Justice, Subsection 8.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 7.0)

"First," spoke Dean, "you have the conventional approach. That is to say turning Kamill--"

It was Natalie who interrupted: "But why can't we tie him up before starting with any of this? I'm sorry, Dean. But the cavalier approach is making me uncomfortable. How can we be serious about this is he's free to do whatever he wants?"

Before I go on I should say that Kamill was in the bathroom that communicated with the reading room. He was not under guard, but the bathroom had no window, and the only way in or out was through our midst. Bernal had been the one originally opposed to fettering Kamill, calling it "barbaridad en teoría, barbaridad de hecho." Kamill, for his part, had settled into a hangdog passivity, having assured us of his growing contrition and intention to stay put and face up to the consequences of his crime.

Natalie continued: "I don't understand why he's walking around freely in there. Look what he's done already. Hardly one of you escaped injury. He's dangerous, and I don't think we should be so sure he won't hurt someone again. Wouldn't you want to escape if you were in his position?"

"But dear Natalie, the man already made it very clear that he wants to face the music." It was Nelson, who that day was wearing a tan herringbone suit in twill. Double-breasted, the jacket had a half-Norfolk back and double side vents. Lapels narrow unto vanishing, cuffed and pleated trousers, and a lavender shirt in poplin from whose neck there issued a slim red cravat that dangled over the assemblage like a fully articulated tongue. "The eruption is over," he said. "He's calmed down now."

"Don't you dear Natalie me, Nelson Leffingwell. You say he's calmed down and wants to make good and all that, but wouldn't he be acting in exactly that way if he wanted to lull us into letting down our guard so that he can escape, possibly hurting anyone who tries to stop him? Isn't that how you might play it? I think, and I'll say it again and again if I have to, I think that if we're serious about this discussion and about staying in control of this situation, the man should be restrained. Or is the whole idea to leave the door open for him escape so we can forget about it? To hope that he escapes so that we can wash our hands of it and pretend like nothing happened as Vanessa's lifelong disfigurement goes unpunished? What kind of justice is that? A roll of the dice?"

There were murmurs of agreement, and it was decided that Kamill would be fettered. And since there was no suitable rope to hand, Nelson ended up by volunteering a silk tie from his own wardrobe for the job. When we swung open the door to the little bathroom, Kamill was seated on the toilet with his hands ready for the shackling. Dean wound the silk tie around Kamill's almost simian wrists and tied it off tightly--very tightly in fact--with a mariner's expertise. He eyed his work with a look of uncertainty and wondered aloud whether it would hold. Nelson responded by yanking off the little red tie he was wearing and handing it to Dean with a courtly flourish. "Once again," he said, and not without a hint of resignation, "the noble cravat demonstrates it dynamism. Who said it wasn't cut out for shifting as a fetter?" Dean took this rather dainty piece of wool in his hand and used it to further manacle our violent offender. Kamill winced at the pressure but said nothing. Natalie was about to say something, but Dean brushed by her and returned to the head of the little conference table. 

Now I was the last to leave the little bathroom. On my out out I took a toothbrush from a mug and used it to jimmy the knot looser for him, if only by a little bit. Still effective, I thought, though not piercing. He nodded a quiet thanks. Next I opened the mirror caddy, swung the shelf assembly out on its hinge, and depressed the panel hidden behind it. This panel folded down on pneumatic hinges with a pleasant languidness to reveal an improbable rebate. In here was a tray on rails that pulled out to rest on the articulated panel, and on this tray was Uncle Cheesegrave's secret liquor service: Crystal, fine stainless steel, and a variety of ethereal spirits in a small format. Saying nothing, I poured out a healthy measure of bourbon and set the glass in Kamill's fettered grip. I then thought better of it and poured Kamill a new measure into a disposable gargling cup, keeping the crystal for myself. Kamill nodded slightly, and I left. 

Behind Dean at the head of the table was a large fireplace that we used to heat that wing of the house in the winter. Above the high pedimented mantel hung a large painting of a football referee done entirely in shades of gray that Natalie had bought for Nelson at an art exhibit put on earlier that year at the university's arts faculty. The stripe-clad man it portrayed filled almost the entire canvas. In it, he was frozen in the act of raising his whistle--the symbol of his authority--from his hip to his lip, presumably to blow dead a play that we could not see. The referee's face--I remember it well--was turned slightly to the left, and there was sweat beaded on his upper lip and brow. All very realistic, with the exception of the beard, which referees never wear. But the notable thing, the thing that for me made it a remarkable painting rather than the poppy piece of kitsch it was very close to being, was the subtle but radical doubt that could be read in the referee's face. Very vague, very nuanced, but the signs were there. The disbelief tugging gently at the corners of the mouth, the glint of incomprehension in the eyes, the shadow of perplexity furrowing the brow, slight unto vanishing. The effect of these touches was impressed on me more and more over time, so much so that I have become convinced that rather than portraying the referee straightforwardly in the act of raising whistle to lips to blow the play dead, the painting was in fact an attempt, masterfully executed, to portray the referee not merely in the act of carrying out his judicial offices, but in the very instant of dawning doubt: When the doubt lays hold of him, clouds the certainty of his judgment, and puts the brake on the whistle's passage from hip to lip. The set of his shoulder and triceps, I was convinced, betrayed a lifting motion in a state of arrest. Supposing that the portrait were excerpted from a live sequence, from a television freeze frame, this was the one, the one freighted with the cargo of pathos and humanity that make the vessels that carry them worthy of artistic study. A portrait based on the preceding or subsequent frames, I liked to think, would have shown nothing but a man going through what was ultimately a banal and bureaucratic motion.

Dean looked at us from under the painting. "So. Now that Kamill is no longer a flight risk we can get down to it. The question is what we should do with him. Many of us have some idea of what we think should be done, but in order to proceed as a collective we have to discuss the options. What are they?"

"We could turn him in, of course." It was Nelson. I noticed he had a pocket square deftly folded into an Astaire. A large bottle of home-brewed beer occupied the oaken expanse in front of him.

"Yes, most obviously," said Dean. "We could turn him in. What arguments can you offer in favor?"

Nelson drew briefly on the bottle before putting it down with a chuckle. "What arguments do I offer? None. What arguments could I offer in favor of the conventional course of action? First of all, that it's conventional. Hell, I think it's required by John S. Law. It would be the low-energy alternative that may or may not tend toward our preservation. And hey, by the way, you guys should feel free to knock back some of this porter. It's a Tadcaster, the offspring of the pairing between me and a miracle. There you go, Jameson. Go right ahead." Jameson's spindly hand trembled as he reached for the bottle. Ever true to form, he was also muttering something to himself. "Then again," he continued, "getting John S. Law involved might be the seed of our undoing."

"Explain," said Dean. "I mean, I think we all have some idea of what you mean. But tell us what you've got in mind. For completeness' sake."

Nelson's expression embraced incomprehension, agitation and good humor in the span of a second, settling on the latter as he began laying the groundwork of our debate. "You know," he said, "it's pretty black and white. Mr. John S. has it in for us and will not squander this delightful opportunity to tar us, hound us, disband us, and jail us if they can. John S. Media, too. Can't you see the headlines before your eyes? Hippie House Gang Rapes, Disfigures Woman. Or the articles in the news magazines? Dark Deeds: The Terrible Truth behind the Throop Street Commune. And let's not forget the nightly news Breaking News: House of Anti-American Subversives Raided. Film at 11. You get the point. It'll be a fucking feeding frenzy. If we turn Kamill in, our house might just be the springboard that launches the next parasite DA and his bevy of adoring John S. Media hacks to national prominence. If we're really serious about turning him in, we might as well just disband now and scatter ourselves to the four winds. I think you all know as well as I do that Johnny S. will not be satisfied by serving justice only to Kamill, whatever that means. Justice of the torture chamber, more like."

"John S. this, John S. that. Why the S.?" asked Dean.

"S. for shithead. John Shithead Law." 

The explanation earned Nelson looks of appreciation from everyone but Bernal, who remained confused, asking: "But who is this man Law in the first place who you all know his first name but his middle name is news?"

Dean laughed and gave Bernal a kindly slap on the back. "Shit, Bernal. It just means the police, the courts, the prisons, everything. We just wrap it all up in one nice personified package so we can pretend to understand it, to make it less terrible."

"But still terrible enough for me. Yon Low," said Bernal, rolling the words off his Mexican tongue. "Yon Sheethead Low."

"That's right." It was Jameson, whose words had a liaised, slurrid quality. "He's a huge man in big black shitkicking boots and eyes like dead coals that feel no mercy. He's coming straight for us, too. And here we are talking about coming to him, about making his job easier. Like we were running late to an appointment with our own destruction. As if we were ticketholders to that event, and the staging of our destruction held some aesthetic pleasure. But guess what? Once you become ensnared in the Law, there is no turning back. Ever. The slightest encounter with it will suffice to destroy you, and you cannot perish twice. Say," he said, turning to face Nelson with a jagged, lacerating smile, "you got any more of this good working-class stuff?"

"Sure, buddy. You know where I keep it. Help yourself. And hey, Bernal, he's right on the money about John S. Law. He's a huge white man in black boots with eyes like dead coals who feels no pain and knows no love and will never heed your orison and will never die. And if we turn in Kamill...if we engage that machinery, he'll head straight for us and will never rest until he has destroyed us utterly."

"I don't know." It was Natalie. "I mean isn't that a bit too grim? We don't have anything to hide as far as I can tell--" [here she looked askance at Jameson] "--so what is to prevent the police and the courts from just doing their jobs and putting away Kamill so all of us can move on? [[deriving enjoyment from various forms of torture is an unwritten part of all the state's employment functions]] And what the hell is the alternative anyway?"

"That's a good question," said Dean, "and I'm glad you asked it. But let's just finish talking about the conventional approach before we get to it. We need to be thorough. This is important--and we need to be thorough. Who among you believes that remanding this matter to the police would necessarily destroy our household, and even our lives?"

Everyone but Natalie ventured a hand into that charged air, with Dean abstaining. "That's a majority," he said, "even if you include those not present. So there's that. But really that is the least of what we should be discussing now. It's secondary, and it's selfish. What we should be discussing here is how best to serve justice, specifically with respect to Kamill and Vanessa. It's about them, not about us."

"But it's the law that if you harbor a--" It was Natalie again, but Dean cut her off: "And this sure as shit isn't about the law. I think all of us here recognize the existence of universal ideals of justice and truth. I also think, very seriously, that we ourselves are more capable of serving those ideals than the courts. I would argue that in a society such as ours, whose structure is predicated on oppression, exploitation, and torture, the state is incapable of dispensing justice, and is doomed instead to eternal travesty, inscribed into the mangled bodies of its victims as the charnel house courts forever conduct their obscene carnival. But all of this deserves a lot of groundwork, a lot of democratic discussion, and I shouldn't make the mistake of saying that anything is self-evident, no matter how much I believe it. In fact, I think we should all be deeply suspicious of there being some fishy business afoot whenever anyone uses language like that, whenever things are made to seem 'self-evident' or when they 'speak for themselves' or when things are 'naturally' the way that the speaker sees them and none other. No, I will not sit here and hold forth in the service of lies. We need to talk about whether justice would be served if we turned Kamill in. And it is not enough to raise your hands and say yes or no or maybe. We need to talk about what justice is and whether this course of action is commensurate with our conception of it. So here is what I propose. That we take a moment to run a thought experiment. How would we conceive of justice for Kamill, and by extension for for Vanessa, in a vacuum? I mean if we were not surrounded on all sides by this justice machine that churns out crimes and investigations and verdicts and sentences. In other words, what do we believe Kamill deserves, and what are the chances that he would get that from the courts and the jails? Can we agree to ponder this for a moment?"

A ripple of affirmative nods and murmurs stirred the room. I poured myself a glass of Nelson's porter

Update, with apologies and a credo

Pardon, again, the unforgivable interruption in transmission. I have been a bit overwhelmed of late with the living of life to engage with it overmuch in the mediate-contemplative mode, at least in the sub-mode thereof that finds public expression--given that "public" these days can be taken to mean micro-dissemination, from one mind to the next, as it were. I only have 45 minutes or so to write this post, since my lady and I will soon be leaving for the AC/DC concert being held tonight in Athens' Olympic Stadium, so I think that it will take the form of vignette, with the occasional aphorism  or epigram thrown in for spice, rather than the Platonic ideal of the 5 to 7 paragraph exercise in verbal onanism I know I should aspire to.

It's shaping up nicely for me over on the Lesbian isle. I would say that my domestic transquillity is now an accomplished fact. We cook or bake every day, be it pies, stews, roasts, pizzas, elaborate salads, and so on, asymptotically to the limits of culinary experience.  And, as my scribbles have indicated, I have also reinvented myself as a brewer. My first batch was not so hot (too watery), but the second batch, a dark, hoppy ale, is on its way to solid drinkability. I hope one day to become one of these hyphenated brewers you hear so much about. Like Sam Adams, the man they call the Brewer-Patriot. Or John McCain's wife, who has profited so handsomely off the Budweiser distribution concession that she has earned the title, at least in my book, of Brewess-Parasite. But I, who cannot aspire to anything so lofty as patriotism or parasitism--abstracting for a moment from the fact that in our corroded national reality, these two noble conditions are nearly one and the same--would settle for a more junior hyphenated title. Something like Brewer-Translator, Brewer-Scribbler, or Brewer-Mensch. Suggestions are welcome, so long as they originate not in the fingertips of patriots or parasites.

Also doing a fair bit of running along the high cliffside road overlooking the sea to the west of town (Plomari, in case you're interested in Google-Earthing it, or in stopping by: Just ask for the American living with the teacher). There's a lot of relief on the run, a lot of horsepower required. Some days are hell, others a triumph.

So far I've only made it into the sea once, but the beauty of the swim merits canonization in the hallowed annals of this url. On Sunday we had the idea to sleep on a beach under the stars. Acting on the idea, we drove to a little spit of land in the SW corner of our section of the island that we had zeroed in on almost at random. We parked our car about 1 km away from the path down to the beach in order to mislead putative miscreants, then strapped on our boots and went for it. First down a pebbly trail, then over surf boulders and briny pools until we came within view of what looked like an idyllic little postage-stamp sized beach not more than 150 yards away. Those 150 yards, of course, were made up of impassable boulders and open water. To get there we were forced to retrace steps, scramble up a decaying cliffside, and then squirm along the interstice between an apparantly abandoned naval radar station and the lip of the crumbling scree slope overlooking the boulders that had blocked our way. The radar station may have been abandoned by the technicians and cadets who once managed it, but the barbed wire was still faithfully performing its repellant service. Our steps quite literally were a dance through its tangled skein. After braving this and some thick, thorny thickets for a few hundreds of yards, there was a little gully leading down to the beach. I cut some gnarled sprigs of wild thyme as we clambered down. The beach was lovely, lovely, full of round stones and driftwood and little shell fragments. The only human befoulment there was sea wrack, some of it of the Egyptian variety, floated up on currents for many hundreds of miles. And ah! the swim: As soon as we'd set our things down, we swam, floating on the bracing current as the setting sun gilded the little reefs of water marching all the way to the horizon. We managed about 15 minutes in the water, which is not quite comfortable so early in the season.

Back on the beach, I used my sandal to level a patch of ground hard by a boulder for our sleeping site, then scrambled back up the hill to look for firewood beyond what the tides had brought. I was duly rewarded by an olive tree, long dead and uprooted, which I hauled on for dear life to negotiate over the hump, down the slope, across the stones. We had a fire, a meal, ad hoc sangria, gazed up at the stars, and slept deeply.

Today in Athens we took care of an item that has been fouling my to do list with its incompletion for far too long: We headed to a neighborhood of Pakistani immigrants and purchased spices in bulk. Now we will be able to provide the coriander and garam masala and whatever else the recipes I want to cook call for.

Penultimately: I continue or at least have resumed writing at a rate that I fancy satisfies the temporal minimum if one is to refer to oneself as a writer. It is going swimmingly, all things considered, and I should soon have an update on the Justice story. It is a story with a point, obviously, and I hope that at least some of my few readers will have the patience and the Quixoticness of spirit to consider the point, if not to translate it into our corroded reality--that pesky son of a bitch is always rearing his behorned head--for that would be to sacrifice the limited parcel of freedom granted you by the masters and minions of the state.

Finally: Many of you will have wondered if it is the case that my politics have taken a definitive turn toward radicalism over the past year. Let me assure you that it is so. I consider it shameful to shirk the truth, of which there is only one, and am facing it full-on and full-up, like a man. The truth, of course, is a metastasizing landscape of bleakest horrors. Capitalist and military elites are experiencing what can only be described as an orgiastic consolidation of their power over the rest of us. The Pentagon and its legions of citizen accomplices (does that include you? i know it includes me, inasmuch as I pay taxes to the militarist state, and oh how I am paying) are carrying off acts of unfathomable evil in broad daylight without so much as a whiff of protest from the groveling media or our idiot citizenry. Truth is avoided like the plague. "Progress" and "hope" have been bled of all meaning by the master class of parasites, and stand there as withered husks for the untutored masses to worship as evil proceeds unabated. The theoretical foundations for martial law--yes, my friends, for dictatorship--are all right there, written into the law. And who will fight for their rights? War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war in Pakistan: Who will stand up and fight for what is right? War on the laboring class at home, war on the unwashed masses with the grave misfortune of requiring medical care in America while not being a part of the ruling class, and, portentiously, complete and utter war on consciousness and on the human soul itself by the gibbering legions of intellectual and media mercenaries. Who will stand up for what is right? Who?

And a taste...

...ever so slight, of what is to come.

Behind Dean at the head of the table was a large fireplace that we used to heat that wing of the house in the winter. Above the high pedimented mantel hung a large painting of a football referee done entirely in shades of gray that Natalie had bought for Nelson at and art exhibit put on earlier that year at the university's arts faculty. The stripe-clad man it portrayed filled almost the entire canvas. In it, he was frozen in the act of raising his whistle--the symbol of his authority--from his hip to his lip, presumably to blow dead a play that we could not see. The referee's face--I remember it well--was turned slightly to the left, and there was sweat beaded on his upper lip and brow. All very realistic, with the exception of the beard, which referees never wear. But the notable thing, the thing that for me made it a remarkable painting rather than the poppy piece of kitsch it was very close to being, was the subtle but radical doubt that could be read in the referee's face. Very vague, very nuanced, but the signs were there. The disbelief tugging gently at the corners of the mouth, the glint of incomprehension in the eyes, the shadow of perplexity furrowing the brow, slight unto vanishing. The effect of these touches was impressed on me more and more over time, so much so that I have become convinced that rather than portraying the referee straightforwardly in the act of raising whistle to lips to blow the play dead, the painting was in fact an attempt, masterfully executed, to portray the referee not merely in the act of carrying out his judicial offices, but in the very instant of dawning doubt: When the doubt lays hold of him, clouds the certainty of his judgment, and puts the brake on the whistle's passage from hip to lip. The set of his shoulder and triceps, I was convinced, betrayed a lifting motion in a state of arrest. Supposing that the portrait were excerpted from a live sequence, from a television freeze frame, this was the one, the one freighted with the cargo of pathos and humanity that make the vessels that carry them worthy of artistic study. A portrait based on the preceding or subsequent frames, I liked to think, would have shown nothing but a man going through what was ultimately a banal and bureaucratic motion.

Justice, Subsection 7.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 6.0)

If I'm not confusing my years here, Nelson had actually just helped us weather a predatory audit fired across our bow by the city by befriending the auditor and discussing with him the relative merits of the various corporate accounting methods in use in those years. It was a contrivance that was, shall we say, completely natural to him. Oddly enough, I think it was also Nelson's huge love for the game of football that helped us survive as a household for as long as we did. Barring cranial trauma or insanity, after all, there is no such thing as a complete divorce from the prevalent culture. And without Nelson's superficial allegiances to the trappings of that culture, which included his almost worshipful regard for the pigskin, I tend to think we would have collapsed in on ourselves well before being undone by the events I'm about to unfold.

"Every Sunday during the fall he would make a great production of cooking burgers or ribs or a chili, usually very well, holding forth as he did so about the similarity of the game at hand to various great historical campaigns that only he knew anything about. He equated the best NFL coaches with the generals of those campaigns. Noll was the great Byzantine Belisarius, Madden was like Patton, and he prized Landry as a Hannibal or a Scipio Africanus, depending on his mood and the matchup. And if Nelson was thorough about anything, it was about football Sundays. Without fail, halftime would feature a betting pool and a little scrimmage between us and some of the kids from the neighborhood, kids who'd drifted in on the wafting odor of burgers. Nelson would sometimes even run a book handicapping the scrimmage on the side, and tempers had a tendency to flare. 

"Nelson also brewed beer, and he liked using football Sundays as an occasion to pilot new varieties. He actually saved out house quite a bit of money how much brew the nine of us could put away all told. He did a lot of research into the brewing, flavoring some of the recipes with spices and fruits from our garden, and was able to delight us with anecdotes about which Belgian abbey or German keller his flavor-of-the-month had made its first appearance in. But he had problems with sanitation, as sanitation requires discipline. Every second batch or so verged on being undrinkable, making the games a bleaker affair than they would have been with the proper lubricant.

"But still. Football brought us together. Together on the strength of paradox. The rest of us may not have given much of a shit about the game, but all of us were enthusiasts of enthusiasm. And of course beer. Truth be told, of all of us in that house, Nelson may have been the one with the most nuanced and expansive revolutionary urges, notwithstanding the conventional, even reactionary wrapper they came in. When he wasn't talking about football or military campaigns or other esoterica you might have heard him waxing poetic about 'going back to Plymouth' and 'sundering the original link in the chain of parasitism'.

"Nelson also had a relationship with the final person who was part of our group at the time, Natalie. If you want to call it a relationship, that is. As far as he was concerned, I think it was little more than an arrangement of sexual convenience. Whereas for Natalie Nelson was the latest link in the long chain of disappointments she had come to expect from and even unconsciously cause in her relations with men. She was a little bit older, around 35 or so, and her background was one of flight. She'd been brought up conventionally, had gone to college conventionally, married a conventional man and embarked on a conventional life. But she had not prepared herself for the dark side of convention, and her husband's thoroughly conventional infidelities had cracked her up and sent her running. Nobody knew for sure, but the consensus was that she had abandoned a child as well. To abbreviate a long story, and one that nobody knows anymore anyway, after a year of peregrinating between friends' houses and a variety of the pseudo-cults that were so much in vogue among the most despicably cretinous faction of our generation in those days, she ended up with us, and we took her in, mostly out of pity and for lack of anything better to do, to be more honest. Not that Natalie was utterly a wandering victim. She was also an artist. Small things mostly: Socks, bracelets, drawings made on 3x5" note cards or even in the margins of playing cards, designs on coffee mugs, small things, indices of her living and her suffering--but things nevertheless, pretty things. 

"If she expected from Nelson nothing other but disappointment, he did not disappoint her. Relationships are mathematical creatures, they must balance. It's not that he treated her badly, exactly. Just that he couldn't be bothered, and was perfectly happy to let the relationship languish at the emotional level of the first date while Natalie's prophesy slouched toward its fulfillment.

"And so a meeting was called to decide what was to be done. We met in the reading room where some of us had heard the drunken Colonel pontificate on dogdom and insult us earlier in the evening. I remember the atmosphere being faintly doggen as we filed in. We sat down, organizing ourselves by instinct in columns that stretched down either side of the table from Dean at its head. Nelson's face was grinning incongruously at the top of his serious suit as he served beer from a large tumbler. What was to be done? The eternal question. But in order to do, we had to think and to talk.

"Dean began. 'We are in crisis,' he said. 'And we must find our way forward. What happened tonight has changed Vanessa's life forever. It was a horrible crime that cannot be undone. It will also come to change Kamill's life forever, as well as the future course of our shared living experiment. The essential thing to know and to recognize at this point, however, is that we are still in control of the form those changes will take, as we have not submitted this case for arbitration by the state.

"'At this point we can proceed along any one of several paths, each with very different consequences for Kamill and for the group. Each of you surely has a sense for what these paths are and what they entail. First you have the con--

Crime

"Objectively, the American public is much more responsible for the crimes committed in its name than were the people of Germany for the horrors of the Third Reich. We have far more knowledge, and far greater freedom and opportunity to stop our government's criminal behavior." 

-James Brooks, Online Journal, 2007

Justice, Subsection 6.0

(Continued from Subsection 5.0)

The point is that Jameson, despite his erratic and irresponsible behavior, was an important and valued member of the household. We had his inspiration to thank for more than one of the customs that made living among us such a pleasure, and it was by the offices of some of his more restrained propagandistic prose that we were able to disabuse Trivingdale's head honchos of any notions they might have had of our perfidy or the threat we posed to their way of life. The fact was that Jameson was a pleasure to be around when he was coherent. He had come, we supposed, from a very cultured background, one from which he had been spilled by some tragic rupture we never managed to learn anything about. We knew he had grown up privileged somewhere in Virginia and that, at 18, he had moved as far away from home as possible to earn a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso. And it was in those scorched borderlands that he developed his radically solipsist worldview--this was a man who went through the tired trope of taking us for figments, more than once--as well as his taste for running crazy on hallucinogens. When shaken by some particularly violent affront to his body and the commonsensical proscriptions for its care he'd confessed to nearly having lost his life while wandering the bone-littered gullies and draws just beyond the city limit. That and precious little more was what we knew.

"He wasn't one for the ladies, at least not in the raunchy and obsessive way that men of 25 tend to be, or if he was he managed to conduct his business elsewhere, in Chinatown, under cloak of night, sub rosa. He wasn't overly close to any of the other guys in the house either. That was Jameson. He was close to Agatha, actually, but whatever they had between them was inscrutable, and probably chaste. They spent a great deal of time together when Jameson wasn't on one of his triploafs--sounds like a kind of turd, doesn't it--time that they seemed to pass mostly in silence. Call it a spiritual connection. Anyhow--onto Agatha.

"You have time, right? I'm not boring you going on like this am I?"

I told my interlocutor that as an unemployed and middle-aged man whose wife and children avowedly thought very little of him, I had nothing but time on my hands and would be please to stay at the bar and hear him out until closing. Besides, I said, it was only eight o'clock. We ordered another drink and observed a solemn toast before he went on.

"Agatha, ah--what is this shit? Are you Mickey Finning my drink with Early Times again, barman? But Agatha. Agatha. Like I said, she was Canadian. From some maritime province. I'd say she was pretty, but compared to Vanessa she was as plain as the nose on your face. She also preferred drab drapes of clothing and little to no hair care, prefiguring all the low-effort girls you see running around these days. I even half suspected that she applied makeup in reverse, so to speak, in an effort to plane out her features altogether. But she was a hell of a cook. Enthusiastic, bold, tireless. You could count the days of the week by the new recipes she thought up. Jameson always said the most subversive thing about our household was the way we ate--never a processed ingredient, never a single piece of produced trucked across state lines. I don't know how she managed. I mean this was in the dead years, after the death of farming and before food's resurrection as a luxury for the incredible hordes of faggots who pay out the nose for it. Agatha also managed to used the needs of the kitchen to direct Vanessa's behavior and generally defuse tension whenever her coquetry threatened to destabilize the goodwill that prevailed among the men of the house. I'm not sure if it was deliberately or by instinct, but it worked out quite well on the ground. After a meeting or activity in which attention had generally shifted onto Vanessa to the detriment of domestic harmony, there would always be something Agatha needed done in the garden in order to prevent the meal she was cooking from derailing into a catastrophe: A new planting, a new clipping, always snipped, shorn or peeled just so. As if by silent accord, Vanessa always allowed herself to be sluiced off, and the pressure was relieved. A woman is at her most dangerous when unchecked by duty and allegiance to other women, and Agatha recognized this better than anyone. I remember once Uncle Theo was over with an attorney friend of his who took a shine to Vanessa and started asking her all kinds of questions about why she preferred to live in a hippie encampment, as he put it, when she could easily affiliate herself with a man of means, a man of substance, a man of class, in his word, and live well with him. Vanessa, far from being put off, entertained his queries with a simpering charm, delighting in the hackles she felt rising on the necks of the other men around her. Kamill, who'd had his eye on Vanessa but had yet to make any definitive moves, was just about to get into it with the man when Agatha wheeled about from her position at the stove and sent Vanessa into the garden with a decisive thrust from her ladle. Get me a little bit of everything, she'd said. And take your time. "Agatha's family owned an amazing summer place on the Nova Scotia coast. I forget exactly where, but it involved a long ferry passage and a great deal of driving. We used to go as often as we could. It was a cabin more or less wedged into the side of a cliff overlooking the wide ocean seething below. It was accessible only by foot, using a path I think even goats would have had trouble negotiating. The ocean view was framed by a tiny garden grafted with great care onto two or three terraces that communicated by ladders, each no larger than a jail cell. One of those projects whose result is far outweighed by the ponderous body of effort that went into achieving it, and which for me carry a great wisdom. A futile wisdom, but a great one in spite or even because of the futility. The last terrace was lined by a low rock wall, but it wasn't enough to shore you up in case of a blunder, and a single misstep would assure you a dashing to death on the boulders wreathed faintly in spume nearly 500 feet below. There was no electricity. Coal and wood could be lowered from above using a bucket and pulley system, but the rope didn't have a catch and you had to be very careful. I'm telling you--" my interlocutor's eye was welling with sentiment "--there was nothing like it. Bernal and I used to stand on the bottom terrace throwing rocks and clods down onto the breakers and the boulders to see who could hit what first, navigating our projectiles through those storied sea buffets as we drank beer out of green or gray or blue cans to suit our mood. There's a lot to the color of a beer can, my friend. Most of the time the spray made it impossible to see where the rocks had hit, meaning that we would have debates. Of course Bernal was from Mexico, where they don't have much of a throwing or aiming culture, so if he hit what he was aiming for it was strictly by chance, which, as I often argued, invalidated the result. In such cases, in common with police shootings, it is the intent that counts, even the probably intent, liberally interpreted.

"And then there were the nights. Nights poured into the eye from a pure molten blackness textured by sound. Often I'd lay awake half the night listening. The cabin's site on the cliff, not just on the cliff but in it, halfway down and in it, meant that when the wind was blowing to sea there would be nothing to hear at all but our own snores and shifts. But when the wind turned, our little niche in the cliff became an amphitheater, amplifying every burble and churn of water on rock until I felt compelled to get up hold my light out into the nothingness to make sure we weren't sliding into the sea or succumbing to a tidal wave. Sometimes as I stood there a great ship's horn would bellow somewhere out at sea and play along the cliff, rebounding and redounding until I thought it might finally shake the cabin loose from its moorings after all. Or me. To my knees. But really it was the times of seaward wind and total silence that scared me the most, especially if the night was moonless. And fragranceless. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing, but knowing full well that my feet had but poor purchase halfway up a towering granite cliff overlooking the cold and endless waters, not to mention that awareness of the pitiless heavens yawning above and beyond that cloud blanket, in all their boundlessness--that is a feeling, my friend. Not a comfortable one, but a vital one.

"I think we need constant evidence of the world and our place in it to know not only where we stand, but even for reassurance in the very basic matter of where we begin, where we end as the concepts of space and time tumble around and play havoc on our minds. Do you see what I mean? Imagine--on a night like that, to be a mote dissolved in the infinitude of the universe and without any sound to give it texture so that the world shrinks down to you or you expand to fit the whole of the world--such nothingness is too much to bear, don't you think?"

I said I thought I understood what he was getting at and that it reminded me of the related sensation of swimming out to sea, into blue water, and then turning about and looking up at the sky and wondering what would the sensation be like, and how long would it last, if the world were to explode.

"Precisely. So that was Agatha. I guess I knew more about her little hideaway than I did about her. That leaves two more of the members of the household. Nelson and Natalie. How to give you an idea of Nelson? Unlike the rest of us, Nelson never went to college. He also knew more about everything than the rest of us combined. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that while he did know more than the rest of us combined about almost anything, he gave the impression of being a repository of knowledge without equal since the time of J.S. Mill--not because he faked it, but because of the breathtaking pace of his appetite for the reiteration and citation of knowledge. Without ever having taken a college course, and also without adopting the annoying autodidact's habit of always lugging around books--in fact, I never once remember seeing him read one, it must have been something he did in his room, under cloak of night, sub rosa. Maybe even in Chinatown. Nelson knew everything about ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the Empire, Islam, the Mongols, Scholasticism, the Monophysite heresy, the dialectic of enlightenment, the role of the Blackstone River Valley in the American industrial revolution, the internal combustion engine, western states' water policy, the evolution of the game of football and the origins of the revolutionary forward pass, the various cuts of men's suits through the decades and centuries, the shadowy dealings and moral failings of an wide array of nationally prominent politicians, the essential anatomical measurements, both estimated and confirmed, of the leading actresses of the day, the morphology of beer brewing on the eastern seaboard, the Soviets' 5-year plans down to their excruciating details, etc., etc. He had a remarkable motley mind. But if you asked him to do something for you, and here's the catch, somehow it would find its way to a crack in the side or bottom of that same mind and drain right out.

"His political leanings were probably more puritan-libertarian than hippie, so much so that I often wondered what the fuck he was doing with us. To see him--he always used to wear these suits that he'd lint-roll in the mornings--he was the type of guy you might cast as a policy aide in the Nixon administration or as a smooth-talking adman. And he could have been those things if he'd wanted to. But he didn't seem to want anything. Was that a problem? I don't know. He constantly spouted off ideas for pranks we could pull on the city council or the school board or some of the war-profiteering executives who lived in Trivingdale. He had his eye on various pieces of land we could buy and improve in the forests of western New England and detailed plans for what crops and crafts to raise and ply, but whatever his surfeit of brainpower and inventiveness and rhetoric, it was offset by his profound lack of elbow grease and staying power when push came to shove. Even of the mental kind. Nelson generated his share of friction too, of course. He was intolerant of anything less than the keenest intelligence and had a hard time suppressing his disdain for mediocre minds, especially when talking to women. Provoked, Vanessa once accused him of being a stooge for the FBI and tried to lead a purge to have him kicked out of the household. I think he was on a kind of unofficial probation in the household when the shit hit the fan. But in the end he was one of us, if for no other reason than that he wanted nothing more than to be what he was, and over the year or two that he spent with us he managed to develop enough tact at least to get by and take the roughest edges out of the friction he caused. He was also quite useful to us as a proxy in whatever dealings we had with the city and the police. He wore a pressed suit at all times, he spoke in the language of the hereditary elite, and knew how to navigate his way around bureaucracies almost by instinct. Combined with Uncle Ted's status and influence, Nelson's rapport with power made us feel relatively safe in our overall defiance of it.

Justice, Subsection 5.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 4.0)

He'd had a lot to drink by now, but if anything he seemed more coherent than when I'd first asked the old fellow what he thought. For each engine a lubricant. My ear had also had the time needed to adjust to his language, his way of telling things. Listening to him spin his tale was much like reading a book, perhaps a great book, and one written in a distinctive style. Bewilderment yields to fascination after a suitable latitude of pages.

"Let me give you an example. One of many.One day not long before the time I'm talking about a few of us were working outside, painting the eaves. Bernal was up on the roof trying to wrap his arm down around the eave to get at a spot that couldn't easily be reached from the ladder because of how far the eaves jutted from the frame. Vanessa was standing on the lawn below, not paying much attention. The ladder, heavy and wooden, was resting on a gutter right next to Bernal. Suddenly he lost his balance. Flailing for purchase, he managed to knock the ladder loose. It bellied out and hung in the air for a long moment before swinging through its balancing point and crashing toward the ground with a low sigh. I was looking on in a state of suspended animation, unable to open my mouth in warning. Not so Kamill. From where he stood some 10 yards away, he lurched into an improbable dead run, straight for the oblivious Vanessa. He reached her just before the ladder would have made impact, almost certainly staving in her skull and killing her where she stood. But what was truly remarkable was the way her tackled her. I swear it was almost gentle. God knows what lightning calculations and calibrations went into it, but when his body met hers it was as if pulled up or staggered his impact by some configuration of his hands and shoulders, cushioning it, mitigating it, so that the overall effect was not one of headlong tackling but of an elegant gymnastic sequence. The ladder must have missed Kamill's own skull by a fraction of an inch. Vanessa yelped and started protesting in his embrace. He hadn't even knocked the wind out of her. Shit.

"Anyway. There I was in bed with Vanessa. By that point I had inspected the equipment, lubricated the moving parts and primed the pump. She was laughing, giggling, gasping. I think she hardly knew what she was doing. I was just getting ready to hit paydirt when there came a rattling at the door. Tentative at first, then rising until it had become one hell of a rattling, crescendoing to the very gong of doom as the rattler understood what was transpiring on the other side of that door. Vanessa cried out as I collapsed into her. Then there was a muffled what the hell?, followed by a rat-a-tat-clattering, then a loud crash. There stood Kamill.

"Get off her, you vermin. I didn't need to be told twice. I rolled off and scampered into a corner, modestly trying to figleaf my flagging manhood with my hand. Kamill approached me, all 250 pounds of him. His black eyes were glassy and unthinking, and were rimmed in the red of much drink. I put up my hands in paltry defense, and he called me a vermin again. Then he kicked them out of the way, and it was only a second more before I winked into a world of morphine grays, a realm of knotted tautologies that witnessed none of the black and white of what came after. Do you see this mark on my face?

"I remember waking up from that so suddenly accomplished gray twilight very well, even though it was nearly a biblical generation ago. The first thing I became aware of was the weight of my body, as if I had undergone some kind of compression and were the prey of dark and ponderous forces thitherto unknown. Then there was a slow dawning of consciousness, a slow surfacing as if through stacked currents of gray water. From off-night through cobalt and charcoal to gunmetal, from gunmetal to slate and graphite and then athletic shirt gray, and finally through to the off-white filter through which I perceived the world when I came through--a world that for us had changed unalterably.

"Bernal was at my side when I came to, his face clouded by baleful concern. He asked me how I felt. I asked what had happened to Vanessa. He hesitated. I told him to let me have it. Vanessa was disfigured. What did he mean disfigured? Kamill had ruined her face. As Bernal explained, he has systematically beaten the beauty out of her until it was lost without hope of remedy.

"I asked why no one had been able to stop him. It was too late by the time we got up there, Ben, he said. We did prevent him from killing her, which he probably would have done. None of us were spared injury. Including you, it seems. It was then that I noticed that Bernal was speaking through a clenched and possibly broken jaw. We were only able to overpower him by all swarming him at once and hanging off him like stones until he fell to the floor.

"Jesus, I said. Where are they now? What's happening? I thought of the police and felt sick. I was sick. I vomited a thin green bile streaked with blood onto the sheet. Nice coloration. Jameson and Agatha drove Vanessa up to Montreal to protect the group, Ben. She's in the hospital now. She insisted, Ben. She wasn't going to die in the car, and she refused to be treated here. All right, I said. So what about Kamill? We're keeping him under guard while we decide what to do. I can't believe he was capable of that."

I looked at my withered old interlocutor. I thought I could see a slight unevenness in his face underneath the thatch of beard now that he'd mentioned it. "You mean you didn't call the cops?" I said.

His cornflower eyes were frank and clear as he answered. "No, friend. We didn't. And that's what this story is about."

Now I was interested. "So what did they do?"

"A meeting was called that night to determine exactly that. Dean had suggested, following Vanessa's lead, that we might be able to handle the matter internally."

I wondered what could possibly be meant by handling matters internally. "Who was Dean?"

"A good question, my friend, and one that makes me glad to have an attentive listener. Dean was our unacknowledged leader. I mean we were supposed to be anti-hierarchical. Ah, Dean. I'll tell you about him. He grew up in a working class neighborhood in or around Boston. South Boston or Dorchester or Roxbury or something like that. He went to Catholic high school and was the star of everything. He was the captain of the football team and the debate team, and I think he was very comfortable in his skin as a whole and strong person from a young age. A whole man in an age of fragmentary destinies. Which led to big problems for him every step of the way. His father was a mean, no-good alcoholic who was habitually out of work and who habitually took it out on his family. The kind of mean bastard who lards his abuse with authoritarian morality. Being both strong and compassionate, Dean grew to adopt a contempt for authority bordering on virulence. Many years later I heard a story about how once after his father had put his mother in the hospital, Dean responded by nearly putting his father under ground. Convalescing in the same ward, husband and wife conspired and cooked up a whopper about a hit and run driver, and the affair was swept under the rug.

"Dean went to Harvard on a football scholarship, but it did not take him long to defect and immerse himself in the antiwar movement and a slew of other activist activities taking aim at the establishment. He was forced to drop out after being confronted by evidence that he had broken into the endowment office, but not before exposing some of the university's shadiest investments in South Africa and Zaire. As a corollary to being kicked out of school, he was given the boot from his own home. Which kicked off his apprenticeship to the art of drifting. He did not self-destruct. He called it chasing the breath of destiny. He cut timber in Maine, worked in the cod fishery on the Grand Banks, shuttled pot between Quebec and Maine, even drove a student shuttle on the campus of a pedigree farm in the New England backwoods. Dean ended up one of us by chance. Like the rest of us, come to think of it. Some of us, I can't remember exactly who since the turnover among us (to use a vulgar word) was high and anyway it was so long ago, but some of us went blueberry picking late one summer, or at least to lessen its impact on Uncle Theo's wallet. And that's where we met him. Tall, confident, easy, apparently wanting for nothing--but needing community and meaning every bit as much as the rest of us. We talked as we picked our way through the patches, and later over blueberry-flavored beers. He fell in with us easily. We held no confab to vet him the way we usually did with folks who wanted to come on board. 

"And it wasn't more than a couple of weeks until he became our de facto spiritual and practical leader, unacknowledged like I said, since none of us would have been comfortable with an overt structure, least of all he. Let me put it this way: Everything about him exuded a quiet confidence that the rest of us found irresistible. His face, his bearing, his voice, his ability to simply bypass the existential worries about our way of life that constantly gnawed at the margins of the social experiment for the rest of us, who were unable to shed out bourgeois neuroses, and whose very traversing of those norms indexed our beholdenness to them. He had it, in short. And when you ally this with his fanatical contempt for authority and institutions, I think you will see why things took the course they did.

"And so a meeting was called. We held it toward midnight after Jameson had gotten back from the drive up to Montreal in Theo's 1960 Ford Country Squire. Agatha had stayed behind to be Vanessa's eyes and ears as the doctors tried to reconstruct her face. Agatha was Canadian and educated and was able to sluice Vanessa's case through the medical system with a minimum of friction, especially the kind to do with contacting the authorities on our side of the border.

"But before I can go on I'm going to have to run through a list of those present. I'll start with Jameson. Jameson Andrews was his full, august name. He was our troubled genius. Genius is always debatable, of course. There was no question that he was troubled, on the other hand. He was the type of kid who if he'd grown up 30 years later they would have had him hopped up on speed from the time he was five. But those were different times, and he was free to be his own pill-pusher. He was 25 or so at the time, and it was my impression that he was constantly on the verge of being unraveled by the stern regimen he pounded his system with day in and day out. Shaky Jay, I used to call him. I know what people used to say about those days, and I know you know enough to take most things people say with a grain of salt, but I shit you not when I tell you that this guy"--my interlocutor's face had been overcome by a vicious grin--"that this guy would start his morning off with a bit of wake and bake and would then proceed, after a breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast, he was very scrupulous about this, to drop a tab or two or even three of acid by noon. At which point he would pledge himself to hours on end of a kind of rumbling, stumbling lunatic mysticism. He called it triploafing, and he did it like four times a week.

"He would read, I don't know how, from the eternal greats like Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, Oppenheimer and his disciple Nock, bot neglected, and he'd kind of latch on to a phrase or syllogism or story (have him do this during the course of the deliberations) and then hold on to it all day, just clutching in in his gibbering jaws, stumbling around and muttering it like a koan while his mind worked under it or through it unconsciously, and work through it he must have, for whenever he'd recovered, usually the next day or the one following, he would be able to sit down and pen interesting and even brilliant thoughts or fragments around the interface between the phrasing of the philosopher at hand and the little social experiment we were conducting in the very bosom of the fascist community of Trivingdale. I remember one day in particular not long before the awful incident. I was out on the lawn mowing grass and knocking back a couple cans of Special Export--which is perfect for lawnmowing because the can is green, you know--when around comes Jameson, who looked like he'd just run out of a burning barn. The fucker was drooling.  He started orbiting me, literally orbiting me as I made my rounds up and down with that old mechanical mower, whose handle I'd fitted with a beer holster, and he was mumbling something or other. The orbit started collapsing in on me when I'd made it about halfway across the relatively vast backyard that served as a backdrop for the old colonial. Maybe it was the gravitational pull of the beer. Then, when he got close enough, when he was within range, I caught the phrase he kept muttering again and again, and I remember it very clearly, because when our little solar system had fully imploded, he put a claw on my shoulder and said it to my face: Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo. These three birds of paradise did not sing in the garden of the people, but twittered and preened in the royal grounds and in the golden cages of the bourgeois salons. The feeders they dined on dispensed contempt for the people. Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo. These three birds of paradise...

"Emaciated, wild-eyed, raving: At times like these Jameson reminded me of an old-timey Russian mystic. Maybe Gogol himself. After such acid-fueled perambulatory ravings, ravings in which he savaged whatever morsel torn from the tree of knowledge, Jameson would usually settle into a nook in the kitchen, or into a hollow under the stairs, or down on the floor of the woodshed itself before I knocked it down, and slowly resurrect himself from the nadir of his trip with strong drink. He preferred an unspeakable sour mash called Early Times, God knows why, and then there would be an hour or two on such evenings when he seemed normal, together, himself altogether. Of course those hours were soon gone, and the inebriate wave that spirited him from the trough at trip's end to an animated conviviality would later crest in a giddy or maudlin incoherence in which the koan or anecdote would make a distorted reappearance--Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoy. Three devil's birds singing that they would never die as they dined on the people...--invariably followed by oblivion. I don't know why I'm explaining this to you. You know the type, I think. You still get them here sometimes, at Hanrahan's. The point is that Jameson, despite his erratic and irresponsible behavior, was an important and valued member of the household.

Justice, Subsection 4.0

(Continued from Subsection 3.0)

Observe.

Now the Colonel prepared another drink--much more speedily than the first--and set it in front of the snoozing dog. The dog's spike nose began to twitch, and it was only a matter of seconds before it stood to attention, looking anxiously at its master.

Drink, Brick!

Urbanely and with a certain dignity, the dog submerged the end of its snout in the highball glass and drew it down to the bottom without the slightest trace of a sound. When it was done it withdrew just as delicately, without disturbing the glass in the slightest. It gave a convulsive sneeze before resuming its repose with a look of dreamy satisfaction. Another murmur roped through the room as the Colonel surveyed the crowd brightly.

Any questions? Clarifications?

Bernal spoke: Well, Sir, what about this sense for moral, ah, corruption, that you claim your dog possesses? I think I speak for us all when I say I'd like to know more about it. Maybe see how it works? ¡Que bromista!

The Colonel looked down at him with something like regret in his eyes: Claro, compinche. But I hope you will forbear with me if my demonstration of this dog's capacities for moral sleuthing are conducted somewhat in the manner of a thought experiment, rather than being aired flagrantly where they might give rise to, ah, to some unpleasantness. Surely you would not want a cordial visit from a hound and his modest owner to sow the seeds of strife in your utopian community merely for the sake of an esoteric demonstration?

With all due respect, Sir--it was Vanessa--what exactly do you mean by discord?

That is an excellent question, young lady. And very well phrased. I am always surprised at the latent female rhetorical powers that are finding expression in your, ahem, liberated generation.

Vanessa looked at me and then back at the Colonel, her face suddenly a wall.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

'Another question,' said the Colonel, absently topping off his highball with more Scotch, 'albeit a less incisive one. Therefore let me dignify the first. What you must understand about Lieutenant Brick if you hope to understand anything about him at all is this. In his natural state, that is to say in the state of undepressed perception we refer to as stone cold sobriety, Lieutenant Brick will of his own impetus sniff out the bad apples in any given barrel of people, and identify them publicly.In cases where the moral fiber is particularly threadbare, Lieutenant Brick has even displayed a propensity to attack. There is none of the timorousness of the repressed would-be whistle-blower in this dog. He knows that his sense for rectitude does not err and is not afraid to broadcast it. No ma'am. Which is precisely why I bred Lieutenant Brick to possess utterly ineffectual jaws. No matter how I tried, you see, I have been unable to circumscribe and contain the breed's moral outrage within the bounds of so-called civilized decorum. I have been unable, if you will, to tame its tendency to arrogate to itself the role of judge, bailiff and executioner, when in fact all I wanted was for it to serve in the sleuthing role of a K-9 squad dog that happens to be possessed of enhanced moral perception. Since the breed's blood was so unstinting about occupying the full spectrum of justice's machinery, the best I could do was to enfeeble certain parts of the apparatus even as I kept the nose keen. I have deprived the judge of his booming voice, stripped the bailiff of his ability to drag and pull--not, you will note, by emaciating him, but by hobbling the dickskinners he uses to enforce the will of the court, in this case his jaw--and dulled the executioner's blade.

If you will allow me to shift gears for a moment and deploy a metaphor that should be accessible to those of you with a liberal arts background, and not only to those of you versed in the narrow field of criminology, I think I will be able to bring my exegesis to a satisfactory conclusion.

The man took a long drink, then looked out at us like a fish seen through water. Lieutenant Brick, he said, and whatever breeds his tincture will be used to sire in my genetic laboratory, are specialists--however much we might want them to serve as the general footsoldiers of the coming revolution --is a complex machine with many moving parts. Revolution is a motley enterprise. Just as it requires of its human practitioners thinkers, propagandists, goons, inventors, police, visionaries, spies, intellectual mercenaries, useless wet-behind-the-ears hippies, and specialized cogs of many others types, so too...ah, excuse me.

Here he paused for a sip. Such are the excesses! Eh, that is to say that when we walk these motley paths toward change, toward revolution, we need companions who are also motley, also specialized. Such is the reflection, my listeners, and thus the propagation! How to put this in a way that the, ahem, puerile mind can understand? Despite the apparent variety of its breeding, mankind's conception of his own casting of the dog into its role has hitherto been entirely too far toward the generalist end of the spectrum of differential utility. Chihuahua or no Chihuahua, St. Bernard's breed or no St. Bernard's breed, we have looked to all dogs for their precise and unflagging loyalties, their few wants, their enthusiasms, their faithful reflection of the master's style and substance, the ineffable quantity dubbed cuteness and, less importantly, some token of specialized utility. But--hiccough--that leaves an awful lot of work undone, especially in view of concerted breeding having begun some thousands of years ago. Sometimes, my friends, I feel as if our forefathers were snoozing at the tiller! The problem with modern man's relationship to the dog, and that includes your relationships to dogs, whatever disgusting articulations they may have assumed over the years, is that it has remained rooted in historical forms, even as the world's has progressed beyond all recognition, and this out of sheer sentimentality, which is a sin. Modern man is split between a million factions that alternately sap and charge his spirit--the former very efficiently, the latter with a million kinds of snake oil, such is the way. He is bisected by a bewildering variety of claims on his time and energy, shuffled and shunted in and out of so many systems of logistics and control like so many anonymous production pieces. Do you get my meaning? Come, break out your flasks, and drink with me in fragmentary communion! Ah! As for the dog, well--aside from Lieutenant Brick here, he's got a long way to go to catch up to out modern way of living. This task of forcible catch up of course falls principally to us as the revolutionary vanguard, pitiable and dithering though some of you may be. But such are the obstacles and thus the opposition to enlightenment latent in the configuration of damnable entropy itself. Whatever the quantities of laziness and foolishness to which you are thrall--no matter, for they are nothing but goads to the ultimate catharsis, the final purge. Cheers! Fine stuff, this. Harrum. Such are the obscure Highland recipes. So where does this leave us, where does this leave the dog, and what is the leash that properly connects dog to man--in a revolutionary way? Well, it leaves us right here in this room. With Lieutenant Brick. Everything proceeds from the notion of fungible traits, as an animal from an assortment of discrete wills and purposes susceptible to manipulation. Traits that can be identified and isolated and assigned at will. In Brick we have a moral sagacity tempered by the predilection for drink that keeps him from going insane or from being executed by the HSPCA before the paradigm of which the HSPCA is a standardbearer can be overthrown. Brick and his kind are bloodhounds to be used as scouts in the coming age of purges. Just as I engineered Brick to be a better kind of dog, Brick will help us in our quest to engineer a better kind of man.

But we must go much further, of course. There is no end to the canine specialties that may be enlisted in the name of revolution: We need shepherds in the camps, executioner dogs to savage the culpable, seed-eaters with incomplete digestion to sow the fields, sled dogs to clear the lines of corpses. Et cetera. Such is the variety. Si, senor?

Bernal had his hand up.

Er, getting away for a moment from your, er, alarmingly bloodsoaked vision of the future, what, eh, what are your methods for breeding new dogs, Sir? I mean what breeds did you use to make the whiskey-drinking dog, for instance?

A titter ebbed through the room. The Colonel's brow was bunched as he responded.

Whiskey-drinking dog? Oh, Lieutenant Brick. Believe me when I say he can put away a lot more than whiskey. And as I have been at pains to explain, his truly notable characteristic is the acuity of his nose in matters of human dignity, so I fail to see why anyone, no matter how limited his facility with critical thinking, would stop at characterizing him as a tippling dog. Tippling is what he does to cope with his gift. And as far as methods and root pedigree go, I'm afraid that those are highly proprietary, my dear little senor.

Bernal's jaw worked thickly before he responded: It's just that the only proof we have of any remarkable traits in your dog is his ability to drink whiskey. Unless you include the fact that he is uglier than I imagine even the mongrel, ahem, crones in your own lineage could possibly have been. Which is a notable achievement in itself, with all due respect. Borracho hijo de puta.

The Colonel's iron gray bowsprit was twitching in consternation, and he was listing dangerously to the starboard side of the podium. If it is proof, he began, proof of this dog's acuity that you require, sir, I shall be happy to give it to you. As we all know, to be true to its purpose, any social order striving for justice, and above all clarity, must deal frankly with issues of sexuality. Everything must be out in the open before it can be responded to and dealt with. And you are also all doubtless aware that few people, no matter how strongly stated their allegiance to reform, are willing to disclose their innermost leanings in matters of sexuality. It is for this reason that we are in need of a canine monitor to push us toward frankness. A dog, Sir, is theoretically capable of smelling anything. In this case we are discussing deviant desires, which is another facet of Lieutenant Brick's virtuosic perception. So, without further ado, I will give you your proof, and mine.

What the hell are you talking about, goes Bernal.

Sensing trouble, the members of our house and the other guests stood up and began to mill about uncertainly.

This, Sir, is what I am talking about...

The Colonel leaned over his dog and first rapped it on the ribs. It gave a pained yowl, then the Colonel whispered, clearly through the expectant hush that had fallen of a sudden, Spot invert!"

Here my interlocutor had to pull up in his narration to deal with a fit of laughter. Locked for a few seconds in silent convulsive struggle, he nearly shed a tear into his drink. When I looked up I saw the barman pretending to be busy. His back signaled a receptive pose. I wondered what he was making of this story and called out for a beer. His face was as slack as ever, but there was some life in his eyes.

"What do you think," I said. "Interesting day at work?"

"Interesting as any other, patron. When it's your work to serve folks lubricating their jaw hinges, what can you say? Such is the way, I guess."

He was smiling. 

My interlocutor's hand suddenly flashed across the bar and seized my wrist. It was a large hand, quivering and clammy.

"Do you want to know what happened?"

"Sure, pal," I said, trying to remain cavalier. "You know, this is pretty much already the strangest shit I ever heard."

A chortle escaped the mouth without registering on the drawn face. "Shit," he said. "Hang around Hanrahan's for long enough and you're bound to hear plenty of strange shit. It's all got to trickle out somewhere. And you haven't heard the strangest part of this story by a long shot. Now, back to the Colonel and Lieutenant Brick.

"In response to his master's command to spot the invert, the dog staggered to its feet and sniffed the air with a look of both resignation and of deep canine concentration. Its snout was long, its jaws tiny, its fogged eyes bulging. Then, suddenly, it snarled and launched its considerable bulk down the room and directly at Bernal. The dog pulled up short of reaching him to snap hoarsely at his groin. Bernal ran for the door but the Colonel barked something and the dog didn't follow after him. And anyway I think it was true what the Colonel had said about the dog's jaw being so small and weak that it would have been unable to do any damage.

And there we have it, the Colonel shouted over the din. A double edged demonstration of Brick's faculties on the one hand, and of the senor's moral turpitude and spinelessness on the other.

The guests were now waving their arms and raising their voices in protest. There were calls for the Colonel's ejection.

Brick, heel! And there you have it, you fine bunch of hippies. Proof of the dog's skill, proof of the faggotry at the bottom of the senor's soul. And don't think for a second, the Colonel intoned gravely as he looked directly at me, that the Lieutenant wouldn't be able to sniff out another queer or two in your ranks. And with that I rest my case. Such are the piecemeal victories, such the vain struggle. Come on, Brick. Fall in!

The room stood in shocked abeyance as the mischievous Colonel and his queerbaiting Lieutenant trained out of the room with exaggerate dignity. He had taken us for a bunch of spoiled pushovers. He was right of course, at least on that particular evening he was. In different circumstances though, in different conjunctures within the topography of zeal, the man would have been run out of town on a rail or worse. But he had smelled tepid blood and taken advantage of it.

Given what happened afterwards I've sometimes found myself wondering if it had somehow been his purpose, or ultimately the purpose of Cheesegrave behind him, to shake us out of our stupor of satisfied progressivism punctuated by these bullshit readings, these bullshit roundtable discussions. God knows we needed a kick in the pants. Then there's the other alternative, that he believed in his spiel about the dogs, or even worse, that it was true, which is just too much to take into your mind and book hold there without breaking or spilling something. Anyway.

He paused for a tipple that immediately seemed to deepen the hue in his face and kindle an eye that may or may not have been beginning to gutter in confusion toward the end of his recounting of the speech about the revolutionary role of the dog. Then I asked him whether they'd ever had nay news of the Colonel again.

"Oh sure. He started hanging around the dorms trying to hit on coeds with the little tricks that Lieutenant Brick could do. The police tried to book him for vagrancy and he used his one call to call us. I passed it in to Uncle Cheesegrave, who pretended never to have heard of the man. But he interceded and wriggled him out of the charge sure enough. It remains a mystery."

And the dog's allegation?

"Hey, that's well put. Well, I'm afraid that dog was right in its senses after all. Bernal ended up running off to join a, shall we say, more sexually liberated commune. In New Mexico. Right in the nick of time, too. And it was out there that he ended up meeting his partner and the man with whom he founded Rancho Dinero, so for Bernal the dog outing him was a good thing in ways more than one. And not only for Bernal--leaving the seaboard police state for the West is a blessing for anyone--but for Chicano letters, too, where Rancho Dinero actually managed to make a difference. But all of this is just a tangent, nothing but a fucking sideshow. I only mention it because the Colonel's presentation is what set the stage for me hooking up with Vanessa and everything that happened afterwards. Hey barman! Another whiskey soda if you would. And make sure it pares the light down to its proper golden hue. Hold it up and see that it is good.

"So yeah, Vanessa. Poor girl. This is what happened. She and I ended up hanging around the reading room when everybody'd left. We talked about the Colonel's bizarre and offensive performance and began sharing the whiskey that he and the dog hadn't finished off. After the first drink I tried something. It was cynical but effective. I tried to invoke the atmosphere and the events that had caused her to be overcome with laughter in the first place, that ripple that had stripped down her defenses and paved the way for us to be locked in a gaze of sudden intimacy. I summoned the image of the way the dog had looked as its absurdity had first begun to wash over us: Its walled and bulging eyes, the fluffy curlicue tail swaying over the squat rump, ribslats like a collapsed accordion, snout like a fucking armadillo. When the description of the dog seemed to have little effect I turned to the Colonel, relishing in sequence the memory of the delinquent mane, the snaggled teeth, the goatee that led and balanced him as he pitched over the breakers of his own inebriation. Then I channeled the Colonel's language: Such is the honor that accrues, such is the duty that binds the acolyte to his truth, such are the ways. At 'such are the ways' I got the response I was looking for: Unfettered, elemental laughter. It was infectious of course. The more she abandoned herself to laughter, the more did I. Our tittering rebounded and redoubled until we could hardly breathe and I could not see her for the tears in my eyes. When they cleared and met hers, I knew she was mine. And this is where the story gets serious.

"Quite serious. In fact, past this point I would venture to say that you have never heard a more serious story. Which is to say," he said with a wink, "that it is just the right amount of serious.

"At that point Vanessa and I went up to her room and did what was predictable. Or rather, we began to do what was predictable. Let me get to the point. God. I was just entering her, when in comes Kamill. His full name was Kamillus Braxator, if you can feature that, although for deception and sometimes even humor he would use the alias Marcel Broodthaers, as we shall have occasion to see in due time*. Kamill was, as I have already mentioned, immensely strong. Whenever anything needed lifting, lugging, or heaving, he was the one to do it. His body was built like a barrel, resting on stout shanks and with arms easily rivaling the thickness of my legs. Which isn't saying much, of course, but the point is that he was huge, that he did not cut an elegant figure, and was more like a rock slab or a tree trunk than a herald of golden proportion.

"He would have weighed in at a good 250 pounds. Enough to play in the gridiron professionally back in those days. But despite the ungainly layout and the outsize format, even so his movement was fairly ringing with the emergent economy and grace peculiar to strong organisms at the height of their powers. Imagine a dancing bear. The poise, the delicate steps, the absolute control that yokes the power. To watch him move was actually enjoyable, a symphonic movement in basso. I never once saw him break or drop anything, nothing as trivial even as overtorquing a screw. And I'm not mentioning this because I'm some kind of faggot who gets a kick out of big fellows with unlikely grace either. This is essential to what happened later."

He drank, thinking things over.