Tree voices

It was known locally as The Hanging Tree. No history to corroborate the name, that Sutton knew of, but he allowed there was enough circumstantial evidence. At least one if not others of its massive reach of sturdy horizontal branches might well have held a rope or more back in the day. And it was old enough. Sutton knew that. At least two centuries under its ragged bark. And huge. Hips big as an Asian elephant's. In fact, damned thing looked like the child of a wild night 'tween a mastodon and a giant squid. Frozen, though, were that the case, save for the trillions of leaflets waving like royal fingers in a parade.

The circumstantial evidence was good enough for the history buffs to picket the tree with scolding signs. The age of the tree was enough to bring out the huggers, who climbed into its multitude of crotches and vowed to stay put come hell or chainsaw horror. The poets enlisted choir members to lend timbre to their march singing new words to the Joni Mitchell chestnut about not knowing what you got 'til it's gone, with the new chorus being, "You rape paradise to put up a business school."

Sutton knew any one of these groups was capable of carrying its protest into lethal territory. And if not the groups themselves then some lone assassin. And assassin was most assuredly the right word because anyone who drove ten-penny nails into a tree that was marked to be taken down was virtually guaranteeing the poor bastard with the chainsaw would get enough of himself sliced apart or off when a nail bounced the snarling teeth back in a finale the local media could only euphemize for their family audiences. Which is why Sutton was up there now with a magnet and a claw hammer as a nasty-looking storm rumbled in from the west.

He didn't especially like the risk of climbing around in a tree with a storm approaching, but it seemed the only opportunity to do so without protesters interfering.

So he was alone, straddling one of the limbs and scanning an area he'd marked for cutting, when the discussion started. At first he thought it was just more of the distant thunder. The voice was low and resonant, Paul Robeson leading into Old Man River. He looked around carefully. Saw no one. As it turned out there was only the one voice, but it spoke a multitude of viewpoints. As if each speaker went to the same microphone which electronically converted all of the voices into Robeson's. It was a gentle discussion, an enlightened one, one without any apparent stake beyond a collective concern for an uncertain future.

Soon locked in the spell of unseen eavesdropping, Sutton slid down to the nearest crotch and leaned his back against the rough old trunk, and listened.

"Kinda small potatoes. No passion."

"We've tried passion. Too dangerous. Inevitably led to religions."

"True, but without the risk what does it matter if a bunch of introverted stoics believe? Organized action is still our best bet."

"Pure love is all that matters. It's all we have. This guy wants to believe but he needs rational assurance. Blind Faith is a band.”

"But the danger. We prove to him, we prove to a million like him that we exist and can and will interfere, can they handle it? Can we be certain none of them will go messianic on us, again?"

"Now wait a minute. The messianics have done good by us. We wouldn't be here without them. It's the ones who take advantage of them, twist their messages. The metaphysical predators."

"There will ever be mortals who can't wait. It's in their genes. Even when our chosen ones sacrifice their bodies, their lives to demonstrate the power of their love, there will always be seculars who subvert the example, the opportunists."

“So you're saying no more beacons?”

“We've given them enough beacons. It's time to go subtle. Time to work with the meek. Prove our existence to them in an intimate way, that we recognize them with love, let them know their calling and their commitment to it are vital.

"Yes. And they recruit by example, their devotion to vocation, the quiet confidence and strength we give them."

"By example alone? No proselytizing?"

“Absolutely.”

“Will that enough?”

“It has to be.”

"But we're nearly out of time. They're destroying the planet. We can't afford to lose the species. What can ten, a million, nay, ten million devoutly loving introverts inherit when all is risked by the others for comfort and pride?"

"The truly devoted can survive."

"They must.”

“If they don't?”

“Have we faith enough to last without the love of mortals feeding us? Have we enough love to face the unknown, the eternal cosmos? Have we? Sing it, children--"

"Shhhhhhh. I should like to think we do, but it's a risk I'm not wanting to take."

"Nor I.”

“Nor I.”

“Ummmm...”

“Nor I.”

“Nor I."

[This rumbles awhile.]

"The nays have it. Well then, as our sole effect is on attitude, we'd best get cracking."

The ringing in Sutton's ears resembled the whine of jet turbines too near, and he choked on the ozone. He saw by the steam rising from the fresh gash in the bark of the neighboring cedar this is where the lightning had struck. Raindrops pelting his head and neck had restored his consciousness. It was just starting, what promised to be a deluge.

"Hoo boy, best to get down now." He clambered out of the crotch and dropped to the ground. He patted the trunk that had provided his backrest. "Later, old girl." He jogged to his truck.

Angel

I've seen her three times now. The first was at the doctor's office. We are waiting in a sort of haphazard line at the window where you arrange for referrals or your next appointment. She is ahead of me, and this is annoying.

A lot of things annoy me at the doctor's office. It's my age, I suppose. It's assumed we get grouchier as we watch our youth fade and find it harder to deny the alternative's approach. I am, anyway. I'm living up, or down more accurately, to the standard assumption. It's worse at the doctor's office because of all the reminders. The stink of latent dread is everywhere, the more noticeable the older you are.

Carpet Ride to Magicland

In case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody Allen glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side of a building so far above a busy avenue the cars below look like ladybugs on wheels.

 Harold Lloyd.

Movie comedian of the silent 1920s. Called himself the “Glass Character” because his trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy was a nut. Blew one of his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what he thought was a stage prop bomb. It was real. Deliberately gave himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair to stand straight up. Did his own stunts—the clock dangle, the shocked hair, pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky, netless—a brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.

Knowing this and being acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even scares me to look at the photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the movies and look at the photos, and I'll read her reports. Well, then again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her book, The GlassCharacter. It's all in there.

Margaret, poor girl, is in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a fascination with soundless images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb somewhere amid the exhaustive research she was conducting for a book about what was then still just a fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is happily married and has two lovely daughters and four darling grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap into the day when her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood. Fortunately, for her and for us, she's a novelist. She has the skill to weave the magic carpet to carry her backward in time to those days of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her gently down along the path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a rebirth in the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven that carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange trip. I rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still agog.

When we stepped off the carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had changed. No longer the familiar author of two of my favorite novels—Better than Life, and Mallory—she'd become sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and erstwhile soda jerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie idol Harold Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later “Muriel”, as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager belongings, cash in her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to Hollywood and into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears. Unfortunately I had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon alighting in the Santa Fe dust.

So it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus ride, Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me hunkered weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.

I won't say more. I took no notes and had to avert my gaze any number of times during moments that really were none of my personal concern.

The Glass Character is Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine. What I did see and hear, and learn during our holiday in history is captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy I can't help but wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her journal to a holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a keyboard somewhere in a place called Coquitlam, B.C.

Heart Full of Hope (a review)

Charmed.

By this lovely little book.

Heart Full of Hope, by Christine Geery, is one of those books I hoped would never end. It has no plot, there is no suspense, no narrative thread that compelled me to keep turning the pages to find out what happened next, and no ending that made me gasp with surprise or delight or experience that sense of satisfying closure when all of the pieces finally click together and the whole makes perfect sense the way we wish it would in our lives. Yet, when I finished reading the final page of Heart Full of Hope and closed the covers for the last time, I felt an odd kind of loneliness. One thing many of these plotted books do have in common with Heart Full of Hope is that by the end you feel as if you know the characters, often as well as if they were family.

I had that feeling with Heart Full of Hope well before I'd read all of its 34 slices of Geery's life. I've never met her, have only the photos of her she's included in the book and maybe wouldn't recognize her if we met on the street. But I know her. I can hear her laugh and cry, and I can savor more than one of the Italian dishes that grace her popular table, even the last piece of apple crostata she confesses to having eaten herself despite her strict custom of always leaving the last piece for someone she loves.

Geery's writing is fluid and natural. It flows directly from her heart to her reader's, without the processed feel of craft or cleverness that compromises innocence and distances so many of the autobiographical sketches I've read from the intimacy that can open the heart as well as tickle the mind.

One image that's going to stay with me awhile is of Daphne, a mix of golden retriever and standard poodle she calls a “goldendoodle”. Daphne pops up several times throughout the book as a memorable character, but the one scene that sticks is how she handled “jail”. Here's Geery's description:

We set up an area that we call “jail”, because this is where she must go when she is naughty. One day she started to chew something that was off limits. I scolded her, and as I did she lowered her eyes, walked off and, to my astonishment, put herself in jail! But as always, one look into those wide brown eyes and I melted immediately, so she wasn't there long.

Geery likens Daphne's face to Woody Allen's. I can see where she gets that, but to me the beloved goldendoodle's mug is a spittin' image of Joan Rivers's.

Slim as this volume is, it took me nearly a month to read. I enjoyed it slowly, as I might sipping a fine Cognac. After a day spent struggling with my own writing and existential angst, I'd leave the bedside light on long enough to read another anecdote from Heart Full of Hope before clicking the room dark and drifting off to sleep. Often the smile inspired by Geery's words would drift along with me as if I had just hung up the phone after a pleasing chat with a good friend.

Boo!

Confederate John Singleton Mosby and two other scouts, riding behind Union lines along Virginia's Pamunkey River in the area of Hanover and King William counties, came upon a Union supply wagon, which they promptly captured.  Mosby left one man to guard the wagon and its team, and rode on with the other.  Further upriver, after discovering two Union supply schooners at dock, he sent the other scout back to inform Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, and rode on alone.

Mosby soon came upon a company of Pennsylvania cavalry, mounted and drawn up in a line across the road. 

Evening was drawing nigh and Mosby's horse had tired from the daylong ride.  He knew if he turned to flee, the Union riders could overtake him with their fresh mounts.  He pulled up at the crest of a hill, made a show of drawing his saber and turned in the saddle, waving it in the air as if beckoning followers.  "Come on, boys!" he shouted, "Come on!"

The Pennsylvania troopers executed a smart wheel-around and vanished in a cloud of dust down the road.

Whiz Quiz

Why keep climbing up

after finding up

is never high enough?

Why keep buying the smile

after learning guile

is ever just beneath?

But what if up were all,

and the smile need never fall,

then what?

Grace for Mao

Initially I thought I had attained a new level, a realm that would prove I was in fact the god I'd devoted my life to become. But my efforts to jump up and down with joy soon disabused that notion.

No matter how fierce the determination I brought to bear--climaxing in a fury that would have effected the deaths in hideous agony of all who displeased me until that moment--my body stubbornly refused to obey. This is when I at least should have suspected I was on the cusp of death, especially as I'd long been unable to deny I was terminally enfeebled. Physically, that is. My mind never wavered. In fact it was what I now know to have been an acceleration of brain activity that lifted my ego to what seemed a breakout dimension.

The Lady Packs a Punch

All the while I was reading Lady of the Lake I heard the late Sam Peckinpah's distant ghost-voice imploring, “Goddammit, Lord, send me back down there for one last movie!”

I toyed with saying film except that might have provoked Peckinpah to come back anyway, on his own, just to punch me in the mouth.

The director known as “the picasso of violence”, who gave us those spellbinding slow-motion mayhem scenes in The Wild Bunch, the original The Getaway and Straw Dogs, would have loved Lady of the Lake from the get-go.

Gregg Townsley writes violent scenes the way Peckinpah films them, bringing us so close to the action we see it break into detailed increments. It enables us as readers to sail virtually with ex-Episcopalian priest-cum-bounty hunter W.W. Ronin over the head of his horse onto a sandy path, breaking his/our fall with a trained tumble that starts with a hand, then rolls to a forearm and finally to a shoulder before we're on our feet dashing into a tree-line.

Townsley brings off a visceral authenticity in this opening scene and subsequent descriptions of fights with fists, knives, clubs and guns with a perfect marriage of writing craft and the authority of knowing what he's talking about. Like his protagonist Ronin, Townsley's a former “reflective, free-thinking” pastor, martial artist and western fast-draw enthusiast. He's also a history buff who brings the same accurate feel to his setting and background as he does to the action sequences.

Lady of the Lake is set in the Carson Range around Lake Tahoe in 1880. I'd never been there in person, but the author's skill at conveying his experience with the region and its people transported me there on the magic carpet of imagination. From my own travel experience I know a masterfully guided imagination can leave richer, more poignant memories than does the ordinary fleeting visit in the flesh.

While the book's compelling action scenes and historically accurate setting might be enough for some readers of the western genre, Lady of the Lake goes much further. It brings us engaging characters and a suspenseful story delivered in an easy-flowing narrative that keeps the pages turning.

Coming alive on these pages with Ronin are his friends: Ormsby County Sheriff's Deputy “Dusty” Slade, a Washoe Indian spiritualist named “Happy Hands”, and the widow Emma Naumann, who runs a Christian mission for children. Other characters include U.S, Marshal Augustus Ash, the requisite villains, who are drawn with satisfying background and depth, and the peripheral folks who populate the story's communities and are as recognizable and interesting as the best supporting cast members in a movie by, say, Sam Peckinpah.

By the end of Lady of the Lake I'd come to know Townsley's characters as intimately as any I've encountered in literature. Easy to imagine them sustaining the four-book series Townsley's planned. This is the second of the two he's published thus far, the first being East-Jesus, Nevada, which I have yet to read. He is currently at work on the final two: The Pinkerton Years and True Believer.

Maybe Peckinpah is waiting to read them all before threatening to punch Somebody up there if he doesn't get the chance to return to make at least one Ronin movie.

404

How ironic, thought Thorogood, the economy's collapse coming forty days and forty nights after the Internet crashed. A quiet agnostic, he guessed this coincidence likely nothing more than that, although he kept the thought to himself. Were he able to Tweet Jane, she would have appreciated the coincidence as well. She might in fact have thought it herself, as the Collapse coincided to the day, so far as most anyone could know, two-score days following the abrupt termination of all digital communication on the planet, so far as most anyone could know.

Now, alone on the road, Thorogood struggled to marshal his warring emotions, foremost among them a mood of dread, a faceless stubborn swell of various dire possibilities that periodically pushed up from his intestines and through his chest into his head, occasionally with no apparent invitation from slack or reactive reasoning. Vying with these surges of black mood to compromise a reliable grip on the fragile optimism he believed kept him going was his grief and anger over the loss of his son and daughter to this apocalyptic turn of events. His teenage son, Jethro, as with most of his generation, had been unable for the first several days to disabuse himself of hope his smart phone would somehow return to life. By the thousands youngsters swarmed into the streets shuffling aimlessly, many mumbling to themselves, heads bowed as their eyes stared fixedly at the plastic devices in their hands. Some used both hands – one holding the device while a couple of fingers of the other tapped desperately on the tiny blank screens. Jethro was one of these.

“He's trying to text,” his sister, Esther, told her father. “I tried at first, too. I thought maybe it was just the screen, you know? The light or whatever? I finally gave up.”

Chapt. 47 (1st draft -- Situation Questionable)

A wake of crackling energy washed into the White House Situation Room behind Victor Maranzano. It was this, the energy, that first drew Harry Trueblood's attention rather than the man who brought it with him. Short and skinny, thick glasses, uncombed shock of dark brown hair bristling above his narrow face, bursting in with no warning from the Secret Service agent monitoring the door, the attorney general's physical presence was negligible, diminished even further by his threadbare jeans and baggy plaid flannel shirt.

“Awright what the fuck's the deal here? Where's Kudlow?” He rotated his wispy torso impatiently back and forth flicking his eyes around the room until he settled on Trueblood. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Harry Trueblood. And you?” Trueblood saw Bart Gladstone, face averted, convulsing under apparent strong emotion. It was Bart who'd suggested Trueblood sit in the president's chair at the head of the conference table.

Maranzano abruptly turned to Bart. “Gladstone, goddammit, who's this asshole sitting in the chair? What's this all about?”

“The president...”

Think you know China?

Review of Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Most often when I review a popular book I like I look to the one-star reviews rather than those with five. This is more so I'm not influenced by the words and sentiments in the raves. I want the review to reflect my own reading experience, not the viewpoint of others. The pans are usually good for a laugh, and they often give me a starting point for my own assessment of the book.

I've come to Wild Swans late, learning of it only recently from a friend who lived in China awhile teaching English. Ordinarily averse to reading books others recommend to me (don't really know why) this time it worked, in part I suspect because my friend in describing some of the fascinating revelations it contained tugged back the hem of a curtain I hadn't realized was blocking my view of a land and a culture far beyond anything I had imagined. Many of the handful of disappointed readers bemoaned that Wild Swans didn't excite them, didn't have enough dialogue to suit their taste for action. They compared the book to works of fiction or fictionalized biographies. They must have missed the parts describing the incomprehensible horrors the Japanese committed on the Chinese in World War II, and then by the Chinese themselves in the subsequent struggles for political control and ultimately by the prevailing Communist Party and by the regime headed by Mao Zedong, a certifiable madman who relentlessly set his subjects against each other by the millions, urging them to torture and beat each other to death and drive one another to insanity and suicide.

I'm surprised anyone who claims to have been bored by author Jung Chang's descriptions of such horrific atrocities as “singing fountains”, in which Red Guards split victims' heads open to entertain onlookers with the subsequent screaming and geysers of blood can read at all. Or maybe they miss the dramatic foreground music that prompts them to glance up from their cellphones in time to catch violent depictions on their wide-screen TVs.

Jung Chang builds her story, an account of China's tumultuous history during the 20^th century, around the lives of three generations of women – her grandmother, mother and herself, the “wild swans” of the title. Eventually allowed to leave her politically oppressive homeland for England as a visiting scholar, she began writing Wild Swans after a visit of several months from her mother. Finally free of the restrictions to talk about anything that might be perceived as showing China in a negative light, Jung Chang's mother starting telling her daughter things she'd bottled up most of her life. She talked almost nonstop, even when she couldn't be with her daughter. Jung Chang said her mother left some 60 hours of taped narrative before returning to China. I could go on for pages describing the horrors these women suffered and the incredible heroism they displayed under conditions brought about by the most wicked behavior the human species has ever displayed.

This statement is bound to arouse suspicion that I'm a political shill or at least am exaggerating beyond reason, but from reading Wild Swans I can say with complete confidence Mao Zedong was a genius of the most evil design ever seen on the planet. If only for the sheer magnitude of Mao's murderous subjugation of China's hundreds of millions, Hitler and Stalin were pipsqueaks in comparison. As Jung Chang observed, Hitler and Stalin relied on elites and secret police to enforce their totalitarian regimes. Mao cowed and brainwashed his subjects with cunning, bringing out their worst instincts toward service without question of his every whim. One consequence was the starvation of millions during a famine brought about solely by Mao's vanity and ignorance.

My vague, naïve sense of China left me woefully unprepared for Jung Chang's deceptively dispassionate revelations. Her straightforward, uncontrived presentation, which has a diary feel at times, gives the horrors she describes a poignance that wrenches the heart. Not that all is ghastly and bleak. Alongside the indelible image of the “singing fountains” is her childhood remembrance of having deliberately swallowed an orange seed. A family member had warned her not to swallow the seeds or orange trees would grow out of her head. She admitted having trouble getting to sleep that night worrying about it.

I prefer this memory to the other, although I know both will ever remain with me. 

[ Click title to buy Wild Swans on Amazon]

Santa Detained at Guantanamo

Santa Detained at Guantanamo

         by Jordan Paust

Santa has been detained at Guantanamo Bay as a person who poses a potential threat to national security. In commenting on the detention, a White House “official” admitted that Santa does not presently threaten national security but stressed nonetheless that Santa:

1. hides his face with a beard

2. wears red (an ominous form of coloring under prior U.K. antiterrorism laws)

3. has a male’s first name ending with an “a” that sounds “foreign”

4. flies into and out of the U.S. without going through airport security checks or immigration controls and flies outside air traffic routes without filing any sort of flight plan

5. brings items of value into the U.S. in a large sack in violation of U.S. customs laws

6. has been alleged (in unsworn statements) to have traveled yearly within countries such as Cuba, Iran, and even North Korea and, thus, has “known links” with such countries and various types of persons therein

7. surreptitiously enters buildings through chimneys

8. as indicated by home searches here and abroad, he transferred items of value to opposition leaders in several countries, which the leaders do not declare for tax or any other governmental purposes

9. harbors strange persons at his compound who perform labor without pay

10. has never taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. or to preserve and defend the U.S. Constitution, is not known to be a national of any country and, indeed, is an alien

11. has never registered to vote in any election or served on jury duty

12. has opposed war in any form, even if authorized by the U.N. Security Council

13. summaries of secret surveillance demonstrate that he has been seen often with a white powdery substance on his boots

14. somehow knows when any person is sleeping or awake

15. opposes NRA members and anyone else hunting deer

16. FBI mail checks indicate that children of various government officials and others write to him and hearsay and undisclosed informants indicate that he keeps a secret book with the children’s names and addresses

17. an alleged terrorist named Rudolph has been captured, and Santa has a known acquaintance named Rudolph

In lieu of the above, the Administration will raise the alert to “red” in December when his organization’s patterns of activities and relevant “chatter” seem heightened. The Administration has also identified things that we and/or the Administration can do in December:

1. seal off your fireplace openings with duct tape

2. kill all deer in Alaska and ask our Canadian friends do to the same in Canada

3. Homeland Security will authorize companies to clear-cut all potential Christmas trees in Alaska and elsewhere in the U.S.

4. intercept letters to Santa from your children and turn these over to the FBI

5. avoid traveling to department stores

6. do not help to finance any charities using his image

7. capture metal pots on tripods manned by Salvation Army look-a-likes as these are actually suspected weapons of mass destruction

8. destroy any Salvation Army trucks engaged in furtive behavior, since drawings from the State Department indicate that they are actually involved in the delivery of the pots

9. remind the world that we are at “war” with his organization and its message of peace

10. Homeland Security will hunt down any elves with “known links” to him or his compound

11. the Administration will launch a preemptive strike against his compound and toy-making schools

12. the Administration may try him in a military commission because much of the abovementioned evidence will not be admissible in a court of law, where he would also have the rights to judicial review of the propriety of his detention, to have access to counsel of his choice, to challenge members of the court for cause, to examine all witnesses against him, to fair procedure and fair rules of evidence, to equal protection of the laws, and to appeal to a real court exercising judicial powers.

 [Jordan J. Paust is the Mike and Teresa Baker Law Center professor of international law at the University of Houston.]

Chapter 46 (1st draft -- Presidential Gas)

Charlotte Remora's attitude morphed through several faces as she sat with the others. Professional blank initially, to conceal her rage at losing exclusivity for her station within minutes of airing quite likely the century's hottest story. Startled next to realize her mouth was hanging open and she'd forgotten to breathe as the full import of President Morowitz's disaster established itself in the room. Finally her camera-ready complexion betrayed from beneath by the clammy pallor of helpless fear, which reflected a growing despair shared by the small group.

They were slumped on the studio's folding chairs. All but Dr. Knoe, who sat tending the president on his cot in the alcove, and Brad Morowitz, dutifully manning the camera for the record and whatever outlets remained tapped into the feed. The sound was off, so the feed carried little more than a still frame of an unconscious president. Even Dr. Knoe for the most part remained outside the view. It seemed to Remora that although Ruth Rose looked as worried as everyone else she'd become by default the center of gravity in the room. Something in her comportment, an implicit poise manifested so far as Remora could see only by a tilt of the head, as if the former president was leading with her chin and daring anyone to take a shot. Ruth's presence mitigated for Remora a creeping sense of claustrophobia. Nonetheless, she suspected that were it not for her appreciation of the irony of being the only news reporter trapped in the eye of the cataclysm she would spontaneously atomize to a mist of shrieking terror. As it was, she joined warily with the others in the frozen surrender of supplicants. Other than slight movements when Ruth and Joan Stonebraker occasionally reached outside the bunker via their cellphones the small group resembled mannequins in a department store window.

Prisoners

This cell the sole certainty,

all else steeped in mystery.

Why should we be here?

Eyes peer through bars.

Intrepid reach for stars,

or respite from some fear?

Is the secret cloistered

in a heart not nurtured

by the cleansing tear?

Eyes without meet eyes within,

two pair sparkling serious whim.

So why damned bars to interfere?

Chapt. 44 (1st draft -- Father Daughter Talk)

It was the tone of her voice, not his name, that cut through his concentration.

“Clem?”

Nothing unusual about his daughter calling him by his name, something she'd done since learning it as a child. He loved how it sounded spoken in the soft contralto she'd inherited from her mother. Ordinarily she said “Clem” with an easy affection that rarely failed to slip under the crusty exterior that kept most people wary in his presence. This time was different.

“Clem?”

She so seldom put the little interrogative curl at the end when saying his name that doing so now, especially with a heightened volume, conveyed an urgency that was equally unusual for her. Yet, he hesitated. Focused so intensely on a scene in the mystery novel he was writing, he needed stages of disengagement to break free. Part of his brain was calculating the degree of urgency represented by his daughter's not rapping on the door. He took a deep breath and stepped back from his laptop.

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Mary Beth. Come in.”

The door started to open, tentatively. He took the knob and tugged it enough to reveal his daughter, whose beauty struck him, as it often did, with its startling resemblance to her mother's when they'd met. Her radiant face was composed and serious.

“It's Randy. He said he'll call you from the cabin. Sounded urgent.”

“Thanks, Sweetheart. Can you find my secure phone? It should be in the desk, top left drawer.”

Clement Botticelli returned to his laptop, looked at the screen briefly and saved what he'd written. He closed it then, knowing he was finished for the day.

The throwaway cellphone twittered less than a minute after Mary Beth brought it to him. He'd moved to the recliner next to the dresser where when he worked on his novel he wrote standing.

Yeah.

Chapt. 43 (1st draft -- In the Arena)

It's the swirling...no. There's no swirling. What then? Ridge...circular ridge...no no no no no...ripple! That's it! The ripple in the deep garnet red, rolling out from the...where the drop plunked into the deep garnet...the drop! Holy shit...

House Speaker Edith Glick's head entered a terrible clarity at this moment, one of several she then knew she'd experienced since things had started swirling...there it was again. Swirling. Of course! It was the swirling cognizance. In and out of realization and then loooong stretches of...what? How long has this been going on? Forever! Ever! No! It couldn't have it just seems like it forever forever ever but only an hour at the most how can this be? Omigod...another ripple ipple ipple ipple...WAIT! No more drops! It's the...Omigod I TOOK THE SHIT! No wonder I couldn't find the goddam capsule for chrissake! I took the goddam capsule I musta thought it was the goddam ginkgo biloba shoulda put the goddam thing in a different goddam thing oh shit SHIT I can't give this to fucking Kudlow! Not now! He's a dumb ass but if he goes down in a babbling ball of batshit and I'm already a babbling ball of batshit then that means next comes...

Despite her sudden panic she understood the extraordinary license she'd been given by the collective befuddlement President Morowitz's surprise performance brought to the room. Everyone was agape. An appearance by Morowitz was not scheduled, but this surprised few of those invited to the exclusive annual Gridiron Club dinner. So when his “show” seized the airwaves only minutes into the start of the program its organizers quickly lowered the projection screen and turned the roast over to the commander in chief.

Most at first assumed it was planned, that Morowitz was mailing it in. That he wasn't funny at first was no surprise either. It soon became apparent something terrible was happening.

All Hallows Eve

Once upon All Hallows Eve, I'd just ingested my Aleve,

Whence came a tapping at my door, a tap tap tapping,

A damnably intrusive rapping tapping, rappity dappity tapping...and nothing more.

Of course, I opened the goddamned door, and there stood monsters, three or four.

Wee ones, they, bedecked in hideous array as tiny ogres, I must say,

They held out baskets, expecting pay by way of treats, or tricks they'd play.

I thought, OK, if that's the game we play this day, you'll get your treat and then away

From here to stray no more to my front door at this late hour as before.

In each ghoul's basket I therefore did place an apple, which afore

A needle I'd embedded in its core, with hopes this bother nevermore would come a'tapping at my door.

And yet next day to my dismay a rapping sent my nap astray, two strapping cops led me away.

Heartlong

The head is good, but the heart will take awhile.

Reason understands the whys, but reason never lies,

Oh the ego had its fling, and the world seemed to sing,

So easy then to smile, as stars conspired to beguile,

Then the joker showed its face, made the hand give up its ace,

Now the head knows what it should, but it'll take the heart awhile.

Chapt. 42 (1st draft -- The President Goes Under)

President Morewitz swallowed the capsule and promptly dropped the glass of water, which shattered into a wet spray of shards on the wooden dais.

“Oops...I'm OK, I'm OK. It hasn't started working yet. I don't think!” Grinning, he stepped clumsily backwards off the dais as Ruth and Geddes rushed forward. Morewitz had regained his footing by the time they reached him. Chuckling, he led them into an alcove behind the curtain. The space was occupied by a steel cot and a couple of folding chairs. Morowitz sat on the cot and motioned to the chairs, but before either Ruth or Geddes could sit something mechanical jerked the curtain up and rolled it into the ceiling exposing them to the floodlights and the president's son peering at them through the camera's viewfinder. Geddes waved him away.

“You can turn that off now, Bradford,” Geddes said. “Show's over.”

“No no, leave it on, Brad! I want the world to see the whole thing live.”

Ruth leaned in and said quietly, trying to keep her voice from the sound pickup, “Not a good idea, Geoff. There'll be a stretch when nobody looks very presidential.”

“I don't care, Ruth. I believe I've already shown them that side of me.” He laughed. “I can't imagine a better way to demonstrate how this stuff works.

“Besides, you're going to join me aren't you? Have you taken yours yet?”

“No, Geoff. Changed my mind.”

“Whatsa matter. 'fraid we'll start singing Auld Lang Syne? No, wait, Eve of Destruction! Hahaha.”

“Oh, Geoff.” She nudged Geddes. “Thanks a bunch, Al. You didn't have to put that in the book, you know.”

“So when will this stuff kick in? Should I be lying down? It sounds in your book, Al, kinda like an LSD trip?”

“You ever done acid, Mr. President?”

“No, Al. They asked me that many times once I got into politics. I've been with people who were tripping. When I was at Yale. At least I assumed they had taken acid. I think they called it windowpane.

“Frankly I was afraid to try it. I smoked some marijuana – oh, and I did inhale hahaha – but the other stuff, the windowpane, if that's what it was, well, they just got too weird for me when they were on that stuff.”

“There are similarities, Mr. President. The first time I took it unknowingly. Thought I was losing my mind.”

“I know. I read both books, Al. You called them fiction, but I suspected at the time there was more truth in them than not. So has Vulcana made you a...a better man?”

Geddes shrugged and, trying to keep his face deadpan, turned to Ruth. She met his eyes and shook her head. Morowitz interrupted her as she started to speak.

“That's an unfair question, Al, and I apologize for putting you on the spot. I know we're still live, although I can't imagine every station is still carrying the feed, but...”

“It's OK, Mr. President. It's a perfectly valid question and, double entendres aside, I really don't feel any different, except obviously a little older and...well, even more disappointed. I'm not sure Vulcana's given me any new insights or mental abilities. Maybe I was too old and set in my ways.”

“You're a goody two-shoes, Al. Vulcana doesn't affect goody two-shoeses...is that right? Two-shoeses?”

“Ruth, jeezus.”

Morowitz remained seated on the cot, but his face wore a puzzled expression. He seemed distracted, staring at something behind them. Before Geddes could turn to see what it might be, Dr. Knoe appeared at his side. Her intriguing scent – a subtle marriage of fetching and dangerous – reached him first. She touched his arm and pushed him gently out of her way as she moved nearer the president.

“Mr. President,” she said, in the protective voice of a mother to her child, “are you comfortable?”

No response.