The Sheckys are a Grey Flower

The dust covered surveyor crossed a hill covered with odd looking daisies, and reached a little townhouse between two sharply angled walls of a canyon.  He heard a beeping and looked down expecting to see a cel ringing but it turned out to be the wrong side of the belt - Ed the surveyor carried several pieces of what looked like telecommunications - test equipment such as orange pluggable phone handsets, also dusty.  Any of a number of those gizmos could be ringing disruptively.  He counted them off and tried to place the ironic ring, as a gloomy and downtrodden pop song from around 1971.  Back at the Music Library, Ed had been drawn to this era because of its weird sadness, and had done all the ringtones, on all his telco equipment to match those songs.  Inside the little townhouse was a woman in a yellow dress.

"I thought you'd never get here," she said.  
"I know," Ed said.
"hang on a second, I just need to - oh."  
In fiddling with all of the grey plastic consoles and boxes from places like Brookstone, Sharper Image and Think Geek, he realized the ringtone was actually coming from his video poker.  He removed Video Poker from the belt clip and shut it off.  As he hit the OFF button on the video poker, a handwritten messages came up on the little screen.
"ATTENTION ED, THIS IS ED." He had written and stored this message in the Video Poker, to come up on just such occasions as this, when he was going to shut it down.  "YOU YOURSELF STUCK THIS MESSAGE IN.  DO NOT SHUT DOWN WITHOUT INVESTIGATING THE REASON FOR THE BEEP."  These sorts of "No-really-I-mean-it" self-admonitions were never very successful, and he wanted to talk to the lady in the yellow dress, so he ignored the message and shut the little device off.  It whimpered a final time and was out of the picture.  Ed and the woman retired to the kitchen. 
 "Would you step into my home-office?" the woman said.  
Ed blinked.  
He admired the woman-whose name he still hadn't registered- either had never heard or had heard and not memorized- as she passed him in filmy yellow fabric and wanted to holler from a canyonside, "WHAT'S YOUR NAME!"  But Ed had a wonky side, and wonkiness will out, at least in this case it did.  
"Home office?" Ed said.  "Begging your pardon, ma'am, but this is not a home office because IRS rules clearly state you need a separate, demarcated chamber..."  She cut him off with a wave of the hand.  
"Look buddy,"  Her chilly tone gave him a wave of pessimism.  "I thought you were just a surveyor.  If you want to get all wonky on me and start looking for loopholes, or bad, like deductions, or taking photos, I'm going to quickly uninvite you from the Spanish Lodge."  He blinked again.  Wonkiness will out.  He considered the alternatives, backing down diplomatically or to be ever more needle-nosed and detail obsessed.
"um," he said.  "I'm s- "  He resisted apologizing. "It's unfortunate that these first couple of minutes have gone the way they have.  I have to tell you, miss-"  He prompted her for a name. 
"Carol," she answered curly.  
"I have a wonky side!  It's how I was raised!  It's difficult to resist!  And you're feeding it by the minute!"  She blinked once, didn't say anything. 
"I can't always, ... there's fuel for wonkiness in the air, do you just want me to drop it?  I can't always just drop it just like that."
"Yes," she said.  "I want you to drop the wonkiness so we can get back to business."
He blinked.  
"Carol," he said.
"Ed," said Carol.
"You know I represent an extensive slate of powerful interests."
"And I," Carol replied, "also represent a slate of people, places , things and ideas."
"I just can't drop the nuances just because you want me to," Ed said.
"That's fine," Carol said.  "Then it's war."
"Proxy war," Ed said.  "That's pretty disappointing.  Don't let the chunks of the world who think the bond between mothers and their children would keep women from starting wars, when you go around saying that it's war."
Carol signed.  "All right," she said.  "You hit a nerve.  Are you proud of yourself?"
"Maybe you can be the new Thatcher," Ed said.  
"Lucky for me I don't know anything about UK politics," Carol said, "because if I did, you might be sorry."
Ed blinked. 
"All right then."
"What is your problem!" said Carol, losing her cool.  "do you think there's only 2 things between people, perfection and disaster?  So you called me out on some detail, so what!"
"I'm sorry, Carol, but I'm as much of a perfectionist as my clients want me to be, and at the moment they want me to be a lot of one, press the details, press the bits.  That 's what they asked me to do and that's what I'm doing!"
Carol stepped away from the fracas and collapsed into he leather couch.  It was only now that Ed noticed the little townhouse window was skewed in a cartoony way - like some kind of strange little Exploratorium house window.  It was in bright primary colors, blue and orange, and the beam in the center was just a representation of a beam in the center like it was purely for art's sake, and didn't really hold up jack.  He blinked wondering, how does she live in this canyon?  By helicopter, he assumed.  Her little cabal of backers had the means to hop all over the place and deliver her as their emissary.  It was a strange bunch of events and physical details, and he regretted how things were going.
"I don't have any choice," he said bitterly.
"Understood," said Carol. "Neither do I."

Wonks like Ed didn't usually hit the road doing surveying.  They usually got jobs in government, law or some other world where you could split hairs down to the quanta.  The Trade Council of Argentina had just taken over several factories that manufactured clay tiles, but in Ed's detached, abstracted base of operations high up above the clouds, the emotionally charged heartbeats of that movement were only translated into a stack of paper as high as a small kid.
"I'm really not cut out for this," complained Ed as the stack landed on his desk.  "I need to get. ... OUT!  I'm bound for bigger things."
"Yeah," said his boss, Abe Vigoda, the underutilized long-suffering character actor.  "Well I'm VERY SORRY, but someone has got to deal with that stuff.  What is it anyway-" he checked out one of the files.  "Let's see... factory occupations-"  
"That language, 'occupations,' is controversial," insisted Ed.  One thing you could say about ol' Ed, he was an equal-opportunity wonk.  He was like the uber-Quaker.  Always expanding his knowledge of everything to encompass everything.  It made him useful to groups in electoral politics who wanted evidence to point out flaws in the reasoning of their political opponents, such as the exposure of lies and fabrications used as substantiation for the disastrous U.S. - Iraq War.  But Ed, himself, didn't work on that wavelength.  It was as if the people of conscience- which itself varied radically as the people themselves determined what conscience was - had an idiot savant in a cage to be used as an oracle for facts, and data, to back up whatever they happened to be working on.  "Do you object to the idiot savant label?" Ed was once asked by his job coach, Charlene Rogers.  "Well, the first recorded use of the phrase idiot savant was in Le Monde in 1858, by Jacques Chirac then just a cobble-appraiser..."  This was what it was like to carry on a conversation with Ed.  She winced, not for herself, but because of the mild disingenuity in placing Ed in paying work, knowing how amoral, asocial, atypical he was.  Ed had attended the birthday party of Erving Goffman, the asocial sociologist, and Erving Goffman had stood at one side of the celebration trying to suss out what they were all DO-ing.  Ed St. John had stood at the opposite end of the hall wishing for some detail to wonk out over.  But it wasn't that kind of party.  Nobody was saying a word because they weren't about to get fooled again.  In fact, there was a banner strung that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR. GOFFMAN!  WE DON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN!  Goffman, surprisingly, had a great sense of humor, but you had to catch him in the right mood.

The only snatch of conversation Ed could hear, which tripped his curiosity, was something about Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had set off World War I.  He considered the situation.  It was five days since the canyon visit.  Vigoda was no help, just piled on the paperwork.  Dr. Goffman would be on mini-sabbatical in the South Pacific for another twelve days.  Ed had, really, no one to talk to and no hairs to split.  The people at the party had stopped talking about Franz Ferdinand and were now talking about their odd little friend JOCK, who, if the stories were to be believed, had "embezzled a shitload of money" from Logos, burgeoning and beloved bookstore in Santa Cruz.  Ed's eyebrows went up and he was about to split hairs, once on the facts and once on the law.  It had been a while since he had been to Santa Cruz.  There was a giant picture of Einstein's head on the side of The Spokesman, burgeoning and beloved bike shop.  He knew through the grapevine and back channels that Jock had in fact NOT embezzled a shitload of money from Logos.
"Um, excuse me," Ed said.

"Oh gawd," said a woman with a San Fernando Valley accent.  Upon closer inspection it was actually he Zappa kid herself, or the former Zappa daughter who had cut the Valley Girl single in a vain and futile attempt by her musical maverick and auteur father to prevent what had happened the last time Zappa album  (on cassette) ha been popped into a mini-stereo at a fun house party in the Santa Cruz hills - namely, cool girl had set her motorcycle helmet on the table and said candidly, "It sucks."  But the whole thing had backfired when the daughter, in an attempt to get away from the legacy of music that would get you scowled at at parties, had changed her name to Charlene St. Croix and taken a new career as a job coach.  "Jock did NOT embezzle a shitload of money from Logos," Ed said.  Charlene St. Croix took a step back.  The thing that gave away Ed as an asocial, though encyclopediacally correct, creep wasn't the high brittle insistence in his voice, nor the rapid rate of eyeblinking, it was his telltale fannypack containing all the bus schedules for all the bus routes in town.  This was a dead giveaway of a wonk, especially a wonk whose circumstances were such that he didn't get to wonk much on a daily basis.  A fish has gotta swim and a bird has gotta fly and the various shades of wonky had to be in their element or gradually they would atrophy like a bad leg.  Ed's was verbal, and he had to hear people talking and object to them, sometimes throwing his arms up like he should have been an attorney, and exclaiming I OBJECT.
"Who really brings a fannypack full of bus schedules to a birthday party?" said Charlene, but it was too late.
"JOCK DID NOT EMBEZZLE A SHITLOAD OF MONEY FROM LOGOS," Ed said,  "And I have the documents to prove it."  He reached into his fannypack under the VTA bus schedules and retrieved an official looking bunch of forms with blanks filled out in blue ink.  Charlene caught a glimpse and saw that they talked about "...JOCK JONES..." and "...bookselling establishment..."  
Her eyes widened like the saucers of myth.  "How is it possible that you had stuff in there about JOCK?"  She wanted to know.  Ed just blinked.
"I'm just prepared," he said.  
"Do you have a job?" Charlene said.
"Huh?" Ed asked.  Charlene gestured at Ed's blue hair.  Cut like a "Mohawk," the ridges on Ed's face gave some clues to his age and background.  "I was just wondering," Charlene said, "What kind of places will hire you and pay you money, and let you have teenage hair."
Ed recoiled with a wonk's attention to detail.  "Listen, lady," he said.  "Have you ever heard of the Celts?!?"  It turned out that the Mohawk of youth culture signified rebellion and fucking shit up, but there was another whole wave of freeky haircuts, historically.  They had not, as far as Ed's research showed, pierced their labretes or their frustums, but expect for those two dubious claims to being "far out" in the modern industrialized post - industrialization post-atomic bomb, post-spaceflight, post-internet world, every little thing about the body markings found at Hot Topic or Rainbow Grocery, or a fake duel to the fake death at midnight in "The Oasis", had a historical precedent.  So, Ed hemmed and hawed for a while over the question of whether his haircut was older than Joe Strummer '77 and the doomsayers' predictions for the years that two sevens clash.
"Okay, okay!" Charlene said finally.  "It isn't teenage hair!  I thought it was teenage hair but it's not.  You made your point.  But you haven't answered my question, there's people who look conservative and normal" - she made the quote gesture with her fingers- "and people like us who look weird by daytime standards in the American workplace and I just wanted a hot tip on what kinds of places will let you get away with having blue hair and a bunch of piercings."
"The university," Ed said.
"Oh," nodded Charlene.  She was satisfied.  Ed's utility belt started to ring more.  It suddenly reminded him of the video poker he had not switched back on since.  The tune was not any rainy-day early seventies radio pop, like "Seasons in the Sun," by the Poppy Family.  It was strident noise, which was damned difficult to translate even into the most poly of polyphonic ringtones.  It was a little ditty called "Carcass Pie" by Merzbow.  The first ever Merzbow ringtone.
"Yes?" Ed answered his phone.  "Really?  Uh- that's terrible.  God damn it."  Charlene was surprised to hear Ed cussing right out in the open at Dr. Goffman's birthday party.  He hung up and looked vulnerable.  A little of his combativeness was gone.  "I just lost my job," he stated sadly.
"Oh," Charlene said.  "Well, I am a job coach.  Maybe I could take you on as a pro bono case."
"Pro bono," Ed recited.  "Noun.  Of, or pertaining to, free legal work."
Charlene was surprised to hear him reciting what sounded like a dry dictionary definition.  She felt rueful on other peoples' behalf, ruing the day for whoever was a coworker and had to be lifted by Ed's weird charisma and then dropped by his rampant disregard for whether the hell he was following social conversions or not.  Apparently Ed in some strange power's employ, moved on an invisible series of pylons and diagonals, at least that was how Charlene was inclined to phrase the problem after two beers and twenty-five cups of tea.
"Well," Ed said, "don't mind if I do.  I don't know what I'm doing next.  This is really weird,"
"Why?" Charlene asked.
"Well," Ed said, "we had jut set up this whole climactic faceoff.  And now I'm sacked, and the whole climactic faceoff is, I don't know, precluded, busted.  I'm still reeling, I'm not going to be a part of this whole story anymore.  I don't understand."  Ed looked upset.
"Don't worry about it too hard, Ed," said Charlene.  "I can probably find you something, or who knows, you may get back in your old situation as an independent consultant."  She sketched out a business card in the air.  "EDWARD ST. CROIX AND ASSOCIATES"?  Ed seemed to consider that for a minute, taken with the vanity, or at least that was Charlene's best guess at what was going on in Ed's head.  "Well," Ed said, "There's more to it than just a paycheck for me.  I'm readjusting to thinking of the old story in terms of its taking place without me.  It's sort of an adjustment.  But even as an independent, gee, I don't know, I'm a little worried about its happening and I thought I was going to be able to take a crack at influencing them."  The party had sheared off a wave of guests.  It was odd.  Charlene had that sensation of assuming the room is still fertile out of your view, then turning around and finding it has gotten quiet while you weren't looking.  
"Hey Charlene!" called her best friend.  It turned out that that extra layer of people had cut through someone's bedroom at the back of the house and climbed out a window on to the room, some to smoke, others to fold their arms and be cold.  She grinned to realize this, and tried to focus her eyes on Ed, but he was droning a bit.  That boy did like to talk.
He seemed not to pick up on cues as to whether his story was registering.  He wasn't drinking alcohol.  Eventually Charlene excused herself gently, still interested in the 'job coach' motif but wanting to get away and do something else while the birthday party lasted.  Her savvy was telling her that Ed would talk all day if you didn't force an exit.

Somewhere far away from Dr. Goffman's party and unrelated to the proxy war in the offing between Carol's camp and Ed's, there was another cadre getting their loins together for perceived excitement.  The OWL was actually a human being like everyone else, but would only talk to the assembled from behind an amusement park chassis intended like a photo opportunity and shaped like an owl.  The cadre seemed for the moment, smitten with the idea, although it was ultimately volatile, at least in the mind of Pete, the latest addition to the cadre.  He had just been appraising cobblestones in the streets of unspoiled old European cities when one of the nearby straw roofs had started to rumble.  There was a weird prevalence of color in the color scheme of the structures down either side, and it seemed at odds with the austerity of a grey and brown unassuming old road.  "Hello," came a voice.  Pete looked over the threads of his scraggly moustache to see someone popping out of one of the roofs.  
"Holy crap!" exclaimed Pete, crudely.  He was frightened like a lamb, or a doe, only at the beginning.  "Are you a desperate scruff" said the person, popping out of the roof, who carried some of the signifiers on his body of English actor Bob Hoskins.  In Pennies from Heaven, holdover of a day when sheet music was king, and Bob went house to house, desperate, in pain, channeling a Dickensian dude, and far away from the comparative luxury of Los Angeles in the days of the Red Line subway, which was an incongruous thread of partial truth, laced in with the comical distractions of Roger Rabbit.  Bob, for he not only appeared to be like Bob Hoskins, he actually was Bob Hoskins in the flesh, popping out of a straw roof in a village free of redevelopment crap, in an old capital like Bratislava, or something.  He had fallen on hard times, and it was anyone's guess why and how he was here.
"I don't understand," said Peter, uttering three charming and un-arrogant little words.  "I've been looking for you, Pete.  How would you like to be EPTified in return for a sum of money?"
Pete had not heard the term before.  "EPTified?"  
"The, um," Bob was immediately at a loss to actually make sense out of the phrase for Pete's benefit.  "EPTified, the PT, has to do with Particular Tasks, and that's all I remember, to be honest."  The term was invented by John Brunner, in his novel Stand on Zanzibar, and it referred- as Hoskins gradually explained to Peter in halting language and from context - to the enlistment of a person into some group or corps with no immediate responsibility except to act as sort of a deep scholar and spend a big chunk of time at some kind of provided library or study hall, either analyzing world affairs or specific domains of knowledge - and expecting that at some undetermined future time, you would be responsible for "activation" and be beholden to the rules or priority system of the powers who had set you up in your study hall.  Hoskins gradually sketched this out for Pete's benefit.  "Gee," Pete said.  "I don't know.  I'm not so sure.  Why me?"
Hoskins was cagey but he knew in his own thought processes that there was no reason and Hoskins' crowd was systematically enlisting whoever they could.  "You're popping out of roofs and---"

There was a commotion at Dr. Goffman's party and while Charlene had crept away from Ed and had been chatting instead with the ubiquitous "caterer's caterer", who didn't get many commissions but was best known by the caterers themselves, admired, beloved - but was also trying with persistence, as the years wore on, to "get a hit", which in the context of the caterers meant to get to make the wedding cake for a hip celebrity, Ed went to inspect the punch with his spectrometer.  According to preemptive wonkyness you could not only drive the details into the ground, you could also take something that might have latent erroneousness and expose it like the least beloved muckraker.  Dr. Goffman heard a loud bonging sound and didn't do anything about it.  His provisional wife, who was somewhere between a sitter-from-an-agency, actress from central casting and a mistress, rolled her eyes.  He never wanted to do things like answer the doorbell, apparently because it sent him into three-dee-models of doorbells from a "How Do Household Objects Really Work" animation on the Discovery Channel.  But that was Erving Goffman, he had the reputation so he got away with it.  In a previous professional life, Dr. Goffman had been the partner of frustrated comedians from a family with a rainbow for a last name: Shecky Green, Shecky Blue, and so on.  Whoever Dr. Goffman was working for that day would sit at a desk with his head on his hand, under a lot of pressure, writing, trying to be funny, filling out little slips of paper and passing them to Dr. G , who lay sunbathing on a towel on the apartment floor, under a sun lamp, puffing a pipe and the comedian would say IS IT FUNNY?? And Dr. Goffman would say, it's funny, it's funny , go on.  He had been less asocial in those days, but the lateral intrigues between the comedians of the rainbow group had wrecked his patience for other people.  He was treated like a glacier- it was the academic planning overlords at his spaceship-like college who had arranged for him to travel to conferences with a wiff.  Dr. Goffman had stormed in on them one day, in the large conference room, adjacent to a strange parasite-like gambling room, card room known as Garden Variety.  It had a neon sign, which the purists had tried to have removed.  Are you going to help us or aren't you, said professor of esoteric arts, Frizz Ref.  His discipline made a lot of people nervous.  Every reference to it in a catalog, word of mouth, or whatever , the spelling of the field changes, advancing one letter each reference.  Right now he was professor of EQJ.  He was the youngest-ever professor of FRK.  He had a fresh-faced quality that made Goffman uneasy, while, of course, all people made Goffman uneasy.  Many people were amused by the concentric circles of his incredibly frizzy and wide haircut.  Goffman, at this time, was speaking according to a code, based on a deck of cards.  He had met with a speech therapist, but only once.  Apparently the therapist didn't want to come back so Goffman threw down an Ace of Spaces.  They crept over to the Garden Variety sign in the dead of night.  Dr. Ref considered the possibility that Goffman would be too impaired by asociality to deal with a mechanical test such as unscrewing giant servos while not being positive what a servo is, but it sounded good and the spinning neon monstrosity was liable to contain quite a few of them.  They passed by the mechanized gardens of Hell, Sweden, which had recently been transplanted to the Special Collections library of "the college where Goffman worked."  It was a power-sharing agreement in which the mechanized gardens got some sun, which had been the central demand they had made in a ransom-note font message actually produced with archaic 1980s wordprocessors in emulation.  Did this have something to do with the way in which the mechanical houses and exaggerated smiling heads themselves got a vote?  Ref had wanted to know, in the closed climate of a three-day conference at a rather grim Marriott in an icy climate.  The panel consisted of one prof: Goffman, plus Goffman's translator, who spoke deck of cards, plus Goffman's concierge, who had no great loyalty to Goffman, but had been sent out from something called the Burton Allen Institute for Concierge Studies.  BAI concierges were very frugal and cut their own hair.  And the hair of those around them!

So it basically was a stacked deck, ideologically and some in the audience were threatening to mutiny.  Dr. Robert Taylor, a professor of normal, Euclidean things such as "math" and "reading" and "social studies" mouthed off in an editorial in the Times, with a great sense of timing such that the mini-essay would come out and be read all while the conference was still in session.  "They don't usually call it 'social studies' at universities, do they, Dr. Taylor?" complained Goffman's mistress.  By a weird irony, it was Goffman's asociality which had made him lionized, the core of a cluster of people, like a courtly assemblage.  Or possibly, not so ironic, as was discussed from without, on television, after Goffman's death, his passivity made him a figurehead for translators, concierges, mistresses, barbers to "prop up", fill full of their own ideas and then, in a game of Three Card Monty (Python), use their own associations with the power vacuum to propel themselves.  "It's brilliant in its way," said disinterested social analysts and inheritor of Goffman's ideas, St. James Infirmary.  He had gotten his sainthood in shrouded circumstances.  The other commenter, who wore no face, just the faceless mask of the IBR root beer coalition, in an effort to create a true extra territorial jurisdiction, the IBR wore the facemask of no features and used digital effects to shroud their voices.   They had gotten the idea from Kirby's OMAC.  So when asked to supply a name to appear on the Khyron, IBR had merely said, "I am you!"
"Blast them to bits," the Khyron replied.
When asked for a hometown, he had said, "Nowhere, everywhere, and Dagobah!" which had been enough to make his critics back off, for now at least.  So the IBR agent was taking exception with Infirmary's allegation that Goffman had been "brilliant."  
"Would you please get some value judgments in there?!"  It bothered the IBR a lot.  
"What do you mean," asked Infirmary.  "Don't you think Goffman was brilliant?"
The IBR agent sighed.  Look, you can have people through history who were extraordinary at what they tried to do, but it would be nice to put the "evil" back in "evil genius."  Otherwise you have an odd conflation of brilliant and good, brilliant for helpful ends, with brilliant and harmful.  What are you gonna do, get them all together and give them Macarthur Grants without distinguishing the consequences of their work?"
The IBR was a pretty level-headed organization.  They had a pragmatic point and St. James Infirmary knew perfectly well that they did.  You could tell by the widening of the mouth, the patheticness of Infirmary's "cauliflower nose," in shades of red.  But his constituency wouldn't let him agree with the IBR.  He'd never get away with it.  There was no cover.  But Infirmary got points for trying.  "I think maybe it wasn't Goffman who did all that.  Goffman was the nonentity."  He was realizing his ideas as he said them, adlibbing.
"Imagine if you will, a process of a bellows, puffing with air, then releasing.  Goffman doesn't care, he doesn't want to be around people in the first place.  So this whole ring of associates start making noises that Goffman has taken them on, agreed to work with them, puffing up, gathering all this notoriety by association with the notoriety of being associated with someone who is associated with THEM.  After a while, the air puffs out - they have this momentum already underway, and the hangers-on get the benefits of the association.  It was an interesting set of theories, which the IBR representatives laughed at when Goffman tried to propose it.  Crack investigative reporters huddled in an enclave and considered Dr. Goffman, probably a while previous to his party.
"I heard," said the one with the moustache, "that he wasn't always so asocial."
"Really?" asked the one with the beard.  "What happened?"
"My sources- my friends on the inside, tell me that he sat in a room with a strobe light going, and that he was never the same again."
So it was the strobe light.  The one with the moustache thought about this for a while.  If anyone was, Sam Park was conflicted by the sequential progress between two ways that things tended to go.  He had noticed this and he wasn't so crusty as Gee, the chief interviewer for Arts & Entertainment Channel's, "Biography," had said at that classical music recital, not at all.  
"I'm eddacated," he had said, and the only problem was that those in attendance went into paroxysms of laughter to the extent that they interrupted the recital.  Who knew?  So his companions thought it was funny that he would say "eddacated."  Maybe his nose was just a little too wide.  The people from A&E's Biography had sat him down for questions.
"Where are you from" they wanted to know.
"Kentucky," said Sam.
"Oh, the old confederacy," said the biographer, uncrossing and recrossing her legs under her short skirt.
"NO!" said Sam indignantly.  "Kentucky was a BORDER STATE."
Gee the interviewer had blinked.
"OK," she said.  "What are you doing now?"  Sam had said that he now split his time between a masters program in Nonviolent Conflict Resolution, and writing restaurant reviews for the Prague Daily News.  
"What made you get into the masters program in Nonviolent Conflict Resolution," said Gee, pronouncing each word in a guileless fashion that charmed Sam and made him suspect he could pull the wool over Gee's eyes if he wanted to.  He scowled, though, because he preferred to concentrate on the reviewing gig rather than the masters.
"It was that thing with the Martians."
Sam had portrayed SAM PARK in a PBS dramatization of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.  An emotionless, steelyfaced Martian had held out his, or her, hand with an unidentified box.
"Sam Park!  This.. is for YOU."  Sam had suspected it was a weapon and had shot the Martian dead.  It turned out the Martian was merely proffering a collection of metal bits, strung together like a mobile, which in Martian represented the deed to a parcel of lands on the Great Unadorned Plain, adjacent to the Lesser Unadorned Plain.  It was only a movie, in fact on the set Sam had taken to reciting over and over to himself, it's only a movie, it's only a movie.  But the scars had lingered and were exacerbated by the unlikely fact of the part of Sam Park being played by Sam Park. 
"And that," he told his interviewer, "is how I happened to get into a masters program on nonviolent conflict resolution."
"Oh," said Gee.  "But hang on a second.  We had you acting the role of a Martian frontiersman and being disturbed by the experience.  But I don't see how that gets us to the master's program on nonviolent conflict resolution."
Sam was irritated.  He already felt that A&E was run by a bunch of dopes, and he had held out hope for his program to be on Bravo, or Discovery, or one of the wee channels that had been popping up, sort of like flies.  The negotiators were a story unto themselves, unruly and difficult.  But he was here now, and he wished she would put 2+2 together, that he had gotten into a masters program to do his bit for an alternative to the type of conduct he had both witnessed and been forced to participate in.
"Well basically," he said, and informed her without guile, of his motives.
"That's very admirable," she answered.  "And what about the restaurant reviews?"  
"Oh, that keeps me in touch with the common man," he answered.  And it was true.  He had showed up one day on Prague's "Restaurant Row", carrying only a Bic and a little pad.  At one table was Goffman.  At another was the wonky surveyor, Ed.  At another sang the gilded pipes of Vic Damone.  At another was St. Patrick and St. Brigid, bastions of Irish myth.  St. Brigid rose to complain and took down one side of her top, in an apparent reference to the symbolic "Liberty" of the French Revolutionary period.  But the people around didn't "get" where she was "coming from."  It was considered offensive in this day and age, or, well sort of.  If you were a breastfeeding advocate, you might get hassled but you had girl power and indignation on your side.  It's not like she was doing it in a sexual context.  But it was an open question, unresolved, how it would be received when the context was not sexual nor maternal, but political.  Actually, she had a good heart and didn't brook any monkey business from the members of her cadre.  The lady from A&E had come to do a special on them, St. Patrick and St. Brigid and had wanted to talk about the third saint.  "Now," she began, "there was another saint, round about 1970?"
"That's right," said St. Brigid., but it was clear she wasn't eager to talk about it.  Sam Park surreptitiously spied on the other tables and noticed that while St. Patrick had ordered the trout, St. Brigid was having a salad.  When a maitre'd asked Sam with an accusing eye if he wanted more water, Sam said, "It's my job!  Just doing my job!" which rather put the cart before the horse, according to the tentacled jobbers who were later to observe Sam through a crystal ball, while the jobbers were doing a job, for "JobAmerica."  So when St. Brigid took her top off, Sam Park didn't care, he was concentrating on everyone's plates full of food.  It took the intervention of Gee the interviewer to change everyone's priority systems until all eyes were upon her in a crisp, no-nonsense suit suitable for a New York Broker.  People said there were not stories or adventures out there, but nothing could have been further from the truth.  In fact the stories were whipping off like a dervish.  After eight years as a banker, tax expert, probate lawyer - impressive when you did it without ever getting an intimate knowledge of what probate really was - what did you do next?  Well, Gee had said in her own A&E special (a result of payola for sure), interviewing herself from behind a shocking red wig of hair, "You chill out for a while."  The attributes of chilling out are elusive.  In setting up a kind of thing lasting more than a few weeks, a person, so went the Goffman theory of human socialization, is willing reality to roll back whatever forces of irrational anxiety or depression act upon that person and allow them to bask, because they are dwelling in oxygen that itself is lifted off the ground.  As a kid, Goffman had told the interviewer, "I was fixated on June 15.  June 15!  June 15!  It was the day of his last final.  I was convinced that the very air would be lighter, that I would no longer have to do "number twos," and if I did, that they wouldn't stink." 
"So what happened," asked the lady from A&E, who strangely, was still wearing her shock wig.
"Pffft," Goffman had said.  "I got up at 11, on the 16th.  I was thrilled but I got into an argument with my younger brother and then I spilled a glass of orange juice into my parents' LA-Z-BOY chair.  There's nothing like spilling a glass of orange juice into your parents' LA-Z-BOY chair to put a taint on one's whole summer."  
Dee nodded.  When she was looking prim, an ex-banker, she was Gee, and when she wore the fright wig, she went by Dee.  Her family was concerned that it was developing into a fullblown case of multiple personality, schizophonia, or worse, the dreaded fugue state.  Dee blinked.
"Wait a minute," she said.
"What's the matter?" Goffman said.
"I, I was just having an interview with St. Patrick and St. Brigid, this is really weird, freaky, I was just having an interview with St. Patrick and St. Brigid was draped in the red, white, blue, and it was becoming a moment of Gallic referentiality, and oblique enjoyment and suddenly - POP - I'm here across town in 'Studio B', the production studio, down an alley and behind some trashcans and I'm talking to you instead."
"Ahhh!" Goffman said.  "She's a tricky one!  You have to watch out for that St. Brigid especially after she's full of salad.  Were you about to get into sensitive territory?"
Dee blinked.  "You know, it's hard to remember but... yes, I do believe we were.  She was about to tell me about 1970 and what happened to the third saint."
"Third saint!" Goffman said.  "Good luck!  Listen I would have to suggest to you that she's not going to go without a fight."  Dee nodded grimly.
"There's people saying the opposite, huh?  Protectors."
"Yes!" Goffman insisted.  "That's a big secret.  It's like Area 51 or something.  Don't expect them to go quietly just because you ask politely.  Unless..."  There was a pause.
"Unless what?" Dee asked.
"Have you considered universal jurisdiction?" 
Dee didn't say anything.
"It worked on Pinochet!" Goffman said. 
"Well, yes," Dee relented.  "But is this really so serious as that?  It's just, it's really just for entertainment."
"Ah, yes, the 'E' in A&E is Entertainment, eh?"
"That's right," Dee said.
"Well,..." he tapped his chin.  He was referring to the International Criminal Court.  Dozens of countries, excluding the USA, were signatories to the International Criminal Court agreements and the controversial implication was, for egregious war crimes, a person could be arrested on the soil of one country and transported to another, with Augusto Pinochet being a high-profile example.  There was also the recent example of Donald Rumsfeld - a recent court case had been filed against the former U.S. Defense Secretary during a recent visit to France, as the person under consideration had to step on the soil of a signatory country to be considered under their jurisdiction.
"I mean," Dee said.  "Pinochet, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, they're not really in the same league as trying to get St. Brigid to answer an interview question about her ousted ex-partner."
"Aha, but doesn't that sort of depend upon what's at stake in getting to find out what happened in that situation?"
"Why?" Dee asked.  "What's at stake?"  Goffman was about to answer, but Dee again blipped out.  It was really disconcerting.  She came to, yet another eight blocks west and one block south!  It was roughly the move of a knight in chess.  "This is really beginning to freak me out!" she said.  It was dark.  She felt mighty disoriented.  She started feeling around.  She struck metal.  At the moment, there was no one with whom to talk about her predicament.  She felt further and hit a door handle.  She opened it.  "It couldn't get much weirder," she thought.  She opened the door and found something that could hardly surprise her any more than she already was.  She was on the inside of a metal phone booth (like they even existed anymore?) and the outside was pretty gross - it was covered in FELT and FAT.  From several years devoted attention to the arts bloc of the cable lens, a way of delineating the territories of the globe, she knew that felt and fat were the hallmarks of the artist Joseph Beuys.  But that was the limit of her knowledge about the guy.  She felt guilty for sleeping through the Beuys unit in school.  She walked amongst opaque boxes of knowledge, like the giant cylindrical pylons that hold up freeways.  She knew of them as pawns, chessmen, chesswomen, but she couldn't tap their contents.  It was a desire to do so in compensation for napping that had led her to take a job with the A&E network.  Three or four traditional "men in black" had been observing her unawares, as the final negotiations were happening.  She had a buddy from school who was an inveterate fibber.  Her first name grated on the nerves: Tammy.  Not even a reputation as a ray of sunshine with a shock of golden curls could make her name less annoying or change her reputation for being called a "gal", and walking around in a Clint Black t-shirt.  She was working as an unloader now
"Where are you working?" Dee had asked the last time they had met for coffee.
"As an unloader for Park Mart."
Dee nodded unenthusiastic and frowning.  Tammy and Dee had gone to the same college.  Dee had studied the femur with a side of Beuys.  Tammy had studied proprietary software packages: SAS, STATA, A.G. Edwards and Bloomberg, with a side of 'the lebrete' in the Bio department.
"Why are you studying the femur anyway?" said Dee's other college buddy, Casey Louie.
"Because," Dee said, "It's the basics.  It's very old-economy.  Everyone has a femur, everyone is GOING to have a femur, and if you crack your femur, it hurts like hell.  So femur-care is a growth industry."  Casey looked at her funny.  He was studying football with a side salad.  Casey, Dee and Tammy had gotten into some hijinks together.  They clambered down a ladder to the bottom of an empty swimming pool where the new RecCen was being constructed.  "You're going to be in big trouble if those companies fall out of favor, Tammy," Dee had said.
In Dee's eyes, she herself was getting a solid grounding and saving the weird esoteric subject matter for her electives.  Tammy was getting trained in a lot of currently "hot" skill sets but it was more volatile.  They all had their Achilles heels.  Bloomberg, Johnny "A.G." Edwards, Joe Stata and Mitchell SAS, the four horsemen, could all have their downfalls without too much trouble.  Bloomberg had a crooked buddy.  Edwards had an associate who had been - stories were fuzzy - apprehended for something really absurd and shady like soliciting sex in a men's room in Florida?  You couldn't make this stuff up.  Joe Stata, had a crooked buddy, who had dealt crack for eleven years, and Mitchell Sas had problems too.  The point was, Dee proved to be correct.  Solid, old-economy skills like the femur, with weird esoteric philosophers only as the icing on the cake, was better than concentrating on the flighty, fickle world of proprietary syntax, with tried-and-true human physiology (like the labrete) as the icing on the cake.  As for a diet of steady footballia with a side salad, no one knew what the hell was going to become of Casey Louie.  The girls thought he was cute - FOR NOW.  But really, how long could that last.  It was like the Velvet Frog, Rufus Wainwright, and the Velvet Toad, Ron Sexsmith.  Both had golden voices that made one think of the sun peeking over the hillside on a cloudy summer's day.  Rufus was blessed with a square jaw, a magenta scarf, a shock of wavy brown hair and a sunny disposition.  Ron wasn't , but it didn't matter, he was bound for the pantheon of timeless Canadian arts, like Alan Thicke, only better.  He was above it all, he was the songwriter's songwriter, not that well known by the general populace, he made up for it by his shelf of golden awards which that Wainwright would die to breathe on.  His Junos alone, were enough to weigh down the floor of his high-rise bungalow overlooking the swamps of the Great Convexity.  Sinking Nova Scotia another inch below sea level, just from the weight of his Junos.  Rufus was jealous of Ron's awards and Ron claimed in Tiger Beat to be above it all but he was honestly also jealous of Rufus' good looks, and so between the two of them, they kept the balance of terror.  It was a stalemate of golden-voiced singers, mutually-assured destruction.  If they ever mixed it up in a big way.  One only had to look at the devastation wrought by Sexsmith the last time someone at a store had said, "pardon me, ma'am."  He did look a bit like Terry Jones in a rain bonnet.  First, he had let out a stream of obscenities to shock the Ottawa Observers, a self-appointed corps of Decency Police, who had recently made it their jurisdiction to also go to Nova Scotia arena-football games and try to score points for decency at the risk of endangering the team.  But Sexsmith had associates on the Observers.
"So does that mean it's all a big Kangaroo Court?" asked Dee.  She was yet again disturbed, shocked and disconcerted to find herself a knight's hop away from the Beuys phone booth and now interviewing Ron Sexsmith on the eve of his ninth Juno.
"If the deck was stacked," she asked.  "What does that do to the quest for decency?"
Sexsmith blinked.
"Ya know," he said.  "Hell if I know."  He looked at her funny, like you'd look at someone who has taken "E" and who you are trying to get to give you all their money by cynically spinning a yarn about human decency and love.
"Decency?  I'm more interested in what it means for ME."  A rip from the Observers could throw his Juno into doubt.
"So then what happened?"  Dee asked.
"Pfft," Ron said.  "I tried, I really did.  I think there's an unwritten rule in this country," (he meant Canada), "that you are allowed to really LET FLY the swear words when someone gets your sex wrong.  I don't care if I do have flowing curly hair, god damn it, I don't care if I do look like Terry Jones in a rain bonnet!"  Dee stepped aside in case Ron caught the air on fire.  In the back of her mind she was concerned about the weird trajectory.  She was postponing doing anything about it because ultimately she felt fatalistic.  If a person or group was determined enough to stop her knowing something, finding something out, to deal in this kind of hardcore scheme or invention, she didn't put much stake in her chances of getting over the "You're nuts" factor.  If she told anyone, much less getting a concerted effort on her side of trying to stop it.  This was DARPA territory.  Seriously scary shit.  Nobody poured money and people into research and development of weird borderline impossible things like the frickin U.S. military.  What was it that - she scowled, the sentences were even hard to put together with all the disorienting hops she was subjected to.  Who had said she should try universal jurisdiction?  It was one of her recent truncated interviews.  Was it St. Brigid?  No.  And it wasn't Ron.  That only left Dr. Goffman.  She hailed a cab.  48th avenue and step on it!  The cab driver tore up the concrete on his way to the outer Sunset.  She hoped Goffman would still be out there where she had left him at a little coffee-outpost at the terminus of the N-Judah, otherwise known as the beach.  They almost hit a pedestrian out in the avenues.  Break the law, please! She cried.  The driver, a Mr. Singh, was reluctant.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, leering at her bodice.  "I'm reluctant to break the law because frankly, I'll drop you off and the freaking cops will probably get me fifteen minutes after you are high and dry."
"I take your point," she said.  She looked in her wallet for some membership card that would impress him, pull rank.  Nautilis Gym?  He shook his head.  Here it is.  A&E, Discovery and Bravo!  Mr. Singh snapped his fingers hard.  In the reconfiguration of geopolitics according to the vagaries of cable television, in which stations were got up by speculators in new maps and new lenses were continually being invented so that the world had a big crisis of being split into a WAY OF SEEING for every man, woman and child on the planet - cultural critics who tried to boost absolutism and inherent human values over relative values, didn't even know how good they had had it before - now you had to work to even find 2 people who talked the same language - it was plurality on a massive scale.  Eventually she found her card from A&E and showed that to Mr. Singh who belonged to the ESPN - and weird little stations who bought the rights to sure-fire reruns in syndication such as All in the Family and MASH, had to cover a bit, because the arts and culture bloc was dang impressive, even to him, for the tendrils they had in interviewing all kinds of people.  
Okay! He cried, so they tore past the park and into the avenues at 40, 50, 60 miles an hour.  But the car chase was for naught because Goffman was gone.  "I could have told you he wouldn't still be there," Singh said to Dee.  Dee smiled grimly.  "Yeah, it would have been too easy.  Damn it!"
"What's the matter?" asked the intrepid taxi driver.  Dee rolled her eyes. 
"It's a long story."
Singh smiled.  I think he's hitting on me, Dee thought.  "I've got to get out of here!"
But now she was stuck in the dang avenues, and it was a pain in the neck trying to get out of the avenues in a hurry.
"Oh, all right," she thought.  "If he acts like a jerk, I can always get out of the cab and take MUNI home."
"Well," she said. "I'm an interviewer for A&E.  I don't usually appear on camera.  I ask the questions and then they edit me out.  I was back at the chicken restaurant on FIFTH AVENUE, interviewing St. Brigid, and I was about to get to the bottom of what happened to their ex-partner, the third saint.  It was St. Patrick, St. Brigid and - a third saint."  But him or her, they kicked him or her out, in 1970, and-"
"Saint Moby," Singh said.  Dee blinked hard
"Huh?"
"It was St. Patrick and St. Brigid and St. Moby." Singh insisted.
"St. Moby?  Like, what, Moby Dick or the bald dude, the musician?"
"Well," Singh said, "He's bald, but the saint came first.  It is Moby who has based his life and career on St. Moby, not the other way around.  It's always been Moby, pulling the marionette strings, through history.  He's rarely photographed."
Dee slapped her forehead - she was reeling.
"Moby!  Singh, this is crazy, do you know how long I've been trying to find this out?  Do you know more about this?"  Singh demurred.  He steepled his hands together.
"I've said too much already.  If you think there are people who don't want Moby, the history of St. Moby made public, you're right."
"So tell me this," Dee said.  "I have a distinct sensation that I've physically been ... transported around, just as I was about to get into sensitive territory about things that people didn't want me to know about St. Moby.  I would half expect it would happen here, too."
"It would be," Singh said.  "Except that we have stayed moving, which makes it harder for them to get a definite fix on your location."
"So it's true!" Dee said.  "It almost seems too easy, or too deliberate.  Why you out of all the cabdrivers?"
Singh looked spiritual, placid.  In fact, he looked like a representation, all of a sudden, of Eastern mysticism clichˇs and less credible.
"I was already having trouble knowing what to believe," Dee said.  "It isn't helping matters that all of a sudden you're looking to me more like a representation of cultural stereotypes through media, that I would somehow get all the answers from some kind of holy man.  It's just too easy."
"What, do you think everyone is some kind of mystic, just because they are Hindu, just because they were born in the subcontinent?"
Dee clammed up.  I guess I was wrong about the taxi driver, she thought.  And it was true- he actually hadn't been looking down her bodice at all - he was checking her bodice for the marks of a dart of curare, the devil's poison - as opposed, presumably, to all the other kinds of poisons which were fluffy like a layer cake?  
Calling something "The devil's poison" struck Mr. Singh as unnecessary hyperbole, but a nickname was a nickname.  The poisons board wanted money, and you could hardly fault them for going to desperate measures to get some.
"The point is," Singh said suddenly, "You've been marked for elimination.  I can tell you or not tell you, what I know.  The first step in their counterattack, the ones who don't want the word to get out about St. Moby- is to get you where they want you, physically.  If you get out of the taxi, if you stay in one place for any length of time, the second stage of their plan is a dart to the heart!"

Back at the dusty community college where Sam Park was taking classes, the cultural heritage clubs were having their annual thing.  Sam passed through the tables of kids tabling - mostly in their first couple of years of college after graduating from high school - and the anachronistic guys in blue suits who came to recruit for jobs, which seemed like an incredibly old-fashioned way of going about it.  Like, really, in 2007, would an undergrad spend their final semester going from the Career Center to meetings with guys from the Big Six, and then upon graduating go and work in the mailroom of General Dynamics, Applied Magnetics, work their way up?  Maybe in the Rust Belt, the depressing industrial Midwest, but this, Sam flattered himself, was California.  But the kids seemed to have a more basic approach, apparently he was dealing in signifier clusters that nobody around him shared.  And the kids just wanted a job.  The engineering students, probably really would go and work for Applied Magnetics.  Sam had bigger fish to fry.  He had held back, hadn't told Dee everything he knew about St. Patrick, St. Brigid and St. Moby.  St. Brigid was by this point clambering up on the tables and scrawling confrontational French slogans on the walls of the little bistro such as WE HAVE THE RIGHT NOT TO BE BORED.  She was engaging in a one-girl revolution against the forces of homogenization.  "Excuse me, miss," said the manager.  "I hate to do this - I don't want any trouble."  He eyed the very sharp metal wings and beak on the eagle on the very end of the handle of the giant French flag which she whipped around in all directions, perspiration now gleaming on her one exposed breast, the other one covered over by white lace.  She looked daggers at him!  He considered dropping his demands and letting her go.
"It's not me," he stammered.  "It's the Ottawans, the Ottawa Observers.  They want you to cover it up, I'm afraid." 
She looked enraged.
"This," she hissed, "is for FREEDOM."  The manager crept back.
"Well," he said.  "here's what I was thinking of doing. I'm going to call the cops -" Her eyes grew wider and she bared a bunch of fanglike teeth.  "But they are pussycats compared to the Observers, believe me.  They'll probably just hang back and drink wine.  It will satisfy the few people in the place who care one way or the other and meanwhile the cops won't bug you.  They'll just drink a bunch of wine."
She seemed half convinced by that.  
"Err- well, okay," she said.  It seemed like as good of a deal as she could hope for, because as the adrenaline rushed back out of her, and her amygdala had to enter into coalitions with her more conciliatory brain functions, she conceded that it would not help the efforts of the revolution of no-boredom and good-jokes, to be bludgeoning guys with metal beaks, to have that blood on her group's hands, would be counterproductive to their fun-oriented premise.  So she relented.
"Okay," she said.  The manager blinked.  There was a little silence.
"Um," he said.  "More salad?"
She put her hand on her stomach, a little queasy.  "No thanks!  I've already had seven salads since I've been in here!"

So let me get this straight, Dee asked Mr. Singh.  They, whoever they are, they don't want me to find out the truth about St. Patrick, St. Brigid and St. Moby.  That's right, said Mr. Singh, and they are terrified of universal jurisdiction, as you would expect, so they will do anything including "pop" people around, to keep you from getting a concerted effort together that would let you find out.
"That's really weird," said Dee.  "So what was all that stuff with the Beuys phone booth?  A phone  booth covered with fat and felt- it was really gross!"
Mr. Singh nodded. 
"Where are you taking me, by the way," said Dee.  She noticed that they were traveling due north through the park.  The park had roads and everything, but Mr. Singh was traveling on a ridiculously persistent route, of massive determination.  She had never seen anything like it.  They went up on park benches, they cut through bushes and the little inedible berries went flying out in a poof of spinning wheels.  They created new cracks in the low concrete walls and deepened the old ones.  Eventually they started to be tailed by "Smokey" in the form of Golden Gate Park Police, but when Mr. Singh took his taxi into a museum exhibit on "pitch" he told Dee to "Hang on!"  He rolled up all the windows with a controller and dove straight into a pit full of sticky black ooze.  The cops followed.  And only one came out.
"Mr. Singh!" called Dee.  "That was unnecessary!  Those guys aren't part of any plots, they are just patrolling the park!"
"Look, Dee," Mr. Singh said, "do you want to get answers about St. Patrick, St. Brigid and St. Moby, or don't you?"
"Yeah," she replied tentatively.
"Okay, well, those guys didn't have to plow into pitch.  Like, duh?  There's only a huge sign on the outside of the museum to the effect that there's a rousing, fascinating exhibit right now and it's on PITCH.  Give me a break."
She relented.
They emerged from the park and squeezed between the old Victorians, going up on 2 legs when necessary.  Dee was astonished.  Then the car was in a parlor, like a pastry shop, with vertical striped walls.
"They can't track us in here" Mr. Singh said.  Dee blinked.
"Why not?"  she asked.
"There's a special component in the wallpaper that blocks all radio contact as well as blocking all 'pop'ping."
"Oh," she said.  "Well, that's great, except we're only safe as long as we stay in here?  Right?"
Mr. Singh seemed to stagger.
"Mr. Singh!" cried Dee.
"We all have to go sometime," said Mr. Singh.  
Oh no!  It was the archetypal killing of the invaluable mentor.

Goffman took it in stride when his interviewer disappeared.  He figured it was someone objecting to the subject matter.  A journalist, a bit hunched, almost 70, with great big glasses, was giving an interview about Goffman in which he referring to "my friends... on the inside..."  It was people like him who never slept, and barely did anything but work.  "My friends... my friends..." People thought it was the strobe light, but it was actually a combination of things that had made Goffman get asocial. 
"Tell me, the readers are right there with you, you'll never find a more receptive audience than we have right now," Frizz said. 
Goffman blinked.  Using the power of charismatic, bejeweled oratory to make a domain of human endeavor out to be interesting or important, when the person being told had never even considered it in their priority system, was as much of a bedeviling skill of journalists, to Goffman, as the amazing trick of seemingly doing math with words, hopping the lilypads of words and ideas, which journalists seemed to be able to do and which he had never been able to understand deeply.
"Huh!" he cried in his twitchy fashion.  "What do I care if we have a receptive crowd?  I don't have an expectation or a wish for talking to you except to get it over with, to be frank."
Frizz nodded and fiddled with his food.  "Well, lookit.  The French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, years after his most famous work, you know, eighties or nineties, he had a New Yorker cartoon up in his office with a unicorn and the unicorn is saying, "Rumors of my non-existence have made it very difficult to secure funding.'"  Frizz grinned.  Goffman did not.
"And I am thinking, you know, on your behalf and unsolicited, that the same could be true for you if you get the word out properly over your outlook on things, you can more easily get funding when you want it, you know, for some serious sociological research."
Goffman blinked.  "Well, Mr. Frizz, it's nice of you to think of me like this, but I have a grant that lasts a couple of years and bla bla bla -"
Goffman was proud of himself for spinning Frizz a yarn, because Frizz had a reputation as No Dummy, and Goffman didn't want his story or the story of how he became asocial, to come out.  Light was fracturing- he felt tired.  "Frizz, I think that's all for today, ya know?"
He dismissed the journalist who shrugged and gave up, to go and do the same kind of thing with Pulitzer Committee members who were making ironically similar appeals on him.  So the cycle went around, and Frizz left for Pachinko Palace to kill a few hours, irritated.  As he put the silver ball bearings into the machine, he could only referee the fight with his subconscious which was saying, "Wise up!  Goffman pulled the wool over you!"


The rainbow of Sheckys was a loose knit group who each controlled one mountain in the catskills.  Like the prism they mostly had power when they got together like the panda bears in Panda-monium, to create a giant and fuzzy panda.  The ASPCA wouldn't touch it, under the logic that "you can't fight city hall."  As the voting "machines" of old had been more than the new mayors could tackle, the local animal people were reluctant to enter Shecky territory.  They dealt power that ran on power lines down to the garment district of NYC, where veterans of the tragic Triangle Shirt Factory fire that had lit the match for improving labor conditions in the USA, still wielded the scissor - which was more formidable in a pair of scissors but still a fearsome device in the hands of a skilled tailor.  The scissor, sometimes, the scalpel, in all, the Sheckys' power flowed to gather small sums of money on collection plates, as had once been done in churches, and funnel it back as a sneaky form of money laundering.  It came to the attention of Frizz, the journalist who was constantly making references ad nauseum to "his friends", "my friends", "my people" and so forth.  Frizz in his big glaucoma glasses with the outlandish big thick plastic frames had tore into Erving Goffman, smelling a rat. 
"Then what happened?" asked Frizz' rival for The Moon, who happened to be Jock Jones, who had himself embezzled a dogload of money from Logos and was about to go up the river but was keeping it a secret and trying not to give himself away with a "tell", beknownst to professional gamblers.  "Well, Jock," said Frizz, "For my efforts I was 'popped' like the move of a knight in chess , out of the zone of the Sheckys because I had been to hear them tell it, nosing around where I didn't belong."
"And were you?" asked Jock, whose attitude towards criminal justice had been reknitted by a conversion to Christianity in a jail cell.  (When pastors , priests, vicars or whatever, had descended, fascinated that they would have a celebrity for their bag, Jonesy had explained his conversion by "there's not much else to do".)  And also, "the rectory has a fridge.  With milk.  And biscuits.  And I stuck them under my shirt and went and traded  them for cigarettes in the vast jailhouse economy."  With an expression on his face of, put that in your pipe and smoke it!  Frizz knew nothing of this.  Apparently he had a nose for big esoteric crime but didn't see it coming when it was his own buddy who was a crook.  "Did you ever wonder" Jock asked, "if there was a connection between the Sheckys' small-time laundering and whatever is going on with St. Patrick, St. Brigid and St. Moby?"  Frizz blinked.  "I have not.  Do you think there is one?  I admit ya got me there," he said.  Jonesy was a canny operator and he figured that the way to keep Frizz off of the trail of himself, was to keep the man's nose busy since he clearly was a brilliant investigator once he had a lead to work on.  "Well," Jones said, "I was thinking maybe this "pop" ability is something, both you and Dee are saying the same thing and I've never heard anyone else talk about it."  Frizz, like others , was interested in the alternation between a LITANY OF STUFF, signifiers of THE GOOD LIFE, and a solidifying effect in the other direction.  He was fascinated both with LISTS and with the impulse to make them.  Ever since he was a little kid and had learned about the series that you always learned about-the four seasons, the twelve months, he had noticed this tendency in people to layer on detail in a rushing way, with the implication that you could never comprehend or touch upon all the attributes, aspects or implications or interconnections of all the items in the list as you were buffeted about, to and from with the stuff coming fast and furious.  And why did human beings do this, why did they like it?  His memories fell over their own feet and one in particular came to mind - some lady at a bus station, talking loud on her cell phone about her honeymoon weekend.  It was the very same bus station where the black sheep buddy of A.G. Edwards [himself] had allegedly solicited sex, wrecking the stock and the popularity of his proprietary line of software systems and bearing out the point of view of those educators and higher-education critics and bloggers on the subject who had said that coursework in AG Edwards was dangerous and fickle and a BA in that stuff might prove not to be worth the paper it was printed on.  The lady was engaging in litany.  She seemed to love litany itself as much as she loved the particular details of her honeymoon weekend.  It was like certain poets who began a line in the same way and went on and on like that, using the common jumping off point of repetition as a means to get everywhere.  Frizz was fond of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso but he always got those guys mixed up.  Ginsberg too.  But he knew they liked a good litany now and then.  "I have seen" was a big opening, as a matter of fact, "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" was another just like it, he knew there must be historical roots to this stuff but wasn't intimately aware what they were, but the setup ("What have you seen, etc., etc., tell me about the litany of details that you witnessed,") and the answer section which could go on for an hour, or actually all night if you let it ("I saw a black dog, I saw a white ladder covered with water, I saw a headless horse, I saw a wheel on fire, I saw a fish that swam in air instead of water...") endlessly fascinated Frizz and this prattling lady ("we had cheese puffs, we had a cake the size of a house, we had car wheels that were blue, red and green, we had papier mache masks that would bite your lower lip for you,") all told like some exercise in rampant schizophonia, made Frizz wonder at that moment, what was supposed to be occurring in the mind of the listener when you had that many things and no time, no air in which to comprehend one before the next one came up.  Like the interjections throughout the Cyclops episode, more and more heroes of Irish myth falling over themselves, or the joys of a splash panel, Neal Adams drawing all sorts of sports figures for a group scene for the cover of ESPN magazine, it seemed to stem from the love of the kitchen sink.  But this was Frizz' problem.  Detectiving takes restraint and concentration and while he was having a conference with his buddy Jock Jones, he apparently had the control of vast and unseen mental powers and techniques because half of him was discussing the weather, the sports, the daily news, the classifieds and the people with Jock, and the other half was there in body but not in mind, while the mind set up and tore down games of 64-facet chess. But that was Frizz, that was why he ate Pulitzers for lunch.  Jock Jones would be lucky to one day have his own little piece of the media, as many newly-minted Christian felons did with the rest of their lives.  But Frizz and Jock Jones were only 2 pieces of the puzzle.  Frizz seemed to trail off in considering whether the Saints Patrick, Brigid and Moby thing was connected to the Sheckys.  It touched upon the tension between the imagining of disparate groups wanting similar things or disparate groups wanting completely different things.  References to "Italian brio", "Nor'eastern moxie," "Gallic pluck" were elusive upon the question of details.  Frizz tried to bring this up and was way out of line.  "The Colts won!  43-24!" cried Jock.  In prison he had picked up an appreciation for the ponies, which begged the question of why he was talking about the Colts, but that was its own tangled web to be sold to dial-a-story, which was calling Ed the surveyor on his Sunrise STS, test equipment for DSL, with a custom ringtone of "Carcass Pie" by Merzbow.  

Frizz knew nothing of this.  "Look," Frizz said, "Let's set aside the Colts for a while.  I don't want to talk about the Colts.  We've already beaten a de-" Jonesy interrupted with a waved hand.  "Don't say it!  Please!"  The complexity was thick like pea soup, and the question, once again, was litany versus narration and solidification , or possibly breadth against depth.  
"You want to get some pizza," Jonesey said.  Frizz shook his head.  
"That was not a question," Jonesy said.  He had never managed to embezzle a shitload of money from Logos without a few mental tricks of his own, Jedi-style, persuasion tricks.  And Frizz ate it up, both the persuasion and the pizza, and with a stuffed maw, could hardly bring up his longwinded pet theories about litany at the same time.
The decision by Dee, Tammy and Casey Louie to go into the academic disciplines they ultimately went into was difficult.  They discussed it, laying around in the bottom of the empty swimming pool.  "We better get out of this thing soon," Tammy said.  Some discussion.  So they went up the metal ladder and into the dry brush behind a supermarket.  There was an eighties video games named after the star system Pleiadeas.  The profusion of many vowels all in one place gave Jock Jones the chills while simultaneously inspiring him.  "I will go," he said out loud, "To the Plieadeas star system!"  Every time he said it, he misspelled it a different way, even though technically you didn't spell things when you said them.  Frizz had been working with a buddy.  It wasn't easy.  He had a crack team of assistants but had begun working with a buddy because he had recently turned 101, but at the same time, who had Frizz's mind?  Who had won the Pulitzer?  He had, so it wasn't something you could shunt off by reputation alone.  Detectives from New Orleans to France, called Frizz to get his help, much as they might have once called up Sherlock Holmes if not for four little things: (1) the opium (2) the racism (3) there were no telephones yet in Holmes' day and (4) Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character.  So Frizz was what they had, and they humored his strange theories about litany, because no one but Frizz solved their cases in the same way, usually limited to two-bit, tit-for-tat lemonade stand, lost dog kind of stuff. So Frizz was a bit impatient for something really difficult.  Jock Jones burst into the office.  Smedley was behind the desk.  
"Frizz around?" asked Jock.  
"He's not available," Smedley said.  
"But," Jones insisted.  "It says on the door, Frizz, Private Investigator, no case too big or too small."  "Look, man," Smedley said, getting little bits of woven straw out of his hair, rearranging them and putting them back in - Frizz is 101, and when you're 101, it doesn't matter how much of a national treasure you are, or how many Pulitzers you have won.  You have to take it easy a little more than you did when you were 91 or 81.  So you gotta either deal with me or find a different shop."
"Fine," said Jock.  He slammed down a chunk of bills, wrapped in a cord, slapped them down on the desk with a THUMP.  "Take me to the Pleadides star system!"  
"Um," Smedley inquired.  "There's no oxygen up there, I don't think you would last very long."  He stopped talking, prompting JOCK for a reply, and when JOCK didn't say anything, Smedley, who was Frizz's partner but basically subservient in matters of detection, cycled in his head trying to think of, "WHAT FRIZZ WOULD WANT."  He thought about whether there were any anomalies or problems in the story so far.  
"And besides," he said finally.  "Where did you get that chunk of bills??"  Jock went red.  A sense of guilt went through him and he thought he was almost going to blurt out that he had embezzled a shitload of money from LOGOS.  It was Jock Jones' future staring him down.  Would he face jail time and never make the Pleiadies, or would he face jail time and THEN the Plieaiedies?  Or would he perhaps be exiled to a spanking new penal colony IN the Plaeidees?  It was a new penal colony, the way Australia had been once.  It was laid out in muted colors.  You just didn't find anyone in offworld penal colonies thinking hard about aesthetics.  Jock Jones awoke and blinked his eyes.  As far as he knew, it was still 2007, with 2007 amounts of scientific invention.  People could get around the solar system if they were willing to throw away decades of their lives on the long trips, but no one was even talking about space rides to other star systems.  And yes, here he was, and the scene wasn't pretty.  Jock had been to see movies back on Earth like Star Trek, Star Wars, and was unhappy to discover that the reality of life on other planets was incomprehensible, brutally violent, noisy chaos.  Not as in the Cantina Scene, in Star Wars, noisy, messy yes anthropomorphic, but unadorned, uncommented upon and a huge stinking mess. And so, this was how Jock Jones spent the prison years, and no amount of pressure to develop "stories" about "science fiction" or damned fool "things" about "space opera" could actually make his Pleiadies years make narrative sense.  And there's only so much a guy like that could take.  When once again he dropped his feet on the Earth, he would seem a little whacked, he wouldn't talk about interplanetary trade or alliances of a hundred worlds, or Rem and Cabell, creatures who seemed to embody the best guess of human writers, like the beloved Julie Schwartz, like Bradbury or Heinlein, substitution a litany of Neat Stuff for the un-understandable nature of real aliens.  He just came back with eleven pupils in one eye and eight in the other, and anyone who met or knew him instinctively understood that that was the calling card of getting to the Pleiadies and back, all in a human lifetime.  And it was Smedley who had sent him there, mediated by secret insights from Frizz.  Because as only Smedley and Frizz knew, resting was a euphemism , especially at 101, and Smedly grimaced to think about his mentor losing little clumps of cells, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, outer lamella, the works.  "I don't have much longer," he told Smedley in a croaking voice.  "You have to carry on for me."
"But boss," Smedley said.  "I just work here... I don't know nothing about winning no Pulitzer Prizes."
"There's nothing to it," Frizz said, "it's more to do with your Rolodex which you are inheriting from me, that with any kind of inherent detecting abilities."  
"Actually," Smedley said.  "I'm a little surprised by how much our work seems to dance around a center, like it's all a bunch of hooey.  It's not like we are solving eleven-sided crossword puzzles, games of seventeen-dimensional chess, here in the office with just a desk and a chair.  You don't even get the internet in here."
"No," Frizz said. "One litany is enough.  Seriously.  It's not good for you to have too many litanies at once.  Like, let's say we were talking about a rainbow.  Like for instance-"  Smedley knew, for better or worse, that Frizz would be talking for a while, and he stoically considered it his duty to listen.  He sat back on a moderately-comfortable vinyl couch.  "So there we are talking about the Shecky family.  They wear color coded shirts- very helpful-and do you know why?"
"Why?" Smedley asked.  
"For greater identification amongst people who cannot read.  Subtly brilliant on their part.  It's like the Candyland game- the chips -it wasn't you, you didn't roll dice, you pulled brightly colored chips out of a bag."
"Oh," said Smedley.  "Like the Wiggles."
"Yes," Frizz said.  "Exactly like the Wiggles.  Also, if you want to dig deeper into the history of kid culture, some guys who looked like Camp Counselors, they had that sort of benign authority.  They appeared in the pages of Dynamite."
Smedley just blinked.
"It's a magazine.  WAS a magazine for kids, and anyway, one of them was called CHIP, they did crazy benignly authoritarian things, like juggle eggs, and they wore primary-colored sweatshirts for greater identification amongst those who don't know how to read."
Smedley instantly felt a wave of gratitude at being able to experience Frizz before he died. Even at 101, he was sharp like the tack.  
"So," prompted Smedley.  "Dynamite, counselor types, Candy Land chips and the Shecky Family."
"The point I was trying to make," Frizz said insistently, "is no internet, because to fly off on an endlessly deepening tangent, wikipedia and metafilter and tons of news articles, it is, itself, a huge litany.  And we don't need two.  It's only going to distract us from the litany we really care about."  Smedley nodded.  And grinned, because Frizz had actually proved him wrong- he had just been listening with glazed attention, to just the kind of meaty detection brilliance he was convinced they really didn't do.
"I take it back!" he cried.  "I was just about to say we dance around the outside but never dig in."
Frizz smiled with an arrogance borne out by his qualifications.  "Well.  You don't win Pulitzers by dancing around the outside."
At that moment, Goffman's party was breaking up.  Someone asked Goffman, "what are you going to do for the rest of the day, Erving?"  
Because it was only 5:00 or so, so there was this nugget of time left in the day when you had already been to a birthday party and it had already broken up.  You had free time in a unique way that couldn't be matched by anything other than a birthday party.  Plus it was raining, which also added to the atmosphere. 
"Well," Goffman said.  "thought I'd go stand under a traffic light and try to figure out what it's DO-ing."  So as the party broke up, Dee was slowly traversing back across town.  She had left Mr. Singh at the Kaiser at Geary and one of the streets that bordered the Presidio.
"What's up, Mr. Singh?" she asked.  He hadn't said anything throughout the avenues as the numbers shrank, 39, 38, 37, 36.  There sure were a lot of avenues in town.
"Oh nothing!" said Mr. Singh.  "I ... just .... have... a ..... little... stomach... ache."  Dee could tell it wasn't true and he was making the best of it, portraying it as less than it was so as not to alarm her. 
"Really?" she asked him firmly, making no secret of the disbelief.
"Shoo!" he scooted her out of the cab door. Well, this was just great, she thought.  I DIDN'T get my interview done, I DON'T know what's going on.  I DON'T have a ride home and I DO have to worry about some kind of weird, arcane power from sinister creeps, zapping me... she considered this.  Maybe I can ride those zaps and get home automatically.  They only think they're hurting me.  All I have to do is find someone and talk about volatile subjects with them, like 'saints' and they will zap me in spite of themselves or because they have to.
"Mr. Singh!  Mr. Singh!"  She hollered, trying to catch up with him.  In fact it was odd, he was going into the hospital, but he had taken his cab with him instead of perhaps parking the cab or better yet, leaving her in custody of the cab when he went inside to try to see a doctor.  Something about it didn't add up.  Unfortunately for Dee, she was correct and incorrect at the same time.  The drive for something fishy was related to a desire, so said researchers, Goffman's contemporaries at odd academic conferences, to short circuit a messed-up situation and redraw the rules.
"The Bay Bridge has been completely gridlocked beyond all reckoning.  So I," claimed a holistic-looking researcher with a little "Extension", "hopped out of my car - we weren't moving anyway- and hopped up on the roof of the car and cried, 'Something is fishy here!' And sure enough, it was all a big exercise in participatory situationist art expression, the creeps, the bastards had basically set up this whole thing involving 200 cars on the bridge at rush hour, caution to the wind, it's not like they really cared if there were pregnant ladies, well, the goddamn bastard can tell it better than I can," and researcher Fintan turned the mic over to a woman who also had a little 'extension' and bugged-out eyes who incessantly kept trying to drive the point home that 'life is art' and 'art is life' and anything rolled - like water off a duck's back - off of her, incessantly, any complaint or criticism could be absorbed.
"I had to give birth to my kid," said a new mom.  "right in the back of my own Chevrolet, because of your goddamn, gridlock art!"
"Aha," instructed Kristin, her eyes bugging out a bit more.  But giving birth to babies is a part of life.  And life is art!"
The crowd was frustrated but it was difficult to argue, at the end of the day,  with that.  Two FBI agents, BOB and DON, stood up.  "We had him in our clutches," said BOB.
"We had him in our MAW," Said Don.
"Who?" Kristin wanted to know.
"One of the Sheckys.  Shecky Red!  He murdered a man down by the old canal."  Kristin was unsympathetic, unrepentant.
"Sir, people have been killing people down by old canals for thousands of years and it's all a part of life, and life is art."  With just such arguments, Kristin avoided the slammer.  It was like saying "a human being is all just atoms and still always just atoms no matter if you are alive or dead, it doesn't matter, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."  Apparently once someone had tried to get Kristin, like a lizard eating its own tail - by clueing her in to the hypocrisy inherent in saying that the rest of the world could be co-opted at her whim, for the ultimate art "happening," but that she herself would not want to be the one who was shot by Shecky Red, or if she was the one shot by Shecky Red, for her killer to escape capture because the FBI agents chasing him got caught up in inescapable car-gridlock because of Kristin's own art thing.  It was a little like being served with a subpoena- or having your Miranda rights read to you - merely the stating of the statement as it was read off a browned scroll was supposed to make Kristin shrivel up and die, in recognition of the untenable nature of her bag.  SO it went down in history as a moment, and in some quarters celebrated like a famous day, like Martin Luther King day - but Kristin remained the woman they couldn't hang.  She snuck around, though, so the ones who wanted to nab her did ultimately have a little fuel to their fire.  But this was pretty tough stuff- a little bit hard to follow, even.  
So in an odd way, actually it was told, "Half the world thinks she's just kooky, half the world thinks she's ultimately responsible, even liable, for crimes of omission that happened because of the absence of what COULD have happened if it wasn't for her interfering art creations."  For once it was both Frizz and Smedley.
"How did you find out about this?" asked Frizz.  Smedley did most of the legwork these days.
"It's because of Shecky Red.  My sources - my friends-"
Frizz broke into a grin.  "Attaboy!" he said.
"My friends always flag me whenever anything happens with a Shecky.  And Red is a bloodthirsty."  Frizz had never heard an adjective used as a noun in quite this way. 
"So I was hanging out with BOB and DON at the Sound Barrier"
"Oh," Frizz said.  "That's where the Air Force Wives hang out."
"Yeah," Smedley said.  "They all drink like fish, I only drink Calistoga, and pretty soon I am the best looking guy in the place, ya know."
Frizz grinned.  "So that's your game."
"No, no," Smedley waved his hands innocently.  "It's just how it works out circumstantially.  Imagine a room full of widows, all completely sloshed by 2 in the afternoon and meanwhile there's me with a tool belt full of cel phones and discrete band communicators."  Frizz didn't know what that was but he nodded anyway.  
"It's inevitable that they're drunk enough to get gregarious.  I had a Racer X once instead of Calistoga and they practically tore my clothes off!  Anyway, those kops, they were talking amongst themselves about the vicious Shecky Red and that's how they happened to clue me in."  
Now it was Frizz's turn to be impressed with his protˇgˇ.  "This is why we're a good team, Smedley," said Frizz, and Smedley couldn't disagree. 
"But I haven't exactly won a Pulitzer," he thought," just by getting information from a couple of KOPS."  It bothered him that he was riding Frizz's coattails to fame and fortune.

Things were nowhere near placid within the illicit family of Sheckys who were identified always by their first name as though it was a surname.  Which was an Asian convention, at least sometimes and much inane pop cultural analysis had been made of the supposed message for what it meant to put the surname first, such as more emphasis on cultural wellness rather than rugged individualism as seen in the USA.  Ironically, Johnny Tung, who was last seen doing a little dance on a flatbed truck, with the Klieg lights and the rumbling of the motors as much a cheap indicator of Fall as the leaves coming off the trees, the tossing around the old pigskin and the heady aroma of hickory smoke coming out of neighborhoods that had signs clearly posted, stating PLEASE NO BURNING THE HICKORY TREES - had made his fortune in writing a book about just such a naming phenomenon and Johnny Tung got a sweet deal -royalties, residuals, points, percentages, giant cardboard mockups to display at readings stating, HAVE YOUR PICTURE TAKEN WITH JOHNNY, BUT PLEASE DON'T BURN THE HICKORY TREES!"  Johnny was a staunch environmentalist but only when it came to the Hickory.  He could give a flying leap for the Elm, Pine Larch, not to mention a charismatic animal life such as the SPOTTED WARTED LITTLE TOAD who could use protection.  The arrangements of Johnny made with the bookstores were very clear on the hickory question, essentially because Johnny wanted all the hickory for himself, is the real reason.  As the day wore into night and Frizz, Smedley  and Goffman were all sleeping in their beds, Johnny wore on, doing a little dance on the back of a flatbed, occasionally giving a hearty whoop.  He then woke up his driver Shecky Blue, who looked like a member of ZZ Top affectionately referred to as the Fourth Z.   The others being Billy Gibbons and a couple of other guys also named Billy.  Blue woke with a start, grumpily.  
"What's the matter," he snorted.  
"Time to get going," said Johnny.  So Shecky Blue rolled over on his other side and began driving in his sleep.  It was harrowing if you had not yet learned to trust him but Johnny did - and it was really no more harrowing than being driven by one of the new radar and GPS detection cars, whizzing on the road knowing when to stop, never bumping any obstacles.  Shecky Blue just did it by, who knew, ESP or some odd force field.  "It's just this talent I have," said Shecky Blue modestly.  "How can you even see between the dark glasses, the beard and the fact that you are slouched all the way down with your eye level facing the dashboard?"  Shecky Blue said ZZZZ.  This was the other reason they called him the fourth Z.  He slept while doing some pretty incredible things.  There had been warnings on the teevee, that such drugs as Ambien could make you sleepdrive, but Shecky Blue did it without chemical augmentation.  In fact he never took so much as an aspirin- if he did, he noticed the changes.  He had once taken Vitamin E, just to see what it was like, but that was it. Subsequently, he had gotten jobs as a closed-track driver, entirely while sleeping and the really odd occurrence was when he began to win awards like that.  And that was when Johnny had taken notice.
"What is your JOB" Johnny had asked Shecky Blue in a tone of voice that was amusingly innocent, like something the classroom of students on a field trip would ask, and the phrasing they would use.  When they went to see architect Frank Fielding at his high building in the New York skyline and asked him 
"What is your HOBBY,"  Fielding smirked.  
But he was just Shecky Blue's understudy so accordingly, hung back and tried not to get in the way.  "Where do you like to TRAVEL to."  Now even Shecky Blue had a grin on his face.  "I like to travel to," he began, as thought he was answering a yes/no question in an introductory language class.
"Si, me gusta," 
"I like to travel to Trinidad and Tobago because they are the place where you can hear music played on steel pans, and I like steel pans."
But, what," he wanted to know, "has this got to do with the driver job?  As of now, he just thought about it but had not said it yet.  
"What is your favorite FOOD."
"I like pine nuts," Shecky Blue answered.  "Pine nuts are in pesto.  I like pesto."  Johnny wrote it all down without a trace of guile.  
"What is your favorite COMEDY."
"Benny Hill," said Shecky Blue, pronouncing the syllables in a slow and deliberate fashion.  He looked at his watch, irritated.  "I'm going to leave soon," Shecky Blue said, "and I'll leave you with my deputy, Steve Cushing.  He'll be able to answer all of your questions."  Johnny nodded with acquiescence, which means there really was no one minding the store in the sense that Frank Fielding, professional architect, was a deputy of interviewee Shecky Blue and Billy Gibbons (the third Z) was deputy of interviewer Johnny, and there was no impartial voice in Large Conference Room today.  It also meant that if they so chose, deputies Fielding and Gibbons could wage in effect a proxy war, cold war, representing their interests, while Tung and Shecky Blue stayed out of the fracas, probably in a paneled den in Denver, even in the same room, having their photos taken with their arms around each other and quite content to be profiteers off the appearance of being mortal enemies when really they each had about seventeen dogs in each others' races, muddying the waters a lot.  Eventually though, Shecky Blue got the job.  He whooped his way through the narrow and unsafe IV streets, crowing that he got the job.  Some wonk from student government, who wore his baseball cap so often he looked like he was disguising having some kind of awful condition like a hole in the head, came out eventually to shut Shecky Blue down.  And it worked.  The wonk went out of his way to keep his identity from being known.  The reporters of the student paper didn't find it out which led one crusty old timer to exclaim "if some famous award winning sleep driver had come through town and been shut down by a wonk from student government on our watch, we would have known what color panties he was wearing."  But posthumous crowing about how much the paper had gone downhill, how much better it was in the crusty oldtimer's day, when Mark Stucky was in charge of shooting pages- was 20/20, and the crusty oldtimer was a bit uncalled for in impugning the wonk's underwear.  In fact, weeks later, Jock Jones breezed into town and embezzled a shitload of money from IV Bookstore, and didn't get caught, didn't get caught, and the oldtimer was like, same diction, same peculiar syntax, "If some little yup in a pink and purple Izod shirt had embezzled a shitload of money from IV Bookstore on our watch, we would have known what color panties he was wearing!" And soon - it was his recurring games of self-promotion and November-morning quarterbacking.  Certainly Johnny didn't care and Shecky Blue was long gone by the time the crusty one's remarks were published.  The ironic thing (again with Johnny Tung and irony) was that in embezzling a shitload of money from IV bookstore, Jock Jones had put a crimp in the purchasing budget for that year, so that if the Nexus actually HAD found out what color panties Jock Jones was wearing, they may have had money in the budget left over to carry Johnny's cultural critique tract LAST NAME FIRST.  And it was the detection skills of FRIZZ AND SMEDLEY, detectives at large, who would have found this out if ANYONE would, and they, alas, were still sleeping.

The Beuys people actually did have ideas underlying what they were doing, and wanted to talk about them.  Specifically, the Beuys people had, with McGovern, co-authored a plan to get the U.S. out of Iraq by next Friday.  The Beuys people were destined, in all likelihood though, to be remembered as the felt-and-fat people.  Someone needed to get their story out who wasn't going to just repeat it like a mantra.  Felt and fat, said with what Pat Paulsen had called BEJEWELLED LANGUAGE, where the tone of the words was the emphasis.  Paulsen had worked in an engineering "shop" where they Degaussed people who had just come back from Russia. This was the Cold War, remember, and under the circumstances, being degaussed was tame, modest, compared to what might happen to you instead.  And in that climate, Paulsen had noticed guys with little mustaches putting degauss on a pedestal like it was something from Tiffanys, so that their thumb and finger came up as thought they were referring to a delicious dish, and they said "we degauss them" which crowed about the sound of words without saying anything about what it actually meant.  Paulsen had only worked there a year.
"Maybe we should see if Pat Paulsen is available," said a Beuys deputy who went by Robert, but who was actually SHECKY RED.  It was in this way that the Sheckys sketched out what was possible, according to camps of people. Paulsen wandered the docks, half expecting to be on the receiving end of some awful activity far away from the peering eyes of social critics.  Because the docks were just like that.  So it was with a little disdain and discouragement that Paulsen turned a corner and saw "THE DOCKS- little restaurant."  On a bed of black and white stones, some prints for sales that were themselves a reference to the docks, some by vomitous artsters like Ansel Adams and Thomas was it Kinkaid or Kinkade, it didn't matter.  They had wrecked it just by breathing. Paulsen thought but always there were arguments of pragmatism, like that those photographer dudes would call attention to the docks, which, yeah, were economically in trouble and never got any attention or visitors because of the likelihood of beheadings.  So Paulsen thought and then he suggested as much to his "personal advocate" who was like a stealth marketer who was good at planting the most outlandish things in the minds of people who there was no prayer that they would be in favor of that.  Like the old clichˇ about Eskimos, selling fans to Eskimos so they could keep cool, Rogers had pulled a couple of coups like that and had been rewarded with being able to charge a higher rate, but now, for god knows what were his reasons, the trick was to let Pat Paulsen come to your house and borrow a couple of bucks.  They were in the process of hanging around the venture capitalist dweebs on Sand Hill Road, to raise funds to try to put together a media blitz, or something, to get people of all stripes to throw in with the Pat Paulsen Society.  When you signed up got a big plastic pen, made by SENATOR, a four-color badge of Dennis the Menace and his dog Gnasher, and a handsome wallet card.  But it was Paulsen, maybe, who could have used the wallet card, because the whole idea of the thing was that Paulsen could come to your house and borrow a couple of bucks.  It was slow at first.  "It's bound to be slow at first," Rogers said to Paulsen,  Paulsen shrugged and it annoyed Rogers.
"Look, Pat, you're ... not OLD, you have a good robust earning power, right?"
Paulsen scowled- he didn't appreciate it.
"What are you driving at?"
"Well, look, why don't you just get a job like everybody else?  People who run for president and lose ... I'm assuming ... find something to do.  How difficult  can it be?  You don't really need a bunch of hooey about getting people to give you a couple of bucks.  Get out there and use your ... moxie?  Don't you have any of that like, you know, sticktoitiveness?  Moxie?  Pluck"
"I used the last of my moxie getting a special kind of paint at the hardware store."  Rogers was pissed.
"That's the other thing I'm not too happy about, Pat.  Why do you bust out with this stuff?  What does that even mean, using moxie at the hardware store for paint."
"It's all true," Pat said.  "They take it, it's like money, they let you use moxie in lieu of money, run out of moxie, go off , get on a treadmill and drum up some more moxie."
Rogers scratched his chin  That's actually pretty interesting- good for the hardware stores.  It rewards moxie!  Moxie instead of money.  I like it!
"Yeah," Pat said.  "It's like, you know, solar cells, businesses are hooking up all these systems to account for all the energy they use up, like you know, all the carbon offsets and everything.."
Paulsen just nodded lightly.  This wasn't his forte.  He gnawed a cuticle.  "So anyway, hardware stores have always been big stars on that stuff, and they get the idea after they installed solar panels and started getting all their power from solar.  It's because they have this huge guilt thing, they have so many obscure solvents, so many times where the con-the general contractors want a dolly with six wheels and so they have to subcontract with China or something and they wind up turning a blind eye on a lot of shit!"
"Really," Paulsen said, gnawing another cuticle.  Pretty soon, taking down a plaster model of a cuticle from on high, gnawing that instead.  While Rogers was busy prattling about moxie and hardware stores- and what the hell did that have to do with unpopular-motif-consulting?  Paulsen sure didn't know- Paulsen was seriously considering ordering pizza right while they were standing around.  The phone rang, sparing them any more embarrassment.  It was VC Moon Rockets.  
"Oh, hi Moon," said Paulsen.  "What's happening?"
Moon Rockets wanted to talk about the fat-and-felt people.  "It's 'Moon Rockets'" Rogers said to Paulsen, covering up the bottom of the cel phone with his hand.
"OH," Paulsen said.  "Did he get us any money?" 
Moon Rockets wanted to make a deal.  "Ya gotta make deals!  Ya gotta deal!" he said bludgeoningly from a sun-lit atrium on Sand Hill Road.  "What do ya think about that DEAL I suggested?" said Rockets.
"Oh," Paulsen said.  "The deal."
"I want you to take on the Beuys devotees and I will take up your case for your Paulsen thing."
And the plot only thickened from there, like it was one of those "scales" problems where you have a pitcher that is the same weight as 2/3 of a tumbler and so on.
"Well," Rogers said.  "I could be talked into it if you'll play this little gala event I'm throwing."
Rogers was always throwing galas for something or other.  One had lifted off the ground and not touched back down for three weeks.
"Well," said Rogers' buddy Erving Goffman.  "That's kinda the dream, when you hope a party will like, coalesce, lift off the ground for 3 weeks."  Goffman, of course, was legendarily asocial and had spent his own birthday party standing off to one side trying to figure out what they were all DOING.  He had a dry wit.  Goffman was an acquired taste.  After he had been to a few birthday parties and had tried to figure out what they were all DO-ing, word had got around until he became an informal consultant for comprehending party dynamics.
"Yeah," Goffman said, employing the slang for "YES".  "This was before I gave it all up, joined a religious order, I had a crack team of analytical helpers.  We would all stand to one side at parties, five of us in the shape of a big pentagram..."
This raised an eyebrow, as Goffman was telling Dee, back at the restaurant of Saints Patrick , Brigid and Moby, that he would have used a pentagram.
"Oh come on," Goffman said to the implication of something wrong with that.  "We're not satanic, give me a break."  And it was true, they were no satanists, they just liked five-pointed stars the way some people liked azure or seashells or embossed magnets to look like bagels, rolls, types of bread.  "It's just another tool for us, a motif"
"You mean, WAS," Dee said.  She always seemed to want to twist the knife.  Goffman winced as though struck.
It was all true.  The Beuys people wanted Rogers' expert advice on how to get more people to listen to their ideas more often.  Goffman had run a party-analysis shop.  It was the little social "tropes" that interested Goffman, "What does it DO," he would sometimes exclaim.
Coming over a low hill, though, was driver Shecky Blue , as discrete ties between a country full of Sheckys gradually was made evident.  Shecky Blue could drive while sleeping, but it not only scared the hell out of his passengers and everyone else, it scared the hell out of him too.  The phone rang and it was Johnny Tung.
"You got the job, let's go!"  At the flatbed truckstop, Johnny Tung was perceived as an odd bird.  His deputy Billy got into hot water later, for suggesting to Johnny that he had said he WAS an odd bird."
"No, no, there's a difference," Johnny said.  "I said I was SEEN as an odd bird, not that I WAS one."
They had this discussion as they were pulling up, once again, to the flatbeds "hangout".  Billy was starting to dislike going there.
"I could be a lot of places," he thought.  "Home sleeping for one.  I could be playing checkers with old retired guys in the public park.  Where they wear Flavor Flav 'clocks' around their neck, but in a literal context, like it's trickled down and they do it so they can always know what time it is.  "I could be with those checkers players instead of here," Billy said as they parked and the truck lurched slightly.  The other flatbedders were swarthy and mean.
"Look, it's JOHNNY THE DANCER," they shouted sarcastically.  "This is the part of the job I hate," Billy said out loud as he initiated fisticuffs.  Fifteen minutes later, no flatbedder was conscious except Johnny Tung and his deputy Billy Gibbons.  Billy was in a gregarious and talkative mood, mixed with guilt for bashing a bunch of heads together.  He wondered if, churchlike, the irony of getting a masters in nonviolent conflict resolution at the center for studies of Advanced Degree Studies in Nonviolent Conflict Resolution,, by day, and bashing flatbedder heads by night to make some extra money, was going to come back and haunt him later or if, churchlike, he wouldn't be able to abide the hypocrisy and would jump up out of his uncomfortable wooden school-desk and shout about his "day job" that happened at night.  There was no resistance, the other flatbedders didn't give Johnny and Billy any guff after that, but one wondered about Johnny's discrete motivations for going through with it, under the klieg lights , for transporting his body and the body of his deputy in a context of truck driving as much for the signifiers as for actually hauling anything, or for any pragmatic considerations.  There actually were guys, said one of the few friendly inviting flatbedders over coffee a while later, who went to Consolidated Freightways headquarters in Menlo Park, picked up a bale of cotton or whatever, jumped down, and then all they had to do was drive and drive and the mantra was 'I lose money', there was time pressure, which was why the truckdrivers, eighteen-wheeler drivers and flatbedders alike, took bronchial dilators with stimulant properties, and why trucker markets sold them and why trucker distributors distributed them and why trucker chemists synthesized them and so forth.  But you didn't have to care.  The production manager was going to be pissed off EITHER WAY.  That's just the way production managers were.  Ruddy, red faced, open collar, you could make your deadline or miss your deadline, those guys were just psychologically whacked and it didn't matter really.  They would puff out, but I mean, when were production managers NOT puffing about money and the clock?  It wasn't like they would make you commit ritual hari-kiri or something.
"But," asked driver Shecky Blue, "Isn't there like a Darwinian selection going on, like you know, for future runs?"
Johnny and Billy smiled.
"I've found," Billy said, "that half the time they need warm bodies and you'd be amazed, when they need drivers, how your reputation just VANISHES like MAGIC!"  Johnny nodded and concurred.  "It's all very disinterested.  You could be a big star with a reputation for being fast and never hear from anyone, if there's nothing going on in the first place.  Sometimes, they're glutted with work and catching shit from THEIR OWN people and they don't know how in the world they're going to get it all done and when that happens they're thrilled.  You'd be amazed how reputations go up in smoke like they never happened."
It was only a matter of time before Johnny, who had just hired Shecky, and their respective deputies, Billy Gibbons and Frank Fielding, sat down for lunch at the restaurant that was, today at least, called The Secret Saint.  The restaurant was decked out with a slot over the door where you could stick a placard with different sayings on it and the employees would put something up there according to their own snarky sense of humor and today it was the Secret Saint.  St. Brigid, who had just a week or two ago been so allured by liberty that she threw one side of her top off selflessly, thought this was a pretty audacious move on the part of whoever had dreamed it up, and she said so. 

"For fuck's sake, isn't that a little dangerous?" she said with endearing tendency to cuss a lot.  But the proprietor was not prone to loud outbursts and tapped the side of his nose with his pointer, gesturing not to worry about it too hard.
"Do we want the story to get out?" said St. Brigid. "No we don't," said the proprietor, cousin of Yves Rodier, Shecky Blue.  The ownership of the darkly lit restaurant, which primarily served up copious dishes of macaroni and cheese and the food equivalents of a professor jokily being a professor of "Social Studies", like an absurd handmade sugar concoction like DOUBLE STUF OREO PIE, that only the PR Flacks for Double Stuf could really justify - by Shecky Blue , member of crime family "Sheckys" and doubling as Johnny Tung's flatbed driver was a scandal in the making.  Not many people knew or suspected how deep and insidious ran the red blood of confounds in human organization, which was just a fancy way of saying that Shecky Blue was a double-triple-quadruple agent who backstabbed and re-re-confided in different camps so many times, there was an amusing and ridiculous likelihood and tendency to lose track of who or what got your true, deepest level of support with a guarantee of no subsequent doublecross when the other camp offered him ten more bucks a month.
"Shecky Blue," said Frizz to Smedley, "is a problem, but he's OUR problem." With which Frizz revealed his true colors.  
"What is the situation?" asked Smedley.  
"It's like massively parallel."
"It is," Frizz said.  "It is massively parallel and I'll tell you something, massively parallel scares the hell out of me."
"Just be glad it's massively parallel of camps of people who want information, want money or something and not .. you know, the bomb."
Frizz nodded.  He knew they would quickly gravitate back to intrigue of a scope that they were capable of following.  By definition almost, what was the point of debating or discussing something that was of a scope beyond, too big, too scary or too depressing.  They spent ten minutes going over the new nuclear arms race of all middle eastern countries, and proprietor Shecky Blue had to wonder if it made the most sense to see the world now in terms of palliative care, doing the best for the most people for as long as possible but in a context of things going boom in a while.
Yeah, they remarked briefly, Jordan, Egypt, UAE, they were all popping up like pieces of toast.  There was going to be a new drive for sanity in a while, the question was basically would it take a kid killed at the crosswalk to get a traffic light put in.  Or, less likely, could the countries of the world contextualize nuclear bombs as being worth relinquishing in massive numbers.  To abolish the conservative impulse was going to be tantamount to abolishing SATIRE.  

Enough, Blue waved his hands around.  Enough, enough.

It really was enough, you couldn't even think about the destructiveness, it was something that quickly became RELIGIOUS AWE, and if you were atheist/agnostic, you were left not knowing where to attribute it if not to something approaching religion.  "It's bad enough," said Frizz, "trying to comprehend the lateral ties just going on in our own little world."
"Ah," Frizz said, waggling a finger.  ""But that's a problem with litany."  Smedley's eyes bugged out a bit.  Frizz was usually such a devotee of litany and derived so much of his like, reportorial cachet from the tangenting form constantly playing that connection of how big would the spiderweb go, a constant litany of directions followed by a hanging back, perhaps attending to your existing threads of stuff, when and how threading out, tying up, threading out, tying up.  "But you don't want a litany of nuclear bombs, Frizz said.  It wasn't something to devise a full story out of, it was more a binary argument than the kind of thing you wanted to prove by example, which just got boring.
"Well," Smedley said, "I'm game, I don't have to catch my "J" for another 45 minutes or so, what are the camps? Where are the fault lines?  Frizz sketched it out with little circles and lines on a whiteboard.  

"We are here," Frizz said satirically.  "You got yer Shecky Blue, only I know this.  What my people are telling me is that Shecky Blue has such divided allegiances and so many of them, he's practically schizo phonic."
"You mean schizophrenic?"
"No.  Schizophonic.  It plays itself out by music and sound, if you could do one of those giant organs, pipe organs, shooting destructive force, you might be able to take out Shecky Blue with sonar, with soundwaves."

Milly had typically only read in books about the crime syndicate of Shecky Red, Shecky Blue, Shecky Green.  But here they were in the flesh, in the dock.  She turned to her friend Dan, who was covering the trial for St. Patrick's Magazine.
"Hey Dan, what is 'the dock'?" Milly asked in a whisper.
"It's a colloquial way of referring to 'the jail,'" Dan said.
"Oh," said Milly, not entirely satisfied.  Shecky Blue had a little cadre of supporters in the audience.  They all wore t-shirts that said, BLUE, written in the typeface also used by an odd little restaurant in the Castro.  Dan was scribbling like a crazy person on an old-fashioned reporters' pad, with the metal loops at the top.  The front of the pad was emblazoned, "NEWS," which struck Milly as pretty helpful.
Milly was bored. She was having a little trouble following the trial.  There was no shortage of attorneys, but their desks were laid out like a five-pointed star.  The arguments, they kept bouncing around from lawyer to lawyer.
Dr. Peter Song had come in a side door and made a high-five gesture to the judge.  Milly thought that that kind of informality was a bit out of place in a courtroom, but Dan had shushed her from complaining.
"Cheer up, Shemra!" shouted Dr. Peter Song to the judge.  "It's Friday!"
The judge gave a friendly, crooked smile back to Dr. Peter Song.
The attorney with the ponytail was just showing a slide of one of the Sheckys kicking over a table in a casino - red and white chips spraying through the air.  "Your honor, I'd like to make my point in three parts," the attorney said.  One of the other attorneys started to gesticulate. Milly looked at the sharp wooden corner of the judge's bench as though it was a Necker Cube, amusing herself by seeing it convex, then concave, then convex.  So far, the trial seemed like just a bunch of loose ends.  
The attorney with the french braids lit a candle.
Another attorney, in garish checks, approached the bench and now the lawyer with the ponytail and the lawyer with the pigtails and the lawyer with the french braids and the lawyer with the bob and the bald lawyer and Judge Shemra all seemed to somehow chat over coffee, and to mull it over, and finally the judge brandished an object known to legislative-branch wonks as The Mace.
"Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll please clear the room.  Thank you for your attendance.  Please!"
Milly blinked.
"Aww"
"Man"
The cheering section for Shecky Blue was ticked off, but sensing that the judge was in no mood for unruly anything, they got out of their seats to go.
"Gee," Milly said.
"Gosh," Dan said.
"Is that going to screw you up with your editor?" Milly said.
"Aw, it will be all right," Dan said.  They sat in silence for a minute.
"What do we do now?" Milly asked.
"It's only 7:00," Dan said.  "Let's go to the cloakroom."
"Okay," Milly said.
They wandered out of the court and into the self-serve coat check room, colloquially known as a cloakroom.  Apparently the honor system was working out pretty good back here.  There was a little basket where you could leave money.

Professor Taylor, who had caught so much crap back at the UC for being a "professor of social studies," was looking a little frazzled.  That was sort of his thing, though.  Since he left the university setting in disgrace for trying to take down the Garden Variety sign, he had been a buddy of what were slowly seeming like satellites in some kind of sly, disdainful proxy war.  Taylor had an audience downtown and he would sometimes go there, "read the trades" so to speak, maybe "open up his own little tool and die shop."   When Taylor said it, you could be sure it was complete BS.  When someone else, say, SAG members, AFTRA members, rolled out of bed hung over, in dark glasses on Sundays around brunchtime and "read the trades" they were probably being sincere, but in Taylor's case you were assured it was a euphemism for video poker, drinking 7up, shooting pool.  All the things in a half-assed dilapidated rec room, in other words a room expressly for the carrying out of "rec".  He was from Couer D'Alene, another instance of something changing slightly on successive references, it dropped a word, gained a word.  And felt an odd and uncommercial desire for those dilapidated rec rooms that he associated with the vacations he had taken back in Idaho.  Really, dire places, holiday camps, and the areas set aside for the execution of "rec", the dartboard, pool table and dilapidated coke machine especially, probably with a post typeface, archaic logo compared to the present day.  In Taylor's office, he had a staircase to the pool table, model trains "rumpus room" but he also had dartboards.  Did he ever.  It was the photographs of these other people who, though litany was more fun in some ways, were starting to coalesce up, with more of a head of steam behind each one.  Taylor blinked.  It was an open question whether or not the basic direction in people's affairs was a piling on of stuff, more stuff, or whether it was the more gentle, settling down, learning more about each of those figures as time went on, and at the moment Taylor was engaging in the latter.  It was Frizz who dwelled on the borders of PI and reporter, who had expressed these theories of litany and breadth, alternating one to the other.  Frizz still liked to keep one foot in the news.  But some of his friends, such as the ones he saw at Goffman's birthday party, were singing the praises of PI.  They called it PI.  

"I still do the same thing," Kay said.  "I talk to sources, check out who corroborates what, get it from multiple people, I write the whole thing up in an easy to understand way, the only difference is now I do it as a PI for the PD and I get paid a lot more."
Frizz nodded but he was scowling on the inside.  Another of "The Brethren" gone and without being exposed to bricks of molten wax, your brain would gradually forget the FOUR TENETS of journalism.  Frizz kept it sharp by stopping by his old paper, the St. Brigid Moon and since he was there anyway, his old editor would hand him a phone and make him write.  It worked out well.  Frizz was one of the guys in Taylor's crosshairs as, "a player."  Taylor talked to few about his approach to the big figures, because everyone, it seemed, who he could corral for fifteen minutes about these distinctions turned out to BE a big figure.  At Goffman's birthday party he had seen Dee, sometimes going by Gee, conducting interviews for A&E.  It was all that line, between journalism and private investigation which seemed to be hanging in the air.  And it had been a hard road.
"It's a hard road for me to walk," Taylor told his one remaining confidante, who stayed under wraps and spoke, "with one voice," out of a loudspeaker on a mahogany desk- Taylor's desk.
"How so, Robert?" Conny, which was short for Confidante, was best known as a German record producer.  He had just about erased his German accent through the use of cassette tapes, themselves a pretty archaic medium at this point.  "Well," Taylor said, "No one, if not me, is more of an adherent of naturalistic causality."
"Oh boy," Conny Plan said by loudspeaker, "here we go"?  He was patient and recognized that he was Taylor's primary confidante and that was how he lived up to his name which was increasingly locked in a complex between whether he was born Conny for Confidante or had earned it.  He had been born Conrad and had only later become Conny for Confidante.
"Please continue," Plank said.
"Well," Taylor wrung his hands.  "It's this problem I had with 'when it rains it pours.'  If it's not for that, I would feel as though I have it all worked out.  I don't believe in god.  I think spirituality is swell, but Sam Harris makes an important point when he says there is no guarantee that the major religions won't blow each other up, in other words, we want them to coexist, we have bumper stickers on our cars saying 'Coexist' but what if, you know?"
Conny said MM-HMM audibly.  He had to make utterances since Taylor didn't have the benefit of seeing him.
"So basically," Taylor continued.  "I think there's some validity to thought-experiments.  It seems very divorced from influencing things, sometimes, the idea of an armchair physicist, an armchair philosopher.  But... I'm not convinced."  He heard the familiar clunk of Conny Plank dropping 75 DM into a machine, getting out a vial of  pure ozone, inhaling it while listening.  They had an unwritten rule that Taylor not inquire about Conny's health, but it did worry him sometimes.  And when your confidante was in poor health, simultaneous with trying to hammer out big questions about cause and effect, what effect did the ill health have?  Taylor wanted to know.  HE got his chance to ask, but in a different setting than their usual.  Conny presented, at irregular intervals, a night of ASK CONNY PLANK, at the Flint Center.  Luminaries came to De Anza from as far away as Shecky Yellow's own Isle.  Again surfaced the Sheckys.  Milly and Dan emerged fro the cloakroom, faces flushes and sheepishly grinning.  Dan was looking for a trash receptacle.
"Good luck, KIDDO," said cloakroom attendant Robby Taylor.  He might or might not have been the same guy as professor Robert Taylor.  But this Robby Taylor was now 75.  That's how the cloakroom was.  Loads of politicians passed through as well as judicial personnel.  Almost all were lawyers- even the ones who weren't practicing. 
"Why?" Dan asked.
"You can't find a trash, they don't have trashcans here?"
"No," Robby said.  "Pack it in, pack it out."  One wondered.  Dan kept it on the down-low, so to speak but gestured to Milly dear with his eyes, that he could really use one.  Plank was therefore surprised, mildly so, to see his charge d'affaires Robert Taylor -the younger - in the audience at his thing at the Flint.  Taylor approached an open mic. 
"Why, it's my charge d'affaires!"  Already Taylor was a bit embarrassed to have called attention to Plank's health in contravention of their rule.  He didn't want to talk about "when it rain it pours," there was plenty of time to do that via loudspeaker.  From the looks of it, Plank was OK, he didn't have plastic tubing attached to his nostrils or anything, but it was entirely possible that he was holding back for the duration of the Flint Center affair, only to throw in with medical equipment afterwards, when the cast parties were over and the busiest layer in the Irish Coffee had hopped their Piper Cub airplanes back to Monaco or wherever the hell.  That was a possibility.  
"Please," said a dude whose job it was to keep it moving, also keep it light, weed out undesirables and take the hoi polloi out back and shoot them, "ask your question and begone.  You are the weakest link."
Taylor was offended but it was par for the course.  "Okay, this is for Conrad," he said, which aroused titters because Conrad was the only one on stage.  And proceeded to do what no one had expected, bust out with a deeply entrenched question about discrete connections, proxy war and litany.
"I heard," he began, "that there was a secret meeting on Shecky Yellow's Island, between Ed, a surveyor, with a complex tool belt full of equipment, and Carol, who apparently subsisted somehow, although I'll be damned if I can tell how, in a little wooden shack in a canyon.  Okay, so that would be the argument for great forces at play , sort of like people who level criticisms against the Fed, you know, a bunch of old men get together in a room where merely the sustenance of the powers-that-be has elevated them to a quasi-governmental status.  That's one possibility, they make a decision, move, launder a million dollars from A to B instead of B to A and other forces fold up to do their best to compensate, like the leaves of the hardy mimosa plant, but in spite of the compensations, it changes the role of money on the ground, you know, down at the level of shipping big cardboard boxes rather than high above the cloud cover."  Conny was nodding patiently,  Some of the audience was shifting nervously, but some others were watching Taylor with rapt attention, highly curious what he was getting at.  References to Shecky Yellow's Island were somewhat of a codeword, that you didn't hear about too often.  So to those who already knew what that was, it was an odd way of suggesting a broad direction of where things were liable, to go, rhetorically. 
"So," Taylor said.  "And I am grateful for your indulgence so far.  There's a whole other camp who says this is hooey, that there are not these shifters, lever-pullers at high levels of power who trip off joy and misery through the influence over money."  Plank nodded that he was still listening.
"The other camp says you don't preside, no one presides, even in the nineteenth century you didn't preside.  So which is it?"
To Conrad, it was interesting to see his charge d'Affaires hop a Piper Cub plane from his headquarters.    The little office he kept was in the industrial monstrosity of Merchant Mart which was as Frizz had discovered about the Ansel Adams-izing of the quayside.  It was all done with computers now and there was a cadre of people who considered that a shame.  It was an open question, ultimately, whether quick search and sortability was really worth it.  People talked about "search" as a thing, with its own wishes and desires, the way they talked about "PI" as a thing, the way docs talked about "call" as a thing, how much they hated call, because sometimes call was all that stood between the doc and some Florentine and a hot bath and possibly some MTV.  But search was fifty times worse.  Taylor had chosen Merchant Mart with a luddite's desire to (a) be close to the headquarters of the Commie newspapers, who could still get an office at Merchant Mart and they, at least, would resist being Anselized.  And (b) escape the claws of search.  Merchant Mart had been very accommodating.  They knew a good thing when they saw one, the ARB of Merchant Mart, and they had suspicions that Taylor would lead them to greater glory.
"See, I told you!" said Johnny Daley, in the audience at the Flint, to another Shecky.  The Sheckys didn't talk often, but when they did, they would talk a blue streak.  This Shecky was disguising things currently, to defer attention, he/she was wearing the blank mask of the IBC carbonated beverage cabal.  Being muttered at low levels was talk of universal jurisdiction once again.  The Shecky was correct to go in disguise, because opening for Conrad had been the Music Tapes, an oddly redundant title.  On stage was a giant hand-clapping machine, of wood and metal, and after that, plastic, and after that, The Music Tapes band, guys with a somewhat alarming beard-no-moustache, looking like a cross between a confederate, a white power dude, led the entire audience of the Flint Center out of the double doors, past an arch, down a garden path to the Garden Variety sign, which was what Taylor had been kicked out of his college for wanting to tear down in the first place.  But the Music Tapes didn't want to take it down with shovels and picks.  They circled it, humming like they were trying to raise the Pentagon, not only raise it but get it off the earth to stay.  But Garden Variety card house, adjacent to Flint, hadn't even caused any trouble.  Conrad watched the procession, waiting to go on, not marching because he was hooked up to ozone.  

They had it timed down to the minute.  Although he may not have articulated it, Robert Taylor benefited from the opening act because encircling the Garden Variety sign, holding hands and, indeed, just what Scott Ritter expectorated spittle and got a red head over: saying "inneresting" and singing Kumbayaa - playing right into Ritter's stereotype of ineffectual liberal peace activists.  It didn't do anything to Garden Variety, nor did it end the war , but Taylor benefited because everyone was in a good mood, softened up, by the time Conny Plank went on.  The Merchant Mart advocates, sitting in the audience, were on the edge of their seats to see what Plank would say.
"It's both," Plank said.
Taylor nodded grimly.  It was sort of a desperate measure or actually, when you could hop a Piper Cub, it wasn't so bad but not everyone could hop a Piper Cub and besides, those planes were really dangerous.  Meteorologist Mike Peckner gave occasional interviews and was in the crowd at Flint, the gist of which was that he felt responsible for the death of Jessica Dubroff, the young pilot.  She was really good and her family thought she could do it, but her death had been a bit of a mid course correction for hubris.  "I should have been rougher in my assessment of the weather conditions," Peckner said.  "I let her go.  I could have held her back a day."  The audience at Flint was like that- you looked left and right and you were liable to see big players in repose.


The strange thing was the half friendly, half not, approach of the other Robert Taylor, cloaksman, towards the people who passed through.  He liked to bang a tack piano and sing a song, "I like to chew gum erasers."  Funny, but not that funny, friendly but not that friendly.  Dan eventually threw up his hands.  Okay, okay!"  He and Milly snuck out trying to not be seen.  They had also passed through Chicago City Hall, the finery and sense of bizarrely entrenched corruption and bureaucracy was like a condensation cloud, thick.  They were cringing at each other, which made it fun.  Dan was reluctant to call someone a racist, but he was subtly less proud of their new friend Fran.  It was cold and they stood outside while Milly brought around the car.  "We could go and stand under that bus stop," Dan said.  "I don't want to," Fran said.  "I see weird people."  Dan tried that one on for size, psychologically and considered that it was a euphemism for black people.  He just felt bad for her.  It was demonization, he could see how in high crime areas, basically good people could generalize out of fear, economically depressed.  They went up to see Robert Taylor.  There was that old saw, that Ross Perot had got his people out with a special writ, in other words, solve things with a bounty.  Robert Taylor loved the Merchant Mart offices EXCEPT for the time the telephone wires got crossed, since at Merchant Mart they still gave you a phone with a cord in the first place, and heard someone discussing a bounty.  And it wasn't about getting your people out either.  It was dang scary.  

"A bounty, Pat, a bounty."  Dr. Taylor was pretty sure he was eavesdropping on something illegal that he wasn't supposed to be hearing.  It was worth it, though.  The bounties, the gangland behavior, the graft, he didn't even know what graft was, but when he got up in the morning after sleeping under his Merchant Mart desk after a chunk of time having luminaries over to hang around the rumpus room, he had to look out the tiny archer's turret window, one in a grid of seventeen across and seventeen up and down, with the implication of endless stories.  In fact, did that have to do with the reference to the floors of a high building as "stories"?  It was a cute sentiment, and a cute discovery, but Taylor recoiled because it was too cozy, like something you would idly contemplate after an hour on a rug shaped like a Bengal tiger.  But regardless, he had to throw open and throw out both arms in a V and say "god, I love Chicago, Chicago!"

It was, for him, a good gig.

"Well, was it or wasn't it?" asked Taylor later with the IBR faceless person and Frizz and Dr. Goffman.  A lot of time had gone by and they were trying to assess Taylor's question over delicious slabs of coffee cake.  
"Anyplace good you can get to from the Flint Center, like in five minutes' walk?"
"No, no there isn't," answered the IBR carbonated beverage dude.  There was a place like that across the street as a matter of fact, but IBR was boycotting it because they wouldn't carry IBR.  So people who emerged from a lecture or performance wanting a slab of coffee cake were out of luck without a fifteen-minute car drive.  The desire to zoom around at 50 mph was now absolute.  "Well," said the IBR rep to Frizz, "I think by answering 'both', Plank was saying yes.  Because when you think about it, symmetry doesn't always hold, if you're talking about one thing that requires a ton of work and effort, and another that doesn't or is the negation of the work, like if you were to ask, do people tell hilarious jokes or don't they," and trailed off.
"Hh yeah," answered Frizz, still a whipsmart mind in spite of being a bit chastened compared to before.  "It's both, they do and not doing it is the answer for all the rest of the time."
"Right on."  He was excited that they had solved the riddle.  "This gives us quite a leg up on---"
They