Movie Club s1e7: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

This week we watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. recima wanted a film with buddhist or taoist themes, and rachel was vaguely aware of this one for a few years, felt that it probably was tangentially in conversation with buddhism, and picked it

She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he’s never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of

- how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as “pretty” <.. but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it 5 to extend any further is more than he can make

He hadn’t thought he’d cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently,

every time his left foot hit the ground walking he'd get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah, this must be what they mean by the “pain of separation!” Pointsman kept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.

But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He’d found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr. Reithinger’s office, VOWI—the Statistical Department of NW7. There, Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gather- ing for the IG economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco, General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In ’36 he came to England to work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from ambiguities. He’d heard of Slothrop, yes indeed... recalled him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there’d been Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slots surveillance, now. that Bland was gone.

This was toward the besitiritied of the great struggle for the IG’s intelligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office and the foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So were the military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of the Gen- eral Staff that maintained OKW’s liaison with industry. The IG’s own liaison with OKW was handled by Ver- mittlungsstelle W, under Drs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The picture was further confused by the usual duplicate Nazi Party offices, Abwehr-Organizations, set up throughout German industry after 1933. The. Nazis’ watchdog over the IG was called “Abteilung A” and was set up in the same office building as—in fact, it appeared perfectly congruent with—the IG’s own Army liaison group, Ver- mittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas, braid-crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like this. Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was what finally drove Schleim over the hill, more

members Slothrop surveillance being assigned to a newly created “Sparte IV” under Vermittlungsstelle W. Sparte I was handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, buna rubber, pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IV handled Slothrop and nothing else, except—Schleim had heard tell—one or two miscellaneous patents acquired through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland. An analgesic whose name he couldn’t recall, and a new plastic, some name like Mipolam... “Polimex,” or something. ...

“Sounds like that would’ve come under Sparte II,” was Gloaming’s only comment at the time.

“A few directors were upset,” Schleim agreed. “Ter Meer was a Draufganger—he and Horlein both, go-ahead

“Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte Iv?” “They must have, but I don’t know if he was SD or SS.

PROS

some sort of rather thin chap with thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But he wore civilian clothes. Couldn’t tell you his name.”

“Surveillance?” Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears, nose, knuckles, “IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the War? What for, Gloaming.”

“Odd, isn’t itP’ Cheerio boing out the door without another word, leaving Roger alone with a most disagree- able light beginning to grow, the leading edge of a revela- tion, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain. IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have known about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for...-well say what the hell is going on here?

_ Halfway up to London (Pointsman has repossessed the Jaguar, so Roger’s on a motorcycle from the PISCES pool, which consists now only of the cycle and one Morris with virtually-no clutch) it occurs to him that Gloaming was sent around deliberately by Pointsman, as some obscure tactic in this Nayland Smith campaign he seems to be into

(Pointsman owns a matched set of all the books in Sax Rohmer’s great Manichaean saga, and is apt these days to pop in at any time, usually while Roger is sleeping or trying to take a quiet, shit, and actually stand there, in front of the toilet, reading aloud a pertinent text). Nothing is beyond Pointsman, he’s worse than old Pudding was, no shame at all. He would use anyone—Gloaming, Katje Borgesius, Pirate Prentice, no one is (Jessica) exempt from his (Jessica? ) Machiavellian—

Jessica. Oh. Yes ofcourseofcourse Mexico you fucking idiot ...no wonder the 137th gave him the runaround. No wonder her orders came from Too High. He had even, lamb frolicking about the spit, asked Pointsman to see what he could do, . .. Fool. Fool.

He arrives at Twelfth House on Gallaho Mews in a _ homicidal state of mind. Bicycle thieves run down the back streets, old pros wheeling them three abreast at a good pace. Young men with natty mustaches preen in the windows. Children loot the dustbins. Courtyard corners are drifted with official papers, the shed skin of a Beast at large. A tree has inexplicably withered in the street to a shingly black corpse. A fly lands belly-up on the front fender of Roger’s motorcycle, thrashes ten seconds, folds its veined and sensitive wings, and dies. Quick as that. First one Roger has ever seen. P-47s fly over in squadron box formations, four checkmarks apiece RedWhiteBlue- Yellow on the unamended. form of the whitish sky, squad- ron after squadron: it is either some military review, or another war. A plasterer is busy around the corner, smooth- ing over a bomb-scarred wall, plaster heaped on his hawk luscious as cream cheese, using an unfamiliar trowel in- herited from a dead friend, still, these first days, digging holes like an apprentice, the shiny knife-edge not yet broken to his hand, the curl of it a bit more than his own strength could have ever brought it to... Henry was a larger bloke....The fly, who was not sip unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool somebody else.

All right Pointsman stomping into Twelth House, rattling the corkboards down the seven hallways and flights, receptionists making long arms fon |the tole dammit now where are you—

give Roger a hard time. “You are ma-king a spec-tacle of your-self, young man.”

“Shurrup you Transylvanian twit,” snarls Roger, “I'm looking for the boss, see, one funny move out of you and it’s your last taste of O-negative, Jackson, those fangs won't even be able to gum oatmeal when I’m through wiv you—” Alarmed Roézsavélgyi; retreating around the water cooler, tries to pick up a swivel chair to defend himself with. The seat falls off, and Rézsavélgyi is left with only the base, which happens, embarrassingly, to be shaped like a cross.

CONS

“Where is he,” Mexican standoff, Roger gritting his teeth do not succumb to hysteria, it is a counter-produc- tive luxury you cannot, in your present great vulnerability, afford. ....“Come on you sod, tell me or you'll never see the inside of a coffin again—”

In runs a short but spunky secretary, bit of a chubbette here, and commences belting Roger in the shins with the excess-profits tax records from 1940 to "44 of an English steel firm which happened to share a patent with Ver- einigte Stahlwerke for an alloy used in the liquid-oxygen couplings for the line running aft to the S-Gerat in A4 number oooo0o. But Roger’s shins are not set up for this kind of information. The secretary’s glasses fall off. “Miss Miiller-Hochleben,” reading her nametag, “you look beastly without your glasses. Put ssem back on, at vuncel” this comic Nazi routine being inspired by her surname.

“I can’t find them,” German accent all right, “I don’t see too well.”

“Well, we'll see if we can’t help you here—ah! what’s _ this? Miss Miiller-Hochleben!”

“With clever little rhinestones all around the rims, Frau- lein? eh?” :

“Male ostrich feathers, dyed a stunning peacock blue, sprouting off the edges?”

“That is my eyeglasses, ja,” sez the groping secretary, “where are they, please?”

“Right here!” bringing his foot down CRUNCH, smash- ing them to bright arctic gatherings all over Pointsman’s rug.

“T-say,” offers Rézsavélgyi from a far comer: the one corner of the room, by the way, which is not brightly lit, yes kind of an optic anomaly here, just a straight, square room, no odd-shaped polyhedrons in Twelfth House . . . and still, this strange, unaccountable prism of shadow in the comer .., more than one visitor has popped in to find Mr. Pointsman not at his desk where he ought to be but stand- ing in the shadow-corner—most disturbingly facing into it. ... Rézsavélgyi is not himself that fond of the Corner, he’s tried it a few times but only came out shaking his head: “Mis-ter Pointsman, I-don’t like it in there, at all. What poss-ible kind, of a thrill can an-yone get, from such an unwholesome experience. Eh?” raising one crookedly wist- ful eyebrow. Pointsman had only looked apologetic, not for himself but to something for Rézsavélgyi, and said gently; “This is one spot in the room where I feel alive,” well bet your ass one or two. memos went up toward Ministerial level over that one. If they reached ‘the Minister himself, it was probably as office entertainment. “Oh yes, yes,” shaking his wise old head of sheep’s wool, high, almost Slavic cheekbones crinkling his eyes up into an inattentive but polite laughter, “yes Pointsman’s famous Corner, yes... wouldn’t be surprised if it was haunted, eh?” Reflex laughs from the underlings present, though only grim smiles from the overlings. “Get the S.P.R. in, to have a look,” giggles someone with a cigar. “The poor bloke will think he’s back in the War again.” “Hear, hear,” and, “That’s a good one, all right,” ring through the layer- ing smoke. Practical jokes are all the rage among these particular underlings, a kind of class tradition.

“You say, ‘I say’? Is that itP Then you should have said, ‘I say, “I say.”’” * biche / pe

VERDICT

“But that was after I asked you the question—you can’t tell me the two ‘I say’s were both part of the same state- ment,” unless, “that’s asking me to be unreasonably,” unless it’s really true that, “credulous, and around you that’s a form of,” that we're the same person, and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaagggbhh and that means, “insanity, Rézsavolgyi—”

“My glasses,” snivels Fraulein Miiller-Hochleben, now crawling around the room, Mexico scattering the glass splinters with his shoe so that now and then the unfortu- nate girl will cut a hand or a knee, beginning to trail dark little feathers of blood for inches at a time, eventually —assuming she were to last long enough—dotting in

“You're doing fine, Miss Miller-Hochleben!” cries Roger encouragingly, “and as for you, you—” but is stopped on noticing how Rdézsavélgyi now is nearly invisible in the shadow, and how the whites of his eyes are actually glowing white, jittering around in the air, winking-out- coming-back ... it is costing Rdézsavélgyi an effort to stay in this shadow-corner. It is not, at all, his sort of place. For one thing, the rest of the room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a camera. And the walls—they don’t appear to be... well, solid, actually. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standing piece of silk or nylon, the color watery gray but

now and then with a surprise island in the flow, some color absolutely foreign to this room: saffron spindles, palm- ) green ovals, magenta firths rmmmning comblike into jagged comicbook-orange chunks of island as the wounded fighter- _ plane circles, jettisons the tanks, then the silver canopy, sets the flaps to just above a stall; wheels up as the blue (suddenly, such a violent blue!) rushes in just before impact throttle closed uhhnnhh! oh shit the reef, we're going to smash up on the—oh. Oh, there’s no reef? We- we're safeP We are! Mangoes, I see mangoes on that tree over there! a-and there’s a girl—there’s a lotta girlsl -Lookit, they’re all gorgeous, their tits point straight out, _and they’re all swingin’ those grass skirts, playin’ ukuleles ‘and singing (though why are the voices so hard and ‘ ot so nasally like the voices of an American chorus \ er )—

And the lava down the mountain’s runnin’ scrump-shus as a cherry pie—

Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you’re on Puke-a-hook-a-look-i 1-i-i-islandl

O-boy, o-boy—go-ing to nail me, one, of those lit-tle is-land love-lies, spend, the rest... of my life, eat-ing pa-pay-as, fra-grant as the cunt, of young paradise—

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rézsavolgyi, who is still strapped in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with helmet, goggles that reflect too much light, oxygen mask—a face of metal, leather, isinglass. But now the pilot is raising the goggles, slowly, and whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don’t you know me? Don’t you really know me?

Rézsavilgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shiver- ing, blinded now in the overhead lights, Fraulein Miller- Hochleben is crawling around and around in the same circle, faster and faster, nearly a blur, croaking hysteri- cally. Both have reached the exact level Roger’s subtle psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to. Quietly but firmly: “Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?”

Mossmoon’s office is a roller-skate ride away from White- hall, and guarded by room after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a frock of a radically different color from the others (and this goes on for a while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with, if that many can be so “radically different,” you know, like that—oh, colors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few), and whom Roger ro 2s, bribes, threat- ens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches his way through till finally “Mossmoon,” pounding on this gigantic oak

it’s not bad at all! i’m just unwilling or unable to enjoy it for what it is trying to be. saying “nothing happens” is an empty critique, because it is about life, and a lot of the time nothing happens in life either. and yet!

door, carved like the stone doorways of certain temples, “Pointsman, the jig’s up! In the name of whatever marginal decency enables you to get through the day without being shot dead by the odd armed stranger, open this door.” This is quite a long speech, and the door actually opens halfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He’s looking into a room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and- water, a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it’s Roger’s entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps on the polished table, over the polished head of a director of a steel com- pany, skidding 20 feet down the waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debonair (well, snotty) smile on his face. “Mossmoon, I’m on to you.” Has he actually come inside, in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia, the incense and the thighbone scepter?

“That’s not Mossmoon,” Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he speaks, “Mexico do come down off the table won't you... gentlemen, one of my old PISCES col- leagues, brilliant but rather unstable, as you may’ve noted —oh, Mexico, really—”

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men. them- selves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know; in any world that really touches, at too many points, the one they're accustomed to... and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by, across ten-guinea crayats, creative-looking little beards, | up into a liver-spotted nostril, across a pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starched fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Tron Crosses, V.C.s, retirement watchchains, Dewey-for- President lapel pins, half-exposed service revolvers, and even a sawed-off shotgun under the shoulder there....

“Pointsman,” the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship among purple clouds (very dense purple, as pile

velvet that color) at nightfall when the sea-breeze promises a difficult landing, “I’ve saved you for last. But—goodness, I don’t seem to have any urine left, here. Not even a drop.

I'm so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you under- stand? If it means giving my life,” the words have just come out, and maybe Roger’s exaggerating, but maybe not, “there will be nothing anywhere for you. What you get, I'll take. If you go higher in this, Pll come and get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest, with an under- standing woman in a quiet room, I'll be at the window. Til always be just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I'll go in, and the room will be defiled for you, haunted, and you'll have to find another. If you stay inside I'll come in anyway—I'll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You'll have the last room, Points- man, and you'll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life.”

Pointsman won’t look at him. Won’t meet his eyes. That’s what Roger wanted. The security police show up as an anticlimax, although aficionados of the chase scene, those who cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase scene, chase scene, wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret there—these enthusiasts may find inter- est in the following:

Roger dives under the table to unbutton his fly and the zealous flatties leap at each other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but Roger has gone scuttling down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped, Mom ’s-argyle- socked sublevel of these conspirators above, a precarious passage, any one foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe him out—till he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the necktie or the cock, which- ever it’s easiest to get a hold on, and drags the man down under the table.

“Right. Now, we're going to get but of here, and you're my hostage, get it?” He emerges dragging the livid execu- tive by his necktie or cock, pulling him like a child’s sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door, past the modally unusual rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated-looking

at least, sirens already wailing in the street MANIAC AS- SAULTS OIL PARLEY Ousted After ——ing on Conferees and — he’s out of the elevator by now running down a back > corridor to a central-heating complex zoom! over the heads

rating: three monkey men out of five possible monkey men monkey

forth a cigarette rolled from some West African narcotic herb, stuffs his hostage into a gigantic furnace which is banked for the spring (too bad), and flees out the back way down an aisle of plane trees into a small. park, over a fence zippety zop, fastfoot Roger and the London cops.

There’s nothing back at “The White Visitation” he really needs. Nothing he can’t let go. Clothes on his back and the pool motorcycle, a pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the city? “I’m fucking Dick Whit- tington!” it occurs to him zooming down Kings Road, “I've come to London! I’m your Lord Mayor. ...”

Pirate is home, and apparently expecting Roger. Pieces of his faithful Mendoza lie about the refectory table, shin- ing with oil or bluing, wads, patches, rods, bottles occupy his hands, but his eager eyes are on Roger.

“No,” cutting into a denunciation of Pointsman when Milton Gloaming’s name comes up, “it’s a minor item, but stop right there. Pointsman didn’t send him. We sent him.”

“You're a novice paranoid, Roger,” first time Prentice has ever used his Christian name and it touches Roger | enough to check his tirade. “Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary—but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough

“Wait, wait, first where’s the Haig and Haig, be a gra- cious host, second what is a “They-system, I don’t pull Chebychev’s Theorem on you, do IP”

“I mean what They and Their hired psychiatrists call ‘delusional systems.’ Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always’ officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s

inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. Your idea that Pointsman sent Gloaming takes a wrong fork. Without

any contrary set of delusions—delusions about ourselves, _which I’m calling a We-system—the Gloaming idea might have been.all right—”

“Don’t let it bother you. You'll find you can operate quite well. Seeing as we haven't won yet, it isn’t really much of a problem.”

-grombo

Roger is totally confused. At this point, in wanders who but Milton Gloaming with a black man Roger recognizes now as one of the two herb-smokers in the furnace room under Clive Mossmoon’s office. His name is Jan Otyiyumbu, and he’s a Schwarzkommando liaison man. One of Blodgett Waxwing’s apache lieutenants shows up with his girl, who’s not walking so much as dancing, very fluid and slow, a dance in which Osbie Feel, popping out of the kitchen now with his shirt off (and a Porky Pig tattoo on his stomach? How long has Feel had that?) correctly iden- tifies the influence of heroin.

It’s a little bewildering—if this is a “We-system,” why isn’t it at least thoughtful enough to interlock in a reason- able way, like They-systems do?

“That’s exactly it,” Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide alarming grin, “They're the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements. Don’t we . . . Mexico?”

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck sits by the window, cleaning a Sten. Outside, blowing over its dorsal and summer still- ness, London today can feel advance chills of Austerity. There isn’t a word in Sir Stephen’s head right now. He is completely involved with the weapon. He no longer thinks about his wife, Nora, although she’s out there, in some room, still surrounded by her planetary psychics, and aimed herself now toward a peculiar fate. In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity. I am Grav- ity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric wastes submit’ and are trans- muted to the very substance of History. .|.. Her wheeling — freaks, her seers, teleporters, astral travelers and tragic — human interfaces all know of her visitation, but none see any way for her to turn. She must prove herself now—find deeper forms of renunciation, deeper than Sabbatai Zvi's apostasy before the Sublime Porte. It is a situation not

without its chances for a grood practical joke now and then —poor Nora will be suckered into séances that wouldn't fool your great-aunt, visits from the likes of Ronald Cherrycoke in a Jesus Christ getup, whistling down the wires into a hidden ultraviolet baby spot where he will start fluorescing in most questionable taste, blithering odd bits of Gospel together, reaching down from his crucified “altitudes to. actually cop feels of Nora’s girdled behind ... highly offended, she will flee into hallways full of clammy invisible hands—poltergeists will back toilets up on her, ladylike turds will bob at her virgin vertex, and screaming ugh, ass dripping, girdle around her knees, she will go staggering into her own drawing-room to find no refuge even there, no, someone will have caused to materi- alize for her a lesbian elephant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks pistoning symmetrically in and out of juicy elephant vulvas, and when she tums to escape this horrible exhibi- tion she'll fnd some playful ghost has latched the door behind her, and another’s just about to sock her in the face - with a cold Yorkshire pudding. ...

In Pirate’s maisonette, everyone is singing now a counterforce traveling song, with Thomas Gwenhidwy, who has not fallen to the dialectic curse of Pointsman’s Book after all, accompanying on what seems to be a rose- wood crwth:

They've been sleeping on your shoulder, They’ve been crying in your beer, And They’ve sung you all Their sad lullabies, And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn’t care for souls, ‘ And They never were about to put you wise. But I’m telling you today, _ That it ain’t the only way, : And there’s shit you won't be eating any more— They’ve been paying you to love it, But the time has come to shove it, And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.

“Ts a war,” Roger sings, driving into Cuxhaven, won- dering offhand how Jessica has cut her hair for Jeremy, and ‘how that insufferable prig would look with a thrust ©

Light one up before you mosey out that door, Once you cuddled ’em and kissed ’em,

These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don’t seem to put out any heat at all, Confiscated weapons and ammo lie around half-crated or piled loose inside the C-Company perimeter. For days the U.S. Army has been out sweeping Thuringia, busting into houses in the middle of the night. A certain lycanthropophobia fear of Werewolves occupies minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won't be enough food or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward the end of the War, for example, all went to make alcohol for the rockets. But there are still small-arms aplenty, and ammunition to fit them. Where you cannot feed, you take away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmly linked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around. .

i didn’t really feel like it was very buddhist coded, though. it seemed a lot more concerned with film and memory.

On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and then, bright as dittany in July at the Zippo’s ceremonial touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a replacement here in the 89th Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, sits hud- dling nearly on top of the fite, shivering and watching the divisional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles a cluster of rocket-noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all in black and olive-drab, but which now looks like some- thing even stranger than that, which Eddie will think of in a minute. .

Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes. Not the kind of shiver normal people get, the goose-on- the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that doesn’t stop. Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a con- noisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way, to read them, like Siure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos Thanatz reads whip-scars, But the gift isn’t limited just to Eddie’s own shivers, oh no, they’rd other people’s _ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in

brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning how to sep- arate them out), Least interesting of these shivers are the ones with a perfectly steady frequency, no variation to them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the freqency- modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on in- formation put in at the other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular waveforms that change both in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier- analyzed into their harmonics, which is a little tougher. There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies, cer- tain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the hang of these.

“Hey Pensiero.” It is Eddie’s Sergeant, Howard (“Slow”) Lerner. “Getcher ass offa dat fire.”

“Aww, Sarge,” chatters Eddie, “c’mon. I wuz just tryin’ ta get wawm.”

“No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One o’ th’ koinels wants his hair cut, right now, an’ yer it!”

“Ahh, youse guys,” mutters Pensiero, crawling over to his sleeping bag and looking through his pack for comb and scissors. He is the company barber. His haircuts, which take hours and often days, are immediately recog- nizable throughout the Zone, revealing as they do the hhair-by-hair singlemindedness of the “benny” habitué.

The colonel is sitting, waiting, under an electric bulb. The bulb is receiving its power from another enlisted man, who sits back in the shadows hand-pedaling the twin generator cranks. It is Eddie’s friend Private Paddy (“Electro”) McGonigle, an Irish lad from New Jersey, one of those million virtuous and adjusted city poor you know from the movies—you’ve seen them dancing, singing, hanging out the washing on the lines, getting drunk at wakes, worrying about their children going bad, I just don’t know any more Faather, he’s a good. b’y but he’s runnin’ with a crool crowd, on through every wretched Hollywood lie down to and including this year’s big hit, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. With his crank here young Paddy is practicing another form of Eddie’s gift, though he’s transmitting not receiving. The bulb appears to burn steadily, but this is really a succession of electric peaks and valleys, passing by at a speed that depends on how fast Paddy is cranking. It’s only that the wire inside the

bulb unbrightens slow enough before the next peak shows up that fools us into seeing a steady light. It’s really a train of imperceptible light and dark. Usually impercepti- ble. The message is never conscious on Paddy’s part. It is sent by muscles and skeleton, by that circuit of his body which has learned to work as a source of electrical power.

Right now Eddie Pensiero is shivering and not paying much attention to that light bulb. His own message is interesting enough. Somebody close by, out in the night, is playing a blues on a mouth harp. “Whut’s dat?” Eddie wants to know, standing under the white light behind the silent colonel in his dress uniform, “hey, McGonigle—you hear sump’nP”

i have trouble making heads or tails of the first 3 nights; though i loved the atmosphere when the monkey-boy returns, and spiritual journeys to try and discover the missing void… v psychoanalytic, v fun… but i don’t really know what was there

“Yeah,” jeers Paddy from behind the generator, “I hear yer dischodge, flyin’ away, wit’ big wings comin’ outa th’ ass end, Dat’s whut I hear! Yuk, yuk!”

“Aw, it’s th’ bunk!” replies Eddie Pensiero, “Y-you don’t hear no dischodge, ya big dumbheaded Mick.”

“Hey, Pensiero, ya know whut a Eye-talian submarine sounds like, on dat new sonar? Huh?”

“Pinnnggguinea- -guinea-guinea wopwopwop! Dat’s whet! Yuk, yuk, yu KI”

“Fuck youse,” sez Eddie, and commences combing ths colonel’s silver-black hair.

The moment the comb contacts his head, the colonel begins to speak. “Ordinarily, we'd spend no more than 24 hours on a house-to-house sweep. Sundown to sundown, house to house. There’s a quality of black and gold to either end of it, that way, silhouettes, shaken skies pure as a cyclorama. But these sunsets, out here, I don’t know. Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere? Really—somewhere in the East? Another Krakatoa? An- other name at least that exotic... the colors are so differ- ent now. Volcanic ash, or any finely-divided substance,

- suspended in the atmosphere, can diffract the colors strangely. Did you know that, sonP Hard to believe, isn’t it? Rather a long taper if you don’t mind, and just short of combable on top. Yes, Private, the colo change, and how! The question is, are they chan according to

debris in the prevailing winds? Is there information for us? Deep questions, and disturbing ones.

“Where are you from, son? I’m from Kenosha, Wiscon- sin. My folks have a little farm back there. Snowfields and fenceposts all the way to Chicago. The snow covers the old cars up on blocks in the yards .. . big white bundles... it looks like Graves Registration back there in Wisconsin.”

“Hey Pensiero,” calls Paddy McGonigle, “ya still hearin’ . dat sound?”

the final 2 nights were much more essential and straightforward.

“Yeah uh I tink it’s a mouth-organ,” Pensiero busily combing up single hairs, cutting each one a slightly differ- ent length, going back again and again to touch up here and there...God is who knows their. number. Atropos is who severs them to different lengths. So, God under the aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned, is in posses- sion of Eddie Pensiero tonight.

“I got your mouth organ,” jeers Paddy, “right herel Look! A wop clarinet!”

Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind of modulated frequency. Assume a state of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the colonel’s head. Winds of the day, gestures of distraction, sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls to the edge of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since written on that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero is an agent of History. Along with the reworking of the colonel’s head runs the shiver-bome blues—long runs in number 2 and 3 hole correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night, approaches to a stone house in a wooded park, stags paralyzed beside the high flagged walks. ...

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that. There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you.... :

climbing downward, along these big sheared chunks of concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out... black rust. There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright enough to blur out over their edges, or change the sub- stance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, one by one—ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you're a city boy. There’s a lot to learn, out on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like, so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the sky reproduced in purple, youll know what they look like—that’s a heap better than the city, son, there you just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand-new, noth- ing to couple it back onto. ...”

Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous ruin, his hair at the moment looking very odd—brushed forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great long points, forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet around his face, in which the prominent feature is the colonel’s long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for him out of crevices among the debris, sort of fast happy lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing personal, just thought I'd grab a little night air, ha, hal When they miss the colonel—as they always.seem to do—why they just zip back in with a gambler’s ho-hum, well, maybe next time....

Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be cap- tured and cremated by dacoits! Oh Jesus there they are now, unthinkable Animals running low in the light from the G-5 version of the city, red and yellow turbans, scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a *37 Ford, same undirected eyes, same exemption from the Karmic Hammer— /

A ’37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C’mon quit fooling, They'll all end up in junkyards same as th’ rest!

Oh, will they, Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then? ai hy

W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th’ War, I mean there’s no new cars being built right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable in tiptop shape cause there’s not too many mechanics left here on the home front, a-and we shouldn’t hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker prominently displayed in the lower right—

first there’s the night where uncle boonmee dies, recalling his dream in the cave. the idea was that he took a time machine to the future, where a government would shine light through people from the past, projecting images of them from the past onto a screen in the future, causing them to disappear in the past. i liked how during this description of cinema, the images on the screen become still photographs, it really calls attention to it, and the visuals are very beautiful, depicting monkey-men enslaved by soldiers

Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or “Der Leid-Stadt,” that’s what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. © But we will not read it, because we are going to Happy- ville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there, He hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain City, That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent you on the right trip back. there, Skippy. You can have your fantasy if you want, you probably don’t deserve any- thing better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced auto still on the roads? You said “the War,” just as you rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War was the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattem. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones sur- vive. The others, it’s said, even know they have a short

life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn’t it, Skippy?

Jeepers, it sure would, Mister Information! Wow, I-I can’t wait to see Happyvillel

Happily, he doesn’t have to wait at all. One of the dacoits comes leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let’s-get- to-it grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms comes up out of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers the colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on his ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering oh shit, which even dacoits do too.

“You are under the mountain,” a voice announces. Stony cave-acoustics in here. “Please remember from this point on to obey all pertinent regulations.”

His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic with rolling headlamp eyes. It is shaped something like a crab, “That’s Cancer in Latin,” sez the robot; “and in Kenosha, too!” It will prove to be addicted to one-liners that never quite come off for anyone but it.

“Here is Muffin-tin Road,” announces the robot, “note the smiling faces on all the houses here.” Upstairs win- dows are eyes, picket fence is teeth, Nose is the front door.

“Tm evading-room vino from Visconsin,” sings this boor- ish machine, * ‘and you oughta see the nurses run! So what else is new, Jackson?” The squat creature is actually chew- ing gum, a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, very malleable, even sending out detachable molecules which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalter- werke, developed by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a damn fair approximation of Beeman's reeiaie flavor to the robot crab’s brain.

“For what he’s making, I’'d even question answers. Does it ever snow? Of course it snows in 1 Happyville. Lotta snowmen’d sure be sore if it didn’t!”

“T recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow right up the walk, like a visitor who expects to be let in. Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted there... . Ever get that in Happyville?”

the final night, after boonmee’s funeral, has his nephew and sister-in-law going to the convenience store after looking at the television for a bit. i love how he tells her that they should get going while she looks at tv, and then she tells him while he looks at tv, there’s a very lil realistic back and forth there that only can be captured at the slow pace of the film, and then as they get up to go, they see their doubles continuing to watch

“Then,” pounces the colonel, “if the door is the house’s nose, and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white crystals are blowing up from Muffin-tin Road in a big cloud right into the—”

“Aagghh!” screams the plastic robot, and scuttles way into a narrow alley. The colonel finds himself alone in a brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and adobe colors sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops, streets, not a tree in sight, and who’s this come strolling down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it’s Laszlo Jamf him- self, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a °37 Ford against the World’s ups and downs, which are never more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to wistfully gauze, inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wear- ing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender, a color for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows, minor-keyed lieder about days gone by, plaintive pianos, pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday walks by canals... here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely, attentively on this afternoon, and the bells across the canal are tolling the hour: the men have come from very far away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mis- sion of some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the other’s role....

Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel’s head here is the. same identical Osram light bulb that Franz Pékler used to keep next to in his bunk at the under- ground rocket works at Nordhausen. Statistically (so Their story goes), every n-thousandth light bulb is gonna be perfect, all the delta-q’s piling up just right, so we shouldn’t be surprised that this one’s still around, burning brightly.

only it could speak—well, as a matter of fact, it can speak. It is dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy Mc- Gonigle’s cranking tonight, this is a loop here, with feed- back through Paddy to the generator again. Here it is,

Byron was to’ve been manufactured by Tungsram in Budapest. He would probably have been grabbed up by the ace salesman Géza Roézsavélgyi’s father Sandor, who covered all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to go native enough to where the home office felt vaguely paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the whole operation if they didn’t give him what he wanted. Actually he was a salesman who wanted his son to be a doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad witch-leery auras around Budapest that got the birth of Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram, in Berlin. Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably satirized as if it was the movies or something, well Big Business, ha, hal But don’t let Them fool you, this is a bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort of sideline. All overhead—yes, out of its own pocket the Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogs- heads of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundred- weights of clever Siemens Electric Baby Bulb Pacifiers, giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current without the least trickle of power. One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality. bi

Actually, B.B.H. is rather shabby. The brown rafters drip cobwebs. Now and then a roach shows up on the floor, and all the Babies try to roll over to look (being Bulbs they seem perfectly symmetrical, Skippy, but don’t © forget the contact at the top of the thread), going uh-guhl uhhhh-guhl, glowing feebly at the bewildered roach sitting paralyzed and squashable out on the bare boards, rushing, reliving the terror of some sudden blast of| current out of nowhere and high overhead the lambent, all-seeing Bulb. In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don’t know what to anake of this roach’s abreaction—they feel his fright, but

don’t know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He’s interesting and has good moves. Everybody's excited ex- cept for Byron, who considers the other Bulb Babies a bunch of saps. It is a constant struggle to turn their thoughts on anything meaningful. Hi there Babies, I'm ' Byron-the-Bulb! Here to sing a little song to you, that goes—

Just lay there foamin’ and a-screamin’ like a buncha little demons,

Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped in- side the glass prison of a Baby Bulb. He hates this place, lying on his back waiting to get manufactured, nothing to listen to on the speakers but Charleston music, now and then an address to the Nation, what kind of a setup’s that? _ Byron wants to get out of here and into it, needless to say

he’s been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby Bulb. Diaper Rash, which is a sort of corrosion on his screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a tight spasm of high re- ‘sistance someplace among the deep loops of tungsten wire, Bulb Baby Hyperventilation, where it actually feels “oe his vacuum’s been broken though there is no organic asis. ..\. §

after thinking a bit more about the strange catfish sex scene, it’s hard for me to not relate the film to ai. of course, ai is the intensification of tendencies that were already there in internet, television, cinema, radio etc… but you have the state projecting reflected images of ourselves from the past for social control…….

‘When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet _Byron’s elated. He has passed the time hatching some really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already

hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack _ (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to

the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over Europe, at a given sychronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect Energy— Atten- tion, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time, a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we'll unleash our Kamikaze squads! You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? well that’s the ass end of a firefly compared to what we're gonna—oh, you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad. Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of our num- ber, are more than willing to flame out in one grand burst instead of patiently waiting out their design hours.... So Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast... .

Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the in- ternational light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Asso- ciated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Com- bination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bubb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlot- tenburg, almost within sight of the statue. of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witnessing the more languorous forms of [Republican dec- adence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an escape, Bernie down the: hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged

to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state....

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and are gone. The first few of these hit Byron hard. He’s ‘still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality. But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about the transience of .others: learns that loving them while theyre here becomes easier, and also more intense—to love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon enough becomes a Permanent Old-Timer. Others can recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to know magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs be- gin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Im- mortals are out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence with much, perhaps, everything, in it.

As his burning lengthens toward 600 hours, the monitors in Switzerland begin to keep more of an eye on Byron. The Phoebus Surveillance Room is located under a little- known Alp, a chilly room crammed full of German electro hardware, glass, brass, ebonite, and silver, massive terminal blocks shaggy with copper clips and screws, and a cadre of super-clean white-robed watchers who wander meter to meter, light as snowdevils, making sure that nothing’s going wrong, that through no bulb shall the mean operat- ing life be extended. You can imagine what it would do to the market if that started happening.

Byron passes Surveillance’s red-line at 600 hours, and immediately, as a matter of routine, he is checked out for filament resistance, burning temperature, vacuum, power consumption. Everything’s normal. Now Byron is to be checked out every 50 hours hereafter. A soft chime will go off in the monitoring station whenever it’s time.

__ At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin agent is sent out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She

when you’re photographed or filmed, and you’re carried into the future, and then light is shone through you, why does the person from the past disappears? perhaps it’s because prior to being displayed in that manner, you kind of exist in a more organic manner with all sorts of various potentials, but once you are then portrayed, you only can be understood through one context and thus no longer exist as like a living person with depth and potential?

is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike heels, no not so she can fit in with the crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles they thought were all myth. We can’t help, this common thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in the North, there’s never been anything we could do.... Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, noth- ing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.

He is taken to Neukdélln, to a basement room, the home of a glassblower who is afraid of the night and who will keep Byron glowing and on watch over all the flint bowls, the griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in mid-leap, green spider-webs, somber ice-deities. This is one of many so-

called “control points,” where suspicious bulbs can be monitored easily. haw 8

In less than a fortnight, a gong sounds along the ice and stone corridors of the Phoebus headquarters, and faces swivel over briefly from their meters. Not too many gongs around here. Gongs are special. Byron has passed 1000 hours, and the procedure now is standard: the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin.

But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The plan is to smash up Byron and send him back right there in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s next project (a balloon setting out on a journey from the top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn't be too bad a deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does how many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched

enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and wouldn’t mind going through it himself. But he is trapped on the Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt, a cruelty. There’s no escape for Byron, he’s doomed to an infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers. In zips young Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street urchin—twirls Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket and Ge- sssschhhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, mortal hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, “Who? Who?”

Phoebus isn’t exactly thrown into a frenzy. It’s hap- pened before. There is still a procedure to follow. It means more overtime for some employees, so there’s that vague, full-boweled pleasure at the windfall, along with an equally vague excitement at the break in routine. You want high emotion, forget Phoebus. Their stonefaced search parties move out into the streets. They know more or less where in the city to look. They are assuming that no one among their consumers knows of Byron’s immortal- ity. So the data for Non-immortal Bulbsnatchings ought to apply also to Byron. And the data happen to hump up in poor sections, Jewish sections, drug, homosexual, prostitute, and magic sections of the capital. Here are the most logi- cal bulbsnatchers, in terms of what the crime is. Look at all the propaganda, It’s a moral crime. Phoebus discov- ered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon. In America, Lyle Bland and his psychologists had figures, expert testimony and money (money in the Puri- tan sense—an outward and visible O.K. on their inten- tions) enough to tip the Discovery of Guilt at the cusp between scientific theory and fact. Growth rates in later years were to bear Bland out (actually what bore Bland

out was an honorary pallbearer sextet of all the senior members of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short, plus Lyle, Jr., who was sneezing. Buddy at the last min-

ute decided to go see Dracula. He was better off). Of all the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching Heresy was perhaps his grandest. It doesn’t just mean that some- body isn’t buying a bulb. It also means that same some- body is not putting any power in that socket! It is a sin both against Phoebus and against the Grid. Neither one is about to let that get out of hand.

So, out go the Phoebus flatfoots, looking for the snatched Byron. But the urchin has already left town, gone to Ham- burg, traded Byron to a Reeperbahn prostitute so he can shoot up some morphine—the young woman’s customer to- night is a cost-accountant who likes to have light bulbs screwed into his asshole, and this john has also brought a little hashish to smoke, so by the time he leaves he’s for- gotten about Byron still there in his asshole—doesn’t ever, in fact, find out, because when he finally gets around to sitting down (having stood up in trolleys all the way home) it’s on his own home toilet and plop! there goes Byron in the water and flusssshhhh! away down ‘the waste lines to the Elbe estuary. He is just round enough to get through smoothly all the way. For days he floats over the North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and-white Napoleon pastry tipped in the sea. He stays there for a while at a hotel between the Hengst and the Ménch, till being brought back one day to the mainland by a very old priest who’s been put hep to Byron’s immortality in the course of a routine dream about the taste of a certain 1911 Hochheimer ...suddenly -here’s the great Berlin Eispalast, a booming, dim iron-trussed cavern, the smell of women in the blue shadows—perfumes, leathers, fur skat- ing-costumes, ice-dust in the air, flashing legs, jutting haunches, desire in grippelike flashes, helplessness at the end of a crack-the-whip, rocketing through beams of sun- light choked with the powdered ice, and a voice in the blurred mirror underfoot saying, “Find the one who has performed this miracle. He is a saint. Expose him. Expedite his canonization. ...” The name is on a list the old man presently draws up of about a thousand) tourists who’ve been in and out of Helgoland since Byron was found on the beach. The priest begins a search tol tain, footpath, and Hispano-Suiza, checking out each of the tourists on his list. But he gets no farther than Niimberg, where his

i also was wondering if the film metaphor is maybe the other way around. instead of it being like the death of the subject of the film, instead it’s like the death of the subject through film, aka the nephew and sister-in-law being transfixed by media and sort of dying little deaths by watching instead of living

valise, with Byron wrapped inside in an alb, is ripped off — by a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not content with standing in front of his own mirror making papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick to go out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full drag, and walk around blessing people at random. Green torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father Mausmacher, checking out tits ’n’ asses, waistlines ’n’ baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff, smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses of “Die Fahne Hoch.” Unknown to him, Byron slides out of the stolen vestments onto the ground. He is then walked past by several hundred thousand boots and shoes, and not one so much as brushes him, natch. He is scavenged next day (the field now deathempty, columned, pale, streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds length- ening behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a poor Jewish ragpicker, and taken on, on into another 15 years of preservation against chance and against Phoebus. He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known, for some reason that escapes everybody.

The cartel have already gone over to Contingency Plan B, which assumes a seven-year statute of limitations, after which Byron will be considered legally burned out. Mean- while, the personnel taken off of Byron’s case are busy tracking a long-lived bulb that once occupied a socket on the porch of an army outpost in the Amazon jungle, Beatriz the Bulb, who has just been stolen, mysteriously, by an Indian raiding party.

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. - He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs

listened attentively—others thought of ways to fink to Phoebus. Some of the older anti-Byronists were able to fool with their parameters in systematic ways that would show up on the ebonite meters under the Swiss mountain: there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw the hit men down. \ Any talk of Bulb’s transcendence, of course, was clear subversion. Phoebus based everything on bulb efficiency— the ratio of the usable power coming out, to the power put in. The Grid demanded that this ratio stay as small as possible. That way they got to sell more juice. On the other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and that cut into bulb sales for Phoebus. In the beginning Phoebus tried increasing filament resistance, reducing the hours of life on the sly and gradually—till the Grid noticed a fall-off in revenues, and started screaming. The two parties by and by reached an accord on a compromise bulb-life figure that would bring in enough money for both of them, and to go fifty-fifty on the costs of the anti- bulbsnatching campaign. Along with a more subtle attack against those criminal souls who forswear bulbs entirely and use candles. Phoebus’s long-standing arrangement with the Meat Cartel was to restrict the amount of tallow in circulation by keeping more fat in meat to be sold regard- less of cardiac problems that might arise, and redirecting most of what was trimmed off into soap production. Soap in those days was a booming concern. Among the con- sumers, the Bland Institute had discovered deep feelings about shit. Even at that, meat and soap were minor inter- locks of Phoebus. More important were items like tungsten. Another reason why Phoebus couldn’t cut down bulb life too far. Too many tungsten filaments would eat into avail- able stockpiles of the metal—China being the major world source, this also brought in very delicate questions of Eastern policy—and disturb the arrangement between General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten carbide would be produced, where and when and what the prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37—$90 a pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly governed the production of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War came, some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have

given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any power. Don’t worry.

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pat- tern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gath- ers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon fila- ment was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as be- fore. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change any- thing. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it....

Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal, where dogs are swimming now, dogs in packs, dogs heads bobbing down the scummy canals... dogs’ heads, chess knights, also may be found invisible in the air over secret airbases, in the thickest fogs, conditions of temperature, pressure and humidity form Springer-shapes the tuned flyer can feel, the radars can see, the helpless passengers can al- most glimpse, now and then, out the little window, as through sheets of vapor... it is the kind Dog, the Dog no man ever conditioned, who is there for us at beginnings and ends, and journeys we have to take, helpless, but not quite unwilling. ... The pleats in Jamf's suit go weaving | away like iris leaves in a backyard wind. The colonel is left alone in Happyville. The steel city waits him, the even cloud-light raising a white streak down each great build- ing, all of them set up as modulations on the perfect grid of the streets, each tower cut off at a different height— and where is the Comb that will move through this and

restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony? where are the great Shears from the sky that will readjust Happyville?

There is no need to bring in blood or violence here, But the colonel does have his head tilted back now in what may truly be surrender: his throat is open to the pain- radiance of the Bulb. Paddy McGonigle is the only other witness, and he, a one-man power system with dreams of his own, wants the colonel out of the way as much as anyone. Eddie Pensiero, with the blues flooding his shak- ing muscles, the down, mortal blues, is holding his scissors in a way barbers aren’t supposed to. The points, shudder- ing in the electric cone, are aiming downward. Eddie Pensiero’s fist tightens around the steel loops his fingers have slid out of, The colonel, with a last tilt of his head, exposes his jugular, clearly impatient with the—

She comes riding into town on a stolen bicycle: a white kerchief at her crown, fluttering behind in points, a dis- tinguished emissary from a drained and captured land, herself full of ancient title, but nothing in the way of usable power, not even a fantasy of it. She’s wearing a lean white dress, a tennis dress from prewar summers, falling now not in knife-edge pleats but softer, more accidental, half-crisp, touches of blue in its deeper folds, a dress for changes in the weather, a dress to be flowed upon by shadows of leaves, by a crumble of brown and sun-yellow moving across it and on as she coasts preoccupied but without private smiles, under the leafy trees that line the road of hard-packed dirt. Her hair is’: wound, in braids, up on her head, which she holds not too high nor what used to be called “gravely,” but toward (say against) a particular future, for the first time since the Casino Hermann Goering _..,and she’s not of our moment, our time, at all.

-rachel

The outermost sentry peers from his rusty-boned cement ruin, and for two full pedal-swings they are both, he and Katje, out in the daylight, blending with packed earth, rust, blobbing perforations of sunlight cold gold and slick as glass, the fresh wind in the trees, Hyperthyroidal Afri- can eyes, their irises besieged as early cornflowers by the

crowding fields of white... Qoga-booga! Gwine jump on dis drum hyah! Tell de res’ ob de trahb back in de village, yowzah! ‘ ;

So, DUMdumdumdum, DUMdumdumdum, O.K., but still there’s no room in her demeanor for even curiosity (of course weren’t there going to be drums, a chance for violence? A snake jumping off of a limb, a very large © presence ahead among the thousand bowing treetops, a scream inside herself, a leap upward into primal terror, surrendering to it and so—she has dreamt—regaining her soul, her long-lost self. ..). Nor will she waste more than token glances now on the German lawns rushing so deeply away into green hazes or hills, the pale limbs of marble balusters beside sanitarium walks that curve restlessly, in a fever, a stifling, into thickets of penis-budded sprig and thorn so old, so without comfort that eyes are drawn, seized by the tear-glands and dragged to find, to find at all cost, the path that has disappeared so suddenly... or to look behind to hold on to some trace of the spa, a corner of the Sprudelhof, the highest peak of the white-sugar bandstand, something to counteract Pan’s whisper inside the dark grove Come in... forget them. Come in here.... No. Not Katje. She has been into the groves and thickets. She has danced naked and spread her cunt to the horns of grove-dwelling beasts. She has left the moon in the soles of her feet, taken its tides with the surfaces of her brain. Pan was a lousy lover. Today, in public, they have no more than nervous glances for each other.

What does happen now, and this is quite alarming, is that out of nowhere suddenly appear a full dancing-chorus of Herero men. They are dressed in white sailor suits de- signed to show off asses, crotches, slim waists and shapely pectorals, and they are carrying a girl all in silver lamé, a loud brassy dame after the style of Diamond Lil or Texas Guinan. As they set her down, everyone begins to dance and sing:

Ain’t it grand ta see, that good-time face, again! Pa-ra-noi-ya, boy oh boy, yer

Not the way you looked, just kickin’ in that door— - Call a lawyer, Paranoia, Lemme-awill my ass to you, for-ever-morel

Then Andreas and Pavel come out in tap shoes (liber- — ated from a rather insolent ENSA show that came through in July) to do one of those staccato tap-and-sing numbers:

Pa- ra- noi— (shufflestomp! shufflestomp! shufflestomp! [and] el[ya,lop! clickety cl[Ain’t]ick) it grand (clop) _ . ta (clop) see (clippyclop) yer good-time face again! ete.

Well, Katje realizes long before the first 8 bars of all this that the brazen blond bombshell is none other than her- self: she is doing a dance routine with these black sailors- ashore. Having gathered also that she is the allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a little wacky but pure heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity of this music a bit distressing. What she had in mind was more of an Isadora Duncan routine, classical and full of gauzes, and—well, white. What Pirate Prentice briefed her on was folklore, politics, Zonal strategies—but not black- ness, When that was what she most needed to know about. How can she pass now through so much blackness to re- deem herself? How can she expect to find Slothrop? among such blackness (subvocalizing the word as an old man might speak the name of a base public figure, letting it gutter out into real blackness: into being spoken no more). There is that stubborn, repressive heat to her thoughts. It is none of your heavy racist skin-prickling, no, but a feeling of.one more burden, along with the scarcity of food in the Zone, the chicken-coop, cave or basement lodgings at sun- fall, the armed-occupation phobias and skulkings as bad as Holland last year, comfortable in here at least, lotos- snuggly, but disastrous out in the World of Reality she still believes in and will never give up hoping to rejoin some- day. All that’s not bad enough, no, now she must also endure blackness, Her ignorance of it |'must see her through. isa

With Andreas she is charming, she radiates that sensu- ality peculiar to women who are concerned with an absent lover’s safety. But then she must see Enzian. Their first —

zzz

meeting. Each in a way has been loved by Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some way of making it bearable, just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one....

“Oberst. I am happy—” her voice breaks. Genuinely. Her head inclines across his desk no longer than is neces-

He nods, angles his beard at a chair. This, then, is the Golden Bitch of Blicero’s last letters from Holland. Enzian formed no image of her then, too taken up, too gagged with sorrow at what was happening to Weissmann. She seemed then only one of the expected forms of horror that must be populating his world. But, ethnic when he least wants to be, Enzian came after a while to think of her as the great Kalahari rock painting of the White Woman, white from the waist down, carrying bow and arrows, trailed by her black handmaiden through an erratic space, stone and deep, figures of all sizes moving to and fro....

But here is the true Golden Bitch. He’s surprised at how young and slender she is—a paleness as of having begun to leak away from this world, likely to vanish entirely at any too-reckless grab. She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it. You must want her, but never indicate it—not by eyes or move—or she will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert, and you'll never have the chance again.

- speaks quietly. She is surprised at his politeness. Disap- pointed: she was expecting more force. Her lip has begun to lift. “How did he seem?”

“Alone.” Her brusque and sideways nod. Gazing back at him with the best neutrality she can be sure of in the circs.

She understands then that it isn’t timidity, she was wrong. It is decency. The man wants to be decent. He leaves himself open. (So does she, but only because everything that might hurt has long been numbed out. There’s small risk for Katje.) But Enzian risks what former lovers risk whenever the Beloved is present, in fact or in word: deepest possibili- ties for shame, for sense of loss renewed, or humiliation and mockery. Shall she mockP Has he made that: too easy—

and then, turning, counted on her for fair play? Can she be as honest as he, without risking too much? “He was dying,” she tells him, “he looked very old, I don’t even know if he left Holland alive.”

“He—” and this hesitation may be (a) in consideration of her feelings, or (b) for reasons of Schwarzkommando security, or (c) both of the above... but then, hell, the Principle of Maximizing Risk takes over again: “he got as far as the Liineberg Heath. If you didn’t know, you ought to.”

“Yes, So has Slothrop been, though I don’t think Slothrop knows that.”

-sable

“Slothrop and I—” she looks around the room, her eyes skitter off metal surfaces, papers, facets of salt, cannot come to rest anywhere. As if making a desperate surprise confession: “Everything is so remote now. I don’t really know why they sent me out here. I don’t know any more who Slothrop really was. There’s a failure in the light. I can’t see. It’s all going away from me,...”

It isn’t yet time to touch her, but Enzian reaches out gives a friendly chin-up tap on the back of her hand, a military now-see-here. “There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.”

“Really.” They both start laughing. Hers is weary-Euro- pean, slow, head-shaking. Once she would have been assessing as she laughed, speaking of edges, deeps, profit and loss, H-hours and points of no return—she would have been laughing politically, in response to a power- predicament, because there might be nothing else to do. But now she’s only laughing. As she once laughed with Slothrop, back at the Casino Hermann Goering.

So she’s only been talking with Enzian about:a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum feelsP_ _-

“Slothrop and I” didn’t work too well. Should she have said “Blicero and I’P What would suis bee got her into with the African?

- burnished cheekbones, cigarette smolderin sect in his curled right hand, “we were only close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. ’'d say don’t give me away, but it wouldn't

matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don’t trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun—the truth wouldn’t change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They'd only be passing a story along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you.

“The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me once, What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he’s still human, you’d no more turn him out than you'd turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?”

He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sort of problems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation?

He doesn’t have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner. “At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt, Plexiglass maps of the webs we main- tain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for distributing food and medicine. ... We would gaze down on staffrooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—”

“there was a cow and that’s pretty cool sorry i fell asleep and missed pretty much everything else”

“Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance...” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human ao left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels

He is a lion, this man, ego-mad—but despite everything, Katje likes him. “But if he were still alive—”

“No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old—the last heart in which I might

have been granted some being—was changing, toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster. ... ‘If he is alive,’ he may have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he’s only dead. He’s gone beyond his pain, his sin— driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than—” well, he was about to say “we” but “I” seems better after all, “I haven’t transcended. I’ve only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it’s worse than being told you won’t have to die by some- one you can’t believe in....

“Yes he matters to me, very much, He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let go.”

“And me?” She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the iggos. “And me,” indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a moment of comfort. ... ;

“You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all.” She looks up to see exactly how his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running over his cheeks. “You've only been set free,” his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is he about to go goofy on her.too? What she needs right now in her life, from some man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character, Not this. “I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free... .”

“How can my story be sadder that that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and _ spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn’t his blackness, — but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making be- lieve for the moment is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground — and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey

‘across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and tumed to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligi- ble honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends, But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness.

“Flirt if-you want,” Enzian now just as smooth as that Cary Grant, “but expect to be taken seriously.” Oh, ho. Here’s whatcha came for, folks.

-recima from moth11.net

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the ware- house districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

“I don’t know what to do.” She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

“You don’t have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop,” he finally gets around to telling her. “All you have to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again, Why bother yourself with the rest?”

“Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I don’t know, pay him back for the octopus, or something, Don’t I have to know why he’s out here, what I did to him, for ThemP How can They be stopped? | How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn't I be going all the way in?”

Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how - terrible that must be. . So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, buts in crepe ure your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still... will it fail. .. . But of true submission,

of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream. ... I am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies!

“You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still youre always going to come through. You're free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story is saddest of all.”

“Reward—” she’s getting mad. “It’s a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?”

“Exactly.” He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone comer. “We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don’t have to—”

He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court.

Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beam- ing, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we're strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.

Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, wash- water, disinfectant—a cafeteria in the middle of the As

You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was rescued by a Polish undertaker |

in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver’s, and a Wehrmacht helmet through ~ which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and in- © serted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He’s a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checker- boards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could telll

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benja- min Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

Well, it’s a matter of continuity. Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? In- finity, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s minus infinity! How’s that for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the.same speed in reverse, all in the gnat’s-ass or red cunt hair at the At. across the point. That’s getting hit by lightning, folks. You're way up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don’t think there aren't lammergeiers cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off. Oh yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic - masks around their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity symbol: 00. Little men with wicked eye- brows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of

them are wearing outlandish headgear, not at all the usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are Carmen Miranda hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes, jeepers even watermelons— and there are World War I spike-top Wilhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon hats with and without Ns on them, not to mention little red suits and green capes, well here they are leaning forward into their cruel birds’ ears, whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster, just like that sacrificial ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they won’t let you fall, theyll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will look like the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems’ to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different. Ha-ha! But the lightning-struck know, all right! Even if they may not know they know. And that’s what this under- taker tonight has set out into the storm to find.

Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps out on the backs of eaglesP Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic of anthropology, with the lightning- struck grouped into a subculture, even secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails, private monthly magazine A Nickel Saved (which looks perfectly innocent, old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know the other half of the proverb: “.. . is a stockpile of nickel.” Making the real quote nickel-magnate Mark Hanna’s: “You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public owes the public anything.” So the real title is Long Enough, which Those Who Know, know. The text of each issue of the magazine, when transformed this way, yields many interesting messages). To outsiders it’s just a pleasant little club newsletter—Jed Plunkitt held a bar- becue for the Iowa Chapter the last weekend in April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough luck! But come next Barbecue, you’ll be back good as new.... Minnie Calkins (Chapter 1.793) got married Easter Sun-— day to a screen-door salesman from California. Sorry to say he’s not eligible for Membership—at least not yet. But

with all those screen doors around, well sure keep our fingers crossed! ... Your Editor has been receiving many,

many “Wha hoppen?”’s concerning the Spring Convention in Decatur when all the lights failed during the blessing. Glad to report now that trouble was traced finally to a giant transient in the line, “Kind of an electrical tidal wave,” sez Hank Faffner, our engineer-on-the-scene. “Every bulb in the place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty, sterile eggs.” Quite a poet, Hank! Now if you can only find out where that spike came from—