Literary Mystery

Teaser

2012-01-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

Excerpt of upcoming

RADIO PROGRAM #40

"I'm aware that I've outraged many powerful folks in this town. I know it. This moment at the sound of my voice there's a lot of teeth gnashing going on.

"Why do I have this radio station? Because it was the one way in this alleged democracy to have a voice. The only avenue through which to speak the uncompromised, unedited, unmediated Truth. We have as much speech in this country as we can control or pay for. All else is a magician's trick.

"Don't believe those who say they're for free speech. Distrust them. They're not. Real democracy presupposes a meeting of equals. Equals! The gap between rich and poor in this civilization exceeds that of ancient Egypt, or Babylon, or Rome. I haven't seen all in my excursions in the world but I've seen that.

"When someone tells you how liberal they are then be most alarmed. Those are the individuals who embrace most their own self-bestowed goodness, they can do no wrong, which means if you criticize them there must be something wrong with you and they'll act to quickly shut you down!"

“The Tower”: A Pop Novel

2011-03-03T07:04:00.001-08:00

A CARD

"The Tower" in the Tarot deck is the most striking card in a line-up of striking cards. Visualize a black tower against a blood red backdrop. A sudden bolt of yellow lightning crashes into the haughty structure at its top. The depiction of an instantaneous event.

The Tower card represents obstacle, civilization, corruption, that which must be overcome. Inherited knowledge. Power. The pretentions of man. Chaos. Collapse. Perhaps, America.

The Tarot is a pagan relic of an ancient philosophy. As such, it's a fitting tool for understanding a paganistic age, the hectic barbaric world we live in now.

A CITY

This story about an illustrated card takes place in a fictional city between New York and Baltimore on America's east coast. A city of neighborhoods around a tops-down center, of gaudy wealth alongside sweeping shambles of decay. A metropolis being tied together by idealists at the same time it’s flying apart.

THE VOICE

The voice broke on radio airwaves like a thunderbolt from the sky. A voice of authority. A woman's voice, but no soft wimpy woman's voice. Instead: throaty, aggressive, laughing, mocking. Challenging and inviting. A resonantly unique voice which reached into the inner core of those listening.

"Broadcasting across the globe from the 99th floor of the Tower, I am the voice of direction for oppressed peoples, freeing imprisoned minds from corrupt governments and monster corporations, bringing YOU the news in new ways. I am Lara Vox, your goddess of tomorrow, your voice of today."

A pause. Silence.

"What is this strange word, ‘radio’? What does it represent? What does it mean? Why isn't this medium completely archaic? Newspapers are dead, but you unclued-in people are still listening to your radios. WHY?!

"It's because you listen in darkness. You listen in your cars. In your bedrooms. In your nightmares. Radio is the voice of the submerged conscience. The disembodied voice. The literary voice. The voice of civilization, language, culture, communication-- of humankind's first awakenings, first storytellers-- b.s. tellings around campfires-- history's first Homeric poetry readings.

"Homer didn't need sight, and you don't need to see me. YOU. I'm speaking directly to you. You're getting with my words the real me. The inner me. The personal me. I'm your closest friend. I want you to envision me. Picture me. Please. What do you see?

"I am the fulfillment of your dreams."

THE TOWER

The unfinished skyscraper stood near the west edge of downtown, within view of everyone in the city and for miles around. It'd been part of a construction boom fueled by a misguided tax policy. Fences surrounded it. Hard hats could occasionally be seen on the ground around the entrance, but no one did any work. It violated every safety rule in the book. According to news reports it'd changed owners seven times. It was always in receivership. Funding to complete the project always fell apart.

The silver skyscraper protruded like a glittering knife into the sky. It stood in its incomplete state as an embarrassment to the local populace, but also as a symbol of ambition, the city's brazen desire or need to top all others. At least to match any other. Such a projection could be meant only to match an equal void.

The looming structure stood empty until an enterprising Lefty radio star from out of nowhere began nesting in its uppermost floor.
Who owned the skyscraper? Who was building it?

No one was sure when the office building would be finished, where it'd end, how high it'd climb.

RADIO PROGRAM #9

The unfinished tower stood as a mighty looking empty shell. Outside, it seemed a reflective impressive beacon wonder of technology. A silvery representation of wealth. Inside: an echoing hulk.

Through secretive effort Lara Vox had put together a radio station. This took many furtive journeys inside and out, dragging equipment, traveling up and down the sole working elevator marked by a green door. The door to another elevator shaft, one never completed, was painted red. Many trips taking the long ride to the 99th floor with radio consoles, or carpeting, or chairs. She'd brought other furnishings onto the high floor to create a cozy den she could live in-- paint, drapery, space heaters, a bed. Either she was a strong and inexhaustible woman or she'd had help.

The signal she'd adopted had once belonged to a nonprofit. At night, if you looked closely at the tower, toward its very top, you could see amid the wall of silent darkness, the purple sky beyond, a single glowing yellow light marking where Lara Vox conducted her broadcast.

First: music played. Hours of it. Lara wasn't a fan of jazz but she used cool pieces of jazz as interludes for her show. Cool jazz fit the nightworld mood of the Tower. Coltrane, Brubeck, and beyond. No singers-- hers the only voice. She wanted dots of random notes which fit the chaos of the city around her-- no minimalist classical junk either. She needed humanity present among the jumble. Nothing "hot." She was the heat on her show. Background notes only of blue.

Then: A sudden Introduction. This was always a surprise. Her voice was on the station a great deal-- as much as half a twenty-four hour period-- but there was no schedule. When Lara wasn't on, the listener had to wait. With anticipation. Frustration. Longing.

"Hello."

Had the music stopped? The husky, magical voice reaching inside your soul.

"Corruption breeds on all sides. You know it but you don't want to admit it, you want me to say it.

"So hello! This is the kick-butt creator of the Stay Awake Radio Rebellion: ME! Lara Vox. Herself. The One and Only. Not an imitation.

"Rants, reflections, information, guests, questions, commentary-- unapproved unADULTerated DIY for your listening reawakening. Furthering your deprogramming education."

Next came the body of the show when she told true stories of city mismanagement, cop beatings, and questionable private business dealings. Her research was eye-opening. Her targets were many.

At the top of the list, after the bumbling mayor, was billionaire Arthur Tychon, owner of the city's richest sports team. "The Temple of Greed," she labelled the team's newly built stadium.

"How many poor people in downtrodden neighborhoods were sacrificed for the Temple of Greed? How many homeless kicked into the street? How many laid-off teachers? What was the price of the palace of privilege, playground of fatcats engorging themselves to levels of burst with food and drink in skybox suites which are paid for by you the taxpayer? We don't want welfare for anybody so we certainly shouldn't have it for grabby men like Tychon!

"Who built that stadium? YOU did. With your tax money and license fees. When's the last time you were able to buy a ticket to see the game? What? They're all taken, you say? Handed out to corporations who deduct the cost as business expense for entertaining clients. I know, football's a ridiculous made-up game anyway. A billionaire's moneymaking scheme. . . ."

The show went late into the deepest part of the night, ending not when she grew tired-- Lara Vox never tired; she was energy personified-- but more likely, bored. She gave hints of sign-off time. She wanted you listening again, whenever she reappeared-- wanted you parked near a radio with expectation.

"You will listen to me every day. You will be shaken awake. You will go to bed dreaming only of me."

INFORMANT

"It's fiscal insanity," the man said in the room's dim light. "Tychon owes the city millions. He's not the only one. Instance after instance. The city's being raped."

He was an accountant who worked for the city. They'd met at a downtown bistro with motifs of silver and blue. The meticulous man gave Lara info on tax abatements for luxury condos along the river, and details on the stadium agreement and other issues.

"I know there are political concerns," the man continued while carefully touching the veggie burger on his plate. "The mayor's a good man. But I see us giving away the store unnecessarily and I ask myself, why is this happening?"

They sat across from each other in a back room. The accountant glanced around himself through his slim eyeglasses.

"The woman who owns this restaurant in fact is one of the more notorious real estate developers, known for using scab labor while obtaining, somehow, city kickbacks. The help no doubt are mostly underpaid illegals."

The tiny brown-skinned young woman refilling their water glasses didn't seem to know English.

"Note the mediocrity of the food," the man added.

Lara put the rolls of printed data into her purse.

"What can I do for you for this?" she asked.

"Nothing! I want nothing," the man insisted. "I'm giving you this to relieve my conscience. It's criminal. The city's being raped. Criminal."

He was a fussy, ultra-organized man with a tinny voice, as if unused to speaking. A Bartleby locked in his office. Unspoken words inside himself which now couldn't be stopped, like an opened faucet. Lara listened to them.

"I can't see you very well-- you're in shadow, and my eyes are poor. Accountant's eyes. I recognize you by your voice. There's no mistaking it. I've been listening to your radio program. I thought, 'Aha! An honest person.'"

"Quite a compliment," Lara replied seductively. "I hope I can live up to it."

SIGN

Lara was not beyond promoting her radio show. A large billboard with spotlights on it appeared downtown, showing huge black letters against a red background: "I WANT VOX."

THE REBELLION

Among those who heard the radio broadcasts of Lara Vox were the scattered clans of white radicals in the city known collectively as the West Side Anarchists.

The radicals were of two kinds.

First, nose-to-the-grounders who naively thought they could separate from larger society, like a religious cult, or the Amish. They were more interested in the trappings of anarchism than in actively making it happen. Food coops, boho clothes, looks, music: slumming. Behind the posturing, at the back of their minds was an awareness of the reality of dominant society, which they feared to confront in any fashion.
For the other, less numerous but more vocal kind of radical, the awareness-- the fear-- of power was at the forefront of their consciousness, so that it stood ominously in front of them, starkly visible at all times. They believed those who questioned society to be under a death sentence. They had nothing to lose by activism. They had everything to gain-- their freedom-- from the collapse of the mighty power of civilization.

Miles Milbank was the unoffical but generally acknowledged leader of the west side radicals-- leader because of his benign charisma and the need for group consensus. Miles took few stands, was in neither anarchist camp-- he angered neither camp-- but instead, with his calming words and detached attitude, floated above the mass.

Three whites sat in an African-American lounge in a west side neighborhood known as "The Bottom." The bar had a name like "The African Lion." A neighborhood spot. Its denizens drank cheap bottled beer and select mixed drinks made with rum or brandy. An array of plastic promotional beer company signs surrounded the lone uneven pool table. The three anarchists plotted at a white formica-topped table nearby. They played the odds that by taking a table at the back, discussing their projects and dreams under cover of the noise of billiard balls, they were safe.

Miles Milbank huddled with two of the area's more vociferous radicals, Mary Dreads and Top Hat, whose names were descriptive.

"Heard this Vox?" Top Hat asked.

"Indeed," Miles answered.

"Yes!" Mary said. "She's amazing."

Mary Dreads was a cute white girl dressed to look tough, carrying the affectations of piercings as well as her long hair. She wore shabby blue stockings with holes in them, too-tight pink shorts over that, and a faded yellow leather coat.

"You've got to find a way to meet with her," Top Hat advised the defacto leader of the city's underground.

Top Hat was an antedeluvian creature with yellow whiskers bursting out of every part of his face.

The three peered carefully about themselves, clutching tightly their beer bottles.

"Maybe someone should first call into her radio show," Miles suggested.

"I already have!" bragged Mary.

At her enthusiasm a small animal on the barroom floor beneath her chair looked up. Parker, her dog.

"Really?" Top Hat said to Mary, trying to focus on her with bleary eyes.

They pondered options as the dusky hum of the room in which they were notably out of place became, like an adopted cloak, familiar and alien.

A RADICAL

In daytime, young revolutionary Miles Milbank stood with hands in his pockets on a streetcorner on the crowded west side university campus, invisible in his stillness like a jungle animal hiding from, or scanning for, predators and prey.

He'd started his involvement in DIY radicalism as an alienated freshman at this very school, before dropping out altogether. Miles was recognized here now as the local radical. He encountered professors he'd sparred with as a student. They'd wryly nod, or smile, and in their innate caution, their trained wariness of disagreement, walk fast and maintain significant space.

Miles Milbank was tall and angular, with a tragic air about him. Hamlet in a local production of a Shakespearean play. He carried a sense of displacement. Adrift out of time. His forebears in east coast cities like this one had run this country. There was a sense about Miles of wanting to be in step with the times, yet everything about his being-- his pace, attitude, bearing-- was better suited for the colonial era.

Miles well knew his situation, knew his life was without direction, one of marking time. He blamed his mother who'd raised him. He sighed and touched on his cellphone to see if she'd called today. He wondered if he should visit her later.

His elderly mother lived in a decaying enclave just outside town known as the Old Line. Home of the area's old money aristocracy. Mrs. Milbank was of an obsolete class and generation. Miles felt that way himself, by extension. The impetus for his activism was to prove his relevance in a world that held for him no place.

His parents had Miles, their only child, at an advanced age. This added to his feeling of aloneness and isolation.

At least she casually slipped him bills when he'd visit. Twenties or fifties. She was happy to do so, despite her hints that stock market reverses and bank failures had cut into her legacy. For a free lunch at a pricey Old Line restaurant, Miles endured lectures on the theme of himself as disappointment and failure.

His mother's saving grace was that she was an intelligent woman capable of informed conversation. His father, who'd died when Miles was seven, had been a rather crude and moderately unsuccessful dollars-and-cents businessman. He'd read publications like Barrons, the Economist, and Business Week. His disappointment in Miles would've surely been greater.

Horizontal gray clouds in the sky above threatened rain. This increased his melancholy. Should he move out of the area? He didn't want to become like Top Hat, a local character unwilling to leave the university neighborhood, hanging around campus into his thirties, or later.

Instead of moving, Miles had been toying with a plan, a way to energize the local movement. The arrival of a personality like Lara Vox could be a way to turn that plan into reality.

Without realizing it he'd moved up the street. Bookstores, diners, shops, on all sides. Cars of students and staff lined up at a jammed parking lot. Horns. A clogged street. Red, yellow, green glass steel or stone academic buildings rising like fortress walls. Oppressing barriers. A man peddling peanuts. Steel cart selling hot dogs. Another: falfalel; gyros. Rumbling trucks. To the east, in the near distance downtown, the rising Tower overseeing everything.

A local hooker wearing too-heavy lipstick and a black vinyl jacket squeezed between the impatiently waiting vehicles. Miles smiled at her. Two very young and very pretty coeds with books, exiting a car, smiled his way. He smiled more at them.

THE STADIUM

In the southern part of the city amid mass rowhouse neighborhoods, surrounded by displays of lights, sat the gleaming new sports stadium. Tychon Stadium. It looked like a giant circular spaceship about to elevate. Huge steel pillars rose on all sides, covered with banners.

The entrance at the front of the complex appeared enormous. Spectators entering beneath polished girders received the illusion of a vast canyon. Inside waited a glowing green field. Electronic digital viewing screens shimmered with electric colors. Replays of famous games. Depictions of clashing violence.

On the side of the green field at the fifty yard line spread several levels of office suites punctuated by skyboxes. The suites contained team headquarters. Billionaire team owner Arthur Tychon ran other enterprises, those which had made his fortune, but the football team was his love. At a mammoth desk inside the highest row of offices sat the great Tychon.

COACH OF THE WEEK

Every year Tychon purchased a new one at a large salary and fired him midseason if the team wasn't likely to make the playoffs. He kept the coach the full year if it did, then fired him. The only thing Tychon wanted was a championship. For a man who'd won at almost everything he'd attempted in his life, this was appropriate.

Tychon's arbitrary handling of head coaches was an exhibition of Tychon's power, his bottomless wealth, and his ability to dominate the brightest minds. The most brilliant strategists were slow-thinking compared to him. He'd already gone through the most talented, most legendary coaching names, two who'd been lured from easy retirement by the salary Tychon paid, before having their stellar reputations destroyed by failure.

Tychon's thinking, as with all he did, came from pure logic. He paid better than any other owner. Should he not expect a commensurate performance? Did he not have the right to expect the best?

"There's never an excuse for failure," he stated in final briefings in his office, when the once-hopeful coach, now broken like a knocked-out fighter, was let go.

Tychon's extreme confidence came from his knowledge of himself. He knew, better than anyone, the deep reservoir of his talents.

In fact, despite the team's often dismal performance on the field, Tychon proved his ability in every other aspect of the franchise. The team, once the worst performer in the league, with scanty attendance at the rusted inadequate prior stadium, had become a money-making machine. Its name, logo, colors, were everywhere, assaulting city residents from each view of town, and through every form of media. The "branding," the foundation and uniting thread of team marketing, was superb. Every aspect worked, fabulously. Except one-- the team on the field. Every employee performed the best. Except the coach! Coaches! Supposed geniuses. Hyped by nonstop sports media as geniuses. Did Tychon ask too much by demanding a winning coach?

Lately Tychon had begun recruiting his head coach candidates from college ranks. There was sincerity on his part to this. Tychon wanted a coach of his own genius, an advocate not of caution but of extreme innovation. A master who could revolutionize the game, who in a season or two could remake the team to easily win the entire season. He asked from his coach the impossible. He lived to see, on the glowing green football field before him, displays of total dominance.

Eventually he'd find the person who could give him this experience.

THE DESTROYER

"Why aren't they practicing?" Tychon asked Anna, a production assistant.

Tychon stood gazing at the green field below, from behind glass, in the plush lobby outside his private office. Anna joined him at the window while nibbling a grape. Behind them a lavish buffet spread through the center of the big room, the buffet always there day and night, its trays of every kind of food and cuisine for every taste continually replenished by small white-coated servers, who adeptly switched serving trays, not-so-fresh to fresh, with unobtrusive dexterity.

On the field below, the team mascot did somersaults. No players anywhere to be seen.

"Get the cheerleaders rehearsing at least. This is a tourist attraction. I want constant activity."

Anna talked quietly on her phone. Within minutes the cheerleaders, who Tychon wasn't satisfied with anyway, appeared. She noted the time shown on her phone. Tychon had a meeting scheduled with a player and his agent in four minutes. She was tempted to remind him, but knew he'd know it. He wore no watch, carried no cellphone, required no log. The man had the uncanny ability to carry every point of needed data, including the current time, in the banks of his brain.

She saw now through a glass door Rick Romeo striding down a corridor toward them. Romeo was the boss's security chief. Twenty seconds behind on the thick carpeting followed the current head coach.

Tychon made no effort to step into his office. He'd conduct the meeting here-- a sign of the low priority he gave the request for negotiation.

Rick Romeo positioned himself next to the boss, on Tychon's right. The football coach by contrast sat in a nearby armchair, between two large plants. His lined gray face looked exhausted. He worked 19 hours a day, well over a hundred hours a week. His age was forty-three.

"They have one minute," Romeo said.

"They won't be late," Tychon stated.

The Destroyer's agent knew enough not to be late. Sure enough, the Samson of the Gridiron and his agent appeared on the corridor runway. The tall player in a three-piece blue suit looked younger than when playing.

"Who is she?" Tychon asked about the agent, a lean young black woman.

Like a detective, Romeo flipped open a small notebook and read from it in a low voice.

"Cassandra Lang. Columbia law school. Yale before that. Was on the volleyball team."

Rick gave other details then closed the notebook. The large gladiator limped into the lobby, the trim agent behind him. A ten-year veteran of the game, the Destroyer was the team's best player. His contract expired at the end of the season. He and his new agent wanted an extension at a large sum of money. The impromptu meeting was their idea.

"Good afternoon, Boss," the Destroyer said with an accommodating smile.

"Hello, Destroyer," Arthur Tychon replied pleasantly.

The Destroyer disliked corporate whites, but enjoyed playing up to them, feeding their egos. He appreciated Tychon because the ego was naked. He noted the billionaire's squat form, silver hair, and sunburned face, the quality of his tailored silver-gray suit, his small, slightly hooked nose and blue eyes. Tychon gave the impression of power. He was America's hierarchies-- to Destroyer, its racism-- personified. The Destroyer basked in the man's presence.

Behind Tychon stood a handsome, thick-necked white man about six feet tall in a burgundy suit with a white silk shirt and a black tie, with short cut black hair and a swarthy, chiseled face. Rick Romeo. Ex-Marine, ex-cop. Factotum. Hatchetman. Bodyguard. At the sight of Rick the Destroyer's smile turned into a scowl.

"As my assistant explained, Ms. Lang," Tychon said to the agent, "I have only a few spare minutes, but I wanted to show my respect for Destroyer and what he's meant to this franchise. We're immensely proud of the job he does on the field. We know no one works harder."

The Destroyer, whose real name was Herb, smiled again. He was proud of his work. He'd worked his way out of a north side neighborhood of extreme poverty. Of a high school class of over 800 students, four had gone to college. He'd been one of them.

In truth, he loved his job. The Destroyer pulverized good-looking white quarterbacks for a living. For Herb, it'd always been a game of "Get the white guy." He hated black quarterbacks also, of course, but could never encourage in himself toward them quite the same animosity.

The agent said to Tychon, "I know you'll want to demonstrate your respect and appreciation by rewarding the Destroyer for his work and the sacrifices he's made, including his many injuries-- shattered knees, back, concussions--"

Tychon put his hand up.

"We're not here to negotiate, Ms. Lang. I'll readily concede your argument. The Destroyer will be amply compensated, one way or the other-- at the end of the season."

The lawyer opened her mouth to say more, but Tychon raised his hand again.

"I assure you, Ms. Lang. I'm second to none in my admiration for your client. I respect efficiency. He's devoted his life to performing a task extremely well. Better than anyone has."

He turned his attention to the player.

"You were born with athletic ability, sure. You've multiplied that ability many times over through sheer effort."

Tychon meant what he said. Life had given the Destroyer few opportunities. He'd grabbed one offered. A sign of the man's instinctive intelligence, which he exhibited time and again on the playing field. For his one task of rushing the quarterback he'd imbibed every trick and nuance. Complete focus. Total efficiency.

"So what do you think, Destroyer?" Tychon shifted the discussion. "Will we win the big game in a few weeks against the Champions? Will you sack the Laser?"

"The Laser" was the nickname of an opposing team's renowned quarterback; the ultimate model athlete and cover boy.

"I'll crush him!" Herb said, looking at Rick Romeo as he did.

Rick's hazel eyes silently noted Tychon's question. Just another fan.

After the player and the agent departed, Tychon turned to the head coach, who'd sat quietly in the armchair.

"Is the Destroyer obsolete?"

The coach nodded affirmatively.

THE MAGNATE

The color scheme of his office matched Tychon himself: silver and orange. A chrome wall dotted with small square mirrors behind a large blue-silver chair behind a massive orange wood desk. Tychon touched a buttom which activated silent environmental fans taking away every odor. Then he used an orange-flame chrome lighter on a swiftly produced cigar. Smoking was illegal here, of course, but Tychon followed the philosophy of submersion. Floating beneath the surface. Doing whatever you wished as long as no one knew about it.

At a side bar stoic and obedient Rick Romeo made a drink for Tychon and one for himself. Scotch and sodas. He handed one to Tychon. The silver-haired man sat back comfortably in his blue-silver armchair, enraptured by the cigar. Rick took a standing position to the side, sipping carefully from his glass, a watching guard dog waiting to hear sounds from his boss. He allowed Tychon to relax. He knew the man presented the image of unflinching steeliness, but had weaknesses. The constant talk of perfection in part was bluff.

"Perfection," Tychon said as if cued, not knowing or caring how well Rick knew him. "Destroyer has given us perfection, up til now. We've paid him very well for it. In a just world he'd be further rewarded. But the world isn't just. Or rather, he'll be rewarded, but next year, by another team that'll stupidly take what's left of his broken body."

Tychon puffed on a large cigar and watched smoke from it quickly disappear. The hidden environmental filters. Amazing how fascinated such an intelligent man could become over toys. But then, the football team was a toy, just a very large one.

Tychon downed his drink with a flick of the wrist. He allowed himself one drink at the conclusion of business. When he arrived home later, in his limo, to a secluded new section of the Old Line, he'd undoubtedly have more. Now he stretched his arms and straightened himself behind his desk, thrusting out his jaw. He sat tall in the chair-- was as tall in it as when standing out of it, so that there was no change when he stood up. Disconcerting, the first time you noticed this. The prerogative of a height-challenged man.

Nevertheless, Tychon was impressive. The wide theater of props and tricks backing him, including the team and the stadium, were designed to impress. His piercing eyes and strong countenance, the Roman cast to his head, his vigorous form, the rings on his manicured hands, most of all, his words and the knowledge behind the words, were simply other parts of this. Not a performance. Not even a presentation. A full production.

"Everything in life is sales," Tychon spoke, reading Rick's thoughts. "Marketing. The veneer we show to the world. The world is show."

Tychon puffed on the cigar. He'd given this speech many times, Rick realized.

"People mistake my confidence for arrogance. One has to be confident to achieve. They don't see what I'm doing-- that I'm putting essential pieces in place that will benefit not just me, but everyone in the city. It'll benefit me also, of course. Benefit me most. That's unavoidable.

"Only the builder contains the entire picture inside his brain. One doesn't put up a plywood stand and begin selling. You need a machine to compete against other machines."

Jabbing the polished desk with a stubby finger, Tychon enumerated the changes he'd made to distinguish the team from the rest of the league. To make it the newest model against which all others appeared obsolete. This included more colorful uniforms with horizontal stripes at the shoulders to further accentuate the players' wide tapered bodies. New players were drafted and signed for their speed. It wasn't the best team, yet, but it was the most colorful and exciting team. High scoring games were guaranteed.

Tychon put out the thick cigar in a glass tray on the orange desk and stood up. Opening a drawer, Rick vanished all trace of the cigar. He left the glasses for a Mexican cleaning lady who'd be in shortly. They touched off the lights and stepped into the lobby.

At the long table of food in the reception area, the team's colorful mascot Bobo could be seen sneaking bread, fruit, and slices of beef. At the sight of Tychon he jumped in the air and went scampering away.

"Don't we pay the guy?" Tychon asked.

The door to Anna's office behind the buffet tables stood open, the lights on. Anna worked late as always. A radio in her office played. A talking voice could be heard on it. Anna appeared in her office doorway. Her face looked angry.

"Did you hear what that woman on the radio is saying about us?" she asked.

PIZZA ORDERED

Behind the radio station on the 89th floor, down a long hallway, waited a back bedroom. Lara's sanctuary. Colors of red and black. A scarlet bed sat at the center of the circular room.

Lara relaxed on the large bed while a taped two-hour interview played on the station. She loved the feeling of height, of weightlessness. The feeling of being above the clouds.

A rainy night. Weather assaulted the glassy heights of the lofty edifice. Too wet to go out. Lara punched in a number on her phone and ordered an xtra-large pizza from a renowned pizza shop toward the south of town, verging on Tychon's territory.

"I'm at the Tower," she instructed the person. "Will you be the one delivering it? Good. I'll buzz you in when you arrive. Take the green elevator to the 89th floor."

INTERVIEW

On the recording Lara Vox cut the hapless mayor into pizza slices.

"Though of course some of this occurred during the previous administration, I'm completely aware of the fiduciary responsibility I hold as Mayor of this fine metropolis!" the Mayor said in a surprised, high-pitched voice.

He'd not been prepared for Lara's revelations.

"Please. Cut the double-talk, Mr. Mayor. I have the figures in front of me. Tychon has been 'raping the city.' That's a direct quote from my source."

"I don't know where you've obtained your information. . . ."

"Do you doubt the numbers, Mr. Mayor? You question them? Truthfully?"

"I, er, please be aware that I'm not on the witness stand, Miss Vox."

He said this with a weak chuckle, a failed dry empty attempt at a hearty laugh. The Mayor wanted to dial up his hearty political persona, but in the midst of her surprises, couldn't.

"That's MS. Vox," Lara said.

"Sorry, sorry. I apologize to my women, er, female, er, constituents."

"The data, Mr. Mayor," she prodded. "Tychon has owed the city millions of dollars for three years. You paid for his palace--"

"The stadium--" the Mayor corrected.

"Billion dollar stadium," she added. "Paid for by we the taxpayers for the benefit of the team's billionaire owner, with future tax breaks thrown in. Welfare for the rich I call it, and yet it wasn't enough. Tychon's weaseled out of coming up with his trifling end of it."

"A very necessary stadium, MIZ Vox, when you thin k of the construction jobs, the, er, concession workers and the like, the spur to business, er, you know--"

"And the schools and neighborhoods and streets and services be damned!" her voice mocked.

A fresh assault of rain attacked the upper windows of the Tower as the Mayor's responses became more fumbled.

PIZZA DELIVERED

The green elevator hurried the pizza delivery boy ever higher. The doors hushed open. His eyes adjusted to scant light as he stepped out with the warm box. To his side: the radio studio, scattered lights of the city visible through floor-to-ceiling windows beyond. The structure swayed this high. His feet felt uncertain on the moving floor.

Before him, a dark hallway with a red glow at the end of it. Like a loyal slave he carried the precious gift. The young man stepped carefully down the corridor, on thick carpeting as the red glow moved closer.

Suddenly, a dark-walled room. Drapes, not walls. A beautiful woman sat on a scarlet bed. Sheets of white paper with words on them lay scattered around her.

"Oh. Hi!" she said, her striking eyes looking up, their intensity knocking him back a step. "Pizza! You're the greatest."

The large eyes studied the young man, undressed him, made him feel vulnerable as she handed him a too-large bill and told him to keep the change.

"Bye," she said in a husky voice, dismissing him.

The young man laid the hot pizza box before her. The penetrating eyes never left him as he turned and fled.

The image of the woman high in the skyscraper tower stayed with him as he continued his pizza deliveries into the night.

(END OF PART I.)

Coming Soon

2011-02-26T09:13:00.000-08:00

Coming soon first to this blog: "The Tower," a pop novel.

The characters include:

LARA VOX-- a radio host
RICK ROMEO-- a security expert
MILES MILBANK-- a revolutionary
ARTHUR TYCHON-- a billionaire
BOBO-- a mascot

Stay tuned!

Chapter Forty

2011-02-18T07:06:00.002-08:00

CONCLUSION
To be posted.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

2011-02-18T07:06:00.001-08:00

To be posted.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

2011-02-18T07:05:00.001-08:00

To be posted.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

2011-02-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

To be posted.

Chapter Thirty-Six

2009-02-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

THE GO-BETWEEN

The man across from the literary fugitive looks and sounds like a British fop, down to a monocle, tweed jacket, and lavender ascot. It's a good impersonation of a literary intellectual-- yet something is fake about the performance. The rebel doesn't buy it. Then again, he hasn't bought anything about what's presented as contemporary American literature.

"The problem is you," the faux-Brit tells him, as if reading his mind. "Your paranoia. It's all in your head. You have to learn to ignore what you see and hear. Your judgement is faulty. Haven't we proven that? Can the entire literary establishment be wrong, and you right?"

They sit at a table in a barroom connected to a Romanian restaurant. Outside is the gray devastation of what's left of Detroit-- abandoned structures everyplace. Empty office buildings. The reflection from blood-red neon letters in the bar's windows casts across soot on a sidewalk down which scurry hungry red-eyed rats. The literary fop is oblivious.

"Your own movement abandoned you! You took them farther than they wanted to go-- against the immutable laws of society. They're more comfortable in their natural station. They enjoy the bottom. They never wanted to question the aristocrats. YOU made them do it."

"Aristocrats?" the rebel asks. "Are there?"

"There are and there are not. Background means nothing. How can you hold good people to their parents, or their school? 'Ivy League' indeed! It doesn't matter. They are who they are and where they are. THESE are our writers; designated and accepted. Everyone accepts it. Except--"

The man's finger slowly raises and begins to turn, until it's pointing directly at the fugitive.

"You!" the go-between says in a threat of a whisper.

The other realizes the man who speaks is wearing a mask-- if he's a man at all. The face is a mask. Everything about him is fake. The character embodies training and talent without soul; technique and rules without life-- one of a class of writers with no honesty, honor, or ethics. Two more beers arrive, paid for by the fop's glistening credit card. "Drink!" comes the fake one's command. The rebel wants instead to stand up and rip off the mask. Behind it he senses many spaces, many games; many rooms.

"Who are you?" the rebel asks. "Who's your boss? Who's the Assassin?"

The representative of the literary establishment grins and quips.

"I'd tell you, you know, but you tell everything. That's your problem. You want to tell all of literature's secrets. But some people don't want you telling their secrets."

As the fop moves forward to taste his own beer, the mask slips. His hand rushes to keep it in place. The fugitive imagines a glimpse of his greatest enemy. His mind reels. He all but falls from his chair.

"What?" the hired performer across from him asks.

The fugitive has stood. His eyes circle around the room, and at the lonely streets outside. He feels instinctively the tightening of a trap, realizing to his shock what he saw behind the false face: NOTHING AT ALL.

The spectre behind the ascot and monocle watches with amusement. A moment later it's gone. Darkness has appeared outside the bar's expanding windows. On the table remain empty beer glasses and a monocle.

"At least he paid the bill," the rebel reasons inside the cloudiness of his head.

As he walks outside, scout cars with blue flashing lights pull up from every direction. Masked and uniformed Literature Police officers carrying nightsticks step purposefully out from them. The rebel's hands are cuffed behind his back; nightsticks within his arms prodding him to his knees, then to the ground. His face feels the coldness of the street as throbbing blue bands of light dance against buildings and into the deep blackness of the nightime sky.
*****************************************
NEXT: "The Court of the Demi-Puppets."

Chapter Thirty-Five

2009-01-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

THE CHASE

Alarm bells clang-- clang! clang!-- around the literary fugitive, until he realizes they're inside his head. These are crazy warning signs as he stumbles over debris in the gray city, shadowy demi-puppets closing in on all sides. The Assassin directs operations. The fugitive understands the technique. He'll be driven like a hunted animal to a position of no escape, at which point the hunter will arrive to administer the coup de grace.

He's half-a-mile from Detroit's downtown-- its moody buildings, many of them empty. If he can make it there. . . .

The fugitive climbs through an abandoned building and exits on the other end, rushing into giant weeds; crouching-- panting-- to hide. Before him, after vacant land and an expressway, waits the somber tall structures into which he can run and find a public place. From there-- what? He'll be backed up against the green river which borders the gray towers.

What awaits? The everpresent spectre in white.

He sees the feline ghost fairly leap in his direction-- product of his imagination?-- gleeful; surrounded by evil minions; fearsome; relentless; deep blue eyes within the white mask casting about for the escaping prey. The Assassin's white mask moving across the broken landscape edges closer, and closer.

He ponders the Assassin's identity. He sees three possibilities:
1.) A member of the literary establishment.
2.) A past enemy.
3.) A complete stranger-- a psychopath carrying extreme hatred.

There's a fourth possibility: a combination of all of these.

If he can somehow get behind the Assassin-- otherwise the surging demi-puppets will block his way. He decides to move north, briefly, then circle around and approach his goal from another side. He creeps into a chaotic wrecked neighborhood and begins walking swiftly, not in the direction they'll anticipate.

He enters a land of dogs; scores of snarling beasts with angry eyes, lords of an abandoned section of the city. They recognize in his hard cast and scarred, unshaven face a soulmate. His wariness of them is exceeded by the terror of what he flees.

After an hour he sees downtown from another vantage point. It could be another city. The dark river flows close-- he can smell it. The river and the dogs throw off his scent. The mad posse is nowhere in sight.

Casually he strolls into the corridor streets. He finds an open Kinko's and checks his email. There's one message in his in-box.

"Meet my representative at the restaurant on top of the rise. Neutral territory."

The fleeing rebel knows the location-- a Romanian place with many glass windows and large red letters outside.

The email is signed:
"THE ASSASSIN."

Chapter Thirty-Four

2008-09-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

THE LITERARY PARTY

"Aggressive white men
toxic with testosterone;
polar ice caps melt
like grilled cheese.
Laughing white male faces;
the bird tarries.
Vanilla ice cream cone
dripping onto the street.
The flavor escapes me."

The neutered poet concludes his short work to the ladies' applause. He's sweating at the exertion of having read. The facsimile of a man looks to Margo for approval.

The literary people sit on the veranda of a suburban mansion at pale orange tables with pastel green sun umbrellas, sipping from pink and green lemonade drinks.

Attractive Margo nods her head. The soft poet happily resumes his seat next to Mrs. Vanden Snot, a major patron. The exhausted poet melts in his seat. Mrs. Vanden Snot flaps air at him with a silk fan. The man is surrounded by fit women. A planetary visitor would peg him as the weaker sex.

The women resume their talk.

"Order or chaos."

"The Joker-- an apt metaphor."

"One gross crime after another."

"Dissent for the sake of dissent."

"Their crazy leader."

"Rank and not-to-be endured behavior."

"What of their class status?"

"Bosh! Our diversity speaks for itself."

An elegantly groomed blue lawn spreads before them.

The conversation circles around Margo, a powerful, mature woman with brown kinky hair. At the edge of the gathering, a pretty doctoral student named Maryann glides in, late.

She slinks behind a table to hide her tennis player legs. Margo takes notice.

"Why do you hide there, girl? You have a confused mix of colors today."

Maryann wears a skimpy red-and-black dress, bright yellow leotards, and white boots. The ensemble is mismatched.

"Oh!" she says, noticing her boots. Her eyes look up. She's a relative newcomer who's been adopted by the group.

"I was in a rush," Maryann explains. "A meeting. You know."

The yellow color puts the legs on display, which pauses the discussion. They're quite . . . athletic.

The male poet is choking on his lemonade. A petite Mexican waitress with red skin and black hair brings Maryann a tall glass of iced tea. The student flicks the girl away, then brushes strands of hair off her forehead.

The refined people discuss the destruction of the rebels, a disagreeable but necessary task. Best to be done offstage. They wish to avoid any mess.

While they talk, the new arrival plays with her dress.

"There is no place for them in our world," Margo announces. "Is there, Maryann?"

The distracted student is again the focus. Her dark blue eyes rise. They're very powerful.

"Oh. Er, ah, no."

The talk sweeps on.

"They have no reason, no cause," Mrs. Vanden Snot insists.

"Dinosaur white males," another adds, to much hilarity.

The pasty-faced poet laughs also.

Margo sums up the prevalent attitude, glancing first at the younger woman across the way, a gesture toward nascent, unused force-- the only potential competition for her in this group.

"We need no justification to destroy the rebels, other than they are the Other," Margo states as her shoulders shift and her eyes cast around for possible rebellion. "That's sufficient reason. There can be no outsiders other than ourselves, within the system. There's only the system."

"What of their ideas?"

"I refuse to acknowledge they have ideas!"

Everyone laughs.

(Next: THE CHASE.)

Chapter Thirty-Three

2008-09-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

THE ASSASSIN!
************************************
(Scrolling down the movie screen):
THE MOST DEPRAVED GENERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY IS LIVING NOW, LEADING LIVES OF CONFORMITY WHICH HIDE SOULS OF DEPRAVITY. THESE CONSUMERIST GENTRY REQUIRE PUPPET ARMIES TO SUSTAIN THEIR PRIVILEGED STATUS AGAINST BOLD REBELS WHO FIGHT FOR GOOD AGAINST ESTABLISHED EVIL. . . .
************************************
Irresistible hate. The Man in the Black Hat senses this emotion as soon as the figure walks into the warehouse accompanied by the callow youth who found her. Black hat motions to hidden bodyguards. Shadowy hands grab Willie and toss him outside. A steel door closes.

The men in the room question whether she should fear being alone with them-- or should they instead fear being alone with her?! The Assassin strides forward until she stands in front of Black Hat's desk, staring down with large tilted head at him.

Her sudden presence fills the spacious room. She wears a white jumpsuit over her taut form, with pointed white leather boots, and skin-tight white gloves on her hands with dark red stains on them. He can't see behind her mask, but senses sarcastic features as her sharp blue eyes study him. She's adopted an arrogant yet casual stance, unsettling for reasons no one can fathom. How has the atmosphere in this space of control become so changed-- so charged-- in mere moments?
***********************************
The Defense Committee for Overprivileged Writers meets in a green and gray warehouse moments before the arrival of the spectral creature they've gone to great trouble to hire. The handful of discreetly-dressed men sit in a semi-circle of chairs on a concrete floor, amid deep yellow crates which stand behind a gray metal desk. As they talk in hushed tones, eyes glance warily at a waiting door. One set of eyes, behind glasses, stares at the door most intently.

"Afraid to be here?" the Man in the Black Hat mocks him.

The man in glasses clears his throat. Nerdy and unshaven, he resembles Jonathan Franzen.

"I understand the mission," he puts in.

"YOU should, Black Hat emphasizes, pointing at him.

Objectively, like mad scientists they discuss the creation of an agent; how a struggling person of ambition can be utilized as a tool if caught early enough. It's a tried-and-true technique; the philosophy behind the Blue Caps of the Bolsheviks and the S.S. of the Nazis.

A short man with black hair explains the process to his more aristocratic-looking colleagues. The Weasel, is how he's known.

"The prospects obsess over work and struggle. We use that to bind them to us; to wash from their minds all conscience to keep them on a narrow track. Always there must be an Enemy as focus. This the Rebellion readily provides. The result is the ultimate literary terrorist, programmed to destroy literary terrorists!"

The Weasel smiles with difficulty. His person appears damaged, or deformed, amid the rigid bearing of the others. He sits at an angle as if his back had been broken, peering up at the ruddy Overdog in the black hat across from him.

"The art of the matter," Black Hat talks over him, "is to program the selected agents without their knowing they've been programmed. Presumably this has been accomplished."

"Indeed!" the Weasel answers, black beady eyes glistening as they look up at the man.

Angles of yellow and gray light crisscross the scene. Black Hat rises and sits behind the steel desk which faces the warehouse door as the other men fade into shadow. . . .
**************************************
Now the glowing white spirit is before them.

"Forgive the white mask," the Assassin sneers. "But then, you wear a black one!"

She refers to the veil.

"We're not alike," Black Hat tells her with what tries to be an assertive voice, though it sounds weak next to hers. "Remember that. You're hired to do a job. You'll do what I want. The alternative for you is to be as obliterated as the person you're about to obliterate."

She doesn't reply. Her intelligence burns through the mask at him. He senses her sneer widen. He's happy she wears a mask. Never would he care to see that face.

The camera pulls back to reveal the other members of the Defense Committee. The Weasel grins. The unshaven writer looks away and his hands flutter in his lap. His chair is turned sideways, signalling halfway participation in the project. Part of him wishes not to be here. The other part is compelled to ask a question of the ghost-like character they've hired. He clears his throat.

"Do you know clearly what you're undertaking?" he asks.

The brooding eyes behind the mask turn contemptuously on him.

"I know who I contend with. There's enough talk in literary cirlces to suggest your target is the same. It's, um, rather obvious!"

The Weasel quickly responds.

"Yes, yes," he says. "Obvious to us all. But how do you propose to do it?"

A widening smile before them.

"Good sirs, take off the head and the body is dead. The movement will wither. That's the first step. He's unable to avoid contact. His ego won't allow it! He'll welcome his doom. That I know. It'll be glorious to provide it. Gladly will I destroy literary scum. I'll take down the literary pretender to save the literary art."

"You're a writer?" the Franzen-like character asks.

"You can call me that."

"Of what school? Which program did you attend? Which teachers did you have?"

"The teachers of life! But don't worry, good sir. I've amended my underground status. I've atoned for past crimes. My official learning may now exceed yours. Not to put myself in your lofty realm; I know the gap between us. As to what school I belong to, I'm a Stoic and a Cynic. I'm an Epicurean also. A hedonist, a narcissist, an exhibitionist; yet also a hermit, alone unto myself. I'm of the world and apart from it; ruined by it and repulsed by it, yet thoroughly embracing it. I'm an Imperial Roman; a corrupted product of our time."

As she finishes she bows her head. The voice from behind the mask is more vibrant, more threatening, more authoritative, more filled with meaning than any they've heard before. The men smile. Victory is guaranteed for them, they're certain.

The camera zooms in on the man behind the black veil. His lips move. The voice on the soundtrack becomes peevish.

"My friend has died . . . his funeral . . . they mocked him. They mocked me! You know how they confronted us at Columbia. You went against their leader before and must do so again. Obliterate, obliterate, obliterate, obliterate. No rebellion. NO REBELLION."

The mysterious white-clad figure in front of him bows its head, like a creation of his imagination; mad compulsive product of his id.

"Bring out the dummy," Black Hat orders.

An effigy of the ULA's former leader is wheeled out. The black-veiled literary scion looks at the Assassin, then points to the dummy.

"Kill it," he says.

The room explodes in violence. Before the onlookers can blink the effigy has been kicked, punched, stomped, decapitated; the stuffing knocked out of it; sawdust scattered about the large space. What's left of the dummy lies face first on the concrete floor, a knife protruding from its back.

"Well done," Black Hat comments.

Those behind him enthusiastically applaud. Even hesitant Franzen joins in.

"May the upcoming encounter go as well," the Franzen character tentatively adds, squeamish about the necessity of what's to come.

Chapter Thirty-Two

2008-08-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

THE FUNERAL

The screen shows a funeral procession on a Manhattan avenue; a moving line of black, purple, and maroon cars on a cloudy slate-gray day. One by one the cars pull into a cemetary.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

At a gravesite the Man in the Black Hat stands impassively, his nondescript wife with Chief Lopate set a few paces behind him. The camera shifts to reveal a row of sober young literary priests on the other side come down from New England.

Lost is another of Black Hat's top lieutenants, second in the past year. This man faced off publicly against the rebels twice; against their best poet; against their most insane clown. Now he's too swiftly gone. Ostensibly a poet-- an easy cover-- in fact he'd been a chief apparatchik who'd been key in putting together and maintaining the system of literary control and indoctrination now solidly in place.

A twisted curl appears on Black Hat's lower lip-- we see only the lower half of his face, beneath the black veil. Without a word he turns bitterly from the grave and moves up a rise away from his friends and colleagues, toward a crypt at the center of the cemetary.

Inside: black walls. In front of him is a brass name plate. The camera zooms in on it. We can't read it but know it's for his grandfather or other ancestor, one in an endless line of Puritan-bred patriarchs who've passed on to Black Hat his unbreachable name, his legacy, and his obligations. He feels buried alive. Buried! In this crypt, this grave, this walled prison cell trapping him on a path of power and manipulation from which there's never an escape.

He can't breathe. Cars and people await outside but he doesn't want them. He lies on the cold stone floor like a boy in his mansion's room, saying over and over "Not me, not me, not me. . . ."

Chapter Thirty-One

2008-08-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

THE BUTTERFLY

The literary fugitive awakes on the floor of an abandoned building. A soot-colored butterfly rests next to his head.

"Get out of here!" he yells, startled.

A window in a dusty wall stands open nearby. He tries to close it, but it's stuck. Scattering sweeps of blue-gray rain rush through it. Large drops of wetness gather on the crumbled wooden pane. The butterfly must've entered through the opening.

When the rain pauses, the man tries to coax the butterfly outside. It flaps its wings frantically; hysterically, rushing up and down about the room.

"Calm down!" the man tells it, to no avail.

The butterfly flies not to the window, but away from it, toward an inside corridor, and vanishes.

"Goofy thing," the man mutters to himself.

The fugitive leaves to run errands, returning that afternoon.

He looks in a bathroom off the corridor. The water doesn't run. Blown-in leaves cover the bottom of the bathtub. When he pushes his hand through the leaves, the butterfly jumps up. A hiding place.

The man doesn't chase the butterfly out. It'd do no good.

As night falls and the man lays down on a blanket to think about his life, maybe to sleep, he notices the butterfly hugging a wall. Its wings are closed. A gray insect is all it is. Why isn't it flying? Maybe it's tired. It looks to be catching its breath, if that's possible. Its moments of nervous flying must exhaust its little life.

Just him and the butterfly. Hah! As he nods off, he notices the thing sitting perplexed on a stack of newspaper beside him. They both can rest. They both can hide.

The man awakes to frustrated flapping. The butterfly is trying to fly, but can't elevate.

"Calm down," the man tells it. "You'll tire yourself."

The butterfly's sooty wings flap and flap.

When the man awakes for real, the butterfly is gone. Maybe it escaped through the window. He never sees it again.

Chapter Thirty

2008-08-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

I, MOBY DICK

The hunter has become the hunted. The Rebellion's former leader thinks this as he runs from various agents of conformity sent to destroy him. He's gone underground for real. His every movement and appearance are tracked as if on a radar screen. His last attempts to dynamite established lit have themselves been blown up, spectacularly. He senses a new player thrown into the chase; his instincts cry, "Danger!" as fake demi-puppet voices on all sides plead, "Don't hide. Don't hide!"

A rogue writer roaming the seas. In the most regulated and conformist time in history this is a threat to technified artistic monopoly. Harpoons from past battles pierce his tough hide. A previous enemy is after him. A speech has been made; gold doubloon offered. "Death to. . . ." He awaits the sighting.

On all sides: poverty. Shambled buildings, shambling people. Red and orange brick decay. Stark and moving reality. Gray rubble: broken blocks of stone in the street, alongside broken dreams. Soot, rats, and insects. A city's destruction. Reclaiming-nature's way. This is his ocean. Let the Overdogs come. He's wounded and tired, ready to sleep, but remains dangerous. A few more battles await.

Let the ships come! He'll sink more of them, until all wild life like himself in the unregulated sea is gone; killed; rounded-up; numbered; penned; trained; leashed; all independence and freedom, and rebellion, hammered away leaving for the gratification of the gentry only calmness; silence; smooth and eternal placidity.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

2008-08-18T07:18:00.000-07:00

THE SPY

Under the radar screen!

The assignment to locate the former leader of the ULA is given by Boss Eggers to a hulking figure who's existed on the literary margins for several years. The designated candidate is well-educated-- well-trained anyway-- but not extremely bright. He's been an unthinking McSweeneyite minion and has now progressed to become the Spy.

Meeting the Dave as prelude to the promotion is the highlight of his life. He sees not the ruthlessly ambitious power-hungry gangleader Eggers is in reality, but the myth of charitable good guy. The Spy so wants to believe!

The Spy holds a narrow world view with strict objectives: "Success. Eggers. Eggers. Success." In his mind the two ideas coincide. Obey Eggers, belong to him, and success is assured. This is the way of the world. He's spent his life seeking a figure to placate; a warlord willing to use him; someone to idolize, and has found him.

The Spy's flaw is that with his happy nature he's too willing to listen to the last person who tells him anything. He can be turned-- there is that hazard. The Spy has no conscience but he has a kind of sensitivity, an eagerness to like everybody, to be liked, which if exploited by the wrong non-Eggers person could be dangerous. The God Eggers can make occasional appearances to keep the Spy happy but he can't do it every day.

Brought into play is a coldly rational operative who'll betray any side, if the pay is right. The betrayal itself satisfies his warped ego. The money is secondary.

(Has this operative previously betrayed the underground? This remains a mystery.)

And so, the Spy himself is tailed. Not to his knowledge. Or does he suspect the cheap operative following him? Has the Spy noticed a reflection against a distant building behind him, in the green sour ringlets of moonlight?

The tail, sent to watch the Spy, steps back and waits in shadows at a fence amid the unfamiliar urban landscape. This is a cake assignment. He's counting his paycheck from the boundlessly-funded Eggers empire. All he has to do is keep up with the large bozo. No longer does he hear the Spy's weighty tread.

Lost him! The operative begins to move along the fence. He'll need to take a shortcut to get back to the direction in which the Spy was heading. He doesn't notice the large shadow behind him, the huge hands moving through an opening in the fence, until the hands are around his throat, crushing it, and life speeds out of him like a snuffed flame.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

2008-08-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

ANTIBODIES

Black Hat drives to his refuge in a private enclave for the super-rich beyond the Hamptons. He takes the late ferry ride onto the island.

In the basement of the house is a secure room. Underground, ironically. Even his wife has never been inside. He starts up a computer and logs into a private file, into which he types new entries-- fresh musings.
*********************************************
THE FIREWALL: Bureaucracies of government, foundations, large corporations, and academia, which provide walls of insularity and safety for status quo ideas. The Firewall's institutional effect is to manufacture for the inhabitants the illusion they can be free thinkers within the bureaucracies.

QUESTION: What if a person behind the Firewall began advocating for the literary Rebellion?

TRANSPARENCY: We operate without transparency; with mask upon mask. Honesty has been the ULA leader's undoing. His dilemma: the minute he abandons transparency he becomes "postmodern": i.e., duplicitous. False. Like us.

CO-OPTATION: I, Black Hat, have continued to co-opt the markers of rebellion. Note my story about pirate radio, which created a patter, a mantra which meant nothing. Affectation of the hip. Subversion made toothless. Subverting the subversives. Turning rebellion on its head.

THE DOUBLE SYSTEM: The apparent literary System, and the Behind-System.

THE INSIDER-OUTSIDER: One-eyed jacks. Overdogs who imagine themselves outside. Contradictions. Such as: globalist anti-Imperialists. N+1 in this category?

PRIMITIVES: Residue of literature past, exemplified by the Eggers Gang with its loyalty to an individual instead of the System.

NEW SOCIALIZATION: The acceptance of monopoly culture. Crafting an Anglo-American narrative that's properly Imperialist. The old-style American-centered story is gone.

ANTI-THOUGHT: Monitoring and self-monitoring. Automatic self-editing.

ANTI-LITERATURE: Showcased in prestige magazine poetry and fiction.

ANTIBODIES: What the Rebellion crudely refers to as demi-puppets. Anti-Literature's vigilante warrior knights. Literary reactionaries. White blood cells whose job is to ruthlessly destroy the infection of dissent.
*********************************************
Black Hat is pleased with what he's typed. He locks the room and walks upstairs through the large house which to him is a cottage.

The doors are open on this late summer night. Leaves scatter inside. He's disheveled, wearing slippers. He looks like a homeless guy. The irony is that he's more like the underground than they can know. When he destroys them he'll destroy part of himself.

Black Hat steps onto the porch without his disguise. He sees no green light. The tragedy of his life is to have been born beyond the green light; to have nothing to strive for because everything's been his from the beginning.

Boss Eggers has his mob hoodlums seeking the ULA on the ground. Black Hat will then put his own agent into the chase. An Antibody. Contact with the Assassin has been successfully made. Soon: checkmate.

"Meeting the Assassin"

2008-08-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

A POETIC INTERPOLATION INTO THE STORY
FOUND AFTER THE FACT LETTERED IN THE DUST
OF A WALL OF AN ABANDONED DETROIT BUILDING.

Unstoppable fury,
a clique of nonentities
led by Salome
out to destroy;
"Coward," they call me,
attacking from all sides
this actor,
a fool, a fanatic
adrift in the wilderness
of literary insignificance,
theatrical reading-crash juxtapositions;
"Stop running!
So we can stomp you with our
posted commentaries":
The voice of my opponent,
or one of her envious friends,
envious of my outsized voice,
my underground p.r. noise,
of my acting. . . .

We're both actors,
she the better one,
extraordinary pathological con-artist
playing role after role,
from Tragic Heroine to Superhero,
Urchin, Student, Harlequin,
Villain!

"Coward," she cries at me;
I, coward?
I'm terrified of the Assassin, truth be told,
not without cause
given her terrible hatred of me,
her madness,
multifarious nefarious talents;
Uma dressed as a samurai
wielding a sword, sharp-edged;
glistening;
Yet still I want to see her, and kiss her
without her mask,
behind her seven veils
before I'm slain by her.
Unlike John the Baptist,
I want to do so before I'm dead--
while I'm still more than a decapitated head.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

2008-08-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

CLASSIFIED

Later that afternoon Black Hat stands in a much smaller office that's more important than anything at Literature Police Headquarters. He's with an agent known by a code name: "Jamie." The man isn't with the CIA, because there is no CIA, but the goals of the organization he belongs to are the same.

They study three lighted boards. One tracks every website and e-mail of the literary revolutionaries. Another outlines existing underground structures, or lack of same. A third follows the movements of the rebels' former leader.

Colored lights glimmer on the various boards, while Jamie watches like the conductor of a symphony. The office is dark. Outside a wide window stands Manhattan, and beyond, the sweep of the East River.

"The most radical literary organization, ever," Jamie says in admiration about a series of names on a map on one of the boards. "A cultural insurrection. Currently contained. Some activity here, and here, which could prove troubling. Our big advantage against them is our invisibility. They're like a blindfolded man stumbling around a room with the lights on. They see nothing-- their new leader doesn't want to see anything-- while we see everything."

The vast commercial reach of New York City touches them in a mosaic of lighted dots from the window. A backdrop of power. They glance at the third large screen.

"His person is under our radar screen," Jamie says. "I'm attacking him and two of his former colleagues on-line."

The man turns then to Black Hat with an attitude of submission. We realize he's as much under Overdog control as anyone else in the movie serial.

"Will they be destroyed?" the scion of power and wealth says-- not a question but a command.

"Yes," Jamie says, with slight hesitation. "Eventually. We'll do it piece-by-piece. From inside; outside; all sides."

"Good!" the Mysterious One affirms, then turns as Jamie steps back into shadow like the brainwashed apparatchik that he is.

Without another word Black Hat strides from the room, down shadowy corridors toward a waiting elevator.

Chapter Twenty-Six

2008-08-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

HEADQUARTERS

BY MANHATTAN STANDARDS it's a modest-sized building, a couple dozen stories. The color is battleship gray. The style is generic, unremarkable, so that as one passes down the streets one is unlikely to notice the structure. Even when you search for it, Literature Police Headquarters is difficult to find. Its most noteworthy feature is an absence of windows of any kind.

Inside, the Man in the Black Hat is dazzled by the ground floor's orange-and-purple art deco design. This one area, a tribute to American lit's history, is a temple to a great cultural legacy; an ornate ceiling in the main hall done in pewabic tile. Series of displays pay homage to giants like Whitman, Twain, Katherine Anne Porter, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Toward the end of the room are newer names like Jack Kerouac. Workers ready a glass case for the memory of Norman Mailer. The hall is a museum.

Chief Lopate greets Black Hat near the elevators.

"So good to meet you!" the Chief exclaims enthusiastically, though they saw each other yesterday.

Chief Lopate is a kind of ultimate sycophant; the literary bureaucrat triumphant. Throughout his career-- indeed, his life-- he's followed every rule, obediently. In every area, to the strictures of the system he's loyally complied, without the merest hinted whisper of complaint, and has risen through the ranks accordingly with a comfortable weekly paycheck (all he really cares about) and a title which is meaningless: "Chief."

A glorified servant, like a hotel doorman in purple general's cap, and purple greatcoat with two rows of brass buttons, and clapboards on the shoulders. Lopate saves such clown costume for ceremonial occasions, but it's visible through every part of his being anyway. The man reminds Black Hat of a large dog he owns which greets him eagerly, with expectant look on its face, waiting to be given a command, told to do something, without which the dog is lost, can only creep back into its corner near a window to sleep.

"Today I want a tour," Black Hat tells the man. "Top two floors only."

"Yes. Yes!" Lopate proclaims. "No, no, not there! Those are for ordinary people."

The Chief steers his master away from the normal elevators toward one marked, "Express. Authorized Personnel Only."

They step into the transport to hierarchy with smiles.

The first floor they examine is filled with cubicles of busily working people.

"This is the Truth Department," Chief Lopate says. "As you know, its mission is to suppress Truth!"

Lopate says these words with some glee; the air of a man announcing a game rigged to always ensure victory. He rubs his hands together involuntarily; happily.

The floor spreads over a large area. Most of the workers wear crisp gray Literature Police uniforms. Technology: Computers at every work station, and large screen TV's across the walls which display silent interviews of current writers, give a sense of power and money. The movement of people in the office is regimented, like that of a machine.

Black Hat is impressed with the evident efficiency.

Everything is antiseptically clean.

In a cubicle nearby, prim Officer R. Donadio finishes a report on CIA involvement in literature which states there isn't any! Never been. A few accidental indications over the years which mean nothing. Black Hat peers over her shoulder to read the report. Officer Donadio doesn't mind. As he reads, Black Hat nods his head in agreement. The slate has been wiped clean.

At the center of the floor, equidistant from all sides, is the Room of Secrets. A uniformed guard stands at attention. A red steel door-- the only color to be seen above the first floor-- leads into what is actually a room inside a room. Through this door shredders await, along with TV screens, telephones, and weapons; first line of defense-- given a revolution which makes it this high.

"The key?" Black Hat asks.

"Two of them," Lopate says, pointing to two locks side-by-side which must be opened simultaneously. "The guard on duty has one. I frankly don't know who retains the other. Mr. Plimpton once did. Now--?"

Lopate shrugs.

"Do you ever think about who could hold the Second key?" Black Hat asks.

"It's not my position to think!" the Chief exclaims.

The other suppresses reaction. The Second key hangs around his own neck.

The other side of the floor contains the Marketing department, where staffers create writers to be given to conglomerates to hype, often fake revolutionaries. Posters of Miranda July decorate this area.

The highest floor is as quiet as a monastery, its loudest sound the gentle flow of air conditioning. A handful of studious individuals in white shirts and black ties read silently. "The Harvard Room," an embossed sign announces at the entrance to this area.

"The Investigators," Lopate says in a hushed voice. "Our best people."

"Do they investiage the Rebellion?" Black Hat asks.

Lopate frowns.

"Over here," he says.

The camera follows them to another part of the floor, at the end of the wide movie screen, where sits a large computer screen on a white steel desk.

"Many people fight the Rebellion," Lopate relates in a scripted way. "There are several counter-insurgency actions taking place this minute which are beyond my job category to know the details. But we do our part! Don't think we're not steadily working in approved Literature Police way."

He types in a password, then clicks on a screen:

http://www.undergroundprofiles.blogspot.com/

"This site is the result of the work of Floor 8. It represents thousands of man-and-woman hours."

Black Hat scrolls through it.

"It appears," the Overdog remarks, "that more work is needed."

Lopate takes the rebuke silently. He stands at attention and willfully empties his mind. Anger is suppressed except when dealing with bad guys.

"Come along," his master orders.

Chief Lopate, titular head of the Literature Police, mechanically follows the man.

They're back in the Harvard Room with the Investigators. The Man in the Black Hat observes the many certificates, diplomas, and awards adorning the muted walls. On this floor, as on all others, there are no windows. The Investigators continue to read under soft artificial light, not saying anything. It's a closed room; isolated. The workers could be wearing blindfolds. Fitting for a corrupt town where gang bosses control so much territory. The Police are ultimately on someone's payroll, including his own.

Black Hat strolls about the desks, glancing at the employees, noting the name tags of the Best of the Best: Birkerts, Sante, Menand, Wood. No one of the faceless persons looks up. All continue deliberately to read.

"What do they investigate?" Black Hat asks.

"Why-- nothing," Chief Lopate replies.

Chapter Twenty-Five

2008-07-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

A READING

TO CELEBRATE the coming destruction of the ULA, a reading is held in Philadelphia, hosted by "215" people. With the ULA's leader out of town, and several others of the band scattered, its network in disarray, this is thought safe. The event is to be a joining of two camps; of Overdog Eggers Gang people, and those minor undergrounders who at the urging of Guildenstern have jumped to their side. Unlike the final scene of "Animal Farm," however, there will be no equality at the table. Hierarchical positions so reflective of the greater society-- of high and low in the social order-- will be strictly maintained.

Guildenstern explains the strategy to his underground colleagues.

"Don't make waves!" he tells them. "This is a first step-- a test to see how you'll behave. Follow along. Later you'll reap benefits."

Guildenstern sits up front with the chic 215 people, the Whitneys, Binnies, Joshuas, Mileses, and the like. The underground poets allowed to participate are directed toward the back.

"Don't worry," an undergrounder assures his friends. "We'll have final say-- when we read! We'll show our ability."

He's a tall, ratty fellow with wispy goattee and faded beret, wearing a "I Hate King Wenclas" button on his t-shirt. His motley colleagues, including two skanky females in torn black leotards, nod their heads in agreement. The yuppies across the room think them reprehensible.

"They look subhuman," the cleanly-scrubbed, carefully arrayed gentry remark in loud voices. "They're disgusting!"

They themselves exude the perfection of their class. They're garbed as bohemians, but it's a minutely designed, freshly-washed, and assuredly expensive kind of bohemia: designer jeans worn for the first and only time. The persons in the fine clothes are those who honor the superficial in their art and are themselves superficially attractive, with dead eyes.

"This is a peace gathering," Guildenstern reminds them. "A victory celebration. Don't humiliate them. Let's seat them closer to the stage. Right next to us-- an empty table."

He rises and addresses the room. "Bring up the poets!"

The handful of poets at the back stand up with slow dignity. Guildenstern points them to their new seats. The literary yuppies, leading snobs in the city, react with haughtiness. One takes a can of air freshener and sprays toward the poets' table. The seated poets grit their teeth.

"Patience!" the ratty poet says. "Wait until we read."

The Ivy Leaguers read first, their presentation endless, pretentious, and boring. When the moment for the undergrounders arrives the gentry stand in a group and put on their jackets. "Have to run! Ciao! Bye!" One by one they vanish out the door until only Guildenstern remains.

"Gosh, guys," he says to the undergrounders who've sold out their principles at his urging, in the interest of comity, of acceptance and gain. "It's getting late!"

Then he also hurries from the nearly vacant room to catch up with his friends as the first of the underground poets, with echoing footsteps, takes the brightly-lit stage.

Chapter Twenty-Four

2008-07-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

THE TOURIST, PART IV

Atop a rise, the stone villa fills the movie screen as Willie walks up to it.

DAMAGE. This is the mood conveyed by the misshapen house of no coherent shape or design, white walls turned gray, standing like a wrecked fortress behind overgrown green weeds and out-of-control pine trees.

DEVASTATION. The aftermath of battles fought and survived, with every scar, retreat, and regrouping, of psychic violence resumed again and again, present in every crooked stone on the steep walk, or open window in set-back levels above, within which faded red curtains move slowly in the heavy summer breeze.

RETREAT. Seclusion. Great open wounds. Has the dangerous hunter he seeks herself been hiding?

Before he can knock on the ornate door it opens on its own.

"Hello? Hello?"

Willie walks tentatively into a room.

Expansive views on every side. Thick walls; coolness. He steps through a faded ballroom of surpassing elegance, with orange-red tile floor, what he sees of it beneath cascades of leaves and branches of trees blown in from open windows. Intruding nature; a sense of abandonment. Beyond, a melancholy patio of past joy and a backdrop of mountains.

He moves into an anteroom of white walls and heavy black furniture, leading to a black iron stairwell. Violet flowers stand in a black vase on a black table.

"Hello?"

Willie ascends the stairs. At the top hangs the portrait of a beautiful woman. The camera lingers on the portrait. . . .

From distant rooms comes the sound of recorded music. Chaotic punk noises incongruous with the villa; then again, completely apt. The contradiction surprises him. In a hallway, a hanging Union Jack flag. More leaves; a purple ribbon. Against a wall, a dusty German beer bottle. The echo of long-ago parties.

With feigned casualness Willie steps into the final room, within which lounges a thin woman dressed entirely in white, with a white scarf wrapped around her face, ineptly, as if grabbed in a hurry.She's surrounded by clutter, the debris of the house; by stacks of clothing, end tables, suitcases, and books. Willie is scared to death.

"May Barber?"

The silence which follows his query unsettles him. He can barely stand. The woman's blue eyes, all he can notice from her face, are an overpowering force.

"Um. Brilliant," a throaty voice remarks, then the figure sits up. Perhaps it's been lost in reverie for a hundred years and he's awakened it. "Have a seat."

Willie stumbles into an ornate wood chair as the dangerous eyes study him with amusement and contempt. The deadliest of literary assassins; once member of the ULA gang. Behind the white scarf lives a nuclear force of will; pulsating; ready. She could destroy him with her piercing eyes alone. Willie's only defense if things go awry is his own weakness.

The still-young woman has bangs of jet-black hair. He doesn't look directly at her white face-- he senses this isn't allowed-- but has the impression of grotesque scars behind the silk covering rustling now in the warm air with every inhale and exhale from the woman's mouth. Not a ghost, of this he's sure. A demon, maybe, but not a ghost. He feels the slap of heat of her breath carry to him as she talks.

"I've been waiting for you; someone like you," she tells him, then gazes about herself with a deep sigh, as if the eternal burden of Sisyphus is to be resumed, and it's his fault.

"I have instructions," Willie tells her, while a yellow paper in his hand shakes uncontrollably. "Right here. They say you know the assignment."

"I KNOW IT!"

Her voice surges with emotion; with strength that fills the house. Willie has met many writers; students and teachers, published poets and novelists. None have expressed emotion of this brand. Has the ULA been right all along? Does the underground indeed bring new energy to the art form? He feels himself in the presence of a tornado.

"My unfinished assignment," her voice says wryly, shadows of moving lips visible behind the scarf. "I live only for revenge-- the re-righting of the equillibrium of the world, which the so-called Rebellion has disturbed. The Rebellion must be destroyed. I've seen it up close. The biggest collection of yokels and cretinous goons gathered in one place since the discovery of the gangleader's treasured Buddy Holly and Elvis."

Her voice expresses an Elvis-like sneer.

"Every nuance is lost on them. Utter blockheads mistaking simplicity-- I mean, stupidity-- for genuineness. I tried to wrest away their leadership, you know, which might've saved them. He wanted me to remain simple. He believes art should be simple! Twice I almost defeated him, but he ran away like a coward."

Willie wants to ask then why she wears scars, but is afraid to. Then again, what greater scars must the other side carry?

"Punchbowls," she tells him. "Putting his head in punchbowls at parties is his idea of marketing. But what do punchbowls have to do with being a writer? Punchbowls and literature; literature and punchbowls. They're not similar. I fail to see the correlation. Writing is about the art; only about the art. Words are important. Not punchbowls! Words. We train in the use of words. We're masters of words. Have I removed myself from the world only to immerse myself in strategies about punchbowls? Not! I'm here to improve my skill with words. To learn. To train. To refine words' edge until the sentence is as sharp as a samurai sword. I want to become better, and better, and better, until my words slice the barbarian into a dozen pieces; into a single rivulating pool of blood!"

She laughs vigorously, viciously, with the lusty energy of a knight. For a full minute she doesn't stop. Then her unreal eyes zero in on her nervous visitor who still clutches his yellow telegram. In her gaze he shrinks in his chair.

"As writers we make words move. We make them sing. We create them, craft them, forge them, polish them, until their meaning comes to the finest point. Then we make them enter the reader's soul, here."

Her finger touches her heart. She gasps at the pain. The hand is as white and beautifully shaped as the hand of a Greek statue.

"The person who sent you wants me to fight the Rebellion. To destroy their head. The underground: peasants overreaching themselves. Gangsters. Not literary samurai. I trained with their leader when I was a mere apprentice like yourself. Now I surpass him in every way. The literary priests can't deal with the man so they turn to me."

"You're the best?"

"The worst! No, not good enough. Never good enough. I've enveloped myself in language, its codes, structure, rules; have humbled myself before its mystery. Humility, humility. Oh God, ambition is the greatest sin and from that I forever shirk. It's only by the shedding of rhetorical blood that I can atone for my past misdeeds. Literature is a sacred vessel which must not be tarnished; cannot be touched by literary barbarians, must not be approached unless the seeker be pure in intent and washed in literary training."

She stands from the couch, has moved with surprising quickness. The sinewy body in white has come to life. He sees the form and vigor of an assassin. Still her finger jabs her heart. Smell emanates from her; a smell of body, perfume, ointment, sulfur, gunpowder, and sex, all in one smell, overpowering. Her head shakes. Her striking blue eyes waver. Moisture streams down her face beneath the tightly-wound scarf, sweat or tears flowing like a river.

"Oh God. Oh God! Do you know what it means to be a writer? The price to be paid? The sacrifice? The emotional pain? The emotional violence? To arrive at the highest plane; the highest plane."

Willie is caught up in her mad hysteria. He senses writing now not as a printed page, or dots on a computer screen, but as a living being as real as the walls, the wind, the sun outside, and this person in front of him. He falls out of his chair before her.

"Will you take the assignment?" he asks.

"Yes!" she screams.

Chapter Twenty-Three

2008-07-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

THE SOUL OF AN ASSASSIN

(A Narrator's Voice.)
How does one become a literary assassin? What are the steps which transform a young and idealistic writer into the most dreaded of literary monsters-- into THE ASSASSIN abusively wielding talent and intelligence without character, compunction, or conscience?

For a vast class of writers from the wrong side of society's railroad tracks there is no outlet other than to write in obscurity for zeens, tiny lit-journals, or little-read websites. In this netherworld beneath the established Noise of Literature it's easy to become part of the feuds and fights of the gutter press; to become a soldier of Rebellion; or as often, a mercenary for aristocrats who so fear the vibrant crude raucous Energy of these writers, so different from the refined brand, that hired counterrevolutionary gangs will be sent into literary back alleys and scribes' dives to put down the barbarous miscreants.

Think of a gawky young woman from a small town, insecure yet intelligent, dropout from a major midwestern college-- she'd been kicked out of a writing class-- staying around campus anyway working as a dishwasher, scrawling in spare minutes with large letters a journal which in its angst and nascent madness became the foundation for one of the rawest of all zeen projects during the raging late 90's heyday of the "zine" phenomenon.

The put-upon young woman's split personality began at this time. Maybe it'd been dormant within the person all along. There was the core individual-- a rodent; the mouse-- a self-image forged from beaten-down circumstance. Accompanying the zeen however arose a new persona different from the mouse in every aspect: louder, larger, better-looking, with unreal, often drug or alcohol-fueled confidence. The creation of the new persona was as remarkable and fabulous as the birth of a superhero. The myth of her zeen was propagated as much by the persona's hyperbolic appearances with local zeensters at bars and clubs, later written-up by them, as by the zeen itself.

At the same time, back in her cheap hovel afterward, the superhero having scattered like a puff of smoke through a misaligned open window overlooking the college town, the mouse withdrew into her core self. No longer bold, but fearful. Not anymore confident, but the reverse.

Growing steadily out of her control was the Image; the Myth.

Indeed, she'd become striking looking. She'd become beautiful, and was the last to know. It wasn't her, you see. It was the blown-up Image; the projected superhero. She was a mouse hidden beneath a portrait of a tiger.

The mouse's zeen came to the attention of an underground promoter searching for new talent for a group he was forming. He met her in Chicago and was blown away; stunned. The lo-budget zeen hustler met not the mouse, not the real person, but "May Barber," all-powerful superhero. She joined the group.

Later it'd be known as the ULA, engine of new literary rebellion.

In truth, the mouse had already begun to hate her alter-ego, which in its emotion-spewing vulgarity was the polar opposite of the kind of genteel and precise Anglophile writer she'd long dreamed of becoming. By the same token, "May Barber" detested the weak nerdiness of the mouse. It was an internal dispute within her certain to lead to disaster.

The cheap zeen hustler, more ballyhoo artist than writer, began his assault on the bastions of established literature, carrying forward the controversy-fueled shenanigans of his own zeen of the 90's. Onto this underground zeen animal, crazed and reckless in best underground tradition, conflicted May transferred her self-hate. The mouse saw the over-the-top character as her great antagonist. As she stood half-naked behind the hustler on stage at CBGB's as part of the ULA act, she loathed what she was doing; what she'd become. She didn't want to destroy the literary mainstream. She wanted to join it!
***************************************
Two Mays: the Mouse and the Goddess. In the pressure cooker of the ULA's early days the hate and loathing within both sides of her flowed into a new figure of secrecy and stealth, of transcendent bitterness: the Assassin. This cruel new entity battled the ULA's leader himself. . . .

Chapter Twenty-Two

2008-07-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

THE TOURIST PART III

Willie sits sipping coffee at a cafe directly across from the Spanish Steps. Prostitutes and priests pass by. From a distance, a white coated waiter approaches from between tables. Approaches; approaches. He arrives and hands Willie a yellow telegram.

"TELEGRAM" on screen, many typed words beneath.

"Grazi," Willie says.

These are his long-awaited instructions. They outline an itinerary to northern Italy, a city named Vicenza where exists a large American army base and a CIA station as well as the target of his adventure, a mysterious writer named May Barber he's to convince to do something. She's the most dangerous of the dangerous.

Willie has been in Italy now for two weeks, receiving daily calls from Poofer which have sounded scarier and scarier, centered around some guy "in a black hat" who Poofer insists he was "obligated to please." Otherwise, "poof" would go the professor's esteemed job and reputation. This morning, a final call: from Gloria back at the university informing Willie that Poofer was rushed to the hospital last night after a sudden heart attack which left him buried beneath a cascade of books and papers.

"Will he survive?" Willie had asked.

"Does anyone care?" Gloria had answered.

Now at the cafe, Willie thinks about his mission with misgiving. The adventure so far has been as boring as a Henry James novel, albeit with great food and scenery, paid for by his mother's ample credit line. Ahead waits the climax. He'll be putting himself into the hands of this Barber person, who might enlighten him or destroy him. This, in a country where he knows nobody, and where his vocabulary has expanded to twelve phrases, including "Quanto costa?" and "Gelato chocolatta."

He has toughened, however, in that he now looks forward to his fate.

VICENZA
Vicenza is a city near mountains where most of the people look German and the core center of town is medieval. One could be living eight hundred years ago amid castle walls, the native populace strolling quaintly, but for hyperactive American G.I.'s with boom boxes on their shoulders blasting loudly. Willie buries himself within his tweed sportjacket and tries to look native.

To be fair, he sat next to an American lieutenant and his girlfriend last evening at an open-air restaurant and found them well-mannered and intelligent. They both, in fact, had attended Yale. The man enlisted after college, because he'd "wanted to join the fight against terror." Handsome people. An American centurion and his mate come overseas-- to Italy, appropriately. The turnings of Empire. They conversed about books and writing.

"You write?" the pretty girl asked Willie.

"Not very well!" he replied.

That touch of home now bolsters Willie as he boards a green bus, takes out a Michelin map and begins studying street signs.

The street: he steps off and ascends a hill. At the top glimmers a white villa surrounded by pine trees. This has been described in his instructions. The morning sun is hot. He's sweating. He's very thirsty. The point of his quest in sight, his legs are weak. The wrong messenger, he is, he knows. Hapless messenger. The stone house stands before him. Black, ornate doors. What wounded warrior waits inside?

Chapter Twenty-One

2008-07-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

No, I haven't forgotten about Lindsay, rookie member of the Literature Police, working as a night guard in a literary factory resembling a prison complex. (See Chapter Five and Chapter Seven.)

She's been unable to re-enter the Forbidden Room due to a sudden rush of appearances of The Man in the Black Hat. Something important is happening. The conflict within literature between mandarins and rebels is reaching a climax.

Late at night The Man in the Black Hat sits in his high-up office overlooking the factory. Never does the man sleep. The rookie sees his wide-brimmed hat with its dark veil moving about, then stopping. She imagines at those moments that he looks directly at her. She shudders.

One night the office is dark. He's gone. Her opportunity has arrived.

She rushes through the guard stations, heart beating frantically. The green door awaits. Heavy green door. Mysterious green steel door, full of portent.

She's flung the door open and rushes down the corridor. A utility closet; simple closet, humble and unremarkable closet, seemingly, but the corridor stretches further, deeper, until she feels that it's burrowed far into the earth, or into another world.

Ahead: an orange glow. Her pace slows. Glowing; throbbing. Beams of light, of celebration, filling the green-painted stone block walls with arrays of light. Why here? Oh, why here in this damp surreal dungeon, like a prisoner never to be released?

At the end of the corridor, in the glow of light, placed against a back wall is a book. Only a book. That's all. That's everything. The beginning and end of human knowledge. The signal achievement of humanity.

She's unable to read the title. Something tells her it's the most fabulous book ever created; the greatest work; a story and a symphony; a work of poetry, beauty, history, and meaning. She tries to reach the book, to touch it. A frustrating unseen barrier keeps her away. Her time's up, she knows. It's past. With stampeding footsteps of disappointment and disbelief she turns and runs back the way she came.

Chapter Twenty

2008-07-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Having failed as a clown, the mole known as Guildenstern is lectured by an Eggers assistant before given another assignment.

"The splits and factions within the Underground, the rampant jealousies and fights, are our best weapons against them. We must exacerbate the splits. When underground writers work against conflict with us, they're working against themselves. When they betray the literary Rebellion, they're betraying themselves."

Guildenstern sits unhappily. They're in an empty club in Philadelphia, chairs on tables, a cleaning woman vacuuming. In the half-lit venue, red and black motifs blare from the near walls like mad heralds on every side of them. Guildenstern is on medication to stay awake. This has heightened his senses.

"Don't take what I say wrong!" the McSweeneyite tells the mole, his smarmy Eggers-like face of arrogance pushing close. "At times you've behaved brilliantly. We need a return to form so we can wrap this up. The big guys grow impatient. They expected finality long before now. The tiniest hint of literary dissent and change threatens their empire. It threatens us!"

Guildenstern is too aware of the man's sweat and black stubble, and his whiny voice. The words are discordant notes on an out-of-tune piano.

"Did you know we tried to get an operative into the rebels' founding meeting? A hired hit man. We failed, but succeeded in getting to members of their gang afterward. Not soon enough, as the Rebellion moved very fast and outmaneuvered us. But we slowed them down. We caused turmoil. The buyoff price of those we used was amazingly low. We made the right moves. Yet every time we thought we'd split and destroyed them, disintegrated them, their movement bounced back to life.

"What do we want now? We want literary pacification. You know the message: 'Can't we all get along?' The way to achieve this is to use the literary pacifists in the underground. The 'Don't Make Waves' crowd. The 'Do Your Own Thing' loners. The self-serving factionalists who'd rather fight with other poets and writers than with us! We must encourage this. They must see their former leader, and not us, as the enemy. Simple misdirection, that's what I'm talking about. They will see-- what we want them to see!"

Guildenstern absorbs the lesson, and like a trained pet nods his head in obedience.

The well-dressed young man before him chuckles with closed eyes. His face is red and his suit is black. Operative! The fellow embodies the word. A paid stooge with not a scruple or principle, serving literary power. Suddenly the man drops his smile and points his finger at the lowest of literary animals.

"Give the pacifists the taste of success! Allow them to sniff our air. The instant the Rebellion has been taken over or destroyed these same hapless suckers will be hustled out the back door with the bus boys and the grease scraps. 'Get them out of here!' our crowd will huffily demand, permanently scarred by contact with the grubby beggars.

"Out there!" he exclaims, pointing to a red door behind the bar. "That's where they belong. OUT THERE!"

Chapter Nineteen

2008-07-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

WHILE steps are taken to contact The Assassin, the rest of the new Counter-Insurgency Plan is begun. With initial mole "Rosencrantz" having blown himself up in an act of spontaneous combustion, his brother-in-betrayal, code-named "Guildenstern," becomes the focus. The idea is to put forward an Establishment clown to counter the Underground's famed Jelly Boy.

"The problem I see with this," The Man in the Black Hat murmurs over his cellphone to Boss Eggers, "Is that Guildenstern is a clown. I mean, he's REALLY a clown, with makeup or without. We don't want another insane Rosencrantz who'll piss off not just the underground, but everyone."

Boss Eggers is silent. Guildenstern is his hireling.

The movie screen shows a close-up of the black veil obscuring the thoughts of the Black-Hatted One as his mumbling words appear on the soundtrack.

"I'll gladly back this clown-- but I expect a return from him. He's been a mole for how many years now? How many paychecks? What are the results? Every time I've tried contacting him he's taking a nap!"

"You're not supposed to contact him," Eggers snaps.

On the soundtrack are heard gurgly whimpering noises of frustration coming from the Man in the Black Hat.

"The Underground yet lives!" he whispers in a choked voice as rebuke, then hangs up.

The screen wipes him off to reveal Boss Eggers in his posh San Francisco office with movie set backdrop. An expression of bemusement falls over his surly face. His confidence never wavers. Eggers shakes his head and laughs.

The next day: a new cable-TV show debuts: "Talking Books with Roody McDoody."

A clown in a garish red-and-yellow polka dot clown suit, with makeup smeared over his face, jumps through a sheet of paper saying "ROODY!" on it. A paid studio audience of fourteen people cheers.

The clown waves his arms about.

"Whoop-Whoop-De-Doo!" he hoots. "Welcome to the Roody McDoody Show! Kids, we are going to talk today about books. There are Good books and then there are Bad books. Here is a Good book."

Roody holds up a copy of The Corrections. The audience cheers.

"And here is a Bad book."

We can't see the title, but the camera focuses on the word "ULA" on it.

A chorus of boos.

The screen then displays blown-up photos of various underground personalities, including King Wenclas. The clown throws colorful oversized darts at them. He's not very adept. The darts fail to stick.

"ROO-DY! ROO-DY!" the studio audience chants.

The clown tries again. He begins to sweat, further smearing his clown makeup. A face of desperation is glimpsed beneath.

Inside a Brooklyn flat, The Man in the Black Hat, watching it on TV, turns to his wife.

"This is horrendous," he says.

The clown is worse than Neal Pollock.

The Roody Show moves into the Interview segment.

"Kids, let's give a Big Roody hello! to award-winning novelist Francine Prose. Whoop-Whoop-De-Do!"

"Yaaay!" the paid audience cheers on cue.

Ms. Prose, dressed in a chic pantsuit, looks uncomfortable on the clown set, but is a trouper. Roody plops down in one of the plush chairs provided on stage, glad to be done with the Darts segment. He's exhausted. It's the most work he's done in decades. "Could use a beer right now," he's heard over the microphone muttering to himself.

"May I sit down?" the prim author asks, clearly not understanding the show is supposed to co-opt the Underground. Etiquette has been suspended.

"Why the hell not?" Roody says, prodded from his reverie, feigning to snap into action while not doing so. While leaning back in the armchair and wiping his smeared forehead with one hand, he uses the other to signal the audience.

"Yaaay!"

"So, Fran baby-- tell us about yourself," he says to the esteemed author.

"Okay." The lean and sultry-hued well-bred middle-aged middle class essence of boozhification begins, carrying the self-love of a five year-old.

"In my award-winning book to writers I emphasize the peculiar and precious solitary experience, the almost-religious bond between 'writer' and 'reader' which must not be hindered but needs to instead be strenuously advanced through the indoctrination I mean the education of readers to give them the proper necessities for understanding what we the trained writers of the Academy bring to the page. It's a quiescent procedure by necessity of maintaining our difference from improper and, well, insufficiently screened writers and readers who like bacilli or a virus might infect the Body Literati with their vulgarity and improperly screened. . . ."

Roody points to the audience from his seat as he gazes at the ceiling.

"Yaaay!"

"Keep it going, Professor," he encourages the very proper Ms. Prose, who's stopped. "You have the floor, my dear."

She continues what has to be one of the most boring monologues ever recorded. All the while she studies her host, who during his days as an establishment plant in the underground was infamous for falling asleep every time asked to do anything. She wonders if he's narcoleptic for real. Grittily she continues discussing her book. Roody's head is rocking around on his neck as he leans farther back in his comfortable chair. It's been, after all, for him, a stressful day. The demands made on him lately by his overseers are altogether too much. He'd rather think about something tranquil, like his days as an affluent WASP before various divorces diminished his finances. His times relaxing with a Scotch and soda on his yacht. With a smile he remembers.

Prose: "--rather than capitulate to narrative demands, the best writers of today, the most celebrated anyway, like Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro, will luxuriate over the words and over every last trivial detail of the story's environment to create a framework of sympathy not with the characters but with the task of the writer who has the unfortunate obligation to fill pages with craftings of words so that the reader becomes trapped in the art with no interest beyond the feelings imbued in the observational process. Counter-intuitively, this is good--"

The red-headed producer of the show looks concerned. Her blue eyes gape. Roody has missed one of his scheduled "Whoop-Whoop-De-Do"'s. Members of the paid audience begin to sneak off. Roody's head now is tilted fully back, his mouth open.

Prose: "--the requirement to not judge, to not bring unreliable human opinion into the narrative or rather the text because to narrate presupposes a narrator, a judgement, an authorial authority when our task is generously to describe, with gentle patter, innocent and unthinking patter lulling the mind-- "

Roody: "Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. . . ."

The host is snoring! Loudly and irreverently snoring. The last audience member is heard to say, "They don't pay enough for this shit," before running off.

Ms. Prose glances toward the producer, who has five minutes to kill. This is live television. The producer makes a rotating gesture with her hand, a signal to keep going.

"--the work stripped of the extraneous, of meaning, opinion, society, emotion, we the reader can focus on what is most necessary to the art which is the word on the page itself disconnected from the necessity to thrill or even communicate--"

Prose continues talking in her ultra-refined way as time runs out. With her last monotonous words, the camera focuses on the sleeping clown while graphics flash on the screen over his image: "ROO-DY! ROO-DY! ROO-DY!" Then the image fades to darkness.

Chapter Eighteen

2008-07-01T07:48:00.001-07:00

THE TOURIST, PART II

A large sign: "MILANO AIRPORT."

Next door is the train station. "Scusi. Scusi!" Willie bustles among a throng of Italian extras and is shoved into a Prima Classa rail car. Vendors sell Campari and snacks between the train tracks. Willie is too shaken from the flight and the culture shock to eat.

His cellphone rings.

"Hello?"

"Willie!" Professor Poofer's voice crackles over the tinny receiver. There's panic in the voice. A desperation, as if in the interim since Willie last saw him, Poofer has learned a terrible secret.

"Roma. Wait there. Further instructions . . . then you'll meet . . . . The barber in May . . . you must. . . . Very urgent. The future of literature, our entire world, depends. . . . Convincing . . . you must be very convincing. Desperate . . . awful . . . nightmarish . . . horrible! You must. . . . Goodbye."

As Willie absorbs the stream of incoherence, the sliding door to the train compartment opens. A tall young woman with flowing auburn hair, carrying a large artist's case, plops down on the seat across from him.

"Hello," she says.

"Hi," Willie squeaks.

The woman is dressed in black from head to toe, and wears large black sunglasses which obscure much of her very white face. She puts out her hand and they shake.

"Melanie. From Toronto."

"Willie. From Connecticut. Via Rhode Island."

His hand has been crushed. Canadian girls are very strong. He puts the throbbing hand in the pocket of his tweed sportjacket.

"Do you play hockey?" he asks, realizing he's an idiot.

Melanie sneers. "Were you born in a bathtub?" she replies. "Were you raised at Starbucks, or Disneyland, or McDonald's? Did you go to college with operatic clowns and Ivy-covered prima donnas?"

She grabs a large glossy magazine and begins turning pages. Willie takes out a notebook to jot down reflections on his experience. He senses Melanie observing him over the pages of her magazine, behind the sunglasses. His notebook fills with nonsense.

The train speeds fast, through tunnels; across the movie screen until it arrives amid the chaotic madness of Rome's Stazione Termini.

"Well," Willie says to Melanie as they rise.

He wants to ask if they can meet later. Melanie slams him against the compartment, putting a red card into his jacket pocket.

"For a nearby hotel," she says. "Three blocks away. Go there. You'll be safe. Wait for instructions. Don't trust anybody!"

She leaves. Gone. Italian extras jam the corridor of the train.

(Next: The Clowns.)

Chapter Seventeen

2008-06-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

THE TOURIST PART I

Professor Poofer's pale blue eyes widen as he reads the text message on his cellphone. The panic in his eyeballs fills the movie screen. Then the camera pulls back and we see he sits behind a brown desk in an untidy office. Outside a side window are the vine-covered walls of an Ivy League campus.

"Er, ah, well, yes, er, Mr., er, uh, I mean, well. Willie! Yes! Er, how's your mother, Willie?"

The wary writing student utters a noncommital reply. Poofer appears to him as a grotesque, propped on several phone books behind his desk, an amorphous blob-like nondescript lump of characterlessness. Poofer leers at the student. Willie is reminded of Poofer's famous story, "The Writing Student"-- famous for its multiple viewpoints of a writing professor's obscene and occasionally violent fantasies about one of his young female students. Highly lauded-- the foundation of the Poofer reputation-- but when reading it Willie found it only embarrassing-- squeamishly embarrassing-- and was thankful he was male.

"She's doing well, is she?"

Poofer's eyes gleam as he sets aside his cellphone and sits back in his creaky chair.

"Yes," he continues. "One of the university's largest donors. We're very grateful for her philanthropy, Willie, believe me. You should be grateful to her also, for recognizing your writing ability and sending you to me!"

He ponders this as if it had been a momentous occasion. In truth, Willie is no better or worse a writer than his similarly competent but undistinguished classmates.

"What you lack, Willie, is experience," the Professor pontificates. "Your mother and I were discussing this at the University Club the other day. She worries that her divorce from your father has left you without proper masculine, er, guidance. That you've turned out too delicate; too soft. She feels she's been too protective of you-- raising you, an only child, among books, paintings, cats, and rich matrons. Properly educating you, yes. But Willie, there remains outside the library: life. Life!"

A painting of Henry James frowns down at both of them from behind.

"I've just received a phone message from a very important colleague-- a famous author, actually-- who was once a student of mine. He informs me a young writing person is needed to fly to Italy for an important, er, artistic assignment. And right before me sits the perfect candidate! Tickets are on their way. They'll arrive shortly. Fly there, Willie. Milano! Roma! Venezia! BE the writer you've dreamed of being! Experience the summer joys of Italy. Culture! Art! Beautiful young women! Molto bellisima. Your mother will be grateful."

A door opens. "Oh! Gloria!" Poofer coos. A scared coed with outstretched arm hands Poofer an envelope, then hurries away. On the envelope: "PLANE TICKETS."

"You must rush now, Willie. You'll receive further instructions when you deplane. Life awaits! Irrepressible life! Get going. Perhaps you can run down Gloria, who I hear scampering down the hall, to give you a ride to the airport." Poofer giggles. "Go! Now! Run!"

Poofer rises halfway from his phone books and with pudgy hands motions Willie through the door.

"Life! Art! I'll call your mother!"

These words echo behind Willie as he runs ineptly down the hallway with the plane tickets to catch up with Gloria.

Chapter Sixteen

2008-06-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

The movie screen is filled with bold, hand-written letters which spell two words: "UNDERGROUND" and "MANIFESTO." In the glitzy restaurant, Boss Eggers takes the brightly colored sheet of paper from his African sidekick and begins to read.

"Who creates revolutionaries? They're created by authoritarian regimes themselves, through their own blundering authoritarianism.

"What you need to know. There IS a literary rebellion. It began before I heard of it, through rebel writers like Richard K. I joined it in 1993. . . . Since 2001 I've been one of the movement's leaders, but only one of them. If I'm destroyed, others will step forward. We operate through organizations like the Underground Literary Alliance but also outside them. There are more of us than you know. One joins the Rebellion simply by acknowledging to yourself that literary change is necessary-- then working for that change in every way possible. All writers need to reorient the way they view themselves within the System of literature. Then they need to renegotiate their relationship within that System, and with those who run it.

"Every revolution creates: -Rebels; -Moderates; -Reactionaries; in symbiotic topsy-turvy rotations of weakness and strength. This revolution has experienced all three. Who has the upper hand at this moment I can't say. . . .

"HISTORY: From 2001 to 2004 we were kicking the Establishment's ass, going from victory to victory. In the years since we've faced waves of reaction. Our allies in the media were destroyed. Our main vehicle was shaken by betrayals. Yet, the literary Resistance has survived. I consider what we went through to be growing pains. We've been shattered, but the pieces are still out there, able to be reconsolidated at any time. . . .

"SECRET CODICIL #1: In hindsight, when setting up the ULA we behaved like naifs, with no anticipation of the moles, turncoats, and attacks upon us which would follow. Our structure, our discipline, and our internal security needed to be tighter. I had assumed that once a public profile was accomplished we'd be unassailable. This was mistaken.

"As solution I propose an ultra-secret arm of the underground, Unit Z, whose members would be known not by name but by number, and whose purpose will be to counter the counter-insurgents: to defend against the paid moles and spies who've been attacking us. Our biggest weakness has been our lack of "intelligence"-- a failure to know not only what is going on regarding us in the other camp, but on our own side; even in our main organization. We need a clearing house for tips and information. Unit Z would contain the hard-core of the hard-core; be relentlessly devoted to the cause. Not an ideal solution-- but given an unscrupulous enemy, how else is the cause to prevail?"

Boss Eggers stares across at his lunchmate, the man behind the veil, for effect, before reading one phrase more.

"CODICIL #2."

He looks up. "The rest of the page is blank."

A storm has appeared outside, as if in warning, while they talked. Thunder shakes the glass windows of the skyscraper and vibrates across the tables of the restaurant's elegant room. Sudden rain sweeps down upon the street outside as they watch, while waitresses light golden-flame candles. The three men involuntarily shiver.
***************************************
The same storm passes across the Great Lakes and buries the crumbling industrial city of Detroit in lightning and rain. Clouds spread purple in all directions. The deposed leader of the Rebellion scurries like a wet rat from doorway to doorway of boarded building in the beat-down Cass Corridor, seeking shelter. He sprints across a street through a blue curtain of rain to another doorway, where he pauses with heart racing. Water runs down his face. The hoodie he wears is soaked, as are his shoes, and himself. This is the end of the line-- but here he can hide and regather his resources before attempting another wave. Or should he? The Apparatus of Dissent he's set into motion has jumped from his hands. . . .
**************************************
Alone in his New York pied-a-terre at the storm's end-- his wife out of town-- the Man in the Black Hat considers the lunch meeting. The underground broadside read to him, concocted or real, has thrown him. He sits in darkness, behind his veil, considering his next move. Extreme measures are called for. The Rebellion has to be isolated, its outlets shut down. It has to be stopped!

He's shouted these last words, and punched the arm of his armchair weakly with his fist. His words linger in the air before him. "Stopped!" Two moles, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are already at work. He knows also that Boss Eggers has sent an unnamed Spy on the underground's trail. This isn't enough. It's time to put into play the ultimate weapon, known by many names and identities; a human missile of unspeakable ability and unstoppable hate. Even the fiercest undergrounder would be no match for the individual known infamously as THE ASSASSIN. Assassinate! Demolish! Kill! The man smiles as he picks up his cellphone and punches in a text message. His order. Is the person still alive? Can the jackal-like agent be summoned and quickly brought into the fight? Impatience. Impatience! He needs victory NOW, by every measure; wants the underground broken; wants proof that the destruction of all protest, all complaint, all dissent against his dominance is assured.

Chapter Fifteen

2008-05-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

"The Meeting"

In the tony restaurant, as large as a stage set, Boss Eggers sees the Madman in the Black Hat, and smirks. The crazed literary bigwig sits in a corner near a window, barricaded by tables and plants, with a black veil attached to his broad-brimmed hat covering the upper part of his face. It makes him look like a comic book bad guy. Is it done for effec, to frighten his associates, Eggers wonders? Or a sign of the man's insanity?

"Let's proceed," Eggers says to his silent African sidekick.

Walking very straight, they navigate through the glossy tables and seat themselves with the plutocratic lunatic.

A waitress appears instantly.

"Anything to drink?"

"Get me your best beer, your best salad, best steak, rare, buried in onions, then your largest, most expensive dessert. The best of everything! And the same for him," Eggers says, pointing to his friend and dismissing the waitress in one easy gesture. The young woman, tall, with auburn bangs and clunky eyeglasses, and a white blouse, stares, smirks, grimaces, glares, then leaves and returns a moment later with their glistening beers. The Madman across from them is carefully sipping from a crystal goblet of bloodless wine.

"Who's behind you?" the gang boss throws at him.

A low voice creeps from beneath the veil.

"Who? Who indeed? Bankers? Money? The System? The Establishment? My father? My wife? Anyone? It's all paranoia. Maybe the CIA-- but what is that? A repository for a particular mindset, just as the ULA is a coalescence of a particular anarchist mindset-- or was, until I touched a button and destroyed it. What was the CIA? It also no longer exists. I'll say they were Eastern Establishment liberal Cold Warriors, well-educated, Yale mostly, with a yen for poetry."

"What did they want?" Eggers asks.

"Oh: victory. World domination. It was a class thing. One can't say they-- we-- are any longer bent on it, because we've 98% achieved it."

"Conspiracy theories," Boss Eggers sneers.

"No, no conspiracy. Public fact, visible for all to see."

The gang boss moves closer across the table, edging forward the man's wine glass, and his plate of alfalfa, asparagus, and beets, crowding his space.

"So is your class backing my rivals here in New York, the Negativity Plus people? Where do they get their money?"

"Rivals? Hardly. Partners, if anything. A different branch on the same tree. From what I hear they've retreated from literature-- into philosophy. The arcane teachings of an intentionally useless philosophy."

"So you're telling me--"

"I'm not telling you anything!" the madman exclaims.

He's become red-faced. At the same time beneath the veil appears a secretive smile. His head shakes, a mad spectre of black and red. It occurs to the crude gangland boss, who believes in nothing save his own enrichment, that before him sits the embodiment of evil. The man's face is so red it appears to be a shaft of burning fire, behind a black veil beneath a black hat. Yet the plutocrat keeps smiling. Insanely. Involuntarily the boss backs away.

The waitress drops their salads and steaks with a loud clunk onto the table. She knows the arrogant newcomer will tip lavishly regardless to impress the masked man, who eats here often and never tips anything.

Boss Eggers uses the sharp knife provided to cut his steak multiple times into tiny pieces. He watches the blood rush over the plate. He's wondering if he's underestimated this guy. Eggers has given him all the space in his publications he could want, has promoted his friends-- Britishers and bluebloods-- had thought he was humoring him, but now wonders, who is using whom?

Why the veil? Is the man a mutant who needs to shield his eyes? One of the High Priests! The Priests believe themselves to have special powers. Eggers knows how they view themselves, as part of a special Order, a club whose entry is gained through birth and indoctrination. Even he, all-powerful Boss Eggers, isn't good enough to be one of them.

But many times the caste's magic has failed. Such as, their failure-- even Plimpton's failure! Pimpernel Plimpton himself-- against the literary revolutionaries. He sees an opening.

"You say the rebels are destroyed," he tells the man. "Yet I've obtained this very day, through my planted sources, a message purporting to be from their former leader."

He snaps his fingers. His African companion produces from beneath his dashiki a glowing orange sheet of paper, the word "MANIFESTO" in large handwritten black letters across the top of the page. Eggers pushes aside his empty plates, grabs the paper and begins to read. . . .

Chapter Fourteen

2008-04-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

A GANG SELF-DESTRUCTS

While the literary Rebellion fights for its survival; while various other gangs plot against the rebels but also against themselves, the n+1 "Negativity Plus" boys have abandoned the battle altogether. Their latest project: building an "End of the World" underground shelter.

They meet in their current green-walled Manhattan headquarters, spartanly furnished, the walls bare save for one tattered poster of Karl Marx; tables empty except for stacks of unsold copies of their hysterical (both meanings) journal.

The five-person decision-making staff sit around a trapezoidally-shaped staff table with one leg shorter than the others, so that it rests permanently askew.

"This is the plan," Chad Harebrane, the looniest of their loony hyper-intellectualized ranks, lectures while unfurling many dozens of graphically colored blueprints and charts. "The planet begins to reach maximum crisis point early next year. I've located an abandoned stretch of subway on the upper west side. I've taken it over. Stocks of soon-to-vanish oil will power our computers and air-conditioning."

"Oil?" one of the others asks.

"Oil," Chad affirms. "It's vanishing anyway. Might as well grab our share." (Ideological consistency is never a concern with these fellows.)

"A private jet, already fueled, will be down there with us, so we can continue our flights to Cali and Europe. Best of all"-- he points to a stairway on a map-- "this leads directly to the heart of Columbia U, so we'll be able to continue to teach, at least until the heat aboveground becomes intolerable, which I estimate will take a few semesters."

A self-satisfied smirk, of a kind usually seen in an Idiot ward, takes shape about the corners of his mouth.

"What about food stocks?" one of the other sober-faced nut cases throws at him with an Inquisitional glare.

"Plenty of food stocks!" Chad assures them. "Enough for staff and select friends-- very select friends-- five dozen in all-- our entire readership actually-- plus allowances for expected 1.1 children per couple, though why we'd care to introduce new human-types into this awful planet is beyond comprehension. All-in-all, an adequate plan; enough food, oil, jet fuel, and DVDs of pretentiously bad foreign language movies to keep us entertained, right to the deadline of Earth Day, April 22, 2050."

"What happens then?" the others ask, hunching closer around the cockeyed staff table.

"Why, the world ends," Chad tells them.

Chapter Thirteen

2008-04-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

THE WHEELS OF REACTION

While gangleader Boss Eggers and the mysterious monied string-puller in the Black Hat have lunch together in a tony Manhattan restaurant, the Counterinsurgency plan intended to wipe out the Literary Resistance once and for all is implemented. Participating in the Plan, receiving directions from above, are a host of reactionary new lit organizations.

Such as: Blueblood Literary Alliance Haute (aka BLAH!); or, for those not blue-blooded enough, the Ultra Literary Trustfunders (ULTras), taking their name from aristocratic reactionaries during the French Revolution. Less well organized, and less serious, frankly, is the Mauve Hundreds, modeling themselves after the infamous Black Hundreds from the final days of Czarist Russia.

While Boss Eggers and his patron talk, and the leaders of the ULA vanish underground, the Mauve Hundreds hold their initial meeting at a fancy Manhattan bistro.

"Isn't this exciting?" one of them remarks while sampling jumbo-sized shrimp and sipping from a flavored martini. Inside the bistro, within the gaily-lit room, all appears to those gathered there to be secure and wonderful.

"We are going to wipe out the mosquitos!" a well-dressed publishing exec screams drunkenly, mauve mascara disarrayed over her mad eyes.

Hey, they overwork themselves into a frazzle for the garbage books they produce, and so are entitled to relax on occasion; loosening ties or corsets (the latest fashion trend); getting drunk or snorting high-priced cocaine-- only the best for them.

"Power to the Privileged!" a young man in a silk shirt and golden tie responds, thrusting his fist into the air. "All Power to the Conglomerates!"

The other partygoers look at him questioningly, wondering if he's being ironic. They are unused to anyone speaking UNironically, and can no longer tell the difference between genuineness, faux-genuineness, or pure snarkiness.

A hint of worry runs through them, as they remember why they've gathered. Can this possibly be one of the rebels? Does anyone know the person? Have the rebels crashed even this affair; done it to them again? Where are the bouncers, the bodyguards, the security people? They must throw him out to be safe!

After awhile they notice that there aren't hundreds of them gathered after all, but about two dozen-- those most committed to preserving things-as-they-are. (Given the lack of commitment from such people to anything but their own careers, this is actually a fantastic turnout, indication of how much the rebels have become feared.)

"Oh well," the mascara'd power-executive woman says while reaching for the drinks tray. "We'll be the Mauve Dozens!"

Longer-term literary reactionaries are already in full gear. One of the founders of the Lit-Blacklisters Co-Op is busily typing a novel intended to denounce-- in typically obscure fashion, with obscure but elegantly crafted prose-- the grubby band of rebels. It will provide justification of a sort-- at least, rationalizations-- for the hypocrisy, from such good liberal folks, of the Blacklist, and provide a framework for the Co-Op's existence, which after all is a Co-Op in that it's been fully "co-opted" by the establishment; by the minions of Mr. Black Hat himself.

The book's working title: "Sycophancy USA."

Chapter Twelve

2008-04-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

THE SEARCH

Climbing the steps to a Writers House on an Ivy League campus to post flyers, in the realm of the enemy, the leader of the ULA notices a sudden smell or chill in the air. He studies the movie-backdrop expanse of slate-gray clouds overhanging the city.

When he steps back outside, the cautionary feeling lingers. He's been betrayed so many times, on so many occasions almost destroyed,, that he's developed a sixth sense about such things. There isn't, really, anything different in the air. It's instead an accummulation of minute changes which have been building. Several key unanswered e-mails. Cryptic remarks from people. A suddenly cancelled meeting. This moment, an extra car or two upon nearby streets. A chill from the overall literary environment which surrounds the place.

The ULA's rebellion has been tolerated, but the amused, mildly irritated tolerance has ceased. The band of literary rebels have once too-often crossed the line between being merely quirky and becoming a genuine threat to the network of established literary gangsterism which dominates the racket; which controls most of the territory.

The ULA's unique position is to be feared and hunted by all sides, gangsters and literary police alike. Now word has come down from on high. Tolerance of any dissent is over. The mob bosses have lost patience. The shadowy figure above them in his wavering sanity has lost patience. The packs of destruction have been unleashed.

The ULA's leader-- front man more than leader, as the amorphous rebellion has no leader-- catalogues the things he needs, and where they are, how quickly he can get to them, what time a certain bus departs. He makes plans in his head to vanish as fast as possible within the shadows of this east coast city, or to leave it.

Chapter Eleven

2008-03-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

"The Meeting" Part ?

When Boss Eggers enters the restaurant, African friend at his side-- one step behind-- he reminds The Man in the Black Hat of an Imperial Roman with his curly hair and arrogant profile outlined against the room's sunny beams of light.

It resembles a scene of a movie. But which one? He can't decide. Eggers is an Imperialist of some kind, but not Roman after all; has too benevolent of a face. Yes! "Lawrence of Arabia"-- when Lawrence enters the Officers Club with a young Arab companion. Boss Eggers is playing the role of enlightened colonialist.

In the seconds before Eggers sees him at a back table near the windows, nearly invisible within streams of sunlight, The Man in the Black Hat thinks of many things.

He wonders: How could this crude gang boss defeat the Rebellion? Boss Eggers is too much of the material world, gauges his progress mechanistically there, in terms of sales numbers and percentages, and mainly, dollars. The underground on the other hand is an Idea more than an entity. They have no structure, no home, no buildings. A seldom updated website. An Idea which can't be killed. Or rather, something which has been killed again and again, yet continues. It isn't for lack of effort that the Man in the Black Hat has failed. The right moves were made. He takes the Plimpton Image's criticism as a personal affront. Yet the Image is correct. Like any guerrilla army, the ULA need win no battles but the last one. They need only survive.

The battle isn't one of sales or buildings or numbers of employees, of material substance or territory. Instead it's a psychological war, an ideological contest; a test of minds.

Lately he's been seeing the rebels everywhere. At a recent reading in their home city one of them had stared him in the face. A laughing face laughingly close-- his own senses had failed to recognize the person. Only later did it occur to him it was one of them.

Or a copycat? (Like the man who confronted Boss Eggers at a private Literature Police soiree?) He can't know. The Resistance is every place.

To win, he needs to understand their strategy. But how can he? It's Custer against Sitting Bull, two vastly different mindsets. On the one hand, order, rule, hierarchy. (Custer sent to find the Sioux because in his wildness he was the only white man who could approach their viewpoint. Custer loved to hunt and shoot and ride, in the open spaces. A throwback to Gothic warrior ancestors, he'd never enjoyed civilization. Still, he was entrapped in the rigid System which had recruited and trained him, which gave him his limitations.)

Sitting Bull, on the other hand, was no warrior, no leader. A mystic having dreams. He needed no structure to buttress him. He communicated with his warriors through mental telepathy.

The Man in the Black Hat stirs from this reverie. His head wavers from undefined worry. The elegant napkin in his hand drops under the table. He's surrounded by phalanxes of tables, black wood lacquered and polished to a mirror'd gleam; barriers protecting his security. The tables to him are markers of wealth, of power, of established artistic order manifested by skyscrapers of thousands of people.

The physical dominance of the Machine is unquestioned. But there can be other vulnerabilities. How do you fight ideas? His own standing in the literary Empire is buttressed by money, true, but he retains other powers-- the heritage of his caste!-- and understands the importance of mind, of psychology. It's on THAT plain he must be prepared to fight.

Arrogant warlord Eggers has spotted the Man in the Black Hat at a distant table in the large and exclusive room in this well-guarded office building-- so-secure building-- at the heart of the city of Empire, and smiles.

Chapter Ten

2008-03-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

"DESTROY THE ULA"

As the Man in the Black Hat speeds in a fast elevator from a high floor down to his important meeting with Boss Eggers, he takes a cellphone from his pocket and touches a button with a red X on it. A display on the cellphone reads in sharp red letters, "DESTROY THE ULA."

This message is transmitted to Imperial offices throughout the country.

Literature Police Sergeant John Freeman at Literature Police headquarters smirks happily as he reads the incoming message on his computer screen: "DESTROY THE ULA."

Trooper Skurnick at a desk nearby begins to say, "I know we're not supposed to pay anymore attention to them, but--" She's cut off with a glance from Freeman, whose eyes point her to her own screen with its own message, "DESTROY THE ULA."

In a newspaper building in Philadelphia, a short man with curly black hair rearranges a stack of papers on his desk as his computer begins to beep. The man looks like a Roman and thinks of himself the same way. Last January he'd spotlighted a ULA-like book with a ULA-looking cover in the newspaper's "Spring Books" section. Unironically, he'd written about the book, "about two renegade leaders of an underground literary movement"-- knowing well his city harbors the most infamous of all underground literary movements, which he'd helped his paper to ignore the past several years; the capper being a major article about one of the city's least talented poets which appeared the same day as one of the ULA's readings. Glorious!

The incessant beeping disturbs the Roman's reveries of literary Empire, then he gloats as he reads on the screen, "DESTROY THE ULA."

In another office, Michael Signorelli, dressed in a gray Star Wars uniform marking him as a drone, also reads the command and prepares to comply. "DESTROY THE ULA."

Across the Empire the message is sent and read, giving satisfaction to guardians of literary privilege only too eager to enforce conformity and shut out the forces of dissent and change. They feel swift encouragement. In their fears of literature's failure they have a target which can be named only secretly-- the target has now been named to them and they feed on the information: "DESTROY THE ULA!"

(So ends the first section of the serial, originally posted at AttackingtheDemi-Puppets. Coming soon: All-New Episodes. More literary gangland action.)

Chapter Nine

2008-02-23T10:45:00.000-08:00

(Continuation of "The Meeting.")

The glowing holographic image of George Plimpton, in a darkened room inside a towering black skyscraper, explains the literary galaxy to the Man in the Black Hat.

"Look!" the Plimpton-image cries out in a sudden thundering voice. "There! The home planet; center of our galaxy."

His long, tanned finger is pointing at New York City.

"The largest planet. The center of literary Empire; home of the giant book companies, and scores of glossy magazines produced here to be sent out daily to other parts of the realm. Every day starships depart on missions to far-flung corners of the near-Universe, to reinforce, spread, and strengthen Imperial ideas."

His finger wanders to a much smaller light on the map, marked "Iowa."

"This is one of our colonies. A model base. Our goal has been to establish a network of outposts completely loyal to Imperial literary rule. They're manned by MFA-trained literary soldiers. The MFA programs, modeled on the successful one at Iowa, recruit-- if not the best-- at least the most cooperative and pliable of local writing talent. A typical example was Ray Carver. Beaten-down working-class man! His writing expressed the poverty and futility of his life-- yet never once did he show anger at, or knowledge about, the civilization itself. His writing said, 'This is the natural course of events. The caste system is immutable. Accept it!'"

Plimpton smiles wryly, proudly, for the small part he played in the writer's development.

"No Dreisers. No Jack Londons. No John Steinbecks. No! Ray Carver! That became the model. We multiply our lobotomized Ray Carvers and our patrician John Updikes throughout the galaxy. Wherever they go, they inhabit the available literary space. They monopolize media coverage and arts funding. Local writers have the option to join the system or vanish into obscurity. Many underground poets desiring to 'just write' are only too happy to comply, with scarcely a quibble of protest, but with instead: apathy.

"The MFAers are our missionaries-- our Starbucks employees, if you will-- opening the way for succeeding layers of conglomerate book companies and big-money foundations; ultimately, for us. For literary Empire."

The Plimpton holograph leisurely paces about.

"But you know this. That you're here; that you've questioned this oracle that I've become, from the past, speaking to you in the future, means that all is not completely well with the literary Machine which has controlled the art form for over five decades. What could be the problem?

"The radicals of the ULA? Those upstarts? I rather assume that measures were taken to destroy them. They are the Empire's most dangerous enemies. If they have not been destroyed, you've already failed. The longer they exist, in any condition, the greater their threat. Not a single voice of authentic rebellion to the Machine can remain. For them, survival is victory.

"Who else? 'Boss Eggers'? At the time I'm recording this, he's in the process of making a fundamental mistake, by moving his base of operations from the home planet. He prefers to stay here," (the finger lands on the San Francisco Bay area) "at the other end of the galaxy where he can rule as omnipotent warlord. The representatives of his he's left behind are weak. Meanwhile, a new organization arises on the home planet as I speak, with the rather cryptic and even silly title of N+1. Or something like that. Not a compelling name. Flawed from the beginning, I'd rather think. BUT, they've been trained in the Empire's best academies. They understand the prime importance of this location. They have a network of support drawn from intellectual movements of previous generations. Their leader, born in another galaxy, represents fresh blood which could be dangerous. They seem in themselves highly intelligent, perhaps more so than any potentials rivals.

"Where are their loyalties? Do you know? Do they understand the importance of our Legacy? Will they maintain the essential foundation? What do they believe? That's for you to discover. Absorbed or destroyed: the only choices.

"In the meantime, I presume The Paris Review is alive and well for use as our Flagship. A little dusty, perhaps, but with still-powerful engines. I know you'll maintain a ready crew. I've spoken long enough. I believe it's time for a nap! I bid you. . . ."

The image begins flickering, then quickly fades out. The soundless room resumes its blanket of darkness. The Man in the Black Hat hears only the flow of air-conditioning. He glances at his luminous watch. An hour has passed. It's time for the meeting.
******************************

Chapter Eight

2008-01-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

THE MEETING, PART II

SCENE THREE
Early afternoon. Protestors gather outside a large black tower in Manhattan. A new Mercedes parks down the street from it. A red-haired man steps from the car dressed in the garb of a scruffy protester. From the car's trunk he takes a sign and joins the shouting mob. "Power to the people!" he yells. "Close the corporations!"

Near him stands the editor of The Nation. He knows that her investment portfolio is even larger than his. They both own substantial pieces of this building. They shout with genuine anger at the monolithic tower facing them.

"Destroy it! Destroy it!" the mob is saying. Several of their number push at the building's glass doors, a low-paid black security guard watching from inside. For a few minutes, the red-haired man joins them. "Destroy! Destroy!" he screams.

A chant begins:
"Send the pigs to outer space,
Shove their money in their face!"

The red-haired man notices from his expensive watch that it's time for him to leave. Shortly he'll enter the structure from the back. Inside, a change of clothes and identity awaits him.

SCENE FOUR
The Man in the Black Hat is one hour early for the meeting. This leaves him time to consult the Wise One. He needs guidance for his upcoming actions.

A plastic pass card in his wallet gains him automatic entrance to an off-limits floor. It gives him entrance to a room at the end of a hall. The room is without light. The specially programmed card in his pocket causes a set of green lights to turn on at the far end of the room. He walks to these lights as the hologram machine warms up.

In a few minutes, on a stage behind glass, stands a holographic representation of deceased literary master George Plimpton. It's completely lifelike. The old man smiles graciously, as if happy to be released from his machine box.

"Hello, again. So good to see you. As you, er, know, this was recorded as contingency in case I became disabled, incompetent, or worse."

(The three-dimensional image frowns, hands casually in the pockets of its khaki trousers.)

"I've anticipated your needs and your questions."

The image paces about its cell for a long minute, staring at the floor, before it looks again directly at the camera-- toward the questioner-- and returns to its monologue.

"I am from the greatest generation: the Creators of Empire. We are the Wise Men. We created the literary world you live in. In many ways, it could be said, we created you.

"We know that those who follow won't be up to our ability. It's the nature of the universe that in a civilization such as ours, the ruling generations decline. Not due to any fault of their own. Don't mistake me, please. It's a natural process. It's inevitable that you're less forceful, less intelligent, less shrewd. Your own father mocks you about this, I know. The question is whether you're intelligent ENOUGH to rule this machine we the Creators have set into motion.

"Why is this struggle important? This battle over literature? Because literature is language, the foundation of culture, of civilization, of thought itself. Without words we are not even human, will regress to become mere grunting animals. Beasts! Mere beasts. This fate is what we oppose. Without our wisdom to guide humanity, through literature, through ideas and discussion, we will have in this world only chaos. Another Dark Ages. Freedom equals Chaos. We have given humankind the illusion of freedom but we've always directed their path. You know this." (The image pauses.)

"I will give you now, to arm you for the intellectual battle ahead, a proper way to view the map of battle.

"Think for a moment about science fiction novels which use the universe of galaxies, planets, and stars as metaphor for this planet. Let's use this metaphor to explain real objects. Let's imagine-- imagine!-- this nation as an entire galaxy."

The Image of Plimpton turns suddenly. Behind him has come alive a large map of America dotted with lights-- sparks of lights representing cities of the civilization, as if they were glowing planets against a night sky. He points with wonder and pride at this sparkling backdrop before continuing the narrative.
***************************************************************

Chapter Seven

2008-01-12T08:57:00.000-08:00

THE MEETING, PART I.

SCENE ONE: THE NIGHT BEFORE
Boss Eggers just arrived in New York City speeds in a dark blue limousine, the Ogre as bodyguard beside him. The limo disappears into the parking entrance of a gigantic skyscraper. A speeding elevator whisks the Boss to an uppermost floor while the Ogre waits back at the vehicle.

The smug publisher of one of the giant book companies takes Boss Eggers on a tour of his company's office suites. The publisher is a smarmy preppy type wearing a dull gray suit with a yellow polka-dot bow tie. Eggers endures the man's in-born condescension. In five years Boss Eggers will own this building. In their eagerness to cut publishing deals with him, the conglomerates are ensuring their own destruction. He is the vital life force embedding itself into the declining body of established literature.

"How does one combat the underground?" the preppy announces to him. "Why, we buy them out!" (He could add, "The same way we bought you.")

They turn into a hallway and stare at a display of a man washing dishes. "One-way glass," the publisher murmurs. "An underground favorite. He's now fully ours."

Boss Eggers smirks. They move down the corridor to another display. A dark-haired, slope-shouldered man is ranting to the walls.

"Chuck Palooka," the publisher states. "Our creation. He will be the leader of a new Underground-- an underground controlled completely by us. It's 1984 all over again, for real. Palooka will be our O'Brien. He's ours through and through. He goes where we tell him, speaks to who we tell him to speak to. He speaks what we allow. It's perfect co-optation. Palooka writes about the underground without being part of the underground himself. Through him, we the literary Establishment will become our opposite."

Boss Eggers sees that this doesn't fit exactly with his own Master Plan for takeover of American literature. That these decrepit publishers are thinking for themselves after decades of stagnation isn't a factor he's allowed for. Are these moves coming truly from the man before him? Or is someone with greater power, who Eggers had taken to be his friend-- his dupe-- about to betray him?

He'll find out at the meeting tomorrow.

SCENE TWO
At this same moment, Lindsay the rookie cop (Literature Police Department, the patch on her uniform says) is again on her rounds.

"Click." She runs fast to the next key station, in a minute stands before the forbidden steel door to the utility closet. Three minutes to spare. She allows the seconds to click away. She stares at the door. Tomorrow night, she vows, she will open it again. She'll investigate its depths to discover, for good or ill, its well-guarded secret.

Chapter Six

2007-11-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

THE MAN IN THE BLACK HAT HAS A DREAM.

He is troubled at night by recurring images running through his head. They're images which should belong to another person. They contradict his public persona. Now, as his brain slips into sleep and the images return, he wonders which "him" is the truth.

He sits not where he wants to sit. He's atop a podium at a judicial tribunal. Long robes cover him. Down below, at a plain wood table on a checkered tile floor, in handcuffs, await the accused. Wait! he wants to cry. I'd rather be down there, with you. Instead his large head carries forward as he signals his fellow jurists to begin the trial.

A man resembling Chief Lopate rises to read the indictment. Next to Lopate sits a dark-haired man with a malignant frown. How did I get mixed up with such as them, the Black-Hatted Man wonders? More, his fellow judges look to him for direction. To him! They work for HIM!

"Crimes Against Established Literature." Lopate in the Robes of Authority angrily points a shaking finger. Members of the ULA in the dock scowl back with reciprocal contempt. The Man in the Black Hat is of two minds about the hostile rebels. One side of him wants them wiped from the earth, banned forever, locked away in some underground literary dungeon never to be heard from again. Yet another part of him wishes he could pose as their savior; could borrow everything they represent, their authenticity, their voices, their cred. But he knows that to save them would be to destroy himself.

The other judges look now to him for direction, with sheeplike faces. It's his turn to speak, to enable the prosecution. His eyes glower with decision as he feels within him the unearned power he draws from his trappings; from his robes, his guards, his peers, and the impressively constructed courtroom festooned with golden symbols. Before the trial can continue he wakes up.

To get the recurring dream out of his head, the Man in the Black Hat journeys outside, warily onto the city's streets, seeking a latte coffee and a donut. There is a meeting of some importance later, he recalls, this afternoon, to discuss something. He has to be there. "He": the Very Important Man in the Black Hat. His falling-apart postmodern mind can't remember exactly what the meeting is to be about.

A homeless man stands threateningly on the sidewalk outside the local Starbucks. The man's features, or maybe just his eyes, resemble those of a prep school classmate from many years ago. The Man in the Black Hat wants to believe this man before him is a self-made failure. Why, once this fellow had been as privileged as himself! To admit there is something wrong with the city which surrounds him, with this civilization, is a conclusion he dare never admit, because it would pull out the foundation from beneath his all-powerful station; that which has fuled his identity, his success, his corrupt decisions these many years. The homeless man points a finger of accusation at him. In response he embraces the man.

"My friend! My former classmate!" he says to the smelly beggar. "You're sick! You're paranoid. It's conspiracy which you believe. Conspiracy! It's not true. Not true! Your eyes of accusation are not true! You need help. Get away from me!"

The Man in the Black Hat is running back down the street the way he came, scampering home, fleeing from himself while very upset at the world because he forgot to buy at Starbucks his coffee and donut.
***********************************************

Chapter Five

2007-11-08T07:51:00.000-08:00

Rookie patrolwoman Lindsay is called into the office of Chief Lopate at Literature Police headquarters. As Lindsay waits for him to speak, she studies the various certificates and outmoded maxims covering the wall behind him. "Our Mission: Clean and Quiet Streets," she reads on one plaque. On another: "Obedience Before Change."

"Well, Officer!" Chief Lopate says, removing his eyeglasses and leaning back in his rusty seat.

The Chief makes an effort to put an expression of kindliness over his face, the effort a failure. A perpetual glower has hardened onto his features like concrete.

"I've been studying your personnel file, Officer, searching for clues to your behavior. I must confess, I don't know if you're sufficiently loyal to what we're doing. I don't know! As we try to infiltrate the opposition, we must be cautious about infiltrators coming into our ranks. As you know, Officer, we tolerate almost anything in this outfit: nepotism; corruption; incompetence. Everything except insubordination. In an organization like ours-- enforcers of the status quo-- it's the only and greatest crime. We can tolerate no dissent. Ever. Otherwise the entire system will collapse. The realm would descend into chaos."

Chief Lopate knows the weaknesses of the system he works for yet is filled with justification. He worked his way up the ranks, through total obstinate loyalty to the powers-that-be. Drilled into him again and again was the idea that the Literature Police way is the only way. His loyalty is not to ideas, truth, or even literature-- but, as with the pure bureaucrat, to the organization. To protect those who'd given him his tenured position near the top of the ranks he would dissemble and denounce, as he'd publicly denounced from a stage the dreaded underworld literary guerrillas of the ULA. Now he observes the careless tow-headed rookie before him. What does she know of struggle, compromise, and achievement, he thinks? Chief Lopate points to an officer standing at the coffee machine outside his office glass.

"Observe there Officer Green," he announces to Lindsay.

Officer Green, struggling to make a fresh pot of coffee, spills coffee grounds and coffee filters everyplace.

"Green has spent fifteen years in the ranks," Chief Lopate states dramatically. "Fifteen years! No promotion in sight. Yet his obedience is unquestioned. Officer Green remains unswervingly dedicated to what we're doing, which, in the final analysis, beneath the trappings, offices, uniforms, medals and awards, is: Nothing. Never a grumble from the man! He knows he's found his place."

With that the Chief lifts a large rubber stamp in his meaty hand and brings it down onto a sheet of paper with a pronounced "smack!" The entire movie set office shakes. A camera zooms in to read the paper. In large block letters: "TRANSFER." Officer Lindsay gulps as the shot fades.

THE SCENE: Night, in the midst of a dark and chaotic city. The humming machines of a gigantic factory. Rookie patrolperson Lindsay steps along a catwalk near the roof. The sky smells of sulfur, and carries a yellowish cast. The great factory appearing in the darkness like a medieval fortress rumbles and creaks. Its technology is obsolete, she knows (it was state of the art in 1955) yet the plant's managers refuse to change things. Their thinking: if it was fine then, it's fine today. But it's not fine, she realizes. Lindsay sees a huge smokestack belching postmodern cultural pollution into the sky. This factory, which dominates the industry, with its clouds of obscurity prevents any clean message of renewal which might yet save the failing art. Oh, if only they could interest the public again! A quixotic dream. That would take far stronger personalities and voices than those offered by the factory's caretakers.

The young cop proceeds back into the soot-covered building. She carries a round clock, on her way to the next designated key station. She strides with robotic obedience.

"Click!" She inserts a key hanging on a wall chain within the clock and turns it.Everything in this world is monitored and regulated-- her job scrutinized to the minute to ensure that never a stray word of dissent from her will ever escape. Wasn't that what Chief Lopate said? "Ever"? Never!? She no longer remembers, overwhelmed by a sense of disillusion about this field, this art, which should shout to the public with joy, with the cleansing sunlight of day, but instead is content to exist in the shadows of the society.

Lindsay quickens her pace. She watches for saboteurs, which she's been assured are ready to destroy everything. This is the line that's been propagated to her about the ULA. She fully believes it. Would that they existed not to destroy, but to save! Who knows where the truth lies. Pounded into her brain again and again at the Literature Police Academy was the idea that there is no truth, and so no one can know anything. This is the mantra even of the formidable Eggers Gang, supposed Apostles of Change who aren't changing a thing; who dwell at the center of corruption, cronyism, insularity.

As she does every night, Lindsay passes a steel door to a utility closet. She's been given strict instructions to never unlock the door and look inside. On her rigid schedule she never has time-- but tonight she has the time; is one minute ahead of schedule for the next key station. Has she done this deliberately, her conscience asks? "Insubordination!" the authoritarian voice of Chief Lopate reverberates through her mind. In her head she's gone too far in her thought crime to turn back. She struggles with a ring of keys on her belt. Seconds tock away. At last she finds the right round shiny key and as her brain emits a scream of terror, unlocks the door.

It's a utility closet. Nothing more. A long tunnel of mops and pails lead toward the nothingness of mystery. She feels on her face for a quick instant a puff of cool air. Where does the tunnel lead? Underground? Outside? What awaits? What puzzle? What solution?

She has not time to find out as more scarce seconds click away. She slams the door-- wondering if she's relocked it-- and runs in panic toward the next key station as if Chief Lopate himself were watching.

Bounding up a metal stairway, she clicks the key waiting at the top into her clock. "Click!" A pronounced sound shattering her. Only then does she see blazing yellow light in the management office before her, which overlooks the factory floor. A man dressed in black, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, sits at the steel desk inside, his back to her. He begins to turn around, to reveal his face, as Lindsay runs back the way she came.

NEXT CHAPTER: "The Man in the Black Hat."
**********************************************************

Chapter Four

2007-07-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

"THE MOUNTAIN"

Meanwhile, gang moll Vendela Vida is in Manhattan meeting with her Columbia University buddies. The MFA program consists of a severe indoctrination regimen based on a martial arts academy. Their grads are trained to think of themselves as superior Masters of the Art-- though the version of the art they train on is, unknown to them, badly out-of-date.

Evil Vendela, who aspires to be best of all, returns to the secret writers gymnasium on campus to train.

At the moment she's practicing her literary "kicks" on cardboard silhouettes of her rival, Captain Rebecca Skloot-- a leading member of the Literature Police dedicated to wiping out any hint of literary noise on the streets, even the mild form Vendela and the rest of the Eggers mob engage in.

"Hiyaaahhh!" Vendela shouts as she kicks a hole through another Rebecca Skloot silhouette.

The cardboard hangs in tatters as Vendela graces it with a malicious sneer.

"If you really want to be the best," Training Master Ben Marcus advises, "You should visit the old wise man: the Master of Masters."

"Where's he?" Vendela snarls. "Where do I find the person?"

"On top of the Mountain," Marcus cryptically whispers.

She follows him to a dusty office at the back of the gymnasium. Wiping away cobwebs, he unlocks a faded green file cabinet. From the top drawer he produces, like a magician from a hat, a faded map.

"Follow this," Marcus tells her.

The light in the office is too dim for her to read the map, as is the artificial light in the gymnasium itself. Staring at the map, mesmerized by its existence, she walks hypnotically up a stairway with iron handrails until she's outside.

The malignant stuffiness of the room she left behind drops away. In sunlight Vendela sees a blue line thickly marked on the ancient paper. The words on the map are in an unreadable language, but the blue line is clear.

It's a long and arduous journey to the Mountain. Driving and driving through the reaches of New England; through snowstorms; past stuffy suburban communities of extreme wealth; past the environs of Providence and Boston, beyond, into the woods of Vermont, past Bennington, onto a road unmarked on any roadmap but this one. The car rises. She has driven onto the Mountain itself! Round curve after curve, ever higher, and higher, the air becoming colder and thinner.

The road ends. She unpacks hiking gear from the car's trunk and leaves the vehicle behind, making her way up a rocky path toward the summit; a path few have walked upon. The path is filled with obstacles; boulders; noxious growths of distorted plants. Then snow and ice.

The light is vanishing. The thin air this high influences her head. Vendela feels a sense of exhilaration. Why, she is one of the best! Her own husband mob boss Eggers himself seems very far away. Very far below. Up here, there is just her-- and the Master of Masters, whoever that might be.

She feels no fear about meeting this personage. She's been raised to think she's the best and has little regard for other people. Her entire life, her every action, every class taken, has been geared toward arriving at this special place: the Mountaintop! Many thousands of writers have gone through indoctrination programs but up here there is only her. She. Vendela Vida.

A few yards more. Then, at the front of a small cave beneath the very top squats a shadow. A man; a very small and very ancient man from ancient times, other eras, another generation. The 1940's! An impossible distance away, to her mind. So far back in time. Incomprehensible. Yet he's still here, alive, this wrinkled troll. How? Why?

She stands before him, towering, and scowls, hands on her hips.

"Tell me, O Master," she says with a trace of irony, of sardonic sarcasm intrinsic to her gang, "Tell me, Master, your Secrets. Tell me the mysteries of writing and literary achievement, of how to breathe your rarified air. Tell me how to be a Legend, adored and worshipped by millions, receiving millions in payment, fawned over by mighty corporations and placed on TV. Tell me how you accomplished this, Wizened One. What wizardry did you rely upon? Was it simply a marker of your more glorious times? Or can we capture the Power and Glamor the Word once held for people? Can we sweep away this nonsense of Mass Media we're bombarded with every day to arrive at the truth we as a lost people seek? Tell me, oh Noble Author. Tell ME!"

"You are all a lost generation," the troll, who looks suspiciously like Norman Mailer, murmurs in a polite and barely audible voice. "I know I'm quoting from another writer essentially revolutionary writer when I say that but it's essentially true, if we can know the essential truth about anything which I suppose is a kind of mystifying illusion perpetrated upon us by higher forces like the Old Boys who I once knew and played with, WASPy icons like Plimpton you know not all of them but many of them of course from the CIA and its many Martha Vineyards kind of playgrounds I hope I'm not being too verbose in capturing or trying to capture I've never been completely successful you know the riddle of existence as a writer in this technologically mad society of spaceships and stereo systems which doesn't much value the author, the writer, which I take to mean or are taking to mean for you in this conversation you and I. . . ."

(Vendela would think such an old troll would have to pause for a breath but he doesn't. . . .)

"Not to blather too much there are too many of us old white guys chauvinistic white guys as we see in today's news headlines none more chauvinistic than myself of course I Mailer trying to grab the 'Macho' ethos of Hemingway failing that then of the Beats the essential be-bop bluesiness whatever was trendy at the time I tried to grab onto it; always tried to be relevant, you know, the one true media writer if there ever was one so you see the irony of me of all people being atop this somewhat chilly and dreary mountain! These are shitty times. All is shit. That's the message, you know. Shit! SHIT is the one essential truth in life. We all shit! Can't you see it? The monumental profundity of that statement?"

(He gestures with his hands as if kneading dough.)

"I, Mailer, this literary god, this truly great Author if you really must know, have said many profound things in my spectacular Baudrillard life but none more spectacular or existentially true than that. The one thing I really know. In the final analysis I've become no more than this old and sleepy castrated CAT this benign animal preoccupied with naps and my trips to the litter box; the knowledge of how good it really feels exercising the sphincter muscles producing in the process not unlike my last few books you know this one warm and essential thing. . . ."

Vendela has had enough.

"THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT!" she screams to the empty cold mountainous air and with one great thrust of her muscular leg she's kicked through the head of the Master of Masters. His voice is gone. He's become silent.

All silent-- only the beating of her heart and happy ringing in her ears. She steps forward on the dirt floor to analyze the damage.

The Master's head is on the dirt floor in pieces. She looks closer. It's not a head at all, she realizes. It's squishy and orange.

Vendela Vida has destroyed a pumpkin.
**************************************

NEXT CHAPTER: "The Fortress."

Chapter Three

2007-07-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER THREE: "The Literature Police"

The next morning, while Boss Eggers and Pretty Boy are headed to the airport, the Kid at gang headquarters is disturbed by a knock on his office door.

"Wha- - -?" he begins to ask.

Before him stands a tall and somewhat gawky woman in a severe black uniform and black jackboots. He recognizes her immediately. Captain Rebecca Skloot.

The Literature Police!

"How'd you get in?" he growls.

"I could have obtained a warrant." Her diction is crisp, cold, efficient, perfect, like that of a well-programmed robot. "Instead I called your boss. His cell. He cooperated."

"Cooperated? WHY?" The Kid hates coppers.

She stares through him. To her-- a super-intelligent yuppy writer slumming in this movie as police captain-- the Kid's a lowlife, and no association with the Eggers Gang will add luster to that fact.

"We're taking him out."

"Him?" Kid asks.

"Him."

"Out?"

"Out. Rants. He comes with me."

Beyond tight-lipped tight-assed Captain Skloot of the Literature Police, the Kid notices now a figure standing nakedly exposed, no doubt embarrassed in the presence of Skloot but happy to be alive. He survived Eggers's bizarro Valencia headquarters, Rants can now claim.

"One of yours?" the Kid asks.

"NOW he is," Skloot replies. She turns to her charge, looks him up and down, then stalks toward the exit. The man dutifully follows.

(Cut to Literature Police Headquarters.)

Police Sergeant John Freeman gives the day's briefing.

"Men and women," he continues. "Our job is to patrol the streets of this city to make sure nothing exciting happens, no disturbances, no dissension, no debate, and that the public realizes that in this town which we control nothing exciting ever WILL happen."

(The camera pulls back to show the various officers in the briefing room. Most are sleeping.)

"Number One Priority," he continues blandly. "The ULA is still in the city; in alleyways, corners, shadows: everywhere. Let's be careful out there."

A hand raises. It's rookie patrolwoman Lindsay Robertson, the only person still awake in the room. "Gosh! But we have to know," (fresh from the Academy, Lindsay waits to jot down the facts with pen and paper). "What laws have they broken?"

Sergeant Freeman becomes alert for the first time that morning.

"Laws? LAWS?" Coffee spills threateningly from his mouth. He splutters, unable to continue. He begins coughing, choking, donut chunks emerging from his mouth, face glowing red an avalanche of sudden coughing so that the entire room is now awake wondering with no great concern if Sergeant Freeman is about to croak.

"ARUMPHAARGHGURGGAGARRRRHHHHHAUGGHCARUMPH!" the sergeant says, clutching his throat. Then he notices Chief Lopate standing unpleasantly behind him. The coughing immediately ceases.

"Yes, sir," Freeman squeaks.

Chief Phillip Lopate leans over the podium and glares at the clean-and-scrubbed preppy officers, before he barks, in a loud and angry voice, "DISMISSED!"

NEXT CHAPTER: "The Mountain."

"Plutocracy USA"

2007-06-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

(The continuing misadventures of a gang in the book business trying to consolidate and monopolize its position in a ruthless and primitively competitive urban landscape while taking on several rivals. Low budget. Black-and-white. Not on video or DVD.)

CHAPTER TWO: "Turf Wars."

"Pretty Boy" Bronson arrives in the anteroom of the Boss's huge office and takes a seat. He carries a portfolio of paperwork. Across from him waits The Kid, also with a portfolio. The Kid is sweating profusely and shaking a bit. "It's not good. It's not good," he says over and over. Bronson wonders what drug-of-choice The Kid is on this week.

"What happened?" Pretty Boy asks.

The Kid begins rambling. "I was ready to jump. It was the meds. No-- my girlfriend. We didn't get them. The warehouse bomb went off but we didn't get them. Not all of them anyway. Took out five I think-- maybe others. Their leader and a few more escaped. Our informant-- he's a screwball-- was wrong. The ULA yet lives."

The Kid takes a snot-covered handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his brow. His shaky eyes zero in on Bronson.

"Who's this new bodyguard the Boss has? I mean, I think that's what he is. He never says nothin'. The black guy. He just goes with the Boss everywhere like an unspeaking shadow."

"I don't know," Pretty Boy answers.

At that instant Boss Eggers appears in the corridor, silent bodyguard next to him. The two others realize he's heard every word. Boss Eggers shows no reaction. He nods to the bodyguard, who departs.

Eggers opens the door to his office. It's an entire soundstage, with an enormous desk-- fit for a gangland boss. Backdrop is a matte painting of the city of San Francisco. Eggers gazes possessively at the backdrop for a minute, as if he owns the world.

"Reports?" he asks while sitting in the leather chair behind the huge desk.

Pretty Boy, a former bond trader, knows the Manhattan landscape well.

"They're moving into our territory," he says, reciting figures. "N+1 is pushing their stuff" ("stuff" said as if it were illegal whiskey) "on the shelf right next to ours!"

"Do we still have allies?" the Boss quizzes.

"Oh yeah, sure. Loads. Whitney and others like her. The rich boys of course."

Eggers's fist slams suddenly hard onto the desk, startling Pretty Boy, and The Kid also.

"Then motivate them!" Eggers shouts.

He takes a minute to calm himself. His eyes are very intense. The camera zooms in on them. Instantly he calms, as if nothing had occurred.

"We don't have even this town locked up 100%," he smirks in his cute-but-cynical postmodern way. "Show me who we've got in The Room."

The three men walk down a long and spooky corridor. With a ring of keys, The Kid unlocks a heavy steel door, then leaves them. Inside sits a man bound to a chair in the center of the naked room.

"Who is this creep?" Eggers asks. Pretty Boy consults a clipboard.

"He calls himself Ed Rants. A gangster wannabe-- playing the role around town for a couple months pretending to be a big shot. Got into a scuffle with Gessen and his boys. Note the black eye. We found him in a movie theater. Had seen four movies in a row. He blew his cover-- was complaining to the usher about stale popcorn! He's a goof."

Eggers frowns. Pretty Boy continues.

"We told him we'd have The Ogre play with his head. Note the photo."

On the wall opposite Rants, in plain view staring at Ed every minute, is a blown-up photograph of mob enforcer Daniel Handler, aka The Ogre. Rants looks at the photo. His eyes bulge from his head in terror. Unknown to him, Handler is already in New York to set up the coming visit. The Boss nods to Pretty Boy, who removes the gag from Rants's mouth.

"Sarvas is an idiot!" the man screams uncontrollably, saying what he thinks they want to hear. "Sarvas is an idiot!"

The gag is replaced. Boss Eggers glances at Pretty Boy, then laughs. Pretty Boy follows him from the room.

"When he begins to say," Eggers calmly tells his advisor, "'Gessen is an idiot,' then we'll know we've made progress."
*********************************************
NEXT CHAPTER: "The Literature Police."

Movie Serial

2007-06-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER ONE

Mob boss Dave Eggers of the powerful McSweeney's Syndicate, accompanied by evil gun moll Vendela Vida, holds a meeting at creepy Syndicate headquarters on Valencia Street. Present are main henchmen Po "Pretty Boy" Bronson, Dan "The Ogre" Handler, and Stephen "The Kid" Elliott. Boss Eggers is upset that the latest effort to destroy underworld rivals "The ULA" has failed.

(Blockhead Eggers little knows that as an amorphous organization with no address and no property, appearing out of and vanishing into thin air, the ULA can't be killed. It's an idea, not an entity.)

"We'll change strategy," Boss Eggers declares to the gang, as Pretty Boy stares wide-eyed, the Kid shivers, and the noxious Ogre blinks uncontrollably. (Slinky Vendela looks at the inept gang members and sneers.)

"Duh, Boss, does I gets to hurts somebody?" the Ogre asks while decapitating a child's doll.

Pretty Boy's question is marginally more intelligent. "We need easier territory."

Eggers grins, having anticipated him."We'll go after. . . ." Eggers announces, "The other guys!"
***************************************************

WELCOME!

2007-06-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Literary Mystery. Open the door for surprises inside. . . .