It took over 70 years to find the wreck of the Titanic, but only a couple days to uncover the wreck of the Titan submersible that went down to geek at the Titanic’s grave.

The Titanic drowned a few millionaires. The Titan squished two billionaires.

We’re getting better at some things down in the bottom of the ocean.

*   *   *   *

Two people I know well and respect share a similar and to me quite unsettling view of what science is, and especially of who scientists are. They seem to look at the average scientist as a sort of low-level goofball hampered by a predetermined outlook on the world, their knowledge based on outdated theories and a blindered view of present concerns.

Real science is exactly the opposite: a wide-open search for the truth of how existence works. It’s easy to point out bad or pointless research – there’s enough of it out there, and it gets picked up as gospel by dunderheads like RFK, Jr. (that swishing sound you hear is his father whirling in his grave) – but scientists, like any other collection of human beings, range from brilliant to incompetent, from upstanding to scoundrels.

[I confess to viewing nearly all psychological research as a vast wasteland of half-baked approximations and low-tier grant-grabbing, and I know that kind of generalization reflects a failure of acceptance on my part. Part of my reaction is that I don’t consider psychology an actual science, just a collection of disorganized flapdoodle.]

But the physical sciences – the “hard” sciences – have long been focused on finding the physical laws behind everything from the universe to the human mind, and at no time have been more strenuously and widely studied than now.

Over the last century, and especially the last couple decades, the advances in health and disease prevention, in cataloguing the workings of the human nervous system, for example, have been astounding (though with the unfortunate side effect of quadrupling the human population). 

At opposite ends of the physics spectrum, both cosmology and quantum mechanics have in the last decades brought us more knowledge of how the universe is governed and constructed than in all of previous human history. It’s interesting to set this progress against that of political and social behavior, which has barely evolved over tens of thousands of years.

I’ve been reading Science News magazine for the last 40 years. A less technical summary of current advances in the sciences than Scientific American, it goes to great lengths to present the widest array of research in all areas of science, and to hold it up to close examination, by discussing the experiments or advances with experts across the field – those who support and those who, often enough, point out the inherent shortcomings in the various researchers’ approaches.

I’d recommend a subscription to Science News for anyone with the slightest interest in the progress in understanding brought by the elegant use of the human mind. Under the current editorial staff, it has been especially good at shining the light on young researchers who are upsetting established views.

As a side comment, over the past half century, academic research has moved away from the time when graying university profs held all the power and often took sole credit for advances within their departments. It’s no long uncommon these days for grad students and post-docs to be cited as lead authors in academic journals. Also, ongoing studies can be accessed on free sites like arxiv.org or PLOS.org. These are wonderfully healthy developments.

Remember: Einstein was 26 and working in a patent office when he published his special theory of relativity.

*   *   *   *

The Great Replacement Theory: A rightest sneer that there is a deliberate attempt to minimize the relevance – if not the existence – of white Americans through unleashed immigration. 

If only it were true! I’d love to see the dingleberries who come up with such asinine conspiracies become the least uncommon denominator.

Which brings back memories of our World History class in high school. In those days (the late ’50s), “world history” was almost entirely Western Europe over the past roughly 2500 years. It started with ancient Greece and Rome, who saw everyone to the south and east as barbarians and looked down their aquiline noses at Northern European white trash. Too bad, because I kinda liked the Goths and the Vandals.  

Every week I read the crime blotter in the local paper up here, because… well, you want to know what crime is like in your little area, right? Yeah. But mostly because it’s good for giggles and the enduring touches of absurdity that are the core of a well-rounded life.
Almost all law enforcement here is through the PA State Police in Laporte. Yes, we have a county sheriff, but he seems mostly responsible for salting away those who need to be removed from the public sphere for the Greater Good. (We don’t even have our own jail; we export our crooks and crooklets across the county line to our neighboring incarcerators.)
Anyway, awhile back I started to note that the charges in the blotter filed for various crimes (mainly DUI, weed possession, and some form of harassment) were getting… a mite strange. I was no longer just “DUI,” but “DUI and…” a variety of added unlikelihoods.
Online, I further noted that either things have changed throughout the country and wider world, or I was just getting more observant: The same creeping charge sheet was happening everywhere.
So here’s a random selection of weird crime charges I’ve collected over the last roughly three months:

• “causing grievous bodily harm with intent.” Yup, only that – “intent.” So is this the same as or different from “causing grievous bodily harm just for the hell of it”?
• “recklessly causing grievous bodily harm, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and common assault.” I guess there must also be “virtual assault,” “highly uncommon assault,” and possibly “egregious assault with Indian spicing.”
• “assault with a deadly weapon with a hate crime enhancement.” As everybody knows, hate crime will enhance any assault.
• “obstructing an official proceeding, assaulting police with a weapon and robbery.” I don’t remember the details and can’t quite envision the context.
• “DUI combined with substance.” It really was pretty substantial, since it involved a drunk-driving Mississippi state senator.
• “obstruction of official business.” A fairly laidback charge when applied to a man climbing 73 stories up the exterior of a South Korean skyscraper, barefoot, while wearing only shorts.
• “grand larceny and mischief, as well as misdemeanor counts of conspiracy and criminal trespass.” A bunch of teens, slapped for roasting and eating the town’s swan.
• “voluntarily causing hurt by means of a heated substance.” A woman in Singapore, for scalding her husband with boiling water. (Well, it could have been an involuntary whim.)
• “criminal solicitation in the second and fourth degree, tampering with physical evidence, and conspiracy in the fifth degree.” Just shows how many degrees you can heap on a guy for his second attempt to hire a killer to off his wife.
• * * *
  I see a tendency among political commentators (I try to avoid them like the bubonic plague but don’t alway succeed) to equate Trump and Florida governor DeSantis. This is a mistake! Yes, both are vile, repulsive human beings, but that’s only the unlettered surface response.
  As I’ve probably claimed before, Trump is stupid but wily. The stupid is obvious, but the wilys of the world are skilled at a kind of street smarts that has little to do with intelligence: It’s an ingrained ability to see how to take advantage of the weakness in others to order to create your own personal advantage.
  People in places like up here judge you by who you are (or by who they think you are), not by your looks, position, or smarmy pretense. I think Trump appeals to many of them not because he’s a good guy but because they see him as a straightforwardly bad guy, right up front.
  DeSantis, alas, is actually smart, which gives him a different kind of advantage. He can form his asininity to sound like it’s based on logical reality.
  How about a wider contrast. Trump’s raucous hatred is intensely personal, not ideological; he hates anyone who is not himself. DeSantis’s hatred, by contrast, is less personal than ideological; he hates anyone who does not share his warped beliefs.
  Now let’s take this yet a little further.
  The fear that either of these two miserable examples of humanity might become (again, or for the first time) U.S. president calls up specters of Nazi Germany. I’ll say it – right of the bat – that I think that’s ridiculous. This isn’t Germany in the 1920s, and neither of these guys has the heft to pull off a Hitler, no matter how much they might want to.
  But…
  Again thinking back on Nazi Germany, I see an interesting pair of analogies:
  Trump as Goering
  DeSatis as Goebbels
  Goering was a blithering dumbbell, placed several levels above is competence, with no concern beyond his own festering skin.
  Goebbels was a clever, probably brilliant believer in the Nazi ideal of racial superiority.
  Make of that what you will (or won’t).

One last partisan gasp:
I’ve been wondering right along whether Trump’s pronounced reluctance to read anything handed him might reflect a learning disability: not that he avoids the written word by choice, but that he simply can’t fully comprehend it.
Recent extracts reported from his interactions with his lawyers in the secret-document retention case now make me wonder if there isn’t something deeper at work. Take this from one ecorded conversation:
“They presented me this—this is off the record, but—they presented me this,” Trump continues. “This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”…“I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret.”
Does this represent someone, even in private conversation, who can speak or understand basic English?

[I was about to apologize if I had offended anyone of an opposing political persuasion, but I quickly withdrew that incipient apology. In your case I intended to offend and exquisitely enjoyed the offense.]

All you Rastafarians are, of corse, familiar with Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, revered by your faith as God. But did you know he had a cousin who never made the pantheon? His name was Haile UnLikeli.

*  *  *  *

This is a tale from the 14th century. An “itinerant” (read “bum”) visited a French monastery and convent. He begged for something to eat and was well received, becoming so accepted by the monks that they offered him a menial job, the pay being a monastic cell and meals, which suited him just fine.

But he had a talent of which, initially, the monks were unaware. He dealt with a variety of tradesmen who quickly learned that he was an expert at relieving them, manually, of their sexual tensions.

Word of his digital prowess spread rapidly to the attached convent. The Mother Superior asked if he might like to visit and bestow his favors equally upon her charges. This he did, to their immense delight.

Over time, his fame encompassed the countryside, where he became know as Jack Off All Trades and Masturbator of Nuns.

*  *  *  *

Two Afghans were walking down the road. One was a bedspread, the other was not. The one who was a bedspread asked the one who was not: “Why are you not a bedspread?” The other replied: “Because I am a purebred dog.” The first sneered, “Foreigner,” and turned away in disgust, causing him to fall over a cliff where he snagged to death on a hemlock tree. This made the purebred dog sad, because now he would have no one to sleep on.

*  *  *  *

This parody does not follow the original past the first line, but I sang it on our answering machine in Philly:

I’m an old cow hand from the Rio Grande

And you might think I’m dumb,

Just four fingers and a thumb,

Or maybe I’m dead,

‘Cause I don’t have a head,

But it sure is grand,

Bein’ an old cow hand.

Thank you.

Roswald was the main character in the American arm of the plot, though I can’t recall his job, his position in the world. He was pulled into a crazed situation because, while being supposedly treated for a dental abscess, the dentist clandestinely installed a miniature radio transmitter in the affected tooth.

That was the opening foray of my first attempt at a novel, which had to have been in 1973 or ’74, because everything driving me to writing then was the result of reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravtiy’s Rainbow.

No other book has hit me with the same intensity. The day I finished it, as I sat on our improvised couch on Hamilton St., I cried for 45 minutes.

Why? I don’t really know, but it may be because I’d experienced something as complete, as right and true as I’ll ever encounter. Three or 4 times since I’ve gone back to GR but simply can’t read it again. It stymies me. The attempt comes to a full-stop, a roadsign that won’t let me past.

I hope to break through before I die, but somehow I doubt it. That book is telling me I’ve had an experience I can’t repeat – and shouldn’t, even if it were possible.

But as a limping Pynchon acolyte, I decided to write a novel that would encompass all of my life, all of the world’s life, a monumental work that would summarize everything I had to say in a single volume. 

Kind of a stupid idea.

A really stupid idea.

I was 35 years old, having written a daily column in the UPenn student paper in my senior year, typed random blather while living in The House on 34^th St. in the mid 1960s… then let it all dissolve, dissipate, while I did ill-paying, often incompetent freelance carpentry. 

But thanks, Tom Pynchon, for awakening in me the possibility of doing something Significant.

Julie (my first wife) and I had bought a twin house in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village neighborhood. We lived on the first floor, rented out two apartments on the second floor, one (or was it two?) on the third. When the second-rear tenant moved out, we expanded our area to include a better bedroom and study upstairs.

As our marriage collapsed, that area became my refuge, while Julie stayed downstairs. Me, my typewriter, a single bed, and my father’s (originally great grandfather’s) walnut desk with its 15 sq. ft. surface, upon which I spread an expanding sweep of 3×5 and 5×8 index cards, each filled solid with typed notes for some aspect of what I wanted to include in my magnum (or magma) opus.

Between minimal carpentry jobs, I plugged away at the typewriter. Later, once I’d taken the maintenance job at Morgan and Erin’s private school, Miquon, I left Powelton and moved, no longer married, into a delightful garret in Germantown, where I forced myself to produce at least 3 typed pages a day. After that, it was back to Powelton and the Baring St commune where, bless the fates, I met Linda.

Altogether, I kept at this blundered, blindered literary effort for about 4 years. What I produced was something not only unfinished, but harebrained and ultimately inconsequential. So why bother you with its history? Because that’s what I do here in the ruminations, I try to explore and explain my life, more for my good than yours.

Though I can’t recall what Roswald himself was up to, his Irish girlfriend, Rylla, was based (sometimes word-for-word) on conversations with my first great love, Ronnie. 

The plotting expanded along two non-parallel lines, one set in Philly, the other in the Australian Outback. In Philly, along with (but mostly unrelated to) Roswald, sat miserable, repressed Michael, living in the apartment I loved up the fire escape at 37^th and Chestnut Sts. There he talked to his one true friend, Zeralda, a cockroach who was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian scarab. (You might think this was not a conventional plot. You would be right.)

Three characters – Tweaser, Klaxton and Bjornstrom – predominated in the Australian plot arm. Were all 3 astronomers? I’ve lost even that hold on memory, but the setting was an observatory that had picked up emanations from a planet orbiting a star that – once they had deciphered the keening messages – the trio came to understand was about to go nova. Mixed in with apocalyptic cries, the outer space broadcasts included pointless snippets of alien life, such as a recipe for chicken dinner.

Independent of either continuig stream, I also introduced interludes featuring Popeye and Wimpy, who argued about Blutto and things like 12^th-century polyphony.

But I became most obsessed by how to separate yet identity the non-parallel plot lines. There were close to 20 chapters set in Australia, 30 in the U.S. Toss in the Popeye freebies and the total came to 51. 

Could there be, wondered I, such a thing as a collection of 51 similar “objects” that broke into two sub-collections of roughly 20 and 30? Of course not! Ridiculous! 

By contrast, 52 would have been easy – the number of cards in a deck, the number of weeks in a year. Any fool could fiddle with that! And if you did uncover 51 of anything, the collection would most properly be divided 3×17 (for those as numbered-crazed as me). 

But this is what I found, no idea where, years before the Internet existed (though the quote included here is taken from today’s Wikipedia):

“The molecular formula of human insulin [my note: the first enzyme to have its protein structure determined]… is a combination of two peptide chains (dimer) named an A-chain and a B-chain, which are linked together by two disulfide bonds. The A-chain is composed of 21 amino acids, while the B-chain consists of 30 residues.”

It may not seem possible, but this actually happened to (for) me: Serendipity had entered my bedroom and hoisted her skirts.

I sat for several days, arranging the chapters into the two plot chains, with the Popeye interludes flexibly assigned to either one as needed. The titles I gave to the chapters? The three-letter codes for each amino acid in the insulin sequence.

That gift should have sealed the deal: All was destined to fall into place with almost preternatural grace.

Except… the typed product was total crap. It’s gone now. I officially obliterated its traces a couple years ago. Why hold onto a major error for close to 50 years? Maybe it springs from my personal fondness for a failure that illuminated something about my underlying humanity (which I often come to doubt).

And it’s not entirely gone. 10,000 words remain from the Rylla segments. Something could be done with them, but likely (and rightly) will not be.

As for Ronnie, their muse? I last saw her in 1971, last heard from her in 1973, her one and only letter, sent from Vietnam or Laos, claiming that she had been fired on while boating down the Mekong River.

Who knows?

It’s possible.

At her request, I responded c/o post restante, in Bali of all places. The writing of that letter is yet another example of blatant absurdity. To save weight and (supposedly) postage, I typed my tale of the dissolution of my marriage on both sides of a sheet of onionskin paper. When I removed it from the typewriter, the type from both sides showed through as soon as the light hit it. I was unreadable. I inserted a new sheet of standard copy paper, retyped the entire thing and mailed it.

The letter was returned, undelivered. So Ronnie remains in my life as a packet of memories written down and attributed to a weird skewing of her name (itself an adaptation of a character’s name from Ray Bradbury’s Martian tales).

A lousy mishmash of writing, that almost-book, which never received (or earned) a title, but still not a total failure, because from its impetus sprang, in ways I can’t begin to explain, the complexity and compulsion of Evolution Unfolding in a Small Town in Western Pennsylvania, a novel that took me 35 years to complete.

That novel is in no way a failure. If there’s any continuing blunder attached to Evolution, it’s my deliberate failure to promote what I sincerely believe is a beautiful and extraordinary piece of work. Yeah, it will die with me. But should anyone want to read it in the meantime, it’s there on Amazon.

Second only to my marriage to Linda, it’s my greatest success, the one object I’m most proud of in my life.

Some cosmologists, astrobiologists, etc, have come to view machine intelligence as the next step in evolution. Some of their wackier adherents suggest that UFO aliens are machines (or even that the UFOs themselves may be intelligent machines – one way to get around surviving a several-century-long journey through space).

Whatever the case, it’s a novel and interesting outlook on evolution. Since Darwin, we’ve mostly come to see evolution as the genetic inheritance and modification of organic beings. But with the development of AIs scaring the pants off Aunt Sophie and everybody else, it’s time to broaden the definition of “evolution.” 

Oh, we talk about “social evolution,” but again that’s about shifting changes taking place within groups of organic machines like us. But now that we’re busy creating non-organic “beings,” they’ll likely develop a higher order of consciousness and intelligence (however you define those terms), so yeah, makes good sense to treat that as a continuing process – a continuation of evolution.

I especially like the implication that when machines become more intelligence than we are (which surely will be the case), there’s little or no reason to think they’ll act toward us with inbred malevolence. It’s at least as likely that we’ll become their puppy dogs or pussy cats and be considered “cute.”

On the other hand, human politicians would no longer be needed, so the few cretins that insisted on such destabilizing endeavors could be labelled “rabid” and put down – to everyone’s good, organic or otherwise.

*   *   *   *

I’ve heard the sound of one hand clapping!

When I worked at the Welcomat, one of our weekly paper’s top writers (as far as learning about the world of insurance and bureaucracy goes, the top writer) was John Guinther.

Probably in his mid-60s, tall, often solemn but always engaging, he would punctuate his pronouncements by flapping the long fingers of his right hand back against his palm.

Yes, it made a sound. I couldn’t tell you what that sound… sounded like, just that it was the sound of one hand clapping.

*   *   *   *

I despise arrogance.

Which, of course, is an arrogant posture to take.

*   *   *   *

Around 1977, soon after I’d moved into the commune in the Powelton area of West Philly, Betty Nemeth and Peter Tilley also moved in and beefed up the then-depleted assemblage, bringing their kids, Peter’s two teenage boys and Betty’s brood of four – three boys and one girl, ranging, if I remember rightly, from about 7 to 14 years old.

Betty’s adopted son Paul, age 9, was unlike any other child (or adult, for that matter) I’ve met. I had many a long talk with him on the front porch, because he had a wide-ranging and incisive mind, especially about machinery.

He told me that when he dreamed, it was often of gears and levers, observing their interaction. He was an engineer at heart, with an inherent instinct for how things mechanical interacted.

At the time, I had an AT6 record changer (a ubiquitous brand in the 1960s) that hadn’t worked in maybe a decade. The cartridge arm was frozen in position and wouldn’t track at all.

Don’t know if I asked Paul about it or he’d just said he could take a look at it. About an hour and a half later, he brought the unit back to me, working perfectly. It’s pretty obvious he’d never handled a machine quite like it before, but he understood its mechanical soul, if that makes sense (or even if it seems absurd).

Paul also had a mental condition that threw him into manic states where Betty would hold him tight to keep him from (supposedly) doing damage to himself or others.

Our other memorable interaction with Paul (which I didn’t learn about at the time) may have reflected a combination of his mechanical interest and that physical intensity.

Linda and I had set up a small pond, and off from that I ran an even smaller, shallow, winding waterway, lined with black plastic – no pump, just a serene wander of water fed by the height of the pond.

We put goldfish in the pond, where they stayed through the winter, apparently frozen into the ice, then come February they revived and moved at the rate of about an inch per day.

One summer we added a pair of black mollies (a common fish-tank inhabitant). The female produced a stunning mob of tiny-weeny black fishlets who could (and did) navigate the miniature stream its full 3-4 foot length to the end, then return.

Damn, I loved those mollies. I could watch them for hours (not true for me when dealing with the rest of the world). Then the pond’s heavy-duty plastic liner sprang leaks. The baby mollies mostly stranded and died. Soon after, a raccoon decimated the goldfish (including the alpha, whom Ben and his friends named Jaws), not eating them, but hurling them into the bushes, a rather bizarre approach to predation. 

We assumed the raccoon had damaged the pond liner with its claws. Not so, we learned years later: Leaning out a second-floor window, Paul would attempt to pick off the goldfish with his BB gun. I don’t think he ever hit a fish, but he riddled the liner.

I still mourn those mollies. But how mad can you get, in retrospect, at an amazingly talented 9-year-old with a BB gun?

*   *   *   *

Most years, a couple mourning doves live in the trees out front. I know – I’ve heard this form others – that some folks find the call of the mourning dove sublime. I find it the most annoying, idiotic, asinine sound any living creature could possibly make – as bad as being tied to a chair while some fool plays Tommy Dorsey and Vic Damone at full volume.

Their whining call assaults me when I’m working in the garden, and I restrain the immediate desire to shout, “Shut the fuck up! I know what your mama does in the hemlocks!”

*   *   *   *

Try this as a character name: Submersible Pump, whose acquaintances know him as either Sub or Mercy, depending on their relationship and general life outlook.

I intended to finish off another old, tailless short story for this weeks awakenment, but I just couldn’t scrounge up the ending. It’s probably in the washing machine, along with the tight little notebook that I forgot to take out of my trouser pocket and ended up in oddly pilled wads in the bottom of the dryer. So you’re stuck with yet another random dribble of noise.

Hope you’re sleeping well. We could all use a lot more sleep.

*   *   *   *

Almost every horrendous tragedy today is followed by someone involved (usually closely involved) wailing, “They didn’t deserve this.” True, in a literal way, but then, nobody, anywhere deserves to be mowed down in a spray of bullets or run over by a vehicular maniac.

And beyond that, what does any of us deserve? What is “deserving,” what is “meaning”? The definitions are different for each of us.

*   *   *   *

Don’t know how many of you work up recipes that tell you to “fry the onions until they turn golden.” This drives me nuts, because onions, cooked or uncooked, do not turn golden! Have recipe writers never seen gold in quiet recline? Go to Penn’s University Museum in west Philly and look at their South and Middle America collections. You could fry an onion until it begged for mercy, and it would not resemble an Incan bauble for an instant. At best, fried onions turn a quiet, unobtrusive yellow. OK, I guess if you read, “fry your onions until they turn an unobtrusive yellow,” it might leave you scratching you head. But you’d pay closer attention (and so would the onions).

Or how about, perhaps, “Steam the mangled residue of onion until it snoozes in saffron languidity.”

*   *   *   *

Throughout the ’60s and beyond, hippy side-sliders like me were greeted at local non-profit co-ops by Dr Bronner’s products.

Who the hell was Dr. Bronner? No idea, but I see that his ghost is still pushing all-natural products online. I’m not sure if his “castile soap” is the same thing as the ubiquitous bottle of clear, goopy liquid sold back then. That bottle was round, about 4-5 inches tall, cloudy plastic, with writing all over the sides. Around it’s exterior it told you, in deep blue lettering, that you cold use the product for any conceivable cleansing operation – including brushing your teeth. Yes, this same thick, blubby liquid that you could spread as a soap on your body or your dog or your baby could also serve as a toothpaste. Does this idea give you the same aching queases it gives me?

But looking more closely online, it seems that Dr. Bronner’s Cheezons have disappeared.

What were they? An alternative to standard-issue cheez doodles or cheez puffs, but confected from something far more earthy, like, well… earth?

Back then, our family had a delightful, engaging, superbly wonderful, universally loved St. Bernard, Pearl, who would eat anything that would fit into her mouth. When I peeled an apple with one of those hand peelers, I would lower the residue, inch by inch, into her waiting jaws. Once, as a joke, I held out a handful of pebbles – not to destabilize her, but to see what would happen. I had to quickly withdraw my hand because she would have cobbled them down.

The only item on earth Pearl would not allow into her mouth was Dr. Bronner’s Cheezons. The look on her doggy face said, clearly: “What?”

Lately I’ve a fantasized on giving the good doctor a call and receiving this reply:

“Dr. Bronner? I… I’m sorry, he isn’t in. He died of confusion.”

*   *   *   *

Why is pork always cheap?

Chicken fluctuates (or cluckulates) in price, and beef consistently reaches for the monetary stars, but somehow pork never increases in price; on sale it costs half as much per pound as a red pepper.

There’s been swine flu, leading to the slaughter of thousands if not millions of pigs in North Carolina, there are reports of a world-wide collapse in oink production, there are supply problems, but just this week, boneless pork tenderloin was on sale for $1.99 a pound.

This indicates either that there are a few holes in the elementary concept of supply and demand – or that pigs know something we don’t (and if so, likely something we would be better off not knowing). 

I mean, how can you convince people to shift from a carnivorous lifestyle to a vegetarian one when they can no longer pay their exorbitant rent, yet are asked to fork over twice as much for an evening meal?

Equally peculiar (but at the opposite extreme), bacon – processed pork – has nearly doubled in price over the last year. Think about it … if you slaughter a pig and toss its already degenerating carcass onto a truck, it’s cheaper than broccoli. But if you process its belly with vile chemicals that turn it almost eternal, it’s worth far more as food.

But what do I know? I’m a convinced carnivore. I’ll float with that.

*   *   *   *

The other night after dinner, Linda and I had a… discussion about my increasingly vile bouts of rage – increasing even more in frequency than in intensity. We were talking about what that might mean, what these raucous explosions might indicate, ranging from plain rotten temper to a mind slipping into dementia.

I see my anger as reflected throughout my immediate family. If I seldom saw it in my father, it was because in his teens he had come close to killing a friend during a rage (threw a hatchet at his head), which had helped teach him how to stifle his impulses. But both my older brothers would erupt into waves of astonishing obscenity, often accompanied by the heaving of sharp objects and breaking of more fragile ones. To one degree or another, it’s also present in all my daughters.

At base, these tantrums originate from our inability to accept any opposition that might, in the slightest degree, impede – physically, mentally or spiritually – the task we’ve involved in. With me, it’s gotten worse in recent years, to the point where misplacing a tool, mistyping a word, failing to properly pick up an object from the floor, or dropping a spoon leads, without the least transition, to a screaming fit.

But here’s the more important side: The object of my rage is almost always myself (“clumsy fucking cocksucking idiot asshole oaf!”) or the inanimate object that has failed me (“shitdicking crap-faced fuckwadded pissdump”). Years ago, when I suggested to Rod (the best of all possible brothers) that my anger was directed at myself, he quietly said, “O yes.”

But why should my anger now be on the increase? Because I just fucking hate being old. It’s a pointless offense ladled on me, a mistake in the organization of the universe, that at a point when I might have found peace and understanding, instead, I’ve become physically decrepit and mentally forgetful. When I look in the bathroom mirror (though I try not to), I shudder with disgust – this thing is what I’ve become?

Those of you at my age, but with a more gentle and controlled mind, have probably either gotten past this narrow outlook or, bless you, beaten it into submission. But with me it’s hardcore. I feel horrified, betrayed by my own body.

Also, you’ve heard about old age leading (or leaching) into “second childhood.” It seems only too true. I hated being a child and greeted the world most mornings with abject fear. School was terror, I had no friends or clear idea of what friendship might be.

Over later decades that flipped on its head (like Billy Barty). I’ve known so many years of joy, forged few but encompassing friendships, moved up here where the pressures have largely fallen away, and married a woman whom I could never have deserved.

But now I’m old. Many mornings I wake with that resurgent fear that something I can’t envision or understand is pressing on me like a mass of mental stones. I feel myself a failure, self-condemned by my unwillingness to be what I could have have been if I hadn’t been reluctant to succeed.

Oh, it’s not that bad. Other days I feel fine.

You ever calculate the amount of crap you throw away when you buy a simple product like a bottle of aspirin? Depending on the brand and outlet, you may buy a standard bottle of aspirin shoved inside a larger cardboard box wrapped in a plastic sleeve. 

Once you’ve ripped off the plastic and torn open the box (neither one of which have a convenient point of entry), you now grasp a bottle whose top is incapacitated by a plastic seal that, if you have no a sharp object at hand, you must rip off with you teeth.

Wrestle the top off, and inside you find – another seal, paper over foil, that can’t be totally annihilated by any known implement, though you can get enough of it loose the shake out your two aspirin – except that they’re blocked by a wad of cotton that requires tweezers for its removal.  Remove the cotton, and mixed with the aspirin is a bumbly desiccant packet inserted to absorb excess moisture that had no earthly way to get into the bottle-fortress in the first place.

So: plastic, cardboard, outer cap seal, inner seal, cotton, desiccant – 6 pieces of trash before you’ve swallowed a pill. When, later, you toss the empty, there’s the bottle and its cap – 8 pieces in all. 

Don’t worry, this rant is not finished. I plan to expand later with a full-scale screed on waste.

Actually, you should worry, because I may drive you nuts with my conspiracy theories about packaging.

    *    *    *

Linda and I support a variety of social, educational and environmental groups. I arrange our giving according to a (somewhat anal) schedule: Each outfit receives a single annual donation during its specific month of the year. This, to spread the outlay. A few exceptions – Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and the Southern Poverty Law Center – each have permission to yank $25 a month directly from our bank account.

But that’s it, all of it. We don’t respond to phone calls, emails or snail mailings from any of these groups whining for us to up the ante.

The emails are no real problem – just a quick tap of the “delete” key. The phone calls (cleverly timed to our second bite of dinner) are more annoying but rapidly eliminated with a hearty “fuck off” (actually, said only once; we either hang up of leave the receiver open to waste as much of the bleater’s time as possible).

But those paper mailings force steam out my ears. “We give you money for important environmental work and you spend part of it to rag me with litter that I toss into my environmentally unsound woodstove?” When I think of it (and where the outfit’s website allows) I enter my contact preference: “Never, under any circumstance, send me a piece of postal mail about anything whatsoever.”

I’m probably wrong – you can never overestimate human gullibility – but I can’t imagine that this constant nattering for “more” brings in enough extra cash to cover the cost of broad-spectrum postage, and of the waste created.

    *    *    *

My daughter Morgan recently gave us an electric two-burner hot plate so we’ll have a way to cook when we miss our propane delivery again next winter. It’s a tidy outfit that just plugs into a wall outlet and is immediately ready to spew happy energy.

Of course, it comes with two pages of the usual dire cautions of the form, “Do not plug the cord into your ear!” (Similar cautions, of no value whatsoever, help keep the company’s legal department busy.)

In this case, there was also a round paper sticker glued to the metal surface next to the burners It read: “Caution, surface may become hot!” Now, of course, no one using a stove would ever consider such a possibility unaided by an exclamation point.

I always remove such annoyances because they’re ugly, asinine and attract dirt, grease and soy sauce. I did my best to peel the little fucker off, but it fragmented, so I wet the paper, waited ten minutes and scraped like mad. I did remove the paper, but the underlying glue would not budge. Which meant it was solvent-based. Which meant it was flammable. Which meant that, should the surface actually get hot enough to burn your fingers, the caution label would become a fire hazard.

I love wallowing in the native intelligence of corporate bumwads.

    *    *    *

We both, as leftist Pennsylvanians, really like Sen. John Fetterman (we first heard him speak at a dinner, were impressed, and have generally liked his outlook since), so we were pretty upset when he had his stroke. But he still won the election. Then he was treated for depression and out of an active role in the Senate for two  months, which both won him praise for honesty and openness, along with the usual damnation from the ever-angry morons on social media.

But what really knocked me sideways was the conspiracy theory that he had been replaced by a body double. Now, take a good look at any photo of the man: There is no human being alive that could serve as a body double for John Fetterman. 

This guy, with his massive brow ridge and menacing loom, looks like those early bestial drawings of a Neanderthal. And that’s OK, considering what’s been learned about Neanderthals in recent years. Today, we know that those looming, shambling, big-brained goons invented art and just about every other hominin advance that used to be attributed to the pretty-boy Cro-Magnons.

So maybe John Fetterman has a surfeit of Neanderthal genes, and maybe that’s why he’s the kind of politician this post-Cro-Magnon country needs. 

  *    *    *

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, on leaving his post as head of AI development at Google:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we’re developing is very different from the intelligence we have. So it’s as if you had 10,000 people, and whenever one person learned something, everybody automatically knew it. And that’s how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.” 

  *    *    *

Yesterday was my 84^th birthday.That’s not in any way important, but for me it’s unsettling.

Roughly 3 months past his 84^th, my oldest brother, Rod, died of heart failure. It had come on fairly quickly, played out even quicker. So, if I carry on for another few months, I will have outlived, by age, everyone in my nuclear family’s last 2 generations.

This was not supposed to happen. I was a ridiculously sickly kid (or at least treated as such), and I figured I’d crap out pretty early. Instead, my mother died at 61, my father at 76, brother Vic at 81, Rod at 84, while I’ll likely piddle on for another half decade or so (my paternal grandma kept at it until age 98).

It’s not fair, in the least. Rod was twice the human being I could ever hope to be, and, were I in charge of things, he would have lived well into the next century, timing his brewing coffee by his wrist watch and railing against the congenital stupidity of the human race. 

  *    *    *

Last query: Did Blaine T. Kneebone get elected?

It must have been at least 20 years ago, during election season, that Linda and I were driving, don’t recall why, along Rt. 32 that parallels the Delaware River in Bucks County, north of Philly. Every half-mile or less we’d pass a red, white and blue election yard-sign for Blaine T. Kneebone. I have no idea what office he might have been running for, just that every time we’d pass a sign, I’d mutter, “That’s not possible… there couldn’t be…” But apparently it could be – and was. 

I have no idea if Mr. Kneebone was elected, but I’ll tell you, if I lived in his district, I’d vote for him in a minute.

Wouldn’t you?

The city of Acre, besieged by the forces of Richard the Lion-Hearted, slouched in terror of invincible armor, of horses mythical in size and steadfastness, of a human frenzy that had deserted the Moslem world two centuries earlier. To hold against this menace meant slow but certain annihilation and growing depravity. To capitulate meant… what? Blood ankle deep in the streets, rape, torture, death beyond all conceivable deaths, the sundering of reason from body. Those who already quaked with the fever of pestilence shook like wind chimes at the mention of surrender. 

Sulieman Hareim, vendor of needlework excerpts from the Koran, had shivered enough in times of peace, hounded throughout his life by something never far behind that refused to make itself manifest. Now, at last, that something had a name. It lurked beyond the walls, though still unseen by those who, like Sulieman, were not chosen to battle it.

The tales of the invaders were five times truth, perhaps ten, but to those who knew the truth, it was enough: fanatics under the banner of a military zealot, more cunning that a religious one, huge in the saddle, with the strength of kings of legend, merciless in pursuit of..  not the True Cross, not the Holy Land, but of competition which knew no limit. Such a force had been long absent in that part of the world, the desire to be and to do, to win without ultimate object, so that each victory must be succeeded by another, greater, until the world, believed flat by the ignorant, should be rendered so in fact.

Sulieman knew the stories of this Avenger who dared Allah Himself and seemingly fought the Only One to a standstill. The merchant’s belief in the forces of destiny grew stronger, even as his acceptance of the limitless might of Allah lay shaken. A wrath greater than the wrath of God had reached through a rent in the fabric of the world. Yet if Sulieman was powerless before this scourge, might it not rightly be also his personal scourge, brought to afflict the city of Acre only as a portal to his spirit?

His one-room dwelling was piled high with the product of his wife’s deft fingers. She it was who transformed the flowing testament of Allah from the pages of the Holy Book to simple cotton cloth. Nor did the siege restrict her output. Day after day she added to the heaps of coarsely embroidered sayings which she knew to recite by heart, but which she could no more read than could her husband.

“What are we to do with these?” he asked. “We cannot put them for sale in such times. The infidels would desecrate them when they conquer. That would be a sin.”

“It is a sin to oppose the will of Allah.”

“The will of Allah has gone elsewhere.”

His wife did not reply, nor did her fingers slow.

At night a hypnogogic form assailed Sulieman, ten feet tall, mounted on a horse with breath of fire, its hooves bearing down upon him, sometimes in the street, other times here in his bed. The stained yellow background held no contrasting feature, only horse, rider, and the sharp-edged, brilliant colors of their motion. A great iron bucket encased the rider’s head, featureless but for eyeholes and the sinuously delineated outlines of ears. He bore a shield nearly his own height, embossed with a cross of fire, a mouth writhing at the cross’s intersection, speaking in an unknown language words too vile to be comprehended in any tongue. The twisted lips spat molten saliva that hissed and steamed where it struck the horse’s flanks. The steed’s head, uncovered, shone with flesh so lean, skin so tight over the bones, it appeared to be clothed in an impenetrable substance.

The rider rose in his saddle by aid of strange boot-holders strapped across the animal’s middle, and he lifted a lance that stretched backward to the edge of thought. Its tip speared a beating heart, pulsing with the desire to incorporate, to master. At its touch, a gout of red fell across Sulieman, sucking greedily at this flesh. Then the image died, vanished of its own accord, and the shaking spasms left his body. An unexplained blessing filled his head and he slipped into true asleep.

Richard had taken sick before the walls, no less human in the face of pestilence than his adversaries or his supposed invincible cohorts, who fell like flies and boiled inside their cushioned chain mail, until relieved of it by those with sufficient strength remaining to lift more than their own weight. Food was short, patience and tempers shorter. Close to half the horses were dead, the rest put out of their misery, one by one, to serve as provisions, strips of flank and belly drying over smoky fires. Saladin threatened, at a distance, to descend upon their encircled position. Richard raved for half a day, believing himself back in England, berating John for the black-hearted whimsy of his regency.

Close to sunset, the great king blinked, sat upright, and demanded a flagon of water. The fever did not leave him, but his will returned, and with it his hope, which outstripped even his ambition. He called together his lieutenants, a wretched lot dripping sweat, hacking phlegm onto the already putrid ground. Great sores enveloped their bodies from the chafing of the armor they felt constrained to don each day as a sign that right, wielded by the arm of might, would triumph.

Without Richard, nothing had triumphed but disease.

“We must undermine the tower,” the revitalized king said, “bring the whole damned mass of masonry down on their heads. Can you not envision it? Bloody heathens up on their wall while we scurry about like moles under the earth, chomp, chomp, chomp, chewing away on the foundations, then we haul back on the supports, heave ho, and their grand stupid walls vanish into a chasm.”

“We built those grand stupid walls,” observed the Duke of Gascony, wiping a bony arm across his nose.

“And we’ll bloody well tear ’em down again. Who better for it? Eh? Got to get out of this confounded litter.”

Richard rose from the litter, stood tall, and fell into a faint.

Sulieman rose from the rank straw pallet where he had been avoiding the afternoon. Feet slapped past his doorway, a few at first, then many, racing from the walls. Cries ran with them, cries without words, or with words so shrill they became both more and less than words. As the feet and cries dwindled, other sounds replaced them, thumpings and bangings and clankings at the walls. What could they mean, he asked himself, knowing that they could mean only the end, the triumph of that madness beyond the reach of Allah.

After a time, even these sounds diminished, replaced by a silence louder than battle. Had for forces of Allah, armed only with spears, lacking metal armor, held the God of Chaos at bay? The thought of victory called to his faith, but what answered was not his faith. Something deep within him wept that the destiny which had searched him out across seas and deserts had been defeated.

Runnels of sweat streaking his filthed flanks under his burnous, he ran, against the resistance of terror, toward the walls. The odor of blood rose as sweet as the blossoms of a carrion plant. The tower steps were piled with bodies, three deep in places, taking on rigor in the heat. With muscles now unyielding, they turned like logs beneath his feel, throwing him off balance.

Atop the tower, wounded defenders, gore encrusting their bodies and pasting their arms to their sides, slumped against the walls. A single crusader lay arched across the stone of a crenel. His sword was a broken stump, the jagged ending bloody, suspended from his forearm as though by magic, some small nick or snag in the metal caught on his chain mail. His helmet, a battered piece of iron crossing his head from brow to nape, was pressed hard against his crown. Sulieman knelt to see his face, but it was covered by a veil of chain, struck with sufficient force to drive it through eyes and sockets both, to hidden places within. Sulieman’s stomach attempted to erupt, but is contents were too meagre to respond.

He stood so he could inspect the body from above. It seemed little larger than his own, and the armor, though efficient, did not obliterate the underlying human form as his mind had pictured. Here was a man who had fought for a cause which, though unjust, had led him to assail a great heigh with but a broken sward. Sulieman pulled at the leather ties behind the infidel’s shoulders and found that he could lift the body. With a cry of what could have been taken for rage he pitched it over the wall.

A short laugh sounded behind him.

“Well done. You fight the dead with valor.”

“Allah be praised,” mouthed Sulieman, his lips moving from instinct

“Allah,” said the soldier, “Allah.” He laughed again.

Something spoke to Sulieman’s feet as he sidled to the stairway, as though a loquacious bug had crawled beneath his step. He stopped. The stone sang to him through his soles, the grating voice of eternity from the throat of the inanimate. He shook and his teeth chattered. He placed his hand against the wall, and the voice was there also, a snicker at first, then laughter harder than the soldier’s.

Sulieman hurdled down the stairway, setting off avalanches of stiffened flesh. The odor of decay hand increased tenfold, the flies a hundredfold. He fought through black swarms that he inhaled in his panic, causing him to cough and retch again. At the doorway to his hovel, he raised his hands above his head and feigned a dance of celebration.

“Allah be praised,” he shrilled, “Allah be praised.” His wife looked up only briefly from her needlework, never ceasing her careful stitches. Sulieman lowered his hands.

The infidels launched no concerted attack during the following week. Though sorties rode to the base of the walls, they turned back as the defenders massed above them. They made no feints toward the tower. The city’s inhabitants, straining for normality, drifted back to their homes close under the walls. The Crusaders’ naval blockade prevented supplies from reaching them, and brother eyed the shrunken shanks of brother as the corpses in the streets threatened to equal the number of the living.

Sulieman made trips to the tower daily. Some of the bodies of the defenders had been claimed; far more, with regret, had been carried to the wall and let fall. The soldiers did not question him. He was a fact of life that came, looked on the Christian camp with strange intensity, then departed.

One mid-day a small party of horsemen approached the wall but stopped beyond bowshot. Something hung between two of the horses, something rich in colors, assertive yet vulnerable in the barren, ruined land of siege.

“That is he,” said a soldier at Sulieman’s side.

“He?”

“The Lion-Heart.”

Sulieman leaned into the crenel and swung his head left to right. “Where? Which is he?”

The soldier pointed to the isolated group “There, in the litter. He has been ill, they say.”

“Ill?”

The great Avenger from beyond time… an injured man in foppish colors tied between horses. From the stones beneath Sulieman’s feet the song sang again; as before, the singer did not identify itself.

His nighttime vision returned, but stripped of its majesty. The armored rider slumped in the saddle, his shield hacked and dented, the cross upon it little more than two sticks crudely fastened. The mouth at their intersection slobbered idiot drool over blistered lips. No heart adorned the lance, though the broken tip pumped gore like a bellows, issuing a stream of red that, for all its liquid flow, spoke of an unslakable thirst. The horse broke into a brief canter, then stumbled to its knees. The dissolution of the image brought nothing of its former peace.

Rumors of impending surrender circulated both within the walls and without. Saladin continued to promise resistance, but his armies remained in place. One day a massive sound erupted throughout the walls, the bellow of the earth itself. The tower wavered like a harem dancer before the Sultan, shifted forward and settled downward, shorter by the height of three men. Its stairway clogged with fallen stone and a renewed supply or corpses, yet the tower wall stood solid in what had been intended as its breach.

“Blast,” said Richard, swinging his weakened legs over the side of the litter. “What sort of mole-work is that? Never give a job to Frenchmen, they do everything half-assed.”

Conrad of Montferrat, no friend to Richard at the best of times, blinked from smoldering eyes. “At least there are fewer of them. The mining collapsed prematurely. The moles, all, were killed.”

Richard wavered slightly on his feet. “In that case, they died nobly, none I’d rather have make the attempt. Where’s my armor? The delegation is due today. Find something regal for me to sit on, deuced upsetting if I fell over in the middle of things.” He looked toward the tower. “We know how to build ‘em. Just as well, might come in handy once we enter. Acre will be ours by nightfall.”

And so it was. Saladin’s rebuff of the defenders’ terms of surrender arrived too late. The garrison of Acre had already staggered through the gates, prisoners of the Lion-Heart. Yet no massacre followed – not then. After thirty months of siege, the infidels entered the city in relative quiet, their minimal rape and pillage little more than a pro-forma exercise by wasted, weary men.

They sacked Sulieman’s dwelling in an almost cursory way, the words of Allah taken, strewn in the street and beaten into the dust. An infidel knight ripped the veil from his wife but found the fact beneath less than the promise unseen. He cuffed the woman, bloodying her face, but left her otherwise in peace. The colored embroidery threads he appropriated for his own spouse, should he ever return from this accursed land of Christ.

Sulieman fled, attempted to scale the tumbled tower stairs without success, then took up with a contingent of soldiers who recognized him from his wanderings atop the wall. Together, they were rounded up by the conquerers, sent from the city, and confined with a thousand others on a small stretch of open ground, one tiny stream serving for both drink and the removal of wastes.

Sulieman felt no resentment. Allah, in His unknowable wisdom, had found the Faithful expendable. Less comprehensible to the merchant was the behavior of the infidels, who lived, by choice, little better than he. True, they ate well, now that food flowed freely into the camp, but food itself, the basic process of life, seemed to make them crazed. Bowmen, surrounded by their own refuse, squatted and tore at their provisions. Nobles, devouring gobbets of half-raw flesh, spattered their gilded finery with grease and used the ruffled sleeves as depositories for the excesses of mouth and nose. The horses, trained for nothing but stolidity in battle, dropped their waste before the tents, soiling the cloth, leaving it crawling with flies.

At first, Sulieman fixed his gaze on the central tent, waiting for a view of the Lion-Heart, who did not emerge. At night he grappled with the remnants of his vision, reduced to a muddle of disconnected figures and tumbled geometry. Once these too had fled, he fell into mindless stupor. Before the second week had passed, he no longer kept watch on the fly-specked pavilion of the Avenger.

So the situation remained, static, for five weeks. Saladin sent Richard repeated offers of exchange, but none pleased the victor. Rid of his fever and eager again to win momentous battles, to capture Jerusalem, to return to his realm and uproot the certain mischief of John, he found it degrading to haggle over the worthless bodies of his enemy.

On the final morning, the prisoners awoke to a mad din, the gnashing of demon teeth and the torment of the damned. As the upper limb of the sun cleared the horizon, the infidels beat swords and shields, warbled and whistled and bellowed like bulls. Sulieman blundered from his deep stupor to a lighter one, then burst fully awake, his weeks of numbness torn away. In their exaltation, the infidels had raised a pall of dust through which the sun shone as golden as the streets of paradise. It was the color of his former vision, rich yet terrifying.

“Allah, Allah,” he prayed, but questioningly.

Leaping and whirling through the golden mists, the knights at last took on the aspect of their legend. Their movements were quick, huge, exalted, as they swung their swords in arcs before them, fwuuuh, fwuuuh, fwuuuh, the sound of rooks alighting to claim the eyes of the dead. Slowly, the massed figures parted, forming a lane to the great tent. Down this lane strode the Lion-Heart, a true colossus, a head taller than any man else in the assemblage, angular from illness but firm of tread. Larger than life, his motions signaled the immortality of the present.

He strode the soldiered highway to an open area between his warriors and the cowed prisoners, and boomed barbaric sounds, the song the stones had sung to Sulieman. At the Lion-Heart’s last grating note, a cheer arose from the knights, rooks taken flight once more. Each man took a step forward, as if pulled by an unseen cord. Richard drew his sword, raised it high, then swept downward.

The infidels surged forward and the slaughter began. The prisoners shrieked and fled, but Sulieman stood unmoved until the giant form became lost in the swirl of maddened men armed with any implement of death that came to hand – sword or crude wooden truncheon, morningstar or sharpened segment of broken harness.

The captives still standing were cut down, the fallen skewered where they lay. Swordsmen hewed arms as a butcher cleaves chickens, slit abdomens and tossed the tangled entrails high, sundered heads, scattered brains until a grayish red mixed into the golden light, darkening it toward orange.

Bowmen and squires lashed right and left without care, catching at each other and striking sparks from knights’ armor as their bloodlust increased with each kill. A youth of perhaps eighteen, clad in green tatters, thew up an eyeball, still trailing its optic nerve, and made as if to catch it with open mouth. At the last, he stepped back so that it fell before him, then ground it into the squelch of gore, giggling all the while. Everywhere, the siege plain echoed with cries and laughter, screams of death and howls of belated vengeance.

Sulieman, loosed from stasis, tumbled into the reddened, viscous mud. Above him a sword cut the air with the note of a wind-touched lyre. A man, still standing, had been sliced diagonally from right shoulder to left flank. His upper section levered away on a hinge of flesh, leaving legs supporting one arm and a scant triangle of body. The exposed organs squirmed and pulsated, unaware of their end, then the knees curtsied to the attacker, who staggered off, giddy, in search of the center of mayhem.

Sulieman rose slowly. After the soft drop of the halved body, a local silence pushed outward, driving the clamor of carnage before it, until a single sound remained, a repetitive liquid sibilance, as of stones dropped into a shallow pond. Twenty yards distant, a gigantic rider approached astride a still more gigantic horse, a beast with legs of stone, a third taller than the tallest Arabian.

Richard reined in the Percheron, a workhorse commandeered from the supply ships. Its massive feet sank through the mire to find firm purchase beneath. The Lion-Heart wore neither the shield or helmet of Sulieman’s vision. Instead, a slowly browning crust of others’ blood covered horse and rider alike in an armor more terrible than steel. The Avenger’s eyes shone brilliant as the orange-yellow light. Of a sudden he bellowed laughter and lowered his lance to the ready. A spume of spittle, mixed with the blood on his lips, arched from him in a reddish spray.

Sulieman threw his arms wide, his body forming a living cross. The Lion-Heart held still, tossing back his head to shake loose his stiffening hair. He laughed again, almost soundlessly, then wheeled the horse. With his heels he coaxed it into a reluctant canter as it carried him away. The heavy splashes turned to lighter splashes, to drips of sound, to nothing.

Sulieman lowered his arms in the grief of abandonment, surrounded by the bodies of the dead, the silence of death, and a dead, empty light.

[I’ve already described some of the apartments I lived in after returning from a half-year at Stanford grad in 1962, but below is what I first wrote about them, around 1970, with a different slant from later. It’s interesting to me to see the difference. If it means nothing to you, you can trash it easily, one of the delights of email.

[I transcribed it as best as I could from a lousy scan of paper that had turned deep tan with age; I’ve indicated missing or unreadable words with question marks (within brackets, if following a single questionable word.)

[This and other barely rescued snippets were typed on Telex paper swiped from the Penn student newspaper’s office, sitting untended and useless years after the paper – and most of the rest of the world – had stopped using Telex. The paper came in a cardboard box, 18” long, about 6” across, maybe 4-5” high. The paper was accordion-folded so that the whole stack could be fed through the Telex machine in a steady stream. There was probably a half-mile of paper when I first inserted it into my 1937 IBM Selectric, one of the first-ever electric desk typewriters. I probably picked it up from a junk store. You could adjust the response of the keys with almost infinite variation. I’d guess that at the lightest setting you could have breathed on the keys to start them typing. I wish I still had that beast, loved it.]

[23 S. 34th St. was and will always remain The House for me. Much more written about it elsewhere. I lived there summer 1962 to spring 64.]

Eight years (nine years, I do not know) back, it was the House, already described, communal in that middle-ground that campus housing has, close-knit yet uncontrolled. At this remove I can add nothing that would make the House seem anything more than what I have said. It was bought by a thin, nasty, crass soul of contemporary age. It is reported that his parents died in an auto crash, leaving him fifty thousand, in thanks for which providence he went on a five-day tear. Under him the House was caught, slaughtered and butchered into six ratty[?] apartments, all cut against the grain. The shed into which I threw the chairs I ritually broke at each drunken party was ripped off as though by a giant hand and cast from him. The walls I had painted and ??, the witty, filthy sayings we had scrawled upon the walls were scraped and shattered. My room was defiled by a pullman kitchen. I spit  in his eye. I urinate upon his business holdings. I defecate in the doorway of his French restaurant which ?? from rowhouse to rowhouse along the last remaining backstreet of the campus, [half line too mangled to read] around a pole and, as his eyes roll detached across the road, watch the glee unfold across his parents long-strained faces.

In succession after the House:

[Summer 1964, 3700 block of Spruce St.]

A three-room apartment, pleasant enough, of no significance other than a wide gutter outside the third-floor window, where I could place my feet and survey the street, pleasant, tree-lined. Two floors down lived a guitar-picker, looking like a snaggle-toothed Missouri hick, but from Haddonfield, N.J. He drank continually, or appeared to without being immoderate, studied math and surrounded himself with small, intelligent, giggly, deformed-looking people. He also treated his wife, whose chin and personality receded like ?? stars at infinity, as though her main function were to provide the shortest distance between himself and their refrigerator. They were together possessed of a liberated, swinging two year old (the occasion of their marriage) who danced sporadically on a footstool to obscure delta blues. He (the picker, not the kid) was given to moodiness and would every month or so lock his door and mutter nastiness if someone knocked. I heard later than the receding[?] wife was adept at two-day marathon fucks, which helps clear up many of the ambiguities. The middle floor was unoccupied during the first two months and since a roommate and the picker had been satellites of the House during its second (lesser) year, the place provided a scaled-down, pastel transition from the room where I first began to compose all this and the almost-exile of my first experience at living alone.

[Fall 1964 to… ?1966. SE corner of 37^th and Chestnut Sts.. Julie moved in near the end. What’s written here is much too negative a view of one of the most absurdly delightful places I’ve ever lived. The negativity comes, really, from what followed, when the two of us knew way too much difficulty.]

A two-roomer this time, again the third floor, but in contrast completely cut off from the rest of the building. The house itself could best be described as a brownstone shanty, a disgustingly ugly pile of featureless rock with rancid plywood attachments on the second floor and the third floor porch (mine) entirely enclosed by chicken wire, as thought a cage for or defense against some great predatory bird that fed on entrails. I ripped down the chicken wire, cleaned and painted the porch, removed the checkerboard grey linoleum that covered every inch of the floors, sand the floors, whited the walls, tacked curtains over the immense closet doors and, in the one act of distinctive brilliance, closed, locked and draped-over the one official entrance. My new entrance was an immense outward-thrusting fire escape, an act of aggression perpetuated by some mad ironworker who had decided to make his offense a blatant feature of the landscape. It was old, ?? and scaled, possessed of a particular[?] sort of grime and grit which did not settle on it but somehow regenerated within hours after I had swept its cleated steps. It hunkered like a scabrous dinosaur above the daily mounds of garbage which issued from the food store on the first floor. I also shook and creaked whenever walked upon, giving my guests a cheap taste of the abyss. On the strange green lattice of the porch gate I hung Durer’s self portrait, grimacing[?] like a Christ gone sour, shedding[?] its mental masturbation down to the street by means of a spotlight I put on it all evening. The door into the main room took the place of the central window in a bay and was opened by a skeleton key which I left in the drawer of a table on the porch. I ignored the building and it ignored me. The view (a corner building tic[?]) was down upon a Presbyterian church which had a small, functionless yet beautiful cloister on our side. We left (the girl I lived with — now my wife – and I [first wife, Julie]) when the loneliness of the sun setting slowly, slowly – shadows creating [most of line lost on fold] monkish view, threatened to turn my mind to dung. It was place of ?? happy summer afternoons and horrid autumn evenings. It distilled my fear of night approaching.

[1966-April ’67, 500 block of Delancey St. The one great wonder of our stay was the birth of Morgan, my eldest, far more important than the minutia of shit listed here. Again, the sour outlook is a back-reflection from later sorrows.]

 The next, three rooms again, though four by nature, and with it came this night I feared, the Dark Night of the Soul. Oh, this is an exaggeration of course. 2 men can know primal misery only if his condition is truly primal and there is no hope, or if his condition is so much his own that it does not matter what the facts are. We lived comfortably enough without statistical want, so the latter case pertains, and there can be no social justification of the misery we felt, the grinding horror we lived under. Most of it had little to do with surroundings anyway, and so belongs elsewhere. Even if ?? were otherwise, ?? it all here would be too much of distortion this early in the game, too much a cry for pity when presentation is the only aim. Enough though to catalog the semi-objective points of this side-show trap.

Above us a slim[?] divorcee fucked morning noon and evening, or as soon as they returned from anywhere, with her lover, a personification of slow wittedness and five-o’clock shadow. They climaxed in maddening crescendo, like mammoth rodents and, so nearly as the listening world could gather, always simultaneously. Either they were perfectly attuned, or one of them was a hypocrite. This was not as madly annoying as amazing, especially as their bed was directly over ours. We laughed in fact, mentally timing them from their mad dash up the stairs to the last shriek. She had a five year old son who was either conveniently absent at the right time or, for him, strangely quiet – awed no doubt. The rest of his waking life was spent leaping off whatever article of furniture was nearest him, landing heels first and tearing across whichever room he was in until he encountered an obstacle, at which point the process was repeated. The front door was guarded by a fat, arthritic red dog, part chow its owner would tell you daily, who snapped at your heels as you stepped or leapt over him, sprawled at the foot of the stairs. The dog, though, was preferable to the owner, a widower overbrimming with a cowardly nastiness[?] which he inflicted on his sons through hours of verbal harassment, mostly threatening them with imminent dismemberment which, unfortunately – at least in the case of the elder son – never ?? place. He was something of a low-degree electrician by trade, enough of one at least to be tapping half the power to his apartment off our line.

Aunt Edith tapped the steering wheel.

“Jeremy, would you roll down the window?”

Five minutes later

“Jeremy, would you roll up the window?”

Would Jeremy roll the entire car down the mountainside? Why would he not?

They stopped at a convenience store, a tidy faux-brick structure from the ’70s, and bought bags of grease and salt, bottles of colored sugar water. Maeve and Lucy inhaled the “food” and “drink” and belched, their midriffs oozing over miniskirts that barely covered their overabundant rumps. Humans should be fully clothed or nude, thought Jeremy.

“Jeremy, would you please get me those batteries from the top shelf?” Aunt Edith pointed pointedly, something in her stance indicating that Jeremy could not recognize a battery on his own. How minuscule did she see herself that she could not grasp an item no more than five feet from the floor?

The van had waited patiently in the five-car mini lot. It had not zoomed off and left them like any halfway self-respecting vehicle would.

Jeremy, would you –

And Jeremy always would, without comment or visible reaction, because Jeremy had always been that sort.

Would always be?

Lucy and Maeve, slouching in the back seat, resented the countryside and the absence of their electronic games, which they had uncharacteristically left on the living room table. Their cell phones found no consistent reception in the undulating, wooded hills. There was nothing for them to do but look and think. They could not accomplish both at once and the second only on occasion.

Jeremy loved the woods and the wild, the wilder the better. Sharing it with Aunt Edith and her grand nieces was as enjoyable as being poked in the eye with a stick. Though separated by two generations, the three women shared an insular self-indulgence that excluded the natural world.

On occasion, Jeremy could admit to himself that he was as nasty, bitter and solipsistic as the girls, and more virulent than Aunt Edith, who simply settled into herself and ventured out only to seek inconsequential assistance.

As they exited the spectacular beauty of one of the last remaining old-growth stands in the Northeast, Jeremy carefully plotted the murder of his three companions, rejecting any detail that veered from the narrow path leading to the perfect crime.

Guns were out. They could usually be traced and seldom disposed of effectively, and he had never held, much less fired, a gun.

A knife would hardly be effective against three people, even sleeping; at least one was sure to awaken and make a hideous racket.

Driving the car over a precipice would involve first incapacitating the three occupants, then somehow contriving to shoo the car forward under its own volition – he had no desire to commit suicide. And a plunge down the mountainside might not obliterate them all. The news daily carried stories of “miraculous” escapes.

The best he could do, at the moment, in a tiny soupcon of revolt, was turn the radio to the classical music station which, with occasional drifts and sputters, reached the heart of the woodland.

One, two, three….

“Jeremy, would you mind turning that down just a tad?”

Jeremy flicked the volume control full clockwise, filling the van with St. Seans’ organ symphony to the point of threatening the windows, then quickly revolved the knob in the opposite direction.

“Sorry, wrong way.” The wondrous thrum of organist E. Power Biggs (was ever a human more sublimely christened for his occupation?) barely grunted from the speakers.

“Where are we?” asked Lucy.

In the heart of darkest Africa, where lions devour indolent teens with lip-smacking delight.

“Thirty miles from Morgantown.”

“That where we’re goin’?”

“No, we are simply driving along to enjoy the scenery.”

“Jeez,” said Maeve.

“Now, children,” oozed Aunt Edith in mild remonstration, “the scenery holds endless possibilities.”

It did indeed. In his scheming mind, Jeremy poked beneath the mold of his internal forest floor, spread the venereal openings of its hollow trees, nibbled at the numerous fungi that infested his musings. For this lonely, sequestered man was happiest in his internal wilds that others could never reach.

Yet, if they were to reach them…?

Once the St. Seans had rumbled to its conclusion, Jeremy played idly with the radio dial, which brought him an unending cascade of shrieking commercials, one leaping onto the back of another. At last he stumbled across a nostalgia station, piping doo-wop and mellow R&B from the ’50s.

“What’s that?” wheeped Lucy, her spine tortured into the lower reaches of the back seat.

“Music, my dear. The human voice in harmonic and melodic variety.” He turned the volume up slightly.

“I guess.”

“Where do you propose we eat your lunch?” Aunt Edith placed only the mildest emphasis on “your,” to register her suspicion of the picnic that Jeremy had packed. Sitting on the lap of Mother Earth for repast might impart stains to both her clothing and her assumptions.

“I had thought a mossy stream bank,” he suggested.

Maeve made the sound of a cat under pressure.

Jeremy glanced in the rear view mirror. “Or a large outcropping of volcanic lava.”

“You mustn’t tease, dear,” admonished Aunt Edith.

Mustn’t I?

“I recall a spot,” he mused, only half aloud, “a somewhat unusual spot…” A surge of recollection, a glowing light, a sunrise of the mind, spread across his internal horizon. He maneuvered the radio dial to a rock station that blared even at low decibels and turned the volume to an ear-splitting blast. 

“Hey!” said Maeve.

“Awright!” said Lucy.

Jeremy laughed aloud and began to jive and shimmy in his seat. “Oh yes,” he shouted above the shattering sound, “this is definitely the enjoyable life, the very epitome of cool.” Almost imperceptibly, he pressed his foot with increasing firmness against the accelerator. The van took the snaking curves at 45, 50, 55 mph. 

At 60, Aunt Edith queried, “Jeremy, would you mind slowing down?”

“What?” he bellowed as he increased the volume. “I can’t hear you over this marvelous music.”

“I said – “

“What?”

“Jeremy, please?”

Without warning, he swerved the van to the side of the road and jolted to a stop that slammed the unseatbelted girls against the front seats.

“Here we are!” he whooped.

“Jeremy, really –”

He switched off the engine.

“Oh frabjous day! Come along, everyone out, come, come, come, time to evacuate, so to speak, ha ha.”

“Where are we?” ventured Maeve, spilling out the right-hand door like a dessert gone bad.

“Who is your favorite rock ‘n’ roll star?” asked Jeremy, bouncing on his toes.

“We like hip-hop the most,” said Lucy.

“Hip-hop paddy-wop, give your dog a bone.” Jeremy swiveled from side to side, alternating feet. “Which hip-hop artist would you most, most just love to meet?”

“50 Cent,” said Maeve, with something close to attention.

“50 Cent! Just as I thought! Right there at the airport I looked upon the two of you, and I said to myself, ‘These two must surely be aficionados of Mr. 50 Cent.'”

“What’s an aficionado?” asked Lucy.

“Ha ha! Silly little geese. Such a sense of humor.”

Aunt Edith touched Jeremy’s arm, a moth-like contact. “Are you perfectly all right, Jeremy?”

“Perfectly! Without defect! A complete and utterly unblemished adherent to the world of 40 Cent.”

“It’s 50 Cent,” said Maeve, working up almost enough effort to sneer.

“Of course! Even this dreadful economy could not devalue such a stellar artist of hippity hop. Now pay close attention! We are the beneficiaries, so to speak, of exquisite fate, for Mr. Cent has a cabin below, in this very valley. Come along, we must truly join him.” 

Aunt Edith glanced back at the van. “Should we take the picnic?”

“Oh, pshaw, we will dine on our return.” He squatted twice at the roadside, hands on knees, then pumped his arms. “First, we must work up an appetite.”

The girls looked down the steep incline that slashed and skewed to accommodate the concrete and blacktop rubble of a recent road repair.

“Why’d 50 Cent wanna be out here? He doesn’t rhyme about trees.”

“Oh, but he does. He rhymes ‘oak’ with ‘broke,’ and ‘hemlock’ with ‘ham hock.’ He once rhymed ‘maple’ with ‘staple’ – or it may have been ‘may pole.’ No one dared do that before 60 Cent.”

“50 Cent.”

“Let us not quibble over differential denominations, ha ha.” Jeremy strode forward, over the lip of the raw hillside, and lurched down the scree, holding Aunt Edith’s hand, pulling her across roots and boulderettes that tripped her. Behind them, Maeve and Lucy levered hand over pudgy hand from sapling to ruined sapling.

“Down in the val-ley, the val-ley so lo-o-w,” warbled Jeremy, “hang your head o-ver, hear the wind blow-wo-wo-wo.”

“I don’t like this,” said Maeve as she picked herself up from a spill that scraped her knees and abraded her $60 designer miniskirt, dyed black as the dark matter behind stars.

“But you like Mr. Cent, don’t you?” yawped Jeremy over his shoulder, “you want to meet Mr. Cent, don’t you?”

“I don’t think he’s down there,” wailed Lucy as she slammed into a scarred hemlock that ripped her face. “We oughta go back.”

“Go back, and miss the chance of a lifetime? Mr. Cent is up to 70 now, he’ll be 80 before you can say ‘Shazam.'”

Aunt Edith had slipped from Jeremy’s grasp and dropped behind as they plummeted through ferns, undergrowth and spindly saplings. They had passed beyond the roadway rubble and into farmland reverting to its ancestral woods. Who could ever have farmed these precipitous hillsides? Yet someone had.

The soft, sensual trickle of a stream on the valley floor would have exhilarated travelers less untested than Lucy and Maeve. Jeremy felt reborn, bursting with possibility. “Gather to me, children – you too, Aunt Edith,” he megaphoned up the hill to the laboring lady. “This is the” – he leaned forward and whispered behind his hand – “Garden of Eden.”

“That’s not real, it’s a story,” said Lucy.

“Jeez,” said Maeve. “Where’s 50 Cent?”

“I’m sorry. I’d totally forgotten. Mr. Cent had a previous engagement.”

“But you said—”

“Perhaps I lied.” Jeremy whooped with laughter. “Perhaps your uncle lied. You know, I have no idea of my true kinship to you. Are we cross cousins, uncrossed cousins, mildly exasperated second cousins forcibly removed? I may be a grandsire of exceptional insight and fortitude. Or – I may be completely mistaken.”

Maeve leaned against a paper birch, which she could not have identified if her life depended on it. “You’re a nut case.”

“I am a case of nuts! And here is your great aunt, stranded against a tree root and wondrously confused. What do you suppose exalts an aunt enough to make her ‘great’? Might you be a great niece instead of a grand niece? Do you feel great or the least bit grand? Aunt Edith, it’s so good to see you here.”

“I’m exhausted.”

“Of course you are. Have some tea.”

Aunt Edith swiveled her head, though her body barely moved. “I don’t see any tea.”

“Exactly! So we must forge ahead until the tea presents itself.”

As they forged, the spindly growth became more robust, the landscape more solemn, the creek more assertive. No one had spoken for five minutes when Lucy suddenly plopped on the ground like a sack tossed from a peddler’s shoulder.

“I’m not going any more.”

“I see that,” said Jeremy. “Your locomotion has gone loco. You may have snapped a tie-rod. Or whatever those things are. Well, that puts us in a fix.” He turned to Aunt Edith, who puffed to a stop. “We can go no farther. We must pull up here and, I suppose – rot.”

“Jeremy, I’m concerned.”

“As am I! Rot is very bad for one’s bearings. We wouldn’t want to lose our bearings, would we?”

“I don’t think 50 Cent was ever down in this dirty place,” said Lucy from her own segment of dirt.

“50 – if I may be so familiar – is actually much attracted to loam and forest detritus. You might not expect it, no, but he is a man of the woods, like the orangutan.”

“50 Cent’s not a monkey.”

“Nor is the orangutan.”

“What are we doing here?” asked Aunt Edith.

“Very little,” admitted Jeremy, “so I would suggest – strongly suggest – that we all arise and DO SOMETHING.” The sudden explosion of his voice staggered Maeve against a fungally diseased beech, tipped Lucy into a bed of moss, and inflated Aunt Edith’s face as though she were attached to a cylinder of helium. Jeremy’s own face had taken on a frightening tincture of decayed animation. The three lined up behind him to follow without further complaint.

The valley trail branched. The left fork rose away from the creek bank in a gentle, unassuming incline. Jeremy took this, and the group’s continuing silence seemed to expand into the outer world. Their feet made little sound on the hard-packed earth. The canopy of trees grew increasingly dense, absorbing the sunlight high in the branches of majestic oak, ash, and occasional hemlock. The land held a serenity edged with unease.

“I don’t want to be here,” whined Lucy.

“Good fortune awaits,” said Jeremy, pointing to a small clearing where a tiny plank house, a cabin at best, sagged and wept at the lost history of its youth. “Mr. Cent’s hideaway,” he exclaimed.

“You said he wasn’t around,” growled Maeve.

“At the moment, no, but his great-grand-friend, his thrice-removed and twice-worthy mentor, Johnny Dollar, should certainly be at home.”

Jeremy led the troop along a worn stretch, no longer quite a path. He rapped a neat rat-a-tat on the plank door, its skewed Z of cross-supports lifting away from what they were meant to tie together. For a moment there was no sound, then a vague shuffling and the padding of animal feet.

The door was opened by a tall, scrawny, mustached man in a battered city Stetson and the remnants of a pinstripe suit. His face sported a half-week’s growth of sad whiskers. In his right hand he held a chipped glass of dirty brown liquid. Two forgettable mutts framed him.

“My dear Johnny,” enthused Jeremy.

“Jeremy,” sighed the disheveled figure.

“I have brought some friends. Relatives, actually.”

“Everything’s relative,” mumbled Dollar, stepping aside. Jeremy bounded through the doorway, followed by the sullen footfalls of the two girls and Aunt Edith’s reticence.

“I’m thirsty,” hazarded Maeve.

“To be sure,” said Jeremy. “All this long, long walk without a sip of bottled water! Johnny, dear friend, might you have something to ease the dryness of these shy young things? And Aunt Edith – oh my, I have not introduced you all. Johnny Dollar, please meet Maeve, Lucy and, as I just exclaimed, Aunt Edith, who has along the way expressed the desire for a cup of – no? – a glass of ice tea.”

“Yeah.” Dollar drifted behind a scarred, chrome-edged mini-bar and leaned down to rummage. “Cokes?” He held up a small glass bottle with an inflated bust and slimmed waist. “Nah, no tea.”

“A Coke would serve admirably,” admitted Aunt Edith. The girls reached out like organ-grinder’s monkeys, standing well away from the mini-bar. Dollar church-keyed the caps from three bottles and walked around to hand them out. Lucy looked at hers as though it were an archaeological find. “We wanted to see 50 Cent,” she whined.

Dollar made a dismissive gesture. “He went off to fish.”

“What’s he doin’ with fish?” asked Maeve, her petulance threatening to dismember her face. One of the mutts sniffed her abraded knee and she kicked at it, feebly.

“For dinner,” explained Dollar.

“Fish,” snarked Lucy.

“50 Cent loves fish,” he added.

“Trout!” exclaimed Jeremy. “Mackerel! Pike! Sturgeon! Albacore!”

“Have a seat, ladies.” Dollar waved a long-boned hand toward a wall of caned furniture half lost against the cabin’s water-stained planking. Aunt Edith sank into the nearest chair, which complained and then split, wedging her posterior between the cross members. The girls walked aimlessly and attempted to peer out the filth-encrusted window.

“A fish fry,” continued Jeremy, “with french fries and tartar sauce and vinegar and perhaps macaroni and cheese. Yams? Not likely. But pickles? Definitely.”

Dollar scratched one of the dogs behind its ears. The claws of the animal’s right hind leg clattered on the floor in response. “Me, I’m sick of fish,” he grumped. “Used to be I could wolf a T-bone every couple weeks. Now….” He shrugged at the memory, ambled to the battered round table in the center of the room, and fell into the wreckage of a bentwood chair. His elbows rested momentarily on the tabletop, then slid back until he transferred his slim weight to his forearms. 

Jeremy eyed the cobwebs that hung deep as thoughts of despair in the corners, and at the aged, cracked floorboards. Someone had carved “SCREW BATMAN” into the unfinished wood of the table. “Business bad, eh?” he queried Johnny.

“It stinks. The big outfits get the real grab. Met Life, AIG. I’m just a two-bit insurance dick. Who needs ’em these days? All I get’s half-assed divorce cases, and two out of three, they don’t fork over when I bring ’em the goods. Everybody’s a chiseler.”

Johnny pushed upright, then retraced the few feet to the mini-bar, where he rattled and clanked in the back and drew out a tall, smeared bottle. He filled his glass, shot a third of the liquid down his throat, then studied the contents and grimaced. 

Jeremy pointed to the bottle. “Could you spare me a bit of the same?” 

Dollar rummaged for another glass, filled it half way and handed it over. Jeremy sipped, delicately. “I have a proposition.”

Dollar shrugged. “So did Loeb. Ended his sentence with a proposition.” He started to laugh but choked on his recent intake of liquor. He swiveled his shoulders against the internal grating of a rusted hinge.

“Not that sort of proposition. I have a case to offer you, a business transaction with a strictly monetary recompense.”

Across the room, the girls, trim in knee-length dresses, studied a small floral tatting framed near the misted window. Aunt Edith smiled in her padded rocker, fingers tapping its arms to an unheard rhythm.

Dollar brushed cracker crumbs from the smooth surface of the table and held his hand out to the Doberman by his side. The dog’s long tongue scoured the crumbs from his palm. Johnny smiled broadly. “Now, that’s the kind of transaction I go for. Shoot.” He propelled the remaining liquid from his glass and sucked it down with head thrown back.

“Oh, no shooting. Not a bit of it. I have,” Jeremy announced in conspiratorial tones, “uncovered a case of fraud at least, I would think, fifteen years in the making.”

Johnny’s hawk-like face showed interest. “Goes a back a ways, hmm?”

“It does. And” – Jeremy blasted a similar quantity of the smooth liquid down his own throat – “without your help, I fear it could continue into the indefinite future.”

Maeve and Lucy, side by side on the horsehair love seat, released a seeping sadness. Their hands rested in their laps and their knit shawls hung in limp folds. Behind Jeremy, Aunt Edith asked, quietly, “Jeremy, would you –”

“I would not!” His venomous blast pulsed the corners of the cabin.

“I was only going to ask for another… drink. Is that so awful, Mr. J?”

Jeremy turned in his chair. A simmering smile spread across Edith’s face, a suggestion of…

“But of course. Please excuse my inattention.” Jeremy signaled to Johnny, who whipped a fresh Coke from under the gleaming counter. He strode across the room and held it out it to Edith, then, bowing, offered her his hand. She arose from her brocade armchair with fluid grace to join them at the table, where she tipped a small measure of whiskey into a glass and added a splash of Coke.

Dollar leaned toward Jeremy. “So OK, what’s the scuff?”

“I have two, umm, packages, that I would like you to take under your watch.”

“Are they hot?”

Jeremy choked on a chortle. “Some might think so, but you must judge for yourself.”

“How’s this mesh with your fraud?”

“The fraud is inherent. It happened long ago, but it continues, personified. Only you can prevent it from proliferating.”

One elbow resting on the lustrous tabletop, Edith released a light spurt of laughter. She tapped her high heels on the floor and pointed a questioning finger at Dollar’s half-full bottle. Johnny stood and poured her an ample measure.

“Mind if I ask for a retainer?” he addressed Jeremy. The relaxed grin fit well with the knife-edge crease of his trousers.

“Naturally.” Jeremy withdrew his wallet, bulging with bills. He fingered half a dozen from the wad and handed them across to Dollar, who folded them into his pocket without counting.

“Looks like we’re yakking the same lingo. OK, these packages, where do I pick them up?”

“I have them with me, by Jehovah.” Jeremy waved an exuberant hand toward the two almost matronly figures standing in the sunlight streaming through the unobscured window. Their skin lay lax; their expressions, though vacant, held a suggestion of experience that might, perhaps, have earned the vacancy.

“Huh,” grunted Dollar. “How long you need me to hold onto ’em?”

“Forever!”

“‘At’s a long time.”

“And a day.”

Dollar stood and considered, his hand fondling the bills in his pocket. “I dunno.”

“What would the Fat Man do in such a case, or Barry Craig, or the Falcon?”

Dollar looked at the dowdy maidens, at the fresh saw cuts in the wall planking , at the table’s bent-iron chairs. “Why not? A job’s a job.”

Edith rose and smoothed the taffeta covering her slim hips.

“What’s happening?” asked Maeve in a flickering whisper.

“Oh , dear me,” tsked Jeremy, “I didn’t properly explain. Mea culpa. You see, my dear, Mr. Dollar will be taking care of you and your sister from now on.”

Maeve’s eyes spread open like a map unfolding. Tears rolled down Lucy’s flaccid face, but her hands gripped each other in tight embrace, a mating of garter snakes.

“With Mr. Cent’s help, of course,” Jeremy amended.

“Unless,” snapped Johnny Dollar, his snap-brim angled above his sharp-boned face, “he doesn’t make it back for a bit. Sometimes he just kind of… meanders off.” He drew his hand across his mustache and smoothly downed the remainder of his drink.

Jeremy raised his own glass high. “To Mr. Dollar, who can be trusted, believe you me, to make your stay not only comfortable, but I dare say, extraordinary.”

“But we were going to…” began Lucy, her hands twisting in the ghost-gray dress that reached halfway to her ankles. She could not say quite what it was that they were going to.

Edith sidled up to Dollar and held out her now-empty glass. Dollar reached behind the polished bar to fetch a narrow-necked bottle and three aluminum tumblers, snugged into nappy cloth holders. Into each tumbler he splashed an ample dollop of the amber liquid. Jeremy joined Edith and Johnny in a celebration of Four Roses, as they once grew in the vivid neon of Times Square. The merry-makers clunked tumblers and smiled like three old friends.

Jeremy spread his arms wide and twirled, a dancer. He stopped to face the two girls who huddled in resignation. “My dears, my dear dears.” He reached, as if to swoop them into his arms, but they backed away, unblinking deer in a headlight.

By the bright blue front door, Jeremy and Edith bid adieu to handsome Johnny and his frisking Weimaraner, then stepped across the welcome mat with its jolly family of bears. They retraced the trail from the ancient wood into the regeneration of the once-ruined valley. Jeremy whistled “Canadian Sunset” while Edith slapped her hand against a succession of saplings.

Back in the car, after their rugged but exhilarating ascent of the embankment, Edith placed her arms behind her head, a Cheshire Cat smile enveloping her face. “I can’t believe I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass those two could be.” She closed one eye and squinted at Jeremy. “You think they’ll be OK?”

Jeremy stretched his arms and flexed his fingers, relaxing the often-frozen contours of his mouth. “Have no fear. Johnny Dollar is a renowned – an exquisitely renowned – investigator and righter of all conceivable wrongs. He knows the ropes, as they say. All will be for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”

Edith slid closer in the seat and nudged him with her elbow. “You’re OK. Sorry I gave you all that grief. You know, I’m not exactly sure I’m your aunt. Maybe… I might be a… somewhat closer relative.”

“Everything is relative,” said Jeremy. As he turned the key in the ignition, he found Edith’s hand on his.

On the day of their return to the valley, Jeremy’s step had lost something of its old spring. He slithered and slid down the incline, now slicked smooth, the road debris absorbed by moss- and weed-encrusted earth. Edith skipped nimbly, finding easy footing on the occasional tree root or snag of rocky outcropping.

At the bottom, they turned slightly left, toward the cabin, marching along what remained of the trail, stopping short before the abandoned shack, its sides bowed and leaning, its roof gone ignorant of its function. The door hung, precarious, by one hinge. It threatened to complete its dissolution as Jeremy carefully shifted it open.

The inside reeked of mold and darker possibilities. Most of the scant furniture was gone or lying in shards. When had anyone last inhabited this repellant space?

Jeremy shuffled through the clutter and splinters without clear intention. Edith scanned the walls.

“Look,” she said, pointing.

Two mid-calf dresses drooped from rusted hangers resting on nails. Both had incipient flower patterns that would never bloom. When Edith reached out to the one on the right, the fabric pulled apart at her touch, as though it had been an illusion. 

“Where can they be?” She asked, waving her hand at the emptiness. “You said he could be trusted.”

“They must have moved. Maybe he got his business back together.”

“He really had a detective business?”

“I told you. Yeah, he can be trusted if anyone can.”

“And he never called you about them?”

“He never called me before or after. We weren’t that way with each other.”

He peered into the space beneath what remained of the bar. Inside, a bottle, half full, of Johnny Walker Red. “Here we go.”

A piece of lined notebook paper hung from a nail on the wall across from the dresses. Edith reached for it but held back. It could well crumble to dust. The handwriting was ill-formed, so elementary that she could make nothing of it, except the closing salutation, “Yours Truly,” and below that… a dollar sign?

She shook her hand in consternation, then shook her head. “I think we should leave.”

“Guess so. Not much to do. Here. For sure.”

Turning, Jeremy spied something on the floor where the table had stood. It  must have been there when they entered; why hadn’t he noticed it then? He picked up the fedora, caressed its gentle brim and smart top fold, both dust-free. He placed it on his head at what he took to be a rakish angle and beckoned to Edith. 

They did not reset the failing door as they left. The elements had claimed the rest of the structure, let them have this last, barely resistant bit. Had the same elements, or some elementals, also claimed the inhabitants? No way to know, so why question?

As they traversed the half-erased path to their climb, Edith took Jeremy’s hand. Jeremy, in his found fedora, pictured himself a gallant figure.

He was not. It takes a fluid grace, an expansive sense of self, to earn the promise of command offered by a fedora.