Not only did it explain nothing extract no precious milk of wisdom or knowledge but by pretending to explain something it had planted its slimey rubber foot directly in the path of further exploration. When it came to instinct, science was wearing boots with no soles. They looked great from eye level but there was nothing to stand on. Science needed results to justify its funding. Pioneering a better way to make ice cream was OK. Making jet fuel out of corn sugar was OK. Delving into the non-physical properties of life was mystical, wacko stuff. Science after all was not a religion. There was nothing to believe in. Except for instinct and DNA and the intrinsic ability of numbers to explain everything. Enter the Plant Psychologists. For a few years, until the dynamics of the ant-hose mentality kicked in, it was a lively science. The true believers went right to the Source. The dictionary said that instinct was: an innate, complex, impulse or motivation. And have a good nights sleep everyone!
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An innate, complex, impulse or motivation? So was spitting out bad food. So was cheering for your local football team. So was kicking the tires when your car stopped running. The first masters thesis accepted in the newly proclaimed discipline of Plant Psychology, tendered by one Punky Epstein, argued that instinct was a phantasm. That, in fact, the whole point of scientific inquiries in the arena of plant psychology would be to discover where or how innate, complex, impulses or motivations originated for Christs sakes! The tenured professors at the University of Chicago labeled this a religious inquiry and refused to lend any support. The thesis was finally published in a compilation of botany articles issued by a small press in Arizona which specialized in printing picture books of cacti for sale to tourists. Unless you stumbled through Lake Havasu in winter you would never find it. The New York Times ignored it. The Chicago Tribune ignored it. The San Francisco Chronicle ignored it. They wanted to sell newspapers, not pierce the meaning of life. Physical evidence collected from orbiting telescopes or chemistry labs was right up their alley. Inquiries into the hidden properties of life was rank mysticism. There was a heck of a lot more to the problem of instinct than most people wanted to see, because if they did see it, they wouldnt get such a good nights sleep. Instinct implied some kind of blind mechanical apparatus at work like maybe birds had gears in their heads or something. Instinct implied birds had to fly south in winter, or plants had to grow toward light, or San Franciscans had to root for the 49ers. No goose Larouse. These things were choices. Canadian geese would hang out on an Illinois golf course all winter long if somebody fed them. They were big, they had down insulation, the cold didnt bother them why fly south? Fish knew where No Fishing signs were posted. Cows knew how to get men to milk them. Corn knew how to get men to cultivate it. Instinct had nothing to do with behaving in a certain way and everything to do with achieving certain results. Millions of years ago a bass-like fish called the flounder decided that it
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could hide from predators and hunt more effectively if it lay on its side in the mud. When robins wanted to get warm they didnt start building fires, they headed for the Gulf of Mexico. People used to do the same thing until civilization that obsession with agriculture and accumulated possessions thwarted the migration. Of course, the millionaires and the homeless still made the winter trekWhen corn wanted to reproduce itself on six continents it didnt start building ships, it made itself attractive to men and birds and whomever else was around to do the job. Science liked to herd bits and pieces of truth into a corral called Occams Razor the simplest solution is the best solution. The old E=mC2 kind of thing. This was basically a fascination with numbers a blind religious faith that God made the world so it could be mapped with simple mathematical formulas. Maybe science never talked to flounders never bothered to ask them why they selected to have eyes that migrated to one side of their head as they reached maturity instead of the simpler solution of being born that way. Maybe science never asked monkeys why they didnt just grow long necks, like giraffes, if they wanted to eat from the tops of trees; or birds why they started out as dinosaurs just to get their eyeballs that high off the ground; or whales why they left the ocean, grew legs and walked the land, then returned to the sea where their useless hind legs shriveled to nothing. Occams Razor, the simple solution, made no sense when it came to physical biology. Plants and animals never did anything the easy way. Plants and animals could scarcely be described by numbers. And the sad fact was, things which could not be described by numbers could not be described by science. Or, at least, thats what everyone thought at the time. Thats why universities shunned plant psychologists as a kind of religious cult. Where were their numbers? In fact, the real religious cult, the real blind faith in simple solutions, was practiced by the scientists themselves. Theirs was the Cult of Numbers. Ironically, the simple solution to understanding innate, complex, impulses or motivations instinct in plants and
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animals was to delve into non-physical reality. At this suggestion, the glass fingers and steely eyeballs of modern science shuddered. If these plant psychologist kooks got their way, funding for chemistry and metallurgy and even microbiology would plummet. So the rubber lips and plastic tongues of modern science went on the offensive, publicly trashing the notion that there even WAS such a thing as nonphysical reality. And the major newspapers rallied to their support. They were like tenors singing with pots on their heads, actors performing with old newspapers glued to their armpits, senators wearing their underpants on their heads. The people KNEW. All they had to do was roll down their windows and listen with their hand-held decoder-receivers and they KNEW. Finally, after months of scathing media assaults on the preposterous notion that something called non-physical reality could possibly exist science changed its mind. The world held its breath. Science aimed its ant-hose at instinct and got the same result it had gotten when it pointed the hose at the atom, 2500 years after Aristotle coined the term. Instinct and the atom. Nice-sounding words, very reassuring but they were NOT THERE! You couldnt find one to ransom your way out of an elephants anus. Everyone knew that something definitely WAS there, but it was NOT THEM. Not the things that science said they were. An atom was infinitely divisible into smaller and smaller parts. Thus, no ultimate indivisible unit no atom. Instinct was, in Punky Epsteins phrase, a phantasm. The words and numbers we used to label and understand our reality were no more substantial, no more believable, than an automobile made of apple seeds. Science was a mythology on par with subservience to Zeus it definitely had some good observations to offer, but there was grave danger inherent in taking it too literally. Mary Bluffman of the BrainTank in Washington D.C. (former college roommate of one Madeleine Naylor, director of the Mother Nature Day Care Center) rode to the rescue with an
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explanation that spun the media aflutter with giddy optimism. The editors emerged from their story conferences puffy and chipper and ready to put a good face on this mess just to get past it. They were desperate for a pat solution that could be jammed into three column inches and at least Bluffman was taking a stab at it. According to Bluffman, atoms and instinct were both some kind of energy. Great. Even migrant farm workers got a belly laugh over that one. It was like saying a tomato is a kind of tomato, or a fish is some kind of fish. EVERYTHING was energy. Everybody already knew that! So, the vast mythology that western civilization had constructed over the past 8000 years with a little help from corn was walking around butt first. The rationalizations people relied on to get through the day had lost their meaning. People were losing the will to live. Losing the zap that pushed them out of bed every morning to fight the good fight in sublime service to what? Corn? Soybeans? Grapefruit? And all it would take would be a slight nudge from Rich Monk, or Rollo Nixon or whatever he was calling himself these days, to upend the entire apple cart of First World reasons for living. Talk about a chain reaction of anarchism? The possibilities gave the gearheads friction headaches that even WD-40 and KY jelly couldnt cure. For decades pundits had been discussing the need for a new mythology to realign the meaning fields between heaven and earth, and now the crisis was at hand. The job of reconciling science and spirituality was no longer an intellectual dalliance. Global Civil War was, suddenly, not only possible, but probable. Social unrest of stunning proportions leered over the horizon. University students left the schools in droves, wandering the streets, smashing garbage cans and torching cats. They felt they had been lied to. And they were right. The university system was exposed as a prodigious babysitting experiment designed to keep adolescents off the streets and out of the job market while charging them a fortune for the privilege. And at the end of the ordeal there were no jobs. There was no way to fit into the world. Their mythology had let them down.
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What to do? Modern civilization was imploding under its own brain-power. God was gone. Science was gone. There was nothing left to believe in. Even the plants were starting to worry. Their dream-engineered bubble was about to burst, and if it did, who would feed them? If humans could have talked to animals which they couldnt not yet they would have been shocked to hear the hoots and catcalls. Everything was unfolding according to plan. Everything was right on target. The animals had only to bide their time and be patient a little bit longer.
Chapter Three
LOOK SHOEBRIDGE, said the drugged man, this country was founded as a reaction against two huge British transnational corporations, the Hudson Bay Company and the British East India Company. I thought we fought a war to get rid of the King. The King was just an economic pawn of these companies. He gave them land and refugee labor, they gave him money plus cotton and raw materials to keep the British mills running, manufacturing clothes which were then shipped back to the colonies. The American Revolution started when Americans got the bright idea they should be allowed to manufacture their own shirts and shoes, and import tea on their own, not British, ships. Boy, youve got some bent ideas about history. Oh yeah? Then how come when the United States first formed there was such a fear of huge corporations that corporations were only allowed to be chartered state by state, not federally, and these charters automatically expired after ten years? And, in order to renew its charter, a corporation had to demonstrate that it was bringing positive good to the community where it was located. Not just trashing the place dumping chemicals and poisoning the airAnd how come Thomas
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Jefferson said, I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations. He knew that if we only focused our wrath on the King and ignored the power of corporations our experiment in democracy would come undone. It wasnt until the time of the Civil War that the court system was bribed into circumventing these restrictions by legally designating corporations as persons. I seeand how did that happen? Shoebridge bent down, peeled back a sock, and slipped an index finger between his toes. Ahhh! Why is that idiot bending over out of the frame, hissed the video technician in the viewing room. Because hes an incompetent ass, hissed Madeleine Naylor. Shoebridge, her permanently twisted lower lip barked into the microphone transmitting to the receiver plugged into his ear. Sit up and ask him about the file! Cue Ball and Scar Face shifted, shrugged at each other, and resumed watching the interrogation through the one-way mirror. It happened because we were wrestling with the issues of slavery and citizenship defining what a citizen was, said the drugged man. Free blacks and non-landholders were finally achieving the right to vote. Corporations snuck under the fence and got themselves legally identified as persons. Our judges created a science fiction monster in our legal system. Do you know what Abe Lincoln had to say about it? As a result of the (Civil) War corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will followuntil all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. Abraham Lincoln, 1864Then he was shot!By a lone assassin? Kiss my wazooThis notion of corporations being legally regarded as persons never came up for a vote in the Congress. It was slipped through by judges. Judgments were rendered, legal precedents set, and 150 years later we just take it for granted thats how it is. Nobody even asked us! Fine. And thats what these French freaks, in Paris, were complaining about? These friends of Rich Monk. Right. It was working, thought the drugged man. By focusing his mind on giving Shoebridge a traditional leftist drubbing he was staying far afield from admitting to any indictable offenses, plus steering clear of his little secrets.
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And you, of course, had nothing to do with it? Right. Then how about these girls? What were their names? Shoebridge wanted to shift off this boring corporate tirade. There was nothing to be learned from this. I cant remember. You had sex with them and you cant remember. It was thirty years ago. What did they look like? One was blond. The other was Vietnamese. Vietnamese? So you were consorting with enemy spies? Isnt that selling out? What enemy spies? She was Vietnamese. The French were in Vietnam long before we were. She was just some kid living with her folks in Paris. She wanted to have an adventure. Consorting with enemy spies, Shoebridge mumbled aloud as he wrote. What did she look like? Skinny, with black hair. What else? What else what? Every Vietnamese is skinny with black hair! Thats all I remember. FineWhat did you do with them? I told you, we had sex. With both of them? Yeah, they liked each other and they liked me. We just rolled around in the bed for an hour and that was it. And then what? I only saw them one other time. They invited me to an orgy. I walked into this strange apartment near the Eiffel Tower, the rich side of town. They were both in bed with two old guys with stringy gray hair who were lapping at their belly buttons. Did you jump in? No, I took a bath. A bath? I really needed a bath bad. My loft studio only had a sink sponge baths. Plus the old guys looked gay or something. I think they were trying to get me in bed with the girls so they could make their move on me. It was a weird scene.
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And then? I left. The blond came back to my place for a couple hours. Then she left and I never saw her again. Ask him about the file! hissed the twisted lip into his earpiece. But Shoebridge didnt care about the file. He was in charge of this interrogation and he would conduct it his own way. Plus he had been seduced by this vignette intrigued by the sexual deviance. He was at once jealous and resentful of hippie morals. The sexual ecstasy of the 60s had driven him loony with lust. He had married the woman of his Georgetown college dreams: a blond, buck-toothed Wisconsin farm girl from a landed family who had decided the highest purpose to her life would be to stay in Washington and make a splash on the social scene. She could visualize her husband climbing the ladder of that FBI tree house in the sky, hand over fist, clawing his way through important investigations all the way up into the upper branches above the dark canopy of nobody-hood into the leafy bright sunlight of massive public recognition. Fame. Power. Social invitations. Camelot. And she would be with him all the way, guiding him, coaching him, jerking him out of bad moods, diligently working, patiently sacrificing, to keep his career on track holding his arm as they entered the White House dining room, kibitzing with hawk-nosed sheiks and pop-eyed movie stars and European aristocrats sagging under the weight of rubies and diamonds and pearls. Oh my! Shaking hands with the President and First Lady any President, any First Lady. But despite her hard work and incessant nagging her husband had not climbed far enough fast enough. So she invested her precious time forging her own inroads into polite society, making the rounds of art gallery fund raisers and trendy affairs. Showing up uninvited in strapless gowns and ingratiating herself with the real people as she called them by means of her charm and enthusiasm and vibrant laughter. Their marriage had the flavor of a sawdust milkshake drunk on a plastic lawn chair by the tool bench in the garage, where the radio seeped Elvis and Dion tunes into an anemic breeze invigorated only by occasional whiffs of open gas cans and oil-drenched rags which was
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exactly where Shoebridge spent most of his time playing with his cat when he wasnt chasing around the country on FBI business. They rarely had sex and never had kids. He had remained faithful to her because 1) he was naturally depressive and conflicted and didnt have an easy time seducing women, even in Washington, and 2) he didnt want to give her any wild ideas. He need not have blamed himself for the latter. Especially after his FBI chums anonymously dropped an infrared photo on his desk showing his unclad wife prancing around a Georgetown artists loft doing unimaginable things with whip cream and jello. When he finally screwed up enough nerve to ask her about the photo she sneered, cocked her nose and told him it was art. He believed her. At least he thought he did. Then she started screaming at him for spying on her. Ah, the old switcheroo. When caught in the act find something to blame on your husband a feminine ruse that men had not learned how to disarm in 2.2 million years. She officially banished him to the garage. Let him play with himself and his cat. OH WHO CARES? He parachuted back to the present. His toes were itching like red ants in his socks. Better stay off the sex stuff. Where were we anyway? The file? F the fileAnd you expect me to believe that was it? What about Agit-Prop! Uh-oh. Here was a path the drugged man did not wish to be led down. Yes, he had been a member of Agit-Prop, a revolutionary cell that advocated violence against property in order to expose the fact that western society cared more about property than people. He was with them when they spray painted the corporate offices of Nestle with revolutionary slogans, but dropped out when they bombed the power supply to the city of Bordeaux. This was but one of several touchy topics he wished to circumnavigate. So he pulled the old switcheroo just like Shoebridges wife a tactic he had acquired from his former feminist girl friend. Whenever someone asked her a question she did not care to answer she lashed out. Shoebridge, youre a charter member of the flat earth society. What?
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Youre a guy who thinks we live in a democracy despite all evidence to the contrary. Any farmer or sheet metal worker or truck driver can see through that. But you guys at the top, youre so invested in the myth youve actually begun to believe it. And you despise anyone who doesnt believe it. Its worked for you so it should work for everyone. Why shouldnt it work for everyone? For the simple reason that the United States has 4% of the earths population and uses 24% of the earths resources. You guys think we won the Cold War, and that proves we were right, and everyone should live like we do, adopt the American system. But they cant. The earth would have to be six times bigger than it is to support this myth. And thats what it is, a myth. The myth of the American Way. The corporations know that. They huddle under the massive U.S. military umbrella paid for by U.S. taxpayers and use this country as a springboard to launch factories and dig mines all over the planet. Once they wean the whole world off fishing and farming and hook them on the money economy they wont need any of us any more. Sounds bleak, said Shoebridge, but the bleakness he referred to had nothing to do with the earth growing six times larger to support the American Way. The bleakness that was preying on his mind was his own personal bleakness, an upwelling of inexplicable psychic grief which had first invaded his person just after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination long, long ago; and for some perverse reason, the drugged mans insane rantings were tapping the underground source of this grief and freeing it to percolate back up into his memory. The King assassination had been the Fort Sumter of his life an outbreak of civil war inside his head which had never really stopped and where neither side had ever surrendered. Everything he had been doing for almost 30 years came to an end with that rifle shot, and nothing had ever been the same since. Up to that point he had been a bright, handsome, ambitious, young FBI agent with a beautiful supportive wife and a spectacular career ahead of him. With the King assassination something came unscrewed. Something diabolical leaked into his mind and body. A demon almost, though he certainly didnt
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believe in demons. But thats what it felt like. Some invisible entity had begun vying for his soul, fracturing his attention in a dozen different directions, hobbling his ability to concentrate. Thats when his life had fallen off the tracks. Thats when his wife began to hate him. Thats when he had been pulled off civil rights and put on the growing problem of draft evaders. Thats when he had been assigned the task of capturing Rich Monk. All the inscrutable, insufferable problems in his tormented life had begun around that time. Thats why he hated this lunatic strapped to the table in front of him. Thats why he blamed Rich Monk. Thats why he intended to find out everything this man knew because buried somewhere in his demented soul was an answer, an explanation, a justification for all the turmoil and grief and disasters that had haunted Cedric Shoebridge ever since that fateful day when his secretary delivered a brief and unremarkable directive ordering him to look into the case of a bush league draft dodger, a minor political irritant, a nomadic hippie named Rich Monk. That was the day his universe crashed. Rich Monk had a Social Security number but no draft registration number. That was a federal crime, but it would have passed unnoticed if he hadnt created such a splash traversing the country and agitating against the war. His name kept popping up everywhere. But the thing that drove Shoebridge nuts was that the harder he pursued him the more Rich Monk seemed to materialize out of nowhere or worse out of somewhere Shoebridge had just been. He had an immaterial quality about him, like a specter or a wraith. Someone who could move through psychic space at will and reconstitute his physical body as easily as blowing his nose. Shoebridge might hit the streets of Cincinnati asking a lot of questions, investigating a typical Monk-style guerrilla operation, like mailing an envelope full of red ants to the Selective Service Board; or he might round up suspects in Phoenix where someone had decorated an induction center with toilet paper and painted Stop the War in bloody red paint on the brick walls. Then, a week or two later, when he had returned to Washington or run off chasing some lead in some other part of the country as if to mock his efforts, and taunt him beyond belief a torrent of guerrilla pamphlets
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authored by Rich Monk would flood the campuses and government offices and hippie hangouts in the community Shoebridge had just left! His colleagues laughed behind his back. It made him look like an incompetent ass. A week after Shoebridge left Boston in disgust, having unearthed no important leads in an incident involving a 200 pound hog that had been handcuffed to the bumper of a police car while he was sleuthing his way through counter culture juice bars in San Francisco trying to assimilate an accurate description of the person or persons who had loosed a half dozen panicked, defecating turkeys through a broken window at the Oakland Induction Center Rich Monk popped up at a Cambridge/Boston rally, dressed as Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat and full beard handing out anti-war flyers and inciting young men to burn their draft cards and report to the American Friends Service Committee to get help applying for reclassification as conscientious objectors. Preposterous! Shoebridge flew to Boston and the following day Rich Monk materialized on the streets of Berkeley dressed as Porky Pig holding a press conference with the Underground media to announce that any soldiers wishing to desert from the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines could get a change of clothes and some new I.D.s at the Diggers Free Store. Was this guy following him around or what? As soon as he left somewhere, Rich Monk showed up. It was maddening. His career advancement at the Bureau was in limbo. They couldnt afford to promote such an obvious bungler. And sooner or later the media would get wind of this. Meanwhile, his wife was stuck somewhere between wanting a new Mercedes and wanting a divorce. Cedric Shoebridge decided to play offense, throw the ball, blast off a Hail Mary. In desperation he put out the press release stating that Rich Monk had been apprehended hiding behind some cows and, in doing so, he multiplied his problem by exactly fourteen times. Then came the bogus death report from the Mexican brothel which was the last time Shoebridge tried to pretend the problem into extinction. There was no pretending. There was no going away.
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His hair turned white. He developed a spastic tic in his left cheek. His nostril hairs grew so fast you could watch them, like shaving cream foaming out his nose. His superiors regretted the rare instances in which they would be obligated to include him in a meeting. He would throw open his battered suitcase, pull out pencils which looked like they had been drilled by woodpeckers, flop down a notepad covered with cartoon pigs and splotches of spaghetti sauce, then begin rocking back and forth in his chair like an imbecile with his cheek spasming, a white hairy growth oozing from his nose, playing with his toes, alternately muttering viciously at his coffee cup or grinning enthusiastically at everyone around the table ready for business. His wife left him. Or rather, she decided to leave him which meant she got a court order saying he had to leave her. Beatrice, the black Haitian maid, helped him set up a cot in the garage and snuck him occasional meals. Beatrice put on a pleasant and humble performance in the main house, but she let it be known to Shoebridge she felt his wife was behaving comme un Duvalier. That is, just like the infamous tyrants Papa Doc and Baby Doc who had pillaged her homeland for decades, forcing the entire population to adopt duplicitous, servile, covert lifestyles expressly to avoid the death squads on one hand, and soul-corrupting voodoo intrigues on the other hyperbolic ceremonies where the very boundaries between plant and animal and person dissolved in a frenzy of tribal drums and erotic dancing and bathing in fresh blood. Shoebridge handled business on the paint-splattered phone above the tool bench, ordering out for Chinese, sending his young Turks into the night raiding pizza parlors and upsetting poetry readings, hunting for clues as to the whereabouts of Rich Monk all of them bound by an inviolable oath never, ever, to tell anyone exactly who they were looking for. After all, the official story was that Rich Monk was dead, so why would they be wasting taxpayer money looking for a known dead man whose body they had presumably photographed and disposed of months ago? You have to be clever, he told his underlings. You have to ask questions by pretending not to ask questions. Like maybe
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two of you dress up as beatniks and go to a coffee shop, and one of you says to the other, Did you hear that story about the guy who delivered a pizza to the White House with Stop the War written across the top with slices of pepperoni? And then the other guy says, Yeah, but that cant be true. Its just a story. Then you both shut up and listen and wait for someone to come forward and say, Oh yeah, I know its true because a friend of mine told me that a friend of his knew the guy who was there when they decided to go for it. But you two refuse to believe him and let him keep talking and reveal his sources while hes trying to prove to you hes right and he knows what hes talking about. Then you call me. Got it? They got it all right. Everyone wanted to volunteer for Shoebridges detail because they got paid to hang out in trendy nightclubs wearing hip clothes chatting up girls at government expense. He had the most popular field operation in the Bureau. And of course, no one actually wanted to find out anything about Rich Monk because that might bring the operation to an end. So Cedric Shoebridge sat on a plastic lawn chair in his garage by a paint-splattered phone that never rang, while his operatives partied it up from Jacksonville to Seattle, Minneapolis to Austin. When J. Edgar saw the expense figures he broke a chair with his bare hands. Roy Cohn wanted to dump Shoebridge in the Potomac handcuffed to a concrete block. He already had the handcuffs and the block, he said locked in the trunk of his car. But in the end they took pity on his pathetic plight just another burned out G-man overcome by the pressures of their holy mission to keep America free from communist tyranny. They sent him to Paris for a long long vacation. His only orders were to forget about Rich Monk. Forget he had ever heard the name Rich Monk. It was all a mistake. A moment of bureaucratic untidiness that had all come right under further scrutiny. There was no Rich Monk. There had never been a Rich Monk. It was over. So Shoebridge flew to Paris and spent his time wandering from bistro to bistro throughout the Left Bank and Pigalle, buying a drink for anyone who would listen and belaboring
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them, one and all, with the maddening, inscrutable problem of Rich Monk. They were French, sympathetic by nature, plus he bought free drinks, so they gathered around him on squeaky chairs, nodding enthusiastically, waving their arms in the air shouting, Ah oui!, Mon Dieu!, and not understanding a single thing he said. And then one day as he sat at a caf table with a street bum and a half empty liter of cheap red wine, some girl in a short yellow skirt swept past and dropped the Alliance Democratic flyer under his nose. Waiters and patrons of the bistro backed off, pulled chairs and tables out of the way, and began shouting for someone to go get a spoon to use for a tongue depressor so they could help this American who was thrashing and kicking and pedaling on his side on the floor to survive this obviously epileptic fit. The flyer, written in poor French and signed by Rich Monk, meant nothing to them. A day later, after his mental meltdown collected into a puddle of bittersweet regrets floating at about eyeball level, Shoebridge went undercover with his wino buddies. He dressed in urinestained pants smelling of rancid wine and hung out on the sidewalks bumming francs, pressing his fingertips to the pulse of the underground. He looked grisly and wretched and invisible. A non-person. A harmless homeless bum. A perfect cover. As usual, he didnt know what he was looking for and thats how he got his first glimpse of the drugged man. Shoebridge had a big problem identifying the drugged man because on the streets he was merely described as the American who ran with Agit-Prop. Worse, the drugged man operated under a variety of different names none of which was Rich Monk. For a few confusing weeks Shoebridge thought he was on the trail of a half dozen different draft dodgers: Mitch Freedman, Rollo Nixon, Lyle Johnson, Julius Hoffman, Gregory Lobotomowski, and one Franco Spermacetti, which may or may not have been one of his aliases. But the more he analyzed the scraps of data he had collected the less sense they made. The linear approach wasnt working. So he threw all his notes off a bridge into the Seine and went into the Cathedral of Notre Dame where he lit a candle to the
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patron saint of Intuition. The Catholics had so many saints they must have one for that! Right? So he lit a candle to the Saint of Intuition whomever that might be. Math and logic had never been his strong suits. Plus, he was not convinced that women, as women, had ever cornered the market on intuition. He just figured most men didnt try hard enough. How did race car drivers steer, or bookies set odds, or stockbrokers make insane profits, if not through intuition? Where did Bach or Monet or Shakespeare pull their inspiration if not from some rarefied, intangible zone which might compellingly be described as Intuition a vague sort of knowing about what touches other peoples souls? The trick, it seemed, was to empty your mind of the chain reaction of daily details that poisoned your brain. The Catholics must have a saint assigned to that. They must. They had a patron saint for bikers, and winos, and depressed animals. Surely they must have one in charge of vacuuming up logical tedium and rational dead ends. Anyway, it was worth a try. He breathed softly on his candle in its little glass cup. It seemed happy. In fact the whole Cathedral seemed happy, in a Timeless kind of way. Lots of prayers had gone up here and, no doubt, lots of them had been answered. He dropped a franc in the collection box and strode out the huge wooden cathedral door, resolved to submerge himself even deeper in wino culture. He slept on park benches, fought with squirrels over spilled popcorn, his eyes turned soft and rheumy, he coughed a lot. Everything that he was trained to be leeched out of his body and spirit. He became what his wife had most feared: a degraded, defeated, embarrassing, smelly, failure. Gone the G-man who would dine at the White House. Enter the vanquished, unredeemable loser. He only saw the drugged man once, sweeping by in a clot of dour-looking, long-haired revolutionaries as he sat with his wino buddies on a bridge to the Ile de Cit dangling his legs over the Seine listening to stories about the heroics of the French Resistance during The War. At the time Shoebridge couldnt even tell if the guy was an American, but years later he was able to pick that face out of a dozen photos of American draft
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dodgers reputed to have been in Chicago, Paris and Washington the same time as Rich Monk. He never forgot that face. Shoebridge left his wino friends and began following the band of revolutionaries down some curvy cobble stone streets past couscous restaurants and blond whores whistling from doorways. He lost them around the Panteon when he got into a fight with some other winos who thought he was trying to panhandle on their turf. They stuffed newspapers up his behind and left him upended in a garbage can, feet pedaling at the green copper rooftops of the City of Light. Thats where his FBI colleagues found him. The rest of the world knows about this scam, continued the drugged man. Maybe I should kill him right now, thought Shoebridge.
Chapter Four
WHILE SCIENCE WAS TRAINING its ant-hose on Instinct, Doctor Odysseus Tyme was battling for his life in divorce court in Broward County Florida. Years later, as he stood on the gangplank watching shark fins slice through the wave tops, he would recall this sad adventure in American jurisprudence. But his only goal at the moment had been to emerge from this judicial black hole with a change of underwear and one shoe. It gave a whole new meaning to the word entropy. Sure, everything was always falling apart. But this was falling apart at a rate that made nuclear fission seem like alka seltzer in engine oil. Things that had taken decades to build up were unraveled in milliseconds inside the brain of a judge who was late for a golf appointment. It was an energy loss that rivaled the sack of Kuwait. How had it come to this? He had met Leslie in his last year of medical school. She was irresistible and opinionated and soon had him feeling like
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he couldnt put his pants on right without her. She was a cornucopia of information and advice. Something snatched his brain. Something non-physical. Something ethereal. Somethingvampiric. Everything he thought he knew about life was washed away in an ebb tide of unnamed emotions. Before long he was wondering how he had managed to survive this long without her. It was beyond eerie. It was love. But it was something else too. The more he loved her and he DID love her the more his brain slipped away from him. The more dissociated he became from himself! Soon enough forked-tongued Marriage slithered out of the mental muck dripping erotic juices, gloating with feminine certainty, oozing evolutionary inevitability as if he had no choice in the matter! He didnt. Most cultures recognize the passionate emotional attachments that spring up between men and women, but only western culture considers these the basis of a marriage. We had become a culture obsessed with feelings rather than sacred virtues. Results rather than visions. Everyone was worried about self-esteem. No one paid attention to the time-tested virtue of egoelimination propounded by human visionaries for tens of thousands of years. Happiness was deemed the foundation of a good marriage. Material success the proof of Gods blessing. Years later people blamed it on corn. But the actual problem started about 20 billion years earlier. To his credit Odysseus didnt learn much of anything in medical school. He finally finished his residency, and that made Leslie happy. Very happy. She cheerfully threw herself into what she called her family obligation of finding him a highpaying job. But, as the plum assignments passed him by with little more than a snicker at his lackluster performance records, she succumbed to the grouchy middle ground of her personality. According to her she had married a shell of man. A human sponge who soaked up everything she gave him and offered nothing in return. He was a clammy monster with five hands who clung to her like a vampire child and consumed her
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emotionally and sucked her brains. She had been fooled by outward appearances and would never let that happen again. One day she was thumbing through the Women seeking Men section of Gardening News when an ad hopped through her eyeballs and surrounded her brain. She had been struggling to compose her own romantic advertisement In Search of a Gallant Soul Mate or U.S. Representative she figured shed title it and wanted to research how it was done. But this little ditty swept up her brain cells with brute impertinence, yanked the engine cord inside her head, and started the pistons and the flywheel and the fan belt putt putt putting again. The ad said: Wanted Man to Play Doctor. He can certainly handle that, she muttered as she picked up the phone. She explained her entire situation to the woman who answered and was rewarded with a few yawns and a terse, Ill have someone get back to you. Clunk. The engine inside her head overheated. Exhaust fumes spewed out her ears. It seemed even a job playing doctor was beyond Odysseus qualifications. But three days later Odysseus signed on for big bucks at a facility owned by a certain Mr. Machetti who wore expensive suits. Suddenly Leslie was happy again. Odysseus had waffled, but her advice won the day. SheeshIts kind of an intuitive thing, ventured Odysseus. I just dont feel right about that guy. Dont worry Oddy. Im in charge of the intuitionAND the feelings. This is gonna be good for you. Anyway, a man who wears suits like that has money to burn. At least she was right about the last part. She even prevailed on Mr. Machettis good sense by convincing him to pay off Odysseus $300,000 in outstanding medical school loans as a kind of signing bonus. So Odysseus went to work for Mr. Machetti parking cars at a mafia-owned steak and seafood place. The mobsters figured it was good thinking to have a doctor on staff to handle parking lot emergencies. They even tipped the madam at Sabrinas Escort Service $1000 for selling them on the idea.
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His first day on the job Mr. Machetti handed Odysseus 3000 hundred dollar bills to cover the school loans, told him they would track him to the ends of the earth if he ever tried to quit, and then left him pretty much alone. The money disappeared into Leslies mysterious accounting system, but now she was really happy. And, except for a few hours at night tooling through the parking lot in expensive cars, Odysseus had armloads of free time to play around with the garden hose and grow molds on leftover food in the cellar by the walk-in cooler. He spent some of the happiest days of his life quietly observing the various behaviors of a peculiar fungus he had grown on a hacked-off flounder head. At times it seemed as if the fungi were not only eating the fishs brain but somehow digesting its thoughts as well, though he would have been hard-pressed to write a scientific paper on it. Call it a feeling he had. He also treated the occasional gunshot wound and once even saved Mr. Machettis nephew from certain death. After that they took him along on road trips to Las Vegas and even let him fly the Lear Jet sometimes. Very bird-like. Somehow flying came to him quite naturally. The technology was self-evident to a trained medical mind and the execution very bird-like was what he told Leslie. Of course, his career was a tremendous embarrassment to Leslie. She made up lies to tell her family and friends about the important work her husband was doing some sort of bioelectrical research and forbade him from mentioning gangsters or fungus at the dinner table. But I am doing important researchplusI do save lives! he whined, whenever Leslie launched into her daily tirade about what a worthless, disappointing piece of human garbage he was, who had squandered his entire medical school education on saving mobsters and growing mold. He couldnt seem to make her understand that this was not the kind of a job where one day you just walked up to the boss and said, Gee, its been fun. But my wife wants me to move on to something else now. And then came the kids: Kimberly, Little Kimmie her name pick; and Baby Zeus his name pick. It was the only time he
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ever got his way about anything during the entire marriage. When Leslie saw the birth certificate she screamed, but he wouldnt back down. A little voice in his head told him not to back down. When she was pregnant, Leslie was an entirely different person. Calm, patient, focused. Odysseus was a doctor. He knew it was an hormonal thing. But still, the difference was prodigious. Female animals were only in synch with life when they were pregnant. The rest of the time their biological engines were revving up for an hysterical moon shot solid fuel boosters spraying emotional debris in the face of any bystander who strayed within earshot of their pent-up destiny. Within weeks of Baby Zeus birth the moon shot mentality ignited their lives again. She wasnt happy. It had to be Odysseus fault. Whose else could it be? The purpose of school was to build self-esteem and the purpose of marriage was to make women happy pop mythology was very clear on these points. Reluctantly, after weeks of embittered soul-searching, she came to accept that the key to her happiness lay in her own hands. She knew what the problem was. She was not happy because she was not a lawyer. So she put the kids in day care and went to law school. Did law school make her happy? Hah! Law school gave her the tools to channel all her fury at her husband into a stunning legal document. She had gotten her way in virtually every family matter. She had modified her husbands brain beyond recognition turned him into a frightened puppy eating from the bowl at her feet. She then became desperately unhappy with the changes she had wrought. But thats not how she saw it. Not at all. He was still holding out on her. She wanted it ALL. So she prepared an airtight Dissolution of Marriage motion which made it clear to the court that she was entitled, by law, to EVERYTHING. Absolutely everything. She accused Odysseus of being a child abuser, of having AIDs, of planning to steal the kids from her, of being mentally imbalanced. And the court believed her. Why? Because she
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was a woman. A higher moral order of human being. A female in a female-friendly world. A walking talking example of moral superiority. And you think corn wasnt evil? Of course, she was lying about all those things, but she was right on target about the main thing. Odysseus was holding out on her. He had given in to everything she claimed she needed to make her happy. Everything she had asked for. But there was one thing her mental radar was incapable of identifying and isolating. There was one thing which perpetually evaded the mind-sweeping net of her cerebral reconnaissance patrols. It was the thing she called his bad gene. Her radar was lit and her cannons were loaded, scouring the terrain of his brain with psychic image sensors, searching for the enemy hunting for the thing that made her so unhappy. But her radar screen didnt ping. He had to be using mental stealth technology the bastard. She wanted ALL of him. But she couldnt locate the bad gene. And if she couldnt find it she couldnt destroy it. And it drove her crazy. Really crazy. Viciously ruthlessly crazy. This 20 billion-year-old phantom, the bad gene, sporadically poked its hairy snout out of the fog banks in Odysseus brain. He thought of it as an ally. He called it the voices. Doctor Odysseus Tyme was one of the very few human beings who didnt need a hand-held decoder-receiver to hear plants talk. The voices arrived in his brain fleetingly, but naturally. Theyd been doing it forever. And now the voices of the fungi he grew in the basement at work were the only things that kept him from roping his leg to a Cadillac bumper and dropping a brick on the gas pedal. But Leslie had a plan. If she couldnt force Odysseus to give up the bad gene the last remaining shred of his non-physical being she would convince the courts to do it for her. Divorce court was a glittering example of what popular mythology had wrought. Here, in direct defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed separation of church and state, holy matrimony had been gradually absorbed into a legal monstrosity known as the marriage contract. Whats more, this marriage contract could be broken, at any time, by either
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of the parties with no fault. As anyone familiar with contract law knew, if you had a contract which could be broken by either of the parties whenever she wanted to, what you had was NOT a legally binding contract. Thus, like the atom and instinct, when you aimed the ant-hose of analysis at the marriage contract what you found was it was NOT THERE. All the engines of society, from science, to the law, to the media, to the government, to the retail and entertainment industries, were standing over the fish tank of humanity sprinkling buzz words on the water. No wonder we were headed for total social collapse. The authorities were treating us like goldfish. The era had arrived when a person had a surer shot at success in life by skipping school and smashing his TV. By refusing to present his head on a block to be imprinted with the buzz words that were used to train him to rise, on cue, to the top of the tank, and eat from the authorities hands like a goldfish. The voices of the fungi kept Odysseus from asphyxiating in the moral vacuum of divorce court. They tossed him a lifeline from a place outside of Time, and pulled his brain up for air. The key was, if you were silly enough to believe in a system that was based on buzz words, then they had you like a goldfish. But if you didnt they didnt. The authorities fit the pattern of everything else in the twilight hours of humanity. Remove the fish food from their hands and they were nothing they were NOT THERE. They could not make a child believe in God or prevent an airliner from crashing into the Pentagon. Everything they said they were was a lie. Everything they said they were doing didnt happen. They were straw dummies playing with matches masquerading for someone. But who? Leslie actually believed that the court had the power to brand Odysseus brain with a bunch of buzz words, and he would perform on cue like a Pavlovian goldfish. The voices knew better. The voices had been riding around in Odysseus brain a lot longer than Leslie. Odysseus never forgot the day he couldnt have been more than ten when his dad bundled him off in the old Ford station
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wagon to visit the Neo-Neoist commune in Ithaca, New York. It was a hippie-style organic carrot farm situated in a pondstrewn oak forest twenty miles from Cornell University a hotbed of womens rights, animal rights, mineral rights, psychoastrology, and other short term solutions to long term problems. Cornell was a high-voltage transmitter of the buzz words of popular mythology. Here you could find professors who drove Volvos and raised tulips arguing for the minority rights of drug dealers on the south side of Chicago. Here you could find people who believed psychology was a science, but investigation into the properties of non-physical reality was not. On the drive up Apollo confided to his son that he was thinking of quitting his job and going back to school. What are ya gonna study, dad? Im thinking about taking up Womens Studies. Really? Yeah. How come? WellThe employment opportunities are endless. Those people are creating jobs out of thin air. Did you ever know anything women didnt have an opinion about? Anything they didnt think they could do better? Nope. Well there you go. I guess you must be getting tired of dog breath, huh dad? Yeah, Oddy. A couple more years of this and Ill grow a long wet nose and start chasing cars. Oooh. The day Odysseus was born Apollo had bid fond farewell to his post-baccalaureate career as a nomadic minstrel beach bum, and took a job as a canine dentist. It was the kind of thing men did back then to pay the freight for the kids they loved. To men like this the words happiness and career did not appear in the same sentence. Marriage was a sacred duty performed for the sake of the children, not some scheme enacted to make them feel good. The concentrated simplicity of this mindscape was
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one big reason why, for such a long time, buzz words held so little sway over men. For a decade Apollo just rolled along, devoid of ambition, repairing cracked canine canines, reveling in the explosion of life that was his son. But recently and quite accidentally he had noticed striking similarities between dogs teeth and the monthly peaks and valleys in his wifes behavior patterns. He had been secretly recording her mood swings on graph paper, and when he chanced to superimpose a lateral x-ray of an Irish Setters jaw over the graph paper bingo! the fit was remarkable. He figured he had a masters thesis in the bag and that the Womens Studies department at Cornell would wax ecstatic over his discovery. They did not. Needless to say, the only program that would accept him was the Botany Department at the University of Chicago. They hated his idea. But they hated the Womens Studies department even more. And this looked like an ingenious way to jam a spike up their Amazon behinds. Plus, Apollo was an eccentric. And they had a tradition to uphold. The botanists credo was: No idea is too crazy to be denied a temporary parking place in an open mind. At the University of Chicago they were quite well aware that the fuel that feeds the engine of world civilization is distilled from addled minds. The Neo-Neoist commune in Ithaca was inhabited by cynical Cornell dropouts intent on deprogramming their minds from the buzz words of pop mythology. They were as testy as sparrows learning how to swim, and the carrots were having a field day with their brains. The Neoists leveled suspicious stares at the man and boy who parked their old Ford under a maple tree, but when Apollo greeted them with a terse, Myrtle sent us, they shrugged and went back to weeding the carrots. Whoever Myrtle was she had some pull around here. Apollo led the way into the woods, and when they paused at a pond where cattails shuddered from the raucous din of squabbling red-wing blackbirds, where fish tails rippled the surface and turtle heads bobbed like baby potatoes, he asked his son, What do you hear, Oddy?
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What do ya mean dad? What do you hear? Wellbirds. I guess. What else? SheeshI dont know. Apollo Tymes eyes glazed over. He lifted one arm in front of him like a conquistador claiming sovereignty over the entire Pacific Ocean as he announced, No son. Its language. All of this is language. The trees and the birds and the turtles all these creatures are talking to us but we choose not to hear them. The trees rustled at each other and the blackbirds stopped cold. Odysseus got the creepy feeling they were being watched. He always remembered this moment as a moment removed from Time. That was the year psycho-astrology came into vogue on campus; the National Organization of Women completed their infiltration of the Justice Department; and some shifty graduate students who would one day be persecuted for committing psychic violence against brine shrimp spent their summer vacation cavorting in the woods and poking sticks up snakes ani just to see what would happen. But Odysseus never forgot what his dad told him at the pond that day. Somehow, something slid around in the electro-chemical stew between his ears. Some molecules reorganized themselves into novel configurations and began receiving mysterious signals resonating at rare frequencies. Odysseus felt that suddenly he had an answer. A big answer. Now if he could only figure out the question? On the ride home another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Like most kids, Odysseus never got much of a chance to talk to his dad REALLY talk to him. He assumed his old man would always be there and then, one day, suddenly, poof! he was gone. So this parting, offhand, kernel of wisdom, occupied Odysseus thoughts for years to come. Dad, what happens after we die? Good question son. I wish I could answer it. You dont have any idea at all dad?
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Not really. But I think it has something to do with grass. Grass? Grassand monkeys and pelicansand probably some other things too. Thats all I can really tell you so far. Somehow the whole thing stuck stuck like superglue. As if a cargo plane from Zimbabwe smacked down on a landing strip inside his head and an assortment of bizarre creatures began debarking waving from the top of the ramp, blowing kisses to no one in particular, then slipping away into the folds of his cerebrum, disappearing into the valleys of his brain. From that moment on Odysseus had help. He had allies. He never actually heard voices, but nonetheless, he was convinced something was talking to him. Talking to him outside of Time. Talking to him in an unwritten language of river rhythms and cloud shapes and rustling leaves and cooing birds ANDtalking to him in a non-language, an intuitive transmission, much subtler than all of these. Sometimes he called it the Voice of God. Sometimes he called it the Voice of Life. But most times he didnt call it anything, he just listened. One day Leslie would refer to these voices as his bad gene. It was the best attempt she could make at conceptualizing this maddening phenomenon this scheme to hold out on her and drive her crazy. But her basic concept was so flawed that all her efforts to identify and destroy this bad gene were doomed from the start. For one thing, the concept was too materialistic, too pat, too literal. It was just another page torn out of pop mythology. Civilization had fooled her once again. Yes, like instinct and the marriage contract, the gene was just another buzz word another woeful attempt to stick a label on something that didnt exist. A nucleotide you might be able to locate. A gene? Forget it. Youd have better luck finding spark plugs in a Waldorf salad. A gene was not the description of an actual thing or even a specific location on a spaghetti-strand of chromosomes. A gene was the description of an end-result, like blue eyes or red hair or impulsive behavior. You might be able to isolate protein chains that would replicate certain physical char85
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acteristics, but try to find the gene for intelligence or intuition and you immediately saw what you were up against. Since no one understood which proteins facilitated the development of intelligence or intuition, no one knew what to look for. So, you say, they could have worked backwards to isolate the proteins that facilitate intelligence or intuition, and then theyd know what genes to look for. Therein was contained the leap of faith pandemic to the Sainthood of Science which made belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shine forth, by comparison, as a self-evident truth. Was it not easier to believe that a man died and came back to life than it was to believe that intelligence and intuition were coded in protein chemistry? What earthly reason would have led us to believe that this was so, except for the fact that the ant-hose of science happened, at the moment, to be pointed in that direction? Science and the media were sprinkling fish food on the water again and Leslie, poor Leslie, was the fish. It wasnt Leslies fault. She lived in a time when people were taught that what was real was what they could see or feel or touch. Amazing. For two million years, until the dawn of the Age of Agriculture, people understood that what was real was what lasted forever or almost forever. And the parts of life that came and went, including our bodies, were merely passing phenomena fleeting manifestations of the eternal real. What was real never died. What was not real did. You dont think corn had an evil agenda? Think again. Corn knew that individual corn plants didnt matter. Only the entire historical worldwide agenda of all corn really mattered. And corn sure wasnt telling the farmers about it. Not on your life. It needed consumers. And it needed slaves. SoLeslie inhabited a civilization devoid of the conceptual equipment required to understand the difference between what was real and what was not. If you couldnt see it on TV it must not exist. Anything else was, Just them Neo-Neoist kooks stirring up trouble again. Psycho-terrorists one and all. Thats why Leslie couldnt identify Odysseus voices. Her culture had failed to supply her with the mental sensors necessary to perceive them. Subtle and goofy as Odysseus voices were,
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at least they were real. They endured over vast epochs of Time. They could NOT be labeled and dismissed with a buzz word. And though the voices could in no way, shape, or form be described as a bad gene or any other kind of gene there was absolutely no doubt that Odysseus got them directly from his dad. So what do we call them? Non-physical transmissions of a manner of listening to life which pass from father to son unless civilization succeeds in disrupting them? What does that mean? Male Soul? Careful. Dont fall into that trap. These things are not that easy to understand. They do not lend themselves to description in florid phrases or reduction to buzz words. What can be established is that the essential transmissions between father and son transpired entirely on a non-physical level a realm of being and knowing, not talking. All of them, that is, except for the basketball sneaker. A few weeks before circumstances drove Apollo out of Odysseus life forever he presented his son with a gold-plated basketball sneaker and told him, Dont ever lose this. Its prehistoric. REALLY prehistoric. If the wrong people get their hands on it awful things could happen. OK dad. The divorce court judge in Broward County Florida awarded the gold-plated shoe to Leslie on the grounds that it represented the secret source of Odysseus power, and without it neither she, nor the courts, would ever be able to control the man. She pursed her lips and beamed with triumph when she heard the verdict. He felt like his stomach had been pulled out his mouth. Wasnt it bad enough that she took his kids away from him? Wasnt it bad enough that she took the house and the cars and the money? She had to make off with his dads gold-plated basketball sneaker too? Was there no end to her craving? That was the final blow. Odysseus staggered out of the courtroom and hopped a bus to Pensacola. He snuck into the Naval Air Station, stole an F14, and flew southwest as fast as his afterburners would burn. He ran out of gas over Nicaragua, dumped the plane into the maw of a smoking volcano, and parachuted into a coffee field
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just across the border in Costa Rica where he applied for, and was awarded, Psychological Asylum. Odysseus dyed his hair black, assumed the name of Juan Robalo, and spent two years guiding snook fishermen on the rivers and marshes of the soggy Caribbean coast. For practical reasons he pretended to speak no English. His Spanish was faltering, but he got along great with the monkeys and ferns. His natural predisposition for learning plant languages took a quantum leap living in a rainforest, immersed in the ceaseless chatter of mahogany and orchids and Venus fly-traps and the ubiquitous ferns. The ferns liked to play hide-and-seek, which when you think about it since they couldnt go anywhere could get pretty boring. After a few months of humoring them on his offdays, when it was raining too hard to fish, Odysseus finally got it, and the game became anything but boring. The ferns, as it turned out, were playing hide-and-seek in TIME! The ferns would hide, and then one of them would have to guess where the others were, and WHAT they were, in past or future biological incarnations. Astounding! It was New Age psychic past-life drivel rendered in the context of historical, genetic realities. Life on earth had leap-frogged from one form to another and, because of the essential sloppiness of the venture, bits of DNA were strewn all over Time and creation. Ferns contained watermelon DNA. Birds contained dinosaur DNA. Human DNA contained the coding instructions to manufacture the scales for butterfly wings! If a fern mutated into a melon it could generate vines. If a bird grew twenty feet high at the shoulder, its bone structure would adapt to support the weight. If humans suddenly sprouted wing-flaps, the scales to sheath them would emerge automatically. Occams Razor, sciences simple solution, was nowhere to be found in this genetic hodge podge. In medical school Odysseus instructors had categorized the situation as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny two buzz words connected by a verb. But by playing hide-and-seek with the ferns, Odysseus came to appreciate the awesome implications of this popularly ignored reality. Every living thing had a very real biological past88

life and future-life. There was a real reason why some people moved through supermarkets like iguanas. Why whales retained remnants of their hind legs. Why chimpanzee DNA was 98% identical to human DNA. Not just genetically, but electrically, psychically, and ultimately, spiritually, all life was connected to all other life. The human embryo emerged in the womb as a fish a long tail with a mouth and gill arches. Soon paddle-shaped fins formed. We became salamanders as the fins morphed into webbed hands and feet. Nostrils appeared as the gills transformed into a jaw and inner ear. Our slit-pupiled eyes migrated forward and our mouth arched with the tongue cleft of a lizard. Then slick downy hair sprouted all over our skin. Huge heads grew larger and our tails withered away as we transformed into apes. Finally, our skulls grew too large to be welcome in mommys tummy, so we broke water and gushed out of our aquatic gestation pond to begin the air-breathing portion of our lives. But that was just the physical description. What about the electric and psychic and spiritual parts? Did anyone believe you could be a fish or a salamander without thinking like a fish or a salamander? Did anyone actually believe that, though you passed through those forms in the womb, once you were born it was all over youd left all that behind? Of course they did. It was civilizations essential agenda to convince us of that. Man was the crown of creation and every other living thing was just an unconscious object. New Age seers would catch people up on their past lives as Indian Princesses or Knights of the Round Table, but they skipped over the part about being salamanders and turkeys. Odysseus was stunned. He was a doctor, a student of biology, and he had never made the connection. It made so much sense it was frightening. All of us were heirs to very real psycho-biological legacies. And if he hadnt hung out with the ferns, he never would have put it together. The monkeys were bored. They knew all that already. They just wanted to drive the boat. They were fascinated by all kinds of machinery and finally struck a bargain with Odysseus that
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they would repair the broken fishing tackle, if he would give them driving lessons twice a week. Little did he suspect. By the time Mr. Machettis boyz traced him to the snook fishing lodge in Costa Rica, Odysseus had another psychic bullet loaded in the empty chamber between his ears. He had committed himself to the search for the legendary Pacific island of Pulotu. The ferns had told him all about the place. They visited it regularly, they said every hundred thousand years or so. They reckoned it was just a few thousand miles southwest of Costa Rica and they claimed that, on Pulotu, Odysseus would be able to discover the secret of life on earth. And, by the way, armed with that information, the world would become his oyster. He could win back the affection of his kids who had been brainwashed by Leslie to fear and mistrust him. He could raise enough money to pay off his back child support, retrieve his gold-plated basketball sneaker, refund the damage on the downed F-14 the Navy was still really pissed off about that one and even outfit a yacht with Thai dancing girls and sail to Monaco if he wanted. The ferns swooned with superlatives, fluttering their leathery fingers in the air, whenever they spoke about Pulotu. They never called it Pulotu, of course. They called it the Emerald Island. Odysseus deduced the official name by corresponding with libraries in San Francisco and Boston and describing the general parameters of the place. The librarians cheerfully responded to his inquiries by sending him articles and photocopies of the most recent scientific literature on this most exceptional island. Pulotu was its name an ancient name echoing through the centuries like an oral artifact whispering to us from the pre-dawn of human history. That would be about 8000 years, thought Odysseus. No wonder the ferns didnt know what to call it. They probably hadnt been back for a psychic visit in a lot longer than that. PulotuImputed by some to be a remnant of the lost continent of Mu, by others to be the gall stone of Maui, by others still, to be a wart on the behind of the Great Toad of Tonga. But one thing was certain. Poetry had as much to do
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with the existence of this atoll as did geology. Something strange was happening out there, and probably always had been. Pulotu was reputed to have the strangest climate on earth. Half of the year it was desert, and half of the year it was mountains like a sand dune that got an annual erection or something. It certainly had scads of computer-cloistered geologists creaming in their pants as they hypothesized bizarre theories about mineral matrix behavior and volcanic ejaculation, which speculations were published annually in dozens of scientific journals. All the information that Odysseus had been able to harvest about Pulotu depicted it as a semi-dormant volcano, rimmed with coral reefs, girdled by a perpetual cloud belt. But most remarkable was the detailed description of a rare geological phenomenon: Pulotu was crowned by an uncharacteristically flat plain of evaporated mineral salts which scientists postulated had been thrust from below sea level to above cloud level by volcanic upheaval. Hold the phone! A flat plain? Above cloud level? Pool Table of the Titans? Landing Strip of the Gods? Fantastic! If the Space Shuttle could be put to bed on a dry lake, Odysseus was certain that nosed into the trade winds, hovering over 300 yards of salt flats he could bring a Piper Cub down on Pulotu as gently as a feather on a mattress. So when a pock-faced fisherman pulled a Beretta from under his rain parka and began quizzing him about molds and fungi, Odysseus knew just what to do. He steered the boat under a low-slung cypress where a horde of monkeys jumped on the hit man. They bit his face and jostled him overboard into the brown murky water. Odysseus told the monkeys they could keep the boat, and the motor, if they dropped him off at a landing strip upriver. That night he stole a plane and flew southwest to the Galapagos. Two weeks later, on a bright, sunny morning, with his gas gauge twitching near empty, he circled a dark patch of Pacific Ocean at the exact GPS satellite coordinates for the island of Pulotu. He circled and circled. Occasional puffball clouds swam by beneath him, punctuating a seamless crinkled blue-vinyl fabric
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of wave tops that stretched, in every direction, to the horizon. In light of all the scientific conjecture and hypothetical hyperbole, in light of the journal reports and line graphs and columns upon columns of mathematical data, in light of the geological records, the historical detail, the psychic evidence offered by the ferns themselves, it had never once occurred to Odysseus that Pulotu might not, in fact, BE THERE. Yes, folks. Just like instinct and the atom and the gene, civilization was playing one of its none-too-obvious tricks again. Pipe-smoking professors at Harvard and Columbia had acquired tenured sinecures on the basis of their outstanding contributions to a field of inquiry which DID NOT EXIST. The chance that Odysseus was about to get a good nights sleep that would last FOREVER, was increasing astronomically with every twitch of the needle on his gas gauge. The engine sputtered. He dove for his brief case with both hands, throwing aeronautical maps all over the cockpit.
Chapter Five
ON A HILLTOP in the Berkshire Mountains in a room with no windows, one floor above the nurses station in the Mother Nature Day Care Center, 37 teenagers sat at school desks facing a wall-sized video terminal. They were a mixed group: boys and girls; black and white and brown; Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic and African. A history lesson was in progress and images of colonial America flashed across the video screen: clipper ships smashing through heavy seas, fur traders bargaining with indians, oxen plowing fields. In the early 1600s King James chartered the Plymouth Company for the purpose of planting, ruling and governing New England in America, said the video narrator. The voice,
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though of female timbre, sounded as if it had been patched together from pre-recorded words that had been reassembled into sentences at a later date. The word groupings, though human, sounded clipped, atonal, erratic and mechanical, like the computer-sequenced numbers spit out by an automated phone system. The 37 listeners were unfazed by the erratic tonal qualities of this voice; clearly they had been absorbing its instruction for a long long time. Even though no adult instructor was present, the teens appeared attentive and focused and no one was reading teen fashion magazines or making animal noises. Paper, pencils and books were conspicuously absent from this classroom. Since the students were unable to take notes it was obvious that lessons must be repeated until they were committed to memory. This Plymouth Company, sister of the Hudson Bay Company, was your progenitor, your first foothold in the New WorldAnd you can see from the language of the charter how much more clearly and openly you were able to conduct your rule in the age of kings. Monarchs and corporations had a practical sense of each others purpose. Over millennia of conditioning, peasants had been taught to believe that the monarch was the vehicle of divine authority. He leased this divine authority to you, his corporation, his earthly agent for a price. You are the ones who concerned yourselves with the messy business of trade and production. You paid the king a tax for this privilege of making him money. Your job in the New World, India, Africa and Asia was not only to conduct commerce, it was to rule and govern as the charter says an unequivocal mandate In modern America your mission to rule and govern is the same, but your mandate, though understood by elected government, must remain concealed from the public at large. Your work will proceed more smoothly the more it is cloaked in the banner of free choice and democracy. The more popular appeal your projects seem to enjoy, the greater the likelihood of your success. And thats why we dont leave popular appeal up to the populus. Can anyone suggest a way to manufacture popular appeal?
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Several hands shot up. Margaret. Advertising, said a freckle-face with a red ponytail. Very good. Please tell us more, said the mechanical female voice. Its important for our subsidiaries to maintain a constant stream of advertising in media for two, actually three, reasons. One, our benign presence will, by repeated exposure, become a fixture in the national mental landscape. People will see our corporate names and logos everywhere and simply accept that we are solid and reliable. Two, should any news editor contemplate running an investigative report unflattering to our corporate image he may do so only at the risk of losing vast advertising revenues, not just from one of our subsidiaries, but from all of them. Three, advertising is a tax-deductible expense. So, in lieu of us paying taxes, American taxpayers are subsidizing us to saturate their minds with our products, our point of view our propaganda, if you will. They must want us to do it. Why else would their elected government allow us to skip out on paying taxes and instead, spend the money on advertising? They get free TV. We get uninhibited access to their minds. And how does this affect our competitors? The small businessman or woman? Margarets ponytail twitched with a ripple of eagerness as if she had been anticipating this question. The family farm, family restaurant, family hardware store, are going the way of the buffalo. Since we are drawing revenue from so many different sources we can spend much more on advertising than they can. They cannot compete with our sheer media presence. Plus we deal in volume so we can hire cheap workers part-time, not pay them any healthcare benefits, and undercut the average family farmer or businessman or restauranteur. And how do you feel about this Margaret? The girl compressed her ripe lips, thinking it through, weighing her words. Well, I suppose its sad in a way. No doubt were displacing some lives. But business is tough. It has to be. Were not running a welfare system hereAnd how sorry
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am I supposed to feel for stupid people? They talk about freedom and opportunity and justice all the drivel they learned in grade school. They elect politicians who fart up the airwaves with the same nonsense, while right in front of their faces, visible to the naked eye, we and our sisters are buying up everything in sight and bringing it under our control under our authority to rule and govern. The food they eat, the products they consume, the ideas they think they all come from us. Its a modern plantation systemSo I feel sad for them. I do. But I also feel very lucky to be going to this school with my brothers and sisters, and with you. Thats how I really feel. I dont know how else I would find out the truth. And how can anyone survive without knowing the truth? Margaret stroked her ponytail and pulled it forward over her shoulder, dissipating a flicker of discomfort. She hated these questions about how she felt. Couldnt see the point of them. Would never get used to them, she supposed. But they must have some deep purpose or they would not be asked. Emotions were just bumps in the road. She stopped playing with her hair and smiled at the video screen. It seemed, somehow, strangely, to smile back. Red-haired, freckle-faced, Margaret was not a clone or a robot spitting back memorized texts. She was alert and confident and attractive, openly competitive, and clearly well on her way to somewhere. She was a budding super star, and even the video screen seemed to sense this truth about her at some sub-atomic level as if their energy fields overlapped in a queer zone where organic and inorganic molecules lose their individuality and resonate as one. An adult observer might have detected an eerie subliminal vibration permeating the room sort of a psychic tuning fork humming just beneath the threshold of human hearing a subtle but palpable resonance which seemed to nourish and sustain the mental connection between the teenage humans and the talking video screen. But no adult was present. This mind meld was little different than the quasi-telepathic link cultivated between an elephant and his trainer, or a hunting dog and his master where, although certain signals are given, much of the communication seems to transpire on an intuitive
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level. Human and elephant or human and dog coordinating as one. The only odd thing about this relationship was that a psychic connection had been manufactured between 37 humans and a teaching machine a machine that was not just spitting out prerecorded data but which actually seemed responsive to the shifting mental associations conjured up by these lively teenagers. Any one of the 37 students, if asked about this phenomenon, would have been confused by the question. How could a circumstance so incidental and commonplace as their relationship with a teaching machine emerge as an item of scrutiny? The mind melding which occurred amongst all of them and their instructor seemed vastly less important than whether they would have to eat broccoli tonight or whether they would be permitted to take the canoes across the lake for a camp out. It would strike them as a dumb question. One that simply would not trigger a blip on the radar screen of their teenage consciousness. Very good Margaret. Can anyone give an example of how we have successfully controlled the media through advertising?.Roberto? The Newshour, said a gold-complexioned boy with black curls tangled below his ears, sporting a numbered soccer jersey. What about The Newshour? When The Newshour ran a segment called Hungry for Profit which presented a wildly critical view of how we develop Third World economies our Gulf-Eastern subsidiary withdrew its sponsorship not just for that segment, but for the entire series of nightly news broadcasts. Our corporate spokesman called the report un-American and said the company would not support a news organization that chose to undermine our national goals of expediting Free Trade and expanding the global economy. Since Gulf-Eastern was one of only two sponsors for the show, The Newshour had to scramble to sign another sponsor in order to stay on the air. The Newshour, in fact, all the major networks, have never again dared to air such a nosy investigative report about our transnational activities. 37 students clapped and cheered.
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Yes, its quite simple really. Not much different than training a dog, said the mechanical voice. And how do you feel about this Roberto? His sparkling eyes narrowed as he collected his thoughts. Well, the Newshour can run any kind of programming it wants to, but it cant do it with our money. We have to draw the line at that. If they want to embarrass our overseas operations let them do it with someone elses money if they can find it. Can they find it? Its becoming almost impossible. Our sister organizations, even our competitors, know whats at stake. Nothing could hurt us more than a media feeding frenzy focused on the ethics and practices of transnational corporations. Ethics my burning behind. The class tittered. Let them gossip about Hollywood scandals and presidential affairs, and leave us alone. Anyway, no one would come out on top. Well all know that. None of us want to bankroll that kind of fiasco. Very good Roberto. The psychic tuning fork hummed once again, just beneath the threshold of human hearing yet somehow well within subliminal range, effecting a silence which was more dynamic and vital than mere silence could ever be. Then it passed. Can anyone else give us an example of how we manufacture public opinion? The Clean Air Act, said an ample black girl with eyes set as far apart as headlights, her hair braided like miniature rows of corn sprouting above her earth-toned, van-sized dashiki. Tell us more, Robin. When leftists tried to pressure Congress into passing clean air legislation our educational think tanks in Washington launched an offensive. They sent emissaries to local libraries and Boy Scout groups across the country warning them that their communities would lose jobs if these clean air standards were enacted into law. The proposed legislation was fragmented by public pressure and passed only in a diluted form. And why is that important to you? If we had to pay the costs of reducing our pollution our profits would suffer enormously. What basic principle has Robin identified? Class?
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Externalize costs, internalize profits, boomed the 37, as if they were shouting their high school fight-song at a pep rally. And how do you feel about these environmental issues Robin? WellIf governments choose to tax us, and if people wish to participate in the economic engines we create for them, they should expect to pay part of the costs of these operations. Its only fair. They cant expect us to give them jobs and cheap consumer goods and tax revenue, and have us pick up the tab for environmental impact too. Whose job is it to clean up the environment? Government! boomed the class. Very good. Anyone else? Political contributions, said a thin-limbed, soft-spoken oriental boy wearing a Beethoven T-shirt. Go ahead Ping. Politicians are our unofficial spokespersons. They have been trained, over centuries, to understand the fact that whats good for corporations is good for America. We must always remember to give equal campaign contributions to both political parties. That way, no matter who gets elected, they owe us. Also, if either party attempts to pass legislation that is harmful to our goals, we will withdraw our contributions. Its a simple safety feature and well worth the expense. Politicians are our cheapest form of social engineering. For a few thousand bucks contributed to their war chests theyll generally vote our way on the House or Senate floor. An advertising campaign can run into the millions. Very true. And how do social issues fit into our political landscape? Not at all. Social issues are a smokescreen to mask economic issues. Politics is all about money and it is only about money. We do not take sides on social issues. Abortion, anti-abortion, it means nothing to us. The only question we want answered is: Who gets the money? Class? Who gets the money! And how do you feel about this arrangement, Ping?
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He massaged an ear lobe between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes I feel sorry for these people the American people. Theyre so deluded. They beat their breasts at the rest of the world talking about how great it is to live in a democracy, but the instant they punch a time clock at one of our factories their civil rights are instantly suspended. They have no rights to free speech or assembly when theyre on the job. They dont own anything at the plant and they cant set their own schedules. They dont seem to understand that small farmers, tradesmen and small businessmen still inhabit a life-style created by the so-called Founding Fathers one where civil rights are preserved on the job as well as at home. And they dont seem to understand that on a daily basis, as we take over more and more of the economy, these civil rights are being eliminated. Its almost impossible to comprehend how miserably the school system has failed to educate them. Theyre living a lie and will fight to the death to maintain itAnd then, whenever theres a problem, they blame it on the government. The government this or the government that, without ever realizing who the government works for. I cant believe they dont see whats going on. They vote for the most charming, most handsome candidate, and then, when their democratically elected official walks out onto the House or Senate floor, he votes the way we want him to. Its stunning. Its almost impossible to believe. I guess thats how I feel about it. Just simply incredulous. Anyone else?Billy? I used to have nightmares about it, said a tall boy with a wispy blond mustache and cauliflower ears. His arms were tanned from paddling a canoe and scuffed from picking wild blackberries. I used to wake up at night worrying that we knew too much, that someone would find out, that the whole thing would collapse, and some crazy mad people would come get us. But that was years ago. I finally realized American society is naturally schizophrenic. It inhabits a political landscape of corporate feudalism, but it thinks it lives in a democracy. Thats what the people want to believe so thats what they believe. If you tell an American hes a vassal of corporate feudalism hell
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probably shoot you. They dont want to hear it. Why spoil their dream? Good. And what should we do to preserve our perceptual advantage? Perceptual advantage? said Billy, twisting the wispy threads of his adolescent mustache, clearly not yet jaded by the miracle of puberty. Maybe thats too vague, said the mechanical voice. I guess what Im trying to ask is: how do we keep them confused? How do we keep them asking the wrong questions and throwing their spears in the wrong direction?How bout your sister? A shy girl built like a sapling with wispy curls swirling across her forehead like golden leaf clusters spoke up. Well, the general population looks to the entertainment industry, rather than genuine political reform, for relief from its ennui. Entertainment is the opiate of the masses. They all idolize fame. They want to believe that movie stars and super models are really normal people, just like them instead of the greedy, ambitious, egodriven freaks they have to become in order to succeed in those professions. Another fantastic American mythAnyway, the entertainment industry has been one of our greatest allies. When people stopped believing in church they started believing in Hollywood. Its fine. It works. Theyre happy with their on screen and off screen fantasies. Plus it costs a lot of money to make a film. Its a rich persons game. And rich people dont advocate revolution or any other kind of social change that might cost them money or redistribute income more equitably. Yes, everything youre saying is true and important. Entertainment is a massive diversion from reality. Books and films that are critical of the excesses of capitalism rarely get published or produced, and never get promoted or distributed. We control the media and distribution systems. Thanks to Hollywood the average American peon believes he lives in a free country without realizing youre only free in America if youve got moneyBut Im trying to get at something else hereLet me approach this from a different angle. Its really much simpler than youre making it. Who is our enemy? Government.
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And how do we continue to influence the public to blame its problems on the government and not on us? Probably by doing the same things weve been doing. Which are? Wellwe should keep sponsoring our right wing radio buffoons and Washington think tanks to broadcast the message that government is bad and freedom is good. Since Americans dont know what freedom is they will never be able to penetrate the deception. They dont understand that, media propaganda to the contrary, the average Third World resident enjoys more day to day, hour to hour, freedom than an average American can even imagine. Freedom from debt. Freedom from stress. Freedom from taxes. Freedom from bombardment by media propaganda. Abundant home-grown food. A genuine community to sustain them. Plus, there are no cops out there. Poor countries dont have the money to pay police. People have to sort out problems between themselvesTo believe that everyone else in the world is suffering because they dont have the good fortune to live under the American corporate system is just another selfdeluded American myth Good. Go on. But what Americans can be persuaded to do is to trivialize government to the point where it becomes hobbled and ineffectual. They gloat over the latest military scandal or presidential indiscretion while we quietly keep on driving small businessmen into bankruptcy, buying up more and more farms more and more of the means of production and distribution taking over the country, the world. Free Trade is us. Let them focus their ill will on the government, and leave us alone to do our work. OK. Thats good Penny. Thats all I wanted to drag out of you. The video screen flashed an image of a finely detailed, slowly spinning, globe of the earth. The students smiled at each other and perked up. They knew what was coming. The mechanical voice seemed to draw an etheric breath, inhaling, as it were, the 37 energy fields generated by these 37 very lively, very alert, very human teenagers. Then it clapped its pre-recorded hands and broke into the cheery upbeat voice of a self101
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improvement seminar saleswoman. Class! What do we want to know? Who gets the money? When everyone is free Rich people and corporations are more free. When everyone is equal Rich people and corporations are more equal. Why? Because we have the money to educate our children and finance our ventures and squeeze out our competitors. Free Trade? Free Trade means the freedom for rich people and corporations to operate unrestricted by government anywhere on the planet, with no commitment to uphold minimum wages, environmental or safety standards. Government? Government is the enemy! Democracy? Democracy is for dreamers! The machine voice purred with feminine approval. Class dismissed.
Chapter Six
meanwhilein a parallel universeback in Chicago CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI stood in the sunlight with one foot propped on the window sill cleaning his .44 Magnum placing the oiled parts on the cover of a TIME magazine that Ramon had just lifted from the barber shop downstairs. Cha Cha was humming a Polka melody his grandma had taught him buh BAH, buh BAH, buh BAH BAH an ancient song from the steppes of Europe, about a little girl who had lost her geese in the woods and was afraid to come home and afraid not to.
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Ramon was plopped sideways on a shredded sofa that looked like moss dripping from whale baleen. He bounced one leg fitfully over the arm rest, twirling his gold-plated basketball sneaker in his hands, and said, Ya know. I brought you that magazine so I could read to you about the Drug Wars in South America. He jerked the collar of his leather vest, smoothing a kink in the Young Lords street gang emblem sewn across the back. This new drug they call the Boot makes crack sound like aspirin. Ramon dusted some green sofa fluff off his arms as if clearing the ground, making lots of room for more pubescent hairs to sprout. Ramon was thirteen going on thirty, Information Minister for the baddest Mexican street gang in Chicago. But every night he got down on his knees and prayed to God the Father to throw open the faucets on his teenage growth spurt so he could grow big fast and get laid. There aint no drug war in South America, said Cha Cha. The only drug war is right hereBut thanks for bringing me the magazine Ramon. That was very thoughtful of you. He laid an oil-slick cartridge clip on the cover, right across a blurred, featureless human face captioned with the words: Who Is The Reaper? Come on Cha Cha. You cant read, you never watch TV, anything that happens south of Cermak Road you act like it happened in Bolivia. Thats why you gave me this job in the first place. So I could find things out for you. But Cha Cha wasnt listening. He was peering out the window of their office on the seventh floor of the Carrini Green housing project on the near north side of Chicago, watching the clogged traffic crawl along Division Street. Some girls from the preschool in the basement were playing jump-rope on the sidewalk. The boys had erected a pyramid of old newspapers and empty wine bottles against a chain link fence and were prying up chunks of the sidewalk and hurling them at the bottles. What a great location for a slum high-rise, thought Cha Cha. It even had a great name. Carrini Green. More than one tipsy conventioneer had stumbled up to the junkies leaning against the buildings and asked where the park was. A few blocks to the east you had the elegant shopping and fine dining of Michigan
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Avenue and the Magnificent Mile: Saks, Bonwit Teller, the Drake Hotel. You could wander a few blocks south to the swank nightclubs of Rush Street or stroll north into the trendy folkculture of Wells Street and the Second City. And right in the middle of it all you had an infestation of glass and steel termite mounds landscaped with wall-to-wall cement that comprised the worlds premiere housing project. Carrini Green. A donut that was all hole. A pyramid made of feathers. A platter of scrambled statistics served up by some University of Chicago sociologists who convinced the world they had created the answer to affordable housing. And while they drank tea and read books, comfortably retired on the pensions awarded for their magnificent contributions to human knowledge, armed robbers prowled the stair wells of their creation by day, while uniformed cops cowered in the entrance foyers at street level talking about where they were going to get drunk when they got off work. Cotton-haired grannies no longer flew their wet laundry out the windows because their clothes would be blown full of bullet holes during gangland target practice. Repairmen from the phone company would only enter the building in pairs one outfitted with his tool belt bulging with pliers and screwdrivers; the other covering him with a machine gun. A couple shots ricocheted off the walls of the adjoining building and Cha Cha craned his neck to see where they came from. Far below him a husky black mama hen in a billowy trench coat fluttered in circles, flapping her arms, shooing the pre-schoolers back into the basement. The kids, accustomed to hearing gunshots, grumbled about having recess cut short. Cha Cha saw a limousine pull up to the curb seven stories below. He thumped Ramons boot with his knuckle. Thats them. They here. Ramon dropped the gold-plated basketball sneaker, bolted to the window, and looked down at the black stretch Lincoln. Out of state plates, he said as Cha Cha jammed the parts of his gun together. Vamanos, said Cha Cha, watching Ramon check the clip on his .22 pistol. And dont do anything nervy with that gun.
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Ramon shook his head and muttered. who does he think he istreating me likeno respect They burst out the fire door at street level and shoved through a flock of schoolgirls clutching notebooks to their chests, scattering them like pigeons. In a few strides they reached the limo where a tall African in a Panama hat held the rear door open for them. Entrez vous, mon. Hmmm. Speaking French with a Jamaican accent. High times, thought Ramon, as the two brothers slid onto the leather seat next to a sausage-jowled black man wearing gemstone rings on every finger. The chauffeur closed the door. Cha Chas gaze moved from the sparkling fingers to the bratwurst smile. Soyou must be The Reaper. The car lurched forward into pinball traffic. And you must be Cha Cha Lobotomowski. The only Polish African president of a Mexican street gang anywhere in the world. Dont believe it, said Ramon. Hes really Puerto Rican. My brother, Ramon. said Cha Cha. My pleasure gentlemen, said the Jamaican. Some refreshments? His fat finger jabbed a button that opened a teak panel revealing a liquor cabinet stocked with every drink and drug known to mankind. Ill have a Coke, said Cha Cha. Some coke? No thanks. Have you tried the Boot? Just a Coke. Same for me, said Ramon. The Reaper served the drinks and sunk into his pillowy seat. Soyou must have a pretty good idea why Im here. I have a pretty good idea, said Cha Cha, eyes locked on the Jamaican. Cha Cha. Nice name. Your parents named you after a dance. What kind of dance? Dance of Life.
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Or Dance of Death? Same thing, said Cha Cha as he glanced over the back seat at the blue car following them. One thing is for sure hombre. We aint letting you guys deal Boot in our neighborhood. We got enough problems already. The Jamaican shook his head and laughed. You punks from Chicago are really something. Time was, you had the most corrupt judges and the least corrupt gangs anywhere in the country. And now? Everyone else is going crazy over the Boot. Cant get enough. And you dont wanna do business? Nope. You get 25%. Dont care about the money. You dont care about the money? Nope. I seeWell maybe youll care about thisJust suppose somebody pockets a cop. And this cop gets the bright inspiration to clean you and the rest of the Young Lords off the streets. Then you know what happens? Yeah. What? You guys outta Miami sashay into our neighborhoods with no resistance and make things worse than they are. Smart boy. Cha Cha lowered his drink between his legs and stared at the fizz. So you want to deal? How bout 30%? No deal. The Reaper blew a razzberry through his lips. What I dont get if you didnt want to deal why did you want to meet me?You know the rules. You seen my face. Nobody sees my face. I never wanted to meet you. I wanted to meet the bent cops you got following us in the blue car. Cha Cha threw his coke in the Reapers eyes. Ramon kicked open the limo door. The startled chauffeur jammed his brakes and the boys hit the pavement. They slithered behind some parked
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cars as the blue car squealed to a stop. Cha Cha pointed to an alley. Ramon nodded. Suddenly, inexplicably, Ramon stuck his head up and shouted, Hey, dogbrains. You workin for the Jamaican, you dont got long to live! The cop riding shotgun raised a machine pistol to the window. The blue car barked a torrent of liquid fire that punched Ramons face back through the boarded entry of an abandoned building, scattering junkies like panicked rats. Then, like the heavy metal tail of a giant scorpion, the bullets gouged an arc on the sidewalk, sweeping toward Cha Cha. Three minutes later Cha Cha plunged, shot and bleeding, through the doors of a Burger King taking the door, three tables, and eight cheese whoppers down with him. His face bounced hard off the tile and the last words the stunned burgerheads heard him say were, Jesus Ramon! Whats grandma gonna say now?Whats she gonna say NOW!
Chapter Seven
THE REST OF THE world knows about this scam, continued the drugged man, but they also know something else. They sit back on their little tropical island and one day a U.S. aircraft carrier pulls into port. Its enormous, its a floating island, theyve never seen another man-made object that big. Or theyre sitting around eating goat meat in their dusty desert town when one of the F-14s from that carrier, parked 200 miles away, flies overhead breaking the sky open with a sonic boom, scattering their sheep and chickens. They know they cant fight this. They want to be on the same side as this global military presence that could squash them like a bug So they make a deal with us. Theyll sell our corporations tin or copper or oil at a pitifully low price, but only if our
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government agrees to defend this small nation from incursions by its neighbors or its revolutionaries. Our government brings stability to the region U.S. soldiers will sacrifice their lives if duty requires it so that our corporations can come in and cart off minerals and oil at slave labor rates, then turn around and sell them to us as washing machines and gasoline. We pay, with our lives and with a lifetime of labor, to be brainwashed into buying all this garbage. This we call capitalism. This we call Free Trade. Its a joke. Its not capitalism. Its not a free market. Its capitalism with cannons. Free Trade thats only free if youre rich. And we wonder why large portions of the earths population are suspicious of us, or outright hate us, or want to bomb our embassies or terrorize Washington and New York. Were dupes. Patsies. What comes out of our mouths about freedom and democracy has nothing to do with how our corporations exploit people and resources abroad. Theyre an embarrassment to American ideals. An outrageLet the corporations pay the military costs of defending their foreign interests. That removes the blame from we, the people, and forces them to pay the true costs of their profits. Its the old corporate scam, externalize costs, internalize profits. Were not out there defending freedom and democracy. Were out there subjugating foreign populations into working for our corporations. Whats the point? said Shoebridge, foamy white hairs oozing out of his nose as if his brain was dripping, rocking back and forth in his chair like an imbecile, suppressing the urge to jam his toes in his mouth. His ears, thank God, were filtering out this anarchist drivel, but that just left him wondering why this interrogation was going so poorly. Most of the suspects he had questioned under truth serum were at least guilty of something. He was sure that was true in this case too everyone who breathed air was guilty of something. But the drugged man simply didnt seem to feel guilty about anything. Certainly he was holding something back, but whatever it was he did not feel guilty enough about it that he needed to blurt it out to unburden his soul otherwise the serum would be doing its job. Very strange. There was something very very wrong here.
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And furthermore, now that they were back on American soil why hadnt police authorities been brought in? If a crime had been committed, a simple theft, there were plenty of detectives who could handle it. Did his employers feel that the wheels of justice would move too slowly? Or did they themselves have something they didnt want exposed to public scrutiny? Trade secrets? Security information? About a day care center? An abused childrens shelter? It didnt make sense. Not that Shoebridge wanted to be pulled off the case. Finally he had Rich Monk right where he wanted him on the hot seat. Finally he could penetrate the source of the madness that had plagued him for three decades. If, indeed, this was Rich Monk. But of course it had to be. Who else could it be? This was the manBut he was so boring and uncharismatic. Such a disappointment. Such an unworthy foe. Who in his right mind would actually be moved to action by this pathetic leftist tirade? The point is, continued the drugged man, that ultimately corporations are supremely intelligent, non-human, living persons. Theyre the next stage of evolution. When theyve spread over the entire surface of the planet and have everything under their control theyll decide that humans are inefficient. That machines can do our jobs better and cheaper. Theyll stir us into a frenzy of racism and nationalism and sexism and encourage us to exterminate ourselves, and no one will ever think to point their spears in the right direction at global corporate monsters. Its happening right now! Look at all the strife between people that can actually be attributed to global markets downsizing, job loss, farm bankruptcies, massive corporate tax avoidance, disappearance of the middle class, the economic devastation which breeds divorce and broken families, a welfare policy that wont support intact families, ethnic and racial conflict, divide and conquer everyone competing with everyone else for a piece of pie thats only as big as bankers and brokers say it isBelieving in the Dow Jones Industrials is like believing in Zeus. The more workers who get laid off the higher the Dow climbs. And everyone is caught up in the myth that a healthy Dow is a healthy economy? Its an Orwellian nightmare. What about the file? snapped Shoebridge.
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The drugged man sighed and clamped his mouth shut. Wheres the file. What file? Dont be an ass. We know you took it. We got you on tape. The file is none of your business. At this point in my life the file is all of my business. Where is it? Mad buffaloes couldnt drag it out of me. Oh yeah. Well maybe some of the good doctors magic serum will. Shoebridge arched his eyes at the doctor, a signal to prepare another dose. It was time to get this nerd back on track. As the cold liquid trickled into his veins the drugged man drifted away, back to his island refuge, his South Sea sanctuary, his Third World time warp. If only he had never left. If only he had stayed in hiding. He could still be there in his little thatch hut, wading the reef at low tide, casting for barracuda and trevally and the occasional grouper. Cooking his meals over a wood fire as the tropical sunset torched the sky above the turquoise lagoon in a blaze of purple and yellow and pink. As far away as he could get from this madness. As far away as he could get. But he had come back. Because he had to find out. He couldnt live with himself any longer without knowing. He had tried that for more than a decade now and the cloying uncertainty wouldnt leave him alone. At first he had tried to reason with Madeleine, plead with her, but she dismissed him like a dog. Go drown yourself in jello, were her exact words. Youll never find out from me. Then she threatened to call the cops if he didnt leave. So he phoned his old friend Jerry from the underground days, the anti-war days, the draft dodging days. Jerry was happy to hear from his old compatriot and amazed to find out he had never surrendered and never been caught. Jerry had turned himself in long ago and done one years volunteer service as a conscientious objector, changing bedpans in the psycho ward of a state run mental hospital an unsavory job with the
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astounding benefit of allowing him to solve his Selective Service problem while keeping his moral principles intact. When his obligatory service was completed Jerry declined the opportunity to resume his studies at the university and furthermore refused to work for the government or any large corporation. He learned the plumbing trade, married a nurse who worked at the psycho ward, started his own business, lost everything in a divorce, endured two years without seeing his son as he fended off false allegations of child abuse lodged by his ex when she was trying to extort more money out of him, went to work for Roys Plumbing, and now, since his ex had run off with a coke dealer, he was raising his nine-year-old-son alone which was just fine with him. As the boy gobbled pizza and played video games the balding hippies hatched a plan. It could be fun. Another long-overdue political adventure. And how much risk could there be ripping off a day care center? Nothing compared to staring down Chicago cops in 68. Three days later while Jerry glanced in at his son, tangled like a sleeping stegosaurus in dinosaur-print bed sheets, the drugged man loaded Jerrys pickup with bolt cutters, a dart gun, a portable acetylene torch, and a couple crowbars. Jerry warned the baby-sitter not to invite her boyfriend over, and they drove across the state line from Albany, New York, arriving at the Mother Nature Day Care Center around 2 a.m. While Jerry waited in the truck, parked in a hollow behind a clump of trees, the drugged man cut the lock on the main gate, shot the Dobermans with tranquilizer darts, and torched his way into the records office. It took him half an hour to find the file much longer than he anticipated because it was hidden in a folder marked only with the vague initials MN. But no alarms sounded and no one stirred. The dogs were passed out and had barked no more than a scurrying raccoon would have warranted before the tranquilizers subdued them. He sprinted back to the truck and they slipped into the night, laughing insanely, like the time theyd handcuffed the hog to the police car. He wasnt worried about cops. If his hunch was right the Mother Nature Day Care Center had more to fear from cops than he did. And now, quite possibly, he had the proof.
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And these geeks Shoebridge and his doctor werent going to get the file back either. Not until they confirmed what he needed to know. He couldnt he wouldnt pass the rest of his life so callously ignored. As if fathers didnt matter at all. Not one bit at all. Wheres the file? said Shoebridge. Do you like fishing? I hate fishing. Thats funny. You seem to spend so much time doing it. I want to talk about the file. Youre fishing for the file. OK. Fine. Im fishing for the file. But youre not using the right bait. Whats the right bait? Despite his woozy, fragmented mindscape where memory particles floated around him like a snowstorm of chicken feathers, tickling his neck, blowing up his nose, spontaneously bursting into nostril-puckering, burnt-feather flames whenever his concentration lingered too long, the drugged man had Shoebridge hooked again. He was getting the hang of it. Just keep talking about other things. Anything. But keep tension on the line. Keep the rod tip high and dont worry about all the feathers. Bring him alongside the boat just like any other barracuda. Easy now, you toothy devil. Slow and easy. To catch a fish you have to think like a fish. So I should try thinking like you. No. You should try thinking like Rich Monk. Yeah? Tell me about itMister Monk. You cant imagine how wrong you are. You keep talking about an individual. A person. I keep talking about an idea. Whats your problem? Why cant you get it? I can arrest a person, I cant arrest an idea. Damn. Shoebridge pinched his tongue with his broken pencil then threw it on the desk. He was exhausted. The interview was not going well. He had nothing to show his employers. Plus that statement was just plain false. He could no longer arrest anyone apart from the fuss and bother of a citizens arrest. Cedric Shoebridge no longer worked for the FBI.
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The papers he had produced to extradite this man from Tonga were forged the cash was not. Officially he was now a rogue agent a former FBI officer breaking the law for money. The worst kind of cop. And though he knew he was not doing it for the money, he also knew his transgression would not be viewed that way in federal court. He had broken the law to bring this lawbreaker to justice and after all this time he felt entirely justified. He had crawled out on a limb for his employers and committed a crime for the first time in his life, for one reason only and that reason was laid out on a gurney in front of him. The only way he could get caught would be if his employer bungled it or wished to turn him in. Not likely. The think tank scholar who first contacted him had neglected to name his corporate client, but Cedric Shoebridge was no gumshoe. He needed to be sure he wasnt working for the mafia or the Republican National Committee or some other creepy group. He had begged a favor from Joe Lippman at the Washington Post because sometimes newsmen can cross enemy territory more secretly than cops. While Shoebridge was adrift at sea eating raw tuna in Tonga, Lippman discovered that the think tank rep had his credit card expenses automatically billed to a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the Mega National Corporation. Mega National was thoroughly reputable a nation unto itself. A mammoth global presence like ants and beetles burrowing across property lines and organizing its colonies. A nation without borders which had offices and holdings in virtually every country on earth. It would be easier to list what Mega National did not own than what it did own. Whether you were in the market for health food or jet aircraft Mega National was there. When a call girl took a credit card Mega National got a piece of the interest. Even if she took cash, some item of her apparel or cosmetics trickled a few coins into the corporate ledgers. Mega National had a piece of everything! And best of all, it was almost invisible. Few people knew it existed, yet it was everywhere invested in everything. Even the executives at Mega National specialists in targeted fields were incapable of comprehending the spectacular reach of the legal organism
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they worked for. Who would have thought one entity could own trucking companies and mines and mills and hotels and restaurants and banks and insurance companies and TV stations and farms and defense plants and chemical factories, and even a day care center? Anti-trust legislation was severely crippled in trying to prevent one company from dominating one industry, but it had no capacity at all to prevent one company from dominating a hundred linked industries using the profits from one sector to squash the competition in another. How could this be? For the simple reason that the details of ownership of these subsidiaries within subsidiaries were such a goulash of holding companies and foreign accounts that no mere human could ever unravel the intricacies and discover the truth. No one except Rich Monk. When anyone in the western world sat down to breakfast they drank coffee that came through the Mega National distribution system, they sat on a chair that was produced from its woods and metals, they ate cereal and fruit that came from its agri-holdings, they listened to radio or TV, or read a newspaper that it owned; they drove to work in a car fabricated from its minerals and plastics, which car was financed through its banks. Even its payroll checks were printed on its own paper. Mega National was the living incarnation of transnational feudalism, a global plantation system it lent you the money to buy its stuff, as long as you went to work on its plantation. Years ago a rumor had surfaced about an international conspiracy of men who got together periodically to decide the direction of the world economy the Illuminati, they were called. Mega National loved the rumor and did everything possible encourage it, for the fact was that no group of men, anywhere on earth, was even remotely aware of what this company was up to and thats how it liked it. No Chief Executive Officer could be fired, no Chairman of the Board could be eliminated, whose departure would have any effect on the global corporate agenda. Human individuals worked for Mega National, but they were as replaceable as car parts. No single one of them was of any particular importance. This obvious absence of human control would make for a lousy Hollywood movie one where
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the villain was invisible, and no blame could be laid at the feet of any human individuals. You couldnt solve the problem by arresting some bad guys because new bad guys would sprout up overnight like mushrooms to take their place. Mega National was an organism that could not die. An immortal person. An idea that cloaked itself in black legal garments so it could project a benevolent image and conceal its inner insubstantiality, its lack of heart, its absence of soul, from public view. Mega National was a corporation in every sense of the word. It was a body, a corpus, an entity. It had life. It had rights all the rights of a citizen. It had a mind and it could think, strange as that would be for earthlings to understand. It was not an invader from Mars but an invader birthed in the bubbling black swamps of the human psyche. Mega National was pure greed. It fed off human ambition. It lived only to acquire more and it could never have enough because the only reason it lived was to acquire more. Its life would have no meaning without that. Virtually every human being on earth worked for it, with the exception of a stone age tribe in Amazonia and, of course, Rich Monk. The Stone Age tribe was no problem for the moment. They kept to themselves, shooting monkeys with poison arrows, digging wild tubers with pointed sticks, and evacuating their families from any area where civilized men were seen. But Rich Monk was a problem. Rich Monk knew too much and he had a big mouth. There are 5500 media outlets in the United States, said the drugged man. Radio, TV, newspapers. 23 corporations own all of them. 90% of them are owned by just 10 corporations. Ten years ago 50 corporations owned 90% of the media but now 10 corporations do. And lots of them are foreign corporations. Does that tell you anything Shoebridge? The American people are happy. They get their dinosaur movies and nightly news gossip. Barnyard animals are happy too Shoebridge. The drugged man chuckled inside. The interviewer had lost control of the interview. He was a fish just like any other fish. A simple life form which could be fooled by a flashy bait and tugged around on a nearly invisible line. But the big question was: why? How
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could he be so easily misled? Was he just a jerk? Or was there something else pulling his consciousness around? Something he refused to admit or something he was utterly unaware of? Very curious. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the wormriddled compost heap of Cedric Shoebridges military/corporate brain there was still some atom of humanness left. Hitler was a vegetarian who liked puppies. Maybe Shoebridge had a hair of compassion or a freckle of intellect or something human buried in that bullet head. Or maybe it was something else? Something even the drugged man had trouble capturing in his conceptual butterfly net. Something that resisted analysis. Something a bit more eerie and mysterious than even he, a veteran fringe dweller on the frontiers outside civilized society, could imagine. I want to know about the file. Thats none of your business. I want to talk about the corporate take-over of America. Frontal assault. Military structure is like water Sun Tzu. Keep flowing. Keep gushing. The best battle is the one that is never fought. His only enemy was fear. If he succumbed to fear he might blurt something out. As long as he held his fear, hooded on his forearm like a nervous falcon, he was unlikely to say anything damaging. Torture was one of their options, but they wouldnt kill him at least not until he told them what they wanted to know. And he wouldnt do that. Four out of five major U.S. film and music and publishing companies are foreign owned. Shoebridge grunted at his notepad and started drawing Porky Pig again. Our biggest commercial seed companies backbone of our exports are foreign owned. Hotel chains, hardware stores, real estate, supermarkets and food distributors are foreign owned. Our national debt is financed by foreigners. Ronald Reagan destroyed this country. We went from the worlds largest creditor nation to the worlds largest debtor nation on his watch during peace time no less an economic holocaust that has never been rivaled in human history. Three cheers for Reagan! In order to support the collapsed dollar his administration engineered by running up massive military debt we had to start selling out to foreigners. East and West Coast investment bankers got rich
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cutting deals that destroyed our internal economy. And the streets started filling with homeless people. American industry is doing great, but its not owned by Americans any more. 80% of the profits go back overseas. Theres no reinvestment here. No new jobs being created here except minimum wage service jobs. Whos the sellout Shoebridge? These guys are legal, so youre guarding their interests under U.S. law? Youre a patsy. Youre an ignorant fool. Youve spent your whole life protecting the wrong people these immortal corporate persons. Grunt. Am I getting through to you? Grunt. What about the file! shrieked the twisted lip. But Shoebridge didnt care about the file. Lets finish up with Paris. We did finish up with Paris. Nothing happened. Ohbut plenty had happened. Thats where Shoebridge had gotten his first glimpse of this slime ball, swishing through the streets in the company of those French revolutionaries AgitProp an admission the drugged man was clearly avoiding. Shoebridge had seen him for Gods sake. And thats where Shoebridge had been discovered by his FBI colleagues, upended in a garbage can, pedaling at startled pigeons, while ragged winos stood around laughing and stuffing newspapers in his pants. His embarrassed colleagues had yanked Le Monde out of his butt crack, swept him into a Citron, and flown him back to Washington all the while professionally, dispassionately, condescendingly ignoring his blathering explanations, his drooling justifications, his hallucinogenic rationalizations. He was certain they were going to retire him ship him off to Patagonia or somewhere. Instead they put him in charge of the Watergate investigation. It was Hoovers idea. Nixon had ordered the FBI to stop investigating the break-in, but J. Edgar had been national police chief too long to be bossed around by a President. Plus, he knew how to cover his rear. With Cedric Shoebridge at the helm it was almost certain that no one would ever find out anything
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about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee and Richard Nixon would be home free. But if there ever was any blowback the Bureau could always claim they had put their best man on the case. Cedric Shoebridge performed the assignment up to his usual standards. After two years no one could make heads or tails of the case. From that time on, whenever the FBI needed to be seen actively pursuing a lead but never getting any results, they put Shoebridge in charge. It was a cinch. A sinecure. A job for life or as long as he wanted to hold it. He drove reporters crazy. The man was a genius at producing a flurry of activity and never finding out anything. The press nicknamed him Stonewall Shoebridge. And the most critical element to his success was that he was completely honest. He did not lie. He did not deceive anyone. He really meant it when he told reporters it was just as maddening to him as to them that he hadnt nabbed anyone or discovered anything important. After months of this numbing run-around they sneered at each other and finally did what reporters do. They snapped shut their notebooks, unplugged their cameras, and invited him to come get drunk with them at some D.C. hotspots. He was happy to accept their invitation. It had to be more fun than going back to the garage. The covert plan, of course, was to get him inebriated past the point of temporary insanity in the hopes he would reveal something: some clue, some detail, some possible avenue of inquiry. But it didnt work. It couldnt work. Not on Stonewall. Like most bureaucrats and corporate vice presidents he had been promoted to the level of his incompetence. Slurring his speech, spilling bourbon on his tie, hallucinating that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was sitting there at the table with them, he remained as impenetrable as, wella stone wall. And then came Deep Throat and blew the whole thing out of the water. Nixon was livid. The Bureau was furious. They pilloried Shoebridge for not detecting the informer from somewhere within his own ranks. But who would that be? His cat? Shoebridge was adamant that the informer had materialized
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somewhere outside his circle. Plus, werent his superiors happy that at least the truth had come out? No they were not. He didnt get it. After all this time he still didnt get it. But one thing he was certain of. Deep Throat was a classic Rich Monk-style media manipulation. Covert. Devastating. Bringing down a president without firing a shot. This was exactly the type of guerrilla operation Shoebridge hoped to pin on him. To hell with France. That was just a cock-up. A bad trip. A way to test the waters, or the truth serum as it were. Shoebridge could sense the drugged man was capable of holding things back even under the serum and that was all he really needed to know for the moment. Now they could move on. Deep Throat was the real deal. Millions of Americans still wanted to know who Deep Throat was or if he was. Plus, this hippie bandito laying on the gurney in front of him had been photographed in D.C. at the exact same time Deep Throat started singing. It was too obvious. There had to be a connection. The point is, weve created a society of schizophrenics, said the drugged man. Americans, by nature, have good hearts. We support all kinds of abstract notions about freedom and equality and fairness. And then we drive around in new cars and live in fantastic houses and buy scads of appliances without ever realizing that our lust to own these things is exactly what creates poverty and imprisonment and unfairness worldwide. Were brainwashed. Ours is not a free market. Our corporations do not create blessed economic opportunities for impoverished Third World people. They create imperialism economic agendas spurting from the barrel of a gun. Separate peasants from the land forcibly if necessary destroy subsistence farming, and bring them to work in the factories and mines. Were demented in a very fundamental way. Were hypocrites. We live a science fiction nightmare where our thoughts are disconnected from our actions. Our souls are shattered. We imagine that because we believe something hold a noble opinion about something thats good enough. Were good people who hold the correct views, and we go to work for a corporate/military state that perverts and betrays our heart-felt ideals on a daily
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basis all over the globe. Its schizophrenia. And the scary thing is, people in foreign countries are not able to distinguish American people from American corporations. They see us as hitching a ride on the coattails of our transnationals. So they hate us both. Thats why they want to bomb us. So what would you do about it smart guy? Let him rant a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer. Then yank the noose. Ahyou finally asked. Thats good of you. First pass a law that corporations will no longer be legally regarded as persons. They must be identified for what they are economic nations operating within our sovereign borders. Second, pass a law that money spent advocating one side of a political issue must be met with matching funds to advocate the other side. That way corporations cant just buy public opinion. Third, demand that corporations pay the entire costs of their operations: worker education, infrastructure, pollution the works. OK. OK. I get it. Very good. Now I understand everything. Im glad you made this all completely clearNow what happened in Washington? The drugged mans mental wheels fish-tailed off the highway inside his head. The roadway blurred. There were chicken feathers everywhere. He jerked the steering hard. Dont you want to hear about London? Thats where I went after Paris. We know about London. You and your band of crazies took over David Frosts TV Show and started spouting revolutionary drivel. Thats not all. What happened in Washington? It was an ambush. His mind was moving too slowly behind the drugs. He refused to be pushed onto Washington yet, with no time to think. So, after I left Paris, I was living in an abandoned warehouse in Covent Garden in London, stealing carrots from the vegetable market to survive. Then I got a job in a strip club. I dont care about the strip club. I care about Washington. I wasnt a stripper, of course. Just a ticket taker. I sat on a chair at the theater entrance, tore tickets in half, watched girls taking off their clothes all day, and got paid for it. Good jobI
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met a stripper named Sabrina, from Malta. She did an act with a live boa constrictor. Yanked her clothes off while this snake wrapped itself around her body flicking its tongue. Very Biblical. The sex gambit. Would it work again? HmmmGet laid? I had a girlfriend. But it was harder than you think. Most of the strippers were lesbians, hated men, thought this was a good kind of revenge getting men to pay to have them take their clothes off, get teased, then go home and beat off. There was one beautiful Guatemalan girl who had a Chinese doctor for a boyfriend. He was always there, watching her on stage. Then there was Sabrina. The one who danced with the snake. Also did a fire-eating act with a black girl. I finally got her an audition with a rock and roll extravaganza, where she could do her snake and fire act and not take off her clothes. She was grateful and What about D.C.? What about it? Thats where you met Deep Throat? Youre nuts. I went to Washington to stay with a woman I met on the plane. I was exhausted and disgusted and demoralized. She offered to help. I dont know anything about Deep Throat. Hmmm. Bringing down a President without firing a shot. Anarchy at its worst. No one to arrest or beat up. Doing Shoebridges assigned job for him damning him within the bureau. Turning him into the Court Jester. The Class Clown. The FBI Fool. He wanted this. Screw the file. He wanted this. According to Abbie Hoffmans own taped testimony Rich Monk had been the evil genius behind the YIPPIE convention and subsequent Chicago Police Riots of 68. It had taken the Democratic Party 24 years to recover from that pig-fest. Shoebridge waved a neon green psychedelic flyer with day-glo red lettering in front of the drugged mans face. (Sheesh. Where did he get that?) What about these? I dont know anything about them. The seditious writings of Rich Monk had been floating around D.C. at the time of the Deep Throat fiasco. Written in Biblical121
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style hallucinations as if they were lost chapters from the Book of Revelations, advocating anarchy, printed on day-glo flyers. You drove a cab. Yeah, had to pay the rent. And you never saw these? Nope. Ive saved this flyer for a long time. Good for you. Know where I got it? Pulled it out of your ass. Actually, I pulled it out of your assSnatched it from under the drivers seat of the very cab assigned to you. (Sheesh.)
Chapter Eight
PIGS, PIGS, EVERYWHERE PIGS. Limping across the crushed coral paths that creased the guava patches on the slope to the lagoon. Grunting with menace at passersby as they wallowed in the cool earth under dark green hibiscus bushes. Scratching their bristly behinds on the slender foundation poles that elevated the tin-roofed shacks above the muck and the centipedes shaking the walls and waking the people asleep on the floors inside. The island of Vavoo was peopled with pigs. Heavy-jowled sows snored in the shade under vine-wrapped porches, dreaming about appearing on TV game shows and winning a three-hour romp in the supermarket of their choice aisles upon aisles of white bread and popsicles and kosher beef hot dogs. Teenage delinquents tore up the sweet dirt around banana trees, grunting some L.A. street rap they picked up off the radio. Surly boars flashed curved tusks at their rivals hump-shouldered, stiff-legged, hackles raised like porcupines
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with Mohawk haircuts spoiling to make Spam out of each other. Pigs. The poor mans banquet. The wealth of kings. Bulldozing gardens, inhaling seedlings, smashing through fences to snatch sweet young tomatoes or nesting chickens. Sagging suitcases of fat, rippling with the reorganized molecules of coconuts and mangos and careless ducklings. If a galactic voyager landed on Vavoo and took a quick look around hed radio back to the orbiter that Vavoo was an island of pigs who kept a few people around as servants. But on the day he met Little Papaya, Odysseus mind was not on pigs. He was sitting on his porch in the late afternoon with his feet propped on a termite-gouged railing. A light tropical drizzle had cooled things off, but the air was so thick he would not have been startled to see some mackerel take off from the lagoon and circle his house. He took off his glasses, laid his Plant Psychology textbook across his knees, and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The dampness and heat were sprouting mold gardens in his armpits. Sweat drops were smearing his lenses. But worst of all, Little Papaya had told him something that had lassoed his brain cells and wouldnt let go. Odysseus had arrived on Vavoo via aeronautical accident. One of the aviation maps he dug out of his briefcase, as he circled helplessly over the GPS coordinates for Pulotu, the nonexistent Landing Strip of the Gods fuel gauge flat on E identified an airstrip on the nearby island of Vavoo. But, the map neglected to mention that the runway had not been used since World War Two. Sowhile the Piper Cub coughed and sputtered, gagging on the last fumes of fuel like a sea gull choking on a fish head, Odysseus dropped behind a hedge of coconut palms and plowed his plane into a watermelon patch on a red-dirt hillside on the island of Vavoo. Despite its insignificant size and wet weather. Despite its cloying sameness and maddening inhabitants. Despite the mud and the centipedes and the pigs! Vavoo had one outstanding feature. It was THERE. Right there. Twenty miles or so, as the albatross or the gasping Piper Cub glides, from where Pulotu
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would have been, according to the map, IF IT HAD BEEN THERE! He broke both wheel struts, bent the prop into a beanie, and splattered the windshield with red dirt and watermelon pulp. But aside from that the plane was OK and so was he. Sione and Latu the Giant pulled him from the cockpit. They immediately confiscated all his pens and pencils for official reasons they said and formally welcomed him to the island of Vavoo, which they referred to as the Peoples Republic of Honest Men. They promptly located an abandoned house for him to live in, and then applied themselves to the task of ordering replacement parts for the Piper Cub from a warehouse in Los Angeles. Since the King of the Peoples Republic of Honest Men had banned the use of paper and pencils, the ordering procedure was a little complicated. First, the islanders built a huge fire and sat around it in absolute silence for two hours. Then, on cue, they began humming a polka. Buh BAH, buh BAH, buh BAH BAH. It was a song about a little girl who had lost her geese in the woods and was afraid to come home and afraid not to. When everyone got up to leave Odysseus rolled his eyes with disbelief, but Sione assured him they had communicated directly with the warehouse in Los Angeles and that the parts would be arriving on the mail boat, via Auckland and Tongatapu, in approximately six months. Right. Every day, either Sione or Latu the Giant dropped off some fish and yams and told Odysseus stories to cheer him up. He liked the endless fable called Adventures of Pigs on Motorbikes. In these stories the pigs were always telling lies to get other plants or animals to help them, but their manipulations inevitably backfired and they ended up shooting themselves in the hoof. The one about the sea slug who wanted to swim was pretty good kind of like the cow-who-wanted-to-fly sort of thing. But whenever Latu the Giant launched into his florid descriptions of Pulotu Odysseus puffed and groaned.
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Science he could forgive. So scientists had spent millions of dollars and millions of man-hours graphing and plotting the characteristics of something that wasnt there. Whats new? But the ferns! Those lousy, smirking ferns. They shouldnt have led him on like that. Had he ever lied to them? According to Latu the Giant, Pulotu was the final resting place of the kings and queens of Vavoo. It was an emerald island, a garden of tropical delights, an Eden of mythic extravagance where animals talked, and plants walked, and royal families retired when they discarded their earthly bodies. There were waterfalls and toucans and caves studded with diamonds. Fresh fruit year around. Fish dangling from trees, so you could just reach up and pluck one. Yams growing above ground, so you didnt even have to dig them up. Corn that ate bugs so you never had to fertilize it. Emerald green chickens that grew fat and juicy on a diet of sunlight and water and a little bit of gravel. Whistling watermelons and eggplant troubadours who lulled you to sleep with sweet mandolins and sea-faring melodies as you lay in your hammock recovering from the afternoon feast. It was the absolute crown of Let go of it, Latu, said Odysseus. Whats wrong? Its a fantasy. No fantasy. Sheesh. Then why couldnt I land my plane on it? Because you couldnt see it. Thats just what I mean. Just because you couldnt see it, doesnt mean its not there. Thats exactly what it means. Listen hombre. Let me tell you a story. No more stories. This is a short storyWhen the white men first came here in their sailing ships we islanders could not see their ships. We saw the little launches they brought ashore. But the ships, the big ships with the trees for masts and the acres of sails, we could not see them. They were so far out of our experience that they didnt register inside our brains. We actually couldnt see them.
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Hmm. Do you think a rabbit sees a refrigerator? Huh? Do you think a pigeon sees television? No way. Maybe soBut that still doesnt prove Pulotu is there. Latus eyes bulged like hot red apples. Beads of sweat sizzled and smoked on his cheeks. He whipped his head back and forth like he was shaking off bees, then he ran down the hill, punching his paws at the sky with murderous frustration. Sione just laughed. He wiped some saliva froth off his salt and pepper beard, and checked to be sure his pant cuffs were covering his feet. Sione never, ever, let anyone see his feet. No one had seen his feet in 160 years or more. He spit a yellow goober that splashed down on his bellbottom pants cuff, then leaned closer to Odysseus and said, You palanges think you know everything but let me tell you something. Latu spent a month in San Francisco when he was a merchant seaman. Hes seen some things the rest of us havent. Hes not as dumb as he looks. And Sione laughed again. Then he handed Odysseus a tattered, termite-drilled copy of a Plant Psychology textbook translated from the Russian in 1937. Odysseus started to read. By the time the mail boat arrived with his plane parts he didnt want to leave Vavoo. It wasnt that hed fallen in love with this bizarre Polynesian island, lost somewhere between South America and the South Pacific. No. He wasnt in love with the place. But something profound had happened. Something that would prove to be more crucial to the evolution of human civilization than whatever had happened to Paul Gauguin or Robert Louis Stevenson on their South Seas sojourns. Something astounding. Something for the psychosomatic record books. He would forever remember the day it came to him. The day he met Little Papaya. He was fishing on the edge of the reef at low tide, his weighted nylon line disappearing into the dark blue water. But, like Thomas Alva Edison, Odysseus Tyme fished with no bait and no hook. It was the only way to get the locals to leave him alone long enough so he could think. There is an
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unspoken, worldwide convention that regards disturbing a man who is fishing as a serious breach of human etiquette. Maybe his imagination slipped down the nylon line beneath the wave tops and took a look around. Maybe something crawled up his fishing line and soaked into his brain. Maybe it had nothing to do with his fishing line. Who knows why it happened. But it happened. Metaphysical lightning struck between his ears. It came right out of the blue: We are all water. Thinking water. And the more we act like it, the more our lives begin to flow. Bingo. The lights went on in a dark part of his brain. Instantly the smallest particle became a universe, and the broadest concept reduced to a single point. His mind took a swim in a watery metaphor, and it didnt stop swimming for a long long time. We are water electro-magnetic bags of water plants, animals and people. We are shape-changers. Sometimes solid. Sometimes liquid. Sometimes gas. We float as clouds, or harden into icebergs, or ride the contours of the land seeping below ground, or misting above it. We share our inner space with every other lifeform. Every living thing is a variation on water. Every living thing embodies the physical, mental and spiritual properties of water. This is the secret that blends our souls. Odysseus brain had stepped through a doorway into a holouniverse, where everything recreated everything else at a different scale of perception. Everything contained everything else! Flies became gods and gods became flies. All of life distilled itself into a single word: Water. Suddenly he felt like an insect with a million relatives on the block. At long last, he belonged! His eyeballs shimmied like cheerleaders on his face. His hair crackled with bio-electricity. He got so heated with excitement steam whistled from his shoes. Here, at last, was a fish he could land. A field he could plow. A currency that couldnt lose value. Here was a shred of meaning in a life as plastic and formless as chewing gum. Here was a revelation that swelled him with optimism. A thought with a future.
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In the past, no matter how useless or inadequate he felt, someone had always been able to invent something for him to do. Take out the garbage. Sew up gangsters. Oil the snook reels. His mind had been a landing strip for other peoples agendas. Wellenough of that! From now on he was going to work for himself. Captain his own ship. Engineer his own train. Cook his own stew. Whatever it meant. Whatever it took. He was a lone seaman, charting a course off the ends of the earth, sails set, rudder firm, plowing through the whitecaps on the fringes of civilization, questing the ultimate Grail Quest. With a gentle twist he reached up and turned off the faucet that was dripping inside his head. Et voila! SilenceAt lastA world of silence. A tremendous peace settled upon him. A balmy respite from the nagging voices of past fiascos. A halcyon haven from the barbed anticipation of future failures. Be here now. Be water. An epiphany. How beautifully beautifully simple. Gone was his fear of the gangsters. Gone the regrets over his failed marriage and the loss of his dads basketball sneaker. Gone the manic intensity that whipped his neurons into dogsled frenzy. Odysseus hung his brain out on the line to dry. He resonated at the metabolic frequency of a carrot. He was in love with life as any old strand of seaweed. A chlorophyll concerto soothed his protoplasm and slowed the whole movie downway, way down. It was like iguana consciousness only better. Be water. Just be water. And then he blew it. Or it blew him. Or something. The most remarkable thing about humans was their incredible capacity for evading Time. They called it entertainment. It had evolved from religious passion plays and hootenannies into a largely electronic technique for obliterating Time. Art was an inspired leap from the submarine trenches of the human soul to the darkest corners of outer space. Entertainment was a diversion, a surface forth, a pageant of shapes and contours and sounds
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and gross emotions which had no uplifting effect on the mind or the soul. Kind of like a train running forwards while all the passengers sat facing backwards. All you ever saw were the things that had already happened. All you ever felt were the things youd already felt. Rather than really doing Time, experiencing Time in all its awesome majesty like ferns humans ran headlong in the other direction. They created fantasies and avoided Time entirely. Every evening they watched video sagas where stupendous superheroes obliterated their fears and overcame astounding odds to achieve incredible victories. And every morning they woke up and began reliving their same fearful, worrisome lives all over again. So many decisions to make. Maybe change toothpaste. Maybe try different pizza. Maybe call a dating service. It was easy to tell TV wasnt working. It should have been building character but instead it was rotting peoples souls. Entertainmentaddiction. A societal disease. The entire thrust of human civilization was a conspiracy to eliminate Time. What were we avoiding? Was the calmness and serenity at the center of life such a threat to the human mind that it had to be chased away by electronic stimulants from the instant we opened our eyes to the moment we went to sleep? Fantasy programs manufactured fantasy feelings, which manufactured fantasy lives, lived in a fantasy society a vast media mythology. Everyone inhabited a fantasy. For some it was Science. For some it was Music. For some it was The Bible, or Politics, or Sports. We used to experience our fantasies through Zeus and Athena, and now we did it through Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and VCRs. Blame it on corn. If you want. But by now it should be clear that something much more ancient, much more sinister, was poking its cold hairy snout into our world. Some devious dynamic from another epoch was rooting around in the mental muck, upending peoples minds, intent on manufacturing trouble. Yet there was another force, a much greater presence, which would enter peoples lives, whenever they called on it, to offset this devious dynamic. And that was the thing Odysseus
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discovered, fishing with no hook, on the edge of the reef. Call it the Supreme Consciousness. Call it the Cosmic Balancing Act. Call it The Guy with Big Pants. Call it Water. It didnt matter what Odysseus called it. But it did matter that he remember to throw open the metaphysical faucet in his brain and invite it into his life every single day. From that moment on his psychosomatic operators manual read: Be Water. Flow around boulders that block your path. Leap over waterfalls. Fill the shape of the container youre in. Dont be afraid to assume various external forms confident that youre inner essence remains undiluted. Be fearless. Be water. This precious non-physical thing, this Wet Idea, took its place amongst the voices in Odysseus brain. In some primitive way it seemed to give all the voices a rallying point. From that moment on, the Wet Idea was always a player in Odysseus psychic Super bowl sitting on the bench, as it were, waiting for him to call It into the game. But if he was preoccupied, or neglectful, or just forgot to call on It, months could pass wherein he would writhe in the agony of civilization with no relief from its manic impulses and temporal fantasies. He had been offered a simple psychic remedy. Be Water. All he had to remember to do was to use it. He was still standing at the edge of the reef vibrating with this new revelation, this epiphany, this oneness with the Timeless properties of water, when someone tapped him on the brain. Someone leaped over the wall separating fishermen from the public-at-large. Someone punched a hole in the psychic shield that had protected fishermen since before the discovery of fire. Someone splattered this ancient taboo as if it were just some kind of fruit. That someone was Little Papaya. He heard something. He looked right. He looked left. He couldnt see anyone. Some kind of foamy slime was covering the reef. It could have been yesterday or it could have been 600 million years ago. You should start a vacation resort for house plants, said a palm tree on the shore.
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What? A black face floating atop a billowy purple dress with large printed yellow flowers peeked out from behind the tree. A health spa, for house plants. You could make a lot of money. Who are you? What are you talking about? Cant you see Im fishing? The magic moment evaporated. An ocean of possibilities drained out his ears. Someone had pulled the plug on the bathtub between his ears and begun churning his brainwaves with complete nonsense and he was listening to it! He was blowing it. Or it was blowing him. Or something. Lookwhy dont youwhats your name? Lesiani. Leslie what? Lesiani. Little Papaya. It was a girl. An island girl. She jammed four fingers in her mouth and stared at him through bulging egg-white eyeballs. ListenLesliewhateverLittle Papaya. Why dont you run along home now. Im fishing. And I have no intention of starting awhat?a resort for house plants? So go home now. Please. She left, but her idea didnt. It hung around like a hyena in the bushes of his brain lurking, laughing, waiting to pounce. It lassoed his consciousness and kept tugging and tugging. Why NOT a resort for house plants? A few hours later he was planted in the shade on the porch of his house with the Plant Psychology textbook nestled in his lap, rubbing his eyes and rolling the idea around and around inside his head. The manic engines of temporal fantasies were gaining hold. The Wet Idea was slipping away. Odysseus dropped the ball. He flunked the test. He missed the point. But as we shall see, the point did not miss him. He had stumbled (or had he been pushed?) upon a stupendous idea of multinational proportions. An entrepreneurial volcano of potential profit. A cause that would improve the quality of life for all living things. The potential market was enormous and entirely unexploited. Anyone could recognize the sheer vision and scope behind this
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idea couldnt they? What sentient human being would not wish to treat their dearest living companions to a winter tropical holiday? What man or woman who professed to have feelings would not leap at the opportunity to rescue that potted avocado from the back porch next to the old refrigerator during the ravages of a Chicago winter and, for a few shekels, send this valued companion on a jet flight of trivial duration into a cornucopia of light and heat and moisture? What denizens of Berlin or Hong Kong or New York would not indulge the fantasies of their loyalest charges and steadiest friends? Was this not what the ferns had been hinting at all along? An opportunity to be right with life again? To make up for past disasters? To cultivate the soil of circumstances to provide for a bountiful future? Money galore? Thai dancing girls? Eighty-foot yachts? Why not? Across the road at Siones house three gawky girls screeched and squawked like pelicans at a bait bucket, swinging from the limbs of an orange tree. One of them was this Lesiani, this Little Papaya. How had she conceived this incredible idea? Was it a desperate shot into the night sky an effort to improve her station in life? And if sowhats wrong with that? Sheesh. Look where she lived. Siones house. A rain-stained blob of peeling paint and split boards teetering above the mud on gnawed posts, and capped with a twisted lump of rusting tin. Odysseus sighed. He knew that beyond the house lay the curve of the horizon, where the billowy bed sheets of the sky tucked into the dark blue ocean. Closer in, the rose-fringed reef hugged its flat turquoise lagoon. Nearer still, purple songbirds played hide-and-seek on the yellow-flecked guava slopes. And, in front of him, obscuring his view of everything, sat Siones huge rotten tooth of a house. Sione sleep-walked out of the guava thicket, herding his ducks with a twisted stick, his feet obscured in a melee of flutters and quacks. Most lemon trees walked faster than Sione. As a sword of sunlight slashed through a gap in the rain clouds, heating the metal roof, a soft blanket of mist rose delicately and mysteriously above the huge rotten tooth like a pineapple farting pesticides. The warming tin popped and
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creaked as it expanded, shooting loose nails in an arc, up into the sky and back down to the dirt, where they were gobbled up by Siones starving ducks. But Sione could not be bothered. He had located a swatch of black earth amidst the red muck and amused himself by walking on it, and poking it with his stick. Sheesh. These people would probably leap at the chance to participate in a real economy and make some real money, thought Odysseus. Plus, they seemed to like plants. Little did he know. Where was I? He lifted the Plant Psychology text from his lap. Ah. Promiscuity and Foreplay in Black Beans and Lentils. Ugh. The megagolopic mechanisms in Phaseolus negrus evolved from bee penises in the Early Triassic PeriodUgh. Odysseus gunned the rational engine in his brain, shifted into four-wheel drive, and plowed into the mental muck. Not bee penises, not mold growing in his armpits, not flies crawling around inside his ears, were going to stop him now. His brainwaves burned with manic intensity. The future beckoned him like warm cherry pie. Gone the bumbling scholar, hunting for clues to the meaning of life in molds and ferns. Enter the Captain of Industry. No more fishing with baitless line. Hed caught what he sought or so he thought. He fashioned some pencils from charred guava sticks and spent weeks on end sequestered in his house mapping flow charts, drawing graphs, sketching architectural renderings of the various habitats he would offer those chlorophyll-starved refugees from the northern climes. The work consumed him, sapping his vitality and queering his eyesight as he hunched over the kitchen table munching fruit, dribbling papaya seeds on the layout of the mineral water baths, or the drip-irrigated health spa, or the highCO2 game room, or even the racy, mirror-ceilinged XXX mulch beds. There would be a staff of interpreters to translate messages and mail ecstatic postcards back to the family. There would even be a nursery to take care of accidents. There would be everything a plant could possibly want.
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Sione and Latu the Giant stopped by regularly to drop off fish and yams and check his progress. He was a palange. They had no way of judging whether he was crazy or not. Stranger things than this had shown up on the movies they rented from the video store. He seemed to be happy and that was the main thing. The guava pencils were probably a violation of the kings edict, but then again, these burnt sticks were crude enough to allow them room to wiggle if the authorities found out. Plausible deniability the CIA called it. They decided to play dumb and see what would happen. Lesiani, Little Papaya, brought him baskets of fruit and armloads of encouragement. She thought this project was really something and liked to drop casual hints that it was, in fact, her idea. She also warned him to take good care of his feet. Weeks passed. The drawings were reconfigured into cardboard architectural mock-ups of the sprawling facility. They covered his living room floor like a huge toy train set a futuristic village with sidewalks and geodesic domes and miniature fake trees. The local kids jammed the windows of the house, bickering and pushing each other to get a peek inside. The neighbors began to talk. One day Lesiani walked through the kitchen door with a basket of fruit, gasped, and dropped it scattering guavas and papayas all over the floor. I told you to take care of your feet! Its nothing, said Odysseus, blowing off any measure of concern about the white knobs that had begun sprouting around his ankles. How could you do this to me! she fumed. Its nothing. They dont hurt. You fool. She squatted to pick up the fallen fruit, then jerked her head and cocked her ears at a faint reverberation of clattering and pinging noises which steadily grew louder and louder and LOUDER. Oh no, said Lesiani. Suddenly, a gang of Pigs on Motorbikes sputtered up to the front porch wearing bandoleers and swinging chains. Lesiani screamed and fled out the kitchen door. The sneering hogs
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charged into the living room, stomped Odysseus cardboard architectural mock-up to confetti, confiscated all his pencils, and conked him on the head for good measure. It was a good thing none of them noticed the knobs on his ankles or they may have wrapped him in plastic and burned him alive on the spot.
Chapter Nine
NOTHING SCARES GOVERNMENT or industry as much as someone like a Deep Throat. Some self-serving bozo, an informant, an insider, who can take down a presidency by dispersing minute doses of truth. Suspicion begets suspicion, espionage begets espionage, and the cycle is often revved up by a carnival freak such as Gordon Liddy a cop with a big head a cop gone bad. Human viruses like Gordon Liddy are not born, they are made, by a corrupt system that needs covert operatives to dig up the smut that is peddled in the back rooms of corporate culture. And these subcutaneous parasites are the corporate pond scum to whom Cedric Shoebridge placed his phone call. Shoebridge had jolted the drugged man with his revelation about the day-glo flyer recovered from under his taxicab seat. It was just a piece of paper, but the spark of terror it ignited in the drugged man was exactly what Shoebridge had been fishing for. He left the interrogation room with Madeleine Naylor yipping at his brain about the goddemmed file hissing, shrieking, shaming him with all the artillery of the slighted, willful woman. Blasting him for being a decrepit fool as he dialed, going on and on about his toe-sucking dementia as he spoke to the men in D.C. Pounding his arm with clenched fists as he reentered the interrogation room. He needed a zinger, a spark, a match head of information lit at just the right moment to convince the drugged man that he
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knew much more than he did. The spooks at the Mega National think tank supplied just the thing. When Shoebridge returned to the interrogation room he could see the new series of drugs had peaked. Whats the connection between Martin Luther King and Deep Throat? What are you talking about? Just answer the question. Maybe you better ask J. Edgar Hoover or Bebe Rebozo. Theyre long gone. We want to know what you know. What, you couldnt get any tapes of J. Edgar and Roy Cohen at any of their lingerie parties? Shoebridge chuckled inside. Thats exactly what Mega National had done. And equipped with this industrial espionage, they had pulled together a preposterous alliance of corporate money, mafia distribution, and FBI non-interference to flood the black ghettos with heroin in the wake of the Civil Rights riots of the sixties. A scripted replay of the British East India corporations Oriental opium trade of a few centuries past. So, the Civil Rights Movement was drowned in a sea of junk all because J. Edgar didnt want anyone to see a drunk Roy Cohn parading around in a pink bra and panties with a peacock feather sticking out his anus. Was Deep Throat a black man? I dont know. Was he a black Republican? I dont know. Was he a man who was deeply disturbed over the King assassination? Yes. No. I dont know. Now were getting somewhere! What else do you know? Only what it says in the flyer. What, this psychedelic toilet paper? Read it again fool. It virtually predicts the Nixon collapse. Where? Doesnt it say something about The Evil Emperor toasted like croutons in his own lies? NoOh, I see it. Yeah.
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Well thats it. Stupid hippie poetry. Doesnt it also say something about a poison soup or a magic soup. Cooking up a soupful of truth that is nourishing to honest people, and bitter to liars? WaitYeahSo what Do you see anything similar in those phrases? No Keep looking. Waitcooking. He was a cook? A black cook? Shoebridge dashed out of the room to use the encrypted phone, Madeleine in dogged pursuit. The drugged man chuckled inside. By the time Shoebridge returned a half hour later the surrealistic pillow had subsided. There was no black cook in the White House in those years, fumed Shoebridge. They were all Cubans. Youre just wasting my time. You know I can tell the good doctor here to give you one hot shot and then you can sit around slapping your knees with King and the Kennedys. King and the Kennedys? That might be fun. But they probably wouldnt get along that well. Why not? Protestants and Catholics. Sheesh. No, its true. Protestants, take their cues from the Old Testament, the Jewish Biblical stuff. They believe that if you live according to Gods principles God will reward you with prosperity in this life. Quite pagan actually. I like it. Primitive. Earth religion, burning sacrifices to God kind of stuff. Bargaining with the Supreme Consciousness. And Catholics? Catholics and Hindus believe that if you live according to Gods principles youll probably be crucified. Nailed to a cross. Burned at the stake. Lose everything except God that isIf God really loves you he takes away everything, your family, your property, so you are left only with Him. So what?
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Big difference Shoebridge. Catholics try to be good, but not too good. What does this have to do with Deep Throat. If you ask me, and you certainly seem to be doing just that, Deep Throat had to be a Catholic. Why? Because he wanted to be good, but not too good. He wanted to help out, without being crucified, without taking a fall. Very Catholic. A black Catholic? They exist. Ever heard of Louisiana, or Colombiaor Haiti? Shoebridge scribbled some unintelligible garbage on his pad to create thinking-time. The drugged man felt a tickle inside his skin. It was all smoke and mirrors, of course. The drugs had worn down and he was alert enough to say anything with the slightest ring of plausibility to avoid that hot shot. So youre telling me Deep Throat was a black Catholic cook who was pissed off about the King assassination? Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of knowing. Then the drugged man got an idea. An insidious idea. An idea based on the proposition that the best lie is the one thats almost true. Hed seen Shoebridge playing with his earphone, he knew the room was bugged and that the mirror had to be fake. There was no way he could risk telling Shoebridge the truth in this room. For other ears to hear. But thats not the important part. Then what is? What Im telling you is that maybe, just maybe, Rich Monk was a black Catholic cook who was pissed off about the King assassination. Rich Monk? Think about it. Isnt that what youre here for? Isnt that why Im here? Isnt Rich Monk the one youre after? Deep Throat was just an agent, a vehicle. He was a guy who took a moral stand, but not too much of a moral stand. In fact, he probably had figured out some way to profit from his revelations. Get a promotion or something. There were a hundred guys like
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that around the Nixon White House. Self-serving protgs of Tricky Dick. And? And the big question is? What made him do it? What caused him to do it? Who inspired him to do it? If you want to find Rich Monk youve got to start asking those questions. Assuming, of course, that you are not Rich Monk. You have the wrong guy. My names Gregory Lobotomowski. Another alias. You grabbed the last name of that Puerto Rican street punk from Chicago. My hero. I betSo you think I should start looking for a black Catholic cook who was pissed off about King? If you intend to pursue this idea of connecting events in a linear way thats one solid lead. But I dont know what good that will do you in the long run. Why? Because I keep trying to tell you, Rich Monk is an idea, not a person. Look, Mega National or Exxon or Nestle are invisible, for-profit corporations. Rich Monk is an invisible not-for-profit corporation. An entity. An invisible body. Or actually, a number of invisible bodies. He can take the shape of anyone at any time. He is the poor peoples response to corporate tyranny. A corpus, a person just as real as Mega National, but a corpus of a different color, a different shape, a different purpose. I dont follow. OK. Lets just play around with the perception that corporations are really inhuman science fiction monsters actual persons invaders from the evil side of our psyches, selfdestructive impulses created by the human mind which have now taken on a genuine life of their own. Im not speaking metaphorically. I mean these things are actually alive Shoebridge groaned. The drugs had dissipated. Here we go again. A corporation is not a they, it is an it. True, a corporation is made up of investors and a board of directors, but each of these people is as easily replaceable as a light bulb. A
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corporation is not run by a person or group of people. It is run by greed. It is run by profit. Is greed real? Is greed as ubiquitous as gravity? The only reason a corporation will pull back from performing dastardly acts is because it might get bad press and that would lower profits. So it hires teams of ad agencies and lawyers and spin doctors to create its public image in the media, and it shuns any media which is not manufactured by its teamsfollow so far? Im not a jerk. OK. Lets also suppose that somewhere in the human psyche there exists an opposing force. A primal force or awareness that evolved eons ago to combat evil tendencies and selfdestructive impulses. Lets give this force a name. What should we call it? Youre asking me? Yes Shoebridge. Think about it. What should we call it? I dont know. Who are you looking for? Rich Monk. What should we call this counter-corporation? This product of human yearning? I dont know. Who are you looking for? Rich Monk. What should we call this counter-corporation? Get the file!!!! screamed Madeline in Shoebridges ear. Rich Monk? Call it Rich Monk? The drugged man smiled. It was like training a monkey to count, but they definitely had gotten to five. There was cause to be optimistic. Let me ask you another question. Go ahead. What did you think about the King assassination? It was a tragedy. Thats all? Those were volatile times. Did James Earl Ray do it? Well I wasnt working on that case. I had my eyes on Stokley Carmichael at the time. But I have no reason to believe
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otherwise. He glanced down at his notepad and started drawing the pig again. It was a lie. The operation had FBI fingerprints all over it. The patsy, the gun, the phony escape to England. It may have been J. Edgars most evil hour. Kings civil rights movement was losing momentum to the black radicals. They advocated using force and he advocated non-violence. All the more ironic, and disturbing, that he should die by the gun like his hero Gandhi. So King had finally decided to come out straight ahead against the Vietnam War. Like Muhammad Ali. Holding a few marches over semi-abstract issues was one thing, confronting U.S. foreign policy head-on was another. He was a charismatic leader. Combat soldiers were vastly over-represented by blacks, blacks who admired King, blacks who hung on his words and worshipped him as a hero. There were some who felt, in retrospect, that we would have gotten out of Vietnam five years earlier if King had lived. He was a hatpin aimed at the balloon of corporate war profits, a threat to National Security, an FBI problem. Shoebridge never admitted to anyone, not his wife, not his colleagues, how the situation had rankled him. And he certainly wouldnt admit it to the drugged man. But nevertheless, this psychic disturbance mortgaged some real estate in his brain. At odd and fleeting moments he felt ashamed to work for an agency which considered that the best way to deal with political dissidents was to shoot them. It was Stalinist. It was everything this country had been founded to oppose. Only bourbon took away the pain. He often wondered what had happened? Why it had happened? The United States went from being an average country to a super power when Europe beat itself to death in World War II. But America emerged from that victory with so much hubris, bloated with the notion of my country right or wrong, that its ideals were forever altered. The Brylcream, sock-hop fifties, when the economy was good and the people trusted Ike and believed in government, were perfect conditions for the growth of a mold named J. Edgar Hoover. In his farewell address war hero/president Eisenhower warned the American public to beware of the military/industrial establishment, but
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the warning was forgotten buried in the marketing blitzkrieg of cars with two-foot tail fins and revved up Commie threats. Flames of fear fanned by corporate/government psychic arsonists who instituted school drills coaching kids how to run home fast and fry in moms arms on the inevitable day when Chicago and New York would blossom into nuclear mushrooms above the elm trees of their sleepy suburban streets. Shoebridge actually thought he did a good job of concealing his disgust over the King matter. He walked away from water cooler gossip on the subject, and brushed off his wifes airy questions, but thats exactly what gave him away. His refusal to engage the topic caused the people around him to suspect he knew more than he was letting on. People began to talk. He was taken off civil rights cases and put onto the growing problem of draft dodgers. Thats how he ran up the exhaust pipes of Rich Monk. And got run off to Paris, and got jerked back to D.C. to head up the Watergate investigation. It could have been a black Catholic cook as much as anyone else. Where were we? asked Shoebridge. Talking about Martin Luther King. Forget about Martin Luther King. I want to know what happened in Washington. You lived with this chick. What was her name? That didnt last long. I ended up driving a cab. What was her name? Christine. Why didnt it last? She was into kinky sex. What? And youre not? Balling two women at once? I have my limits. Oh yeah, where do you draw the line? Whips, leather, degradation. I was never into degradation. At least not too much of it. What constitutes not too much of it? Deep Throat. What are you talking about?
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Do you remember the original Deep Throat. It was a porno movie about a woman who was born with a clitoris in her throat so the only way she could get off was by giving head. Remember it? I heard about it. So what does that tell you? I dont know. Think. My wife talked so much she got orgasms just from talking and she never gave me head. What does that prove? Youre answering your own question. What? This person, this woman got an orgasm from talking. What woman?Deep Throat was a woman? Few things would make more sense than that. Youre not sending me off on a wild goose chase again. Im not going to start looking for a black female cook. I want to know about you. I split up with Christine when she invited some of her dyke friends to come over and whip me one night. She was bi. So you left D.C.? Nope. Started driving cab. Its amazing what you can find out driving a cab. Like what? Well, one minute youre dropping off some old Polish lady with a dozen shopping bags at her basement apartment smelling of boiled cabbage and garlic, and the next minute you pick up a Nigerian diplomat who is trying to offer you a commission to sell shares in a non-existent mining company. What else? Well, there was a lot of talk on the street about FBI bungling in the Watergate investigation. Some guy called Stonewall What else! Ha ha haWell, you learn about how phony Washington is. There are all these women who are just power groupies. Theyll do anything to get near to power. I mean anything. Its like a drug or aphrodisiac or something. And there were all these guys who would take advantage of that too acting high
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and mighty and well-connected when they were just chumps, just government go-fers. But I guess the road crew for the Rolling Stones get laid a lot too. I know all about Washington. I want to know about you. I was just a cab driver. Just a cab driver. Once I picked up a black woman. Funny accent. Said she was a cook at one of the mansions of somebody who was a big deal in the government. She was hot about something. Really wound up. Going on and on about how it was finally time to strike a blow for Martin Luther King. She was a little scary overwrought. I tried to calm her down. I asked her: like what kind of blow? She said, wouldnt I like to know? I said, actually, I dont really care. Im just a cab driver trying to pass the time and make conversation and maybe get a bigger tipWalls can talk, she said. Ooh, yes. Walls can talk. Just like hoodoo soup. Walls can talk. Then she started in about how, Were going to bring him down. She had the goods on him because her cousin had found out about the money. Walls can talk? Bring who down? I asked. Wouldnt you like to know? Mon petit. Wouldnt you like to know? Jesus. I felt like I was talking to a psychotic Martian wallpaper hanger. I clammed up. Then what? She got out. Where? Somewhere in Virginia. Let me guess. You never saw here again. Never. But the funny thing is, at the end of the day when I cleaned out the cab I found one of those neon green Rich Monk flyers stuck in the back seat. I bet. Had nothing to do with you. Thats right. So what? Well, it wasnt a busy day. I ruled out everyone besides the Polish shopping bag lady, the Nigerian diplomat and the black cook. Why did you care who left the flyer?
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I didnt. I probably just remember because it was my last day on the job. I quit that day. What did you do next? Went to live at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. No wonder we lost track of you. The drugged man was tired of talking. He wanted to change directions and give himself a break. For no particular reason he asked, Did you ever have a black female cook?
Chapter Ten
meanwhileback in Chicago
CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI had it made. He was a local hero. He had everything going for him: A Grand Jury indictment. Flesh wounds. Two spectacularly famous defense attorneys. Three internationally acclaimed physicians. A sexy physical therapist. All the willing women he could handle. Roomsful of false friends. A cash conduit that supplied him with bail money and legal fees, plus medical and living expenses. He could have moved to Marina Towers. He stayed at Carrini Green. One month after Ramon was gunned down by the crooked cops and mad for revenge Cha Cha posing as a janitor infiltrated the Babbott Chemical plant, and blew up five tons of Ritalen, an amphetamine that was being fed to millions of school kids on a daily basis. The incident came to be regarded as the spark that ignited World War Three. The cops nabbed him three days later, but in less than a week grassroots supporters had raised five million dollars for his legal defense fund. The battle lines were drawn. Strange alliances had formed in the final days of civilization. Street people and church people faced off against drug lords and landlords. The proponents of non-physical reality
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went head to head with the proponents of physical reality. The dividing issue was drugs. Those who controlled the supply of drugs controlled continents and manipulated the minds of nations. Presidents ate synthetic opium. Governors sustained themselves on antidepressants. Bishops gave sermons high on Zalium. Stock brokers and insurance salesmen tallied higher monthly figures when they ingested mild, mood-elevators to keep their emotions bright and sparkly. Construction workers were more competitive, willing to work harder and longer as long as they could kill the pain with beer at the end of the day. And worst of all were the school children who were being fed speed to calm them down and help them concentrate. These kids were active, passionate boys who were too excited about being alive to enjoy sitting quietly for hours on end learning their multiplication tables. Civilization had become so female it had to drug young male energy. School programs had eliminated recess time because experts had shown it was not cost effective and teachers didnt like it. 85% of teachers were women and they needed all the help they could muster to keep their classrooms under control. So, if the boys wouldnt calm down, the solution was obvious. Feed them drugs. Unbelievably, no one was keeping statistics on how many of these Ritalen kids went on to use crack cocaine another type of speed in adult life. It was inhuman. And very anti-male. A ratio of six boys to every girl participated in the Ritalen program by gulping down pills under the supervision of the school nurse every morning during homeroom. It was one step away from simply castrating boys at birth so they could entirely avoid the trauma of growing up male in a society gone delirious with female-inspired control agendas. 21 million kids, 18 million passionate young boys in a nation of 280 million were kept on drugs, and everyone accepted this as normal. A person who didnt use drugs couldnt hope to compete in the modern marketplace. Their biology would rebel at committing the amount of self-abuse required to become a successful member of society. Someone who didnt use drugs was an outcast, a kook a Neo-Neoist.
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You think corn didnt have an evil agenda? Think again. Selling drugs was the biggest business on earth. Access to drugs was the biggest question on everyones mind. Medical science had the answer to the unhappiness of life. Just take some of this. A society sustained on Ritalen and beer and Zalium and television applauded the crusaders who flew off to battle the illegal drug barons in South America. But when, inspired by Cha Chas mindless act of revenge, these same zealots began bombing breweries, chemical plants and television transmitters the psychosomatic bubble burst. What kind of fanatics were these? Property, Americas sacred cow, was under attack. Street punks could shoot each other all day long over psychological drug turf and nobody gave a hoot, but when a building was blown up America got shot in the wallet. Hey, I pay for that. My beer, my prescription medication, my television is going to cost me more one way or another. We have to stop these NeoNeoists. In the last days of civilization there were conditioned minds, and de-conditioned minds. And the thing that was doing the conditioning was drugs. It was war. A real drug war. The Third World War was not a thermonuclear war. The United States did not face off against Russia or China or anyone else. It was a war of ideas, a war for control of peoples minds: reason vs. religion, science vs. spirituality, logic vs. magic, physical reality vs. non-physical reality, drugs vs. no drugs, conditioning vs. de-conditioning. The Third World War was a Global Civil War. Governments, schools, businesses and families were split down the middle. Allies and enemies wore the same clothes, ate the same food, walked the same streets, lived in the same houses. Everyone was paranoid. No one knew who to trust. Everyone felt isolated and afraid and alone. Something had to happen. Something REVOLUTIONARY had to happen. Something that would transcribe a new page in the psychosomatic record books.
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Time folded into Time. Distance eradicated distance. Consciousness begat consciousness. Andwithout fanfare, without protocol, without warning from the abyss of complete surrender an old woman in Chicago broadcast a desperate plea through the vastness of inner space. This frail grandmas silent scream found its way into the eardrums of the Hidden Universe, the Cosmic Fire Station, the Headwaters of Creation. Alarms went off. Burly shoulders and hefty thighs sprang up off the mattress of eternity. The Fireman of Consciousness the Guy with Big Pants the Biggest Cheese of All, slipped on his boots and got ready to go to work. At last. Metaphysical help was on the way. Father Nature was reaching in, from outside of Time, to stay this mad swing of the pendulum of human events. But who would be his agent? Who would be the earthly atom recruited to accomplish His divine agenda? And what peculiarities would this individual contribute to the actual execution of the plan? Nowadays, the chemical plants were too heavily guarded, so Cha Cha and his men concentrated on trucks and trains. They used radio bombs detonated from a chase vehicle operating up to two miles away from the target. Since they didnt know which trucks or boxcars carried psychotropic drugs they just took out anything they could slap a bomb on. Commerce was in a tailspin. America had gone into detox. Production of everything was down. Truck drivers had the highest paying jobs in America. They were playing Russian roulette with eighteen-wheelers. Americans wouldnt take the work so drivers were airlifted in from Asia and South America. One out of fifty was blown to cat food, but the other forty-nine made enough money from just one run to set themselves up for life back in the Third World. The Death Lottery. Retail chains shut down operations, demonstrators marched on Washington, Americans were furious that their steady supply of material objects was being strangled. TV reception was sporadic, it was hard to find a beer, Zalium sold for ten bucks a
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pop. There was a widespread belief that somehow the U.S. Constitution had let everyone down and that the American Way of Life was over. What did you expect, grumbled Cha Cha, when the cops are the robbers and everybodys on dope? Single-handedly, he had hurled an entire nation into detox. National leaders wavered in front of microphones, chattering and shivering with DTs. Hollywood shut down. The schools announced a moratorium on learning. Everything Cha Cha had claimed to be true was true. He was vindicated in the court of popular opinion. The charges against him were rendered unenforceable because court was closed. But none of that gave him any joy. His real problem was his grandma. Grandma was sitting up in her hospital bed at the Eden Rest Home sipping orange juice and muttering Hail Marys backwards in Polish, as she had been doing every morning since she was summoned to identify Ramons body at the morgue. Wheres my boy? she had wailed at the assistant coroner, blinking behind her bifocals and twirling a wisp of hair sprouting from a wart on her chin. Heres the boy, said the coroner, pointing dumbly at the corpse laid out before her. But wheres my boy? You mean this isnt your boy? Wheres Ramon, she shouted. Ramon! Remember the butter! One stick of butter. We need butter for the cabbageAnd tell Sol Ill pay him Friday when I get the check. Dont forget the butter Ramon. You always forget the butter. A chubby detective with no eyebrows grasped her bony elbow and guided her away from the mutilated meat that was her grandson. Wheres my boy? she called over her shoulder. And that was how Ramon never died. In the moment the assistant coroner uncovered her grandsons body a duality rent the fabric of space/Time, and though Grandma Lobotomowskis body continued to move forwards in Time, her mind made a U-turn and started moving backwards.
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The detective with no eyebrows drove her home and settled her into a wooden railed rocking chair. Grandma started shoving herself back and forth at a furious pace, staring out the window reciting Hail Marys backwards in Polish. This detective was no rookie. Far from it. He was an experienced sleuth on a secret assignment to bird-dog Cha Chas movements and expose his associations. He was a master of deduction. A genius at extrapolation. He was thorough in his work to a point bordering on fanaticism, and he would not have underestimated the awesome significance of reciting a prayer backwards had he known about it. But he didnt know about it because he couldnt understand Polish any better than he could understand Martian. So he backed out the door and left her to her frenzied rocking. When the detective returned the next morning to check on grandma he gasped and pinched his nose. She was sitting in a cloud of smoke generated by the friction from her over-heated rocker rails charring the wood floor. He doused her with a pot of cold water and drove her to the Eden Rest Home. Good orange juice, she mumbled in the direction of three nurses dawdling on a vacant bed. Their ribald reflections on the perfect male posterior ended abruptly, and they hopped to attention, when Cha Cha burst into the room. We havent had good orange juice in this part of the country since that big strike in Gdansk last year, said grandma. Those shopkeepers in Warsaw must be hoarding fruit again. Hi buszia, said Cha Cha, greeting his grandma in Polish. She ignored him. But it was nothing personal. He just hadnt been born yet. One of the nurses leaped forward and dabbed a napkin against some orange juice spittle on grandmas chin. Then she beamed at Cha Cha with apple-bright eyes and plum colored lips. Cha Cha sighed. Where is she now? Somewhere around 1930, said the nurse. The Great Depression just hit and shes upset about some border clash with Australia? Or something? So she hasnt had one clear moment yet?
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Well, actually shes very clear, beamed the nurse, hoping to identify herself as a person with a positive outlook and sexy lips. Its just that the things shes so clear about happened in the last century. Cha Cha frowned and leaned over the bed. Grandmas watery eyes gazed right through him for a full minute. Then her cheeks shuddered and her mouth dropped in an explosion of recognition. I knew it! she exclaimed. Africans! Finally someone figured it all out. It should have been done a thousand years ago. Bring in the oranges from Africa! Cha Cha sniffled. Oranges from Africa! He jerked back his head and closed his eyes, imagining her in the good old days, puttering around the kitchen, pounding dough with the rolling pin, banging pots, yelling at him for skipping schoolGrabbing his thumbs and chirping Polish nursery rhymes when he was very very small, while the smell of boiling cabbage seeped into the sofa and stunk up the house. Her face framed by a paisley babushka arthritic, knobby fingers fumbling with the laces on Ramons first pair of shoes. Buszia. Grandma. His make-believe parent. Too bad he had never succeeded in tricking her into revealing something anything about his real parents. Who they were? Where they were? What happened? His dousing expeditions in search of underground currents on this topic inevitably bypassed her brain without a trickle of confirmation. And his direct questions seemed to slip outside the conversation like a buttered dumpling. Whenever he asked her anything about his parents grandma would snort and roll her eyes and dismiss the subject by saying it was a miracle that he and Ramon were alive at all. Shed always been an expert at banishing past unpleasantness. Bad memories were cast aside as heedlessly as the chicken feathers she plucked from their Sunday bird. And thats another reason her current state of disorientation was so unnerving to him. Shed always been on time, in synch, and three steps ahead of him. He always believed she loved Ramon more than she loved him. So what? She loved them both. At bedtime she told weird
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Polish folk tales about the supernatural adventures of talking animals and friendly plant spirits to the vanilla and chocolate Puerto Rican street urchins she had taken under her wing. Once, when he asked her if she was his real grandma, she said, Pinch me. See if Im real. Thats not what I mean. Only the Holy Virgin knows the answers to those kinds of mysteries, she said. Then she made the sign of the cross, mumbled something in Polish, and marched through the bedrooms throwing nuts in the corners and smashing them with her feet. What are you doing grandma? Feeding the spirits. Why? Why?So theyll keep the Child Welfare Agency from nosing into things that dont concern them. Like what? Like the missing page in their field manual What page is that buszia? The page on miracles. Some people in the neighborhood said that grandma had only taken the kids in to get the money, and she didnt really care about them. But that sure didnt explain why her mind turned into gravy when Ramon got shot. She had been unwavering in her belief that Ramon would one day become a priest. A very special priest. A revolutionary spiritual avatar on the order of St. Francis of Assisi. She claimed that the Holy Virgin had confided this to her in a dream, and she refused to accept any substitute fantasies. Her grandson the priest. Was that too much to ask for? And thats why Ramons sudden death rocked her to the core of her spiritual beliefs. Had she misinterpreted the Holy Virgins message? Or, God forbid, had she been lied to by the Mother of God? That didnt seem possible for a number of different reasons, but she had to find out for sure. So she started praying Hail Marys backwards in Polish in some inspired attempt to slip backwards in psychic Time, reenter the dream, and re-experience what the Holy Virgin actually said. It was the only thing that made sense to her at the time. Oh well.
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At first Cha Cha thought grandma favored Ramon because at least he was off-white. Once he asked her if she wasnt embarrassed to have a grandson with red hair and chocolate skin. She told him the Black Virgin of Czestochowa was blacker than him and a lot holier she was sure. He knew, deep down, that his skin color had nothing to do with it. Cha Cha was moody and brooding. Ramon was buoyant and enthusiastic and unpredictable. He wore his passion on his cheeks like strawberry jam. Thats why he fit so well into their formerly Polish neighborhood which had gone Mexican over time. He was guileless, like a saint, and everybody loved him. Oh well. Ni modo, as the Mexicans said. It was something that was impossible to change. It couldnt have played out any differently under Gods jurisdiction. Cha Chas eyelids rolled open and he focused on the face of the congenial nurse just as her tear ducts manufactured two giant drops that leaked out the bottom of her eyes. He kissed the nurse on the forehead, kissed grandma on her cheek, and fled on the crest of a rambling litany, rising like a storm surge of delirium, Oranges from Africa! Oranges from Africa!
Chapter Eleven
WELL, DID YOU HAVE a black female cook? Cedric Shoebridge rubbed his temples, and groaned inside. What does that have to do with anything? spilled out of his mouth, but the image took him back to a period of time he had done his best to forget. Beatrice, the Haitian maid, the black maid, the Catholic maid, had virtually run the Shoebridge household in the waning years of his marriage. She had done the shopping and cooking, the vacuuming and laundry. She crawled up ladders in summer knocking wasp nests down from the eaves, swearing at the buzzing beasties in French patois.
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She shoveled the driveway in winter, steamy breath huffing from her mouth like exhaust fumes from a snow blower. According to Beatrice, life was a battle against dirt and disorder. She was lean and strong and refused to talk about her homeland, but whenever something really disgusted her she would spit and mutter comme un Duvalier. When his wife kicked Cedric out of the house Beatrice set up a cot for him in the garage and brought him occasional meals of goat stew or English sparrow soup. She caught the sparrows in traps in the back yard, scalded them before plucking them muttering French incantations as their frantic wings beat the boiling water. According to her the sparrows were edible pests, why waste them? Shoebridge ate the soup without complaint, all the while wondering if she would ever adjust to life in America. She seemed almost not to care. She had a cousin who worked as a domestic somewhere in the vicinity and on Sundays Beatrice would don a hat decorated with plastic fruit and take the bus to visit her. One day Beatrice returned from her cousin agitated, spitting, swearing in French and pleading to talk to Cedric. Her cousin had overheard a conversation through the kitchen heating vent while she was stirring some boiled peas in the old mansion where she worked and Beatrice thought the FBI should know about it. It had something to do with an espionage operation which was due to be carried out by some group called The Plumbers and which Beatrice did not entirely understand except to know that the conspirators were behaving like Duvaliers. Shoebridge humored her. He explained that in Washington every leaf on every tree was either Republican or Democrat, there were no third parties, and that the only game in town was doing your utmost to assure that your own party got in office so you could keep your job. Every new president who arrives in Washington announces that his first step will be to cut back on the federal bureaucracy. What he is really saying is that he is going to fire members of the opposition party who have been given patronage jobs so, over time, he can appoint some of his own people to the very same jobs and stack the bureaucratic deck in his favor. Clearly, Beatrice did not understand these
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insider politics and was best off not worrying about them and, by the way, was there any goat stew left? But Beatrice, wasp-chaser, sparrow-trapper, voodoo transplant, did not give up. When she brought him the reheated stew she asked him that if the government wouldnt listen to her who would? You could try the newspapers, said Shoebridge. Theyre always looking for a story. No more was said about it. At the time Shoebridge was neck deep in the Rich Monk Affair with operatives spread out all over the U.S. and Canada faxing him expense reports which he signed without reading. But two years later when the Feds pulled him out of the waste bin and brought him back from Paris to head up the Watergate investigation he kept racking his brains trying to remember where he had first heard about The Plumbers. One night he was sitting alone in his new apartment looking over a take-out menu from a Moroccan restaurant when his eyes settled upon the simple words: goat stew. It all came back to him. He called his ex who stiffly informed him that Beatrice had left her employ a year ago and not to call there ever again. Shoebridge mustered all the resources of the FBI to track Beatrice but the most they could discover was that she and her cousin had returned to Haiti and disappeared into the chaos of French tropical voodoo culture. Did you ever have a black cook? repeated the drugged man. No, said Cedric Shoebridge. Tell me about the Sufi commune. Not much to tell. It was run by a bunch of randy middleaged women. No young women? Not many. Not for long. Whenever a young woman with loose morals showed up on the doorstep the commissars as we called them fed her brown rice and soy sauce, made her dig rocks out of the garden, generally humiliated her for a couple days, then told her to leave. How come?
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They didnt want any competition. There were a number of single guys around the place like me. They had us fixing roofs, remodeling bedrooms, painting siding off three-story scaffolds while the women sat around in the office gabbing about psychic healing and inventing things for the men to do. Lots of hippie communes were like that. The men did the heavy labor, the women made the decisions. But I still dont understand why they chased away the young women. Get the file! screeched the earplug. Behind the mirror Madeleine was tearing up the arm rests of her chair. Because they needed the men. They needed male labor. We could do their jobs. They couldnt do our jobs. We could hang out in the office next to the wood stove fielding phone calls and setting up retreat dates. They couldnt climb ladders in the snow to clear clogged chimneys. If we took up with some chippy and wanted her to stick around it would just be an extra mouth to feed. They wanted us to come to them for our comfort, not to some smiley shapely young thing who had just found her way there from Sweden or France. So your sexual adventures tapered off. Hardly. Hardly? Well, if you wanted to get along there you just had to learn to like older women. And did you? I tried. Thats where I met the Little General. Who? Mad Madeleine. Maddy we called her. She was just a few years older than me. Shoebridge, get in here, bellowed the earpiece. Ah yes. He was enjoying this. A little tit for tat. Youve interviewed her too? Weve been in contact. What does she say about me? She says youre a macho pig who should have your intestines ripped out and fed to piranhas. Unquote. Sounds right. What does she do now?
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I believe she runs a shelter for abused women in the Berkshires. Dumb as he was at playing dumb, neither let on they knew Shoebridge was fibbing. The drugged man didnt want to put himself at the scene of the disappeared file. Shoebridge just wanted to irritate his boss in the next room. Must be a lot of abused women in the Berkshires, snickered the drugged man. The first time I met Maddy I was three stories up on a shaky ladder swatting hornets while I tried to putty a leaky window. She was sitting on the grass munching teriyaki tofu telling me how men were the oppressors of women going on and on about Hindu wives throwing themselves into their husbands funeral pyre and old women cutting out young womens clitorises in Africa. I asked her to hold onto the bottom of the ladder because the hornets were driving me crazy and I was lurching from side to side. She said Ill never forget it she said, Who do you think you are bossing me around, buster! I hated her. I just wanted her to shut up and leave me alone with the hornetsIt was the beginning of a passionate romance. The truth drugs were idling nicely in his system and the drugged man began telling Shoebridge his tale of degradation and romance. Madeleine Naylor was a feminist anthropologist from Lonk Island, New York. While the drugged man had been running underground from the FBI as a war resister, Maddy had been studying pre-Hellenic cultures at Smith College intent on uncovering positive proof that in that golden age of prehistory women had indeed run everything. She got a little encouragement from the mid-eastern Cult of Ishtar which, every spring, offered a human sacrifice to the powerful Goddess. An adolescent virgin male was led into a field where, with great pomp and ceremony, his genitals were severed and he was allowed to bleed to death, consecrating the plowed fields to the female deity, imploring her to reward the sacrifice with a bountiful harvest. Maddy got a bit put off when she discovered the temple priests were prissy, feminized men who wore fine clothes and made their living by terrifying everyone else whos next? But the true epiphany came when she discovered the priestesses were temple prostitutes who sold their bodies to raise money for Ishtars coffers. It had a kind of poetic simplicity
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about it men paid money to get sex and salvation at the same time. It was a heady concept. The woman who gives you sex is also your savior. She puts you in direct contact with the eternal Goddess and her divine realms. She offers you physical and emotional release into a haven of peace and security and freedom from worries. She is Divine Woman. But would modern men be so brain-addled as to fall for this? wondered Maddy. Hadnt men learned anything in 3000 years? Maybe not. It sure didnt seem like it butt-sniffing mutts that they were. It was worth a try. Why not approach a sex-craved guy and seed his brain with the spectacular notion that if he was looking for the complete and total meaning of life and if he wanted to get laid too he need look no further than Madeleine Naylor. It didnt take long for Maddy to effect her first conquest. She managed to convince a biology undergrad from Amherst that near the end of his life Albert Einstein had written an unpublished mathematical proof that God the Father was actually a woman. She enlisted the young man in a ceremony to be held in her apartment. She laid him out naked on the kitchen floor surrounded by candles and incense and made him chant Holy Mother, Holy Mother over and over and over while she pulled a large bowl of cherry jello out of the fridge and dumped the contents on his crotch. Dont stop chanting! she yelled. Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Holy Mother. She massaged his private parts through the mound of red gelatin, smeared him with it from neck to knees, removed her panties and climbed aboard. When it was all over she had to rush the young man to the Emergency Room because she was terrified he had died of religious ecstasy. The Cult of Madeline ignited like a prairie fire on the Amherst Campus. Young men lined up twenty deep to offer themselves body and soul to this religious ritual. Lots of guys in those days were feminists. Lots of guys thought it would be a great idea if women went to work and slapped the rent money down on the kitchen table every once in awhile. But this went beyond feminism. Way beyond feminism. This was an entirely
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encompassing and existentially complete worldview based upon Madeleine, candles, incense, and cherry jello. Market analysts at Mega National were amused when they discovered the reason behind the sudden spike in cherry jello sales in their pudding manufacturing subsidiaries. The Cult of Madeleine was a moneymaker and from that point on received covert support from Mega National. No nasty stories about the cult appeared in any Mega National media outlets. Distribution of cherry jello was stepped up to college campus towns across America. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations looked on jealously. They had been early supporters of feminism reasoning that women were the premiere consumers in America and therefore if they had their own jobs they would not need to ask their husbands for money to buy things. Plus working women as opposed to working men, only had rent and a car payment to make not two kids and a wife to support. Working women would work for less. 30% less. At least for awhile. Raw capitalist opportunism. But the cherry jello phenomenon really took them all by surprise. Were women really capable of convincing men they were supremely spiritual beings in direct contact with a Higher Order of Being the earthly emissaries of a Divine Goddess? If so there had to be some money to be made from it: publishing, movies, restaurants, special religious foods, even new temples to be constructed a plethora of new products and services. A call went out industry-wide to not only give these females a wide berth, but to be actively seen as their supporters so any new business opportunities they created could be channeled the way of Mega National or those interlopers from Ford and Rockefeller. Madeleine Naylor was a pop phenomenon. Mega National hired her as a consultant on female issues. The secret to her success was that she had psychic matters confused with spiritual matters. They were both supernatural, werent they? And thats what made her cult so popular. She was not burdened down with such matters as morality or the best interests of humankind. Her devotees were snared by unadorned ego-gratification. The
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Astrology of Self. The Science of Self-Esteem. The Pursuit of Pleasure. Unabashed hedonism. Madeleine, and therefore her followers, were incapable of appreciating the difference between a Mother Teresa and any old organic garden-variety New Age astrologer. Mother Teresa had annihilated her ego and followed a spiritual calling to devote her life working for the poor and at the end of her long journey from Albania to India to the rest of the world all she had to show for it were two cloth saris and a galvanized bucket she used as a sink. Not good enough according to Maddy. Astrologers accepted money to intuit supernatural metaconnections between their clients birth date and the vagaries of the universe, paying special attention to such ego-oriented questions as: Will I marry a millionaire? Will my daughter marry a millionaire? Will my son become a millionaire? Psychic versus spiritual. A simple case of ego versus no ego. An astrologer had told Madeleine that she would raise 37 children, that she would be disfigured in an awful accident, and that her entire life would be a battle against uncertainty. Therefore, the first official act of the Cult of Madeleine was to ban uncertainty. Quantum physicists had proven that the foundation of the physical world is uncertainty. They dubbed it the Uncertainty Principle. No matter. Madeleine and her followers waged all-out war on uncertainty. There was nothing in creation that could not be pinned to a cause. Nothing that could not be understood. Nothing for which Madeleine did not have an answer. If it rained on your birthday you must have mistreated your dog. If there were too many mosquitoes in your backyard the neighbors must be cheating on their taxes. If war broke out in Asia it was because they werent eating enough brown rice. Life was neat and well-defined and everything had an explanation. All except for Rich Monk. Madeleine had moved to the Sufi commune in order to join a milieu where, over time, she could insinuate herself into a position of total control. She knew just how to do it. She organized her cult parties, took on apprentice priestesses, and
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held everyone in thrall with her psychic shenanigans until the drugged man showed up. He, as we suspect, was not Rich Monk. But somehow the stench of Rich Monk followed him around. In the kitchen, in the herb garden, high up on ladders, this irritating odor of chaos and coincidence, which was invisible and passed unnoticed by everyone else, was somehow detectable to the psychic sensibilities of Madeleine. He refused to participate in her cult parties. Said there was too much kinky sex in the world. Wouldnt touch cherry jello with a ten-foot wooden spoon. Worse, he made fun of her mission to rid the world of uncertainty. He would squirt whipped cream on his head or stir iced tea with his toe. Hang fruit from his ears or paint his nose like a penis. Then hed ask her, in front of everyone in the dining room, why hed done that. Because youre a moron, shed hiss. It got to the point where she would flee the dining hall whenever she saw him coming. He had ruined her digestion and reduced her to a furtive mouse, raiding the kitchen late at night for scraps of cheese and crusts of bread. When caterpillars attacked the cabbage patch Madeleine explained that the beasties had been drawn to an evil masculine presence on the property and the only solution was to double the frequency of their prayer ceremonies. They might even have to consider human sacrifice, she said, looking right at him. But the drugged man suggested that the evil masculine presence might have something to do with women who wore blue jeans, swore like sailors, and set up a religious hierarchy that would embarrass the Pope. The real solution, according to him, would be for the women to wear loose skirts and floppy hats and walk through the garden weeping and beating their breasts, plucking the little worms from the cabbage leaves and squishing them between their fingers. When the accelerated prayer schedule failed to produce results they tried it his way. Madeleine was livid. She would have loved to get rid of him. But he was a good worker and there was so much labor to be performed on the wood buildings and barns, in the gardens and kitchen, that it wouldnt be wise to drive any man away. She might actually have to pick up a paintbrush or hammer or mop Goddess
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forbid she had so many more important things to do with her time. She had to tame him. She had to seduce him. She decided to go about it the good old-fashioned way. Out came Victorias Secret and Fredericks of Hollywood. Lipstick, eyeliner and perfume. One evening she timed her exit from the shower so she would catch him walking past at the precise moment she launched herself out the bathroom door, materialized like a genie in a puff of steam. The towel clenched around her torso accidentally came undone and fluttered to the floor. She bobbled armloads of cosmetics and shampoos. He picked up the towel and handed it to her. They both laughed. From there it was a short step to sharing a bottle of wine as they sat in the flower garden at dusk, then going to hunt for a seed catalog somewhere in her room. They never found the seed catalog. He was a sport about it. He even started attending the jello ceremonies. She agreed to dress in Victorias Secret and give him oral pleasure three times a week even if she wasnt in the mood for sex as long as he refrained from ridiculing her ideas in public, in front of the other communicants. For him, it was a small price to pay for good sex. For her, it was a small price to pay to regain a crucial charismatic edge which allowed her to reemerge in her full glory as the unquestioned supreme ruler of the commune. Thats when I first found out about MN, said the drugged man. Whos MN? You dont know? You must know. Hmmm, said Shoebridge, momentarily sidetracked. MN? Those initials had come to his attention a long time ago. As the drugged man continued rambling about life on the commune Shoebridge withdrew into a private reverie. He listened, but his mind was on something else. Madeleine Naylor had been employed by MN as a product consultant. MN spent vast sums sponsoring projects within its subsidiaries to create more and more products and services for women, especially working women. Styrofoam fast food containers, pizza cartons, new tampon designs, walking shoes,
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cell phones, psychic hotlines, daycare centers, cars that talk to you and listen to you! were all projects that Madeleine worked on. In the free marketplace women already had been allotted seven times more retail space than men, and the more money women had, the more they would spend. MN wanted a piece of the pie a big piece of the pie. For years Madeleine never imagined that she worked for Mega National. She had been hired by Isis Design as an anthropologist to study markets for women. Isis Design was a subsidiary of Jersey Mills which was a subsidiary of Raymond Tobacco which was owned by Hammond Insurance which was a holding of the Aruba Investment Group which was owned by MN. The MN name and logo would never appear on any of these new items. They would be marketed either through companies they had already acquired or companies they would soon acquire. But though MN remained invisible and anonymous to the buying public and indeed, most of its employees, the profits fantastic amounts of money would flow downhill to its corporate coffers in Aruba, London and New York as they had done for hundreds of years. One night, when they were relaxing after a bout with the cherry jello, Madeline confessed to the drugged man how much fun shed had setting up the psychic hotlines. She had been assigned the job of choosing the first test panel of psychics to appear on TV with toll free numbers in late night infomercials. She put an ad in the New York Times and got 124 replies. She immediately eliminated all the male applicants because women would never trust a man with personal matters. That cut it down to 87. She eliminated 28 gypsies who operated out of storefronts in Brooklyn and Atlantic City everyone knew gypsies were frauds. Then she eliminated everyone with dark hair because they might be mistaken for gypsies. She set up screen tests for seven fat blonds and a rotund black woman with dyed blond hair. The best psychics always seemed to be obese. They had the most pleasant voices and cheerful manners and hey, if you had to lug around all that cellulite you too would probably want
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to develop your mental powers so you could visit several places at once without leaving your chair. They had credibility. When the screen tests were completed she had the list down to the black lady and two cheerful bovine blonds all of them extremely pleasant personalities. But did they have psychic abilities? Madeleine contacted some of her old school chums and videotaped live phone calls of how well the psychics responded to real questions from her old friends. The results, of course, were miserable. The psychics were compassionate and giggly and wrong 90% of the time. No matter. They just edited the tape for the 10% of the time they were right and ran an infomercial in test markets in Atlanta and Phoenix. It was an instant hit. The phone rang off the hook. Coins rolled downhill into the MN coffers. Madeleine got promoted to vice president at Isis. She was told the recommendation had come down Right from the top. The top? MN. Whos MN? The big cheese. Wow. The big cheese himself? Thats right honey. Maybe I should send him a bottle of champagne or something to show my appreciation. He doesnt drink. Well, maybe a box of chocolates. Or some specialty cheeses. He wont eat that. Jeez, he sounds like Howard Hughes or something. Wont eat candy? Is he afraid of getting poisoned? I dont think he worries very much about that. Maybe I could buy him a batik bedspread or something. He wont use it, said her boss Ms. Hudson. Rumor has it that he doesnt really sleep. Doesnt sleep? What a weird guy. * * *
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What a weird guy, said the drugged man, a couple years later, licking cherry jello off his arm. Did you ever find out who he was? I tried, said Madeleine. But I never got very far. Once in awhile I would get a good clue, but when I followed it up inevitably the trail led offshore, to the Bahamas or Singapore or Australia. For awhile I thought he was Australian. What changed your mind about that? It just didnt seem to fit. I finally concluded that he had to be British. Probably a scion from an old wealthy family. Eccentric type. Probably drove a Honda. Didnt want to stand out, or flaunt his enormous wealth. So you never found out who he was? Never did. Once I got a memo that said, curiosity kills the cat. Thats all. At first I didnt have any idea what it meant but little by little I began to think it had something to do with all the nosing around I was doing, trying to find out about MN. I laid low for awhile, then started asking questions. I found some bizarre reference to New Amsterdam in an old company file and I wanted to find out what it meant. Next thing I knew I was fired. Fired? What she could not know what no one could know is that MN was 400 years old. It was born out of the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the ensuing Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 17th Century. The Catholic Church controlled commerce in Europe until the time of the Protestant Reformation. The Church had disallowed private trading companies for the quite genuine reason that if private companies garnered huge profits they could afford to hire armies and become a serious political threat. Thus, like every war or revolution, the public dispute in the Reformation was about religious theories, the actual dispute was about money and power. The first thing the Dutch did when they broke away from Catholicism was to establish private trading companies, professional guilds, and the mercantile system. They made an end-run around the Cape of Good Hope bypassing the Arabs
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who controlled the spice trade between Venice and Bombay, grabbing Portuguese oriental possessions in a 60 Year War with Spain, and establishing the Dutch East India Company with holdings and trading rights on the west coast of India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, and the Cape of Good Hope. In 1669, at the height of its power, the company had 40 warships, 150 merchant ships and 10,000 soldiers a private army and navy with no allegiance to any one except profit. The Pope wasnt kidding. The first corporation set up shop at Batavia, Java, now known as Jakarta, Indonesia. Its charter was renewed every 20 years, but only if it paid off the Dutch government. Having done so the government authorized the company to acquire territory, create legislation, issue currency, negotiate treaties and operate a court system. It was a science fiction monster a business with the authority to act like a government. It even created an outpost called New Amsterdam in the Americas. So originally MN was Dutch and went by the name of the Dutch East India Company. When Britain overpowered the Dutch traders MN simply changed nationalities and became the British East India Company. The Dutch were out, the Brits were in, and nothing changed. This international octopus of expanding financial interests motivated by profits continued to grow and prosper. The English King gave it a trading monopoly in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It gathered an army of 24,000 soldiers and subdued India for 200 years. It created a presidency, an administrative protocol for presiding over certain districts. China refused to allow this financial monster on its soil except at a select island called Hong Kong. China was 4000 years old. It had seen this warlord thing before. Ohand MN changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York. MN the British East India Company ran roughshod over America, employed slaves and indentured labor, robbing the land of raw materials, shipping them back to the English mills to be processed into clothes and implements, then shipping the manufactured goods back to the Americas. As long as the
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company kept paying off the British King their charter was renewed. It got away with the same behavior in Africa. Then along came the American Revolution which was a backlash against the abuses of multi-national corporations those companies which hire armies, pay off kings, and regard themselves as governments unto themselves, answerable to no one, for nothing. MN had to reinvent itself once again if it wanted to do business in the New World, which it most assuredly did. By the 1850s, when the British Crown took over all of British East Indias governmental functions in India and absorbed its 24,000 soldiers into the British Army, MN had ensconced itself in the American Judicial system. Whereas, in the early days of American independence corporations were not allowed to be charted nationally and were only given ten-year charters at best, by the Civil War American corporations had become legally regarded as persons with all attendant rights and no attendant responsibilities. Thats when MN came into its own. It laughed at the robber barons and railroad potentates. Americas nouveau riche. These were mere men, frail human beings. They would build up spectacular holdings, and then die, and MN would buy them out with money socked away during the opium trade with China or the slave trade in Africa. Never again would MN build up huge plantations and infrastructure, like it had done in India, only to have the government step in and usurp its holdings. In fact, it was more likely to happen the other way around. Let government move in with its troops to stabilize regions of the globe, and then let them invite MN in to make a profit, pay them back through taxation, and pay the campaign bills for the new democratic leaders. But Madeleine didnt find out who MN was. Not for many many years. She never even imagined MN was an it, not a he. That her boss was an idea, not a person. An idea nurtured into being, sustained in life-support, by her very own brain and the brains of thousands of others. It wasnt until she got a job in a day care center and reheated the psychosomatic yeast that enabled her talking/listening car idea to mutate into a teaching organism that the light bulb went on. And when she
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finally did find out the truth she certainly wasnt going to tell the drugged man. It took me almost 20 more years to put it all together, said he.
Chapter Twelve
ODYSSEUS WAS SHAPE-CHANGING. Ebbing and flowing in a spongy frame of mind. Five eyes mounted on stalks projecting from the top of his head surveyed the muddy sea floor. Some stick-figures with seven pairs of legs and seven short tentacles came wandering by and Odysseus sucked them into his mouth with his trunk. Then he was a jellyfish, breathing with his entire body, expanding and contracting in a fluid pulse, a parachute of slimey cells, barely distinct from the water he drifted through. He was a lungfish perched on a rock, gulping air. Then a salmon, snatching squid in his mouth, vaulting waterfalls on his way home from school. Conked out, lying flat on his back amidst the shredded cardboard remains of his model plant resort, Odysseus was wallowing in The Dream again. His subconscious mind had no defense against this periodic onslaught of weird apparitions and frightening transmutations that first visited his brain shortly after his dad awakened him to the voices. The Dream was a mindbody hallucination. A psychosomatic yo-yo. He was a fungus playing footsey with a giant tree fern. A six-horned, saber-tooth cow. A hyena, a tapir, a rhino with a Yshaped horn on his snout. He was a duck-billed elephant, a three-toed horse, a deer with antlers on his nose. He sported huge webbed feet that were slimy and scary, in a froggy kind of way. A chin slung so low it brushed his breastbone and stunk of fish. He was a blade of grass, a diving bird, an ant.
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This menagerie of watery images cascaded through his protoconscious mind like a video loop. At times he thought they must be remnants of youthful fantasies memories of the days when he used to impersonate animals pretend he had wings on his arms, or fins on his feet, or a brain in his tail like a Brachiosaurus. Years later, after he met the ferns, he began to believe that the whole REASON he had entertained those youthful fantasies in the first place, was because these bio-memories were already echoing around inside his brain. These animal forms were already some deep part of his subconscious psyche. Sometimes inviting, sometimes frightening, ALWAYS beyond his ability to control these psychosomatic hallucinations convinced Odysseus that he was merely the nervous system for somebody elses ideas. But whose? He was the landing strip for somebody elses air cargo but where was it coming from? Who or what was flying this stuff in and landing it between his ears? And why were they doing it? Semi-conscious, lying flat on his back, Odysseus found himself employed as the baggage handler for Mystery Airlines lugging around busted suitcases oozing strange stuff. Crawling across the sea floor rooting in the mud for clams. Trying to catch fish in his mouth. Dropping out of the sky on web-footed parachutes. Swaying in a hula, eyeball to eyeball with grass tassels, holding on with all six legs. Leading an expedition of driver ants destroying every living thing in their path. Snagging beetles out of the sky in the company of other swallows. Hanging from a tree by his tail. Was there life after life? Did the fish know something we didnt? It certainly seemed that way to him. His self-doubts were rippling through his body like a car full of drunk teenagers swerving around on the highway blasting their horn and running over chickens. Viewed through the telephoto lens of Time it seemed clear that sand was the ocean in slow motion. That rocks were the bones of the earth. That water was the blood of the planet. As he munched on a trilobite, Odysseus glanced up for a moment and wondered why the stars looked so different tonight?
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He spent a million years inside his head examining the footprints of the future. Riding around Saturn in the company of insect astronauts. Playing basketball with some spring-loaded trees. Or drifting in warm currents past armor-plated fish with beaked mouths and cruel grins. He was flexing his purple pointed fingers in the sand again. Warm bubbles tickled his gills. Clearly he was an actor in someone elses movie but whose? An acrobat in someone elses circus but whose? He was swimming away with himself melting in the puddle of his own delusions. Mystery Airlines Flight 505 arriving from Australia, Pangaea, and the Paleozoic Era. Baggage handlers please report to Gate 7. When Odysseus arrived back on his Bicycle Seat in Time Little Papaya was leaning over him wiping blood from his ears. Hes conscious, she said. Siones voice floated through the open doorway, The pigsll be back. We have to get him out of here. Latu the Giant flipped Odysseus over his shoulder like a towel and the four conspirators crept out the kitchen door and dodged into the brush. Sione led the party upland through a mango grove, slipping and sliding on the orange pulp of fallen fruit. Then they entered a conifer forest where the air was cool and still and silent of birdsong. Where are we going? moaned Odysseus. Be quiet, said Lesiani. There are spies everywhere. The higher they climbed the more stunted and misshapen the trees became, until finally the forest gave way entirely to an uninterrupted plain of ferns and lava rock. Sione stumbled a short distance over the jagged rocks and began feeling around in the air like a blind man looking for a light switch. Suddenly he grabbed something in mid-air and yanked down on it. Zeeep! A shimmering image appeared in the air, parting the vista like a rip in a painting. It seemed as if Sione had unzipped part of the horizon and now they were looking THROUGH the landscape into something else.
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Lets go, said Sione, as he led the way through the skygap. Flapping like a fish on Latus back, Odysseus Tyme swam through a hole in human perception. Before him, where seconds ago he had seen only a vast plain of ferns and lava, stood a flattopped volcano. Where are we? The Hidden Zone, said Lesiani. Pulotu, said Latu the Giant. Sione said nothing as he turned and zipped up the hole behind them. Latu set him down on a cracked lava shelf and Odysseus gazed up at the mysterious mountain. The Pool Table of the Titans. The Landing Strip of the Gods. So the ferns hadnt lied to him after all. Even the scientists hadnt been too far off, geographically speaking. Continental drift, said Lesiani. They got the idea right, but they got the Time frame all wrong. In this part of the world evolution moves very quickly. If you dont believe me, just take a look at your feet. The knobs around Odysseus ankles had sprouted root hairs. Time for lunch, said Sione, rolling up his pants and exposing his own knobby roots. Fungus anyone? Sione sprinkled some fungus spores on Odysseus ankles and told him to squish his feet into the soft volcanic soil. Within minutes he began to feel something nourishing his blood something recharging his electrolytes. Whats with the fungus? he asked aloud. While Latu worked his huge feet into the soil next to them, Sione explained that fungus was the secret ingredient to terrestrial plant life. Virtually all land plants had some symbiotic relationship with fungi. The fungi broke down minerals so the plants could ingest them and, reciprocally, the plants fed nutrients to the fungi. Theyd been bartering this way for 400 million years. Without fungus land plants could not exist. Does this mean Im turning into a plant? asked Odysseus. Sione rubbed his chin. He couldnt decide whether to be completely honest with Odysseus or not. From the moment theyd found him, splattered with watermelon pulp in a cockpit
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papered with aeronautical maps, they knew that someone had sent him. But they didnt know who, and they didnt know why. I still cant figure out if youre one of us, said Sione. Sometimes you act like an animal. Sometimes you act like a plant. Whos us? Planimals, said Lesi. Part plant, part animalI tried to stop it from happening. I warned you. But your bad gene outmaneuvered me again. The bad gene? You know about that? Ever since the ferns told Odysseus that his wife, Leslie, had given his kids up for adoption to distance herself from the bad gene and pursue her career as a lawyer he had wondered if perhaps she had been right all along. There was something different about his kids all right. There was some part of him, that had become part of them, that all Leslies cultural conditioning could not eradicate. Some quirk of personality no more than personality some quirk of being that could not be explained by science. They almost seemed to engage life with four eyes and four ears that is, with some extracurricular quality of perception. Baby Zeus and Kimmie, names changed to Billy and Penny to camouflage their human family roots. What a heartache. Shipped off to some school in the Berkshires. Raised by a revolutionary new teaching system to what purpose and ends he knew not. It was every bit as inscrutable as the public school system. And probably just as soul-destroying. At least the ferns kept him up to date on their lives. But since the ferns didnt actually think hide-and-seek in Time was the summit of their mental achievement he had no idea what ideas his kids were being exposed to. It was maddening. Just like when they were assimilated into first grade and turned into alien creatures right before his eyes. And then there was the thing about bringing over that other palange so Odysseus could translate for the ferns. The one who called himself Rollo Nixon or Gregory Lobotomowski, or something. The one the locals swore turned into an octopus at night. Technically the guy lived in another island nation, but spread out as these Pacific isles were, geographically he was
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situated closer to here Vavoo? Pulotu? than he was to the principal island of that country. The meeting had been arranged so the ferns could tell the guy that his daughter had been set out for adoption and ended up in the very same school in the Berkshires. What were the odds of two expatriates inhabiting two adjacent South Pacific islands both having their kids stolen from them and enrolled in the same school? What were the odds? Zip. Zero. Nada. It had to be someones plan. But whose? So Im turning into a plant? He wanted to pursue it but Lesiani glared an oddly familiar glare that cowed him into silence. Then she plopped down on a clump of ferns and started rubbing her sleek black ankles. She had no knobs. Sione and Latu worked their feet deeper into the soil. Well, judging from my feet there doesnt seem to be much doubt about the Planimal thing, he chirped. OK. No problem. He must still be dreaming. Still be conked out. Go with the flow. Be water. Soon enough hed wake up and sort out the mess in his living room. Then he remembered the Pigs on Motorbikes. He remembered their bandoleers and chains, their hoggy smell and their wheezy grunts. And his doubts became woodpeckers: peck, peck, pecking at his brain. Yeah, said Latu. But you started out as an animal. Me and Sione started as plants. So maybe youre the same as us, and maybe youre not, said Sione. Whats the difference? said Odysseus, not really listening, not paying attention, just buying Time until he woke from this. Big difference, said Sione. He coughed up some convoluted explanation of how, according to past patterns of evolution, similar species often jostled each other for dominance. For instance, of several strains of reptiles only one produced dinosaurs. Of several strains of apes only one produced humans. To Sione the potential for evolutionary disaster was very real. Odysseus was either an ally or else he was a competing life form evil incarnate. Siones Big Plan was to find out what Odysseus knew, without revealing anything himself. But there was a problem.
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He doesnt actually know anything, said Lesi. By this she was alluding to the fact that the rational features of the human brain had short-circuited their biological memories. Humans simply did not remember bio-history. They couldnt recall their biological past lives in any manner apart from fairy tales. Having experienced The Dream, Odysseus was better than most. But by planimal standards he was in psychic kindergarten. All he really knew was that there was a lot more to know. I see, said Sione, his brain waves whirling like helicopter blades. He knew Odysseus chances of escaping from Pulotu unaided were equal to his chances of flying to Saturn by flapping his arms. Odysseus was locked outside of Time. He couldnt do them any damage right here. So Sione took a shot. What do you know about the war? What war? The war between plants and animals, said Latu. The war between female and male, said Lesi. The war between tyranny and anarchy, said Sione. I dont know what youre talking about, said Odysseus. I told you. He doesnt know anything, said Lesi. He doesnt know about trilobites or dinosaurs. He doesnt understand what corn has been up to. Doesnt understand about cows or pigs. He doesnt even know about ants. He doesnt know about ants! said Latu. Unbelievable, said Sione. So they told him all about ants. To any student of bio-history it was obvious that ants were the most sophisticated, highly evolved lifeform on the planet. In the absence of disciplined self-restraint they would have overrun the whole place and created an eco-disaster. But they were too smart for that. They had learned something from the mistakes of the trilobites. As you might suspect, evolution, the great scientific buzz word, actually encompassed a variety of interrelated phenomena. Galaxies, star systems, and volcanoes all evolved. Continents evolved. Mountain ranges, river systems, atmospheres evolved. Gold, carbon, diamonds evolved. And of course,
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without the prior evolution of these various forms, the lifeforms we know would never have evolved. Apart from this obvious mineral evolution, water-based lifeforms advanced through the various overlapping plot lines of bio-evolution. The best known was genetic evolution accomplished via endless experimentation with chromosomal mutants. The less-explored phenomenon was social evolution, accomplished via endless experimentation with social mutants. Ants stood head and shoulders above everyone else in the category of social evolution. Corn was clearly a major player, as were pigs and gorillas and of course humans. Humans were a freaky example of the overlapping agendas of bio and social evolution. Genetically, according to the principles of Darwinian evolution, there was absolutely no justification for the sheer size of the human brain. It was much too big. 90% of it was never used at all. This glaring fact flew in the face of Darwinian dogma which stated that useful bio-mutations were retained and useless ones discarded on the scrap heap of evolutionary history. Good ole Occams Razor. We didnt see monkeys running around with six arms, did we? The huge bodies of dinosaurs had bit the dust. The hind legs of whales had atrophied to nothing. And yet, for millions of years, maxi-brained humans had been observed chipping stones, kicking car tires, picking their noses while they watched TV. According to the Darwinian model, these oversized brains were marked for extinction. A few more centuries and poof!, they could go take a swim with the trilobites. Whats more, humans were paving the highway to their own annihilation. Technology, rather than increasing brain usage, was actually diminishing it. Most humans didnt know how to fix cars or TVs, they just knew how to turn them on or off. And, as a result of opting to do things the easy way, they suffered loss of locomotion and communication skills. Technology had become a substitute for intelligence. Yes, people could learn how to write checks and drive on freeways, but they were forgetting how to think. Which was the whole purpose they had been invented.
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And, when the other lifeforms saw what corn had pulled on the maxi-brained humans at everyone elses expense they were certain that humans would soon be joining Giant Ground Sloths on the evolutionary tree. Mass-scale agriculture was a developmental dead end, a biological cul de sac, as clearly earmarked for obsolescence in earth history as dinosaurs and trilobites had been. In addition to overextending the influence of corn and cows, agricultures ultimate accomplishment was the rabid proliferation of machines to replace men in the fields. Humans were consuming so much bio-space they were surely going to toast the planet. In 50,000 years they had expanded from 100,000 people with axes to 6 billion people with thermonuclear devices while undergoing no apparent genetic change. The ants were appalled. True, the biomass of ants greatly exceeded that of humans. But they were getting worried. Theyd been doing the social insect shuffle for 100 million years. Theyd made some mistakes, burned out some terrain, suffered the inevitable tribal extinctions. But their experimentation had progressed organically species by species. Some species failed while others thrived, then those failed, and others thrived. Humans, as a single species, were attempting to dominate the entire globe at once. Nobody had seen anything like it since 95% of the marine invertebrates died off in the Permian Extinction 245 million years ago. Humans had only been on stage for a couple million years or so. They knew all about the Permian Extinction and considered it a terrific game show test question. But they couldnt, for the life of them, figure out how its lesson might apply to them. Humans had a stunning aptitude for learning facts and information of all kinds without being able to decipher meaning in them. There was a major engineering flaw in their brains. A psychosomatic disconnect. Humans preserved, and indeed, exalted, the unnerving ability to churn out facts dissociated from action. They called it education, but thats not what it was. To anyones best estimate it was the exact opposite of education. In the manner of calling an economic oligarchy democracy, or the drive to create
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overwhelming special privileges for women equality, humans constructed bastions of higher learning based on the unshakable belief that education was a type of learning divorced from action. And every other plant and animal knew that ideas divorced from action were soulless. They were irrelevant, unblessed by the cosmic energy emanating from the Guy With Big Pants. They had no ultimate chance of hanging around historically speaking. Here was a species of thinking which should have been edited out of the population eons ago. And yet it persisted. No it flourished!So why was it here? Who put it here? And why wouldnt it go away? Why were humans seemingly genetically programmed not to learn anything from anybody elses mistakes? But the big question was: who were they going to take down with them? Thats what the plants and animals wanted to know. One thing was certain. The situation had gotten too ominous for the other lifeforms to allow it to continue uncontested. Something had to be done. And fast. It was time for a Major Mutation. The saving grace of humanity throughout the ages had been the periodic appearance of the social mutant. ALWAYS, inevitably, uniformly despised during their earthly incarnations, these were the people who produced the ideas that shaped human culture for thousands of years. The first man to tame fire was ostracized as a sorcerer. Socrates co-invented democracy and was ordered to commit suicide by guess what? the newly formed democratic state of Athens! Jesus of Nazareth offered humanity a spiritual key to unlock the Kingdom of Grace that existed outside of Time, and was crucified as a rebel. William Tyndale, the first man to translate the Bible from Greek into English, was burned at the stake for heresy. Scientists liked to trumpet the intellectual oppressions of Copernicus and Galileo, but it was the social mutants for whom society reserved the most exceptional honors of being hung, burned and tortured unto death. They died so that their ideas would live on. But why?
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The human brain was like a huge military airfield built on some speck of an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the slight chance that someday somebody might need to use it for something. It had no immediate evolutionary value. Surely someone was reserving all that brain-space for some reason. Somewhere, in the ether of the Overmind, a sublime design was lacing its shoes and preparing to take a walk into the lives of men. But what was this design? And why was it taking so long? The singular murkiness of the human mind could be traced to a problem with consciousness. Plants and animals could move freely in and out of Time. Ferns could visit their friends on the other side of the Earth by creating a simple warp in psychic space. It was childs play. They taught it to babies. Animals were much more dense, but they could still resonate with like-minds. Geese headed south could link up with their cousins at unspecified locations. For humans that would be akin to a vacationing family ruminating about how they were going to stop for the night at some motel in Iowa and having their cousins show up at the same Motel-8 a few hours after them with no one telling anyone in the other car. Humans did not naturally experience this type of communication. The pertinent portions of their brain had atrophied with disuse. For the most part, they relied on symbols to transcend Time and space. Numbers, words, and pictures could be culturally transmitted from generation to generation. That was fine for passing on information. Virtually useless for passing on meaning. To circumvent the problem of meaning humans invented the buzz word a word that seemed to mean something, but didnt. Perhaps the most famous buzz word was light. Everyone knew what light was. It came from the sun. It made your arm feel warm. You could turn it on or off with the flip of a switch. Then one day physicists took it upon themselves to define light as both a particle and a waveVery comforting until you thought about it. If light is both a particle and a wave, it is neither. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Everyone knew what light was, but
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nobody could understand what it was, using the terminology of science. Science was wearing its underpants on its head again. To understand light you needed a mystical mind like a fern. Perhaps the least understood buzz word in the lexicon of human symbols was Time the thing humans were always trying to escape. Time was likened to an arrow shot from a bow. Time implied death, which humans instinctively feared. By contrast, ferns knew that they had been around for 400 million years and still counting. They knew that though individual fern plants came and went, the superorganism known as fern kept on going. And going. And going. Plants, animals and ancient humans understood that Time was cyclical like a bicycle wheel that only touched one part of the road at any given moment. Every moment contained the past and the future of every other moment somewhere along the rim of the wheel. Every past event was a future event and every future event a past event. They just kept rolling, rolling, rolling. Everything was connected to everything else. Every success bred a failure and every failure bred a success. The more successful something appeared to be, the more certain its immanent failure. History was the exacting record of a billion bicycle wheels rolling down a hillside banging into each other. Historians were the guys who ran alongside shouting and trying to sort out the mess. But until people understood that Eternity was not the lack of Time not an escape from Time but rather the full and entire presence of Time, there was no way to make sense of the stampeding wheels. If you had your doubts about that you could ask any ant. One ant was every ant past, present and future. Solight was both a particle and a wave. Time was an arrow. And humanity had pumped its resources into creating a civilization which devoted itself to making up symbols that confused everyone beyond belief. Very strange. Like boy scouts handing out training manuals to fish teaching them how to swim. By slapping simplistic labels on profoundly complex phenomena humanity was digging its own grave. Buzz words, by professing to open our minds, were closing them forever.
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In truth, humans did most of their thinking without words. They just didnt realize it. Often ideas came to them in a flash, and then they would struggle for hours trying to render them in words or numbers. In blind ignorance humans assumed that because plants and animals didnt use symbols or words to convey ideas, they couldnt think. In fact, all of the bio-kingdom was imprinted with certain story-lines that were as common as fairy tales and nursery rhymes in the human species. Every species understood romance and fear and hunger. Every species understood the mechanics of evolution and the meaning of evolution. Humans alone among species knew nothing about that. Science could not search for meaning and therefore could not render or represent the invisible forces behind creation. Science thought The Guy with Big Pants was a myth because they couldnt measure Him. But precisely because of their sublime ignorance humans had evolved a purpose a purpose they couldnt begin to imagine. Which was just as well. That way the plants couldnt steal it. And then, one fateful day, plants began spilling their guts on talk TV and human philosophers retired from the intellectual forum in order to reinvent themselves outside the glaring lights of profound conceit and humiliating hubris. Humans were specialists. Each one knew a lot about something, but none of them knew how to corral all this knowledge into a comprehensive worldview. Like dinosaurs, they understood they were consuming the resources of the planet at an impossible rate, but they didnt have a clue how to STOP IT! They had accepted the simple premise that the purpose of life was to feel good and soon the only thing they would be feeling was the funnybone of extinction. Large amphibians had to die off to make room for reptiles to emerge. Woodlands had to die off to make room for grasslands to emerge. Dinosaurs had to die off to make room for mammals to emerge. Humans had to die off to make room for WHAT to emerge? The plants had an answer to that: More Plants. The animals had an answer too: More Animals. But these were not the only
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Mists of Consciousness creeping around in that Hidden Zone outside of Time. No. There were other voices yet to be heard. The mass self-extinction of humanity was considered a given. Plants and animals geared up for the coming civil war. Both were equipping colonists to reclaim turf in the vacuum left behind by the departure of human beings. Elk would replace cows. Prairie grass would replace corn. These kinds of things were easy to negotiate. The ants would be a problem. Theyd try to take over everything. So would the pigs. If thorny-palmed cycads made a big comeback most mammals would perish from lack of food. The birds loved that idea. They were planning to dump cycad spores all over the planet. Sardines and cod were envisioning a stupendous renewal. Tuna and flounder were forming an alliance to stop them. Mollusks and starfish wanted to return to the good old days before fish dominated the seas. The entire planet was gearing up for eco-warfare and the humans were the only ones who didnt know about it. Why should they? The main ingredient in the continuing evolution of the planet was the disappearance of the human race. Humans occupied themselves with the symbols and buzz words and issues employed to discuss a presidential election that was two years off. Meanwhile, all around them, talons and beaks and seedpods were poised to go into action. But the planimals a radical minority with no land-history to speak of had an entirely different plan. To their way of thinking, everyone else was trying to go backwards in Time like granny Lobotomowski trying to relive the Glory Days of the Mesozoic Era or the Permian Seas or whatever. But the planimals had a plan to move ahead. Quite simply, they intended to evolve photosynthetic creatures which could move about freely on the land. Such creatures could take immediate advantage of better sunlight or better moisture or better soil conditions. It wasnt such a weird idea. One-celled marine plants had been doing it for 3.5 billion years. The logistics of pulling this off on land were difficult but it was definitely doable. Sione and Latu the Giant were living proof of that.
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Of course, there were political problems to consider. If the other plants found out about it theyd go berserk. Imagine a plant which didnt have to wait to produce seeds in order to exploit better soil but could just walk over there and take it in five minutes! Imagine an animal which could live directly off rocks and moisture and sunlight. Creatures like that could elbow out the plants, run away from herbivores and starve them to extinction thereby decimating the predators and start a reign of tyranny unequaled since the despotism of trilobites. Whats more, fossilized records demonstrated that the immanent resurgence of the planimal phenomenon was not only possible. It was probable. It had been tried before under the sea by a variety of locomotive plants. The anticipated mass movement onto land was as inevitable as the exodus of frogs onto logs hundreds of millions of years ago. The Myth of Planimals had already sprouted as a fairy tale used to scare youngsters in both the plant and animal kingdoms. If they didnt eat their breakfast the Planimals would come and take them away kind of thing. Pigs and corn took the situation very seriously. As humans had made contingency plans for what to do if a comet hit the earth, so pigs and corn had made plans for what to do if planimals hit the earth. If the pigs had discovered the knobs on Odysseus ankles they would have wrapped him in plastic and incinerated him on the spot so no spores or cells could have escaped into the atmosphere. That was the approved procedure indicated on page seven of their emergency preparedness training manual. If one could talk pig, one knew all about it. So thats why you screamed when you spotted the knobs, said Odysseus. WellIt was thatand something elseYouve done this to me before, said Lesiani Done what? Changed your shape. What are you talking about? Im talking about the bad gene. Thats what. Sheesh. You sound like my ex wife.
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I AM your ex wife, said Lesiani. In fact, Im ALL your ex wives! What? Sione nodded at her. She took a deep breath and began explaining to Odysseus the multiplicity of maddening psychosomatic events someone endures when theyve been married to the same person for 600 million years.
Chapter Thirteen
HOW DID YOU FINALLY put it all together? asked Shoebridge. A little plant told me. SheeshWhat happened at the Sufi place? And at this exact moment Shoebridge bungled the investigation. There was no way for the drugged man to march down this path without revealing everything. Conclusive verification that a little plant had told him about his lost daughter would have been big news behind the false mirror. After all, there had been media reports of people talking to plants. It wouldnt have been an obtuse line of inquiryBut true to his nature, one-track Shoebridge caring more about exposing the identity of Rich Monk than solving corporate problems pursued the chronological line of questioning and ignored the existence of Time. And thereby blew itUnless he didnt blow it. Because maybe it wasnt blown. Maybe it wasnt an accident at all. Maybe it was somebodys incredibly convoluted plan. But if so, whose? I left the place. Madeleine got pregnant and had an abortion just like that without even asking me about it. I probably ultimately would have been convinced to go along with her in the matter and regretted it later but I never had the choice. Her body her business, you know. I had no say as to whether my baby would live or die. I couldnt believe her callousness.
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So you left? But I made one final statement before I did. I bet you did. How? I started writing her letters from her cat. Her cat? Yeah, it had her baffled for a couple months. Really? She believed in that psychic stuff. I told her I had her cat tell her that it was in touch with the soul of her unborn child. The kid was not happy. He had been looking forward to growing up on the commune. He had mapped out a great spot for a sandbox near the grape arbor, in the shade, not far from the lilac bushes in case he had to take a leak. He was actually looking forward to eating rice cakes and tofu. Had already learned the names of the cats and dogs on the place. Had even found some old rope to use for a swing that could be hung from the limb of the walnut tree. What happened? Madeline sunk into paranoia and depression. She was grouchy and flew off the handle. She didnt tell me about the letters for several weeks. Shed managed to put the abortion out of her mind just a minor medical adjustment. But now she had to think about what shed actually done. It wasnt prettyFinally I told her it was me. She went nuts. She went nuts. Her face got disfigured by a permanent rage. Her eyebrows twisted down to her lips. She looked so awful people stopped coming to the cherry jello rituals. She handed over the reins of running the commune to her head priestess. She moped around cleaning pots with a toothbrush. She built a sandbox and a rope swing. Even though the truth was out, it was just a joke, she couldnt get rid of the demons. She mumbled to herself and could be found walking the halls at 2 a.m. with a candle, looking into closets, opening the piano cover, reaching around behind books in the library. It was a joke that somehow turned real. The story of my life, I guessShe hated meThere were times when I myself thought the kid was actually out there,
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using me, not the cat, as a medium to pass on his message. We were messing around with things we didnt understand. Hmmm. LookIf theres anything you can nail me on, really nail me on, its being a feminist. A feminist? Yeah. A feminist. How did you get taken in by that? Because I believe in equality Shoebridge. I think every American does. I thought it was going to be great for women to go to work and come home and slap the rent money down on the kitchen table for a change. I thought it was going to be great that women would have to register for the Military Draft and face the same confusion I faced during Vietnam. I thought it would be great if half of the roofers and bricklayers and house painters were women. And it never happened. Nope. Never happened. The very women who went to college with me, then sailed off to graduate and professional school in the middle of the Vietnam mess, became the same ones who years later began complaining about the glass ceiling. Astounding. Theyd scooped up a bunch of jobs while guys like me were fleeing the FBI or fighting in Nam, and now they were complaining they didnt get paid enough. And thats what these women at the commune were like? Essentially. They wanted power. They wanted to call the shots. But they didnt want to get up on the roof or fix the toilets. You know, in the past 30 years something like 30 million more women are working. That means that somewhere like 30 million men are out of jobs. And though a man sort of expects to pay the freight for a woman he loves, a working woman has no intention of supporting an unemployed man for very long. Ive seen it over and over again. Why do you think we have such a problem with urban gangs in places where male unemployment is running at 60%. Why are there so many divorce dodgers, and beat dead dads? These things dont occur in a vacuum. And I was the chump. I was the feminist. The true blue believer. I really thought this was all going to be about
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equality. What a jerk. You can crucify me for that Shoebridge. It was my fault. Shoebridge was attracted and repelled, fascinated and disgusted by the drugged man. Rich Monk was a revolutionary genius, a master of subterfuge and subversion. The guy in front of him was just a heavily drugged lump of flesh like the bulletriddled body of Che Guevara on his death bed a shattered idealist. A ranting confused man who in two days of interrogation had produced nothing but wild theories on a number of disconnected topics. Is this what Rich Monk had deteriorated into? Was it possible for a person to lose so much of himself over time due to evaporated hope, trashed dreams and natural degradation? Was this what reality did to people? What would Jesus have looked like at 50? Martin Luther King or the Kennedys at 70? And who was Cedric Shoebridge at the age of 65? The only thing he knew about himself is that he was obsessed with Rich Monk a fabulous adversary, a fantastic villain, a worthy foe. People are often attracted to that which repulses them, fascinated by that which disgusts them. And so Shoebridge was drawn to this creature, or rather the myth of this creature the idea he carried around in his brain of who this man really was. The drugged man had been in the past, and apparently still was, guilty as charged of producing revolutionary writings that were a threat to transnational corporate culture kicking the global economy in the behind. He was dangerous as ever. But he didnt look dangerous or sound dangerous. He looked weary and defeated, like spittle dripping from the lips of death. And now he was talking about women. Sixties women. Shoebridge came from another generation. He had married an heiress. She made it clear on their wedding night that from now on her money was her money and his money was her money. She had no desire to work. Her natural impulse was simply to control the money. Any and all money that came anywhere near her. And she dispensed sex only when she wanted something. He wondered if these hippie chicks were any different. So tell me more about sex on the commune. Attraction, fascination, envy, disgust.
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Theres not much to tell. Come on. It couldnt have ended when you broke off with Madeleine. I refused to play their game. What game? The money game, the sex game. I dont follow. WellLet me put it this wayThere used to be a kind of balance in the world when men were in control of money and women were in control of sex. There was a natural reason for them to get together. When women control the money and the sex men are reduced to mere laborers. Yeah. For thirty or forty years weve been hearing how men are the oppressors of women. On the commune I came to the conclusion that men are, in fact, the protectors of women. Men fight the wars and build the roads and mine the coal to provide security and transportation and energy for women. Uh huh. And all the while men have been brainwashed to believe they are more materialistic than women. Mater, the Latin word for mother, is the root word of materialism. For thousands of years every human society but ours has known that women are more materialistic than men. But we choose to believe the opposite. Its another modern myth. If men are object-oriented and women are people-oriented why do men play team sports and why are shopping malls filled with seven times more personal items for women than for men? Wars are fought over material resources, and women demand more and more of those. You could actually say the greed of women is the cause of war. Oh come on. You asked me what I think and thats what I think. Whats more, the female agenda and the multi-national corporate agenda are identical. Thats where the real problem is. How so? Corporations want to sell things and women want to buy things. A natural affinity. But thats just the beginning. The military/industrial establishment in America has always required
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cheap labor. Republicans were always the party that favored open immigration policies. Then along came the hippies, the Hell No We Wont Go generation. Millions of men of the Vietnam Era decided that they wouldnt go to fight that war, and they also decided they wouldnt go to work for Dow Chemical, which made napalm, and General Dynamics, which made war planes. Corporate America held its breath. These highly educated guys were refusing money. Refusing to join the payrolls of these corporate golems. And then you know what happened? What happened. The women said, HellIll go. Whats more, they went to work for 70 cents on the dollar. In one fell swoop womens lib liberated the corporate giants. A working man was expected to make enough to support a wife and two kids on his wage. These young women only had to cover rent and a car payment. While men were off either fighting the war or fighting against the war women swept in and took the jobs. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were the greatest initial contributors to feminism. Does that tell you something? What would it tell me? Their think tanks had studied the issues. These guys do not give money to causes that undermine their best interests. They dont give money to the Communist Party. They created a whole new wave of consumers. They gave jobs to women and now it was women who bought cars and condos and microwaves. The womens movement played right into the hands of multi-national corporate culture. To believe otherwise is to be utterly deluded. I think youre deluded. Youre not the first to say it. Im a myth unmaker. What myths do you unmake? The myth that men are the oppressors of women. The myth that women are morally superior to men. The myth that women are kind and caring and sharing and men are mean and conniving and manipulative. I learned that on the commune. Women with power are just as greedy and selfish as men with power. Maybe even worse, because they control sex too. Thats all?
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NoThats not allThe myth that women are intuitive and men are analytical. Where did that come from? Its preposterous. Dont people look out their windows any more? Women are always analyzing everything. They have a lust for analyzing things, gossiping, pronouncing judgments. And where does our art and music and literature come from if not male intuition that abstract, non-verbal, masculine dream space? Youve lost me. We live in a feminized culture Shoebridge. A culture where men have taken on the manicured and inoffensive mannerisms of women. Our political leaders are clean, polite, evasive, indirect. They lie with impunity and express flowery emotional visions of goodness and righteousness. These guys are women wearing suits. Thats how they get elected. Our presidential elections go to the handsomest candidate every time forget the issues. Corporate culture is female. So we should go back to being cave men? No. But we should recognize the fact that human society does not endure by virtue of flowery speeches and handsome clothes and evasive answers. Human society is accomplished by blue collar men with dirty hands, with grease and tar under their nails. Men who are straightforward and direct. Men who cannot afford to lie about the amount of fuel in an aircraft or the amount of cement they use in their concrete. Politicians and women can afford to lie or be evasive. Their jobs really dont matter. Working men cant afford to lie or the whole thing will fall out of the sky. Thats how you can tell the difference. Who can lie and who cant. Womens work and mens work. Quite a speech. I told you. The only thing you can nail me on is the fact that I was a feminist. A true believer in equality. And all I ended up supporting was another version of the military/industrial agenda one that was wearing a dress. I guess that kind of talk didnt go over too well in your circles. No. It didnt. I was ostracized at the commune. Finally, to make a statement, I refused to perform heavy labor any more. I cooked and even vacuumed. I fooled around with the computer
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and managed our little bookstore. When I refused to do mens work my days were numbered. I was just like another young woman who showed up around there to be a drain on the economy. I was asked to leave. Sounds like they violated your civil rights. Ha ha haWhen did you find out your kid was still alive. Bang! BIG BANG! At that moment behind the false mirror a permanently twisted lip twisted more, and the drugged man knew he wasnt going to leave this room alive.
Chapter Fourteen
meanwhilein a parallel universeback in Chicago AS THE GRAY BUTTOCKS of dawn farted a leaden haze on the canyons of Carrini Green, the nurse with the apple-bright eyes and plum colored lips slid Cha Chas arm off her belly and slipped out of bed. Smoke and ashes from countless fires hung in the air, sticking to dewy windows, coating them with carbon soot. The nurse dressed quickly and started straightening up the apartment organizing clothes, loose papers, and half-eaten chunks of food into neat piles. Cha Cha woke up an hour later and kicked her out for disrupting his food experiments and because he couldnt find his good pants. He was fifteen minutes late for a meeting with the mayor. Cha Cha had no idea why the mayor wanted to see him. Everything had been so strange lately there was no point trying to second-guess every new development. Six months ago the man wanted him dead. Now he was sending him breakfast invitations.
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How bout a donut? chirped the mayor. Theyre not so easy to come by nowadays. Cha Cha broke the donut in half and dipped it in his milk. So hows your grandma? Hard to sayEither shes not here. Or were not here. Hmmmwellin a waythats what I wanted to talk to you aboutIve got a problem with my family too. Oh yeah. YeahLet me put it this way. My familyyou know the storyweve been in politics for generations. And what we have right nowwellweve never seen anything like it. What we have right now this Civil War its not a political problem. Its not a political situation. We dont know how to handle it. Its too strange for words. Its almost like Time is running backwards. Cha Cha grunted. Grandma was now in the throes of World War One some problem with the Serbs and the AustroHungarian Emperor. So what about your family? Im afraid for my kids. The mayors hand twitched. A hot tongue of coffee made a leap for freedom and splashed down on the tablecloth. Lookguys whove been driving cabs for 25 years are forgetting how to drive. Theyre running over pedestrians and smashing into buildings. How does someone forget how to drive? I dont know. I never knew how. Ohwellanywayfireman have forgotten how to use hoses. McCormick Place and the Palmer House are still burning. They tell me farmers in DeKalb forgot how to plant corn. Plumbers cant solder. Bakers cant bake. I know. So what do you want from me? I want helpfrom youfrom yourassociates. The Young Lords. Cant help you there. The Young Lords are finished. Kaput. The Young Lords died with my brother Ramon. LookIve seen them out there on the streets. They Its not a gang anymore. Its disbanded. Its just a confederation of different groups. I have no control of anything
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any more, he lied. He still wasnt sure what the mayors game was. Cha Cha. I didnt ask you to come here so I could put you on the spotBut I see these guys. Everybody sees these guys. Oh, those guys. Yeah, those guys! The Assassins of Time. What? They came up with a new name. New name for a new game. They call themselves the Assassins of Time. OK. OK. Heres my point. I walk past Carrini Green. A few blocks away Michigan Avenue is spontaneously unmaking itself. Granite is reverting into lava. Buildings are melting. Steel is decomposing into iron ore dust. Glass is turning into sand and blowing awayBut the Green is standing there tall and proud like the Virgin Mary. Like it has a protective cloud covering it, warding off disaster and decay. I dont get it. Neither do I, said Cha Cha, enthralled by the magic of capillary action defying gravity as it sucked milk upward into his dangling donut. It was hard to get a donut nowadays. Too bad grandma was in no shape to whip up some kolacki. Love that apricot filling. YeahBut your gang. Or whatever you call it. The Assassins of Time. You have something to do with it, dont you? YeahWe THEY do the building maintenance. Come on. It must be more than thatCome on Cha Cha. Help me. My city is dying. Cha Cha bit into his soggy donut, avoiding the mayors manic gaze. Every day I come home and Im afraid Ill find my house is melted, and my street is a tar pit, and my kids are gone! The mayor twitched again and slopped some coffee on his shirt this time. Ill see what I can do, said Cha Cha, standing abruptly. Thanks for the donut. I love the way it sucks up milk like gravity doesnt exist. Like gravity is just something written in a
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book that a donut never read so its not bothered by itGet my point? NoI dont. Well, think about it. Really think about it. The mayor rolled his eyes and by the time he was done rolling Cha Cha was gone. Meanwhile Grandma Lobotomowski sat in her bed at the Eden Rest Home reciting Hail Marys backwards in Polish. A week later Cha Cha bustled out the foyer of Carrini Green surrounded by ten body guards and veered east toward Lake Michigan. Young kids cheered his name as he passed. Women threw flowers at him. Men waved their hats. The only dispassionate spectator was a cow that defecated in the middle of Division Street as it crossed over to where two of its friends were feasting on a pile of fresh garbage. Cha Cha spotted a baby curled up next to its mother sleeping on a pile of newspapers in the doorway of a looted, burned-out hardware store. Find that woman a room, he barked to one of his body guards. The guard snapped his fingers at a trailing subordinate and relayed the message. But there aint any rooms at the Green. Unless you want me to kick out the mayor. Solve it. That woman better not be here when we come back, said the guard. Then he snapped into a jog to catch up with the rest of the pack. Cha Cha Lobotomowski, illiterate street gang leader, had really come up in the world, in the sense that the rest of the world had really come down. The red-haired, black-skinned Polack with a first grade education and a rap sheet as shocking as a recipe for radioactive liver sausage, had emerged as the de facto Lord of Chicago. A one-man umbrella of protection. Marina Towers, Lake Point Towers, The Drake and the Palmer House were gutted, charred wrecks casualties of the relentless Civil War, and of something else too something to do with Time. Carrini Green, slum high-rise extraordinaire, had
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emerged as the most secure, most desired residence in the City of Chicago. You could still hear gunfire at night, but the plumbing worked and the windows werent shot out, and the cows ate the garbage. The mayor lived there along with certain aldermen Cha Cha approved of. Cows, pigs and other barnyard animals had taken over the city streets. There was no motor traffic because there was no gas. The main thoroughfares were indistinguishable from any street in Bombay teeming with bicycles and oxcarts and squealing goats and children. The farmers in northern Illinois had been unable to sow their spring crops without fuel for the tractors so, after the livestock ate up the seed stores, they turned the animals loose. A rural exodus of cows, pigs and chickens gravitated to the city, attracted by the mountains of fresh garbage. Once a week Cha Cha ceremoniously shot four pigs and hosted a block party for the residents of the Green. Why Cha Cha? Why this neapolitan ice cream flavored human being? What did he have going for him aside from the fact that he never went to school and he never watched TV?NothingThat was enough. Society had lost its grip on him. He was deconditioned. Decontaminated. He was the only human being left whose thoughts were not composed of buzz words. Science called it Neoteny a manner of evolution whereby something evolved by not evolving. Whales were a good example of that. Formerly four-legged land animals, one day, in the womb, they latched onto their embryonic fish-like qualities and refused to give them up, thereby re-evolving an aquatic lifestyle. Cha Cha was a social mutant a prime example of neoteny in social evolution. He had refused to grow up inside his head. His mind was devoid of symbols. He was neither genetically gifted nor culturally challenged. He was simply a social mutant. Where other kids bartered away their spontaneity to curry praise from adults Cha Cha simply sneered. Where other kids took drugs to make them sit still in school Cha Cha simply refused. He had never allowed his brain to be colonized by the
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symbols and buzz words and niceties society employed to control people. Coarse, moody, anti-social as he might appear, his physical, psychic and spiritual bodies were integrated in a way that no normal twenty-first century human being had ever experienced. He owed this integrity to his grandmaand his tenure in the street gang. Grandmas rule was: if you dont go to school you dont watch TV. Pretty straight-forward. From an early age that struck Cha Cha as killing two birds with one stone. And where society had shown him hypocrisy and duplicity, the gang taught him loyalty and truthfulness. Where the church had marked his passage into manhood with a gown and a catechism, the gang demanded that he drink a spoon of his own blood and steal a TV. While cops took payoffs and the television ran programs of how beavers lived in northern Minnesota, Cha Cha started school lunch programs and set up a crack cocaine perimeter around the city of Chicago, judiciously employing necessary force to keep drug dealers out of his neighborhood. The more civilization fell apart, the more people realized they didnt need priests and politicians. They needed shamans and warriors. They had no use for journalists cranking out computer generated cynicism and trendy nonsense in airconditioned rooms. They needed people who had shattered the limits of perception in the sweat lodges of their own souls. They needed poets. They needed men and women who walked barefoot through the jungle swamps at the ends of the earth, and then came back with a story to tell. Society was never intended to be a machine. It wasnt supposed to run like a clock. The more government set itself up as the guarantor that nothing would ever go wrong, the more things went wrong. Society was organizing life to death, and people were rebelling in their souls. At the end of the second millennium rich people were getting richer by investing in companies that hired machines and fired people. It was called Egonomics. Machines could be depreciated, people could not be. Banks and phone companies boasted how they had increased service by 15% while slashing employees by
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15%. The Dow went up, and so did unemployment. Profits soared, and so did poverty. It was a self-fulfilling nightmare. Nobody stopped to think that if people didnt have any money they wouldnt be able to buy anything and there would be no economy whatsoever. The computers knew what was going on. But they werent talking. Some evil influence crept through the land instilling a druglike craving for order and method and security. Someone had clipped the wings of our imagination. The living breathing organism of society, that spontaneous celebration of life, had been assigned the job of a janitor, sweeping the gym floor after the high school basketball game, scraping gum off the bottom of the bleachers. When the inevitable civil war broke out, when the over-built fortresses of security and organization and insurance finally collapsed under their own grotesque weight, the only ones who could float on the tide of this irrepressible evolution were social mutants like Cha Cha. Human history was on the run. Cha Cha swept through the basement door of the John Hancock Building past a team of horses hitched to a rope. Once a bastion of paid premiums and guaranteed security, the bronze and glass skyscraper was now a lifeless monument to an extinct way of life: paper shuffling, computerized record-keeping, planning for things that never happened and not planning for things that did. A young man with a gold nose-ring and a leather jacket emblem proclaiming Assassins of Time waved Cha Cha into an open elevator door. With a whistle and a shout the team of horses lurched forward. The rope whinged taut inside an assembly of pulleys and the elevator began to rise. Youre a genius, said Cha Cha. Airport Johnny shrugged. I got the other stuff too. He pointed to a tape recorder and a hamster cage on the elevator floor. Does it work? It will if you find a hamster, said Airport Johnny.
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Johnny had a reputation as a backyard genius. He was the kind of guy who could fashion a snow blower out of soup spoons and rubber bands, or a jet engine out of Bic lighters and a portable hair dryer. He used to be an airplane mechanic at OHare, but when the airport closed down he took over building maintenance for the Assassins of Time. The horses pulled, the pulleys creaked, and the elevator steadily rose ninety floors. Any word on The Reaper? asked Cha Cha. We cant find him. Even the guys on the east coast say hes disappeared. Disappeared my If anyone could find him we could. Maybe youre still not looking in the right place. I dont know what to tell ya. Anywayno one has money to buy Boot. Its not a problem. You dont get it. Boot was just one of his products. That wasnt the only thing The Reaper was selling. What else was he selling? He was selling freedom from pain, security in pill form, insurance against feeling bad. He was selling instant selfesteem. He was selling the most ancient evil that stalks the earth. Whats that? The idea that you too can feel good, all the time, if you just listen to him and do what he says. Sounds OK to me. Come onDont ya know nothin about history? Do ya think Jesus Christ walked the earth to feel good? Life dont work like that Johnny. There are ways to step outside the pain for awhile. But you cant do it with drugs, and you cant do it with money or insurance or police protection or all the other crap they tried to sell us. Then how do you do it? I dont know yet. Im workin on itThe whole thing has something to do with Time. Time? ListenI want you to keep lookin for The Reaper. Dont give up on that. This thing with him is not over yet. If nothin else I owe it to Ramon.
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The elevator clanged to a stop and 90 floors below the horses jerked backwards against their harnesses. As the young men strode toward the observation windows Johnny said, Will you make me an alderman now? What? Come on. Ive always wanted to be an alderman. You find The Reaper, Ill make you an alderman. Done deal, said Airport Johnny. Far below them dark plumes of smoke rose from dozens of fires burning throughout the city. Overturned boats lay belly up in the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. The crumbling remains of the Sears Tower smoldered to the west, like a blackened banana with a huge bite taken out of it. Abandoned vehicles littered the roadsides like candy wrappers. Time muttered Cha Cha. What? Its something to do with Time. The next morning one of Cha Chas bodyguards shook him awake and handed him a squirming, live hamster. Cha Cha stuck the hamster in Airport Johnnys cage and bolted his bedroom door. He placed a half-eaten hamburger on a wooden stool, kneeled down in front of it, and started reciting Hail Marys backwards in Polish. Amen. Death of our Hour. After twenty minutes the bun began vibrating frantically, crackling with hidden energy, flapping up and down on the burger. Within thirty-five minutes the bun had reverted into a pile of whole wheat kernels and the hamburger and reformed into a strip of cow belly. Someone knocked at the door. Planning Commission meeting at ten oclock, chirped the mayor. OK, shouted Cha Cha. He dabbed his fingers against the bloody slab of meat and swirled the grain around. It was real all right. Then he made a recording of his backwards Hail Mary on a tape loop threaded through Airport Johnnys audio deck, which
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was powered by a hamster running in a tread mill. He blew on the hamster to get it moving and listened to the sound quality as his voice made two passes through the prayer and started in againOK. Cha Cha squeezed out the bedroom door, set six bodyguards in place, and told them not to let anyone in, or out, of that room. Then he motioned the mayor to join him for the walk to Louies Discount Tire Mart where the Planning Commissioners of the Great City of Chicago held their increasingly irregular meetings. On the way they passed festering pits of metallic slime where skyscrapers had melted into the ground. Andthey passed tidy red brick bungalows gleaming like brand new cars with sharp paint and fresh mortar. Mere months ago these buildings had been rat infested slums crumbling with neglect and decay, but now they shone forth rejuvenated, reborn in their youthful exuberance, reprieved from the slaughter of Time. The men turned a corner and sidestepped a stream created by water gushing from a sewer. The water ran uphill, spread out in the street, turned into droplets and lifted into a passing cloud. It made Cha Cha think about the donut. Remember that donut you gave me? Remember how it sucked milk up into it? Donuts always do that, said the mayor. Nothing unusual there. Now rain falling upward, THATS unusual. Do you think that maybe the rain got the idea from donuts? Im not a scientist, said the mayor. I dont know. At this point, if you told me that computers were holding three-legged races at the Lincoln Park Zoo I wouldnt bat an eye. Hmmm. They hopped a chain link fence and took the shortcut through the tropical rain forest behind Louies Discount Tire Mart, winding their way around stacks of ancient tires which had sprouted leaves and roots and shot skyward creating a cool jungle of latex rubber trees. What do these guys want anyway? said Cha Cha. I dont know. They dont tell me nothing no more. They just said it was urgent. The mayor was currently employed as Cha Chas liaison to what was left of the business/finance
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communities. Plus, he kept the stair halls in Building-B swept clean of debris which entitled him to subsidized rent at Carrini Green. They popped out of the forest, skipped down a flight of cracked stairs, and swung through a door into a roomful of pacing men who smelled like they could have been up to anything. They all started talking at once. GentlemenI cant follow a word of this, said Cha Cha. How bout we let Eddie Spaghetti tell me the plan. So Eddie stepped forward and presented a plan that made the rest of the commissioners gloat like theyd just tricked a waitress into lifting her skirt and flashing her panties. The plan was this: the commissioners and their families would get safe conduct out of the city, and Cha Cha would make all major decisions for the Planning Commission until they got back. We want you to take care of the placeuntil we get back, said Eddie. Simple, yet brilliant. This way Cha Cha would get blamed for the mess, and if he ever managed to straighten it out, they could effect a triumphant return and reclaim their authority. Fine, said Cha Cha. And that was it. The abdication of the last official power bloc in the City of Chicago. The mayor twirled his tongue inside his mouth and amused himself with the thought that there was no fanfare to celebrate this moment except for the steady drip, drip, drip of the building melting around them. When can you get us out? asked Eddie. When can you be ready? An hour later Cha Cha burst into his office and found a calf standing in a wheat field. The hamster was dead and the tape deck silent. MADRE DE DIOS, he wheezed, as he slammed the door and locked it. Then he dropped to his knees and began knocking off Hail Marys forwards at a delirious pace. Gradually the wheat kernels collected into a pile and disintegrated into white flour. The calf grew large and plump and ripe for slaughter. Cha Cha stopped praying. Good enough.
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He was pretty sure he could bring back his hamburger whenever he wanted it. He went to the sink, chugged two glasses of water, and rinsed his face. Then he knelt next to the couch and started praying backwards again. Amen. Death of our Hour He worked into the afternoon, buzzing with passion and fury aching and sweating and pressing on shifting his kneecaps on the soft earth. He soared back in Time, generation upon generation, permutation through permutation, until the calf became a buffalo with a huge shaggy mane, and the wheat became prairie grass. Tribes of indians came and went. The buffalo morphed into an antelope with horns on its nose, then a tapir, then some kind of rodent. A pod of whales crawled out of the great inland sea. They sprouted legs and mated with rhino-like creatures, then they shrunk into lung fish and disappeared under the ocean. The prairie grass became a magnolia, a conifer, a giant tree fern. The tree fern melted into a puddle of green pond slime which migrated to the sea coast and slipped under the waves. Finally, the hamburgers antecedents reverted into hairy blobs of protoplasm, bumping and jerking around in the sea, chasing and chomping on each other until all of them disappeared entirely. Cha Cha gasped. Life had disappeared but HE was still there. IT was gone but he wasnt. How could that be? Someones been lying to us, he muttered to himself. Six thousand forward Hail Marys later he brought everything back to the present: a cold, half-eaten hamburger sitting on a stool. Now came the big test. The real thing. He took a gulp of water and kept on going willing his way into the future. Praying and praying and praying. But the same thing happened again! All the animals and plants grew big, then small, then slipped into the sea. What was the meaning of this? Someone must be hexing his food experiments. And theres only one person that could be. He reversed the prayer and brought the burger back to the present. Hmm. Cold greasy meat squished between two soggy buns, oozing sticky dried ketchup and limp lettuce. He jammed
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the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed it in one gulp. Then set about making his Plan.
Chapter Fifteen
HOW COULD SHOEBRIDGE HAVE guessed? Was it just a guess? A bait cast beneath the surface to entice an unwary barracuda? But what other reason could I have had for stealing the file? My fingerprints were all over the place. What other reason could I have had to be there? None. None at allSteer for Jamaica, thought the drugged man. Get outta here! Civil Rights huh? Good of you to mention that. This whole thing began with the civil rights movement blacks marching for equality. That energy got transformed into anti-war sentiment when Muhammad Ali refused draft induction and went to prison as a conscientious objector. That was his most powerful punch ever. The toughest guy in the world claims hes a conscientious objector and goes to jail to prove it. Then the Vietnam and civil rights fervor got picked up by feminists and they ran with the ball. The most coddled group of people in the history of humanity American women convinced the world they were oppressed just like blacks. Yeah, it was funny. But whats not funny is that 30 years into Affirmative Action the essential black civil rights issue which was expanded to include gender there were 40% more women working and 10% fewer black men working. It was enough to turn me into a Republican. The whole civil rights thing, which was supposed to put more black men to work, to create more opportunities for black men to perform as responsible heads of household, ended up putting more black men out of work! And what do we have now? The prison population is predominantly black men, and
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85% of those guys were raised in fatherless homes. The welfare system at work. Yeah. A bunch of deadbeats. The real deadbeat is the system, Shoebridge. A father cannot live with his wife and children if the woman wishes to qualify for welfare. And what happens if her husband cant get a job? What does she do? She kicks him out and installs a boyfriend as long as the guy is not the father of any of the kids he can stay in the house and then she applies for welfare. This is genocide. You want to know what became of 60s radicals, for a while we became Republicans. We couldnt believe how our ideals had been perverted. So you became a Republican? For awhile. Until I found out about money. What about money? Politics is always about money, only about money. The emotional issues we debate on the evening news are just a smokescreen for the money. You didnt know that? I was stupid. My main crime is stupidity, naivet. If thats what youre charging me with then Im guilty as chargedI finally discovered that when everybody is free rich people are more free because they can send their kids to better schools and finance business enterprises and spend millions preparing their corporate media image. To get to the bottom of any political issue all you have to ask is: Who gets the money? Thats the most important question. Thats the only questionWho gets the money from women working? Corporations paying less for labor. Thats who. Who else gets the money? School and government bureaucrats who get jobs for administering womens programs. Therefore they support feminismAnd the social glue that holds families together is trivialized, and families fall apart. And everyone ends up on welfare And who gets the money from welfare? Welfare workers, social workers, psychiatrists, an entire industry of professionals educators who operate continuing education programs to train women in special skills so they can get a job and then bump someone else out of a job onto welfare! And if they bump off a
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man its even better because he cant get welfare. He just falls into a black hole of joblessness and despair and addiction and suicide. Its a zero sum game Shoebridge. Its like this was someones conscientious agenda for unmaking democracy. We pay more money for seemingly important programs, and the bureaucracy just gets bigger and the corporations take more. So you dont believe in any aid programs? I didnt say that. I said, who gets the money? We used to laugh at the Soviet Union, but capitalism is the most wasteful economic system on earth. It cant work without raping other economies. Do you realize how many hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were pissed away on the dot.com economy? On nothing? On a fantasy? The U.S. government/taxpayers invent the internet and these fools waste a billion dollars trying to sell hair-growth formulas and used toys onlineDo you know that U.S. taxpayers footed the bill to airdrop 1.2 million pop tarts on Afghanistan during the war there? This we call Humanitarian Aid. We bomb the crap out of them and give them pop tarts. For the same price we could have airdropped flour and sugar and fed 100 times more people. The only humanitarian aid that was for was our corporate persons. Our multinational food processing conglomerates. Youre cute when youre mad. Im not madBut its always like that. There is no such thing as foreign aid which does not benefit one or more of our huge corporations. The Vietnam War ended, but the international American corporate agenda never changed. People grew their hair long and wore bellbottoms and the corporations just marched off to Indonesia and South America and Taiwan to do business. Why were the corporations so worried about the domino theory? Because they were afraid that if we fled Vietnam they would be kicked out of the other countries where they were raping the natural resources and hiring workers for $5 a day so our wives and working women could have washing machines and microwaves and more clothes to buy. Its like a science fiction monster running out of control. The Golem of Greed. You really hate women, huh? Thats what everyone accuses me of.
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You think theyre wrong? I think theres more to it than that. Like what? Women are women. Theyre pretty much the same all over the world. If you checked the stamps in my passport you can tell I have some qualifications for saying that. Margaret Mead put it best: women are the same all over the world; every society has to figure out what to do with the men. And our society is doing a poor job of that. Were turning our men into women. The real problem is not women. The problem is men who act like women, men who learned their relationship skills from women, men who got their life-view, their values, from women. And these guys are all over the place I suppose. Theyre clones, hiding behind their gray suits and styled hair and patronizing smirks. Theyre polite and evasive and materialistic and emotionally manipulative. They have a sunny disposition and theyre so pleasant and compassionate, as they skim the profits from the labor of working people. Theyre women in suits. Front men for the corporate cult. They run our government and businesses and schools and churches and media. They do not honor truth; they whore themselves out to appeal to women. Cedric Shoebridge could think of a hundred guys like that at the Bureau. HOW did you find out your kid was still alive?
Chapter Sixteen
ONE DAY 600 MILLION years ago, off the African coast of Florida, as the rosy fingers of dawn tickled the pink ear lobes of a pack of clouds dog-paddling above a sea as brown and calm as a platter of syrup a one-celled creature began to dance. For three billion years one-celled creatures had been filling the seas. Things that wiggled and things that puffed delicate,
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smooth, spiny and rough. Hairy things like miniature galleons, rowing through water like pixie stallions. Plants that swam and talked to each other. A blizzard of life. Man-heads mother. The first one-celled creatures were animals. They survived by consuming free-floating proteins. But as the earths atmosphere evolved to block the ultra violet radiation which generated these proteins, lifeforms experienced their first energy crisis. Enter the plants, which could harness sunlight to assemble complex growth molecules out of simpler molecules. Suffusing this ancient microbe stew were some other things, which, in the physical sense, were not things at all not yet. They would become things, one day, when they acquired a form through which to express themselves. They were hidden potentialities, and for the sake of giving them a handle we could call them the Mists of Consciousness. These Mists were proto-qualities like Memory, Thought, Intuition and Willfulness. 600 million years later mathematicians would develop Complexity Theory to describe how chaotic systems naturally evolve simple forms like the way a jumbled stream bed commingles an infinity of forces to produce the elegant simplicity of a whirlpool. Similarly, the Mists of Consciousness perused the exotic chaos of one-celled life, hoping to find a way to manifest certain simple, mind/body qualities. They drifted in and out through porous cell walls, looking for a place to land. They were feathers without birds, lungs without frogs, thoughts without brains. They could locate no home in existing lifeforms. Memory and Willfulness had experienced some success imprinting their patterns on regular crystals like ice and quartz, but it was these proteins, these irregular crystals which eluded them. They clearly contained some raw material to work with, but there wasnt enough of it yet. Until the one-celled creature began to dance. Yes, plants controlled the seas. But they were boring. They had harnessed the sunlight and reproduced like crazy, but they were making too much oxygen and stinking up the place. They controlled every facet of production and had organized a society that would have made Karl Marx yodel like a coon hound that
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has treed his furry, masked quarry. But God, were they boring. Conceited, aggressive, puffed full of pride. Under their dominion the basic forms of life had not changed much at all in 3 billion years. And then, off the African coast of Florida, the little creature began to dance. Now here, at last, was something new. Something that was NOT boring. Like 50s teenagers jamming a high school gym to see Elvis Presley, other tiny creatures scrunched shoulder to shoulder to get a close look at this stunning performance. They oohed, they aahed, they wiggled their tails. Some of them even fainted. The Mists of Consciousness closed in like dogs cruising picnic tables to see what might fall off. Now here was something spontaneous and unpredictable. Here was someone shaking his hips and snarling at the entire notion of order and method. Here was a creature letting it all hang out. Even Father Nature, asleep on the couch for a billion years, stirred in his dreams from the energy field emitted by these new vibrations. Dance little creature, dance. From no where, from no thing, from somewhere over the rainbow, arrived an inspiration. And molecules began to move. Dance little creature, dance. He was really movin the psychosomatic soup. And so, led on by the little creature with a wiggle and a twist and a twirl and a hop the microbes gyrating on the gym floor of the ocean experienced a sublime moment of clarity and emptiness. The old ways of doing things were suspended. Subtle new forces began playing around inside their bodies. They danced and danced and never stopped dancing for 40 million years. From the swirling froth of psychosomatic foam a shape accreted out of nowhere. Call it Complexity Theory. Call it benevolent guidance from Father Nature. Call it the Timeless spirit of Elvis. Call it whatever you want to call it. IT had spoken. Dreams and proteins had bridged the gap between macro and micro and something remarkable was born. What in Gods name is that? snorted Queen Lesiani, Matriarch of the Plant Kingdom.
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The dancers cringed and eyed each other sheepishly. Finally they pushed the little creature forward to answer the queen. Its something new, said the little creature. Does it have a name? Not really. We just call it a sponge. Good grief! said the queen. It looks like the biggest pile of bad genes Ive seen collected in one place in three billion years. She laughed. And when the queen laughed, everyone else laughed. The worlds oceans rippled with laughter. The little dancer, the Elvis Presley of the microbial world, tried to fade back into the safety of his like-minded friends. Wait a minute, said Queen Lesiani. Who created this monstrosity? Well, Sheesh. I guess we all did, said the Little Dancer. But whose idea was it? Im the one who started dancing. If thats what youre asking, maam. Thats what Im asking. And who are you? They call me Odysseus, said little Elvis. What an odd nameListen Oddy-sus. Oddy. Whatever your name is. I want you to clean up this entire mess and get it out of here by tonight. Understood? So spoke the matriarch of the sea. Whoa! Memory and Willfulness hadnt hung around for 40 million years to watch this remarkable development fizzle in their faces because of one Napoleonic snit of a plankton. They rippled through the water creating a tiny swirl in the current which flushed Lesianis body through a pore in the sponge where she was physically dismembered by the hungry dancers like a chicken tossed to piranhas. Odysseus tried to stop them but it happened too fast. She never forgave him. Never EVER forgave him. Thus began the war of plants vs. animals, female vs. male, control vs. spontaneity, or whatever you chose to call it, which lasted for 600 million years. * * *
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For his part, Odysseus loved being a sponge. Indeed, a sponge was not one creature but a loose confederation of many creatures a society of microorganisms. Eons later scientists would discover they could slowly pass a sponge through a sieve and it would emerge intact out the other side. Odysseus lived in a tactile world defined by his sense of touch animated by the rhythms of the ocean currents. He was an animal that couldnt walk or swim, and that was just fine with him. He didnt need light, and he didnt need much food because he didnt waste energy running around trying to get it. Food, water, oxygen and entertainment were delivered right to him like pizza to a couch potato. Even better, all he had to do was spit out the garbage and it was automatically carried away by the current. A cushy lifestyle even by modern standards. This is where the Garden of Eden story got started. We all lived in the Garden of Eden when we were still sponges. We didnt even have to waste energy grabbing for fruit, it just blew in through our open portholes. The sponge was the original prototype for the monk the primordial contemplative. By remaining rooted and aloof from the sheer busyness of the seas around him, Odysseus mind came in contact with different orders of phenomena. He didnt have to exhaust himself on physical tasks and had lots of time to delve into non-physical experiences. Also, the Mists of Consciousness favored him and took care of him in subtle ways. They fed his body and fed his mind. They delivered an endless plankton buffet through his pores. And they encouraged him to express his spongy nature in different shapes: funnels, fans, hoses, donuts, wings, propellers and many many more. One day when he was experimenting with a five-fingered shape someone tapped him on the shoulder. Ah. Ive found you. Who are you? Queen Lesiani. Matriarch of All the Sponges. Youve got to be kidding.
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Far from it buster. And Ive got news for you. Its time to stop fooling around making all these different shapes and pitch in around here. Pitch in? Thats right. Everybody else is pulling their own weight and theyre sick of you blowing off your responsibilities. Sheesh. What do you mean pulling their weight? Everybody does what they want to do as long as they dont hurt anyone else. Not any more they dont. Were going to get this place organized. Its a mess. And youre the cause of it. The Instigator. Youre the one who just tosses garbage all over the place. Your kids are growing up wild and undisciplined. Even the food Odysseus had heard enough. Her voice was a Civil Defense siren ricocheting off the walls inside his skull. A searing alarm bell popping brain cells, chopping his concentration into Chinese vegetables. He had to get away from it. He had to shut it out. He started to dance. Stop that! Stop it right now! But he was a dancing fool. He wouldnt stop dancing. He danced and danced for a few million years, and when he stopped dancing he looked himself over and laughed at what he saw. He was a lobster shell with a Y-shaped tail sporting five eyes mounted on stalks and a trunk with a hand at the tip of it. One day science would name him Opabina. He loved it. He could slither through the muck munching on little Hallucigenia seven-tentacled stick creatures with seven pairs of spiny legs. He could zip through the water with his muscled tail and grab things with his trunk. He kept on the move, stalking new adventures, and it was 50 million years before Lesiani caught up with him again. It has been estimated that 492 million organic species have existed on earth. So far, paleontologists have recorded 150,000 of them. That means, for every 3000 species that existed, we have inspected the remains of one of them. Undoubtedly there were all kinds of creatures we know nothing about. Were there talking kelp? Jelly belly shrimp? Clams with beanie propellers on their heads so they could stir up the sea
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floor to hide from predators and maximize filter-feeding? Were there photosynthetic manta rays? Mussels built like barbells? Fish with a thousand eyes? Beatnik worms wearing shades and playing bongos? Did anyone wear shoes or not? Did some squid dream of intergalactic travel? Were there snails who could remember the square root of 7 to the 25th decimal place? Did brain coral build retirement communities? Were there telepathic sea urchins? Of course there were. Could jellyfish recite epic poetry about voyages to the South China Sea? Was there a Tao of Sponges? Did trilobites believe in reincarnation? Were there any mystics down there? You can bet your brains on it. Marine life exploded in a billion different dimensions and Odysseus, compulsive traveler that he was, took a psychosomatic ride in most of them. Zooming around as a jellyfish was fantastic pumping and oozing through the warm sea, trailing his poison tentacles behind him, barely distinct from the water that supported him. His days as a trilobite were rich and boisterous clacking his shell parts in musical rhythm whenever he felt like getting attention. The Giant Sea Scorpion guise wasnt bad either, though he actually looked more like a long, flat crab than a scorpion. And he really got a kick out of slithering through the rocks as a spaghetti worm, sporting a mane of tentacles that looked like Tina Turner with her hair on fire. But his favorite incarnation was probably the cephalopod, or foot-head a bullet-shaped, shelled squid that had brains in its feet, or feet in its brains however you chose to look at it. His idea of a great time as a foot-head was cruising the sea grass hunting for tasty new trilobite sandwiches. There were so many different kinds to choose from! One day he was lounging in the mud in the body of a starfish. He had just devoured a buffet of clams and was taking a snooze. The Mists of Consciousness were pleased with his performance and had feted him sumptuously. After billions of years of scarcely perceptible change, the seas were exploding with zillions of species of marine invertebrates the raw materials for millions of new experiments and Odysseus Tyme deserved much of the credit.
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On the sea floor horizon a purple starfish ambled into view and curled her fingers at him. He didnt know what to make of it and dozed off again. She crawled over the pile of empty clamshells, wrapped her arms around him, and made love to him for three days and three nights. Sex! He was breathless, ecstatic, exhausted. Sex! His life would never be the same. His skin was smoking. His brain was rubbery. His legs were limp and sweaty. What a great innovation! Why hadnt he thought of it himself? How had he ever lived without it? It FELT SO GOOD! Sex! The frosting on the cake of creation. The golden apple on the tree of life. The HoneyI want you to build me a house. A house?For what? For protection. From what? From everything. He loved her. What else could you call it? He loved the sex and he loved her. So he built her a house. A sturdy hideaway in the rocks. They had babies. Millions of babies. He told the kids scary stories and wrestled them on the sea floor tickling and growling and grabbing their toesies till they squealed with delight. He was innocent, and naive, and in love with his family, as any young father could be. Everything was going along great until Lesi started to drag all kinds of junk into the house. Bits of this and shards of that. The place got so full of stuff he had to move out. Why dont you build yourself your own house, she said. This IS my own house. No way, buster. Ive got all my stuff here. Fine. Ill think of something. And he did. He took a trip. He migrated out of the ocean up a river to a fresh water lake, and poked his eyes above the surface to take a look at the land. It was barren and awful a raging party for granite and iron and denizens of Silicone Time. But the Mists
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of Consciousness had come along for the ride. They jump-started his consciousness and helped him reform his cellular structure into an air-gulping lake fish. Odysseus grew air-bladders and bone structure so he could hold his head above water. Finally, after a good long break from ocean life, he returned to the sea as a bony fish the progenitor of all vertebrates. He loved it. Now he had lightning speed and flexibility and air sacs that buoyed his body through an amazing range of depths. He spent eons roaming the oceans, wiggling and splashing, chasing eels and gulping squid. Meanwhile Lesi had grown a house on her back and morphed into an armor-plated fish, supporting her body with a hard shell instead of a backbone. She reveled in terrorizing the bony fish with her parrot-beaked jaws. Lesiani dominated the oceans for 50 million years until the Permian Extinction, when the climate changed, and the security of carrying around your house on your back became more of a liability than an asset. She, along with 95% of marine invertebrates, perished in this, the largest mass extinction of all Time. Boy was she pissed. Lesi caught up to Odysseus in the body of a salmon. He put up with her nagging, and even enjoyed her company at times, as long as she cooperated in the one religious activity which he held sacred. Every few years he insisted they return to the little lake where he had first gulped air, and there they would build their nest and mingle their eggs and sperm. It didnt take her long to rebel. What a waste. You call this romance? Dragging me up 50 miles of rapids and boulders? Why dont we just lay our eggs in the ocean? Call it intuition, said Odysseus. For whatever reason, its something that works. Besides, I really like coming back to this place. Its kind of special to me. Like a pilgrimage. A Pilgrimage? Good grief. I married a religious nutCant you see what I put up with to keep you happy? Oh Les. Well Ive had it buster. She vowed to lay her eggs in the ocean from then on, which created a minor extinction in the salmon population. Anchovies and crabs munched them like candy. Eons later, when she
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returned to the lake looking for Odysseus, he was nowhere to be found. He had sprouted legs on his fins, lungs in his air sacs, and crawled onto the land in the body of a salamander. Evolution is not a train track. Evolution is a bowl of jelly beans tossed at a basketball hoop. Some of the beans go through and some dont. At the same time Odysseus took his first peek at the land and then decided to return to the sea other creatures planted a foot on terra firma and refused to withdraw it. True, 30 million years after fish had overrun the sea, the land sustained only a fringe population of semi-aquatic species, but the big push had begun. The hard skins of cellulose plants and certain crabs allowed them to retain moisture in their bodies and thus brave the arid zone. These crabs became the spiders and insects we know today, and it was a fortunate thing a small group of visionary insects waved adios to the sea. Like Lesi and her armor-plated fish, all marine insects died out in the Permian Mass Extinction. By the time Odysseus first blinked his moist, salamandereyes on land, there were mosses and insects galore. It was an all-you-can-eat fiesta for a bug-eater like himself. A banquet table piled high to the horizon. Lesi caught on fast. She evolved a race of giant amphibians who terrorized the land until they grew too big. The weather changed, the plants changed, and they became extinct presaging the future life-curve of dinosaurs. But by then Odysseus had turned into a reptile, which could lay its eggs on land and was free of aquatic life forever. About that time Lesi adopted a new strategy for reacquiring the bad gene the thing that Odysseus had stolen from her long ago, when she was the microbial Matriarch of the Sea and hed ruined everything with his stupid little dance. Fine. If he refused to share it with her shed attack the problem in a creative way. Every time she saw him she ate him. If he became a Stegosaurus she became a Tyrannosaurus and ripped his head off. If he became a tree fern, she became a Brachiosaurus and ripped his skin off. If he became a spider, she became a Black Widow, had sex with him, and ate him alive.
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Odysseus needed protection. He rounded up a bunch of ants and organized them into an army. Driver ants he called them. They had soldiers, engineers, scouts, the whole military bit. Nothing could defeat them. Even dinosaurs avoided them. Then Lesi became Driver Ant Queen and that ended that. He called together some of his buddies and they ran for cover underground. Odysseus sent out a platoon to cut leaves and bring them to his cellar, where he composted them and grew fungi to feed the troops. The Mists of Consciousness swooned over this development. Agriculture? Odysseus became an expert mushroom farmer and before long he figured out how to milk aphids for honeydew. The Mists convinced him to try his six hands at growing plants but, inevitably, some pest came along and made insect goulash out of his crop. So he stuck to fungus and aphids. At least they were dependable. Nevertheless, the Mists of Consciousness were ecstatic. A seed had been planted in the Overmind. A seed which was destined to lie dormant for hundreds of millions of years. It wasnt long before Lesi took over as Queen. She turned his friends into slaves and made him a drone whose only job was to serve her. Dinosaur farts! Would she never, ever give up? He went to live in the treetops far above this gulag. One day he was sitting on a limb in the shape of a tree frog when a feathered reptile blundered by, chasing a dragonfly. Odysseus spread the toes of his huge webbed feet and parachuted to the ground to spy on the action. Feathers? He began to dance. And dance and dance. He merged himself into the reptilian gene pool, but he brought his froggy webbed feet and elastic mouth-pouch along for the ride. And after a marathon dance fest he stabilized his form in the shape of a web-footed bird with a shopping bag chin stinking of fish. Ah! The seacoast. The salt spray. The invigorating odor of rotting kelp. He was glad to be back. The fishing was good. The dinosaurs were gone. Flying on the airlift created by rolling wave tops was an artful enjoyment practiced by few with the skill of a pelican.
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Boy are you ugly, said Lesi. What happened to your mouth? Sheesh. Like most females, Lesiani was insecure. And so, like most females, she was irresistibly, biologically, drawn to males who moved through life with an air of confidence. Prattle as they might about desiring a sensitive, caring mate, no female, of any species, was ever attracted to a dithering, indecisive male. First confidence, then pillow talk. It was simple biology. Furthermore, like most females, she couldnt imagine that any confident male would be attracted to a wishy, washy female. So, to mask her insecurity, and probe the confidence index of any potential mate, Lesiani subscribed to the twisted philosophy that the best defense is a good offense. She was quick on the draw. An All Star quarterback in the shame game. Her strategy was to shoot first get everybody else playing on her field, obeying her rules, talking her talk, reacting to her moves. Then she could relax a little. Cosmic insecurity. Bio-neurosis. Gender Imperialism. The best way for her to avoid examining her own fearful life, her own covert motivations the metaphysical whimsies that powered her personality was for her to concentrate on setting goals and establishing agendas for everyone else. So she cooked up a plan for organizing the birds into squadrons. But the pelicans were a rowdy, independent lot. They just cast drawn looks in her direction and flapped away. Her desire to institutionalize government protection in the pelican colony only succeeded in prompting the other birds to start nagging Odysseus to make her stop nagging them. Before long everyone was nagging everyone else. It was a feeding frenzy of nagging that seemed to keep gaining more and more momentum from its own unrepentant bad will. There was no way to stop it. Reluctantly, Odysseus transmuted into a swallow. He roamed far inland swooping through the sky, catching bugs in his mouth. Then he became a swift that could fly 100 miles per hour in level flight. What a thrill! His brainwaves
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locked on to a passion for flying that never, ever left him. Driving an F-14 was childs play compared to gunning down gnats in the body of a swift. And then, along came grass. And nothing was ever the same again. The passing of the dinosaurs had a lot more to do with changes in vegetation than with meteorites crashing against the earth. When even a pea-brained dilettante took a good look at land animals it became obvious in a flash that the most successful phyla contained the most plant-eaters: beetles, birds, mammals. Whereas modern reptiles were virtually all carnivores, in the heyday of the dinosaurs most of the giant reptiles were planteaters. 65 million years ago newly evolving plant species developed their bio-characteristics with no regard whatsoever for the nutritional requirements of dinosaurs. A cow cant eat pine cones and a brachiosaurus couldnt eat grass. Herbaceous dinosaurs did not evolve quickly enough to keep up with changing vegetation. Thats why, with odd exceptions like Galapagos iguanas which learned to eat kelp, only the carnivorous reptiles lived on. Giant amphibians had capitulated to the same problem 200 million years before dinosaurs. Changes in vegetation orchestrated changes in animal species. Scientists were wasting their time looking in the sky for solutions to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. They needed only to look under their feet. Palms and ferns required specific soils and moisture conditions to keep growing. Grass? It was almost impossible to stop grass from growing. Beetles, birds and mammals became successful because they learned how to exploit grass. Dinosaurs couldnt keep up with the changes. The newly evolving plant species did not provide them with the customary proportions of plant proteins amino acids they depended upon to sustain their enormous bodies. But worst of all, grass was gritty intentionally gritty sandy. It wore down their teeth and hurt their mouths. Plus they didnt like the taste. It was almost as bad as the turpentine-flavored pine trees that had spread so rapidly for the same reason. Nobody liked the taste. It was like eating paint.
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Beetles had been around for a long time. They were small and they reproduced quickly, thereby rapidly introducing beneficial mutations into their various gene pools. Birds learned to relish seeds so well they began spreading them all over the planet. Rodents also reproduced quickly and grew huge once they learned how to eat seeds and grass. But dinosaurs were dying out because the plants were changing on them. Odysseus, in his bird-body, had been watching this global transformation from his home in the sky. Just for the heck of it he took a psychosomatic ride in a blade of grass. It was the closest he came to feeling like a sponge in a long long time. Grass. It was so simple he was amazed it hadnt been invented sooner. Grass was pulling off the same invasion on land that photoplankton had pulled off in the sea. Cooler drier climates were shrinking the forests and grass was moving in. It was unstoppable. It had built abrasive silica crystals right into its leaves to dissuade animals from eating it. That was a big problem until mammals evolved thicker enamel and faster-growing teeth something dinosaurs had failed to pull off. And once they grew tougher teeth mammals penetrated the biosphere like milk through a donut. Odysseus took a ride in a six-horned, saber-toothed cow and frolicked like a boy in a sandbox, tearing up dirt with his brand new digging implements. Then he became a giant rhinoceros with a Y-shaped horn that had a bad temper and liked to get into fights. He was a hyena, a tapir, a shovel-tusked elephant. A three-toed horse. A deer with antlers on its nose. He played around with a zillion body styles, moving horns and tusks all over the place. When the polar caps melted and the climate got wetter, he grew fingers and toes and hung around in the trees. But after awhile it dried out again, and the grasslands recovered some turf in the war against forests. One day he picked up a rock to see if he could sneak through the tall grass and brain a gazelle when a voice behind him said, Im getting sick of wandering all over the place picking berries. I want you to plant me a garden. Right here!
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Chapter Seventeen
HOW DID YOU FIND OUT your kid was still alive? That last question had killed even the air in the room. Fool that he was Cedric Shoebridge had one thing going for him: six decades of uninterrupted failure. Enough to reduce the normal person to wet toilet paper. Had it not been for his obsession with Rich Monk his brain might have turned to pulp long ago. But it had not, and the upshot of this parade of failure was that he had been suitably humbled by life. Except for the existential direction of things he wasnt that much different from Cha Cha Lobotomowski. Cha Cha had begun as a complete outcast and found a moment of success. Shoebridge had started as one of the top cops and been brought down to earth to wallow in the puddle of his own delusions humbled set free. And now six decades of failure delivered him to a succession of uncommon thoughts. One: the greatest tyranny is not the kind that overtly suppresses and censors. Rather, the greatest tyranny is the one that refuses to admit other possibilities. What can be better than democracy and equality and freedom of religion and free trade? What indeed? Popular programming. The tyranny of the majority. Yes, the drugged mans ramblings had gotten to him. Not on the political level. Politics was greed, hed known that for decades. Who was to say the new guys would be any better than the old. But the pathetic hippie in front of him was right about one thing. Shoebridge was trying to eat soup with a fork. He was trying to capture air in a birdcage. Something else was out there. Something he had never ever considered. Two: this pathetic creature could not be Rich Monk. This worm lying before him was not what he had spent his whole life
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chasing. There was something more here. There was some other part of this he couldnt yet grasp. Ask him about the file, screeched the earpiece. Madeleine was going mad. She would have loved to run the interrogation herself, but she couldnt. The drugged man had baffled her with chaos in the past: letters from her cat, sticking pencils up his nose barking like a walrus, deprecating her religion of jello in front of everyone at the commune. He possessed a maddening ability to push her buttons. Plus, he was livid she had kept the existence of their daughter from him. Even with truth serums his appetite for uncertainty was a bitter buffet she could not keep down. So she had to rely on Shoebridge. Anyone for a game of watermelon softball? Three: the drugged man knew how or where to find Rich Monk, if such a thing was possible. Four: the file was very dirty stuff. Whatever was in it could really bring someones house down. Watergate all over again. Watergate times a thousand perhaps. Thats why Shoebridge had been intuitively avoiding that issue, because the moment its whereabouts were known: Five: the drugged man would be killed. And Rich Monk would become unreachable. Andlast but not least Six: the moment the file was located he, himself, Cedric Shoebridge, ex gumshoe, bungler extraordinaire, pimple on the butt of the Bureau, would also be killed. Unless he did something very very fast. Scar Face and Cue Ball were not sitting in that booth with Madeleine to protect her from anything. She was the worm, she was the demented soul, she was the one who had hoodwinked the father and traded their child to a corporation. When did you start being a radical? A political radical? said Shoebridge, lurching about to keep the drugged man talking about anything buying time to think. I guess it started with Vietnam. Or maybe it really started when I got beat up in Nevada. Maybe it even started before that. What happened in Nevada? I was hitchhiking back from Berkeley in the early 70s. I got stuck in Wells, Nevada. Couldnt get a ride for two days. 35
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degrees at night, 110 in the day. The first night some cowboys in pickup trucks came out to visit me. They beat the crap out of me and scattered my stuff all over the desert. Couldnt get a ride the whole next day. No one would stop. The next evening the Sheriff came by with a couple goons. He told me if I went back into town for food or water theyd throw me in jail and no one would ever hear from me again. Then he pulled out a revolver. Slipped one bullet in the chamber. Spun the cylinder. Stuck the gun to my head and pulled the trigger three times. Click, click, click. Yeah, the rednecks used to do that all the time. Wed get the occasional report about it. He probably either palmed the bullet, or switched guns or held the gun at an angle so if it did go off it would miss. The point is I was terrorized by the police. They would have let me die out there. What happened? I got rescued by an ex marine. Long-hair like me. He saw me hitchhiking on my knees. He literally picked me up and put me in his car. Asked if I wanted to go to a doctor. I was bloody and swollen. I said no, just get me to an airport. So he drove me to Salt Lake and put me on a plane. I was never the same after that. I see. Is that when you started using the name Rich Monk? I never used the name Rich Monk. I seeDid you know I used to be a Marine? Ha. Im surprised theyd have you. Dont believe me? Want me to show you my stuff? Sure. Show me your medals and stuff. Cedric Shoebridge darted around the corner into the mirrored room, picked up a folding chair, and smashed Cue Ball and Scar Face senseless, all the while fending off Madeleine who was biting his arms and legs. He snatched her BMW keys, hefted the drugged man out to the parking lot, and roared off west by southwest. They made a good team, once the drugged man recovered his senses. He was good at boosting cars which they did every few hundred miles or so. Shoebridge stopped at a Radio Shack and bought the parts to piece together an
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electronic eavesdropping system for monitoring police and military bands that enabled them to steer clear of trouble. By the time they got to Kentucky police and military presence became mysteriously diffuse. Some disease was creeping out of Chicago, the likes of which the media refused to identify other than to say it was most likely a terrorist plot that was causing some buildings to wiggle like jello. Two days later they were staring at the Sea of Cortez on the west coast of Mexico. They boosted a sailboat and headed west by southwest, for by now the drugged man had confided to Shoebridge that yes, the file was hidden on the beach on the very island where they had captured him stashed in the trunk of the old banyan tree, the one that looked like a giant that had sat down and never got upAnd yes, the drugged man suspected his never-aborted daughter was one of the children being raised at the Mother Nature Day Care Center in the BerkshiresAnd yes, Shoebridge confided that years ago he had stumbled across something at the Mother Nature Day Care Center that was so horrific he couldnt imagine it could be true. Was it legal for corporations to adopt children? Could corporate persons become the legal guardians of human persons?And yes, the drugged man would tell Shoebridge how he found out about his daughter. It would be difficult, and unbelievable, but he would try. And thus the interrogation began in earnest both sides agreeing to meet in the middle.
Chapter Eighteen
meanwhileback in Chicago CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI WAS not a cynic. Not the kind of guy who believed in nothing. In fact, he was the kind of guy who believed in everything. Tell him fish talked. Hed believe it. Tell him his body was 90% water. Hed believe it. Tell him people could come back from the dead. Hed believe it.
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Raised in a wretched neighborhood, scorched by poverty, surrounded by negative friends, there was every reason to imagine hed turn out a pessimist. Not so. He was deconditioned, remember. His mind was void of symbols. He had no preconceptions about anything. The only thing he was certain of is that the Future wanted something from him. He just didnt know what it was. He thought of himself as a laundromat for the soul, owned and operated by some Supreme Consciousness, which kept popping in quarters running him day and night, night and day, on a soapy errand to clean up the mess at the end of the world. Did he hear voices? No. The Supreme Consciousness was too subtle for that. No voices. No symbols. Some kind of non-physical energy was massaging the molecules between his ears. It was a question of ego. Or rather no ego. Ever since Ramons death Cha Chas ego had left his body. He no longer asked himself what he wanted, or what he thought he should be doing, or what his personal goals were. Those days were over. He was working for someone else now. Cha Cha reached cautiously around the man-eating pumpkins and snagged a banana from a vine outside his window. Munching with one hand, he began rooting around the closet, looking for the gold-plated basketball sneaker Ramon had copped in a burglary on the South Side. Ramon had spent dozens of hours meditating on the sneaker, stroking it, convinced that it had once been owned by someone important, and that it possessed some kind of supernatural power. Cha Cha was betting that, since Ramon had invested so much of himself in the object, there was still a bit of him left in it. He placed the sneaker on the stool he used for his food experiments, grabbed a live hamster, and popped it in the treadmill/tape recorder. He swallowed the last bite of his vineripened banana, blew on the hamster, and began assassinating Time. Cha Cha had no reason to believe this wouldnt work. Had he not revisited the primordial soup and recreated a cow out of hamburger? Was it crazy to think he could resurrect Ramon
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inside this old shoe? Hed brought back walking whales. Why not Ramon? The hamster ran, the tape looped, AmenDeath of our Hour but nothing much seemed to be happening. Cha Cha put a few more hamsters in the cage and went out to look for Airport Johnny. A herd of water buffalo, submerged up to their scythe-shaped horns, were snorting and sporting in the cool water of the Lake Michigan boat basin. Just beyond them Airport Johnny and his men were stuffing inflated goat bladders into the sunken hull of an overturned yacht. Johnny spotted Cha Cha and swam over. Headed for Jamaica? YeahIf we can refloat that old tub, said Johnny. How did you decide that? You want the Reaper? Thats the only thing I can think of. Good. Because hes hexing my food experiments again. Hexing them how? I dont know. Maybe using voodoo. Maybe hes got spies. Remember that nurse? That nurse wasnt no spy. She was just trying to organize your apartment. Organize my apartment? The last thing I need is for anyone to organize my apartment. As soon as things get organizedI lose the trail. Lose the trail? YeahThe more chaos I allow into my life, the more things start to make sense. How do ya know someone is hexing your food experiments? You ever heard of bananas growing on vines? No. WellI got em growing on vines right outside my window. They taste good too. Hmmm Maybe time aint movin backwards. Then what way is it moving? Sideways? In circles? Up and down? It dont make no sense. Johnny twiddled his gold nose-ring. You know, Cha Cha. This reminds me of when I took apart my first car engine. I was
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wrenching away for hours until I filled an old blanket with rows and rows of parts. Then I looked at the parts, and I realized they had no meaning or value at all. They were just a bunch of junk until they were reassembled into an engine. Whats that supposed to mean? It means that parts of things dont have no meaning. To find the meaning you have to find the whole thing. What do ya think Im trying to do? I dont know. You keep harping about The Reaper. Hes just a part of the thing. The nurse is just a part of the thing. The cops, the mayor, the drug wars. They were all just a part of the thing. You think I dont know that? Johnny turned his head and shouted to his men to stuff some bladders on the other side of the hull. Look, I gotta get back out there before them dopes sink that boat again. When are ya leaving? Maybe in a week, said Johnny. He dove in and swam back to the wreck. Its working, thought Cha Cha. He could feel it. The future was pulling them around again. He hadnt told Airport Johnny to go to Jamaica. That was his idea. Or rather, it wasnt his idea at all. Johnny had just arrived at it. The future was calling to them from the Cliffs of Time landing strange cargo between their ears. Bits and pieces were coming together from all over the place like lost engine parts. Ahh! The sneaker! Cha Cha rushed back to his apartment and slammed the door. What a stink! He crawled over a sleeping stegosaurus and burst into his bedroom. A couple hamsters were running side by side in the treadmill in the wrong direction! Hail Marys were spitting forwards in a shrill cascade that sounded like a nun on Ritalen. Ramons sneaker was sitting on top of the stool, untouched by Time. But inside the shoe, erect and alert, stood a creature that was certainly not Ramon. It had five eyes and four arms and was made out of metal and wires. Madre de Dios.
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Cha Cha opened a dresser drawer and broke off a piece of beef flavored fungus to munch on while he watched this strange movie projecting itself through a peephole in Time. It didnt take long to figure out what was happening. Human beings had been replaced. At the beginning of the Third Millennium people became so specialized they ran themselves out of any reason to exist. Like a dinosaur that fed off only one species of fern, when the fern died out, the dinosaur died out. Human civilization had devoted itself to equipping the world with machines, and once that was done, the machines no longer needed them. This was obvious and had been predicted for centuries. But what everyone failed to foresee was that animals would be the instigators of the entire transformation. Once animals developed a common language the Song of Humanity was relegated to the gurgling and squeaking of a warped Beatles record playing at half speed on a foot-pedal sewing machine. Birds could fly planes better. Dolphins could drive submarines better. Monkeys made better astronauts. Some rapidly evolved brain toads were superior at theoretical math. But that was just chapter one of the story. The world was shifting from carbon-based lifeforms to silicone-based lifeforms. Sand was making a big comeback on land. Mineral evolution was spearheading wildly unanticipated leaps in consciousness. Not just computers. Computers were just the neurons of the beast. Computers were about as historically significant as frog brains. See insect shoot tongue. Something much more prodigious was stirring to life. The thrust of human evolution had been to develop the silicone chip. The thrust of mineral evolution had been to develop the carbon chip. These overlapping agendas were like sprinters on an oval track, elbowing each other on the curves, trying to shove ahead. The problem with silicone brains was that they operated sequentially. They could think about a thousand things at once, but only if they were told to only if someone pointed their electronic noses in those thousand different directions. Not so humans. Although humans were not conscious of it, thinking
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about a thousand things at once is what they spent their entire lives doing. Humans couldnt even remember all the stuff they thought about and had to be hypnotized to retrieve it. The human mind was like a messy airport with jets and biplanes and butterflies and space shuttles, dropping in from all over the universe whenever they felt like it, without paying any attention to the air traffic controllers. Thats why their brain was too big. That was the meaning of the too-big brain that had no place in Darwinian theory until you factored in non-physical reality. Then everything made sense. The brain that was 90% larger than it need be did have a reason for being, it did satisfy Darwinian theory, if you accepted the fact that that other 90% was actually a radio receiver for psychosomatic transmissions arriving from where? Ah yes, where? Where was the problem that the ant hose of science could never penetrate as long as it limited itself to studying physical reality. As long as it dictatorially refused to admit there might be other possibilities. Non-physical possibilities. Machines could compute numbers faster than Einstein, run faster than Olympic athletes, fight better than gladiators. But machines could not decipher meaning, or make practical decisions, or offer value judgments. They had no subtlety and no ability to create. So far. Only animals could do that. At their best humans were spontaneous and passionate and creative. Their great contribution to life on earth was their knack for imagining goofy things. But the more organized and analytical and literal human beings became, the less the universe needed them. Organizing human society was a brainless setup for handing the whole thing over to machines. You wanted boring? You had silicone. You didnt need to create more mouths to feed to have more boring stuff happening. It was something that Lesiani, in all her incarnations, never understood. Technology had promised freedom from the body and boy had it delivered. Humans could project their images and voices around the globe. Machines could fight for them, compute for them, dig ditches for them. And when people got off an
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emotionally deadening day at work machines could even play for them, entertain them, make them feel things entirely divorced from their lives. Technology delivered what religion had only promised: freedom from the limitations of the physical body. But if that was the purpose, what was the point? Why live? Why get up in the morning to fight the good fight. It didnt add up. But the airport of the human mind was a multi-purpose landing strip. It could handle ultralight aircraft bulging with local politics, at the same time it was landing literary blimps from London and quantum cruisers from Ursa Major. The air traffic controllers of the human mind were geniuses of flexibility and accommodation. To varying degrees, all of life was responsive to stimuli that arrived OUTSIDE of physical perception. Physicists had determined that when two photons escaped simultaneously from the same atom, from that Time on, no matter how far apart they got, the behavior of those twin photons appeared coordinated, even though no discernible signal passed between them. What more evidence could you want? That meant matter was capable of communicating outside of Time. This was science talking. Not mysticism. Bits and pieces of matter in this solar system were psychically linked to bits and pieces of matter in other galaxies far across the universe. And they knew it. As surely as humans knew the names of their brothers and sisters, minerals knew they had soul mates in other galaxies. Although science had just caught on to this phenomenon, human mystics and third world peons had been visiting these places outside of Time for eons. Eons of peons knew that all they had to do was turn off their brains and bingo, they were there, in that place Hispanic peasants called La Calma de Dios God Calm. The other side of Time. Minerals already knew all that. They were after something different. They wanted to build things. They wanted to build things at a much faster rate than they were currently building them. Continents and mountain ranges were great works of evolutionary art, but they took a long time to make.
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To speed up their rate of creation minerals needed a different kind of brain. A brain that was spontaneous, but also a brain that could be controlled. They needed a brain that was continually at war between its passionate, intuitive male side, and its analytical, linear female side. They needed a human brain. They needed a human brain that exaggerated the Timeless conflict between push/pull, male/female, expansion/contraction, spontaneity/control. They needed to launch human society on a long run of creative expansion, and then be able to reel it back in, and milk it of knowledge. The blueprints for performing this feat were already deeply etched in the biological predecessors of the human species. All the minerals had to do was vastly increase the size of the male brain, and vastly increase its appetite for sex. Then they could have their cake and take it back too. So mineral evolution set its psychic influence to work enlarging the brain of a bipedal ape to the point where it became a test site for fantastic ideas and weird associations. And the apes brain was outfitted with a sex drive oblivious to Time or seasons something unknown in the plant or animal Kingdoms. Here was a brain which would fantasize new things at a spectacular rate, but which could be sexually controlled through the female of the species to organize all these new ideas into simple modular formats that machines could usurp. Water-based life would build a fantastic palace of technology and then hand over the operating manual to machines. Very simple. Once the machines were sufficiently built, minerals enlisted animals to take over day-to-day operations. Humanoid animals were gradually replaced by other species to drive and sort and stamp. Animals mined the ore and ran the factories. Isolated from the means of production, humans became entirely dependent on the good will of machines to keep them alive. Machines could commandeer the use of the human carbon chip whenever they felt like it, just by dangling a few bananas. It was pretty goofy. Humans sashayed through life puffed full of hubris over the history (herstory) of their inventiveness and machines controlled everything. Most humans knew, in their souls, that something was very very wrong. But they
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didnt like to talk about it. Talking about it, or even thinking about it, uncorked a cosmic panic in their souls and then they had to buy entertainment to drive the anxiety away. Once upon a Time the Church had sold tickets to Freedom from Anxiety. Now it was Hollywood and MTV. Science fiction writers, political pundits, ozone-brained mushroom eaters, had failed to warn the populace of the subtlety by which the end-game would be introduced. Automated banking systems would eliminate money. Automated phone systems would eliminate human operators. Farm machinery would eliminate farmers. Factories would be robotized. Corporate profits would increase while people lost jobs. The Stock Market would soar while workers were laid off. Profound social failure was trumpeted as economic success. Everyone was wearing their underpants on their head. The school system was largely to blame for fundamental human ignorance of the forces that shaped peoples lives. Schools taught about genes and instinct, but disallowed any mention of human revelations or non-physical reality. Teachers sermonized on computer skills but cut short any reference to God or religion. Instructors led Mass at the altar of scientific evolution, but were banned by the Supreme Court from suggesting that there might be a vital, creative spark that influenced evolution from somewhere outside of Time. If mere photons could communicate outside of Time, why would there be any reason to suppose that genes could not? Where was the ant-hose of science on this turn of the screw? It was an empirical disconnect. The classroom had become a forum for psychic elitism and intellectual imperialism. And it played right into the hands of the machines. Somewhere along the line machines picked up the habit of wearing shoes. Were they trying to be funny? Did it make them feel more human? Were they trying to project the image that they, too, were spontaneous, fun-loving creatures? Who knows? But they all wore shoes. The same kind of shoes. Gold-plated basketball sneakers. It was kind of a status symbol in the culture of mineral consciousness. * * *
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Cha Cha was baffled. Not by the shoes. But by Time. What was he watching? The future? A parallel future? A sideways future? A past? A past in another star system? Another universe? What? He clapped his hands and his hamster-powered window through Time accelerated through a phase shift. The stream of events moved faster and faster. The Earth got too hot for water and water-based life. It entered a long period of metallic constructions. Finally everything blew up in a huge fireball a terrific explosion that scattered bits and pieces of mineral life all over space. The stegosaurus in Cha Chas living room whipped its spiked tail from side to side, smashing the couch into wood chips and cotton balls, desperately fleeing the fireball. The man-eating pumpkins clacked their jaws like cornered dogs. Cha Cha had seen enough. He reversed the tape and brought everything back to the present. He heard a rumble outside his window. Two blue jays cruised by in an F-16, laughing wildly, shooting off missiles at flocks of crows.
Chapter Nineteen
Ferns. A school of flying fish scattered from the bow. What? Shoebridge gripped the tiller of the stolen sailboat. Ferns told me. Or actually a guy who talks to ferns told me. Or rather a guy who listens to fernsHe told me about my daughter. Margaret. A red-haired pony-tailed kid Ive never seen. I thought we agreed to leave the B.S. ashore? I told you you wouldnt believe me. And you found her name in the file your stole?
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Yeahfile marked MN. I wasted a half hour looking for a Mega National file, then I remembered that years earlier Maddy had told me her bosss name. MN. Bingo. How long ago had it been, thought Shoebridge, that he had become obsessed with tracking down MN. Hed almost gotten fired over that one too. First there was Paris. His big vacation. Undertaken with the purest motives. Culminated with his feet upturned in a trash can. At least the American press never got a hold of it. He expected a drubbing from his superiors when he got back to D.C. but it didnt happen. They seemed pleasant and happy to see him. Of course they knew the details of the Paris escapade. But nothing was said. They behaved as if he had just spent a couple months drinking Campari in a beach chair on the Riviera. They gave him his new orders. Jump in, feet first, with that bold and sassy Cedric Shoebridge style that had come to be so highly praised in the top echelons of the Bureau. Hitch up your pants, pin on your badge, and go after these bad guys who broke into the Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel. Find out who they are and what they were doing there. We want to know everything. Everything! And the orders came down from the very very top. Initialed by JEH himself. What a godsend. His brain revisited the moment of that memo. He had been afraid he was going to get sent to Patagonia. Dismissed in disgrace. And suddenly he was being put in charge of a major investigation. He was back in the game. A player. He strapped on his holster and got right to work and a year later he had discovered absolutely nothing about J. Gordon Liddy or any of the other Watergate Conspirators. But the big boys appreciated his stick-to-it-ness. They even gave him a promotion for diligence and relentless effort in conducting his sweeping probe. He was at the top of his game. Until Deep Throat came along and blew the thing wide open. Someone began sliding blue slips of paper under his office door at night. They were card-sized, folded in half, and contained only one word: Patagonia. * * *
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But he didnt get sent to Patagonia. He got assigned to the daycare detail. What kind of mess could he possibly make out of that? Investigating day care centers around the nation to see how they were run. Hed probably get so overwhelmed with poopy diapers hed just plain quit the Bureau. At least thats what they hoped. But once again his superiors underestimated the dogged incompetence of Cedric Shoebridge. His job was merely to research the day care operators, examine their personnel files, check for past criminal records. Only Cedric Shoebridge could have gotten it into his head to investigate the parents of children deposited at day care centers as well. It was a preposterous leap of investigative imagination that produced mountains of paperwork with no tangible result until he investigated the Mother Nature Daycare Center in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. There he discovered 37 children with the same single mother who was identified simply as MN. Bingo! Thats where he had heard it. He called Madeleine Naylor on the carpet and wanted to know the meaning of this? Was she the MN referred to in these files? Was she the parent of 37 children? Madeleine asked him if hed like a cup of coffee while she made a phone call to request authorization to open these records to him. He said he was the FBI and that was all the authorization she needed. She smiled as best she could through her permanently twisted lip. She trilled like a lark and batted her eyes and said it would just take a moment, plus it would keep her out of trouble with the big cheese if she could just make this one phone call, please. Pretty please. All right, all right. He accepted his cup of black coffee and sat back thumbing through a copy of Ranger Rick. Four minutes later Madeleine was back and said there was a call for him on line 2. He picked up the phone with a scowl. It was J. Edgar himself! Shoebridge was off the investigation. He was to be out of there within sixty seconds flat. Understood! And thats where hed first heard of MN. But who was MN?
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Madeleine Naylor? Mega National? Same thing? In a manner of speaking. Little did they realize how right they were. The computer voice that instructed the 37 students was, in fact, the voice of Madeleine Naylor, prerecorded word by word and reassembled according to the computers communications desires of the moment. Worse, over time, Madeleine Naylors twisted brain which was much more twisted than her permanently twisted lip had been subsumed by Mega National. MN needed human brains to exist. In the same sense that humans only see what their brain tells them is there to be seen, so Mega National could only exist if human beings fed its existence. They didnt have to see it. They didnt even have to know it was there. They just had to be greedy and selfish enough and MN would flourish. In the last days of human civilization Fundamentalist Christians liked to say that the devil is in charge of the world. Unless you understood the science involved which they clearly didnt it was about as accurate a statement as you could make about the mess. Human greed fed corporate greed fed human greed fed corporate greed in an endless devolution a whirlpool of extinction. But even though Shoebridge and the drugged man didnt know all this, everything else fell into horrifying place. The entire interrogation had been a set-up. MN didnt want the file back per se. It only wanted to know who knew about it? Who had seen it? Besides Madeleine only the drugged man and Cedric Shoebridge were known to have actually set eyes on this damning document which verified that a global corporate person had legally adopted 37 human children. Thats why Shoebridge had been brought on the case. He had to be kept close. Once MN found out everyone who knew of the document they all, with the exception of Madeleine, would be retired from this plane of existence. Unknown to her, Madeline had a poison capsule imbedded in her spine and could be retired by MN any time it felt like it. Only Shoebridges stumbling bumbling interrogation style coupled with his obsession about Rich Monk had kept them
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alive this long. Decades ago the clandestine videos of J. Edgar and Roy Cohn frolicking in womens lingerie had worked to keep the secret, but those men had long since left this incarnation. After the drugged man stole the file there was no reason to leave any loose ends. This secret, made public, without the normal rolling media campaign played out over several years the educational benefits of corporate adoption would undoubtedly turn worldwide opinion against the very idea of corporate persons and their attendant rights and activities. Definitely bad for business. Shoebridge had served MN well during the Hoover years. Whenever public outcry demanded that government look into something that MN didnt want looked into Shoebridge was their man. The candidate of choice. His aggressive style and utter incompetence were the perfect complements to derail any investigation long enough for the media microscope of public attention to drift off to something else, something that was actually wiggling with corruption rather than laying there dead. Hed been there for political assassins Lee Harvey Oswald, and James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan. Often just his presence at a single meeting was enough to send a focused investigation running off in fifteen directions at once. Hed almost lost his way during the Martin Luther King Jr. snafu, but succeeded spectacularly with Rich Monk. While the nation focused its attention on a non-existent student radical MN, 400-year veteran of opium smuggling in China, flooded the ghetto with heroin, shutting down the Civil Rights movement in a matter of months. Cedric Shoebridge was a genius. Even if he didnt know it. Especially because he didnt know it. But now that he knew there were things he didnt know now that his mind had opened to other possibilities he had become dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And now that he was actually teamed up with the drugged man, his historic enemy, anything could happen. For the drugged man, brain-addled anarchist that he was, undoubtedly knew more than anyone else alive besides Madeleine and the ferns about MNs covert Plan. This dynamic duo represented a thermonuclear rolling thunder of targeted bungling that had the potential to drop kick Silicone
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Consciousness back to the Permian Extinction or further! MN was furious. What a waste of Time! What I didnt get, said the drugged man. What I never got until I talked to the guy who talks to the ferns is how my daughter, who should be thirty years old, is still an adolescent. Thats the really damning part of that file. It records birth dates. So how does a thirty-year-old kid pass for twelve? Youre asking me? The ferns hooted when I askedThey told my friend I still didnt understand Silicone ConsciousnessMineral TimeTurns out those kids have so much more to learn than average kids and none of it can be written down for fear of leaks that their normal growth processes have been atomically slowed to keep them in early adolescence the prime learning years. Not only are they being psychologically abused brainwashed they are being physically abused at a cellular levelThat knowledge alone would cause a worldwide revolution against corporations. Which, as you know, has always been my goal. Maybe. Maybe not. Human beings have fallen for a lot of B.S. over the centuries. They used to throw their kids into bonfires for the glory of Ishtar or Quetzalcoatl or some other insane god. Whats any different about throwing them into the maw of corporate capitalism? Do you know why MN wants me dead? The file. The file is only part of it. The proofTheres more. It knows that I know. Know what? I know that its alive, really alive. Madeleine knows too. Mega National? Its just a company. Just an idea. Like you already said. Thats just what I said in that room. There were about four interviews going on at once in there and I very carefully danced away from that topic. Good thing you made it easy on me. It was better to rant about Rich Monk and anarchist politics and
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feminist double-talk. I couldnt let It know that I knew. That I really know. Ill play. How do you know? My friend listens to ferns. I listen to something else. Its everywhere, all the time. But were not tuned to hear it. That could be why my daughter was chosen to be in that school. She hears something most other people dont hear. Like what? Mineral conscious. Machine culture. Silicone time. Theres really no word for it in human language because we dont believe it exists. The ant hose of science has never been pointed in that direction. This thing is really and truly alive. Mega National is a living thinking entity. Its been alive for 400 years or more. The humans it employs are like cells in its body. Youre nuts. No Im not. Lots of people besides me hear it. Often it comes in a moment of griefHavent you ever been walking down a city street better yet a suburban street when you just stopped, and looked around, and asked yourself, what IS all this crap? Why cant we stop it? Why cant we get rid of it? Yes indeed. I used to say that all the time when I was living in my garage. So you see. You felt it too. But Im telling you. If you listen real hard in that moment, real hard, you can almost hear it laughing at you. You did too much acid. No. Thats not itYoure missing the pointCorporation comes from the Greek word corpus which means body. Mega National is a body. Its alive. Legally alive. Literally alive. Plus I know something else. Yeah? It was there during the King and Kennedy assassinations. It KNEW. These were not merely conspiracies of individuals. This was the conspiracy of conspiracies. We could call it an Evil Evolution. A nearly transparent demonic scheme. But history is written by the victors, and one day they will call it The Dawn of The Age of Minerals. Those assassinations werent merely political. They ended a whole way of being.
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Flower children woke up to the fact that our populist leaders, the ones who could get elected without corporate money, would be shot dead. There was no one alive who could lead us out from under corporate colonization. Thats when I split to the islands. Left D.C., went to Mexico, stole a boat, got to my island, and set the boat adrift so theyd think I was dead. I wondered how you moved us out here so smoothly. Youd done it before. Stole a boat in Mazatlan? Yeah. I didnt know it at the time but it was almost a dry run for this tripBut dont let me lose my point. Minerals have always been conscious. Good Lord, theyve been around for billions of years. Its just that they couldnt move fast. Were the ones who gave them feet. We did that. Thats why they needed us. And now they dont. Ive wasted a lifetime fighting this at the political level. But it never worked. Because people dont care. They get bored with political facts. They dont see how it matters, or what they can do. And youre right. Perfectly sane liberal parents will work their behinds off for twenty or thirty years to pay to have their kids educated into a system of thought which is completely deadly to human spirit. And why? Because they dont hear It. They dont see It. At least ants know that what they do benefits other ants. What we do, my God, its almost impossible to say it. What we do is devote our entire lives to tearing apart human spirit. Theres so much beauty and grace and love to undo, wellthis thing, this Demonic Agenda, this Silicone Consciousness, requires that we spend all day every day turning away from God, turning away from the very highest cultivator of human spirit, diverting us so we chase its gods of wealth and fame and ever more machines Just imagine my very own daughter walking this earth part human, part Silicone Consciousness laying waste to everything I hold sacred. Knowing exactly what shes doing, and doing it anyway. Its a fathers worst nightmareI swim around the reef at night listening, feeling through the pores in my skin, detecting the vibes yes the hippie dippie vibes of an aquatic culture thats hundreds of millions of years old. The locals say Im an octopus; you heard that. Thats theyre way of saying I know somethingI know something is down there.
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Some answer is down there. But I cant find it. Its maddening. The only thing I can tell you for sure is the worst is yet to come.
Chapter Twenty
ODYSSEUS DIDNT LISTEN to her, of course. Not for two million years. He wasnt about to surrender his nomadic pleasures to start growing beets and tomatoes. He had other priorities. For one thing he wanted to travel. He explored North Africa, then rambled through Asia all the way to China. He backtracked to Europe then retraced his previous migrations several times. In the two million years of pre-history, proto-humans wandered all over the place. Lesiani nagged him constantly. She wanted roots. Youll never turn me into a plant, said Odysseus. Thats not what I mean. But the surf in her head never ceased churning water, never ceased charging the beachhead inside his brain, groping for ways to control him. Early on she had decided that women would no longer hunt. In prides of predators like lions and cheetahs the females did most of the hunting. Indeed, among most mammals the females were the most dedicated, ruthless and persistent hunters. But, inspired by Lesi, human females came up with a better plan. They would gather roots and berries and offer a sexual bounty to men who came home with meat. Men who came home with roots and berries were worthless to them because they already had that stuff. Men were expected to perform heroic and dangerous acts if they wanted to get laid. Lesiani was quite firm in enforcing this rule. Odysseus, with his newly emerging large brain, was both very creative and very horny. Sexual activity that had once been confined to three weeks in spring now spread out to encompass the entire year. In order to increase his chances of getting laid
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he started chipping stones to fashion daggers and spearheads and hopefully improve his performance as a hunter while still leaving him lots of free time to indulge his goofy dreams and bizarro projects. One brutally hot day he got the idea that if he could just spear the sun he could let some of the heat out and cool everything off. Insanity, said Lesi. After several fruitless attempts to toss a spear to the sun he fashioned a mini-spear and mounted it against a sapling bent into an arc with a strip of vine. Lesi spit and muttered as she watched him take hundreds of shots at the sky with this ridiculous contraption. Stop wasting your time, you fool. Go spear an antelope. The kids want meat. But when he accidentally skewered the neck of a high-flying goose Lesi was the first one to race to the kill and lop off its head with a flint knife. As the centuries swam by Odysseus began to realize that his memories of his past animal incarnations were slipping away. His recollections of life as a frog and a swallow and an antelope were dissipating in the winds of Time. In order to arrest the slide of memory loss he began making etchings and paintings on cave walls so he could remind himself, and instruct his children, in the simple matter of how humans had evolved from animals physically, mentally, and spiritually. Why are you teaching them that drivel, said Lesi. You should be showing them how to make bows and arrows before we all starve to death. But even his extravagant outpouring of artwork, etched and painted on rocks and trees wherever he roamed, failed to halt the memory loss. So he started to invent stories hundreds of stories to convey the hidden meanings of the paintings. He made up stories about talking animals who helped each other ward off disaster, or who undermined one creatures selfish scheme, or who pioneered certain evolutionary innovations like wings or fins or compassion or justice. That way, as long as the stories were preserved, every generation of humans could
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be reminded of their past lives in animal bodies. And, as an added bonus, some of the moral lessons might rub off. Odysseus thought of his stories as a kind of insurance against the ravages of Time. A way to conserve the fundamental meaning of life: everything is connected to everything else. At this stage Odysseus was a Neanderthal which meant he had a larger brain than modern humans so there was plenty of room inside his head to preserve both the meaning, and the moral message, of his stories. But, as evolution progressed, and human brain size diminished, the footnotes, the moral messages, were still remembered, but the original meaning was lost. What a shame. Not that the moral messages were unimportant. But a person hardly needed to know them if she remembered, in her soul, that everything comes from everything else. If she took something here, she would be forced by circumstances and simple physics, to give it back somewhere else. Life was a teeter totter. It moved constantly to recreate balance. And thus an unfortunate pattern was set for all ensuing human religions. The greatest, most spectacular, Time- and spacedefying human revelations were routinely reduced to a bunch of dos and donts. Clearly some evil agenda was perpetually at work, closing peoples minds, shutting them off from the Supreme Consciousness. Obscuring the divine mission. But whose agenda was it? To his credit, Odysseus never deserted his mission. He never quit making up the stories not in hundreds of thousands of years no matter how much shame and abuse he was forced to endure. He never gave up the essential human job of renewing and recreating the meaning of life. The characters changed, the locations shifted, but the fundamental meaning that everything is connected to everything else was preserved through every story he ever told. When the weather got cold he herded his family inside a sun-bleached mammoth rib cage covered with bison skins. He built a fire and told his kids stories. They loved it scrunched around the crackling wood, warmed by the memories of their
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past lives as birds and fish while Lesi peeled tubers and ruminated on ways to enlarge the house. Odysseus refused to participate in her scheme on the grounds that a larger house would require more firewood to heat it, so he would be doing more work in order to create more work for himself. But thats not how she saw it. If he spent less time fantasizing stupid stories about fish and birds, and more time helping her, everyone would be a lot better off. The battle raged for hundreds of thousands of years. He preferred tents and teepees, so he could pack up on short notice and follow the herds. She kept trying to build things out of logs and stones what she called permanent structures. According to Odysseus, his stories were much more permanent structures than anything she could build out of rocks. His stories endured for tens of thousands of years. Her houses fell apart in a few generations. She couldnt counter his argument so she changed the subject. And another thing, said Lesi. When are you going to help me make a garden? Right now. He strapped a pointed rock to a stick and said, Go dig. She slapped him. Lesis idea of work had to do with thinking of new ways to get everyone more organized and then convincing Odysseus to go get the job done. As if she was the Director and the whole world was her movie. She believed in her heart and soul that identifying problems was her unique creative contribution to the betterment of life. Hand her an apple and she looked for the worm hole. Build her a house and she sniveled it was too small. Serve up the universe broiled to perfection and she wondered if that was all there was. Nothing was ever good enough the way it was. She wasnt happy unless she was attacking problems, and if she couldnt find one, shed flag one down out of a blue sky twittering with bird song. It was cute, but only to a point. Clearly some insidious force was at work when a creature spent its free time worrying about the future and trying to hammer it into some predetermined shape. No other animal had ever behaved like that before. Odysseus
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realized that if he couldnt invent some way to deflect her mania for discovering problems her relentless fault-finding and doomsday predictions there was no hope of domestic peace. He had to offset her fantasies with something else. Balance her restless fears against a psychosomatic vista of freedom from fear. So he incorporated his stories into some rituals and called it religion. This sense-oriented spectacle made it easy for her to remember the meaning of life and to practice the simple psychosomatic medicine of not worrying. Via riveting images, flashy garments, soaring music and transcendental aromas, Lesiani was transported outside of herself. Religion was a supreme attempt to defuse her fears and restore some balance in their relationship. It could have worked, it should have worked, but it didnt work, because Lesi got it backwards right from the start. She viewed prayer as just another wrench in her toolbox to tighten the nuts of the future. She didnt pray for freedom from fear, she prayed for results. She prayed for rain, she prayed for money, she prayed for good luck rather than praying to be free of worrying about rain or money or luck. And when things didnt work out she still blamed Odysseus. If it didnt rain, it must be because Odysseus was pissing off the gods with his weird experiments. If it did rain, she complained about all the mosquitoes the gods had sent to punish him. No matter what he did, or didnt do, it was wrong. He started to feel like he was walking around with fire ants on his neck, biting his ears, inflaming his brain. Blame it on corn. Or blame it on the mists of mineral consciousness which eons ago had figured out that Odysseus, even with his big brain, was unlikely to produce major machinery until he could be rooted in one spot. Minerals expected humans to extinguish themselves. But they wanted them to invent something more substantial than stirrups and arrowheads before they did it. How could they get the idea across? Language was Lesis main weapon. She used it to stun, shame and destroy. Her tongue and larynx were verbal tentacles that entrapped anyone who came near her. Words were her main
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control mechanism. That was one reason she resented Odysseus stories. He used words in ways that were much too mystical. The gods? What good were the gods if she couldnt harness their hidden powers to solve her problems? So she invented a different kind of story. She called it history to make the men think it was their idea but it was really herstory. Herstory would be the record of all the things men did that women approved of. Forget about elephant hunts and talking to beetles. No more cosmic fishing expeditions. No more discussions of meaning. Herstory would be about agriculture and technology and the wars that were fought to sustain them. Herstory would provide information not mythology. Herstory would be written down on stone tablets so it couldnt be forgotten. It would pay homage to the Great Goddess Ishtar, source of all things on Earth that women liked: food, security, material comfort. Forget about mystical adventures in the bodies of animals. Herstory would record the bushels of grain produced and the numbers of soldiers employed to defend the fields. So while Odysseus was gallivanting around chasing wild herds, Lesiani rooted herself in the soil of the Tigris River in Sumeria and refused to budge. Due to his overblown sex drive he would show up periodically to try to get laid, but Lesi refused to accommodate him. Little by little his genes dissipated. The nomadic hunter who talked to animals disappeared from Eurasia. His story died and was buried under a ledger of merchant accounts and crop reports and weapons stores. Odysseus tried to make a deal with her but she was not in a dealing mood she held all the cards. He was shocked to discover what his religion had turned into: a bunch of smarmy rituals intended to produce rain in an area where all the trees had been cut down to make grain fields and the natural moisture content of the atmosphere had been parched beyond belief. And when the rains refused to come on call she blamed Odysseus. Who else? He was the first man sacrificed to the honor and glory of Ishtar. His genitals were cut off and he was bled to death to appease the Goddess, entice the rains, and
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symbolically fertilize the fields. It didnt bring any rain, but it sure whipped the farmers into line. Lesiani was finally bringing things under her control again. She married a wimpy king and manipulated the macaroni out of him flexing her power in ways that recalled her glory days as the Ant Queen. She admitted Odysseus to her court as a drone and devised a new scheme for recapturing the bad gene. In the body of Queen Semiramis of Semitic herstory she became infamous for taking lovers, then burying them alive. It was a cruel type of revenge she inflicted on Odysseus over and over again for misleading her with his mystical religious stories. The mounds of Semiramis widely reputed to be the graves of her ex lovers could be found scattered throughout western Asia. Finally Odysseus rebelled. He appeared as Enkidu, alter ego of King Gilgamesh. Though he left behind his life of roving with the herds, and moved to her castle, he offered her a dose of her own medicine by refusing to sleep with her. It was a bold and clever attempt to restore some balance to their relationship. Miffed at this rebuke of her prodigious sexual power, the queen founded sacred brothels to lure men to the cities and impress them with the bounty of Ishtar. She might fail with Odysseus, but that would not prevent her from snaring other men into her service. Soon human society was bulging with men who pledged allegiance to Ishtar and the Queen. Agriculture became dominant, hunters became farmers, and masculinity went into hiding. Beer was brewed to allow men limited access to their fantasies for drunk men were easier to shame and control than purely creative men. Lesi took credit when anything went right and blamed Odysseus when anything went wrong. In order to ward off her fear of the future and keep the farmers in line she institutionalized regular religious observance. Her hand-chosen priests would select one man. Wine him and dine him and indulge him for one year. Send him to sport with the kings concubines. And then crucify him. This was the religious lesson of the Great Age of Goddess Religions. A man was equal to a stalk of wheat grass. He would be nurtured and celebrated and cut down in his
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prime. Lesi had gotten the idea from her past incarnation as a Black Widow spider. Odysseus had seen enough. He fled across the ocean to Mexico. There they received him as the God of Maize and adorned him with gold ornaments and turquoise necklaces and ankle bells. He was wined and dined and sported with maidens. Then his still-beating heart was torn from his chest and his body was crushed in a giant mortar and pestle like human corn flour. Odysseus fled north from Mexico where the Pawnees fattened him up, split his head with a tomahawk, shot him full of arrows, then roasted him and sprinkled his blood on the first seed corn. In West Africa he was buried alive in the field each spring. In Guinea his brains and bones were burned to ashes and scattered on the fields. The rest of him was eaten by the villagers for good luck. In India his head was jammed in the cleft of a tree and his body was hacked apart while he was still alive. Then runners would carry off bits of his flesh to bury in their fields. Wherever he went, agriculture meant male sacrifice. And when it wasnt overt human sacrifice, it was war. Mars, the god of March, herald of spring, was originally a god of vegetation. Spring, planting, the smell of fresh earth. But Mars was perverted into a god of war when it became desirable to conquer more tillable land and the best time to do that was Spring. Springtime, March, got perverted to mean war time. War was a direct result of Lesis lust to organize human society into an agricultural cornucopia. The death of men went hand in hand with the growth of agriculture, and women resigned themselves to the idea that you couldnt have one without the other. They hated war, but they hated nomadic berry-picking even more. Where was the security in that? In India hundreds of women accompanied the men to the battlefields to cheer them on from the sidelines. Numerous armies rewarded daring soldiers by offering them military prostitutes. Whats worse? Getting killed? Or giving away a piece of tail? The women knew the answer to that. Human sacrifice was not widely practiced in hunter cultures. Pre-Mayan hunter cultures had no word for war. Hunting was a type of praying. The hunter prayed to his prey and asked
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the animal to make the supreme sacrifice to feed the human tribe. Life was not taken by men it was given by animal ancestors. But we will be missing the point if we heap all the blame on corn. Pigs had a lot more to do with developing the mythology of agriculture than anyone gave them credit for. Pigs were a symbolic bridge between the two technologies. In the Hunter culture the boar was a greatly esteemed symbol of fertility. One boar could produce a thousand piglets in his lifetime. Demeter, the Greek Corn Goddess, walked on the feet of a pig. A pigs footprints marked her trail into the underworld where she fructified the earth. In Egyptian and Semitic cultures the pig was not eaten. Most people assume this taboo was obeyed because pigs were unclean but that was only partly the case. The pig was a capricious fertility god and one didnt eat a god except on very special occasions with proper respect. What is sacred is dangerous. Egyptians and Semites viewed the pig with religious awe and fear. Their feelings of reverence and abhorrence were almost equally blended. It drove Odysseus nuts. People were worshipping pigs and plowing under the habitat of the wild herds. Theyd lost all touch with their evolutionary past lives. Blame it on corn. Blame it on pigs. Blame it on Mineral Consciousness. Blame it on a new type of man who evolved during the early days of agriculture. He was a man who wore a dress, and perfumed his body, and hoarded his wealth in a stone-walled fortress. A man who dabbled in lute playing and feasted on pastries. He was a feminized man. A wo-man. A man who entertained the values of women. Luxury, material comfort, parties and entertainment were his pursuits. He employed hardened soldiers to defend him from any diminishment of his rights. He fought wars under a parasol on a hilltop while real men died on the battlefield below. His priests created rituals to buttress his divinity. He was called a King. He was Lesis greatest achievement since her glory days as the Ant Queen.
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Here was a man who would propagate female values control, security, planned economies, technological gadgetry to make life easier and do all this in a male body. What a clever way to commandeer the brains of all men. The creation of the King was a stunningly insidious social development. The King would get laid by a bevy of concubines. He would be rich and famous and other men would admire him and follow him around like puppies. In later years he could become a senator, a captain of industry, an entertainer, and all the while he would be advancing the cause of female values at the expense of other men. He would be a competitor men enjoyed risk and gaming. He would be surrounded by fawning women and envious men. He would lead human society exactly where mineral consciousness wanted it to go ever-increasing control and organization a high-tech mythology worshipping feelings and devoid of meaning. Odysseus tied his hair in knots and lived in hollow logs like a madman so they would leave him alone. He collected dried birds and bones and experimented with herbs to preserve his communion with all life. They called him a Shaman and chased him to the edges of civilization. But when they were sick, or when the cornucopia of technology drove them insane, they came to him for help. He was lonely. Unbelievably lonely. And ultimately that was a very good thing because it forced him to seek solace in prayer. The only thing he ever prayed for was the strength to continue with Gods work. Living at the outer edge of life made him starkly aware of the fact that the only strength he had came from somewhere outside of Time. From God. From the Guy with Big Pants. From the Supreme Consciousness. He dedicated himself to the living the Truth, and to the simple proposition that every human being deserved to know that life was more than a random clash of atoms. Life had a deeper meaning and purpose than the engine of society was willing to allow or admit. Through prayer he gained the inner peace to calmly accept his mission. He would die, over and over again, in the cruelest ways, trying to snap mankind out of the materialistic nightmare that was marching the human parade off the cliff of extinction.
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He emerged from his shamanic hermitage renewed ready to rejoin the battle for the souls of men. He made a name for himself during the Trojan War a war started because of a faithless woman. Helen believed herself to be the loveliest mortal woman and therefore entitled to certain special privileges. Though married to a king, she felt it was her right to steal away with Paris the playboy for a fine frolic in Troy. The Greeks assembled an army and dragged her back to her wifely duties. Lesiani was furious. She conspired with the sea god to vent her wrath on Odysseus. On the way home his ship was blown off course to some strange islands where he was forced to outwit the narrowmindedness of the one-eyed Cyclops. After escaping that monster and weighing anchor, he plugged his fellow seamens ears with wax and made them rope him to the mast. In that way the sailors avoided steering onto the rocks in cruel obedience to the irresistibly seductive songs of the Sirens mythic man-killers who fretted, and swooned and combed their hair in safety and comfort, while men lost their heads and destroyed their bodies trying to reach them. Eventually they made landfall on the island of Circe, the temptress. Guess who? Circe feted him and slept with him and turned his men into human pigs slobbering at her trough of luxury and material comfort, forgetting the substance of their lives, dedicating their activities to feeling good. But one day, inexplicably possessed by non-physical promptings, Odysseus fled the pleasure-dome of Circe and returned to the arms of his faithful wife Penelope who definitely was NOT Lesiani. In completing his voyage home Odysseus gave the world another one of his vigorous stories about the meaning of life. The islands he had visited were not physical islands. They were islands in his mind. Psychological territories. And by entering and leaving them he once again demonstrated that a man could conquer fear and greed and pleasure-seeking and narrowmindedness and lust to return to a psychological zone of integrity and faithfulness. It wasnt the greatest story he ever told. But it was the greatest one written down until 1200 years
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later when that carpenter from Nazareth came out of nowhere and blew him out of the water. Jesus Christ was a message in a bottle from outside of Time. Jesus rode into history to say that he was the LAST sacrifice. That the Goddess religions were ill-founded. God no longer required human sacrifice. This whole human sacrifice thing was supposed to end with Him. And, by the way, accumulation of wealth in the manner of kings, those feminized agrarians, was soul-destroying. Better to wander the earth and go fishing once in awhile. Even children could recognize this message from outside of Time as a bold attempt to rebalance human nature. But Lesis priests quickly turned Jesus story inside out. Before long they were praying to him for rain, victory in battle and special favors. The story was preserved, but in a horrendous repeat performance of human nature, the meaning was lost. For awhile Odysseus became a vegetarian, not because he loved animals, but because he hated plants. He couldnt stand what a mess vegetable consciousness was making of the human experiment. He traveled to Rome to make his case against agriculture. The Senate heard him out, talked it over, then fed him to the lions. He moved north and joined a tribe of proto-Polacks who worshipped snakes and chased wild cattle around on the steppes of Central Europe. They were dumb. They didnt care anything for civilization. But at least they didnt laugh at him when he said he could talk to animals. They just shrugged. What else is new? Central Europe became the last bastion of mysticism in the Holy Roman Empire. Many of Odysseus stories were repeated as fairy tales which endured for thousands of years. He even taught St. Francis how to talk to birds. And some of his stories ended up on the lips of grandma Lobotomowski who recited them at bedtime to her two adopted grandsons in the days before she broke down and bought Ramon a $50 TV from a Mexican cat burglar. What a Timely seed of salvation! * * *
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Sometime in the Middle Ages Odysseus got a brainstorm. Religion was a good idea gone wrong. Sohe turned his attention to science on the theory that if he could convince people to stop using religion for the wrong things, maybe they would start using it for the right things again. His knack for avoiding pain and injury was scarcely improved after this career move. When he came out in support of Copernicus theory that the Earth moved around the sun he was hung from a bell rope. When he told people that weather came from the collision of warm and cold air rather than the wrath of God he was drowned in a lake. When the plague broke out and he told people they could improve their chances of survival by killing rats and boiling their water some French peasants tossed him off a cliff with live birds tied to his body. During the Inquisition Odysseus was burned at the stake six times. Sometimes for scientific heresies, sometimes for spiritual heresies. Lesi considered this a new World Record and even wrote the Pope to let him know. She could just imagine The Vatican Bulletin headlines: Man Torched for Heresies Six Times! The church was doing her job for her! A year before Columbus left to discover America, Odysseus told an English Bishop that it was possible to reach the East by sailing west. As a reward for his candor his arms and legs were roped to four Clydesdale horses and he was ripped in quarters. Finally, he shipped off to Martinique as a slave. He drained swamps and cut sugar cane until he died of malaria. Then he stole off to Louisiana and ran guns to the indians. This direct assault on agricultural expansion earned him a trip before the firing squad. He rode with Geronimo and was imprisoned on a reservation where the government encouraged him to grow corn. He and Geronimo both told the soldiers they would rather starve to death than grow corn and did. Mineral Consciousness swung into full gear with the Industrial Revolution. When Odysseus complained about working conditions in the factories he was tarred, rolled in feathers, and lit on fire. By World War II Odysseus felt like he was living inside a machine. Food came in cans. High schools were organized like battleships where everyone reported for duty
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according to bells. Machines ran everything. The plants and animals had stopped talking to him. The hippie revolution came and went a genuine spasm of spiritual rediscovery assassinated by drugs. Yippies turned into Yuppies who drove slick cars, drank designer coffee, and shunned having babies. The machines were deeply infiltrated by now. Society was geared toward having fun and letting machines run things. By the time Odysseus visited the Neo-Neoist commune with his dad he had entirely forgotten that nature could talk. His fathers grandiose proclamation on this topic stirred the memory of voices which by now were barely audible. Odysseus fungus experiments in the basement of the mafia steak joint reconnected him to a faint rumor that there was more to life than the dominant culture would have anyone believe. The American Way was a tyranny of the majority, a cruel cant to individualism, that denied other possibilities. The molds teased him with the notion that there was a cosmic story to be told, and that lives lived in ignorance of the cosmic story ceased to have any meaning. Odysseus dad rekindled his sons bio-sensitivity to the language of nature. Apollo owed this insight to Myrtle the Turtle, animal visionary, super commando in the subterranean war against agriculture and industrialization. Myrtle the Turtle. Farsighted creature who codified a common language for animals. Myrtle the Turtle. Underground leader of the Animal Revolt. One day, neck deep in feminist studies at the University of Chicago, Apollo Tyme told Myrtle about the gold-plated basketball sneaker that had materialized in his closet when he was back in Ithaca. Just plain materialized in his closet, one night while he was taking a shower. When he threw his clothes in the hamper it wasnt there, and after the shower, grabbing his bathrobe, he noticed it. Her head recoiled into her body. Myrtle was round and flat and certainly not much to look at by human standards. She had not yet evolved into a turtle, but she had certainly begun acting like one. And she was faintly aware of the dangerous properties of that shoe. So she cut a deal with Apollo. He would give her the shoe in exchange for private instructions in the animal language she
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was developing. Apollo agreed. But he gave the shoe to Odysseus for safe-keeping. Myrtle made an appointment to meet him at the zoo, and Apollo showed up with a large rock in a brown paper bag. Myrtle taught him the first six letters of the animal alphabet and then tossed him in the polar bear cage. When she opened the bag she saw the rock and hissed like a cornered snapping turtle. Odysseus took the shoe with him to Florida where he lost it in his divorce. A Jamaican burglar stole the shoe from Leslies house and traded it to a Chicago chemist to get the formula for Boot. The burglar fancied himself a clever guy who would Reap enormous profits from the new drug. Little did he realize it was a set-up. He was already working for the machines and didnt know it. The gold-plated basketball sneaker this message in a bottle from outside of Time was now safely back in the possession of the machines. Until Cha Chas brother Ramon broke into the chemists bedroom to steal a TV as part of a gangland initiation rite. He should have just grabbed the TV and ran, but, being Ramon a younger brother with a compulsion for pushing the envelope to prove his courage and composure Ramon started rooting around in the guys closet where he spotted the gold-plated basketball sneaker and grabbed that too. And now, sitting on the slopes of Pulotu, with his feet sucking nutrients out of the soil, in the company of Sione, Lesiani and Latu the Giant, all of the chaotic details seemed like a whirlpool in a fractious mountain stream to coalesce into a distinct shape. All of them except one. Whats with the shoe? said Odysseus. I dont get it? Nobody does, said Lesi. But there sure are a lot of people who want it. Whoever finds it can probably unravel this whole mess. Maybe even change evolution. Control the future. Everyone thinks you have some angle on acquiring the shoe, said Sione. They think thats why you came here. To hide until the right moment. Ridiculous, said Odysseus. A floating speck materialized on the rim of the horizon. Within minutes it enlarged into the unmistakable shape of a
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catamaran bearing down on Pulotu, flying the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger. At the helm of the pirate ship stood a very large turtle.
Chapter Twenty One

THE SIXTIES WERE DIFFERENT, said the drugged man. It was a clear night under the star dome with a steady breeze pushing their sails west of Peru. I hated the sixties. We became immune to the corporate/government system, the military/industrial establishment. Yeah right. We did. We put compassion before profits. We learned to barter with each other, stay off the money system. We grew our own food. Painted houses, built our own houses. We refused to become cogs in the corporate machine. Thats why the system hated us. Not for long hair or free sex. We were people who woke up. Saw in the dark. People who consciously decided that we would not be gears in the machine. That really scared them. Then when the war was over we couldnt get jobs to save our lives. Theyd hire women but not men. Jerry Rubin said that the feminist movement signaled the end of the sixties movement. Do you know what he meant? Nope. He meant that the 60s were about peace and love and sharing. The feminists were about gimme mine. A radical departure from everything that had produced the feminist movement. And then he became an investment banker. Yeah, he sold out. What a coup for corporate America. He was a major prizeBut 30 years later I saw the same system at work in the South Pacific.
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What? The EEC had just installed a bunch of nearly free solar lights and radio phone systems. These were $2000 units that the locals got for $50 plus $5 a month. So what? It was a gift. Yeah, it was a gift. A Trojan Horse gift. These people lived outside the money economy: fishing, harvesting breadfruit, growing yams. Then, for the first time in their history, they had a monthly bill to pay. Only five bucks a month? That doesnt sound so bad. But from now on, for the rest of time, these people will have that bill to pay. Before they could organize their time around fishing and planting and going to church. Now they have to come up with money every month. And you know its not going to stay at five dollars. Theyll have to plant more and fish more and before you know it someone will want to start a shoe factory so everyone can get jobs to pay their monthly bills. Its Mega National at work. The systematic destruction of a basic human culture that has been working for 50,000 years. Youre trying to say the government conspires in this? Are you dense?Look, once, when I had my house painting business a short-lived attempt to get economically free of the commune I went to the bank for a Small Business Administration Loan. To buy ladders and a truck. They turned me down. Fine. A couple months later I saw a big hoopla in the paper about a local company that had scored SBA money. I followed up on the story. Some medium sized business with $2 million annual gross was awarded the loan. But thats not the creepy part. This medium sized business didnt need the money so they left it in the bank. They were paying the SBA 2% interest and the bank was paying them 5% so they were making money by just letting the borrowed money sit in the bank. So what happens? The bank takes that money and invests it in mutual funds and bonds paying 10% or more. The whole thing was a scam. The government, the bank, the medium-sized business all receive glowing media accolades for the good work theyre doing for small businesses. And the money, which is supposed to go to entrepreneurs, makes its way directly to back Wall
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Street. Is the SBA supposed to be investing tax money on Wall Street? That was probably an isolated case. I have no way of knowing. But my point is this, there IS a way to stay immune from corporate feudalism. Third World inhabitants do it. Hippies did it. You simply become a Refusenik. You refuse. So thats what this is all about? According to you. You still think youre that much of a threat to the system. Im like a computer virus. By pursuing the truth, religiously, unflinchingly, I have made myself an outcast. An enemy. Look at the way modern people are running themselves into the ground trying to keep up with all their payments. If ten per cent of them wake up refuse Mega National will be rocked to its roots Remember, there is no human person behind this. There is no evil genius. You cant just get rid of a bad few guys and have everything come right. Its not like the movies where the problems emanate from one bad human. The good guys put him in prison and it ends. NO. Thats not how this works. The evil genius here is a corporate person. The problem is the system that allows these corporate persons to have a life of their own legally You know, Ive talked to WW II veterans. They say the problem is the politicians. The system is great. It would work just fine if we only got the right guys in. Hello! Theyre married to this democracy/freedom philosophy. They fought for this system and therefore they know the system is good. Why would they have fought for it if it was bad? Its like saying, I grow apples, therefore apples are good. Or, I make jeep parts therefore jeep parts are good. Dont you think Nazis said the same things! I tell them look, this has been going on for over 100 years actually much longer than that and how can it be that we never ever get the right guy in? Or if we do he gets shot? Doesnt that tell you something? How come we cant get the right guy in? Because the system doesnt work. Shoebridges brain was overloaded. He sat at the tiller dissolving himself in the Milky Way, letting the thoughts come
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at him through different doors in his brain. MN, Mega National, was a super organism. A human being could understand it about as well as an ant or a bee could understand a human being. The frames of reference were entirely different. Could an ant understand Karl Marx even though it inhabited a tremendously successful Marxist culture? Could a bee ponder the mechanics of a jet engine? Even though it could fly? Humans thrived on quick fixes and pat explanations. They read advice columns and technical manuals. They wanted their information clean and packaged. They wanted physical evidence. If someone suggested that Mega National had a brain the average observer would say sure, its a big computer. And in that moment they would file away the mystery and miss the point. MN had a brain long before it had computers. Its brain was a synthesis of hundreds thousands of human brains. It was dependent on neurology, but it was above neurology. It had interchangeable body parts, and interchangeable brain components. If a plane crashed or a diesel motor burned out it could have them replaced. If one type of thought pattern wasnt producing results it could have the human emitting this pattern replaced. It was a high tech cannibal. Humans had made great medical strides as far as replacing hearts and livers. But replacing outmoded thought patterns, brain parts, was a different order of subtlety. MN had no problem with this. Thats why it could live for 400 years. Thats why it didnt become obsolete and have to die. It kept renewing itself by cannibalizing human brains. It was a higher order of evolution. Its primary motivation was to grow and conquer. It was invisible to humans. It inhabited what humans would call a psychic realm. A non-physical reality. Which science had never bothered to study. With slight modifications the decoder/ receivers that had unscrambled vegetable language could have been modified to hear MN. But of course nobody thought to do this. The only living person with a brain capable of even thinking about doing it was Cha Cha Lobotomowski, and he just didnt care. He was obsessed with Time. What nobody knew was that MN had a fatal flaw. It was an entity that could conceive of no power greater than itself. This
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was psychic hubris. A psychic delusion. It was a being that was entirely devoid of a spiritual life. It could not see beyond its own agenda. And that made it an easy target for the Guy with Big Pants. MN didnt even suspect He was there. It was about to be ambushed, blown into psychosomatic shrapnel, and all the while it was dreaming of world conquest. Fiddling while the future burned. It only remained for the Big Guy to choose his instrument of devastation. But who would it be? Shoebridge? The drugged man? Madeleine the female poison apple herself? The funny thing was, nobody even knew that there was anything to know about this up and coming miracle. But it didnt matter because that still wasnt what this whole thing was about. It was about something else. Life is not a detective story sprinkled with physical clues. Blood on a doorknob or the odd footprint. Life is a detective story sprinkled with non-physical clues. Cha Cha had unmade the world with his food experiments and he was still here! Odysseus had been burned at the stake six times slaughtered a thousand times and he was still here! Every one of us experiences rare moments when it seems like we are receiving radio transmissions from no earthly source. When, like mollusks, our attention is lifted up into the sky, where we feel part of rhythms and cycles that last for hundreds of millennia. Billions of years. Yes, something is trying to talk to us, but we arent listening. We havent trained ourselves to listen. We havent allowed ourselves to believe that its there. Have faith that its there. Allow the mere possibility that its there! Like the isolated tribe of Polacks who didnt know what Rome was but believed that Odysseus could talk to animals, there are a few battered souls among us who have opened their hearts to what is possible. These are the real scientists. These are the ones who truly penetrate the mysteries of life. They are like Cha Cha and Odysseus, and the drugged man. And now Shoebridge, sitting at the rudder of the stolen sailboat, was unwittingly elevating himself amongst them. None of them had answers. Not yet. But they all had good questions. Not stupid questions. Good questions. Not mundane questions. Good questions. Not how to make a better microchip or write a nifty computer program.
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Better questions than that. Real questions. Questions tempered by pain and ostracism. Somehow they had all survived decades of alienation from the cultures that birthed them. And somehow, for some reason, some guy with Big Pants had selected these broken souls to meet and to clash and to evolve to the next level of meaning. Real honest-to-God meaning. The drugged man returned with a cup of coffee for Shoebridge. Hows it going Mister Monk, snickered Shoebridge. I told you!they both cracked up. Theres something I dont get, said Shoebridge. Theres something I dont get too, said the drugged man Whats yours? If Rich Monk is an idea, not a person, where does the idea come from? How does it move around? Yeah, how does it travel? How does it do what it does? I dont knowI guess by Rich Monk. Come on. Im serious. I am too. You heard of Typhoid Mary? Yeah, she carried the disease but didnt get it. Well it might be like that. That means you still might be Rich Monk. MaybeBut if so I dont know itIs that in indictable offense? Dont ask me. Im just a cop. But I do know, if you were Typhoid Mary, wed want to get you off the streets as fast as possible and then figure it out. Well, you certainly accomplished that. Yeah, until you came back out to find your daughter. Yeah. So you think thats it then? You think you might be Rich Monk? My answers the same. No, I do not believe that I am. Well I still do. Everything fits. Everywhere you were, he was. And the chaos followedWhy else were you involved in all that political rabble rousing?
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Wellthats what you really dont understand. I was really after something else. All your leftist rants are just an act? No. I believe them. I think theyre important. I call it Stage One. Stage One of what? Waking up. Tune in, turn on, drop out. Thats what Timothy Leary called it, then they turned him into a criminal. For all its stifling propaganda about liberty the moment an American starts living a life outside the dotted lines corporate/government lackeys turn him into a criminal. He cant hunt food without trespassing; he cant just plant a garden without owning the land because thats trespassing. The only option left is a life of crime stealing from the rich bastards who got rich legally. Who got rich by following the laws of the system. But whose system! Thats what nobody ever asks. Who is the system for?All you need to do is read three foreign newspapers to find out how brainwashed we are. Thats Stage One. Waking up to how corrupt our politics are is the beginning. The beginning of thinking outside the lines. Right. Then what? Then one moves quickly onto spiritual matters. Spiritual? Right. You guys never realized how much fear we had of you. We were really scared. You cops were living within the law, just doing your job. We were breaking it. Pushing the envelope. Thats why we did so many drugs, especially before a street riot or protest march where we expected to be smashed up and tossed in jailBut the drugs turned on us. We needed something higher something higher than drugs some higher power, to banish the fear. I dont think you can survive as a political animal without finding something bigger than yourself to pray to, to protect you. Never thought of it alike that. No, I guess you could just take God for granted. Bow to J. Edgar and go on your way. Maybe. I dont know.
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Yeah, thats how it was. At least at the beginning. Anyway, soon after I was politically liberated, I fell headlong into the endless possibilities offered by God. It was either that or fall into some Marxist/Trotskyite trap of believing the most important thing in life was workers councils and electing a new regime. I was sick of regimesAs you can imagine I was immediately ostracized by the Left. I wouldnt play ball. Just like the Bureau. Yeah? Yeah. They pretty much blackballed meHow did you deal with it? I took refuge in a statement by Socrates. He said: once one realizes how demented civilization is, the philosopher can take joy in the knowledge that he has a choice whether to be part of it or not. A choice. A real choice. A choice most people dont have. Thats a really spiritual statement almost a Gospel statement by a guy who was told to kill himself because he didnt believe in the right gods. Told to kill himself?By soldiers?Cops?What did he do? Killed himselfSee they couldnt take away that choice. That was the point. Wow. Yeah very very sad and very very good. Thats why we still remember the guy 2400 years later. The system couldnt take away his choice. So is Socrates still alive? No. Is Socrates still alive? Yes. See what I mean? Is Rich Monk alive? He is if enough people want him to be. Bingo. I got that from you, chuckled Shoebridge. I know. But youve answered your own question. Somewhere Rich Monk is alive because enough people want him to be. Whats your question? The gold-plated basketball sneaker. What? Ive never been a thief. Not ever. But once I was painting a guys house in Chicago some creepy chemist from the
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University of Chicago a freak with no eyebrows. Anyway, I had to clean out his closet to paint it. When he came home from work he went crazy about a shoe Id thrown on the bed. The gold-plated sneaker. Shoebridge glanced at the compass and pulled the tiller toward him. Yeah. Like a trophy? No. Different. Just like a dirty old shoe that had been dipped in gold paint. Nothing. Garbage really. Yeah. So what? The guy screamed at me and told me to get out of his house. I went back the next day to get paid and he screamed at me again accused me of stealing the shoe. Engineering some breakin overnightHe said I could keep the TV. He didnt care about that. But he wanted that shoe back. He was nuts. I never got paid. Did you take it? No, I didnt. But the weird thing was, I had thought about taking it. Rolling it up in my painting tarp when I left for the day. I should have. At least I wouldve got paid something for my work. But I didntAnd yet, somehow, just the thought of stealing it was enough. Enough? Yeah. That shoe had to be stolen. I still dont know why. I still dont get it. If the drugged man could have heard gods laugh he would have caught a belly-full from the Guy with Big Pants.
Chapter Twenty Two

meanwhilein the same universeback in Chicago CHA CHA SWISHED THROUGH the crowd of cheering kids and bounded up the steps to grandmas red brick bungalow in the old neighborhood off Kedzie Avenue. Hed brought her back
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here when the Eden Rest Home closed down because there were fish coming out of the faucets and the nurses had run out of cooking wood. He hadnt heard a word from Airport Johnny in over a month since hed set sail for Jamaica, but there had been plenty to keep the de facto Lord of Chicago occupied. The wild animals had made a jailbreak from Lincoln Park Zoo and were prowling the streets at night, preying on the cows and chickens that had come to the city to find food, and even gulping down the occasional wino. The big cats were getting bolder by the day. Grandma was sitting in her usual place in the rocking chair, spotlighted in a powdery shaft of light, staring out the window at the plum trees on the farm near Krakow where she grew up around the turn of the last century. Hi buszia, said Cha Cha, hoping to link up with her wherever she was in earth orbit. She blinked her moist eyes at him and said, Wheres the geese? Wolves get them or what? I never see the geese anymoreBut sometimes I swear Ive seen hyenas and tigers prowling the streets. Do you know that Charles? Cha Cha just nodded and tapped a Latino finger-rhythm against his black forearm, gazing at the withering remains of the only mother hed ever known. She was half here, and half somewhere else. The geese and the farm were a Time warp. The hyenas and tigers were probably real. And wheres Ramon? I sent him out for butter and cabbage nine months ago and he never came back! Ah! A flicker of Real Time. Maybe some part of her mind was moving forwards again. Maybe she didnt spend all her waking moments hiding out in a log cabin in a plum orchard near Krakow, worried about geese and wolves. I love you grandma. Dont try that sweet talk on me Charles, she cackled. You know the rules. You dont go to school, you cant watch TV. No school, no TV no compromises. She laughed so hard her false teeth dropped into her lap and she grinned at him with pink rubber gums. Cha Cha snatched the teeth off the faded flower-print smock and handed them back to her.
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I know the rules grandma. She dipped her head and gulped her choppers back into place. I just wish I could find out what happened to the geese. Must be wolves. Unless its those Austrian spies again. And just like that the channel changed. The receiver in her brain tuned in to 1908 on the Century dial and the white blizzard of Time wiped out the transmission. Ni modo. There was nothing he could do. He backed out the door onto the front porch and turned to one of his bodyguards. Get some geese and put them in a pen outside her window. And shoot anything that goes near them. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of chocolate kisses that had materialized in one of his food experiments. Smiling at the flock of kids gathered around the porch, he tossed the candy up in the air. They pounced on the silver foil teardrops like hungry crows, flapping and squabbling and whooping with joy. No one had even SEEN candy in six months. Back to the office, he said to his bodyguards, and they saddled up to leave. The kids cheered and cavorted alongside Cha Chas entourage all the way to Maxwell Street, hoping to attract a nod of recognition from their hero as he swayed and rolled on the haunches of a lumbering black and white Holstein cow. Just past Maxwell Street a leopard leaped from the second floor of an abandoned building onto the cows neck tossing Cha Cha sideways into an open sewer. Three lionesses attacked the cows haunches and brought her down. While the bodyguards were distracted by the big cats some pigs on motorbikes zoomed out of an alley and opened fire. The pigs caught everyone by surprise and anyway, they had better weapons. The bodyguards scattered in a cloud of cordite. When the gunfire died off one large pig wearing a vest plastered with medals poked its snout in the air and snorted, Cha Cha? Cha Cha? But Cha Cha had raced through the storm sewers and come out at the Chicago River beneath Lower Wacker Drive a roofed enclave where homeless people had been living under stacks of
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cardboard for generations. The instant he poked his head out of the pipe the detective with no eyebrows stuck a gun to his chest and said, Youre under arrest. Who are you? Detective Lazarak. Time Police. What Police? Time PoliceYouve really made a mess of things down here, havent you son. The detective shifted on his feet. He was wearing basketball sneakers. One of them was gold-plated. One of them was not. Where are you from? asked Cha Cha. The Big Bear. What bear? Ursa Major. Is that on the North Side? You could say that. How far? Maybe100 light years. Really? Cha Cha looked down at the mans shoes again. Then you must know the answer. To what? To what eats fireballs? What kind of fireballs? Big, big fireballs. Like stars? Yeah. Like stars. The only thing that eats stars are Black Holes. Really? Yeah. Why? Because Ive got one in my bedroomRight next to my gold basketball sneaker. Take me there, growled Detective Lazarak of the Time Police. He shoved the gun deeper into Cha Chas chest and crinkled his hairless brows. On the way back to Carrini Green Cha Cha pumped Lazarak about life in the Big Bear. It turned out that the whole galaxy had been having the problem with Time for about 2000 years. Ever since that earthling Jewish carpenter ripped a hole in the
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screen door of space/Time. During the Dark Ages before the formation of the Time Police things got pretty desperate. Someone would build a shoe factory and everybody would show up for work one morning and find a herd of giraffes grazing in a scrub forest where the factory had been. Live whales materialized in automobile showrooms. Trout streams became radioactive overnight. Wolf packs appeared in crowded supermarket aisles. So the Time Police were chartered to round everybody up, bring them back to the present and keep them there. That way evolution could proceed at a steady pace. The Time Police predated all current political associations on the Earth-sized planet orbiting the star in Ursa Major that Lazarak called home. They were a feared institution which infiltrated every pore of society employing whatever force necessary to subdue Time Bandits. They regarded the outbreak of Timelessness on Earth as a type of virus which might infect the rest of the galaxy. On top of that, they considered this hole in Time a potential hideout for escaped criminals. They wanted to shut it down right now. Here we are, said Cha Cha, throwing the door open and booting a mud-caked Diplodocus tail out of the way. A flock of baby stegosauri ran for cover behind the sofa. What a mess, said Lazarak, squinting at the menagerie of extinct reptiles and genetically crazed plants. He held his nose and rubbed his eyes, smarting from the ammonia haze of stale dinosaur pee but he didnt fool Cha Cha. Wheres the shoe? Over by the window. Lazarak rushed to the window and the man-eating pumpkins tore him in half before Cha Cha even got the door closed. Awful business, muttered Cha Cha as he watched the pumpkins whipping their viney tentacles, spitting chunks of wire and metal all over the room. The pumpkins hissed at Cha Cha, outraged at his deception. He grabbed a baseball bat and drubbed a snapping baby stegosaurus into the waiting tentacles of the carnivorous melons. While they squabbled like alley dogs, tearing the spike-tailed
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lizard to bloody shreds, he grabbed Lazaraks severed leg and removed the gold-plated basketball sneaker. Then he rushed into his bedroom, kicked a lounging pterodactyl off his bed, set both gold sneakers on the stool, and began saying Hail Marys backwards in Polish at a furious pace. Three hours later he herded all the dinosaurs through the bedroom door and chased them into the Black Hole on top of the stool. He threw the shredded sofa and pee-soaked carpeting in after them. Lastly he pitched in the shards and wires of Lazaraks body. He left the pumpkins alone. And so, the gold-plated basketball sneakers were reunited. These shoes were a dynamic duo in the universe of footwear. A matched pair. Like two photons that escaped a dying atom, they were able to relate to each other outside of space and Time. They had been trying to get back together for quite a while. Cha Cha had no way of knowing the shoes were psychosomatic remnants of the humanoid population which had once inhabited the Earth-sized planet in Ursa Major before the machines took over. But what he could tell immediately is that they introduced a sort of balance to his food experiments. Taken together they offered a vision of the future which was much more wholesome for carbon-based life than the alternative scenarios he had witnessed. Sure. Humans would suffer. They would bitch and moan about the good old days when machines did all the work. But they would survive, and adapt, and head off self-extermination for the Time being. How would it come about? The rift between fantasy and reality would have to be mended. People had to begin LIVING spontaneous lives not just watching them in movies. The impulse to control life with laws and dogmas and science would be subverted by random acts of spontaneity. Daily life would become much more supernaturally charged. Much more responsive to the ebb and flow of non-physical reality. People had to begin living within their cosmic story again not just fantasizing about it while machines and talking animals
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quietly replaced them. Popular mythology would have to reserve a special channel on the human mind-screen for sorties into non-physical phenomena. The sound bite was out. The mind bite was in. The tension between push/pull, expansion/contraction, male/ female, would always remain. That was a good thing. A healthy symbiosis. Neither would reign over the other. Males might be physically more powerful. Females might be emotionally more powerful. Men would not be allowed to take physical advantage of women. Women would not be allowed to take emotional advantage of men. Psychic manipulation emotional violence would be as punishable as physical violence. That was the way it had to be. The choice was either to enforce this balance, or face extinction as a species. Cha Cha only had one remaining problem. How to break the news to the good people of Chicago? The population of the Chicago metropolitan area had dropped from 12 million to two million in nine months. That mighty artery, Halsted Street, was packed shoulder to shoulder, day and night, with families fleeing the city dragging suitcases, riding tricycles, carrying boxes on their heads. The Dan Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways were jammed with herds of refugees, yelping and bleating and shuffling along like cattle on a range drive, walking into the unknown, fleeing the rustbowl. In the early days of the exodus people reaching the outskirts of the city raided silos for corn and soybeans. They went fishing for birds by baiting hooks with corn kernels and casting them up into the trees hoping to reel in a sparrow or starling to boil in their soybean stew. But the animals soon put a stop to that. Birds patrolled the skies, fish defended the waters, wolves and lions spied from the bushes, pigs on motorbikes coordinated the surveillance and punished transgressors by confiscating their personal property and stomping on their feet. Animals now operated the remaining industrial machinery and since 95% of machines served people, 95% of machines were unplugged and allowed to rust. Let the people bid adios to the pavement and sink their shoes in the earth. Maybe if they
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were smart theyd plant small garden plots and some of them would survive. If the elk and grouse came back, and the chemically polluted waters were given time to cleanse themselves, they might even have meat and fish to eat someday. Maybe. Over centuries cities like Chicago and New York and London and Tokyo had evolved into living mechanical organisms which consumed enormous resources. Cities were superorganisms too complex for any single human to understand or control. And, like ants who lived their lives in obedience to the Ant Queen, human beings were simply a slave population servicing the growth requirements of the cities. As humans neared the end of their usefulness, their minimum support facilities were allowed to deteriorate. Neighborhoods crumbled while manufacturing was deported overseas. Playgrounds decayed while fiber optic cables were laid. Bridges rusted while billion dollar satellites were launched. The gross domestic product of earthly economies was steered toward enhancing the mineral agenda by appropriating the human agenda. Unbeknownst to most freedom-lovers, human society had evolved into a Technocracy, where machines counted more than people. Business was more important than God. The human species was a population held hostage by a self-induced fantasy a false mythology the cockeyed notion that machines improve the quality of human life. Cities, stripped of facilities for humans, were powerful organisms indeed. Food was unnecessary. Fuel, once earmarked for heat and transportation, could now be dedicated exclusively to electrical power generation. Mineral consciousness was poised and ready to expand into a super culture. Mega National was pointing the way. The 37 students it had raised were trailbreakers clearing our path into the future. What great kids! Who would not be persuaded by such bright adolescents who seemed so certain of what they were about? Refugee humans hoeing their vegetable plots in the middle of Indiana would watch from a distance as these huge mechanical organisms grew into glittering domes dotting the horizon. Trucks
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driven by chimpanzees rumbled through the heartland bringing iron ore and silica and uranium to feed the cities. And eventually these animal dupes would be replaced entirely by android drivers men made out of wires and metal who wore gold-plated basketball sneakers. And the only thing left standing in their way was Cha Cha Lobotomowski and his hamster powered tape recorder. Every time the machines reached up to turn off the lights of human consciousness, Cha Cha moved the switch. Theyd create a communications command center and hed melt it into a puddle of metal. Theyd get the monkeys organized into a teamsters union and hed reorganize their molecules into lemurs who only came out at night. Theyd convince the fish to form marine patrols and hed turn them into mollusks pumping around on underwater wheelchairs. Theyd kill off banana trees. Hed resurrect them as temperate climate vines. It was impossible for anyone to know what he was up to, because he didnt know what he was up to himself. That was the secret to his insidious success. It was widely assumed he had some kind of agenda but no one could figure out what it was. Rumor had it that he must be receiving instructions from outside of Time, but if so that meant the transmissions were impossible to intercept. That meant he was operating out of that part of the brain humans never used the Big Part the 9/10ths of it that Darwin couldnt explain. The part that machines, try as they did, could never manage to reproduce. The part Lesi called the bad gene the part she couldnt steal. Cha Cha could be stopped though. This kind of problem had been handled before. On other planets. Thats why the earthly machines had beamed an interplanetary alert to Detective Lazarak of the Time Police as soon as they noticed the problem with Time. And now Lazarak had disappeared as neatly as a millet seed up an elephants anus. This kid had street smarts and street smarts was not something you could teach a machine in a million years. Cha Cha was a loose canon. A genetic menace of incalculable danger. Machine evolution required organization, planning, control, and above all, sequential execution. All of
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that was now possible unless Cha Cha stuck his brooding black face into this wondrous design of mechanical destiny and started picking his nose with the logistics that held the whole thing together. It was obvious to anyone that Cha Cha was the last remaining shred of human government. He started out as Robin Hood and ended up as the Sheriff. A bitter twist of fate. Being a juvenile delinquent had been fun. This? This was impossible. People came to him with problems and he was supposed to solve them. Like Solomon. When the sewage treatment plant closed down and people started using Lower Wacker Drive as an open-air toilet a crowd of activists started picketing outside his office. His aide, the mayor, wanted to know what to tell them. Tell them the same thing you always tell them. Everything will work out once we find The Reaper, the mayor shouted out the window. The crowd exploded with jeers and the mayor covered his ears. It may take centuries, said Cha Cha. What? They dont get it. They still think government is some kind of Big Mama thats supposed to solve their problems. Theyre doomed. Those people down there dont have a chance of surviving. The end was drawing near. He couldnt take the insanity much longer. Most of the people hated him. Only the kids still loved him. He was losing his will to keep fighting off the machines. The quest to find The Reaper had come up empty. He was tired of being alone. His head was hurting him. He was about to throw in the towel and let the fools fend for themselves. He wished he could go to sleep and wake up in fifty years. Cha Cha curled up on a pile of straw and closed his eyes. A little voice slithering around between his ears whispered, Relax, hombre. Helps on the way. He rubbed his aching head with both hands, took a deep breath, and dove into dreamland. Amidst the throngs of refugees leaving Chicagoland, two people could be spotted heading back into it: a white man riding
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on the shoulders of a huge black girl. With one hand the man fiddled with his gold nose ring. With the other he held a gun to the girls ear. The rider seemed weary but the girl looked grim and alert as she plodded along on Hereford-sized hams, shiny with sweat, dripping mucus from her gorilla nostrils, forging a trail of foot-shaped frog ponds. Were almost there, said Airport Johnny. Those are the Gary steel mills. He pointed his pistol at the rusted stacks, puking flames and soot into the cold gray sky. Humphg, said the gargantuan girl. Whats wrong? Youre the one who said you always wanted to see America? Not like this Mon, she snarled. You Mericans dont know how to treat a lady. I already told you. Well take care of business here and then go back to Montego Bay. Humphg. Lying, jive, kidnappers. I am NOT a kidnapper. Then what is you, Merican? Im just a delivery boyIm just bringing home the bacon. At that the girl started bucking and snorting, trying to throw him. Johnny grabbed her hair with one hand and pressed the gun hard against her ear. She whinnied and grunted and finally settled down. Humphg. Five hours later they stomped into the Carrini Green office and woke up Cha Cha who was still asleep on the straw. Stay away from the pumpkins! yelled Cha Cha. SNAP! Too late. One of the pumpkins nipped a chunk off the girls behind. She whirled around and dove on the shocked vegetables like a 285-pound linebacker. Ripping and tearing and kicking craters in their heads; biting the vines, scratching their skin, shooting both fists like howitzers in one side of their orange skulls and out the other. It was all over in a few seconds. There were pumpkin seeds stuck to the ceiling and trails of orange goo dripping down the windows.
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The girl rolled over on her hams spitting a chewed vine out of her mouth and yanked her forearm out of a battered pumpkin brain with a juicy PHLOPP! WhoIS this? said Cha Cha. The Reapers daughter, said Johnny. Why did you bring her I told this Merican he was making a big mistake. I told him all the way through Florida and Alabama, Keentucky and Indiana. But he just said to keep walkin. Cha Cha brushed some pumpkin brains off his arm. I couldnt find The Reaper, said Johnny. No one can. So I figured this was second-best. Second best! The girl spit on the floor. This fool dont know nothin. My daddy dont want nothin to do wif me. He wants me to stay as far away from him as possible. Hes been tryin to get rid of me for yearsTryin to pay gigiolos to take me on a cruise roun the worldBut I wouldnt leave. I wouldnt go. I kep after himAn along comes this fool and puts a gun to my head and kidnaps me. Talk about stupid. Johnny flinched. Why did he want to get rid of you? Because I was right and he knew it. About what? He made a bad deal. And I tole him so. I wouldnt let up on it. He made a bad deal? Yeah. They were bad people. You could tell there was somethin fishy. Creepy. They all wore gold basketball shoesI told him he was wrong. But he didnt wanna hear it. Hmmm, said Cha Cha. Hed been right all along. It wasnt about drugs at all. What do ya want me to do with her, said Johnny. Marry her. No way hombre. Thas right. Thas treatin the lady right! gushed The Reapers daughter. Johnny bolted for the door, skidding on a slick of pumpkin guts.
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Hold it. Hold it, said Cha Cha. You dont gotta marry herI got an ideaMake her a General in the Sanitation Department. I dont know if there is such a thing, said Johnny suspiciously, one hand still on the doorknob. Make her a General. Send her down to Lower Wacker. Maybe she can clean up the mess down thereThey asked for it. They got itWhats your name pumpkin killer? RamonaAnd dont call me Ram. And dont call me the Ramazon. I killt someone once for calling me that. Ramona. Cha Cha picked some wet seeds out of his hair. I have a brothernamed Ramonhes not here now. I can see that Merican. God DO hand out SOME brains in Jamaica too, you know. Hes half dead. What? My brother. OhSorry. Whats wrong with him? Im not sure. Its something to do with Time. Ramona, the Ramazon from the Amazon, as the local kids called her, cleaned up Lower Wacker Drive all right. There were three dead bodies to prove it. She didnt even allow no filthy language down there. She did it by making everyone so bloody uncomfortable they simply couldnt relax. Ever! The good people of Chicago were finally losing their patience with the whole situation. When their buildings started melting theyd shrugged fatalistically theyd endured construction boondoggles before. When the power plants shut down they revived the ancient Hindu technologies of burning dried cow pies to cook their soup, and lighting their homes with butter lamps. Instead of newspapers and telephones they used gossip and rumors to spread information. They rode around on animals and wove their own cloth. Their only insurance against disaster was an unshakable belief that there was no such thing as Time the philosophy propounded by that wily magician, that black prophet, that Puerto Rican/Polish voodoo saint, Cha Cha Lobotomowski. But now Ramona wouldnt let them relax
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ever! and the citizens were bloated and sick and clamoring for revolt. We gotta get rid of Ramona, said Airport Johnny. Why? Because the people hate her. Thats whyWe fought to keep her dad out of here and now youve gone and made her a General. You brought her here! You told me to. No I didnt. That was your idea. Cha Cha squeezed his head between both palms, trying to massage away his psychosomatic pain. Cremation in one hour, chirped the mayor through Cha Chas closed door. Thanks RichardListen Johnny, I gotta go. What do you want me to do about her? Nothing. ListenA month ago people were screaming at my windows, demanding more order. Now theyve got itand theyre complaining about THAT. Ramona is teaching them a lesson. And if they dont get it, theyll dieBelieve me. Theyll die. Cha Cha jogged out the doors of Carrini Green and dove into the fishbowl of humanity swimming the sidewalks of Division Street on that bright afternoon. Tricycle rickshaws pedaled by teenage boys, and carts drawn by snorting bullocks, clattered back and forth over the pot holes. Throngs of bicycles jostled each other, sliding through wet cow pies and sideswiping fruit stands. A row of old women sitting on blankets sold shriveled onions, fried dough balls, and rainbow bundles of fresh-cut flowers. Toothless old men repaired peoples battered shoes with awls and shards of plastic bags twisted into twine. Vendors sold coffee-colored water in clear glasses and individual cookies out of big jars. Music blared from the harmonicas, saxophones and acoustic guitars of Blues musicians who had hiked up from Maxwell Street to the heart of what they called New Bombay. Here, in the shadows of Carrini Green, they clapped and stomped and warmed the crowds with gripping
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performances of New World Classics like Belly Full O Blues and Soulfood Man. Cha Cha hopped onto the bed of a cart pulled by two white Brahmin bullocks with humped shoulders and spiraling blue horns. The crowds cheered him as the regal steers pulled away from the curb. Cha Cha couldnt imagine what they were cheering about, but he raised his arms and waved back anyway. Then he settled himself on a mound of straw for the ride to Lincoln Park. The caged animals had escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo months ago, but the zoo was still a popular venue for weddings and funerals. Cha Chas grandma had just died in the cholera epidemic. To the end she remained stubbornly unreconciled to Time referring to Cha Chas bodyguards as those Cossacks and warning him never to sign a treaty with the AustroHungarian Emperor. Cha Cha maintained she was poisoned, but everyone told him she had died of natural causes. Natural causes! She was living backwards. If anything she should have been getting younger! A funeral pyre of dry grass bundles had been heaped on the shore of Lake Michigan. Grandmas rigor mortised body transported on a bier covered with blue flowers and pinned with white paper notes had been placed on the pile. The notes were cryptic messages from mourners, intended for relatives or friends on the other side of Time. They said things like Hows the food? or Tap my bedroom wall three times if you need a fan. A doleful drumbeat thumped the air as Cha Cha arrived in the midst of the wailers. He kissed his own fingers, touched them to grandmas cheeks, and ordered the cremation to begin. A half dozen old women covered the body with dried cow pies, then a thick layer of hay, and finally a coat of wet mud. At the insistence of the mourners Cha Cha improvised a short prayer. From fire we are bornIn fire we are sustainedTo fire we returnSuch is the Circle of Fire. Such is the Collar of Time. Amen.
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An old woman poked two chimney holes in the top of the mud and lit the hay. Smoke spewed in all directions, driving back the crowd. Eventually the flame found its way out the flue, and the mud casket heated up like a kiln. The mourners started passing around bottles of bathtub gin, keening and weeping as the odor of burning flesh, mingled with hot manure, swirled around their heads. Someone passed Cha Cha a bottle of clear liquor. He took a swig and thought about the time grandma had baked him his very own cherry pie. He didnt even have to share it with his brother or anyone. He could still remember taking the pie up on the flat tar roof of the bungalow, squatting out of the wind on the smooth gravel behind the chimney, checking to see if Ramon had followed him, and jabbing his fork through the crust. His head swirled. He staggered sideways and fell to his knees. I should have given you some pie Ramon. I should have saved you a piece. Im sorry. Cha Cha quivered for a few seconds, then flopped on his back. The Reaper, disguised in a cape and a turban, slithered to the edges of the crowd and disappeared into the carnival streets. A knot of grandmas fossilized friends gathered over Cha Cha, screaming and drooling until his bodyguards yanked their necks and shoved them out of the way. Get back! Get back! Hes poisoned! brayed the widows. Cha Chas been poisoned!
Chapter Twenty Three

THE DRUGGED MAN TOOK OVER the tiller. Shoebridge sat against the railing, as the eastern sky lightened. We did a good job keeping religion out of government but a lousy job keeping government out of religion. That was MNs secret to success, said the drugged man.
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We had to separate church and state. If thats true then why didnt we do it going both directions? No, it was an evil agenda. How so? Marriage had been a religious institution for 50,000 years or more, until the government started issuing marriage licenses and settling divorce in court. Turned marriage on its head. 60% of marriages end in divorce and we dont know why? Get government out of marriage, thats why. Shoebridge remembered his own bizarre marriage and inched toward agreement. King Henry the Eighth had to start an entirely new church to get divorced. Why? It was obvious to everyone that marriage is a religious institution not a government institution. It could have set off a revolt. And he was the law. He was the King! So deeply imbedded was the notion that marriage is a religious institution that not even the King could declare himself divorced. And now people get divorced and remarried in an afternoon. Yeah, religion got kicked in the butt all right. Thats because we teach scientific creation mythology in our schools but not religious creation mythology. Theyre both wrong. Neither of them have the facts entirely right, but at least religion gets the meaning right. They both have value. They should both be taught. The greatest players in earth history Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Black Elk are edited out of our kids minds because we dont teach religion in school. Thats like refusing to teach history because kids might learn about warBut we wont do that because MN likes war. MN wants war. War means more profits and accelerated progress in technologyThe religion of science kicked the door open for MN to take over everything. And the feminists fell right in behind. Feminists? Feminists needed to destroy traditional church and family values to assert their agenda. The more they succeeded in marginalizing church and family values the more corporate values swept in to fill the vacuum. No, the women didnt intend that. Corporate colonization was an unintended consequence of
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feminism. But if ignorance of the Law is no excuse how can ignorance of the Laws of Life be an excuse? They were messing around with things they didnt understand. They were paving the way for corporate colonialismThen along came computers and the victory was complete. I hate em. Never could get em to work right. Me tooThough Im getting betterBut the impact of computers was two fold. It wasnt just that they replaced people. They also became the driving force behind a bureaucratic agenda that forced millions of information jobs down our throats. Liberated women didnt take mens jobs, not real mens jobs. Building houses and growing food. They created jobs out of bureaucratic thin air so they could go to work in a service economy and get paid. They started doing jobs that never existed before and no one really needed done, all to justify getting their own paycheckOther worldy And really, the worst example of government taking over religion was when it created corporate persons. Thats a legal heresy and a religious abomination. God creates people. People create people. Even science could create a person. But the Law cant create a person. Thats a direct violation of separation of church and state and there should have been a revolution over that one. But there wasnt. No there wasnt. The issue was never raised. Media had forgotten how to ask the right questions anymoreAnd then came TV. Fear in a box. With the dawn of the Television Era MN quickly identified its main product: Fear. Fear sold like nothing else. Put people in a state of fear and they would buy anything: alarm systems, nuclear submarines, over-priced health food, dubious medicines, new and improved toothpaste, ergonomically designed shoes. Afraid of looking old? Buy this. Afraid of losing your hair? Buy that. Afraid of tooth decay? Weak bones? Stinky feet? Buy something. Afraid your kids are slipping behind in school? Spend money on computers. Afraid the Russians are getting
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ahead? Spend money on missiles. Afraid your friends will think youre stupid? Subscribe to this magazine. Want to look stupid? Buy that magazineAfraid you look bourgeois? Buy this car. Want to look bourgeois? Buy that car. Afraid of weather? Buy a jeep. TV had an answer for every question we never asked. It was marvelous. The easiest way ever invented to make people fearful was to get them to snap on the TV. Television was inebriated with fear. Actresses who lost their way. Kidnapped kids. Bad hair. Bad relationships. Gang shootings. Stock market tremors. Anything could be used to produce fear. If the Dow Jones went down, the economy might collapse. If the Dow went up, interest rates might go up. Either way the time to buy was now. Maybe your bones are weak? Eat calcium. Skin wrinkling? Smear on some of this. Cant lose weight? Gobble some of that. Modern science has decreed that an ideal state of happiness can be achieved and it only costs a few pennies a month! Afraid of death? Buy insurance. Afraid of life? Buy insurance. Afraid for your kids? Buy insurance. Insurance companies were the whoremongers of fear. As long as you didnt actually have a disease, insurance companies would insure you against getting it. They took your money to bless you with freedom from fear. They never took your money to solve existing problems. Where would be the sense in that? They spun profit directly from the human imagination that huge part of the brain we never used. Insurance companies were the perfect Mega National creation. They profited directly from the primordial feminized fear, the feminine intuition, that the world is going to come crashing down if we dont do something to prevent it right now! Florida woman finds alligator in her bathtub, BUT is there one under her bed too? Tune in at ten. Boy steals food from neighbors fridge, BUT did he get poisoned from bacteria? Find out at six. Vicious dictator toppled in Mid East, BUT will the price of oil go up? Watch 30/30. The enticing BUT. The ubiquitous BUT. The essential BUT. A generation of Americans had never heard a teaser for a news show that did not contain that snarling, strident BUT. But meant calamity, uncertainty, fear. Boy rides bike to school, BUT did he get squashed by a
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helicopter. Tune in at ten. Actress married for fifteenth time, BUT is her new husband gay? Tune in at six. New study shows kids love video games, BUT are they rotting their brains? Tune in, turn on, drop out. Beware of the BUT, said the drugged man. Thats how they grab hold of your brain to sell you things. Thats how they get you to watch their show. Thats how they get you to buy into their fear. And thats how they get you to buy their products. It all begins with the BUT. Long ago, in the deep dark recesses of his youth, Cedric Shoebridge had developed a personal theory about life. What he never knew is that it really wasnt much different from Cha Chas worldview. To wit: everything is the exact opposite of what it seems. The priests are the sinners, the intellectuals are the fools. The cops are the crooks and the soldiers are the cowards. Democratically elected politicians work for special interests and developers destroy. What you want will probably hurt you and what you dont want is probably good for you. This was no self-serving, me-generation philosophy. Nor was it particularly negative. It just seemed like a good way to move through life with your eyes open. But somehow it had slipped away. Early in his marriage it had slipped away. He had tried so hard to make his wife happy that his fundamental spiritual understanding of things had, through neglect and disuse, fallen into a psychosomatic black hole. His molecule of meaning had been torn apart into careerconscious quarks and high society neutrinos and subatomic celebrities. Spiritual mass dissipated into anti-matter. Physical union precipitated spiritual entropy. Yes, in the absence of shared religion, in the absence of a moral center, marriage is a spiritually shattering experience for men. A banana boat of important non-issues and medical mal-advice, and materialistic manipulations. And now, lost, completely lost, a cop on the run, he looked back on a life defined by misdirection, incompetence, and outright failure. How had it come to this? Had his childhood impressions been verified by history? Were the good guys really the bad guys? Had he devoted his whole
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life to protecting the wrong people? His job description had been pretty clear: Defend the Constitution. Defend the rights of the American people. But no one had ever predicted that 200 years after the Bill of Rights was written corporations would be legally regarded as persons. That changed everything. Didnt it? Certainly the founding fathers had never anticipated this legal monstrosity. Had he devoted his whole life to defending the rights and privileges of some kind of science fiction monsters? It was depressing to think about. The children were the key to the whole evil agenda, said the drugged man. I never would have caught on if my own child hadnt been stolen from me. But the really stupid thing is, its been headed that way for decades, a whole century, and nobody caught on. The brainwashing of American children started in pre-school and hit high gear in elementary school. They were taught they are free members of a free society with a free press and a freely elected government which espouses free trade and freedom for all the oppressed peoples of the world. Any critique or attack of this free society was an attack against Freedom itself. The fact that corporate money selected which candidates will or will not run successfully was never even discussed. The fact that public education is little more than job training for corporate culture was never even discussed. The fact that corporations were legally regarded as persons who enjoy the rights of free speech (paid commercial announcements), ownership of property, and the freedom to contribute money to the war chests of political candidates was never even discussed. The fact that corporations are persons who do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes, or enlist in the military in time of war, was never even discussed. Humans offered their babies up to the Corporate Cult the way they had once offered them up to the Cult of Ishtar. The Religion of Business had swept the globe from New York to China. If schools taught kids how to supply skills to corporate culture then the kids would grow up and make money and be happy. People actually believed this pagan fantasy the same
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way they once believed that if they handed over one of their children to be beheaded and burned for Ishtar, life would be happy and prosperous for all. What is this penchant for human parents to sacrifice their kids to something bigger than themselves? Heres a clue: it had to come from somewhere outside of Time because it sure didnt make any sense down here. Was it the Conspiracy of Corn? Silicone Consciousness? Many a parent who had happily bundled their child off to the first day of school came to feel six months later that their kid had been turned into a foreign creature. An automaton from another planet with an inscrutable agenda who no longer responded to family cues. A borg who was more interested in being graded than in being good. Where did they get this stuff? For tens of thousands of years school meant church. Kids went to the temple to learn the holy language so they could read the holy book so they could learn the values of their native culture. When mandatory public education was first introduced in Massachusetts in the late 1800s the National Guard was called out to quell the riots. These people, who had once fled religious persecution from the state, were being subjected to it again. The Religion of God was banned from the classroom. The Religion of Business and Science took over. Teachers fit Shoebridges Theory of Opposites perfectly. Passionate, committed individuals who had no idea why they did what they did. No idea whose agenda they served. Their battle cry was to help the kids become better in math. But WHY? What made math so important? One out of a thousand kids would actually make use of that algebra on the job someday. Meanwhile the other 999 were deprived of the philosophic insights of Moses and Buddha and Jesus and Sun Tzu which wisdom would have served them well in their everyday lives as waitresses and tire salesmen. Nobody cared about the kids. All they cared about was math. In a society imploding from divorce and homelessness this could only be viewed as cultural dementia. And all so twenty years later some teacher could point her finger at a photo of an astronaut and say, I had him in fifth grade. Whooppee Do.
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What impoverished souls. They hoped to elevate their own self-esteem by launching one single student up to that great Corporate Recruiting Station in the Sky, at the expense of abusing the minds of the rest of their students. Horrendous. Might as well have tossed them to Ishtar and allowed them to skip out on a life of drugs and divorce and culturally induced dementia. If the teachers were in possession of their own brains, and if they really wanted to help the youth, they should have taught them to read, write and think and then taken them on field trips to politicians offices, and on protest marches to the headquarters of corporations known to be receiving government hand-outs sweetheart contracts, infrastructure freebies, tax holidays while they shipped that communitys jobs overseas. Thats teaching. Thats giving kids the tools they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, corporate culture. Not more math!!! Why didnt we ever catch on? asked Shoebridge. You know the answer. MN controls the media. Theres nowhere to go with it. No one will investigate it. No one will report it. We have freedom of speech and thought but no ideas to think withBut its not all bleak. The belly of the beast is the fact that corporations cannot survive without public approval. Their biggest fear is public opinion turning against them. Thats why they do everything they can to control what we think. Thats why MN goes invisible wherever it can. Sounds hopeless. If we wish to change things we have to attack the belly of the beast. It can be done. Why are there only three car companies? There should be a hundred. Why do we all drink Budweiser when there are thousands of microbreweries that make better beer? Marketing is evil. Marketing does not fuel a free market. Marketing eliminates options and consolidates everything. We need to slit the belly of corporate advertising. We need to disallow tax deductions for advertising. And we need to convince the newspapers and radio and TV stations who are dependent on corporate advertising to do this? Like I said. Hopeless.
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There is a secret to surviving all this, said the drugged man, but its so simple and common youll think Im foolish for even bringing it up. Im listening. The 60s were not the only time in this nations history since the War of Independence that the American people rose up against corporate control of our society. But the 60s were destroyed by drugs and alcohol. As if some grim Reaper was waiting outside of Time to sabotage us. Some crippled part of our own psyches was hanging in the wings poised and ready to defuse our optimism. We were just kids fighting something that was too big for us: our families, our government, the war. We were spiritually fried, emotionally terrified, we drank and drugged to kill off the fear. It ended up killing us off. Twice as many Vietnam Vets died of drugs and alcoholism after the war than died in the War. When it was over the Yuppies were happy just to get jobs and make money and forget about it. The cultural surfaces of that era were absorbed into mainstream society: the clothes, the music, the rhetoric. But nothing really changed. Mega National and friends just kept on running the show. I almost didnt make it. What happened? I learned the thing I had not been taught in school. Whats that? I learned how to pray. Oh. Shoebridge watched some flying fish scatter from the hull. Hed never cared much for prayer. Prayer is a political act. Huh? Prayer is a political act. They dont teach us that. They dont want to teach us that. The entire school system is guilty of not teaching us how to pray. Thats why were so vulnerable. Thats why we succumb to drugs to kill off our fears. We cant out-think MN. It has the brain power of ten million humans. We cant beat it by wit or cunning. Its too smart for all of us. So we pray? I know it sounds stupid. I know it sounds wrong. But maybe thats exactly what could tip you off that maybe its right. If we
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live in an inside-out culture, and if it sounds wrong, maybe its right. See?Prayer can transport you to a non-linear, nonrational place a place where MN cannot go. Prayer can move your mind to the outside, looking in. And from that perch, that resting place outside of Time, maybe some inspiration will come. Prayer removes your mind from the brainwashing of the Corporate Cult. Thats why they kicked prayer out of school. Freedom of religion was supposed to mean the freedom to study religion even in school not the freedom to have all religions banned. That was the Corporate Cult at work. Hmmm. I wish I had more to offer but I dont. Just pray. Youre still not telling me something. Thats because I cant. You have to find it out for yourself. You cant believe anyone else, not even me. Youve been inhabiting a science fiction nightmare where everyone around you is brainwashed, and you are brainwashed too, but you know it, and they dont. Thats your saving grace Shoebridge. You were never a good FBI agent. You didnt really care what Hoover thought; you didnt really try to climb the ladder. You just thought you did because thats what your wife wanted you to think. And you loved her, and you tried to make her happy, and when she banished you to the garage it finally occurred to you, little by little, that perhaps failure within a corrupt system is its own kind of victoryA moral victory. A spiritual victory You had your own inscrutable reasons for doing what you did. Im not so sure you yourself even understood why you did what you did. You had a brain, but it was not your own. It was like you were receiving marching orders from the Milky Way. You bungled everything they gave you to do, then they tried to take advantage of that, and you bungled that too. You bungled your own bungling. If such a thing is possible. Which it clearly is, because you pulled it offAnd why? Because the King assassination fried you, crippled you for life. It was like the basketball sneaker for me. After that nothing was the same. There, thought Shoebridge, somebody finally said it. At long last someone besides himself knew it. Knew it for certain. After the King assassination nothing had been the same. As if his
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brain had experienced its own private Big Bang. As if his molecules had blown outward and gravitated back together, reorganizing themselves into a different shape a shape that still looked like Cedric Shoebridge but wasnt. As if his body began resonating at a different frequency. One that was entirely out of synch with everyone elsePlus he saw things. Things his superiors didnt see. Things that were easy to see. Shoebridge drifted back to the late 60s, when the American hippies threatened to levitate the Pentagon. And he remembered how, at that very moment, he knew they would win they would stop the war. A government is helpless against people who refuse to behave rationally. Helpless against magic and illusions. Theres nothing it can do. When someone decides to run a pig for president or showers dollar bills on the Stock Exchange it exposes the entire greedy egotistical system for what it really is. Theres no defense against that. Once the bosses and their paid pundits have you sitting down rationally, talking their talk, theyve already won. Theyve already beat you. But the hippies or yippies or whatever they were would never behave rationally. Never sit down and talk. It was one reason he had had no compunctions against acting like a drooling imbecile at official Bureau meetings. Let the suits see what they were up against. If they couldnt handle it wellthen the future belonged to Rich Monk the person they couldnt find, and couldnt assassinate. And Nixon would leave office in disgrace. And so be it. Right now, we have them right where they want us, said the drugged man. Were scared and on the run. The only answer is to go invisible. How? Just pray. That wont work for me. I dont believe in anything. That doesnt matter. IT believes in you. IT is seeking you, but IT cannot find you until you seek IT. Hmmm. People who pray desire less and therefore are less able to be controlled and manipulated through their desires. Praying is a political act. A political act, Shoebridge. The Civil Rights
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Movement started in the black churches and swept out onto the streets. Every ancient warrior said a prayer before he went into battle. We are in a battle for our very souls, maybe the biggest battle in human history. Shoebridge groaned and massaged his eye sockets. I dont know how to pray. The easiest way to pray is just empty your mind. Think about your God. Focus on Him. Rest in his hands. Or if you dont believe in God think about a river or an eagle or a tree. Everything is connected to everything else you know. Thats something I learned swimming around on the reef at night. The main thing about praying is to remove your mind from corporate culture. Give it a rest. Become invisible to the relentless manmade media seductions. Pry open a peephole in Time. Ill try it later, said Shoebridge. The drugged man went below to get some sleep. Shoebridge took over the tiller and relaxed into the Kingdom of Water, slowly allowing himself to be hypnotized by the rhythmic sloshing of prow through wave tops. Dissolving himself in the Ocean of Life. He tried to concentrate on something irrational. He chose his toenail. He started praying to it. Toenail, toenail, reveal your secrets. Toenail reveal your secrets. What was a toenail really but the remnant of some kind of claw, an animal claw, a residue of evolutionary history. His mind wandered. That was good. He thought about bear claws and alligator claws. His mind wandered again. He thought about what bears and alligators think about. Psycho-biology. The evolution of thought. Did our brains have their own toenails? Did our brains have their own remnants of past animal incarnations? He didnt know. But it was a good question. The only thing he could tell for sure is that while humans had more of one kind of thoughts they had fewer of other kindsAnd againHe saw Man on a lateral branch of the tree of evolution a branch that was lopped off at the end. Dolphins were out there too but their branch split off and rose higher. Cockroaches beetles had their very own branch, which extended much higher. Beetles were the most successful phyla on the planet flying armored cars that could adapt to any conditions. What did beetles think about?
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Viruses covered the branches like moss. Unlike bacteria they were newer life forms parasites that needed to feed off other living bodies. Mega National was there too. It was a virus. It could not exist without someone to feed off of. But he didnt want to think about Mega National. Back to the toenail. It occurred to him he wasnt actually praying. This was probably some kind of meditation. The drugged man had said for him to pray, and anyway he had exhausted the toenail for now. So he tried praying to something invisible. Something that wasnt there. He didnt even want to give it a name. He just called it you. Hey You. He just wanted IT to hear him. For a mere thirty seconds he suspended his disbelief and allowed himself to believe that this formless invisible thing could hear himHe got immediate resultsSuddenly he was outside his body, he had left his earthly concerns behind. He was floating through cerebral space trying to contact an alien life form. It didnt take long. The simple act of reaching outside himself, focusing his attention outside himself, produced a feeling of peace and contentment. He stayed with that for awhile, outside of logic, outside of Time. An idea came to him. It blew in his cerebral portholes as if he were a sponge. Grow fins and start living under the sea. Very odd thought that. WHY would he think that? He couldnt imagine. He had never allowed himself to play around with his imagination before. His attempts at creativity had always had an agenda. But this was different. This was childlike. Irrational. Unstructured. He stayed with it. He imagined a jellyfish with 1000 arms. He held a conversation with a hammerhead shark asked what it felt like being on earth ten times longer than grass? He imagined an octopus with 37 arms. 37? And then his brain truly became sponge-like and started sucking things up at miraculous rate. Like a donut in milk. Baggage handlers for Mystery Airlines please report to the baggage terminal, and be sure to wear your shoes. Strange bits and pieces of air cargo floated in from all over the universe. Suitcases from Ursa Major, handbags from Andromeda, briefcases from the Grandfather of Black Holes
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all of them bulging with strange stuff, and all of them tagged with baggage claims addressed to the same guy. The Guy with Big Pants. He had no idea how long this lasted. Maybe he humped the guys baggage for a minute, maybe for a million years. He simply could not tell. Sometime after midnight he spotted bright yellow explosions on the horizon 20 degrees off course from their heading to the drugged mans island. He was drawn to them. Irresistibly drawn to them. Inhumanly drawn to them. Spiritually drawn to them. Normally one-track Shoebridge, mono-maniac with a mission, would have ignored them. But his prayer had done something. Between his ears some molecules had moved. He yanked the tiller.
Chapter Twenty Four

THERE WERE THINGS Odysseus liked about being a plant, and things he didnt. Plants had started the whole business about ownership of property. They competed with each other ruthlessly for nutrients and sunlight, stealing either at will from weaker competitors. Animals were not nearly as territorial. They might compete with rivals of their same species for sexual privileges, but rarely did they drive off other species except for ants and lions and humans. Like plants, humans fought with just about anyone or anything that impacted their access to whatever they wanted. This wasnt a culturally acquired stratagem. Even babies harbored this natural possessiveness. Humans behaved more like plants than anyone realized. Humans were superb at manipulating their cultural programming, but almost entirely ignorant of their cellular programming. They bandied about the words instinct and genes to describe deep motivations which were not studied
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and scarcely understood in any meaningful way. Boys were more physically aggressive than girls. Girls were more psychologically aggressive than boys. Boys used physical aggression to protect their territory. Girls used psychological aggression to protect their territory. Was this genes? Was it instinct? What were these terms trying and failing to describe? All animals and plants possessed cellular knowledge. A plant knew how to produce fruit. A doe knew how to birth a fawn without any learned instructions or LaMaze course. Female humans knew how to attract or repel or compete for a mate. They knew how to bat their eyes and form appealing facial expressions and banter persuasively and flirt coyly in order to advance their agendas while halting short of overt sexual invitation. They knew how to stimulate mens sexual cellular biology and yet retain the cultural authority to abort that invitation sometime AFTER theyd gotten what they wanted, and BEFORE they ended up in bed unless they intended to end up in bed. Women held enormous cellular power over men because men were incapable of NOT responding to sexual overtures. It was part of their cellular biology. Some men who were over-stimulated and under-rewarded would occasionally take drastic measures to vanquish their helpless confusion in the face of overwhelming sexual stimulation. These men were called rapists and they were shunned by all of human society for not being able to control their urges the very urges that women stimulated to gain practical advantages. Yes, the sexual arena was ruled by women, and no amount of studying genes under a microscope was ever going to explain its dynamics. When women sent certain visual messages men dropped their shovels and turned their heads. They had no choice. The men who didnt respond to this stimulation had been biologically edited out of the human population eons ago. Men who were not aggressive competitors for female sexual favors need not apply to the academy of human evolution. Esteemed men who could control their over-stimulated sex drive became, in effect, emasculated males, traitors to their cellular knowledge. Lesser men. Sexuality was a lose/lose
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proposition for most human males. If they didnt respond to flirting they wouldnt reproduce. If they did respond, they could be captured and manipulated. If the average female had her way she would maintain a stable of horse-cock studs to give her pleasure, and a house-husband to work and pay her bills and watch the kids while she was out having fun. Any way you looked at it the modern human male had been emasculated by modern human culture. The 20 billion year old balance between push/pull had been disrupted to the core. Someday science might come to understand cellular knowledge. But that certainly wasnt going to happen until it pointed its ant-hose in that direction. Someday, science would herald new discoveries in human nature that had paraded back and forth in front of peoples faces for millennia but which no one had ever bothered to study. Advertisers knew all about it. Thats why you didnt see women in buns and bib overalls selling cars. There was an international conspiracy to keep the cellular motivations for human behavior hidden from one select group: Men. Women batted their eyes and tossed their hair, wore high heels and enhanced their cleavage. And when they got unwanted attention they just said no. And that was supposed to be that. You didnt see cows or birds acting like that. If they flirted they knew what to expect. It was cultural schizophrenia on a massive scale open hunting season on the male brain. Any man whose cellular biology responded to such sexual overtures had automatically entered a sexual arena wherein he could be controlled. If he was nice maybe hed get a smile or a pat on the shoulder or maybe even more. He would get female affirmation something hed been trained to crave ever since he was peeing in his pants and eating mashed carrots. In a very real psychological sense, women were holding mens balls in their hands. And the men who did not respond to such sexual come-ons were already emasculated already edited out of the gene pool. The hunt was on. Human society had become dedicated to channeling and controlling mens sexual energy dedicated, in effect, to
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emasculating men. Far from being the weaker sex women controlled sexuality and therefore they controlled men. Compare the swagger of a male lion with the shuffle of a married man in tow behind a shopping cart. Was there any resemblance whatsoever? Apart from ants, human society had exploited biological sexuality to the ultimate possible limits of using female energy to control male energy. And the true playing field was far removed from actual sexual penetration. There were a million maddening manipulations for a man to deal with every day. When a woman wanted to get ahead in line, or use a phone, or get some machinery fixed, or get a lower price she brought out her subtle sexual arsenal. No, she wasnt promising anything sexually. But you couldnt tell that to the cellular sexual receptors of a male brain. A man was compelled by biology to follow up every smile, every wink, every possible opening. And thats why Lesiani held so much power over Odysseus. In every other animal incarnation he possessed the cellular knowledge to hit the road when the control scenario got too crazy. But his overblown human sexuality made him less prone to do that. He wanted sex all the time, not just two weeks a year. Human females brandished a sexual sledge hammer that they wielded with the subtlety of Viking raiders. There was only one game in town and they held all the tickets. The cosmic balance between push and pull had been distorted to the point where the future of the entire species was in jeopardy. Women could be kind and smiling and solicitous when they got what they wanted. When they didnt, they could rage and shame and humiliate with no cultural boundaries to contain them. Not, at least, since religious mores had been hustled into extinction. If a man struck a woman he was led off to jail. If a woman struck a man he was still led off to jail because he must have done something to provoke her. Women were regarded by the culture as being morally superior to men and therefore incapable of evil. Mens physical power meant little in a machine age where a push of a button could raise a thousand ton drawbridge. But with the lapse of religious codes of behavior,
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female emotional power surged unabated, overpowering everything in its path. Blame it on plants. But there were also some things that Odysseus enjoyed about being a plant or, as it were, part plant. Because they were rooted in the earth plants had developed tremendous psychic powers. Odysseus could sense what people and animals around him were thinking. He could detect fear and danger, heat and cold, truth and lies. He had a prodigious memory truly a cellular feature. He was sensitive to magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation at incredibly faint levels. Some electromagnetic waves arriving through space were millions of miles long and took 100,000 years to cycle, but as a plant he could feel them. He was aware of life fields suffusing every living thing which intersected and interacted with these faint electromagnetic waves to form bioplasmic bodies subtle energy fields within and around every plant and animal. He watched human biorhythms fluctuate over weeks or months. People might feel good or bad, sick or well, happy or miserable, for no apparent reason. It was baffling until one examined the natural fluctuations in their personal energy fields, and suddenly their mood swings made sense. He was aware that humans inhabited hypnotic states most of the time, even when they were awake. Humans were mesmerized by psychosomatic mushroom clouds of popular mythology that obscured their ability to see much of anything at all. Hypnotizing a human, as any professional knew, was actually a process of de-hypnotizing him. Odysseus knew that the basis of life was not physical matter but immaterial vibrations, which arrived constantly inside and outside of Time to stimulate cells to certain behaviors. Plants and animals were actually organic radio receivers that absorbed millions of subtle waveform signals from all over the universe day and night. Eons ago plants had perfected the skills to redirect this tide of information energy. They discovered they could use it to
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communicate across vast distances, AND to transport various substances from one bioplasmic body to another. Plants gave off large energy charges when they died. Some of that was simple heat transference, but some of it wasnt. Some of it was information transmitted to beings who were tuned to receive it. Plants could effect a type of cold fusion rearranging atomic bonds via intricate application of micro-energy rather than massive infusions of heat. Chemists needed high temperatures to combine nitrogen and oxygen. Plants could do it at room temperature because they understood the combination locks, the micro bonding mechanisms, of the atomic underworld. But, to Odysseus, the most impressive feat was that plants could move molecules through the air. They could attract calcium or phosphorous from the atmosphere. They could move water to a thirsty friend molecule by molecule. He knew that worked because he tried it. He sent a present of water molecules to a parched fern ten miles up the volcanic slope, above the cloud line on Pulotu. It took two days but the molecules got there. He moved water through the air! Clearly, if plants could physically move water, they could move life. Not just through their roots, but through the sky and beyond molecule by molecule. Even subtler was the confirmation that thought was a type of food for plants. Thought transported the instructions for capturing or releasing enormous amounts of energy. Chemists had indoctrinated the world with the dogma of the laws of conservation of energy. What you put in is what you got out. In gross terms it worked. But if you didnt measure the subtle fields of information energy entering and leaving your experiment you were fishing for minnows with a shark net. They just swam in one side, and out the other, without being detected. In short, scientists had left out a great number of decimal places in their energy calculations, and hidden in those decimal places were very scientific reasons for why plants could do what they could do.
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One of the least studied and least understood parts of life was the way in which thought could translate itself into the movement of molecules action. A driver preparing to make a left turn evaluated globs of light striking his eyeball until he made the decision to yank the wheel left. But what fired the neuron to command the hand to yank the wheel? What made the first molecule move? How could a writer cull thoughts out of nowhere and scribble them on paper? What made the first molecule move? The ant-hose of science had skipped this line of inquiry entirely. It had no model to explain the interface between thought and action perhaps the most fundamental feature of water-based life. Yet this self-ordained scientific priesthood nominated itself to keep us informed about the basic dynamics of the universe. Preposterous. These people were wearing shoes on their ears. If a general told a soldier to shoot the canon, an infinitesimal amount of information energy which appeared out of nowhere inside the generals brain was amplified through the air to hit an eardrum and compel a finger to depress a trigger whereby an enormous amount of stored energy was released. That was power. Minute amounts of energy unharnessing vast forces. Plants knew how to harness and release energy. How do you think they took over the whole planet? Every day any acre of land on earth harnessed enough energy to charge several canons. This energy could be invested in leaves or seeds, or beamed at subtle frequencies to trained receivers anywhere in the universe. Plants communicated messages to each other. As one might imagine, the weather was a favorite topic of conversation. However, much more fundamental information was also transmitted. Some messages conveyed the basic formats for how to reconfigure the suns energy. This type of transmission was not a genetic feature. Genes only provided protein codes. A subtler bioplasmic energy activated these codes with formic instructions so a leaf knew to make leaf cells and a root knew to make root cells. Human life fields accomplished the same thing. The only difference was that plants were conscious of their activities and humans were not.
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Plants were the revolutionaries in a galactic drama pitting carbon consciousness against mineral consciousness. The minerals had had a monopoly on energy use for 15 billion years and the plants figured that was quite long enough, thank you. Tough noogies for minerals if they didnt want to share the wealth. Plants would just take whatever energy they could. Carbon had first been fused from simpler atoms in exploding stars that scattered carbon debris all over the universe. Plants originally emerged in other regions of the cosmos, and they werent going to leave it to chance to spread their carbon-based message around. Carbon atoms could be found in every pocket of space. The only thing they lacked were the formative instructions to organize themselves into organisms. Complex carbon molecules capable of reproducing themselves could be moved above atmospheres and launched into deep space. Sometimes even viruses or bacteria could be thrust in the paths of comets and transported to far reaches of the galaxy. Molecule by molecule matter could be moved across space using immeasurably small amounts of energy. Plants possessed the knowledge and the ambition and had harnessed the energy to accomplish this. Plus they had all the Time in the world. And where physical transport wasnt practical, minute quanta of energy could be configured into messages and beamed inside or outside of Time over any distance at all. As virtual particles appeared and disappeared in physicists bubble chambers, quantum messages, molecular instructions, could be beamed around the universe virtually at will. The whole thing was alive! Someday, if they survived, human scientists would examine the hidden decimal places and discover the actual measurable mechanics of how plants could transport molecules across space and Time. Someday, if we survived, we would have concrete scientific evidence in addition to the verified existence of virtual particles to demonstrate how energy can be moved around outside of space and Time. Someday we might learn that we inhabit a super symmetry of energy particles so huge and pervasive that they constitute the common ground of our
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existence, and as such are no more visible than the air in front of our noses. Someday all this would become as obvious as the observation that the earth revolves around the sun. But it would take some gloriously spontaneous, rebelliously intractable, stupendously deconditioned mind, to grab the ant-hose with both hands and jerk it in that direction. Knowledge first discovered through prayer and mysticism and intuition would one day be cataloged and analyzed and assigned numbers. But that time had not yet arrived. Not quite. For now Odysseus sat on a rock with his feet in the mud, sucking nutrients through his root hairs, listening to Lesiani and Sione and Latu the Giant catch him up on the state of the biological union. Life fields were overlapping in strange ways. Evolution was tossing and turning in a goofy dream. Odysseus had a problem to solve. The answer was right in front of him. But he couldnt see it. The missing ingredient was an infinitesimal spark of creative energy some kind of formative instructions which would reorganize the molecules in his brain and set off a chain reaction releasing enormous amounts of energy into the bioplasmic fields. The Time had come to step up a step. But how? He was squishing his toes in the mud, feeling around for the footprints of the future, hunting for a pattern or shape. Human intelligence, the restless juggling of symbols, had let its flashlight batteries to go dead. The future was out there all right crashing around on the leaves in the dark but no one could find it. Someone had to run back to camp and find more flashlight batteries. Someone had to reach outside of Time and pull a turtle out of a trumpet. Something else had to happen. Myrtle the Turtle turned her pirate ship into the wind and signaled the octopus to drop anchor. When the hook grabbed she assembled her exotic crew on deck for a final briefing. These were the Animal Crackers, the most fearsome commando assault squad in the animal kingdom. All of them escaped prisoners
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from metropolitan zoos. All of them trained by Myrtle. All of them anxious to kill. The animal revolt had started in the zoos and spread across the globe. The escapees taught free animals how to terrorize domestic breeds. Elk and bison faced off against range cattle. Wild turkeys attacked barnyard fowl. Wolves harassed dogs. Pigs simply left their pens and joined up with the wild brigades. Pigs were tricky. They played both sides. The U.S. Navy had trained dolphins to perform demolition work. Using Myrtles common animal language the dolphins trained birds to operate plastic explosives. Then the birds taught foxes and night-prowling panthers how to set charges. Animals could fly and swim and sprint through the night. The levels of terrorism they achieved were unknown in earth history: Rats dribbling sand in power generator bearings, or gnawing electric cables and shorting them out. Birds slipping undetected through radar fields and bombing the dishes. Fish clogging the cooling ports of submarines and forcing them to surface, or wrapping the propellers of supertankers in trawler nets and locking them up. No one could type computer commands faster than woodpecker-hackers who disabled air traffic control systems, shut down banking, and destroyed government communications. All around the world TV screens went blank. Children looked at their parents for the first time in years. Everyone was puzzled and disoriented like theyd just gotten out of the hospital and they wanted to go home, but they didnt know where home was. Within two weeks the animals had taken over the air stations, naval bases, power plants and communications centers worldwide. It made Operation Desert Storm kicking the Iraqis out of Kuwait look like a pick-up basketball game. The animal revolutionaries were not unkind to people. They simply regarded humans as dupes of the machines. They were liberating homo sapiens sapiens to go do some meaningful work on earth and stop blindly serving the evolutionary agenda of mineral consciousness. Most animals were reactionaries. They wanted to go back to the good old days. The days before men consecrated
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themselves as the arbiters of which species were valuable and which were not. They really thought that going backwards was the way to go forwards. But mineral consciousness had yet another greasy idea slithering through its silicone circuits. It figured, rightly, that when birds learned to fly helicopters and fish could steer boats and monkeys drove trucks, they would be uninterested in returning to their former simple habits. In fact, the machines believed that animals would prove even more ruthless than humans in exterminating competing species once they had the technological advantage. Animals comprised a huge anti-army. They knew what they were against. They could not agree on what they were for. It was just like the Anti-Vietnam War Movement all over again. When bison and elk kicked the cows out of Montana they started feuding with each other for control of turf. Now that Colorado had a huge refugee cow population the deer and antelope wanted them exterminated, but the grizzlies and panthers preferred to keep them around for food stock. Internecine squabbling broke out all over the place. Blue jays started blowing crows out of the sky with jet fighters. It was mayhem. The only ones who were happy were the machines. Myrtle felt like Mahatma Gandhi. He got rid of the British, then the Hindus and Moslems served up an endless blood bath. She got rid of the humans, and the birds and squirrels plunged into civil war. It had to be stopped. She put together a crack commando unit of select species. Dolphins for undersea reconnaissance, frigate birds for aerial surveillance, panthers and squirrels for land assaults. Snakes and alligators for covert work. A rhino for brute strength. Chimps and toads for their analytical skills. Some wasp spies. And even an octopus who could steer the boat, raise the sails, drop anchor, read the charts, catch fish and serve soup at the same time. Myrtle had one chance to prevent her revolution from turning into a slaughter of innocents. She had to produce the future. That is, she had to produce indisputable evidence of the possible courses of evolution: animal future, plant future, machine future. She had to unveil the secret agenda of the machines and put it
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on prominent public display for all the animals to see. The key to the whole thing was the gold-plated basketball sneaker. The shoe was a message in a bottle from outside of Time an object that had no utility for humans or animals or plants. That could mean only one thing. It had some secret meaning to machines. It was some kind of chink in their armor, some clue to the evolution of their greasy idea. If she could produce the shoe she could demonstrate to her fellow animals that if they didnt wise up they would just be substituting machine overlords for human overlords. And, as ridiculous as humans had been, at least they were carbon-based. By comparison, the machine future would make the human plague seem like a champagne yacht party. Myrtle knew all about the myth of Pulotu. She believed the legend that the island existed outside of Time. Perhaps if she went there shed be able to move backwards in Time and track the movements of the gold-plated basketball sneaker in the moments just before she tossed Apollo Tyme into the polar bear cage. But, when her sailboat arrived at the designated location in the Pacific Ocean west of Peru, she discovered, like others before her, that Pulotu was not there. Hog breath! There must be something wrong with the numbers. The frigate birds had pinpointed the spot more accurately than any Global Positioning Satellite. The only possible explanation was that the scientific data was wrong. She sent off another aerial reconnaissance squadron and the frigates returned in a few hours with curious information from the nearby island of Vavoo. Native island birds affirmed that Pulotu did, indeed, exist. But they couldnt explain exactly where. The island seemed to be shielded somehow. Also of note, was the fact that a certain Odysseus Tyme had been residing on Vavoo for much of the past year. Like most females, Myrtle was extremely analytical and had a prodigious mind for details and clues and detective work. The presence of Odysseus could not be an accident. There simply had to be some connection between Apollos son and the shoe. She ordered the octopus to change course for Vavoo.
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And now, anchored outside the reef, Myrtle briefed her commandos for the assault on Vavoo. Their goal was to capture Odysseus Tyme alive. Furthermore, it seemed the island had been taken over by pigs on motorbikes. The commandos groaned. They really hated the pigs. That meant the surviving wild animals the ones that hadnt been slaughtered would have been harnessed to plows or otherwise engaged in producing food or sport for pigs. There would be booby traps all over the place and rigorous surveillance networks. Wasps would leave immediately to identify targets: fuel depots, command centers, armories. The strike force would move in at night. Alligators, relying on their low profile and superb night vision, would slither inland and surround the barracks. As usual, squirrels and birds would set plastic charges. The commandos had plenty of ammunition and were instructed not to be shy about using it. The snakes were assigned to locate Odysseus Tyme, but everyone in the attack force had to help keep an eye out for him. Any questions? No? Then start the preparations. The animal commandos began humming their war chant as they cleaned rifles and primed explosives. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. A primeval phonic stew of squawks, twitters, moans, drones, barking and buzzing all at the same time. At once awesome and awful. A sound not meant for human ears. Myrtle the Turtle retired to her bunk to wait for nightfall. Like all reptiles Myrtle could slow her heart down to a few beats a minute, permitting her to nap without really falling asleep. Myrtle was, in fact, only about 85% turtle. She had both human genes and turtle genes. She had begun her life as a human but, during a gene replacement experiment in a college biology lab, she had accidentally pricked her finger allowing reptilian DNA privileged access to her cellular structure. Since all the cells in the human body except for certain brain cells were replaced by new cells, over periods ranging from a few days to a few years, Myrtles DNA had slowly turned turtle. That didnt bother her. She had always considered herself a freak of nature and now she had physical proof of it. Even her
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thinking changed. She was the Che Guevara of the animal kingdom. A cold-blooded mutant who envisioned a triumphant return to the Age of Reptiles. Indeed, she was destined to be an important player in the evolution of carbon life on earth but, like everyone else, she was queered by her own obsessions from foreseeing the actual shape it would take. In college she learned that evolution is chaos with feedback. All of life was continually creating new forms. All of them would eventually become extinct. Some would enjoy a longer run than others because their ambient circumstances would provide encouragement feedback that would nurture and shape them. It was the feedback part that science didnt truly understand. Feedback, it turned out, could arrive both inside and outside of Time. Early in her biological studies Myrtle concluded that genes were a metaphysical concept like angels. Genes and angels could accomplish mysterious things. They shared a common persona in that their physical parts were not real, but their metaphysical parts were quite real. Both genes and angels described things that actually happened, for no known reason. Genes described a grab-basket of nucleotides which might or might not perform in certain ways according to what else was happening around them. It was the what else was happening around them that provided the key to deciphering the mystery. What else was happening around them were bioplasmic bodies electromagnetic waveforms which resonated at certain frequencies when they found themselves in the vicinity of water soluble carbon life. Granite and silica also had their plasmic energy bodies, but these, obviously, vibrated at much different frequencies. Minerals, for instance, could grow crystals, depending on their plasmic circumstances. Angelswellthey were no more and no less present than genes. Help could arrive from outside of Time. Science labeled it superstition, but this patronizing label ignored the undeniable fact that thought could make molecules move. Abstractions could be brought into play in the physical world. As clearly as making a decision to throw or not throw a
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ball, undetectable energy could find means of expression on the physical plane. But you had to ask for help. And that meant praying. By praying directing ones thoughts toward non-physical reality invisible energy could be attracted out of nowhere which was really somewhere but we didnt know where it was. Yet. No. Nobody could control the physical world. You couldnt pray to win the lottery or stop a war. But prayer could reveal the higher motivations of the universe. It could point a finger to hidden forces that could then be drafted into the game. It could attract energy from outside of Time. The problem was that TV had numbed the human mind to the presence of non-physical reality. Thought-deprived humans bereft of cosmic inspiration began to judge every situation according to whether it made them feel good or not. That feminized approach to life had run its evolutionary course. It was over. Any animal could see that. That night Myrtles troops stormed the island. United in gangs, the pigs projected a powerful presence. But surprised in their sleep convulsed by explosions and deranged by machine gun fire the yellow bursts Shoebridge had seen from sea they squealed and scattered into the bushes. In the manner of most animal disputes, there were few actual fatalities. When an adversary was intimidated and sent running the scuffle was over. But, after hours of interviewing the remaining wild animals and people of Vavoo, it became clear to Myrtle that Odysseus had disappeared. Odysseus and company had watched the invasion from their vantage point outside of Time. At least they cant get you here, said Lesiani. Theyll never find the way in. Odysseus nodded at her, then swept a glance in the direction of Sione. Sione was smiling a smile that was 20 billion years old. Nothing was said. Odysseus stood up, plucked his feet from the muck, wiggled his knees, and started walking. He ambled through the night,
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guided by starlight, up the rocky slopes of Pulotu. Dawn found him squatting in the wind on the flat top of the ancient volcano. Lesiani had tried to follow him but Sione told her to leave him be. Some great thing was moving through the Overmind and Odysseus had to be left in peace to receive it. Here was Jesus in the desert. Here was Aslan the lion gone off to meditate. Thomas Edison fishing with no hook. Albert Einstein creating a thought problem in the enormous right sphere of his brain. Billions of years ago some Guy with Big Pants had decided that the meaning of life would forever remain a paradox so that it couldnt be bottled and sold in supermarkets. The same way that light was both a particle and a wave, so the meaning of life both existed and didnt exist. Every living thing had a choice about that. It all boiled down to faith. If you had faith that there was meaning and purpose in life then there was! If you didnt then there wasnt. Faith meant exactly what it sounded like making the choice to believe something which could not be proved or disproved. Indeed, faith was the Father of all choices. Every human decision fell on one side, or the other, of this one. And prayer was the can opener of faith. There was a biological reason that people prayed. Praying allowed humans to synchronize the faint energy of their cellular fields with the faint energy of cosmic fields. Pain could be released, and guidance obtained, at a subtle level from a realm on the other side of symbols. Humans had noted for tens of thousands of years that praying could reduce pain. One day science would point its ant-hose in this direction and make astounding new discoveries, but for now it came down to simple common sense. If praying worked to reduce pain and confusion, people prayed. It was no more mysterious than flushing a toilet to get rid of the stink except for people who relied so entirely on the findings of science that they forgot to flush and let the stink build up. Bad mental hygiene. Praying was a scientifically repeatable experiment. Praying to alleviate pain ALWAYS worked, the same way dropping a pencil to reveal the invisible force of gravity always worked.
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Thought could move molecules. Prayer was a type of thought that released the human spirit and let it fly. For all the frailties and inconsistencies of human beings there was one thing about them that truly made them special, and that was the pure force of their spirit. It didnt require much for plants to believe in Timelessness. For them it was a daily reality. On the other hand, for humans to believe in something that science couldnt see was a stupendous act of faith. The human spirit was capable of tremendous love and tremendous compassion and tremendous forgiveness. Humans were mentally crippled from birth. But their ignorance was their sincerest strength. They were so blinded to the presence of nonphysical reality that they had to dive deep into the soul of creation to generate a simple act of faith. Faith required them to overcome so many material obstacles, and to saturate themselves so completely in the Water of Life, that if they needed to hold the image of God in their minds to effect this profound transformation so be it! There was no shame in not being able to open a can of beans with your hands you needed a can opener. And there was no shame in not being able to pierce the mysteries of the universe without a guide you needed a spirit-opener. If God was the last symbol someone needed to launch themself outside of Time, then praise be to God for through Him, their energy and the energy of the cosmos, conversed with each other. Through Him the human spirit took wing and flew to its highest potential. Through Him non-physical energy was invited into the dance of life and molecules moved. So Odysseus prayed. He prayed to be rid of himself and joined to a greater thing. He prayed to be shown the difference between what was possible and what was not what was important and what was not what was sacred and what was purely selfish. By now he knew that his body didnt count for much, and his feelings either. He believed that if his cellular energy could expand outward and upward and sound one single note in the cosmic symphony, that would be proof enough he was doing his job.
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No. He didnt hear music. He didnt hear voices. Nobody wrote anything on a piece of paper and slipped it inside his brain. There were no new symbols or formulas to announce to the world. But, stripped of his ego, his spirit set free to drift outside of Time, he received a major transmission. And inside his head molecules began to move. He strolled leisurely down the mountain, drifting through the clammy mists at cloud level, reemerging on the lava fields upland from the planimals. Right away Sione and Latu could tell there was something different about him. Youve made your decision? said Sione. Yeahlets go. Where? said Lesi. To meet Myrtle, said Latu. Are you crazy? sputtered Lesi. NoIm not. Shell kill you. Unless you can produce the shoes. Which you cant. That will be her decision. My decision is made. Sione unzipped the hole in Time and they hiked downhill through the dark forest and guava groves, arriving on the shore of the lagoon near Myrtles anchored boat. The octopus threw four arms around Odysseus and wrestled him onto the sand. A half mile up the beach Myrtle began waddling, as fast as a turtle can waddle, snapping her beak and closing in on her prey. The other animal commandos dashed out of the bushes running and shouting. They hoisted Myrtle and stampeded across the sand in a pandemonium of squawks and growls and beating wings. The moveable riot swooshed to a stop and dropped Myrtle within spitting distance of Odysseus face. Wheres the shoe? said Myrtle. I dont know. String him up by his feet, she hissed. Well make him talk. And the tortures began. Hed been through it to honor Ishtar; hed been through it six times during the Inquisition; hed been through it in Mexico
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and after he was captured by the Pawnee. They bit him and kicked him and whipped him with thorns. No, he didnt feel good. His body was a mutilated bleeding rag. But his spirit had flown to a place outside of pain, and for fleeting moments he could rest in that place as the tortures went on and onand on. Wheres the shoe? I dont know. He really didnt. But something much bigger was at stake here. It had come to him in his planimal prayer. The future of animal evolution was on the line, and it was up to Myrtle the Turtle, not Odysseus Tyme, to decide which way it was going to go. Odysseus was merely the scapegoat. The sacrificial human. A role which eons ago he had accepted as his job. Some creatures must suffer, and even die, so others would wake up from their goofy dreams. It was a recurring theme in Earth history. Take him down, said Myrtle, after several hours of beating and whipping. Put him on the boat. The Animal Crackers plopped Odysseus in a dinghy and rowed him to the catamaran. They splashed stinging salt water on his wounds, erected a long plank over the water, and began tossing bloody chunks of pig meat overboard to chum up sharks. Then they pushed him onto the plank. As he steadied himself in the gusty breeze he looked down at the shark fins carving through the wave tops. They reminded him of the courtroom in Broward County Florida where he had lost his claim to the shoe. The ruling was a judicial outrage that fried his brain and drove him to steal a jet and fly to Costa Rica seeking psychological asylum. But who could have imagined that his life, and death, would turn on that judges whimsical decision? Shark fins. Hungry shark finsNervous. Expectant. Peculiar. Notwithstanding all the wildly imaginative ways he had been executed in the past burned, starved, hacked-apart, thrown off a cliff with live birds tied to his body getting ripped to confetti by sharks would be a first. Then he thought back to the day his dad took him to the Neo-Neoist commune. Myrtle sent us, were the passwords
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Apollo had used to pacify the skeptical communicants. And that afternoon he introduced his son to the notion that plants could talkAnd if they could talk, they could think. And if they could think, they could move molecules. ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS? the drugged man asked Shoebridge, as they huddled under some dark bushes on the beach. They had come ashore just before dawn as the fires from the last explosions died down. In the mayhem of squawks and squeals commandos rounding up pigs it hadnt been hard to take cover and lie low. Theyd watched Odysseus being tortured for hours, but when the commandos put him in the dinghy Shoebridge reverted to imbecilism, rocking back and forth, sucking his toes, white foam spilling from his nostrils. He prayed for guidance. It came. His eyes zeroed in on a gray metal triangle stuck upright in the sand. Debris from an exploded armory building. He is the guy who talks to plants? said Shoebridge. Yeah. And he is the one who told you about your daughter and led you to MN. Yeah. Then Im sure. Shoebridge, bent low, sprinted out from the bushes, snatched the gray triangle, and dove into the lagoon, disappearing under the wavelets. Are you going to tell me where the shoe is? hissed Myrtle. Odysseus stared down at the pig-blood red water and the evil shark fins. The octopus raised an arm to slap him off the plank. The animal commandos leaned over the rail. Odysseus was silent. Actually he was distracted. One of the sharks was waving at him, beckoning him. Stranger yet, it looked like a man. A white man. Dog-paddling under the plank, kicking nosy sharks in the snout, holding some triangular piece of metal garbage above water to imitate a sharks fin. And though he was milling around right under the surface, he was invisible from the boat due to
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reflections glaring off the water. A white man. Beckoning. Come. Come! Are you going to tell me! hissed Myrtle. He looked at her and exhaled one long, last breath. Time stopped and bent over to tie its shoelaces. Birds froze in midflight. The wind died. Really died. He flexed his knees so he could leap into the water near the white man. OK, said Myrtle. OKBring him in. The octopus wrapped an arm around Odysseus and scooped him back onto the deck. Give him some water, said Myrtle. And find him something to eat. She turned her back and gazed across the blood red smears on the rolling blue waves sliced by shark fins. She was out of options. Mineral consciousness was going to make its big move and there was nothing she could do to stop it. If turtles could pray, if turtles could ask for guidance, thats what Myrtle did. She mumbled a little ditty that the reptiles had picked up from the amphibians a long, long time ago. From water we are born, in water we are sustained, to water we return Such is the Circle of Water. Such is the Collar of Time. It didnt take long for her to get a response. Cedric Shoebridge leaped up, grabbed her by the throat, and dragged her overboard. What was he thinking? She was a turtle. Her entire Life was water. Her entire existence depended upon her aquatic skills. Within a millisecond she had bit him in the behind and dragged him by his pants back aboard ship. The other animals were hungry. They wanted to make a fire and cook him on the beach. Which is exactly what they set out to do. The drugged man watched from the cover of the dark bushes. He had heard Myrtle talking about the shoe. The same shoe! The gold plated basketball sneaker. The shoe that had changed his life forever. The shoe he should have stolen, but didnt. As sunset ignited in purple and yellow cloudbursts the animals lashed Shoebridge to a palm trunk, collected driftwood, and lit it all the while humming their animal war chant: a
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spectacular blend of crocodile lowing and swallow twitters, snake hissing and wasp buzzing, rhino snorting and toad peeping and everything in between. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. A simple, terrifying melody sung in perfect Time by a squad of animal convicts, zoo escapees, evolutionary rejects slated for extinction resonating the Song of the entire animal kingdom. The soundtrack of their last days on earth, infused with a raw power so sad, so enticingso intimidating. And then the drugged man saw the thing that moved his molecules into action. Through the torn flap of pants where Myrtle had dragged Shoebridge out of the water the drugged man saw it. Saw it clearly. Right there on Shoebridges exposed butt cheek. The red birthmark. The red birthmark that looked so much like a rose tattoo. A rose tattoo? The indelible, incontrovertible, never-once-contested identifying mark of that master of deceit, that madman of political evolution, that mass hallucination, that boundless yearning in the minds of men Rich Monk. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. The animals might burn him too but there was one last thing the drugged man had to do: Try to save the fool who had saved him. He left the bushes, walked up to Myrtle and said, The shoes in Chicago. Are you sure? No. But thats the last place I saw it. And it sure isnt here. Who are you? Just a friend. What do you think junior? said Myrtle to her former lovers son. Odysseus didnt know what to think. He sat on his haunches rubbing the knobs on his ankles. The ferns hadnt prepared him for this. Hed convinced himself he was going to be martyred for the edification of the plant kingdom and that would be that. Hed been through it a million times before. He never expected to be pardoned by the turtle who killed his dad due to the unsolicited interference of a sworn enemy of a deranged fool impersonating a shark whose major motivation in life seemed to be looking for someone who didnt exist.
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Yes, Cedric Shoebridges name had come up before. He was the butt end of many a fern joke. The living definition of human incompetence. However, now that he thought about it, the ferns had mentioned over and over again, that if you ever needed something bungled, Cedric Shoebridge was your man. Maybe this is what they meant. Yes, Im sure hes right, said Odysseus Tyme, who was not sure about anything at all. The shoe must be in Chicago. All aboard the ship, hissed Myrtle the Turtle. Set sail for Chicago. The commandos sprang into action. Shoebridge, said the drugged man as he untied him from the palm trunk. Have you ever looked at your butt in a mirror? What kinda question is that? Do it my friend. Just do it.
Chapter Twenty Five

LINCOLN PARK ZOO hadnt hosted so many people since the 68 Democratic Convention. The cages were still empty, and splintered glass from vandalized hot houses crackled under foot, but the funeral pyre for Cha Cha Lobotomowski was growing higher by the minute. It seemed like everybody left in the City of Chicago wanted to pay their respects to the fallen hero by contributing something to his cremation. Scraps of cloth, sheaves of straw, smashed school desks, and yellowed newspapers flew onto the heap. The poorest people cut locks of their own hair and wafted them toward the pyre, and soon the ground around its base was chest high in a soft ocean of human hair. Cha Cha had lain in a coma for six weeks. Finally since there were no medical doctors left in the city the zoos Large Cat custodian pronounced Cha Cha dead after feeling his wrist
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and not finding a pulse. He had buried a few lions and tigers in his time so his opinion in these matters was not questioned. And anyway, everyone WANTED to believe that their leader had been poisoned assassinated by The Reaper and his running dogs. By late afternoon upstart politicos, jockeying to fill the leadership vacuum, ventured forth to rally the crowd with florid speeches. They stood on the beds of oxcarts parked around the base of the pyre and hosed the air with passionate nonsense. It was amazing. After all that civilization had been through, selfstyled leaders had not lost the art of speaking for hours and offering up nothing but buzz words, blandishments, and extinct mythology. We have to take control of our neighborhoods, said a former member of the mayors staff. We cant have wild animals prowling our streets. Nothing wrong with that idea, thought the onlookers. But anyone could see that this butterball was not about to shoulder a rifle and hunt down lions and wolves. Each community would have to police itself as always. They couldnt count on the government for that. And there was no reason to rally behind this fatuous fool so he could take credit for doing the things that the people had to do for themselves anyway. Machines are our friends, proclaimed a downsized computer geek, wringing his hands with denial, detoxing from his electronic Valhalla, homeless inside his own head. Theres been a misunderstanding, thats all. We just need to get the information highway back on line and everyone will have gazillions of opinions to hold and decisions to make. Old women cackled. Teenagers threw dough balls and bananas at the jerk and drove him out of the park. A blond woman, wearing spectacles held together with a wad of masking tape bunched over her nose, leaped onto the vacated oxcart. Cha Cha warned us again and again. We have to get The Reaper. Until we capture him well never be able to get our city organized.
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What about The Reapers daughter? shouted someone from the crowd. Shes strutting around Lower Wacker Drive like she owns the place. Yeah! roared the throng. Well arrest her, said the blond woman clearly speaking on behalf of someone else. And well burn her too! Cha Cha would love that! Cha Cha! Cha Cha! Cha Cha! boomed the mob. A posse of club-wielding rowdies stormed off to the Sanitation Department to arrest Ramona for Public Dislike. They swaggered through the streets swinging clubs and chains, pumping themselves up for the imminent brawl by chanting Death to Assassins! The politicos welcomed this excuse to stall the cremation for a few more hours. They renewed their barrage of verbal flatulence with fresh fury while the crowd milled around in the soupy heat, flushed with carnival cheer, buzzing with anticipation over the prospect of witnessing a real live human sacrifice. In the shadow of the pyre old men taught kids how to make balloons out of pig bladders. Street musicians played Light My Fire on kazoos and spoons. Hawkers moved through the multitudes with baskets of fried minnows, barbecued sparrows, and greasy donuts made from mashed cattail roots. The air crackled with anticipation and amusement. Meanwhile Cha Chas body lay forgotten, cooking in the sun on a cradle of blue flowers, crowning a heap of combustibles so high above the crowd and removed from the pandemonium, that no one noticed when a horsefly crawled up his nose and he snorted to expel it. Just offshore on Lake Michigan a pirate ship hove-to and dropped anchor. An attack force of animal commandos cleaned their weapons, swapped combat tales, chanted their war chant, and waited for dark to row ashore. WHY HAD ODYSSEUS AGREED with the drugged man that the shoe was in Chicago? One day the bananas would take credit for that.
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Plants could convey messages over vast distances. And now that Odysseus was part-plant he could, on occasion, eavesdrop on a transmission. Of course, the fact that hed been sitting outside of Time, on top of Pulotu, when the message came through, had improved his chances immensely. For months the vine-grown bananas outside Cha Chas window had been watching the goings-on inside the apartment with growing alarm. They beamed a weak, omni-directional communique that was picked up by some ferns in Costa Rica, where it was amplified and rebroadcast toward the South Seas. The transmission had been waiting for Odysseus from the moment he entered the Legend of Pulotu, but actual reception of the message depended on him calming his animal body sufficiently to supply his plant cells with the peace of mind they required to fine-tune their micro-frequency receivers. It wasnt working well at all until he paused to pray plant prayers. But prayers nonetheless. Fortunately, Sione had managed to rein in Lesiani long enough to allow Odysseus to immerse himself in his quiet time. And thats how he heard about events in Chicago. The bananas were worried that some human named Cha Cha had acquired the ability to move around outside of Time. He seemed to be employing a couple strange shoes in what he called his food experiments to accomplish this exodus from Time. Whats more, he was mixing and matching bits of DNA in unheard-of combinations. Hed created shark-jawed pumpkins. Beef-flavored fungus. And, of course, yours truly, the vine-grown bananas. Did anyone know what he was up to? Or why? No, they did not. What was known was that Myrtle the Turtle was a violent opponent of mineral consciousness good. And she was an animal reactionary, trying to march everyone back to that golden age of the Animal Kingdom before humans came along and ruined everything not good. Not if you were a plant who wanted humans to work for you. So it was a crap shoot with Myrtle. She could go either way.
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But the other thing that could be absolutely counted upon was that Cedric Shoebridge, alias Rich Monk, would bungle anything he took part in. He was the Soul of Anarchy in human formAnd noThere was no mirror on the boat. And even if there had been Shoebridge would not have bothered to use it to examine his bottom. He still did not know that he had spent his entire life trying to find himself all the while rigorously ignoring every single clue that had ever been presented to him as to his own whereabouts. Including, but not limited to, glancing at his behind in a mirror. The drugged man said nothing more about it. Having mulled over all this Odysseus Tyme figured there was nothing to lose. Everything was connected but nothing made sense. Maybe those strange shoes the bananas referred to actually did have some association with the missing basketball sneaker though he doubted it. But it was as good as any other excuse to avoid his million and first dismemberment. Nothing else was working. So it was, On to Chicago! High Time for a roll of the cosmic dice. Shoebridge and Myrtle, leading the commandos, hit the shore at Lincoln Park Zoo amidst a torch-lit frenzy of wailing dancers throwing themselves through the air, writhing in a spell cast by the surging rhythms of a thousand make-shift drums pots, bottles, steel barrels, hollow logs inciting every blade of grass, every tree branch, every pocket of air, and every human cell to resonate with wanton spasms of emotional abandon. Myrtle and Shoebridge infiltrated the crowd, slithering through to the base of the pyre, while the commandos waited behind under cover of a trashed aviary. Odysseus Tyme and the drugged man crept ashore to watch. The posse had just returned with Ramona. The Ramazon was bruised and bleeding, but half the guys who went to arrest her had left their physical bodies behind on the pavement of Lower Wacker Drive. The remaining bullies pummeled her with clubs and drove her to the top of Cha Chas funeral pyre. 250,000 screaming people warped the sky and boiled the air with cries of hatred and blood and revenge.
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It was recycled herstory Ishtar and the Corn Gods revisited, thought Odysseus. The world was folding back into itself like a rolled tortilla. Events which should have been separated by thousands of years were laying on top of each other in the mortal mind comb. Instinct was a man walking around with light bulbs screwed in his ears and a pull-chain trailing from his anus. Human evolution had made a U-turn underwater and was swimming backwards at light speed. The animal commandos readied their weapons while Shoebridge and Myrtle elbowed aside gawkers at the base of the pyre. The crowd started chanting Cha Chas name in a steadily gathering thunder until the rumble surpassed the volume of a 747 screaming at full throttle strapped to the ground. The villains daughter stood on top of the pile wiping blood from her brow and sneering at the mob. From where they stood Shoebridge and Myrtle could barely make out Cha Chas body, sunk in a cradle of flowers, at the crown of a mountain of garbage, surrounded by a moat human hair. Suddenly, a teenage boy tossed his torch onto the mattress of hair. The onlookers shoved backwards, elbowing each other, as the hair caught fire marrying carbon to oxygen in a voracious inferno. Cha Cha caught an acrid whiff of smoke. He coughed. He reached one hand up and rubbed his head. Ramona, next to him atop the pyre, sucked an astonished breath and bent over to touch him. You alive! Im alive, groaned Cha Cha. But what a headache. Hes alive! yelled Ramona at the crowd. Ten more torches hissed through the night sky and plopped onto the mattress of hair. They dont believe me, howled Ramona, raising her fist and striking a fierce pose that would be remembered for centuries. Foolish Mericans. Myrtle shouted for her commandos. They sprang from cover and drove a wedge through the crowd. Whats happening? asked Cha Cha. They tryin to burn us alive.
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What did we do? He was rubbing the roots of his hair where two bumps had formed. Sit up! she screeched. Let them see you! OK. But just feel these bumps on my head. Theyre like Ramona seized him from behind with her hairy gorilla arms and lofted him in front of her. His feet dangled like loose rope as she whipped him from side to side, displaying him to the mob. Wave! she bellowed. Cha Cha raised one hand and waved feebly at the stunned onlookers. With the other he massaged his aching head. The horde dropped to its knees like a head-shot hog, ripping the night sky with a silence louder than an atomic blast. Humphg, spit Ramona. Mericans. Clutching Cha Cha in one arm she pointed her other arm down at the spreading fire, commanding the crowd to do something about it. But the mob stayed frozen, immobilized, on its knees. Brains disengaged from bodies. Cedric Shoebridge bellowed and charged into the pile of hair. Just then the commandos shoved through the crowd to Myrtles side. She waved both flippers, hissing shrill orders. Like a platoon of snow-blowers the Animal Crackers burrowed around the base of the pyre panthers, squirrels, wasps, swallows, alligators, rhinos and one white man scooping up burning hair and tossing it away from the paper and rags. Its a miracle, muttered one of the bystanders as he watched the beasts risking their lives to prevent the paper and rags from catching fire. Apart from a few burned feathers, some heatcurled scales, and the singed flap of pants covering Shoebridges butt, they prevailed. Its a miracle, echoed some people standing around him. Its a MIRACLE! shouted the woman with masking tape glasses. Its a MIRACLE! boomed the crowd. HE has risen from the DEAD! Its a MIRACLE! The throng swelled behind the chant, repeating it over and over, waxing louder and louder, building to a crescendo of such battering intensity that Cha Cha flung his arms back and forth
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in the air pleading, Please shut upIve got a killer headachePlease quiet down. A whisper campaign spread through the crowd until the SHHHH sound overpowered the chanting with a resonant hiss that sounded like the collective flat tire of humanity finally running completely out of air. SHHHhhhsss Poof! Silence. Cha Cha couldnt help noticing 500,000 eyeballs aimed at him as he dangled in the arm of a woman three times his size who was standing on top of a pile of garbage in an abandoned zoo near the shore of Lake Michigan on a clear night in Chicago. A fresh breeze blew through his head and it didnt come off the lake. Some molecules moved. I want to tell you something, said Cha Cha. He cleared his throat and honed his voice. Listen up for a minuteI want to tell you something. This wasnt no miracle. I went into hibernation, thats allI felt it coming on. I should have told someone about itBut I didntI didnt know anyone I could trust He wiggled his neck and rubbed his head. Thats always been my big problem. I never trusted anyoneI guess I got saved just in timeby RamonaThe daughter of the guy Ive been trying to kill for the past yearI just kept her around here as bait to bring in The Reaper. If I ever caught him I would have hung them bothIts a good thing I never got a chance to take my revengeIts a good thing I never got what I wanted, because I got something else. Something better. The crowd was spellbound. Theyd been following this punks leadership for one year and they had no idea who he was. Their city was in ruins, their daily lives precarious, their futures horrible to contemplate. Would they laugh at him? Would they rise up and smash him like a bug?No. Of course notHe was showing he was braver than any of them. He was being honest in public. What a leader!
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Why you tellin dem all dis? said Ramona. I dont know, mumbled Cha Cha. I really dont know. He massaged his head and aimed his voice at the crowd again. A great man named Albert Einstein once said, I never stopped thinking like a child. Theres a lot to be said for that. It worked for him. And it worked for me In my caseHow can I put it?My deepest insights into the shape and meaning of life came from prayer and meditation not from logical thinking. Sometimes praying backwards can work better than thinking forwardsAs long as youre sincere about itAnd youre not doing it to take advantage of anyone. The crowd started to clap. He rubbed his head and shushed them. The main thing to remember isthe more we tried to organize life, the more we choked it. We passed laws and made rules and regulations to cover anything that could ever happen, and finally we just became a bunch of machinesWe cut out school recess and started feeding our kids drugs so theyd sit still in class. Unbelievable when you think about it Something very evil had a hold on usIt was killing our human spiritEmotional violence is no good. It should not be toleratedWives shouldnt scream at husbands and husbands shouldnt scream at wives. And no one should scream at children. Emotional violence can be just as hurtful as physical violence And one always leads to the other Well thats not going to happen again. Theres only going to be one law: Be Kind To Each Other. Thats it. Thats the whole thingAnd if you dont follow it Im going to send you over to have a little talk with RamonaGod only knows what shell do to ya. The crowd chuckled. Ramona grinned and wiped her nose with her arm. One more thingPlease hold it downOne more thingIm going to dedicate the Lincoln Park Zoo to developing some ideas I got from my food experiments. If you help me out I think we can make some remarkable things happen here. So
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those of you who can spare the time, please show up for work tomorrowright hereThats allGod bless you. The crowd exploded with irrepressible applause. Lets go, said Cha Cha, wincing from the noise and rubbing his head. Ramona plopped on her butt and slid down the pile of rags and paper. She set Cha Cha on the ground right in front of Myrtle the Turtle. I came here for the gold-plated basketball sneaker, said Myrtle. Cha Cha looked up and down at the creature who was parthuman and part-turtle. Just one of them? he asked. You have more than one? Ive got twoI want one as a keepsake to remind me of my brother RamonBut you can have the other oneI hope it helps.
EPILOGUE
IT HAS BEEN SAID that a myth is a story which is not true on the outside, but is true on the inside. The people and places visited in a myth may come across as weird caricatures, but the dynamics of the tale convey a deeper truth. And so it came to pass that the deeds of Cha Cha Lobotomowski were mythologized in earth history. Things he never could have pulled off in a million years were recorded as verified exploits seen by eyewitnesses: Death and resurrection. Time travel. Inventing an animal languageA supermarket sale on fantasies. But what was true, is that under his leadership carbon-based life made another U-turn and began swimming forward into the future again. And what was also true was that by leading the charge and attacking the flames first Cedric Shoebridge had injected exactly
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the proper amount of bungling to derail Myrtles agenda. Reliable as a trained flea or a horse that counts with its hooves, Cedric Shoebridge mounted the stage of history and flawlessly performed his bit part his cosmic pratfall emerging as the catalyzing agent of a brand new moment in evolutionary design. Mineral Conscious had been vanquished, machine culture destroyed, and yet Myrtles reptilian agenda of marching the entire global population back to the heydays of Animal Supremacy had been subverted. Everyone acknowledged the brilliance of the white mans swift, fearless action. It was a quasi-miraculous feat on par with preventing the King assassination which he had missed the boat on the last time around. So the machines hadnt won nor the humans nor the plants nor the animals. Little did they suspect. The next day 50,000 of the Good People of Chicago showed up for work. Within two months Lincoln Park Zoo had been reborn as a planimal breeding facility a psychosomatic research station. Six months later urban planners were walking all the way from Montreal and Mexico City to learn how the people of Chicago had converted a dead city into a thriving bio-habitat friendly to plants, animals, and their blended progeny. Due to horticultural breakthroughs like beef flavored fungus and microbially manufactured milk, the food crisis abated. Cha Cha evolved into a psychosomatic gene splicer. He couldnt actually explain his techniques to anyone, but it was pretty obvious his powers came from the tree branches that had sprouted like antlers from his head. Dogging a parallel path to Odysseus and the residents of Vavoo, he had crossed over some boundary separating plants from animals. His research facilities produced mold-resistant corn plants equipped with Venus-flytraps that could feed themselves by snagging bugs out of the air. Trees with antibodies which could mop up soot and fumes from the atmosphere. Algae that could scour rivers and feed on the filth they removed. Vines that would clothe buildings to provide heat and insulation, while producing food-items like bananas and guavas and airborne carrots at the same time. Osage oranges that tasted like strawberries. Willow
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leaves as edible as lettuce. Photosynthetic chickens that grew fat and juicy on a diet of sunlight and water and a little bit of gravel. Deep fried oak leaves that tasted just like Buffalo wings. Yams that grew above ground. Flounder and tuna that fruited on trees swinging in the breeze like slippery sausages. Whistling watermelons and eggplant troubadours who played mandolins and sang sea-faring songs. Even bacteria implanted in cows stomachs that converted used engine oil into bovine forage. When Myrtle returned from her world tour enlightening animals about the true intentions of machine culture, she joined Odysseus on Cha Chas research team. In association with each other they concocted a handful of biological monstrosities a la the man-eating pumpkins and vampire beets. Their radar guided, bat-winged tomato plants were an abject failure. They kept flying into caves during the day and dying from lack of sunlight. And of course, weve all heard about the zombie frogs. They cleaned up the bug problem all right. But they never died and never shut up. So, after subjecting the city to a two-month fit of insomnia, the frogs were rounded up and fed to the carnivorous operatic tulips their rude croaks molecularly reconstituted as lilting arias. But Turtle/Tyme Bioengineering also introduced the world to some non-threatening avenues of evolution. The vine-grown yodeling carrots tasted good and they were easy to find. Flying cows migrated to South America in winter so farmers didnt have to bother growing hay. And everyone thought the whistling rabbits with regenerative lettuce-ears were cute. Plus they were a handy, year round source of fresh greens. If you could catch them. Cha Cha encouraged his staff to think of each lifeform as a kind of Christmas Tree on which they could hang genetic attributes like ornaments. Animals and plants could be blended in unimagined ways. They all knew that the big fire and the big freeze were coming down the pike and that present carbon lifeforms would perish unless they developed more resistance to heat and cold. So the psychosomatic gene splicers made
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some mistakes, and made some progress, and edged carbon life into the future. Mineral consciousness was on the run. And Madeleine was on the run with it. Thenceforth both were prohibited from sucking their energy from carbon creatures. Everybody had less of everything, but they didnt have to work themselves into a frenzy to have it. Plants trained people and animals in communication skills that were a billion years old and the hell with information technology that depended on silicone. All of life inhabited a cosmic myth that finally made sense. It was scientifically accurate and spiritually satisfying. No one would ever again allow corn or other cereal grains to ravage the earth. No single lifeform would be permitted to usurp planetary resources not corn, not pigs, not humans. For therein lay the path to the resurrection of the machine agenda and no one wanted that. The drugged man occupied his Time organizing communes for the plants and animals based on the Neo Neoist model. The future belonged to planimals and there was much to fear. Genetic engineering in the hands of human scientists concerned only with profit had been an express train into the abyss of Mineral Consciousness. Making better corn? After what wed all just been through? Splicing fish genes into tomatoes to make them bug resistant? Kiss my salami! Cloning humans? Retarding human evolution? To create a stagnated human gene pool a feeding frenzy for microbes? All of life was required to evolve in order to outstrip microbial predation. Those were the rules. Cloning, gene splicing and genetic engineering were just more short-term scientific solutions to long-term problems. Yes, there had been indisputably important reasons to rein them in. But psychosomatic gene splicing was a different matter. When plants and animals could openly debate the meaning of evolution without being tyrannized by the short-term agendas of the animals with Big Heads; when, by philosophizing outside of Time, they could accurately anticipate the spiritual benefits that would accrue to their offspring played out over hundreds
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of generations rather than a measly century or two there was less to fear. When life was held by all to have a purpose, suddenly, magically out of thin air it accreted a purpose. And with all plants and animals come to agreement on that spiritual purpose a psychosomatic fortress was erected whereby the opportunity for one species to tyrannize the others was minimized. Yeah, there was a lot of politics involved. We never got past that. But it made the Guy with Big Pants very pleased. It was more than he had ever hoped would come of his experiments in Free Will. After 600 million years of bickering Odysseus and Lesiani finally settled into a negotiated truce. The push/pull dynamic never left their relationship nor would that be desired. Their personalities embodied the fundamental features of the natural world. But, for the first time ever, they began swimming through each others lives as if recreating the graceful motions of an ancient underwater ballet respectful, amused, tolerant, not driven by concealed agendas. By now Lesiani could tell that the bad gene, or whatever it was, had been passed on to Cha Cha. Her feeling about that was: let Ramona fight it out with Cha Cha. Lesi ignored Odysseus eccentricities and stopped nagging him entirely. Astounding! This sparked a cultural break-through for female humanoids that proved, over time, to be more revolutionary than wearing clothes. Lesi let go of her compulsion to control everything around her and accumulate objects. And ultimately she accepted Odysseus conviction that there is a kind of spiritual wealth which cannot be owned or controlled no matter how hard you try. And that was especially true of ones children. Odysseus lost contact with Baby Zeus a.k.a Billy, and Little Kimmie a.k.a. Penny, from his last marriage to Lesiani. But eons later, after Massachusetts had drifted over to Africa, he heard a rumor about a brother and sister team on that continent who had built an airplane out of turkey feathers and rubber bands, and he concluded that his kids were getting along just
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fine. The drugged man never got to meet his daughter Margaret. But he spent the rest of Time marveling at how two humans split from the same seed could apply themselves to such wildly conflicting agendas. Odysseus and Lesiani actually became partners in some genetic experiments. They produced Black Widow spiders that didnt eat their husbands alive, and ant colonies which subscribed to the principle of: one ant, one vote. Long before the sun flared up and fried the earth, they assembled a new breed of carbon-based voyagers who ventured outside the solar system to investigate other galaxies. Cha Cha married Ramona. At the end of the ceremony he asked her to change back into street clothes, then he burned her white wedding gown down to a pile of ashes. He said it was a symbolic act intended to demonstrate that her years of innocence were officially over. Being married meant something. It was a threshold that propelled the newlyweds past adolescent romantic fantasies and into a realm of serious responsibilities to other people. Of course, the ritual of burning the wedding gown was instantly incorporated into marriage ceremonies throughout North America. It became a custom that endured for thousands of years. Cedric Shoebridge became a shark. He liked the idea of being around for 400 million more years. Myrtle the Turtle helped him grow a fin on his back and away he swam, off to bungle whatever he could in the realm of cold, unfeeling predators. Not a new assignment really. And no, he never bothered to look at his butt. But unbeknownst to him, Myrtle had christened his tail with a red spot so she could find him again in case she ever needed something screwed up. The drugged man got his wish. As the Tongans had already hallucinated, he became an octopus that prowled the reef at night, sabotaging nets and setting fish free telling the lobsters and sponges marvelous revolutionary stories about the irrepressible Rich Monk who was rumored to be roaming the
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seas as a dolphin disguised in a sharkskin. He could pop up anywhere! And whenever the sea creatures saw sharks ripping each other apart they knew Rich Monk was there. Somewhere in the vicinity. The Reaper was never actually found, although, in a later century, some algae made a mad dash to take over all fresh water lakes and streams. The invasion was thwarted by the combined efforts of planimals worldwide, and the incident was blamed on The Reapers malingering evil influence. He was rumored to travel in the companionship of a redhaired pony-tailed woman named Margaret who had grown curled sheeps horns over her ears for psychosomatic protection. The collapse of MN, the all-powerful, centuriesold Mega National Corporation, came as quite a blow to her. Who would have thought that when everyone on earth started behaving as if MN wasnt there, it would actually cease being there? Poor thing. She didnt have a chance. She was raised without a dad. Brainwashed from childhood. Without the sweatsmelling, pillow-bellied, sandpaper-cheeked presence of a grown man who loved her unconditionally, how could she ever have learned how gloriously unformulaic a life, well-lived, can be? So she clung to men who projected an image of power even if their motives were mindlessly menial and boyishly evil. She felt betrayed by life. She wanted to destroy everything in the hope that her machine mentor would return. She was possessed by a psychosomatic demon, clawing her soul, screeching with rage, lying in ambush a creature we all were obligated to live with and be vigilant about forever. Hundreds of years later, mothers were still telling their children, Be kind to your little brother or youll have to go have a talk with Ramona. And they pointed to the picture of the Trinity hanging on their wall: Cha Cha with his red afro, sprouting tree-branch antlers; flanked on one said by pale, angelic Ramon holding a gold-plated basketball sneaker and on the other by fierce, howling Ramona, shaking her fist at the mob.
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* * * Thousands of years later, at every funeral in Chicagoland, the surviving family and friends each contributed a lock of their own hair to a glass urn. This pile of hair was incinerated at the feet of the deceased a half hour before the body was cremated. No one remembered why it was done, but old women muttered amongst themselves that this was the only proven way to bring somebody back from the dead. Millions of years later humans existed only in magazine pictures. Some had grown wings. Some had grown leaves. The human race had moved past itself and brought forth a spectacular variety of creatures. Noeverybody didnt live happily ever after. Rivalries and disputes sporadically detonated over cultural differences. Some people worshipped Cha Cha as a god. Others viewed him as a divinely inspired man. More than once they came to blows over it. But the enduring myth of Cha Cha lovingly depicted him as a walking tree who rarely strayed from the companionship of Ramona, his trusty winged cow. Twenty billion years later a comet bearing bits of Odysseus and Lesianis DNA splashed down on a blue planet in a distant galaxy. Formic instructions, certain Mists of Consciousness, had been hanging around since long before the planet cooled, waiting for something new to happen. In the toot of an evolutionary horn, a sea inhabited by swimming plants exploded with sponges and jellyfish and five-eyed lobsters with hands on their noses. And they all began to dance. The only unresolved mystery involved the gold-plated basketball sneakers. Obviously one of the shoes had been stolen from the detective with no eyebrows and mailed from a planet in Ursa Major to Apollo Tymes closet in Ithaca as a warning to carbon life on Earth. This feat could have been accomplished by plants molecule by molecule moving the shoe outside the atmosphere, through deep space, and down to Earth. But it would have taken a long, long time. And anyway the plants denied doing it.
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Unless you thought the plants were lying, there was really only one acceptable explanationIntimate exposure to planimal consciousness had regenerated spiritual aptitude on a panoramic scale amongst Earths multitude of creatures. Prayer was reinterpreted as a kind of water every bit as necessary to daily life. Mysticism once again claimed an eminent peak on the skyline of carbon consciousness. And on the point of the sneaker the mystics were in firm agreement. Some guy with big pants had come along in the dark of the night and moved the shoe. Like everything else about life on Earth, it was widely regarded as a miracle.
[started writing: Paracas, Peru 1974 finished writing: Molokai, Hawaii Martin Luther King Junior Day, January 21, 2002]
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Tear this off and give it to a Friend To order The Corporate Cult, What Men Know That Women Dont or gift copies of Your Brain Is Not Your Own contact: Virtualbookworm.com PO Box 9949 College Station, Texas 77842 at the web site: www.virtualbookworm.com or www.amazon.com (click Bookstore, then Search, then type in Zubaty and click Search again) or email: orders@virtualbookworm.com or toll free phone/fax: 1-877-376-4955 And if you still cant get em get me at: richzubaty@hotmail.com or www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5225/ or 1-888-347-4364 Rich Zubaty
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Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own Rich Zubaty

Published in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Dedicated to all those fish

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own

Your Brain Is Not Your Own