The Haunted Refrigerator: In

By Dave Veith

On November 4 1953, Theodore F. Schism climbs into his mother’s defrosting refrigerator and shuts the door. He is 9 years old.

On December 1 1968, five young people sit at a table watching the very first Vietnam draft lottery. Actually there are six, counting Isabel Schism’s unborn daughter Snap. Sitting next to them, Leif Lambrochet has a plan with the virtues of being simple and straight-forward. Also at the table, Leif’s sister Clare is waiting with an unearned placidity to find out what she wants out of life; Roberto “Robot” Larch is waiting with a more dangerous ennui for his draft number; and next month Jay Knot—eventually to become Jay Null, yes that one, author of The Book of Data—will begin to change the world.

Meanwhile, Theo Schism has a lot of time in the refrigerator, or maybe not so much. He can, for example, review his life-to-date, and a lot can happen in nine years. But about what’s going on outside (good luck, Mom & Dad)? Eventually, though, comes a visitation of sorts, with a hint of avatar and a whiff of doppelganger, and after that things get crowded.

On the other hand: if he got himself in here, why can’t he get himself out?

There’s Nam. And L.A. And the transportation system of Perth, and a midnight bridge in Edmonton. As crucibles go, take your pick.

In your hands you hold the first of three books in which these and other human beings live out their lives in the midst of whatever it was that happened in the U.S.A from that time to this. Their stories turn out to be very American: i.e., you wouldn’t believe them if I told you.

But this way, you’re in at the start. You’ve got a fighting chance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728329499

Dave Veith

Dave Veith is retired and lives with his wife in Northern California. They have four children and three grandchildren.

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© 2020 Dave Veith. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/30/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2951-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2950-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2949-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019917170

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

IN

INVOCATION

The Adventures of Tommy Thermometer

Rez

INCANTATION

01 Meet the Schisms

02 Number Up

03 Where’s Theo?

04 Ayn in Austria

05 As She Lay Dying

LIFE OF IZ ABRIDGED

INCEPTION

06 Picket

07 Rose Rent

08 Clare’s First Journal

09 At The (Capital T) King’s Hotel

10 The Buffalo Get Serious

IZ ABRIDGED CONTINUED

INITIATION

11 Des Errata

12 The Last Day of the First of His Life

13 Clare’s Second Journal

The Adventures Commence

14 9:10 to Joondalup

15 Excerpts from the Interdiction of S. Bagwa (Redacted)

INVESTIGATION

16 Maker Go

17.1 Boot Hill

17.2 S-Curve

17.3 North

The Adventures Continue

18 The Border

19 Clare’s Journal 1970

20 Acreage

IZ ABRIDGED CONTINUED

INTERROGATION

21 At Peter Vann’s

22.1 The Line

22.2 Line #2

The Adventures Go Camping

23 Clare’s Journal 1970 Continued

24 Jane Gad

25 Line #3

ITERATION

26 Creature

27 The Clipper

The Adventures Consort

28 Firewood

29.1 Forty Klicks from Nowhere

29.2 Clark the Clerk

30 Shan-ti

31 Clare’s Journal Continued

32 Movie Man

33 Ice Fire (Ice)

34 Clare’s Journal Continued

35 Monstrance

IZ ABRIDGED CONTINUED

INTUITION

36 Children & the Athabascan

The Adventures Converge

37 Buu II

38 White Out

39.1 Down in the Valley

39.2 Clare’s Journal Resumed

40 Monsoon

The Adventures Collide

41 At the Villa Matilda

IZ ABRIDGED CONTINUED

INSTALLATION

42 Valentino’s

43 Night Jeep

44 Acreage: Fin

45 Ayn Exits Austria

46 House Child …

47 … Book Tree

48 Additional Excerpts from the Interdiction of S. Bagwa

49 Parry’s Boots

INVOICE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE HAUNTED REFRIGERATOR

CONTENTS THAWED TO-DATE

INTERMISSION

The Adventures Conclude

MADRID (UPI) – A woman who was shot in 1936 was buried here Friday after 32 years in a coma.

Dolores de la Gala Duran was 4 when her family was lined up against a wall by republican soldiers at Granja de Torre Hermosa, in the western province of Badajoz, shortly after the start of the Spanish Civil War.

A burst of bullets mowed down the entire family, and Dolores lay in a coma for three days under the bodies of some of her 14 slain relatives before she was rescued by nationalist troops. She never emerged from the deep coma.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This is the story of Theo Schism, who at the age of nine climbs into a refrigerator, remembers his life until then, and imagines (?) the rest.

Side-stepping why, the question becomes how long is he in there? If the answer includes the numeric value ‘65,’ what is the temporal unit involved: second, minute, hour … all the way up to (at least theo-retically) … decade, century, eon …?

The Haunted Refrigerator is NOT a trilogy but a saga, published for user-friendly reasons in three volumes (i.e., books), titled:

1. In

2. Bifurcated Proceedings

3. Hoist a Few Cold Ones.

Otherwise, it would be as big as a dictionary. And who wants to lug around a honkin big dictionary.

Or else would be in very small type.

It’s a free country, but we strongly advise against reading Book Two (see above) before Book One, or Book Three before Book One and/or Book Two.

Should a reader insist on this, the likelihood is that he or she will encounter confusion, and hence disgust, and end up not reading anything, which would be bad for all concerned.

In the old days, they called user-friendly ergonomics.

Finally, elsewhere are data ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

It’s not me.

IN

"I Vun-der Vut Timitis"

Jul 22 1864 > International Dateline Feb 2010

INVOCATION

  Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

— Olde English,

c.1226

Valid Login Commands,

Anon*ics North (c.1980):

Login

The Adventures of Tommy Thermometer

by Theodore F. Schism (age 8.5)

At last!

With beautiful Nurse Diane Reedcastle at my side and Li’l Nod past her bedtime and evil Mr. Vundervutimitis distracted by his ticking watch, never have I known such happiness.

It was you, says Nurse Diane with an adoring look. You all the time! But tell me, how did you do it?

Streams of sinister byproducts plaster the venous maze, green-black tumors pulse like the throats of frogs in soft pulmonary tissue, squadrons of black poop blast from spastic colons. I square my chin, firm my jaw, steel my gaze.

Some things, my dear, are cloaked in mystery.

Her lovely lips form a pout. But I want to know! Don’t you love me? If you love me, tell me!

The Devil’s minions lurk in the human body: Dr. Liver and Mr. Gizzard. I flex my bicep, feel an odd premonitory twinge between my legs.

Tommy Thermometer is slippery, I say. "Not slimy, gooey, or slick. He slips into an available orifice and hunts down his prey, stifles their shrieks, gags their groans, and injects them with secret serum."

I might say this, but I don’t. How can I disclose to this lovely gentle girl such brutal truths? And yet, how hide from her the role I play, the alternate identity I must assume to battle the forces of darkness and complete the mission of my life?

[Editor’s Note: Theo has recently attempted with increasing frustration to erase the bikini of Nurse Brenda Starr as she waits for her eye-patched lover Basil St. John on their island retreat, and has been subsequently forced to remove the comic section from the newspaper to prevent his parents from and discovering the true depravity of their cherished son—now that’s brutal.]

"Better yet, my love, let me show you!"

Ipso Switch-o:

TOM THERMOM!

Her cornflower-blue eyes grow wide. Her faultless snow-white skin turns snowier and whiter. Her firm but pliant lips form a perfect O from which issues a cry, the essential question of mankind’s existence—soft—loud—louder—LOUDER YET—

AND THEN—

Thus the inward probe of a deliberately introduced isotope—the polar opposite of diaspora: a million brilliant stars in a desert sky.

Rez

She thinks: This happened before I was born.

Tommy Thermometer came down into Mother and made Theo.

Later, he came back and made her.

But in the meantime in-between time, and afterward when she was small, a lot happened she was not a party to.

Except, as Lucy her mother said, in Absentia.

A difficult place, Absentia.

If she pictured it, something like New Mexico.

Children is driving in tonight—or is she? Last spring she’d left the little yellow Honda at Peter Vann’s Truck Stop out on NM 559 and called her maternal uncle Jim Fence for a ride.

Jim is a mostly full-blooded Navajo and has issues with modern society, yet carries a hand-held device on which he communicates with computers in Tempe and Albuquerque and receives but doesn’t return Children’s calls. He sits in the opening of his hogan. The hogan is round, the floor packed earth, and the opening faces East.

Do you think she’ll call, or drive on in?

We must wait, he says. And see.

Children weighs 275 pounds, it’s a question of the Honda’s suspension. Jim Fence draws on his cigar. The sun drops behind the mesa at their backs.

Are you anxious? he asks.

Yes.

Anxiety is the white man’s problem. And Belief.

In front of them the rocky ridge turns orange. If there were dust it would be orange also, tiny motes lit by the setting sun—

150160.png

—but there is no dust.

When there is (dust), it hangs in the air until the wind blows it away.

When there’s little or no wind, the dust settles along the narrow rutted track at the top of the slick-rock ridge, coating the rocks with orange grit.

When there is (wind), the dust is blown in a fine cloud across the dry wash and turtle-colored sage if it (the wind) is westerly, or, if easterly, down into the draw and up the hill toward the tiny trailer and outbuildings huddled at the edge of the ravine.

In any case, the cloud of dust will eventually (and invisibly) disperse across the canyons and gullies of the Big Rez.

In all cases, night will fall. And Jim Fence will sit in the doorway of his hogan and smoke a Prince Albert cigar.

White Man’s belief, he continues, "requires separation of something from everything else. And nothing is separate. And that’s the problem."

At one time she’d been disturbed, had even made argumentative, by Jim Fence’s semi-Navajo philosophy, but her response has long since blown away on the wind across the pitted rock. Jim is older than she is and looks like Geronimo on a bad day. He has a Doctorate from Arizona State University in Geomorphology and is a Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico in Hydrogeology. He is gradually weathering and blending with the sere landscape into which every so often he leads accredited field trips up rocky canyons to the headwaters of seasonal rivers.

It is foolish, he goes on, to believe in anything, since anything is something and therefore part of everything.

He does not look at her but straight ahead, through the twilight at the distant Brazos cliffs.

And likewise foolish, he continues, to attempt the measurement of life.

She is aware that he’s referring to the flimsy cardboard box (which had once packaged a man’s dress shirt) that she keeps on the floor at the back of the closet in Lydia’s trailer, and of the papers shuffled and stacked and unorganized inside. Papers! he’s been known to snort, while puffing on a Prince Albert. He’s convinced that the white man thieved his country out from under its indigenous peoples, including him, and bristles at indigenous.

She would not put it to him in so many words, but in her mind Jim Fence is a stone outcropping carved by opposing winds. Or one of countless bleached buffalo skulls painted red and blue by the Crees of Montana and arranged in vengeance, facing East. Or the product of his actual ancestry, an Athabascan, a descendant of Asian nomads who crossed the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, made their way down slowly the coast, and so arrived in what is now the American Southwest.

And yet, at other times, at other campfires, he’s proposed, and seemed by his subsequent silence almost to endorse, a form of cross-cultural measurement:

Build a house, sire a child, write a book, plant a tree.

THE BADLANDS

lie beyond the ridge, to the north and east, cut by dark serpentine canyons from which stars and moons emerge but into which later they do not penetrate.

You are unconvinced, says Jim.

She is not required, she knows, to reply.

Except for his device—a thin black rainbow-faced rectangle on which his thumbs press and forefingers slide—he maintains a stoic separation from modern times, from which he considers himself once removed from provenance (or, as his detractors claim, responsibility). He believes—she knows—in a past stretching back into pre-history, shared by uncountable dead and a few still living:

Him and his.

Scoured dry by sun and wind, as lined and wrinkled as a North African monk, he taps ash from his cigar into the dying coals of the fire. After his sister passed, Jim Fence had come one night from the hogan to the trailer and stood without knocking outside the door until she let him in. Old man, old woman, not a word was said. Some would say that nothing happened but she thought otherwise. In the morning he’d left, thinking her still asleep, that she’d never noticed, had been unaware of him first to last, closing the screen door softly behind him.

When she’d first arrived, following Lydia’s dust cloud from Bone Thunder, she’d slept on the broken plastic strands of the lounge chair in the brush arbor, by the path that climbed to the mesa, past the lonely mountain birch that had no business being there, to the spring.

Where, under soft turf, Lydia sleeps now.

THE COYOTE

calls from the mesa. The blades of the windmill creak a quarter-turn. The hour is late.

Children has not come.

In her defense, it’s a long way from Tonopah NV.

She’s disappointed but not surprised. Children is bi-polar and not to be depended upon.

She thinks of the postcard affixed to the refrigerator in Lydia’s trailer. Without the return of the yellow Honda, left isolated and with no way out, she will have no choice. She will not have even the opportunity to go.

The postcard had turned up one day in the dented aluminum mailbox 5.3 road miles away, down along the draw, up and over the slick-rock ridge, across the bone-dry treacherous wash and through the turtle sage. There’s a fence and a gatepost with Jim’s old boot signifying he’s at home. When he leaves, he takes the boot off the gatepost. When he comes back, he puts the boot back on. There’s no correlation between the boot and the presence or absence of Isabel Schism in the ravine. And the mail’s delivered either way.

Turn left outside the gate and drive 2.6 miles on a dust-white road and you arrive at Peter Vann’s truck stop trading post café and cabins on NM 559. There has been some indication to Isabel that the ghost of Henry A occupies one of the cabins. The sand-blown asphalt of NM 559 runs north toward the Four Corners and south through the Big Rez. Tucked away down there is Bone Thunder, or what’s left of it, and the small town of Silver Lining on I-40, marking the last known sightings—she, perhaps naively, thinks—by the civilized world of her own wiry white-haired self, evolved through a half-dozen handles proliferated by her fugitive status to most recently Is, though the postcard fixed by the magnetic lady-bug magnet to Lydia’s refrigerator is addressed to IE Schism which is a clue to how it found her, a happening both worrisome and miraculous.

For the fact remains that on one of an identical and never-ending number of white-hot searing afternoons the dented aluminum mailbox had been opened and the postcard placed inside, delivered by a white truck marked USPS but sent from beyond the pale.

The front is a photograph of skies so blue they’re almost purple above Denver CO, taken from the slope of the Rocky Mountains looking East.

The reverse side is bisected, her name and the route number and mailbox to the right, to the left a brief and concise notification printed by hand in black ink: she’s invited to a two-day reunion of the Finley family, the tentacles of the Finleys stretching fore and aft, now and then, hither and yon.

A celebration of longevity, connectivity, fruitfulness, happiness, and recognized and rewarded success—or a brave facsimile thereof.

The strange thing being the designated date: a weekend in July, but not this year, or the next: not any year she’s heard of: Z+1.

And the Schisms?

Isabel / Is lies down on the narrow couch in Lydia’s trailer and closes her eyes and here they come, five abreast over the mountain, walking fast, arms swinging in unison. She and Snap are at the ends and as always she worries that Snap will wander off, she was always a footloose daughter. She can never decide if George or if Lucy should be in the middle, so Theo goes there, and because he’s invisible and her parents are deceased it looks like she and Snap are walking with a wide space between them, which is accurate enough.

Her and hers.

Even in their various states of being (or not) they are all happy, even cheerful, the von Trapps skipping through meadows singing The Sound of Music. Indeed it’s a movie, the final credits. They wear peaked alpine hats with feathers and carry rifles, machine guns, ammo, bows and arrows, she’s not sure why, probably Theo’s idea. What she knows about him is mostly what Mother told her, but some things Mother hadn’t known, how could she: like Tommy Thermometer and Li’l Nod, out to save the world.

George her father was a Professor. He’d written things down, though not what a Professor would normally write. To fill the gap, Lucy her mother had written a thesis that turned into a book and almost a college musical production, and even Lucy’s mother Else had recorded thoughts and feelings in the form of a daily diary.

Her parents and grandmother were the last generation to write things down. Now there’s no time. Now is now, followed at speed by the next and the next. She’s Is. Is is, on the Rez. Yet if she’s to find an answer, or unearth an enigmatic clue, the writing is all that’s left.

On the floor at the back of Lydia’s closet sits a flimsy cardboard box, 9 x 12 x 2.

Since November 4th 1996, she’s carried it around with her, wherever she’s gone: opening it, shuffling through the pages, adding a few from other sources, losing (?) some, mixing up the rest, watching Aunt Dixie have her way with it, reading a little of this and a little of that from here or from there from time to time.

By this time, she thinks, she must have read it all. But never start to back, top to end—so how can she be sure?

And if that’s what it takes—to read it, once and for all—what’s stopping her? Is she afraid of what she’ll find?

She remembers Indiana Jones, exploring ruined temples and walled-up caves. Grab the forbidden treasure, turn and run for your life as the roof falls in?

But she’s no Indiana. That would be Theo, or would have been—Theo the explorer of the ultimate walled-up cave.

150183.png

From the back of her mind, an old cry comes:

"Wha happen, T’eo?"

If not her, who? If not now, when?

Outside the trailer, stars sprinkling the desert sky, Jim Fence studies the screen of his device, thumbs dancing, fingers wanding to and fro.

Tomorrow, up in the ravine, the leaves of the mountain birch will turn and chase in the hot wind from the mesa like green sparrows with silver wings.

I don’t fear Death, he says.

Yet sometimes—more often lately—he wears his moccasins on the opposite feet, in order to frustrate ghostly trackers from the after-world.

INCANTATION

Can’t live with it.

Can’t live without it.

Jay Null

The Book of Data

01 Meet the Schisms

George Pike Schism (SHIZZ-UM), b. April 4th, 1915, in a woodsy suburb of Chicago on the edge of a Forest Preserve, by his own account (typed laboriously with two fingers) having a love-hate relationship with Insdale, where I took a quarter century to partly grow up, and:

Lucretia Mildred Barnes, b. July 30th, 1920, across the river from St. Louis on a homestead known to her and her older brothers as Goose-Shit Hill, her Mother a teacher, her Father a moody man who, when a brother misspoke at dinner, took a spoon to the barn and returned to force cow dung down the offending throat (in a somewhat parallel act, mercifully in the privacy of their bedroom, he gave Mother gonorrhea).

George and Lucy at Illinois Normal College in 1940, meeting in the library to discuss the poetry of Walt Whitman, performing in Our Town (George was Mr. Gibbs), parted by World War II, she to him a promise, he to her a somewhat mawkward (sic) quatrain:

What, have I found in you that something wild

I read of in a primer of pretend,

Something so good I after was beguiled

To hope to verify it might extend?

Married on May 16th, 1942, Private George P. Schism posted to Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, his bride working in Chicago and moving in with George’s parents in their brick two-story house on Woodvale Ave in Eastern Spring (one stop closer on the CB&Q). In April 1944 George applying for a three-day pass to greet his first child, but the Normandy Invasion canceling all leaves, and so it’s the end of May before he holds in his arms his son:

Theodore Frederick Schism, b. April 30th in Cook County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, a.k.a. Theophilus, Theobald, Teddy, and later (if only to himself and his faithful assistant) T. Thermometer, superhero.

And there would be one additional issue from the coupling of George and Lucy: on November 17th, 1950, in Alachua County Hospital, Gainesville, Florida, the unsuspecting world welcomed Isabel Else (after Mother Barnes, EL-SIE) Schism, a.k.a. Io, Lil Nod, Izzie, Izbel, Zizzie etc., a whole passel (as Lucy called it) of alternate names.

Thus complete, the Schism family moved North to New Jersey and New York, then back to Florida.

And then:

At 10:30 AM on the bright blue day of August 6th, 1953, they headed West.

02 Number Up

December 1st 1969

They gather at The Ramifications, a hundred young men looking to get drunk, sweat it out, and see where they stand in life and death.

Across the street, the inland campus of Arcadia College lies quiet. Brown mountains girdle the eastern end of the L.A. basin. A light breeze stirs the serrated fronds of the palm trees along Jesus y Maria Avenue and around the corner of Trafalgar Square.

Some of the young men think of themselves as idealists, although in reality they are just naive. They are also incredibly lucky. It does not occur to them that no one in history has ever been luckier, to be alive in this particular century, at this particular place on planet Earth.

Except maybe Sweden, says the dark-eyed girl named Zizzie, with a wink.

The night before, Roberto Robot Larch had gone to see a Swedish film by Ingmar Bergman called The Seventh Seal, in which the Knight’s Squire said of the Crusades: it was so stupid, only an idealist could have thought it up. Now he’s watching the new waitress, who’s just delivered a pitcher of beer to the next table. The new waitress is small, compact, green-eyed and speedy in her green form-fitting dirndl. Long wheat-colored hair swings behind her as she glides away, and in her wake a guy in a blue shirt jumps up and lifts his hands above his head and dances around like a victorious boxer receiving slaps and punches from his friends.

1. SEPTEMBER 14

HOWOOO!

The guy in the blue-shirt howls like Tarzan. On the wall behind the bar the gray screen of a TV displays a haze of buzzing horizontal lines and white board with a number and a date. Blue-shirt guy’s birthday is evidently September 14th. He beats his chest. He’s hit the jackpot: Draft Lottery Number 1.

The new waitress is delivering another pitcher. Her dirndl twitches as she zips off and a guy behind her leans over and pukes.

2. APRIL 24

Puking guy’s birthday must be April 24th. Draft Lottery Number 2.

She’s two for two.

Across the table from Robot, Leif Lambrochet (LAM-BRO-SHAY) is also watching. The new waitress slips behind the bar and waits for the next pitcher. Dark-eyed Zizzie nestles against Leif’s broad shoulder and gives Robot a sleepy smile, as if she knows what he’s thinking, as if to say: Go ahead, what’s stopping you?

Leif takes out a five-dollar bill and waves it in the air. Hey! Over here!

Don’t do that, says earnest Clare, his sister, furrowing her brow. Can’t you see she’s the kiss of death?

But it’s too late. The new waitress turns her small white face in their direction, two green eyes, up-turned nose, small tight-lipped mouth like a bud waiting to open. Leif grins. Eighteen months younger than his sister Clare, he’s big, easy-going most of the time, and confident in ways she’s not.

Don’t worry, he says. No way she goes three for three.

The flickering TV shows a glass jug with a jumble of capsules inside. A fat man in a suit and tie reaches in and draws out a capsule, another fat man opens it, and a third old fat man reads the date written inside and posts it on the big white board:

3. DECEMBER 30

Nothing happens.

Robot glances over at the bar. The new waitress is still waiting, tapping her fingers. Surreptitiously he wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans.

He’s feeling defenseless and vulnerable and it’s his own fault. He’s made his choice and there’s nothing he can do about it now except face the consequences. His II-S student deferment, shaky in the first place, had disappeared when he dropped nine units that fall. Not that it matters, all deferments are out the window now.

In October 1966 a massive number of men had been drafted. Most of them have served their time by now, one way or another, and are getting out. As if to hasten their departure, in late January 1968 the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet Offensive, surprising the south, shocking the American command, and altering the perception of the war back home.

But not enough. America’s in too far to back out now. Nixon’s promise to end the war was politically calculated and is now shown to be a lie. More troops are needed. But this time, to counter the obvious truth that the poor and black have borne a disproportionate brunt of the fight, rich white affluent pointy-headed intellectual Americans will be required to contribute their pounds of flesh. No more student deferments. This time it’s going to be fair.

Robot’s problem is he wants to be a veterinarian but he doesn’t like science, just dogs and cats. These days, when he says he wants to be a vet people think he means veteran and has plans to enlist He’s messed around too long. He’s always known, intellectually and lately viscerally, that he’s gambling with his life. Claiming high moral ground, he’s declared, to others as well as to himself, that no action is the best action, that the peaceful resistance of Gandhi is a proven winner, and that furthermore he refuses to define the rest of his life by avoiding the outrageous, immoral, impossible threat of fat old men assigning him to die in a useless, absurd, and criminal War.

Now, here, on this night of convocation and decision at The Ram, his gamble has come to a head. At some point during the evening a capsule will be drawn containing his birthday, which will be posted beside the next sequential Draft Number on the big white board. If that number is low, he will be sent to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia. A mid-range number will leave him in limbo—no one can predict how many numbers will be called before the end of 1970. A high number, say 250 or above, will mean he won’t be drafted at all, anointing him as an unfettered, unblemished, and honorable heir to that unencumbered future which Roberto Robot Larch, like most American youths of his time, has always been told and has always believed his just and rightful due.

Time goes by. Leif Lambrochet has his money out, but a different waitress sails toward them, a pitcher as her prow.

No, Frenchie. Not you.

You want it, you got it. Pay, Big Red.

Frenchie Spiggs is 32 years old, from French Lick IN. To avoid her Robot drops his napkin. While under the table he notes Clare Lambrochet’s nylon-stockinged knees pressed together under the hem of her dark blue business suit, John Knot’s white socks and tasseled loafers beneath the cuffs of his surgically creased khaki pants, and Zizzie Schism’s protruding belly, small and round in a white on white top, her hand resting possessively on Leif’’s blue-jeaned thigh.

He lifts his head. Frenchie’s gone and the new little green-eyed waitress scoots out from behind the bar with a full pitcher and heads in their direction but notes that they’ve already been served and swerves to the next table, where a fat-cheeked guy stands up and oom-pahs a trombone:

Leif’s refilling their mugs and at the same time watching the TV.

Number up, he says.

15. JULY 12

Oom-PAHHH!

The fat-cheeked guy with the trombone crosses his eyes and falls over backwards. Chairs crash. The trombone sticks straight up like a glittering elongated pretzel.

So long, fat-cheeked guy with trombone, says Leif. Zizzie, more in tune with her inner condition than exterior surroundings, says What? Clare opens her purse from Bullock’s and powders her nose. John Knot (KA-NOT) regards Robot Larch from slightly bulging eyes.

Robot doesn’t like him. On the surface Knot appears unremarkable except for the brown hair sticking up behind his head as if from electric shock and the bulging eyes which maintain a steady appraisal unflustered by almost anything. He makes Robot uneasy. Why has Knot of all people showed up at this pivotal juncture? Who invited him? Yet there he sits.

John Knot has the reputation for thinking he’s smarter than everyone else, which may have been the effect of those probing eyes. They harbor no self-doubt, yet seem engaged in a continual wrestling match with demons beyond the pale. Of this he’s not aware, or doesn’t care: the demons allow no empathy. The beat he marches to is a different drummer.

Robot’s never decided if Knot’s eyes hold contempt or anxiety, if he’s a genius, an idiot savant, or a harmless psychophobe. All he knows is, he doesn’t like him.

Just ignore him, was Leif’s advice.

Easier said than done. Across the table, Knot leans forward. The choice is simple, Larch.

As always the delivery is reasonable: level, sensible, of unassailable moderation. Is there an inner purpose? Robot can’t tell. Knot had originally gained notoriety by declaring a double major in Microbiology and Astronomy: little things big things. But in the last two years he’d dropped both and switched to Economics, in Robot’s opinion a stultifying fate. But he’d achieved his Bachelor’s a semester early and had already been accepted to the Graduate School of Business at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

If you’re in Canada, they can’t draft you, says Knot now, and reasonably and sensibly adds: Do you want to live or die?

Staring into the serene yet mysteriously plagued appraisal of those eyes, Robot senses a brain behind them of many corridors but just one entrance and an unknown number of exits, if any. And then appear—for a brief moment, then gone as if never they’d never been (have they?)—a fat red tongue, a squinch of nose, a cross of eyes, hands in armpits and arms flapping like a Red Skelton seagull.

"Kah," says John Knot.

Time goes by.

On the TV of gray buzzing horizontal lines the proceedings have been taken over by long-haired boys with patchy beards and girls next door with long straight hair and boots: the Youth Advisory Committee dreamed up by President Nixon and his conniving cohorts Haldeman and Ehrlichman to anesthetize protesting the war, the draft, or anything else, the theory being see, you’re doing it to yourself so how can it be wrong. A few feeble boos ring out, then die. Yep, Nixon has our number all right. Capsules continue to be drawn, dates posted. It’s all happening somewhere way back East. The denizens of The Ram sink into stupor.

Frenchie comes back and glares at Robot.

Bjork, she says.

What’s this, a curse from the banks of the Wabash?

No, Be-YORK. The new girl. With the green eyes. She’s from Iceland and doesn’t need guff from guys like you.

Guff? Zizzie Schism’s eyes sparkle. "Roby, are you giving out guff?"

Robot and Zizzie come from the same county in Northern California. There’s history between them, but it’s mostly ancient and too complex to bring up now. On the other hand his relationship with Clare Lambrochet is recent and raw and even more complex, so much so that he has no idea what the hell it is.

She’s ignoring him, which she’s done for the last six months. Leif’s watching the TV set while Zizzie rubs the top of her head under his chin.

"Nah," says John Knot.

The table is round with six chairs, five occupied. The three young men are all 22 years old, born within a week of each other in October 1947. Knot (10/24) is the youngest and is leaving after New Year’s for Edmonton. Leif Lambrochet (10/17) is the oldest—after high school he’d spent two years driving truck for BK Ukrainian Moving and Storage in Big Piney, then followed his sister Clare to Arcadia and proved himself an indifferent student but a natural leader (by size and presence if nothing else) of the disaffected underground group known as the Better Angels, or the Angular Bagels for short. Roberto Larch (10/22), in the middle by birth as in most other things, has gravitated from the sidelines to become Leif’s wingman.

Clare (24, Clooney or Looney) Lambrochet graduated two years ago with a B.S. degree in Applied Logic and Critical Thinking and already has her own cubicle in the Customer Service Department of Anon*ics Industries in Beverly Hills. Isabel (who has just turned 19 and chosen to be known as Zizzie) Schism came down from Gunplay (oxymoron!) County a year ago and got herself knocked up (please hold sexist outrage until the facts are in) and dropped out of school to work as a clerk-of-all trades temp at the law firm of Lusk Hornberg (Lust Horny). Since last summer she’s been living with Leif, the putative knocker-upper, in a by-the-month motel on Santa Monica Blvd, sixteen blocks from the beach.

That’s about all we know about these five at this point. They are distant figures of the past by now, and what they are to become, which we will find out in due course, cannot be predicted from who they were then.

However, one immediate question is:

Who’s sitting in that sixth chair?

Two pitchers in, the first 100 birthdays up on the board, Robot feels cautious optimism. All over the country, in dorm rooms and auditoriums and watering holes just like this one, the pale capsules in the big glass jug are determining one at a time like Chinese water torture the fate of every guy in the USA between the ages 19 and 25.

So far so good. Some will escape. Why not him?

He’s lost track of the new little green-eyed waitress and for a moment panics.

Number up, says Leif:

115. JULY 3

A chair scrapes behind him. Mama save me! Too late dipwad. Gone baby gone. Darting across his field of vision, foxy little Bee-YORK clutches a fold of cash and heads for the bar.

‘Dipwad,’ says Leif. I like that. He’s a big tall guy. Zizzie calls him her big lug. He has shoulders and a chest and an impressive brow with a receding scruff of red hair and pale eyes with invisible lashes and eyebrows.

Clare is a redhead too, with the high Lambrochet forehead and wide-spaced grey eyes. She has status because she has a real job but is secretly afraid of being thought horsey and deep down holds grudges, as Robot knows to his cost:

There’s a pattern here, she says.

He senses the same thing. The ceremony on the static-y TV screen is as alien as the concept of jungle (think about it). Lyndon Johnson bellows like one of his own cows in quicksand, goes down for the count. And Tricky Dick smirks with glowering brows.

What are they waiting for? Why don’t they end it? Call it off? Get out while we still can?

I mean: it has to end sometime. Doesn’t it?

Shakespeare the Bartender tunes the juke-box.

Somethin happenin here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

Number up, says Leif.

116. AUGUST 23

Robot leans back. Purple and orange pipes angle across the ceiling in parallel routes conforming to the laws of two-dimensional geometry. He should have applied to Veterinary School, damn it, but he’d seen the big table where horses were raised onto their sides and cut open.

Still, he could have been a Vet instead of a vet.

Clare ignores him in a way that denies his very existence. Sloe-eyed Zizzie sticks out an amazingly long pink tongue (so she’s the one). Leif empties their pitcher and signals for more. The little green-eyed waitress comes up fast, bearing her golden chalice. A thin forearm brushes Robot’s shoulder, a frail elbow brings the pitcher in for a landing.

Leif holds up five ones but Robot’s wallet is already out, Abe Lincoln plucked by small fingers and expressionless green eyes. And already she’s sped away, long hair swinging, trim rear mocking in its tight green dirndl skirt.

Number up, says Leif.

117. OCTOBER 22

Oh no Robe, says Zizzie.

Hoist a cold one, says Leif, filling his glass.

Clare blushes a deep red.

John Knot crosses his eyes, sticks his fingers in his ears and flaps like a gull.

"Dah," he says.

03 Where’s Theo?

November 4th 1953

Here he is.

Right here.

Theodore F. Schism, super-(if slightly unconventional)-hero in training.

Home in his own bed in his own room, missing school with the sniffles. Getting ready to watch I Love Lucy on the portable TV his mother wheeled in from the den. Which is only fair, since she’s the one who made him walk that dumb little neighbor kid to school yesterday in the rain.

The little neighbor kid wore a yellow raincoat with black buckles and cried. It’s only rain, Theo said, exasperated. So of course he’s the one who got sick.

But it’s turned out OK. Sort of. He gets to stay home today and watch I Love Lucy.

Theo likes watching I Love Lucy because his mother is also called Lucy, though her real name, courtesy of Grandpa Luther Barnes (so Mom claims), is Lucretia.

She’s back in the kitchen now, cleaning. Perhaps because of her experience with her own name, his mother has many names for him: Theophilus, Theobald, Teddy, or T-Bear, depending on her mood. Theo thinks a lot about names too. His mother’s last name, for example, is no longer Barnes but Schism, because she married his father, Professor George P. Schism.

He also thinks about now, as in:

Now = Tuesday, 8:57 AM.

And also about his personal existential relationship to now, as in:

Theodore F. Schism = 9 years and 189 days old.

There are two other reasons he likes watching I Love Lucy (to be followed at 9:30 by I Married Joan, December Bride, or Dear Phoebe, he doesn’t care which):

2. It beats going to the morning session of fourth grade at Oak View School, where, as usual, he’s the new kid), and

3. Lucy his mother is so completely different from wacky Lucy on TV.

Lucy on TV has big rubbery lips. Lucy his mother’s lips are thin even when she puts on lipstick. She also has a line down her forehead between her eyes. My worry line, she says. I earned that line and nobody’s taking it away from me.

Lucy his mother has big dark eyes. She’s also big on earning. And something’s been on her mind lately, something Theo can’t figure out.

He wonders what it is.

Also, Lucy his mother is all business although occasionally for no reason bursting into song. The joke’s on her that she has the same name as wacky Lucy on TV: a joke that Theo enjoys.

On TV a kitchen knife hovers in mid-air and spreads peanut butter onto soft white bread. He’s experimented with the same kind of knife and bread and peanut butter but the bread always tears. What magic TV ingredient is used so that the peanut butter spreads smoothly, without tearing the bread?

Suddenly he’s hungry, in fact starving, as only a 9-year-old boy can be. He’s tempted to call out in his quavering sick boy voice, knowing his mother will appear, maybe not right away but sooner or later, and bring him a peanut-butter sandwich. He would never summon sick boy outside his family, say with other kids or with his teachers, Peggy in New York, Mrs. Metcalf in Florida, Mrs. Laffalot and Miss Groutsch at Oak View. No, sick boy belongs only at home, part of a select repertoire to be used exclusively in the unique Schism family drama in which Theo has his parts, his mother and father theirs, and even little Io, on the cusp of her third birthday, hers. To alter or abandon his assigned role without prior approval or adequate warning would betray not only the ensemble cast but the theater of family itself—what he’d grown up with and into—what had always been.

But recently the sick persona has been losing its appeal. Nine weeks ago he’d watched his father George P. Schism stride up a long sidewalk and disappear into the Administration Building of Gunplay State College. Kneeling on the front seat of the hump-backed 1949 Dodge named Roda by his mother, who named everything, he’d sensed Lucy’s apprehension holding IO in the back seat. Had they driven across the country for nothing? Did George have a job or not? To children of the Depression, as he’d been told his parents were, what could go wrong usually did.

But not this time. His father had reappeared with an advance on his first paycheck and the address of the Eldred Motel. And since then, Theo has developed a distaste for sick boy and his attendant neediness and whine.

Except that, he’s not sure how to get rid of him. Or even if he’s allowed to get rid of him. He doesn’t know—and hasn’t a glimmer that he doesn’t—that it’s up to him.

In fairness, raised as he’s been within the confines of his particular family and subject to the particular dynamics thereof, if by some miraculous mental embolism Theo had been able at the age of 9.5 to assay the awesome intuitive leap normally reserved for rebellious teenagers with skin problems he would still in all likelihood have found himself up the creek without a paddle, in alien corn. Even if he somehow managed to formulate the question, who could supply the answer? His business-like songbird mother? His father the absent pre-occupied Professor? Io, z. a.k.a. Li’l Nod, her round face as blank as a sonar dish listening for signs from outer space?

On this day, this innocuous Tuesday forenoon, none of the above presents itself to young Theo as coherent thought. How could it? He has no more chance of thinking it than a nose-less man of wearing pince-nez. No, what presents to him on this bland and forgettable November day is: fear.

Fear incomprehensible. Fear without a name.

But this is now, not then, so let’s go ahead and name it.

The Schisms are about to change. Forever.

They live in a small tidy house, of the kind sometimes called a bungalow, at 765 Burnside Ave in the town of Gunplay CA. Their lone instrument of communication to the outside world, a big black telephone at the end of a black cord as tight and restrictive and curly as a piglet’s tail, sits on a built-in shelf between the living and dining room, around the corner from the kitchen.

It rings.

Hello … ?

His mother’s voice sounds strained, muffled, as if she has an idea who’s calling, as if she’s been expecting the call—thinking back to how she hurriedly rolled in the TV, Theo is sure of it—and is nervous about it and not sure if she should answer it, or if she did answer it what she would say, but now has gone ahead and answered it anyway.

Oh ... Jack … Hi.

From his bedroom, one thing is immediately clear. If he wants a peanut butter sandwich any time soon, he must get out of bed and make it himself.

He gets out of bed, barefoot out of his room and across the tile of the den to the kitchen.

And here’s a surprise:

Chaos.

Lucy’s kitchen normally presents a lived-in look, but now it’s a total mess. True, the linoleum floor shimmers with wax, the grout on the countertops has been scoured, the appliances gleam a lustrous white. But foodstuffs, utensils, and miscellaneous accoutrements overflow from the table, chairs, shelves, and sink. A can of Blue Lake green beans (his favorite) sits in the iron frying pan with which his mother dispatched a black widow spider at the Eldred Motel. Metal ice-cube trays with handles on the sides that are supposed to pry out the cubes but never work commingle with blue plastic ice-cube trays you have to bend with your hands and press up on the bottom to pop out the cubes except they either don’t come out or come out all at once and scatter across the floor. What remains of a carton that once contained the new kind of ice cream called Neapolitan (Theo and George share the chocolate and vanilla, leaving the strawberry for Lucy and Io). Four eggs in random positions as if his mother has selected the other eight with particular care ("What if the world ends tomorrow? Wouldn’t it be better to have eaten the best eggs?) or alternatively with no care at all (Sooner or later they all get eaten anyway, so what’s the difference?). And various bowls and dishes, like relics from an abandoned civilization, covered with wax paper and tin foil (Stop complaining, Theo—once you’ve been poor, you never throw anything out").

Had they been poor? In Waldcroft Hall, New York City, where for a dining table they’d used a wooden crate covered by a sheet—did that qualify? His eyes settle on the presentable if ordinary Burnside kitchen table, where like a troika in judgment sit:

1. A box of Grape Nuts cereal (his father’s favorite);

2. A cardboard cylinder of Quaker Oats with an endlessly replicated man who looks like, and possibly is, Benjamin Franklin (his mother’s and Io’s); and

3. His own cereal of choice, with the coupon on the side promising one square inch of Alaska to be owned in perpetuity if only he mails it in plus 99 cents (See how they do that? They won’t ask a dollar, that’s too much, but people are happy to pay 99 cents because it sounds thrifty, I won’t say cheap) without delay.

Around the corner his mother says: Yes … No. His gaze lifts. An archway leads to the dining room. She’s just out of sight, speaking in a low voice, but mostly listening.

Not now … Maybe.

He pictures her cradling the mouthpiece, free hand at her cheek. As if what’s being discussed, while out of the question, or at the very least terribly inconvenient, might nevertheless be put up with, depending on factors yet to be negotiated.

Next to the archway is the refrigerator, door open. Hollowed out, grill-like metal shelves removed and dumped in the sink, thick drops plunking from the freezer compartment at the top to accumulate on the ribbed plastic floor at the bottom in a pinkish slush—defrosting, that’s the word, his mother is defrosting the refrigerator.

Obscurely, it reminds Theodore F. Schism of a Cold-Eared Man with red eyes and an ice-clumped beard. Without thinking much else about it, he climbs in.

If asked at some future time why, why did you do it, he might have answered:

To see if I’d fit.

Which, pulling his knees up to his chin and tucking his bare feet under and scrunching down his tousled head, he barely does.

If pressed further—although it’s hard to see how he could be—he might have revealed a second motive:

To surprise Mom.

Not to make her laugh. Or to erase, if only for a moment, the worry line down her forehead between her big dark eyes. And not because of jealousy, it’s nothing to him that she’s so absorbed in her phone call that she hasn’t heard him in the kitchen, nor (more surprisingly) a new and rising complaint from Io in her bedroom at the back of the house, a little chunky girl with a surprisingly-developed sentience but also mighty non-sentient lungs producing a noise like the siren of an approaching fire truck.

No, not that kind of surprise either, but this kind, not that he actually thinks it: to present himself (all right, admittedly by foolish means) as something other than what he’s previously been, which is to say as a manifestation of the ingrained instinct of the male of all species, stripes and ages, their women to impress.

So once again, where is Theo?

Here. Right here. Neck bent under the freezer, head skewed, toes splayed apart by the hard plastic ribbing on the floor. Immobilized, or just about.

To shut the door he will have to unfold just enough to free his left hand, during which process comes floating from his bedroom the brassy opening theme of Lucy:

Da-dee-da dadee DA! da-dah ...

For a moment he’s inclined to abandon the project.

But Theodore F. Schism alias T. Thermometer is no quitter. Still firmly wedged, he makes a determined grab for the narrow shelf inside the door where his mother keeps the margarine, hooks it with a pinky, and pulls it awkwardly but efficiently shut.

04 Ayn in Austria

February 20th 2010

The empty land is endless but eventually ends. Yet they keep on, out over the deepening dark of the Indian Ocean, toward the last fires of the vanished sun.

But then the wings tip and the big plane turns, ponderous and lumbering as if suspended in mid-air until they face back the way they’ve come and Snap Weaver sees the lighted skyline of the city and rising up from the dark shore to receive them two parallel rows of hooded lights that remind her of illuminati in La Paz.

She’s a long way from Baja and the Sun Field. The International Dateline and the Southern Hemisphere and the Australian time zones have confused things, but they’re all behind her now. She’s pretty sure that sometime today—or yesterday—she turned 40 years old.

For the last ten of those years she’s lived in a small but comfortable concrete stucco-patched modernized bunker, painted a rusty orange and stained by orange rust, half-buried in a sun-bleached hill of rock and sand among the furry tridents of Cardón cacti above the winding road to Playa de Tecolote. Before that she’d spent a year in Spain, two in Paraguay, and too many working in the office of Dr. Dorf the bad-breath urologist, before, as she put it, going solar.

Most days she sits on the patio of the orange stucco house with her laptop, telecommuting with the home office in San Diego, or with satellite companies, vendors, or clients. Sometimes she greets clients at the airport and takes them on a tour of properties, sometimes to the Sun Field itself. One day a week she spends time in the Sun Field office herself. And in the evenings she returns to the patio outside her sun-drenched little house, a salt-rimmed skinny margarita beside her on the low orange wall.

Some days the Agua Azul Tour Bus chugs up the winding road from the latest cruise ship docked at Pichilingue, tourists gawking and taking photographs from the windows. After the bus has wheezed up and over the low pass to Owl Beach, she glances through the open patio door at the narrow niche next to the fireplace, and to the small gray velvet pouch within the niche. I still can’t believe it, Grandma, she says out loud—in reference to the summer day in 2003 when Grandma Lucy at age 83 had persuaded the Agua Azul Tour Guide to stop the bus and let her off so she could toil up the sun-bleached hill among the cacti and surprise her granddaughter (again).

In reference to the niche itself, it’s meant, according to Finbar, in one of his civilized moments, for an important religious artifact, if lucky semi-holy, if extraordinarily lucky a relic from one of the better-known saints. He’d grinned as he said it, her architect and lover, the flash of teeth, the starkly jagged scar between his eyes the origin of which he will not tell except that it knocked sense into me at last—the niche in any case preempted by the small gray velvet pouch of unsaintly Lucy Murdock’s ashes.

After they’d met again (years from Tuesday Island, as if by accident but Uncle Hank had something to do with it), in La Paz by the white pillars reflected in the swimming pool of the house once owned by Marlon Brando where Finbar was removing the underwater Christmas lights—and after she’d traveled to Illinois and back and returned to the little stucco house and placed in the niche the small gray velvet pouch containing the remaining surprisingly thick tough brownish-beige flakes that were all that was left of Lucretia Mildred Barnes Schism Murdock—after that, he’d kidnapped her. For atmosphere and symbolism, he said, he was big on both, back to Brando’s ex-swimming pool, where they’d done the deed.

Grandma’s ashes have remained with her for three-and-a-half years—Finbar, not so much. On coyote nights when she’s haunted by her own peculiar demons and chooses to be alone, or when business calls him (F. Bernal, Design and Build) up to Loreto or down to Cabo, or when he’s in a mood or works late at the second-floor office he maintains near the Catedral de Nuestra Señora in town, she finds it reassuring to have a back-up companion, a replacement for her hard-bodied lover, who she’d barely known when Lucy was alive.

Visible from the patio, the azure and lime-green Gulf of California seems wide and inviolate, but across the water in Sinaloa the drug cartels have stepped up their territorial roundelay, flaunting the feeble and corrupt authorities, mutilating, severing, and posing their enemies’ bodies in bloody tableaux.

Her second cousin Ruthie, the daughter of Mummit’s cousin Darrell and the granddaughter of Grandma’s brother Edgar, mails her a handwritten letter (Ruthie doesn’t use the Internet) stating the concerns of herself and her Dad and her Grandpa Ed who is 90 years old and watches the news all day. She replies by means of her favorite La Paz postcard, the pink-and-green swirls of the beach-front boardwalk La Malecón: No worries. Grandma’s safe with me and vice-versa.

On her laptop she compiles and occasionally updates her To-Do List:

1. Inventing a time-machine to go back and marry Finbar when they’d met the first time, at Henry A’s funeral in the Beavertail Valley when she’d been 20 years old, and

1-A. Confronting at long last and once and for all her real father, an ethereal Bio-Dad from the same fantasy domain as the semi-abandoned Bio-Sphere over the hill past the Solar Field, Mummit never told her but she’s pretty sure who it is, and on down to:

22. Grandma.

She’d materialized so unexpectedly and stayed so short a time that afternoon in 2003 that it still seems like a dream, the legendary Lucy sipping ice tea on the orange patio in the chair with the plump purple cushion, her dark eyes snapping as they’d done in Spain as she pronounced: It appears we must write your mother off, my dear. And handing her a sealed green envelope with a purple embossed ‘GC’ marked TO BE OPENED BY ISABEL SCHISM ONLY in large black hand-printed letters, adding rather mysteriously: Damn it, why did I ever accept this from the fourth wife? And also, with a wag of her finger as she got up to head down the hill and flag down the returning bus, You owe me one, Snap Weaver.

So that in the fall of 2005 she’d spent days and then in the summer of 2006 weeks paying back this debt (though she’d never opened the gaudy lightweight envelope, addressed as it was to Mummit), flying not once but twice from La Paz to Cabo to L.A. to Sacramento, renting a car and driving the 2.5 hours to the cabin on the ridge above Dice CA, and in the process gaining a deepened respect and regard for the old woman. And inheriting—the point of it all, at least from Grandma’s perspective—what she’d come to think of, apart from her own, as Lucy’s List.

Since then, following the handwritten instructions on the pale blue fragile tri-fold sheet of paper, Snap Weaver has scattered 95 percent of Grandma: on a decrepit Rockman IL obelisk (Great Grandpa Luther) and a polished marker set close to the ground at Bunker Hill IL (Great Grandma Else) and other weathered stone monuments of various sizes arranged in rows or lost among weeds in other country cemeteries in southern Illinois, and on the farmland itself, among the fallow furrows of corn and winter wheat where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers join—until, as required by Grandma’s precise phrase, only a pinch remained.

She’s completed her task—almost. At the bottom of the tri-fold sheet yet one more instruction remains, one final disposition that is daunting beyond all reason.

Good grief, Grandma!

Australia?

Under the circumstances she’d decided that stashing Grandma indefinitely in her fireplace niche was hardly an affront. Finbar assured her that saintly relics have been stashed in far worse, and for centuries. Besides, she likes having her around.

And then, on a January morning three weeks ago, the sun rose over the waters of the Gulf and climbed the hill of rock and sand and picked its way among the Cardón cacti to the doors of her living room and on the patio sat Lucy’s ghost, sipping coffee in the chair with the plump purple cushion, her eyes snapping over the rim of the cup as they’d snapped in Córdoba and Seville (and as Snap’s did too, according to Mummit on the day she’d come home from the Black Chateau (Second Visitation)).

Today’s the day, dear, Grandma said. Get up get up, the British are coming.

And so here’s Snap Weaver, licensed in real estate and solar panels, in Row A Seat 1 at 30,000 feet: straight up, or, globally speaking, down, the steady hum of the big airliner in her ears and daylight sifting through the closed lids of her eyes. She’s flown before, from Sea-Tac to Munich and on to Valencia, then later to Miami and on to Asunción, both times with Santa Barbara Sheila (before her face), but this time it’s halfway around the world and alone, Cabo San Lucas to L.A. to Sydney, and now the last leg, due West, into the dropping sun.

Dozing, she dreams a dream within a dream. She’s asleep on the couch in Grandma Lucy’s cabin in Northern California and dreams she’s drifting out through the picture window, down the through the trees to the barn and broken-down corral and the sturdy branches of an old oak tree to find suspended there from frayed knots of unraveling rope an old warped swing, cracked and splintered and stirring in barely perceptible motion, gently nudged (by who, or what?) in the windless failing light.

Good grief Grandma, am I even to dream your dreams?

Her eyes open. A strange