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I come from the Grateful Dead school of marketing which can be summarized as: let them steal everything. This is a pre-publication edition FOR MEN ONLY! Please read it and pass it on to some other guy and dont stick it in your socks drawer or use it to roll bombers you cooty. If you ACTUALLY paid money for this forget everything I just said. Rich Monk PS. If you find a typographical error, hypothetical error, or you just want to tell me your own theory of everything please email us.
other books by Rich Zubaty: The Corporate Cult What Men Know That Women Dont Surviving the Feminization of America Water People Wisdom
Copyright 2002 by Rich Zubaty All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author, except for excerpts which may be used in reviews, if you are a corporation. If youre a little guy dont worry about it. drawings by Daniel Burgevin author photo by M. Noyce Orders: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing PO Box 9949 College Station, Texas 77842 Toll free phone/fax: 1-877-376-4955 Email: orders@virtualbookworm.com info@virtualbookworm.com Web Site: http://www.virtualbookworm.com Zubaty Publishing PO Box 1442 Kaunakakai, Hawaii 96748 Email: richzubaty@hotmail.com Rich Zubaty Web Site: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5225/ ISBN: 1-58939-130-6 (book) ISBN: 1-58939-131-4 (e-book) ISBN: 1-58939-132-2 (CD)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zubaty, Rich, 1948 Your brain is not your own / Rich Zubaty. p. cm. ISBN 1-58939-130-6 I. Title. PS3626.U23 Y68 2004 813'.54dc21 2002000634
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Anarchy is not a political philosophy, it is a way of life. Henri Cartier Bresson All art is religious art. There is good art and bad art according to whether it elevates the human spirit, or sells underwear. Rich Monk Anarchy is opposition to tyranny. Noam Chomsky Anarchy is the sane persons response to an insane world. Rich Monk
Chapter One
THEY FINALLY CAPTURED HIM on a small island in the South Pacific as he trudged up a red dirt hill through the coconut grove to his thatch hut carrying a spinning rod and a stringer of fish. His Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt was dripping seawater, his Porky Pig cap crusted with dried salt. A trickle of blood seeped from a finger where a baby barracuda had nipped him in a final spasm for freedom. His forearms were hot and brown and slick with sweat and he had been whistling Sweet Home Chicago in time to his squishy sneakers as he plodded through the viney undergrowth back to his shady jungle refuge. After four hours of wading waist deep across the slippery reef, sidestepping moray eels, buffeted by waves and rising tide, casting his bait into the dark blue water off the edge of the submerged coral cliff, he was exhausted, in no mood to resist, and anyway, where was there to run? Of course he denied everything. But he was curiously unmoved, unsurprised at the charges leveled against him. He did not wince or protest as an innocent person might be expected to do. He simply said, Youve got the wrong man, then tossed his fish on a pile of halved coconuts near the cookfire and guzzled fresh water from a plastic jug, spilling it on his face and rinsing the salt from his eyes. The three sneering foreigners pounced on him, pulled down his pants and inspected his buttocks. No tattoo, grumbled Cue Ball, the pink-faced, shaved-headed one pulling his huge frame erect like an elephant leaving a water hole. The bronze-skinned islander with the police insignia on his hat held his watermelon belly and laughed at this strange style of police work his gold tooth sparkling on and off like a drunk flashlight in the yellow rays that flickered through the wavy crests of the coconut trees. The one sporting a purple skirt and zebra-striped hair ran his fingers through his black
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and white crew cut. He nodded sharply to the others, and as he wiped some black stuff off his hand onto a tree trunk, Scar Face the blond skinny one with the knitted knife wound on his cheek handcuffed the man and jerked him back to his feet. They had waited for two hours in this jungle clearing, agitated, restless, snatching bananas from a bunch that hung inside the shack eating half and tossing the rest to a marauding squadron of pigs that wandered in from the bush sniffing then wincing at a blackened pot of boiled breadfruit swinging from a branch in the lime tree, rooting through his suitcase for the stolen file or any other evidence that would cap their investigation. Zebra Hair had begun by pacing and swearing and ordering the others to lift up this and turn over that, dig over here, dig over there, feel around the rats nests and spider eggs in the crunchy palm leaf roofing. Take apart the outhouse walls. Inspect the insides of bamboo rafter poles for hidden rolls of paper. Evidence. He needed evidence. This whole thing had gone on much too long and he needed to be convinced he had finally got his man. Check the trees, check the ground, check the sky, check everything. He whooped when the native cop found the electric typewriter wrapped in double plastic garbage bags, stuffed in the hollowed cleft of a mango tree useless on an island without roads or electricity. Only a sentimental fool would leave behind a clue like that. He must have thought theyd given up the search. Within an hour they had scratched and combed every crevice within 100 feet of the shack, thumped every tree, inspected every hollow bamboo pole, excavated every soft patch of ground where the pigs had been rooting sifting the soil through their fingers looking for a trace of paper, or books or any other subversive documents. They had been thorough and efficient and had found absolutely nothing incriminating beyond the typewriter. Zebra Hair crackled with fury and frustration. He slammed a machete into a coconut trunk scaring off a family of fruit bats whose blathering, fluttering commotion startled him so bad he lost his footing and fell against a flattened automobile axle the locals used to husk coconuts. Fortunately he only tore his shirt and scored his shoulder. The local cop was choking like a parrot swallowing a corncob his blubbery lips constipated from
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as the case seemed to be his clients records were not suitably held confidential. In other words, they wanted the file back. Whats in the file? asked Shoebridge. Just some names. Shoebridge didnt give a hoot about the file, or the abused childrens shelter for that matter. But the mere mention of the name Rich Monk, after all this time, knotted his stomach into a walnut. Ill help you but A tidal wave of rage reamed his brain, smashing him upland into the dark forests of his most public disgraces, then reversed direction, pulling him downward, carrying off drowned mattresses and splintered boards and twisted metal which clawed at his soul until, rattled by an epiphany of aftershocks, the tsunami of wrath disappeared once again beneath his brain waves, leaving behind an inhuman calm of bright light and twittering birds and clouds reflected in puddles and insane hope. But what? said the rep. You have to put me in charge of the entire investigation. Give me a budget and total control and Ill get your man and Ill get your file. Ill have to ask my client. Within one hour the think tank rep called back with an affirmative reply from his client. A $500,000 expense budget was approved and a bounty quickly agreed to. Field operatives would be provided by the corporate client from its stable of security personnel. Shoebridge would be in charge. Theres one more thing, said the rep. You have one month to grab this man and the file. Otherwise your funding will be cut off and the abuse shelter will be closed. Youll have the man and the file, said Shoebridge. He hung up the phone and stuck his toes in his mouth. After all this time! After all these wasted years, Rich Monk was back. His nemesis. His dark star. His cynical twin. The human being who had single-handedly destroyed his FBI career, ruined his marriage, and caused him to be banished to a Siberia of interstate stolen tire investigations and day care worker background checks, had finally excreted a hot trail. Decades
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I used to be a federal employee, said Shoebridge, dismissing the generalization with a scornful sniff. He knew just about all you could know about how government works. She didnt understand the half of it. In fact, if my memory serves me well, a long time ago I did some personnel background checks for you here. They were interrupted, I believe, when I was called back to Washington to head up an important federal investigation. Its been a long time. Your office was in an old wooden Shaker building. Oh that! I remember you now, said Madeleine. The Shaker Building was torn down when we built the new classrooms and dormitory. She threw one arm in an arc indicating a nearly windowless brick fortress that looked more like the outside of a gymnasium than a school or dormitory. A clot of shouting adolescents burst out the door and raced down to the canoes by the lake laughing and prancing and flipping off their shoes. Lets see where the file was kept, said Shoebridge, kicking the sniffing dogs aside. She led him to a metal file cabinet in a windowless storage room drowsing under the cold glass eye of a security camera. It was an amateur job. Fingerprints all over everything. The camera had caught the mans face on tape. The stringy long hair bald patch now the bent nose, Shoebridge remembered him well. Mitchell Freedman, alias Gregory Lobotomowski, alias Rollo Nixon, alias Lyle Johnson, alias Julius Hoffman, alias godknows-what-else alias Rich Monk. What do you know about him? asked Shoebridge. Well, actually, Im ashamed to admit it, but he was an old boyfriend of mine. A very old boyfriend. What did he want with the file? I dont know. Harassment. Just to cause me pain I guess. Hes sure doing that. Plus hes gonna hurt 37 innocent kids. Hes an irresponsible jerk. Always has been. HmmmDont worry maam, Ill get him. Within hours Shoebridge had transmitted a computer enhanced photo of the mans face to security officers at all major U.S. airports. Bingo. Albany, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Honolulu, Kingdom of Tonga. He assembled the two field
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to get up in the morning and go to work. They quit their jobs. They pulled their kids out of school and gave away their TVs. They shunned bestsellers and created an underground distribution network to disseminate his writings. And then more people quit going to work. Cedric Shoebridge had been pursuing him for decades, a chase that led from Chicago to Taos, New Mexico, Berkeley to Boston, Paris to Washington D.C., Old Mexico, the Berkshires, and now Tonga. What would they find in Tonga? Who knows? he laughed, salivating over the opportunity to coach his operatives in the methodology of super-espionage, the Big Leagues, FBI meat and potatoes. The important thing with Rich Monk was to expect the unexpected. He was a master of invisibility. He could disappear in the blink of an eye and reappear a thousand miles away. He was a genius at disguise and could assume various human forms, from a withered old granny sweeping the packed dirt around her palm hut to a Noble in the Tongan Parliament driving through town in a convertible throwing flowers to young girls. They must overlook nothing, suspect everyone, follow every conceivable lead. Within five minutes of deplaning in Nukualofa Shoebridge was hauled away by five 300-pound Tongan cops detained, indefinitely, for being rude, obnoxious and asking too many stupid questions. He had shot out the plane door onto the rolling staircase into a steamy tropical mist and slipped at the top of the wet metal steps. If Cue Ball hadnt grabbed him by the neck he would have plowed down 20 passengers. In the terminal he made a bee line for the security police who were standing around in formal gray lava lava skirts leering at the beefy Tongan women waddling from the tarmac toward the ruckus of honking cabs and shouting relatives out on the street. He showed the cops the suspects photo, told them he had flown all the way from the States on FBI business, and that he had come to Tonga to arrest an international criminal. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He told them there wasnt a moment to waste and if he had to he would go and ask for help from the King. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He said they were interfering with an
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from jail smelling of urine and humming Tongan melodies he had learned from the guards it was clear they had lost the trail of their man. No one had seen him. No one had heard of him. He didnt exist. Three days later, after a maddening search that took them from the skuzziest beer halls to the Mormon College dormitory, from kava parties in the bush to pig roasts at the estates of the nobles, from fishermens shacks reeking of boiled octopus to the frangipani-scented reception room at the Kings Palace, Shoebridge had reverted to sitting in the hotel room rocking like an imbecile, sucking his toes. He refused to believe Rich Monk had outmaneuvered him again. It was time for drastic measures. Time to tap into the Great Unknown. Time to seek help from the spirits. He donned a lava lava skirt, blackened his hair with burned cork and began walking the beaches at sunset, impersonating a Tongan spirit. He could have fooled any Tongan. All over the island the coconut wireless hummed with the gossip that there was a ghost walking around the beach at dusk wearing a purple skirt printed with huge yellow flowers. His skin was white as the belly of a shark. And, Jesus save us, his hair! Shoebridge had blackened his white hair by smearing it with burned cork. But since he sweated so much, and kept running his fingers back across his scalp to wipe away the perspiration, he had rubbed a handful of white lines through the black cork producing an ungodly effect black and white zebra-striped hair. It was awful. The cops wouldnt come within 100 yards of him. The adults pretended not to see him. How else do you deal with a spirit? And more important, how could they make it go away? The next day at sunset he was standing knee deep in a tide pool watching a purple starfish digest a fish head by extruding its stomach out of its mouth when a young boy came up to him and said, You must be looking for the palange who lives on the island? The boys mom had told him to say that. It was worth a shot. Maybe this ghost just needed some direction. Maybe he was just waiting for someone to give him the idea to go look for the other man with skin as white as a sharks belly who came and went from this quiet beach where the villagers
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But he was the chief. He had to deal with it. He said a prayer to Jesus and planted himself behind the chest-high counter as the purple-skirted, zebra-haired, white-skinned ghost swept through the door. His former-cannibal eyes narrowed to slits. He clenched the machete kept under the counter for emergencies. But wait a minute! This ghost looked familiar somehow, like maybe a dead cousin who had lost 100 pounds. And then when it started ranting about the palange who lived on the island Latu cracked a smile. This was no ghost. It was the stupid palange who had given him $200 to get out of jail the last time they had arrested him for nothing. He was more like a wayward cousin, a boy who drank too much bush beer and lost his temper once in awhile. Oh well. Nothing to worry about. Ha ha ha. Why dont you tell me you looking for the palange who live on the island? he chuckled. Sure I know who he is. I take you there. In my boat. For a small donation to the police charity fund. Next morning the three spooks and the chief piled into the police motorboat and swung outside the frothy reef onto the broad dark waves of the open ocean. As the outboard sputtered and Cue Ball hung onto the railings in nauseous terror of the rising and falling swells, the chief let out a thick nylon line baited with a plastic squid. An hour later, as the main island was disappearing from sight and a cluster of islets blinked into view at the top of each swell, the chief hooked a yellow fin tuna the size of a German shepherd. As the fish peeled off line from the coil under his foot he cut the motor and waited. When the fish slowed he grabbed the taut line in his callused paws and wrestled it hand over hand, the tendons in his thick brown forearms shuddering as if to snap. The fish ran twice more, searing the chiefs palms as it tore away line, but finally he horsed it alongside, slipped a fist into its gills, hefted the silver blue prize onto the bottom of the boat, and beat it to death with a loose floor board, squirting blood all over everyone. Lucky day, said the chief. Shoebridge wanted very much to believe that this would be a lucky day as he rinsed fish blood off his leg, but when the motor refused to start and they drifted for half an hour with no
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just have to drag Shoebridge around. No good. Just wait. This FBI dick would get his. It was another hour of bouncing, puking pain for the corporate spooks until they mooshed the prow of the boat into the fluffy sand of a crescent-shaped sunken volcanic cone and entered another world. There was something magically different about this atoll and everyone felt it immediately. Even the chief. It was a place apart a windswept yellow islet crowned with a hump of green coconut trees lost in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean pounded by huge blue swells that rolled across thousands of miles of open ocean to break apart on the gray windward rocks of this sunken crater rim, spewing a perpetual mist into the pure salt air. Crushed coral seeped out of the leeward side of the volcano like runoff from a broken ice cream cone. Overhead the palm crests rattled and swayed, but down on the beach a windless cove nestled against a gentle turquoise lagoon where wavelets lapped at the sand in the shade of a lone banyan tree. Lizards chirped high up in the trees cool viney branches which dropped shoots vertically to the ground forming a maze of secondary trunklets that supported a vast green canopy making this tree seem like twenty trees in one. Half-wild pigs plowed the soft soil between the elongated fingers of its raised bony roots, and a cormorant stopped by to dry its feathers perched on a withered, hollowed upper limb. The banyan tree looked like a frizzy-bearded giant who had sat himself down on this beach centuries ago and simply never decided to get up again but just to rest in this quiet spot far, far removed from the radar screen of human civilization. Cue Ball, leaning over the railing for one last dry heave, was the first one to notice the human footprints in the sand. They followed the tracks up the brushy hillside to the shack in the coconut grove on the crest. At least they had found someone this time. The locals on nearby islands had watched the foreigner, the palange, come and go gone for a month, back for two months off and on for five years or more. Sometimes he waved to them when they passed in their fishing boats. They were acquainted with the family who dropped him off and picked
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Youve got the wrong man, he said again, as they lifted him by his handcuffed arms and settled him in the police boat. Rich Monk died on a sailboat between here and Fiji. Lost at sea. It was as good as any other story he could have told them, for he knew things they could not know, and would probably never know. The legend of Rich Monk was the second biggest lie the human race had ever swallowed. It would be inaccurate to say he was dead. For Rich Monk to be dead would mean that he had actually once been alive, and there were many who felt it would be easier to prove that the first pelicans had flown to Florida from Venus. On the other hand, there were those who would argue that Rich Monk was more alive than most people ever had a chance to become in their entire lives. His aliveness was smelly, like a dead fish in a lawyers briefcase. His aliveness was loud, like thunder in a dumpster. His aliveness was invisible, like gravity tugging on a baseball. He was alive the way only an idea can be alive an idea like truth or passion or beauty and as such he could never actually die. Even if his body had been lost at sea which it hadnt but even if it had, Rich Monk lived on in the minds of a million different people in a dozen different countries and, like King Arthur, as long as his story was remembered he could never truly die. A million people wanted him to be alive. A million people needed him to be alive. Therefore he lived. The man they had captured was, of course, not Rich Monk. But the authorities of the remote island nation where this man had built his thatch hut and passed his time fishing needed U.S. aid more than they needed yet another transient expatriate from the northern climes much less one rumored to be already married, a mad scientist, and, under cover of darkness, an octopus. The Minister of Immigration after a few minutes of rough haggling in Tongan with his cousin, the police chief about dollar amounts quickly agreed to a request for the captives extradition once he secured a promise to get some help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for building the new airport. The U.S. government credentials displayed by Shoebridge and his men seemed impeccable, and an envelope
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million Social Security numbers trying to match them with draft registration numbers, passports, or anything else. Within 20 years machines accomplished the job at the speed of light. So, first and foremost, Rich Monk was a number. A ninedigit number. A bogus nine-digit number if a number can, in fact, be bogus. Rather, he was a fantasy number. A number that sprang from the pot-addled brains of a group of undergraduates at the University of Chicago one snowy evening when no one wanted to go out to the Hungry Eye to drink Nigerian coffee and play beatnik. Whose idea was it? asked Shoebridge, fiddling with his earplug, rubbing the hair behind his ears, trying to remove the last particles of burned cork. There was no doubt their captive was somehow involved in the conspiracy. He probably knew more than anyone else did. He undoubtedly knew enough to identify some pressure point, some weak link in the chain, some clue that would allow Shoebridge to expose the fraud, publicize it in the international media, and bury the problem for once and for all. I dont remember, said the drugged man, woozy and dreamy and floating through a softened mental landscape of marshmallow imagery and misty associations brought on by the cocktail of injections administered through an intravenous needle which a doctor in a white lab coat had jabbed into a vein and taped to the back of his hand. The doctor sat in the shadows of the room fiddling with transparent tubes and collapsible bottles preparing different drug combos careful to stay to one side of the false-mirrored nurses office which had been set up as a video recording room. A video camera, backup tape recorder, and several folding chairs had been arranged in the office so those inside could view and record every nuance of the interrogation without being seen through the one-way mirror. Who was in the dorm that night, at your little pot party? asked Shoebridge. I think it was Willie, and Mikeand Debbie. She was always around. And what happened?
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Well? OK. Its coming back. It was something about an imaginary army. An imaginary army? Yeah. What does that mean? Look, it was a pot party. A bunch of crazed students cooking up goofy ideas. Tell me about the imaginary army. Well, if a bunch of people went to the Post Office and filled out Selective Service forms with bogus names, then when the Army drafted people to go to Vietnam no one would show up because they didnt exist anyway. It was like that John Lennon song. What song? The one about if they held a war and nobody came. Shoebridge rubbed his eyes. That doesnt make any sense. If they drafted a bunch of people and they didnt show up theyd just draft someone else. Of course it doesnt make any sense. Its a bunch of stoned ideas! I already told you that. And what does this have to do with Rich Monk? Tread softly here, thought the drugged man in his viscous haze. I dont know. I thought you said you knew? Thats all I know. Bull! Shoebridge hunched in his chair. He grabbed a pencil and scrawled a picture of Porky Pig in his notebook. Then he drew a bulls-eye over the pig and stabbed it with his pencil. He put the pencil sideways in his mouth, bit hard, relaxed his bite, and started talking again. OKAnd a fer weeks latuh Wich Monk spwang to life. I cant understand you. Youve got a pencil in your mouth. He snatched it out. And a few weeks later Rich Monk sprang to life? Thats right. And thats all you know?
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The FBI had miles of taped conversations and speeches that had been clandestinely recorded on campuses, at demonstrations, and in the offices of the YIPPIE party. In all this material they had found only two entirely conflicting references to Rich Monk. During an ad hoc meeting with SDS leaders, Abbie denied any knowledge of Rich Monk, denied he had ever met him or even knew who he was. In another sound clip, recorded three weeks before that, he confided to Jerry Rubin that Rich Monk had come up with the idea to bring a million hippies to Chicago. They would put LSD in the citys water supply, hold a counterconvention to the Democratic Convention, and nominate a pig for president. The rest of the tape broke up into a half hour of animal snorts and wheezing laughter. This much the fuzz knew. Rich Monk never fought in the war, he fought against the war. Or rather, he fought in the war against the war. Thats when the FBI first began tracking him. References to Rich Monk began popping up from Berkeley to Kent State. He was admitted as a student at both schools simultaneously, qualified for financial aid, took the money, and, as far as anyone could ascertain, never showed up for a single class. He opened a bank account, got a passport, and took out a car loan. The car was recovered three years later on a hippie commune in Taos, New Mexico. Nobody then living on the commune remembered anything conclusive about him. He was variously described as being short and fat, tall and skinny, blackhaired, blond-haired, walked with a limp and able to outrun jackrabbits. Oh, and he wore glasses, but only when no one else was looking. One woman came forward and announced that she had become pregnant by him and bore him a son. Under further questioning examiners discovered the father could have been any one of five different men. It was the Sixties for Christs sakes. These revelations precipitated two years of FBI inquiries and finally DNA testing which established that the real father was a diesel mechanic in Oakland, California who had never been on a college campus, didnt know where Chicago was, and had never even heard of Rich Monk.
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Tell him about the tattoo, said an aide, clawing through the junk pile of his brain, scrambling to produce some scrap of hard data to justify their ballooning field expenditures. What tattoo? Absolutely everyone questioned agrees on one thing. Its the only thing they agree on. He has a red rose tattooed on his behind. Jesus. How many of these people have actually seen his rear end!!! The aides attentions were suddenly drawn to details of curtain rod pulleys and plastic wood grain as they shrugged in unison. But decades later the first thing his captors did outside the shack in the coconut grove was pull down their suspects pants and check his buttocks. No tattoo. Oh well. Nothing else fit. Why should this? Cedric Shoebridge kicked out his aides, pulled off his socks and began sucking his toes. A baby in a buggy. Recidivism. Longing for those bygone days when a warm bottle and a change of diapers were the summit of his yearnings. In those awkward moments when his wife caught him in the act he told her he was just trimming his toenails. She sneered and tossed him some clippers. But the fact was, sucking his toes remained the best method he had ever stumbled upon for relieving overwhelming frustration. And he was frustrated. His career at the FBI was looking more and more like a paper-mach rowboat gummy, soggy, minutes away from disintegrating under his feet in a sloshy goo of newsprint and paste and drowned dreams. Maybe his father-in-law would take him into the insurance business? No. Never. What a ridiculous thought. Hed rather go to work as a male stripper, wiggling his johnson at twittering divorce lawyers and realtors with tie-dyed hairdos. Stop already! There had to be a way out of this mess. He yanked his toes out of his mouth. His brain stormed. Kind of a lightweight drizzle. It could work. It should work. Years later it would be dubbed a creative visualization but for Cedric Shoebridge it was merely a case of wishing something into becoming a fact. He leaked the story that Rich Monk had been shot dead in a brothel in Guadalajara, Mexico. The FBI even had blurry, blood-spattered,
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The drugged mans head spasmed to one side as spittle ran from his mouth. You just dont get it, man Get what? You expect me to believe you never used that name? Yeah, I used it. But so did other people. And I used a lot of other names tooRollo Nixon was my favorite. His muscle tension faded and Shoebridge lightened his grip. I used to tell people I was Richard Nixons illegitimate son and he refused to acknowledge me because of politics, you know. That bought me a lot of pie and coffee in the Midwest. One year later you showed up in Paris, snapped Shoebridge. So what? The drugs hit hard and the man slumped like pudding into the gurney. Scar Face and Cue Ball withdrew to the viewing room and closed the door. The doctor readied another bag of colored fluid. When are you going to ask him about the file! barked a female voice into the wireless receiver plugged in Shoebridges ear. Ill get to that. What? asked the drugged man. Nothing. Never mindYou went to ParisAnd you wrote this. Shoebridge slapped a faded yellow flyer down on the desk. It was jammed with dense French writing, headlined: Alliance Democratic, and signed Rich Monk. The drugged man glanced at the page and slurred. How could I have written that? I dont know how to write French. Then you had someone else write it, or translate it. Ri-di-cu-lous. Are you trying to tell me you dont know where this came from? Thats right. I dont know where it came from. I was sitting at a bistro in Pigalle one hot afternoon when some giddy teenage girls came by handing them out. Frankly, I was more interested in the girls than the flyer. And what happened? We got to talking, and I ended up going back to my apartment with one of them. Well, actually, two of them.
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can ever imagineThe real dirtbags are the transnational corporations. They expect to rape the world of natural resources, build sweatshops, export jobs overseas, employ the creative technologies developed by our taxpayer-financed schools and government, skip out on paying taxes altogether, and then, when they make a mess, American boys are supposed to grab guns, fly halfway around the world, and get shot at, trying to save their assets. Its outrageous. We need a civil war! Shoebridge picked up his pencil bits and rubbed the notepad, smearing it worse. His toes began itching and curling inside his shoes and he suppressed the urge to whip off his socks and stuff them in his mouth. He was getting nowhere with this worm. A civil war huh? He jabbed his scratchpad with the broken pencil and began drawing whirlpools to make his fingers stop quivering from bottled rage. As the mesmerizing circles narrowed and grew smoother he succumbed to the notion that he needed to take a softer tone, coddle the captive, atone or pretend to atone for his crude put-down. Give the guy a little bit of rope then yank him back on track. When Vietnam ended the hippies put on paisley ties and started selling yogurt, said the drugged man, and the transnationals went back to business as usual copper, aluminum, oil in Indonesia, South America, Africa, the MidEast. Mainstream Americans adopted the cultural surfaces of the uprising the music, the clothes, the health food but the transnationals just became more covert, more media conscious, and nothing changed. It was a disaster. A sellout. Nixon won. His corporate sponsors won. And of course you didnt sell out. What do you think I was doing on that island? We all sold out. We stuffed granola bars in our pockets and went back to work for the soft machine. Peace, love, corporate paychecks. The drugs were coming on stronger, cooking his brain, sizzling his circuits. Snap, crackle, pop goes the weasel. He started imagining things. He was a drunk cowboy driving a rusted pick up truck around the back roads of his own brain squashing chickens and splattering blood on the ghost of his unborn child. His lost baby.
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work to compress his thoughts into heretofore unimagined volleys of verbal clarity. They seemed to be doing that already. He was neither drowsy nor slurring his speech. In fact, he seemed more mentally alert than any time he could remember. He just had to stay away from certain things. But not those guys, said Shoebridge, angling for an opening to get back on track. Not Alliance Democratic. Maybe not. Maybe they turned into whales, and gave up on land disappeared back into the sea. Thats the only way they could have avoided selling out. It was clear to Shoebridge that the drugged man was a raving lunatic even without the drugs. He saw things nobody else saw. He was passionately devoted to issues nobody else cared about. He probably even heard voices the voices of dead communists or somebody. He was a human haunted house complete with shrunken heads in the freezer and black cats sharpening their claws on his soul. But he knew something Cedric Shoebridge needed to know, and it had taken decades to put him here on this table, so the only sensible course was to guide him back onto the flight path. Coax him down for a safe landing. OK. Alliance Democratic. Are these the same guys who brought down the Gaullists and put that commie Mitterand in power? No they didnt. They put out a flyer. So what? How long has it been since you read this flyer? A long, long time. Shoebridge slapped another piece of paper on the desk. An English translation. I dont feel up to reading right now, mumbled the drugged man, dripping spittle on his chin. Then Ill you read a few lines. Shoebridge stabbed the page with his broken pencil and chose a sentence. We live in a democracy? True or false? Is your family run as a democracy? Are family decisions achieved by round table discussion? How about the school you attend? Can you take whatever courses interest you and still earn a degree? Or are you seduced down a path of corporate job training chasing credentials and big bucks? Is the church democratic?
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So what is that these persons do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes or get drafted in time of war. Theyre our new aristocrats the gods of commerce immortal persons. Immortal persons? Immortal persons. Theyre tyrannical by nature. Theyre not business entities but political entities with tremendous power over peoples lives at the same time they are utterly unaccountable to the people. Tyrannies. Science fiction monsters we loosed from the darkest, greediest parts of our own minds that live only for profit and devour us in the process. Commie lies, sputtered Shoebridge. It was a knee-jerk response, a Cold War refrain that even he realized was lacking in explanation, but how else could he respond to a person who actually believed the government was controlled by huge corporations? Rank leftist drivel. Politics of paranoia. Socialist deceptions. Shoebridge twirled his broken pencil. He was succumbing to butterflies-of-the-brain his mind flitting from thought to thought, confusing flowers with colored coffee cans. It wasnt the drugged mans lies about the government that bothered him. He was lying about something else too. He was leveling off from the initial rush of chemically induced hysteria and now he would cruise for a while, babbling about whatever he felt like babbling about. But Cedric Shoebridge had been here before. The drugged man had been holding something back and the serums had pushed his mind to the brink of civil war with itself. Thats why, moments ago, he had been snapping his head from side to side, spasming against the restraining belts on the gurney. And now he was past it, gliding along on the bicycle path in his brain, pedaling through familiar ideological landscapes, listening to populist songbirds and chirping his anarchist propaganda. Whatever had been detonating inside his head trying to explode out his mouth had fizzled. But the good news was: it was a confirmation. An unequivocal confirmation. This moron definitely knew something he didnt want Shoebridge to find out. Perhaps he should have pushed him harder a few moments ago. Then again, the man had absorbed such a massive dose of
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Chapter Two
In a parallel universeor Time sandwichor something YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him plants could talk. The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists from Tallahassee to Tokyo smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. Theyd made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic werent they? Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudoscientific reports on Lettuce in Love or I was a Toxically
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Shamed Geranium. One could dip into the mind of a potato discoursing on Arrested Development in Rocky Soil or hear why Real Manure is the Cure by a panel of tulips. It was a whole new mindscape. Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. Human Odors and Lunar Cycles made TIME magazine, as did The EcoAdvantages of Urinating on Your Bushes, a fascinating portrayal of exactly how lilacs transformed pee into perfume. Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate did not think or feel. They had based this fantasy on the idea that plants didnt have a central nervous system. But, said the New Science, the spine has to do with locomotion, not thinking or memory. Plants, as it turned out, were suffused with emotion every cell bathed in an electro-chemical dance of life just like us. In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions and modes of communication beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was already too late. Some grant-hungry grad students at the University of Chicago started the uproar in Psycho-Botany when they performed a seemingly bogus experiment on two tanks of brine shrimp. They set the first shrimp tank in the corner of a dormitory kitchen and shielded it with empty egg cartons to baffle all sound. They placed the second shrimp tank on a table 30 centimeters from the stove, fired up a frying pan with hot oil, and sat around in shifts talking about how they were going to fry up the little brine shrimpies and eat them in sandwiches with mayonnaise and onions. Within three days all the shrimp in tank number two were dead. The political fallout from this cruel experiment earned the grad students an appearance before the student tribunal. They were barred from university sponsored social functions through the influence exerted on the administration by Animal Rights activists who censured the killers for emotional violence to fellow animals.
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to plants. A brain-shift that made the discovery of fire seem as insignificant as the mass-marketing of granola. Do Plants Think? was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly one day you woke up and looked out your window and all you saw everywhere were eentsy green people. Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized than when the Space Shuttle blew up. Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games of talking to your vegetables right at your table before you ate them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience than eating live monkey brains in Bangkok. And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew around cemeteries the Washington Post clamored, Do Plants Eat Us? What a question. Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists choked the airwaves with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. Real work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroomeaters vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didnt take long. After a few brief weeks in the field the gold diggers and sleuths compared tape recordings and mud-splattered notes in stunned disbelief. They triple-checked their data, scoured the facts for any contradictory evidence whatsoever, merged into a
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your window, tune in your hand-held decoder-receiver, and just listen. Cornism. In time it came to represent something more sinister than Stalinism. Mothers used the sheer menace of the word to scare two-year-olds into peeing inside the round white hole. If you dont do what mommy tells you the corn will get you. Cornism. Evil stuff. Corn was a big supporter of beef and chicken production. You didnt have to be able to add and subtract inside your head to figure out why. People couldnt possibly eat as much corn as cows or chickens, so the more people who ate cows or chickens, the more corn they had to grow. In a murky sort of way, cows and chickens were in on the conspiracy too. Clearly, there would never be so many cows or chickens if they hadnt trained people to feed them and protect them from predators or to prefer them over such other species as grouse or elk, which had suffered devastating declines in the onslaught of agriculture. Chickens had gone from being a scrawny Indian forest bird to the third most widespread vertebrate on the planet behind humans and rats. And all because of corn. It was decades before anyone figured out what the wild animals had to say about any of this, and by then it was way too late. By then the ego-blinded pimple of consciousness humans called civilization had devolved into the backward-running nightmare of a Puerto Rican street gang leader in Chicago named Cha Cha Lobotomowski an inhuman being if there ever was one. A fast-spreading gangrene on the toe of higher culture a psychosomatic mushroom cloud irradiating shopping, journalism and education in one garlicky sneeze a peppery pork sausage jammed up the nose of the American way of life. But we are ill-prepared to meet this street tyrant, this Cha Cha, just yet. For now, it is enough to understand that corn and cows would have gone the way of the giant tree fern and the wild buffalo had they not been capable of tricking humans into breeding them and feeding them tilling the prairies, trudging through thighdeep snow lugging bags of grain, scooping the do-do out of their barns. Some deep, mysterious, existential magic must be
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seed was her. The fruit was her. Cows were fed and nurtured while young bulls were slaughtered for meat. The same with hens and roosters. Wild Nature was fifty/fifty, males to females. The barnyard ratio was fifty females for each male. Human hunters were permitted to shoot cock pheasants and buck deer, but the females were always protected, and the wild gene pools grew weaker and weaker as the hardiest males were sought out and shot down. Blame it on corn. Although humans had just figured out how to communicate with plants, plants had been communicating with humans for a long, long time. They called it dream engineering. Eons ago plants had realized they could enter human minds undetected, at a subconscious level, and influence their thoughts. Millennia past they had figured out that human females were born with a certain susceptibility to a subconscious message of domestication and control. Buck deer, for instance, were useless for these purposes. You couldnt get them to do anything they didnt want to do. Human females, on the other hand, were prone to being influenced. So, plants trained women to cultivate them. Growing food was strenuous work, but it produced a reward more coveted than big boobs or turquoise trinkets SECURITY! Women no longer had to depend on God or husbands to provide for them. Now they could provide for themselves. What progress! Under the influence of plants women began to believe that wandering freely about the earth was an awful way to live, whereas rooting yourself and your family in one spot was greatly to be preferred. Under the influence of plants women began to dream they could create a wondrous society where there was no risk and everything was controlled and planned and organized and insured and guaranteed. A world without fear and chaos where everyone would be happy and everyone would have enough of everything for all Time. A veritable Utopia. A wondrous dream. A plants dream. But it didnt take long to figure out what was wrong with it.
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had been experimenting in the hinterlands of sexuality for 59 million years. True, for a few weeks in spring the male tassels got to tell big stories and throw their pollen around kind of like a twoweek fishing blow-out at the lake but that was the full extent of male freedom. The rest of their year was devoted to the female agenda. After all, the tassels were married to the stalk. They couldnt go anywhere. Marriage was not a hard sell to human females. They got the point right away. If each man could be married to only one woman the methods by which that woman could control that man increased astronomically. With a minimal amount of dream engineering, initiated by corn, the idea spread like a flu virus through the human population. Natural male wanderlust was legally fenced in, slopped with fragrant manure, harvested before the first frost, boiled into paste, sealed in brightly colored cans and stored on a shelf in the cellar of the human psyche. With agriculture came the death of masculine soul. And next the oxen. Corn and oxen were natural enemies. After all, oxen ate corn. To one unskilled in diplomacy, it would not have been evident that a natural alliance between the two was ripe for exploration. To corn, however, nothing could have been more obvious. It knew it was needed and it knew how to turn that need into control. So here was the deal. If the oxen were willing to pull the plows to till the fields they could have all the corn they could eat! No more wandering around all day looking for grass. It seemed like a good deal to the oxen. A secured food supply all they had to do was pull plows through clay for 12 hours a day. These were oxen remember. Brain power rated slightly higher than a dinosaur. SoWith marriage established and oxen in cahoots with corn the rest of the pieces slipped neatly into place. The women married the men who hung around the camp and plowed the fields with oxen. The guys who split into the woods to chase
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to this proposal. No one wanted to be a martyr. But as the atmosphere grew more and more toxic the plants became convinced that it would be tolerable to sacrifice individual members to ensure the survival of the entire plant kingdom. The key to their political conversion was communication. Plants, around the globe, required constant reassurances that this thing was working. They needed to know that their uncles and aunts had been eaten for a good reason. So they invented psychic communication methods which connected every plant to every other plant via a non-physical web or brain. Every plant came to accept that she was merely an individual cell within the organism of her species. She might perish so that her kind could endure. The experiment with animals got off to a great start and promptly bogged down. There was an unanticipated problem. Animals were stupid. They lacked communication skills. They couldnt even catch most plants. En masse, the plants negotiated a covenant. They would ALL sit still and let the animals eat them. It was the only way out of the mess. Submit to this, or die. There was no alternative. Theyd come this far. There was no other way. So they did the sensible thing. They put down roots and let themselves become subject to the whimsy of animals. It became a global poker game to see who would get eaten and who would not. Some tricky species grew thorns and hard skins to protect themselves, but they were just shooting themselves in the foot or root, as it were. True, they didnt get eaten. But the whole POINT was to get eaten. By being eaten they would become valuable and therefore humans could be induced to work their butts off reproducing them. Thats what corn figured out that the other plants were slow to understand. Corn even developed the Aztec ritual of slaughtering virgins to the Corn God so that everyone would be hooked into the same spiritual program. Some must die so the group might live. Soldiers must sacrifice themselves in battle. Jesus died to give us life. The seed must die to birth the plant. Get it? Its everywhere! * * *
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along came some prophets, some mystics, some visionaries who planted one foot on this side of the doorway, and another foot on the other side. Would they discover the dream engineering? Would they lead other people through to the other side? Would they expose the secret manipulations? Would they finger corn as the culprit? Corn stepped up the psychic propaganda. Corn made sure that humans kept wanting more and more stuff, and that the more stuff they got, the more insecure and threatened they felt constantly worrying that someone or something would take away all this stuff they had now that they never had before. It was the Biggest Joke in the World. Envious as the other plants were of corn they couldnt help but admire this psychic coup. Later human inventions of electricity on demand and air travel were insignificant compared to this. This needy mentality drove all of humankind, particularly the women. Certain peas and squash were known to have laughed themselves to death over this the Biggest Joke in the World. SoAgriculture was fueled by civilization. Civilization was fueled by material cravings. Material cravings were fueled by corn. What a mind-boggling plot. But dont give corn all the credit. Corn didnt create this insatiable craving. It merely de-stabilized a pattern that was 20 billion years old. Bang! A spark flashed and a universe exploded into being. In the vast Uniformity outside of space and Time a glitch occurred. Maybe two angels crashed into each other. Maybe God tripped over a hose. Maybe He did it on purpose. Maybe its too simple to understand. Well never know. What we do know is that 20 billion years ago a tiny speck detonated into a titanic fireball. Out of every billion and one particles created in the Big Bang, one billion of them immediately found their anti-matter mates and disappeared back into the vast Uniformity outside of space/Time where we cannot find them to this day.
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the finesse of a rhinoceros grazing at the salad bar in a Burger King. People were confused and disturbed. Eating dinner took on a funereal air. The aborigines had a big belly laugh. Theyd been praying to their food for 100,000 years. Theyd always known that it was alive and had a mind of its own. Thats why it fed them! The only ones who really understood what was going on were the animals. And they werent talking. Not yet. They had other plans. To some it seemed that plants grew people and people grew plants. A simple symbiotic arrangement, no? No! Something much deeper was at work here. The plant psychologists were onto something, but they couldnt get a handle on it. The Conceit of Corn, the female flavor of civilization, the blind pursuit of material agendas. These became obvious in a flash in a fiveminute ride through a vegetables brain. But to Apollo Tyme, Odysseus father, the media hoopla felt like a decoy, a ruse, a calculated attempt to throw everyone off the track. The stark and overwhelming nature of these new scientific discoveries was precisely the thing that was getting in the way of understanding them. Their obvious implications for human society were masking something much much deeper something much more obscure. It was time to step up a step. Time to jump-start the 90% of the brain humans never used. Revitalize the dead space between our ears. Move the mental soup. But where to begin? THERE WERE MANY MODELS to describe the workings of science. One of the best was: a hose full of ants. One day someone accidentally pointed the ant hose at a brain-sandwich called the Big Bang and Blam!, suddenly, overnight, the sandwich was swarming with ants. They were measuring things, pulling things apart, digesting information. And every 3.4 seconds they squirted out another squishy little egg of understanding to deposit in our mind combs. Science was on the case. Everyone could get a good nights sleep knowing science was protecting them and understanding things for them.
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find the mechanism for it. It wasnt located in any particular part of the brain; it wasnt in the blood or bones. Where was it? By the time the newly founded academic discipline of Plant Psychology was accepting its first masters theses, it was becoming shockingly clear to everyone that a great portion of what life is and does, transpires in a place which cannot be physically found. So when the eggheads and tape measure geeks pointed their ant-hose at plant consciousness they immediately came face to face with the greatest scientific buzz word of all time. Instinct. Why did birds fly south in winter? Instinct. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Why did plants grow toward light? Instinct. Buzz, buzz, buzz. We used to say that birds flew south because Zeus made them do it, or plants grew toward light because its what Athena wanted. But with the dawn of science we put it all down to instinct buzz, buzz, buzz. Attempting to explain the motivations of terrestrial life with the word instinct was like trying to milk a cow with a toilet plunger. Not only did it explain nothing extract no precious milk of wisdom or knowledge but by pretending to explain something it had planted its slimey rubber foot directly in the path of further exploration. When it came to instinct, science was wearing boots with no soles. They looked great from eye level but there was nothing to stand on. Science needed results to justify its funding. Pioneering a better way to make ice cream was OK. Making jet fuel out of corn sugar was OK. Delving into the non-physical properties of life was mystical, wacko stuff. Science after all was not a religion. There was nothing to believe in. Except for instinct and DNA and the intrinsic ability of numbers to explain everything. Enter the Plant Psychologists. For a few years, until the dynamics of the ant-hose mentality kicked in, it was a lively science. The true believers went right to the Source. The dictionary said that instinct was: an innate, complex, impulse or motivation. And have a good nights sleep everyone!
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could hide from predators and hunt more effectively if it lay on its side in the mud. When robins wanted to get warm they didnt start building fires, they headed for the Gulf of Mexico. People used to do the same thing until civilization that obsession with agriculture and accumulated possessions thwarted the migration. Of course, the millionaires and the homeless still made the winter trekWhen corn wanted to reproduce itself on six continents it didnt start building ships, it made itself attractive to men and birds and whomever else was around to do the job. Science liked to herd bits and pieces of truth into a corral called Occams Razor the simplest solution is the best solution. The old E=mC2 kind of thing. This was basically a fascination with numbers a blind religious faith that God made the world so it could be mapped with simple mathematical formulas. Maybe science never talked to flounders never bothered to ask them why they selected to have eyes that migrated to one side of their head as they reached maturity instead of the simpler solution of being born that way. Maybe science never asked monkeys why they didnt just grow long necks, like giraffes, if they wanted to eat from the tops of trees; or birds why they started out as dinosaurs just to get their eyeballs that high off the ground; or whales why they left the ocean, grew legs and walked the land, then returned to the sea where their useless hind legs shriveled to nothing. Occams Razor, the simple solution, made no sense when it came to physical biology. Plants and animals never did anything the easy way. Plants and animals could scarcely be described by numbers. And the sad fact was, things which could not be described by numbers could not be described by science. Or, at least, thats what everyone thought at the time. Thats why universities shunned plant psychologists as a kind of religious cult. Where were their numbers? In fact, the real religious cult, the real blind faith in simple solutions, was practiced by the scientists themselves. Theirs was the Cult of Numbers. Ironically, the simple solution to understanding innate, complex, impulses or motivations instinct in plants and
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explanation that spun the media aflutter with giddy optimism. The editors emerged from their story conferences puffy and chipper and ready to put a good face on this mess just to get past it. They were desperate for a pat solution that could be jammed into three column inches and at least Bluffman was taking a stab at it. According to Bluffman, atoms and instinct were both some kind of energy. Great. Even migrant farm workers got a belly laugh over that one. It was like saying a tomato is a kind of tomato, or a fish is some kind of fish. EVERYTHING was energy. Everybody already knew that! So, the vast mythology that western civilization had constructed over the past 8000 years with a little help from corn was walking around butt first. The rationalizations people relied on to get through the day had lost their meaning. People were losing the will to live. Losing the zap that pushed them out of bed every morning to fight the good fight in sublime service to what? Corn? Soybeans? Grapefruit? And all it would take would be a slight nudge from Rich Monk, or Rollo Nixon or whatever he was calling himself these days, to upend the entire apple cart of First World reasons for living. Talk about a chain reaction of anarchism? The possibilities gave the gearheads friction headaches that even WD-40 and KY jelly couldnt cure. For decades pundits had been discussing the need for a new mythology to realign the meaning fields between heaven and earth, and now the crisis was at hand. The job of reconciling science and spirituality was no longer an intellectual dalliance. Global Civil War was, suddenly, not only possible, but probable. Social unrest of stunning proportions leered over the horizon. University students left the schools in droves, wandering the streets, smashing garbage cans and torching cats. They felt they had been lied to. And they were right. The university system was exposed as a prodigious babysitting experiment designed to keep adolescents off the streets and out of the job market while charging them a fortune for the privilege. And at the end of the ordeal there were no jobs. There was no way to fit into the world. Their mythology had let them down.
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Chapter Three
LOOK SHOEBRIDGE, said the drugged man, this country was founded as a reaction against two huge British transnational corporations, the Hudson Bay Company and the British East India Company. I thought we fought a war to get rid of the King. The King was just an economic pawn of these companies. He gave them land and refugee labor, they gave him money plus cotton and raw materials to keep the British mills running, manufacturing clothes which were then shipped back to the colonies. The American Revolution started when Americans got the bright idea they should be allowed to manufacture their own shirts and shoes, and import tea on their own, not British, ships. Boy, youve got some bent ideas about history. Oh yeah? Then how come when the United States first formed there was such a fear of huge corporations that corporations were only allowed to be chartered state by state, not federally, and these charters automatically expired after ten years? And, in order to renew its charter, a corporation had to demonstrate that it was bringing positive good to the community where it was located. Not just trashing the place dumping chemicals and poisoning the airAnd how come Thomas
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Jefferson said, I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations. He knew that if we only focused our wrath on the King and ignored the power of corporations our experiment in democracy would come undone. It wasnt until the time of the Civil War that the court system was bribed into circumventing these restrictions by legally designating corporations as persons. I seeand how did that happen? Shoebridge bent down, peeled back a sock, and slipped an index finger between his toes. Ahhh! Why is that idiot bending over out of the frame, hissed the video technician in the viewing room. Because hes an incompetent ass, hissed Madeleine Naylor. Shoebridge, her permanently twisted lower lip barked into the microphone transmitting to the receiver plugged into his ear. Sit up and ask him about the file! Cue Ball and Scar Face shifted, shrugged at each other, and resumed watching the interrogation through the one-way mirror. It happened because we were wrestling with the issues of slavery and citizenship defining what a citizen was, said the drugged man. Free blacks and non-landholders were finally achieving the right to vote. Corporations snuck under the fence and got themselves legally identified as persons. Our judges created a science fiction monster in our legal system. Do you know what Abe Lincoln had to say about it? As a result of the (Civil) War corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will followuntil all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. Abraham Lincoln, 1864Then he was shot!By a lone assassin? Kiss my wazooThis notion of corporations being legally regarded as persons never came up for a vote in the Congress. It was slipped through by judges. Judgments were rendered, legal precedents set, and 150 years later we just take it for granted thats how it is. Nobody even asked us! Fine. And thats what these French freaks, in Paris, were complaining about? These friends of Rich Monk. Right. It was working, thought the drugged man. By focusing his mind on giving Shoebridge a traditional leftist drubbing he was staying far afield from admitting to any indictable offenses, plus steering clear of his little secrets.
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And then? I left. The blond came back to my place for a couple hours. Then she left and I never saw her again. Ask him about the file! hissed the twisted lip into his earpiece. But Shoebridge didnt care about the file. He was in charge of this interrogation and he would conduct it his own way. Plus he had been seduced by this vignette intrigued by the sexual deviance. He was at once jealous and resentful of hippie morals. The sexual ecstasy of the 60s had driven him loony with lust. He had married the woman of his Georgetown college dreams: a blond, buck-toothed Wisconsin farm girl from a landed family who had decided the highest purpose to her life would be to stay in Washington and make a splash on the social scene. She could visualize her husband climbing the ladder of that FBI tree house in the sky, hand over fist, clawing his way through important investigations all the way up into the upper branches above the dark canopy of nobody-hood into the leafy bright sunlight of massive public recognition. Fame. Power. Social invitations. Camelot. And she would be with him all the way, guiding him, coaching him, jerking him out of bad moods, diligently working, patiently sacrificing, to keep his career on track holding his arm as they entered the White House dining room, kibitzing with hawk-nosed sheiks and pop-eyed movie stars and European aristocrats sagging under the weight of rubies and diamonds and pearls. Oh my! Shaking hands with the President and First Lady any President, any First Lady. But despite her hard work and incessant nagging her husband had not climbed far enough fast enough. So she invested her precious time forging her own inroads into polite society, making the rounds of art gallery fund raisers and trendy affairs. Showing up uninvited in strapless gowns and ingratiating herself with the real people as she called them by means of her charm and enthusiasm and vibrant laughter. Their marriage had the flavor of a sawdust milkshake drunk on a plastic lawn chair by the tool bench in the garage, where the radio seeped Elvis and Dion tunes into an anemic breeze invigorated only by occasional whiffs of open gas cans and oil-drenched rags which was
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Youre a guy who thinks we live in a democracy despite all evidence to the contrary. Any farmer or sheet metal worker or truck driver can see through that. But you guys at the top, youre so invested in the myth youve actually begun to believe it. And you despise anyone who doesnt believe it. Its worked for you so it should work for everyone. Why shouldnt it work for everyone? For the simple reason that the United States has 4% of the earths population and uses 24% of the earths resources. You guys think we won the Cold War, and that proves we were right, and everyone should live like we do, adopt the American system. But they cant. The earth would have to be six times bigger than it is to support this myth. And thats what it is, a myth. The myth of the American Way. The corporations know that. They huddle under the massive U.S. military umbrella paid for by U.S. taxpayers and use this country as a springboard to launch factories and dig mines all over the planet. Once they wean the whole world off fishing and farming and hook them on the money economy they wont need any of us any more. Sounds bleak, said Shoebridge, but the bleakness he referred to had nothing to do with the earth growing six times larger to support the American Way. The bleakness that was preying on his mind was his own personal bleakness, an upwelling of inexplicable psychic grief which had first invaded his person just after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination long, long ago; and for some perverse reason, the drugged mans insane rantings were tapping the underground source of this grief and freeing it to percolate back up into his memory. The King assassination had been the Fort Sumter of his life an outbreak of civil war inside his head which had never really stopped and where neither side had ever surrendered. Everything he had been doing for almost 30 years came to an end with that rifle shot, and nothing had ever been the same since. Up to that point he had been a bright, handsome, ambitious, young FBI agent with a beautiful supportive wife and a spectacular career ahead of him. With the King assassination something came unscrewed. Something diabolical leaked into his mind and body. A demon almost, though he certainly didnt
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authored by Rich Monk would flood the campuses and government offices and hippie hangouts in the community Shoebridge had just left! His colleagues laughed behind his back. It made him look like an incompetent ass. A week after Shoebridge left Boston in disgust, having unearthed no important leads in an incident involving a 200 pound hog that had been handcuffed to the bumper of a police car while he was sleuthing his way through counter culture juice bars in San Francisco trying to assimilate an accurate description of the person or persons who had loosed a half dozen panicked, defecating turkeys through a broken window at the Oakland Induction Center Rich Monk popped up at a Cambridge/Boston rally, dressed as Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat and full beard handing out anti-war flyers and inciting young men to burn their draft cards and report to the American Friends Service Committee to get help applying for reclassification as conscientious objectors. Preposterous! Shoebridge flew to Boston and the following day Rich Monk materialized on the streets of Berkeley dressed as Porky Pig holding a press conference with the Underground media to announce that any soldiers wishing to desert from the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines could get a change of clothes and some new I.D.s at the Diggers Free Store. Was this guy following him around or what? As soon as he left somewhere, Rich Monk showed up. It was maddening. His career advancement at the Bureau was in limbo. They couldnt afford to promote such an obvious bungler. And sooner or later the media would get wind of this. Meanwhile, his wife was stuck somewhere between wanting a new Mercedes and wanting a divorce. Cedric Shoebridge decided to play offense, throw the ball, blast off a Hail Mary. In desperation he put out the press release stating that Rich Monk had been apprehended hiding behind some cows and, in doing so, he multiplied his problem by exactly fourteen times. Then came the bogus death report from the Mexican brothel which was the last time Shoebridge tried to pretend the problem into extinction. There was no pretending. There was no going away.
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two of you dress up as beatniks and go to a coffee shop, and one of you says to the other, Did you hear that story about the guy who delivered a pizza to the White House with Stop the War written across the top with slices of pepperoni? And then the other guy says, Yeah, but that cant be true. Its just a story. Then you both shut up and listen and wait for someone to come forward and say, Oh yeah, I know its true because a friend of mine told me that a friend of his knew the guy who was there when they decided to go for it. But you two refuse to believe him and let him keep talking and reveal his sources while hes trying to prove to you hes right and he knows what hes talking about. Then you call me. Got it? They got it all right. Everyone wanted to volunteer for Shoebridges detail because they got paid to hang out in trendy nightclubs wearing hip clothes chatting up girls at government expense. He had the most popular field operation in the Bureau. And of course, no one actually wanted to find out anything about Rich Monk because that might bring the operation to an end. So Cedric Shoebridge sat on a plastic lawn chair in his garage by a paint-splattered phone that never rang, while his operatives partied it up from Jacksonville to Seattle, Minneapolis to Austin. When J. Edgar saw the expense figures he broke a chair with his bare hands. Roy Cohn wanted to dump Shoebridge in the Potomac handcuffed to a concrete block. He already had the handcuffs and the block, he said locked in the trunk of his car. But in the end they took pity on his pathetic plight just another burned out G-man overcome by the pressures of their holy mission to keep America free from communist tyranny. They sent him to Paris for a long long vacation. His only orders were to forget about Rich Monk. Forget he had ever heard the name Rich Monk. It was all a mistake. A moment of bureaucratic untidiness that had all come right under further scrutiny. There was no Rich Monk. There had never been a Rich Monk. It was over. So Shoebridge flew to Paris and spent his time wandering from bistro to bistro throughout the Left Bank and Pigalle, buying a drink for anyone who would listen and belaboring
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patron saint of Intuition. The Catholics had so many saints they must have one for that! Right? So he lit a candle to the Saint of Intuition whomever that might be. Math and logic had never been his strong suits. Plus, he was not convinced that women, as women, had ever cornered the market on intuition. He just figured most men didnt try hard enough. How did race car drivers steer, or bookies set odds, or stockbrokers make insane profits, if not through intuition? Where did Bach or Monet or Shakespeare pull their inspiration if not from some rarefied, intangible zone which might compellingly be described as Intuition a vague sort of knowing about what touches other peoples souls? The trick, it seemed, was to empty your mind of the chain reaction of daily details that poisoned your brain. The Catholics must have a saint assigned to that. They must. They had a patron saint for bikers, and winos, and depressed animals. Surely they must have one in charge of vacuuming up logical tedium and rational dead ends. Anyway, it was worth a try. He breathed softly on his candle in its little glass cup. It seemed happy. In fact the whole Cathedral seemed happy, in a Timeless kind of way. Lots of prayers had gone up here and, no doubt, lots of them had been answered. He dropped a franc in the collection box and strode out the huge wooden cathedral door, resolved to submerge himself even deeper in wino culture. He slept on park benches, fought with squirrels over spilled popcorn, his eyes turned soft and rheumy, he coughed a lot. Everything that he was trained to be leeched out of his body and spirit. He became what his wife had most feared: a degraded, defeated, embarrassing, smelly, failure. Gone the G-man who would dine at the White House. Enter the vanquished, unredeemable loser. He only saw the drugged man once, sweeping by in a clot of dour-looking, long-haired revolutionaries as he sat with his wino buddies on a bridge to the Ile de Cit dangling his legs over the Seine listening to stories about the heroics of the French Resistance during The War. At the time Shoebridge couldnt even tell if the guy was an American, but years later he was able to pick that face out of a dozen photos of American draft
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Chapter Four
WHILE SCIENCE WAS TRAINING its ant-hose on Instinct, Doctor Odysseus Tyme was battling for his life in divorce court in Broward County Florida. Years later, as he stood on the gangplank watching shark fins slice through the wave tops, he would recall this sad adventure in American jurisprudence. But his only goal at the moment had been to emerge from this judicial black hole with a change of underwear and one shoe. It gave a whole new meaning to the word entropy. Sure, everything was always falling apart. But this was falling apart at a rate that made nuclear fission seem like alka seltzer in engine oil. Things that had taken decades to build up were unraveled in milliseconds inside the brain of a judge who was late for a golf appointment. It was an energy loss that rivaled the sack of Kuwait. How had it come to this? He had met Leslie in his last year of medical school. She was irresistible and opinionated and soon had him feeling like
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he couldnt put his pants on right without her. She was a cornucopia of information and advice. Something snatched his brain. Something non-physical. Something ethereal. Somethingvampiric. Everything he thought he knew about life was washed away in an ebb tide of unnamed emotions. Before long he was wondering how he had managed to survive this long without her. It was beyond eerie. It was love. But it was something else too. The more he loved her and he DID love her the more his brain slipped away from him. The more dissociated he became from himself! Soon enough forked-tongued Marriage slithered out of the mental muck dripping erotic juices, gloating with feminine certainty, oozing evolutionary inevitability as if he had no choice in the matter! He didnt. Most cultures recognize the passionate emotional attachments that spring up between men and women, but only western culture considers these the basis of a marriage. We had become a culture obsessed with feelings rather than sacred virtues. Results rather than visions. Everyone was worried about self-esteem. No one paid attention to the time-tested virtue of egoelimination propounded by human visionaries for tens of thousands of years. Happiness was deemed the foundation of a good marriage. Material success the proof of Gods blessing. Years later people blamed it on corn. But the actual problem started about 20 billion years earlier. To his credit Odysseus didnt learn much of anything in medical school. He finally finished his residency, and that made Leslie happy. Very happy. She cheerfully threw herself into what she called her family obligation of finding him a highpaying job. But, as the plum assignments passed him by with little more than a snicker at his lackluster performance records, she succumbed to the grouchy middle ground of her personality. According to her she had married a shell of man. A human sponge who soaked up everything she gave him and offered nothing in return. He was a clammy monster with five hands who clung to her like a vampire child and consumed her
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His first day on the job Mr. Machetti handed Odysseus 3000 hundred dollar bills to cover the school loans, told him they would track him to the ends of the earth if he ever tried to quit, and then left him pretty much alone. The money disappeared into Leslies mysterious accounting system, but now she was really happy. And, except for a few hours at night tooling through the parking lot in expensive cars, Odysseus had armloads of free time to play around with the garden hose and grow molds on leftover food in the cellar by the walk-in cooler. He spent some of the happiest days of his life quietly observing the various behaviors of a peculiar fungus he had grown on a hacked-off flounder head. At times it seemed as if the fungi were not only eating the fishs brain but somehow digesting its thoughts as well, though he would have been hard-pressed to write a scientific paper on it. Call it a feeling he had. He also treated the occasional gunshot wound and once even saved Mr. Machettis nephew from certain death. After that they took him along on road trips to Las Vegas and even let him fly the Lear Jet sometimes. Very bird-like. Somehow flying came to him quite naturally. The technology was self-evident to a trained medical mind and the execution very bird-like was what he told Leslie. Of course, his career was a tremendous embarrassment to Leslie. She made up lies to tell her family and friends about the important work her husband was doing some sort of bioelectrical research and forbade him from mentioning gangsters or fungus at the dinner table. But I am doing important researchplusI do save lives! he whined, whenever Leslie launched into her daily tirade about what a worthless, disappointing piece of human garbage he was, who had squandered his entire medical school education on saving mobsters and growing mold. He couldnt seem to make her understand that this was not the kind of a job where one day you just walked up to the boss and said, Gee, its been fun. But my wife wants me to move on to something else now. And then came the kids: Kimberly, Little Kimmie her name pick; and Baby Zeus his name pick. It was the only time he
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was a woman. A higher moral order of human being. A female in a female-friendly world. A walking talking example of moral superiority. And you think corn wasnt evil? Of course, she was lying about all those things, but she was right on target about the main thing. Odysseus was holding out on her. He had given in to everything she claimed she needed to make her happy. Everything she had asked for. But there was one thing her mental radar was incapable of identifying and isolating. There was one thing which perpetually evaded the mind-sweeping net of her cerebral reconnaissance patrols. It was the thing she called his bad gene. Her radar was lit and her cannons were loaded, scouring the terrain of his brain with psychic image sensors, searching for the enemy hunting for the thing that made her so unhappy. But her radar screen didnt ping. He had to be using mental stealth technology the bastard. She wanted ALL of him. But she couldnt locate the bad gene. And if she couldnt find it she couldnt destroy it. And it drove her crazy. Really crazy. Viciously ruthlessly crazy. This 20 billion-year-old phantom, the bad gene, sporadically poked its hairy snout out of the fog banks in Odysseus brain. He thought of it as an ally. He called it the voices. Doctor Odysseus Tyme was one of the very few human beings who didnt need a hand-held decoder-receiver to hear plants talk. The voices arrived in his brain fleetingly, but naturally. Theyd been doing it forever. And now the voices of the fungi he grew in the basement at work were the only things that kept him from roping his leg to a Cadillac bumper and dropping a brick on the gas pedal. But Leslie had a plan. If she couldnt force Odysseus to give up the bad gene the last remaining shred of his non-physical being she would convince the courts to do it for her. Divorce court was a glittering example of what popular mythology had wrought. Here, in direct defiance of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed separation of church and state, holy matrimony had been gradually absorbed into a legal monstrosity known as the marriage contract. Whats more, this marriage contract could be broken, at any time, by either
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wagon to visit the Neo-Neoist commune in Ithaca, New York. It was a hippie-style organic carrot farm situated in a pondstrewn oak forest twenty miles from Cornell University a hotbed of womens rights, animal rights, mineral rights, psychoastrology, and other short term solutions to long term problems. Cornell was a high-voltage transmitter of the buzz words of popular mythology. Here you could find professors who drove Volvos and raised tulips arguing for the minority rights of drug dealers on the south side of Chicago. Here you could find people who believed psychology was a science, but investigation into the properties of non-physical reality was not. On the drive up Apollo confided to his son that he was thinking of quitting his job and going back to school. What are ya gonna study, dad? Im thinking about taking up Womens Studies. Really? Yeah. How come? WellThe employment opportunities are endless. Those people are creating jobs out of thin air. Did you ever know anything women didnt have an opinion about? Anything they didnt think they could do better? Nope. Well there you go. I guess you must be getting tired of dog breath, huh dad? Yeah, Oddy. A couple more years of this and Ill grow a long wet nose and start chasing cars. Oooh. The day Odysseus was born Apollo had bid fond farewell to his post-baccalaureate career as a nomadic minstrel beach bum, and took a job as a canine dentist. It was the kind of thing men did back then to pay the freight for the kids they loved. To men like this the words happiness and career did not appear in the same sentence. Marriage was a sacred duty performed for the sake of the children, not some scheme enacted to make them feel good. The concentrated simplicity of this mindscape was
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What do ya mean dad? What do you hear? Wellbirds. I guess. What else? SheeshI dont know. Apollo Tymes eyes glazed over. He lifted one arm in front of him like a conquistador claiming sovereignty over the entire Pacific Ocean as he announced, No son. Its language. All of this is language. The trees and the birds and the turtles all these creatures are talking to us but we choose not to hear them. The trees rustled at each other and the blackbirds stopped cold. Odysseus got the creepy feeling they were being watched. He always remembered this moment as a moment removed from Time. That was the year psycho-astrology came into vogue on campus; the National Organization of Women completed their infiltration of the Justice Department; and some shifty graduate students who would one day be persecuted for committing psychic violence against brine shrimp spent their summer vacation cavorting in the woods and poking sticks up snakes ani just to see what would happen. But Odysseus never forgot what his dad told him at the pond that day. Somehow, something slid around in the electro-chemical stew between his ears. Some molecules reorganized themselves into novel configurations and began receiving mysterious signals resonating at rare frequencies. Odysseus felt that suddenly he had an answer. A big answer. Now if he could only figure out the question? On the ride home another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Like most kids, Odysseus never got much of a chance to talk to his dad REALLY talk to him. He assumed his old man would always be there and then, one day, suddenly, poof! he was gone. So this parting, offhand, kernel of wisdom, occupied Odysseus thoughts for years to come. Dad, what happens after we die? Good question son. I wish I could answer it. You dont have any idea at all dad?
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acteristics, but try to find the gene for intelligence or intuition and you immediately saw what you were up against. Since no one understood which proteins facilitated the development of intelligence or intuition, no one knew what to look for. So, you say, they could have worked backwards to isolate the proteins that facilitate intelligence or intuition, and then theyd know what genes to look for. Therein was contained the leap of faith pandemic to the Sainthood of Science which made belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shine forth, by comparison, as a self-evident truth. Was it not easier to believe that a man died and came back to life than it was to believe that intelligence and intuition were coded in protein chemistry? What earthly reason would have led us to believe that this was so, except for the fact that the ant-hose of science happened, at the moment, to be pointed in that direction? Science and the media were sprinkling fish food on the water again and Leslie, poor Leslie, was the fish. It wasnt Leslies fault. She lived in a time when people were taught that what was real was what they could see or feel or touch. Amazing. For two million years, until the dawn of the Age of Agriculture, people understood that what was real was what lasted forever or almost forever. And the parts of life that came and went, including our bodies, were merely passing phenomena fleeting manifestations of the eternal real. What was real never died. What was not real did. You dont think corn had an evil agenda? Think again. Corn knew that individual corn plants didnt matter. Only the entire historical worldwide agenda of all corn really mattered. And corn sure wasnt telling the farmers about it. Not on your life. It needed consumers. And it needed slaves. SoLeslie inhabited a civilization devoid of the conceptual equipment required to understand the difference between what was real and what was not. If you couldnt see it on TV it must not exist. Anything else was, Just them Neo-Neoist kooks stirring up trouble again. Psycho-terrorists one and all. Thats why Leslie couldnt identify Odysseus voices. Her culture had failed to supply her with the mental sensors necessary to perceive them. Subtle and goofy as Odysseus voices were,
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just across the border in Costa Rica where he applied for, and was awarded, Psychological Asylum. Odysseus dyed his hair black, assumed the name of Juan Robalo, and spent two years guiding snook fishermen on the rivers and marshes of the soggy Caribbean coast. For practical reasons he pretended to speak no English. His Spanish was faltering, but he got along great with the monkeys and ferns. His natural predisposition for learning plant languages took a quantum leap living in a rainforest, immersed in the ceaseless chatter of mahogany and orchids and Venus fly-traps and the ubiquitous ferns. The ferns liked to play hide-and-seek, which when you think about it since they couldnt go anywhere could get pretty boring. After a few months of humoring them on his offdays, when it was raining too hard to fish, Odysseus finally got it, and the game became anything but boring. The ferns, as it turned out, were playing hide-and-seek in TIME! The ferns would hide, and then one of them would have to guess where the others were, and WHAT they were, in past or future biological incarnations. Astounding! It was New Age psychic past-life drivel rendered in the context of historical, genetic realities. Life on earth had leap-frogged from one form to another and, because of the essential sloppiness of the venture, bits of DNA were strewn all over Time and creation. Ferns contained watermelon DNA. Birds contained dinosaur DNA. Human DNA contained the coding instructions to manufacture the scales for butterfly wings! If a fern mutated into a melon it could generate vines. If a bird grew twenty feet high at the shoulder, its bone structure would adapt to support the weight. If humans suddenly sprouted wing-flaps, the scales to sheath them would emerge automatically. Occams Razor, sciences simple solution, was nowhere to be found in this genetic hodge podge. In medical school Odysseus instructors had categorized the situation as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny two buzz words connected by a verb. But by playing hide-and-seek with the ferns, Odysseus came to appreciate the awesome implications of this popularly ignored reality. Every living thing had a very real biological past88
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they would repair the broken fishing tackle, if he would give them driving lessons twice a week. Little did he suspect. By the time Mr. Machettis boyz traced him to the snook fishing lodge in Costa Rica, Odysseus had another psychic bullet loaded in the empty chamber between his ears. He had committed himself to the search for the legendary Pacific island of Pulotu. The ferns had told him all about the place. They visited it regularly, they said every hundred thousand years or so. They reckoned it was just a few thousand miles southwest of Costa Rica and they claimed that, on Pulotu, Odysseus would be able to discover the secret of life on earth. And, by the way, armed with that information, the world would become his oyster. He could win back the affection of his kids who had been brainwashed by Leslie to fear and mistrust him. He could raise enough money to pay off his back child support, retrieve his gold-plated basketball sneaker, refund the damage on the downed F-14 the Navy was still really pissed off about that one and even outfit a yacht with Thai dancing girls and sail to Monaco if he wanted. The ferns swooned with superlatives, fluttering their leathery fingers in the air, whenever they spoke about Pulotu. They never called it Pulotu, of course. They called it the Emerald Island. Odysseus deduced the official name by corresponding with libraries in San Francisco and Boston and describing the general parameters of the place. The librarians cheerfully responded to his inquiries by sending him articles and photocopies of the most recent scientific literature on this most exceptional island. Pulotu was its name an ancient name echoing through the centuries like an oral artifact whispering to us from the pre-dawn of human history. That would be about 8000 years, thought Odysseus. No wonder the ferns didnt know what to call it. They probably hadnt been back for a psychic visit in a lot longer than that. PulotuImputed by some to be a remnant of the lost continent of Mu, by others to be the gall stone of Maui, by others still, to be a wart on the behind of the Great Toad of Tonga. But one thing was certain. Poetry had as much to do
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of wave tops that stretched, in every direction, to the horizon. In light of all the scientific conjecture and hypothetical hyperbole, in light of the journal reports and line graphs and columns upon columns of mathematical data, in light of the geological records, the historical detail, the psychic evidence offered by the ferns themselves, it had never once occurred to Odysseus that Pulotu might not, in fact, BE THERE. Yes, folks. Just like instinct and the atom and the gene, civilization was playing one of its none-too-obvious tricks again. Pipe-smoking professors at Harvard and Columbia had acquired tenured sinecures on the basis of their outstanding contributions to a field of inquiry which DID NOT EXIST. The chance that Odysseus was about to get a good nights sleep that would last FOREVER, was increasing astronomically with every twitch of the needle on his gas gauge. The engine sputtered. He dove for his brief case with both hands, throwing aeronautical maps all over the cockpit.
Chapter Five
ON A HILLTOP in the Berkshire Mountains in a room with no windows, one floor above the nurses station in the Mother Nature Day Care Center, 37 teenagers sat at school desks facing a wall-sized video terminal. They were a mixed group: boys and girls; black and white and brown; Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic and African. A history lesson was in progress and images of colonial America flashed across the video screen: clipper ships smashing through heavy seas, fur traders bargaining with indians, oxen plowing fields. In the early 1600s King James chartered the Plymouth Company for the purpose of planting, ruling and governing New England in America, said the video narrator. The voice,
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Several hands shot up. Margaret. Advertising, said a freckle-face with a red ponytail. Very good. Please tell us more, said the mechanical female voice. Its important for our subsidiaries to maintain a constant stream of advertising in media for two, actually three, reasons. One, our benign presence will, by repeated exposure, become a fixture in the national mental landscape. People will see our corporate names and logos everywhere and simply accept that we are solid and reliable. Two, should any news editor contemplate running an investigative report unflattering to our corporate image he may do so only at the risk of losing vast advertising revenues, not just from one of our subsidiaries, but from all of them. Three, advertising is a tax-deductible expense. So, in lieu of us paying taxes, American taxpayers are subsidizing us to saturate their minds with our products, our point of view our propaganda, if you will. They must want us to do it. Why else would their elected government allow us to skip out on paying taxes and instead, spend the money on advertising? They get free TV. We get uninhibited access to their minds. And how does this affect our competitors? The small businessman or woman? Margarets ponytail twitched with a ripple of eagerness as if she had been anticipating this question. The family farm, family restaurant, family hardware store, are going the way of the buffalo. Since we are drawing revenue from so many different sources we can spend much more on advertising than they can. They cannot compete with our sheer media presence. Plus we deal in volume so we can hire cheap workers part-time, not pay them any healthcare benefits, and undercut the average family farmer or businessman or restauranteur. And how do you feel about this Margaret? The girl compressed her ripe lips, thinking it through, weighing her words. Well, I suppose its sad in a way. No doubt were displacing some lives. But business is tough. It has to be. Were not running a welfare system hereAnd how sorry
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level. Human and elephant or human and dog coordinating as one. The only odd thing about this relationship was that a psychic connection had been manufactured between 37 humans and a teaching machine a machine that was not just spitting out prerecorded data but which actually seemed responsive to the shifting mental associations conjured up by these lively teenagers. Any one of the 37 students, if asked about this phenomenon, would have been confused by the question. How could a circumstance so incidental and commonplace as their relationship with a teaching machine emerge as an item of scrutiny? The mind melding which occurred amongst all of them and their instructor seemed vastly less important than whether they would have to eat broccoli tonight or whether they would be permitted to take the canoes across the lake for a camp out. It would strike them as a dumb question. One that simply would not trigger a blip on the radar screen of their teenage consciousness. Very good Margaret. Can anyone give an example of how we have successfully controlled the media through advertising?.Roberto? The Newshour, said a gold-complexioned boy with black curls tangled below his ears, sporting a numbered soccer jersey. What about The Newshour? When The Newshour ran a segment called Hungry for Profit which presented a wildly critical view of how we develop Third World economies our Gulf-Eastern subsidiary withdrew its sponsorship not just for that segment, but for the entire series of nightly news broadcasts. Our corporate spokesman called the report un-American and said the company would not support a news organization that chose to undermine our national goals of expediting Free Trade and expanding the global economy. Since Gulf-Eastern was one of only two sponsors for the show, The Newshour had to scramble to sign another sponsor in order to stay on the air. The Newshour, in fact, all the major networks, have never again dared to air such a nosy investigative report about our transnational activities. 37 students clapped and cheered.
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Externalize costs, internalize profits, boomed the 37, as if they were shouting their high school fight-song at a pep rally. And how do you feel about these environmental issues Robin? WellIf governments choose to tax us, and if people wish to participate in the economic engines we create for them, they should expect to pay part of the costs of these operations. Its only fair. They cant expect us to give them jobs and cheap consumer goods and tax revenue, and have us pick up the tab for environmental impact too. Whose job is it to clean up the environment? Government! boomed the class. Very good. Anyone else? Political contributions, said a thin-limbed, soft-spoken oriental boy wearing a Beethoven T-shirt. Go ahead Ping. Politicians are our unofficial spokespersons. They have been trained, over centuries, to understand the fact that whats good for corporations is good for America. We must always remember to give equal campaign contributions to both political parties. That way, no matter who gets elected, they owe us. Also, if either party attempts to pass legislation that is harmful to our goals, we will withdraw our contributions. Its a simple safety feature and well worth the expense. Politicians are our cheapest form of social engineering. For a few thousand bucks contributed to their war chests theyll generally vote our way on the House or Senate floor. An advertising campaign can run into the millions. Very true. And how do social issues fit into our political landscape? Not at all. Social issues are a smokescreen to mask economic issues. Politics is all about money and it is only about money. We do not take sides on social issues. Abortion, anti-abortion, it means nothing to us. The only question we want answered is: Who gets the money? Class? Who gets the money! And how do you feel about this arrangement, Ping?
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probably shoot you. They dont want to hear it. Why spoil their dream? Good. And what should we do to preserve our perceptual advantage? Perceptual advantage? said Billy, twisting the wispy threads of his adolescent mustache, clearly not yet jaded by the miracle of puberty. Maybe thats too vague, said the mechanical voice. I guess what Im trying to ask is: how do we keep them confused? How do we keep them asking the wrong questions and throwing their spears in the wrong direction?How bout your sister? A shy girl built like a sapling with wispy curls swirling across her forehead like golden leaf clusters spoke up. Well, the general population looks to the entertainment industry, rather than genuine political reform, for relief from its ennui. Entertainment is the opiate of the masses. They all idolize fame. They want to believe that movie stars and super models are really normal people, just like them instead of the greedy, ambitious, egodriven freaks they have to become in order to succeed in those professions. Another fantastic American mythAnyway, the entertainment industry has been one of our greatest allies. When people stopped believing in church they started believing in Hollywood. Its fine. It works. Theyre happy with their on screen and off screen fantasies. Plus it costs a lot of money to make a film. Its a rich persons game. And rich people dont advocate revolution or any other kind of social change that might cost them money or redistribute income more equitably. Yes, everything youre saying is true and important. Entertainment is a massive diversion from reality. Books and films that are critical of the excesses of capitalism rarely get published or produced, and never get promoted or distributed. We control the media and distribution systems. Thanks to Hollywood the average American peon believes he lives in a free country without realizing youre only free in America if youve got moneyBut Im trying to get at something else hereLet me approach this from a different angle. Its really much simpler than youre making it. Who is our enemy? Government.
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improvement seminar saleswoman. Class! What do we want to know? Who gets the money? When everyone is free Rich people and corporations are more free. When everyone is equal Rich people and corporations are more equal. Why? Because we have the money to educate our children and finance our ventures and squeeze out our competitors. Free Trade? Free Trade means the freedom for rich people and corporations to operate unrestricted by government anywhere on the planet, with no commitment to uphold minimum wages, environmental or safety standards. Government? Government is the enemy! Democracy? Democracy is for dreamers! The machine voice purred with feminine approval. Class dismissed.
Chapter Six
meanwhilein a parallel universeback in Chicago CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI stood in the sunlight with one foot propped on the window sill cleaning his .44 Magnum placing the oiled parts on the cover of a TIME magazine that Ramon had just lifted from the barber shop downstairs. Cha Cha was humming a Polka melody his grandma had taught him buh BAH, buh BAH, buh BAH BAH an ancient song from the steppes of Europe, about a little girl who had lost her geese in the woods and was afraid to come home and afraid not to.
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Avenue and the Magnificent Mile: Saks, Bonwit Teller, the Drake Hotel. You could wander a few blocks south to the swank nightclubs of Rush Street or stroll north into the trendy folkculture of Wells Street and the Second City. And right in the middle of it all you had an infestation of glass and steel termite mounds landscaped with wall-to-wall cement that comprised the worlds premiere housing project. Carrini Green. A donut that was all hole. A pyramid made of feathers. A platter of scrambled statistics served up by some University of Chicago sociologists who convinced the world they had created the answer to affordable housing. And while they drank tea and read books, comfortably retired on the pensions awarded for their magnificent contributions to human knowledge, armed robbers prowled the stair wells of their creation by day, while uniformed cops cowered in the entrance foyers at street level talking about where they were going to get drunk when they got off work. Cotton-haired grannies no longer flew their wet laundry out the windows because their clothes would be blown full of bullet holes during gangland target practice. Repairmen from the phone company would only enter the building in pairs one outfitted with his tool belt bulging with pliers and screwdrivers; the other covering him with a machine gun. A couple shots ricocheted off the walls of the adjoining building and Cha Cha craned his neck to see where they came from. Far below him a husky black mama hen in a billowy trench coat fluttered in circles, flapping her arms, shooing the pre-schoolers back into the basement. The kids, accustomed to hearing gunshots, grumbled about having recess cut short. Cha Cha saw a limousine pull up to the curb seven stories below. He thumped Ramons boot with his knuckle. Thats them. They here. Ramon dropped the gold-plated basketball sneaker, bolted to the window, and looked down at the black stretch Lincoln. Out of state plates, he said as Cha Cha jammed the parts of his gun together. Vamanos, said Cha Cha, watching Ramon check the clip on his .22 pistol. And dont do anything nervy with that gun.
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Or Dance of Death? Same thing, said Cha Cha as he glanced over the back seat at the blue car following them. One thing is for sure hombre. We aint letting you guys deal Boot in our neighborhood. We got enough problems already. The Jamaican shook his head and laughed. You punks from Chicago are really something. Time was, you had the most corrupt judges and the least corrupt gangs anywhere in the country. And now? Everyone else is going crazy over the Boot. Cant get enough. And you dont wanna do business? Nope. You get 25%. Dont care about the money. You dont care about the money? Nope. I seeWell maybe youll care about thisJust suppose somebody pockets a cop. And this cop gets the bright inspiration to clean you and the rest of the Young Lords off the streets. Then you know what happens? Yeah. What? You guys outta Miami sashay into our neighborhoods with no resistance and make things worse than they are. Smart boy. Cha Cha lowered his drink between his legs and stared at the fizz. So you want to deal? How bout 30%? No deal. The Reaper blew a razzberry through his lips. What I dont get if you didnt want to deal why did you want to meet me?You know the rules. You seen my face. Nobody sees my face. I never wanted to meet you. I wanted to meet the bent cops you got following us in the blue car. Cha Cha threw his coke in the Reapers eyes. Ramon kicked open the limo door. The startled chauffeur jammed his brakes and the boys hit the pavement. They slithered behind some parked
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Chapter Seven
THE REST OF THE world knows about this scam, continued the drugged man, but they also know something else. They sit back on their little tropical island and one day a U.S. aircraft carrier pulls into port. Its enormous, its a floating island, theyve never seen another man-made object that big. Or theyre sitting around eating goat meat in their dusty desert town when one of the F-14s from that carrier, parked 200 miles away, flies overhead breaking the sky open with a sonic boom, scattering their sheep and chickens. They know they cant fight this. They want to be on the same side as this global military presence that could squash them like a bug So they make a deal with us. Theyll sell our corporations tin or copper or oil at a pitifully low price, but only if our
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government agrees to defend this small nation from incursions by its neighbors or its revolutionaries. Our government brings stability to the region U.S. soldiers will sacrifice their lives if duty requires it so that our corporations can come in and cart off minerals and oil at slave labor rates, then turn around and sell them to us as washing machines and gasoline. We pay, with our lives and with a lifetime of labor, to be brainwashed into buying all this garbage. This we call capitalism. This we call Free Trade. Its a joke. Its not capitalism. Its not a free market. Its capitalism with cannons. Free Trade thats only free if youre rich. And we wonder why large portions of the earths population are suspicious of us, or outright hate us, or want to bomb our embassies or terrorize Washington and New York. Were dupes. Patsies. What comes out of our mouths about freedom and democracy has nothing to do with how our corporations exploit people and resources abroad. Theyre an embarrassment to American ideals. An outrageLet the corporations pay the military costs of defending their foreign interests. That removes the blame from we, the people, and forces them to pay the true costs of their profits. Its the old corporate scam, externalize costs, internalize profits. Were not out there defending freedom and democracy. Were out there subjugating foreign populations into working for our corporations. Whats the point? said Shoebridge, foamy white hairs oozing out of his nose as if his brain was dripping, rocking back and forth in his chair like an imbecile, suppressing the urge to jam his toes in his mouth. His ears, thank God, were filtering out this anarchist drivel, but that just left him wondering why this interrogation was going so poorly. Most of the suspects he had questioned under truth serum were at least guilty of something. He was sure that was true in this case too everyone who breathed air was guilty of something. But the drugged man simply didnt seem to feel guilty about anything. Certainly he was holding something back, but whatever it was he did not feel guilty enough about it that he needed to blurt it out to unburden his soul otherwise the serum would be doing its job. Very strange. There was something very very wrong here.
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The drugged man sighed and clamped his mouth shut. Wheres the file. What file? Dont be an ass. We know you took it. We got you on tape. The file is none of your business. At this point in my life the file is all of my business. Where is it? Mad buffaloes couldnt drag it out of me. Oh yeah. Well maybe some of the good doctors magic serum will. Shoebridge arched his eyes at the doctor, a signal to prepare another dose. It was time to get this nerd back on track. As the cold liquid trickled into his veins the drugged man drifted away, back to his island refuge, his South Sea sanctuary, his Third World time warp. If only he had never left. If only he had stayed in hiding. He could still be there in his little thatch hut, wading the reef at low tide, casting for barracuda and trevally and the occasional grouper. Cooking his meals over a wood fire as the tropical sunset torched the sky above the turquoise lagoon in a blaze of purple and yellow and pink. As far away as he could get from this madness. As far away as he could get. But he had come back. Because he had to find out. He couldnt live with himself any longer without knowing. He had tried that for more than a decade now and the cloying uncertainty wouldnt leave him alone. At first he had tried to reason with Madeleine, plead with her, but she dismissed him like a dog. Go drown yourself in jello, were her exact words. Youll never find out from me. Then she threatened to call the cops if he didnt leave. So he phoned his old friend Jerry from the underground days, the anti-war days, the draft dodging days. Jerry was happy to hear from his old compatriot and amazed to find out he had never surrendered and never been caught. Jerry had turned himself in long ago and done one years volunteer service as a conscientious objector, changing bedpans in the psycho ward of a state run mental hospital an unsavory job with the
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And these geeks Shoebridge and his doctor werent going to get the file back either. Not until they confirmed what he needed to know. He couldnt he wouldnt pass the rest of his life so callously ignored. As if fathers didnt matter at all. Not one bit at all. Wheres the file? said Shoebridge. Do you like fishing? I hate fishing. Thats funny. You seem to spend so much time doing it. I want to talk about the file. Youre fishing for the file. OK. Fine. Im fishing for the file. But youre not using the right bait. Whats the right bait? Despite his woozy, fragmented mindscape where memory particles floated around him like a snowstorm of chicken feathers, tickling his neck, blowing up his nose, spontaneously bursting into nostril-puckering, burnt-feather flames whenever his concentration lingered too long, the drugged man had Shoebridge hooked again. He was getting the hang of it. Just keep talking about other things. Anything. But keep tension on the line. Keep the rod tip high and dont worry about all the feathers. Bring him alongside the boat just like any other barracuda. Easy now, you toothy devil. Slow and easy. To catch a fish you have to think like a fish. So I should try thinking like you. No. You should try thinking like Rich Monk. Yeah? Tell me about itMister Monk. You cant imagine how wrong you are. You keep talking about an individual. A person. I keep talking about an idea. Whats your problem? Why cant you get it? I can arrest a person, I cant arrest an idea. Damn. Shoebridge pinched his tongue with his broken pencil then threw it on the desk. He was exhausted. The interview was not going well. He had nothing to show his employers. Plus that statement was just plain false. He could no longer arrest anyone apart from the fuss and bother of a citizens arrest. Cedric Shoebridge no longer worked for the FBI.
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they worked for. Who would have thought one entity could own trucking companies and mines and mills and hotels and restaurants and banks and insurance companies and TV stations and farms and defense plants and chemical factories, and even a day care center? Anti-trust legislation was severely crippled in trying to prevent one company from dominating one industry, but it had no capacity at all to prevent one company from dominating a hundred linked industries using the profits from one sector to squash the competition in another. How could this be? For the simple reason that the details of ownership of these subsidiaries within subsidiaries were such a goulash of holding companies and foreign accounts that no mere human could ever unravel the intricacies and discover the truth. No one except Rich Monk. When anyone in the western world sat down to breakfast they drank coffee that came through the Mega National distribution system, they sat on a chair that was produced from its woods and metals, they ate cereal and fruit that came from its agri-holdings, they listened to radio or TV, or read a newspaper that it owned; they drove to work in a car fabricated from its minerals and plastics, which car was financed through its banks. Even its payroll checks were printed on its own paper. Mega National was the living incarnation of transnational feudalism, a global plantation system it lent you the money to buy its stuff, as long as you went to work on its plantation. Years ago a rumor had surfaced about an international conspiracy of men who got together periodically to decide the direction of the world economy the Illuminati, they were called. Mega National loved the rumor and did everything possible encourage it, for the fact was that no group of men, anywhere on earth, was even remotely aware of what this company was up to and thats how it liked it. No Chief Executive Officer could be fired, no Chairman of the Board could be eliminated, whose departure would have any effect on the global corporate agenda. Human individuals worked for Mega National, but they were as replaceable as car parts. No single one of them was of any particular importance. This obvious absence of human control would make for a lousy Hollywood movie one where
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could he be so easily misled? Was he just a jerk? Or was there something else pulling his consciousness around? Something he refused to admit or something he was utterly unaware of? Very curious. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in the wormriddled compost heap of Cedric Shoebridges military/corporate brain there was still some atom of humanness left. Hitler was a vegetarian who liked puppies. Maybe Shoebridge had a hair of compassion or a freckle of intellect or something human buried in that bullet head. Or maybe it was something else? Something even the drugged man had trouble capturing in his conceptual butterfly net. Something that resisted analysis. Something a bit more eerie and mysterious than even he, a veteran fringe dweller on the frontiers outside civilized society, could imagine. I want to know about the file. Thats none of your business. I want to talk about the corporate take-over of America. Frontal assault. Military structure is like water Sun Tzu. Keep flowing. Keep gushing. The best battle is the one that is never fought. His only enemy was fear. If he succumbed to fear he might blurt something out. As long as he held his fear, hooded on his forearm like a nervous falcon, he was unlikely to say anything damaging. Torture was one of their options, but they wouldnt kill him at least not until he told them what they wanted to know. And he wouldnt do that. Four out of five major U.S. film and music and publishing companies are foreign owned. Shoebridge grunted at his notepad and started drawing Porky Pig again. Our biggest commercial seed companies backbone of our exports are foreign owned. Hotel chains, hardware stores, real estate, supermarkets and food distributors are foreign owned. Our national debt is financed by foreigners. Ronald Reagan destroyed this country. We went from the worlds largest creditor nation to the worlds largest debtor nation on his watch during peace time no less an economic holocaust that has never been rivaled in human history. Three cheers for Reagan! In order to support the collapsed dollar his administration engineered by running up massive military debt we had to start selling out to foreigners. East and West Coast investment bankers got rich
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about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee and Richard Nixon would be home free. But if there ever was any blowback the Bureau could always claim they had put their best man on the case. Cedric Shoebridge performed the assignment up to his usual standards. After two years no one could make heads or tails of the case. From that time on, whenever the FBI needed to be seen actively pursuing a lead but never getting any results, they put Shoebridge in charge. It was a cinch. A sinecure. A job for life or as long as he wanted to hold it. He drove reporters crazy. The man was a genius at producing a flurry of activity and never finding out anything. The press nicknamed him Stonewall Shoebridge. And the most critical element to his success was that he was completely honest. He did not lie. He did not deceive anyone. He really meant it when he told reporters it was just as maddening to him as to them that he hadnt nabbed anyone or discovered anything important. After months of this numbing run-around they sneered at each other and finally did what reporters do. They snapped shut their notebooks, unplugged their cameras, and invited him to come get drunk with them at some D.C. hotspots. He was happy to accept their invitation. It had to be more fun than going back to the garage. The covert plan, of course, was to get him inebriated past the point of temporary insanity in the hopes he would reveal something: some clue, some detail, some possible avenue of inquiry. But it didnt work. It couldnt work. Not on Stonewall. Like most bureaucrats and corporate vice presidents he had been promoted to the level of his incompetence. Slurring his speech, spilling bourbon on his tie, hallucinating that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was sitting there at the table with them, he remained as impenetrable as, wella stone wall. And then came Deep Throat and blew the whole thing out of the water. Nixon was livid. The Bureau was furious. They pilloried Shoebridge for not detecting the informer from somewhere within his own ranks. But who would that be? His cat? Shoebridge was adamant that the informer had materialized
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basis all over the globe. Its schizophrenia. And the scary thing is, people in foreign countries are not able to distinguish American people from American corporations. They see us as hitching a ride on the coattails of our transnationals. So they hate us both. Thats why they want to bomb us. So what would you do about it smart guy? Let him rant a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer. Then yank the noose. Ahyou finally asked. Thats good of you. First pass a law that corporations will no longer be legally regarded as persons. They must be identified for what they are economic nations operating within our sovereign borders. Second, pass a law that money spent advocating one side of a political issue must be met with matching funds to advocate the other side. That way corporations cant just buy public opinion. Third, demand that corporations pay the entire costs of their operations: worker education, infrastructure, pollution the works. OK. OK. I get it. Very good. Now I understand everything. Im glad you made this all completely clearNow what happened in Washington? The drugged mans mental wheels fish-tailed off the highway inside his head. The roadway blurred. There were chicken feathers everywhere. He jerked the steering hard. Dont you want to hear about London? Thats where I went after Paris. We know about London. You and your band of crazies took over David Frosts TV Show and started spouting revolutionary drivel. Thats not all. What happened in Washington? It was an ambush. His mind was moving too slowly behind the drugs. He refused to be pushed onto Washington yet, with no time to think. So, after I left Paris, I was living in an abandoned warehouse in Covent Garden in London, stealing carrots from the vegetable market to survive. Then I got a job in a strip club. I dont care about the strip club. I care about Washington. I wasnt a stripper, of course. Just a ticket taker. I sat on a chair at the theater entrance, tore tickets in half, watched girls taking off their clothes all day, and got paid for it. Good jobI
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style hallucinations as if they were lost chapters from the Book of Revelations, advocating anarchy, printed on day-glo flyers. You drove a cab. Yeah, had to pay the rent. And you never saw these? Nope. Ive saved this flyer for a long time. Good for you. Know where I got it? Pulled it out of your ass. Actually, I pulled it out of your assSnatched it from under the drivers seat of the very cab assigned to you. (Sheesh.)
Chapter Eight
PIGS, PIGS, EVERYWHERE PIGS. Limping across the crushed coral paths that creased the guava patches on the slope to the lagoon. Grunting with menace at passersby as they wallowed in the cool earth under dark green hibiscus bushes. Scratching their bristly behinds on the slender foundation poles that elevated the tin-roofed shacks above the muck and the centipedes shaking the walls and waking the people asleep on the floors inside. The island of Vavoo was peopled with pigs. Heavy-jowled sows snored in the shade under vine-wrapped porches, dreaming about appearing on TV game shows and winning a three-hour romp in the supermarket of their choice aisles upon aisles of white bread and popsicles and kosher beef hot dogs. Teenage delinquents tore up the sweet dirt around banana trees, grunting some L.A. street rap they picked up off the radio. Surly boars flashed curved tusks at their rivals hump-shouldered, stiff-legged, hackles raised like porcupines
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would have been, according to the map, IF IT HAD BEEN THERE! He broke both wheel struts, bent the prop into a beanie, and splattered the windshield with red dirt and watermelon pulp. But aside from that the plane was OK and so was he. Sione and Latu the Giant pulled him from the cockpit. They immediately confiscated all his pens and pencils for official reasons they said and formally welcomed him to the island of Vavoo, which they referred to as the Peoples Republic of Honest Men. They promptly located an abandoned house for him to live in, and then applied themselves to the task of ordering replacement parts for the Piper Cub from a warehouse in Los Angeles. Since the King of the Peoples Republic of Honest Men had banned the use of paper and pencils, the ordering procedure was a little complicated. First, the islanders built a huge fire and sat around it in absolute silence for two hours. Then, on cue, they began humming a polka. Buh BAH, buh BAH, buh BAH BAH. It was a song about a little girl who had lost her geese in the woods and was afraid to come home and afraid not to. When everyone got up to leave Odysseus rolled his eyes with disbelief, but Sione assured him they had communicated directly with the warehouse in Los Angeles and that the parts would be arriving on the mail boat, via Auckland and Tongatapu, in approximately six months. Right. Every day, either Sione or Latu the Giant dropped off some fish and yams and told Odysseus stories to cheer him up. He liked the endless fable called Adventures of Pigs on Motorbikes. In these stories the pigs were always telling lies to get other plants or animals to help them, but their manipulations inevitably backfired and they ended up shooting themselves in the hoof. The one about the sea slug who wanted to swim was pretty good kind of like the cow-who-wanted-to-fly sort of thing. But whenever Latu the Giant launched into his florid descriptions of Pulotu Odysseus puffed and groaned.
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Hmm. Do you think a rabbit sees a refrigerator? Huh? Do you think a pigeon sees television? No way. Maybe soBut that still doesnt prove Pulotu is there. Latus eyes bulged like hot red apples. Beads of sweat sizzled and smoked on his cheeks. He whipped his head back and forth like he was shaking off bees, then he ran down the hill, punching his paws at the sky with murderous frustration. Sione just laughed. He wiped some saliva froth off his salt and pepper beard, and checked to be sure his pant cuffs were covering his feet. Sione never, ever, let anyone see his feet. No one had seen his feet in 160 years or more. He spit a yellow goober that splashed down on his bellbottom pants cuff, then leaned closer to Odysseus and said, You palanges think you know everything but let me tell you something. Latu spent a month in San Francisco when he was a merchant seaman. Hes seen some things the rest of us havent. Hes not as dumb as he looks. And Sione laughed again. Then he handed Odysseus a tattered, termite-drilled copy of a Plant Psychology textbook translated from the Russian in 1937. Odysseus started to read. By the time the mail boat arrived with his plane parts he didnt want to leave Vavoo. It wasnt that hed fallen in love with this bizarre Polynesian island, lost somewhere between South America and the South Pacific. No. He wasnt in love with the place. But something profound had happened. Something that would prove to be more crucial to the evolution of human civilization than whatever had happened to Paul Gauguin or Robert Louis Stevenson on their South Seas sojourns. Something astounding. Something for the psychosomatic record books. He would forever remember the day it came to him. The day he met Little Papaya. He was fishing on the edge of the reef at low tide, his weighted nylon line disappearing into the dark blue water. But, like Thomas Alva Edison, Odysseus Tyme fished with no bait and no hook. It was the only way to get the locals to leave him alone long enough so he could think. There is an
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In the past, no matter how useless or inadequate he felt, someone had always been able to invent something for him to do. Take out the garbage. Sew up gangsters. Oil the snook reels. His mind had been a landing strip for other peoples agendas. Wellenough of that! From now on he was going to work for himself. Captain his own ship. Engineer his own train. Cook his own stew. Whatever it meant. Whatever it took. He was a lone seaman, charting a course off the ends of the earth, sails set, rudder firm, plowing through the whitecaps on the fringes of civilization, questing the ultimate Grail Quest. With a gentle twist he reached up and turned off the faucet that was dripping inside his head. Et voila! SilenceAt lastA world of silence. A tremendous peace settled upon him. A balmy respite from the nagging voices of past fiascos. A halcyon haven from the barbed anticipation of future failures. Be here now. Be water. An epiphany. How beautifully beautifully simple. Gone was his fear of the gangsters. Gone the regrets over his failed marriage and the loss of his dads basketball sneaker. Gone the manic intensity that whipped his neurons into dogsled frenzy. Odysseus hung his brain out on the line to dry. He resonated at the metabolic frequency of a carrot. He was in love with life as any old strand of seaweed. A chlorophyll concerto soothed his protoplasm and slowed the whole movie downway, way down. It was like iguana consciousness only better. Be water. Just be water. And then he blew it. Or it blew him. Or something. The most remarkable thing about humans was their incredible capacity for evading Time. They called it entertainment. It had evolved from religious passion plays and hootenannies into a largely electronic technique for obliterating Time. Art was an inspired leap from the submarine trenches of the human soul to the darkest corners of outer space. Entertainment was a diversion, a surface forth, a pageant of shapes and contours and sounds
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discovered, fishing with no hook, on the edge of the reef. Call it the Supreme Consciousness. Call it the Cosmic Balancing Act. Call it The Guy with Big Pants. Call it Water. It didnt matter what Odysseus called it. But it did matter that he remember to throw open the metaphysical faucet in his brain and invite it into his life every single day. From that moment on his psychosomatic operators manual read: Be Water. Flow around boulders that block your path. Leap over waterfalls. Fill the shape of the container youre in. Dont be afraid to assume various external forms confident that youre inner essence remains undiluted. Be fearless. Be water. This precious non-physical thing, this Wet Idea, took its place amongst the voices in Odysseus brain. In some primitive way it seemed to give all the voices a rallying point. From that moment on, the Wet Idea was always a player in Odysseus psychic Super bowl sitting on the bench, as it were, waiting for him to call It into the game. But if he was preoccupied, or neglectful, or just forgot to call on It, months could pass wherein he would writhe in the agony of civilization with no relief from its manic impulses and temporal fantasies. He had been offered a simple psychic remedy. Be Water. All he had to remember to do was to use it. He was still standing at the edge of the reef vibrating with this new revelation, this epiphany, this oneness with the Timeless properties of water, when someone tapped him on the brain. Someone leaped over the wall separating fishermen from the public-at-large. Someone punched a hole in the psychic shield that had protected fishermen since before the discovery of fire. Someone splattered this ancient taboo as if it were just some kind of fruit. That someone was Little Papaya. He heard something. He looked right. He looked left. He couldnt see anyone. Some kind of foamy slime was covering the reef. It could have been yesterday or it could have been 600 million years ago. You should start a vacation resort for house plants, said a palm tree on the shore.
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idea couldnt they? What sentient human being would not wish to treat their dearest living companions to a winter tropical holiday? What man or woman who professed to have feelings would not leap at the opportunity to rescue that potted avocado from the back porch next to the old refrigerator during the ravages of a Chicago winter and, for a few shekels, send this valued companion on a jet flight of trivial duration into a cornucopia of light and heat and moisture? What denizens of Berlin or Hong Kong or New York would not indulge the fantasies of their loyalest charges and steadiest friends? Was this not what the ferns had been hinting at all along? An opportunity to be right with life again? To make up for past disasters? To cultivate the soil of circumstances to provide for a bountiful future? Money galore? Thai dancing girls? Eighty-foot yachts? Why not? Across the road at Siones house three gawky girls screeched and squawked like pelicans at a bait bucket, swinging from the limbs of an orange tree. One of them was this Lesiani, this Little Papaya. How had she conceived this incredible idea? Was it a desperate shot into the night sky an effort to improve her station in life? And if sowhats wrong with that? Sheesh. Look where she lived. Siones house. A rain-stained blob of peeling paint and split boards teetering above the mud on gnawed posts, and capped with a twisted lump of rusting tin. Odysseus sighed. He knew that beyond the house lay the curve of the horizon, where the billowy bed sheets of the sky tucked into the dark blue ocean. Closer in, the rose-fringed reef hugged its flat turquoise lagoon. Nearer still, purple songbirds played hide-and-seek on the yellow-flecked guava slopes. And, in front of him, obscuring his view of everything, sat Siones huge rotten tooth of a house. Sione sleep-walked out of the guava thicket, herding his ducks with a twisted stick, his feet obscured in a melee of flutters and quacks. Most lemon trees walked faster than Sione. As a sword of sunlight slashed through a gap in the rain clouds, heating the metal roof, a soft blanket of mist rose delicately and mysteriously above the huge rotten tooth like a pineapple farting pesticides. The warming tin popped and
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Sione and Latu the Giant stopped by regularly to drop off fish and yams and check his progress. He was a palange. They had no way of judging whether he was crazy or not. Stranger things than this had shown up on the movies they rented from the video store. He seemed to be happy and that was the main thing. The guava pencils were probably a violation of the kings edict, but then again, these burnt sticks were crude enough to allow them room to wiggle if the authorities found out. Plausible deniability the CIA called it. They decided to play dumb and see what would happen. Lesiani, Little Papaya, brought him baskets of fruit and armloads of encouragement. She thought this project was really something and liked to drop casual hints that it was, in fact, her idea. She also warned him to take good care of his feet. Weeks passed. The drawings were reconfigured into cardboard architectural mock-ups of the sprawling facility. They covered his living room floor like a huge toy train set a futuristic village with sidewalks and geodesic domes and miniature fake trees. The local kids jammed the windows of the house, bickering and pushing each other to get a peek inside. The neighbors began to talk. One day Lesiani walked through the kitchen door with a basket of fruit, gasped, and dropped it scattering guavas and papayas all over the floor. I told you to take care of your feet! Its nothing, said Odysseus, blowing off any measure of concern about the white knobs that had begun sprouting around his ankles. How could you do this to me! she fumed. Its nothing. They dont hurt. You fool. She squatted to pick up the fallen fruit, then jerked her head and cocked her ears at a faint reverberation of clattering and pinging noises which steadily grew louder and louder and LOUDER. Oh no, said Lesiani. Suddenly, a gang of Pigs on Motorbikes sputtered up to the front porch wearing bandoleers and swinging chains. Lesiani screamed and fled out the kitchen door. The sneering hogs
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Chapter Nine
NOTHING SCARES GOVERNMENT or industry as much as someone like a Deep Throat. Some self-serving bozo, an informant, an insider, who can take down a presidency by dispersing minute doses of truth. Suspicion begets suspicion, espionage begets espionage, and the cycle is often revved up by a carnival freak such as Gordon Liddy a cop with a big head a cop gone bad. Human viruses like Gordon Liddy are not born, they are made, by a corrupt system that needs covert operatives to dig up the smut that is peddled in the back rooms of corporate culture. And these subcutaneous parasites are the corporate pond scum to whom Cedric Shoebridge placed his phone call. Shoebridge had jolted the drugged man with his revelation about the day-glo flyer recovered from under his taxicab seat. It was just a piece of paper, but the spark of terror it ignited in the drugged man was exactly what Shoebridge had been fishing for. He left the interrogation room with Madeleine Naylor yipping at his brain about the goddemmed file hissing, shrieking, shaming him with all the artillery of the slighted, willful woman. Blasting him for being a decrepit fool as he dialed, going on and on about his toe-sucking dementia as he spoke to the men in D.C. Pounding his arm with clenched fists as he reentered the interrogation room. He needed a zinger, a spark, a match head of information lit at just the right moment to convince the drugged man that he
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knew much more than he did. The spooks at the Mega National think tank supplied just the thing. When Shoebridge returned to the interrogation room he could see the new series of drugs had peaked. Whats the connection between Martin Luther King and Deep Throat? What are you talking about? Just answer the question. Maybe you better ask J. Edgar Hoover or Bebe Rebozo. Theyre long gone. We want to know what you know. What, you couldnt get any tapes of J. Edgar and Roy Cohen at any of their lingerie parties? Shoebridge chuckled inside. Thats exactly what Mega National had done. And equipped with this industrial espionage, they had pulled together a preposterous alliance of corporate money, mafia distribution, and FBI non-interference to flood the black ghettos with heroin in the wake of the Civil Rights riots of the sixties. A scripted replay of the British East India corporations Oriental opium trade of a few centuries past. So, the Civil Rights Movement was drowned in a sea of junk all because J. Edgar didnt want anyone to see a drunk Roy Cohn parading around in a pink bra and panties with a peacock feather sticking out his anus. Was Deep Throat a black man? I dont know. Was he a black Republican? I dont know. Was he a man who was deeply disturbed over the King assassination? Yes. No. I dont know. Now were getting somewhere! What else do you know? Only what it says in the flyer. What, this psychedelic toilet paper? Read it again fool. It virtually predicts the Nixon collapse. Where? Doesnt it say something about The Evil Emperor toasted like croutons in his own lies? NoOh, I see it. Yeah.
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Big difference Shoebridge. Catholics try to be good, but not too good. What does this have to do with Deep Throat. If you ask me, and you certainly seem to be doing just that, Deep Throat had to be a Catholic. Why? Because he wanted to be good, but not too good. He wanted to help out, without being crucified, without taking a fall. Very Catholic. A black Catholic? They exist. Ever heard of Louisiana, or Colombiaor Haiti? Shoebridge scribbled some unintelligible garbage on his pad to create thinking-time. The drugged man felt a tickle inside his skin. It was all smoke and mirrors, of course. The drugs had worn down and he was alert enough to say anything with the slightest ring of plausibility to avoid that hot shot. So youre telling me Deep Throat was a black Catholic cook who was pissed off about the King assassination? Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of knowing. Then the drugged man got an idea. An insidious idea. An idea based on the proposition that the best lie is the one thats almost true. Hed seen Shoebridge playing with his earphone, he knew the room was bugged and that the mirror had to be fake. There was no way he could risk telling Shoebridge the truth in this room. For other ears to hear. But thats not the important part. Then what is? What Im telling you is that maybe, just maybe, Rich Monk was a black Catholic cook who was pissed off about the King assassination. Rich Monk? Think about it. Isnt that what youre here for? Isnt that why Im here? Isnt Rich Monk the one youre after? Deep Throat was just an agent, a vehicle. He was a guy who took a moral stand, but not too much of a moral stand. In fact, he probably had figured out some way to profit from his revelations. Get a promotion or something. There were a hundred guys like
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corporation is not run by a person or group of people. It is run by greed. It is run by profit. Is greed real? Is greed as ubiquitous as gravity? The only reason a corporation will pull back from performing dastardly acts is because it might get bad press and that would lower profits. So it hires teams of ad agencies and lawyers and spin doctors to create its public image in the media, and it shuns any media which is not manufactured by its teamsfollow so far? Im not a jerk. OK. Lets also suppose that somewhere in the human psyche there exists an opposing force. A primal force or awareness that evolved eons ago to combat evil tendencies and selfdestructive impulses. Lets give this force a name. What should we call it? Youre asking me? Yes Shoebridge. Think about it. What should we call it? I dont know. Who are you looking for? Rich Monk. What should we call this counter-corporation? This product of human yearning? I dont know. Who are you looking for? Rich Monk. What should we call this counter-corporation? Get the file!!!! screamed Madeline in Shoebridges ear. Rich Monk? Call it Rich Monk? The drugged man smiled. It was like training a monkey to count, but they definitely had gotten to five. There was cause to be optimistic. Let me ask you another question. Go ahead. What did you think about the King assassination? It was a tragedy. Thats all? Those were volatile times. Did James Earl Ray do it? Well I wasnt working on that case. I had my eyes on Stokley Carmichael at the time. But I have no reason to believe
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the warning was forgotten buried in the marketing blitzkrieg of cars with two-foot tail fins and revved up Commie threats. Flames of fear fanned by corporate/government psychic arsonists who instituted school drills coaching kids how to run home fast and fry in moms arms on the inevitable day when Chicago and New York would blossom into nuclear mushrooms above the elm trees of their sleepy suburban streets. Shoebridge actually thought he did a good job of concealing his disgust over the King matter. He walked away from water cooler gossip on the subject, and brushed off his wifes airy questions, but thats exactly what gave him away. His refusal to engage the topic caused the people around him to suspect he knew more than he was letting on. People began to talk. He was taken off civil rights cases and put onto the growing problem of draft dodgers. Thats how he ran up the exhaust pipes of Rich Monk. And got run off to Paris, and got jerked back to D.C. to head up the Watergate investigation. It could have been a black Catholic cook as much as anyone else. Where were we? asked Shoebridge. Talking about Martin Luther King. Forget about Martin Luther King. I want to know what happened in Washington. You lived with this chick. What was her name? That didnt last long. I ended up driving a cab. What was her name? Christine. Why didnt it last? She was into kinky sex. What? And youre not? Balling two women at once? I have my limits. Oh yeah, where do you draw the line? Whips, leather, degradation. I was never into degradation. At least not too much of it. What constitutes not too much of it? Deep Throat. What are you talking about?
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and mighty and well-connected when they were just chumps, just government go-fers. But I guess the road crew for the Rolling Stones get laid a lot too. I know all about Washington. I want to know about you. I was just a cab driver. Just a cab driver. Once I picked up a black woman. Funny accent. Said she was a cook at one of the mansions of somebody who was a big deal in the government. She was hot about something. Really wound up. Going on and on about how it was finally time to strike a blow for Martin Luther King. She was a little scary overwrought. I tried to calm her down. I asked her: like what kind of blow? She said, wouldnt I like to know? I said, actually, I dont really care. Im just a cab driver trying to pass the time and make conversation and maybe get a bigger tipWalls can talk, she said. Ooh, yes. Walls can talk. Just like hoodoo soup. Walls can talk. Then she started in about how, Were going to bring him down. She had the goods on him because her cousin had found out about the money. Walls can talk? Bring who down? I asked. Wouldnt you like to know? Mon petit. Wouldnt you like to know? Jesus. I felt like I was talking to a psychotic Martian wallpaper hanger. I clammed up. Then what? She got out. Where? Somewhere in Virginia. Let me guess. You never saw here again. Never. But the funny thing is, at the end of the day when I cleaned out the cab I found one of those neon green Rich Monk flyers stuck in the back seat. I bet. Had nothing to do with you. Thats right. So what? Well, it wasnt a busy day. I ruled out everyone besides the Polish shopping bag lady, the Nigerian diplomat and the black cook. Why did you care who left the flyer?
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Chapter Ten
meanwhileback in Chicago
CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI had it made. He was a local hero. He had everything going for him: A Grand Jury indictment. Flesh wounds. Two spectacularly famous defense attorneys. Three internationally acclaimed physicians. A sexy physical therapist. All the willing women he could handle. Roomsful of false friends. A cash conduit that supplied him with bail money and legal fees, plus medical and living expenses. He could have moved to Marina Towers. He stayed at Carrini Green. One month after Ramon was gunned down by the crooked cops and mad for revenge Cha Cha posing as a janitor infiltrated the Babbott Chemical plant, and blew up five tons of Ritalen, an amphetamine that was being fed to millions of school kids on a daily basis. The incident came to be regarded as the spark that ignited World War Three. The cops nabbed him three days later, but in less than a week grassroots supporters had raised five million dollars for his legal defense fund. The battle lines were drawn. Strange alliances had formed in the final days of civilization. Street people and church people faced off against drug lords and landlords. The proponents of non-physical reality
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went head to head with the proponents of physical reality. The dividing issue was drugs. Those who controlled the supply of drugs controlled continents and manipulated the minds of nations. Presidents ate synthetic opium. Governors sustained themselves on antidepressants. Bishops gave sermons high on Zalium. Stock brokers and insurance salesmen tallied higher monthly figures when they ingested mild, mood-elevators to keep their emotions bright and sparkly. Construction workers were more competitive, willing to work harder and longer as long as they could kill the pain with beer at the end of the day. And worst of all were the school children who were being fed speed to calm them down and help them concentrate. These kids were active, passionate boys who were too excited about being alive to enjoy sitting quietly for hours on end learning their multiplication tables. Civilization had become so female it had to drug young male energy. School programs had eliminated recess time because experts had shown it was not cost effective and teachers didnt like it. 85% of teachers were women and they needed all the help they could muster to keep their classrooms under control. So, if the boys wouldnt calm down, the solution was obvious. Feed them drugs. Unbelievably, no one was keeping statistics on how many of these Ritalen kids went on to use crack cocaine another type of speed in adult life. It was inhuman. And very anti-male. A ratio of six boys to every girl participated in the Ritalen program by gulping down pills under the supervision of the school nurse every morning during homeroom. It was one step away from simply castrating boys at birth so they could entirely avoid the trauma of growing up male in a society gone delirious with female-inspired control agendas. 21 million kids, 18 million passionate young boys in a nation of 280 million were kept on drugs, and everyone accepted this as normal. A person who didnt use drugs couldnt hope to compete in the modern marketplace. Their biology would rebel at committing the amount of self-abuse required to become a successful member of society. Someone who didnt use drugs was an outcast, a kook a Neo-Neoist.
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Time folded into Time. Distance eradicated distance. Consciousness begat consciousness. Andwithout fanfare, without protocol, without warning from the abyss of complete surrender an old woman in Chicago broadcast a desperate plea through the vastness of inner space. This frail grandmas silent scream found its way into the eardrums of the Hidden Universe, the Cosmic Fire Station, the Headwaters of Creation. Alarms went off. Burly shoulders and hefty thighs sprang up off the mattress of eternity. The Fireman of Consciousness the Guy with Big Pants the Biggest Cheese of All, slipped on his boots and got ready to go to work. At last. Metaphysical help was on the way. Father Nature was reaching in, from outside of Time, to stay this mad swing of the pendulum of human events. But who would be his agent? Who would be the earthly atom recruited to accomplish His divine agenda? And what peculiarities would this individual contribute to the actual execution of the plan? Nowadays, the chemical plants were too heavily guarded, so Cha Cha and his men concentrated on trucks and trains. They used radio bombs detonated from a chase vehicle operating up to two miles away from the target. Since they didnt know which trucks or boxcars carried psychotropic drugs they just took out anything they could slap a bomb on. Commerce was in a tailspin. America had gone into detox. Production of everything was down. Truck drivers had the highest paying jobs in America. They were playing Russian roulette with eighteen-wheelers. Americans wouldnt take the work so drivers were airlifted in from Asia and South America. One out of fifty was blown to cat food, but the other forty-nine made enough money from just one run to set themselves up for life back in the Third World. The Death Lottery. Retail chains shut down operations, demonstrators marched on Washington, Americans were furious that their steady supply of material objects was being strangled. TV reception was sporadic, it was hard to find a beer, Zalium sold for ten bucks a
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The detective with no eyebrows drove her home and settled her into a wooden railed rocking chair. Grandma started shoving herself back and forth at a furious pace, staring out the window reciting Hail Marys backwards in Polish. This detective was no rookie. Far from it. He was an experienced sleuth on a secret assignment to bird-dog Cha Chas movements and expose his associations. He was a master of deduction. A genius at extrapolation. He was thorough in his work to a point bordering on fanaticism, and he would not have underestimated the awesome significance of reciting a prayer backwards had he known about it. But he didnt know about it because he couldnt understand Polish any better than he could understand Martian. So he backed out the door and left her to her frenzied rocking. When the detective returned the next morning to check on grandma he gasped and pinched his nose. She was sitting in a cloud of smoke generated by the friction from her over-heated rocker rails charring the wood floor. He doused her with a pot of cold water and drove her to the Eden Rest Home. Good orange juice, she mumbled in the direction of three nurses dawdling on a vacant bed. Their ribald reflections on the perfect male posterior ended abruptly, and they hopped to attention, when Cha Cha burst into the room. We havent had good orange juice in this part of the country since that big strike in Gdansk last year, said grandma. Those shopkeepers in Warsaw must be hoarding fruit again. Hi buszia, said Cha Cha, greeting his grandma in Polish. She ignored him. But it was nothing personal. He just hadnt been born yet. One of the nurses leaped forward and dabbed a napkin against some orange juice spittle on grandmas chin. Then she beamed at Cha Cha with apple-bright eyes and plum colored lips. Cha Cha sighed. Where is she now? Somewhere around 1930, said the nurse. The Great Depression just hit and shes upset about some border clash with Australia? Or something? So she hasnt had one clear moment yet?
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Polish folk tales about the supernatural adventures of talking animals and friendly plant spirits to the vanilla and chocolate Puerto Rican street urchins she had taken under her wing. Once, when he asked her if she was his real grandma, she said, Pinch me. See if Im real. Thats not what I mean. Only the Holy Virgin knows the answers to those kinds of mysteries, she said. Then she made the sign of the cross, mumbled something in Polish, and marched through the bedrooms throwing nuts in the corners and smashing them with her feet. What are you doing grandma? Feeding the spirits. Why? Why?So theyll keep the Child Welfare Agency from nosing into things that dont concern them. Like what? Like the missing page in their field manual What page is that buszia? The page on miracles. Some people in the neighborhood said that grandma had only taken the kids in to get the money, and she didnt really care about them. But that sure didnt explain why her mind turned into gravy when Ramon got shot. She had been unwavering in her belief that Ramon would one day become a priest. A very special priest. A revolutionary spiritual avatar on the order of St. Francis of Assisi. She claimed that the Holy Virgin had confided this to her in a dream, and she refused to accept any substitute fantasies. Her grandson the priest. Was that too much to ask for? And thats why Ramons sudden death rocked her to the core of her spiritual beliefs. Had she misinterpreted the Holy Virgins message? Or, God forbid, had she been lied to by the Mother of God? That didnt seem possible for a number of different reasons, but she had to find out for sure. So she started praying Hail Marys backwards in Polish in some inspired attempt to slip backwards in psychic Time, reenter the dream, and re-experience what the Holy Virgin actually said. It was the only thing that made sense to her at the time. Oh well.
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Chapter Eleven
WELL, DID YOU HAVE a black female cook? Cedric Shoebridge rubbed his temples, and groaned inside. What does that have to do with anything? spilled out of his mouth, but the image took him back to a period of time he had done his best to forget. Beatrice, the Haitian maid, the black maid, the Catholic maid, had virtually run the Shoebridge household in the waning years of his marriage. She had done the shopping and cooking, the vacuuming and laundry. She crawled up ladders in summer knocking wasp nests down from the eaves, swearing at the buzzing beasties in French patois.
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She shoveled the driveway in winter, steamy breath huffing from her mouth like exhaust fumes from a snow blower. According to Beatrice, life was a battle against dirt and disorder. She was lean and strong and refused to talk about her homeland, but whenever something really disgusted her she would spit and mutter comme un Duvalier. When his wife kicked Cedric out of the house Beatrice set up a cot for him in the garage and brought him occasional meals of goat stew or English sparrow soup. She caught the sparrows in traps in the back yard, scalded them before plucking them muttering French incantations as their frantic wings beat the boiling water. According to her the sparrows were edible pests, why waste them? Shoebridge ate the soup without complaint, all the while wondering if she would ever adjust to life in America. She seemed almost not to care. She had a cousin who worked as a domestic somewhere in the vicinity and on Sundays Beatrice would don a hat decorated with plastic fruit and take the bus to visit her. One day Beatrice returned from her cousin agitated, spitting, swearing in French and pleading to talk to Cedric. Her cousin had overheard a conversation through the kitchen heating vent while she was stirring some boiled peas in the old mansion where she worked and Beatrice thought the FBI should know about it. It had something to do with an espionage operation which was due to be carried out by some group called The Plumbers and which Beatrice did not entirely understand except to know that the conspirators were behaving like Duvaliers. Shoebridge humored her. He explained that in Washington every leaf on every tree was either Republican or Democrat, there were no third parties, and that the only game in town was doing your utmost to assure that your own party got in office so you could keep your job. Every new president who arrives in Washington announces that his first step will be to cut back on the federal bureaucracy. What he is really saying is that he is going to fire members of the opposition party who have been given patronage jobs so, over time, he can appoint some of his own people to the very same jobs and stack the bureaucratic deck in his favor. Clearly, Beatrice did not understand these
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They didnt want any competition. There were a number of single guys around the place like me. They had us fixing roofs, remodeling bedrooms, painting siding off three-story scaffolds while the women sat around in the office gabbing about psychic healing and inventing things for the men to do. Lots of hippie communes were like that. The men did the heavy labor, the women made the decisions. But I still dont understand why they chased away the young women. Get the file! screeched the earplug. Behind the mirror Madeleine was tearing up the arm rests of her chair. Because they needed the men. They needed male labor. We could do their jobs. They couldnt do our jobs. We could hang out in the office next to the wood stove fielding phone calls and setting up retreat dates. They couldnt climb ladders in the snow to clear clogged chimneys. If we took up with some chippy and wanted her to stick around it would just be an extra mouth to feed. They wanted us to come to them for our comfort, not to some smiley shapely young thing who had just found her way there from Sweden or France. So your sexual adventures tapered off. Hardly. Hardly? Well, if you wanted to get along there you just had to learn to like older women. And did you? I tried. Thats where I met the Little General. Who? Mad Madeleine. Maddy we called her. She was just a few years older than me. Shoebridge, get in here, bellowed the earpiece. Ah yes. He was enjoying this. A little tit for tat. Youve interviewed her too? Weve been in contact. What does she say about me? She says youre a macho pig who should have your intestines ripped out and fed to piranhas. Unquote. Sounds right. What does she do now?
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about it men paid money to get sex and salvation at the same time. It was a heady concept. The woman who gives you sex is also your savior. She puts you in direct contact with the eternal Goddess and her divine realms. She offers you physical and emotional release into a haven of peace and security and freedom from worries. She is Divine Woman. But would modern men be so brain-addled as to fall for this? wondered Maddy. Hadnt men learned anything in 3000 years? Maybe not. It sure didnt seem like it butt-sniffing mutts that they were. It was worth a try. Why not approach a sex-craved guy and seed his brain with the spectacular notion that if he was looking for the complete and total meaning of life and if he wanted to get laid too he need look no further than Madeleine Naylor. It didnt take long for Maddy to effect her first conquest. She managed to convince a biology undergrad from Amherst that near the end of his life Albert Einstein had written an unpublished mathematical proof that God the Father was actually a woman. She enlisted the young man in a ceremony to be held in her apartment. She laid him out naked on the kitchen floor surrounded by candles and incense and made him chant Holy Mother, Holy Mother over and over and over while she pulled a large bowl of cherry jello out of the fridge and dumped the contents on his crotch. Dont stop chanting! she yelled. Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Holy Mother. She massaged his private parts through the mound of red gelatin, smeared him with it from neck to knees, removed her panties and climbed aboard. When it was all over she had to rush the young man to the Emergency Room because she was terrified he had died of religious ecstasy. The Cult of Madeline ignited like a prairie fire on the Amherst Campus. Young men lined up twenty deep to offer themselves body and soul to this religious ritual. Lots of guys in those days were feminists. Lots of guys thought it would be a great idea if women went to work and slapped the rent money down on the kitchen table every once in awhile. But this went beyond feminism. Way beyond feminism. This was an entirely
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Astrology of Self. The Science of Self-Esteem. The Pursuit of Pleasure. Unabashed hedonism. Madeleine, and therefore her followers, were incapable of appreciating the difference between a Mother Teresa and any old organic garden-variety New Age astrologer. Mother Teresa had annihilated her ego and followed a spiritual calling to devote her life working for the poor and at the end of her long journey from Albania to India to the rest of the world all she had to show for it were two cloth saris and a galvanized bucket she used as a sink. Not good enough according to Maddy. Astrologers accepted money to intuit supernatural metaconnections between their clients birth date and the vagaries of the universe, paying special attention to such ego-oriented questions as: Will I marry a millionaire? Will my daughter marry a millionaire? Will my son become a millionaire? Psychic versus spiritual. A simple case of ego versus no ego. An astrologer had told Madeleine that she would raise 37 children, that she would be disfigured in an awful accident, and that her entire life would be a battle against uncertainty. Therefore, the first official act of the Cult of Madeleine was to ban uncertainty. Quantum physicists had proven that the foundation of the physical world is uncertainty. They dubbed it the Uncertainty Principle. No matter. Madeleine and her followers waged all-out war on uncertainty. There was nothing in creation that could not be pinned to a cause. Nothing that could not be understood. Nothing for which Madeleine did not have an answer. If it rained on your birthday you must have mistreated your dog. If there were too many mosquitoes in your backyard the neighbors must be cheating on their taxes. If war broke out in Asia it was because they werent eating enough brown rice. Life was neat and well-defined and everything had an explanation. All except for Rich Monk. Madeleine had moved to the Sufi commune in order to join a milieu where, over time, she could insinuate herself into a position of total control. She knew just how to do it. She organized her cult parties, took on apprentice priestesses, and
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forbid she had so many more important things to do with her time. She had to tame him. She had to seduce him. She decided to go about it the good old-fashioned way. Out came Victorias Secret and Fredericks of Hollywood. Lipstick, eyeliner and perfume. One evening she timed her exit from the shower so she would catch him walking past at the precise moment she launched herself out the bathroom door, materialized like a genie in a puff of steam. The towel clenched around her torso accidentally came undone and fluttered to the floor. She bobbled armloads of cosmetics and shampoos. He picked up the towel and handed it to her. They both laughed. From there it was a short step to sharing a bottle of wine as they sat in the flower garden at dusk, then going to hunt for a seed catalog somewhere in her room. They never found the seed catalog. He was a sport about it. He even started attending the jello ceremonies. She agreed to dress in Victorias Secret and give him oral pleasure three times a week even if she wasnt in the mood for sex as long as he refrained from ridiculing her ideas in public, in front of the other communicants. For him, it was a small price to pay for good sex. For her, it was a small price to pay to regain a crucial charismatic edge which allowed her to reemerge in her full glory as the unquestioned supreme ruler of the commune. Thats when I first found out about MN, said the drugged man. Whos MN? You dont know? You must know. Hmmm, said Shoebridge, momentarily sidetracked. MN? Those initials had come to his attention a long time ago. As the drugged man continued rambling about life on the commune Shoebridge withdrew into a private reverie. He listened, but his mind was on something else. Madeleine Naylor had been employed by MN as a product consultant. MN spent vast sums sponsoring projects within its subsidiaries to create more and more products and services for women, especially working women. Styrofoam fast food containers, pizza cartons, new tampon designs, walking shoes,
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to develop your mental powers so you could visit several places at once without leaving your chair. They had credibility. When the screen tests were completed she had the list down to the black lady and two cheerful bovine blonds all of them extremely pleasant personalities. But did they have psychic abilities? Madeleine contacted some of her old school chums and videotaped live phone calls of how well the psychics responded to real questions from her old friends. The results, of course, were miserable. The psychics were compassionate and giggly and wrong 90% of the time. No matter. They just edited the tape for the 10% of the time they were right and ran an infomercial in test markets in Atlanta and Phoenix. It was an instant hit. The phone rang off the hook. Coins rolled downhill into the MN coffers. Madeleine got promoted to vice president at Isis. She was told the recommendation had come down Right from the top. The top? MN. Whos MN? The big cheese. Wow. The big cheese himself? Thats right honey. Maybe I should send him a bottle of champagne or something to show my appreciation. He doesnt drink. Well, maybe a box of chocolates. Or some specialty cheeses. He wont eat that. Jeez, he sounds like Howard Hughes or something. Wont eat candy? Is he afraid of getting poisoned? I dont think he worries very much about that. Maybe I could buy him a batik bedspread or something. He wont use it, said her boss Ms. Hudson. Rumor has it that he doesnt really sleep. Doesnt sleep? What a weird guy. * * *
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who controlled the spice trade between Venice and Bombay, grabbing Portuguese oriental possessions in a 60 Year War with Spain, and establishing the Dutch East India Company with holdings and trading rights on the west coast of India, Sri Lanka, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, and the Cape of Good Hope. In 1669, at the height of its power, the company had 40 warships, 150 merchant ships and 10,000 soldiers a private army and navy with no allegiance to any one except profit. The Pope wasnt kidding. The first corporation set up shop at Batavia, Java, now known as Jakarta, Indonesia. Its charter was renewed every 20 years, but only if it paid off the Dutch government. Having done so the government authorized the company to acquire territory, create legislation, issue currency, negotiate treaties and operate a court system. It was a science fiction monster a business with the authority to act like a government. It even created an outpost called New Amsterdam in the Americas. So originally MN was Dutch and went by the name of the Dutch East India Company. When Britain overpowered the Dutch traders MN simply changed nationalities and became the British East India Company. The Dutch were out, the Brits were in, and nothing changed. This international octopus of expanding financial interests motivated by profits continued to grow and prosper. The English King gave it a trading monopoly in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It gathered an army of 24,000 soldiers and subdued India for 200 years. It created a presidency, an administrative protocol for presiding over certain districts. China refused to allow this financial monster on its soil except at a select island called Hong Kong. China was 4000 years old. It had seen this warlord thing before. Ohand MN changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York. MN the British East India Company ran roughshod over America, employed slaves and indentured labor, robbing the land of raw materials, shipping them back to the English mills to be processed into clothes and implements, then shipping the manufactured goods back to the Americas. As long as the
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finally did find out the truth she certainly wasnt going to tell the drugged man. It took me almost 20 more years to put it all together, said he.
Chapter Twelve
ODYSSEUS WAS SHAPE-CHANGING. Ebbing and flowing in a spongy frame of mind. Five eyes mounted on stalks projecting from the top of his head surveyed the muddy sea floor. Some stick-figures with seven pairs of legs and seven short tentacles came wandering by and Odysseus sucked them into his mouth with his trunk. Then he was a jellyfish, breathing with his entire body, expanding and contracting in a fluid pulse, a parachute of slimey cells, barely distinct from the water he drifted through. He was a lungfish perched on a rock, gulping air. Then a salmon, snatching squid in his mouth, vaulting waterfalls on his way home from school. Conked out, lying flat on his back amidst the shredded cardboard remains of his model plant resort, Odysseus was wallowing in The Dream again. His subconscious mind had no defense against this periodic onslaught of weird apparitions and frightening transmutations that first visited his brain shortly after his dad awakened him to the voices. The Dream was a mindbody hallucination. A psychosomatic yo-yo. He was a fungus playing footsey with a giant tree fern. A six-horned, saber-tooth cow. A hyena, a tapir, a rhino with a Yshaped horn on his snout. He was a duck-billed elephant, a three-toed horse, a deer with antlers on his nose. He sported huge webbed feet that were slimy and scary, in a froggy kind of way. A chin slung so low it brushed his breastbone and stunk of fish. He was a blade of grass, a diving bird, an ant.
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He spent a million years inside his head examining the footprints of the future. Riding around Saturn in the company of insect astronauts. Playing basketball with some spring-loaded trees. Or drifting in warm currents past armor-plated fish with beaked mouths and cruel grins. He was flexing his purple pointed fingers in the sand again. Warm bubbles tickled his gills. Clearly he was an actor in someone elses movie but whose? An acrobat in someone elses circus but whose? He was swimming away with himself melting in the puddle of his own delusions. Mystery Airlines Flight 505 arriving from Australia, Pangaea, and the Paleozoic Era. Baggage handlers please report to Gate 7. When Odysseus arrived back on his Bicycle Seat in Time Little Papaya was leaning over him wiping blood from his ears. Hes conscious, she said. Siones voice floated through the open doorway, The pigsll be back. We have to get him out of here. Latu the Giant flipped Odysseus over his shoulder like a towel and the four conspirators crept out the kitchen door and dodged into the brush. Sione led the party upland through a mango grove, slipping and sliding on the orange pulp of fallen fruit. Then they entered a conifer forest where the air was cool and still and silent of birdsong. Where are we going? moaned Odysseus. Be quiet, said Lesiani. There are spies everywhere. The higher they climbed the more stunted and misshapen the trees became, until finally the forest gave way entirely to an uninterrupted plain of ferns and lava rock. Sione stumbled a short distance over the jagged rocks and began feeling around in the air like a blind man looking for a light switch. Suddenly he grabbed something in mid-air and yanked down on it. Zeeep! A shimmering image appeared in the air, parting the vista like a rip in a painting. It seemed as if Sione had unzipped part of the horizon and now they were looking THROUGH the landscape into something else.
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papered with aeronautical maps, they knew that someone had sent him. But they didnt know who, and they didnt know why. I still cant figure out if youre one of us, said Sione. Sometimes you act like an animal. Sometimes you act like a plant. Whos us? Planimals, said Lesi. Part plant, part animalI tried to stop it from happening. I warned you. But your bad gene outmaneuvered me again. The bad gene? You know about that? Ever since the ferns told Odysseus that his wife, Leslie, had given his kids up for adoption to distance herself from the bad gene and pursue her career as a lawyer he had wondered if perhaps she had been right all along. There was something different about his kids all right. There was some part of him, that had become part of them, that all Leslies cultural conditioning could not eradicate. Some quirk of personality no more than personality some quirk of being that could not be explained by science. They almost seemed to engage life with four eyes and four ears that is, with some extracurricular quality of perception. Baby Zeus and Kimmie, names changed to Billy and Penny to camouflage their human family roots. What a heartache. Shipped off to some school in the Berkshires. Raised by a revolutionary new teaching system to what purpose and ends he knew not. It was every bit as inscrutable as the public school system. And probably just as soul-destroying. At least the ferns kept him up to date on their lives. But since the ferns didnt actually think hide-and-seek in Time was the summit of their mental achievement he had no idea what ideas his kids were being exposed to. It was maddening. Just like when they were assimilated into first grade and turned into alien creatures right before his eyes. And then there was the thing about bringing over that other palange so Odysseus could translate for the ferns. The one who called himself Rollo Nixon or Gregory Lobotomowski, or something. The one the locals swore turned into an octopus at night. Technically the guy lived in another island nation, but spread out as these Pacific isles were, geographically he was
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He doesnt actually know anything, said Lesi. By this she was alluding to the fact that the rational features of the human brain had short-circuited their biological memories. Humans simply did not remember bio-history. They couldnt recall their biological past lives in any manner apart from fairy tales. Having experienced The Dream, Odysseus was better than most. But by planimal standards he was in psychic kindergarten. All he really knew was that there was a lot more to know. I see, said Sione, his brain waves whirling like helicopter blades. He knew Odysseus chances of escaping from Pulotu unaided were equal to his chances of flying to Saturn by flapping his arms. Odysseus was locked outside of Time. He couldnt do them any damage right here. So Sione took a shot. What do you know about the war? What war? The war between plants and animals, said Latu. The war between female and male, said Lesi. The war between tyranny and anarchy, said Sione. I dont know what youre talking about, said Odysseus. I told you. He doesnt know anything, said Lesi. He doesnt know about trilobites or dinosaurs. He doesnt understand what corn has been up to. Doesnt understand about cows or pigs. He doesnt even know about ants. He doesnt know about ants! said Latu. Unbelievable, said Sione. So they told him all about ants. To any student of bio-history it was obvious that ants were the most sophisticated, highly evolved lifeform on the planet. In the absence of disciplined self-restraint they would have overrun the whole place and created an eco-disaster. But they were too smart for that. They had learned something from the mistakes of the trilobites. As you might suspect, evolution, the great scientific buzz word, actually encompassed a variety of interrelated phenomena. Galaxies, star systems, and volcanoes all evolved. Continents evolved. Mountain ranges, river systems, atmospheres evolved. Gold, carbon, diamonds evolved. And of course,
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And, when the other lifeforms saw what corn had pulled on the maxi-brained humans at everyone elses expense they were certain that humans would soon be joining Giant Ground Sloths on the evolutionary tree. Mass-scale agriculture was a developmental dead end, a biological cul de sac, as clearly earmarked for obsolescence in earth history as dinosaurs and trilobites had been. In addition to overextending the influence of corn and cows, agricultures ultimate accomplishment was the rabid proliferation of machines to replace men in the fields. Humans were consuming so much bio-space they were surely going to toast the planet. In 50,000 years they had expanded from 100,000 people with axes to 6 billion people with thermonuclear devices while undergoing no apparent genetic change. The ants were appalled. True, the biomass of ants greatly exceeded that of humans. But they were getting worried. Theyd been doing the social insect shuffle for 100 million years. Theyd made some mistakes, burned out some terrain, suffered the inevitable tribal extinctions. But their experimentation had progressed organically species by species. Some species failed while others thrived, then those failed, and others thrived. Humans, as a single species, were attempting to dominate the entire globe at once. Nobody had seen anything like it since 95% of the marine invertebrates died off in the Permian Extinction 245 million years ago. Humans had only been on stage for a couple million years or so. They knew all about the Permian Extinction and considered it a terrific game show test question. But they couldnt, for the life of them, figure out how its lesson might apply to them. Humans had a stunning aptitude for learning facts and information of all kinds without being able to decipher meaning in them. There was a major engineering flaw in their brains. A psychosomatic disconnect. Humans preserved, and indeed, exalted, the unnerving ability to churn out facts dissociated from action. They called it education, but thats not what it was. To anyones best estimate it was the exact opposite of education. In the manner of calling an economic oligarchy democracy, or the drive to create
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The human brain was like a huge military airfield built on some speck of an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the slight chance that someday somebody might need to use it for something. It had no immediate evolutionary value. Surely someone was reserving all that brain-space for some reason. Somewhere, in the ether of the Overmind, a sublime design was lacing its shoes and preparing to take a walk into the lives of men. But what was this design? And why was it taking so long? The singular murkiness of the human mind could be traced to a problem with consciousness. Plants and animals could move freely in and out of Time. Ferns could visit their friends on the other side of the Earth by creating a simple warp in psychic space. It was childs play. They taught it to babies. Animals were much more dense, but they could still resonate with like-minds. Geese headed south could link up with their cousins at unspecified locations. For humans that would be akin to a vacationing family ruminating about how they were going to stop for the night at some motel in Iowa and having their cousins show up at the same Motel-8 a few hours after them with no one telling anyone in the other car. Humans did not naturally experience this type of communication. The pertinent portions of their brain had atrophied with disuse. For the most part, they relied on symbols to transcend Time and space. Numbers, words, and pictures could be culturally transmitted from generation to generation. That was fine for passing on information. Virtually useless for passing on meaning. To circumvent the problem of meaning humans invented the buzz word a word that seemed to mean something, but didnt. Perhaps the most famous buzz word was light. Everyone knew what light was. It came from the sun. It made your arm feel warm. You could turn it on or off with the flip of a switch. Then one day physicists took it upon themselves to define light as both a particle and a waveVery comforting until you thought about it. If light is both a particle and a wave, it is neither. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Everyone knew what light was, but
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In truth, humans did most of their thinking without words. They just didnt realize it. Often ideas came to them in a flash, and then they would struggle for hours trying to render them in words or numbers. In blind ignorance humans assumed that because plants and animals didnt use symbols or words to convey ideas, they couldnt think. In fact, all of the bio-kingdom was imprinted with certain story-lines that were as common as fairy tales and nursery rhymes in the human species. Every species understood romance and fear and hunger. Every species understood the mechanics of evolution and the meaning of evolution. Humans alone among species knew nothing about that. Science could not search for meaning and therefore could not render or represent the invisible forces behind creation. Science thought The Guy with Big Pants was a myth because they couldnt measure Him. But precisely because of their sublime ignorance humans had evolved a purpose a purpose they couldnt begin to imagine. Which was just as well. That way the plants couldnt steal it. And then, one fateful day, plants began spilling their guts on talk TV and human philosophers retired from the intellectual forum in order to reinvent themselves outside the glaring lights of profound conceit and humiliating hubris. Humans were specialists. Each one knew a lot about something, but none of them knew how to corral all this knowledge into a comprehensive worldview. Like dinosaurs, they understood they were consuming the resources of the planet at an impossible rate, but they didnt have a clue how to STOP IT! They had accepted the simple premise that the purpose of life was to feel good and soon the only thing they would be feeling was the funnybone of extinction. Large amphibians had to die off to make room for reptiles to emerge. Woodlands had to die off to make room for grasslands to emerge. Dinosaurs had to die off to make room for mammals to emerge. Humans had to die off to make room for WHAT to emerge? The plants had an answer to that: More Plants. The animals had an answer too: More Animals. But these were not the only
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Of course, there were political problems to consider. If the other plants found out about it theyd go berserk. Imagine a plant which didnt have to wait to produce seeds in order to exploit better soil but could just walk over there and take it in five minutes! Imagine an animal which could live directly off rocks and moisture and sunlight. Creatures like that could elbow out the plants, run away from herbivores and starve them to extinction thereby decimating the predators and start a reign of tyranny unequaled since the despotism of trilobites. Whats more, fossilized records demonstrated that the immanent resurgence of the planimal phenomenon was not only possible. It was probable. It had been tried before under the sea by a variety of locomotive plants. The anticipated mass movement onto land was as inevitable as the exodus of frogs onto logs hundreds of millions of years ago. The Myth of Planimals had already sprouted as a fairy tale used to scare youngsters in both the plant and animal kingdoms. If they didnt eat their breakfast the Planimals would come and take them away kind of thing. Pigs and corn took the situation very seriously. As humans had made contingency plans for what to do if a comet hit the earth, so pigs and corn had made plans for what to do if planimals hit the earth. If the pigs had discovered the knobs on Odysseus ankles they would have wrapped him in plastic and incinerated him on the spot so no spores or cells could have escaped into the atmosphere. That was the approved procedure indicated on page seven of their emergency preparedness training manual. If one could talk pig, one knew all about it. So thats why you screamed when you spotted the knobs, said Odysseus. WellIt was thatand something elseYouve done this to me before, said Lesiani Done what? Changed your shape. What are you talking about? Im talking about the bad gene. Thats what. Sheesh. You sound like my ex wife.
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Chapter Thirteen
HOW DID YOU FINALLY put it all together? asked Shoebridge. A little plant told me. SheeshWhat happened at the Sufi place? And at this exact moment Shoebridge bungled the investigation. There was no way for the drugged man to march down this path without revealing everything. Conclusive verification that a little plant had told him about his lost daughter would have been big news behind the false mirror. After all, there had been media reports of people talking to plants. It wouldnt have been an obtuse line of inquiryBut true to his nature, one-track Shoebridge caring more about exposing the identity of Rich Monk than solving corporate problems pursued the chronological line of questioning and ignored the existence of Time. And thereby blew itUnless he didnt blow it. Because maybe it wasnt blown. Maybe it wasnt an accident at all. Maybe it was somebodys incredibly convoluted plan. But if so, whose? I left the place. Madeleine got pregnant and had an abortion just like that without even asking me about it. I probably ultimately would have been convinced to go along with her in the matter and regretted it later but I never had the choice. Her body her business, you know. I had no say as to whether my baby would live or die. I couldnt believe her callousness.
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So you left? But I made one final statement before I did. I bet you did. How? I started writing her letters from her cat. Her cat? Yeah, it had her baffled for a couple months. Really? She believed in that psychic stuff. I told her I had her cat tell her that it was in touch with the soul of her unborn child. The kid was not happy. He had been looking forward to growing up on the commune. He had mapped out a great spot for a sandbox near the grape arbor, in the shade, not far from the lilac bushes in case he had to take a leak. He was actually looking forward to eating rice cakes and tofu. Had already learned the names of the cats and dogs on the place. Had even found some old rope to use for a swing that could be hung from the limb of the walnut tree. What happened? Madeline sunk into paranoia and depression. She was grouchy and flew off the handle. She didnt tell me about the letters for several weeks. Shed managed to put the abortion out of her mind just a minor medical adjustment. But now she had to think about what shed actually done. It wasnt prettyFinally I told her it was me. She went nuts. She went nuts. Her face got disfigured by a permanent rage. Her eyebrows twisted down to her lips. She looked so awful people stopped coming to the cherry jello rituals. She handed over the reins of running the commune to her head priestess. She moped around cleaning pots with a toothbrush. She built a sandbox and a rope swing. Even though the truth was out, it was just a joke, she couldnt get rid of the demons. She mumbled to herself and could be found walking the halls at 2 a.m. with a candle, looking into closets, opening the piano cover, reaching around behind books in the library. It was a joke that somehow turned real. The story of my life, I guessShe hated meThere were times when I myself thought the kid was actually out there,
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equality. What a jerk. You can crucify me for that Shoebridge. It was my fault. Shoebridge was attracted and repelled, fascinated and disgusted by the drugged man. Rich Monk was a revolutionary genius, a master of subterfuge and subversion. The guy in front of him was just a heavily drugged lump of flesh like the bulletriddled body of Che Guevara on his death bed a shattered idealist. A ranting confused man who in two days of interrogation had produced nothing but wild theories on a number of disconnected topics. Is this what Rich Monk had deteriorated into? Was it possible for a person to lose so much of himself over time due to evaporated hope, trashed dreams and natural degradation? Was this what reality did to people? What would Jesus have looked like at 50? Martin Luther King or the Kennedys at 70? And who was Cedric Shoebridge at the age of 65? The only thing he knew about himself is that he was obsessed with Rich Monk a fabulous adversary, a fantastic villain, a worthy foe. People are often attracted to that which repulses them, fascinated by that which disgusts them. And so Shoebridge was drawn to this creature, or rather the myth of this creature the idea he carried around in his brain of who this man really was. The drugged man had been in the past, and apparently still was, guilty as charged of producing revolutionary writings that were a threat to transnational corporate culture kicking the global economy in the behind. He was dangerous as ever. But he didnt look dangerous or sound dangerous. He looked weary and defeated, like spittle dripping from the lips of death. And now he was talking about women. Sixties women. Shoebridge came from another generation. He had married an heiress. She made it clear on their wedding night that from now on her money was her money and his money was her money. She had no desire to work. Her natural impulse was simply to control the money. Any and all money that came anywhere near her. And she dispensed sex only when she wanted something. He wondered if these hippie chicks were any different. So tell me more about sex on the commune. Attraction, fascination, envy, disgust.
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cheap labor. Republicans were always the party that favored open immigration policies. Then along came the hippies, the Hell No We Wont Go generation. Millions of men of the Vietnam Era decided that they wouldnt go to fight that war, and they also decided they wouldnt go to work for Dow Chemical, which made napalm, and General Dynamics, which made war planes. Corporate America held its breath. These highly educated guys were refusing money. Refusing to join the payrolls of these corporate golems. And then you know what happened? What happened. The women said, HellIll go. Whats more, they went to work for 70 cents on the dollar. In one fell swoop womens lib liberated the corporate giants. A working man was expected to make enough to support a wife and two kids on his wage. These young women only had to cover rent and a car payment. While men were off either fighting the war or fighting against the war women swept in and took the jobs. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were the greatest initial contributors to feminism. Does that tell you something? What would it tell me? Their think tanks had studied the issues. These guys do not give money to causes that undermine their best interests. They dont give money to the Communist Party. They created a whole new wave of consumers. They gave jobs to women and now it was women who bought cars and condos and microwaves. The womens movement played right into the hands of multi-national corporate culture. To believe otherwise is to be utterly deluded. I think youre deluded. Youre not the first to say it. Im a myth unmaker. What myths do you unmake? The myth that men are the oppressors of women. The myth that women are morally superior to men. The myth that women are kind and caring and sharing and men are mean and conniving and manipulative. I learned that on the commune. Women with power are just as greedy and selfish as men with power. Maybe even worse, because they control sex too. Thats all?
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and managed our little bookstore. When I refused to do mens work my days were numbered. I was just like another young woman who showed up around there to be a drain on the economy. I was asked to leave. Sounds like they violated your civil rights. Ha ha haWhen did you find out your kid was still alive. Bang! BIG BANG! At that moment behind the false mirror a permanently twisted lip twisted more, and the drugged man knew he wasnt going to leave this room alive.
Chapter Fourteen
meanwhilein a parallel universeback in Chicago AS THE GRAY BUTTOCKS of dawn farted a leaden haze on the canyons of Carrini Green, the nurse with the apple-bright eyes and plum colored lips slid Cha Chas arm off her belly and slipped out of bed. Smoke and ashes from countless fires hung in the air, sticking to dewy windows, coating them with carbon soot. The nurse dressed quickly and started straightening up the apartment organizing clothes, loose papers, and half-eaten chunks of food into neat piles. Cha Cha woke up an hour later and kicked her out for disrupting his food experiments and because he couldnt find his good pants. He was fifteen minutes late for a meeting with the mayor. Cha Cha had no idea why the mayor wanted to see him. Everything had been so strange lately there was no point trying to second-guess every new development. Six months ago the man wanted him dead. Now he was sending him breakfast invitations.
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any more, he lied. He still wasnt sure what the mayors game was. Cha Cha. I didnt ask you to come here so I could put you on the spotBut I see these guys. Everybody sees these guys. Oh, those guys. Yeah, those guys! The Assassins of Time. What? They came up with a new name. New name for a new game. They call themselves the Assassins of Time. OK. OK. Heres my point. I walk past Carrini Green. A few blocks away Michigan Avenue is spontaneously unmaking itself. Granite is reverting into lava. Buildings are melting. Steel is decomposing into iron ore dust. Glass is turning into sand and blowing awayBut the Green is standing there tall and proud like the Virgin Mary. Like it has a protective cloud covering it, warding off disaster and decay. I dont get it. Neither do I, said Cha Cha, enthralled by the magic of capillary action defying gravity as it sucked milk upward into his dangling donut. It was hard to get a donut nowadays. Too bad grandma was in no shape to whip up some kolacki. Love that apricot filling. YeahBut your gang. Or whatever you call it. The Assassins of Time. You have something to do with it, dont you? YeahWe THEY do the building maintenance. Come on. It must be more than thatCome on Cha Cha. Help me. My city is dying. Cha Cha bit into his soggy donut, avoiding the mayors manic gaze. Every day I come home and Im afraid Ill find my house is melted, and my street is a tar pit, and my kids are gone! The mayor twitched again and slopped some coffee on his shirt this time. Ill see what I can do, said Cha Cha, standing abruptly. Thanks for the donut. I love the way it sucks up milk like gravity doesnt exist. Like gravity is just something written in a
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emerged as the most secure, most desired residence in the City of Chicago. You could still hear gunfire at night, but the plumbing worked and the windows werent shot out, and the cows ate the garbage. The mayor lived there along with certain aldermen Cha Cha approved of. Cows, pigs and other barnyard animals had taken over the city streets. There was no motor traffic because there was no gas. The main thoroughfares were indistinguishable from any street in Bombay teeming with bicycles and oxcarts and squealing goats and children. The farmers in northern Illinois had been unable to sow their spring crops without fuel for the tractors so, after the livestock ate up the seed stores, they turned the animals loose. A rural exodus of cows, pigs and chickens gravitated to the city, attracted by the mountains of fresh garbage. Once a week Cha Cha ceremoniously shot four pigs and hosted a block party for the residents of the Green. Why Cha Cha? Why this neapolitan ice cream flavored human being? What did he have going for him aside from the fact that he never went to school and he never watched TV?NothingThat was enough. Society had lost its grip on him. He was deconditioned. Decontaminated. He was the only human being left whose thoughts were not composed of buzz words. Science called it Neoteny a manner of evolution whereby something evolved by not evolving. Whales were a good example of that. Formerly four-legged land animals, one day, in the womb, they latched onto their embryonic fish-like qualities and refused to give them up, thereby re-evolving an aquatic lifestyle. Cha Cha was a social mutant a prime example of neoteny in social evolution. He had refused to grow up inside his head. His mind was devoid of symbols. He was neither genetically gifted nor culturally challenged. He was simply a social mutant. Where other kids bartered away their spontaneity to curry praise from adults Cha Cha simply sneered. Where other kids took drugs to make them sit still in school Cha Cha simply refused. He had never allowed his brain to be colonized by the
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15%. The Dow went up, and so did unemployment. Profits soared, and so did poverty. It was a self-fulfilling nightmare. Nobody stopped to think that if people didnt have any money they wouldnt be able to buy anything and there would be no economy whatsoever. The computers knew what was going on. But they werent talking. Some evil influence crept through the land instilling a druglike craving for order and method and security. Someone had clipped the wings of our imagination. The living breathing organism of society, that spontaneous celebration of life, had been assigned the job of a janitor, sweeping the gym floor after the high school basketball game, scraping gum off the bottom of the bleachers. When the inevitable civil war broke out, when the over-built fortresses of security and organization and insurance finally collapsed under their own grotesque weight, the only ones who could float on the tide of this irrepressible evolution were social mutants like Cha Cha. Human history was on the run. Cha Cha swept through the basement door of the John Hancock Building past a team of horses hitched to a rope. Once a bastion of paid premiums and guaranteed security, the bronze and glass skyscraper was now a lifeless monument to an extinct way of life: paper shuffling, computerized record-keeping, planning for things that never happened and not planning for things that did. A young man with a gold nose-ring and a leather jacket emblem proclaiming Assassins of Time waved Cha Cha into an open elevator door. With a whistle and a shout the team of horses lurched forward. The rope whinged taut inside an assembly of pulleys and the elevator began to rise. Youre a genius, said Cha Cha. Airport Johnny shrugged. I got the other stuff too. He pointed to a tape recorder and a hamster cage on the elevator floor. Does it work? It will if you find a hamster, said Airport Johnny.
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The elevator clanged to a stop and 90 floors below the horses jerked backwards against their harnesses. As the young men strode toward the observation windows Johnny said, Will you make me an alderman now? What? Come on. Ive always wanted to be an alderman. You find The Reaper, Ill make you an alderman. Done deal, said Airport Johnny. Far below them dark plumes of smoke rose from dozens of fires burning throughout the city. Overturned boats lay belly up in the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. The crumbling remains of the Sears Tower smoldered to the west, like a blackened banana with a huge bite taken out of it. Abandoned vehicles littered the roadsides like candy wrappers. Time muttered Cha Cha. What? Its something to do with Time. The next morning one of Cha Chas bodyguards shook him awake and handed him a squirming, live hamster. Cha Cha stuck the hamster in Airport Johnnys cage and bolted his bedroom door. He placed a half-eaten hamburger on a wooden stool, kneeled down in front of it, and started reciting Hail Marys backwards in Polish. Amen. Death of our Hour. After twenty minutes the bun began vibrating frantically, crackling with hidden energy, flapping up and down on the burger. Within thirty-five minutes the bun had reverted into a pile of whole wheat kernels and the hamburger and reformed into a strip of cow belly. Someone knocked at the door. Planning Commission meeting at ten oclock, chirped the mayor. OK, shouted Cha Cha. He dabbed his fingers against the bloody slab of meat and swirled the grain around. It was real all right. Then he made a recording of his backwards Hail Mary on a tape loop threaded through Airport Johnnys audio deck, which
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communities. Plus, he kept the stair halls in Building-B swept clean of debris which entitled him to subsidized rent at Carrini Green. They popped out of the forest, skipped down a flight of cracked stairs, and swung through a door into a roomful of pacing men who smelled like they could have been up to anything. They all started talking at once. GentlemenI cant follow a word of this, said Cha Cha. How bout we let Eddie Spaghetti tell me the plan. So Eddie stepped forward and presented a plan that made the rest of the commissioners gloat like theyd just tricked a waitress into lifting her skirt and flashing her panties. The plan was this: the commissioners and their families would get safe conduct out of the city, and Cha Cha would make all major decisions for the Planning Commission until they got back. We want you to take care of the placeuntil we get back, said Eddie. Simple, yet brilliant. This way Cha Cha would get blamed for the mess, and if he ever managed to straighten it out, they could effect a triumphant return and reclaim their authority. Fine, said Cha Cha. And that was it. The abdication of the last official power bloc in the City of Chicago. The mayor twirled his tongue inside his mouth and amused himself with the thought that there was no fanfare to celebrate this moment except for the steady drip, drip, drip of the building melting around them. When can you get us out? asked Eddie. When can you be ready? An hour later Cha Cha burst into his office and found a calf standing in a wheat field. The hamster was dead and the tape deck silent. MADRE DE DIOS, he wheezed, as he slammed the door and locked it. Then he dropped to his knees and began knocking off Hail Marys forwards at a delirious pace. Gradually the wheat kernels collected into a pile and disintegrated into white flour. The calf grew large and plump and ripe for slaughter. Cha Cha stopped praying. Good enough.
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the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed it in one gulp. Then set about making his Plan.
Chapter Fifteen
HOW COULD SHOEBRIDGE HAVE guessed? Was it just a guess? A bait cast beneath the surface to entice an unwary barracuda? But what other reason could I have had for stealing the file? My fingerprints were all over the place. What other reason could I have had to be there? None. None at allSteer for Jamaica, thought the drugged man. Get outta here! Civil Rights huh? Good of you to mention that. This whole thing began with the civil rights movement blacks marching for equality. That energy got transformed into anti-war sentiment when Muhammad Ali refused draft induction and went to prison as a conscientious objector. That was his most powerful punch ever. The toughest guy in the world claims hes a conscientious objector and goes to jail to prove it. Then the Vietnam and civil rights fervor got picked up by feminists and they ran with the ball. The most coddled group of people in the history of humanity American women convinced the world they were oppressed just like blacks. Yeah, it was funny. But whats not funny is that 30 years into Affirmative Action the essential black civil rights issue which was expanded to include gender there were 40% more women working and 10% fewer black men working. It was enough to turn me into a Republican. The whole civil rights thing, which was supposed to put more black men to work, to create more opportunities for black men to perform as responsible heads of household, ended up putting more black men out of work! And what do we have now? The prison population is predominantly black men, and
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man its even better because he cant get welfare. He just falls into a black hole of joblessness and despair and addiction and suicide. Its a zero sum game Shoebridge. Its like this was someones conscientious agenda for unmaking democracy. We pay more money for seemingly important programs, and the bureaucracy just gets bigger and the corporations take more. So you dont believe in any aid programs? I didnt say that. I said, who gets the money? We used to laugh at the Soviet Union, but capitalism is the most wasteful economic system on earth. It cant work without raping other economies. Do you realize how many hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were pissed away on the dot.com economy? On nothing? On a fantasy? The U.S. government/taxpayers invent the internet and these fools waste a billion dollars trying to sell hair-growth formulas and used toys onlineDo you know that U.S. taxpayers footed the bill to airdrop 1.2 million pop tarts on Afghanistan during the war there? This we call Humanitarian Aid. We bomb the crap out of them and give them pop tarts. For the same price we could have airdropped flour and sugar and fed 100 times more people. The only humanitarian aid that was for was our corporate persons. Our multinational food processing conglomerates. Youre cute when youre mad. Im not madBut its always like that. There is no such thing as foreign aid which does not benefit one or more of our huge corporations. The Vietnam War ended, but the international American corporate agenda never changed. People grew their hair long and wore bellbottoms and the corporations just marched off to Indonesia and South America and Taiwan to do business. Why were the corporations so worried about the domino theory? Because they were afraid that if we fled Vietnam they would be kicked out of the other countries where they were raping the natural resources and hiring workers for $5 a day so our wives and working women could have washing machines and microwaves and more clothes to buy. Its like a science fiction monster running out of control. The Golem of Greed. You really hate women, huh? Thats what everyone accuses me of.
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Chapter Sixteen
ONE DAY 600 MILLION years ago, off the African coast of Florida, as the rosy fingers of dawn tickled the pink ear lobes of a pack of clouds dog-paddling above a sea as brown and calm as a platter of syrup a one-celled creature began to dance. For three billion years one-celled creatures had been filling the seas. Things that wiggled and things that puffed delicate,
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smooth, spiny and rough. Hairy things like miniature galleons, rowing through water like pixie stallions. Plants that swam and talked to each other. A blizzard of life. Man-heads mother. The first one-celled creatures were animals. They survived by consuming free-floating proteins. But as the earths atmosphere evolved to block the ultra violet radiation which generated these proteins, lifeforms experienced their first energy crisis. Enter the plants, which could harness sunlight to assemble complex growth molecules out of simpler molecules. Suffusing this ancient microbe stew were some other things, which, in the physical sense, were not things at all not yet. They would become things, one day, when they acquired a form through which to express themselves. They were hidden potentialities, and for the sake of giving them a handle we could call them the Mists of Consciousness. These Mists were proto-qualities like Memory, Thought, Intuition and Willfulness. 600 million years later mathematicians would develop Complexity Theory to describe how chaotic systems naturally evolve simple forms like the way a jumbled stream bed commingles an infinity of forces to produce the elegant simplicity of a whirlpool. Similarly, the Mists of Consciousness perused the exotic chaos of one-celled life, hoping to find a way to manifest certain simple, mind/body qualities. They drifted in and out through porous cell walls, looking for a place to land. They were feathers without birds, lungs without frogs, thoughts without brains. They could locate no home in existing lifeforms. Memory and Willfulness had experienced some success imprinting their patterns on regular crystals like ice and quartz, but it was these proteins, these irregular crystals which eluded them. They clearly contained some raw material to work with, but there wasnt enough of it yet. Until the one-celled creature began to dance. Yes, plants controlled the seas. But they were boring. They had harnessed the sunlight and reproduced like crazy, but they were making too much oxygen and stinking up the place. They controlled every facet of production and had organized a society that would have made Karl Marx yodel like a coon hound that
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The dancers cringed and eyed each other sheepishly. Finally they pushed the little creature forward to answer the queen. Its something new, said the little creature. Does it have a name? Not really. We just call it a sponge. Good grief! said the queen. It looks like the biggest pile of bad genes Ive seen collected in one place in three billion years. She laughed. And when the queen laughed, everyone else laughed. The worlds oceans rippled with laughter. The little dancer, the Elvis Presley of the microbial world, tried to fade back into the safety of his like-minded friends. Wait a minute, said Queen Lesiani. Who created this monstrosity? Well, Sheesh. I guess we all did, said the Little Dancer. But whose idea was it? Im the one who started dancing. If thats what youre asking, maam. Thats what Im asking. And who are you? They call me Odysseus, said little Elvis. What an odd nameListen Oddy-sus. Oddy. Whatever your name is. I want you to clean up this entire mess and get it out of here by tonight. Understood? So spoke the matriarch of the sea. Whoa! Memory and Willfulness hadnt hung around for 40 million years to watch this remarkable development fizzle in their faces because of one Napoleonic snit of a plankton. They rippled through the water creating a tiny swirl in the current which flushed Lesianis body through a pore in the sponge where she was physically dismembered by the hungry dancers like a chicken tossed to piranhas. Odysseus tried to stop them but it happened too fast. She never forgave him. Never EVER forgave him. Thus began the war of plants vs. animals, female vs. male, control vs. spontaneity, or whatever you chose to call it, which lasted for 600 million years. * * *
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Far from it buster. And Ive got news for you. Its time to stop fooling around making all these different shapes and pitch in around here. Pitch in? Thats right. Everybody else is pulling their own weight and theyre sick of you blowing off your responsibilities. Sheesh. What do you mean pulling their weight? Everybody does what they want to do as long as they dont hurt anyone else. Not any more they dont. Were going to get this place organized. Its a mess. And youre the cause of it. The Instigator. Youre the one who just tosses garbage all over the place. Your kids are growing up wild and undisciplined. Even the food Odysseus had heard enough. Her voice was a Civil Defense siren ricocheting off the walls inside his skull. A searing alarm bell popping brain cells, chopping his concentration into Chinese vegetables. He had to get away from it. He had to shut it out. He started to dance. Stop that! Stop it right now! But he was a dancing fool. He wouldnt stop dancing. He danced and danced for a few million years, and when he stopped dancing he looked himself over and laughed at what he saw. He was a lobster shell with a Y-shaped tail sporting five eyes mounted on stalks and a trunk with a hand at the tip of it. One day science would name him Opabina. He loved it. He could slither through the muck munching on little Hallucigenia seven-tentacled stick creatures with seven pairs of spiny legs. He could zip through the water with his muscled tail and grab things with his trunk. He kept on the move, stalking new adventures, and it was 50 million years before Lesiani caught up with him again. It has been estimated that 492 million organic species have existed on earth. So far, paleontologists have recorded 150,000 of them. That means, for every 3000 species that existed, we have inspected the remains of one of them. Undoubtedly there were all kinds of creatures we know nothing about. Were there talking kelp? Jelly belly shrimp? Clams with beanie propellers on their heads so they could stir up the sea
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On the sea floor horizon a purple starfish ambled into view and curled her fingers at him. He didnt know what to make of it and dozed off again. She crawled over the pile of empty clamshells, wrapped her arms around him, and made love to him for three days and three nights. Sex! He was breathless, ecstatic, exhausted. Sex! His life would never be the same. His skin was smoking. His brain was rubbery. His legs were limp and sweaty. What a great innovation! Why hadnt he thought of it himself? How had he ever lived without it? It FELT SO GOOD! Sex! The frosting on the cake of creation. The golden apple on the tree of life. The HoneyI want you to build me a house. A house?For what? For protection. From what? From everything. He loved her. What else could you call it? He loved the sex and he loved her. So he built her a house. A sturdy hideaway in the rocks. They had babies. Millions of babies. He told the kids scary stories and wrestled them on the sea floor tickling and growling and grabbing their toesies till they squealed with delight. He was innocent, and naive, and in love with his family, as any young father could be. Everything was going along great until Lesi started to drag all kinds of junk into the house. Bits of this and shards of that. The place got so full of stuff he had to move out. Why dont you build yourself your own house, she said. This IS my own house. No way, buster. Ive got all my stuff here. Fine. Ill think of something. And he did. He took a trip. He migrated out of the ocean up a river to a fresh water lake, and poked his eyes above the surface to take a look at the land. It was barren and awful a raging party for granite and iron and denizens of Silicone Time. But the Mists
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returned to the lake looking for Odysseus, he was nowhere to be found. He had sprouted legs on his fins, lungs in his air sacs, and crawled onto the land in the body of a salamander. Evolution is not a train track. Evolution is a bowl of jelly beans tossed at a basketball hoop. Some of the beans go through and some dont. At the same time Odysseus took his first peek at the land and then decided to return to the sea other creatures planted a foot on terra firma and refused to withdraw it. True, 30 million years after fish had overrun the sea, the land sustained only a fringe population of semi-aquatic species, but the big push had begun. The hard skins of cellulose plants and certain crabs allowed them to retain moisture in their bodies and thus brave the arid zone. These crabs became the spiders and insects we know today, and it was a fortunate thing a small group of visionary insects waved adios to the sea. Like Lesi and her armor-plated fish, all marine insects died out in the Permian Mass Extinction. By the time Odysseus first blinked his moist, salamandereyes on land, there were mosses and insects galore. It was an all-you-can-eat fiesta for a bug-eater like himself. A banquet table piled high to the horizon. Lesi caught on fast. She evolved a race of giant amphibians who terrorized the land until they grew too big. The weather changed, the plants changed, and they became extinct presaging the future life-curve of dinosaurs. But by then Odysseus had turned into a reptile, which could lay its eggs on land and was free of aquatic life forever. About that time Lesi adopted a new strategy for reacquiring the bad gene the thing that Odysseus had stolen from her long ago, when she was the microbial Matriarch of the Sea and hed ruined everything with his stupid little dance. Fine. If he refused to share it with her shed attack the problem in a creative way. Every time she saw him she ate him. If he became a Stegosaurus she became a Tyrannosaurus and ripped his head off. If he became a tree fern, she became a Brachiosaurus and ripped his skin off. If he became a spider, she became a Black Widow, had sex with him, and ate him alive.
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Boy are you ugly, said Lesi. What happened to your mouth? Sheesh. Like most females, Lesiani was insecure. And so, like most females, she was irresistibly, biologically, drawn to males who moved through life with an air of confidence. Prattle as they might about desiring a sensitive, caring mate, no female, of any species, was ever attracted to a dithering, indecisive male. First confidence, then pillow talk. It was simple biology. Furthermore, like most females, she couldnt imagine that any confident male would be attracted to a wishy, washy female. So, to mask her insecurity, and probe the confidence index of any potential mate, Lesiani subscribed to the twisted philosophy that the best defense is a good offense. She was quick on the draw. An All Star quarterback in the shame game. Her strategy was to shoot first get everybody else playing on her field, obeying her rules, talking her talk, reacting to her moves. Then she could relax a little. Cosmic insecurity. Bio-neurosis. Gender Imperialism. The best way for her to avoid examining her own fearful life, her own covert motivations the metaphysical whimsies that powered her personality was for her to concentrate on setting goals and establishing agendas for everyone else. So she cooked up a plan for organizing the birds into squadrons. But the pelicans were a rowdy, independent lot. They just cast drawn looks in her direction and flapped away. Her desire to institutionalize government protection in the pelican colony only succeeded in prompting the other birds to start nagging Odysseus to make her stop nagging them. Before long everyone was nagging everyone else. It was a feeding frenzy of nagging that seemed to keep gaining more and more momentum from its own unrepentant bad will. There was no way to stop it. Reluctantly, Odysseus transmuted into a swallow. He roamed far inland swooping through the sky, catching bugs in his mouth. Then he became a swift that could fly 100 miles per hour in level flight. What a thrill! His brainwaves
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Beetles had been around for a long time. They were small and they reproduced quickly, thereby rapidly introducing beneficial mutations into their various gene pools. Birds learned to relish seeds so well they began spreading them all over the planet. Rodents also reproduced quickly and grew huge once they learned how to eat seeds and grass. But dinosaurs were dying out because the plants were changing on them. Odysseus, in his bird-body, had been watching this global transformation from his home in the sky. Just for the heck of it he took a psychosomatic ride in a blade of grass. It was the closest he came to feeling like a sponge in a long long time. Grass. It was so simple he was amazed it hadnt been invented sooner. Grass was pulling off the same invasion on land that photoplankton had pulled off in the sea. Cooler drier climates were shrinking the forests and grass was moving in. It was unstoppable. It had built abrasive silica crystals right into its leaves to dissuade animals from eating it. That was a big problem until mammals evolved thicker enamel and faster-growing teeth something dinosaurs had failed to pull off. And once they grew tougher teeth mammals penetrated the biosphere like milk through a donut. Odysseus took a ride in a six-horned, saber-toothed cow and frolicked like a boy in a sandbox, tearing up dirt with his brand new digging implements. Then he became a giant rhinoceros with a Y-shaped horn that had a bad temper and liked to get into fights. He was a hyena, a tapir, a shovel-tusked elephant. A three-toed horse. A deer with antlers on its nose. He played around with a zillion body styles, moving horns and tusks all over the place. When the polar caps melted and the climate got wetter, he grew fingers and toes and hung around in the trees. But after awhile it dried out again, and the grasslands recovered some turf in the war against forests. One day he picked up a rock to see if he could sneak through the tall grass and brain a gazelle when a voice behind him said, Im getting sick of wandering all over the place picking berries. I want you to plant me a garden. Right here!
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Chapter Seventeen
HOW DID YOU FIND OUT your kid was still alive? That last question had killed even the air in the room. Fool that he was Cedric Shoebridge had one thing going for him: six decades of uninterrupted failure. Enough to reduce the normal person to wet toilet paper. Had it not been for his obsession with Rich Monk his brain might have turned to pulp long ago. But it had not, and the upshot of this parade of failure was that he had been suitably humbled by life. Except for the existential direction of things he wasnt that much different from Cha Cha Lobotomowski. Cha Cha had begun as a complete outcast and found a moment of success. Shoebridge had started as one of the top cops and been brought down to earth to wallow in the puddle of his own delusions humbled set free. And now six decades of failure delivered him to a succession of uncommon thoughts. One: the greatest tyranny is not the kind that overtly suppresses and censors. Rather, the greatest tyranny is the one that refuses to admit other possibilities. What can be better than democracy and equality and freedom of religion and free trade? What indeed? Popular programming. The tyranny of the majority. Yes, the drugged mans ramblings had gotten to him. Not on the political level. Politics was greed, hed known that for decades. Who was to say the new guys would be any better than the old. But the pathetic hippie in front of him was right about one thing. Shoebridge was trying to eat soup with a fork. He was trying to capture air in a birdcage. Something else was out there. Something he had never ever considered. Two: this pathetic creature could not be Rich Monk. This worm lying before him was not what he had spent his whole life
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chasing. There was something more here. There was some other part of this he couldnt yet grasp. Ask him about the file, screeched the earpiece. Madeleine was going mad. She would have loved to run the interrogation herself, but she couldnt. The drugged man had baffled her with chaos in the past: letters from her cat, sticking pencils up his nose barking like a walrus, deprecating her religion of jello in front of everyone at the commune. He possessed a maddening ability to push her buttons. Plus, he was livid she had kept the existence of their daughter from him. Even with truth serums his appetite for uncertainty was a bitter buffet she could not keep down. So she had to rely on Shoebridge. Anyone for a game of watermelon softball? Three: the drugged man knew how or where to find Rich Monk, if such a thing was possible. Four: the file was very dirty stuff. Whatever was in it could really bring someones house down. Watergate all over again. Watergate times a thousand perhaps. Thats why Shoebridge had been intuitively avoiding that issue, because the moment its whereabouts were known: Five: the drugged man would be killed. And Rich Monk would become unreachable. Andlast but not least Six: the moment the file was located he, himself, Cedric Shoebridge, ex gumshoe, bungler extraordinaire, pimple on the butt of the Bureau, would also be killed. Unless he did something very very fast. Scar Face and Cue Ball were not sitting in that booth with Madeleine to protect her from anything. She was the worm, she was the demented soul, she was the one who had hoodwinked the father and traded their child to a corporation. When did you start being a radical? A political radical? said Shoebridge, lurching about to keep the drugged man talking about anything buying time to think. I guess it started with Vietnam. Or maybe it really started when I got beat up in Nevada. Maybe it even started before that. What happened in Nevada? I was hitchhiking back from Berkeley in the early 70s. I got stuck in Wells, Nevada. Couldnt get a ride for two days. 35
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electronic eavesdropping system for monitoring police and military bands that enabled them to steer clear of trouble. By the time they got to Kentucky police and military presence became mysteriously diffuse. Some disease was creeping out of Chicago, the likes of which the media refused to identify other than to say it was most likely a terrorist plot that was causing some buildings to wiggle like jello. Two days later they were staring at the Sea of Cortez on the west coast of Mexico. They boosted a sailboat and headed west by southwest, for by now the drugged man had confided to Shoebridge that yes, the file was hidden on the beach on the very island where they had captured him stashed in the trunk of the old banyan tree, the one that looked like a giant that had sat down and never got upAnd yes, the drugged man suspected his never-aborted daughter was one of the children being raised at the Mother Nature Day Care Center in the BerkshiresAnd yes, Shoebridge confided that years ago he had stumbled across something at the Mother Nature Day Care Center that was so horrific he couldnt imagine it could be true. Was it legal for corporations to adopt children? Could corporate persons become the legal guardians of human persons?And yes, the drugged man would tell Shoebridge how he found out about his daughter. It would be difficult, and unbelievable, but he would try. And thus the interrogation began in earnest both sides agreeing to meet in the middle.
Chapter Eighteen
meanwhileback in Chicago CHA CHA LOBOTOMOWSKI WAS not a cynic. Not the kind of guy who believed in nothing. In fact, he was the kind of guy who believed in everything. Tell him fish talked. Hed believe it. Tell him his body was 90% water. Hed believe it. Tell him people could come back from the dead. Hed believe it.
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inside this old shoe? Hed brought back walking whales. Why not Ramon? The hamster ran, the tape looped, AmenDeath of our Hour but nothing much seemed to be happening. Cha Cha put a few more hamsters in the cage and went out to look for Airport Johnny. A herd of water buffalo, submerged up to their scythe-shaped horns, were snorting and sporting in the cool water of the Lake Michigan boat basin. Just beyond them Airport Johnny and his men were stuffing inflated goat bladders into the sunken hull of an overturned yacht. Johnny spotted Cha Cha and swam over. Headed for Jamaica? YeahIf we can refloat that old tub, said Johnny. How did you decide that? You want the Reaper? Thats the only thing I can think of. Good. Because hes hexing my food experiments again. Hexing them how? I dont know. Maybe using voodoo. Maybe hes got spies. Remember that nurse? That nurse wasnt no spy. She was just trying to organize your apartment. Organize my apartment? The last thing I need is for anyone to organize my apartment. As soon as things get organizedI lose the trail. Lose the trail? YeahThe more chaos I allow into my life, the more things start to make sense. How do ya know someone is hexing your food experiments? You ever heard of bananas growing on vines? No. WellI got em growing on vines right outside my window. They taste good too. Hmmm Maybe time aint movin backwards. Then what way is it moving? Sideways? In circles? Up and down? It dont make no sense. Johnny twiddled his gold nose-ring. You know, Cha Cha. This reminds me of when I took apart my first car engine. I was
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Cha Cha opened a dresser drawer and broke off a piece of beef flavored fungus to munch on while he watched this strange movie projecting itself through a peephole in Time. It didnt take long to figure out what was happening. Human beings had been replaced. At the beginning of the Third Millennium people became so specialized they ran themselves out of any reason to exist. Like a dinosaur that fed off only one species of fern, when the fern died out, the dinosaur died out. Human civilization had devoted itself to equipping the world with machines, and once that was done, the machines no longer needed them. This was obvious and had been predicted for centuries. But what everyone failed to foresee was that animals would be the instigators of the entire transformation. Once animals developed a common language the Song of Humanity was relegated to the gurgling and squeaking of a warped Beatles record playing at half speed on a foot-pedal sewing machine. Birds could fly planes better. Dolphins could drive submarines better. Monkeys made better astronauts. Some rapidly evolved brain toads were superior at theoretical math. But that was just chapter one of the story. The world was shifting from carbon-based lifeforms to silicone-based lifeforms. Sand was making a big comeback on land. Mineral evolution was spearheading wildly unanticipated leaps in consciousness. Not just computers. Computers were just the neurons of the beast. Computers were about as historically significant as frog brains. See insect shoot tongue. Something much more prodigious was stirring to life. The thrust of human evolution had been to develop the silicone chip. The thrust of mineral evolution had been to develop the carbon chip. These overlapping agendas were like sprinters on an oval track, elbowing each other on the curves, trying to shove ahead. The problem with silicone brains was that they operated sequentially. They could think about a thousand things at once, but only if they were told to only if someone pointed their electronic noses in those thousand different directions. Not so humans. Although humans were not conscious of it, thinking
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emotionally deadening day at work machines could even play for them, entertain them, make them feel things entirely divorced from their lives. Technology delivered what religion had only promised: freedom from the limitations of the physical body. But if that was the purpose, what was the point? Why live? Why get up in the morning to fight the good fight. It didnt add up. But the airport of the human mind was a multi-purpose landing strip. It could handle ultralight aircraft bulging with local politics, at the same time it was landing literary blimps from London and quantum cruisers from Ursa Major. The air traffic controllers of the human mind were geniuses of flexibility and accommodation. To varying degrees, all of life was responsive to stimuli that arrived OUTSIDE of physical perception. Physicists had determined that when two photons escaped simultaneously from the same atom, from that Time on, no matter how far apart they got, the behavior of those twin photons appeared coordinated, even though no discernible signal passed between them. What more evidence could you want? That meant matter was capable of communicating outside of Time. This was science talking. Not mysticism. Bits and pieces of matter in this solar system were psychically linked to bits and pieces of matter in other galaxies far across the universe. And they knew it. As surely as humans knew the names of their brothers and sisters, minerals knew they had soul mates in other galaxies. Although science had just caught on to this phenomenon, human mystics and third world peons had been visiting these places outside of Time for eons. Eons of peons knew that all they had to do was turn off their brains and bingo, they were there, in that place Hispanic peasants called La Calma de Dios God Calm. The other side of Time. Minerals already knew all that. They were after something different. They wanted to build things. They wanted to build things at a much faster rate than they were currently building them. Continents and mountain ranges were great works of evolutionary art, but they took a long time to make.
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didnt like to talk about it. Talking about it, or even thinking about it, uncorked a cosmic panic in their souls and then they had to buy entertainment to drive the anxiety away. Once upon a Time the Church had sold tickets to Freedom from Anxiety. Now it was Hollywood and MTV. Science fiction writers, political pundits, ozone-brained mushroom eaters, had failed to warn the populace of the subtlety by which the end-game would be introduced. Automated banking systems would eliminate money. Automated phone systems would eliminate human operators. Farm machinery would eliminate farmers. Factories would be robotized. Corporate profits would increase while people lost jobs. The Stock Market would soar while workers were laid off. Profound social failure was trumpeted as economic success. Everyone was wearing their underpants on their head. The school system was largely to blame for fundamental human ignorance of the forces that shaped peoples lives. Schools taught about genes and instinct, but disallowed any mention of human revelations or non-physical reality. Teachers sermonized on computer skills but cut short any reference to God or religion. Instructors led Mass at the altar of scientific evolution, but were banned by the Supreme Court from suggesting that there might be a vital, creative spark that influenced evolution from somewhere outside of Time. If mere photons could communicate outside of Time, why would there be any reason to suppose that genes could not? Where was the ant-hose of science on this turn of the screw? It was an empirical disconnect. The classroom had become a forum for psychic elitism and intellectual imperialism. And it played right into the hands of the machines. Somewhere along the line machines picked up the habit of wearing shoes. Were they trying to be funny? Did it make them feel more human? Were they trying to project the image that they, too, were spontaneous, fun-loving creatures? Who knows? But they all wore shoes. The same kind of shoes. Gold-plated basketball sneakers. It was kind of a status symbol in the culture of mineral consciousness. * * *
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Chapter Nineteen
Ferns. A school of flying fish scattered from the bow. What? Shoebridge gripped the tiller of the stolen sailboat. Ferns told me. Or actually a guy who talks to ferns told me. Or rather a guy who listens to fernsHe told me about my daughter. Margaret. A red-haired pony-tailed kid Ive never seen. I thought we agreed to leave the B.S. ashore? I told you you wouldnt believe me. And you found her name in the file your stole?
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Yeahfile marked MN. I wasted a half hour looking for a Mega National file, then I remembered that years earlier Maddy had told me her bosss name. MN. Bingo. How long ago had it been, thought Shoebridge, that he had become obsessed with tracking down MN. Hed almost gotten fired over that one too. First there was Paris. His big vacation. Undertaken with the purest motives. Culminated with his feet upturned in a trash can. At least the American press never got a hold of it. He expected a drubbing from his superiors when he got back to D.C. but it didnt happen. They seemed pleasant and happy to see him. Of course they knew the details of the Paris escapade. But nothing was said. They behaved as if he had just spent a couple months drinking Campari in a beach chair on the Riviera. They gave him his new orders. Jump in, feet first, with that bold and sassy Cedric Shoebridge style that had come to be so highly praised in the top echelons of the Bureau. Hitch up your pants, pin on your badge, and go after these bad guys who broke into the Democratic Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel. Find out who they are and what they were doing there. We want to know everything. Everything! And the orders came down from the very very top. Initialed by JEH himself. What a godsend. His brain revisited the moment of that memo. He had been afraid he was going to get sent to Patagonia. Dismissed in disgrace. And suddenly he was being put in charge of a major investigation. He was back in the game. A player. He strapped on his holster and got right to work and a year later he had discovered absolutely nothing about J. Gordon Liddy or any of the other Watergate Conspirators. But the big boys appreciated his stick-to-it-ness. They even gave him a promotion for diligence and relentless effort in conducting his sweeping probe. He was at the top of his game. Until Deep Throat came along and blew the thing wide open. Someone began sliding blue slips of paper under his office door at night. They were card-sized, folded in half, and contained only one word: Patagonia. * * *
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Madeleine Naylor? Mega National? Same thing? In a manner of speaking. Little did they realize how right they were. The computer voice that instructed the 37 students was, in fact, the voice of Madeleine Naylor, prerecorded word by word and reassembled according to the computers communications desires of the moment. Worse, over time, Madeleine Naylors twisted brain which was much more twisted than her permanently twisted lip had been subsumed by Mega National. MN needed human brains to exist. In the same sense that humans only see what their brain tells them is there to be seen, so Mega National could only exist if human beings fed its existence. They didnt have to see it. They didnt even have to know it was there. They just had to be greedy and selfish enough and MN would flourish. In the last days of human civilization Fundamentalist Christians liked to say that the devil is in charge of the world. Unless you understood the science involved which they clearly didnt it was about as accurate a statement as you could make about the mess. Human greed fed corporate greed fed human greed fed corporate greed in an endless devolution a whirlpool of extinction. But even though Shoebridge and the drugged man didnt know all this, everything else fell into horrifying place. The entire interrogation had been a set-up. MN didnt want the file back per se. It only wanted to know who knew about it? Who had seen it? Besides Madeleine only the drugged man and Cedric Shoebridge were known to have actually set eyes on this damning document which verified that a global corporate person had legally adopted 37 human children. Thats why Shoebridge had been brought on the case. He had to be kept close. Once MN found out everyone who knew of the document they all, with the exception of Madeleine, would be retired from this plane of existence. Unknown to her, Madeline had a poison capsule imbedded in her spine and could be retired by MN any time it felt like it. Only Shoebridges stumbling bumbling interrogation style coupled with his obsession about Rich Monk had kept them
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Consciousness back to the Permian Extinction or further! MN was furious. What a waste of Time! What I didnt get, said the drugged man. What I never got until I talked to the guy who talks to the ferns is how my daughter, who should be thirty years old, is still an adolescent. Thats the really damning part of that file. It records birth dates. So how does a thirty-year-old kid pass for twelve? Youre asking me? The ferns hooted when I askedThey told my friend I still didnt understand Silicone ConsciousnessMineral TimeTurns out those kids have so much more to learn than average kids and none of it can be written down for fear of leaks that their normal growth processes have been atomically slowed to keep them in early adolescence the prime learning years. Not only are they being psychologically abused brainwashed they are being physically abused at a cellular levelThat knowledge alone would cause a worldwide revolution against corporations. Which, as you know, has always been my goal. Maybe. Maybe not. Human beings have fallen for a lot of B.S. over the centuries. They used to throw their kids into bonfires for the glory of Ishtar or Quetzalcoatl or some other insane god. Whats any different about throwing them into the maw of corporate capitalism? Do you know why MN wants me dead? The file. The file is only part of it. The proofTheres more. It knows that I know. Know what? I know that its alive, really alive. Madeleine knows too. Mega National? Its just a company. Just an idea. Like you already said. Thats just what I said in that room. There were about four interviews going on at once in there and I very carefully danced away from that topic. Good thing you made it easy on me. It was better to rant about Rich Monk and anarchist politics and
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Flower children woke up to the fact that our populist leaders, the ones who could get elected without corporate money, would be shot dead. There was no one alive who could lead us out from under corporate colonization. Thats when I split to the islands. Left D.C., went to Mexico, stole a boat, got to my island, and set the boat adrift so theyd think I was dead. I wondered how you moved us out here so smoothly. Youd done it before. Stole a boat in Mazatlan? Yeah. I didnt know it at the time but it was almost a dry run for this tripBut dont let me lose my point. Minerals have always been conscious. Good Lord, theyve been around for billions of years. Its just that they couldnt move fast. Were the ones who gave them feet. We did that. Thats why they needed us. And now they dont. Ive wasted a lifetime fighting this at the political level. But it never worked. Because people dont care. They get bored with political facts. They dont see how it matters, or what they can do. And youre right. Perfectly sane liberal parents will work their behinds off for twenty or thirty years to pay to have their kids educated into a system of thought which is completely deadly to human spirit. And why? Because they dont hear It. They dont see It. At least ants know that what they do benefits other ants. What we do, my God, its almost impossible to say it. What we do is devote our entire lives to tearing apart human spirit. Theres so much beauty and grace and love to undo, wellthis thing, this Demonic Agenda, this Silicone Consciousness, requires that we spend all day every day turning away from God, turning away from the very highest cultivator of human spirit, diverting us so we chase its gods of wealth and fame and ever more machines Just imagine my very own daughter walking this earth part human, part Silicone Consciousness laying waste to everything I hold sacred. Knowing exactly what shes doing, and doing it anyway. Its a fathers worst nightmareI swim around the reef at night listening, feeling through the pores in my skin, detecting the vibes yes the hippie dippie vibes of an aquatic culture thats hundreds of millions of years old. The locals say Im an octopus; you heard that. Thats theyre way of saying I know somethingI know something is down there.
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Chapter Twenty
ODYSSEUS DIDNT LISTEN to her, of course. Not for two million years. He wasnt about to surrender his nomadic pleasures to start growing beets and tomatoes. He had other priorities. For one thing he wanted to travel. He explored North Africa, then rambled through Asia all the way to China. He backtracked to Europe then retraced his previous migrations several times. In the two million years of pre-history, proto-humans wandered all over the place. Lesiani nagged him constantly. She wanted roots. Youll never turn me into a plant, said Odysseus. Thats not what I mean. But the surf in her head never ceased churning water, never ceased charging the beachhead inside his brain, groping for ways to control him. Early on she had decided that women would no longer hunt. In prides of predators like lions and cheetahs the females did most of the hunting. Indeed, among most mammals the females were the most dedicated, ruthless and persistent hunters. But, inspired by Lesi, human females came up with a better plan. They would gather roots and berries and offer a sexual bounty to men who came home with meat. Men who came home with roots and berries were worthless to them because they already had that stuff. Men were expected to perform heroic and dangerous acts if they wanted to get laid. Lesiani was quite firm in enforcing this rule. Odysseus, with his newly emerging large brain, was both very creative and very horny. Sexual activity that had once been confined to three weeks in spring now spread out to encompass the entire year. In order to increase his chances of getting laid
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he started chipping stones to fashion daggers and spearheads and hopefully improve his performance as a hunter while still leaving him lots of free time to indulge his goofy dreams and bizarro projects. One brutally hot day he got the idea that if he could just spear the sun he could let some of the heat out and cool everything off. Insanity, said Lesi. After several fruitless attempts to toss a spear to the sun he fashioned a mini-spear and mounted it against a sapling bent into an arc with a strip of vine. Lesi spit and muttered as she watched him take hundreds of shots at the sky with this ridiculous contraption. Stop wasting your time, you fool. Go spear an antelope. The kids want meat. But when he accidentally skewered the neck of a high-flying goose Lesi was the first one to race to the kill and lop off its head with a flint knife. As the centuries swam by Odysseus began to realize that his memories of his past animal incarnations were slipping away. His recollections of life as a frog and a swallow and an antelope were dissipating in the winds of Time. In order to arrest the slide of memory loss he began making etchings and paintings on cave walls so he could remind himself, and instruct his children, in the simple matter of how humans had evolved from animals physically, mentally, and spiritually. Why are you teaching them that drivel, said Lesi. You should be showing them how to make bows and arrows before we all starve to death. But even his extravagant outpouring of artwork, etched and painted on rocks and trees wherever he roamed, failed to halt the memory loss. So he started to invent stories hundreds of stories to convey the hidden meanings of the paintings. He made up stories about talking animals who helped each other ward off disaster, or who undermined one creatures selfish scheme, or who pioneered certain evolutionary innovations like wings or fins or compassion or justice. That way, as long as the stories were preserved, every generation of humans could
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past lives as birds and fish while Lesi peeled tubers and ruminated on ways to enlarge the house. Odysseus refused to participate in her scheme on the grounds that a larger house would require more firewood to heat it, so he would be doing more work in order to create more work for himself. But thats not how she saw it. If he spent less time fantasizing stupid stories about fish and birds, and more time helping her, everyone would be a lot better off. The battle raged for hundreds of thousands of years. He preferred tents and teepees, so he could pack up on short notice and follow the herds. She kept trying to build things out of logs and stones what she called permanent structures. According to Odysseus, his stories were much more permanent structures than anything she could build out of rocks. His stories endured for tens of thousands of years. Her houses fell apart in a few generations. She couldnt counter his argument so she changed the subject. And another thing, said Lesi. When are you going to help me make a garden? Right now. He strapped a pointed rock to a stick and said, Go dig. She slapped him. Lesis idea of work had to do with thinking of new ways to get everyone more organized and then convincing Odysseus to go get the job done. As if she was the Director and the whole world was her movie. She believed in her heart and soul that identifying problems was her unique creative contribution to the betterment of life. Hand her an apple and she looked for the worm hole. Build her a house and she sniveled it was too small. Serve up the universe broiled to perfection and she wondered if that was all there was. Nothing was ever good enough the way it was. She wasnt happy unless she was attacking problems, and if she couldnt find one, shed flag one down out of a blue sky twittering with bird song. It was cute, but only to a point. Clearly some insidious force was at work when a creature spent its free time worrying about the future and trying to hammer it into some predetermined shape. No other animal had ever behaved like that before. Odysseus
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control mechanism. That was one reason she resented Odysseus stories. He used words in ways that were much too mystical. The gods? What good were the gods if she couldnt harness their hidden powers to solve her problems? So she invented a different kind of story. She called it history to make the men think it was their idea but it was really herstory. Herstory would be the record of all the things men did that women approved of. Forget about elephant hunts and talking to beetles. No more cosmic fishing expeditions. No more discussions of meaning. Herstory would be about agriculture and technology and the wars that were fought to sustain them. Herstory would provide information not mythology. Herstory would be written down on stone tablets so it couldnt be forgotten. It would pay homage to the Great Goddess Ishtar, source of all things on Earth that women liked: food, security, material comfort. Forget about mystical adventures in the bodies of animals. Herstory would record the bushels of grain produced and the numbers of soldiers employed to defend the fields. So while Odysseus was gallivanting around chasing wild herds, Lesiani rooted herself in the soil of the Tigris River in Sumeria and refused to budge. Due to his overblown sex drive he would show up periodically to try to get laid, but Lesi refused to accommodate him. Little by little his genes dissipated. The nomadic hunter who talked to animals disappeared from Eurasia. His story died and was buried under a ledger of merchant accounts and crop reports and weapons stores. Odysseus tried to make a deal with her but she was not in a dealing mood she held all the cards. He was shocked to discover what his religion had turned into: a bunch of smarmy rituals intended to produce rain in an area where all the trees had been cut down to make grain fields and the natural moisture content of the atmosphere had been parched beyond belief. And when the rains refused to come on call she blamed Odysseus. Who else? He was the first man sacrificed to the honor and glory of Ishtar. His genitals were cut off and he was bled to death to appease the Goddess, entice the rains, and
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prime. Lesi had gotten the idea from her past incarnation as a Black Widow spider. Odysseus had seen enough. He fled across the ocean to Mexico. There they received him as the God of Maize and adorned him with gold ornaments and turquoise necklaces and ankle bells. He was wined and dined and sported with maidens. Then his still-beating heart was torn from his chest and his body was crushed in a giant mortar and pestle like human corn flour. Odysseus fled north from Mexico where the Pawnees fattened him up, split his head with a tomahawk, shot him full of arrows, then roasted him and sprinkled his blood on the first seed corn. In West Africa he was buried alive in the field each spring. In Guinea his brains and bones were burned to ashes and scattered on the fields. The rest of him was eaten by the villagers for good luck. In India his head was jammed in the cleft of a tree and his body was hacked apart while he was still alive. Then runners would carry off bits of his flesh to bury in their fields. Wherever he went, agriculture meant male sacrifice. And when it wasnt overt human sacrifice, it was war. Mars, the god of March, herald of spring, was originally a god of vegetation. Spring, planting, the smell of fresh earth. But Mars was perverted into a god of war when it became desirable to conquer more tillable land and the best time to do that was Spring. Springtime, March, got perverted to mean war time. War was a direct result of Lesis lust to organize human society into an agricultural cornucopia. The death of men went hand in hand with the growth of agriculture, and women resigned themselves to the idea that you couldnt have one without the other. They hated war, but they hated nomadic berry-picking even more. Where was the security in that? In India hundreds of women accompanied the men to the battlefields to cheer them on from the sidelines. Numerous armies rewarded daring soldiers by offering them military prostitutes. Whats worse? Getting killed? Or giving away a piece of tail? The women knew the answer to that. Human sacrifice was not widely practiced in hunter cultures. Pre-Mayan hunter cultures had no word for war. Hunting was a type of praying. The hunter prayed to his prey and asked
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Here was a man who would propagate female values control, security, planned economies, technological gadgetry to make life easier and do all this in a male body. What a clever way to commandeer the brains of all men. The creation of the King was a stunningly insidious social development. The King would get laid by a bevy of concubines. He would be rich and famous and other men would admire him and follow him around like puppies. In later years he could become a senator, a captain of industry, an entertainer, and all the while he would be advancing the cause of female values at the expense of other men. He would be a competitor men enjoyed risk and gaming. He would be surrounded by fawning women and envious men. He would lead human society exactly where mineral consciousness wanted it to go ever-increasing control and organization a high-tech mythology worshipping feelings and devoid of meaning. Odysseus tied his hair in knots and lived in hollow logs like a madman so they would leave him alone. He collected dried birds and bones and experimented with herbs to preserve his communion with all life. They called him a Shaman and chased him to the edges of civilization. But when they were sick, or when the cornucopia of technology drove them insane, they came to him for help. He was lonely. Unbelievably lonely. And ultimately that was a very good thing because it forced him to seek solace in prayer. The only thing he ever prayed for was the strength to continue with Gods work. Living at the outer edge of life made him starkly aware of the fact that the only strength he had came from somewhere outside of Time. From God. From the Guy with Big Pants. From the Supreme Consciousness. He dedicated himself to the living the Truth, and to the simple proposition that every human being deserved to know that life was more than a random clash of atoms. Life had a deeper meaning and purpose than the engine of society was willing to allow or admit. Through prayer he gained the inner peace to calmly accept his mission. He would die, over and over again, in the cruelest ways, trying to snap mankind out of the materialistic nightmare that was marching the human parade off the cliff of extinction.
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later when that carpenter from Nazareth came out of nowhere and blew him out of the water. Jesus Christ was a message in a bottle from outside of Time. Jesus rode into history to say that he was the LAST sacrifice. That the Goddess religions were ill-founded. God no longer required human sacrifice. This whole human sacrifice thing was supposed to end with Him. And, by the way, accumulation of wealth in the manner of kings, those feminized agrarians, was soul-destroying. Better to wander the earth and go fishing once in awhile. Even children could recognize this message from outside of Time as a bold attempt to rebalance human nature. But Lesis priests quickly turned Jesus story inside out. Before long they were praying to him for rain, victory in battle and special favors. The story was preserved, but in a horrendous repeat performance of human nature, the meaning was lost. For awhile Odysseus became a vegetarian, not because he loved animals, but because he hated plants. He couldnt stand what a mess vegetable consciousness was making of the human experiment. He traveled to Rome to make his case against agriculture. The Senate heard him out, talked it over, then fed him to the lions. He moved north and joined a tribe of proto-Polacks who worshipped snakes and chased wild cattle around on the steppes of Central Europe. They were dumb. They didnt care anything for civilization. But at least they didnt laugh at him when he said he could talk to animals. They just shrugged. What else is new? Central Europe became the last bastion of mysticism in the Holy Roman Empire. Many of Odysseus stories were repeated as fairy tales which endured for thousands of years. He even taught St. Francis how to talk to birds. And some of his stories ended up on the lips of grandma Lobotomowski who recited them at bedtime to her two adopted grandsons in the days before she broke down and bought Ramon a $50 TV from a Mexican cat burglar. What a Timely seed of salvation! * * *
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according to bells. Machines ran everything. The plants and animals had stopped talking to him. The hippie revolution came and went a genuine spasm of spiritual rediscovery assassinated by drugs. Yippies turned into Yuppies who drove slick cars, drank designer coffee, and shunned having babies. The machines were deeply infiltrated by now. Society was geared toward having fun and letting machines run things. By the time Odysseus visited the Neo-Neoist commune with his dad he had entirely forgotten that nature could talk. His fathers grandiose proclamation on this topic stirred the memory of voices which by now were barely audible. Odysseus fungus experiments in the basement of the mafia steak joint reconnected him to a faint rumor that there was more to life than the dominant culture would have anyone believe. The American Way was a tyranny of the majority, a cruel cant to individualism, that denied other possibilities. The molds teased him with the notion that there was a cosmic story to be told, and that lives lived in ignorance of the cosmic story ceased to have any meaning. Odysseus dad rekindled his sons bio-sensitivity to the language of nature. Apollo owed this insight to Myrtle the Turtle, animal visionary, super commando in the subterranean war against agriculture and industrialization. Myrtle the Turtle. Farsighted creature who codified a common language for animals. Myrtle the Turtle. Underground leader of the Animal Revolt. One day, neck deep in feminist studies at the University of Chicago, Apollo Tyme told Myrtle about the gold-plated basketball sneaker that had materialized in his closet when he was back in Ithaca. Just plain materialized in his closet, one night while he was taking a shower. When he threw his clothes in the hamper it wasnt there, and after the shower, grabbing his bathrobe, he noticed it. Her head recoiled into her body. Myrtle was round and flat and certainly not much to look at by human standards. She had not yet evolved into a turtle, but she had certainly begun acting like one. And she was faintly aware of the dangerous properties of that shoe. So she cut a deal with Apollo. He would give her the shoe in exchange for private instructions in the animal language she
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catamaran bearing down on Pulotu, flying the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger. At the helm of the pirate ship stood a very large turtle.
Rich Zubaty
Street. Is the SBA supposed to be investing tax money on Wall Street? That was probably an isolated case. I have no way of knowing. But my point is this, there IS a way to stay immune from corporate feudalism. Third World inhabitants do it. Hippies did it. You simply become a Refusenik. You refuse. So thats what this is all about? According to you. You still think youre that much of a threat to the system. Im like a computer virus. By pursuing the truth, religiously, unflinchingly, I have made myself an outcast. An enemy. Look at the way modern people are running themselves into the ground trying to keep up with all their payments. If ten per cent of them wake up refuse Mega National will be rocked to its roots Remember, there is no human person behind this. There is no evil genius. You cant just get rid of a bad few guys and have everything come right. Its not like the movies where the problems emanate from one bad human. The good guys put him in prison and it ends. NO. Thats not how this works. The evil genius here is a corporate person. The problem is the system that allows these corporate persons to have a life of their own legally You know, Ive talked to WW II veterans. They say the problem is the politicians. The system is great. It would work just fine if we only got the right guys in. Hello! Theyre married to this democracy/freedom philosophy. They fought for this system and therefore they know the system is good. Why would they have fought for it if it was bad? Its like saying, I grow apples, therefore apples are good. Or, I make jeep parts therefore jeep parts are good. Dont you think Nazis said the same things! I tell them look, this has been going on for over 100 years actually much longer than that and how can it be that we never ever get the right guy in? Or if we do he gets shot? Doesnt that tell you something? How come we cant get the right guy in? Because the system doesnt work. Shoebridges brain was overloaded. He sat at the tiller dissolving himself in the Milky Way, letting the thoughts come
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was psychic hubris. A psychic delusion. It was a being that was entirely devoid of a spiritual life. It could not see beyond its own agenda. And that made it an easy target for the Guy with Big Pants. MN didnt even suspect He was there. It was about to be ambushed, blown into psychosomatic shrapnel, and all the while it was dreaming of world conquest. Fiddling while the future burned. It only remained for the Big Guy to choose his instrument of devastation. But who would it be? Shoebridge? The drugged man? Madeleine the female poison apple herself? The funny thing was, nobody even knew that there was anything to know about this up and coming miracle. But it didnt matter because that still wasnt what this whole thing was about. It was about something else. Life is not a detective story sprinkled with physical clues. Blood on a doorknob or the odd footprint. Life is a detective story sprinkled with non-physical clues. Cha Cha had unmade the world with his food experiments and he was still here! Odysseus had been burned at the stake six times slaughtered a thousand times and he was still here! Every one of us experiences rare moments when it seems like we are receiving radio transmissions from no earthly source. When, like mollusks, our attention is lifted up into the sky, where we feel part of rhythms and cycles that last for hundreds of millennia. Billions of years. Yes, something is trying to talk to us, but we arent listening. We havent trained ourselves to listen. We havent allowed ourselves to believe that its there. Have faith that its there. Allow the mere possibility that its there! Like the isolated tribe of Polacks who didnt know what Rome was but believed that Odysseus could talk to animals, there are a few battered souls among us who have opened their hearts to what is possible. These are the real scientists. These are the ones who truly penetrate the mysteries of life. They are like Cha Cha and Odysseus, and the drugged man. And now Shoebridge, sitting at the rudder of the stolen sailboat, was unwittingly elevating himself amongst them. None of them had answers. Not yet. But they all had good questions. Not stupid questions. Good questions. Not mundane questions. Good questions. Not how to make a better microchip or write a nifty computer program.
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Wellthats what you really dont understand. I was really after something else. All your leftist rants are just an act? No. I believe them. I think theyre important. I call it Stage One. Stage One of what? Waking up. Tune in, turn on, drop out. Thats what Timothy Leary called it, then they turned him into a criminal. For all its stifling propaganda about liberty the moment an American starts living a life outside the dotted lines corporate/government lackeys turn him into a criminal. He cant hunt food without trespassing; he cant just plant a garden without owning the land because thats trespassing. The only option left is a life of crime stealing from the rich bastards who got rich legally. Who got rich by following the laws of the system. But whose system! Thats what nobody ever asks. Who is the system for?All you need to do is read three foreign newspapers to find out how brainwashed we are. Thats Stage One. Waking up to how corrupt our politics are is the beginning. The beginning of thinking outside the lines. Right. Then what? Then one moves quickly onto spiritual matters. Spiritual? Right. You guys never realized how much fear we had of you. We were really scared. You cops were living within the law, just doing your job. We were breaking it. Pushing the envelope. Thats why we did so many drugs, especially before a street riot or protest march where we expected to be smashed up and tossed in jailBut the drugs turned on us. We needed something higher something higher than drugs some higher power, to banish the fear. I dont think you can survive as a political animal without finding something bigger than yourself to pray to, to protect you. Never thought of it alike that. No, I guess you could just take God for granted. Bow to J. Edgar and go on your way. Maybe. I dont know.
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University of Chicago a freak with no eyebrows. Anyway, I had to clean out his closet to paint it. When he came home from work he went crazy about a shoe Id thrown on the bed. The gold-plated sneaker. Shoebridge glanced at the compass and pulled the tiller toward him. Yeah. Like a trophy? No. Different. Just like a dirty old shoe that had been dipped in gold paint. Nothing. Garbage really. Yeah. So what? The guy screamed at me and told me to get out of his house. I went back the next day to get paid and he screamed at me again accused me of stealing the shoe. Engineering some breakin overnightHe said I could keep the TV. He didnt care about that. But he wanted that shoe back. He was nuts. I never got paid. Did you take it? No, I didnt. But the weird thing was, I had thought about taking it. Rolling it up in my painting tarp when I left for the day. I should have. At least I wouldve got paid something for my work. But I didntAnd yet, somehow, just the thought of stealing it was enough. Enough? Yeah. That shoe had to be stolen. I still dont know why. I still dont get it. If the drugged man could have heard gods laugh he would have caught a belly-full from the Guy with Big Pants.
Rich Zubaty
I know the rules grandma. She dipped her head and gulped her choppers back into place. I just wish I could find out what happened to the geese. Must be wolves. Unless its those Austrian spies again. And just like that the channel changed. The receiver in her brain tuned in to 1908 on the Century dial and the white blizzard of Time wiped out the transmission. Ni modo. There was nothing he could do. He backed out the door onto the front porch and turned to one of his bodyguards. Get some geese and put them in a pen outside her window. And shoot anything that goes near them. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of chocolate kisses that had materialized in one of his food experiments. Smiling at the flock of kids gathered around the porch, he tossed the candy up in the air. They pounced on the silver foil teardrops like hungry crows, flapping and squabbling and whooping with joy. No one had even SEEN candy in six months. Back to the office, he said to his bodyguards, and they saddled up to leave. The kids cheered and cavorted alongside Cha Chas entourage all the way to Maxwell Street, hoping to attract a nod of recognition from their hero as he swayed and rolled on the haunches of a lumbering black and white Holstein cow. Just past Maxwell Street a leopard leaped from the second floor of an abandoned building onto the cows neck tossing Cha Cha sideways into an open sewer. Three lionesses attacked the cows haunches and brought her down. While the bodyguards were distracted by the big cats some pigs on motorbikes zoomed out of an alley and opened fire. The pigs caught everyone by surprise and anyway, they had better weapons. The bodyguards scattered in a cloud of cordite. When the gunfire died off one large pig wearing a vest plastered with medals poked its snout in the air and snorted, Cha Cha? Cha Cha? But Cha Cha had raced through the storm sewers and come out at the Chicago River beneath Lower Wacker Drive a roofed enclave where homeless people had been living under stacks of
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screen door of space/Time. During the Dark Ages before the formation of the Time Police things got pretty desperate. Someone would build a shoe factory and everybody would show up for work one morning and find a herd of giraffes grazing in a scrub forest where the factory had been. Live whales materialized in automobile showrooms. Trout streams became radioactive overnight. Wolf packs appeared in crowded supermarket aisles. So the Time Police were chartered to round everybody up, bring them back to the present and keep them there. That way evolution could proceed at a steady pace. The Time Police predated all current political associations on the Earth-sized planet orbiting the star in Ursa Major that Lazarak called home. They were a feared institution which infiltrated every pore of society employing whatever force necessary to subdue Time Bandits. They regarded the outbreak of Timelessness on Earth as a type of virus which might infect the rest of the galaxy. On top of that, they considered this hole in Time a potential hideout for escaped criminals. They wanted to shut it down right now. Here we are, said Cha Cha, throwing the door open and booting a mud-caked Diplodocus tail out of the way. A flock of baby stegosauri ran for cover behind the sofa. What a mess, said Lazarak, squinting at the menagerie of extinct reptiles and genetically crazed plants. He held his nose and rubbed his eyes, smarting from the ammonia haze of stale dinosaur pee but he didnt fool Cha Cha. Wheres the shoe? Over by the window. Lazarak rushed to the window and the man-eating pumpkins tore him in half before Cha Cha even got the door closed. Awful business, muttered Cha Cha as he watched the pumpkins whipping their viney tentacles, spitting chunks of wire and metal all over the room. The pumpkins hissed at Cha Cha, outraged at his deception. He grabbed a baseball bat and drubbed a snapping baby stegosaurus into the waiting tentacles of the carnivorous melons. While they squabbled like alley dogs, tearing the spike-tailed
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quietly replaced them. Popular mythology would have to reserve a special channel on the human mind-screen for sorties into non-physical phenomena. The sound bite was out. The mind bite was in. The tension between push/pull, expansion/contraction, male/ female, would always remain. That was a good thing. A healthy symbiosis. Neither would reign over the other. Males might be physically more powerful. Females might be emotionally more powerful. Men would not be allowed to take physical advantage of women. Women would not be allowed to take emotional advantage of men. Psychic manipulation emotional violence would be as punishable as physical violence. That was the way it had to be. The choice was either to enforce this balance, or face extinction as a species. Cha Cha only had one remaining problem. How to break the news to the good people of Chicago? The population of the Chicago metropolitan area had dropped from 12 million to two million in nine months. That mighty artery, Halsted Street, was packed shoulder to shoulder, day and night, with families fleeing the city dragging suitcases, riding tricycles, carrying boxes on their heads. The Dan Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways were jammed with herds of refugees, yelping and bleating and shuffling along like cattle on a range drive, walking into the unknown, fleeing the rustbowl. In the early days of the exodus people reaching the outskirts of the city raided silos for corn and soybeans. They went fishing for birds by baiting hooks with corn kernels and casting them up into the trees hoping to reel in a sparrow or starling to boil in their soybean stew. But the animals soon put a stop to that. Birds patrolled the skies, fish defended the waters, wolves and lions spied from the bushes, pigs on motorbikes coordinated the surveillance and punished transgressors by confiscating their personal property and stomping on their feet. Animals now operated the remaining industrial machinery and since 95% of machines served people, 95% of machines were unplugged and allowed to rust. Let the people bid adios to the pavement and sink their shoes in the earth. Maybe if they
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driven by chimpanzees rumbled through the heartland bringing iron ore and silica and uranium to feed the cities. And eventually these animal dupes would be replaced entirely by android drivers men made out of wires and metal who wore gold-plated basketball sneakers. And the only thing left standing in their way was Cha Cha Lobotomowski and his hamster powered tape recorder. Every time the machines reached up to turn off the lights of human consciousness, Cha Cha moved the switch. Theyd create a communications command center and hed melt it into a puddle of metal. Theyd get the monkeys organized into a teamsters union and hed reorganize their molecules into lemurs who only came out at night. Theyd convince the fish to form marine patrols and hed turn them into mollusks pumping around on underwater wheelchairs. Theyd kill off banana trees. Hed resurrect them as temperate climate vines. It was impossible for anyone to know what he was up to, because he didnt know what he was up to himself. That was the secret to his insidious success. It was widely assumed he had some kind of agenda but no one could figure out what it was. Rumor had it that he must be receiving instructions from outside of Time, but if so that meant the transmissions were impossible to intercept. That meant he was operating out of that part of the brain humans never used the Big Part the 9/10ths of it that Darwin couldnt explain. The part that machines, try as they did, could never manage to reproduce. The part Lesi called the bad gene the part she couldnt steal. Cha Cha could be stopped though. This kind of problem had been handled before. On other planets. Thats why the earthly machines had beamed an interplanetary alert to Detective Lazarak of the Time Police as soon as they noticed the problem with Time. And now Lazarak had disappeared as neatly as a millet seed up an elephants anus. This kid had street smarts and street smarts was not something you could teach a machine in a million years. Cha Cha was a loose canon. A genetic menace of incalculable danger. Machine evolution required organization, planning, control, and above all, sequential execution. All of
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on the shoulders of a huge black girl. With one hand the man fiddled with his gold nose ring. With the other he held a gun to the girls ear. The rider seemed weary but the girl looked grim and alert as she plodded along on Hereford-sized hams, shiny with sweat, dripping mucus from her gorilla nostrils, forging a trail of foot-shaped frog ponds. Were almost there, said Airport Johnny. Those are the Gary steel mills. He pointed his pistol at the rusted stacks, puking flames and soot into the cold gray sky. Humphg, said the gargantuan girl. Whats wrong? Youre the one who said you always wanted to see America? Not like this Mon, she snarled. You Mericans dont know how to treat a lady. I already told you. Well take care of business here and then go back to Montego Bay. Humphg. Lying, jive, kidnappers. I am NOT a kidnapper. Then what is you, Merican? Im just a delivery boyIm just bringing home the bacon. At that the girl started bucking and snorting, trying to throw him. Johnny grabbed her hair with one hand and pressed the gun hard against her ear. She whinnied and grunted and finally settled down. Humphg. Five hours later they stomped into the Carrini Green office and woke up Cha Cha who was still asleep on the straw. Stay away from the pumpkins! yelled Cha Cha. SNAP! Too late. One of the pumpkins nipped a chunk off the girls behind. She whirled around and dove on the shocked vegetables like a 285-pound linebacker. Ripping and tearing and kicking craters in their heads; biting the vines, scratching their skin, shooting both fists like howitzers in one side of their orange skulls and out the other. It was all over in a few seconds. There were pumpkin seeds stuck to the ceiling and trails of orange goo dripping down the windows.
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Hold it. Hold it, said Cha Cha. You dont gotta marry herI got an ideaMake her a General in the Sanitation Department. I dont know if there is such a thing, said Johnny suspiciously, one hand still on the doorknob. Make her a General. Send her down to Lower Wacker. Maybe she can clean up the mess down thereThey asked for it. They got itWhats your name pumpkin killer? RamonaAnd dont call me Ram. And dont call me the Ramazon. I killt someone once for calling me that. Ramona. Cha Cha picked some wet seeds out of his hair. I have a brothernamed Ramonhes not here now. I can see that Merican. God DO hand out SOME brains in Jamaica too, you know. Hes half dead. What? My brother. OhSorry. Whats wrong with him? Im not sure. Its something to do with Time. Ramona, the Ramazon from the Amazon, as the local kids called her, cleaned up Lower Wacker Drive all right. There were three dead bodies to prove it. She didnt even allow no filthy language down there. She did it by making everyone so bloody uncomfortable they simply couldnt relax. Ever! The good people of Chicago were finally losing their patience with the whole situation. When their buildings started melting theyd shrugged fatalistically theyd endured construction boondoggles before. When the power plants shut down they revived the ancient Hindu technologies of burning dried cow pies to cook their soup, and lighting their homes with butter lamps. Instead of newspapers and telephones they used gossip and rumors to spread information. They rode around on animals and wove their own cloth. Their only insurance against disaster was an unshakable belief that there was no such thing as Time the philosophy propounded by that wily magician, that black prophet, that Puerto Rican/Polish voodoo saint, Cha Cha Lobotomowski. But now Ramona wouldnt let them relax
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performances of New World Classics like Belly Full O Blues and Soulfood Man. Cha Cha hopped onto the bed of a cart pulled by two white Brahmin bullocks with humped shoulders and spiraling blue horns. The crowds cheered him as the regal steers pulled away from the curb. Cha Cha couldnt imagine what they were cheering about, but he raised his arms and waved back anyway. Then he settled himself on a mound of straw for the ride to Lincoln Park. The caged animals had escaped from Lincoln Park Zoo months ago, but the zoo was still a popular venue for weddings and funerals. Cha Chas grandma had just died in the cholera epidemic. To the end she remained stubbornly unreconciled to Time referring to Cha Chas bodyguards as those Cossacks and warning him never to sign a treaty with the AustroHungarian Emperor. Cha Cha maintained she was poisoned, but everyone told him she had died of natural causes. Natural causes! She was living backwards. If anything she should have been getting younger! A funeral pyre of dry grass bundles had been heaped on the shore of Lake Michigan. Grandmas rigor mortised body transported on a bier covered with blue flowers and pinned with white paper notes had been placed on the pile. The notes were cryptic messages from mourners, intended for relatives or friends on the other side of Time. They said things like Hows the food? or Tap my bedroom wall three times if you need a fan. A doleful drumbeat thumped the air as Cha Cha arrived in the midst of the wailers. He kissed his own fingers, touched them to grandmas cheeks, and ordered the cremation to begin. A half dozen old women covered the body with dried cow pies, then a thick layer of hay, and finally a coat of wet mud. At the insistence of the mourners Cha Cha improvised a short prayer. From fire we are bornIn fire we are sustainedTo fire we returnSuch is the Circle of Fire. Such is the Collar of Time. Amen.
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We had to separate church and state. If thats true then why didnt we do it going both directions? No, it was an evil agenda. How so? Marriage had been a religious institution for 50,000 years or more, until the government started issuing marriage licenses and settling divorce in court. Turned marriage on its head. 60% of marriages end in divorce and we dont know why? Get government out of marriage, thats why. Shoebridge remembered his own bizarre marriage and inched toward agreement. King Henry the Eighth had to start an entirely new church to get divorced. Why? It was obvious to everyone that marriage is a religious institution not a government institution. It could have set off a revolt. And he was the law. He was the King! So deeply imbedded was the notion that marriage is a religious institution that not even the King could declare himself divorced. And now people get divorced and remarried in an afternoon. Yeah, religion got kicked in the butt all right. Thats because we teach scientific creation mythology in our schools but not religious creation mythology. Theyre both wrong. Neither of them have the facts entirely right, but at least religion gets the meaning right. They both have value. They should both be taught. The greatest players in earth history Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Black Elk are edited out of our kids minds because we dont teach religion in school. Thats like refusing to teach history because kids might learn about warBut we wont do that because MN likes war. MN wants war. War means more profits and accelerated progress in technologyThe religion of science kicked the door open for MN to take over everything. And the feminists fell right in behind. Feminists? Feminists needed to destroy traditional church and family values to assert their agenda. The more they succeeded in marginalizing church and family values the more corporate values swept in to fill the vacuum. No, the women didnt intend that. Corporate colonization was an unintended consequence of
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ahead? Spend money on missiles. Afraid your friends will think youre stupid? Subscribe to this magazine. Want to look stupid? Buy that magazineAfraid you look bourgeois? Buy this car. Want to look bourgeois? Buy that car. Afraid of weather? Buy a jeep. TV had an answer for every question we never asked. It was marvelous. The easiest way ever invented to make people fearful was to get them to snap on the TV. Television was inebriated with fear. Actresses who lost their way. Kidnapped kids. Bad hair. Bad relationships. Gang shootings. Stock market tremors. Anything could be used to produce fear. If the Dow Jones went down, the economy might collapse. If the Dow went up, interest rates might go up. Either way the time to buy was now. Maybe your bones are weak? Eat calcium. Skin wrinkling? Smear on some of this. Cant lose weight? Gobble some of that. Modern science has decreed that an ideal state of happiness can be achieved and it only costs a few pennies a month! Afraid of death? Buy insurance. Afraid of life? Buy insurance. Afraid for your kids? Buy insurance. Insurance companies were the whoremongers of fear. As long as you didnt actually have a disease, insurance companies would insure you against getting it. They took your money to bless you with freedom from fear. They never took your money to solve existing problems. Where would be the sense in that? They spun profit directly from the human imagination that huge part of the brain we never used. Insurance companies were the perfect Mega National creation. They profited directly from the primordial feminized fear, the feminine intuition, that the world is going to come crashing down if we dont do something to prevent it right now! Florida woman finds alligator in her bathtub, BUT is there one under her bed too? Tune in at ten. Boy steals food from neighbors fridge, BUT did he get poisoned from bacteria? Find out at six. Vicious dictator toppled in Mid East, BUT will the price of oil go up? Watch 30/30. The enticing BUT. The ubiquitous BUT. The essential BUT. A generation of Americans had never heard a teaser for a news show that did not contain that snarling, strident BUT. But meant calamity, uncertainty, fear. Boy rides bike to school, BUT did he get squashed by a
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life to protecting the wrong people? His job description had been pretty clear: Defend the Constitution. Defend the rights of the American people. But no one had ever predicted that 200 years after the Bill of Rights was written corporations would be legally regarded as persons. That changed everything. Didnt it? Certainly the founding fathers had never anticipated this legal monstrosity. Had he devoted his whole life to defending the rights and privileges of some kind of science fiction monsters? It was depressing to think about. The children were the key to the whole evil agenda, said the drugged man. I never would have caught on if my own child hadnt been stolen from me. But the really stupid thing is, its been headed that way for decades, a whole century, and nobody caught on. The brainwashing of American children started in pre-school and hit high gear in elementary school. They were taught they are free members of a free society with a free press and a freely elected government which espouses free trade and freedom for all the oppressed peoples of the world. Any critique or attack of this free society was an attack against Freedom itself. The fact that corporate money selected which candidates will or will not run successfully was never even discussed. The fact that public education is little more than job training for corporate culture was never even discussed. The fact that corporations were legally regarded as persons who enjoy the rights of free speech (paid commercial announcements), ownership of property, and the freedom to contribute money to the war chests of political candidates was never even discussed. The fact that corporations are persons who do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes, or enlist in the military in time of war, was never even discussed. Humans offered their babies up to the Corporate Cult the way they had once offered them up to the Cult of Ishtar. The Religion of Business had swept the globe from New York to China. If schools taught kids how to supply skills to corporate culture then the kids would grow up and make money and be happy. People actually believed this pagan fantasy the same
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What impoverished souls. They hoped to elevate their own self-esteem by launching one single student up to that great Corporate Recruiting Station in the Sky, at the expense of abusing the minds of the rest of their students. Horrendous. Might as well have tossed them to Ishtar and allowed them to skip out on a life of drugs and divorce and culturally induced dementia. If the teachers were in possession of their own brains, and if they really wanted to help the youth, they should have taught them to read, write and think and then taken them on field trips to politicians offices, and on protest marches to the headquarters of corporations known to be receiving government hand-outs sweetheart contracts, infrastructure freebies, tax holidays while they shipped that communitys jobs overseas. Thats teaching. Thats giving kids the tools they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, corporate culture. Not more math!!! Why didnt we ever catch on? asked Shoebridge. You know the answer. MN controls the media. Theres nowhere to go with it. No one will investigate it. No one will report it. We have freedom of speech and thought but no ideas to think withBut its not all bleak. The belly of the beast is the fact that corporations cannot survive without public approval. Their biggest fear is public opinion turning against them. Thats why they do everything they can to control what we think. Thats why MN goes invisible wherever it can. Sounds hopeless. If we wish to change things we have to attack the belly of the beast. It can be done. Why are there only three car companies? There should be a hundred. Why do we all drink Budweiser when there are thousands of microbreweries that make better beer? Marketing is evil. Marketing does not fuel a free market. Marketing eliminates options and consolidates everything. We need to slit the belly of corporate advertising. We need to disallow tax deductions for advertising. And we need to convince the newspapers and radio and TV stations who are dependent on corporate advertising to do this? Like I said. Hopeless.
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live in an inside-out culture, and if it sounds wrong, maybe its right. See?Prayer can transport you to a non-linear, nonrational place a place where MN cannot go. Prayer can move your mind to the outside, looking in. And from that perch, that resting place outside of Time, maybe some inspiration will come. Prayer removes your mind from the brainwashing of the Corporate Cult. Thats why they kicked prayer out of school. Freedom of religion was supposed to mean the freedom to study religion even in school not the freedom to have all religions banned. That was the Corporate Cult at work. Hmmm. I wish I had more to offer but I dont. Just pray. Youre still not telling me something. Thats because I cant. You have to find it out for yourself. You cant believe anyone else, not even me. Youve been inhabiting a science fiction nightmare where everyone around you is brainwashed, and you are brainwashed too, but you know it, and they dont. Thats your saving grace Shoebridge. You were never a good FBI agent. You didnt really care what Hoover thought; you didnt really try to climb the ladder. You just thought you did because thats what your wife wanted you to think. And you loved her, and you tried to make her happy, and when she banished you to the garage it finally occurred to you, little by little, that perhaps failure within a corrupt system is its own kind of victoryA moral victory. A spiritual victory You had your own inscrutable reasons for doing what you did. Im not so sure you yourself even understood why you did what you did. You had a brain, but it was not your own. It was like you were receiving marching orders from the Milky Way. You bungled everything they gave you to do, then they tried to take advantage of that, and you bungled that too. You bungled your own bungling. If such a thing is possible. Which it clearly is, because you pulled it offAnd why? Because the King assassination fried you, crippled you for life. It was like the basketball sneaker for me. After that nothing was the same. There, thought Shoebridge, somebody finally said it. At long last someone besides himself knew it. Knew it for certain. After the King assassination nothing had been the same. As if his
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Movement started in the black churches and swept out onto the streets. Every ancient warrior said a prayer before he went into battle. We are in a battle for our very souls, maybe the biggest battle in human history. Shoebridge groaned and massaged his eye sockets. I dont know how to pray. The easiest way to pray is just empty your mind. Think about your God. Focus on Him. Rest in his hands. Or if you dont believe in God think about a river or an eagle or a tree. Everything is connected to everything else you know. Thats something I learned swimming around on the reef at night. The main thing about praying is to remove your mind from corporate culture. Give it a rest. Become invisible to the relentless manmade media seductions. Pry open a peephole in Time. Ill try it later, said Shoebridge. The drugged man went below to get some sleep. Shoebridge took over the tiller and relaxed into the Kingdom of Water, slowly allowing himself to be hypnotized by the rhythmic sloshing of prow through wave tops. Dissolving himself in the Ocean of Life. He tried to concentrate on something irrational. He chose his toenail. He started praying to it. Toenail, toenail, reveal your secrets. Toenail reveal your secrets. What was a toenail really but the remnant of some kind of claw, an animal claw, a residue of evolutionary history. His mind wandered. That was good. He thought about bear claws and alligator claws. His mind wandered again. He thought about what bears and alligators think about. Psycho-biology. The evolution of thought. Did our brains have their own toenails? Did our brains have their own remnants of past animal incarnations? He didnt know. But it was a good question. The only thing he could tell for sure is that while humans had more of one kind of thoughts they had fewer of other kindsAnd againHe saw Man on a lateral branch of the tree of evolution a branch that was lopped off at the end. Dolphins were out there too but their branch split off and rose higher. Cockroaches beetles had their very own branch, which extended much higher. Beetles were the most successful phyla on the planet flying armored cars that could adapt to any conditions. What did beetles think about?
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all of them bulging with strange stuff, and all of them tagged with baggage claims addressed to the same guy. The Guy with Big Pants. He had no idea how long this lasted. Maybe he humped the guys baggage for a minute, maybe for a million years. He simply could not tell. Sometime after midnight he spotted bright yellow explosions on the horizon 20 degrees off course from their heading to the drugged mans island. He was drawn to them. Irresistibly drawn to them. Inhumanly drawn to them. Spiritually drawn to them. Normally one-track Shoebridge, mono-maniac with a mission, would have ignored them. But his prayer had done something. Between his ears some molecules had moved. He yanked the tiller.
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proposition for most human males. If they didnt respond to flirting they wouldnt reproduce. If they did respond, they could be captured and manipulated. If the average female had her way she would maintain a stable of horse-cock studs to give her pleasure, and a house-husband to work and pay her bills and watch the kids while she was out having fun. Any way you looked at it the modern human male had been emasculated by modern human culture. The 20 billion year old balance between push/pull had been disrupted to the core. Someday science might come to understand cellular knowledge. But that certainly wasnt going to happen until it pointed its ant-hose in that direction. Someday, science would herald new discoveries in human nature that had paraded back and forth in front of peoples faces for millennia but which no one had ever bothered to study. Advertisers knew all about it. Thats why you didnt see women in buns and bib overalls selling cars. There was an international conspiracy to keep the cellular motivations for human behavior hidden from one select group: Men. Women batted their eyes and tossed their hair, wore high heels and enhanced their cleavage. And when they got unwanted attention they just said no. And that was supposed to be that. You didnt see cows or birds acting like that. If they flirted they knew what to expect. It was cultural schizophrenia on a massive scale open hunting season on the male brain. Any man whose cellular biology responded to such sexual overtures had automatically entered a sexual arena wherein he could be controlled. If he was nice maybe hed get a smile or a pat on the shoulder or maybe even more. He would get female affirmation something hed been trained to crave ever since he was peeing in his pants and eating mashed carrots. In a very real psychological sense, women were holding mens balls in their hands. And the men who did not respond to such sexual come-ons were already emasculated already edited out of the gene pool. The hunt was on. Human society had become dedicated to channeling and controlling mens sexual energy dedicated, in effect, to
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female emotional power surged unabated, overpowering everything in its path. Blame it on plants. But there were also some things that Odysseus enjoyed about being a plant or, as it were, part plant. Because they were rooted in the earth plants had developed tremendous psychic powers. Odysseus could sense what people and animals around him were thinking. He could detect fear and danger, heat and cold, truth and lies. He had a prodigious memory truly a cellular feature. He was sensitive to magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation at incredibly faint levels. Some electromagnetic waves arriving through space were millions of miles long and took 100,000 years to cycle, but as a plant he could feel them. He was aware of life fields suffusing every living thing which intersected and interacted with these faint electromagnetic waves to form bioplasmic bodies subtle energy fields within and around every plant and animal. He watched human biorhythms fluctuate over weeks or months. People might feel good or bad, sick or well, happy or miserable, for no apparent reason. It was baffling until one examined the natural fluctuations in their personal energy fields, and suddenly their mood swings made sense. He was aware that humans inhabited hypnotic states most of the time, even when they were awake. Humans were mesmerized by psychosomatic mushroom clouds of popular mythology that obscured their ability to see much of anything at all. Hypnotizing a human, as any professional knew, was actually a process of de-hypnotizing him. Odysseus knew that the basis of life was not physical matter but immaterial vibrations, which arrived constantly inside and outside of Time to stimulate cells to certain behaviors. Plants and animals were actually organic radio receivers that absorbed millions of subtle waveform signals from all over the universe day and night. Eons ago plants had perfected the skills to redirect this tide of information energy. They discovered they could use it to
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One of the least studied and least understood parts of life was the way in which thought could translate itself into the movement of molecules action. A driver preparing to make a left turn evaluated globs of light striking his eyeball until he made the decision to yank the wheel left. But what fired the neuron to command the hand to yank the wheel? What made the first molecule move? How could a writer cull thoughts out of nowhere and scribble them on paper? What made the first molecule move? The ant-hose of science had skipped this line of inquiry entirely. It had no model to explain the interface between thought and action perhaps the most fundamental feature of water-based life. Yet this self-ordained scientific priesthood nominated itself to keep us informed about the basic dynamics of the universe. Preposterous. These people were wearing shoes on their ears. If a general told a soldier to shoot the canon, an infinitesimal amount of information energy which appeared out of nowhere inside the generals brain was amplified through the air to hit an eardrum and compel a finger to depress a trigger whereby an enormous amount of stored energy was released. That was power. Minute amounts of energy unharnessing vast forces. Plants knew how to harness and release energy. How do you think they took over the whole planet? Every day any acre of land on earth harnessed enough energy to charge several canons. This energy could be invested in leaves or seeds, or beamed at subtle frequencies to trained receivers anywhere in the universe. Plants communicated messages to each other. As one might imagine, the weather was a favorite topic of conversation. However, much more fundamental information was also transmitted. Some messages conveyed the basic formats for how to reconfigure the suns energy. This type of transmission was not a genetic feature. Genes only provided protein codes. A subtler bioplasmic energy activated these codes with formic instructions so a leaf knew to make leaf cells and a root knew to make root cells. Human life fields accomplished the same thing. The only difference was that plants were conscious of their activities and humans were not.
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existence, and as such are no more visible than the air in front of our noses. Someday all this would become as obvious as the observation that the earth revolves around the sun. But it would take some gloriously spontaneous, rebelliously intractable, stupendously deconditioned mind, to grab the ant-hose with both hands and jerk it in that direction. Knowledge first discovered through prayer and mysticism and intuition would one day be cataloged and analyzed and assigned numbers. But that time had not yet arrived. Not quite. For now Odysseus sat on a rock with his feet in the mud, sucking nutrients through his root hairs, listening to Lesiani and Sione and Latu the Giant catch him up on the state of the biological union. Life fields were overlapping in strange ways. Evolution was tossing and turning in a goofy dream. Odysseus had a problem to solve. The answer was right in front of him. But he couldnt see it. The missing ingredient was an infinitesimal spark of creative energy some kind of formative instructions which would reorganize the molecules in his brain and set off a chain reaction releasing enormous amounts of energy into the bioplasmic fields. The Time had come to step up a step. But how? He was squishing his toes in the mud, feeling around for the footprints of the future, hunting for a pattern or shape. Human intelligence, the restless juggling of symbols, had let its flashlight batteries to go dead. The future was out there all right crashing around on the leaves in the dark but no one could find it. Someone had to run back to camp and find more flashlight batteries. Someone had to reach outside of Time and pull a turtle out of a trumpet. Something else had to happen. Myrtle the Turtle turned her pirate ship into the wind and signaled the octopus to drop anchor. When the hook grabbed she assembled her exotic crew on deck for a final briefing. These were the Animal Crackers, the most fearsome commando assault squad in the animal kingdom. All of them escaped prisoners
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themselves as the arbiters of which species were valuable and which were not. They really thought that going backwards was the way to go forwards. But mineral consciousness had yet another greasy idea slithering through its silicone circuits. It figured, rightly, that when birds learned to fly helicopters and fish could steer boats and monkeys drove trucks, they would be uninterested in returning to their former simple habits. In fact, the machines believed that animals would prove even more ruthless than humans in exterminating competing species once they had the technological advantage. Animals comprised a huge anti-army. They knew what they were against. They could not agree on what they were for. It was just like the Anti-Vietnam War Movement all over again. When bison and elk kicked the cows out of Montana they started feuding with each other for control of turf. Now that Colorado had a huge refugee cow population the deer and antelope wanted them exterminated, but the grizzlies and panthers preferred to keep them around for food stock. Internecine squabbling broke out all over the place. Blue jays started blowing crows out of the sky with jet fighters. It was mayhem. The only ones who were happy were the machines. Myrtle felt like Mahatma Gandhi. He got rid of the British, then the Hindus and Moslems served up an endless blood bath. She got rid of the humans, and the birds and squirrels plunged into civil war. It had to be stopped. She put together a crack commando unit of select species. Dolphins for undersea reconnaissance, frigate birds for aerial surveillance, panthers and squirrels for land assaults. Snakes and alligators for covert work. A rhino for brute strength. Chimps and toads for their analytical skills. Some wasp spies. And even an octopus who could steer the boat, raise the sails, drop anchor, read the charts, catch fish and serve soup at the same time. Myrtle had one chance to prevent her revolution from turning into a slaughter of innocents. She had to produce the future. That is, she had to produce indisputable evidence of the possible courses of evolution: animal future, plant future, machine future. She had to unveil the secret agenda of the machines and put it
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And now, anchored outside the reef, Myrtle briefed her commandos for the assault on Vavoo. Their goal was to capture Odysseus Tyme alive. Furthermore, it seemed the island had been taken over by pigs on motorbikes. The commandos groaned. They really hated the pigs. That meant the surviving wild animals the ones that hadnt been slaughtered would have been harnessed to plows or otherwise engaged in producing food or sport for pigs. There would be booby traps all over the place and rigorous surveillance networks. Wasps would leave immediately to identify targets: fuel depots, command centers, armories. The strike force would move in at night. Alligators, relying on their low profile and superb night vision, would slither inland and surround the barracks. As usual, squirrels and birds would set plastic charges. The commandos had plenty of ammunition and were instructed not to be shy about using it. The snakes were assigned to locate Odysseus Tyme, but everyone in the attack force had to help keep an eye out for him. Any questions? No? Then start the preparations. The animal commandos began humming their war chant as they cleaned rifles and primed explosives. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. Oooo Ahhh Oooo. A primeval phonic stew of squawks, twitters, moans, drones, barking and buzzing all at the same time. At once awesome and awful. A sound not meant for human ears. Myrtle the Turtle retired to her bunk to wait for nightfall. Like all reptiles Myrtle could slow her heart down to a few beats a minute, permitting her to nap without really falling asleep. Myrtle was, in fact, only about 85% turtle. She had both human genes and turtle genes. She had begun her life as a human but, during a gene replacement experiment in a college biology lab, she had accidentally pricked her finger allowing reptilian DNA privileged access to her cellular structure. Since all the cells in the human body except for certain brain cells were replaced by new cells, over periods ranging from a few days to a few years, Myrtles DNA had slowly turned turtle. That didnt bother her. She had always considered herself a freak of nature and now she had physical proof of it. Even her
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ball, undetectable energy could find means of expression on the physical plane. But you had to ask for help. And that meant praying. By praying directing ones thoughts toward non-physical reality invisible energy could be attracted out of nowhere which was really somewhere but we didnt know where it was. Yet. No. Nobody could control the physical world. You couldnt pray to win the lottery or stop a war. But prayer could reveal the higher motivations of the universe. It could point a finger to hidden forces that could then be drafted into the game. It could attract energy from outside of Time. The problem was that TV had numbed the human mind to the presence of non-physical reality. Thought-deprived humans bereft of cosmic inspiration began to judge every situation according to whether it made them feel good or not. That feminized approach to life had run its evolutionary course. It was over. Any animal could see that. That night Myrtles troops stormed the island. United in gangs, the pigs projected a powerful presence. But surprised in their sleep convulsed by explosions and deranged by machine gun fire the yellow bursts Shoebridge had seen from sea they squealed and scattered into the bushes. In the manner of most animal disputes, there were few actual fatalities. When an adversary was intimidated and sent running the scuffle was over. But, after hours of interviewing the remaining wild animals and people of Vavoo, it became clear to Myrtle that Odysseus had disappeared. Odysseus and company had watched the invasion from their vantage point outside of Time. At least they cant get you here, said Lesiani. Theyll never find the way in. Odysseus nodded at her, then swept a glance in the direction of Sione. Sione was smiling a smile that was 20 billion years old. Nothing was said. Odysseus stood up, plucked his feet from the muck, wiggled his knees, and started walking. He ambled through the night,
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Thought could move molecules. Prayer was a type of thought that released the human spirit and let it fly. For all the frailties and inconsistencies of human beings there was one thing about them that truly made them special, and that was the pure force of their spirit. It didnt require much for plants to believe in Timelessness. For them it was a daily reality. On the other hand, for humans to believe in something that science couldnt see was a stupendous act of faith. The human spirit was capable of tremendous love and tremendous compassion and tremendous forgiveness. Humans were mentally crippled from birth. But their ignorance was their sincerest strength. They were so blinded to the presence of nonphysical reality that they had to dive deep into the soul of creation to generate a simple act of faith. Faith required them to overcome so many material obstacles, and to saturate themselves so completely in the Water of Life, that if they needed to hold the image of God in their minds to effect this profound transformation so be it! There was no shame in not being able to open a can of beans with your hands you needed a can opener. And there was no shame in not being able to pierce the mysteries of the universe without a guide you needed a spirit-opener. If God was the last symbol someone needed to launch themself outside of Time, then praise be to God for through Him, their energy and the energy of the cosmos, conversed with each other. Through Him the human spirit took wing and flew to its highest potential. Through Him non-physical energy was invited into the dance of life and molecules moved. So Odysseus prayed. He prayed to be rid of himself and joined to a greater thing. He prayed to be shown the difference between what was possible and what was not what was important and what was not what was sacred and what was purely selfish. By now he knew that his body didnt count for much, and his feelings either. He believed that if his cellular energy could expand outward and upward and sound one single note in the cosmic symphony, that would be proof enough he was doing his job.
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and after he was captured by the Pawnee. They bit him and kicked him and whipped him with thorns. No, he didnt feel good. His body was a mutilated bleeding rag. But his spirit had flown to a place outside of pain, and for fleeting moments he could rest in that place as the tortures went on and onand on. Wheres the shoe? I dont know. He really didnt. But something much bigger was at stake here. It had come to him in his planimal prayer. The future of animal evolution was on the line, and it was up to Myrtle the Turtle, not Odysseus Tyme, to decide which way it was going to go. Odysseus was merely the scapegoat. The sacrificial human. A role which eons ago he had accepted as his job. Some creatures must suffer, and even die, so others would wake up from their goofy dreams. It was a recurring theme in Earth history. Take him down, said Myrtle, after several hours of beating and whipping. Put him on the boat. The Animal Crackers plopped Odysseus in a dinghy and rowed him to the catamaran. They splashed stinging salt water on his wounds, erected a long plank over the water, and began tossing bloody chunks of pig meat overboard to chum up sharks. Then they pushed him onto the plank. As he steadied himself in the gusty breeze he looked down at the shark fins carving through the wave tops. They reminded him of the courtroom in Broward County Florida where he had lost his claim to the shoe. The ruling was a judicial outrage that fried his brain and drove him to steal a jet and fly to Costa Rica seeking psychological asylum. But who could have imagined that his life, and death, would turn on that judges whimsical decision? Shark fins. Hungry shark finsNervous. Expectant. Peculiar. Notwithstanding all the wildly imaginative ways he had been executed in the past burned, starved, hacked-apart, thrown off a cliff with live birds tied to his body getting ripped to confetti by sharks would be a first. Then he thought back to the day his dad took him to the Neo-Neoist commune. Myrtle sent us, were the passwords
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reflections glaring off the water. A white man. Beckoning. Come. Come! Are you going to tell me! hissed Myrtle. He looked at her and exhaled one long, last breath. Time stopped and bent over to tie its shoelaces. Birds froze in midflight. The wind died. Really died. He flexed his knees so he could leap into the water near the white man. OK, said Myrtle. OKBring him in. The octopus wrapped an arm around Odysseus and scooped him back onto the deck. Give him some water, said Myrtle. And find him something to eat. She turned her back and gazed across the blood red smears on the rolling blue waves sliced by shark fins. She was out of options. Mineral consciousness was going to make its big move and there was nothing she could do to stop it. If turtles could pray, if turtles could ask for guidance, thats what Myrtle did. She mumbled a little ditty that the reptiles had picked up from the amphibians a long, long time ago. From water we are born, in water we are sustained, to water we return Such is the Circle of Water. Such is the Collar of Time. It didnt take long for her to get a response. Cedric Shoebridge leaped up, grabbed her by the throat, and dragged her overboard. What was he thinking? She was a turtle. Her entire Life was water. Her entire existence depended upon her aquatic skills. Within a millisecond she had bit him in the behind and dragged him by his pants back aboard ship. The other animals were hungry. They wanted to make a fire and cook him on the beach. Which is exactly what they set out to do. The drugged man watched from the cover of the dark bushes. He had heard Myrtle talking about the shoe. The same shoe! The gold plated basketball sneaker. The shoe that had changed his life forever. The shoe he should have stolen, but didnt. As sunset ignited in purple and yellow cloudbursts the animals lashed Shoebridge to a palm trunk, collected driftwood, and lit it all the while humming their animal war chant: a
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Yes, Cedric Shoebridges name had come up before. He was the butt end of many a fern joke. The living definition of human incompetence. However, now that he thought about it, the ferns had mentioned over and over again, that if you ever needed something bungled, Cedric Shoebridge was your man. Maybe this is what they meant. Yes, Im sure hes right, said Odysseus Tyme, who was not sure about anything at all. The shoe must be in Chicago. All aboard the ship, hissed Myrtle the Turtle. Set sail for Chicago. The commandos sprang into action. Shoebridge, said the drugged man as he untied him from the palm trunk. Have you ever looked at your butt in a mirror? What kinda question is that? Do it my friend. Just do it.
Rich Zubaty
What about The Reapers daughter? shouted someone from the crowd. Shes strutting around Lower Wacker Drive like she owns the place. Yeah! roared the throng. Well arrest her, said the blond woman clearly speaking on behalf of someone else. And well burn her too! Cha Cha would love that! Cha Cha! Cha Cha! Cha Cha! boomed the mob. A posse of club-wielding rowdies stormed off to the Sanitation Department to arrest Ramona for Public Dislike. They swaggered through the streets swinging clubs and chains, pumping themselves up for the imminent brawl by chanting Death to Assassins! The politicos welcomed this excuse to stall the cremation for a few more hours. They renewed their barrage of verbal flatulence with fresh fury while the crowd milled around in the soupy heat, flushed with carnival cheer, buzzing with anticipation over the prospect of witnessing a real live human sacrifice. In the shadow of the pyre old men taught kids how to make balloons out of pig bladders. Street musicians played Light My Fire on kazoos and spoons. Hawkers moved through the multitudes with baskets of fried minnows, barbecued sparrows, and greasy donuts made from mashed cattail roots. The air crackled with anticipation and amusement. Meanwhile Cha Chas body lay forgotten, cooking in the sun on a cradle of blue flowers, crowning a heap of combustibles so high above the crowd and removed from the pandemonium, that no one noticed when a horsefly crawled up his nose and he snorted to expel it. Just offshore on Lake Michigan a pirate ship hove-to and dropped anchor. An attack force of animal commandos cleaned their weapons, swapped combat tales, chanted their war chant, and waited for dark to row ashore. WHY HAD ODYSSEUS AGREED with the drugged man that the shoe was in Chicago? One day the bananas would take credit for that.
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But the other thing that could be absolutely counted upon was that Cedric Shoebridge, alias Rich Monk, would bungle anything he took part in. He was the Soul of Anarchy in human formAnd noThere was no mirror on the boat. And even if there had been Shoebridge would not have bothered to use it to examine his bottom. He still did not know that he had spent his entire life trying to find himself all the while rigorously ignoring every single clue that had ever been presented to him as to his own whereabouts. Including, but not limited to, glancing at his behind in a mirror. The drugged man said nothing more about it. Having mulled over all this Odysseus Tyme figured there was nothing to lose. Everything was connected but nothing made sense. Maybe those strange shoes the bananas referred to actually did have some association with the missing basketball sneaker though he doubted it. But it was as good as any other excuse to avoid his million and first dismemberment. Nothing else was working. So it was, On to Chicago! High Time for a roll of the cosmic dice. Shoebridge and Myrtle, leading the commandos, hit the shore at Lincoln Park Zoo amidst a torch-lit frenzy of wailing dancers throwing themselves through the air, writhing in a spell cast by the surging rhythms of a thousand make-shift drums pots, bottles, steel barrels, hollow logs inciting every blade of grass, every tree branch, every pocket of air, and every human cell to resonate with wanton spasms of emotional abandon. Myrtle and Shoebridge infiltrated the crowd, slithering through to the base of the pyre, while the commandos waited behind under cover of a trashed aviary. Odysseus Tyme and the drugged man crept ashore to watch. The posse had just returned with Ramona. The Ramazon was bruised and bleeding, but half the guys who went to arrest her had left their physical bodies behind on the pavement of Lower Wacker Drive. The remaining bullies pummeled her with clubs and drove her to the top of Cha Chas funeral pyre. 250,000 screaming people warped the sky and boiled the air with cries of hatred and blood and revenge.
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What did we do? He was rubbing the roots of his hair where two bumps had formed. Sit up! she screeched. Let them see you! OK. But just feel these bumps on my head. Theyre like Ramona seized him from behind with her hairy gorilla arms and lofted him in front of her. His feet dangled like loose rope as she whipped him from side to side, displaying him to the mob. Wave! she bellowed. Cha Cha raised one hand and waved feebly at the stunned onlookers. With the other he massaged his aching head. The horde dropped to its knees like a head-shot hog, ripping the night sky with a silence louder than an atomic blast. Humphg, spit Ramona. Mericans. Clutching Cha Cha in one arm she pointed her other arm down at the spreading fire, commanding the crowd to do something about it. But the mob stayed frozen, immobilized, on its knees. Brains disengaged from bodies. Cedric Shoebridge bellowed and charged into the pile of hair. Just then the commandos shoved through the crowd to Myrtles side. She waved both flippers, hissing shrill orders. Like a platoon of snow-blowers the Animal Crackers burrowed around the base of the pyre panthers, squirrels, wasps, swallows, alligators, rhinos and one white man scooping up burning hair and tossing it away from the paper and rags. Its a miracle, muttered one of the bystanders as he watched the beasts risking their lives to prevent the paper and rags from catching fire. Apart from a few burned feathers, some heatcurled scales, and the singed flap of pants covering Shoebridges butt, they prevailed. Its a miracle, echoed some people standing around him. Its a MIRACLE! shouted the woman with masking tape glasses. Its a MIRACLE! boomed the crowd. HE has risen from the DEAD! Its a MIRACLE! The throng swelled behind the chant, repeating it over and over, waxing louder and louder, building to a crescendo of such battering intensity that Cha Cha flung his arms back and forth
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Why you tellin dem all dis? said Ramona. I dont know, mumbled Cha Cha. I really dont know. He massaged his head and aimed his voice at the crowd again. A great man named Albert Einstein once said, I never stopped thinking like a child. Theres a lot to be said for that. It worked for him. And it worked for me In my caseHow can I put it?My deepest insights into the shape and meaning of life came from prayer and meditation not from logical thinking. Sometimes praying backwards can work better than thinking forwardsAs long as youre sincere about itAnd youre not doing it to take advantage of anyone. The crowd started to clap. He rubbed his head and shushed them. The main thing to remember isthe more we tried to organize life, the more we choked it. We passed laws and made rules and regulations to cover anything that could ever happen, and finally we just became a bunch of machinesWe cut out school recess and started feeding our kids drugs so theyd sit still in class. Unbelievable when you think about it Something very evil had a hold on usIt was killing our human spiritEmotional violence is no good. It should not be toleratedWives shouldnt scream at husbands and husbands shouldnt scream at wives. And no one should scream at children. Emotional violence can be just as hurtful as physical violence And one always leads to the other Well thats not going to happen again. Theres only going to be one law: Be Kind To Each Other. Thats it. Thats the whole thingAnd if you dont follow it Im going to send you over to have a little talk with RamonaGod only knows what shell do to ya. The crowd chuckled. Ramona grinned and wiped her nose with her arm. One more thingPlease hold it downOne more thingIm going to dedicate the Lincoln Park Zoo to developing some ideas I got from my food experiments. If you help me out I think we can make some remarkable things happen here. So
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EPILOGUE
IT HAS BEEN SAID that a myth is a story which is not true on the outside, but is true on the inside. The people and places visited in a myth may come across as weird caricatures, but the dynamics of the tale convey a deeper truth. And so it came to pass that the deeds of Cha Cha Lobotomowski were mythologized in earth history. Things he never could have pulled off in a million years were recorded as verified exploits seen by eyewitnesses: Death and resurrection. Time travel. Inventing an animal languageA supermarket sale on fantasies. But what was true, is that under his leadership carbon-based life made another U-turn and began swimming forward into the future again. And what was also true was that by leading the charge and attacking the flames first Cedric Shoebridge had injected exactly
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the proper amount of bungling to derail Myrtles agenda. Reliable as a trained flea or a horse that counts with its hooves, Cedric Shoebridge mounted the stage of history and flawlessly performed his bit part his cosmic pratfall emerging as the catalyzing agent of a brand new moment in evolutionary design. Mineral Conscious had been vanquished, machine culture destroyed, and yet Myrtles reptilian agenda of marching the entire global population back to the heydays of Animal Supremacy had been subverted. Everyone acknowledged the brilliance of the white mans swift, fearless action. It was a quasi-miraculous feat on par with preventing the King assassination which he had missed the boat on the last time around. So the machines hadnt won nor the humans nor the plants nor the animals. Little did they suspect. The next day 50,000 of the Good People of Chicago showed up for work. Within two months Lincoln Park Zoo had been reborn as a planimal breeding facility a psychosomatic research station. Six months later urban planners were walking all the way from Montreal and Mexico City to learn how the people of Chicago had converted a dead city into a thriving bio-habitat friendly to plants, animals, and their blended progeny. Due to horticultural breakthroughs like beef flavored fungus and microbially manufactured milk, the food crisis abated. Cha Cha evolved into a psychosomatic gene splicer. He couldnt actually explain his techniques to anyone, but it was pretty obvious his powers came from the tree branches that had sprouted like antlers from his head. Dogging a parallel path to Odysseus and the residents of Vavoo, he had crossed over some boundary separating plants from animals. His research facilities produced mold-resistant corn plants equipped with Venus-flytraps that could feed themselves by snagging bugs out of the air. Trees with antibodies which could mop up soot and fumes from the atmosphere. Algae that could scour rivers and feed on the filth they removed. Vines that would clothe buildings to provide heat and insulation, while producing food-items like bananas and guavas and airborne carrots at the same time. Osage oranges that tasted like strawberries. Willow
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some mistakes, and made some progress, and edged carbon life into the future. Mineral consciousness was on the run. And Madeleine was on the run with it. Thenceforth both were prohibited from sucking their energy from carbon creatures. Everybody had less of everything, but they didnt have to work themselves into a frenzy to have it. Plants trained people and animals in communication skills that were a billion years old and the hell with information technology that depended on silicone. All of life inhabited a cosmic myth that finally made sense. It was scientifically accurate and spiritually satisfying. No one would ever again allow corn or other cereal grains to ravage the earth. No single lifeform would be permitted to usurp planetary resources not corn, not pigs, not humans. For therein lay the path to the resurrection of the machine agenda and no one wanted that. The drugged man occupied his Time organizing communes for the plants and animals based on the Neo Neoist model. The future belonged to planimals and there was much to fear. Genetic engineering in the hands of human scientists concerned only with profit had been an express train into the abyss of Mineral Consciousness. Making better corn? After what wed all just been through? Splicing fish genes into tomatoes to make them bug resistant? Kiss my salami! Cloning humans? Retarding human evolution? To create a stagnated human gene pool a feeding frenzy for microbes? All of life was required to evolve in order to outstrip microbial predation. Those were the rules. Cloning, gene splicing and genetic engineering were just more short-term scientific solutions to long-term problems. Yes, there had been indisputably important reasons to rein them in. But psychosomatic gene splicing was a different matter. When plants and animals could openly debate the meaning of evolution without being tyrannized by the short-term agendas of the animals with Big Heads; when, by philosophizing outside of Time, they could accurately anticipate the spiritual benefits that would accrue to their offspring played out over hundreds
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fine. The drugged man never got to meet his daughter Margaret. But he spent the rest of Time marveling at how two humans split from the same seed could apply themselves to such wildly conflicting agendas. Odysseus and Lesiani actually became partners in some genetic experiments. They produced Black Widow spiders that didnt eat their husbands alive, and ant colonies which subscribed to the principle of: one ant, one vote. Long before the sun flared up and fried the earth, they assembled a new breed of carbon-based voyagers who ventured outside the solar system to investigate other galaxies. Cha Cha married Ramona. At the end of the ceremony he asked her to change back into street clothes, then he burned her white wedding gown down to a pile of ashes. He said it was a symbolic act intended to demonstrate that her years of innocence were officially over. Being married meant something. It was a threshold that propelled the newlyweds past adolescent romantic fantasies and into a realm of serious responsibilities to other people. Of course, the ritual of burning the wedding gown was instantly incorporated into marriage ceremonies throughout North America. It became a custom that endured for thousands of years. Cedric Shoebridge became a shark. He liked the idea of being around for 400 million more years. Myrtle the Turtle helped him grow a fin on his back and away he swam, off to bungle whatever he could in the realm of cold, unfeeling predators. Not a new assignment really. And no, he never bothered to look at his butt. But unbeknownst to him, Myrtle had christened his tail with a red spot so she could find him again in case she ever needed something screwed up. The drugged man got his wish. As the Tongans had already hallucinated, he became an octopus that prowled the reef at night, sabotaging nets and setting fish free telling the lobsters and sponges marvelous revolutionary stories about the irrepressible Rich Monk who was rumored to be roaming the
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* * * Thousands of years later, at every funeral in Chicagoland, the surviving family and friends each contributed a lock of their own hair to a glass urn. This pile of hair was incinerated at the feet of the deceased a half hour before the body was cremated. No one remembered why it was done, but old women muttered amongst themselves that this was the only proven way to bring somebody back from the dead. Millions of years later humans existed only in magazine pictures. Some had grown wings. Some had grown leaves. The human race had moved past itself and brought forth a spectacular variety of creatures. Noeverybody didnt live happily ever after. Rivalries and disputes sporadically detonated over cultural differences. Some people worshipped Cha Cha as a god. Others viewed him as a divinely inspired man. More than once they came to blows over it. But the enduring myth of Cha Cha lovingly depicted him as a walking tree who rarely strayed from the companionship of Ramona, his trusty winged cow. Twenty billion years later a comet bearing bits of Odysseus and Lesianis DNA splashed down on a blue planet in a distant galaxy. Formic instructions, certain Mists of Consciousness, had been hanging around since long before the planet cooled, waiting for something new to happen. In the toot of an evolutionary horn, a sea inhabited by swimming plants exploded with sponges and jellyfish and five-eyed lobsters with hands on their noses. And they all began to dance. The only unresolved mystery involved the gold-plated basketball sneakers. Obviously one of the shoes had been stolen from the detective with no eyebrows and mailed from a planet in Ursa Major to Apollo Tymes closet in Ithaca as a warning to carbon life on Earth. This feat could have been accomplished by plants molecule by molecule moving the shoe outside the atmosphere, through deep space, and down to Earth. But it would have taken a long, long time. And anyway the plants denied doing it.
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[started writing: Paracas, Peru 1974 finished writing: Molokai, Hawaii Martin Luther King Junior Day, January 21, 2002]
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Order Coupon
Tear this off and give it to a Friend To order The Corporate Cult, What Men Know That Women Dont or gift copies of Your Brain Is Not Your Own contact: Virtualbookworm.com PO Box 9949 College Station, Texas 77842 at the web site: www.virtualbookworm.com or www.amazon.com (click Bookstore, then Search, then type in Zubaty and click Search again) or email: orders@virtualbookworm.com or toll free phone/fax: 1-877-376-4955 And if you still cant get em get me at: richzubaty@hotmail.com or www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/5225/ or 1-888-347-4364 Rich Zubaty
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