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Sitting on the step, a warm breeze blowing an occasional dead leaf against his legs, that fresh young homosap sat softly whistling "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," as he waited for the solar sun to rise, and the Baltimore Sun to be delivered. Suns had been dropping around this step since 1837, in all surely enough newspapers to bury the house. A fly landed on his thigh, just below the hem of his shorts, and he smacked it. Did the defenders of Fort McHenry read the Sun by the rockets' red glare as from their ramparts they watched all that gallant streaming? No. That was 1815. Billy had sat up all night conversing with Dr Bruhn after Sebastiana had eased the last guests out of the house. Bruhn had just gone to the bathroom to wash and change clothes. "Wait for the paper, Billy; I'll be right back." That French maids' skirt and those net stockings did give Bruhn a certain air, an élan, which, assuredly, could add a dimension to the biochem classes he taught at Johns Hopkins. Even if I weren't a medical student I'd surely read the book he kept suggesting: Unit 731, Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. He said General Shiro Ishii performed vivisection and conducted biological experiments on Chinese, Korean, Russian, British, Australian, and American prisoners or war. Inspired in part by General Amherst using smallpox to exterminate Indians by giving them infected blankets, Ishii saw promise in racially selective diseases, and tried to develop maladies effective against whites. Was he prosecuted for war crimes? No. The Americans, with the support of their allies, concealed the crimes, protected the scientists, and studied the data with the intent of building on it. Ishii's group refined lethal diseases and used insects to distribute them. Absolutely odious! Don't you agree? That Dr Bruhn talked a lot about Ishii I can understand. But why did he keep talking about flies, and even to them? Flies! Some professors are weird. Any student can tell you that. But this guy! What a pessimist! Dr Night! "Humanity, young man, is certain to bring about its own extinction. The only question left is how and when? Before the end, I am determined to create a much better living vehicle for enhanced intelligence, and scan the DNA pattern into space with lazer beams. Man---- the New Man, is destined to inhabit the universe."
That was last night.
Blaise Cendrars replied. "All this ingenuity and scientific display are simply posturing, for the universe is not a puzzle, nor is life a crossword for the morning Sun, and that is where the error lies, the error of the Germans, the Herrenvolk, ever since Luther, and of their coarse imitators, the Russians and the Americans."
And me, I asked him: "Why not enhance the intelligence of a better species and shine that pattern out into space?"
Has Dr Bruhn written anything?
Could, would, his cosmos-ranging DNA beam strike and organize universe soup?
Why not scan the sky with genome of shark? Or even better, the gene/chromosome pattern of cockroach?
Much more likely to take root somewhere.
Maybe even a million light years away.
Too bad Blaise Cendrars didn't stay instead. A much better guy. Old! How old can old get? He said the mentality of his home town La-Chaux-des-Fonds is embodied in a row of trees on the parkway of a separated street which has been trimmed flat at about ten meters up, hedge-style, to create a plane exactly one thousand meters above mean sea level. He thinks the trees should be mounted on hydraulic jacks so they can go up and down with the tides and indicate true sea level. At birth, they named him Frederick, Frederick Sauser. "I became scion of the Souse family in 1887, long before the thousand-meter trim."
He lifted up his empty sleeve.
"I still suffer from delusions of existence."
Me too.
"It all reminds me of the old days when if you'd turn off the set, TV-reality would collapse into a bright spot and empirical reality would resume."
Flies!
Dr Bruhn said to understand flies, as to understand any other form or life, one must remember the social order hinges on survival of the young. "Where the young are born helpless, there you have Society. As with anything else, the leitmotif of fly life is the production and survival of the young. Therein lies the prime contradiction! To attack a species, you strike at reproduction and youth."
"And," said Sebastiana, "you do that through art. Beyond eat, sleep, fuck, shit, all life is art. War is art. Crime is art. God is art. Bad art, to be sure, but art."
Fireflies still flashed in the warm night.
"Perception," said Billy.
Something struck his lap.
I've been hit by the sun.
Before dawn.
He stripped the rubber band off of the Sun and glanced at the headlines.
The lead story said a fast-acting lethal and mysterious malady comparable to Legionnaires' disease, which had proved to be spread by air conditioning systems, had killed the DCI and two of his colleagues. Another story announced US BANS CHESAPEAKE SEAFOOD. According to the Surgeon General, local fish and crustaceans alike had become too poisonous to eat. He passed by DOG PACKS SAVAGE REFUGEES and paused at FAMED SPEAKEASY TO BE RESTORED. A newly formed group of rich locals had dedicated itself to the resurrection of The Peabody Bookshop as it had been in the 1920's and was now seeking a suitable downtown location. "Elderly residents will remember The Peabody on Charles Street as an oasis favored by H.L. Mencken and his cronies, and will recall passing between tall stacks of books through a back door opening into a noisy barroom, an arrangement maintained long after the repeal of Prohibition. 'We plan to reproduce the establishment exactly as it was in 1925,' said spokesman John B. Miller, 'except for a state-of-the-art pinball machine being custom built for us in Chicago. This electronic game runs scores up into the trillions and is called The National Debt."'
Billy brushed a mosquito off his head and carried the paper into the house.
Dr Bruhn snatched it from him and avidly read the CIA story. He'd changed into gray slacks and a white shirt.
And his spectacles had remounted their customary nose saddle.
"Those CIA chiefs!" said Santa Sebastiana. "Nemesis oozed by security. Boomerang karma struck home!"
Bruhn looked up from his easy chair, annoyed.
"Yes," said Santa Sebastiana, "yin-yang's rebalanced and kismet's fulfilled."
Hurling the Sun aside, Bruhn sprang to his feet, alarming the pigeons, who flew up from their feeding, and Crow, who cawed and
flapped around until, contrite, Bruhn calmed him. "They've banned seafood! I love oysters and sushi and clams and bouillabaisse and flounder and . . . ." He paced angrily. "God damn it to Hell. Chesapeake seafood's the main reason I moved to Baltimore."
"At the next pheromone party, Doc, I'll serve insects. Fried grasshoppers. They're just as nasty and taste better."
Bruhn kicked a piece of armor George had left behind.
"No bloody way, woman! That's the first and last of your parties. You made me act the fool, yes, once, but never again. From now on I'll get my sporting girls somewhere else."
"You don't know how. Tom's dead. You're an aged innocent. Treat me right, and I'll take care of it."
"Well, you do know your way around."
"Tonight, I'll take you to the Rat Club. Only a few blocks from here. It's where all the employees are obliged to wear livery: Artificial rat skin, rat head for a hood, tail hanging behind, open in front, on both male and female, so you can lust for crotch and bare legs."
Billy excused himself and went to the bathroom. As he dropped the toilet seat and slid down his shorts he looked at Bruhn's bath toys. A yellow rubber duck and a little red sl00p lay stranded in Bruhn's lionfooted tub. Reaching in to squeak the duck, he saw the faucet and laughed out loud. A bronze woman's upper body reared at him from out the porcelain. Raising her head made water squirt from her nipples; turning it adjusted the temperature. We'll leave Billy now in the bathroom squeaking and turning where he can enjoy his privacy and other pleasures over which the curtain of anonymity should be discreetly drawn, and return to the living room to eavesdrop on Sebastiana and Dr Bruhn.
"You teach but one class, yet you told Billy you're a professor?"
"Of course. The kind of work I do I can't tell anyone the truth."
"Tell me the truth. Where . . . is . . . Mosca?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him since I fell asleep."
"Since you passed out. Well, me, I haven't seen hir for a couple hours. She could be anywhere."
Bruhn led to the kitchen where a helix of orange flypaper drooped from the ceiling. Bruhn inspected this sweet, twisting, curl-down paper of death, found but three conventional exoskeletal corpses and a struggling mosquito. "Did your crow eat him?"
"Not possible." Crow flew to her shoulder and shook his head. "Tell me Dr Bruhn, after Tom turned Mosca loose on those CIA types, did he disinfect hir?"
"We forgot to provide for that."
"Wash hir? Clean hir?"
"Not bloody likely."
"So anything Mosca touches is dead!"
"Probably, except for me. I vaccinated myself."
"Did anyone else?"
"I doubt it."
"How contagious is that virus?"
"I don't know. The strain is more virulent than I expected."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning the culture worked much faster than I thought it would. It's a real quick kill. Fortunately, I've worked out a cure as insurance." He removed his glasses and cleaned them, then spoke quietly, with profound sincerity. "It's a deep responsibility, Sebastiana. I think I may have created the perfect pathogen."
"Why do you think nobody but you took the vaccine?"
"I developed vaccines for my various weapons in secret. Cures, too. Why? Don't you see? No bioweapon is practical without a vaccine and a cure. For some, I have vaccines and cures I've told no one about."
"No one? Why not?"
"Because it's time for mankind to go. His act in the play is over. Bring back the dinosaurs. Improve their brains. Create the New Man,
a Supreme Man who can fly. I think of enhanced intelligence in a birdlike body. How's that strike you?"
"Why not a batlike body to keep the fingers? Why not something exoskeletal? Smart insects? What's wrong with the Mosca model?"
"I favor birds."
"You favor the way they look. You can't judge this aesthetically. You can't put birds over insects and bats just because you prefer the way birds look."
"Why the Hell not?"
"In the beginning He created them, birds that think like men, androgynous He created them, His ideal, in His own Soul's image." "Ignorant woman! Mankind's as big a failure as cast-iron houses! If the rest of the universe is as barren as the rest of our solar system, what's at stake here is not just humanity, but life itself!"
"At stake! Auto-da-Fé! Saint Joan!"
"Consider frozen embryos. We can thaw them out now s0 they develop and grow. It's in a recent New England Journal of Medicine. They want to send frozen embryos out into space, to potential homes selected by computer in other solar systems here in our galaxy and even in other galaxies, which could be thousands of light years away---- millions! Talk about spreading the ultimate pathogen! They are s0 self-centered they want to give us another chance and thus endanger all the other life in the cosmos, if any. Fie! We take root somewhere else, we'll fuck it all up, just as we have here. Space colonist! Look at what colonies did to the Indian!" He stood. "Come." He strode to his study, drew some papers from a drawer. "Just look at these. Go ahead, look. Then tell me humankind is not on its way out, or that we should try to prolong its departure, let alone save it."
"Are you telling me Bruhn's disease will spare outer space from salvation from Earth?"
A pigeon pooped on his shoulder.
He snarled through his weasel teeth and forced the papers into her hands. She sat at the desk and leafed through them, mainly articles and abstracts from inscrutable scientific journals. Here and there she found stories and features from the popular print media. KILLER SMOG SLAYS THOUSANDS, and . . . LIFE'S END LOOMS SAY TOP SCIENTISTS. Twenty Plus Species Vanish Daily. In Fifteen Years One-fourth of All Species May Be Extinct. And . . . CARTELS SAID TO CONTROL WORLD ECONOMY. This went on to say implicit in the predominance of international banking and associated multinational corporations is the establishment of a new feudalism resting on hereditary castes: Overlords, Overseers, Toilers, moving about in the market Prime-evil. ERGOT CRAZES SMALL TOWN. RADIOACTIVE REBAR TRACED TO MEXICO. MOLECULAR PSYCHOLOGY SEEN AS KEY TO TOTAL SOCIAL CONTROL An article told of an immense fungus underlying square miles of Michigan woodland having been taught to think; another, from the People's Republic of China, reported factory robots gaining independence by massacring their coolie keepers; and still yet another said most human diseases originate in domestic animals. CHILD KILLED IN DWARF HUNT. FARMER SLAIN BY WORLD WAR I SHELL.
"What do you think of this one?" said Bruhn, pointing. This one told of the billions of dollars in private bank accounts, securities, and property CIA has accumulated by selling arms and dope, taking the paychecks of agents working in deep cover for legitimate businesses, earning profits through phony proprietaries, keeping appropriated money left over at the end of the fiscal year, accepting gifts from foreign governments, and by reinvesting it all over and over through operations like MHMUTUAL and SOUTHERN CAPITAL. "Sebastiana. Think about it! I'm virtually independent! We've plenty of money to finance my research; and, to sweeten the cookie, I don't have to explain anything to anyone outside the Company, and, even in it, accountability is tightly restricted by need-to-know."
"What do you have there?" She'd noticed a black, diamond ring displayed on a desk stand. "I think I'll wear it for a while to see if you'll keep following me around."
"That's my lucky charm. I never let it leave the house."
"Indeed?"
"It's my keepsake. When they told me about carbon rings in high school chemistry I got so excited I made a ring out of carbon, and then, later, to celebrate my Ph.D., I had that bright bit or supercarbon set into it."
She stalked into the living room, Bruhn behind.
Billy lay sprawled on the couch, listening to Gospel Pam. "Catch this preacher. She's something else."
Although Gospel Pam never appears on TV, the exponential rise in popularity of her radio/internet ministry has proved to be a stunning phenomenon in the pop culture of the first decade of the new millennium. Her influence is waxing to an extent and profundity far greater than that of even her most illustrious predecessors: Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, Fathers Divine and Coughlin, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham. This is true despite the fact her shows are broadcast from recordings, and that although someone real banks the blizzard of checks drifting on her daily, no one has ever seen her.
"Dig this! She's interviewing the Devil!"
Pam: And s0, then, you believe that without the help of our Father, we have infinite sources of power, a true cornucopia."
Devil: Yes, Pam, I do. The cornucopia resembles Sir Arthur Eddington's Drifting G. The expansion of the universe forces it, at its center, to create something from nothing, an attribute that charlatan Jehovah attributes to Himself."
Pam: Is it true as it's s0 often said, you have occult powers? Devil: My dear sister, electricity is the occult power.
Pam: And what's your position on Original Sin?
Devil: Oil not apple is the original sin.
Pam: Is technology neutral or does it have a moral character? Devil: It can be neither neuter nor neutral because it breeds more and its evolution can be directed.
Pam: Malleable means morality?
Devil: Education, technology's DNA, is subject to genetic control.
Pam: What of AIDS? Will they find a cure?
Devil: Yes, and soon.
Pam: Well, brother, that's no cause for complacency. When it's cured, our Father will send another punishment down.
Devil: As he's doing right now at Langley, killing all those people with a new form of CIAIDS.
Pam: And your view of Central Intelligence?
Devil: Central to intelligence is what you affect so deeply, the neurons: axions at one end, receptors at the other.
Organ music sounds the sales-pitch cue and Gospel Pam thanks the Devil for taking the time to appear on her show. She then segues into a commercial for a new film in her Christian Porn series, Lot Does His Daughters, and another for her next crime movie, High Waters, the story of Jehovah's mass murder by flood of the entire human race, save Noah. "In closing, it's my honor to announce a full twenty-percent discount on Bullrushes, my inspiring video about Moses, a baby who is left in a swamp to die, but, lives to become rich and famous."
She signs off with her slogan: "Because Gaia's God's mother, I'm sister, I'm brother."
The radio slides into a pop music program and plays the latest craze: City Western.
My son wears a cock ring,
My daughter sports a Mohawk;
They both fuck with animals,
And I'm in deep dope-shock.
The strained and desperate voice pauses for a moment as the guitar and banjo amplify, only to return and sing:
Pretty Amy, soaked in beers,
Has left me after thirty years;
And my hunting buddy called to say
He just blew my dog away.
And more:
Went to work, a wasted trip,
In my box, a layoff slip,
Stopped in a bar to wonder why; And now I have a DUI.
Bruhn clicked off the radio. "I've heard that preacher's voice somewhere before," said he, "but not on the air."
He was about to say more when a sudden commotion at the front door interrupted, startling all the pigeons into flight.
Bruhn opened the door, and in came Pedro; the nine-year-old brat; the Cumpire; and George Baxter, Sergeant in the Special Forces, Optio in Legio Dix Fretensis, hero of Legio Vicesimus Valeria Victrix, veteran of Mao's Long March, Feldwebel in the army of the Emperor of Austria, Blood Glutton.
"Hello," said Sebastiana.
"I left my grieves around here some fucking place."
Bruhn returned them with obvious contempt.
"Hey, you old fuckhead, what you think about germ war chopping down all those CIA assholes?"
Sebastiana replied. "Show respect, you shit sucker."
"For you cuntface?"
"Don't judge others by yourself."
"Now you gonna tell me God has tits."
She smiled, and he smiled back.
"Hey, babe, I've got one for you. What's the worst thing about eating bald pussy? Give up? Putting the diapers back on."
He clashed his grieves together.
"Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Understand? Ha! Ha! Ha!"
"Time to leave," said Bruhn. "The party's over."
"In the old days, asshole, war was honest. Sword against sword.
Look at it now! Germ against germ!"
"Yes," said Sebastiana. "The S-word, sword, is behind us now. Cavalry charges, white horses with pompoms on their foreheads, galloping, frothing, carrying young romantics, like Billy here, all in the black uniform of the King of Prussia, Uhlans, thundering down on the French in a flash of shining sabers, all of that, passé. And now ? Now it's up to flies and mosquitoes and rats to sustain the mystique, the romance, of war, to rise to eternal glory, to be commemorated in heroic public art. Those bold creatures are the new millennium's valiant vectors of death, our Constitution, our Hornet, our P-40, our B-17. Spad versus Fokker? Stormovik against Focke-Wulf? Not these days. Virus against virus. Vector against vector. That's it. That's the new mode for romantic movies." She smiled an evil smile. "Flies with pompons; mosquitoes uniformed in black; rats that look like Ishii heavy-chested with imperial medals; rock-and-roll vivisection; war prisoners used by CIA for medical experiments; ethnic cleansing; Mengele resurrected. The world---- can that be a synonym for Mankind---- saved! Uzbekistan, Turkestan, Baluchistan, Kurdistan, double-damn."
"Gospel Pam," said Billy. "You sound like Gospel Pam."
"What a ham!"
"Oh, come on!"
"What a bore."
"How can you say that?"
"We Saints don't need preachers."
"Me, cuntface, me, when I was in the Great Khan's army and we were trying to take a Persian town, and they held us the fuck off, us invincibles, we catapulted diseased corpses over their walls and got even."
"I want you to leave," said Bruhn.
"Asshole! I'm going to flay you and dance in your skin." Little Adolf, that vile child, sat in a double lotus on the floor tearing the wings off a fly.
Bruhn snatched it from him, looked at it, hurled it away.
A pigeon ate the corpse.
Sebastiana eased the intruders toward the door.
The Cumpire broke away and flung herself at Billy and began devouring him with kisses. He grasped her head, whispered in her ear, and she embraced Bruhn and unzipped his pants. Sebastiana seized her and pushed her and the other invaders out. "That woman," said Billy. "She found my address, and came all the way from California to haunt me. It's like my doorbell rings, and there she is, on my fucking step."
Something hit Bruhn's door. Bruhn went out and came back with the Washington Post. He stripped off the rubber band and dropped into a chair avidly scanning the lead story and Billy read it over his shoulder. Mystery Disease is Decimating CIA. Twenty Seven at Langley Are Dead as Are Eleven Family Members. Including the late DDS&T's twin boys. Bruhn drew Sebastiana aside. Crow followed. "Where is Mosca? I'm quite profoundly worried." She said she didn't know. Returning to the living room they found Billy reading the Post. "The paper says this epidemic is probably carried by air conditioning. All they seem to know about it is that it's extremely virulent." He turned the page. "Lightning Bolt Slays Golfer. And catch this! Once a week in New York they're going to auction off a numbered street. The highest bidder gets to rename the street after himself if he wants. Next year, they're going to sell the avenues. D.C. could do the same, and sell letters, too."
"That blasted Roman!" Bruhn had found a wad of bubble gum stuck to the side of his TV. "No more parties in my house, ever!" "He told me he used to work in Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace. As he put it, 'I get along fine with assholes'." She dusted her hands together. "At Caesar's they wear armor and togas. Him? A Roman. Well . . . ? A roman-tic. A Romantic-depressive, a real toenail biter, a true colon cake, a guy who says women don't need to be liberated because they can run faster with their skirts up than guys can with their pants down."
"Here's something to consider," said Billy. "World Agriculture Is Destroying the Topsoil. And this! Runaway Kids Killed for Black Market Body Parts."
"I prefer more personal news," she said. "The kind that follows the course of life from twat to tit to tot to twit, with a bit of twaddle mixed in."
Billy laughed and said, "Me too."
Bruhn took the paper back.
"Even the worst of the news has its shiny side," said Billy. "If the Post has it right, that disease, that epidemic, will kill the heart of CIA before it gets the rest of us."
"Young man," Bruhn replied, peering at him. "It's naiveté like yours that's bringing on the extinction of mankind. Animals with eyes on the sides of their heads are peaceful. They're prey. Their eyes scan around looking for predators. Yes. So where are your eyes?"
"In front."
"And what does that say about your basic nature?"
"Beats me."
"Animals with eyes in front are predators. Cats, owls, people. Murderous violence, young man, is your deepest nature, and can only be eased by cutting your balls off or steeping you in civilization, leaving you too weak to defend yourself. Somebody in civilization has to be tough enough to defend you, and it. You should be thankful for CIA. Of all the intelligence agencies, in and out of the armed forces, and of course the forces themselves, CIA is the least hawklike, It's the liberal. It's the dove. For the others, warfare is welfare. Of them all, CIA's the only one devoted to the achievement of world peace."
Billy sprang to his feet.
"CIA! Those nice boys, and you, Dr Bruhn, are carrying on the work of Ishii and Mengele! Pragmatic pacifists! Patriots! Hell no. Utterly amoral. Technological man. Post-Christian technological man. The Company! You'll do anything it pays you to do, and find your challenge in the means. Not in the What, or the Why---- But in the How. I think of Hermann Göring. Shoot down planes. Run the Gestapo. Marry an actress. Steal art. Bomb London. Smoke opium. Be a Field Marshal. 'Right is that which benefits the German people.' He said so. What's wrong with that? Scratch German. Try Chinese. Try Iranian. Try Colombian. Try Serbian. Try American. Got it right now, don't we; Doc? Every heinous crime, every double-cross of what America is supposed to believe in, CIA has and most likely right now is committing. All in the name of National Security. CIA! High-tech Nazis! Post-Christian Man!"
Bruhn strode off to his study and slammed the door.
Sebastiana flung a bottle at it.
Billy shook his head and said, "That professor. His reality, is it empirical or imperial?"
"What comes to my mind is that when flies shit on a page of Arabic text, the shit-specks can change the meaning. Even of God's word in the Koran!"
Billy laughed and clicked on the radio and ranged the dial for more Gospel Pam.
"Bruhn going, Billy; that's the shiny side. The ugly side? Like winter, he's bound to come back. And excrete more diseased fly specks. Let's make our contribution to meaning. How's this sound for a plan? How shall we describe the hierarchy of the new world-wide high-tech feudalism? The new nobility of owners-rulers composes the master caste. But we can't call them what they are. We need innocuous names for all the castes. No indeed, the names of the castes, of these hereditary Hindu-style world families, should not reveal who does the work and who gets the rewards. So what should the names be? Put on your thinking cap! We'll invent a nomenclature for this very fishy social model."
"I haven't a clue. Maybe Gospel Pam will help us out . . . at least catalyze something."
He found her on another station.
Pam: Doubtless, you, as I, have wondered on occasion why the Good Lord ordained the sun should shine in the daytime, instead of at night when we need the light more. Mysterious are the ways of the Lord. Today, my guest is the ghost of the man to whom the Lord revealed the way to turn night into day s0 cabbages will grow as big everywhere as they do in Alaska . . . .
Sebastiana turned down the volume. "That's it! Alaska! The fish state! We'll use the hereditary hierarchy of salmon! The master caste is the King caste, divided into two feuding hereditary parties, the Red Kings and the White Kings, popularly called the Smileys. Just below the Kings are the Sockeyes, known idiomatically as Reds. Under them, we find the Coho Caste, a.k.a. the Silvers, and under that, the Dog Caste, often called the Chums. At the very bottom, at the base of the pyramid, is the Coolie Caste, the Humpeys---- which some people call the Pinks." She polished the lucky carbon ring on her sweater. "Is that fishy enough for you? Pam's audience would suck that up."
"Oh, Yeah! And Pam! She'd put it to them that way so as to make it new, in order to clean their crystal so they can see deep down into . . . . I mean, because . . . ."
"Because if she does it right it could be an American parable. Or, sure, she could even shape it into an American fable." She kissed Billy's cheek. "Why fable? You scum sucking A-merican toad boy? Because I don't think fish in the sea see like you and me. Suck on that.."
"Hey! You know what?" He seized her shoulders and squeezed and said, "It's happening fast. People are learning. We are learning. Yes! We're all much more hip to what's happening than ever before.
People are much looser then they used to be. We're browsing around the show-and-tell of Ms Macholand. People are open to new ways in everything. Question the received verities. The Irish flag and its stripes! All of the Irish know what the stripes are. But they don't agree. Green and white. No trouble there. But the third stripe! Is it gold or orange? What does it stand for? Hence, trouble and poetry, as Al, my grandfather, the man who raised me, used to put it. Only he'd say reared. His flag theory---- and plenty of Irish dispute it, is the stripes are Green for Catholic, White for Peace, Orange for Protestant. Meaning the flag of the Republic declares Catholics and Protestants can live in peace. We're changing direction. We really are. It's happening fast, but not fast enough."
"It's happening too fast. The slimy fishy hierarchy is establishing as the new world order."
"Yes. But that's in spite of us."
"Silly boy."
"For me, it's, well . . . what grandfather Al used to say. Life is often a moral dilemma."
"Morel? As in morel mushrooms? Is this one I'm about to eat poison or not? Tell me about it."
"The slime?" He trembled, but not from this. "The fish slurry?" For a moment he felt sick. "What I'm saying is, me and my friends, we are showing understanding, understanding consecrated by will and spirit, as we struggle up out of this slurry of reeking, rotting myths."
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