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 were interrupted by the jaw-clenched official, not a Shecky, agnostic on Ed and Carol, no particular feeling for Johnny Tung, and his deputy or lack thereof, but a Flint man, a Flint loyalist all the way.  And the thing about shooting hoi polloi was no hyperbole.  It was truly awful, but the local constabulary wouldn't get together and do anything about it because Flint and Merchant Mart was broken into small autonomous regions called cantons, this was the stipulation for even getting them together in the first place, and they therefore had a hard time getting anything done that required common effort.  The people that Dr. Taylor heard discussing a bounty were implicitly taking advantage of these conditions of disconnectedness, to get away with bad things with no repercussions.  He had frizzy tufts of hair, big round glasses and the outfit of a frontier sheriff and seemed to like to act like one.  He ushered Frizz and IBR out.  The good thing about this kind of security detail was he could ward off search.  Search, otherwise, lurked in the ether.  They set off by car and were nearly run off the road by a flatbedder.  Johnny Tung was trying to tear up the road.  Why don't you look where you're going, cried the IBR.  It's my driver, he's sleeping, cried Johnny.  Frizz scowled.  He had heard about this type of thing and it was great for the passenger but the driver was holding the rest of the world hostage in the process.  They came to a hill, up the hill down the hill, they entered the zone of very raw, unrarified, grunting, unconcerned cuisine like THE PORK STORE.  Monosyllabic.  
"Do you want to go to the Pork Store?"  The IBR representative asked.  
"No," cried Frizz. "Step on it!  Cut off that flatbed truck!"
  It was a busy day, somehow.  The air was heavier now.  Frizz was one of the sharper minds and he suspected that more of the people with connections to the notion of intrigue and proxy was would be rearing their ugly heads.
"Smedley," he said by cel.
"Yes, boss?" asked Smedley.
"We're going to be crossing the 8 soon, do you know of anyplace that would have a slab of cake at this hour?"  Smedley paused.
"Boss, the Three Saints is just about to change its sign again.  And yeah, I'm getting a radio transmission now and it seems they are changing it to SLAB OF CAKE!"  So Frizz and Dr. Taylor's restraint in not tearing down Garden Variety was paying off in the hereafter, as five, six, seven cars tore in to the SLAB of CAKE parking lot.  
"What do you want me to do, if I follow your advice, am I supposed to go over and grab his collar??!" muttered Taylor.
Just being around whatever sort of bounty hunters in Merchant Mart, with their adjunct in the form of that Flint loyalist with shotguns threatening the territory all around, was putting Dr. Taylor in more of a violent context, at least in the sense of being aware of it, though he redoubled his efforts to deplore it.  Plank was nowhere to be found.  Plank was on a Piper Cub within several minutes of the end of his talk  But the damage was done, Taylor had asked a question and by virtue of having gone to the effort of coming all the way to Flint, Plank had answered honestly, in deference to Taylor's effort.

Coming out of Conny "confidante" Plank's Q&A session at the Flint, Taylor felt compelled to review the situation since there didn't seem to be a hell of a lot of communication amongst the circles who tended to communicate.  The ones who thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, the ones who thought there was no more likely to be some kind of burgeoning influential catastrophe from a bunch of Sheckys than from discredited ranting tract books like The Great Depression of 1990, could all still get together via cel.  That was Dr. Taylor's feeling especially, so he rang up FRIZZ and soon he was talking to the little iconic head of FRIZZ courtesy of Haptek, who were in the animated talking computer head business-and who had once been situation not too far from Logos, where Jock Jones had once embezzled a shitload of money, and from the big Einstein head on the side of t bike store The Spokesman.  "Hi Taylor," said a synthetically masked voice that Taylor assumed was Frizz.
"Hi Frizz," said Taylor. 
"Yes yes," came the voice humorously as much as you could make humor through digital masking.  "I thought I told you, no more crank calls from the Pulitzer Committee, I already have enough!" Taylor blinked.  "You're not Gary Frizz!"  The first thing was that Taylor was spilling Frizz's big secret by spilling his real first name.  And the other thing was that Frizz generally did not crack jokes, he had yogi-like control over different parts of the body and tried to redouble his detection efforts through sublimation of the humor centers, deep in the mammalian brain.  "You're right" the voice said.  "I'm not Frizz, I'm Smedley!"  Ah yes, Smedley, still beknownst to the outside world as Frizz's little buddy.  It was less well known that he had been doing the heavy deductive lifting in detection for about the last six months, while Frizz dreamed of the stars, dreamed of his days in an ozone den - which by becoming a bigshot detective he had done quite a good job overcoming afterwards and generally chilling.  This was a new development.
"It's a wonder that Tass doesn't have it yet," Smedley said.  
"Tass has it," said a rotund little man.  "I am Tass."  But they were just being indulgent, cracking jokes.  The new separation line was derived from whether or not you recognized the name of Soviet landmarks like Tass.  To the kids they had read about it, but had never had, for example a "Social Studies Professor," bringing a family from Russia to speak to the class.  Smedley muttered about it for a few minutes and then realized Taylor may have had something in particular.
"So, what's up, Taylor!"
"Well," Taylor said, "There's no one more digressive than me, but I was thinking it was time for some of the other thing, Contraction."  Smedley nodded and the iconic digi-head also nodded.  Frizz had not only taught Smedley the solid techniques, but also had filled his head full of lots of indoctrination and Frizz's own ideological bent, and Frizz was very preoccupied most of the time with litany and contraction and more litany and more contraction, as a human rhythm.  But he couldn't get much of an audience because it was amorphous and blobby and didn't lend itself to writing 22-minute scripts for the TV shows that were accepting scripts from writers, like the very poorly animated children's program POW, WHEEEE, FOMP.  He had done some work for those TV programs, and it usually had to involve red and white poker chips flying.  It was all about color contrast, so the storylines became subservient to a chance to get in red, blue, yellow and green.  And in a harrowing copycat story, the money that would have been better donated to Nuclear Threat Initiative, which had the well-respected Sam Nunn lending his name, was instead donated to the Society for the preservation of Color Coded Villains Shooting Big Tractor Beams and scooping up the great landmarks (Eiffel, Taj, Pisa) like so much lagniappe.  The paid staff at that organization was  elated for the attention, but Nunn and the NTI regretted what it meant for the dilution of charitable giving.  The public had the attention span of a jaybird.  "Well," Smedley said.  "Who can we get ahold of , we can conference them in."  Taylor was into it.
"Let's get Dee, she's really sharp." Dee had gone from her taxi ride with Mr. Singh, back on a muni bus now.  She was on a 38, with the incomprehensible sugar spilled on the seats, pairs of girls inexplicably poking their cheeks inwards, basically just another day on the 38.  She passed the CCRC.  This was the crown jewel of Geary.  It was looking like the stereotypical spooky-house of a kid's archetypal Halloween.  The quasi-education line of Choose Your Own Adventure books was instructive in this, because Dee had studied Frizz's ideas of litany and contraction, and under the circumstances, kid's entertainment that was a rainbow of a certain array of basic, recurring signifier clusters, was important as the building blocks of litany.  It was a bastardization of human history, so the historians would be ticked off, but since it was a reliable and internally consistent bastardization, it was instructive, for instance, to predict what degree of realism would never be in it.  "I don't understand why I'm so confused," said Dee during her one and only session studying with Frizz and Smedley.
"Well, look," Frizz said.  "My friends, my people, this is what they tell me.  One basic repository is childrens' series, literature such as the Choose Your own Adventure.  They were hooked up with Scholastic."
"Now, what was Scholastic?" said Dee.  "It's a big trick, right?  It's like that Russian, it's like the supposed subtle effect of having the Bolsheviks, the 'majority' party, that you as an impressionable pigeon would take some feeling from that.  Scholastic, you were supposed to feel it was like, scholarly, to do with school.  Classic trick"
"Like the Lincoln Bedroom" Dee said.
"Yes!  Very good!" Frizz said.  "great example, this bedroom at the White House ,it's supposed to give off this aura that shuts down curiosity, but really it's a case of words being employed for a purpose.  Well, Scholastic is a whole other case, they had some pretty shady tips, they were doing things with Anheuser-Busch I had never seen.  But the litany this series idea, you go to countries.  If you want to go back, you could say Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew."
"Oh!" exclaimed Dee.  "The stratemyer syndicate!"
"Precisely," Frizz said.  "Also, Herge's Tintin.  It was often brought by deadline pressure.  When pulpy disposable entertaining fiction ran for a couple of years, you had to travel the world out of the constant need for more and more plots and adventures.  So that's how you get the series going.  Because when it come right down to it, episodic adventure writers are a superstitious, cowardly lot.  And susceptible to when they find something that works, doing it over and over with slight variations, because it gives them a feeling of security and how are they going to get something out on deadline."
"Lind of like with Rufus Thomas, the funky, chicken, the funky penguin, the funky robot, the funky dog."
"Exactly!" cried Frizz.  "Dee!  You are going places, kiddo.  Go Dee!  That s great, I want to adopt you!  So yeah, you go back to the well and then you go back to the well again.  So that's how you start to get your Tintin in India, Tintin in France, Tintin in Scandinavia, Tintin on the Moon."
"Travel through space, travel through time.  And where can you go after you travel through time?"
"Well," Frizz said.
"Exactly.  The well seems to run dry.  You ca send your people, your friends, you can shrink them and explore the atom, you can do freaky psychedelic self -referential things with them . But eventually, these past series end, after 50 or 100 or 200.  They all end.  It's uncanny and it's got scientists wondering if there are 50 or 100 or 200 representations of human culture.  And so you pay attention to these series and you start to feel as though, when you then catch ANOTHER one, you know that it has an upper limit.  And that's where we are with what's worrying us a lot ,which is the expression of the series in human behavior in general."  So Frizz had explained it to Dee and Dee relayed it back to Taylor via video head conference on cel phone.  Taylor was really admirable for his curiosity. 
"So did Mr. Singh talk about this?" asked Taylor. 
"Yes," Dee said.  "he talked about sinister, shadowy forces who believed that they could see the 50 or 100 fictional archetypes as having symbolic expression in history and that when we reach the last one, the universe will go FFFFFFT."
"And is it really?"
"No," Dee said.  "It's the self-fulfilling prophecy by true believers , many of whom have high positions in government, media, blah blah, military , business, they're going to implode the economy cause they just don't care, and they're expecting to e doing something having to do with white stone pylons, space arks that take them to safety and screw the rest of us." 
Taylor blinked. 
"I'm glad you guys were available for a teleconference." Taylor was feeling a little smug.  Getting those guys together was a brilliant stroke.  And apparently he now had more of a handle on what was going on with this whole thing about litany.  He pressed his fingers to his forehead.  The battery light on his fancy phone was starting to flash.
"It's a good thing I rounded everybody up when I did.  I got kind of lucky, I suppose."  The little man from Flint who was in charge of dispatching (his word) the poor hoi polloi had watched the cars peel away at a scary velocity, cutting up on sidewalks and almost running into pedestrians which would have been worse.  This was Tass. Frizz and Smedley descended upon Flint in their own air car, it hovered by ocean and eventually struck the earth.  It had been Smedley, who had insisted on the trip.  Like Conny Plank, Frizz was now taking oxygen.  He wasn't really frail, he wasn't in a bad way, but his admirers were painfully aware that he wasn't going to be around forever.  He almost didn't remove the plastic tubing from his nostrils before getting out of the air car with Smedley and skirting around the edges, behind a bunch of bushes, not to go and talk to Tass ,but just to stare at him.  Tass didn't see them.  He was so in love with being officious that now that there weren't any more tickets t tear, he was corralling squirrels with nuts ,getting them under an oak tree, bopping them on the head with the candy hearts then giving them leftover tickets to hold in their wee paws, then taking the tickets away and making the squirrel say NIK NAK.  First once, then with a little more gusto.  The squirrels tried to "Overthrow" Tass, which in their case meant burrow to where he was standing and come up from underground so that he would be bowled over and fall down.  But it was ineffectual because they were just a bunch of damn squirrels.  Tass was rumored to have a second career besides enforcer of justice against the regular people who attempted to watch a show - Conny Plank Explain It All - at the Flint.  
"See that guy," said Frizz to Smedley.  "He's the bouncer, but my friends, my sources on the inside, say that he works for the Sheckys, rainbow arrayed killers."  Taylor was behind a copse and listening.  It really was a serious situation, and he was dying to triangulate stories and compare notes, himself, Smedley, Frizz, as a matter of fact what he really wanted to do was convent a Constitutional Convention, only this would be devoted to the question of what was really going on with the rumored importance of litany in the sense of a bunch of story archetypes that were trotted out by writers on deadline.  Someone mentioned cultural effects.  It was St. Brigid! Dawn of the whole thing, Dee was unclear, was she being bopped around town, because of the secrecy over St. Patrick, St. Brigid, St. Moby and their restaurant with the nameplate that fit in a slat?  This time it was Frizz who got everyone together by videophone and he was very inclusive.  He brought in everyone he could think of, so it was Frizz, the fabulous but fading detective and/or Journalist star, Smedley the heir apparent, who was no slouch and had begun assuming some of the important decisionmaking in working with Frizz, who was limited now in his mobility by plastic tubing day and night, and the next in the processing was this also officious woman in a different way, Anna of Green Somethings, who, when someone once wanted to talk at a bar with Al Alberts about all countries beginning with "I" and how interesting they were (Israel ,India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Indonesia, Iceland) Anne of Green Somethings had reminded everyone that that premise assumed you were an English speaker.  Centered around other English speakers and the people she told it to, it was like when Dee studied with Frizz and came up with genuine little gambit bits that Frizz had not yet considered .  People were gracious or acted like they were.  So that was Anne's other contribution and had seemed as though she was resting on her laurels since then.  People were beginning to refer to her as the IIII girl.  It was pretty slim pickings - she portrayed her own abilities as some kind of continuum, but really it was just that one time.  So now she had a second act.  No one was expecting her to do so.  She said, "this thing you refer to, it's a bit colonial, if you are going to have Biggles Goes to Rome, you know, number 27 in a series of fifty, Biggles goes to Bordeaux, you're carving out all of those cultures as the squires in a lifesized walkable diorama." Dee snarled.  She wore a necklace of pearls, and Anne had a bizarrely teased-up blonde head, and it was like Pelosi versus Harman all over again in miniature. Dee Circled left.  Anne circled right.  Apparently they don't like each other very much," Taylor said.  And yet, Anne had made the point she had come to make.  She was only ever supposed to be a pinch-hitter type in the first place and had never expected to stick around for long.  But had been roped in by animosity.  It almost sounded like a sneaky screenwriter's own little red book of techniques for getting a band of sparkly, jeweled characters to travel together FOR NOW, while in dialogue thy despised each other and were compelled to kill or backstab if the opportunity presented itself.  One of the characters was called Wolf.  It was short for Wolfgang Hanisch.  He traveled not only with a charge d'affaires and a majordomo but with a wife and a mistress.  That was the way it worked in the German territories.  It was very interesting . Hanisch stormed in like a brown bear and started ordering people around according to feng shui. 
"What are you doing?" said Frizz.  "I'm in charge of setting up the little conference that Smedley put together," Hanisch said.  "Relax!  It will be fun!  We'll learn about Avogadro's number."
He ushered people to one of 100 benches.  People were beginning to trickle in, those who had been invited and the crashers.  Frizz, Smedley, Dee.  That was three.  Johnny tung, followed by Shecky Blue and the deputies Billy G and Frank Fielding, eager to please maybe a bit treacherous but not bad people.  Billy G, the fourth Z, had abandoned boogie guitar.  
"What do you play now?" asked Frizz, ever the inquisitor.  "I knew you could never give up music."
"Well, you caught that right," said the fourth Z.  "Now I pluck my beard."
Frizz raised an eyebrow.  "It's more beautiful than even the music of Trinidad."
"What about Tobago?!" asked Smedley, who sometimes could be differentiated from Frizz by their dialogue and sometimes was not very well realized.
"No," Billy said with a humorless smirk.  "I'd like to be but for the moment I'm more beautiful than Trinidad, but not Tobago, not yet.  Their music is more beautiful than me, but I've only been plucking my beard fibers for a year."
Frizz, for his part, admired Billy's honesty.  So the deputies were put by Hanisch at a lower smaller table like a bunch of children.  The deputies weren't complaining, though.  Tung in particular was a stoic fellow, who only wanted to dance his little tripes off.  He could give two hoots what psychological spillover there was from Hanisch's domineering moves.  People were piling in and layering up.

By this time, Dee was ,like Taylor, pretty proud to be associated with such illustrious, if wonky, if weird people on the little phone conference.  She could feel that there were rings around peoples' eyes - for a while and then back to earth and she snapped her finger.  "This is what those guys meant by litany!!" she said.  She looked to and fro in the restaurant.  Things had gotten a lot more calm since the fracas when she had been "blipped" or whatever it was and this was the first time since then that she had again set foot inside the place.  They had put another bit of flubbery plastic label into the big slat over the door and the restaurant was now called MICE PATROL OTHER MICE.  Some old timers reading the philosopher Kierkegaaaaaard (not to be confused with the philologer Kierkegaaaaaaard) looked up a bit haughty.
"Um, sorry," Dee said.  She felt a little out of place and deferent to the local culture.  "I was here but -" she waved her hand dismissively.  There wasn't a hell of a prayer of getting them to understand and it would just sound weird.  One of the craggy ones puffed on a pipe.
"No, please, continue!"  The dude was oddly friendly and Dee wasn't expecting it.  "Well," she said.  "Something or someone blipped me, I guess you could say," she scowled, "Teleported . But I 'm not a big fan of super powers, but that's what happened, I was suddenly in a booth with".. He waved her off.  "Felt and fat!  Felt and fat!  Yeah he was really into that because of the Tartars who-"
She interrupted him
"I know!  I know!  I got curious and went and looked him up and read his wikipedia entry.  That's all great but then it happened again and it was always because of asking questions that someone didn't want to have answered."
"You know," said the craggy patron, "I am in contact with Dave Singh on my little headset jobber right now."  She blinked.  Up until now he had always been facing her with the other side of his head and she had not been able to see that he had one of those, previously really creepy looking and now really commonly accepted, augmented-human type of cel phone jobbers in his ear.  
"Mr. Singh?" Dave Singh?  No kidding," she said.  
"He says hello," said the craggy dude.
"Hi," said Dee.  I am Dee."
"I am SHECKY YELLOW!" said the craggy dude.
"Wow," said Dee.  "No shit."
"Yeah, that's me!" he gave a friendly and guileless wave which Dee took as an indication that first impressions could be very misleading.  She had utterly assumed from the book of philosophy, the forbidding umlauts over the author's name and the puffing pipe, that he was some kind of old cranky Luddite, but upon seeing the little headset thing and the big grin she thought, "hey, this guy is kind of a goof!"
"I'm surprised," she said out loud.  "Dave Singh. I 'm surprised his name is Dave.  I was just calling him Mr. Singh."
Shecky Yellow nodded.
"Well, uh, is he okay?  He dropped me off and he was going to Kaiser.  I'm a little nervous, I, oh, god."
She put her head in her hands and sobbed.  "It's been so damn disorienting."  Shecky Yellow put down his forbidding umlaut-heavy beer, put his glasses up on his forehead.
"My dear, in seven days the people who have been bopping you all around town and trying to prevent the truth from getting out about the three saints and about the great piling-on we call LITANY, will be defeated in a heap."  Dee looked up.  She was thrilled that Shecky Yellow would turn out to get over the tiresome compulsive limitations of speaking in universal truths.  
"Or," he continued," They won't."
"God damn it," Dee said.  "What, are you the Buddha?  Do you have an obligation to talk in" she waved her hands in circles.  "Generalities, tautologies?"
"But," he put up a craggy pointer finger," They probably will be!  I fall like the rooster on the roof, you find yourself at 50-50 possibility and then there is a conclusion at the final tick so that the chance of succeeding is maybe 51, 52, 53%."
"Okay," Dee said.  "I'm satisfied.  I should have let you finish, I guess.  So what do we do???"
"Well," said Shecky Yellow.  "I'd like to find a copse.  It's at its lowest ebb, the restriction, when you are on a copse."
"What is a copse anyway?" asked Dee without guile.  "It's a low profusion of plants and bits of dirt."  Said Shecky Yellow.
"Hey1" Dee said.  "I know where there is at a copse."  She put her fingers on her forehead.
"I was just on a whizzing like, teleconference with a bunch of talking heads. It was fun and very impressive."
"Yes," said Shecky Yellow.  "I eavesdropped."
"No!" said Dee.  "You couldn't- really?!"
Shecky Yellow smiled and nodded smugly.  "Absolutely true.  This little thing gets everything except thought crimes and I understand by this time next year Motorola is going to come out with headset phone that has a built-in SHOTGUN MRI."  She believed him.  He was a goof, but she doubted he would bust out with something completely false.
"So what did you hear?" Dee said.  "I got a whiff of existential crisis," Shecky Yellow said.  "Frizz is a smart guy."
"Let's not count out Smedley."
"Yes," Shecky Yellow said.  "Smedley, to an ever increasing extent, is it extent or degree?"
"Extent."
"To an ever-increasing extent, Smedley is filling in the gaps for Frizz, because we aren't going to have him forever, unfortunately.  I heard a bunch of wholehearted reviewing.
Dee wrinkled her nose to say, "What does that mean?"
"Also," Yellow said, "I heard Taylor.  He's.... a good egg."  Now Dee was nervous.  When pressed to tell what he had eaves dropped upon, he seemed to be falling back on the most general and noncommittal phrasing.  She gave him a hard look.  For the briefest fraction of a second, she saw Yellow as a mass of tentacles.  Could he have been bluffing?  Suppose, she thought to herself, all he did was to see me in a car with Dave Singh, if that is even his real first name?  I think this is all just a bunch of bullshit to get information out of me about what we discussed, .. that's what I think!"
It was disappointing.  She thought she saw in Yellow the glimmer of a nice guy.  Aha, but it just meant he was skillful in filling in the gaps of a person's desire and expectation.
"AIEEE!" she heard it echo but only inside her own skull, which was plenty weird, the sound that would have given the game away.  
"So tell me more," she proffered.  "Dr. Robert Taylor was there.  He gave some good feedback."
Now she too was feeding the fires of rhetorical bullshit.  "He added value, I would hasten to add."  Yellow's eyes widened a bit.
"Taylor is the dean of Merchant Mart.  I am fond of him.  Also Frizz and Shecky also Conny Plank, Robert Taylor's buddy."
She nodded , wary.  SO he had mentioned Plank.  God damn it, the Necker Cube, there were bits of evidence for either direction, honest or dissembling. 
"Yes," she said.  "Do you want to see Plank?  He gets his tubing right around here?"  Now Yellow looked like a frightened doe
He nodded slow.
"This is a weird person," thought Dee. She was trying to work out what she could get away with now.
"Come with me" she said.
"Okay," said Yellow.  Dee was telling the truth about Conny Plank.  A few doors down from this very odd restaurant was the little mom 'n' pop medical supply house where Plank bought his "cigarettes and copper tubing" which was a euphemism for "cigarettes and copper tubing and fancy imported condoms with lots of bells and whistles."  She felt like the pied piper now.  Yellow had a glazed look .  She led him past a foofy bakery and some kind of very un-foofy metal and wood shop, and the sunlight glinted off of Yellow's nostrils.  He was a senior citizen in a t-shirt with a sparkley iron-on, which was only apparent now that they were out in the sunshine.  In one hand, he carried along The Compleat Kierkegaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and the a's stretched right off the far right side of the front cover which Dee considered a little odd.  In the other hand, like a zombie, he carried the open bottle of beer, lousy with umlauts.  "You're going to run afoul of our open container laws if you keep up like that," she said, and he nodded but didn't do anything about it.  Beyond the restaurant , the bakery, the wood 'n' metal shop was the medical supply depot and beyond that was a vicious grain thresher with miserable blades.  I'd better be right!  I' mustn't be wrong!  She led Yellow along, then climbed up the little handicapped-access or ADA-compliant ramp to one side of the thresher, so as he inexorably traveled towards her in a straight line, she crossed her fingers, kept watching him get ever closer, completely un-savvy about his surroundings, though he had the small motor control for putting one foot in front of the other, he wasn't smelling a trap.  Closer, closer and WUMP - an awful sound but she realized as soon as it happened that some kind of veil of illusion was lifting, that her mind had been clouded to see him as having a particular appearance.  She rolled her eyes.  For someone who was averse to the whiff of "super powers," she had been exposed to a lot: she had been teleported,, had mind control and hallucinations used upon her and god-knew what else.  The disgusting, rotted bits of a horrible reptilian creature, went deeper into the grain thresher.  Now she was sure she had done the right thing. Bee-bee-beep!  Her fancy phone was making noise.  "Hey kiddo!  Congratulations!"  She could hear whooping and hollering in the background.  It was Dave Singh talking.
"Dave!  Mr. Singh!  Yellow told me your name was Dave."
"Yes," he said.  "Ya know.  Dave, David, whatever.  My friends call me Chuck."
"What the hell just happened?"  Singh was at that moment under a ceiling fan in a little saloon, resplendent with a lot of iconography of the old west, like grain-threshers, fences and the preserved horns and skull of something, buffalo or a primordial horse.  There was a group who was doing codebusting activities on everything Yellow had said. 
"Don't worry, Dee.  What I ought to tell you is that we can no longer afford to be going in ten million directions, so that's why we're starting to work in groups, cadres and pods a little more."  She threw her hands up.
"I am like, look, I just led some ... beast to his death!  If he had been human, I would just have committed murder."  She heard the sounds of New Year's Even streamers, root beers being popped and someone cried out, "We got a Shecky!"   She recognized an abrasive punk rock song playing ONE DOWN, THREE TO GO!  ONE DOWN, THREE TO GO!
"Ugh," she said. "I'm disgusted to say I know that song.  And I'm exasperated, Dave.  I'll ask it again, what is going on!"  
"Well," Dave Singh said.  "You don't like 'special abilities' very much, do you, Dee?"
"No!" she said.  "You gotta problem with that?"
Singh was quiet.  "It's the role of the girl who has been blipped around like a damn pinball!  I didn't know what was real!  Special powers make me want to punk!"
"Fair enough," Singh said.  "And nevertheless, let's follow through with a little Aristotelian logic.  You were being strung along by one of four sinister forces.  They want to lead the world, through a litany of STUFF, centered around 50 or a hundred clusters of ideas and cultural bits."
"Yeah?" said Dee impatiently.  
"So Shecky Yellow was using special powers on you, like it or not!"  Now Singh was ticked off. "Right?
Dee demurred.  "Right."
"So we have to use them too.  That's why we controlled your limbs and made you lead yellow into a grain thresher."  Now Dee really did throw up.  What's going on?  She heard voices in the background.  What's happening now?  She heard other muttering voices talking about "a copse They want to go to a copse."
It sounded something like a political rally with a bunch of pizza boxes, volunteers, maybe music, posing under the label of "a party." With ulterior motives.  Only, it was no party, or a two-bit party, and the crowd of attendees was each a luminary in their own right, plus a bunch of cryptography wonks pulled out of the ranks of a cryptocon, by promising each of them twenty bucks CASH if they would participate in a special project.  She got done.  For better or worse, there was a grain thresher right on main street and it was already full of disgusting, non-human beast limbs, so given the possibilities it could have been a lot worse if she was going to have to throw up someplace.
"You damn freaks, you moved me around like a puppet?"
"I'm sorry to tell you this, Dee, but this is serious business. If they manage to get us to the end of a sequence of places and motifs, like circus, farm, museum, the old west, the crusades, like all the big convoluted crowd scenes in a Where's Waldo by Martin Handford - the world and all the sister worlds ("sister worlds??!??" thought Dee.)  and all the Nooman beings spread throughout the Pleiadieaeies system, all go to dust even worse than that tentacled jobber who you just killed in a grain thresher... with our help."  Dee was speechless.

According to the group now talking to Dee on her fancy phone full of little avatars, there was a new phase of urgency about to begin.  She whacked her cel with a palm, because it started making ZZ-ZZ sounds.  Then she realized it as someone at the party, either using a razor because the demands of the party meant people were sleeping under their desks and taking showers at the "Y" (as if there even was such thing as a "Y" anymore) or possibly because the crypto stars were still running all sorts of ambitious code breakers on Yellow's weird pronouncements and the execution of those processes gave off an odd, ZZ-ZZ whine as though they were carving up wood or metal rather than signals, letters, numbers.  But then, unfortunately, her cel totally gave out, and it would remain indeterminate whether it was going to anyway or whether she had made it give out by thumping it indelicately.  So she stood there by a grain thresher that just happened conveniently to be embedded in a city park -one would think it was a bad idea with children running around, but there you go.  And with a new reliance upon fancy teleconferencing, at least until she found way to get over to whatever rented office suite they were having their party, she had a defunct phone. Pulling out the sides of her face out of desperate nervous energy, she looked down at the tentacles and wracked carcass of the Shecky Yellow monster.  The dude had never built up much charisma with her in the first place but apparently in the big picture, the four Sheckys had provided Social services in poor areas such as unlicensed "schools" food giveaway days and other necessities.  And she saw a glint of metal.  And she got a devilish idea.  Holding her nose and suspecting that she would have an iron constitution for gross things now that she had thrown u (it was like an acknowledgment almost) she reached a tentative hand and snatched at the metal plate and pulled out a perfectly valid and useable headset phone jobber.  It had no screen or visual component, of course, but it was better than nothing.  She thought it would be tricky to get the numbers she wanted but not impossible.  She dialed director assistance.
"Operator," the voice said.
"Dave Singh," she said.
"Is that a business?" said the operator.
Dee rolled her eyes.  "No," she said.  "It's a guy."
"What kind of guy?" asked the operator.
"A guy!" said Dee.  There was a moment of silence.  Apparently that had shut her up.  Then a ring, another ring.
"Hello?"
"Dave?" She was excited to have gotten back in the loop so quickly.
"Hello Dee.  Would you care to join us," said Dave.
"Yes please.  I'm shivering, I'm hungry, I still have Shecky Yellow guts on my blouse.  Please hurry!"

In a way, what you gained in eliminating redundancy by fitting out a giant yellow taxi like a massively equipped limo and fighting the three remaining poles of the Sheckys' domination plans, you lost in the illuminate magical potential of lots of different little people running in their own directions, because all of those actors in small groups could expose Shecky plans in their own ways (not that Goffman, Ed, Sam Park, Dee, St. Brigid, Casey Louis, Frizz, Smedley, Dr. Taylor, Conny Plank, Tass or the others had actually happened to DO that , but that was the idea behind NOT combining forces) whereas a big yellow taxi full of such freedom-fighters would tend to notice only Shecky affairs that actually disturbed or interrupted big yellow taxis, such as the Speedbump Affair, or the affair Johnny Tung and his driver.  So that was what Dave wanted, and the group had demurred.
"Boss, we got a copse," said some motionless, x-crable yapping zits, who worked iteratively on codes such as substituting all ten zillion factorials on a coded sentence.  Their computers gave off a ZZ-ZZ sound.  But Dave raised his eyebrows.  If the codebreakers said they had a location, that was important.
"All right!" he hollered.  "Adjust course, full speed ahead to... the copse!!"  Dee in the meantime was in a converted harem-chamber, all inside of this really big taxi.  A bunch of ladies were brushing their hair.  Dee scowled.  She felt like she was suddenly in the 1950s.   A lithe, buxom girl spoke in Turkish.  Dee looked to the slightly older concubine for help.
"She says, the new Deep Brick lip gloss is the bomb!"  Dee shot up.  "All right, that does it.  Which way to Dave Singh?  I needed a rest and the spa is lovely, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated but I ain't no concubine, I'm a player, a contender!  Do you know who I am?!"
The concubines blinked.  "I'm Deedee Matt and I'm the head interviewer for A&E!"  She pulled a pair of grey sweats on over the anachronistic harem-garb that the spa attendants had issued her after she got out of a very "relaxing" shower.  "Screw this !  Who are you ladies being kept around for?  Dave Singh?"
No," answered the older one.  "We're not being kept around for anyone.  We power the ship."
"What do you mean?"
"We hang around the sauna and brush our hair and that energy turns a turbine which drives the wheels of the taxi round and round."
"That's really bizarre!"
"Yeah," said the concubine.  "Well, whatever!  You power ships your way, and we'll power ships our way."
"And do you know what I just did?" Dee said.  
"Nuh uh."
""I eliminated Shecky Yellow!  I led him into a grain thresher!"
The concubines, or pieces of iron pyrite in a big oven, whichever they were, blinked some more, which was not exactly the reaction that Dee had been hoping for.

Somewhat similar to that old Wizard of Oz thing with the crystal ball, though unrelated in other myriad ways, the Sheckys were considering pooling their resources.  It was a tough and unlikely step, for two reasons.  (1) Each Shecky was the head of a semi-autonomous kingdom called a canton, and they value their autonomy so group action didn't come easy.  To extradite someone, for instance, which was already an odd concept when each piece of the puzzle was like "a guy," would have taken a High Council of Sheckys group meeting and to do that, they would have had to hash out details such as whether the meeting table would be round, square, rectangular and given the heavy role of color in their identities, would the walls of the meeting room be painted red, yellow, green or blue?  (Although under the circumstances, Shecky Yellow's cheering section was getting a little anemic, since he was now bits of compostable clippings.)  And (2) As the big cheerleaders for LITANY, the seemingly endless manifestation of infinite diversity in infinite combinations in the form of neat stuff piled upon neat stuff, with little overlap, the idea of getting together was anathema to them.  And yet, Shecky Blue had just waltzed out of his trial and was considering calling up a Shecky on the phone.  Dan and Milly were sitting on a park bench fidgeting and doing everything they could get away with.  In the past sixty seconds both Dan and Milly had said a throaty "Grr" into each others' ear.
"So why don't you get yourselves behind closed doors already?" said Shecky Blue, rolling his eyes.  "Are you freaking Mormons or something?"
"hey," said Dan.  "Aren't you the defendant from that courthouse?"
"Yes," Blue said.  "Yes I am."  He stroked his scraggly chin.  "You know I can use people like you for my ... 'project.' Are you interested in a little.... 'project'?"
"Without knowing more 'about it," said Dan, making the gesture of people who liked to talk about 'irony,' as in, "The old west in inverted quotes, you know 'Tombstone Arizona',", "I can't say if we 'would' like to be in your 'project'."
"Well, the thing is," Blue continued, "You both have a lot of like, ENERGY."  And it was true.  All Blue had to do was stop talking for a minute or two and those two were at it again.  "Energy like yours is hard to come by.  I'm always looking for new renewable energy sources for my Litany Project.  Wouldn't you kids consider doin' it on a turbine?""
"How does it work?" asked Dan.
"Glad you asked," said Blue.  He happened to have a cardboard card with a diagram.  IT showed clip art of a man and a woman on a couch.  "You sit down at the bottom here.  Steam rises off of you, which it's going to anyway,, only now we're going to capture it.  The hall is a narrow and tall room.  And further up there is a bunch of big wheels, steam drives the wheels and it saves me having to burn any coal!"
"Gee," Milly said.  "I don't know.  Is it, you know, 'safe'?"
"Of course it's safe," said Dan.  "Member what I told you, it's safe except when there is a full moon.  Anyway," he turned to Blue.  "we're not interested thanks.  If you wouldn't mind running along.  This is a private affair, and we will not be commodified!"
Blue looked disappointed.  "Tut tut," he said.  "Okay then.  In the event that I get my act together and start to get things done in tandem with my brethren, I will consider you my opposition instead of my allies!"
Milly shivered and she and Dan put their arms around each other.
"It's not anybody else's energy source!" Dan said.  "Don't exploit the lovers!"
"You did the right thing," Milly said.  Blue left Dan and Milly alone ,but he ducked behind a tree because he saw his barristers coming.  There were six of them, each with a different hairstyle.  Blue began to bask in the litany.  There was the attorney with the pageboy, the barrister with the bob, which was a frizzy pile of hair that was a tribute to Bob Dylan, who the litaneers really liked a lot.  Beknownst to Shecky Blue, the original litaneer, the piling on of a litany of details made things happen.  As Matt Groening had once said about the Simpsons, reality would just get a little bit elastic once in a while, and sometimes it was the litany of detail that made it happen.  And Shecky Blue bonked himself on the forehead , besides himself with enjoyment at the barristers rounding the corner and stepping up on the sidewalk.  One had what looked like a redhead wig.  What were they thinking?  It was kind of great but , he spoke up.  "Can you really practice law that way?  What's up with all the headgear?"  
"Well," came back William Kunstler, famed civil rights dude.  "The short answer is yes."
"So wait a minute," Shecky said.  Kunstler blinked like he hadn't been planning on going anywhere anyway.  "You know who I am, right?"  His defense team had ballooned so much, and attorneys were bringing in their own pinch hitting crew, so some of them, Blue hadn't even met.
"Yes," Kunstler said.  "I've seen you on the corner in the bail bond district."
"Whaat!" said Blue.  "You're my attorney, haven't you like, met me in court??"
"That's as maybe," Kunstler said, adopting a semi-archaic UK-ism in his speech for no known reason.  "But the image that stands out in my mind is of you, Blue, wearing entirely Blue..."
"Oh," nodded Blue.  "Yeah, that was my blue period."
"Yes," Kunstler said.  "You had a bushy blue beard, little specs and you were in a blue bed with an Asian woman with long straight blue hair on the corner of Bryant and something, right by the courthouse."
"Okay," Blue said, waving his hands dismissively.  "My question, if you don't mind not pontificating for a few minutes, I just wanted to bring a contradiction out in the sunlight."  Kunstler waved a finger.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," he quoted.  "Louis Brandeis."
"Very nice," said Blue with a humorless smirk.  "Let me be concise here.  You crusade for improvements, you are an idealist in the sense of a belief in the desirability and the possibility of human progress, such as your crusading work on behalf of the twenty-somethingth amendment to the constitution, which gave suffrage to kids over eight."
"Close enough," Kunstler said.
"Okay, okay, so basically you know my beliefs, I worship entropy, and Litanists believe there will be a piling on of stuff, neat stuff, ever more and more until every neat thing is happening to every atom in the universe."
"Perfectly consistent position," Kunstler said grimly. 
"Thanks a hell of a lot," Blue said.  "I know your kind.  'Consistent' is a polite way of making a putdown.  I can feel the walls of the little box being drawn up around me, the pigeonhole."
Kunstler said nothing one way or the other.
"So just tell me, Kunstler, is there a problem here between good liberal-"
"We prefer the term 'progressive'" Kunstler said.  "Okay, fine.  Between 'Great Society' diehards and the fact that you're defending someone who worships entropy??"  Without knowing it, Blue was too clever for his own good.  Kunstler raised one eyebrow.
"Gee," Kunstler said.  "I never thought of that."  It was cowardly in a way, to make your strongest rhetorical case for something and then when it actually worked, made a difference, to feint back, unprepared.
"err, ooh," said Blue.  "I didn't- that is to say.." 
Kunstler got on his cel.  "Hello!  Give me Darden!"  Kunstler worked for a cadre of high-profile both defense attorneys and prosecutors.  Darden, Belli, Kunstler, Cochran and Tigar and Associates, where the 'and Associates' referred to a bustling ant colony of paralegals, clerks, nebbishy drones, glorified helper slaves who were disgruntled to discover that while having a law degree was a prerequisite to being there in the first place, it didn't stop their duties from being shit, or stop Darden, Belli, etc., from treating them all haughty.
"Look Darden," said Kunstler.  "Are you aware we are defending someone who worships entropy.  I cannot hang with that.  Can you?"
Darden could not.  "all right then!"  Blue was horrified.  The trial had represented a bend in the road and the last time he had gotten together with Pat Paulsen, they had discussed "the bend in the road," as a kind of bejeweled language, something Paulsen liked to advocate, and which he was then very excited and enthusiastic when Blue adopted the term and the idea.

"Blue!" said Paulsen.  "It's great to see you! What's the matter?"  Paulsen, as a onetime presidential candidate, had a great empathy for people or so he liked to say.  He had even written a book called BEJEWELLED LANGUAGE, a primer.  And he spoke at conferences.
"So what's up, Bluey?" Shecky Blue sighed, his stomach rose and fell.  "I set up a big goddamn rift in my own defense team by asking very good questions."
"How good?" said Paulsen.
"Too good," said Blue.  "They got this funny 'I never thought of that' look in their eyes and started t confer amongst themselves."
"Ouch," Paulsen said.  "That can't be good."
"No," Blue said.  "And I really thought we had turned a corner on my criminal trial for that casino brawl."
"Careful," Paulsen said. "You're using bejeweled language again!"
Paulsen's other clients included the Legion of Died-in-the-wool Hawkish Congresspersons who liked to use a lot of bejeweled language to rationalize, misrepresent, misconstrue disastrous, murderous and horrifically failed foreign wars and military adventurism, but nevertheless liked having Pat Paulsen around as a sort of barometer to warn them when they were going too far.
"Why is it bad?" Blue asked.
"Huh?" Paulsen said.  
"Why is it a problem to use bejeweled language?"
"Because," Paulsen said.  "You only give yourself a false sense of security that way.  It's bound to come back and bite you on the ass and 'on the merits.'"
"You know," Blue said, " that's a little piece of legalese I don't understand, like there's really a grand ideal of 'on the merits' with a pure answer?  It's usually contrasted with bribery, ya know, graft but isn't it all a big continuum anyway?"
"Oh, I guess so," Paulsen said.  He looked a little tired.  "All this big debating of esoteric concepts," he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief.  "I've had enough for a while, you want shoot some foosball?"
Blue gestured, but of course.  Not only was Pat Paulsen an ace political consultant and an expert on bejeweled language, he shot a mean foosball.
"So what do you think I should do?" Blue said as he turned the plastic handles and the white whiffle (or whiffle-esque) ball flew between the handcrafted and handfired little foosball figurines. 
"Frankly, Shecky, you're up shit's creek," Paulsen said.  "You can be completely circumspect, you can be completely open, but it's important to be consistent, I have found.  If you alternate haphazardly between keeping a poker face and letting it all hang out  without rhyme or reason, you will get into trouble undreamed by either of the two extremes."
After she fought her way out of being stuck away like a towel on a shelf, she reached some kind of control room, make shift.  She blinked at the inevitable collecting up of disparate crusaders in a makeshift cockpit, to attempt to pool their forces against something, whatever it was , instead of the million approaches.
"Dr. Taylor," Dee suggested.
"Hi," said Dr. Taylor.  After several weeks of Merchant Mart and lots and lots of socialist newspapers for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Taylor was only too happy to by a cup of coffee and a newspaper from an entrepreneurial vendor.
"Hello, my good man," Taylor said.  Conny Plank was not so persistent about ideological purity and Dee didn't even want to talk about it.
"What in the world is all of this,?" Dee said.  She swept her arm around.
"Well," said Dr. Taylor "Frizz over there is a progressive socialist, I think Smedley is playing it close to the chest but he probably is too, because he follows Frizz's lead out of deference.  If you don't mind, I'd like to proffer you a little test, would that be all right?"
"Argh, no , it wouldn't," Dee said.  
"All I'm looking for is a little common sense, debriefing, explanation or something other than a bunch of antic, hijinks, aaargh!"
"But," Taylor said.
"I don't wanna talk about ideological purity," Dee insisted.  "I'm trying to cut through a fog of weird misdirection and obfuscation!  Really, all I want is to file my story, bring the truth about the St. Patrick's restaurant to a wider audience, go home and check my mailbox and find a paycheck..."
"Okay, " said Dr. Taylor.
"And just relax, take a bath ,ya know, order some more Florentine."
The Florentine was starting to pile up in Dee's apartment, specifically the recyclable plastic tubs that they gave you your food in.  There was a knock and it was Florentine's Collections Manager wielding the long knives.  "We have come for the plastic tubs," said the Collections Manager.
"Oh," Dee said.  "Wait a minute!  Wait a minute!  I was just about to get a clue from Dr. Taylor about what's at stake in the St. Patrick Restaurant thing..."
The delivery boy blinked.  "And... suddenly, jarringly, I'm back at my little apartment."
The delivery boy blinked again.  He stammered.  "I should really be going!"
"No," Dee said.  "Wait a minute.  What's your name?"
"Brian," said the kid.
"Hi Brian, I'm Dee.  Look, there's, it's hard to describe but I keep getting physically blipped from place to place when I start to broach certain subjects in interviews.  It's really freaking me out!  So I want you to do a delivery for me, are you available?"
"Well, yeah, I'm available at 3," said Brian.
"Okay, I want you to go to the bakery on DMR Street,"
"Uh huh," Brian said, jotting down notes.
"Go down a couple of doors and you'll see what looks like fan blades inset into the ground."
"Oh," Brian said.  "The Grain Thresher of Monte Cristo."
She nodded It was indeed the grain thresher of Monte Cristo, previously the informal territorial purview of Shecky Green, who had an interest in the Cargill company which did angelic things with salt because it was inherently renewable, and on the side, pissed off all the oversight boards with their controlling interest in two grain threshers, one of Monte Cristo and one of Monte Carlo.  It was the Monte Carlo statistical investigations, a technique for running tests, such a Z-test and y-test on large collections of silver pachinko ball bearings.  When they got their result, Dee's brother Steve sat on a stage and read from the results, to a large crowd of casino denizens, from odd free-drink waitresses who even gave you free drinks for patrons of the Nevada Nickels, one of the most frugal things you could do in Las Vegas, to security lugs, to the hardworking and dedicated service staffs who themselves had a controlling interest in the Grey Flower, to all of the performers such a Shecky Green and other comedians, singers including the gilded pipes of Vic Damone, who Dee notes was recently seen at the St. Patrick's plastic-slat eatorium, chomping on a sandwich.  They were all hanging on Steve's every word.
"So," Steve said.  "Members of Casino Nation, your success is my success. As you know, we have employed the Monte Carlo to great efficacious result to try to figure out what everyone in this room wants, to screw the visitor by screwing luck itself.  It you screw luck itself, your hands are clean, all you're doing is run an honest casino where luck happens to favor the house.  And that means we rake in the revenue we need to feed our families."  At this, Steve Matt Blinked and the audience applauded a lot.  Shecky Green approached Steve afterwards.  "It's good to have you in charge," Shecky Green said.  "What's good for you, I am beginning to suspect, is good for us sheckys in the long run."  Steve Matt nodded agreement.  
"I'm glad you think so, Shecky."
"So how do you plan on skewing luck?" Shecky said.
"It's a secret, I'm afraid, Shecky," Matt said.  And Shecky Green was placid and nodded, for now at least.  It would be another few months before Green went on a tear at Chasen's kicking down tables and smashing up chairs in a restaurant that would get him his notoriety, with the same hoi polloi that Tass, round little man, and bodyguard at Flint, had taken it upon himself to cull, which was just a less impolite by virtue of being more obscure - way of saying 'kill.'  It was rotten, no good!

Conny Plank and Taylor had walked on boy, giving a quiet form of assent to activities that were unconscionable for 2007 standards.  Plan's awareness of it had drifted into ozone when he hooked up to pure oxygen and started to breathe, but Taylor was still stinging about this, as well as the "commie" question, as well as the persistent blipping out of Dee Matt.
"Where did Dee do?" said Taylor.  He had been exasperating her by seeing the room of cryptographers, navigators, investigators and hangers-on, persistently through the lens of international communism, which really not many people did these days (though China was a big place) however he could smell the injustice of blipping her out for trying to ask questions.
"I don't know," Frizz said.  "I have enough problems as it is, trying to be the brains of the operation."  Taylor nodded.  He smelled a behemoth underway, begetting more behemoths underway.  Frizz and Dave Sigh had known each other for quite a while.
"Oh," Taylor said.  "Well, Dave Singh can handle it, right?"
"That's true," Frizz said, and symbolically turned the metal-and-wood steering console over to Dave Singh.  Singh was in love with bejeweled oratory and looked like he was about to give a little speech.
"My dear friend Frizz," he began. Frizz waved him down but he continued.  "In times such as this, with three sheckys yet to bedevil us,..."  Several of the plainspoken and the children of Pat Paulsen went so far as to physically toss a bolo net  - which was a net weighted down with bolos - over Dave Singh.  Singh , symbolically gestured that the lion might lay down with the lamb, and symbolically taking the tossing of the bolo net to be a symbolic truncating of his power, sat down on a dilapidated pear-green couch in the records room which begged the question of who was now in change, with Taylor and Singh and Frizz and Dee all temporarily or permanently out of the running.  Goffman?
"Hey Erving," said Frizz, the one who knew him best.
"Nyuh," said Goffman passively.
"We want you to be chief navigator for a while."
"Oh," Goffman said, and Frizz tchh'ed at the extent of the damage.  He had known Goffman for a long time , in fact , before he because so asocial on an interpersonal level,.  Dee Matt, when she was putting together a retrospective on Goffman's work with good, solid heartfelt "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" initiatives, like Head Start and The Peace Corps and Medicare, was immediately struck by the contrast between Goffman the liberal researcher and this lightning bolt shock to the system, something seemingly much worse than an afternoon with a strobe light and a prohibition-era hooker.  Dee had called up Frizz.  Because Frizz was the one who knew him the best.
"I'm so glad you could make it, Frizz," said Dee.  They were camped out in a blasted-out abandoned building, with broken windows, cooking beans over a little kerosene stove like a couple of idealized hobos, who exposure to real trouble would be limited to the occasional bonk on the head but whose more realistically gross lives would be airbrushed out of the picture.
"Well, on the contrary," Frizz said, "I'm glad you agreed to meet me in this odd condition,.  But it's important."  He had a lot of scarves wrapped around his neck under a 100 degree sun, which made Dee wonder if eccentricity was more prevalent than brilliance or the other way around in the case of Frizz.
"If you don't believe me, or if you have doubts," Frizz said, "the example of Charles Ives is instructive."  Dee blinked.  "he was a successful composer of absurd ditties planed on the Commodore 'SID Chip.'  And the funny thing about the SID chip composition was that he didn't need an orchestra and it didn't seem to bother him"
"You're digressing, Frizz," Dee said.  It was a criticism often lobbed at Frizz Ref, but he was often proven to just have been making a point with many tentacles.
"No, no," Ref said.  "I am not, I SWEAR IT!"
"Okay, okay," Dee relented.  
"It's just what happened to Erving Goffman.  His basic sentiments have never been cold.  He's a human supporter, a true humanitarian.  A people person, if you will."  Dee flipped her beans.  She was willing to indulge Frizz Ref for quite a while, but she still shot him a look saying, "...and ...?"  
"Okay, so, like Ives with his ditties, he hits, apparently, a glass ceiling of some sort.  He's trying to get more adventuresome, keep from repeating himself for a new decade.  He gets into some pretty dissonant territory.  Not easy to do on the SID."  Dee nodded.  
"Something happened, and I don't think it was senility," said Frizz.  "and that's the connection with Erv.  If you still don't believe me, check out,. Well, wait, don't you work for A&E?"
"That's right," Dee said.
"Okay then, great.  Go and watch the BIOGRAPHY episode on Charles Ives.  He's quite a guy.  Go and look him up in the OED while you're at it."
Dee rolled her eyes.  How did she know - Pulitzer winners and grad students always seemed to want to talk about the Oxford English dictionary which was swell, except that reading about etymology with a magnifying glass gave Dee rickets.  "It's quite a piece of work," said Frizz with jolly enthusiasm.  "charles and 'Ives' are both from the Latin.  Charles is from 'QAZXQRLS' meaning 'to expectorate' and Ives is from-"
"Okay okay!" interrupted Dee.  She felt guilty for calling a Pulitzer on his running off at the mouth but really, looking up Charles Ives in the OED???
"Mr. Ref, please Goffman?  Goffman's strange change?"
"Yes", Ref said.  "Ives and Goffman both.  They came from good families, terrific familiar as a matter of fact!"
"You mean like upbringing?"  Dee made a face .  It didn't even sound like Frizz Ref's usual egalitarian approach to people
"No no!  For crying out loud not on my watch it's not upbringing!  They were GOOD GOOD FAMILIES.  They did good deeds, helped ladies across the street and the like.  And that right  there, raised the ire, of , you know, existing powers.  Because they felt threatened and were often scouting the horizon for what was the most powerful challenge, who was most likely to be seriously threatening."
"Now we're getting someplace," Dee said.  "This is the kind of thing I wanted to know.  What else can you tell me about these shadowy forces?"
"Well," Frizz said," They're real, for starters.  You're familiar with the four Sheckys?"
Dee nodded.  Who wasn't.  They seemed to like to incorporate a lot of iconography and color identification into reports of their otherwise drab business dealings.  A recent quarterly filing from the Casino Denizens Association had put on its front cover a quasi-mythical elevation of the four Sheckys as some kind of four winds, like the significance of the earth ,wind, fire and water, type of imagery.  In footnotes, it explained their complementary significance.  Yellow had his own island.  Green was a standup comedian.  Blue was a driver, was getting into weird, dimly -lit little restaurants and RED had recently beaten the rap, as a whole slate of barristers, solicitors, attorneys, counsel had been shown to be illegally in cahoots.
So the four sheckys had their domains of influence, and generally stayed out of each others way ,or that is what Dee thought.  "For the first time," she said around a conference table with Frizz and Smedley.  "I feel like I have a clue of the parameters of the fight."
"Yeah," Frizz said. "But I've had a hell of a time trying to find out simply what's at stake."  
"Well, sure," Frizz offered.  "That's their game.  I basically only know them by negative space that they displace, if that makes sense.  You can get their outlines.  It's like how astronomers detect distant stars sometimes, by their gravitational effects rather than by actually being visible.  They seen them through their displacements of the surrounding environment."
"And that's how you know there must be somebody underlying somebody there."
"That's right," Frizz said.  Like Conny Plank, Frizz was now on ozone.  But they had taken a potentially grim medical condition and turned it into a festival of yoks.   The ozone den, it had been decided was not=, and did not need to be, a medical facility and since the deregulation of oxygen dens, they had taken on the subversive quality of an opium den with everybody prattling on about how they were THINKING CLEARLY.  And Frizz and Plan were no exceptions.  They crept under a fan bay, behind a bunch of cardboard boxes and past the ""pump room" that would inflate a giant "lung" tarp for outdoor tennis during cold weather.  In the pump room was a vent and it was because of the vent that Frizz could not only breathe oxygen but snort it without detection.  Smedley detected that their small detective office was hermetically sealed, one day.
"Boss.  I smell oxygen," Frizz tried to play innocent.  "It wuznt me," he said.  "It wuznt me."
"You don't have to do a little dance," Smedley said.  "I believe you if you say it wasn't you."
"A little dance?  No, of course, if I wanted to do a little dance I would bring in Johnny Tung."
Tung had visited those places once or twice but had sworn off when he started to have doubts about how healthy it was.  "I started to miss my moves.  I was off my game.  It wasn't pretty," he said amongst big company, high rollers who just happened to like, or need, oxygen.  Frizz was irritated there was a dancer present.
"So as I was saying, Dave," he said loudly.  "GDP is a perfectly good thing to look at, but the problem with GDP-"  Tung looked indignant.  They just had nothing in common, a roomful of economists and Johnny Tung.  Some dancers and some wonks were real renaissancepersons, striking a balance and doing a commendable job hitting the bases, physical, cerebral and emotional, but Johnny Tung, Dave Singh, Frizz Ref, and Smedley Darling were not in this group.  Frizz and Plank became jokingly known among their circles as the druggies.  "It's not exactly a drug!" said Frizz defensively.  
Plank said defensively, "I should be exempt from this discussion, I mean, isn't the fact that I'm willing to lug around an apparatus, day and night, proof that this is not something light and flippant that I'm doing for kicks, for a clear head?"
This was enough to win over some observers and Plan's "Q" rating did gradually recoup.  Dee crossed her fingers as Singh, Frizz and Smedley appeared on TV.  She was on a dilapidated pea-green couch in the back of her own apartment, under a wood-paneled wall with a framed picture of monsters by a seventies illustrator known for drawing monsters and in fact , the visual template for the creepy quality of Shecky Yellow, tentacles and all.
"Well, which was real?" shecky Blue wanted to know.  They did speak occasionally.  Being regular guys, if they were going to be some kind of meeting or something, they did not require a fanfare in order to appear.  At least all buy Yellow.
"Where's the fanfare?" said Yellow on arriving at Yellow's own Island, his island, where Brian worked on laying cobbled streets before being eptified by Hoskins or someone very much like him.
"Oh!" Blue said.  "we had a trumpeter here, but I didn't want to get locked into a golden handcuff, SY." 
"You sent him home?"
"Yeah."
"But I told that guy we would have work for him."
"Oh."
So yellow could essentially claim like a powerful political boss, to have the peoples' interests in mind, like the old one about creating jobs.
"That guy plays the French Horn too.  I was looking forward to using him.  And now he's gone."
"Sorry SY."  The same was true for the staff.  Tass had offered to reduce the ranks in a Malthusian fashion, but that was just Tass.
"Are you Russian?" Dee asked.  
"What, who are you?" Tass said.
"I'm with A&E" she said.
"I'm not Russian," Tass said.
"Is it true you have been killing people left and right?  Is it true you refer to the hoi polloi?"  It got Dee's dander up.
"I don't kill people," Tass said.  "I ask them to leave the Flint.  The way it works is, there's the Flint exit, then there's a narrow stripe of DMZ, and then there is a sidewalk and then there is the Grain Thresher of Monte Carlo.  People leave as I tell them and can I help it if they keep walking and walk into a grain thresher with its big helicopter blades?"
"God damn it," Dee said.  "It's loopholes like yours that are what I went into journalism in order to shut down.."
Tass nodded smugly.
"And you get away with it, don't you."
"I reckon so."
'Yeah, okay, well, just watch your back, Tass, because I have my eye on you."  Dee was not known for her outbursts, in fact she was considered fairly reserved most of the time, so word got around in the gossip sheets that she had been at the Flint, telling off, excoriating Tass.  Tass had not been in the news ever before, he ground his haw and took tickets at the Packard Pet Project, the Stanford Theater.  A very nice guy personally, Dee was incensed the more she thought about him and his backers.  She watched Singh, Frizz and Smedley duking it out on TV.  It was a public manifestation of the idea that something was very wrong.  "Calling this meeting of allied groups to order" - What kind of  a name was Allied Groups?  She recognized the dispassionate, featureless faces of the IBR people.  It was exciting that some people were finally getting it together as a group, but she was also ticked off that not only was she not a contender, she wasn't in the ludicrous harem room at headquarters.  Somebody in this organization had messed-up views of women ,but at the moment there wasn't time to straighten them out or concentrate on that.
"Called to order," Singh said on the TV.  Well, she trusted Singh.  And he knew about the blipping.  Pretty soon, though, she was hollering at the TV.  "Talk about Tass!  Talk about Tass!!"  They did open up the phone lines.
"Okay," Frizz said.  The public exposure did not suit him.  "Now we are ready to solicit contributions from our audience.  What in your view is the number one most important aspect of the corrupt and dangerous Shecky Thing, and where would you like us to expend the energy of our crack team of cryptographers and other major smarties?"
It was a little exhilarating just to hear reference being made to the Sheckys out loud and out in the open.
"Talk about Tass!" she screamed.  "If not for this bizarrely disconcerting experience of being blipped for asking the hard questions," she thought, "I would still be over there, quizzing the major players with my little mini disc recorder.  It means I'm too good, I'm getting close to something and all the perpetrators can do is continually buy time, keep on me and keep on stalling me back and out of the picture, over and over."
She watched as Singh began to read from a stack of slips of paper.  "Here's one.  Dee Matt, investigate, why she was prevented from completing her interviews by being 'blipped' back to her apartment to her dog Jasper, her hot shower, her bubble bath and her plastic tubs of Florentine."
Thank you whoever you are, Dee thought.  Someone had thrown that one in on her behalf.  She felt slightly relieved that someone else would know about her situation.  I might have been Dave, come to think of it, her buddy.
"Yeah," Smedley added.  "What's this next one?"  It was sort of a strange scene on the screen.  They had set up card tables with cryptographers and their computers, working round the clock to understand Red, Blue and Green as well as possible and file constant reports, like a wire service, on their whereabouts and the latest strategies for their defeat.  It had a strange quality of being the dispatches from a moving vehicle, probably due to the rumbling from the overbearing "REZNOR" air conditioner overhead.  Dee blinked.  She was so tired and frustrated of moving like a glacier, always losing two steps strategically because of the disorientation that accompanied being blipped.  She called Frizz.  She had a charged phone at her apartment
"Frizz?" she said.
Frizz, onscreen, got a horrified expression as his phone rang "Carcass Pie" by Merzbow.  He cupped his hand over his mouth and turned his back to the camera, leaving Smedley and Singh to field the responses for a while.
"Dee?  What is it?  I'm on live TV right now."  
"It's because of Yellow you're doing this, isn't it?" Dee said insistently.
"Yes, yes it is," Frizz said.  "The costs of getting a minor victory.  Do you see why it would be that way?  There's only so long you can feint and jab from secrecy.  Sooner or later someone gets a little victory in a battle and right now it happened to be us, and we couldn't ignore or deny it, we  don't work that way.  Cover-ups are just awful.  As well as being wrong, they are hell to try to manage."
Dee nodded.
"So what about ME then?  I was your puppet and I didn't like it and I'm not thrilled with how I have been treated since.  I took down Yellow for you, you may have engineered how to move the pawn, but I was the pawn.  It's like Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno.  You have to give some props to Ferrigno even if all he ever says is 'UNNHH!'"
"You're absolutely right, Dee, but the problem is a short-term problem, because if you come back down here and join us, they'll blip you and what's more, do you know what happens to the area around where you are blipped from?"
"I would have a hard time knowing that," she said, chilly, "considering that I was the one being blipped."
"Well," Frizz said, "Ozone.  Lots of ozone is released, which means the drug fiends, Plank and me, can't work because we're addicted to pure oxygen, and ozone is still pretty darn good, and the others are getting tired of picking up the slack of our work when we're indisposed."


"It does make it tricky to try to fight, whatever it is we are fighting, crime, corruption, when you would go on TV and take people's suggestions for what to do first... to constantly be tossed around like a leaf.  It's starting to get to me, Frizz, I am a patient woman but do you know how many times my internal organs have been tossed around like a salad and what's worse is, without a sentence worth of coherent analysis of why or how."
"Yes," Frizz said, I understand what you're saying.  I can see how it would be upsetting and I'm sorry it has been you.  Back on TV, she could see, a four color pinwheel attached to the wall, was spinning of its own accord. 
"What is that thing," she asked.  
"That's, oh, that's a sort of 'sporiti barometer.'  We use it to try to track the Sheckys."
"Does it work?"
"I mean, sometimes, I think even the frightening freaks at DARPA enlisted a psychic who used a pet, a dog who could supposedly hear signals from the beyond.  So, I mean, what kind of credentials do you want?  It was only fifteen dollars.  I got it at a garage sale."
"Frizz, what the heck is going on?  When do I get some coherent analysis instead of just a litany of detail upon detail?  Frizz shrugged his shoulders.  She could see it on TV.  I know it's difficult, and there are a lot of people asking you to be patient.  Take a look at that barometric gizmo up there.  See the yellow... that's actually really odd."   He had a closer look.  "I wonder. " He took it off the wall.  The flaps looked like they were paper but when he held it in his hand it was evident that it was a hefty implement, and if spun, could actually be a formidable and dangerous weapon because the colorful flaps were mounted on formidable brass spokes.  He held it up like a divining rod and it pointed to a closet.  This was all on live TV.  The others were fielding questions about farming.  Someone wanted to know literally about the threshing of grain.  
"You losers are using a grain thresher for some pretty unorthodox things.  Can we please talk about it?  Read me my wheat figures!" said the caller.  Singh and Goffman put him down and he got off the phone.  Fatima came in from the womans room and cussed out Dave.  "I'm out of there.  You said fifteen minutes!"  What was going on, Goffman wanted to know.  He usually didn't ask questions but this time he did.  Singh shrugged his shoulders.  Al of this doubletalk about cussing was heard in the background on live TV.  It was another fuel scheme, he admitted.

Dee was enthralled by a woven hand in the background on the wall of the TV studio where the ragtag bunch of whatever they were, were busily talking on headset mics as though their little shabby apartment were a spaceship.  She was still reeling from the premise that Frizz and Plank were addicted to ozone.  She sighed, discouraged, and considered the possibility of nihilistic doom.  They're going to win out, aren't they, Frizz?  she said.  "Huh, what?" Frizz said.  "The Sheckys.  Whatever the hell they want.  It's not going to be a heroic story."
Conrad Plank was spending more and more time in ozone dens.  He had come to Flint to answer questions but that was over, and he was hopping his own little Piper Cub back to Germany when he saw Frizz Ref walking down the street.  They looked like two of a kind - both had the telltale plastic tubes in their noses of the ozone addict.  "Ref!" said Plank.  Ref waved.  "What's up, still on the, you know?"  Ref said nothing but nodded grimly.  "Yeah," Ref said finally.  "It's not a good situation.  I can only think when I'm on ozone ... and I feel like something is brewing, you know what I mean?  This would be a good time for my most fabulously sharp deductions, but I don't think I'm there."
	



I know what you mean, Frizz, said Plank.  Well, we have two choices.  Give up ozone right now and never again touch the stuff... or... go down to the wharf and get a bunch of ozone and inhale it for the rest of the day!  Frizz chose the latter, as Plank had assumed he would, which meant that once again, it was Smedley, poor Smedley, who for the last few weeks had been picking up the slack remarkably, out of necessity, because Frizz had taken a leave of absence from responsibility. It was Smedley who had been answering all the phones, doing all the books, and solving all the cases.
The prevalence of commies and ex-commies in Merchant Mart had made Dr. Taylor want to frequent little entrepreneurs, just for some balance, but he did put up with it on a day-to-day basis.  Plank went one step further and that was why, as Taylor's confidante, he would only talk to him as a voice on the phone and never in person.  But when word got out that Taylor wanted capitalism, because by virtue of having them as his neighbors, he had become an anti-bigot towards lefties, just from the familiarity, lots and lots of orphans on the lookout for "the main chance" crowded Taylor's ankles and bit them, as he left Merchant Mart for the day.  "But!" cried one orphan, "You said you wanted to see some moxie, sticktoitiveness, hard work and pluck!  And here I am!"  Taylor looked at him funny.  "I used to have gang wars on the streets of the Lower East Side," said the kid, whose brown locks stuck out under a green cabbie's hat.  "What?" said Taylor.  "That was like, at the turn of the century?"
Taylor voted Tass as the most pressing problem.  "He's been shooting a crossbow through people!" hammered Taylor.  "But," said Goffman, "don't we have some more important things to worry about, like for instance, Sheckys?"  "Look," Taylor said.  "The Sheckys may be corrupt businessmen, but ask ten average people who have been on the receiving end of Shecky largesse.  Are they going to say the Sheckys are good  or bad?  They'll say that they are good, because of self-interest.  A short-term, immediate benefit, for a lot of people, would outweigh something that is undeniably awful, like a big human rights abuser, and yet, seems detached from daily life."  "Can you give us a few instances?"  It wasn't Goffman who said that.  It was Doreen.  "Well, uh," Taylor said, thrown off a bit.  "Like Hezbollah, they give social services to the people who live around them and that's why Nasrallah is a big hero.  They run schools, I believe."
"And Tass?" asked Goffman.  "Yes," Taylor said.  "Look, first of all, who even says 'hoi polloi' anymore?  That's no good."  "But we're not going to go after Tass for saying 'hoi polloi.'"  "That's true," Taylor said.  "Okay, well, there's the matter of the crossbow.   I don't understand the ambiguity in enforcement, the wiggle room.  He kills people coming in and out of Flint!"  Goffman tapped the side of his nose with his finger.  "What the hell does THAT mean?" asked Taylor.  "To be aware of a crime in progress and not follow through on it, isn't that sort of a crime?"  "All right," Goffman said.  "I'll put down your vote for Tass."
Tass was down at the post office sticking up "REWARD" posters for Shecky Blue.  "Wanted, Shecky Blue, for FOOD POISONING and FALSE RESTAURANTING!"  As is often the case, Tass had resorted to a tricky charge, after being told that confronting Shecky Blue with the things he had really done, wouldn't fly.  "Why?" Tass said to attorneys Kunstler, Tigar, Darden, all arranged with breathing tubes between their skulls like a gerontopod.  Michael Tigar, so it was said, did a marvelous job, and today was no exception.  He skritched his chin.  "I smell disingenuity," Tigar said.  "What," said Tass.  "Did you just learn how to use that word in a sentence last weekend?"
"Why were you down at the post office, Tass?" asked Tigar.  "Just wanted to call a little more attention to Shecky Blue?"   "Why? What are you driving at, Tigar?"  Michael Tigar put a bony finger in Tass' comfort zone.  "Look here, Tass.  I know disingenuity when I smell it.  You put up those posters of Blue to call attention away from YOU!"  Tass stuck his pointer in his collar and twisted it in cartoon nervousness.  "Er, yeah, so I did."  Look here, Tigar, money's really tight since my house-organ folded and I have to get revenue where I can find it.  I put up those reward posters because I want the reward!"
Eventually Tass was locked up by Eliot Ness and his boys.  Goffman scowled a little, and Taylor crowed about it until he was shushed.  "All right!" Goffman said.  "So tell me, Goffman," Taylor said, pressing the advantage and going for the jugular.  "Just how did you become so asocial?  I heard you had a little mishap with a strobe light and a bottle of Zima."  "Zima?" Goffman wrinkled up his nose.  "Who even uses Zima in their gossip anymore.  I've heard some pretty absurd things 'twain East and West, but outdated gossip is new to me."  Now Taylor wrinkled up his nose.  "What, are you turning into a wandering bard?"
Although it seemed like a spaceship from the little couch in the cockpit, which was even outfitted with seatbelts just to increase the feeling of "space travel", the inhabitants were not prohibited from getting up, walking around, or even going down to the corner for a Slurpee.  They were requested to be back in time for the daily TV broadcasts, but Goffman missed one because he got distracted by the "Wanted" poster for Shecky Blue down at the Post Office, and the little round man who was nailing it to the church door.  "Busted!" cried Goffman.  Tass wasn't the only one who did heroic things out of anxiety and guilt.  Goffman hauled Tass, who didn't put up much of a fight, back to the old brownstone.
Dee got an idea.  She picked up her cel phone and tut-tutted.  She remembered all of a sudden that several people had given her their private cel phone numbers after the interview, for follow-up questions, which was very considerate of them.  She felt at once pissed off and determined.  She picked up the phone and dialed the private number of St. Brigid.  St. Brigid was down at the restaurant waiting tables.  "Hello?" said a voice.  "Brigid?  This is Dee."  "Oh.  Hi, Dee."  "What's going on?"  "I'm just about done here.  Then I'm waitressing over at Cattleman's. I'm a cowgirl."  Dee made a "huh? wha?" face.  "Cowgirl?  You didn't used to be a cowgirl."  "I know," Brigid said.  "I just got the idea and now I can't get it out of my head.  I wanna be a cowgirl, Dee!"  "But ... what about libertay, egalitay..."  Something about this struck Dee as wrong.  "I think the people need you, Brigid, they're relying on you to liberate the people!"  "Well," Brigid said.  "The people are going to have to liberate themselves.  I pulled up my blouse.  I'm a cowgirl now."  Dee was frustrated.  "All right.  I just want to ask you a simple question."  "What's that, Dee?"  "There's something cooking with Goffman and how he became antisocial.  I've just gotten the faintest glimmer that there's a controversy there, in my interviewing.  The other thing is, the three saints.  I only know what I've been able to piece together but Dave Singh told me it was St. Patrick, St. Moby, and you."  There was a silence at the other end of the phone.  "That's right," Brigid said.  "It was."  "Okay then," Dee said.  "That's fine.  But what I want to know is, why is it important?  WHAT'S AT STAKE?"  There was a sudden jag.  Dee was horrified to discover that her life had happened to her, instead of her making decisions.  She was on the floor.  She got up.  Her cel phone was gone, and the room smelled like ozone.  She went for her box of SARS masks and put one on.  The last thing she needed was an ozone habit.  She expected the phone to disappear, after all, her whole body had already been disappeared several times.  "All right, you assholes!" she said.  She marched out of her apartment to the convenience store and bought a disposable cel phone.  They were $13.  Expensive, but under the circumstances it was okay.  She rarely cussed.  She came back into her house, idly eating the last of the Florentine from a white plastic spoon stained dark orange.  She hammered out Brigid's numbers again.  "Hello?" said a voice.  "Brigid?  Dee." said Dee curtly.  "Oh.  What happened?"  "Someone doesn't want these questions asked, that's what.  Asked or answered.  What's at stake?"  The disposable vanished in her hand!  This time she was not knocked unconscious.
Brigid was certainly free to go become a waitress over at Cattleman's.  It was better than embezzling a shitload of money like Jock Jones.  St. Patrick wasn't going to bodily block her exit.  "Well," he said indignantly, "I'm sure I will get SOMEONE to help me change the restaurant name on the slat."  Brigid rolled her eyes.  "I gotta go, Patrick.  I gotta deal!  I gotta make deals!"  "All right.  Who was that on the phone?"  "It was Dee."  "That journalist?"  "Yeah, that's right."  "What did you tell her?"  "Nothing.  She wanted to know what was at stake, but her line kept on going dead."
The management of Flint looked the other way when Tass was having his shift.  In fact, they liked to look the other way, and then spun it as 'good for you.'  It was a very contrived exercise plan, but that's what they did, and they had their mitts in Steve Matt's casino-based honey pot, and they had great big white walls at the Flint, all the better to plaster up all the signs and insignias they wanted.  In fact, the McClatchey organization had once remodelled Flint to give the white walls more visibility.  It was very surprising to those who didn't know you could do things like that.  The Flint Managers, who did their business dealings using desk-intercoms, a little like Plank, so that they would not have to be seen in person except at the occasional Emmys when they would 'go public,' were just amazed when they arrived the next day with their attorney, Michael Tigar.  The place had been quantized and reassembled, by the atom.  It was incredibly quick and incredibly quiet, and the result was 30% more wall space.  "Well, what do we do now?" said Flint Manager Nixon, who hid his identity with a thick, collectible Nixon mask.  "Enjoy it, I guess?" said Flint Manager Ford.  "But," Flint Manager Nixon complained.  "They didn't get our permission and they disassembled and reassembled our building while we were asleep."  "Let me ask you this," said Flint Manager Reagan.  "Are you better off now, than you were four years ago?"  "Err, well... " Nixon thought about it for a minute.  "Thirty percent more wall space means we can indoctrinate the audiences any way we want, thirty percent more.  We will get thirty percent more mindshare."  "Mindshare!" said Ford.  "Leave it to the sterling minds of marketing to come up with some vile shit.  Okay, they're not around and it actually helps us, I say we accept it and get on with putting up some posters."  Nixon folded his arms stubbornly but that's what they did.  "That damn McClatchey," said Nixon.
It had nothing to do with a strobe light.  Goffman told the story to no journalist.  He would attack the press whenever possible.  The actual truth was far more peculiar.  He had decided upon asociality after reading a book about Eisenhower, who was generally very reserved and mild, which meant that when he did get a bright red face and let off a string of swear words, you knew he was mad!  Goffman told the story only to his teddy bear.  "Well, Sydney, that's when I decided that networking and schmoozing is better when it comes in a burst.  So I swore off entertainment ceremonies.  I do occasionally come out of retirement for the Emmys, but that's just so there is an exception that proves the rule, and the many members of the Goffman hoi polloi can have something to write about in their newsletters."  He yawned and adjusted his tall nightcap with the tassle.  "Good night, Sydney."
"I don't want to be eptified," said the boy.  "I'm happy putting down cobblestones on the streets of an old capital city in the EU."  "Hmm," said Hoskins.  He threw off a Bob Hoskins mask and revealed himself to be TASS, the round little man who figured it all out.  He drew back his crossbow.  "no, no! what are you doing!" cried the cobbler.  "Sorry, kid," said Tass.  "It's nothing personal.  Money, as I recently told Michael Tigar--"  "He does a fabulous job," said the kid, apparently trying to use some kind of psychological distraction trick on Tass.  "Yeah, yeah.  Money is really tight and I have to take it where I find it!  Sometimes I work security at Flint, and when they tell me to employ Malthusian principles and take a few patrons out, I do it.  Because I'm an employee and that's what my employer is telling me to do.  And the rest of the time I work freelance.  I just want to take on jobs.  This one came courtesy of Shecky Red."  The kid gasped!  "Yes, they say he killed a man down by the old canal, but he didn't.  They passed it off to me!"
The old capital happened to be Prague!  And Sam Park heard the mechanical springs releasing from across town.  It was a disturbing sound.  He was just putting the finishing touches on the re-edited version of a review for the Prague Post-Intelligencer, which posited that people were going to get stupid, when he heard, with the delayed reaction of thunder after lightning, "aiiieeeeeeeeeee!"  He got on the phone with McClatchey.  They got away with a lot.  They had been doing terrific work, and they didn't attract as much wrath from people like Goffman, because as a wire service, they were relatively anonymous and didn't grab the glory.  Their reporters generally didn't go on TV very much.  It was a long distance call to the USA but he did it anyway.  "Hello, McClatchey?  This is Sam Park!  I just heard a murder being committed!"
Dee's brother, Steve Matt, of course had known Tammy and Casey back at school, and he ran into Tammy a while later at the photocopy shop.  She looked stoic and grim when the subject of Casey came up.  "He should have known better," she said.  "All of those big software moguls had their dirty little buddies.  Every last one of them had a secret or something wrong."  Steve nodded.  He wanted to talk about his chain of hotels, but you couldn't get Tammy off a topic once she got started.  "So what happened?" Steve asked.  "He spent time homeless.  He spent time in Hawaii, homeless."  "Ugh," Steve grimaced.  "Well, I got my real estate papers notarized, my excitement for the day, I gotta go!"  Tammy was a ray of sunshine and he could have stared at her sunshiney face and her sunshiney neckline for longer and longer intervals for the rest of the day, but her boyfriend had gone next door for a coke and was coming right back, and he saw no reason to prolong the frustration.
Shecky was never quite the same after returning from the Pieledieaditeees.  He was in a bad way.  It wasn't helping matters that Frizz was on ozone and scored it as often as he could.  "Where you going?" Shecky asked as Frizz ran out the door, his tie askew.  "I'm going to Dee's!"  That was code.  There was some shit going on with Dee asking questions.  Frizz had explained it to him three times but he still didn't understand, but there was a new little drug symbiosis going on, where Frizz would go and get disposable cel-phones, bring them over to Dee's, Dee would make them disappear in a puff of ozone, and Frizz would get high on the ozone.
Generally only defined by their ghostly outlines and their influence, the surviving Sheckys were disturbed enough by the demise of their Yellow brethren to hop on their respective Piper Cub airplanes, being sure to get meteorological reports from someone other than Mike Peckner, who was never seen in public these days and hung around at the back of Phil-B-Qs, chastened by having told Jessica Dubroff, the little girl pilot, that it was probably ok to fly.  "Where are we going to meet?" said Blue.  "On the island," said Red.  "Oh!  Shecky Yellow's Island!" said Blue.  "Yes," said Red.  "Will Green be joining us?"  The Shecky's had an odd, slightly stilted way of referring to each other.
There was no longer any use denying that the people were beginning to pile on, either in the old brownstone, or in Frizz's spartan detective office.  For the Sheckys to come out of hiding and for them to appear in one place, rather than try to divide and conquer and stick with their own enclaves on the globe, was a change.  Yellow is dead, said Shecky Green.  The strange thing was that he was in the middle of a performance at the Bellagio! (the exclamation mark was Steve Matt's idea) - when he said it.  "Not a brother exactly, my parallel-in-another-color, was pushed down a grain thresher at nine this morning," ladies and gentlemen.  The crowd was nonplussed and wasn't certain whether this was some kind of gag.  Only Alan Abel would go on the news posing as a member of an organization who is against breastfeeding.  St. Brigid had taken particular note of that one when she did her legal survey of the likely reception of taking one side of her top down, in downtown Manhattan, waving a French Flag.  "It's not that big of a deal!" she told her attorney, Michael Tigar, who, as always, was doing a fabulous job.  But even the children and grandchildren of Abel would pull gags of a lesser magnitude.  Gradually, the crowd in the little theater realized that Green wasn't kidding.  His mind went blank.  "I got no more jokes," he said.  He undid his tie, and hoisted himself down to the stage, so that his legs were dangling back and forth.  The crowd was rumbling, and they might have gotten angry if their rumbling had not been overtaken by a louder rumbling: a Piper Cub VTOL craft, hovering over the glass ceiling of the Bellagio.  A rope ladder appeared and Shecky Blue hollering, "Get in, dear boy!"
It was a languid scene.  Frizz and Smedley were beginning to wish Dee would come back and say some of those smart things she had said when she had come over to study with Frizz and impressed everyone.  Frizz had the telltale red eyes of an ozone eater.  Smedley had stars in his eyes, also little moons, and ringed-Saturns, constantly pining for the Pleiaieiaeiadies.  He didn't want to work.  Frizz had gotten himself into a bind because he was too weak and lethargic to go get another disposable cel phone.  Plus, he had run out of money.  Dee tried to get him to wear a SARS mask, but of course he wouldn't.
"Don't go!" said Johnny Tung, as Shecky Red reeled up the ladder and Shecky Blue got into the Piper Cub and vanished.  "How am I going to get from coast to coast without my driver?"  Shecky Blue's final words to his boss and mentor were, "WHY DON'T YOU ASK FRANK FIELDING!"  Johnny Tung's final words to Shecky Blue, which couldn't be heard for the roar of the airplane, were "BUT HE'S AN ARCHITECT!"  It turned out that Fielding could help after all, or so he hoped.  In return for a wad of cash, Fielding offered, "I can dig you a tunnel complex.  It's held up by concrete pylons, each of which contains the work of a poet you slept through in school." Tung  blinked.  Apparently that was Frank Fielding's idea of humor.  "The tunnels can get you from New York to Los Angeles with darn good time."  Tung nodded.  "Why, do you have a lot of dance performances coming up?"  "Well that depends, doesn't it!" snapped Tung.  "I just lost my driver.  I'm not going to make any performances if I can't get around!"
The piper cub landed on Yellow's Own Island.  There was no longer any doubt that the slumbering beast was awakened.  The ramp came down and Shecky Blue, Shecky Red and Shecky Green all stepped off.  The phone rang.  "Yes?" said Shecky Red.  "Boss!" cried Tass.   "That kid didn't want to be eptified."  "Oh," said Red.  "So what happened?"  Tass was always cagey when he had killed someone.  "Never mind," Red said.  "We can spread a rumor that I did it.  Just like that other guy down by the quayside."  "By the way," Tass said.  "Have you heard about that quayside?  It's been completely redone.  All the old rat nooks we used to love..."  "I really don't have time to talk about that now," Red said.  "It would have been nice but it's not critical.  Get out of the EU as quickly as you can.  Meet us on the island."
Taylor had a shock of black hair and was a little indignant at being lumped in with the grey beards.  But he was both fascinated and repulsed to be in the center of things, as the other four watched with some sort of remote shotgun camera, as a mild-mannered man and woman, Dan and Milly walked along.  "Why don't they get out on the road themselves," thought Taylor, "instead of zombifying innocent bystanders to do their legwork?"  He was scared to ask it out loud.  He watched the monitor, not entirely sure if it was live or a recording, as Dan and Milly stiffened and gradually came under the greybeards' complete control.  There was a fortress nearby, which had a small sign on one wall that said, "Industrial Supply House.  For restaurants including: Cattleman's, the Grey Rose, Blue..."  Apparently, it was the inclusion of Blue that made it relevant.  Holding crossbows with dangerous-looking spears ready to let fly, Dan and Milly did the bidding of the greybeards.  "Gee, guys," Taylor said.  "Do the ends really justify the means?"  But he was drowned out by the dervishy wild whoops that Dan and Milly let out as Milly dropped one side of her blouse to look both fearsome and weird, and they went hurtling into a stone wall of the fortress with their crossbows drawn!  The crossbows took out a chunk.  Apparently it was quite an important chunk because what was revealed was a middle-aged man taking a shower!  "Aieee!" shouted the man.  "So what are you gonna do," said Taylor, now openly critical.  "Embarass and inconvenience the staff of all the satellite companies, just because their ownership can be traced back to a Shecky?"  "We don't mind you questioning us, Dr. Taylor," Singh said.  "But if you are doing so, it's probably because you don't know what is at stake."  "What is at stake?" Taylor asked.
With the Sheckys together in one place, little swirls and eddies were coming off of Yellow's Own Island.  One of them reached Dee.  She was pissed off.  She had gotten a raw deal, been blipped around like a doll, and then had been used as the zombie for the greybeards in the brownstone and their ideas on how to proceed - it's not like she had been consulted.  And then she had been tucked away on a shelf.  All told, she imagined there had been about fifty of these ozone "pops," with a cluster of over a dozen all in the last day, because Frizz, the druggie, had been bringing her phones.  She knew there was a "them".  She believed Dave Singh, but now she was even irritated at Singh.  It was like getting together with those other pompous geeks had eliminated Singh's charisma and sense of moderation.  One of the whirlpools swirled around her head.  "You're doing volatile things," it said.  "Stop."
Now Tass was running from the dogs of war.  He took the train to the plane, and did as instructed.  Later, over the Pacific, Tass mopped his forehead.  He was one of those guys who never seemed to be able to get their collar closed around their neck.  And when an otherwise nice person made that cruel assessment, it tempered the judgment a bit to realize that Tass had chosen murder as his line of work, since the folding of his state-run wire service.  Eventually he touched down on the island, the underarms of his white shirt drenched
Dave Singh got a little smile on his face when he looked at Dee, and in a quiet moment in the taxi cab he got to tell her why.  "What do you think the A&E network stands for?" he asked.  "Arts and entertainment?" asked Dee.  "Yes," said Dave," but that's not the only thing, it also stands for arm and elbow."  Dee blinked.  "Arm and Elbow?  The Arm and Elbow network?"  "That's right."  "I never heard anything so daft."  "Well, it's true," Dave said.  And I used to be the elbows man.  "What?  You used to work where I work?"  "That's right," Dave said, smiling.  "So wait, do we know people, do you know Sharon Graves?"  "Oh sure," Dave said.  They grinned at each other warmly.  "Is that why you picked me up, Dave?  Something tells me you are no ordinary taxi driver."  "Ummmmm," said Dave with a sheepish smile.  "Yeah, you could say that.  It's partially because you're at the center of the hurricane, like it or not, it's you, Dee."  Dee looked irritated.  "And I didn't ask for it.  And I don't see a hell of a lot of rewards coming my way."  "I know," Dave said.  "Well, there's a piece of old A&E folklore that if all four Sheckys were to be deceased, and their ashes used to fertilize a plot of a garden, there would grow a grey rose."  Dee blinked.  She tried to suss out briefly whether he was in poetic mode or literal mode.  When he didn't bother following up on what the grey rose had to do with anything, she concluded he was in poetic mode.  She nodded politely.
Dee finally got her answer.  Dave, who she was the least annoyed at, didn't really have a grey beard.  He was obviously a good guy.  And he tapped his nose for Dee's benefit and took the brass key on his ring and unlocked a little screening room.  It was all black.  There was a three-legged stool inside and a bunch of DVDs on shelves.  He put in an unlabeled, gold DVD-R.  "Watch this," he said.  It showed a haggard, self-absorbed TV host talking about economic disaster.  "If you'll please look at the converging lines on this graph," said the host, "this is what happens when the big powers decide that the litany of fun, colorful themes has run its course, and pull all their dough out of the economy, retire to their castles, wither away and die.  Now, you may ask, would some of these lion-like, devouring industrialists, some nice guys, some not, some sharp, some dumb as a post, some nurturing mothers and grandmothers, some Thatcher-like, with that twisted desire to prove their 'balls.'  Anyway, the answer is, yes."  Dee blinked.  "Do you pay attention to the periodic Christian TV flurries that try to align some frightening new world event with the second coming?  Well, the world will end not with a bang but with a whimper.  If you take all of these believers, shift it laterally just a bit so that instead of Jesus they believe in, it's the 'litany of fun stuff.'  Which must come to an end, according to them.  So as convinced as they are that they would not be 'left behind,' they might get a little detached about the period of time on earth when they were bound for bigger things.  The inverse is, if everything is about to end, if you truly believe that, there's no shame in folding up in a ball emotionlessly, because a lot of these industrialists work on logic, and if the end of the world is inevitable, it's logical not to try."  "So that's what we're trying to prevent," Dee said.  "Yes," Singh said.  "Now you know what's at stake."
Steve and Dee got along okay, but things were moving pretty fast now. After Shecky Green was airlifted out of his own comedy show, Steve was on the phone with Dee a while later and happened to mention it.  "Oh my god!" Dee said.  Since Singh had shown her that analytical DVD, she too was a true believer, not in the litany theory, but in the idea that the litany theory, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, was going to fuck everything up.  "Steve, Green is going to ruin all of our lives."  Steve, as a Casino Denizen, had a moderate opinion of his comics.  "Aww, Dee," he said.  "He's not so bad.   You know he distributes milk, eggs and butter to poor neighborhoods?  And he runs a school.  And a hospital!"  "It doesn't matter, Steve, this is worse!"  It was the beginning of a stalemate between the Matts.
When Dee found out what was at stake, she stopped making ozone, and when Dee stopped making ozone, Frizz and Plank got even more desperate than before.  Frizz had started going by the name of John Train, and hanging around some of the nightclubs in Greenwich Village that he used to go to deliver a rant, when the East Village Other put on an experimental performance of a newspaper, someone had the smart, innovative idea that you could have stand-up journalism, with a reporter, as long as he or she was reading their quotes properly off of paper, you could hear the scuttlebutt live from the reporter's mouth.  And Frizz had done that in the day.  He was back now, but he was John Train, and he was in serious trouble.  Always trying to raise the funding for his movie, Smedley and Dee were both ashamed and sad for him.  "I heard he did a commercial for Gallo wine," Smedley said to Dee ruefully.  "Oh," Dee said.  "Did he get a pile of cash for that one, at least?"  "No," Smedley said.  "They gave him a pile of wine."  "Oh.  What did he do with that, drink it?"  "No, he sold it all to a wine dealer."  "Oh.  Did he get a pile of cash for that one, at least?"  "No, he blew it all on ozone."  She cringed.  Poor Frizz.  She really felt, and Smedley and even Taylor had concurred, that with all the weird shit happening it would be a great time for a really smart mind.  His absence was going to be sorely missed.
The greybeards were looking askance at each other.  It's not like the partnership was about to dissolve, but when they convened the following weekend for their TV show, they had the five of them- and when Dee watched on TV, she saw Plank - obviously a smart guy, but addicted to drugs, Frizz, the same thing, Taylor, who had criticized their proceedings, which Dee personally thought was great, but how would it fly in a quasi-authoritarian mini-culture of the greybeards?  Then you had Goffman, who, obviously, had limited social skills and might cause as much trouble as he resolved.  So it was Goffman and Singh.  And Dee knew Singh was somewhat of an imposter - he had allowed them to take over Dee's body and move her around like a marionette, but now that she knew that he had worked at A&E, and what kind of nihilistic shit they were up against, she doubted that he would have initiated such a plan, even if he went along when it was proposed by others.
They put the "top issue" cards in a hopper, spun it around like some kind of cheesy lottery program with all-around cheesy celebrity host Geoff Edwards.  Edwards went to Steve Matt for career advice, as did lots of other denizens who didn't want to be caught without free tickets to the wedding of Matt's son, and be discovered beneath a truck, or something like it.  "Get a travel blog," Steve said.  "Geoff, you should write about cruising."  "Gulp."  Edwards said.  "But Steve.  I kind of like the Big Spin."  "Silence!" said Matt.  "I have spoken."  Edwards slunk out.  That was the power of Steve Matt.  Geoff Edwards writes about cruises on his travel blog to this day.
They put the "top issue" cards in a hopper and they pulled out 'litany.'   "Congratulations!" said Goffman, who was being stressed by his new role of doing more and more social things, almost a social butterfly.  "You are in the top five.  And we are on the case!"  Unfortunately, watching Erving Goffman on no-budget TV saying he would protect you, was like watching Brian Lamb, who was terrific in the realm of ideas but would be smushed by a tank in Tiananmen Square just like most other members of Mark E. Smith's League of Bald-Headed Men.  It wasn't reassuring, in other words, to look at the Hall of Heroes and see Frizz, laying around groaning, Conny Plank on the phone with his doctor even as the cameras rolled.  Basically, the facade of five brilliant greybeards, who had some kind of odd history and vendetta against the Sheckys, an axe to grind which would fill them full of fiery fervor, was cracking apart.

Depending upon interpretation the fact that the three remaining Sheckys had landed on Yellow's Own island - could be spun, for them, as a good or a bad thing.  They valued their sort of "canton" powers and usually stayed out of each others' hair.  In the Shecky equivalent of Grey beard control center, a shabby apartment in an old brownstone, whatever that meant, they were trying to muster the nihilistic equivalent of what the greybeards had done to poor Dee. Their subject stood at the decks, spinning house, chawing something vaguely carcinogenic and looking bored.  "I'm not getting anything," he said.  
"Me neither," said Blue.  The three of them were wearing little tin foil beanies and were arranged at equidistant points around "the coffin" which was an 'in' term for two turntables on a mixing console.  The strain showed in their faces.  Paul D. Oval fiddled with the BPM and kept chewing.  "you gotta spittoon?" he asked.  Blue looked irritated.  "I'll take that as a no."  Oval had answered their inquiry.  They had tried the disclosure approach  "automaton needed. Must be willing to subjugate own will to control by a hive-mind.  Must be dextrous.  Must sign 'no-whistleblowing agreement' (NWA).  Generous compensation.  Apply in person on Yellow's Own Island, Building "B".  They posted the notice in laundromats around New York They figured anyone determined enough to get an air-drop to Yellow's Own, which could only be reached by air followed by a scuba dive under a natural sand-barrier to compound entirely surrounded by water and sand - and who also met the asked-for traits, was a good candidate.  Oval had shown up and made his request.  "I wanna throw a party here."  The Sheckys blinked.
"But," said Red.  "We need to keep our island secret."
"I gotta throw parties!" said Oval.  "I gotta make deals!  It's in my-" he flexed his knuckles.  "the rest of the time, I'm putty in your hand.  But you gotta let me throw parties here."  The Sheckys were undecided.  They looked back and forth trying to weigh the risks.  Eventually, Shecky Red said, "Well, we do have Tass, if anything gets out of hand we can leave it to Tass to be the enforcer."  The others nodded.  Soon Tass arrived, but the damage of having killed the cobbler kid was following him.  First there was one nosy cobblers' ombudsman looking into it.  Then there was a small cadre.  From Prague, they hooked up with Tass' former European liaison who eventually "turned state's evidence," solely for the sake of being able to say the cool-sounding phrase, "turned state's evidence" at parties.  
"Where is Tass?" asked the cobblers' own mini mafia.
"Russia?" said Tass' ex-friend.  Her name was Amanda and she was wearing a wire the last time she had come to see Tass.  "Don't play games with us, Amanda," said the cobblers.  
"Ok, Ok," she said.  "France."
They blinked.  "Any particular part of France?"
"Just 'France,'" Amanda said.  "If you're trying to annoy us, it's working," said the cobblers.
"Well, I'm sorry," Amanda said.  "I just don't know anything about the different parts of France. What, Cantons?  Prefectures?  Counties?"
"Yeah, okay," said the cobblers.  It was a very vociferous lobby.  "Why is it like that," said Steve Matt when he was on a trip to see if he might want to hook up with a bunch of cobblers.  The funny thing is, it was propaganda from Shecky Green that got the bug in Steve's ear.  "hey boss," Green had said to Matt as they left the Casino Denizens' Club one day.
It was everything Vegas was not.  It was like an atheist-nihilist's Bible Study club.  They studied Madelyn Murray O'Hair, who the airport was named after.  A long time prior to the current hand-wringing between Sheckys, Greybeards and other little cadres, there was a whole different thing going on at Merchant Mart, future home of the Socialist Workers' newspaper and Dr. Taylor's Institute for the study of 'Social Studies.'  O'Hare ad set up a little atheism war room.  She made money with a small pizza parlor; Prep's.  Their mascot was a gator.  As is often the case there was a kind of cool symbiosis between the pizza shop and the warroom.  In fact social critics would tsk at the way the war room 'trolled' the pizza palace for new helpers.  Paul Oval, Dee Matt, Casey Louie, all passed through as teenagers.  After you ordered a couple of dozen slices, they would start giving you free tokens for skee-ball and when you went to try to redeem your tickets, there would be a Pinocchio-style luring devil , with gold teeth, who said "Would you like the neon green pencil-eraser, the cheaply-made-trinket, the teeth-rotting neon green candy lump" (which was nigh indistinguishable from the eraser), "Or.. if you desire... I can turn your skee-ball tickets, with a ratio of ten to one, into a token for a NEW game."  The residents of the atheist-nihilist war room were watching the poor kids through one way mirrors to see what would happen.  One in ten would get to skee-ball.  One in a hundred would get to the next game which happened to be cryptograms.  One in a thousand would receive a similar offer to turn their cryptogram tickets into tokens for another game, "dodge the alligator with the scimitar in its teeth."  So that by the end of seven or eight rounds of games, they had run the candidate, unbeknownst to the candidate's self, through a series of tests of strength, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, agility, luck, charm, ethics and so forth.  Dee, Oval, Casey, all passed with flying colors.  At the end of the day, O'Hair came forth.
"You kids are some true champions," she said, brandishing red, white, blue and gold medals from the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.  
"Thanks," said Dee.  Casey Louie scuffed his feet.  At the age of thirteen he was still a bit gawky and had not, as he later would, discovered scientology which, he swore allowed him to become "clear", get rid of his acne and psoriasis and thus become "clear" of skin, and become a minor hero at his school, hollering when he was available for a touchdown pass, "I'm clear!"
"So," said O'Hair, "how would you like to come and work for us in the atheist-nihilist war room?  It's right next door to pizza."  Unfortunately, the incredibly elaborate winnowing plan that had exposed these all around exemplary, high-achieving dweebs had also taken a good eight years.  Dee, in particular, was now 24.  
"I already have a job," she said.  And that was that for the pizza place as a recruiter, unfortunately for O'Hair because as it always took an order of magnitude's time to do the next step, she explained to a young Robert Taylor, then only a resident and struggling with the villain of "CALL" rather than "SEARCH".
"Just finding out who our candidates was, took ten years!"  O'Hair said.  "So I suspect the next step, making a system out of what we have done once, would take a hundred years."
"Yeah? So?" Taylor said.
"Hush," O'Hair said, flashing Taylor an are-you-stupid?  "I had big plans, I was planning on coming down with a fatal disease called being 115?"
"Well," Taylor said.  He had tried to tear down Garden Variety card club, because they were very old fashioned, the management there, and he was planning on changing his name to VICTOR VITA-MORE, which was supposed to signify being (a) one who attains victory and (b) one who attains 'more life.'  But the manager of Garden Variety was already a Victor Vita-More and he didn't want to share, so Taylor was ticked off and had an axe to grind, and that was why he had gone out with "the usual suspects" of lefty culture, scraggly poets, poetic ex-mayoral candidates gone mountain climbing with Sean Penn, surrounded the sign ,joined hands and  antagonized Ritter, who was devoted to good level-headed things, like preventing a disastrous, stupid Iran War through educating people about the dangers brewing but who, at the same time, was a hothead whose face turned red and neck turned purple when he said "inneresting" and talked about people at protests singing Kumbayaa.
Therefore, the groundwork for the current struggle was created in Merchant Mart in a more simple time.  It was Dee's reminiscence, now that she had her answers about what was really at stake, the multifaceted proxy struggles between opposing camps and opposing interests, started to become more clear.  She would still occasionally talk with Dave on the phone - the only one who everyone still talked to, conciliatory, political, he was a true go-between.  
"O'Hair set off on a Frankenstein story, to prove atheism correct she would become god to prove there wasn't one.  She combed her long straight hair." Said Dave.
Dee nodded.  They both seemed to know that things in the sort of cold war were getting hotter, gradually.  "She had a tub of chemicals.  It was slightly gruesome but she was doing it anyway.  She added guanine, cytosine, the basic base pairs.  She had strands of hair from dozens of real people.  Everyone who came in for pizza, she started commanding them to yank out a single strand of their own hair (or "no pizza for you!") and drop it in the foul smelling concoction."
"She certainly doesn't give atheism-nihilism a very good name, between stirring up genetic brews and recruiting people from pizza palaces in a sort of involuntary, bizarre MENSA."
"Yes," Dave said.  "She isn't, it's true.  The last ingredient she added was a grey flower.  Itself, it looked like it had been through cross-breeding wringer.  Visions of high school genetic cross-squares and Gregor Mendel went through Dee's mind.  There was the white tulip, the red tulip, the pink tulip, and now there was a completely grey flower.  Stem, leaves, petals, pollen, it wasn't an albino, it was as grey as the bluest orchid was blue.  She dropped the grey flower in and that was all that was needed!  There was a popping sound and she stood back in her little safety goggles and four blobby formless creatures stepped out of the cauldron.  
"I DIT IT!" O'Hair cried.  The creatures did nothing but stand in the corner and eventually O'Hair began to order them around with simple voice commands.  To tell them apart, she took her cans of KRYLON spray paint and sprayed them: RED, BLUE, YELLOW and GREEN.  She called them the Sheckys.
"I have big plans for you Sheckys!" she said.  But unfortunately for her big plans and the world advocacy organization for FREETHINKERS, O'Hair, with husband Cliff Brooks, were shortly thereafter carrying a miniature treasure chest full of gold coins, across a road in downtown Chicago, when they were run over by a steam roller, becoming part of the fabric of the street, gold coins and all.
"It's a very interesting story," Dee said.  "It sounds to me more like mythology than the truth.  I wrote a magazine article once about O'Hair.  I met her at the pizza parlor.   I believe the part about the pizza and institute- I was there!  - but the thing about creating creatures, I'm not so sure."  Singh did not insist.  
"Okay," he said.  "The points is, she is the spiritual godmother..."  
"I'm sure she'd be nuts about that term," Dee said.  
"I know, well, she's the progenitor of the four sheckys and also of Dr. Robert Taylor.  She talked about how there was no time to go through their processes again.  Taylor begged to differ.  Some accounts say there were fisticuffs.  That led to Taylor trying to take down the sign, which led to his expulsion, which led him back to Chicago, which led him to get into a little cadre with Conny Plank, which led to him getting on a Piper Cub for Plank's talk ,which led to the both of them getting into the greybeards."
"This is pretty rough stuff," Dee said.  "I want to know concretely, now I know the Sheckys are bad and I'm glad you told me that story because now I know where their nihilism came from.  I'm assuming O'Hair was instrumental in Sheckys believing in that whole thing about litany and what happens when the like "story primitives" run out"
"Yes, yes!"  Singh said.  "Because she would read them bed time stories, even if you don't think she made them in a lab, she would tell them all about the circus!  The farm!  Adventures on a pirate boat!  Treasure of the Incase!  Treasure of the Red-Sea Sharks!  Adventure in China!  Adventure in Bordeaux!"
Dee was nodding  and she threw in a few.  "Adventures in Spain!  The Haunted House!  The farm!  Deep undersea!  Adventures in the hospital!  The zoo!  The museum!"  It was interesting in an ominous way: when Dave started to go off on a litany of neat stuff, she immediately knew, from a lifetime of looking at the themes and locations and settings in series fiction, prose, movies , TV, things like "the adventures of Mack Bolan," hard-boiled (whatever that meant) mercenary for hire in his adventures in the museum!  Jungle!  The amusement park and gaudy midway!   The icy north!  The spooky islands of voodoun!'  What he was getting at, and by extension, what the Sheckys were so obsessed with.  But it really didn't have to end, did it?  Surely it was just a question of human creativity and there was always one more?
She asked Dave about it.
"Why don't you do a little exercise for me.  Go down to the public library,"  (Adventure in library stacks! She thought), " and get a piece of paper and a pen and think of all the instances you can, of that particular litany of representations of 'fun' colorful cultural backdrops for some kind of murderous villainy and heroic achievement.  Go and look them up, Take, oh, 48 hours.  I'll give you a little stipend while you do it."
"Great," she said, "because I was going to say, they're going to miss me at my day job."
"What is your job?" Singh asked.
"I work at the cash register at the little shop at a gas station in Glasgow."
"What, Scotland?"
"That's right," Dee said.
"Wait, so you go from A&E offices, downtown New York, you have some dealings I assume with Merchant Mart in Chicago."
"Yeah," Dee said.  "Plus Scotland, plus..."
"How did you get around?"
"Well," she said.  "I guess it must have been a side effect of being popped around so much- my muscles must have kicked in and I learned to do it at will, so now I jetset all round the country as much as I want."
"so wait," Dave said. "Okay, we need to get back to the library, but doesn't that mean that the handwringing of no rewards and no acclaim, this whole bugaboo, isn't that undercut a little by your being able to pop?"
"No!" said Dee.  "It hurts, Dave!  Hurts like hell." 
Dave nodded with a grim appreciation.  "Okay, I understand Dee.  Well, things are heating up as you may have noticed.  Do you know what it means, the significance of Merchant Mart?"
"Bunch of leftists and nihilists and atheists, sounds like," Dee said.  "Plus some damn good Chicago-style pizza."
"Yes," Singh said.  "Okay.  We really need to get back to the library but-"  Dee smelled disingenuity.  She wondered why Dave would set up this whole thing and then conveniently keep postponing it.  Like her buddy Neil who always used to hang around her apartment saying "I really gotta gooooo."  And then stay for another half an hour.  Sign of a big weasel.
"The points about Merchant Mart is a greater than average amount of sharing.  Because of all the lefty newspaper staffs trying to live it in their daily lives too."
There was a silence.  "Will you just get over to the library, I'll write you a note if necessary, I'll get Dr. Taylor to write you a doctor's note for your gas station job."
"Yeah, okay."

"What does it mean only to have three quarters of our colors?" asked Green.  "The goddamned grey beards and their automaton led yellow to his doom in a grain-" 
"Don't say it!" said Blue.  "Look, can we please set up some euphemisms, like can we just say he got a 'strange flu-like virus that sapped his immune system'?  I don't want to talk about any more heavy farm equipment."
"Well, what does it mean?"  Blue sighed. "I'm not sure.  We're less powerful now.  That's why we need Tass and that 's why we need Paul D. Oval to supplement us."
Red was constantly frowning.  "Well, yeah," Red said.  "But our whole thing, our whole trip is a four-way deal."  That was just how Red spoke.  "We're a series, like the four seasons.  What does it mean when SUMMER gets an odd flu-like virus?"  They were all subdued.
I think it means we're in deep shit," Blue said.  "Without yellow, we can't glom together .  And that's what we're supposed to do.  When the end of litany arrives and the world has had its last archetypal adventure story on a boat, or in a plane, we're supposed to join from four little Sheckys into one big Shecky and that will herald the time that economic activity will begin to die down and all of our follows spread across the world will go from being crypto-Litanists to Litanists.  They'll be proud of it.  And-"
"Yes," Red said.  That's what we can't do.  That's what we want to be able to do and can't do, and bringing in new and better things isn't going to help.  We got in through an airlock but we're not going to be able to get out through the same airlock we got in by."
They studied their hands for a few minutes, antique coke machine, pool table.  What do we do about it?"" asked Green. 
"I could try asking my old boss, for help"  Red raised his eyebrows.  "Err, that's sort of interesting.  Casino Denizens.  I hadn't thought of that."  They caught up with Steve Matt in his side gig.  Since the departure of Tass, first for Prague and later for Yellow's Own, somewhere near Haiti in an archipelago, Flint had no security guy and Steve had been contacted by Flint, via McClatchy, and asked to take on weekend work.  
"Err, yeah, okay," Steve said.  "Not to interfere with your weekend," McClatchy's own equivalent of Johnny Tung said.  He was a dancer in an IBC-style face mask - but danced only in the Cloud City and never mixed it with doing errands like he was doing now
"well," said Steve, "With this kind of work, you do it when you got it, ya know.  I can rest and play when there's no project going on."  He was bluffing a little - it just sounded good and he hoped it would be borne out by the facts.  So McClatchy had rather a big figure, ushering people in and out of Flint.  And he had a much better attitude than Tass, and didn't shoot people with crossbows, requiring an incredibly Orwellian rejigging of cognitive dissonance and unequal, selective justice.   People began to flood back when the word started to get around.  His cel rang.
"Hello?"
"Boss?" said Green.
"What the - Shecky Green?  You cost me a shitload of money, Green!" 
Green winced.
Steve was still made that Green had been  airlifted out, leaving an unsatisfied comedy audience behind.  "Oh.. that.  I'm sorry boss . I really couldn't help it.  My brothers knew something was up and they summoned me.  Things with litany are um, coming to a conclusion." 
"Oh god." Matt rolled his eyes.  He considered Shecky Green to belong to a fringey religion but didn't say anything about it most of the time because Green was a good draw and he was funny, and Steve's rule of thumb for funny people was that funny people can write their own ticket.
"Okay, Green," he said, "You were very helpful during the luck thing."  His attempt to fuck with luck had itself run into a string of bad luck, which had killed the plan, but there had been some lively Denizens meetings.  
"What's up?"
"We need your help, boss.  I'm here with my brothers, and Tass, and Oval.  We're on Yellow's Own island.  And Yellow is dead."
"Really?  No kidding?  Who killed him?"
"Your sister Dee!"  Steve gasped.  "I knew Dee was in cahoots with greybeards, but I didn't know it had gone that far."
"Yes.  I should warn you this is going to be difficult."  Green hesitated because there was no guarantee Steve would go against his own sibling.  But it had worked with Ted Kaczynski.  
"Well," Steve said, "I have always taken the moderate view of Sheckys.  Believe me, no one realizes better than I do, what the Sheckys do for poor communities.  I know they have some bad behavior on their records too.  But, I have always taken their good works into consideration.  For where would we be without pretty-good works by not-so-good people?  Philanthropy and volunteering both, people do it to assuage guilt!  A lot!"
"Well, we all three of us, appreciate that a lot, Steve.  But we need a little more.  When Dee killed Yellow, with the greybeards behind her, we lost a limb.  We're at a loss.  We cannot carry out our destiny without our fourth quarter, and we don't know what to do about it."
"Oh, Steve said."  
"We were hoping you could help."
"Uh, well.  I guess this has something to do with the fact that Dee is my sister, doesn't it."
"Yes.   You have Dee's ear, we have your ear."
"Oh!" Steve said.  "Dee has Yellow's ear." 
Silence.
"Yeah, I forgot all about that.  She grabbed Yellow's funky headset cel phone and - sorry this is a bit gross perhaps - she got his ear, picked it out of the grain thresher."
Ear!
Now it was a race for that ear!
Dee was at the Midtown Library when her brother Steve tucked around a metal shelf and confronted her with a friendly wave. 
"Huh!  Steve!  You startled me!" she said.
"Hi, Dee."  She frowned, uneasy.
"You still hanging around with Sheckys?  I really have to tell you, Steve, I think it's unconscionable.  We've been through it once already."
Steve winced.  He was going to play hardball with his own family.
"I'm sorry, Dee," he said.  He gestured and Tass and Oval were with him.  And Tass had brought his crossbow.  
"We need Yellow's ear!" he said.
"Huh?"
"we need Shecky Yellow's ear!"
"Oh no!  Steve, please listen to me, you're on a bad road, you're hanging with bad people!  And it's not too late to change!"
Steve looked extremely stoic and the stoicism of Oval and Tass made him look like a ray of sunshine by comparison.  "There's no time for that crap," he said.  "We want Shecky Yellow's ear!"
Singh wasn't fibbing about having worked at Arms and Elbows.  He was especially sensitive to this notion that the Sheckys had lost "a limb."  Word got back to him from a quickly evolving , developing grapevine composed of cel phones.  The Sheckys had told Steve, Steve had told Dee. Dee had then been corralled at the library.  She got a scare but managed to get away with her head still on her shoulders and in one piece.  The stoic and monotonous Tass and Oval, who were increasingly becoming a little cadre work working in tandem although they didn't get along- had been only too willing to 'do impunity' to Dee, which was putting it cutely but the details were vicious and miserable.  But Steve had called them off, or actually Oval.  He was wearing a deadest and he called up Shecky Green.  "I need you three to get Oval to take it easy," he said.  The three of them had eventually gotten through to Oval, when they were, hanging around the rec room and Oval was having fun spinning.  Why?  What's up?" Steve considered whether he should tell the truth or bluff and possibly maintain the channel of communication with the Sheckys for longer.  "Umm, Oval got a hangnail," he said.  "He needs to take five but he's hammering a wall with his fist over and over because he's under control" (meaning 'being controlled') , "and can't break out of it without some kind of intervention from you." 
Steve's cover story, worked, but it actually became moot a minute later because Dee, pain aside, "pop"ped out of the library back to safety.  This time she popped to the greybeards apartment.  It was doubly stressful!  She felt her jaw and joints aching.  A similar feeling to having a sneeze when a cold was coming on.  "Owww!" she said.  "Got to rest.."  As she lay down on the couch and was therefore on webcam, the other part of the stress hit her.  The greybeards were in awful shape.  Even worse than last time.  It was Taylor, Singh and Goffman now.  Who weren't that jovial or charismatic without the social glue of Plan and Frizz putting everyone in a good mood.

I have to tell you, Dee, said Plan.  "I think the way we took down yellow was our last hurrah"  Dee nodded grimly.  The upkeep of the place was also suffering.  There were piles of laundry behind a tarp, the couch cushions were in disarray.  On a monitor on one wall, she saw static - the TV show was no longer happening, apparently.  Plank saw Dee looking at the monitor.
"That was Frizz's baby, when Frizz stopped coming, we stopped broadcasting."
"Oh," Dee said.  "did you have an audience?"  Plank nodded "And it's one of the most heartbreaking aspects of what has happened to us: they were I believe, just on the verge of catching fire.  After listening to Frizz talk about the litany theory and the evidence for it, we were getting viewer-mail in quantities that were going up exponentially."
"Gee, that's impressive," Dee said.  She was a little skeptical felt like she had been swept up in the orbit of Frizz's ideas because she was reverent about his abilities at solving cases.  It was like you couldn't have one without the other, they got conflated and she had wanted to keep on visiting and talking to Frizz and just always gently steered him away from Litany and the four Sheckys at least until the greybeards had turned her into a puppet.  There was a slammed door.  Goffman came in looking harried.  He went to the kitchen and came back out, walking quickly, with a carton of orange juice that he was drinking out of.
"Hi, Dr. Goffman," said Dee.
"Hi," Goffman said brusquely, scooting from place to place.
"Are you looking for something, Erv?" said Plank.
"I can't talk now, I'm very busy," Goffman said.  He was the embodiment of "chickens coming home to roost." 
The story of how Goffman did become asocial was one that Dee never did find out through questioning.  AS every siren in the place was going off there wasn't much time.  Goffman had put out word, some years back, that he was interested in becoming less asocial.  Singh told Dee.
"Oh," said Dee.  "So he was asocial first-"
"Yes," Singh said.  So the answer to the riddle is, he didn't "become" asocial.  Up until recently, discussing this would have gotten Dee "pop"ped away, but she had mastered it, and pre-empted the pre-emptors, by constantly popping to the same spot.  So she was a little blurry but had no trouble carrying on a conversation.  They both wore SARS masks to avoid ozone addiction.
"He grew up that way, undiagnosed and with all-the-VTA-bus-schedules-in-a-fanny-pack.  Even when he was too little and his parents wouldn't let him ride the bus by himself, he was fascinated!  The boy who loved busses!  So adolescence came and he decided that in order to get attention from the opposite sex he would have to do something about the asociality.  So he posted to the psychic ether.  Once your mind could be read by shot gun, quantized MRI at a distance, it could also be filled up and this had resulted in a transom of short psychic messages called Creep's List after founder Ben Creep, who was actually a really nice guy, he just had that surname but it didn't signify anything.  So he got a reply from Ed, a surveyor and Carol, a mysterious woman.  He met them in a canyon in a little house.
"We can help you" Carol said.
"Oh?" said Goffman.  "How?"
"Ed here has just developed a medical procedure by which you can borrow against your own future sociability.  It's like a Visa card for charisma."
"Oh," said Goffman.  "But will I ever have enough charisma to pay off the debt?"
"You better," said Ed, "or you might find yourself in an Ansel Adams girl shop at the quayside."
Carol gave him a quizzical look of "that's not much of a scary threat."  
"Uh," Carol said.  "Wouldn't it be scarier if he was IN the quay, you know, like with a pair of concrete shoes?"
"Well, it would," Ed said.  "But the quayside just isn't like that anymore."
Goffman smirked.  He assumed they were bluffing , like a sort of good cop / bad cop routine.
"Well," he said.  "It sounds pretty good to me.  I'm young now!"  he thumped himself in the chest.  "I need charisma NOW!  And I'll pay it off later."  And that, Singh said to Dee, is how Erving Goffman became social in the first place.  It took several years before he had to pay the bill.  Visa cards always come with a bill and this special one that Ed and Carol whipped up was no exception.  But actually, all Ed and Carol did was act as brokers.  They ushered Goffman through their living room and a replica of Sagairo National Park, full of dirt, grubby resilient plants that Bruce Sterling loved to talk about surviving in Texas, like "grama", and the occasional cactus.  Through an arch and into a meeting room where he saw Shecky Yellow.
"This is Shecky Yellow," Ed said.  And the meeting in fact took place on Shecky Yellow's Island where, when he wasn't boozing it up with a bunch of air force widows or shooting pool in a vast "rec" room, Shecky Yellow huddled in his lab perfecting the ultimate charisma-VISA.
"Time travel is real," he told Blue when Blue came for a visit.  "But it doesn't work on people, places or things - only on ideas.  So you can grab the schadenfraude that a bunch of political junkies feel over their opponent's big losses in the 2040 elections and zap it backwards so you feel it now."
"Wow," Blue said.  "And you discovered how to do it?""
"Yeah, basically," Yellow said.
"Wow," Blue repeated.  "how did you do that?"
"I am just one smart cookie," Yellow said.
"I guess that's true!" Blue said. "I can't believe they gave Frizz the Pulitzer." 
Yellow nodded.  So Yellow performed these operations with impunity until the first of the patients hit the point of having to pay rather than borrow.  It didn't work!  Only the borrowing part of the system worked.  When you tried to pay, it turned them into a raving, violent dervish!  And we are only now starting to see that with Goffman!  He was beginning to revert at his party.  This was a big reason why there were the indictments against Shecky Yellow!  And that's why we went ahead with this dissolution."
Dee wrinkled her nose at the euphemism for a murder to which she was complicit.  "The cases against the remaining 3 are a little more fuzzy," Dave said.  "Yellow was the weak link and our best possibility."
"But now what?" Dee asked.  "So what do we have?  Goffman is gone, the heyday of whatever little bit of critical mass we had going from the TV show has gone fzzt.  Have you a plan?"
Dave thought about it.  "I'm postponing that for now.  We need to do something and soon.  I'm glad your brother didn't lure you away from us.  But for now I'm not sure."
It is said that Sheckys abhor a vacuum and after their attempt to get Dee to deliver them Yellow's ear they shot the messenger.  It was Tass.  He stepped forward bravely and said what he thought.
"You guys, I hate to say it, but you're believing an apocryphal story, like Pinocchio and his island."  The Sheckys just stared at him.  
"You know what I think, frankly, is that there IS no 'yellow's ear."  The three of you just don't want to accept that you may be in an insoluble problem.  Who said there had to be a way out?  The door shut behind you and that could be the end of the story."
There was a bout a twenty second interlude of calm, before the proverbial "night of the long knives."  Oval came in and witnessed the ghastly deeds.  And then, Shecky Blue said, "Oval , congratulations, you're promoted to security chief."
"Do I get more money?" Oval said.
"No," said Blue.  
"Okay.  Thanks," he said, grim-lipped.  "Can I still throw parties on the island?"
"Yes" said Blue, crossing his fingers behind his back.  The sight of blood hit Oval suddenly.  I need to sit down.
"Okay," said Blue.  "I'll leave you alone."
Oval sat in an office on a stall stack of pulpy paperbacks and rubbed his head.  Is this what you want to be doing? he thought.
Suddenly, there was a loud BOOM!
"Security chief!" someone cried.  He looked out the office window.  A shuttlecraft, an oddly autonomous little spacecraft, was touching down on the island.  Shecky Green stuck his head in.  Something big was about to happen, Oval thought.  First Yellow, now Tass.  And for backtalk?? They were in big trouble if the Sheckys created an environment where they punished criticism with death.  Come on! Said Green.  Green and Oval hurried out to the landing pad.  The shuttle doors opened and Steve Matt got out.  This is was big for sure.
"What was that boom?" said Oval.
"Mortars.  We have a little opposing army on an adjacent island and apparently they've been religiously watching Greybeard TV.  Word gets around," Green said.  "And they heard Steve was coming."
Green, Oval and Steve ran in a spiral-eyed panic, off the landing pad and back to the compound.  "I still don't entirely understand why the people on the adjacent island would be firing mortars," Oval said.  "Some security chief!" said Green.  "Well I'm sorry," Oval said, Irritated.  I've only had the job for fifteen minutes and I'm still shaken up because my predecessor was butchered.  They came in the stately wooden doors into the model trains area.  "So what's going on, Steve?"  "Well," Steve said.  "I have some news, but I want to tell all the Sheckys all at once."
"Okay, Steve," said Shecky Green.  "We trust you."  Soon they were in the spinning room and Oval couldn't resist.  It was like a drug.  He stood in the middle of the room and the triad of remaining Sheckys stood in a triangle around him.  "So did you bring us Yellow's EAR?" said Blue.  "Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about," Steve said.  "There's been a change.  You know how you were remarking that I have Dee's ear?"  "Yes, yes," said Blue.  "Well, there's been a little sea change and now Dee has my ear."  "Whaaaat!!!" said Shecky Red.  He gestured towards Oval.  "Security!"  But Oval was wearing a PLUR t-shirt - even though he had a fearsome scimitar on his belt.  It stood for peace, love, unity and respect - and he couldn't bring himself to hack anyone with a sword.  He didn't make eye contact with Red, and concentrated on matching the beats on his next slab of thumping house.
There was a sudden fluid cloud of ozone.  To the uninitiated it smelled like dry-erase markers or semi-toxic compressed-air-can products being released.  Steve put on his SARS mask.  The rest had none.  There was Dee, and she was everywhere!  "Quickly, pop her away before she can ask questions!" shouted Red.  But Dee had learned that trick already, and she was popping too fast for them to isolate.  She popped around the four - three Sheckys, plus Oval.  It was a bit of a raw deal for Oval, but they did it anyway.  Soon the Sheckys were tipping over, lethargic and drugged.  She tightened the circles, she was popping in tighter perimeters around the Shecky's, closer, closer.  They finally all collapsed and fell asleep!  Oval was still conscious and he looked out a little archer's turret window in the compound and saw another figure getting out of the shuttlecraft.  He had been tucked secretly in the back until now.  It was Goffman!  He never blinked.  He looked like he was on a rampage, and he was!  Goffman tore the stately door off its hinges and tore the model trains up.  Dee and Steve left the room.  "Please!  Let me go with you," said Oval.  "Oh, all right," said Steve.  They carried him - he was too weak to walk - to the shuttlecraft.
"You must restrain Goffman!" Dave said by cel phone.  "It's not good, he has no restraint, he'll kill them."  "Would that be such a terrible thing?" asked Steve.  Dee was astonished and relieved by how thoroughly Steve had repudiated his Casino pal, Shecky Green.   "Yes, they should be glommed back together into one creature, from the ooze from whence they were first created by O'Hair!"  "Look," Singh said.  "I'm coming over there, this is too important of a thing  to do over the phone."  "Oh," Dee said.  "Well, be sure that you bring the ear!"
"Uh oh," said Oval.  "What's the matter," said Dee.  "Goffman went ahead.  We're too late.  Ugh."  Now Oval was really shuddering.  It was only now occurring to him that he and Dee had met before, but he was too nauseated to bring it up right now.  First Tass, and now all three Sheckys.  Goffman, looking like Lou Ferrigno, thumped his chest and gave an inhuman banshee wail!  "Oh crap," said Steve.  "Well, anyway, now we don't have to worry about the constant bickering between the greybeards and the Sheckys.  Greybeards ...uh... win?"  It was a pyrrhic victory.  "Yes," said Dave, arriving in the room, his second shuttle parked outside.  "Of the five greybeards.... Goffman is a beast... Frizz and Plank are human wreckage.  Glad you got your SARS masks on, by the way.  And that leaves just me and Taylor, the social studies professor."
"Hi," said Taylor, sidling in.  "Yeah!  We win!"    He held a camera up and you could hear thousands cheering from the adjacent island.  "I guess that little TV show did do the trick after all."  "Dear god," said Dave," opening and quickly shutting the adjacent rooms that would soon have placards next to the door, even once the island was changed from Shecky Yellow to Greybeard's Isle.  "Well, we will have to try anyway.  Oval, you get the dirty work because you worked for them.  Go in there and light the whole thing on fire.  We need their ashes.  And be sure to bring......... THIS!"  He held out Shecky Yellow's lost ear.  "So it was no myth!" said Oval.  "That's right," said Dee.  Fifteen minutes later, there was a gross pile of ash, but to the victims of the Shecky's many crimes, the little bit of vigilante justice was worth it.  "At least we hope so," Dee said.  "Okay," Dave said.  "This is kind of a big deal.  Drop in the ear!"  Someone tossed the ear on the ashes.  It sizzled.  As the four colors merged together, Steve, Dee, Taylor and Dave gradually saw the emergence of.... a grey flower.
"So that's why you were so determined," said Dee to Dave.  "Yes," Dave said.  "I had to have that flower.  It's worse than ozone addiction for me."  He went up to the pile of ash and plucked the flower.  "The harmful work of O'Hair has just been undone!  Now that there are no Shecky's, there will also never again be any crime families like them!"  "Well, I wouldn't go that far," Steve said.  "Anyway, they were four gross, belching Sheckys and we'll miss them."  "No!" said Dave.  "We won't miss them!  There is no excuse for crime."  "Err, right," Steve said.  "But they did have food-giveaway days in poor neighborhoods.  And Shecky Green was really funny, too."  Dave Singh looked frustrated but held his tongue.
"Well," Dave said.  "Our work is done here.  The Shecky's will not bother anyone ever again."  He tucked the grey flower into a little valise.  They were about to leave on their shuttles, with Goffman in handcuffs to prevent him from freaking out, when they heard a sound.  "Yes we do!"  "No we don't!"  They looked to see where it was coming from.  Beyond the placards for "Tass Room" and "Shecky Ashes Room" was a door marked "Charisma-VISA brokering".  Steve went over to it and put his ear up against it.  "We controlled the face-off between the greybeards and the sheckys!" came the voice of Ed the wonky surveyor.  "No, we don't, we just observe it, we don't influence it!"  said Carol.  "You're just saying that because you were backing the sheckys and you lost!" said Ed.  There was the sound of anger-steam bubbling off someone's head.
"Hey guys," said Steve, blowing their cover.  It was the weird people who had gotten Yellow together with Goffman.  From his handcuffs, Goffman gave a friendly grunt.  "Hi, Dr. Goffman," said Ed.  By the looks of it, Ed and Carol were unresolved over whether they made the greybeards and sheckys do what they did, the way the greybeards had controlled Dee.  "I believe I can solve this little feud," said Taylor.  He and Dave went over and grabbed Ed and Carol.  "You do not, I repeat, do not, wield control over greybeards."  "darn it," said Carol.
The 2 remaining greybeards did not have a hell of a lot of respect for Ed and Carol, but they weren't criminally liable for anything, and with the end of the Shecky's reign, there was somewhat of a respite in the unending fight against mafias of all sizes, at least for now.  "So now can I throw my party?" said Oval.
"Yes," said Steve and Dee.
The big loser in the situation possibly, was poor Johnny Tung.  "How am I going to make my dancing engagements if I don't have a driver?"
"I can teach you how to pop around," Dee said.  "Then you won't need a driver."
"Cool!" said Johnny.
"Just be sure you bring lots of SARS masks. You won't be asked back if you get your audiences addicted to ozone."
Smedley took over the private-investigations company from Frizz.  "I'll give you your first case," said Dee.
"Oh yeah?" said Smedley.  "What is it?"
"I want you to find out what the heck is so special and important about the three saints: St. Patrick, St Brigid and St. Moby."
"Didn't you already find that out?"
"Actually, no!  I found out how Dr. Goffman became asocial and why, I found out the secrets of the four Sheckys, but the one about the saints, I'm still in the dark."  Apparently it was the price of having the other mysteries be resolved, for this one to remain in the hands of fuzzy language, which was just what had frustrated Dee about Shecky Yellow when they briefly met.
There was a big party.  Oval was DJing.  Pat Paulsen, Michael Tigar, Dan and Milly, Casey Louie, they were all in attendance.  Jock Jones got a special furlough to attend.
Dave Singh went into his little valise and got out the grey flower.  He went over to Dee.
"Hi, Dee," he said.
"Hi Dave," said Dee.
"Well, it's been a rough road but we made it in one piece."
"Well, yeah, you could say that, but I lost my interview subjects and because of all the mayhem, A&E isn't eager to give me more."
"Why don't you come work for my new TV network.  I'm calling it Arm & Elbow!"
"Okay," Dee said.  "I don't think there's anything left for me at A&E."
"There's just one more thing," Dave said.
"What's that, Dave?" asked Dee.
Dave handed Dee the grey flower.  "Dee, will you marry me?"
"No, I won't," Dee said.  "What are you, crazy?  You think I forgot about that weird shit?  Everyone's in a great mood now, because we win and it's a fait accompli and everything.  But what's up with the harem?  I was trying to get in and have some influence.  As a matter of fact, if I had had more control over the proceedings, Goffman might not have been let loose without a little more forethought, and the Sheckys might not have been killed."
Dave sighed.  "Okay then."
"By the way," Dee said.  "What difference would it have made if they weren't?"
"Oh," Dave said.  "Instead of one grey flower, we would have gotten two.  One that I was going to give you, and the other that I was going to sell to the highest bidder.  Do you know what a completely grey flower will go for these days???"
Plank and Frizz did briefly come out of their sick beds to eat crackers and drink punch for an hour.  
As the somewhat ambivalent and side-switching Steve pointed out, the Sheckys did do a lot of good for people.  A miniature party-within-a-party got together a little speech to memorialize pretty-good things by not very good people.  "Shecky Yellow invented a procedure that allowed Erving Goffman to have a terrific adolescence which gave him a positive outlook on life, which enabled him to become a real diehard liberal, working in LBJ's administration and helping to co-author many social programs we still take for granted today.  Yellow is partially to thank for that!  Shecky Blue once said that he could drive Johnny Tung around in his sleep - and he wasn't speaking figuratively!  And Johnny went on to enrich the world with his daring innovative dance!"  There was scattered applause.  It was more of a pottery crowd.  "Shecky Green, we are losing in Shecky Green a fine comedian."  "Yeah!" heckled one of the Greybeard TV viewers.  "Unless you were one of the ones that he shook down in his protection rackets!"  Steve cleared his throat.  "Tut tut."  
Before Steve had a chance to be an apologist for Shecky Red, the rest of the TV-viewers held up their replicas of the grey flower.  Steve was a bit stunned, walked off the podium.  "None of that matters now," said a rowdy demonstrator, "because all four Sheckys are DEEEEEAAAADDD!!!"  There were lots of whoops, and that was the end of the apologists for the night.  There was more dancing and general chatter, and though the Sheckys raised emotions, everyone generally had a pretty good time at the party.  And then they all went home and went to sleep.

THE END